links

Some links:

* The Curse of Motivational Speaking, which curse being that it doesn’t actually change anybody, and prevents them from listening to the stuff that does.
* Viral video leads to university president resignation. Apparently, he was allergic to the words “free college.”
* Civilization
* Immigration, and Red-headed property.
* Compulsory voting?
* Divorced from God? Doug Wilson says, “Prove it!”
* Matt Waymeyer on the continuing spiritual hope of Israel. One could wish he would write with the same biblical perception and clarity on the subject of continuing function of spiritual gifts.
* Personals. The author at Outer Life shares a few traits with me, including a poor ability to modify reality without irony.

From Pseudo-Polymath:

* German court declares circumcision illegal. Two views, sympathetic, and unsympathetic (to the circumcision party, that is).
* When I was at OCS, my platoon sergeant thought it would be funny to give the little guy a 240B machine gun. I didn’t think it was all that funny. In fact, I was tempted to complain. Now, I’m just glad he didn’t make me carry this.
* Everybody’s got an Economic Crush, don’t they? Currently, I’m geeking out on Adam Smith.
* A bird of prey gets goosed.
*Okay, maybe weapons safety is an oxymoron after all.
* New research indicates that the zombie apocalypse is rabies.
* Gospel: the only answer for pornography. My experience was that pornography was a replacement, not for sex, but for worship.

Enough for now?

Links

Some links for your perusal.

* First, a friendly reminder not to believe every rumor you hear. There are plenty of rumor checking sites for you to use to double check whenever you hear something unbelievable. Snopes is my favorite, since I can always remember the name. The most recent one I heard is the Starbucks military non-support rumor, which can be disproven here.
* Global distribution of world GDP, illustrated: “How a minor British colony became a world economic superpower with free market capitalism.” That, and also with 3.7 million square miles of undeveloped prime real estate, with no competition or major military threats.
* Husband and Wife, the foundation of gender diversity.

  • Why you should consider cancelling your short term missions.

    This has been a concern of mine for several years. In a lot of ways, most short-term mission trips could be replaced with Christian vacations, with an increase in the actual long-term spiritual good being done. Instead of a traditional mission trip to Guatemala, why not take a vacation in Guatemala, where you rent a house near a local church and participate in normal church life with them? Instead of building a school for someone, why not hire an underemployed church member to give you a tour of the community, introducing you to key people, who can teach you how to pray for their church? Schedule your vacation to coincide with the local church’s annual conference, pay full price for everything, try to form real friendships, and don’t think too highly of yourself.

    • * Eternal Generation of the Son of God. I balk at the original objection – Who says monogenes doesn’t mean only-begotten? Etymologically, that’s exactly what it means. Of course, by extension, only-begotten must mean unique, but you can’t use one to cancel out the other. That’s not how language works.
    * Greg Mankiw pours hot coals. Sometimes, I suspect he may be a Christian.
    * An Allen Levi update. Excellent.
    * Honoring God in an Unequally Yoked Marriage
    * Peace through confusingly similar flags.

    Links

    Howdy. Here’s some interesting reading:

    * 83% of physicians are considering quitting, and other interesting answers from a Doctor Patient Medical Association survey.
    * CS Lewis and GK Chesterton agree: Tyranny for the good of the people is called… tyranny.
    * Similarly, in test cases tyranny leads to rebellion.
    * Passive solar heat from aluminum cans. What I want is aluminum can air conditioning.
    * Book burning

    Links

    Here’s a collection of my favorites from today’s reading:

    • Doug Wilson on making regeneration an idol. I love the first paragraph.
    • A comparison of prices. Apparently homes in Detroit and Williston, ND, are the same price.
    • Rococo Cola
    • Inequality – Necessary? This guy gets bonus points every time he mentions the book, The Bottom Billion. I probably should read it some time.
    • Yes, this is how we react to indirect fire in a combat zone.
    • Caught in a recursion:Congress passes a bill that makes it illegal for Congress to later modify that bill. Guess which bill it is.
    • I’m not sure how this works: University makes waves by considering ability to pay in its admissions process. Was it adjusting tuition post hoc before? How would that work at McDonalds?
    • I’ve got qualms of my own about the value of a college degree, but really it’s the second sentence in this post that caught my attention.
    • As far as I know, all of my friends from my high school church youth group ended up in full-time ministry. I’m the only one who still holds a “secular” job. So this article has some pull for me. But I still harbor in my heart the hope that maybe, one day I’ll be a preacher too…

    Like a B-Rate Romance

    Trying to sift through your music library can have strange effects on you.

