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I heard a commentator say the other day that we need to keep the Federal Reserve around, known hereafter as the Fed, because don't we always need a lender of last resort? I mean, what are we going to do without a lender of last resort?

Well, maybe we might not borrow trillions of dollars that will not be repaid to anybody. Maybe something like that would happen.

The shift between the old conception of human rights (e.g. the right not to be messed with via various forms of tyranny) and the new conception of human rights (e.g. the right to free dental care) was a momentous shift. It represented a change from the government needing to recognize that God had endowed each citizen with certain inalienable rights, to the notion that the government should become the god of each individual citizen, with federal corn making the young men cheerful, and federal new wine doing the same for the maids.

From this we have progressed to the next stage -- the idea of debt as a basic human right. In the old view, the government could respect the rights of its citizens simply by refraining from certain things. Refusing to charge someone falsely doesn't need to be funded. Neither does allowing people to keep and bear arms, and so on. But when the government takes on the responsibility of being the environment in which we live and move and have our being, the government, not being able to create that environment ex nihilo like the real God can, is forced to find a base of tax revenue, one that it can twist like a dishcloth. This is because all the rights that some people now have are rights that somebody else has to pay for. In these new-fangled schemes, there's always something.

When the deficiencies of this new theology begin to be manifest, one recourse is to tax a bunch of people who can't protest, for the compelling reason that they are not born yet. The mechanism for doing this is called "borrowing like a crazy man," and the end result of this kind of thinking is that access to debt is assumed to be a Basic Human Right.

Consider the drive to make Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans available to everybody. There it is: indebtedness as a basic human right, just like that free dental care, and free lasik eye surgery, and free chocolate milk for everybody. And now we always need a lender of last resort. Why? Because we must never allow anyone or anything to come to the place when their desire to be in debt can be denied. For debt is now the very air we breathe, just like real freedom used to be.

In the Greek honor system, men prove themselves honorable and virtuous by defending women.  Explaining Achilles’ reaction to Agamemnon, Peter Walcot writes that “The law of reciprocity applies: when insulted or injured the man of honour must retaliate in at least equal measure if his personal prestige is to be upheld, and the man of honour is at his most sensitive when a woman from within the family group is in any way threatened.  Athenian law, for example, regarded homicide as justified if a man engaged in illicit sex and was caught in the act with a wife or even with other female dependents . . . of the killer.”

Crucial as women are to the honor system, the system is constructed in a way that excludes women from a share of honor.  Honor is won in competitive settings.  Walcott notes: ““Greek society was intensely competitive at every level, whether those engaged in competition were athletes, dramatists, statesmen, or soldiers.  And it was the relentless pursuit of honour, often at other’s expense, that made society so agonistic and, therefore, unstable.”  These agonistic settings are precisely the settings in which women have to place.  Honor is publicly bestowed; it is bestowed on public actions, and women cannot act in public.  For women, virtue is not found in honor but in shame.  Not even a woman’s name should come up in the public world of men: “Women especially must exhibit shame, keeping well out of the way of men: the great glory of a woman, Pericles claims in the Funeral Speech, is to be least talked about by men whether they are praising or criticizing her.”

Either that, or a sad kind of funny. HT: Nathaniel Carswell.

While the political scrum is messy, as it always is, a narrative is starting to emerge. If we change the metaphor from rugby to movies about Transylvania, that narrative appears to be that a large number of peasants with pitchforts and torches will be assembling at the Castle of the Ruling Elite this coming November. The returns will not start coming in until after dusk, when we will be able to see the torches more clearly.

These peasants do have differences among themselves. The differences are not tiny in themselves, but they are tiny in comparison to what is going on in the main dining hall of the castle. The activities in there are of a metaphoric sort that got Belshazzar so talked about, with the addition of lots of symbolic vacations and golf. Meanwhile, outside, Ron Paul libertarians wave their pitchforts back and forth in a certain way, and Palin peasants on the other side of the castle shake their pitchforks up and down. Some inside the beltway neocons are holding pitchforks gingerly, thumb and forefinger, with an embarrassed look on their faces, wondering how this ever happened to them. Now there actually are important concerns behind these differences, to be sure, and I really don't want to minimize them.

