Food Network Under Sharia Law

Well, just think of it, ladies - America in 2025, after Islamic Sharia law is enacted.

The Fall of Satan

I maintain that Genesis 3 records not only the fall of man but also simultaneously the fall of Lucifer. Satan's fall is his temptation of Adam and Eve. Called to serve mankind, this high-ranking angel chooses instead to seduce mankind to serve him. This seems to me to make the most sense of the record. Everything was very good at the end of the 6th day of creation. Then on the seventh day we have the fall of Satan and Adam intertwined.

The angel Satan, who was created with the rest of the angels to serve man (Heb. 1:14), rebelled against his God-given role in creation and become man's tempter. That was the fall of Satan. The judgment in Genesis 3 against Satan is God's judgment against his original sin. Genesis 3, therefore, documents the fall of Satan and man.

Consider also Christ's comment in John 8:44 regarding Satan: "He was murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks on his own, for he is a liar and the father of it." Satan is Satan in virtue of his dual role as the first "murderer" and as the "father of lies." Where do we see him do these things? At the temptation of Adam and Eve. It is an attempt to bring death upon mankind (murder) by means of a lie. Just the opposite of the purpose for which he, as an angel, was created.

The idea that Satan fell sometime before Adam and Eve’s fall originated with the Church Father Origen in the 2nd Century AD. Origen, then, seems to be the primary source for the "standard, accepted view" of the fall of Satan. Origen places the fall of Satan and his angels prior to the creation of the world, motivated by pride directed against God (De Principiis 1.5.5, 1.8.3; Homilies on Numbers 12; Homilies on Ezekiel 9.2; Commentary on Luke 30.2; Gregory of Nyssa seems to have followed Origen here (see A.J. Philippou, "The Doctrine of Evil in St. Gregory of Nyssa" in Studia Patristica: 9:251-256). This same version of the story is repeated by St. Augustine of Hippo from which it becomes the standard view in the Latin west (On the Free Choice of the Will, Book 3; City of God 11.10, 13, 15; 14.27; Commentary on Genesis 3.10, 11.13-30). Augustine is, of course, followed by most other Latin writers (St. Anselm of Canterbury, St. Thomas Aquinas, etc.).

This is one of those times that tradition got it wrong, I believe. It make so much more sense to read Genesis 3 as the record of the original sin of Satan and the fall of man.

Something's Coming

If you've never read this interview with J.K. Rowling, I would recommend it. People still spread ridiculous rubbish about Rowling encouraging little girls to practice witchcraft. Conservative Christians can be so gullible and boorish.

But note especially the hint she gives of some resolution to the controversy about Harry Potter's story and the Christian faith in book seven:

E: You do believe in God.

JK: Yeah. Yeah.

E: In magic and…

JK: Magic in the sense in which it happens in my books, no, I don't believe. I don't believe in that. No. No. This is so frustrating. Again, there is so much I would like to say, and come back when I've written book seven. But then maybe you won't need to even say it 'cause you'll have found it out anyway. You'll have read it.

And don't forget this gem from her published interview with the Vancouver Sun (October 26, 2000):

Are you a Christian?

“Yes, I am. Every time I've been asked if I believe in God, I've said yes, because I do, but no one ever really has gone any more deeply into it than that, and I have to say that does suit me, because if I talk too freely about that, I think the intelligent reader, whether 10 or 60, will be able to guess what's coming in the books.”

Draco dormiens numquam titillandus!

Christendom

Harvey Cox argues that modern religion was born when “God the maker of heaven and earth, became the deity of religion, approached through what came to be called religious experiences.” Then, “a faith which had once proclaimed a Lord who lifted up and cast down emperors, who condemned extortion and profit gouging, was now reduced to being concerned exclusively with the inner spirit or at most with frictions between individuals.”

The kingdom of God is not confined to the inner life of Christians, nor to relationships, nor to the family, but God rules over all realms of human knowledge, all realms of life, all things! His kingdom embraces all.

