A Vast Gulf Fixed Between

Well-meaning evangelical friends often advise me to cool down my rhetoric or dial back the perceived intensity of my objections to certain aspects of Reformed Theology. “After all,” they remind me, “We are brothers in Christ.”

That is true, and I want to acknowledge it right out of the starting gate. The basis for Christian unity is common faith in the person and work of the resurrected Christ, not any particular theological position about divine sovereignty, the composition and future of the nation of Israel or the timing of our Lord’s return for his people, not to mention several dozen less serious matters.

At the same time, the differences in faith and practice between dispensational Christians and Reformed believers go well beyond the theoretical. They are hugely practical.

Somebody Else’s Mail (28)

The sheer variety of ideas any given psalm generates in the minds of its readers constantly amazes me, both with respect to the circumstances in which the psalmists wrote them and with respect to their intentions in writing. I don’t look frequently at what other commentators have written about the scriptures before putting together one of these posts, but I happened to this morning. Almost everybody had something to say about the inspiration for Psalm 13.

Concerning the circumstances that led David to write it, we have a complete information vacuum. Vacuums apparently exist to be filled.

Too Hot to Handle: Faith and the Fatherless

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Single motherhood is the new “normal”.

Government programs of various kinds have made possible a generation (or more) of children many of whom know no father but the state. The Washington Post reports that by age eighteen fully half of children today will have lived some period with a single mother.

And increasingly, evangelicals are being called upon to aid, abet and even validate single motherhood.

Tom: IC, are there predictable consequences to growing up fatherless?

Collective Madness

“They said, ‘Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name.’ ”

What is collectivism? It’s not just the belief that it helps to have others around, or that a group can do more than a lone person can. Rather, it’s the belief and practice of making a group more important than any or all individuals in it.

It requires us to define the value of each human being by the crowds to which we suppose them to belong — their cultural, racial, economic, educational, sexual and historical peer-groups. It’s a form of Marxism, really, but Marxism in new clothes, because the evils of Marxism are too well known.

Godhead and Gifts

We’ve written a fair bit here about the gifts of the Holy Spirit over the years, though perhaps not so much recently. A quick search by topic shows 34 posts referencing spiritual gifts, and there may be more that didn’t get tagged, yet I doubt we’re in any danger of exhausting the subject.

There is at least one aspect we haven’t explored much or, if we have, I’ve forgotten about it. That would the origin and empowerment of the gifts.

The Sword

Christmases were idyllic when my brothers and I were very young, or at least they seemed that way to me. Like every family, we had our own traditions, including a pillowcase full of surprises at the foot of each bed on Christmas morn and three or four highly prized confections that turned up in the kitchen only in December. But the big draw for me was the Christmas day drive an hour or so west of the city to my uncle’s big, impressive house. Empty roads, snow, and the atmosphere of sweet anticipation.

Mom’s eldest brother was — not to put too fine a point on it — set in his ways. He wasn’t going anywhere for Christmas. I don’t believe he ever did. The family was coming to him. Also, his wife was a lovely, generous, hospitable woman who didn’t in the least mind opening her home to her husband’s four siblings, their spouses and multitudinous offspring. The arrangement worked for many years until it didn’t.

Anonymous Asks (428)

“What’s the difference between fornication and adultery?”

Translators make choices. English translators of different versions of the Bible over the centuries have rendered the same Greek and Hebrew words various ways in English. That diversity of language complicates our understanding of certain terms. It compels us to make a bit of an effort to put ourselves back in the shoes of those to whom the word of God first came.

Doing that is always rewarding, so let’s make an effort with these two words.

Serendipity or Something Else

Reader participation time. Has anything like this ever happened to you?

It’s Sunday morning. The house is quiet, you’ve had coffee and a shower, and you’re sitting down for a few minutes with your Bible before heading off to the Lord’s Supper.