However, comma . . . But when you consider . . . So when your town is invaded by Martians with those big old insect eyes, perhaps you should make commmon cause with some folks you wouldn't ordinarily team up with, and then return to your small town politics after the credits are rolling.

This will be a triage election. Will we do the next necessary thing? We have a Class IV Hemmorhage going, and so now is not the time to be debating that neocon splotch is a melanoma.

What is that necessary thing? The currrent wisdom is going back and forth about whether the congressional elections will result in the House going back to the Republicans, and some are saying that even the Senate might be in play. But it seems to me that to think this way is to set our sights way too low. Our goal really ought to be the dissolution of the Democratic Party. In the history of our nation, there have been several electoral shocks that certain political parties were not able to recover from, and there is no reason to believe this has happened for the last time. The Federalists are gone, as are the Whigs. Our structures and processes assume two parties, but we need a total recalibration of the center.

The repudiation of the Democratic flimflam machine needs to be so massive that multitude of Democrats go down, and those who have begun, even now, to run away from Obama just keep on running. Once that happens, we can appoint the "moderate" wing of the Republicans to be our new liberals, and they can form their own party, and the Tea Party gang can be our new conservatives. Outliers, like the greens and the libertarians and the strict constitutionalists, can continue to do what they always do, which is to complain about the lack of ideological purity. But if anything remotely like this unfolds in this fashion, the latter two of these groups can rest content in the fact that there are times when the complaints get heard. It happens every so often, like a comet.

 

 

"Ezekiel rails against the adulterous idolatry of the Israelites by using sexual imagery of  the most graphic sort. He uses obscenity to reveal the real obscenity of doing such things in defiance of God's law . . . Ezekiel was more concerned about the obscenity he was exposing than the obscenity he was using . . . Phineas certainly observed a man and a woman copulating, but he was not doing so as a voyeur. His interest was ethical; he was taking aim" (Fidelity, pp. 15-16).

"Therefore, there is no religious use . . . in a sermon that merely discloses the minister's opinion, but does not disclose the opinion of God. And there surely can be no use in a sermon that does not even disclose the minister's opinion clearly" (T. David Gordon, Why Johnny Can't Preach, p. 19).

As you’ll notice on the right of the page, my survey of the gospels, a sequel of sorts to House for My Name, will be available in November.  You can check out the Amazon page by clicking on the cover icon.

Gregory (Against Eunomius, 3.3) insists that only a Trinitarian theology can truly affirm the goodness of God.  He assumes the Scriptural titles for the Son – light, truth, life, glory – and asks whether the Father could ever have been without these goods.  If He was once without the Son, then He was once without these goods.  God is good because God is Triune.

What is God? he asks.  And he answers: “Well, God is a Father. It follows that He is what He is from eternity: for He did not become, but is a Father: for in God that which was, both is and will be. On the other hand, if He once was not anything, then He neither is nor will be that thing: for He is not believed to be the Father of a Being such that it may be piously asserted that God once existed by Himself without that Being. For the Father is the Father of Life, and Truth, and Wisdom, and Light, and Sanctification, and Power, and all else of a like kind that the Only-begotten is or is called. Thus when the adversaries allege that the Light ‘once was not,’ I know not to which the greater injury is done, whether to the Light, in that the Light is not, or to Him that has the Light, in that He has not the Light. So also with Life and Truth and Power, and all the other characters in which the Only-begotten fills the Father’s bosom, being all things in His own fullness. For the absurdity will be equal either way, and the impiety against the Father will equal the blasphemy against the Son: for in saying that the Lord ‘once was not,’ you will not merely assert the non-existence of Power, but you will be saying that the Power of God, Who is the Father of the Power, ‘was not.’ Thus the assertion made by your doctrine that the Son ‘once was not’ establishes nothing else than a destitution of all good in the case of the Father. See to what an end these wise men’s acuteness leads, how by them the word of the Lord is made good, which says, ‘He that despises Me despises Him that sent me’: for by the very arguments by which they despise the existence at any time of the Only-begotten, they also dishonour the Father, stripping off by their doctrine from the Father’s glory every good name and conception.”

