#226 The Homeland of Peace

"It is one thing from a wooded summit to catch a glimpse of the homeland of peace and not to find a way to it, but vainly to attempt a journey along an impracticable route surrounded by the ambushes and assaults of fugitive deserters with their chief, 'the lion and the dragon' (Ps. 90:13). It is another thing to hold on to the way that leads there, defended by the protection of the heavenly emperor. There no deserters from the heavenly army lie waiting to attack. For this way they hate like a torture."

-- Augustine, Confessions, Book VII xxi (27)

#225 Our Struggle Against the Powers

"For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms... pray... pray... pray"

-- A much abbreviated quotation from Ephesians 6:12-20

#224 Calvin on Cheney

I had to post this if for nothing else than for the great picture. If you're unaware of the Scottish Prebyterian Samuel Rutherford, and his concept of Lex Rex, then you should certainly look into him at some point in your life of being an American citizen. Considering it doing your due diligence as a patriot and lover of freedom.


The article is from David Neff, an editor at Christianity today, and may surprise some people. I have been constantly surprised each day over the past week or two as I've been reading through Pulitzer Prize winner Charlie Savage's Takeover. The guys knows his shit and documents it well. We're used to assuming that for Calvin, all governments were ordained by God, regardless of whether they govern justly or not. But Neff corrects this notion, pointing to Calvin himself:

"...what about the unfaithful political leader? Calvin wrote that 'dictatorships and unjust authorities are not governments ordained by God.' They are no longer 'God's ministers' if they 'practice blasphemous tyranny.'"

Neff's article is here.

Savage's book is here.

#223 What is Gluttony?

There is one sin that no one talks about. One sin that no one ever commits. One sin that we often consider more of a historic artifact peculiar to ancient culture than to our modern times of plenty. One sin to rule them all! No, the Lord of the Rings reference is getting a little carried away. Then again, the way to a man's heart is through his stomach. So maybe there is something to this. I'm talking about gluttony.

What is gluttony? Is it even possible to commit it anymore, I mean, more than nominally with a knowing laugh, of course? The reason it's come to mind lately is that I've gone from 2 incomes for 2 family members to 1 income for 3 family members in the past year and we've had to examine literally every expense. Now with the potential for deflation (the scariest word in all of economics) looming on the horizon, my already sharp emphasis on consumption is further enhanced.

And consumption is really a key word when it comes to thinking about gluttony, if as I asked before, there even is such a sin anymore. Is there? And if so, what's the point? What's the point of it being prohibited in an age of plenty?

The opposite of gluttony, though we don't often think of it this way, is fasting, of course. But strangely that contrast only came to my mind today for the first time. If you have trouble understanding the prohibition against gluttony, start with your understanding of fasting and work backwards. If you trouble understanding the purpose of fasting, start with gluttony and work backwards.

Both are at opposite ends on the spectrum of how we relate to food. One by indulgence, one by denial. Both are unsustainable. And yet sustainability, particularly my ability to sustain financing as much food intake as my stomach desired, was one of the driving forces that led me to start examining my actions in the first place.

And so to a certain degree, I feel that I'm fasting each time I don't give my stomach the full extent of what it desires. That unmet physiological/psychological need, is essentially a fast from the satisfaction that I've voluntarily foregone. In other words, it's a form of abstinence, a denial of self.

So instead of focusing on whether your committing gluttony or whether you ought to try fasting, examine instead your relation to food. For me, it was particularly helpful to do this in the context of my financial condition and the alternate uses of those dollars I was literally consuming. Who else or what else could consume those dollars were I not to consume so much of them? For you, there may be a context that hits closer to home.

#222 Juxtaposition

Next time you run across a prosperity gospel-type, give them a dose of historic Christianity.



God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.

Thanks to Philip Sumpter for this illustration.

#221 Semantics and The Deity of Christ

Dan Wallace, director of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, announced a book he authored based on his doctoral dissertation regarding (from what I can tell) grammatical pointers to Christ's divinity. In summarizing his work, he says something I'd never thought about:

"The fact that the book came out after Gordon Fee’s Pauline Christology has afforded me the opportunity to interact with Fee’s arguments that “our great God and Savior” refer to the Father rather than the Son. I disagree with him on this, and argue that the epithet speaks of Jesus Christ."

