Here is an entertaining review by Amy Sullivan of Eileen Yuhr’s book, Witnessing Suburbia: Conservatives and Christian Youth Culture, from the Harvard Divinity Bulletin.  I can resonate with Eileen’s description and Amy’s review having grown up on and off participating in a youth group (which met in my parent’s basement for 2 years).  Sounds like a fascinating re-telling of christian culture for the last 30 years.

The 1970s and early 1980s were good times to be a young Jesus geek. Christians may have endured periods of persecution and ridicule from ancient times through the Scopes Trial and beyond. But in the suburban evangelical church where I grew up, being Christian was not just expected—it was actually cool.

VeggieTales hadn’t been created yet, but we had Psalty, the anthropomorphic singing praise-songbook. We read Spire comics, a Christian offshoot of the secular Archie series, in which Archie, Jughead, and the whole Riverdale gang go on mission trips and talk about the Beatitudes. We grew our hair long, not to copy Marcia Brady but Amy Grant. And we strutted down our public school hallways in T-shirts from the latest Michael W. Smith or DC Talk concert.

My youth group friends and I didn’t realize it at the time, but we were part of the first wave of evangelicals to consume Christianity as a brand in addition to a religious and theological tradition. It was the moment when Christian popular culture took off, and a new Christian identity—of pride, not persecution—formed. The era is at the heart of Eileen Luhr’s recent book, Witnessing Suburbia, a fascinating look at the emergence of Christianity™ and the development of Christian popular youth culture.

The story Luhr tells about the growth of Christianity into a global marketing force is unfamiliar for the simple reason that it took place at the same time as the more controversial rise of the Religious Right. The bombastic Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson commanded media attention, whereas the enterprising pastors who founded megachurches and changed the face of evangelical worship went largely unnoticed. Book burners and lyric banners generated debate; Christian music producers and concert promoters generated profits but little notoriety.

And yet without the background and context that Luhr, a history professor at California State University, Long Beach, sketches in detail, it is nearly impossible to understand the current American evangelical community and the seismic changes that may reshape it for a new generation.

As evangelicals moved into the latter half of the twentieth century, many remained in a self-imposed exile, intent on following the biblical injunction to be “in the world but not of it.” This meant abstaining from temptations and corrupting influences, including secular popular culture. These conservative Christians had begun to develop their own parallel institutions, including entertainment outlets, but the offerings were largely limited to programs such as “The Radio Revival Hour” or “The Family Bible Hour.”

The separatist impulse held firm into the 1960s when it ran into the youth revolution. In the face of changing cultural mores and newly popular music forms like rock and roll, evangelicals were divided. One camp responded by condemning popular culture and seeking to limit its influence. But the other, sensing an opportunity to keep young evangelicals engaged, sought to appropriate the culture for Christian themes and purposes. The two conflicting approaches—let’s call them separatist evangelicals and engagement evangelicals—vied for several decades, and the ultimate triumph of one over the other directly explains the vibrancy of American evangelicalism today.

The first group of evangelicals, Luhr argues, was driven by two main beliefs about youth and culture. “Beginning in the late 1970s,” she writes, “youth came to be viewed as endangered, rather than dangerous. While the paradigmatic youth of the 1960s was a young hippie or student protester, that of the 1980s was a younger, innocent white child capable of devout belief but in need of parental guidance and protection.” This conviction that teenagers and young adults were not themselves threats to Christian morality, but were instead passive victims of a dangerous culture, allowed the separatist evangelicals to focus on battling popular culture, not their own children.

The emphasis on protecting children also enabled separatist evangelicals to mainstream their efforts by speaking as parents, not just as theological conservatives. As Luhr notes, a variety of organizations such as the Parents’ Music Resource Center, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and the National Federation of Parents for Drug-Free Youth were all formed around the same time and also promoted the idea that America’s youth were imperiled innocents.

At the same time, separatist evangelicals were convinced that the problem with popular culture was not just the content or message, but the medium itself, particularly rock music. Luhr quotes a music professor at the fundamentalist Bob Jones University who, in 1971, made the case that rock was inherently dangerous, attracting—among others—”drug addicts, revolutionaries, rioters, Satan worshippers, drop-outs, draft-dodgers, homosexuals and other sex deviates, rebels, juvenile criminals, Black Panthers and white panthers, motorcycle gangs . . . and on and on the list could go almost indefinitely.”

The university’s president, Bob Jones III, trained his fire on other aspects of the counterculture that he viewed as incompatible with a Christian lifestyle. Jones criticized the Jesus Movement, the most visible Christian youth movement at the time, because it allowed converts to retain their hippie dress and embraced more modern worship styles. Sounding for all the world like a stock character from the movie Footloose, Jones wrote: “Revival is not spawned in pot parties, love-ins, hippie pads, dens of iniquity, and rock orgies; but that is where the Jesus Movement was spawned.”

Not even seemingly innocuous secular entertainment for children was safe from judgment. Decades before Jerry Falwell denounced Teletubbies for supposedly including a secretly gay character, anti-rock critics like David Noebel went after a series of children’s folk recordings that had been endorsed by such upstanding outlets as Good Housekeeping and Parents Magazine for promoting radical political messages by communist folk singers. Noebel and others reserved a special contempt for Bob Dylan and his leftie sympathies—until the musician became a born-again Christian during the 1970s and recorded several Christian albums. (Once Dylan returned to Judaism a decade later, he became fair game again.)

The goal of separatist evangelicals was to limit the exposure of children—and, occasionally, all citizens—to objectionable pop culture. Activists affiliated with Parents Against Subliminal Seduction (PASS) successfully lobbied for a San Antonio ordinance that restricted attendance at “obscene” rock concerts to those above the age of 14. In 1983, Ronald Reagan’s evangelical secretary of the interior, James Watt, banned rock acts from the annual Fourth of July celebration on the National Mall. The previous year, concert performers had included such subversive acts as Wayne Newton and the Beach Boys.

While separatist evangelicals were busy bashing folk musicians or wringing their hands about possible satanic subliminal messages in rock songs, another group of evangelicals was more interested in adapting cultural forms for their own purposes instead of condemning popular culture outright. These engagement evangelicals drew inspiration from the theologian Frances Schaeffer, who urged them to compete in the “marketplace of ideas” rather than the “hidden censorship” of separatism.

In the aftermath of the 1960s, Luhr writes, “these evangelicals sought to fit within, rather than react to, suburban consumer culture.” Like their secular peers, young evangelicals thought in terms of rebellion against the larger culture. But, for them, the maverick path involved proudly proclaiming their Christian identity at a time when many believed the United States was becoming a post-religious society. These evangelicals reclaimed rock music for themselves by identifying its roots in gospel music. Elvis, they noted, came from a Pentecostal background, as did Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash, and their earliest musical influence was gospel. Young evangelicals saw that it was possible to embrace rock music while rejecting the content.

Separatist evangelicals argued that rock music destroyed the Christian message— one critic said that listening to Christian music was like “trying to get my meals from the garbage can”—but engagement evangelicals saw a way to appropriate the art form and even infuse popular culture with Christianity. “Proponents of Christian rock,” writes Luhr, “argued that the genre provided a tool for evangelism and a way for believers to enjoy contemporary entertainment while enhancing their faith.”

Christian music really took off in the 1980s, aided by the fact that rock music had become so commercial that it was no longer easily associated with rebellion. In 1984, Christian artists sold 20 million albums, and the next year they outsold jazz and classical music combined. Christian radio stations expanded across the country, providing platforms for artists ranging from Sandi Patty to the metal band Stryper, while also promoting themselves as outlets for “family-friendly listening.” Some evangelicals even started looking for ways to sanction acceptable secular music for their children. One article for Christian parents argued that parents who played their kids’ records backwards in search of evil messages were missing a valuable opportunity to engage productively with youth culture. “Believers should scrutinize secular music for Christian—not satanic—content,” wrote the author. “Should Madonna’s repulsive ideals and behavior invalidate the profoundly anti-abortion message of ‘Papa Don’t Preach’? Do Janet Jackson’s recent sleazy videos make her bold song urging sexual restraint, ‘Let’s Wait Awhile,’ any less true? We think not.”

And while music was the most visible part of Christian popular culture, other merchandise—including clothing, toys, and books—was aggressively developed for and marketed to evangelical Christians as well. Luhr notes that Christian bookstores “cater[ed] to a growing evangelical population that believed Christianity was a lifestyle as well as a belief system.” Between 1965 and 1975, Christian bookstores grew from 725 nationwide to 1,850, and in 2000 alone, Christian merchandise produced $4 billion in sales. (The advent of online shopping has shuttered many independent Christian bookstores, as has the sale of books from evangelical authors like Rick Warren and Tim LaHaye through Wal-Mart and other mainstream stores.)

Just as megachurch pastors have learned to co-opt elements of popular culture to spice up their worship services—weaving clips from Saturday Night Live into multimedia sermons or rewriting the lyrics of popular songs to tell Bible stories—Christian songwriters have adapted every conceivable musical genre, from pop to rap to punk to metal. For the more popular artists, a tension sometimes exists between them and their fans, many of whom fear that the bands will be tempted to water down their messages in an attempt to break into secular markets. Yet it is through that cross-over that Christianity has gained a foothold in popular culture. In summer 2008, the Southern rock band Third Day became the first Christian act to land on the cover of Billboard magazine. That same year, millions of Americans listened at home as the contestants on American Idol sang “Shout to the Lord” for a special fund-raising episode.

