Genesis 3:1 Redux

I just finished viewing the heartrending (and staggering) story of 2 young coeds involved in a fatal crash. One of them died, but the other remained mis-identified for over a month after the crash, attended to in her convalescence during the entire 5 weeks of the mix-up by the couple who were actually the parents of the dead girl. The story itself is riveting (and literally unbelievable), the faith of both girls' parents heartwarming and obviously genuine, so much so that the exceedingly cunning sub-message implicit thruout the story doesn't shout so much as slithers into the viewers' consciousness---what I call the "Intellectual Zyklon-B Effect," officially termed "Nested Looping." In effect, what the Dateline raconteurs pull off is an impeachment of belief in the Scriptures and in Christ by implying a parity between the seeming gullibility of both sets of parents and the gullibility of belief in resurrection and heaven.

How Did They Ever Survive Without THIS????

The Apostles were sorely ill-equipped: they had no access to this plastic pet (the ultimate evolution of the turtle), a talking rosary. Why, it even comes with a headphone jack!

Is There Such A Thing?

What is your reaction to this? Is "Christian" graffiti not an oxymoron? Do those red letters not in fact belie what they claim? Do they not reek of the swastikas on synagogues and Jewish gravestones? Even tho I myself despise Darwinism with a purple passion (and hold so-called "theistic evolution" in utter contempt), I'm appalled by this sort of trash.

Another fine result of 30 years of "youth groups" and sentimentalistic "Christianity."

Spiritual Cheerios

{Disclaimer: blogger's print-size function and paragraph spacing are totally haywire; I own no responsibility for the ridiculous vacillations in this post. :( }

A well-meaning correspondent with a wobbly theology often sends me spiritual ditties, this being the latest:

When God leads you to the edge of the cliff, trust Him fully and let go, only 1 of 2 things will happen, either He'll catch you when you fall, or He'll teach you how to fly!

Really? Amazing! Bec. I was under the impression it was more like, "Some were tortured, refusing to accept release, that they might rise again to a better life. Others suffered mocking and scourging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, ill-treated---of whom the world was not worthy -- wandering over deserts and mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth. And all these, though well attested by their faith, did not receive what was promised,..." (Hebrews 11:35)
The power of one sentence! [WHHHat?] God is going to shift things around for you today and let things work in your favor. Sigh. Notice the subtle distortion that results from ignoring the context of a verse. True, the Bible does say, "We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose. But the "in your favor/works for good" is defined, first, by the verses that follow," Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, 'For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.' " Other verses elsewhere teach the same thing, as for example, "that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and may share His sufferings, becoming like Him in His death,..." Hardly Joel Osteenesque triumphalism.

[Then, some "Torquemada-lite":] If you believe, send it. If you don't believe, delete it.

[Next, an out-of-the-blue non-sequitur.] God closes doors no man can open & God opens doors no man can close. If you need God to open some doors for you...send this to ten people. [ROTFL! Didn't it just get done saying "God closes doors no man can open"??? But here we have God as sanctifier of superstition, world without end, amen.] Have a blessed day and remember to be a blessing...

Indeed, I will: I'll not pass this sort of infantility on.

They Will Hate That Doctrine Unto Eternity

Their cunning is colossal: even today, wherever they can, they will attack the core of the Gospel, if not directly, then thru sniping. Here is a recent example I just ran across:

Luther for one admitted that it was very difficult for him to achieve peace of mind on the basis of his sola fides principle, which landed him in a state of schizophrenia.

Is the "schizophrenia" here referring to Luther's famous dictum, "Simul justus et peccator"? I have not read the passage the writer is alluding to; until I actually see it, complete with its context, I will hardly be inclined to think of Luther as a mental case. Temperamental? Yes. Intense? Indisuputably. Hothead? Of course. But mentally disturbed, never.

This kind of branding reeks of the Soviet practice of committing Christians to mental institutions.

He Was Down To Earth

Evening and morning and at noon
I utter my complaint and moan,
and he will hear my voice. (Psalm 55:17)

For we do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, of the affliction we experienced in Asia; for we were so utterly, unbearably crushed that we despaired of life itself. Why, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. (1 Cor. 1:8-9)

In Hyperspiritual-Ville, the Psalmist and Paul would've been tarred 'n feathered----maybe even banished or indeed beheaded----for uttering such defeatist talk. "You have no right to whine about your chicken-scratch anthill problems in the face of the Himalayan suffering that Christ endured for you!"

