Cutting to the Chase

I recently labored through the first volume of C.W. Previté-Orton’s Cambridge Medieval History, which covers the period from the late Roman Empire through to the twelfth century in a little under 700 pages. I say “labored”, but some parts (the earlier ones) were actually fairly exciting. However, as the venerable historian’s focus shifted from Italy and Greece to Germany, then Western Europe, I bogged down in a morass of what appeared (from my limited and relatively disinterested perspective) to be mediocre personages doing mediocre things.

I’m sure it wasn’t really that way.

Anonymous Asks (341)

“What is the core message of the Minor Prophets?”

Sometimes a question is too general to be useful. That’s not a criticism of the anonymous person who asked today’s poser. He is probably trying to get a clear, simple reply to an area of Bible inquiry he finds interesting. Sometimes that is easy to do. Other times it isn’t.

This would be one of those.

Faith in Strange Places

Almost everybody who’s ever flipped the pages of a Bible has noticed most versions have bold headings interspersed throughout its paragraphs to help the reader navigate what would otherwise be a daunting wall of text. Most also understand that these are not original content, which is to say they were inserted by English-speaking translators or editors relatively recently. They were added for much the same reason most of our blog posts have little orange headings every few paragraphs. They break up the text and give you an idea what you are about to encounter. They help the eye keep moving.

The heading atop Joshua 9 in my ESV reads “The Gibeonite Deception”. That’s not wrong exactly, but it’s sure not the whole story of that chapter. Sometimes you find faith in strange places.

119: Pe

Pe [פ] is the seventeenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet. It is also the Hebrew word for “mouth” and refers to the power of speech to change one’s world. (Not by coincidence, pe appears as “mouth” in the third verse of this section of Psalm 119, though not in connection with speech or power.) We can see how the word is used in scripture from Genesis forward, creating several intriguing Hebrew idioms. One example: Pharaoh says to Joseph, “All my people shall order themselves as you command.” The word “command” there is pê. What Pharaoh literally said is that all Egypt would conduct itself “according to Joseph’s mouth”.

That’s some pretty powerful speech, but then we worship a God who spoke our world into being.

Too Hot to Handle: Religion by the Numbers

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

Lyman Stone is a Lutheran believer who likes math. So he has built, in his words, “a complete annual dataset for every religious group in America as far back as I could get data”. That turns out to be 1925. If you want to know how your favorite denomination is doing demographically these days, especially compared to how it has done historically, Stone might well be the most informed guy on the block.

George Barna would be proud. Maybe. Assuming he doesn’t mind the competition.

Tom: You’ve mentioned before that you’re not a big stats guy, IC. What is it you don’t like about parsing data?

Just Church (13)

This week, we’re continuing our discussion of guilt. It’s a key tool being used today by the Woke Left to bludgeon Christians into cooperation with the leftist agenda, and bring that agenda into the church. The Christian recognition of human guilt is leveraged to induce a heightened and unwarranted anxiety about us becoming seen as narrow, discriminatory, unfair, or racially insensitive. In this state, we become vulnerable to the recommendations of seemingly-nice false teachers who claim to lead the way to greater justice and fairness in church life.

Let’s unpack those tactics. We might ask, “Why is guilt such an effective weapon against society in the present moment?” and “How is it even more effective as a weapon against the church?” That’s what we’ll cover this week: and next week, we’ll complete the picture by showing how the kind of guilt we are being invited to experience today is unlike godly guilt and repentance, so we can recognize it for what it is — a strategy of the enemy intended to disorient, fragment and demoralize our people, and thus to render them pliable to an ungodly agenda.

A Toasted Kitten Sandwich

As I write this, we’re not even two weeks into Donald J. Trump’s second presidency, and already the opinions are flying online. Evangelicals who voted for him are generally positive about the way he hit the ground running, others are concerned that too many Christians visibly associated with a secular Trump presidency spells trouble for the church down the road. Still others are, for now at least, holding their peace and waiting to see where this all goes.