The church is the center of the kingdom, but the kingdom embraces all of life. Christ is lord of all. All means everything and every one. He doesn't simply rule over the church or religious individuals. The entire universe is a Christocracy. He's the rightful Lord that deserves the allegiance of individuals, families, presidents, kings, and countries.

This is a vision that once integrated and fueled our educational institutions in the West. This is a vision that once, when proclaimed from the puplits, called for absolute submission from men and women in every station of life. We owe fealty to our soveriegn king, the resurrected and ascended Lord Jesus.

This is a vision that once dominated the worship and prayers of the church and that God used to transform human culture.

Do you want to know what one of the most bizarre (from our point of view) facts about the content of the early post-apostolic church liturgies and prayers is? When churches . . .

. . . possessed nothing

. . . had no political power, nor representation

. . . were relatively poor

. . . met in secret for fear of the wrath of earthly authorities

One of the most amazing facts of history is that the prayers and liturgical texts of the early church . . .

. . . contain no complaints about their suffering,

. . . give almost no evidence of persecution,

. . . express no desire for escape from the world,

. . . do not whine about the church's conflicts and isolation and sufferings!

Rather, they pray that the world might become what it is under the new Lord Jesus. The worship of the early church although simple was much more majestic and triumphal than later Medieval worship. It was broader in its scope and inspiration. The prayers of the church resound with cosmic thanksgiving and embrace in its vision the whole of Creation, the whole of history. They span the entire spectrum of life and existence. Christ reigns over all, so the church saw herself at the very center of the world. She confessed herself absolutely necessarly for the life of the world. She was the royal queen at the Son's right hand. She was his chief and most respected adviser. She was a congregation of priests serving the entire cosmos.

We must recover that vision. We must appreciate the fact that God rules the world through the church, that the world belongs to Jesus and his church - all things belong to Jesus and to his Bride, the Queen. The scope of our prayers ought to be universal, comprehensive - as far as the curse is found.

Oh, Deer Me

I thought about using my new AR-15 for deer hunting this year. But after seeing this I ordered a falcon from Cabelas. You really have to watch it a couple of times.

Catching A Deer With A Bird - Watch more free videos

Marriage from the Beginning

Here's a portion of a handout I used last week in my adult SS class on marriage. We're working our way through the Bible in order to establish a biblical foundation before we get to practical issues. Next week we will deal with Genesis 3. The first half dozen points are sketchy because they were covered the week before. The last point is taken mostly from Jim Jordan's excellent essays on Liturgical Man, Liturgical Women and will serve as a bridge to the the first couple's failure in Genesis 3.

What can we learn about Marriage from Genesis 2?

1. God instituted marriage; it is not a human cultural artifact.

2. God ordained marriage to be between a man and a woman.

3. Marriage is a covenant

• Man torn in two (as covenants are always made)
• Malachi 2:14-16

4. God ordained marriage to be between one man and one woman.

• Bigamy and polygamy are violations of God's intention for marriage.
• Genesis 4:19 (Lamech)
• The Patriarchal sin of concubinage (Gen. 16, 29, etc.).
• Lev. 18:18 forbids polygamy.

5. God instituted marriage for companionship

• Gen. 2:18, "it is not good that the man should be alone"
• Malachi 2:14

6. Marriage creates a new household.

"leave father and mother," Gen. 2:24).
"one flesh" refers not just to sex but to "one new corporate person"

7. The married couple is called to fulfill the "cultural mandate" (Gen. 1:26-28; Gen. 2:15) together.

8. The woman is the glory-form of humanity (Gen. 2:23; 1 Cor. 10:7-9).

• Eph. 5:27; Rev. 21:1-4

9. The woman is called to be finisher.

• Gen. 2:18, 20
• Jesus & the Church - Matt. 28:18-20, Acts 1, etc.

10. Although men and women are equals, they are nonetheless different in a ways that are profoundly, even mysteriously fitting.