Christian culture has undoubtedly provided a way to make the Good News palatable for secular listeners. But its booming popularity is due in large part to the fact that it allows—and in fact encourages—evangelicals to focus on themselves.

Outdoor music festivals have become perhaps the most popular way for young Christians to pursue that goal of affirming their religious identities. Dozens of gatherings take place around the country every summer, each featuring lineups of Christian artists and drawing tens of thousands of young Christians. Importantly, they are not revivals—altar calls may be issued for those who feel moved to become Christians, but events like Cornerstone or the Sonshine Festival are more about giving existing Christians a place to socialize and worship together.

They have also, I discovered a few summers ago while covering Creation Fest in central Washington State, become a magnet for conservative political causes. The subtitle of Luhr’s book is “Conservatives and Christian Youth Culture,” and she writes about the conservative tilt and influence of suburbs in the postwar era in her exploration of Christian culture. But, in truth, there’s nothing inherently conservative about Christian pop culture. As a child I spent hours at Logos (”The Word”) bookstore just off the campus of the University of Michigan and the flagship location for a chain of more than two dozen Christian bookstores with a theological, not political, mission.

I arrived at Creation Fest hoping to revel in the same Christian culture I’d grown up with, maybe picking up some Moses Bobblehead dolls or Samson action figures at the same time. But when I scouted out the vendor tents, I was surprised to find that the Christian kitsch was swamped by booths for conservative causes. The first stand I came to featured a petition to sign supporting the people of South Dakota in their efforts to ban abortion. Next to it was a book with photos of abortions, a handmade sign warning that it should only be viewed by those “13 and up.” Available for sale were T-shirts bearing slogans like “Abortion Is Selfish” and “There’s nothing intellectual about believing you and I evolved from hydrogen gas.”

Yet as I walked the grounds of the festival, I saw very few teenagers wearing political shirts. (The most popular T-shirt read, “Hug Me If You Love Jesus.”) Nor were the people I spoke with preoccupied with banning gay marriage or protecting prayer in schools. Crystal, a student at Ecola Bible College, talked about wanting to go to Africa when she graduated. She had seen a movie about boys in Uganda who were abducted and forced into a rebel army, and she wanted to help them. If she saved some souls along the way, that was a bonus, but Crystal was more concerned about their physical safety. Even one T-shirt vendor told me he wanted to add some shirts with pro-environment messages to his inventory. “It’s really ignorant and arrogant not to take care of God’s creation, this gift we have,” he said, while behind him boxes of anti-evolution wear overflowed.

The bands at Creation Fest were perhaps most vocal about acting on their faith to help others. Members of The Myriad talked about traveling to Haiti when the tour ended and their plans to build an orphanage there. “It would be fantastic,” lead singer Jeremy Edwardson said, “to get socially involved and inspire audiences to care as well.” It was hard not to wonder whether conservative political causes have become associated with Christian pop culture by default, because conservatives have shown up and engaged with the culture and liberals have not.

Witnessing Suburbia is an invaluable read for those wondering how a religious tradition that once shied away from dancing and card-playing embraced electric guitars in the sanctuary and video games about the Rapture. And because Luhr is a historian, it is most useful in understanding how American evangelicalism became the version we know today. As evangelicalism continues to evolve, we will need to wait 20 years for a look back at the role Christian pop culture is playing today.

Witnessing Suburbia: Conservatives and Christian Youth Culture, by Eileen Luhr. University of California Press, 280 pages, $19.95.

Amy Sullivan, MTS ‘99, is a senior editor at Time magazine. Her first book, The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats Are Closing the God Gap, was published by Scribner in 2008.

Here is the site: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/

Here is the transcript: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/etc/script.html

Here is the introduction:

In Sick Around the World, FRONTLINE teams up with veteran Washington Post foreign correspondent T.R. Reid to find out how five other capitalist democracies — the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, Taiwan and Switzerland — deliver health care, and what the United States might learn from their successes and their failures.

Reid’s first stop is the U.K., where the government-run National Health Service (NHS) is funded through taxes. “Every single person who’s born in the U.K. will use the NHS,” says Whittington Hospital CEO David Sloman, “and none of them will be presented a bill at any point during that time.” Often dismissed in America as “socialized medicine,” the NHS is now trying some free-market tactics like “pay-for-performance,” where doctors are paid more if they get good results controlling chronic diseases like diabetes. And now patients can choose where they go for medical procedures, forcing hospitals to compete head to head.

While such initiatives have helped reduce waiting times for elective surgeries, Times of London health editor Nigel Hawkes thinks the NHS hasn’t made enough progress. “We’re now in a world in which people are much more demanding, and I think that the NHS is not very effective at delivering in that modern, market-orientated world.”

Reid reports next from Japan, which boasts the second largest economy and the best health statistics in the world. The Japanese go to the doctor three times as often as Americans, have more than twice as many MRI scans, use more drugs, and spend more days in the hospital. Yet Japan spends about half as much on health care per capita as the United States.

One secret to Japan’s success? By law, everyone must buy health insurance — either through an employer or a community plan — and, unlike in the U.S., insurers cannot turn down a patient for a pre-existing illness, nor are they allowed to make a profit.

Reid’s journey then takes him to Germany, the country that invented the concept of a national health care system. For its 80 million people, Germany offers universal health care, including medical, dental, mental health, homeopathy and spa treatment. Professor Karl Lauterbach, a member of the German parliament, describes it as “a system where the rich pay for the poor and where the ill are covered by the healthy.” As they do in Japan, medical providers must charge standard prices. This keeps costs down, but it also means physicians in Germany earn between half and two-thirds as much as their U.S. counterparts.

In the 1990s, Taiwan researched many health care systems before settling on one where the government collects the money and pays providers. But the delivery of health care is left to the market. Every person in Taiwan has a “smart card” containing all of his or her relevant health information, and bills are paid automatically. But the Taiwanese are spending too little to sustain their health care system, according to Princeton’s Tsung-mei Cheng, who advised the Taiwanese government. “As we speak, the government is borrowing from banks to pay what there isn’t enough to pay the providers,” she told FRONTLINE.

Reid’s last stop is Switzerland, a country which, like Taiwan, set out to reform a system that did not cover all its citizens. In 1994, a national referendum approved a law called LAMal (”the sickness”), which set up a universal health care system that, among other things, restricted insurance companies from making a profit on basic medical care. The Swiss example shows health care reform is possible, even in a highly capitalist country with powerful insurance and pharmaceutical companies.

Today, Swiss politicians from the right and left enthusiastically support universal health care. “Everybody has a right to health care,” says Pascal Couchepin, the current president of Switzerland. “It is a profound need for people to be sure that if they are struck by destiny … they can have a good health system.”

http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1268/reinhold-neihbuhr-obama-favorite-theologian

Here is the intro:

Ever since then-Sen. Barack Obama spoke of his admiration for Reinhold Niebuhr in a 2007 interview with New York Times columnist David Brooks, there has been speculation about the extent to which the 20th-century theologian has influenced Obama’s views on faith, politics and social change. At the Pew Forum’s biannual Faith Angle Conference in May 2009, Wilfred McClay, a historian specializing in American intellectual history, offered an overview of Niebuhr’s unique form of progressive Christianity and its influence on 20th-century American politics and international affairs. E.J. Dionne, columnist for The Washington Post, remarked on the recent revival of interest in Niebuhrian thought and the role Niebuhr played as a public intellectual active during the worldwide political upheavals of the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s.

Speaker: Wilfred M. McClay, SunTrust Bank Chair of Excellence in Humanities, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Respondent: E.J. Dionne Jr., Columnist, The Washington Post; Senior Advisor, Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life
Moderator: Michael Cromartie, Vice President, Ethics & Public Policy Center; Senior Advisor, Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life

In the following excerpt, ellipses have been omitted to facilitate reading. Find the full transcript, including audience discussion, at pewforum.org.

• Revitalizing the Economy
• Ending the War in Iraq
• Providing Health Care for All
• Protecting America
• Renewing American Global Leadership

‘We’ve hit a rich songwriting vein and we don’t want to stop.’ Bono has been talking to U2.Com about how the songs are shaping up for the new record and plans for 2009 to be their year.

‘This is our chance for us to defy gravity once again, ‘ explains Bono, calling in from a break in recording sessions in the south of France. ‘ We have what it takes, we have the songs, new rhythms and a guitar player who is not ready to re-enter earth’s atmosphere until he’s taken a slice of the moon!

‘It’s been fun, it’s been maddening… there have been injuries and recoveries, no babies born that I know of, but this one is nearly ready for the new year of 2009.’

The band have been writing and recording the follow-up to ‘How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb’ since last year, and the feeling is that they’ve hit a creative groove so there are no plans to stop. Everyone, he says, is excited about where the recording is taking them.

‘When we set out on this record it was Larry who came up with the plan not to have a plan. He put up this idea that wouldn’t it be great just to make music for its own sake, not for the purpose of a live show or on album but just to see what we’re capable of…’

It’s an idea that’s paid off. Following sessions in Morocco, in Dublin and through the summer in France, the band have written ‘fifty or sixty’ tracks. And counting.

‘We’ve hit a rich songwriting vein,’ he explains. ‘It gets a bit dark down here but looks like we’ve found diamonds not coal. I thought a while back we might have the album wrapped by now, but why come up above ground now if there’s more priceless stuff to be found?

For now, they’re keeping a promise they made to themselves when they started writing: ‘We said to each other that if we got to the great place then we wouldn’t stop…’

So the writing and recording continues and while they now know what shape most of the album will take, they’re not leaving the studio just yet.