    For instance, I’m coming around to the fact that I will spend the rest of my life, to some extent, as a reactionary. I seem to have a hugely negative response to points of view I used to have, but have no longer. In other words, I’ve actually changed my mind about some things, and now the things I used to love, I hate. So I run up against some of my old way of viewing the world, and I’m set on a rampage to argue with my former self, to set him to rights about the world.

    I can’t tell if I’m preaching to the choir, or arguing with an intractable opponent. Sometimes my old self seems to agree with me quickly, and catches up to my current state of mind. But at the same time, I see my past self continuing to think the old way – because he’s in the past. Internal dialogue has never been a very effective means of time travel.

    Here’s my current diatribe: emotions. I’m totally for them, but I have some concerns. The funny thing about emotions is their relationship with reality. Emotions themselves are real – as emotions, that is. If you’re angry or sad, you really are angry or sad, and it would be silly for someone to tell you otherwise. But emotions have only a vague correlation to the rest of the world as it really is. I mean, if you’re hot and sweaty, the most likely reason is that it’s hot out. Other options include the possibility that you’ve been working out, or that you have a fever, which means that you are sick. If you are physically in pain, chances are that you’ve been wounded in some way. Not so with emotions. If I’m sad, the world is not necessarily a sad place. Something truly saddening may have happened to me – my dog may have died. Or it could be that I’ve thought of something sad that happened 20 years ago. Or I could be reading a book. I have every reason to expect that my emotions are not connected to any real situation in the external world.

    Most people are aware of this at some level, though from talking to people, you might think otherwise. There’s a terrible tendency for people to think that their emotions are perfect lodestones to point them in the direction of right and wrong. My emotions are holy. So-and-so made me feel a certain way, therefore so-and-so owes it to me to correct my emotions for me. I myself bear no responsibility for how I feel, and what’s more, how I feel is the most perfect description of who I am! Down that path, darkness lies.

    This leads to another concept: Emotions, because they are so easily affected by imaginary situations, are extremely malleable. With a little practice, I can control how I feel. (More wickedly, with a little practice, I can even control how other people feel.) Now this is an idea that really appeals to my personality. It just so happens that I have extremely strong, extremely stable emotions.

    I once decided that some issues at work dictated that I should get angry more often. It took me about two weeks to get there, and then I stayed on the cusp of rage for the better part of a month, before I decided it wasn’t a very effective tactic. So I turned it off. More stupidly, when I was in junior high school, my version of oggling the girls was to attempt to analyse their personalities and imagine how much I would have to adjust my own personality in order to get on as a couple… and how long I could keep it up before it wasn’t worth the effort. Of course, I fell for the girl I couldn’t “read”. It went badly.

    Most people don’t spend much time working their emotions like an Adonis at the gym. But there is a huge industry of “personal trainers” who will tell you how to adjust your emotions so that you can be in tune with yourself and handle difficult situations better. So, when I was growing up, there were always books floating around the house with tips on how to handle certain emotions. I think that’s where I picked up the concept that certain emotions are always good, and other emotions are always bad. Anger is always bad. Peacefulness is always good. Shame is always bad. Brassiness is always good. That’s the idea I bought as a kid, that ended in catastrophe, and now I hates it forever.

    See, in the churches I grew up in, spiritual ecstacy was an emotion that fell in the category of “always good.” Every other emotion, aside from perhaps general happiness and peacefulness, was a curse from the enemy and ought to be “broken off” from the afflicted saint. At first blush, this sounds like a good idea. I mean, name a Christian who is against spiritual ecstacy. On the other hand, imagine a community where most everyone enters into a state of spiritual ecstacy on a regular basis, where fear and doubt and shame are signs of something deep and intrensically wrong with you. I hope you can see where this is going. Keep in mind that I am pretty darn good at setting my emotions on a goal and hitting that goal regularly for long periods of time. Imagine my chagrin when I discovered that a fiercely emotional prayer life doesn’t necessarily lead to successful relationships, improved character, or even a deeper understanding of the Gospel.

    I burned out pretty hard.