I'd be really interested to see how this kind argument can be made, especially since Fee's book is on my radar anyway. Too bad the book is $55.96 on Amazon. Perhaps he'll blog about this dialogue with Fee in particular at some point.

#220 It's a Cold and It's a Broken Biblical Theology

The New York Times did a story today on Leonard Cohen's return to touring after 15 years away from the stage which included a "five-year stint in a Zen Buddhist monastery." Cohen is probably best known for having his song "Hallelujah" covered by Jeff Buckley and numerous others artists.

Poetry has always frustrated me because of it's often difficult to extract it's meaning and Cohen is a poet first and foremost, and a songwriter second. So the Times asked him straight up, and he responded as elusively as a poet would.

"About the meaning of those songs, Mr. Cohen is diffident and elusive. Many are, he acknowledges, 'muffled prayers,' but beyond that he is not eager to reveal much. 'It’s difficult to do the commentary on the prayer,' he said. 'I’m not a Talmudist, I’m more the little Jew who wrote the Bible,' a reference to a line in 'The Future,' a song he released in 1992. 'I feel it doesn’t serve the enterprise to really examine it from outside the moment.'

Here Cohen illustrates a concept that over the last five to seven years has revolutionized my personal view on what the Bible is and isn't. Though he writes the songs, he doesn't always understand their meaning. His phrase "muffled prayers" is reminiscent of Paul's recognition of human weakness affecting our ability to pray for what we ought to pray for. Therefore, Paul says, the Spirit intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express (Romans 8:26).

But what hit me as powerful and important was his concept of the muffled pray-er vs. the comment-ator, the Talmudist vs. the "little Jew who wrote the Bible." Though we'd all say we know better, growing up in the church has caused us to become accustomed to thinking of the Scriptures as a sort of systematic theology text, a complete picture of all there is for man to know about God, and an internally consistent monograph guided by an invisible hand, as it were.

But what if the Bible is viewed rather simply as the accumulated reflections of a community who had direct interaction with the one true God? Without a doubt, a large portion of the Scriptures are a documentation of God's spoken words to this community. But what if instead of viewing the Bible primarily as God's word to us, we instead viewed it as the community's muffled prayer and response to him, and it's historical account of this interaction as a deposit for future generations and witness to the nations? Here the document itself is seen as a very human document, again, a muffled prayer. It is a desperate cry, a song, a old story told by parents and grandparents and finally put to papyrus, sage advice from a father, an existential crisis, a love story, a harsh rebuke, letters to fellow sojourners, and most importantly a witness to the Word of God personified, Jesus Christ. Together it is all of these things, but independently it is each of these things.

The implication here, of course, is a question that I've seen making the rounds on other blogs and is increasingly becoming the subject of scholarly book-length studies. The question is: To what extent can we construct a biblical theology considering the diversity of historical contexts, experiences, authors, and viewpoints contained therein? We often hear talk of Pauline theology, covenant theology, Old Testament theology, New Testament theology, and numerous others much smaller in scope. But how far can we go in contructing a grand theological system called "Biblical Theology?"

In an interview over at Ken Schenk's blog, Peter Enns defined biblical theology as "reading the Bible as a grand narrative of diverse and historically particularized episodes that achieves an eschatological coherence in Christ." For me, this raises the question of whether we should look at developing, at least in our own personal minds, an eschatological theology or studying the Bible's own apocalyptic theology, if that's even possible. But that's research for another day.

For now, it's a good start to simply ask: What if we began to see the writers of the Bible more as muffled pray-ers, than as comment-ators? More as little Jews than scholars of God. The comment-ator looks for grand meaning and application. The "little Jew" just utters muffled prayers.

To return to the Cohen article, you can see that it's hard to pin this guy down very easily on the religious map. One of the artists who has covered his songs says, “He has investigated a lot of deities and read all the sacred books, trying to understand in some way who wrote them as much as the subject matter itself. It’s for his own healing that he reaches for those places. If he has one great love, it is his search for God.” Wherever he stands, he can certainly put together some beautiful imagery. The article quotes one of his new songs as saying, "Tell me again when the filth of the butcher is washed in the blood of the lamb.” Depending on how you interpret that, the answer is either "at the cross," or it is the same question the souls under the altar in the book of Revelation keep asking God: "How long?" (Revelation 6:10)