‘We know we have to emerge soon but we also know that people don’t want another U2 album unless it is our best ever album. It has to be our most innovative, our most challenging … or what’s the point ?’

They have no doubts that it will be as important a release for U2 as any. ‘It’s a brand new chapter for us, and everyone we’ve played the tracks to has said that musically it feels like another departure.

‘The last two records were very personal, with a kind of three piece at their heart, the primary colours of rock – bass, guitars and drum. But what we’re about now is of the same order as the transition that took us from The Joshua Tree to Achtung Baby.’

He also mentions that the recording in Morocco was the first time the band have worked in a studio open to the sky: ‘On that track you can hear the sound of a swallows nest close to the building – it’s beautiful.’

Longtime collaborators Danny Lanois and Brian Eno have joined the band at different times, and, more recently, Steve Lillywhite – usually a tell-tale sign that a record is nearly done. ‘Steve has that ear for a top line melody and a good hook.’

But while Bono is itching to get the music out he says it’s going to be early 2009 when we first get to hear the songs.

‘I’m always the one who underestimates how easy it is to simply ‘put out the songs now’, if it was just up to me they’d be out already! But early next year people will be able to start hearing what we’ve been doing. We want 2009 to be our year, so we’re going to start making an impression very early on …’

This is a fantastic article by the editors of The New Yorker that pretty much sums up my thoughts on the election and my choice.   Certainly, governments and their elected officials are imperfect but that doesn’t mean there is no hope.  Ultimately, my hope is in the triune God, so I hold quite loosely to my expectations for a president.  But, I still have some pragmatic opinions about our country and the world as a the setting in which the kingdom of Jesus can be tasted and shared by his people.

Never in living memory has an election been more critical than the one fast approaching—that’s the quadrennial cliché, as expected as the balloons and the bombast. And yet when has it ever felt so urgently true? When have so many Americans had so clear a sense that a Presidency has—at the levels of competence, vision, and integrity—undermined the country and its ideals?

The incumbent Administration has distinguished itself for the ages. The Presidency of George W. Bush is the worst since Reconstruction, so there is no mystery about why the Republican Party—which has held dominion over the executive branch of the federal government for the past eight years and the legislative branch for most of that time—has little desire to defend its record, domestic or foreign. The only speaker at the Convention in St. Paul who uttered more than a sentence or two in support of the President was his wife, Laura. Meanwhile, the nominee, John McCain, played the part of a vaudeville illusionist, asking to be regarded as an apostle of change after years of embracing the essentials of the Bush agenda with ever-increasing ardor.

The Republican disaster begins at home. Even before taking into account whatever fantastically expensive plan eventually emerges to help rescue the financial system from Wall Street’s long-running pyramid schemes, the economic and fiscal picture is bleak. During the Bush Administration, the national debt, now approaching ten trillion dollars, has nearly doubled. Next year’s federal budget is projected to run a half-trillion-dollar deficit, a precipitous fall from the seven-hundred-billion-dollar surplus that was projected when Bill Clinton left office. Private-sector job creation has been a sixth of what it was under President Clinton. Five million people have fallen into poverty. The number of Americans without health insurance has grown by seven million, while average premiums have nearly doubled. Meanwhile, the principal domestic achievement of the Bush Administration has been to shift the relative burden of taxation from the rich to the rest. For the top one per cent of us, the Bush tax cuts are worth, on average, about a thousand dollars a week; for the bottom fifth, about a dollar and a half. The unfairness will only increase if the painful, yet necessary, effort to rescue the credit markets ends up preventing the rescue of our health-care system, our environment, and our physical, educational, and industrial infrastructure.

At the same time, a hundred and fifty thousand American troops are in Iraq and thirty-three thousand are in Afghanistan. There is still disagreement about the wisdom of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and his horrific regime, but there is no longer the slightest doubt that the Bush Administration manipulated, bullied, and lied the American public into this war and then mismanaged its prosecution in nearly every aspect. The direct costs, besides an expenditure of more than six hundred billion dollars, have included the loss of more than four thousand Americans, the wounding of thirty thousand, the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis, and the displacement of four and a half million men, women, and children. Only now, after American forces have been fighting for a year longer than they did in the Second World War, is there a glimmer of hope that the conflict in Iraq has entered a stage of fragile stability.

The indirect costs, both of the war in particular and of the Administration’s unilateralist approach to foreign policy in general, have also been immense. The torture of prisoners, authorized at the highest level, has been an ethical and a public-diplomacy catastrophe. At a moment when the global environment, the global economy, and global stability all demand a transition to new sources of energy, the United States has been a global retrograde, wasteful in its consumption and heedless in its policy. Strategically and morally, the Bush Administration has squandered the American capacity to counter the example and the swagger of its rivals. China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other illiberal states have concluded, each in its own way, that democratic principles and human rights need not be components of a stable, prosperous future. At recent meetings of the United Nations, emboldened despots like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran came to town sneering at our predicament and hailing the “end of the American era.”

The election of 2008 is the first in more than half a century in which no incumbent President or Vice-President is on the ballot. There is, however, an incumbent party, and that party has been lucky enough to find itself, apparently against the wishes of its “base,” with a nominee who evidently disliked George W. Bush before it became fashionable to do so. In South Carolina in 2000, Bush crushed John McCain with a sub-rosa primary campaign of such viciousness that McCain lashed out memorably against Bush’s Christian-right allies. So profound was McCain’s anger that in 2004 he flirted with the possibility of joining the Democratic ticket under John Kerry. Bush, who took office as a “compassionate conservative,” governed immediately as a rightist ideologue. During that first term, McCain bolstered his reputation, sometimes deserved, as a “maverick” willing to work with Democrats on such issues as normalizing relations with Vietnam, campaign-finance reform, and immigration reform. He co-sponsored, with John Edwards and Edward Kennedy, a patients’ bill of rights. In 2001 and 2003, he voted against the Bush tax cuts. With John Kerry, he co-sponsored a bill raising auto-fuel efficiency standards and, with Joseph Lieberman, a cap-and-trade regime on carbon emissions. He was one of a minority of Republicans opposed to unlimited drilling for oil and gas off America’s shores.

Since the 2004 election, however, McCain has moved remorselessly rightward in his quest for the Republican nomination. He paid obeisance to Jerry Falwell and preachers of his ilk. He abandoned immigration reform, eventually coming out against his own bill. Most shocking, McCain, who had repeatedly denounced torture under all circumstances, voted in February against a ban on the very techniques of “enhanced interrogation” that he himself once endured in Vietnam—as long as the torturers were civilians employed by the C.I.A.

On almost every issue, McCain and the Democratic Party’s nominee, Barack Obama, speak the generalized language of “reform,” but only Obama has provided a convincing, rational, and fully developed vision. McCain has abandoned his opposition to the Bush-era tax cuts and has taken up the demagogic call—in the midst of recession and Wall Street calamity, with looming crises in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—for more tax cuts. Bush’s expire in 2011. If McCain, as he has proposed, cuts taxes for corporations and estates, the benefits once more would go disproportionately to the wealthy.

In Washington, the craze for pure market triumphalism is over. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson arrived in town (via Goldman Sachs) a Republican, but it seems that he will leave a Democrat. In other words, he has come to see that the abuses that led to the current financial crisis––not least, excessive speculation on borrowed capital––can be fixed only with government regulation and oversight. McCain, who has never evinced much interest in, or knowledge of, economic questions, has had little of substance to say about the crisis. His most notable gesture of concern—a melodramatic call last month to suspend his campaign and postpone the first Presidential debate until the government bailout plan was ready—soon revealed itself as an empty diversionary tactic.

By contrast, Obama has made a serious study of the mechanics and the history of this economic disaster and of the possibilities of stimulating a recovery. Last March, in New York, in a speech notable for its depth, balance, and foresight, he said, “A complete disdain for pay-as-you-go budgeting, coupled with a generally scornful attitude towards oversight and enforcement, allowed far too many to put short-term gain ahead of long-term consequences.” Obama is committed to reforms that value not only the restoration of stability but also the protection of the vast majority of the population, which did not partake of the fruits of the binge years. He has called for greater and more programmatic regulation of the financial system; the creation of a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank, which would help reverse the decay of our roads, bridges, and mass-transit systems, and create millions of jobs; and a major investment in the green-energy sector.

On energy and global warming, Obama offers a set of forceful proposals. He supports a cap-and-trade program to reduce America’s carbon emissions by eighty per cent by 2050—an enormously ambitious goal, but one that many climate scientists say must be met if atmospheric carbon dioxide is to be kept below disastrous levels. Large emitters, like utilities, would acquire carbon allowances, and those which emit less carbon dioxide than their allotment could sell the resulting credits to those which emit more; over time, the available allowances would decline. Significantly, Obama wants to auction off the allowances; this would provide fifteen billion dollars a year for developing alternative-energy sources and creating job-training programs in green technologies. He also wants to raise federal fuel-economy standards and to require that ten per cent of America’s electricity be generated from renewable sources by 2012. Taken together, his proposals represent the most coherent and far-sighted strategy ever offered by a Presidential candidate for reducing the nation’s reliance on fossil fuels.

