iMurphy

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.

One can not believe in Science and God at the same time. Science is defined as adhering to methodological naturalism. This is the belief that all phenomenon can be (or at least ought be) explained without recourse to anything outside of the material universe. Ungodly philosophers hold that this view can coexist with ontological supernaturalism, the belief in things outside of the natural realm. Their argument is a straw man; any belief in the supernatural that concurrently denies the necessity of incorporating those entities’ effects upon observable phenomenon does not genuinely believe in the ontological standing of the supernatural. Put more simply, if one’s conception of God does not co-mingle with one’s definition of the universe, then one’s God is meaningless, and not the God of the Bible. In the first linked-to article from Wikipedia, the authors vehemently argue that theirs is not an ontology, but it is in effect. The definition of science, however, could be put differently. It would be relatively easy to demonstrate that it was so for many renowned scientists in the past. They merely believed that they were describing patterns in nature, as best as they could understand them. It is not necessary to have a philosophical certainty that recourse to the supernatural will not be the only option to explain empirical data. Do not accept Wikipedia’s definition of science.

Ontology is the branch of philisophy that seeks to answer “What is there?” or “What is real?” These may seem like straight-forward questions, but consider things like Mathematics or The Spirit of Christmas. Are they real? How do you determine what is really real? Most cultures, religions and philosophies can be assessed by how they answer these questions. Traditionally, the West has been labeled Dualistic, that is, considering that there are two fundamental kinds of things in the universe (matter and spirit), while the East has been called Monistic, considering there to be only one thing at heart (the Tao or Brahman). I think that they are both right, but for the wrong reasons.

In the West, we inherited the wonderful traditions of the Hebrews and then foisted upon them the Greek’s errand nonsense. Jewish tradition maintained that a person is his or her body, that the breath was given to man by God and that as long as so animated, he or she was as living soul. Words like soul, mind and heart also mean breath, kidney and wisdom in Hebrew. When someone died, they didn’t have an inner “Casper the Friendly Ghost” float off somewhere: they were simply dead. Sheol, Hebrew hell, was simply an extended metaphor for the nothingness of the grave. It’s grey, monotone description indicates that death was empty and void. The word in Genesis 2:7 where Man becomes a living “soul” is rendered “creature” twelve verses later.

Greek philosophers, who presupposed no God, saw abstract concepts as having some reality beyond the physical. If everyone knows that right triangle obey the Pythagorean theorem, yet only perfectly in the mind, then the mind must be a kind of different thing from crummy, hand measured triangles. The New Testament was written in Greek because it was the lingua franca of the day, but now we’ve taken the pagan etymologies of the word to be what first century Jews were thinking. We are merely perpetuating Greek Dualism.

In the East, the ideas that everything is an expression of the Tao or Brahman, helped people remember that they are their body, not that they have a body. Never mind that God will resurrect everyone, then judge them: we have to have our bodies to exist. God is uncreated, however, and though the word doesn’t fit, He is the only thing of a different substance than everything else. Therein lies the correct definition of Dualism.

    Normally I hate all celebrity gossip and I am trying to shy away from my usual prying into other people’s lives. However, I have long been curious about Bono from U2. I put “40″ from War on my Christian mix tapes and I have long thought that “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” must be a Christian song. But Bono’s politics and rebellion put me off over the years, and they didn’t release any new songs to confirm a Christian faith.

    This new article in World Magazine, now, has renewed my belief! Bono is not only a Christian, but is heard evangelizing to an heathen interviewers who knew nothing of the faith. His politics may be quite left-of-center, but he has always struck me as being very sincere and very concerned about humanity. I hope, however, that there might be a song or two in the future to care for the souls of people, not just their bodies.

    Why is Superman such a popular character in popular culture. I just listened to the free download from Amazon of Mudville’s “Hero of the World”, but I was also thinking of Crash Test Dummies’ “Superman’s Song” and the Superman monologue from Kill Bill 2. Bill is right about Superman, he is unique in the cosmion of superheroes, and modern revisions to his character only highlight our uncomfortableness with his uniqueness.

    We all want a hero. We want someone who is like us, but not like us. We want someone who is human, like us. We want someone who is touchable so that we can no that he is real. We want someone who is hurtable, because we hurt, and then we know that he is not just condescending. But we also want him not to buckle under the pressures of life and stress and years. Not only ought he to withstand external pressures, but internal as well. We want a hero who doesn’t lose to personal demons.

    Superman is half-way between what we want and what we actually need. His alien origin is offset against his completely human appearance. His is just one man but he can save the doomed airplane and the little girl stuck in a tree. He is vastly superior to us, yet comes down to live with us as one of us. He pretends to be Clark Kent and loves Lois Lane, a mere mortal. Because he’s American, he’s not about to overthrow the government, but instead fights to truth and justice. The clearly perceptible injustices of the world are righted by him without painting him a vigilante. But he can’t save us from ourselves.

    Jesus Christ has no comic books or action movies but is the true fulfillment of our Superman inclinations. He is God and so is alien to us, but he is human to a larger extent than we are. He shows us who we ought to be by having lived in the world but never yielding to it. He is vulnerable; Jesus wept. But he didn’t overthrow governments or evil geniuses or sadistic killers. Instead, he diagnosed our unadmittable condition and provided the unattainable solution. The eradication of external evils will not make the world a better place a long as any person has hatein his heart. We need Jesus, not Superman, because we are God’s enemy by nature.

    I hear a lot of talk from Conservative, Christian people that America is a Christian nation. After I exploded “No it isn’t!”, I remembered that during the election I heard a lot of talk about how America was a Christian nation at its founding and we need to get back to our real roots. One has only to read what Thomas Jefferson thought of Christianity to know that America was not what they claim it to’ve been. But, as always, the real heart of the debate comes back to semantics and epistemology, regarding what we mean by a “Christian Nation”. What would a Biblical definition be?

    A Christian nation is nothing more than a great big church (not a church as in a building, but a group of believers). Non-believers are not part of the church and can not be a part of a Christian state. Such was the case in ancient Israel. This notion is repugnant to our modern sensibilities because tolerance has long been heralded as the highest virtue of our times and the redeeming factor in America’s make-up. But this 18th century Enlightenment concept is not to be found in the Bible, and would therefore not be found (in the same way) in a Christian nation. The church is the earthly collection of those who profess Christ and are therefore subject to the authority of church elders, or in the case of the Christian nation, the government.

    As long as we maintain that non-believers are part of our group (aka country) then we are not talking about a Christian nation. America is a country founded on freedom, not Christianity. Pennsylvania was the role-model for the rest of the country during the writing of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. As Christian subjects to this non-Christian government, we are called to submit in all things that don’t go against the Word of God. This includes things like voting. We must not be confused by Christians being elected to high positions in our secular government. This does not mean that the government has become any more or less Christian; The root of the system is firmly embedded in the ungodly soil of the Enlightenment.

    The result of these ideas is a that even ultra-conservative Christians must vote a little more “purple”. Are goal cannot be the Christianization of the federal government of America, though of course we want fellow Christians to succeed and change what can be changed. The highest possible implementation of God’s Law on earth would be an individual state that was theocratic, but it would still be part of the overall, tolerant American scene. We cannot hope to silence or outlaw those who hate Christ or wish us gone in a society that values freedom above all else. At the federal level, we must strive to elect those who will maintain our freedom at the state level to form communities where we can practice religion as we see fit. We must aim to keep the federal government as small as possible, always remembering the Civil War: we are not permitted to leave.