Yet again, my remarkable good taste confirmed

Mrs. Curmudgeon broke down and got me the gift at the top of my list for Christmas: an Ion Tape 2 PC, which is a dual cassette deck with a USB connection. Along with a handy software package, this allows one to easily convert one's old and vast audio cassette collection into mp3 files, thereby redeeming the hundreds and thousands of dollars I spent a couple audio recording revolutions ago. I've started with the As ("Art of Noise" this week), and expect to be done with the process a couple years from now. (I still have a day job.) I must say, even going back some 25 years, my musical tastes hold up remarkably well. If I do say so myself.

Thanks, Mrs. Curmudgeon!

Gambrinus

I have discovered my new hero, thanks to dictionary.com.

My free download addiction

I just discovered I have nine distinct versions of "In the Bleak Midwinter" (Shawn Colvin prefers to hyphenate the last word of that title) in my iTunes. An indication of obsessive downloading of mp3s, or just a good beginning?

The Incarnation & Christmas excess

Lapsed Protestant theologian R.R. Reno gets it just about right in his essay "The Incarnation" over at the First Things website.

Christmastime is beer

I'm not sure why, but I love hops. In moderation, though: I find I enjoy only one bottle at a sitting, and then it has to be drunk by itself, sans any food to get in the way of the hoppy experience. The hops come out in full force for the winter solstice, featured heavily in most brewer's Christmas offerings. I've always looked forward to Breckenridge's Christmas Ale, but this year have fallen for the Full Sail Wassail. A recent review in the Denver Post points out it's not really a wassail, but it's not really like I care very much about that point.

When will the madness end?

Flash-mob singers spark California mall evacuation

The singers were performing Handel's Hallelujah Chorus.

A spontaneous musical concert at a California shopping mall ended with the entire complex being evacuated after some 5,000 people turned up to sing.

You know, he's got a point...

Hah! Get it? Point?

Today's Candorville, by Darrin Bell.

The Presbyterian Curmudgeon wishes you a merry Christmas album

Each year, I allow myself one new Christmas album. In practice, that translates into several impulse buys, although Amazon's many free albums tend to temper that tendency.

An easy rationalization is the clearance offer. When I found Christmas with Johnny Cash in the same Christian junk catalogue from which I order last year's Christmas cards, it was easy to add it to my shipment. Unfortunately, there's not much to get excited about here. The Man in Black delivers competent renditions of the classics, along with a sentimental look at an impoverished Christmas. About what you'd expect, but not more than what you'd expect.

Annie Lennox's new Christmas Cornucopia is a real treat, though. She avoids the recent pop material and instead concentrates on ancient hymns and carols, giving each a respectful and powerful performance. As always, she rises to and above the quality of the material and brings out the strengths so often overlooked by less thoughtful singers.

The big surprise this year is The Christmas Gig, available as a free download from Target. Target recruited a bunch of hepsters who've turned in a collection of pop-heavy originals, a couple of which are in Spanish. It's a great deal of fun, and (did I mention?) free!

Yup. Target.

Time to start preaching politics

According to the Denver Post, two competing bills have been submitted to the Colorado legislature for its next session. One, representing the forces of light, truth, and all that is good, would opt Colorado out of the national folly which is daylight savings time, leaving the clocks in this great state permanently in tune with the daily progress of the sun across the sky, in accordance with the natural creation order. The other, representing bolshevikism, oppression, and all that is vain and empty in this corrupted world, would require the citizens of Colorado to keep their clocks on daylight savings time year-round.

If ever there were a moment for a presbyterian pastor to preach on upcoming legislation...

The Genius of Miles Davis

I know many of you wanted to gift me this box set designed specifically for obsessive-compulsive lunatics (in a trumpet case! A trumpet case!) this Christmas, but were intimidated by the $1200 price tag. The good news, according to a recent Denver Post jazz column by Brett Saunders, is that it's now been reduced to a much more reasonable $750.

C'mon. Make a curmudgeon smile.

The Church-integrated family

One of the most under-appreciated efforts of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church is its journal for Church officers, Ordained Servant. Originally a print magazine, under G.I. Williamson's editorial direction it was a reliable font of practical resources for elders and deacons. Since it went online and Gregory Reynolds became the editor, it has taken more of a foundational direction, looking more to first principles and philosophical underpinnings than the nuts-and-bolts of ministry (although it is not entirely lacking in hands-on advice). While written for officers of the OPC, the webernet makes it accessible to just about anyone, and so I hope many are making use of it (although I fear too few are).

Ordained Servant continues its notable contributions to the health of the broader Church by making this month's lead article my essay "The Church-Integrated Family," based on a lecture I first delivered in 2002.

I carry on a venerable tradition

Or at least an old one, as certified by Wiley in today's installment of Non Sequitur.

Finally down under 180

For a while now, Mrs. Curmudgeon (who reads running magazines) has been insisting that I could get below 180 pounds if I really tried. My position has been that the last time I dropped so far down was when I was a starving graduate student, a tetch over 180 isn't bad for a man of my height and advanced years, and that I really, really love cheeseburgers.

Well, I'm not too big of a man to admit Mrs. Curmudgeon was right all along. According to our "Health-o-meter" this morning, I've dropped down to 179.4. I was wrong, and she was right.

Of course, that might have something to do with having picked up the stomach virus that the kids puking all weekend, but still.

More or less human

There's a tendency amongst commentators, and especially Bible translators, to interpret "the heart" in the Old Testament as roughly equivalent to intellectual capacity or exercise; hence, "heart" is often translated in Proverbs as "understanding" or even "intelligence." However, a more literal rendering can allow for a more provocative reading, as in Proverbs 15:32.

He who ignores discipline rejects his soul,
but he who hears reproof acquires heart.

One might say that to reject discipline is to become less human; to embrace it is to become more so.

Scratch My Back

As a general rule, cover projects by songwriters creative in their own right make for fairly interesting listening. As part of his Scratch My Back project, Peter Gabriel got several of the artists whose songs he covered to cover one of his in turn; these have been issued as singles on iTunes. Paul Simon's version of "Biko" is a fine argument for the cover song genre. His stripped-down, guitar-centric rendering of Peter Gabriel's ominous anthem takes on the tone of a funereal lament while giving renewed plausibility to the thoughtful apartheid-era lyrics. In the same vein, David Byrne's cover of "I Don't Remember" gets at the original's frenetic sensibility while making it very much his own dance tune. On the other hand, Lou Reed takes a hatchet to "Solsbury Hill," turning all his latent misanthropy loose on what is, admittedly, a rather frail reed which Peter Gabriel was able to make a perennial radio favorite purely on the strength of an unabashedly sentimental and sincere performance. Peter Gabriel probably shouldn't have asked Lou Reed to contribute a track.

And actually, he shouldn't have attempted any covers himself. The album itself is monotonous; every song is performed at approximately the same slow beat. Peter Gabriel tries to turn everything into either a lullaby or a dirge or both. Take, for instance, his cover of "Boy in the Bubble." The first song on the still-astounding Graceland, Paul Simon's "Boy in the Bubble" was a frantic collage of dystopian imagery, heavily dependent on wordplay and a quick beat. By slowing it way, way down, Peter Gabriel makes all those stunning word pictures sound mildly silly. What was originally a panicked take on a world spinning completely out of control has become kind of boring.

I don't know what's happened to Peter Gabriel. Maybe hanging out with Richard Branson and the Elders has completely dulled his artistic edge.

Pop music has been saved

Why, yes, She & Him is (are?) dedicated to producing trifles on the eternal pop music themes of love and heartbreak. And that's the point: create a triviality with a good beat the kids can dance to, along with the promise that it's all going to work out and true love will be found. The ethereal vocals only help make the point.

I have a new crush.

It makes an '80s gamer smile

Today at shirt.woot, for those of us who don't understand how to play video games without a joystick.

God bless John Hickenlooper

There was little doubt John Hickenlooper would become Colorado’s next governor, especially after Tom Tancredo entered the race and peeled away the sloganeering nativist constituency from the Republican party. Nonetheless, the fact he won by a clear majority in a hotly contested three-way race indicates the high level of respect he has earned in our great state.