There was once reason to hope that McCain and Obama would have a sensible debate about energy and climate policy. McCain was one of the first Republicans in the Senate to support federal limits on carbon dioxide, and he has touted his own support for a less ambitious cap-and-trade program as evidence of his independence from the White House. But, as polls showed Americans growing jittery about gasoline prices, McCain apparently found it expedient in this area, too, to shift course. He took a dubious idea—lifting the federal moratorium on offshore oil drilling—and placed it at the very center of his campaign. Opening up America’s coastal waters to drilling would have no impact on gasoline prices in the short term, and, even over the long term, the effect, according to a recent analysis by the Department of Energy, would be “insignificant.” Such inconvenient facts, however, are waved away by a campaign that finally found its voice with the slogan “Drill, baby, drill!”

The contrast between the candidates is even sharper with respect to the third branch of government. A tense equipoise currently prevails among the Justices of the Supreme Court, where four hard-core conservatives face off against four moderate liberals. Anthony M. Kennedy is the swing vote, determining the outcome of case after case.

McCain cites Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, two reliable conservatives, as models for his own prospective appointments. If he means what he says, and if he replaces even one moderate on the current Supreme Court, then Roe v. Wade will be reversed, and states will again be allowed to impose absolute bans on abortion. McCain’s views have hardened on this issue. In 1999, he said he opposed overturning Roe; by 2006, he was saying that its demise “wouldn’t bother me any”; by 2008, he no longer supported adding rape and incest as exceptions to his party’s platform opposing abortion.

But scrapping Roe—which, after all, would leave states as free to permit abortion as to criminalize it—would be just the beginning. Given the ideological agenda that the existing conservative bloc has pursued, it’s safe to predict that affirmative action of all kinds would likely be outlawed by a McCain Court. Efforts to expand executive power, which, in recent years, certain Justices have nobly tried to resist, would likely increase. Barriers between church and state would fall; executions would soar; legal checks on corporate power would wither—all with just one new conservative nominee on the Court. And the next President is likely to make three appointments.

Obama, who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, voted against confirming not only Roberts and Alito but also several unqualified lower-court nominees. As an Illinois state senator, he won the support of prosecutors and police organizations for new protections against convicting the innocent in capital cases. While McCain voted to continue to deny habeas-corpus rights to detainees, perpetuating the Bush Administration’s regime of state-sponsored extra-legal detention, Obama took the opposite side, pushing to restore the right of all U.S.-held prisoners to a hearing. The judicial future would be safe in his care.

In the shorthand of political commentary, the Iraq war seems to leave McCain and Obama roughly even. Opposing it before the invasion, Obama had the prescience to warn of a costly and indefinite occupation and rising anti-American radicalism around the world; supporting it, McCain foresaw none of this. More recently, in early 2007 McCain risked his Presidential prospects on the proposition that five additional combat brigades could salvage a war that by then appeared hopeless. Obama, along with most of the country, had decided that it was time to cut American losses. Neither candidate’s calculations on Iraq have been as cheaply political as McCain’s repeated assertion that Obama values his career over his country; both men based their positions, right or wrong, on judgment and principle.

President Bush’s successor will inherit two wars and the realities of limited resources, flagging popular will, and the dwindling possibilities of what can be achieved by American power. McCain’s views on these subjects range from the simplistic to the unknown. In Iraq, he seeks “victory”—a word that General David Petraeus refuses to use, and one that fundamentally misrepresents the messy, open-ended nature of the conflict. As for Afghanistan, on the rare occasions when McCain mentions it he implies that the surge can be transferred directly from Iraq, which suggests that his grasp of counterinsurgency is not as firm as he insisted it was during the first Presidential debate. McCain always displays more faith in force than interest in its strategic consequences. Unlike Obama, McCain has no political strategy for either war, only the dubious hope that greater security will allow things to work out. Obama has long warned of deterioration along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and has a considered grasp of its vital importance. His strategy for both Afghanistan and Iraq shows an understanding of the role that internal politics, economics, corruption, and regional diplomacy play in wars where there is no battlefield victory.

Unimaginably painful personal experience taught McCain that war is above all a test of honor: maintain the will to fight on, be prepared to risk everything, and you will prevail. Asked during the first debate to outline “the lessons of Iraq,” McCain said, “I think the lessons of Iraq are very clear: that you cannot have a failed strategy that will then cause you to nearly lose a conflict.” A soldier’s answer––but a statesman must have a broader view of war and peace. The years ahead will demand not only determination but also diplomacy, flexibility, patience, judiciousness, and intellectual engagement. These are no more McCain’s strong suit than the current President’s. Obama, for his part, seems to know that more will be required than willpower and force to extract some advantage from the wreckage of the Bush years.

Obama is also better suited for the task of renewing the bedrock foundations of American influence. An American restoration in foreign affairs will require a commitment not only to international coöperation but also to international institutions that can address global warming, the dislocations of what will likely be a deepening global economic crisis, disease epidemics, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and other, more traditional security challenges. Many of the Cold War-era vehicles for engagement and negotiation—the United Nations, the World Bank, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty regime, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—are moribund, tattered, or outdated. Obama has the generational outlook that will be required to revive or reinvent these compacts. He would be the first postwar American President unencumbered by the legacies of either Munich or Vietnam.

The next President must also restore American moral credibility. Closing Guantánamo, banning all torture, and ending the Iraq war as responsibly as possible will provide a start, but only that. The modern Presidency is as much a vehicle for communication as for decision-making, and the relevant audiences are global. Obama has inspired many Americans in part because he holds up a mirror to their own idealism. His election would do no less—and likely more—overseas.

What most distinguishes the candidates, however, is character—and here, contrary to conventional wisdom, Obama is clearly the stronger of the two. Not long ago, Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager, said, “This election is not about issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.” The view that this election is about personalities leaves out policy, complexity, and accountability. Even so, there’s some truth in what Davis said––but it hardly points to the conclusion that he intended.

Echoing Obama, McCain has made “change” one of his campaign mantras. But the change he has actually provided has been in himself, and it is not just a matter of altering his positions. A willingness to pander and even lie has come to define his Presidential campaign and its televised advertisements. A contemptuous duplicity, a meanness, has entered his talk on the stump—so much so that it seems obvious that, in the drive for victory, he is willing to replicate some of the same underhanded methods that defeated him eight years ago in South Carolina.

Perhaps nothing revealed McCain’s cynicism more than his choice of Sarah Palin, the former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, who had been governor of that state for twenty-one months, as the Republican nominee for Vice-President. In the interviews she has given since her nomination, she has had difficulty uttering coherent unscripted responses about the most basic issues of the day. We are watching a candidate for Vice-President cram for her ongoing exam in elementary domestic and foreign policy. This is funny as a Tina Fey routine on “Saturday Night Live,” but as a vision of the political future it’s deeply unsettling. Palin has no business being the backup to a President of any age, much less to one who is seventy-two and in imperfect health. In choosing her, McCain committed an act of breathtaking heedlessness and irresponsibility. Obama’s choice, Joe Biden, is not without imperfections. His tongue sometimes runs in advance of his mind, providing his own fodder for late-night comedians, but there is no comparison with Palin. His deep experience in foreign affairs, the judiciary, and social policy makes him an assuring and complementary partner for Obama.

The longer the campaign goes on, the more the issues of personality and character have reflected badly on McCain. Unless appearances are very deceiving, he is impulsive, impatient, self-dramatizing, erratic, and a compulsive risk-taker. These qualities may have contributed to his usefulness as a “maverick” senator. But in a President they would be a menace.

By contrast, Obama’s transformative message is accompanied by a sense of pragmatic calm. A tropism for unity is an essential part of his character and of his campaign. It is part of what allowed him to overcome a Democratic opponent who entered the race with tremendous advantages. It is what helped him forge a political career relying both on the liberals of Hyde Park and on the political regulars of downtown Chicago. His policy preferences are distinctly liberal, but he is determined to speak to a broad range of Americans who do not necessarily share his every value or opinion. For some who oppose him, his equanimity even under the ugliest attack seems like hauteur; for some who support him, his reluctance to counterattack in the same vein seems like self-defeating detachment. Yet it is Obama’s temperament—and not McCain’s—that seems appropriate for the office both men seek and for the volatile and dangerous era in which we live. Those who dismiss his centeredness as self-centeredness or his composure as indifference are as wrong as those who mistook Eisenhower’s stolidity for denseness or Lincoln’s humor for lack of seriousness.

Nowadays, almost every politician who thinks about running for President arranges to become an author. Obama’s books are different: he wrote them. “The Audacity of Hope” (2006) is a set of policy disquisitions loosely structured around an account of his freshman year in the United States Senate. Though a campaign manifesto of sorts, it is superior to that genre’s usual blowsy pastiche of ghostwritten speeches. But it is Obama’s first book, “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance” (1995), that offers an unprecedented glimpse into the mind and heart of a potential President. Obama began writing it in his early thirties, before he was a candidate for anything. Not since Theodore Roosevelt has an American politician this close to the pinnacle of power produced such a sustained, highly personal work of literary merit before being definitively swept up by the tides of political ambition.

A Presidential election is not the awarding of a Pulitzer Prize: we elect a politician and, we hope, a statesman, not an author. But Obama’s first book is valuable in the way that it reveals his fundamental attitudes of mind and spirit. “Dreams from My Father” is an illuminating memoir not only in the substance of Obama’s own peculiarly American story but also in the qualities he brings to the telling: a formidable intelligence, emotional empathy, self-reflection, balance, and a remarkable ability to see life and the world through the eyes of people very different from himself. In common with nearly all other senators and governors of his generation, Obama does not count military service as part of his biography. But his life has been full of tests—personal, spiritual, racial, political—that bear on his preparation for great responsibility.