Richard Dawkins accuses faith schools of “indoctrinating” children, ahead of a TV documentary that accuses them of being “socially damaging” (HT: Christian Institute).

But a 2009 report by Prof David Jesson of the University of York found that faith schools promoted better community cohesion than secular schools.

Don’t the the evidence get in the way of a good bit of prejudice…

Scott Clark has a long post here, in which he urges Reformed congregations to hold the line on strict subscriptions to their confessions, applying that standard of subscription with regard to the members of their congregations. In contrast to that form of Reformed sectarianism, here is a dose of Reformed catholicity.

"In all Churches a distinction is made between the terms upon which private members are admitted to membership, and the terms upon which office-bearers are admitted to their sacred trusts of teaching and ruling. A Church has no right to make anything a condition of membership which Christ has not made a condition of salvation. The Church is Christ's fold. The sacraments are the seals of his covenant. All have a right to claim admittance who make a credible profession of the true religion; that is, who are presumptively the people of Christ" (A.A. Hodge, The Confession of Faith, p. 3).

But Clark's argument is that, if we let folks into our Reformed congregations who do not subscribe fully to the confession in question, this will create a two-tiered membership within Reformed churches -- those who hold to the confession and those who do not.

"There was never any intent to create a circumstance in which the Reformed faith would be confessed by an elite few in the congregation. We don’t confess two classes of believers. We don’t confess two definitions of faith and repentance."

 

But, of necessity, this approach still has to confess two classes of believers. It confesses that there are genuine believers who can join our church and then that other group of genuine believers who can't join our church. What is that but to divide the body of Christ (not, incidentally, the same thing as the URC, CREC, or PCA) into two classes of believers? Often, the next step taken to remove the resultant consistencies has often been to deny that people who don't subscribe to the strict forms of "our denomination" must not be genuine believers. Happily, Clark has not taken this step -- which is why this position remains inconsistent, and really very hard to defend.

This mistake is the result of confusing the session interview with St. Peter's interview at the Pearlies. It demands of preschoolers that they show their high school diploma as a condition for admittance into preschool. It confuses the end from the beginning, and the beginning from the end. It muddles baptism and the eschaton. It reverses the order of the Great Commission -- teach them obedience to all that the Lord commanded, and then bring them in. It is theological dyslexia.

“People don’t like Calvin because he doesn’t flatter them” (Steve Palframan).

The image of the body, which occurs in today’s Bible Gateway verse of the day, is familiar to many Bible readers and — at least in theory — informs our understanding of the Church. We all understand the first point since we all share the same experience:Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function ... (Rom 12:4)Indeed we do have such a body, and indeed our various limbs and organs have various functions, from which we are led to the idea of ‘every member ministry’ in the church.But the point Paul stresses here is not, in the first instance, the variety of ministries but rather that the ‘members’ of Christ do not all have the same function. And the emphasis is not on what we are able to do, but on the fact that we are not able to do everything.In v 3 he writes, For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought ...This is important, because our question is so often phrased in terms of what we can do, or ought to be doing, for the church to take our share of the work. Ironically, this is partly because the church developed a pattern of ‘ministry’ which very much overlooked exactly what Paul was saying, so that we wound up with just one kind of ‘minister’, and very often just one minister per church. And in this case, we must have a minister who is thought of rather too highly, at least by others if not by himself.Paul’s word, however, is to all of us:... but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you.And what we must think of ourselves is this: “I cannot do everything. In fact, I can do only those things God has equipped me to do. Therefore I am dependent on other Christians.” Thus our ‘verse of the day continues,... so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. This is yet another reason why you cannot be a Christian apart from the Church. To do that would require that you are omni-competent. More dangerously, it would also require you to think that you were so good at being a Christian that you did not need the contributions they would make.In fact, though, as vv 6-8 go on to say, each of us has strengths and weaknesses:We have different gifts, according to the grace given us. (v 6)So some of us are good at ‘prophesying’, others at serving, some at teaching, others in leadership, and so on. Sometimes we still forget what this means and we berate ourselves that we are not great at something we see others doing. The message of 1 Corinthians 12 is not that we should make greater efforts, or ask God to enable us in this area as well, but rather accept that this is why there is a Church at all. Relax and rejoice!John P Richardson
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"We live at a time when the world does not hesitate to teach on sexual behavior. Broad evenagelical churches usually mimic the world's teaching with a thin Christian gloss, and the more conservative churches hesitate to teach on this subject at all. The result is that such things are done among us, but in a false application of Paul's words, we still won't name them [Eph. 5:3-5]. We laugh at dirty jokes on the television shows we watch, but woe betide the poor idiot who tries to tell the same joke in the church foyer the next morning. The sin is not the joke, which half the church enjoyed in the privacy of their own homes, but rather his unwitting exposure of their dishonesty" (Fidelity, pp. 14-15).

