“For my thoughts are not your thought neither are your ways my ways,” declares Yahweh. “As the heaven are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” Isaiah 55:8-9
“And my sense of humor and irony will drop your jaw faster than the anvil falling on Wile E. Coyote.” (Paraphrase due to recent experiential evidence).
I am employed in a position that I have never ever thought of being in. Picture this: Continue reading “God’s Direction Part I”
It has come to my attention that certain family units have begun to get the grumblies as far as our lack of posting goes. Rest assured we are not dead; just busy. Kyle’s classes have started well (and his Hebrew retake went wonderfully) and I’m still in the process of looking for a job. I plan to say much more both here and in the next grents letter, but now I’m hungry and need to go eat.
Peace and Blessings.
Great, hurried political commentary from a theology student too busy to read the news. And Cox & Forkum is hardly the premier news outlet. But they’ve got a point in the commentary on this comic.
Part of what’s keeping “the insurgency” going is an unending supply of free weapons from outside sources. There is now proof that Iran is engaging in its own Iran-Contra affair by manufacturing weapons directly for the use of Shiite militias in Iraq. Honestly, I should have suspected as much. How can you keep a guerrilla war on when you run out of ammo? Somebody has to supply. And if that supply is gone, the warfare has to cease. Or at least descend to a more manageable level. Continue reading “I should have thought as much”
| What American accent do you have?
Your Result: The Midland
“You have a Midland accent” is just another way of saying “you don’t have an accent.” You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio. |
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| The Inland North |
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| Philadelphia |
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| The South |
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| The Northeast |
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| The West |
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| Boston |
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| North Central |
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| What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes |
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I blame my parents. They moved to California so my dad could go to school and I understand they picked up all kinds of foreign ways there.
I may be getting my facts mixed up, but in his best-selling book Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond describes the history and fare of several people groups located in the South Pacific. At least in that book, theirs is the story of non-ascendancy in the face of the continuous, precipitous rise of Western, continental nations. To summarize a 300 page award-winning book in only a few words, they were destined to be conquered because they were isolated. As these islands were settled, they arose to precisely the level of density that the land could support, a level too low to develop specialization, on islands too isolated to acquire technologies in the normal interactions of men. Their first contact with foreigners inevitably came in the form of invaders with vastly superior armaments.
The odd thing about these islands though, is that it was rarely as simple a situation as one nation per island. Sometimes a nation would consist of one island, but it was just as likely to be several kingdoms on a single large island, or an “empire” reaching across an archipelago. This strikes me as remarkably similar to the churches I grew up in. Continue reading “Island Nations”
I feel a little bit right now like the boy who was told that for one day he must eat only vitamins, only to discover that his vitamins tasted remarkably like candy. I am participating in what our school calls a Soul Sabbath retreat. The principle of the retreat is to spend a day in vocal silence cum community, so we have borrowed facilities from a Catholic monastery and adopted for a day what is essentially a pseudo-monastic lifestyle: We pray and read; we eat a meal together; we write notes in our journals, but for 6 hours, we say nothing.
The irony for me is great. The monastic life, particularly one of a contemplative nature, is something which I seriously considered, and quite finally had to reject. There’s a huge appeal here: one of the main features of contemplative monasticism is the extreme tension between isolation and community. Normally, living in any tight-knit community results in a huge amount of jostling, so rules are imposed to make space for Something Else. That something else fascinates me; it’s my life bread.
My mom tells me that men don’t make friends properly anyway, because they are so object-oriented. Friendship for us consists frequently in finding ways to do work together. But I’m on the extreme end of that spectrum, because the work I find most pleasant is very difficult to do in community. Find me, I ask you, a group of men with whom I can gather in person to engage in systematic theology! Even at a seminary, their numbers are very few.
So I’m prone to making little monasteries around me. Continue reading “Monastic”
> Mystics and poets … get to play, but although much lip service is paid to both traditions in our culture, it is largely condescension. No partent really wants his or her child to grow up and become a poet; no one in a religious house really wants to live next door to a mystic.