Let’s not even talk about the reaction from the Left. You’d think the President had just eaten a toasted kitten sandwich live on national TV. (He didn’t. Let me just head that rumor off before someone starts it.)

Oracles of God

“… whoever speaks, as one who speaks oracles of God.”

Assuming we take the word “speaks” to mean “addresses the congregation when believers gather”, it should be evident Peter wrote these instructions to Christians exercising the spiritual gift of teaching rather than the spiritual gift of prophecy, though we know both were present among members of the first century church.

The reasons for this are twofold.

Anonymous Asks (340)

“I have a couple of books on my shelf written by Ravi Zacharias. What would you do with them?”

If you have been living under a rock and don’t know the name, Ravi Zacharias was a highly influential apologist, writer and evangelist, the head of a $35-40 million international empire ... er, Christian ministry. His books sold two million copies and his YouTube videos received hundreds of thousands of views.

He died in May 2020, shortly following which allegations surfaced of repeated sexual misconduct over many years.

A Track Record with the Lord

“But You, Lord, are a shield around me,
My glory, and the One who lifts my head.
I was crying out to the Lord with my voice,
And He answered me from His holy mountain.

Selah

I lay down and slept;
I awoke, for the Lord sustains me.
I will not be afraid of ten thousands of people
Who have set themselves against me all around.”

When David found himself in trouble, he would remember the dealings he had had with the Lord in other times of trouble. He did this with Goliath, remember? He said to Saul, “Your servant has killed both the lion and the bear; and this uncircumcised Philistine will be like one of them, since he has defied the armies of the living God.” He knew that when he was fighting to rescue “sheep”, the Lord God would be with him, no matter how great the enemy might look. It had been so before; and it would be so again.

119: Ayin

The Hebrew letter Ayin [ע] means “eye” and signifies not just functional vision but spiritual understanding. The words “eyes” and “understanding” appear six and ten times, respectively, in Psalm 119, so we are not surprised to find both in the first few verses of today’s reading, not least because the importance of seeking understanding from God through his word is the major theme of the psalm.

Occasional verses that address others interrupt some sections of the psalmist’s prayer; however, today’s stanza focuses entirely on God.

Too Hot to Handle: Going Crazy

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

What could inspire a pleasant, thoroughly secularized gay man to trumpet the virtue of belief on YouTube?

Well, in this case, it’s a new Pew Research study which reveals that a staggering 56.3% of white, liberal women age 18-29 have been diagnosed with a mental health condition at some point. That’s a mind-blowing number.

Tom: The report also indicates conservatives of both sexes were only half as likely (16.3% vs. 33.6% and 27.3% vs. 56.3%) to be diagnosed with mental health issues as their liberal counterparts in the same age group, which understandably prompted Dave Rubin to start talking about the value of having a fixed set of beliefs.

Just Church (12)

Chapter 4: What Social Justice Does to the Fellowship

I once knew a woman who was raised in a very abusive home.

Her father was so violent and unpredictable in his temper that she never knew when she would be bullied and struck, or for what. Life was a continual “walking on eggshells”, and as she grew up she began to adopt various strategies for survival. As time passed these strategies became ingrained in her personality.

Her father died in her early adult years, and she escaped. Eventually she married a large, kind-hearted man with a particularly generous and even disposition. Never in their years of married life would he raise a hand to her in violence. Nevertheless, the scars of the past ran deep. How deep they ran she did not even know.

The Next Moses

Right in the middle of Deuteronomy, God promised Israel another mediator “like Moses”. Well, technically, he did it roughly forty years earlier, but Deuteronomy is where we find the details.

Exodus 20 tells the original story of this awesome encounter and its consequences, and Moses repeated it to a new generation of Israelites in Deuteronomy 5. God graciously accommodated a terrified people at Sinai (Horeb), unwilling to continue experiencing the Almighty’s presence directly, when he spoke to them from heaven out of the midst of the fire and gave them the first ‘ten words’ out of many commands.