11. The difference/separation between men and women gives rise to poetry
(Gen. 2:23).

• Song of Songs

12. Sexual intimacy and pleasure is intended for married couples.

• Outside of marriage sex is not good but "fornication" (KJV) or "sexual
immorality" and "adultery."
• Gen. 20:30; 34:1ff.; 39:9;
• 1 Cor. 5:1; 6:13, 18; 7:2;

13. In marriage there should be no barriers between a man and a woman; they should be fully open to one another (Gen. 2:25).

• What about clothing?
• Clothing and Glory, Clothing and Shame
• Exod. 28:2 (Luke 12:28)
• Clothed for war and office - Gen. 41:42, 1 Sam. 17:38, Luke 24:29

14. Divorce was not envisioned or needed in the pre-fall situation.

• "one flesh" - Gen. 2:24
• "from the beginning it was not so" - Matt. 19:8; Jer. 3:8; Mal. 2:16;
Matt. 5:32

15. Since men are the one’s so prone to forget this, they have a special mandate in Scripture: Men are to think and behave first as brothers to women, especially in Christian marriages.

• Song of Songs 4:9-12, 5:1
• 1 Cor. 9:6, "a sister wife [aÓdelfh\n gunai√ka]"
• "weaker vessel" (1 Peter 3:7; 1 Cor. 12:22)

16. Adam was called to be the liturgical leader, and Eve to respond to Adam's leadership and instruction.

• Paul finds meaning in the order of their creation - 1 Tim. 2:12-13
• Adam's priestly duty - "guard and serve the garden" (Gen. 2:15)
• He receives his instruction from Yahweh before the woman is made.
• Gen. 3:17
• We see prophetesses like Miriam (Ex. 15:20), Deborah (Judges 4-5), Huldah (2 Kings 22:14ff.), and Anna (Luke 2:36); and various “wise women”; as well as women leaders of the nation (Deborah, and Miriam, Micah 6:4). But we never see women as priests. We see women as deaconesses at the Tabernacle (Ex. 38:8; Jud. 11:40; 1 Sam. 2:22), and perhaps women among the Levite singers (1 Chron. 25:5-6, where v. 6 almost certainly refers only to the children of Heman; compare v. 2, v. 3, and vv. 4-6a). But we never see women as priests.
• The priests were males only, and they alone entered the new form of the Garden sanctuary, Tabernacle and Temple. They alone supervised the sacramental meals of those sanctuaries. They were the primary teachers in Israel as “angels of Yahweh of hosts” (Mal. 2:7). This reservation of the primarily liturgical office, teaching and sacrament, to men is precisely in line with Genesis 2-3.

Modern Trinitarian Theology I

I'm often asked about modern trends in trinitarian theology. I spent a good many years of graduate work concentrating on the doctrine of the Trinity. In the end, after finishing all my course work, I decided to punt my dissertation. I wasn't interested in jumping through that last academic hoop because I did not intend to leave the pastorate to look for an academic position. Besides, I was getting real tired of school.

So let's put some of this knowledge to good use. I'd like to summarize some trends in modern trinitarian theology. Along the way, I'll suggest some books to read. But I mainly want to outline some interesting developments in modern theological work on the doctrine of the Trinity.

One preliminary caution is probably in order. Much of the theological work I will be discussing here has been done primarily on the “other side” of the mainline/Evangelical divide. Thus, conservative Reformed students sometimes know little about it, except that, because of its mainline associations, it must be very bad. There's evidence that the divide on this doctrine has narrowed recently, but for conservative Reformed pastors and seminarians, we still tend to live in the seventeenth century (well, maybe up to the eighteenth), which means that the world of modern Trinitarian thought often seems dangerous and strange to us.