Now, please do not maliciously misconstrue this as some sort of contempt for the unspeakable agony our Savior went thru; far from it. "By His wounds we are healed." I treasure that; it is my only hope. But I despise crypto-dualism as intensely as I cherish the Redemption. The 34 year old crypto-dualist shouts from the pulpit, "You'll know the quality of a man's faith by how he dies!" and "If you took away everything I owned tomorrow, it wouldn't affect my faith one jot!" but then...proceeds to commit adultery some 15 years later.

In Proverbs 25, there's a description of the hyperspiritualist: {Like} one who takes off a garment on a cold day, {or like} vinegar on soda, Is he who sings songs to a troubled heart. (Remove the bracketed words, which are lacking in the Hebrew, and the verse is exceedingly cutting.) He needs to take these verses to heart: "Bear one another's burdens." "Weep with those who weep." "In all their affliction, He was afflicted."

For He hath not despised nor abhorred
the affliction of the afflicted;
neither hath He hid His face from him;
but when he cried unto Him, He heard.

Deliver Us From Hyperspirituality

Recently, I stumbled across this "gem":

The flesh is the old life, the natural life inherited from Adam, with its apparent resources of personality, of ancestry, of commitment, of dedication, and so forth. You can do all kinds of religious things in the flesh. [No argument with the last sentence at all.] The flesh can preach a sermon. The flesh can sing in the choir. The flesh can act as an usher. The flesh can lead people to Christ. [It CAN??? That's news to me: I thought it was the Holy Spirit who drew people to Christ!]...The flesh can go out and be very zealous in its witnessing and amass a terribly impressive list of people won to Christ, scalps to hang on a belt. [Well, yes, if that flesh has been mis-mentored by the heirs of Finney, I suppose so.] The flesh can do these things but it is absolutely nauseating in the eyes of God. It is merely religious activity. There is nothing wrong with what is being done, but what is terribly wrong is the power being relied upon to do it. That is legality.

Funny, that doesn't seem to be Paul's view. Note how in the face of those who "proclaim Christ out of selfish ambition rather than from pure motives," his astounding reaction is, "What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed..." That in itself would take the hyperspiritualist aback, but then, Paul adds "insult to injury" when he continues, "and in this I rejoice. Yes, and I will rejoice..." What?! Rejoice in a mendacious proclamation of the Gospel? Paul, misguided man, don't you realize that it's "absolutely nauseating in the eyes of God"? It's enough to render a hyperspiritualist apoplectic!

Indeed, it's so dire that:

That is why, in any Christian activity, you have to be careful that your inner reliance is on God, and not on you. Otherwise it comes out all wrong and makes all the difference between heaven and hell, life and death. [!!!!!] You can do exactly the same thing that someone else is doing, and, if you do it with a sense of reliance on anything other than the Spirit of God, what they do will bless people but what you do will curse them. It is the very same action, absolutely the same. What you do one moment, trusting in God's Spirit, will bless people and strengthen them and bless your own life and enrich and fulfill it, but the very next moment you can do exactly the same thing in the power of the flesh, and it will be damaging and destructive and hurtful to others and to you. That is why you need to recognize the subtlety of all this and to be aware that God looks not at the outward appearance, as man does, but at the inner heart. What is going on inside is all-important to God.

So now...it is part of our duty to constantly, morbidly milli-micro-introspect each and every one of our attempts at doing good works? Pray tell, good Sir, in the actual brass tacks outworking of your theory here, how would a Christian be able to tell the difference between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" reliance? Why is any such warning lacking in verses like, "exhorting each other to good works" and "let them apply themselves to good deeds" and "a people zealous for good works"?

Do you suppose that Paul ended each day self-flagellating himself as to whether each and every move he made in his work for God was truly, genuinely, incontrovertibly, indubitably, positively, absolutely 1000% surely wrought by God's Spirit and not by Paul's mere "flesh"? On the contrary, we read this: "striving with all the energy which He mightily inspires within me,"and "For if I do this of my own will, I have a reward; but if not of my own will, I am entrusted with a commission," which is echoed in "For necessity is laid upon me. Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!" ["Pheh," sneers the hyper-spiritualist, "Necessity?! Prosaic, pedestrian, dry, bony, utilitarian, 'necessity'? How lethally legalistic!"] Do you anywhere find Paul agonizing thus, "Oh, woe is me, today I failed in 7 out of 10 counts of the works I did; only 30% of them issued from in reliance on Him, and the rest, miserable worm that I am, originated out of the putridness of my flesh!"