The people then begged Moses to receive God’s message to them on behalf of the entire nation.

The Spirit of Jonah

“But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared.”

The line that precedes these words in Psalm 130 reads, “If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?” The question is rhetorical, and the intended response is “Nobody.” If God gave everyone exactly what he or she deserved, this planet would be a hollowed-out, smoking husk.

But he doesn’t, and there’s the rub. God “devises means so that the banished one will not remain an outcast”. “He is not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.”

Anonymous Asks (339)

“Is there a conclusive argument for the existence of God?”

Sadly, there is no conclusive argument either for the existence of God or anything else. The reason is unbelief. Perhaps I should not use “reason” and “unbelief” in the same sentence. They are in fact mutually exclusive. The unbeliever refuses compelling arguments, persuasive evidence, and even the science he claims to worship when any of these do not agree with his predetermined position.

For such a man, literally nothing is ever conclusive.

Gadflies and Blinded Eyes

Wesley Huff is a Toronto-based apologist and popular YouTube presence with considerable experience in public debates on behalf of the Christian faith. Ammon Hillman is an American classicist who was raised Baptist, but apostatized from the faith in his early twenties and has been passing himself off as a public intellectual and serious Greek scholar ever since.

Bernie sent me one of Huff’s YouTube shorts last week in which he comments on Hillman’s bizarre assertion that the word “Christ” actually means “to be stung by a gadfly”.

Really? Really? Okay, let’s play …

119: Samekh

Hebrew scholars say the letter Samekh [ס] signifies support and protection. The idea is that the perimeter of the letterform symbolizes the Creator and the interior depicts his creation, surrounded on all sides, upheld and protected by him. It’s a nice thought, and it definitely fits with the eight verses of this fifteenth stanza of Psalm 119.

We might note that while the perimeter of the samekh has substance, the interior is a void. Accurate symbolism is not always flattering.

Too Hot to Handle: Alt-Personhood

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

Fox News reports that the Baltimore Book Festival has dropped Rachel Dolezal’s invitation to participate in the festival this year after receiving too much negative public feedback.

You may remember Ms Dolezal from a flurry of media scrutiny in 2015 when it was revealed that the leader of the Spokane chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People wasn’t really a person of color after all, but was in reality a little blonde in blackface.

Tom: IC, I don’t understand. Society says it’s not only okay but morally imperative for me to self-identify as a woman if that’s how I feel about myself, even if I have been born biologically male. It will defend my right to call myself any made-up gender I like, even to the point of stripping you of your right to disagree with me about it in the public space.

Just Church (11)

• Justice must be achieved in the present world.
• Racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, colonialism, ableism, and other such forms of prejudice are our real problem.
• It’s the whole social system at fault, but the church and you are guilty too.
• Guilt is collective, and you can’t escape your social location and your social guilt.
• Everybody’s guilty, and nobody can repent enough.
• To envy anybody who seems privileged is noble, and to resent their advantages is virtuous.

So the present system, whatever it is, and all authority must fall. You can only lift the burden of some of your guilt by joining in an unrelenting war against authority and the existing order — by becoming an “ally” of “the oppressed”.

Reasons for Abortion

Bernie sent me this chart a few months back. Purportedly, it originates with the CDC and breaks down by percentages the main reasons given for women having abortions in the US during some unspecified period. Bernie (wisely) included the stipulation that he was “looking to verify numbers from a second source”. He added, “But this is pretty much exactly what I suspected so I’m inclined to believe it.”

Me too. Still, let’s do our due diligence.

Unnecessary Clutter?

The Talmud — ancient commentaries of Judaism — says there are 613 distinct commandments in the Law of Moses: 248 positive commands (“Do this”) and 365 negative commands (“Don’t do this”). These numbers are not undisputed within Jewish scholarship, but you’ll come across the number 613 more often than not.

That may seem like a staggeringly large number of laws, but it’s really not. Not at all.

Anonymous Asks (338)

“Will serial killers go to heaven with no punishment if they believe in Jesus, repent and ask for forgiveness?”