    I Just couldn’t do it any more. And then came the strange enui of being unable to relate to people around me (still on their spiritual highs), or find confidence in the God of my salvation. I knew emotions were shaky things, and yet I had managed to set my entire identity in my consistent experience of certain emotions. As the kids say these days, epic fail!

    Putting myself back together again took a bit of work, and involved revamping my entire theology, worldview, personal goals, dating preferences, the works. Even now sometimes, I feel a little bit like Calvin Coolidge when the young lady told him she had made a bet with a friend that she could get more than two words out of him. “You lose,” he said. People try to get me riled up about something and… I don’t rile. Please submit your reasons why I should feel this emotion on form 3215-B, in triplicate, and come back to me in a week. By then I’ll have decided whether or not to feel… offended, was it? Anyway, I’ll get back to you. Surprise holidays are a real pain. So are goodbyes.

    Understand, I’m not a wooden, emotionless guy. But, “I cannot hide what I am: I must be sad when I have cause and smile at no man’s jests, eat when I have stomach and wait for no man’s leisure, sleep when I am drowsy and tend on no man’s business, laugh when I am merry and claw no man in his humour.” There a lot going on up in here, and external inputs on how I ought to feel are a real distraction.

    So, music. Again, I’m totally for it, but I have some concerns. Music has one truly great function: to direct and amplify the emotions. It’s wonderful stuff, unless you shiv it like a sledgehammer. I keep running across stuff that I think I was supposed to like ten years ago, but now it hits me like a B-rate romance. IT’S TIME TO FEEL PASSIONATE, BECAUSE WE’RE MAKING LONG EMOTIONAL SOUNDS!!!!!1! Yeah. I’m pretty sure that’s a sound that’s supposed to happen when two people, who love each other very much, are alone together. It is not a sound I want to hear at church, and It’s not a sound I want to suddenly come on my stereo while I’m trying to get the kids to help set the dinner table. That’s a sound they’ll figure out on their own. When they’re older. I don’t really need to explain right now why is she making that sound, papa.

    As the Preacher said, there’s a time for everything, and every emotion under the sun has its place. Music is there to help us get to the right emotions. I just don’t have any use for music that tries to force my emotions into a groove that isn’t exactly appropriate to the circumstances, or even the context of the song. It isn’t powerful; it’s just annoying. Give me thick, clear-headed stuff. Give me something with a reason.

    Fraternization

    My job as a staff officer currently involves building and analyzing some pretty complicated reports for our unit. Recently a young sergeant was assigned the task of sending up the data from her Battalion. “It’s been a while since I’ve had to do these reports,” she wrote to me in an email, “Please bare with me.”

    I quickly wrote back, “Sergeant, in regards to this report, I will gladly bear with you. But I will not bare with you, as that would be fraternization.”

    Husband and Wife

    For some time now, there has been a trend to take perfectly good words and tweak them into meaning something subtly, if not completely different. This has been a matter of some distress to those who are fond of the terms that have been tweaked. With the definition altered, it actually becomes difficult to express the original meaning of the term. This has certainly been the case with the word “marriage.” The meaning of marriage has been shifting for 50 years at least, to the point that it has apparently become necessary to flee to courts and ballot boxes, in order to conscript the statutory system itself as a kind of Académie française on marriage.

    I don’t particularly blame the homosexual community, although there is a tendency there to steal words and make them their own. (A gay divorcée means something entirely different from what it meant when Ginger Rogers was one with Fred Astaire, and “camp” has come to mean something very different from the silliness and joy that goes on at camp meeting revival.) I suppose that, when you are creating a new culture from whole cloth, based on no commonality other than similarly unconstrained sexual urges, you’ve got to grab what words you can.

    No, long before we had “homosexual marriage,” we had “open marriage” and “marriage of convenience,” and (good heavens!) “amicable” and “no-fault” divorce. But for the longest time, these other kinds of marriages were considered aberrations, and the stuff of dynasties and patriarchy was looked on as the real deal. No more! The culture is shifting, and I foresee a day not long off when, government regulation notwithstanding, the colloquial idea of marriage will be nothing more than a collection of persons who are known to have sexual relations with one another, and sign each other’s insurance documents.