There are all sorts of reasons for this. One is that Karl Barth started the modern Trinitarian resurgence. Oh yes. Karl Barth. And we all know that Karl Barth is bad, as every conservative Reformed pastor is taught in seminary. We can’t really read him or appreciate much of anything about him, can we? I've discussed this phenomenon here and here. In addition to Barth there are some other theologians I will be mentioning that have some bad elements in their theology, and we all know that this means that everything they have to say is bad

Of course, I'm exaggerating a bit, but just a bit. I think we ought to be mature enough to learn from people who do not line up with us on every theological point. At any rate, there has been a lot of interesting insights into and productive suggested revisions of the doctrine of the Trinity that have largely come from theological traditions outside of our own. I believe that these insights can enrich Reformed theology. I'll begin in the next post to introduce you to some fascinating developments in modern trinitarian theology.

Go to Part II

What a Great Country

For all the problems we have, America really is an amazing place to live. I was driving down highway 44 last night at about 9:45 PM. Passing through Webster Groves at Elm I could see the fireworks display just on the south side of the highway. People were lining the overpasses and enjoying the show. I thought about how cool it was to have such freedom and peace. I had just spend the evening playing softball at Forest Park. Afterwards we all sat under a tree in the park and had a few beers, talking about all sorts of nonsense. As I walked back to my car I could see the huge fireworks display over the arch in the distance. I wondered when my red dot scope would arrive in the mail for my new AR-15. 4.7 million new firearms were sold in America just last year. How cool is that? I only wish I had some time to shoot this week. I thought about stopping to get a White Castle burger. My moon roof was open. It was about 80 degrees outside. The XM station was playing Zeppelin's Immigrant Song. What a great country. Happy Fourth of July!

Crucifixion

I just finished Chaim Potok's My Name is Asher Lev. A friend of mine has been encouraging me to read this for some time now. I'm not exactly sure why I procrastinated. I know now that I had the wrong impression of the book.

Potok's use of the cross raises all sorts of fascinating questions. It is, on the one hand, simply a symbol for the complex conflict between Asher Lev's anti-iconic Jewish tradition and his artistic passion to paint what he sees and feels. More than that, there was no aesthetic form in Asher Lev's Judaistic culture that could capture his Mother's passionate suffering. But this seems inexorably to point to something richer and more dangerous. Something Potok himself surely did not intend. It's very difficult for me, a Christian, not to read this story as an allegory of the incompleteness of Judaism. Of course, for me, the cross is the fulfillment of pre-Christian Israel's own cruciform existence as the first, corporate form of "the suffering servant" (Isa. 53). Jesus is the true Israel, the one who suffered in love for the world.

All texts transcend authorial intention. Perhaps this is one of those texts that has depths of meaning not only not intended by the author, but also not appreciated.

Our Common Meal

Here's an old essay of mine published in the November 1999 edition of Table Talk.

One of the earliest “church manuals” we possess includes a model prayer to be made over the communion bread: “As this broken bread, once dispersed over the hills, was brought together and became one loaf, so may your Church be brought together from the ends of the earth into your kingdom” (the Didache, c. A.D. 100).

This powerful symbolism—of innumerable grains harvested, mixed together, and baked into one loaf—delightfully combines the biblical imagery of God’s people as grain producing plants (Matt. 13:26; Mark 4:28-29; John 12:34; 1 Cor. 15:37), the harvest of the Gospel throughout history and at the Last Day (Luke 10:2; Rev. 14:15), and the Body of Christ as a loaf of bread (1 Cor. 10:17).

We glimpse here in this ancient prayer a dimension of the early church’s understanding of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper that we modern Protestant Christians need to recover. Our fathers understood this rite to be a Sacrament of unity and ecclesiastical community. When the church takes, gives thanks for, then breaks and distributes the communion bread she becomes what the Father has called her out of the world to be—a unified community Spiritually united to her Lord, Jesus Christ.

Unfortunately, since the Reformation at least, the communal dimensions of the Lord’s Supper have been buried beneath a heap of metaphysical polemics about the location of the humanity of Christ in relation to the elements of bread and wine. Too many Protestants think that they comprehend the meaning of the Sacrament when they come to firm intellectual convictions about the various erroneous answers given to this narrow question. While I do not slight the importance of this question, as pastor I wonder if the devil has not fanned the flames of this debate in order to see the grains once again scattered to the hills. The Sacrament of unity itself has become the source of disunity and ecclesiastical schism.