In both his Christianity and politics, Hickenlooper is liberal (being an Episcopalian Democrat), while I tend to think conservatism in either is suspiciously progressive (being an Orthodox Presbyterian reflexive reactionary). Still, I have been impressed with Hickenlooper’s work as mayor of Denver. He has studiously avoided the politicking and party chicanery of (at least some of) his predecessors. Moreover, he made the centerpiece of his administration a quixotic mission to rid Denver of homelessness and, believe it or not, committed actual time and resources to the effort. Most notable has been his willingness, in fact eagerness, to partner with Churches, Christian missions, and organizations of other religions to assist homeless families and provide resources to individuals WITHOUT, so far as I have been able to determine (and I have been paying close attention), trying to put any constraints on the beliefs and practices which lead faith-based organizations to get involved with the poor and needy in the first place. In one form or another, I have been involved with poverty alleviation since my late teens, and think it unlikely homelessness can be ended before sin is eliminated from the human race. John Hickenlooper, in all sincerity, disagrees with me and has done something real, practical, and long-lasting about it.

Martin Luther once said something about preferring to be ruled by a competent Turk (Muslim) than by an incompetent Christian prince. I would never vote for John Hickenlooper, but he has always struck me as competent, honest, good-natured, and motivated by a genuine desire to serve the people of Denver and, now, Colorado. I hope I am pleased with his service as governor as I have been with his service as mayor.

John Williamson Nevin: High Church Calvinist

The Anxious Bench continues to astonish me not only for its insight into the American religious psyche, but for its well-nigh prophetic foreshadowing of the modern American evangelical movement and what passes for its theology. As I've written earlier, its melancholic tone captures perfectly the unease which any Churchly Presbyterian must experience when attempting to discuss the faith with an evangelical. Accordingly, I've been distressed to hear John Williamson Nevin labeled a heretic by some within the Reformed community. While I am no expert on the Mercersburg Theology, any wholesale dismissal of Nevin and Phillip Schaff's work strikes me as uninformed, to say the least.

D.G. Hart's intellectual biography of Nevin is not the book to make one an expert in the Mercersburg Theology (only actual study will do that), but does, with admirable insight, place Nevin in his historical, theological, and most especially ecclesiastical contexts. Nevin will continue as the patron saint of American Presbyterians whose Churchly orientation leaves them at odds not only with evangelicalism, but with much of what passes for Reformed thinking today.

The central issue [for Nevin], unlike most American Reformed or Presbyterians of his day [or ours, MWK], was not the five points of Calvinism or the imputation of Adam's sin. Instead, it was the church and its ministry. (p. 236)

But if the church is primarily an agency of grace through word and sacrament, then when those means of salvation become marginal, Christianity has entered an era fraught with abiding sigificance. (p. 237)

...Nevin's abiding insight: Christianity's primary influence needs to be evaluated not by the church's ability to influence society, but by its performance of sacred rites and recitation of holy words through which the body of Christ grow.s Nevin's recognition that the church has something to offer that no other institution can is still as pertinient at the beginning of a new millennium as it was in 1843 when he first articulated it. That he saw it so early and so clearly is a reason why Nevin should continue to be read and studied by believers and academics alike. (p. 238)

Spittin' Image

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. - Genesis 1:27

Yes, but what does that mean? What does it mean that man was created in the image of God? What distinct faculties of man make him God’s image? What separates us from the animals? Or is the question moot? Has the Fall into sin destroyed God’s image in man?

When wrestling with questions of systematic theology, a good place to begin looking for answers is in our Confessional standards. The Westminster Shorter Catechism, in answer to question 10, states, “God created man male and female, after his own image, in knowledge, righteousness, and holiness, with dominion over the creatures.” God’s image in man consists primarily in knowledge, righteousness, and holiness.

The Westminster Divines based this statement on Colossians 3:10 and Ephesians 4:24. Both of these texts talk about how the new man, saved from his sinful state, is being renewed in the image of the Creator. Christ’s blood washed away our sin. By good and necessary inference, then, we can apply what is true about redeemed man to the first man in his innocent state.

Colossians 3:10: “(You) have put on the new nature, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its Creator.” Knowledge of what? The context of this verse is an exhortation to live holy lives, putting off sin. A life of sin is opposed to the knowledge in which we are being renewed. This knowledge is spoken of in Jeremiah 31:33, “`But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days,’ says the LORD: ‘I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.’” The knowledge in which we are being renewed, the knowledge which characterized Adam and Eve at creation, is the knowledge of the law of God, his holy rule for our lives. As God’s covenant people, his law is written on our hearts, causing us to live an obedience which glorifies him.

This is reinforced by Ephesians 4:24, which comes in the midst of a passage which parallels Colossians 3. “(P)ut on the new nature, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.” Here again, the image of God in man is displayed by living lives which please and glorify the Lord. Just as God is holy, man is to be pure and without sinful intent in all aspects of his life. He is to uphold the law of the Lord in his every deed. This is why Paul can sum up his exhortation to Christian living with “Therefore, be imitators of God.” (Eph 5:1)

If the image of God consists primarily in holiness, some might argue man is not the image of God. Sinful man is by definition not holy, and even Christians must struggle with a remnant of sin. Our passages from Colossians and Ephesians teach that sanctification is a process, and we will not be perfectly holy until we pass into glory. After the Fall, can we truly say man is still the image of God?

Our Confession provides a helpful corrective to this line of argument. Look particularly at the Shorter Catechism, questions 17-19, and at chapter 6 of the Westminster Confession of Faith. In discussing the effects of the Fall on mankind, the Confession at no point says man is no longer in the image of God. This is because the Bible nowhere teaches such a thing. In fact, Scripture teaches the opposite. In Genesis 9:6 (after man’s Fall into sin in Genesis 3), we read “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for God made man in his own image.” Capital punishment is based upon the image of God in man. Ultimately, every murderer is trying to destroy the Lord; the death penalty is the proper consequence for attempted deicide. Therefore, even sinful man retains the image of God.

How this is so may be understood by reflecting upon the nature of an image (pun intended). Let’s do an experiment: Gaze in a mirror. That’s what you look like, right? Now drop the mirror on the floor. (Kids, don’t try this at home.) Gaze in the mirror again. Is that what you look like? Well, yes and no. Each shard of glass may reflect back a true likeness, but the whole picture is lost. You may see bits of yourself in the mess on the floor, but you most definitely don’t look like that.

In the same way, we have become distorted reflections of God’s holiness. Instead of perfectly imitating him, we twist his image, reflecting back sin instead of righteousness. Corrupted by our wickedness, fallen man is like a funhouse mirror, distorting the truth about God, testifying that the holy Lord is sinful. Every time we sin, we claim God sins. Regeneration rescues us from this lie. Rebirth in the Holy Spirit (John 3) makes us able, by faith, to act righteously, thereby testifying that the Lord is righteous. This is why the Apostle Paul tells Christians in Ephesians 4 and Colossians 3 to live holy lives. The indwelling power of the Holy Spirit is renewing us in knowledge, righteousness, and holiness, so we might faithfully reflect the image of God.

In defense of pedantry

As do all right-thinking persons, I've got George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" in my web browser's main bookmark menu (just under Mapquest, actually). In this inspiring manifesto for clear writing, he does note brevity is not the same thing as clarity; nonetheless, I think one might be forgiven for confusing them. That's particularly the case when reading the works of many members of my guild, who often give the impression of being paid by the word. Very likely, they write like they preach, and they preach by going on and on, giving three examples when one will do and quoting two dead theologians when no quotation was necessary. This too-prevalent pedantry, this insistence on flogging dead oratories with word upon tedious work, has produced in me a paranoid obsession with brevity in my own writing and speaking.

I bring this up because I have just completed two essays which were so pedantic I actively detested the act of writing them. Again and again, I brought up points of only tangential relevance, and went to ridiculous lengths to clarify that which was already transparent. These may be (and this is saying something) the most boring pieces I've ever written.