The great King David once plotted the murder of his own faithful servant in order to cover up his adultery with the man’s wife. Yet upon his confession of guilt, Nathan the prophet told him frankly, “The Lord also has put away your sin.” David himself writes concerning that same incident, “a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise”. That sounds like forgiveness to me. I think we’ll see David in heaven. In fact, I’m sure of it.

Admittedly, that doesn’t deal with the “serial” aspect, does it?

California and the Meaning of History

I read a great deal, as is probably obvious to frequent visitors of this space. So when I come across similar ideas five or ten minutes apart in two or more different places, I don’t necessarily take it as an omen — it could be sheer coincidence — but it sometimes gives me pause, and the occasion to reflect a little.

That happened to me again last Monday, for probably the umpteenth time, resulting in a “hmm” moment.

119: Nun

The letter Nun [נ] is the symbol for soul, the heavenly spark housed in the earthly container of the body. The soul is the self, taking in intellect, will and heart. The shape of the letter leads many to associate it with humility: nun is “the servant bent over”. Hebrew numerology students love to add up the sum of the letters in words to figure out what they signify. The letters in the name “David” add to fourteen, so they associate the great King of Israel with this letter, as well as Messiah, his descendant; the perfect servant and the epitome of humility. (Nun is the fourteenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet.)

Nun is also the word for “fish” in Aramaic, and Hebrew scholars refer to it as the fish that swims in the water of the Torah. Some of this is a bit too mystical for me, but I find these things of interest.

Too Hot to Handle: That Sync-ing Feeling

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

The Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University (“CRC”) has released yet another study on the beliefs and values of the American public. We have commented on and critiqued a few of these polls before in this forum with respect to their findings, and our concerns about possible shortcomings in the methods employed by the data gatherers.

Tom: I don’t really want to get into all that again, IC. But there is a word that came up in their first press release concerning this new batch of data that interested me greatly, because I believe it’s a pretty accurate way to describe the general direction of the evolution of public thought over the last century or more.

Just Church (10)

Last week, we left off halfway through listing the things Social Justice types tend to believe. We had seen that they think justice is a thing that has to happen in this world, now; that the real problem of humanity is not sin but discrimination; and that this discrimination happens primarily through systems and institutions, so that everybody who is in those systems is guilty of the sin of “complicity” with racism, sexism, exclusion, or whatever new pejorative label the Left can come up with, even if they personally have never hurt anyone and hold no unkind attitudes at all. We saw that they view everybody as fated to be mere products of his or her particular social location in race, culture, sex, faith, sexual practice, disability ... or any other divisive category they can invent.

These are also things we’ve all seen in the secular world in the last few years — in education, in the mass media, in politics, in entertainment and the commercial world. But that’s not the complete list, of course. There are several other things Social Justice enthusiasts believe with equal fervency, and so we continue listing them this week.

Recognizing the Teaching Gift

Mature Christians in every denomination recognize that the ability to teach the Bible is a gift that comes from the Holy Spirit of God, as is plainly stated in Romans and 1 Corinthians. Fewer are able to reel off a list of criteria by which gifted teachers may be easily identified, especially when that gift is in early stages of development.

In practice, some believers instinctively associate gift with charisma, others with seminary training, still others for some intangible quality in a teacher’s ministry that reminds them of Bible teachers who influenced them early in their own Christian lives.

The Language of the Debate (13)

Joe Rogan recently interviewed former US State Department Cyber Division head Mike Benz for his podcast. If you have ever watched Rogan on YouTube, as well over 68 million people did when he interviewed incoming President Donald Trump back in October, you’ll know his style is unusual compared to other media figures in that he tends to let his guests actually talk, making his podcast one of the most genuinely informative opinion platforms available.

He certainly let Benz talk. You can find the first part of the interview transcribed here and the second here, or you can just watch the whole thing here. (Caution: Rogan can be fairly profane.)

Anonymous Asks (337)

“Are lustful thoughts natural, and how do I deal with them when they keep coming back into my mind?”