Without sidestepping or belittling theological issues, it seems that the authors of the New Testament, including our Lord himself, were more interested in doing the Supper, than in theorizing about it. Jesus did not say, “Think about this” or “Meditate on this” or even “Theologize about this.” He said, “Do this.” Similarly, the Apostle Paul’s only extended discussion of the Lord’s Supper arises not on account of the Corinthian church’s sacramentology, but because the people were eating and drinking in a manner unworthy of the Meal. They were not ritually doing the Supper as a unified church. They failed to “discern” or “prove” the unity of the Body of Christ in their manner of eating (1 Cor. 11:29, 33).

According to Paul, our relationship with and opinion of Jesus Christ is directly related to our opinion of and relationship with his church. And our relationship with the local church is formed not only by listening to the sermon or thinking truthful theological thoughts, but also by joining in the common meal and eating and drinking with the Body of Christ. The 19th century unbelieving philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach came very close to this with his maxim “you are what you eat.” We might tweak it a bit to get a more biblical dictum: “Who you are is revealed in how you eat” and also conversely “how you eat constitutes who you are.”

The unity of the church is not merely something we claim by faith every week when we sit at the common Table, it is also something we become every week as we eat the bread and drink the wine together. When we join our voices together with the gathered assembly in prayer, confession, singing, eating, and drinking we are weekly reconstituted by the Spirit as the Body of Christ, the very tangible public presence of God’s saving activity in the world.

Sadly, in evangelical Protestantism’s practice, we have too often reduced the Lord’s Supper to a means of providing mental stimulus for individual religious meditation. It is thought by many to be just another opportunity to exercise personal, private devotions at church. To some extent, the way we practice the Supper encourages this. Everyone closes their eyes, turns inward, and mediates privately. The corporate, communal dimension of the Sacrament gets smothered beneath what in effect becomes an opportunity for personal quiet time in church. There is, of course, room for silence during the rite of Communion, but there is so much more going on than merely private devotions with the visual aids of bread and wine. Surely the food on the Table is not merely God’s flannel graph for adults.

I was delighted to hear one of my parishioners explaining to a group of parents his way of disciplining his children when they were at each other’s throats during the evening family meal: “Is that the way you would act at the Lord’s Table?” This father’s rebuke is designed to remind his children that the common ritual of the Lord’s Supper establishes the way they ought to act toward one another at home and in the world as Christians. This is exactly right.

What we do at the Lord’s Table ought to form us into a particular kind of community—a community of sacrificial love united to one another in Jesus our Savior. The Didache, making explicit what the Scriptures teach, insists on the necessity of reconciling any fellow Christians who might be at variance with each other before they could eat the Lord’s Supper together. The unity of the church as the Body of Christ, symbolized in the one loaf, must not be violated by personal disputes among the members of the local body as well as formal ecclesiastical schisms in the larger communion of the saints.

If our faithful eating and drinking of the Supper means this much, then it ought to have a prominent, regular place in our assembling on the Lord’s Day. For the early church, it was never an optional ritual. Neither was the Supper celebrated occasionally in special services. Since the unity and community of both the local and universal church was something central to her existence, something that ought to characterize her normal, ordinary life in the world, the Sacrament of Communion would also have to be part of the every-week routine of the gathered church.

The Apostle Paul indicates that the church “comes together” precisely to eat the Lord’s Supper and that in a openly unified way (1 Cor. 11:18, 20, 33, 34). The more we faithfully do the Lord’s Supper, the more we will experience the communal dimensions of the Sacrament, indeed, the community-forming nature of the ritual meal. Only then will the concrete oneness that our Lord petitioned the Father for be realized in the Church “in order that the world may believe” (John 17:23). After all, as Reformation Christians we do confess the Sacrament as a means of grace! The Lord of the harvest earnestly desires to gather his scattered grains together into one loaf, and all for the life of the world.