"It is a worthy gift of God to be able to speak mildly and moderately so that our speech falls like dew upon the grass; but it is the fiery tonge that beats down sin and works sound grace in the heart" (Perkins, The Art of Prophesying, p. 169).

Gregory of Nyssa (Against Eunomius, 1.15) attacks the notion that the Father has priority in time, and therefore in being, to the Son and Spirit.  Of course, Gregory eventually says that intervals of time have no application to God’s life, but before that he challenges the notion that temporal priority implies superiority in being.  Being doesn’t leak out as time passes.  The dead don’t have any more claim to being than the living.

Gregory puts it this way: “For while the lifetime of the elder as compared with the younger is longer, yet his being has neither increase nor decrease on that account. This will be clear by an illustration. What disadvantage, on the score of being, as compared with Abraham, had David who lived fourteen generations after? Was any change, so far as humanity goes, effected in the latter? Was he less a human being, because he was later in time? Who would be so foolish as to assert this? The definition of their being is the same for both: the lapse of time does not change it. No one would assert that the one was more a man for being first in time, and the other less because he sojourned in life later; as if humanity had been exhausted on the first, or as if time had spent its chief power upon the deceased. For it is not in the power of time to define for each one the measures of nature, but nature abides self-contained, preserving herself through succeeding generations: and time has a course of its own, whether surrounding, or flowing by, this nature, which remains firm and motionless within her own limits. Therefore, not even supposing, as our argument did for a moment, that an advantage were allowed on the score of time, can they properly ascribe to the Father alone the highest supremacy of being.”

Gregory offers this argument as if it were the simplest common sense.  It is not.  All over the ancient world, it was thought that the passage of time diminished the being of man, who slipped from a world of gold into silver into bronze into iron into something even less.  All over the ancient world, time had indeed spent its chief power on the deceased.  In arguing for the Trinity, Gregory is simultaneously proposing a metaphysics of life.

Luke 9:7-9 records that Herod was intrigued by what he heard about Jesus, and “sought to see him” (v. 9). But then Herod disappears from the narrative (apart from a passing mention in 13:31) as abruptly as he appeared, and doesn’t reappear until chapter 23, where he finally meets Jesus, whom (we are reminded) “he had long desired to see” (v. 8).

Herod is left hanging in mid-air for most of Luke’s Gospel.

It’s as if Luke is saying, “Yeah, Herod the Tetrarch really wanted to see Jesus, but it turned out that Jesus was busy with more important things like feeding the poor and healing sick children and talking with women.”

