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.

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!

Sometimes, I listen to so much Hugh Hewitt that I feel a comradery with Conservative America, a connection with the Red half of this country. None of them live within 500 miles of me, so it doesn’t last long! I don’t think I’m in danger of forgetting where my citizenship really lies (Philippians 3:20), but I start to have too much hope in the US of A. Then I read something online like this: a majority of people who have had eggs fertilized in the laboratory are willing to give those embryos over to stem cell research. We don’t even recognize that this whole Culture of Death which we associate with abortion, can be found even in those seeking to have children. The book keepers don’t count selective reductions as abortions or infanticide in the numbers we are read about. We’re willing to kill babies in our demand to have babies. Any society that doesn’t value life above all else will not last, so even from a secular humanist stand-point, America has already taken the step off the cliff, it just hasn’t accelerated to terminal velocity yet. Maybe we should move to Israel…

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.

I just listened to a very good sermon by C.J. Mahaney, former pastor of Covenant Life Church in Gaithersburg, Maryland. He was very Baptist in his use of passion as a persuasive sermon technique, but nonetheless quite convincing and convicting. I recommend the sermon to everyone. (Oh, and thanks to Castle Church Popular Files podcast for the hook-up.)
Totally unrelated to anything serious, I kept thinking how my Mahaney’s voice sounded like a young Alec Baldwin’s! No one else seems to have made the connection, so I thought I’d mention it. Does anyone else hear it? (I think I must’ve heard some audio book Alec did since I clearly am able to divorce appearences from sounds.)

Donald Kingsbury had written an interesting spin-off of Isaac Asimov’s celebrated Foundation Trilogy. Kingsbury was a Math professor in Canada and has authored several other sci-fi books. Other reviewers note his excess length, odd sentence structure and old-fashion gender norms. Not wanting to retread already worn ground, I’ll leave it to the reader to read comments on Amazon or Google it. Now, onto new territory!

Science fiction is useful as long as it makes us more aware of the present. Typically, author utilize their expertise in some field or another to teach us something from a new angle. Kingsbury’s contributions to society are:

1. The state of things (from a physics perspective) can be thought of as information. Newtonian billiard balls tell you about the past and the future by the inertia, since we know the rules of motion. But once you get to the quantum level, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle guarantees that information is being lost continuously. The universe, therefore, cannot be deterministic since there isn’t ever enough information to go too far forward or backwards in time accurately.
2. The amount of information present isn’t enough to derive an absolute system for all conditions. Prediction must be constantly refined and reapplied.
3. Prediction is higher form of Man’s survival mechanisms: we contemplate unfavorable senarios until we can avoid them. Only the lazy aren’t constantly thinking of what is to their disadvantage in the world, right up until the moment it clunks them in the head!

There are many other nu gets of insight littered throughout the 500 pages, all the kinds of stuff that occurs to math professors! They make good food for thought, but as said by others, they could’ve been presented more concisely.
What is most annoying about this book is its unquestioned late-modern/post-modern assumptions. Illicit sex and abortions are ubiquitous features of the future world. Religion is just some political force from the past, passing away as humans become advanced. Science is slowly advancing us towards “The Truth” but the lessons of history are only of use to politicians. Love is simply the maternal gene acting up or ways people get what they want out of each other.
Asimov was cavalier and condescending towards religion in his books, but he was constantly either profound in his plot twists or engrossing in his characters thought-lives. Kingsbury does neither for too many pages upon pages. The main character, Eron, loses his brain-supplement-machine, but we barely spend a dozen pages delving into his torment before we are whisked away to flash backs and competing main characters. Kingsbury brilliantly reveals psychohistory to be Modernist intellectual chauvinism but spends a half page on what should have been an engrossing denouement. The thrill of out-smarting Asimov the Genius is taken away by too many pages of poo-pooing human history. Still, an interesting read.