iMurphy

As you are no doubt aware, there is a large movement about in our time called Open Source.  With this tech industry movement came an entire culture, saying that knowledge ought to be free.  There is a small but present percentage of such adherents who are Christian, even some who believe that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God and the final, greatest authority for our lives, carrying the message of Salvation for all persons.  The Bible itself, both its original texts and ancient translations, is older than copyright and not subject to such laws.  Indeed, failure to transmit the Bible (with additions or subtractions) would be easily regarded as a sin by most devout Christians, going against the Great Commission.  As information is circulated more and more freely, some people who made their living in old ways are being displaced.  For example, as young people are more and more content to read documents online, places like the Gutenberg Project will displace publishers of public domain books to a greater and greater extent (though never entirely).  Already in your domain, the entire Greek Bible is available in parsed form, free, from places like unbound.biola.edu .  Perhaps you will never let down your “walled garden“, but it is only a matter of years before enough people “crowd source” the task and duplicate your data.  You do not nor can not own a copyright of the study of the Bible.  I wish you financial success and thank God for what you’ve done and what it’s done for pastors (mine!), but like all industries that make a living on stockpiling information, you will inevitably see that ours is no longer an information economy, but a service one.  One cannot make a living off of ideas for long, since they can not be contained and can always be duplicated.  Please consider contributing to the community of low-income Bible students and finding profit at a more lasting place on the value chain.

The previous was from a letter I sent to a professor at a Reformed Seminary, who makes a living off of royalties from Biblical texts.

I don’t get to vote for another two weeks, but I’m afraid it may be too late by then. John McCain has come out of left field to dominate the Republican field and he is not a true conservative. Barring some major pledges at CPAC, he will get nothing but my disdain. After the immigration bill McCain/Kennedy, the 1st Amendment fiasco McCain/Feingold, and the Gang of 14, how can anyone call him a true Republican? Mitt Romney is a Mormon, which I have a real problem with, but he’s financially, socially and security conservative. It might just be talk for the campaign, but the others are even talking that way.

I take Al Mohler’s advise, and prioritize the issues before I vote. So here they are according to Robert Murphy’s take on Scripture: Abortion, it’s corollaries, War, Small Government, and Immigration (just to name the top five). The three Republicans all get the first one right, the Democrats get it all wrong. Next, there are all things that should come out of a real understanding of the sanctity of life, like issues relating to stem cells. If George Bush hadn’t held his ground and withheld Federal money from embryonic stem cell research, they never would’ve found pluripotent stem cells in adult skin cells. Huckabee called this one right, and Romney had to face the whole Massachusetts legislature over this. McCain gets the War right, but we can’t skip over priorities; he’s already out by now. To separate Huck from Mitt, we have to move on to Big vs Small government: the Huck was a tax-and-spend, Bush-esque governor of Arkansas.

Outside of the list of priorities, is the concern as to whether our nominee could have a hope of battling Hillary or Obama. There gonna have a ton a cash and a ton of support. Only Mitt has that kind of cash, and anyone but McCain could united the Republicans to battle Clinton or Barack. The Democrats reveal how easy they are gonna push over McCain when they admit that he’s likable and nearly one of them. Ugh!

Elections in America are about winning a party first and independents second. McCain can’t unite his party and if he is indistinguishable from Obillary but less charismatic, then he won’t win independents either. Mitt could unite the party and win the folks in the middle, like he did in MA. Huck is just sticking it out for the glory.

Sometimes I get mad at the Bible for not being what I expect.  Pretty quickly I realize this is because I have assumptions dumped into me by the world and my own avoidance of God that result in false expectations about what possible solutions might look like.  One of the main areas that I keep stumbling over is the nature of the Old Testament: it’s just a story, almost without commentary and almost without ever revealing the thought-life of those involved.  Now, I know the New Testament is a footnote to the Old, but even there, the stories are told in a similar way.

When we read a story, see a film or hear a friend telling us an anecdote, we automatically fill in the bigger picture.  When we are handed the metanarrative, instinctually we fill in a bigger one.  When an author tells us the thoughts of a character, we imagine the feelings behind the thoughts.   God purposed to be in the middle, just giving us the story (most of the time), forcing us to think of the bigger picture and the inner life of those involved.  Anything else would’ve lead us to overvalue thoughts and feelings, or philosophy.

Albert Mohler has become a daily staple in my iPod and for good reason. He has an intelligent take on the day’s news and pay attention to the important topics. Every now and then the conversation gets sufficiently heady for me, but mostly it’s good to hear what average, American Christians are thinking. Someone what distressingly, almost none of those are in Washington State with me

There are a lot of things that start to get me down when I take the wrong perspective on them: the hours I work for the money I make, the time I spend away from my family, my lack of academic and career achievement and the time I’ve wasted in my walk with Christ in this short life. However, on the broadcast from September 14th, I saw that I’m way ahead of the curve on at leas one key issue: marriage. The 2006 Census reports the number of people younger than 30 who are married and have children has plummeted. As Dr. Mohler says, only in times of pestilence, plague, famine or war have the numbers been so abysmal. I feel pretty good about having gotten married at 23 and having two kids by 30. But that wasn’t all.

The subtle hint that the President of Southern Seminary tried to communicate was for young people to consider getting married in the church service on Sunday. I did that! No one else in our experience has had their wedding be part of the worship service in a church. We still spent $3000 on food, flowers and everything else, but that’s way less than the national average of $18,000 per wedding. It was nice to hear that on somethings that really matter, we’ve already begun to build a godly legacy the future generations of our family.