It is perfectly legitimate to call attention, as McCain has done, to Obama’s lack of conventional national and international policymaking experience. We, too, wish he had more of it. But office-holding is not the only kind of experience relevant to the task of leading a wildly variegated nation. Obama’s immersion in diverse human environments (Hawaii’s racial rainbow, Chicago’s racial cauldron, countercultural New York, middle-class Kansas, predominantly Muslim Indonesia), his years of organizing among the poor, his taste of corporate law and his grounding in public-interest and constitutional law—these, too, are experiences. And his books show that he has wrung from them every drop of insight and breadth of perspective they contained.

The exhaustingly, sometimes infuriatingly long campaign of 2008 (and 2007) has had at least one virtue: it has demonstrated that Obama’s intelligence and steady temperament are not just figments of the writer’s craft. He has made mistakes, to be sure. (His failure to accept McCain’s imaginative proposal for a series of unmediated joint appearances was among them.) But, on the whole, his campaign has been marked by patience, planning, discipline, organization, technological proficiency, and strategic astuteness. Obama has often looked two or three moves ahead, relatively impervious to the permanent hysteria of the hourly news cycle and the cable-news shouters. And when crisis has struck, as it did when the divisive antics of his ex-pastor threatened to bring down his campaign, he has proved equal to the moment, rescuing himself with a speech that not only drew the poison but also demonstrated a profound respect for the electorate. Although his opponents have tried to attack him as a man of “mere” words, Obama has returned eloquence to its essential place in American politics. The choice between experience and eloquence is a false one––something that Lincoln, out of office after a single term in Congress, proved in his own campaign of political and national renewal. Obama’s “mere” speeches on everything from the economy and foreign affairs to race have been at the center of his campaign and its success; if he wins, his eloquence will be central to his ability to govern.

We cannot expect one man to heal every wound, to solve every major crisis of policy. So much of the Presidency, as they say, is a matter of waking up in the morning and trying to drink from a fire hydrant. In the quiet of the Oval Office, the noise of immediate demands can be deafening. And yet Obama has precisely the temperament to shut out the noise when necessary and concentrate on the essential. The election of Obama—a man of mixed ethnicity, at once comfortable in the world and utterly representative of twenty-first-century America—would, at a stroke, reverse our country’s image abroad and refresh its spirit at home. His ascendance to the Presidency would be a symbolic culmination of the civil- and voting-rights acts of the nineteen-sixties and the century-long struggles for equality that preceded them. It could not help but say something encouraging, even exhilarating, about the country, about its dedication to tolerance and inclusiveness, about its fidelity, after all, to the values it proclaims in its textbooks. At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader’s name is Barack Obama.

—The Editors

• I am no computer expert, simply an avid user. I have no programming education or experience and have learned most things through trial and error and through the advanced expertise of former roommates and brothers-in law. I like to use sophisticated Bible software (Bibleworks, Libronix, etc.), I have lots of pictures and music (about 50-60 GB’s worth), I like to do web editing (with Frontpage), I sync my devices with the computer (iPod, Blackberry, Pocket PC), and I use most MS Office Applications (Word, Excel, & Outlook). Thus, I like to have a lot of things running at once.
• I have used most phases of Windows, including Windows 3.5, 95, 98, 98 Second Edition, ME, XP Home, and XP Professional (through each service pack). All have had their difficulties, but I found XP Pro to have the least issues.
• I have used a few versions of Linux, including Fedora Core 5-7 and Suse Linux 9. I enjoyed the layout of these systems, but had a great deal of difficulty with drivers and optimizing my screen view (oddly enough). I wholeheartedly support the efforts of open source operating systems and other software, and do enjoy the concept of the Live CD or DVD to run off.
• This is the probably the most important point of all: I added to my RAM by 2 GBs before I upgraded XP to Vista. Even before I upgraded and still had XP, it was a massive difference in the speed and performance of my computer. To upgrade to Vista, it requires at least 1 GB of RAM and I only had 512 MB.

Now, with all that being said, I realize that the Mac (and/or the world) vs. Windows is much like the PR battle of the Democrats (and/or the independents) vs. Republicans. Windows is the corporate product whereas a Mac or Linux OS is a product for the people. Like productive political discussion, however, it is necessary to stick to the issues and not the hype or rumors. After all, it all comes down to how a particular system pragmatically delivers our greatest spread of ideals. I have heard so many people talk about Vista as a disaster, a mistake, poorly planned, and crippled with flaws. However, I am hard pressed to find any specific examples of problems with the actual operating system. Of course, the most common problem with any OS upgrade is hardware/driver compatibility. For PCs, there is really no way around this because the hardware components are all made by different companies, and they are responsible for creating new drivers that are compatible for the latest operating systems. As a matter of fact, even after an entire year of using Vista, the company who made my sound card has not updated their drivers for it such that I cannot get my microphone or line-in jacks to work. I really don’t use them so it’s not that big of a deal to me, but I wouldn’t consider that a “failure” for Vista. And by now, as the first Service Pack is available, most driver issues have been resolved and issues of that nature have been resolved.

I have found Vista to be a very welcome and timely update to XP. I’m glad Microsoft slowed down their production of operating systems, because up to 2001, there was a new one pretty much every year. So they took their time with Vista and gave themselves 5-6 years. Thus, they were anticipating changes of the way in which we use computers. For instance, they have a voice recognition component built into the OS. It may not be the same quality of the amazing Dragon Naturally Speaking product by Nuance, but it provides the service for those who would like to try it. They have also significantly enhanced Windows Media Center, as it will serve in the future as the way people watch TV, movies, photos, and listen to music. It will replace TiVo or a DVR for those who have the vision to centralize their media on their computers. I have seen this in action at my sister’s house where my brother-in-law runs everything through his Windows Media Center server and he accesses the media at each TV through Xbox. It looks and function much better than TiVo or my Comcast DVR, and completely replaces the need for Apple TV. But, you don’t hear people talking about that, because most people have not been exposed to the far-reaching, forward-thinking capabilities of Vista. Of course, I could mention that the Vista interface looks really nice and as appealing as Linux or Apple, or that they’ve simplified the folder structure of Vista to make it a bit more intuitive, but that should be expected. Issues of visual aesthetics are all customizable even for XP. If you have XP, you can make your interface look like a Mac or Linux, or even Vista if you wanted to. You can even add the widget features of Mac or Vista to XP. So, it is no surprise that these things have been updated with Vista.

Two components to the OS that I find have greatly enhanced Vista, which most people don’t like, are Windows Update and User Account Control.  My computer is on 24/7, so Update runs every day at 3:00 AM and it includes all critical updates and even defrags once a week.  Of course, you can turn off this feature.  User Account Control is the big change people feel inconvenienced by.  This alerts you when anything wants to run or install, and gives you the choice to allow it or not.  I find this helps me know exactly what is going on my computer and eliminates spy ware at the front end.  Of course, you can turn off this feature if you do not care to use it.   But, I think it is helpful in most cases.

Other features that I don’t use often but think they are necessary are Windows Backup and Restore Center, Shadow Copy (this creates shadow copies of your computer), Remote Access, Sync Center, and Windows Easy Transfer.  You can always go to the Vista site and demo all the features.

Overall, I am very happy with the upgrade and know it will serve me well for the future.  MS is already close to completion on “Windows 7″ and will be starting “Windows 8″ soon (Vista is “Windows 6″).  I do think that the most important factor in my upgrade was increasing my RAM.  I cannot emphasize this enough.  My wife has only 1.25 GB, and her computer is noticeably slower running Vista.  So, keep that in mind if choosing to take the plunge.

(FYI: I started this post like 8 months ago and just finished today, just so you know)

But, as you can see, learning about 2 topics that have been pretty foreign to me until last fall has contributed to keeping my blog relatively silent. But rest assure, although I could go on and on about politics, I find golf much more interesting because there is more concrete information to learn.  Politics is simply a glorified ad campaign centered around a person or group.

Just got finished watching a fascinating NOVA program entitled, “Ghost in Your Genes” which was about epigenetics. Epigenetics is the study of genetic modifiers called “epigenomes” that are instrumental in turning on and off the varied features of any given genome. The Human Genome Project of the early 90’s was monumental as it mainly purposed to identify all of the genomes or “genes” in the DNA make-up of humans. In 2000 they reported that they had found 22,000-23,000 genomes, which was surprisingly less than they had anticipated. That’s roughly the same that can be found in worms, rats, and frogs. Since it has been thought that humans are more genetically complex, it left many questions about what causes some genes to appear and others not to appear. The salient example of this question is how identical twins which have the exact same DNA structure can develop differently. The answer that has been found in the past few years is the discovery of “epigenomes” which can attach themselves to certain genes or gene sequences and turn them on or off depending on the circumstances. Moreover, they are finding that epigenomes can be influenced early in development, showing that although we inherit genes and epigenomes naturally through our parents, it is how we are nurtured that can determine which traits develop in us. That is certainly a simplification of very complex research, but nonetheless very compelling. They have now launched the Human Epigenome Project to try to identify what could be millions of epigenomes influencing genetic development. This is very exciting, and they have already benefited from this kind of research in cancer treatment.