And it's not my fault.

I've come to realize pedantry is sometimes dictated by one's subject, or, more precisely, one's audience. If said audience is impressed by an awesome flow of verbiage, if it tends to accept every example in support of an argument as entirely sound of itself, then the person addressing it must argue similarly. Leave a single illustration unanswered, and the audience, having never learned to think through the arguments for themselves, will think the defeated proposition still stands. In other words, sometimes the only way to fight erroneous pedantry is with informed pedantry.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union

In the sundry periodicals which I still read, I have of late run across various articles questioning whether Michael Chabon is a literary author, or merely a popular one. I don't care how that question gets answered, as long as he keeps writing paragraphs like this (p. 265):

The wastebasket is a thing for children, blue and yellow with a cartoon dog cavorting in a field of daisies. Landsman stares at it for a long time, thinking about nothing, thinking about children's garbage and dogs in cartoons. The obscure unease that Pluto has always inspried, a dog owned by a mouse, daily confronted with the mutational horor of Goofy.

That's why I read Michael Chabon.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a hard-boiled detective story set in an alternate universe in which Europe's Jews were resettled in Alaska, rather than Palestine, after World War II. The plotting is clever and the dialogue snappy, but as always in Chabon's work, its most compelling element is profound humanism. Its characters are real, recognizable people who operate from a complex and often conflicting set of principles and motives. Of course, my fondness for the novel is likely due, in large part, to recognizing myself in the wreckage of Meyer Landsman, should I suffer similar losses.

I have the "P.S." edition, which includes profiles of the author and an essay of his which led to writing this book. I take great encouragement that he wrote, and left unpublished, another novel on the same subject before he was able to write this one, and has another similarly discarded manuscript in his past. Even amongst the pros, a writer's work demands failures in order to create successes.

Regarding "Torah & Incarnation"

Dear First Things,

In “Torah and Incarnation” (October 2010), Meir Soloveichik captures quite well the essential distinction between rabbinic Judaism and Christianity, one grounded, ironically, in their respective readings of the Torah. That distinction is not so much how the gap between man and God is bridged, but who is to do the bridging.

Soloveichik finds in Deuteronomy 4:15 a declaration that the infinite God cannot, by his nature, become a finite human, whereas the passage itself warns Israel not to presume to worship God by images; in other words, to devise their own way to bridge the gap between man and God. The Lord controls his relationship with his people, saying later in Deuteronomy 30:14 that he has given his Word to instruct his people how to respond to him. In this vein, Soloveichik eloquently captures the communal, intergenerational dialogue participated in by every serious student of that Word. However, as Paul (reflecting on Deuteronomy 30:14) argues in Romans 10, this dialogue must not become our pursuit of God, but a discovery of God’s call to believe Jesus is the risen Lord.

Again, when he observes Christians are “carnal” in their belief in an Incarnate God who is really present in the Eucharist, Soloveichik is quite right. But for the Christian, this carnality is identical to, not at odds with, communion with God the Spirit; that is, the Christian faith rejoices in the union of spirit and body and rejects a solely intellectual pursuit of God without regard for one’s body. As the Torah itself teaches us to accept only God’s self-revelation, and as the Lord has revealed himself to us in his Incarnation, the Christian looks not to a present redemption, an Eden of the mind in this present age (however Isaiah 51:3 is properly translated), but to the inauguration of the new heavens and earth in which his body and soul will be one in resurrection glory, even as are those of the Incarnate Lord and Son of God, Jesus Christ, himself.

They called us the best & brightest (without irony!)

I joined Teach for America in 1992, the third year of the program's existence when it was still a relatively small program and nothing like the player it has become in the national education debate. Back then, any news coverage was an exciting affirmation ("Look! I exist!" [we didn't have the webernet, either, if you can believe that]), and those of us of a certain age still tend to read every article and pass it on to fellow veterans.

So it was that one of my roommates from back in the day (who has now cheerfully sold out to work for the Man on Wall Street) noted how TFA's recruits have largely become graduates of schools at which we could never have gotten accepted; in fact, had current standards prevailed then, we'd never have taught in the Houston Independent School District.

We didn't hike Machu Pichu in the 7th grade and rewrite the curriculum for our middle school WHILE IN ELEMENTARY school and so on.

We were just reasonably smart hard working guys who liked kids and had honest aspirations. APPLICATION DENIED!

And there's the rub. Back in the day, I gained some small notoriety within the Houston corps for criticizing TFA's failure to effectively train classroom teachers. TFA's present model really is the answer to my complaints: get the best and brightest exposed to teaching for a couple years in the hopes that a tiny percentage will commit those Machu Pichu-conquering energies to fixing America's public education system. Mind you, this really is working. Look at our own TFA corps year. Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg produced the KIPP charter school movement, and Joel Rose has become the NYC school chancellor's right hand man and is trying to revolutionize teaching paradigms. And, lest I forget the obvious, there's Michelle Rhee, late chancellor of Washington, D.C. schools, TIME magazine cover girl, and documentary film star. The more TFA recruits the best and brightest, the more likely it is to get this kind of impact.

On the other hand, when they admitted losers such as those of us who once rented a house behind a movie theater, they probably got a decent percentage of classroom lifers. I'd guess that more recent TFA veterans are going into administration than in the olden days, but seriously: when you've been accepted by Yale Law, are you really going to be a classroom teacher forever?

At the end of the day, what the system really, really needs is good teachers. Maybe the TFA model can't produce those, but at least it should admit that.

Calvin's Institutes, Battles edition: page 161

Calvin observes that natural theology is only possible to the Christian mind which has been disciplined by Sabbath-keeping:

For even though our eyes, in whatever direction they may turn, are compelled to gaze upon God's works, yet we see how changeable is our attention, and how swiftly are dissipated any godly thoughts that may touch us. Here also, until human reason is subjected to the obediance of faith and learns to cultivate that quiet to which the sanctification of the seventh day invites us, it grumbles, as if such proceedings were foreign to God's power.

Tongues & eyes (Proverbs 15:1-4)

There's an interesting, albeit implicit, contrast between organs, and what they do, in Proverbs 15:1-4. This section focuses primarily on mouths and what they do; that is, how people affect and attempt to control others by the use of their tongues. In 15:3, though, the eyes of the Lord watch both the evil and the good. While the tongue is active and the eye passive, the Lord's eyes ultimately accomplish far more than do men's mouths, for his observations form the basis of his judgments.

I thought I was hard on hereditary monarchies

From the BBC's website:

One of the Pope's senior advisers has pulled out of the papal visit to Britain, after reportedly saying the UK is a "Third World country" marked by "a new and aggressive atheism".

Apparently, I have not yet begun to snark.

The knucklehead vs. the extremists

It's fairly obvious to most adults in this country that the Florida pastor planning a Koran bonfire this Saturday is something of a knucklehead. Of course, a pastor has the duty to inform his congregation that Islam is a false religion. This, however, is mere provocation. I hope I'm not the only person to note the irony of a congregation with "outreach" in its name making its biggest splash with an event which does nothing to articulate the nature of the true Gospel, the grace of which Islam's system is strictly against.

At the same time, these little episodes underline the astonishing difference between Islam and Christianity. Someone threatens to burn a Koran or draws an irreverent doodle of Mohammed, and thousands of Muslims riot, burn down embassies, and threaten and/or kill Europeans and/or Americans. An irreverent depiction of Jesus is shown on South Park, and thousands of Christians shrug and take a moment to pray for souls of the blasphemers.

So which really is the religion of peace, and which is nothing of the sort?

Inception

I like to think I have an implicit contract with certain artists whereby, if they produce a work which changes my life, I am obligated to continue partaking of any future works until such time as they descend to such mediocrity that I can no longer legitimately expect anything earth-shattering from them again. For example, The World According to Garp and A Prayer for Owen Meany drove me to eagerly read all of John Irving's novels, until a couple years ago. A Son of the Circus, along with a string of other lesser works, released me from any obligation, and Last Night in Twisted River isn't even on my Amazon wish list.