God made the average young man to procreate. There are always exceptions to the average, of course, as the Lord Jesus noted to his disciples — that’s how it becomes an average in the first place. You need the outliers on both ends to put you smack bang in the middle of the pack.

You sound like you’re right there in the middle, Anonymous: a normal human, Christian male.

Semi-Random Musings (39)

For almost nine years, I have been reading the New Testament as closely as possible to the order in which I believe its writers composed its various component letters, gospels and prophecies. That’s well over a dozen times through. As I have commented here, it’s a very different experience from reading the NT in the order we find it in our Bibles. The intended significance of certain passages is much more obvious when you read your mail in the order the mailman actually delivered it.

The relative importance of Paul’s teaching about the return of Christ positively jumps out at the Bible student who stops to put his reading material in chronological order.

119: Mem

The letter Mem [מ] symbolizes water and is associated with the number forty. If that seems an odd pairing, we should consider that the first “forty” in scripture denotes the duration of the Genesis flood in days. Thereafter, the number is often associated with testing or judgment.

In the New Testament, water is most frequently associated with the Holy Spirit of God. It is not without reason that we call that great, singular event in which the Spirit came to indwell all who are in Christ and bind together Jew and Gentile into one body a “baptism”. But water serves other purposes than cleansing and testimony. It meets the perpetual need of humanity. Jesus cried out to the thirsty, “Come to me and drink.” John comments, “He said this about the Spirit.”

How does the Spirit operate in the human heart? Well, he uses the word of God, which is where our psalmist comes in once again.

Too Hot to Handle: Where Did We Go Wrong?

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

We’ve run a couple of posts recently about Christian Nationalism and its appeal to young men, especially those raised on the supersessionist aspect of Reformed Theology.

Tom: I see two different problems cropping up, but I believe they are both coming from a common source. On the dispensational side, I see young men disillusioned with their denominations because they feel like the staid routine their older brothers in Christ have established gives them no outlet for their youthful energies and the desire to effect change, and may inspire them to look for something more real and relevant. On the Reformed side, I see older men panicking over the particular ways the energies of their young men are manifesting themselves. They wanted activism and now they’ve got it. They just don’t like the shape it’s taking.

IC, without getting into a lot of detail about Christian Nationalism, with its accusations of antisemitism and so on — because we have done that elsewhere — I’d like to talk a bit about the package we are offering young men when they come to church, and whether it’s deficient in any way. In short, is the problem them, or is the problem us?

Immanuel Can: Or is the problem with our society? I think it is.

Just Church (9)

Chapter 3: The “Nice” Lady

“… and this is a very nice day, and we are taking a very nice walk, and you are two very nice young ladies. Oh, it is a very nice word, indeed! — it does for everything.”

(Henry Tilney, in Jane Austen’s novel,
Northanger Abbey, 1817)

The word “nice” is tricky. Like so many of our English words, it has had some different shades of meaning, which have switched as time passed. The quotation with which this chapter starts relates to this: through her character, Jane Austen is making fun of the different ways that single word can be taken.

In its present use, it most often means the sort of thing you probably thought of when I first talked about the nice lady — pleasant, friendly, kind, and so on. It will probably come as a real surprise to most people that when the word “nice” was originally coined, it meant “ignorant”.

The Language of the Debate (12)

An international team of university researchers has concluded that people who curse more are less likely to lie and may possess greater integrity than their politer peers.

Sure. Of course. Christians will buy that one hook, line and sinker, right? Didn’t think so.

What fascinates me about the study is not its rather pedestrian conclusions, which are all too predictable given the initial assumptions of psychologist Gilad Feldman and his team. Garbage in, garbage out. No, it’s really their preconceived ideas about the meaning of honesty that ought to cause Christians to stop and think. Why? Because apparently the word no longer means what it once did.

Ugh. Not again.

Three Metaphors

The book of Acts ends with Paul’s first Roman imprisonment, from which he was eventually released and which was a comparative walk in the park.