I’ve started listening to Covenant Radio dot com’s podcast, and made it as far as episode five, Overview of Paedofaith. It was very interesting to hear and I think anyone who cares about Christendom should be aware of such issues in the Modern Church. Mark never mentioned it specifically, but the Federal Vision is what has ripped apart the church where our membership still resides, Lynden formerly OCRC. Some will marvel at my ability to be pro-paedocommunion but anti-Auburn Avenue, so I’d better explain how I arrived at this position.
Our pastor, Rob Rayburn, has spoken very persuasively about childhood participation in the Lord’s Supper. He did so, not speaking so as to break with the Reformed tradition, but to seek to extend it and follow it’s already open line of thought. That is, if we baptize infant because they are members of the visible church in the same way that babies were circumcised in the Old Testament, then we cannot rightfully withhold communion because they haven’t reached the “Age of Accountability”. 1 Corinthians 7 was meant to make us make us practice closed communion, not set up a bar of some test of intellect.
So, as I listened to the podcast interview with Rich Lusk, I was pleasantly surprised by how many insightful ideas he had. Paedo-faith, as a topic, was a nice neologism, I thought, for a section of theology that hasn’t been given in name in my understanding yet. He also had new argument for paedo-communion I hadn’t heard: if someone age 15 is a baptized member of a church, but isn’t getting communion ’cause they can’t become a member, and they fall into a sin they are un-repentant of, how can the church discipline them, since they can’t without the sacraments ’cause they’re already denied them? Also tied in is the question of frequency of the Lord’s Supper: if you’re just taking it once, twice, thrice or four times a year, you almost don’t care who’s denied it or accepted to it! Our traditional definitions of FAITH are based on refuting Works Righteousness of the Reformation Era and do nothing to explain to average Joe’s why we would baptize our infants.
All that good stuff being said, I could also TOTALLY hear all the mess that Guy P. Waters has mentioned about the Federal Vision flunkies going off some proverbial planks. Rich is so quick to bash the Enlightenment that he doesn’t he ar how much like a Socinianist he sounds. Towards the end of the episode, he expressly states the grievous error that drove our old pastor to drop the H-Bomb, that “the branch that is ultimately cut off from Christ once received the same vital sap as the branch that stays.” That is pure nonsense! Children who grow up in believing homes who apostatize finally were members of the Visible Church and never really Elect. We cannot see a roster of the Book of Life in this world, so all we have to go on is the visible Body. Anything else, either Hyper-Calvinist or Federal Visionist, is arrogant presumption.
I don’t call Federal Vision-ites heretics; there are so many people who call themselves Christians who have so much more wrong with their theology! I don’t think they’re great on everything, but their particular bend arises out of a practical hole in Reformed Theology: we don’t teach well on how to raise our children or the role of the sacraments. The solution is to fix our practice, not our theology.

Where have I been?!?! Well, I had finals: that was miserable. Working full time and taking ten credits will not work; I got a 3.0 average. After that, Jessica wanted me to read Harry Potter and I agreed. I got the first book in Ancient Greek, but it’s proving very hard and will take me a long time, I’m sure. So I plunged ahead and got all seven books in English. I read and read and listened to audio books and read and read but now I’m done! They’re really great books and J.K. Rowling is merciless to the end, killing off major characters left and right. When something approaches this level of greatness, however, I think my wife and I both start switching to the Biblical measure of excellence, and then the work of art nose-dives in our estimation. Harry was great when he was a metaphor or an allegory, but as soon as he was totally real and facing real death, he attitudes were shown to be ungodly and his ultimate hope to be in himself.
There proves to be a through-line that is consistent between Harry Potter, The Matrix, Babylon 5 and even Star Wars (if you dig far enough). Aside from all the mono-myth items, the ultimate struggle and solution in all of these is the same. Our hero (or party of heroes) is faced with two kinds of opponents. There are those who are for chaos, power, i.e. physis. Typically, the protagonist is against this force (not so in The Matrix). Then there are the forces of law and order, nomos. In the end, we are left to conclude that the overwhelming necessity is for a third option, typically self-determination or choice. Of all the aforementioned series, Babylon 5 puts it most succinctly, “We can find our own way between order and chaos . . . Now get the hell out of our galaxy!”
The trouble is, from one sense they’re right in that we must pick a third option, but in a larger sense they’re all wrong, because our choice must be for something categorically different from mere nomos vs physis. To come into theological terms, the possibilities are not limited to antinomianism and legalism. The truth is not some bastard child of these polar opposites, it is the most intellectually rigorous acceptance of both dialectal nodes to the fullest extent. The Law cannot save us, but God did give us the Law and call it good. On a higher plane than the simplistic debate, we say we are not saved by the Law, but once saved we love it and strive to obey it out of love for Him who saved us in order that we might be free.
I had this same debate with my mother, and she came at it from another angle: civics. Do we say that the law is ultimate or people? In simple societies, there is the Rule of the One or Few, monarchy or oligarchy. The greater civilizations have the Rule of Law, but corrupted by political maneuverings. A great society would have great laws that need no exceptions or judges. The inconceivability of such a land pushes us to the superlative Kingdom, where the Perfect Man rules and all laws are but expressions of His Will.

We went on a date last night and saw Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix at the IMAX in Seattle. It was awesome! It made me want to go and punch Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi right in the nose! Wake up people, we are in a war bigger than the Cold War and you and Jonathan Edwards are running around saying the War on Terror doesn’t exist and 9/11 is a card Giuliani is over playing! When will you start taking people like Ahmadinejad and Osama bin Laden at their word (like Chamberlain should’ve taken Hitler at his), then I’ll no longer be tempted to call you Corn Fudge.  The final battle scene between Dumbledore and Voldemort was sweet.  One could really believe that these were experienced men of gargantuan, magical conflicts.  It was like the Matrix.   Oh, and I couldn’t help but think that Fred and George Weasley’s firework “W” was intended to express support for our president and his policies that have kept this country from getting attacked again!