Of course those 2 paragraphs of yours look especially ironic in light of other comments in your essay:

It becomes legality when we make unwarranted demands upon others in an area not prohibited by Scripture...and you can [end up] be[ing] legalistic at this point.

Methinks that underlying all this hyperspirituality is the flesh, viz. "Just look at me! I am not as quotidien in my faith as JoeBlow over there! I strain and assay and bleach and filter everything I do for God to make sure it is free from even the slightest hideous taint of flesh-action! Ah, what a wonderfully pure fellow I am!"

Crypto-Catharism.

Unbelievable

The text, released last week, includes the petition that asks the Pope to proclaim Mary as "the Spiritual Mother of All Humanity, the co-redemptrix with Jesus the redeemer, mediatrix of all graces with Jesus the one mediator, and advocate with Jesus Christ on behalf of the human race."

Maybe it's because RCC leaders don't learn Greek anymore, but could anything be clearer than:

when he had by Himself purged our sins

And for good measure, it says it another way elsewhere:

...there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus...

Nota bene: "ONE mediator" and "the MAN." Could it be spelled out any simpler than that?

Hallowed Double Standard

[Disclaimer: I'm neither a Reconstructionist/Theonomist, nor a Bushie, nor a fan of the wars we've been waging since 9/11.]

It always amazes me that what's good for the goose is NOT good for the gander: why are the Berrigan brothers and Martin Luther King enshrined in the Christian Hall of Fame---even by many conservative believers---yet concerted political action by conservative Christianity the past, oh, say, 25 years, THAT at best is maligned as confounding the "2 kingdoms," and at worst, is condemned as foisting a theocracy on America?

Transferrable Argument?

(This is a riff on the 6th comment down @ this site.)

"It’s really not a black and white issue; it’s a very complicated one and should be treated ...with compassion and pastoral sensitivity." That's no doubt a subterfuge many of the RCC priests employed when hurrying former SS members thru the Vatican underground system into countries where the SS could become oxymoronic "U-boots." Or perhaps even antebellum Southern pastors would've considered this a felicitous rationale in the discussion against slavery. Now, if it seems outrageous to use that sort of PC gabble for the SS henchmen and slaveholders, why is it ostensibly defensible in reference to the slaughter of the unborn?

Herod's spirit thrives.

The Fruit of Iron-Clad Predestination Doctrines?

In the meta @ PyroDan's latest post on preaching the gospel, the question rightly was raised about how to balance out recent Pyro advice to "stick it out @ your church" regardless (Frank Turk's view) vs. Dan's question, "If people were to start flooding out of such churches, leaving behind clear statements of the reason for their departure..." One commenter opined, "Just keep praying and acknowledging that God is sovereign, and somehow is causing all this for His glory and our good."

What a recipe for doing nothing about anything! (Should you not flee a decaying church the way you'd flee a rotting, septicimia-causing carcass out in a field?) But then, with the constant harping on sign-on-the-dotted-line church "membership" and "submit to your elders!!!!!" and what seems like almost a concept that the individual believer is married to the particular fellowship where they regularly worship, I guess this kind of absurd fatalism should come as no surprise.

I mean, hey, Elijah should've simply continued trying to work from within the fellowship that followed Baal; and Moses, when he came down from the mtn., he should've simply worked around the golden calf. And Jeremiah, what were you doing, scalding those Israelites with your jeremiads? You shoulda just stuck it out. After all, "Just keep praying and acknowledging that God is sovereign, and somehow is causing all this for His glory and our good."

Never mind Scriptures that seem to teach just the opposite (after all, they're in the O.T., and some are just proverbs, besides):

"Forsake the foolish, and live; and go in the way of understanding."
"Leave the presence of a fool, for there you do not meet words of knowledge."
"Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord..."

DurnTootin Right!

Sloshing around in some backissues of "Slate" today, I found this: "Our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind," as Cosmides' and Tooby's primer on evolutionary psychology puts it." I believe it: that would go a long way to explain the tenacious and moronic adherence to Darwinism.

Straining Gnats

You reckon the thief on the cross or the early Christians would've known what to make of this hairsplitting issue about why you should love God? Is it an issue anywhere in the N.T.?

Hello? Am I missing something? Duh, I thought we worship Him (which I always assumed includes loving) bec. He is worthy of worship. Plain and simple. We're designed to worship Him in the same way we're designed to breathe.