    I think that’s a great loss. It’s almost certainly a loss to the culture at large, but without a doubt it is a loss to those of us who still live according to the old ways. The relationship that I have with my wife is something very different from any kind of sexual union defined by the pleasures and benefits that accrue to “I, the undersigned.” Stiff financial penalties and the promise of endless heartache could not have kept me from marrying her. Nor did we agree to create a new way of living, just the two of us. Instead, we took on roles and responsibilities handed down from the foundations of history. As a husband I lead, provide, and protect. As a wife, she submits, nurtures, and supports. In private times, she calls me ‘lord’ (as Sarah did her husband), and twists my heart with a glance. I guard her from all the troubles of the world, and she guards me from all the troubles of my heart. The commitment is for a lifetime, and is regulated by laws far stronger than human government.

    I submit that marriage in many minds has already been redefined, that the paragraph above is strange and frightening, perhaps offensive, to a vast number of people in the western world. THAT is what used to be called a marriage, but now it hasn’t got a name, because marriage means so many other things.

    So here’s what I propose: I don’t want to give up on marriage yet, but these mindless modifiers have got to stop.

    “Are you married?”

    “Yes, traditional.”

    Or,

    “Married?”

    “Straight.”

    It isn’t clear enough, and doesn’t have the moral heft it needs. After all, marriage is the stuff of civilization. So I propose we merely use the terms “husband and wife” as often as possible.

    “Hey, I got married last week, husband and wife!”

    This has several advantages, the first of which is that it’s clear, because “husband and wife” refers to specific roles. A homosexual marriage could be “man and man” or “woman and woman”; it could even be “dom and sub,” but never “husband and wife.” Witness the Massachusetts marriage application. You will see “Subject A” and “Subject B”, but never husband and wife. Another advantage is that it has these nice churchy, Shakespearean undertones, which will of course, be avoided by people who don’t want to sound churchy or traditional. The third advantage is that it fits naturally into conversation in such a way as to hang on to the “M” word, but without sounding too awfully awkward.

    But it’s really more than that. “Husband and wife” is the pronouncement that they make when the wedding ceremony is over, or maybe “Man and wife.” In other words, “husband and wife” already means marriage. When I say that I’m married, husband and wife, I’m not selecting one out of an array of types of marriage. I’m repeating myself, like a man with an ontological stutter. Every time I say “man and wife,” everybody knows I mean marriage, and nothing else, and yet, saying those words is somehow also an assertion that marriage means man and wife, and nothing else.

    Not even worthy of a decent stalker love song

    A few months ago I finally realized that I didn’t like 30-40% of the 6000 some songs on my iPod. So I’ve been slowly going through and deleting things. Part of what that’s done is to force me to think more analytically about my music.

    A lot of my stuff is contemporary style worship music, with B+ music and C lyrics. Not bad, unless you play 1000 of them in a row. Then you start to pick out certain trends. So many songs that declare how great God is, because he’s “holy” or “mighty” or “amazing.” Really? How about some details.

    But the one that’s really starting to get to me are all the ones that aren’t about God at all. They’re really songs about me, or at least about the person singing. “You make me feel…” “I love you so much!” “I desire you!” “I’m filled with all this passion…” Again, no details, just vague descriptions of passing emotions. Sentiments like that are not even worthy of a decent stalker love song. Why would I want to sing a worship song like that?

    One of the things that has led to a major change in my taste in music is a kind of a change in my understanding of the meaning of life, or as the theologians would say, “the chief end of man.”

    I still remember a conversation I had once with a girl I was trying to evangelize. I was trying to explain to her that the highest expression of human life was found in relationship. Hell is being separated from God, and Heaven is the crowning expression of ultimate intimacy with God. Man was created primarily to be in relationship with Him,and we couldn’t be happy unless we were in relationship with Him and with each other.

    “But,” she said, “I remember lots of times when I played alone as a kid, and I was perfectly happy then.” I was stumped. What was I to say, no you weren’t happy? It was a fake happy? Come to think of it, I’m usually happy to be alone too. Hell isn’t loneliness. There must be something more to it. But I couldn’t think of where it was.

    Some years later, I was exposed to the reformation idea of the glory of God. “The chief end of man is to glorify God and thoroughly enjoy Him forever.” And while I think there’s some error, for instance in the unbiblical idea that Jesus died primarily with the glory of God in mind (“The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.”), I think it’s closer to the truth to say that God made the world for his glory, rather than for relationship. It even becomes clearer when you define “glory” as “the full expression of God’s character,” instead of as simply “fame.”