Evelyn Waugh’s Helena (Loyola Classics) doesn’t get Constantine quite right, but he has some very sharp observations on other fourth-century personalities and events.  His description of the effect of Constantine’s conversion on Lactantius captures the euphoria of the moment: “in that unique springtide there was no escape from change, not even in Treves, most polite of cities, not even for Helena, most excluded of women.  The huge boredom, which from its dead center in Diocletian’s heart had saddened and demented the world, had passed like the plague.  New green life was pricking and unfolding and entwining everywhere among the masonry and the ruts.  In that dawn, reflected Lactantius, to be old was very heaven; to have lived in a hope that defied reason; that existed, rather, only in the reason and in the affections, quite unattached to common experience or calculation; to see that hope take substantial and homely form near at hand and on all sides, as a fog, lifting, may suddenly reveal to a ship’s company that, through no skill of theirs, they have silently drifted into safe anchorage; to catch a glimpse of simply unity in a life that had seemed all vicissitude – this, thought Lactantius, was something to match the exuberance of Pentecost; something indeed in which Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost had their royal celebration. . . .

“Events were no longer following their humdrum human pace.  There was a disproportion everywhere between cause and effect, between motive and movement, an intervening impetus and increase beyond normal calculation.  In his dream a man may put his horse at a sizable obstacle and without design take wing and soar far above it, or seek to move a rock and find it weightless in his hands.”  The narrator rebukes Lactantius for his naivete, but he captures the feeling of fourth-century Christians: “We were like those who dream; then was our heart filled with laughter. . . . the Lord has done great things for us.”

Waugh, of course, can’t be entirely serious.  There is a wonderful lampoon of a lecture by a gnostic teacher, and then there’s the hilarious and prophetic scene where Lactantius is reflecting on history-writing with Helena as both watch the Indian ape that has been sent to her as a pet: “‘You see it is equally possible to give the right form to the wrong thing, and the wrong form to the right thing.  Suppose that in years to come, when the church’s troubles seem to be over, there should come an apostate of my own trade, a false historian, with the mind of Cicero or Tacitus and the soul of an animal,’ and he nodded toward the gibbon who fretted his golden chain and chattered for fruit.  ‘A man like that might make it his business to write down the martyrs and excuse the persecutors.  He might be refuted again and again but what he wrote would remain in people’s minds when the refutations were quite forgotten.  That is what style does.’”

“The third petition of the Lord’s Prayer is repeated daily by millions who have not the slightest intention of letting anyone’s will be done but their own.” (Aldous Huxley)

Once again, the Bible Gateway ‘verse of the day’ gives us words of encouragement drawn from a context of discouragement. The first word of this section of Psalm 119 (which begins with the Hebrew letter ‘shin’ and thus follows the acrostic pattern of the whole psalm) is ‘rulers’ (sarim, v 161) — and it is these rulers who make life difficult for the psalmist.As Derek Kidner writes, ... the prevailing temper [in the psalmist’s day] seems to have been a religious scepticism ... ranging from the non-committal ... to the thoroughly profane ... (IVP OT Commentary, 422)We may be inclined to respond, ‘Not much change there, then.’ And we may equally be inclined to say that the psalmist nevertheless finds strength in God.Simply to put it that way, however, would be to miss almost the entire point of Psalm 119, for the focus is not on God per se as an object of contemplation, so much as God’s word as a vehicle of communication: “Rulers persecute me without cause,” writes the psalmist, “but my heart trembles at your word.”It is not just the idea of what God is like that sustains the psalmist, it is the specifics of what he regards God as having said: his word, his promise, his law, his statutes, his precepts. It is these which produce in the psalmist trembling (v161), rejoicing (v162), love (v163), praise (v164) and, of course in v 165, calmness and inward security:Great peace have they who love your law, and nothing can make them stumble.Surely, if we know and love God, we ought to find the same response in ourselves towards God’s word as we also have received it in Scripture? Indeed, an awakened awe of Scripture — a trembling at God’s word — is one sign of spiritual regeneration. We may not always comprehend what the Bible says, but we will always be eager to discover the truth of God’s word and to follow it. And therein lies salvation. As the psalmist concludes,I wait for your salvation, O Lord, and I follow your commands. I obey your statutes, for I love them greatly. I obey your precepts and your statutes, for all my ways are known to you. (vv 166-168)John Richardson
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"When men finally pick up the mantle of full responsiblity in ministry, they will then discover what a tremendous help their women are -- but not until then" (Why Ministers Must Be Men, p. 60).