I have yet to be disappointed in Christopher Nolan, though. His first feature film, Memento, was astonishing not for its narrative inventiveness, but for its psychological power. In an earlier short film, Following, Nolan used dischronologized storytelling in order to leave the audience as surprised as was the protaganist by the ending. In Memento, however, Nolan did not, ultimately, tell a story about the character played by Guy Pearce, but instead called the viewer's conception of his own identity and self into question. More than any philosophy book ever has, Memento forced me to wonder whether my self-understanding was anything more than convenient, self-chosen illusion.

His two Batman movies have been entertaining thrillers, but I was very interested to see Inception, which I remember one critic describing as "Memento on a Dark Knight budget." Instead, it seemed more like "Dark Knight without Batman." It used the hypothetical architecture of dreamworlds as a setting for a taut and interesting thriller; but by the end of the movie, a thriller is all it was.

I love Memento because, in the end, it was a movie about me and every other person who saw it. Inception, on the other hand, was merely meant to entertain us.

Mr. Breyer Writes a Dissenting Opinion

Hadley Arkes offers this subtle, penetrating, and historically informed analysis of a recent dissenting opinion from U.S. Supreme Court Justice Breyer on a 2nd Amendment case, bringing the justice's reasoning to bear on the question of federal jurisdiction over abortion law.

A Dream Deferred

I attended eighth grade at Langston Hughes Junior High, which may have been why I was particularly alert to the work of the great poet of the Harlem Renaissance whilst in college. Thus, when I read "Hope deferred makes the heart sick" in Proverbs 13:12, I inevitably think of Hughes' ominous masterpiece, "A Dream Deferred." Try as I might, I couldn't work it into my sermon on Proverbs 13:12-19 (other than the reference in the title, "What Happens to a Desire Fulfilled?"), but I can at least post it here.

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Just desserts

Proverbs 13:20-21 form a thematic chiasm:

A- Wise companions make wise (13:20a)
B- Foolish companions bring harm (13:20b)
B'- Sinners suffer evil/trouble (13:21a)
A'- Righteous receive good (13:21b)

By connecting wisdom and foolishness with, respectively, sin and righteousness, the poet helps the reader see that the former categories have a strong moral and ethical dimension.

Publicizing Privacy

Joseph Bottum has some intriguing observations on the place of manners and proper English usage in this essay on the First Things website.

The girl who I read about on vacation

(Spoiler alert: I will give away plot points.)

Whilst in Ontario, I finished the novel I had brought, and the only one in the Canadians' house in which I had any interest was East of Eden. But I was on vacation. So, I walked three feet into the nearest bookstore and got a copy of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

The books don't strike me as particularly well-written, although I'm reluctant to criticize the style of a work translated from Swedish into British English (British English, by definition, being of criticizable style). The books are very, very long, largely because they feature a Grisham-like obsession for the unnecessary detail. For example, every time anyone eats the menu is described in detail, but the two months spent by the male protaganist in prison get only a few pages. Nonetheless, the plots and characters are interesting, so I'm a couple hundred pages into the sequel during the present vacation.

Particularly of interest to me, and unmentioned by any review which I've thus far encountered, is just how astonishingly post-Christian Sweden has become. A notation for Bible verses is a major plot point in the first book, and it's one I can't imagine any Christian anywhere using (but then, I've never been Swedish). A senile Lutheran pastor recalls the formation of the canon, although he can't remember to whom he's talking. A Presbyterian congregation in Texas identifies its mission as "helping people grow closer to God through the sacrament of baptism and prayer," a phrase never used anywhere by any Presbyterian Church of any theological stripe whatsoever. A native of the heart of European Lutheranism apparently can no longer be expected to be much acquainted with Protestantism and its ways.

And I'm surprised this hasn't been remarked upon in the secular press?

Calvin's Institutes, Battles edition: page 97

Why does Calvin have the reputation for being austere and impersonal? Commenting on Exodus 34:6-7, he writes, "Thereupon his powers are mentioned, by which he is shown to us not as he is in himself, but as he is toward us: so that this recognition of him consists more in living experience than in vain and high-flown speculation."

Inferno

Since I'm on holiday, I read an update and rewrite of Dante's Inferno by two science-fiction writers, largely on the strength of a favorable write-up on the First Things website. While it wasn't bad by a long shot, it also wasn't particularly engaging. Part of the problem was I couldn't be bothered to care much about the protaganist; a larger part was that once it became apparent that there was an escape from Hell, it didn't seem so awful to be consigned there.

Perhaps there's a reason the Bible doesn't give too many details about either Heaven or Hell: they're both more interesting when their particulars are left up to the imagination.

Theses on Preaching: Pronouns

Mrs. Curmudgeon and I are visiting Canadian Pastor and Pastor's Wife outside of Toronto in celebration of our 10th anniversary, and I was graciously invited to preach yesterday. (Yes, on Independence Day and while the Queen of Canada was in the actual neighborhood. My new motto: "barely avoiding international incidents since 1970".) During the post-game analysis, Canadian Pastor noted I had used the first person plural during the afternoon sermon. This was notable because the single greatest homiletical influence on me has been Jay Adams' Preaching with Purpose, where he argues (forcefully) that preachers should use the second person when addressing the congregation. Adams observes that this is how God addresses his people throughout Scripture, and therefore contends this is how God's ambassador ought address them as well.

The thing is, the first person plural has been creeping into my sermons over the last few years. Since I work from an outline, my preaching has a large improvisational component, and so what actually comes out of my mouth is largely an intuitive choice. Consequently, I don't know why my practice has been changing, although (surprise!) I now have a theory.

English is interesting not because it lacks a second person plural, but because (outside the American South) the second person singular and plural are indistinguishable. During a sermon, the congregation has no way of telling whether the pastor's "you" addresses the individual or the assembled group. While reflection would almost necessarily dictate the latter, I suspect that during the homiletical moment the individual unreflectively hears the former; that is, he tends to think the pastor is preaching at him directly. In that psychological context, "us" is useful not so much to bring the pastor into the group being addressed, but instead to make clear that the entire congregation is addressed. In other words, the first person plural substitutes for a second person plural.

That, at least, is my theory.

Calvin's Institutes, Battles edition: pages 93-95

As he defends the absolute necessity and sufficiency of Scripture, Calvin offers some critiques of anabaptist excesses in his own day (Book 1, chapter 9) which apply equally well to the current Pentecostal and charismatic obsession with receiving a direct revelation from God. "Furthermore, those who, having forsaken Scripture, imagine some way or other of reaching God, ought to be thought of as not so much gripped by error as carried away with frenzy." In my experience, it can be very difficult to talk reasonably about the sufficiency of Scripture with someone who believes he has received a direct revelation from God. The supposed reception of such has long seemed to me more a function of one's psychology than one's theology.

Calvin closes the question in this way: "[The Holy Spirit] is the Author of the Scriptures: he cannot vary and differ from himself. Hence he must ever remain just as he once revealed himself there. This is no affront to him, unless perchance we consider it honorable for him to decline or degenerate from himself."

Not emergent, but emerging adults

byFaith, the web magazine of the Presbyterian Church in America, has an insightful article on working with "emerging adults" which draws heavily on the work of sociologist Christian Smith. One revealing quote:

Ruling Elder Bob Baldwin at GraceDC commented that when it comes to biblical sexuality, “If the rules don’t fit their cultural expectations, they mentally find a way around them, ignoring what they know to be true scripturally. What surprises me most is how carefully they have thought through their work-arounds.”

Less less, still a word

Turns out "ruth" can be used by itself, in the sense of the opposite of "ruthless." Who knew?

Thanks, Dictionary.com's word of the day!

Grace & mercy

In Proverbs 11:16, we encounter the gracious woman, and in its thematic partner, 11:17, the man of lovingkindness. By pointing to both a man and a woman, the Proverbs indicate that the fruit of the Spirit are accessible to all people, and implicitly point to the whole of the new humanity renewed in Christ.