    One of the reasons why I think glory makes for a better definition of our purpose than relationship is that you can see that relationship fits in as a part of the character of God (He is three-in-one), but you can’t really make glory a subset of relationship. So also in human relations: character trumps intimacy.

    This has to affect the songs we sing in church. If the chief purpose of a man is to be in a relationship, then the closeness of that relationship will be more important than the concrete attributes of the God you are in relationship with. To put it in pejorative terms, if Jesus died because he couldn’t stand to be separated from me, then my songs are going to be about my experience of how close we are now. I’m going to focus on those sensations that are the most trustworthy proof that I am fulfilling my ultimate purpose. Of course, when those sensations aren’t there, there is quite literally hell to pay in the vacancy.

    On the other hand, If my chief purpose is to demonstrate in minute detail the complex and awe-inspiring character of the living God, then how “close” I am to God becomes almost irrelevant. How do you measure “close”, feelings? Feelings are a weak, splintered staff. You can’t lean on them without being wounded. More important will be the nature of that God. The cross splits the universe down the middle, braiding holy judgment and compassionate grace with a sovereignty that is so awesome as to be terrifying. Who has understood the mind of the Lord?

    I do still think there’s a place for “Jesus is my boyfriend” songs. David says, “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.” And again, “Deep calls to deep at the roar of your waterfalls; all your breakers and your waves have gone over me.” But the focus even there is on the God for whom he is panting, not on the glory of panting in itself, as though desire itself conferred righteousness. Those feelings come as a gift, and sometimes in His sovereignty He doesn’t give them, or gives holy emotions that we’d just as soon not experience. In those times, my hope needs to be in the good news of the cross, the sure knowledge of who He is, and what He has done for me.

    The texture of worship comes from the God who is being worshiped. Generic songs imply a generic god, and songs painted only in broad emotional brush-strokes imply a god who is primarily interested in my feelings. Not only is a god like that unsatisfying, it’s profoundly disappointing when it doesn’t stand up to reality.

    Prophecy

    Bibliolatry:
    When a person relies on the authority of scripture to undermine what the text actually teaches.

    This definition pops up for me whenever I hear a cessationist argument. Here we have a summary by Nathan Busenitz of a debate between Wayne Grudem and Ian Hamilton over the idea of “fallible prophecy” in the New Testament.

    For my purposes, we’ll leave aside the question of fallibility for a minute. Let’s just look at authority, or urgency. Does scripture portray any kind of prophecy, in the Old Testament or New, which has less authority than the full weight of Biblical law? Is Saul also among the prophets? If all true prophecy has the full weight of scripture behind it, how is it possible for Paul to instruct the Corinthians that “spirits of prophets are subject to prophets”? Can you imagine someone saying that the text of Jeremiah was subject to Jeremiah, that if someone had interrupted him, he would have done best to sit down and shut up? Of course not. “there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.”

    Scripture itself presents prophecy as being a thing that has different levels of urgency and precariousness. Who then are you to argue that the nature of scripture requires prophecy to be sealed off like scripture? The implication then would be that all prophecy necessarily has the same weight as scripture, and therefore becomes scripture the minute it is written down and preserved. But that simply isn’t the case at all. There are references in scripture to literally thousands of prophetic events of various levels, that nobody thought even worth writing down. An entire school of prophets in Elijah’s time was able to come up with only a single message worth writing down – for dramatic effect. Most prophecy in ancient times never ascended to the level of being considered scripture, so why should it be disturbing to think that, though there may still be prophecy today, none of it reaches the same level of authority as scripture?

    Brothers, we are not Platonists. Neither scripture nor prophecy come down like a mathematical proof, with all the edges carefully sealed. If we are to obey scripture, we must obey it as it is, both in what it says and in the characteristics that it models. What you mustn’t do is determine what it ought to model, based on what it necessary for the formula, and use that to determine what the text must mean.

    Busenitz lists 5 dangers of prophecy. They strike me more as 5 inconveniences. The possibility of modern prophecy creates scenarios where people might be subject to influences that can’t be shot down with a cannonade from scripture. But scripture wasn’t given us so that we might have confidence in the teachers of the law. It was given us that we might have confidence in Christ. God forbid that we should build up a confidence in the text in such a way that we fail to perceive what the text actually says, about itself, and about how we relate to Christ and each other.