Here is the TV Program Description
Here is the Program Manuscript
Here is the Program Preview
Here are some links and resources
Here is the Wikipedia entry for Epigenetics

I was excited that my favorite NPR (WBUR) program “On Point” was discussing this news yesterday, but I was quickly turned off by the fact that the host, Tom Ashbrook, got quite carried away by his misunderstandings of the project. He was calling it the G-phone or Google phone, which is a radical misnomer because there are over 30 companies involved in the alliance, and was very concerned that Google’s agenda with the OS would be to make money by planting ads in phones. Also, he raised the question about security and privacy because he thought that since it is open source it could be tampered with. He had at least 3 field experts on his panel for discussion, and I thought they did a good job talking about the possibilities of the project. However, they also had some of the same misinformation which was also furthered by some of the callers, and I think many people walked away from the discussion thinking falsely that Google has become a phone developer with a few partners putting out an insecure phone that invades peoples privacy. The discussion really missed most of the goals of the alliance in developing “Android” and I hope that in the coming weeks and months that Tom updates this story with a clearer apprehension of the significance of the alliance and it’s project(s).

If you feel you are out of the loop with regards to the recent discussions about the doctrine of justification in Pauline theology, particularly the writings of E.P. Sanders, James Dunn, and N.T. Wright I would suggest checking out thepaulpage.com and Monergism.com’s “New Perspective” section. For many N.T. Wright sources there is also the ntwrightpage.com.

Click here to browse the book or here for the PDF.

Work has been crazy the past few weeks as we just ended our fiscal quarter/year. I’m glad that is finally over and we are back to relative normalcy.

We’ve been taking a break for church the past month and a half as things have been super busy for all of us. Hopefully, we should begin meeting again. 10/4 marked a year that we’ve been gathering.

Kalila has been in classes for the past few weeks. She is taking 3 classes: 1 Monday evenings, 1 Tuesday/Thursday in the afternoon, and 1 Saturday mornings. Her Monday night class is her favorite. It’s an American Lit class I think, but her prof is very intelligent and can teach well. He actually taught them about Jonathan Edwards.

Right now I am at my sister’s house in the Seattle area. My dad and I are visiting my little niece Julia who is 16 months old. She is the cutest thing in the world I think. I’ll put some more pics up soon. Also got to visit Mars Hill Church yesterday. I’ll be back tomorrow to work a half day and get to see my wife for the first time in 4 days!

If the main focus of a sermon is to preach Christ, what do we do with the book of Proverbs and a host of other Biblical texts that seem to focus on wisdom for life, or our own personal growth in holiness, etc? That’s the focus of this edition of the White Horse Inn as Michael Horton talks with Dennis Johnson about his new book, Him We Proclaim: Preaching Christ in All the Scriptures.

This is interview is a great primer on what it means to preach/teach a passage in it’s historical-redemptive context. Josh has been focusing on this book and this topic over at his blog as he has been studying with some friends at his church. This book is a bit on the lengthy side for most people, but in it Johnson clearly lays out the issues, options, and methods of historical-redemptive biblical theology. Even if you are on interested in his book, his interview at the White Horse Inn is worth your time.

The only deficiency I observed in the interview was the lack of discussion on the nature of typology and how it should be distinguished from allegory. The book makes up for that lack, however, so I do not hold it against Johnson; the interview was only 25 minutes after all.

Here is the link to the audio.

With regards to focus, I have been able to continually shift attention from the trees to the forest, to “see the microcosm in macro vision” (line from Depeche Mode song “Macro”). Taking a few steps back from analyzing topics and subtopics of thought into the greater panorama has facilitated my ability to ask more questions. This isn’t just with biblical studies either, this has been with many things in life. There is a great need for both macro exegesis and micro exegesis and an oscillating focus between the two for all areas of life. In particular for me, stepping back from the Bible and assessing the great methods (e.g. discourse analysis) and structures (i.e. historical-redemptive biblical theology) I have come to love has helped me to read the whole Bible in my head. I know that sounds funky, but hear me out. The Bible is a large collection of writings spanning 2000 years of people, nations, backgrounds, and events while employing at least a dozen different genres from about 40 different personalities. Familiarity with this kind of material takes lots of time, which is a major reason to read it consistently. For me, 4 years of a Biblical Studies degree and 3-5 years of a Master of Divinity degree have fostered a generous amount of familiarity. Now, it is impossible to read the whole Bible in an hour or even a day because there are simply too many words and too much information. But when one gains a certain degree of familiarity with the Bible (or anything for that matter), it is really an indication that a mental table of contents or index (or even concordance if you wish) has formed in their mind. Thus, when another person mentions a book of the Bible, or a character, or event, or topic, one can recall or mentally recapitulate whatever is mentioned. The contents of this index are varied for us all and are shaped by the methods and structures we were taught or employ. The more we read the Bible, the sharper and more comprehensive this index becomes (hopefully). This index is what we walk away from the Bible with and can allow us to “read” the Bible in our minds. We can “read” the Bible this way very quickly because of the miracle of instantly thumbing through our index. Thus, I think since I have had time away from “index-building” (or micro exegesis), I’ve had more time to review the index (running it through the logic filter) and ask more questions of it (macro exegesis). I have found this very refreshing and of greater value when I jump back into both my Bible and my books.

With regards to freedom, I have no obligations or demands on me to study which has allowed me to think freely; read less and think more. I still find myself drawn to certain people’s works like Meredith Kline, Gerhard Forde, N.T. Wright, and John Piper, but for the most part I’m trying to work out things on my own and in a small community of close friends. Granted, these friends are on the same page and entertain even the most ridiculous ideas I might have, but I have the freedom to be wrong. I taste much freedom also knowing that I need others. Boy does that take pressure off in the “theological project”.

I think much of what I am talking about has coalesced beautifully with our little home group/church on Tuesdays. It’s been an immense blessing to have a teaching outlet and an on-going discussion with wonderful saints that are relatively flexible and available.

A few months back however, I met up with my buddy Josh over at the cigar shop “The Federal Tobaccanist” in Portsmouth,NH. We had a great time looking around at their fine pipes and cigars. We were also engaged in a good cigar tutorial by the one of the helpful people that work there. Thus we spent a lot of time in their walk-in humidor checking out their vast aray of quality smokes. As I perused the room one last time before we left, I noticed the inside cover of a box that seemed strangely familiar to me. It took me no more than a second after I stopped to look to recollect where I had seen that design and color scheme. Take a look for yourself:

It was then I realized that one of the higher ups at Crossway involved with the marketing of the ESV must be a cigar smoker. What a clever guy. Josh agreed with me instantaneously. Don’t be fooled by the piety of those involved with the ESV. They are stealing their marketing ideas from a vintage cigar company. Keep that in mind the next time you open your ESV for devotions tomorrow. Hehe.

Although I can see how this job will open up many opportunities for me in the future, it certainly is not my first love. I do go into work everyday feeling a little empty inside, knowing that I want to do something else, namely, working full-time at a church. I want so badly to study Scripture and read all day, to have an open schedule so that I can meet with people all the time, and dreaming with saints about God and his glory spread to his people. I find it funny that I have gone into great debt and spent may years in theological education, while volunteering time for ministry with the goal of working in a church, yet nothing has opened up for me. Yet, I have no degree in business and just about 3 years of experience and I got 3 job offers in one day in early February. Figure that out. People are willing to pay me more money than I would make in most churches even though I have no where near the same level of qualifications.

Well, for now I am rolling with the providence alotted for me in Grace, and am stoked about the prospects of the Gospel in our area. We have a wonderful group of saints gathering on Tuesdays now in Haverhill. In the sixth month of our habitual meeting, I have encountered Christ in very sweet levels. Praise be to him for is infinite power and grace and wisdom to channel his waterfall in the greatest direction possible. Soli Deo Gloria.

Here is an essay by Gerhard Forde, former Professor of Theology at Luther Seminary, now with the Lord. He represents the Lutheran view in the book, Christian Spirituality: Five Views of Sanctification (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 1988). This is a riveting piece by Forde that I believe is must reading for everyone. Props to Danny O for bringing this to my attention, because the weight of what Forde is saying and its implications are earth-shattering. May God cause you to read with grace, joy, and freedom in the promise of God through Jesus Christ. Please post your feedback too!

SANCTIFICATION, IF IT IS TO BE SPOKEN OF AS SOMETHING other than justification is perhaps best defined as the art of getting used to the unconditional justification wrought by the grace of God for Jesus’ sake. It is what happens when we are grasped by the fact that God alone justifies. It is being made holy, and as such, it is not our work. It is the work of the Spirit who is called Holy. The fact that it is not our work puts the old Adam/Eve (our old self) to death and calls forth a new being in Christ. It is being saved from the sickness unto death and being called to new life.

In German there is a nice play on words which is hard to reproduce in English. Salvation is Das Heil—which gives the sense both of being healed and of being saved. Sanctification is Die Heiligung—which would perhaps best be translated as “being salvationed.” Sanctification is “being salvationed,” the new life arising from the catastrophe suffered by the old upon hearing that God alone saves. It is the pure flower that blossoms in the desert, watered by the unconditional grace of God.

Sanctification is thus simply the art of getting used to justification. It is not something added to justification. It is not the final defense against a justification too liberally granted. It is the justified life. It is what happens when the old being comes up against the end of its self-justifying and self-gratifying ways, however pious. It is life lived in anticipation of the resurrection.

As such, sanctification is likely not the kind of life that we (old beings!) would wish, much as we might prattle piously about it and protest about how necessary it is. For the most part we make the mistake of equating sanctification with what we might call the moral life. As old beings we get nervous when we hear about justification by grace alone, faith alone, and worry that it will lead to moral laxity. So we say we have to “add” sanctification too, or we have to get on to what is really important, living the “sanctified life.” And by that we usually mean living morally.