Acts is the final historical book of the New Testament, so we must infer anything further about Paul’s life and ministry from his later letters. Without an independent witness to Paul’s travels, trials and tribulations, we only know what went on by reading between the lines of the apostle’s subsequent correspondence with local churches, friends and associates.

Everything we know about the circumstances of his second imprisonment comes from 2 Timothy.

Anonymous Asks (336)

“Should Christians from different denominations date or marry?”

As with so many questions, the answer very much depends on your personal situation. Why do you attend the church you currently attend? Obviously, the most desirable answer is “Out of conviction about the interpretations of scripture taught there.”

But that’s not always why people are where they are, is it?

Inbox: Christ and Learning

“What about the questions Jesus asked as a boy (Lk 2:46). Did He know the answers or did He learn?”

There is no application of the word “learn” in Luke 2:46. Luke simply says that Jesus Christ was listening to the teachers and asking them questions. There’s no reason to suppose he was asking those questions because of any lack in his own knowledge, rather than the sort of rhetorical and didactic questioning in which he would later so frequently engage with his disciples or with the Pharisees. He would call on their judgment in order to set the stage for deeper thinking on a subject they had so far understood only superficially.

There is but one passage in all of scripture that employs the word “learn” in reference to Christ’s life: Hebrews 5:8.

119: Lamedh

The Lamedh [ל] is the twelfth letter of the Hebrew alphabet and the symbol of learning. It begins the second half of the alphabet and the second half of Psalm 119, thus putting learning at the heart of the human experience, and spiritual learning most central of all.

One of the most important lessons we can ever learn is to worship appropriately.

Too Hot to Handle: Tik-Talkin’

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

Something strange has come up recently on YouTube and TikTok. There’s this spate of home-made videos — short ones — that present the following scenario: usually it begins with a girl who claims to have a boy who is her “best friend”. Some saccharine pop tune plays, and then words appear on screen to the effect that she’s secretly infatuated with him and, allegedly, he doesn’t know. So then, the girl invents some pretext for getting close to him, and suddenly kisses him … and whatever happens happens. Either he seems to respond, or he doesn’t. Then the video ends.

Immanuel Can: There’ve got to be thousands of these things. Sometimes it’s a boy who’s made them, but most of the time, a girl. But always the camera — and the viewers — are the third ‘person’ in the equation, of course. Let’s start with the obvious. Do you think it would be okay for young Christian women to try emulating this trend?

Tom: Oh please.

Just Church (8)

And so we arrive at the present moment.

We've been talking about history — about that old nonsense created by Karl Marx, and then picked up in the middle of the last century by a group of rabid ideologues now known as “The Frankfurt School”. But what’s all this got to do with us? Why should we care? Didn’t all that end with the Berlin Wall? Whom do we, in the West, ever meet who preens himself as a Marxist? So why bother ourselves with dead men and dead beliefs?

Well, because sometimes things don’t quite die. Bad ideas have a horrible way of persisting, and even of being resurrected in new forms. This happened with Marxism, which has now reappeared under the cloak of humanist, racial, environmental and sexual-equality concerns, in what we now know as the “Social Justice” movement. So our subject today is this final switcheroo, when the old dogmas of Marxism got converted into their current form, and managed to seize so much of the public agenda, and even to make serious inroads among professing Christians.

Top 10 Posts of 2024

Our most popular posts of last year dealt with relationships (or the absence thereof), the visions of Zechariah, the importance of thought flow in expository preaching, and the practical implications of Reformed theology. If that seems a mixed bag to you, welcome to ComingUntrue, where we try to come up with a little something for everyone … or possibly you just get stuck with whatever random subject is rattling around in our heads on any given day.

Without further ado, let’s count ’em down!

Inbox: The Questions of Young Jesus

My Christmas present this year from an old friend and mentor was not quite a lump of coal in my stocking, more like a hot potato bouncing from palm to palm to avoid getting singed. He responded to last week’s Anonymous Asks post (subtitled “If Jesus was/is omniscient, why did he ask questions?”) with this query: “What about the questions He asked as a boy (Lk 2:46). Did He know the answers or did He learn?”

