Faith: January 2019 Archives
A cordial invitation to Evangel Presbytery - Warhorn Media
"This is an open invitation to pastors, elders, and interested laymen to join with us in a constitutional convention during which a number of us anticipate founding a new association of reformed churches called Evangel Presbytery.
"Our charter meeting will be held here in Bloomington beginning the evening of Tuesday, February 19, continuing through the morning of Wednesday, February 20. At the end of the meeting, we hope to have completed the adoption of constitutional documents ready to take back to our home churches for adoption by each church's elders and congregation....
"Contemporary Confessionalism: Evangel Presbytery will add to the historic Reformed confessions several confessional statements guarding Biblical doctrine under attack in our own time. As currently proposed, both the directory for worship and our statements of faith will confess the Image of God in man; the federal headship of Adam; the Creation Order of Adam first, then Eve; and lifelong, monogamous, heterosexual marriage.
"Church Unity: Evangel Presbytery will demonstrate the unity of the Body of Christ by including in her fellowship both those who hold to the baptism of believers only and those who hold to the baptism of believers and their children. This church unity has been displayed by Reformed men in our time joining together in the work of conferences, seminaries, publishing, and worship services. We believe this unity is good and should be extended to presbyteries and the local church."
Scott Aniol examines the vocabulary and assumptions of the social justice movement, regarding intersectionality, oppression, privileges, structural racism. He writes:
"The tragic result of allowing all of these categories to be defined, not by Scripture, but by secular ideology, is that it has led to a redefining of biblical justice to fit into the secular idea of 'social justice' as framed by these secular categories.
"'Justice,' for many evangelical social justice advocates, has become characterized by tearing down traditional structures deemed to be evidence of 'systemic oppression' and by marginalized intersectional groups 'standing up to power,' that is resisting and even fighting against the influence, control, and values of more powerful majority intersectional groups. Those more powerful groups, then, are expected to withdraw their influence, repenting of and making reparations for their group's collective oppression of minority groups, and give the marginalized groups a more prominent voice, which usually takes the form of "affirmative action" hirings and appointments to leadership positions based on the color of one's skin rather than competency, character, and skill.
"On the contrary, biblical justice is simply choosing to do what is right. If there is something that is wrong, justice makes it right. Justice biblically does not entail blaming the sins of individuals on 'systemic' problems, unless of course you consider original sin a systemic problem, which I suppose it is for the entire human race (Eph 2:2-3). In fact, Scripture is very clear that true justice will mean favoring neither the majority, powerful, or privileged group nor the less privileged group (Exodus 23:2-3). Justice is simply doing right without any notion of intersectionality.
"What creates injustice in the world is sin, plain and simple, and sin is a problem for every individual of every group of individuals. The only solution to injustice in the world is belief in the gospel of Jesus Christ."
Student cracks theologian's baffling religious code - BBC News
Andrew Fuller founded the Baptist Missionary Society:
"A divinity student from the University of St Andrews has cracked a religious code that has baffled academics for generations.
"Jonny Woods has worked out how to read shorthand notes left by leading Baptist theologian Andrew Fuller.
"Hundreds of pages of his sermon notes are held in archives, but until now they have been a mystery to academics."
A Kentucky Bishop, the Covington Kids, and the Ideology of Antichrist
John Zmirak writes about the response of Catholic bishops to the New York full-term abortion laws and the targeting of Catholic high school students at the March for Life:
"What are the worst ideas on earth? Who is spreading them? What should we think of those who wield power, or hijack our churches, to impose them and punish dissenters?
"Liberal Christianity. That's the worst ideology in the world. Not just today, but ever. Since Adam ate the apple.
"[Kentucky bishop John Stowe's] column joining the elite lynch mob targeting the Covington Catholic boys is really stunning. It reads as if lifted from the pages of The Lord of the World, a prophetic novel of the Antichrist penned in 1900. Stowe, who has praised heretical Catholic LGBT activists, launches into a vicious attack not just on teenage fellow Catholics subject to death threats. He denounces virtually the entire pro-life movement and the half of Americans who voted for a pro-life presidential candidate. He does so with little logic, but vast, overweening self-confidence and unearned moral hauteur.
"There is no scenario on earth in which abortion becomes unthinkable, any more than rape or murder or stealing citizenship will ever be unthinkable. No combination of government policies could ever achieve that. Ideologues like Bishop Stowe surely know that. They intentionally and culpably, with premeditation and full consent of the will, conjure Utopia as an idol in place of Christ.
"Yes, they know that it's ludicrous to pretend that every issue that could possibly affect human life is a 'life issue,' comparable to murdering a million kids per year for sexual convenience. They know better. They know they're helping to keep abortion legal. It's time we admit that and see such men for exactly what they are. And whom they serve."
Sad to say, the same mindset is creeping into the PCA, led by big-city pastors who are bothered that only one political party (the one that's out of step with the controllers of popular culture) is welcoming of a Biblical view of abortion, and so they tell their congregations that socialized medicine and open borders are just as important as the murder of millions of children annually.