Now, living morally is indeed an important, wise and good thing. There is no need to knock it. But it should not be equated with sanctification, being made holy. The moral life is the business of the old being in this world. The Reformers called it “civil righteousness.” Sanctification is the result of the dying of the old and the rising of the new. The moral life is the result of the old being’s struggle to climb to the heights of the law. Sanctification has to do with the descent of the new being into humanity, becoming a neighbor, freely, spontaneously, giving of the self in self-forgetful and uncalculating ways. “But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you” (Mt 6:3-4). Sanctification is God’s secret, hidden (perhaps especially!) even from the “sanctified.” The last thing the sanctified would do would be to talk about it or make claims about achieving it. One would be more likely, with Paul, to talk about one’s weaknesses.

No, sanctification is not the kind of thing we would seek. I expect we don’t really want it, and perhaps rarely know when it is happening to us. It is the work of the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life. It is given to us in the buffeting about, the sorrows, the joys, the sufferings and the tasks of daily life. As Ernest Becker rightly put it in his classic work (that ought to be read by everyone interested in the question of “salvationing” today) The Denial of Death, the hardest thing is not even the death, but the rebirth, because it means that for the first time we shall have to be reborn not as gods but as human beings, shorn of all our defenses, projects and claims.1 Can flowers bloom in this desert? Can we survive and get used to justification? Can we live as though it were true? That is the question.

The Argument

Talk about sanctification is dangerous. It is too seductive for the old being. What seems to have happened in the tradition is that sanctification has been sharply distinguished from justification, and thus separated out as the part of the “salvationing” we are to do. God alone does the justifying simply by declaring the ungodly to be so, for Jesus’ sake. Most everyone is willing to concede that, at least in some fashion. But, of course, then comes the question: what happens next? Must not the justified live properly? Must not justification be safeguarded so it will not be abused? So sanctification enters the picture supposedly to rescue the good ship Salvation from shipwreck on the rocks of Grace Alone. Sanctification, it seems, is our part of the bargain. But, of course, once it is looked on that way, we must be careful not to undo God’s justifying act in Christ. So sanctification must be absolutely separated from justification. God, it seems, does his part, and then we do ours.

The result of this kind of thinking is generally disastrous. We are driven to make an entirely false distinction between justification and sanctification in order to save the investment the old being has in the moral system. Justification is a kind of obligatory religious preliminary which is rendered largely ineffective while we talk about getting on with the truly “serious” business of becoming “sanctified” according to some moral scheme or other. We become the actors in sanctification. This is entirely false. According to Scripture, God is always the acting subject, even in sanctification. The distinction serves only to leave the old being in control of things under the guise of pious talk.

On the level of human understanding, the problem is we attempt to combine the unconditional grace of God with our notions of continuously existing and acting under the law. In other words, the old being does not come up against its death, but goes on pursuing its projects, perhaps a little more morally or piously, but still on its of the old subject and the resurrection of a new one, not the continuous existence of the old. Unconditional grace calls forth a new being in Christ. But the old being sees such unconditional grace as dangerous and so protects its continuity by “adding sanctification.” It seeks to stave off the death involved by becoming “moral.”

Sanctification thus becomes merely another part of its self-defense against grace. Justification is rendered more or less harmless. Talk about sanctification can be dangerous in that it misleads and seduces the old being into thinking it is still in control. We may grudgingly admit we cannot justify ourselves, but then we attempt to make up for that by getting serious about sanctification.

Even under the best of conditions, talk about sanctification in any way apart from justification is dangerous. It has a tendency to become a strictly verbal exercise in which one says obligatory things to show one is “serious about it”—but little comes of the discussion. Perhaps one feels sanctified just by talking impressively about it. The result of such talk is what I like to call “the magnificent hot-air balloon syndrome.” One talks impressively about sanctification, and we all get beguiled by the rhetoric and agree. “Yes, of course, we all ought to do that,” and the balloon begins to rise into the religious stratosphere solely on the strength of its own hot air. It is something like bragging about prowess in love and sex. It is mostly hot air and rarely accomplishes anything more for the hearers than arousing anxiety or creating the illusion that they somehow can participate vicariously. We got started in that direction even in the above exercise in this thesis when we talked about how sanctification is “spontaneous,” “free,” “self-forgetful,” “self-giving,” “uncalculating” and all those nice things. Dangerous talk. Dangerous because, like love, none of those things can actually be produced by us in any way. Theology indeed obligates us to talk about them, to attempt accurate description, but unless we know the dangers and limitations of such descriptions, it leads only to presumption or despair. So let the reader beware!

And so at the very least, we can say that sanctification cannot in any way be separated from justification. It is not merely a logical mistake, but a spiritually devastating one. In fact, the Scriptures rarely, if ever, treat sanctification as a movement distinct from justification. In writing to the Christians at Corinth, for instance, Paul refers to them as “those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ”; and later, he refers to the God who chooses what is low and despised in the world, even the things that are not, as the source of our life in Christ Jesus, “whom God made our wisdom, our righteousness and sanctification and redemption,” so that whoever boasts should boast in the Lord (1 Cor 1:2, 28-31 RSV).

To the Thessalonians Paul writes that they have been chosen by God from the beginning “to be saved through the sanctifying work of the Spirit and through belief in the truth” (2 Thess 2:13). Hebrews says that “we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (Heb 10:10 RSV). Sanctification appears in Scripture to be roughly equivalent to other words for the salvation wrought by God in Christ, a phrase which designates another facet or dimension of sanctification, but never calls it something distinct or logically different from justification. J. K. S. Reid is right when he concludes, “It is tempting for the sake of logical neatness to make a clean division between the two [justification and sanctification] but the temptation must be resisted, if in fact the division is absent from Holy Scripture.”2

It is difficult to escape the suspicion that the distinction between justification and sanctification is strictly a dogmatic one made because people got nervous about what would happen when unconditional grace was preached, especially in Reformation times. Doesn’t justification do away with good works? Who will be good if they hear about justification by faith alone? So the anxious questions went. Sanctification was “added” as something distinct in order to save the enterprise from supposed disaster. But dogmatic distinctions don’t save us from disaster. More likely than not, they only make matters worse.

Justification by Faith Alone

It becomes clear, then, that we cannot talk about sanctification without first saying something about justification. The difficulty we have arises because justification by faith alone, without the deeds of the law, is a mighty breakup of the ordinary schemes of morality and religion; a mighty attack, we should say, on the theology of the old being. The fact that we are justified before God—the eternal Judge, Creator and Preserver of all life—unconditionally for Jesus’ sake and by faith alone, simply shatters the old being’s entire system of values and calculations.

As old beings we don’t know what to do with an unconditional gift or promise. Virtually our entire existence in this world is shaped, determined and controlled by conditional promises and calculations. We are brought up on conditional promises. We live by them. Our future is determined by them. Conditional promises always have an “if-then” form.3 If you eat your spinach, then you get your pudding. If you are a good girl, then you can go to the movies. If you do your schoolwork, then you will pass the course. If you do your job, then you will get your pay. If you prove yourself, then you will get a promotion. And so on and so on, endlessly until at last we die of it, wondering if we had only done this or that differently, perhaps then. . . . Though such conditional promises are often burdensome and even oppressive, they are nevertheless enticing and even comforting in their own way because they give life its structure and seem to grant us a measure of control. If we fulfill the conditions, then we have a claim on what is promised. We have what we call “rights,” and we can control our future, at least to a certain extent.

So, as old beings, we hang rather tenaciously onto these conditional promises. As a matter of fact, that is what largely characterizes our being in this world as old. We hang desperately onto the conditional promises, hoping to control our own destiny. We live “under the law” and cannot get out—because we really don’t want to. We prefer to go our own way even up to the last barrier: death. And there we must either hope that the conditionality ends and all account books simply close, or perhaps we make the fatal mistake of thinking that we can extend our control under the conditional promise even into the beyond. We think we have a claim on heaven itself if the proper conditions are met. Religion is most often just the attempt to extend this conditionality into eternity and to gain a certain measure of control even over the eternal itself.

But the saving act of God in Jesus Christ—comprehended in justification by faith alone—is an unconditional promise. Unconditional promises have a “because-therefore” form. Because Jesus has overcome the world and all enemies by his death and resurrection, therefore (and only for that reason) you shall be saved. Because Jesus died and rose, therefore God here and now declares you just for Jesus’ sake (not even for your sake, but for Jesus’ sake). Because Jesus has borne the sin of the whole world in his body unto death and yet conquered, therefore God declares the forgiveness of our sins.

Now, of course, as old beings we have a desperately difficult time with such an unconditional promise. It knocks everything out of kilter. We simply don’t know how to cope with it, so we are thrown into confusion. Is it really true? Can one announce it just like that? No strings attached? Don’t we have to be more careful about to whom we say such things? It appears wild and dangerous and reckless to us, just as it did to Jesus’ contemporaries. The best we can do is to try to draw it back into our conditional understanding—so all the questions and protests come pouring out. But surely we have to do something, don’t we? Don’t we at least have to make our decision to accept? Isn’t faith, after all, a condition? Or repentance? Isn’t the idea of an unconditional promise terribly dangerous? Who will be good? Won’t it lead perhaps to universalism, libertinism, license and sundry disasters? Don’t we need to insist on sanctification to prevent the whole from collapsing into cheap grace? Doesn’t the Bible follow the declaration of grace with certain exhortations and imperatives? So the protestations go, for the most part designed to reimpose at least a minimal conditionality on the promise.