Your church is a little unusual these days in that it hosts a weekly worship meeting with no designated speaker and no fixed order of proceedings. Nobody but the couple doing the greeting has any preordained role. The husband on the door will generally opt to start the meeting with a welcome, a hymn and/or a prayer. After that, the elders encourage an hour of vocal participation in the meeting by what high churches sometimes call the “laity”, Christian men who are not religious professionals. All men, great and small, young and old, are free to give out a hymn, lead the congregation in prayer, or even open the Bible to do a little reading and commentary.

Do you remember when Jesus read from the scroll in a synagogue in Nazareth, then briefly commented to the effect that he was fulfilling Isaiah’s prophecy right in front of them? It’s a bit like that, except you’re not the fulfillment of OT prophecy. Not that you know about anyway.

Somebody Else’s Mail (27)

“The faithful have vanished”, David wrote.

Not that the faithful have been exterminated and evil has finally won the day.

Not that the faithful have apostatized or lost their salt.

They’ve vanished. Elvis has left the building, folks.

This is not simply David’s personal experience here. No way, not without at least some exaggeration or hyperbole.

Too Hot to Handle: Feeding the Gators

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Tom: Let’s do something a little different today, Immanuel Can. I was thinking about the social implications of that clip you sent me this morning from the action-adventure video game Red Dead Redemption 2. It seems like that might be worth talking about from a Christian perspective.

Do you want to take a crack at describing it?

Immanuel Can: It’s hard to imagine if a person has not seen modern video games. (Of course, for those who have children, avoiding video games is all-but-impossible nowadays.) A lot are now story-based, but a lot are also what’s called “first-person-shooters”, designed to let players kill a lot of characters as they move through a maze or follow some kind of prepared story line.

Ship of Fools, or The Titanic Arrogance of Postmodernity

“We’re setting sail
To the place on the map
From which no one has ever returned
Drawn by the promise of
the joker and the fool
By the light of the crosses that burn

Drawn by the promise of
the women and the lace
And the gold and the cotton and pearls
It's the place where they keep all the darkness you need
You sail away from the light of the world on this trip, baby

You will pay tomorrow
You’re gonna pay tomorrow
You will pay tomorrow”

— Ship of Fools, World Party (1986)

Those are pretty “Christian” lyrics, really.

Oh, they’re not genteel, kindly or polite, to be sure; but they’re real, they’re true and they’re accurate — at least when we apply them to our present society.

On the Obsessive Impulse to Correct Others

Call it rhetoric, hyperbole, sloppiness or slang. Call it figurative language or a poorly-chosen idiom. Call it whatever you like, but imprecise language is a normal feature of human interaction. Christians who do not learn to accept and accommodate looseness of expression from others — intentional or otherwise — are going to struggle in their relationships with the world and with their fellow believers.

Even the most popular communicators affect imprecision when it serves their purposes. Ain’t Too Proud to Beg is a decent song title, I Am Not Too Proud to Beg considerably less so.

Killing the Soul

The Lord Jesus taught that nothing men are capable of doing to one another in this life compares to eternal punishment. Not on their worst day with all the weapons at their disposal. “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul,” he told his disciples. “Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”

Interestingly, scientists confirm that our nervous systems have a built-in upper limit to the agonies they may allow us to experience. They refer to the phenomenon as Conditional Pain Modulation or CPM. Pain inhibits pain. In this life, you can only hurt so much.

Anonymous Asks (427)

“What is the Sermon on the Plain?”

Everyone who has spent any time at all in the Bible knows the Sermon on the Mount. The fifth through seventh chapters of Matthew describe the Lord Jesus taking to an impromptu “pulpit” on a mountain in Galilee, leading to three full chapters of teaching that began with his disciples and expanded to the crowds that followed him. Most Christians are well acquainted with it, and most Bibles with chapter headings commence Matthew 5 with the title “The Sermon on the Mount”.

What else would you call it? If there’s a better idea, nobody seems to have come up with it.