Unyielding Compromise

Chesterton says in What's Wrong with the World: "Compromise used to mean half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf is better than a whole loaf."

We really are addicted to mediocrity when we see that the languages of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome bestow the best verbal skills, and then say, "Well, Spanish students score higher than students of English only." 

Chesterton has said somewhere else that the only thing to be done with the "ideal" is to do it. He also quipped, "If its worth being done, its worth being done badly."

Let's hear it for going for the gusto!

Good Reason

The Reformers, Luther and Calvin, recognized three kinds of reason:

1. Natural reason – logic, critical thinking, and common sense.
2. Renegade reason – autonomous reason; refuses to be subject to Christ and exalts itself over God.
3. Regenerate reason – reason within the bounds of revelation, as opposed to Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. Reason is not ultimate and that is reasonable. Reason should know and accept it limits.

Calvin: Reason is the receptacle of revelation.

Aquinas: Reason can prove what faith accepts.

Reason may argue beyond a reasonable doubt or beyond a shadow of a doubt depending upon the nature of the thing it's reasoning about. Scientific reasoning and aesthetic reasoning achieve different kinds of certainty.

Faith is not the denial of reason, but may be a response to reason. Faith is believing what we have been told. Sometimes we can see the rationality of something, but sometimes we cannot. If we cannot see how or why something is true, we may still believe it based on previous experience with that authority.

Luther Gets a Good Rap

The Gift of Time

The more we try to save time or layer it with simultaneous tasks, the more we feel it as a limiting force. Isn't liberating just to take our time and enjoy it as a gift?

Baptism Means Baptism

The Baptized Body by Peter J. Leithart

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Argues the radical thesis that, in the New Testament, baptism means baptism, and that baptism does everything attributed to it. Why didn't someone in the Reformed tradition think of this sooner? Maybe it takes awhile to get over our knee-jerk reaction to Rome.



Leithart also argues that sacraments repair the original design of creation. Grace repairs nature, it does not lay down a "separate track" that intersects with regular life at a later conversion experience. Infant baptism restores the infants relationship to God that was disrupted by the fall, so that nature and grace work on the same track from the beginning of life. Thus, through the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper, New Covenant life resembles the way life would have been lived under the Adamic covenant.



Christians shouldn't raise children so as to bring them into the covenant, but we should raise them from within the covenant. Leithart says that we start talking to our children not because they understand us, but so that they will. Baptism is God's language whereby he starts talking to his children and initiates a relationship with them. Sacraments are word after all.



Leithart also argues that the terminology "means of grace" makes grace sound like a substance that can be channelled. I would add that it seems to resonate with scientific ways ways of thinking about raw materials. Leithart suggests that the gift imagery of Scripture doesn't need help here. In the covenant, grace works naturally upon our children as we talk of the things of God when we get up, lay down, and walk along the way (Deut. 6:4-6).


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Razing Hell!

Atheist, Christopher Hitchens, asks what moral act is a Christian capable of that an atheist cannot do, and what evil act is an atheist capable of that a Christian cannot commit? None on both counts. Both groups are capable of the same things, because both are in the image of God and both are fallen. The question is what moral act can an atheist make obligatory, and what evil act can he condemn? 

A Christian can point to the excesses of the Crusades, the Inquisition, and televangelists and say that these are inconsistent with Christ. But what atheist can point to Hitler and Stalin and say that they were acting inconsistently with atheism? As Dostoevsky said: "If God is not, all things are permissible." If Christ be not raised, why not raise hell? If Christ be raised, don't we have to raze hell?

What's the matter with matter?

If something exists now, something has always existed. If there was a time when nothing existed, nothing would exist now, since ex nihilo nihil fit (out of nothing comes nothing).

Now what could be eternal? The only two candidate are God or matter. Matter is not a good candidate because biological life and intelligence are not native to matter. How does life come from non-living matter and then become intelligent within the limits of inanimate stuff?