Also…
> It was in the play of writing a poem that I first became aware that the demands of laundry might have something to do with God’s command that we worship, that we sing praise on a regular basis. Both laundry adn worship are repetitive activities with a potential for tedium, and I hate to admit it, but laundry often seems liek the more useful of the tasks. But both are the work that God has given us to do.
From Devotional Classics: the Sacramental Life
Church size does not happen by accident. Rather, size is determined by structure. It is possible to stratify a list of churches according to size based on a description of their structure, both logistical and liturgical. Certain kinds of structure simply cannot support a church larger than a certain size. On the other hand, other kinds of structure scale very rapidly and are limited only by the population density of the region adn the efficient use of facilities.
This is important because it requires some intentionality in regards to church size when you choose the structure of your church. You may have other reasons for choosing a certain kind of structure, but when that structure inevitably results in a certain size congregation, you cannot claim ignorance.
I could describe for you the structures of churches of various sizes, but instead I want to ask if a church should deliberately choose to be small.
Does God want little churches?
Crazy slowly going am I. 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, switch….
I really shouldn’t be posting right now but I need to take a short break and remember that there’s a world out there besides school.
Continue reading “I am slowly going crazy. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, switch….”
Or: A Few Thoughts on Infant Baptism
Disclaimer: I am not, nor have I ever been a practitioner of infant baptism. I have never baptized anybody. I was raised in the rural parts of Southwest Oklahoma, first among Southern Baptist churches, and finally among non-denominational charismatic churches. To my knowledge, there are no pedobaptists of any stripe in Southwest Oklahoma. Quite frankly, the very idea of infant baptism gives me the heebie-jeebies.
Nevertheless:
There are no denominations that trace their origins to before the Protestant Reformation, either “Orthodox” or “Catholic,” and which also practice credal baptism.
If differences between between credal and infant baptism have caused such difficulties in our time, surely they would have caused a stir in an era that was willing to commit murder over a difference of one word in the doctrine of the Trinity. Yet there is no record of such a fight.
The modern practice of credal baptism stems from a radical application of Zwingli’s “regluative principle,” which says that only those practices which are specifically prescribed by scripture may be allowed in the church. It is on the basis of this principle that Zwingli banned art and music from his church’s worship. The Anabaptists were those who insisted Zwingli had not gone far enough, and wished to also ban infant baptism on the basis that it wasn’t clearly prescribed by scripture. Since there is marginally more support in scripture for infant baptism than for art and music, those who use these things in worship should not argue that infant baptism isn’t mentioned in scripture. Else, those who argue against infant baptism should also argue against art and music.
The effect, and usually the intent, of credal baptism is to ensure that the church is composed entirely of believers whose salvation is assured. Yet Jesus compared the church to a field in which an enemy had sowed tares in with the wheat. Credal baptism, then, is an effort to “weed out” the tares. This is a futile effort (there are always tares), and potentially harmful: Jesus himself said that removing the tares before the harvest could destroy some of the wheat.
Among churches which practice believer’s baptism, a new practice has arisen, which has all the effects of a sacrament: A newborn infant is taken before the church and blessed by the elders. Sometimes the child is annointed with oil; always they are prayed for. Often the congregation is invoked to support the child’s Christian development. The only discernable difference between this practice and that of infant baptism is the presence of water.
If baby dedication is a form of baptism, then these churches are guilty of performing two baptisms, and possibly creating a church within the church. If it is not a form of baptism, then they have created a new sacrament to replace infant baptism, and which has no support in scripture.
As I said in the title, these things *almost* persuade me to become a pedobaptist. There are other arguments in support of credo-baptism that are persuasive for me – particularly the fact that Jesus based his baptism on John’s, which was clearly performed on those who were themselves repenting, and also Paul’s comments on Christians and circumcision.
Nevertheless, the strongest motivating factor for me is tradition: baptism upon confession is the system that I grew up with and which I have known my whole life. I can’t imagine offending all my friends and family over this issue. But this is a pitiful appeal on an issue where the opposition has a **much** stronger tradition.
If tradition is my strongest point, then there is little doubt that if I had lived in Luther’s time, I would have been a pedobaptist.
neumatikos 