Island Time

is the name of the most recent episode of This American Life, which you can still download here for free, for at least a couple more days. The entire episode in on Haiti, but I found the third act most compelling with Ben Fountain's apocalyptic vision of the earthquake and its aftermath. My own experience in two earthquakes in 1992 was echoed here: when the ground and everything else start moving, one's own insanity can seem the most readily plausible explanation.

R.R. Reno gets optimistic

in this insightful review essay on Dakotas culture on the First Things website. Here's the payoff:

Thus my optimism, encouraged by my experience on the Great Plains. Most of us do not want to live in the political equivalent of a housing project administered by remote bureaucrats. Nor do we want to live in the political equivalent of the New York Stock Exchange where every dimension of civic life has a selling price. And because we don’t, if we are reasonably vigilant and energetic, odds are we won’t.

The structure of 1 Corinthians 8-10

Whilst preaching on 1 Corinthians 8, I had occasion to comment on the unusual way in which the Apostle Paul deals with the sin of idolatry in 1 Corinthians 8-10. I wrote on the implications of his argument's structure in the October 2002 issue of New Horizons in an essay titled "On Charity."

Michael Erard's Pledge to his Readers

I first came across this essay when it was read on the "World in Words" podcast, and since have been trying to figure out why it's so funny. Of course, the notion of growing and transporting words and figures of speech is intrinsically ridiculous, and hence amusing. More substantively, though, Erard here takes a typical bit of locavore/environmentalist doggerel and, by substituting nonsense for all its valid points, exposes the arrogance and self-congratulation so typical of the genre.

In this way, it's a model bit of satire: funny, subtle, and ultimately substantive.

Theses on preaching: For even if he be evil and a sinner

"If?"

I have so had it with all the puritan-reading hi-falutin' the-pastoral-ministry-is-a-high-calling-therefore-pastors-must-always-be-on-some-kind-of-spiritual-high types. Thank God for the Second Helvetic Confession, particularly the paragraph in chapter one which says, "Wherefore when this Word of God is now preached in the church by preachers lawfully called, we believe that the very Word of God is proclaimed...: and that now the Word itself which is preached is to be regarded, not the minister that preaches; for even if he be evil and a sinner, nevertheless the Word of God remains still true and good."

Not "if." I be evil and a sinner. Nonetheless, the Spirit of God makes my preaching of the Word an efficacious means of convincing and converting sinners. If my confidence in my work rested on my own personal piety, I'd have none. Since it rests not on me at all, but on the Spirit himself, it is boundless.

Not personal charisma. Not profound eloquence. Not exciting schemes for saving western civilization. The Holy Spirit. The reformed, not the pentecostalists or the other enthusiasts, are the genuinely Spiritual.

On the Air

To all you East Coast sophisticates: the cowtown isn't Denver, it's Greeley, way up north from here. When the wind is just right, you can smell Greeley, and believe me, you don't want to. Greeley's saving grace is the University of Northern Colorado, or, more specifically, its radio station, KUNC. It's notable for its offering of "eclectic music:" classical, jazz, pop, and treacly folk which appears to be straight out of the free-to-be-you-and-me 70s. Despite the last, it beats the snot out of most of the FM offerings in Denver, so that's what I turn to when the new's not on and I'm not in the mood for jazz. (For the record, Denver does have one of the objectively best jazz stations in these United States, KUVO. But I digress.)

And so it was that one Wednesday morning I heard "On the Air" by Girlyman. An instantaneous 5 stars in my iTunes. The extended metaphor is an aging actor looking back on the early part of his career as an actor in a TV comedy in the 1950s, a show from which he wanted to break out for bigger things, but now realizes was really as good as his life ever got. At first, I thought it was (like all pop songs) about romantic regret, but upon obsessive relistening, realized is a metaphor for life itself, for our insistent refusal to be satisfied with the good we have because we've deluded ourselves into thinking there's something better. Maybe there is, but often there's not. Rock music often keeps us from seeing this; who'd have thought pop could bring everything into focus?

Girlyman's label, Daemon Records, will let you download this pop masterpiece here. Do so. Immediately. Girlyman may never create anything this astounding again, but they can go to their graves knowing they did it once.

Not a bad way to die.

This feels familiar

So it looks like Foster Baby will go to her birth father. After some initial dithering, he's gotten his act together and, it appears, done everything which social services has asked of him. Recently, Mrs. Curmudgeon and I had a meeting with him, his fiancee, the baby's caseworker, and her guardian ad litem (court-appointed attorney), and a week later the juvenile court judge signed off on the reunification plan. We are now in a 6-week (or thereabouts) transition. Around the middle of June, then, she'll be out of our home and in his. Permanently.

So we've begun mourning, even though Foster Baby is still very much present in our lives. Actually, crying in the middle of the night again, after a couple months of allowing us more or less reasonable amounts of sleep. Of course, this is part and parcel of what we signed on for; we were warned; we knew this was a possibility from the beginning; blah, blah, blah. No less painful for all that. I have been up with this child nearly every night since she was born. As far as I'm concerned, she's mine.

Accordingly, the sense of loss is palpable. It's hard to describe what it is I feel I've lost, exactly. On the one hand, she's still here. On the other, she's a baby and changing rapidly. I don't know what she'll be like as she grows older, and so in that sense I don't know what it is I'll be missing. We haven't lost anything we've already experienced with her; what we are losing is the relationship we might have had.

That may explain why this feels familiar. While the comparison may be trivial, this feels very much like the end of a relationship that I had hoped was headed toward marriage. You fall for someone, you allow yourself to begin arranging your mental and emotional furniture around that person, and then she's gone. We had begun to expect our family to look a certain way, and now we're trying to adjust to it looking entirely different. It's a sort of emotional vertigo in which you know your world has been radically altered, but everything around you looks the same. Perception and reality just don't match up.

In the end, you can't describe mourning. If you haven't felt it yet, you will. For me at least, I have no question about God's goodness or his plan. I don't know what will come of all this, and I don't need to know.

What I need, and what I will probably need for the rest of my life this side of glory, is my daughter.

Make the pastor work with the deacons

I hope all congregations have a sessional liaison with the diaconate. At the very least, sessions need to know what the deacons are doing so they can provide proper oversight to their work, and, as needed, assist with counseling or other tricky situations.

In my opinion, the pastor should serve as said liaison. While deacons certainly must hold firmly to our faith, they may not know the Scriptures as well as an elder might. Thus, the pastor (who is usually a congregation's "chief teacher") can help the deacons study the Bible when they need guidance on a thorny problem. Along with insight into God's Word, the pastor can offer the deacons insight into people; that is, if anyone knows what's going on with members of the congregation, he does. That knowledge can prove very useful to the deacons when processing requests for financial assistance.

At the same time, the diaconate offers the average pastor the opportunity to do his work much better. Let's face it: at least in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, said average pastor tends to be cerebral and bookish. He may be good at exegesis, but not so good at helping people put the pieces of their lives back together, which, of course, is what deacons (should) excel at doing. The more the pastor learns about the mundane problems which are consuming the lives of the members of his congregation, the better he'll be able to preach to them. Instead of warning them about the lastest theological controversy amongst seminary students, he can offer his hearers the comfort the Scriptures bring to those who mourn and struggle to faithfully tithe each week.

If elders want a better pastor, they should make him work with the deacons.

Theses on Preaching: If the preacher preaches long enough, even he'll get hungry too

For some reason, many presbyterians I meet seem to think a good sermon will be a long one, "long" being defined as "an hour at minimum." In my experience, however, such sermons rarely stick to an exposition of the text being considered, but frequently digress into extended consideration of some topic mentioned in the text, but far from central to its point. That is, the really long sermons aren't (always) long because the text has so much within it, but because the preacher has so much to say.

The preacher's job, however, is not to talk. Rather, it's to explain and apply the text. That's it. If we believe in the Spirit-driven power of God's Word, then it doesn't need our help. People aren't going to get saved or sanctified because the preacher kept talking until he explained the idea in just the right way to every individual in the sanctuary that morning. They'll get saved and/or sanctified because the Holy Spirit used the Word to that end at that moment.