Abortion: The Mark of Dystopia - Catholic World Report
"...two of the... most preeminent dystopia novels even include swipes at one of the most sacred cows of the 21st-century liberal project: abortion....
"Concerned with the homogenizing and stultifying effects of television upon culture, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 depicts an America that had degenerated into a state of utter inanity, where reading is a lost art and people spend more quality time with strangers on video screens than with their own family and neighbors....
"When they are horrified by [the protagonist's] attempt to draw them out from their shells of entertainment, consumption, and light gossip, he becomes so incensed that he finally explodes at one of them:
"'Go home and think of your first husband divorced and your second husband killed in a jet and your third husband blowing his brains out, go home and think of the dozen abortions you've had, go home and think of that and your damn Caesarian sections, too, and your children who hate your guts! Go home and think how it all happened and what did you ever do to stop it?'...
"The same mark is found in Aldous Huxley's classic Brave New World, which depicts a world where sex has been disassociated from family and procreation, religion has been reduced to a form of social therapy, and science is meticulously censored so as to preserve a political orthodoxy....
"...Without the benefit of modern technology, Linda has suffered the ultimate indignity during her exile from the cosmopolis: She has had a baby. But it isn't her fault, she explains, for 'of course there wasn't anything like an Abortion Centre here.' She goes on to reminisce somewhat nostalgically about the brightly-decorated and well-equipped abortion centers near her childhood home--a narrative detail that was no doubt shocking in the 1930s, when Huxley was mocked for his preposterous and alarmist outline of an antiseptic future.
"This outline was based upon Huxley's conviction that the 'truly revolutionary revolution' was not the Scientific Revolution, not the Industrial Revolution, nor the French Revolution, but rather the Sexual Revolution initiated by the Marquis de Sade. This was, in Huxley's words, 'the revolution in individual men, women, and children, whose bodies were henceforward to become the common sexual property of all and whose minds were to be purged of all the natural decencies, all the laboriously acquired inhibitions of traditional civilization.'"
Why Ex-Churchgoers Flocked to Trump | The American Conservative
Veteran political reporter Tim Carney looks at the inverse correlation between Trump primary support and levels of church attendance and religious involvement.
"The best way to describe Trump's support in the Republican primaries--when he was running against the likes of Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, John Kasich--would be: white evangelicals who do not go to church....
"In March [2016], as the GOP field was narrowing down to Trump and Cruz, one Pew Research Center survey found Trump trailing by 16 points among white evangelical voters who attended church weekly, but leading by 19 points among those who do not....
"While there are no great county-level measures of church attendance, and so we need to rely on ARDA's adherence numbers, the higher the religious adherence, the lower the Trump vote. The correlation is far stronger when you focus on the more rural counties. Exclude the 10 most populous counties in Iowa, and look at the 89 least populous. Among those, differences in median weekly wages explain about 2.4 percent of the variation in the Trump vote, while religious adherence explains about 10.5 percent of the variation. If we could track attendance, the correlation would probably be much stronger....
"Absent strong job prospects, fewer adults form families. When people have fewer weddings and christenings, and fewer kids to educate on right and wrong, they go to church less. Of course then, this becomes a vicious circle: in communities less anchored in church, there's less family formation. A place with fewer families is a place less attractive to employers--thus this social and moral collapse is both a consequence and a cause of economic collapse....
"If you are enmeshed in strong institutions--if you live in a close-knit neighborhood, are rooted in a small town like Orange City, belong to a strong congregation--you may notice how much higher the trust is. Kids leave their bikes on the front lawn. You don't fret if you show up without a ride home arranged, as someone there will take care of you. You don't keep a ledger of favors you do, because reciprocity is the norm, and you're confident you'll receive back about as much as you gave out.
"Social trust is an immensely valuable asset. Increasingly, it's a luxury good that is abundant only in elite neighborhoods and strong religious institutions. Low trust is a condition of the white working class. Charles Murray, in Coming Apart, reported that white-collar Americans were twice as likely as blue-collar Americans to say "people can generally be trusted."
After More Than Two Decades of Work, a New Hebrew Bible to Rival the King James - The New York Times
After More Than Two Decades of Work, a New Hebrew Bible to Rival the King James - The New York Times
"[Translator Robert] Alter regularly composes phrases that sound strange in English, in part because they carry hints of ancient Hebrew within them. The translation theorist Lawrence Venuti, whom Alter has cited, describes translations that 'foreignize,' or openly signal that a translated text was originally written in another language, and those that 'domesticate,' or render invisible the original language. According to Venuti, a 'foreignized' translation 'seeks to register linguistic and cultural differences.' Alter maintains that his translation of the Bible borrows from the idea of 'foreignizing,' and this approach generates unexpected and even radical urgency, particularly in passages that might seem familiar."
Hat tip to Language Hat.