I believe the correct theological rejoinder is “Aaargh!”

Anonymous Asks (335)

“What does leaven symbolize in the Bible?”

Lots of things, none of them good. Let me try to make that case.

Symbols can be tricky things. Where our Bible interprets a symbol, we generally have no difficulty at all, but there are also times when the meaning of a symbol is open to question because the Holy Spirit has not told us plainly, “This signifies that.” Leaven was unacceptable to God in some contexts and acceptable in others. We will need to find an explanation for that.

The Old Testament uses leaven as an illustration. The New Testament unpacks its meaning.

First Things First

An illustration, and I’ll try to keep it as brief and clear as possible.

In the process of editing IC’s Christmas Day post this year, I came across one of those inconvenient translation variants that scripture affirms as legitimate despite what seems to be a significant change in meaning. Matthew 4:16 has the apostle quoting the prophet Isaiah concerning the “great light” that dawned on Galilee when our Lord settled in Capernaum for a time.

119: Kaph

If you are going to find Christ in Psalm 119, today’s eleventh “stanza” of the psalm is by far the best place for it. For a consistent prophetic portrayal of the sinless, suffering servant, these eight lines have no parallel in the psalm, which makes our reading a perfect fit for the tail end of the Christmas season, as we move from the contemplation of our Lord’s birth to considering his purpose in coming into the world. By non-coincidence, the letter Kaph [כ], which begins every line, has a dual meaning to Hebrew scholars: “form” and “crown”.

No, I’m really not making this stuff up.

Too Hot to Handle: Spreading the Infection

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

France is getting ‘woke’, or at least so says the New York Times. Young people on the other side of the Atlantic from an entirely different cultural background and with an entirely different history than their counterparts in the U.S. are mobilizing, protesting and even rioting over the treatment of blacks, over gender issues, over colonialism — you name it, they’re up in arms about it. What’s interesting is that, as French president Emmanuel Macron puts it, all this fuss and bother is “entirely imported”. It is the product of American universities and American media.

Just Church (7)

When we left off last week, we were talking about the roots of the Social Justice movement. We traced things back to a philosopher named Hegel, who passed on some basic ideas to another guy, Karl Marx. Marx might well be the most evil character in all of history, judging by the number of people dispossessed, starved, tortured and killed as result of his ideology. (Let nobody tell you that ideas do not have consequences.)

But Marx died way back in 1883, and went to his own consequences. So we might well wonder why we would be thinking about him now. How did some old atheist guy with a bad idea end up causing problems for the Church a century and a half or so after he was dead? Good question. It deserves an answer. So here we go.

Darkness, and Great Light

“The people who were sitting in darkness saw a great Light, and those who were sitting in the land and shadow of death, upon them a Light dawned.”

If there is any such thing as a universal symbol, it just might be light.

In every place and culture all around the world, everybody instinctively associates light with things like truth and insight and joy. Whether it’s our Christmas, or the Hanukkah of Judaism, or Chinese New Year, or some other “festival of light”, it always seems to point to the same sorts of experience: that of being able to see, whereas before, one could not. Is not the celebrated historical period of the secular skeptics called “The Enlightenment”? Even the irreligious are drawn to this symbolism.

To One and All, A Mary Christmas

“… the power of the Most High will overshadow you.”

“So this is Christmas, and what have you done?”

So sing the children in John Lennon’s wretched ditty. I really don’t know why he bothered himself about Christmas when he also wanted to “imagine there’s no heaven”. But each to his own. I’m sure he’s thought better of that since.

At Christmas time, I can’t imagine a more dismal question. Another year over, Lennon accuses, and you haven’t done anything. The poor are still starving, the world is still at war. When are you going to get off your haunches and be worth something?

Ah, there’s nothing like Christmas pudding and the sounds of self-flagellation to improve the seasonal mood.