To my brethren: trust the Word, don't talk it to death. As Lyle Lovett, the prophet from Katy, Texas, once sang, "If the preacher preaches long enough, even he'll get hungry, too." In other words, shut up already and let us get downstairs for the coffee.

Theses on Preaching: the Word Preached is the Word of God

From chapter 1 of the Second Helvetic Confession:

Wherefore when this Word of God is now preached in the church by preachers lawfully called, we believe that the very Word of God is proclaimed, and received by the faithful; and that neither any other Word of God is to be invented nor is to be expected from heaven: and that now the Word itself which is preached is to be regarded, not the minister that preaches; for even if he be evil and a sinner, nevertheless the Word of God remains still true and good.

This claim, that the Word of God preached is the Word of God, strikes many as presumptuous and extreme. This may be due in part to the fact that thosewho most frequently assert it in our day happen to be professional preachers. Nonetheless, it's a fairly straighforward application of Romans 10:14-15.

How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they preach unless they are sent?

In confessionally reformed circles, this doctrine is widely accepted. However, I don't believe the preaching class, as a whole, has really grappled with its implications. Hence, I hope to present a few theses on preaching which will explain what I believe are important and neglected implications of the thesis that the Word of God preached is the Word of God.

Ain't No Grave

The posthumously released sixth volume of Johnny Cash's American Recordings series has been reviewed widely, and I've no intention of attempting my own critique. However, I do want to mention something I find extremely odd. Every review I've heard or read, including this sympathetically Christian one at the First Things website, has been compelled to pick and choose among the tracks, evaluating some as more wanting than others. This, I believe, misses the point entirely.

Of all the American Recordings, Aint' No Grave is most obviously to be listened to as an album. Taken in isolation, several of the songs are rather weak, and one might argue they should never have been released. But that's only if they are taken in isolation. Listened to as a whole, each track is a piece of a larger artistic statement about death and the inevitability of resurrection. While there is no "When the Man Comes Around" on this one, it may be the best album of the entire series.

Calvin's Institutes, Battles edition: page 40

Footnote 1 offers this definition of the fear of God from Calvin's 1537 Instruction in Faith: "The gist of true piety does not consist in a fear which would gladly flee the judgment of God, but… rather in a pure and true zeal which loves God althogether as Father, and reveres him truly as Lord, embraces his justice and dreads to offend him more than to die."

Calvin's Institutes, Battles edition: pages 37-38

"Without knowledge of God there is no knowledge of self," especially spritually. "For, because all of us are inclined by nature to hypocrisy, a kind of empty image of righteousness in place of righteousness itself abundantly satisfies us." That is, without God as our straightedge, we cannot properly measure or evaluate ourselves or our holiness.

I am not making this up

I just moments ago received an unsolicited e-mail from "Leadership Nexus," promoting its "Workable Evangelism." It cited this testimonial from a Lutheran (!) pastor:

The theological premise is simply that if we are made in the image of God, and God is first attested as creator, then part of our image must be creativity. The pragmatic premise is something that I have been talking about since even before coming to Florida: why can’t we in the church be as welcoming as Mickey Mouse?

Speakers at this event included those theologians and church growth experts that you might expect, even a former pastor from the Crystal Cathedral. But most interestingly, it included professionals from the theme park industry from right next door in Orlando.

At first, I wondered whether the sender knew he was e-mailing the Presbyterian Curmudgeon. But then I realized the sender was likely one of you who have been complaining that I haven't posted much of late.

Translating the end of 1 Corinthians 7

My most recent post was written a number of years ago as an appendix to a larger work on the emancipation of minors. I posted it here because I'm preaching 1 Corinthians 7:31-40 this coming Sunday evening (April 25, 2010, in case my biographers were wondering). Thus, I should say that my preferred English version for the whole of 1 Corinthians 7:25-40 is the New International Version because the translators clearly favor the exegetical view I set forth in said most recent post (which, for the sake of those biographers, I note is heavily influenced by Gordon Fee's New International Commentary), although it thinks the virgin is getting too old. Of even greater interest is that the NIV consistently translates "virgin" as "virgin," unlike any other modern translation I can find. (They do paraphrase "his" as "engaged," but that's because they're trying to make an obscure meaning clear). So, for once, the NIV is the most literal translation available in English.

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, all you "essentially literal" versions.

The Relevance of 1 Corinthians 7:36-38 to Requiring a Woman to Always Be Under Visible Male Headship

For 1 Corinthians 7:36-38, the New American Standard Bible has

But if any man thinks that he is acting unbecomingly toward his virgin daughter, if she is past her youth, and if it must be so, let him do what he wishes, he does not sin; let her marry. But he who stands firm in his heart, being under no constraint, but has authority over his own will, and has decided this in his own heart, to keep his own virgin daughter, he will do well. So then both he who gives his own virgin daughter in marriage does well, and he who does not give her in marriage will do better.

It is not uncommon to see this passage cited by those who wish to argue a woman ought never live independently, under her own authority, but must always be under the headship of a husband or a father.

Unfortunately, the NASB translation here is probably not the best. Those familiar with its presentation style know italicized words have been inserted into the text to “smooth it out.” The word “daughter” does not appear in 1 Corinthians 7:36-38, and so one need not necessarily conclude the “man” under discussion is the virgin’s father. Consequently, the Apostle Paul may very well not be discussing the question of when to give one’s daughter in marriage.1 Instead, he is probably addressing the situation of a man who is deciding whether to marry the woman to whom he is engaged.

An extremely literal rendering of the first half of verse 36 would read, “But if someone thinks he is behaving indecently concerning his virgin, if hyperakmos....” Hyperakmos is a compound word, an adjective found only here in all of ancient literature. Grammatically, it could be describing either the man or his virgin. Akme refers to the highest point of something, and in reference to women often meant sexual maturity. Hyper has either a temporal (“beyond”) or an intensive meaning (“exceedingly”). Thus, if this passage was addressed to a father, hyperakmos would be describing his daughter as “getting along in years.” If it were describing a young man contemplating marriage, it would mean “having strong passion.”

The latter understanding is favored by the phrase at the end of verse 36, “Let them marry.” Though the NASB has the singular “Let her marry,” this option has weak support in the Greek manuscripts. The “father interpretation” leans almost entirely on the verb gamizo in verse 38, which elsewhere in the New Testament means “to give in marriage,” as distinguished from gameo, “to marry.” In classical Greek, -izo and -eo verbs were distinctly either transitive or intransitive. By Paul’s day, however, that distinction had broken down, and gameo and gamizo may very well have been synonyms for “to marry.”

The question then becomes which of the two scenarios (father allowing his daughter to marry or a man contemplating marrying his fiancee) Paul was most likely to address. In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul is speaking to married and single persons about their marriages and whether they should marry. Leaving aside the verses we are examining, he throughout addresses the actual or prospective husbands and wives directly, always assuming they are immediately responsible for their decisions and conduct. He also very strongly states that those with strong sexual desire ought to marry (1 Cor 7:1-9). Therefore, it would be very strange for him to begin addressing the fathers of virgins when he has previously only addressed the parties to be married themselves. Moreover, he would be contradicting his previous statement in 1 Corinthians 7:9 if he were to say a father has the right to deny marriage to his daughter when she desires to marry and has reached sexual maturity.

Therefore, the English Standard Version seems to have the better translation of 1 Corinthians 7:36-38.

If anyone thinks that he is not behaving properly toward his betrothed, if his passions are strong, and it has to be, let him do as he wishes; let them marry- it is no sin. But whoever is firmly established in his heart, being under no necessity but having his desire under control, and has determined this in his heart, to keep her as his betrothed, he will do well. So then he who marries his betrothed does well, and he who refrains from marriage will do even better.

If the English Standard Version is correct, then 1 Corinthians 7:36-38 has nothing to say about the headship of fathers over daughters. Even were one to prefer the NASB translation, our text proves only that a woman is under her father’s authority until she marries. It does not prove marriage is the only way by which she may leave her father’s authority.