To cut down on unnecessary carpings and cavelings, how about just calling no man your master: not Piper, nor Sproul, nor McA nor McC, nor Nevin, nor the Pope, nor Luther, nor Calvin, nor whatever other teacher-idol is yet down the road. That way, you don't get all tangled up in picayune non-essentials. Life is too short.

Talk About Strange Doctrines! ROTFL!

More mirth from the 3-T camp: even the best of us are prone to typos (viz. my "Rudolf" [the perils of being a polyglot, sigh] and "Nobel fir" [that tree deserves the Nobel prize for heavenly fragrance!]), but then there are misspellings which betoken complete ignorance (can anything intelligent emerge from the Emerg*** swamp?). A particularly hilarious one appeared recently @ Solameanie's comments (8th comment down, 2nd paragraph, penultimate line). This type of blooper puts a whole new face on "Merry."

LongTerm Ramifications

Perhaps this isn't an original thought, but I keep wondering if pomo-ism isn't simply a great-great-greatgrandchild of Nominalism.

Why Can't It Be Both?

[PRELIMINARY NOTE: The primary reason this blog lacks comment capacity is bec. I view these utterances of mine as mere mutterings from an underling in the back pews. (Secondary reason: no time or energy for religious wranglings.)]

{GASP!} This li'l hole-in-the-wall blog (which originated mainly so that I could occasionally comment @ the Pyro-metas---IOW, I never intended for it in any way to match the caliber of blogs by IMonk, Pyros, or Challies), this potatobug-under-a-rock collection of pipsqueakings has been mentioned @ the BHT. (I doubt that IMonk ever read my blog before; summun musta ratted.) Is this sorta like Rudolph getting attention from Santa? :)

But seriously, I fail to see why waiting precludes joy. Is it not cause for joy that for our sake: He who is immortal should become mortal; the One Who is infinite should become finite; the Light of the Universe should descend into the darkness of a fallen planet; the King of the Universe would leave behind ineffable splendor and Joy to descend into our Pit of Squalor and Misery?

I still think the barbiturate piece lends itself better to Lent.

Spiritual CodLiver Oil

A good 90% of the time, IMonk's writings edify me in one way or another. But his latest piece on Advent is like a barbiturate. It's not that he doesn't make some valid points here and there, but the TONE of the piece---the sanctimonious preachiness---totally contradicts the joyousness of the season. That "Advent" piece is to Advent what a plastic Christmas tree is to a freshly felled Noble fir.

I need some eggnog to wash the taste out of my mouth.

Say What?

Considering that doubt in God's Word caused The Fall ("Hath God said?"), it's odd that McClaren should diagnose theological confidence (= belief in Absolute Truth) as a "cancer" and as THE Primary Cause of Man's Moral Malaise.

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!

Involuntary Comedy

Most of the time, the blatherings of the Emer***g "Church" supply fuel for thunder, but very occasionally, they provide first class mirth. Consider this clown comment (h-t comments @ Dan Phillips' post): "for your list of solas, i would encourage you to consider adding one that the original reformers were passionate about: sola reformada (always reforming). this was a central tenant of the reformation, but got lost (including the use of the phrase)."

Would it seem that perhaps some sort of residue of "Armada," "Torquemada," and "The 5 Solas" is swirling around indiscriminately in this poor commenter's head? And evidently, the church is not merely "only reformed," but the Reformation was some sort of edifice (well, actually, yes, a magnificent spiritual and intellectual "edifice"), where strangely-named inhabitants resided. (Perhaps for that particular tidbit, the commenter's brain was---ironically!---subconsciously playing the verse that says, "the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth.")

In the face of this sort of linguistic lint, I can't help but recall Solomon's insights into the fool, "Why should a fool have money in his hand to buy wisdom when he doesn't have a mind to grasp anything?" "...A fool flaunts his folly." "Not for the fool is eloquent speech..."

This "LS" Business

Over at iMonk's blog, there've been numerous commenters plugging the literalist RCC view (or the Lutheran one, which to me isn't that different) of the LORD's Supper. Citing 1 Corinthians 10:14-23 NASB, one fellow even goes so far as to insinuate that those who don't share that interpretation are committing idolatry.

His comment struck me as an ironic boomerang, because if we take "participation" to mean spiritual, not physical (as per Jesus' words in JOHN 6:63, "It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life"), then the exhortations of Paul against idolatry could be applied precisely to the literalist practice.