Given that the evidence for the NASB translation is less than compelling, one cannot from this one text build a conclusive argument that a woman must always be under the headship of either a father or a husband. As no other text or compilation of texts proves the case, one must ultimately conclude Scripture does not require that position.

A father's cruciform manifesto: 10 (conclusion)

“Do you think that your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in their ledgerbook? Against what?”

I do think that. I am surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, by my fathers and their fathers. I am burdened by their example and witness and standard they set. But they cannot weigh me in their ledgerbook.

Instead, I must reckon with God. And “who could bring a charge against God’s chosen ones? It is God who justifies. Who is he who condemns? It is Christ who died, yes rather, who was raised from the dead, who is at the right hand of God, who also makes intercession for us.” Therefore, “as it is written, ‘For your sake we are killed all day long. We were accounted as sheep for the slaughter.’” (Romans 8:33-34, 36)

Christ, who condemns me and so was condemned for me, has invited me to make up in my flesh that which is yet lacking in his sufferings for the sake of a few of his sheep. For his sake, and not to satisfy the law of my fathers’ example or, worse, one of my own devising, I am killed all day long and my sinful flesh is put to death. Because of his grace and compassion, he has begun forming me in the shape of his Cross, granting me a cruciform identity. In my children, I have found my cross, and in my cross I have found the comfort, peace, joy, and inestimably strange and wonderful privilege of the imitation of Christ my Savior.

A father's cruciform manifesto: 9

Along with salvation from sin, the Gospel is the story of how God glorifies himself. We cannot attain glory by pursuing glory, but by dying. Christ died and was raised again in glory. We will die and be raised with Christ into everlasting glory. God grants glory as a free gift to those who have died to self and glory by giving up themselves and, by the Spirit, being entirely identified with Christ. We must be crucified with Christ in order to be raised and glorified with him.

Heresy, no doubt, seems an extreme label. But what label do the perversions we make of the Gospel deserve? And we do pervert the Gospel, bending and twisting it so we can use it to mask our own agendas. What we each are looking for is what Martin Luther called a theology of glory, a way to avoid the Cross we are supposed to be taking up. To refuse the Cross is to pursue glory under a Christian guise, and that is disobedience, sin, doctrinal error, and heresy.

And, like all heresies, it is a self-defeating project. Heresies bloom and flourish for a time, but eventually die away. Without the vivifying presence of the Holy Spirit, they cannot sustain themselves over the long term. The present excitement over “family-integrated” Churches and reclaiming the culture through homeschooling, like other recent theologies of glory such as theonomy or the Moral Majority, will shortly fade away. What will endure is the Church and the Gospel of the Cross she proclaims.

Parenting will also endure, of course, but only for a little while. As an artifact of this present age, it will last just as long as this age does. What each Christian parent must decide is whether their children are to be their legacy or the Church’s, whether they are here for Christ’s glory or their own, whether they will use their time in this present age to serve the age to come. That choice, it seems to me, makes all the difference between whether you put a new law, a law of your own devising, on your children, or open up for them a door to enter into the grace of God made known through God’s crucifixion.

The law kills, and the Gospel gives life. Either your children die for your sake, your glory, or you die for your children’s sake. Either glory or the Cross, the imitation of Christ or the false glory of a world which is passing away. Either you lead them to the city which has foundations, or you try to make them sink foundations into the sand of this world.

We must decrease that Christ might increase, and we decrease just as John the Baptist did: by recognizing the cross which God has set before us and taking it up so Christ might be glorified by our passing away.

A father's cruciform manifesto: 8

Not especially foster parents (although I stand in awe of those who are), but parents. I am angry at those who sign up their children to be culture warriors, and in fact tend to think their world-conquering fantasies aren’t just delusional but heretical. Our children are not our possessions. Like the rest of the creation, they’re God’s possession, and we are not even stewards of their lives. We are their servants. We serve them hand and foot as babies and children, we are at their beck and call throughout adolescence and early adulthood, and we live to hear our masters’ voices every moment thereafter. This is our cross: this is the death to self we gladly embrace.
Count it all joy, my brethren. How could you not?

A father's cruciform manifesto: 7

Another anecdote in evidence, perhaps less trivial because it involves actual suffering. A couple years ago we switched health insurers and I began seeing an osteopath who helped me get sufficiently on top of the causes of my chronic pain that I’ve been able to get by without the prescription painkillers I used to take. But then social services placed that newborn in our home, and, with two other and not much older children in the house, I stopped sleeping much. I can get away with six or less hours of sleep a night for a while, but after a couple months, my back ached and my knees started complaining big time. That already had me concocting ibuprofen-Tylenol-Aleve cocktails. Then, just shy of the three-month mark, the old repetitive-motion injury in my wrists showed back up. The drugs may have been what knocked my stomach out of alignment, or maybe it was the green chili I had for breakfast. At any rate, I stopped eating and slept a great deal for two days, which, along with the fact the baby is sleeping more soundly, put my pain levels back in abeyance.

Now, this is pretty much standard fare for middle-aged parents, but the kicker is that my investment in this child in sleepless nights and extraordinarily distracting levels of pain could very well come to naught. The baby’s mother seems to have lost interest in her, but her social worker tells us a new father has been identified through DNA testing; it’s once again (this happens to us a lot) possible that this baby (of whom we cannot help thinking as ours, no matter how desperately we try not to) might end up living with genetic kin rather than our family. If she does, she will never remember us and, very likely, never even know who we are.

Obviously, then, foster parenting is our cross.

The amazing thing is that the foster parents I’ve met don’t seem to have noticed. Every time I listen to other foster parents, their focus is always on the kids, on what can be done for them. We go to support group meetings about once a month, and there are no martyrs in that room. If anything, these people feel privileged to be able to do something, anything, to help children who have been been done gross, unspeakable injustice by this fallen world.

And I can’t believe I’m saying this, since I’ve known myself to be a whining, moaning, egocentric pathetic excuse for a human being for just about as long as I’ve been self-aware, but even with all the very, very real pain, my wife and I are neither heroes nor martyrs. We are parents.

Calvin's Institutes, Battles edition: pages 15-16

Protestants have long observed that the Reformers are properly called such because they believed they were merely trying to restore the Church to her ancient beliefs and practices. Therefore, they labored to demonstrate there was nothing new in their teaching. Accordingly, Calvin's prefatory address to Francis I is in large part a recitation of ancient support for reformation arguments. However, he begins with what I think is a much more profound assertion.

"First, by calling it 'new' they do great wrong to God, whose Sacred Word does not deserve to be accused of novelty. ...That it has lain long unknown and buried is the fault of man's impiety." Here, Calvin is saying that if a doctrine or practice can be demonstrated to be genuinely Biblical, it cannot be called "new," even if NO precedent can be found in Church history. If Calvin is correct (and I believe he is), we must hold our confessional positions sincerely but lightly, always ready to correct them by the light of God's Word.

A father's cruciform manifesto: 6

It occurred to me this morning my cruciform take on parenting did not come out of nowhere. My father was a U.S. Foreign Service officer until the time came for him to take another posting overseas. Though, with his decades of experience and having last served as a consul, I’m sure he would have moved up the ranks, he chose to take early retirement. This was because he was up for what is called a “hardship post,” that is, service in a country neither entirely stable nor safe for U.S. citizens. He didn’t want to expose my younger sisters, still in the home, to danger, nor did he like the other option of sending them to boarding schools and breaking up the family prematurely. For the sake of his family, he gave up his career, and, incidentally, never brought up this fact to me or my sisters. I’m not sure he even gave the choice much thought.

While we’re at it, the fact we had a family in the first place was because my mother accepted being forced to resign her own commission as a Foreign Service officer to marry my father. What I learned from my parents’ example, then, was that one’s family and (potential!) children are far more important than oneself or one’s own ambitions. My sisters and I are not my parents’ legacy: they gave up their legacies and achievements that we might have and mark out lives of our own.

And in the wonderful irony of the Cross, their legacy is that I find myself setting aside whatever I might have accomplished during these years: time which could have been spent finishing this essay and writing more was spent with my son’s Cub Scout den. I do this so my children, my natural-born, foster, and perhaps adopted children, can have a father dedicated to them and they can take that fact entirely for granted.

We must decrease that they might increase.

Calvin's Institutes, Battles edition: page 11

Speaking of the Protestants, Calvin writes "Now, the very stronghold of their defense was not to disavow this very doctrine but to uphold it as true. Here even the right to whisper is cut off." In other words, the doctrine has greater credibility because its adherents are persuaded a right apprehension of it should lead to its being embraced.

Of course, fanatics and lunatics often hold a similar persuasion. Nonetheless, it's interesting to see how impressed Calvin is by the pious zeal of his coreligionists.

Calvin's Institutes, Battles edition: Introduction

The introduction is pretty obviously written in the late 1950s: it unashamedly judges Calvin from a modern perspective. The scholarship is refreshingly honest, however, in that it does not judge Calvin as though he himself were a modern.

A father's cruciform manifesto: 5

The more I think about it, the more self-evident it appears to me Christian parenting must be conducted in the way of the Cross. But it can’t be all that self-evident, or we wouldn’t have amongst us the Vision Forum. For the happily unaware, the Vision Forum is an organization much-beloved by a certain segment of the home-schooling community, particularly those interested in a reformed soteriology but not a presbyterian ecclesiology. Or much of an ecclesiology at all, as, so far as I can tell from their catalogue (which I didn’t ask for, but pastors get sent an awful lot of stuff in the mails whether they like it or not), there seems an unarticulated but clearly evident conviction the nuclear family is all- and self-sufficient.

From their website: "Our name — The Vision Forum — points to our desire that the Lord would use this work to be a forum for communicating a vision of victory to Christian families." I'm seriously concerned about the nature of the victory the Vision Forum has in mind. Victory over sin would be a good thing, of course, but flipping through their catalogue, the emphasis seems to be on victory over the society and culture around us. And the way to beat the snot out of said society is to turn one's children into culture warriors. So much for living quietly, minding one's own affairs (1 Thessalonians 4:11).

The presence of the Vision Forum catalogue in Christian homes gives me, as a pastor and a father, heartburn. There's something unnervingly worldly about the Vision Forum's anti-world vision. Again and again, one gets the impression each Christian family should be building a legacy which will endure for generations to come; not only that, they should be actively engaged in transforming the culture and reshaping it according to their liking. In other words, they are about building a name and a city for themselves and claiming a country in this world, during this age: a country which they hope, and even believe, will endure.

But this present age is passing away.

And as for me and my house, we are also seeking a country of our own, but not that country from which we came out. Rather, we desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore we are not ashamed of the Cross of Christ; for the God who became despised and nothing has called us to be likewise despised and nothing. He has invited us to live as aliens and strangers in this world. He has not invited us to build a city here because he has prepared a city with foundations for us.

Calvin's Institutes, Battles edition

I've begun working through John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion again for a reading group at Park Hill Presbyterian Church. We're using the translation prepared by Ford Lewis Battles for the Library of Christian Classics. I must say, it's a delight to read: nice large print, paper of appropriate thickness (print doesn't bleed through, but each of the two volumes can be comfortably held in one hand or fit easily into backpack or briefcase), and footnotes at the bottom of the page they way they were meant to be (a creation ordinance, don't you know).

The content's not bad, either.

Matthew 27

Peter Leithart has a number of interesting observations on Matthew 27 over on his blog, particularly regarding the women who served Jesus in his death.

A father's cruciform manifesto: 4

I submit in evidence a trivial anecdote (although being a universally experienced anecdote, perhaps not so trivial). The other night, while my wife was at a Bible study, I tried to watch Lost, but the two year-old insisted on yelling, running around, and breaking the blinds while he was supposed to be asleep. What I was thinking, of course, was "Can't I catch a break? Can't I have a moment for myself, to do what I want to do?"

No, of course. I am a parent.

A father's cruciform manifesto: 3

So here’s how I found my cross, only to discover I had already taken it up.

My wife and I are certified foster parents in Adams County, Colorado. The social services department has labeled us "foster-to-adopt;" this is because while we hope to adopt the baby who was placed in our home in April 2009, we are officially her foster parents unless the parental rights of her birth parents are terminated by the courts.

At a recent meeting, a county attorney observed that people like us used to be labeled "legal risk parents” to help judges understand that children placed in our homes were not guaranteed to be taken away from their birth parents and be adopted away, an impression which some had taken from that moniker “foster-to-adopt.” "Legal risk" means that, by law, we take the (very real) chance of welcoming a baby into our home only, after some period of time, to have her returned to birth parents who have proven their competency to the courts.

For obvious reasons, "foster-to-adopt" sounds much better for recruiting purposes than "legal risk." And yet, there's something profoundly right about the latter term. Parenting is a risky business. It is the constant, and often realized, risk of loving a person far more than that person will ever love you in return. It is the risk of a life of sacrifice without reward. To be the kind of parent whose children will not be removed by social services is to risk the loss of one's self, of one's identity, for the sake of one's children.

To be a parent is to be willing to lay down your life for your children, and, in the infinite sacrifices and concessions by which we surrender our individual identities and are forever labeled by them (and by those around us) as, finally and ultimately, their parent, is to actually lose that life. To be a parent (or at least to be a parent who barely approximates deserving to be called a parent) is to take up your cross and, in imitation of your Savior, to crucify self and have that choice overlooked and ignored. After all, only Joseph of Arimathea seemed to have noticed a burial was necessary.

To be a parent is to be at risk. To be a Christian parent is to take up one’s cross.

Daylight Satan's Time

2010 will go down as the year Daylight Savings Time really began to worry me.

Of course, much of my alienation from the mainstream of political discourse in these United States is rooted in the fact I am a single-issue voter, and that one issue is opposition to DST. This year's great leap forward hit as hard as any I can remember not only because Big Government deprived me of an hour's sleep, but also because Foster Baby woke up crying twice that night, and Thing One and Thing Two behaved riotously for a couple hours past bedtime Sunday evening. To be clear, however, my opposition to DST is principled, not merely a sleep-deprived spirit of vengeance.

For starters, the whole ritual is annoying: it's a gigantic pain in the hindquarters to locate and change all the clocks and watches in one's life. And at what gain? Any energy saved by having more daylight during the evening hours is offset by concomitantly increased heating and cooling costs. In addition, studies have shown an increase in traffic accidents the Monday mornings following a "time change" (as though time could be changed).

Rather than accept the given order of things, though, Big Government has to tinker with reality, certain it can come up with something better, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. This arrogance finds it clearest expression in the choice of day on which to implement the change: Sunday. At the very least, one might hope the civil magistrate would respect another institution ordained by God, but instead it chooses to make it that much harder for people to show up on time for services.

(Why is it we often see members arrive an hour late in the spring, but never an hour early in the fall?)

In addition, I think there's a rather serious theological point to be made, one which emerged as I was reading Genesis 1 last year. God created the sun, moon, and stars to order the years and seasons: that is, the progress of time. Time is not, therefore, a social construct which we can change by common consent; it is part of the created order. I think it ironic, but not accidental, that from autumn to spring we are in "standard time." Daylight Savings Time is, by definition, deviation from the standard and, accordingly, a perversion.

And this is why I'm worried. I understand my obsession with this topic is, or at least ought be, a cranky preoccupation. But for the life of me, it daily appears a more and more serious matter, and I think everyone should not only pay attention, but object strenuously. I know I sound like a crank, like the kind of person who tediously holds forth on the merits of the gold standard and the moral hazards of fiat currency, but I can't stop myself. 2010 may be the year in which I slip past an ironic posture in to full-fledged, absolutely sincere curmudgeonry.

And, William Jennings Bryan notwithstanding, I find I do have a few things to say about the gold standard...