It is crucial to see that here we have arrived at the decisive point which will entirely determine how we look at what we call sanctification. It is true, you see, that as old beings we simply cannot understand or cope with the unconditional promise of justification pronounced in the name of Jesus. ‘What we don’t see is that what the unconditional promise is calling forth is a new being. The justification of God promised in Jesus is not an “offer” made to us as old beings; it is our end, our death. We are, quite literally, through as old beings. To use the vernacular, we have “had it.” All the questions and protests that we raise are really just the death rattle of the old Adam and Eve who sense that their kingdom is under radical and final attack. No doubt that is why the defense is so desperate, and why it even quite innocently takes such pious and well-meaning forms.

But isn’t the unconditional promise dangerous? Of course it is! After all, look what happened to Jesus! It is the death of us one way or another. Either we stick in our conditionality and go to that death which is eternal, or we are put to death to be raised to new and eternal life in the one who lives eternally. The point is that when we come up against the danger and radicality of the unconditional promise, the solution is not to fall back on conditionality but simply to be drawn into the death and resurrection of Jesus. The old being cannot survive the promise, the promise which makes new beings out of nothing. God is the one who calls into being that which is from that which is not. The new being finds its center now not in itself, but in Jesus.

One has only to follow out the argument in Romans to see Paul clearly developing this point. The law, the conditional promise, did not stop sin; it only made it worse. As a matter of fact, the law was given to show sin as sinful beyond measure, a bottomless pit, an endless hall of mirrors. But where sin abounded, grace abounded all the more! But isn’t such argument terribly dangerous? Aren’t all the careful barriers built against sin suddenly destroyed? Doesn’t one come perilously close to saying that sin is somehow presupposed by or even necessary for grace? Couldn’t one then justly say, “Well then, shall we not sin the more that grace may abound?” It is a serious question and one that has to be raised. As a matter of fact, if the question isn’t raised, one probably hasn’t yet grasped the radical hilaritas, the joy of grace. No doubt, it is the old being’s last question prior to its death. But what is the answer? It does not lie in returning to the law, to conditionality, but rather in the death of the old.

Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life. If we have been united with him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection. For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin—because anyone who has died has been freed from sin. Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him. The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. (Rom 6: 1-11)

Actually, all evangelical treatment of sanctification should be little more than comment on this passage. The end to sin is death, not following the law, not moral progress, not even “sanctification” as the old Adam or Eve thinks of it. To sin the more that grace may increase is, of course, absurd and impossible precisely because of the death. To do so would mean to will to return to sin in order to get more grace. That would be like a lover desiring to return to the state of unloving in order to experience falling in love again. Quite impossible! How can one who has died to sin still live in it? The movement is simply irreversible if one catches a glimpse of what the grace is all about.

Furthermore, it is crucial to note that Paul does not tell his readers that they have to get busy now and die. He announces the startling and unconditional fact that we have died. It is not a task to be accomplished. All who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death, so that out of that death may come newness of life, just like and as sure as the resurrection of Christ. Sin is a slavery from which we escape only through that death. Only one who has died is free from sin. There’ is no other way. The old self has been crucified so that the sinful body might also be destroyed and we might at last be set free. There is no continuity of the old self to be carried over here. Christ now becomes our life.

Just the sheer and unconditional announcement “You have died!”— the uncompromising insistence that there is nothing to do now, that God has made his last move—just that, and that alone, is what puts the old being to death, precisely because there is nothing for the old being to do. The God who says, “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy,” has decided to do just that through the death and resurrection of Jesus. There is no way for the old being to do anything about such grace. The unconditional justification, the grace itself, slays the old self and destroys its “body of sin” so as to fashion a new one. It is all over! Christ being raised from the dead will never die again. One can’t go back and repeat it. He died to sin once for all, and now he lives to God. Conclusion? You can now only consider yourself dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus!

So, when we come to the decisive and crucial point about justification and the unconditional promise of grace, it is imperative to see that God is at work making new beings through this (to us) shocking act. The answer to all our questions, to the “death rattle” questions of the old Adam or Eve, lies not in falling back on conditionality, but in learning to cope with death and resurrection. All the questions must therefore be answered with a confident yes.

Do you mean to say we don’t have to do anything? Yes! Just listen! Do you mean to say that even faith is not a condition, nor is making our decision, nor repentance? Yes! Faith is a gift. It comes by hearing. It is the Spirit’s work. It is a being grasped by the unconditional promise, a being caught by the sheer newness and joy of it, a being carried by the Word of Grace. But is not such unconditional promise dangerous? Yes, I suppose it is in this evil age. After all, Jesus got killed for it! But God has apparently decided to take the risk, and sealed it by raising Jesus from the dead. “Wake up, 0 sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you” (Eph 5:14).

But do you mean to say we can’t say no? That kind of question is, of course, the trickiest of the old Adam or Eve. But in spite of everything, it must be answered with a confident yes—from the point of view of the new being. The old Adam or Eve will, of course, only say no, can really only say no. The old Adam or Eve wants to remain in control of the matter and so says no even while wanting to say yes.

So saying no is not an option? Perhaps the best answer would be, “What do you want to do that for?” It would be like arriving at the altar for the wedding and answering the big question. “Do you take…” with, “Do you mean to say I can’t say no?” If we see at all what is going on, we would see that even here the answer finally has got to be yes: “Yes, I don’t see how you can say no!” The new being by definition is one who says yes. One is not forced here, one is made new, saved—heart, soul, mind. One is sanctified in the truth of the unconditional promise of God.

The answer to the persistent questions of the old Adam or Eve is therefore always yes, yes, yes, until at last we die of it and begin to whisper, “Amen! So be it Lord!” Sanctification is a matter of being grasped by the unconditional grace of God and having now to live in that light. It is a matter of getting used to justification.

Simultaneously Just and Sinner

But now we must look a bit closer at how the unconditional promise—justification by faith alone—works in our lives if we are to arrive at an appropriate understanding of what we might call sanctification. The first thing to grasp is, of course, that the unconditional promise works quite differently from a conditional one. The unconditional promise, the divine decree of justification, grants everything all at once to the faith it creates. We are simply declared just for Jesus’ sake. But that means simultaneously that we are revealed to ourselves as sinners. The sin revealed is not just a misdeed, but it is precisely our lack of faith and trust over against the incredible goodness of God. The sin to be ultimately expelled is our lack of trust, our unbelief. All our impetuous questions are shown for what they are: unbelief, our reservations over against the God of grace, our fear of being made new.

And still we ask, Don’t we have to do something? You see, that is all we really planned to do—just a little something! We hadn’t counted on being made new! Just that, you see, is the sin exposed! Nevertheless, God simply declares us to be just for Jesus’ sake because that is the only thing that will help. That act of God itself finally exposes us as sinners, desperately in need of saving. So then, for the time being, we are, as Martin Luther said, simul justus et peccator, simultaneously just and sinner. It is the unconditional grace of God that makes us so. In that, we see the truth. And it is in the truth that we are sanctified. The first step on the way of sanctification is to realize that.

This is radically different from our usual, conditional thinking. Conditional thinking is wedded to the schemes of law and progress characteristic of this age. Sin is understood primarily as misdeed or transgression of such a scheme. “Sanctification” is the business of making progress in cutting down on sin according to the scheme. Holiness or righteousness could not be said to exist simultaneously with sin in the same scheme. Righteousness and sin would simply exclude each other. The more righteousness one gains, the less sin there would be. This would be measured by what one does or doesn’t do. It would be a matter of works. Grace would then have to be understood as the power to do such works, to achieve such righteousness. The logic would then be that with the help of grace one progressively gains more and more righteousness and thus sins less and less. One strives toward perfection until, theoretically, one would need less and less grace or perhaps finally no more grace at all.

But such conditional schemes pose all sorts of problems for one who wants to think and believe “in the fashion of Scripture,” as Luther called it.4 In the first place, it doesn’t fit with the divine act of justification by grace alone, by faith alone. There is no real place for justification in the scheme. If it comes at the beginning of the scheme, it makes the subsequent progress unnecessary. Why work at becoming just if you are already declared to be so? On the other hand, if justification comes at the end of the scheme, it becomes unnecessary. You don’t have to be declared just if you have already become so.

The systematic problem is that both justification by faith alone without the deeds of the law and such a scheme of sanctification cannot possibly coexist together. The tradition no doubt recognized this when it insisted on making a sharp and complete distinction between the two, at least in theory. In actual practice, however, one or the other of them generally comes to be regarded as more or less fictional or dispensable. And more likely than not, it will be justification that is so regarded. It comes to be looked upon as a decree contrary to actual fact, a kind of “as if” theology. We are regarded “as if” we were just. Or perhaps it is a kind of “temporary loan” granted until we actually earn our way. Sanctification according to this scheme takes over the center of the stage as the real and practical business of the Christian.

But this leads only to a further, more personal problem in the life of faith if one becomes honest before God. What if the scheme just doesn’t seem to work? This is the much celebrated problem of the “anxious conscience” that bothered Martin Luther. What if one is honest enough to see that one is not actually making the kind of progress the scheme proposes? I am told that grace gives the power to improve, to gain righteousness and overcome sin. I am told, furthermore, that grace is absolutely free. But what if I go to church to “get grace” and then get up the next morning and see the same old sinner, perhaps even a little bit worse, staring back at me through the mirror? What then? I am told that grace is free, and that there is nothing wrong with the “delivery system.” Not even a bad priest, minister or a faulty church can frustrate or limit the grace of God. But I don’t seem to get better. If I am in any way serious, I can only become more and more anxious. I am told that grace gives one the power to love God. But as a matter of fact I only become more and more resentful of a God who sets up such systems and makes such demands. I don’t seem to grow in love of God. I begin to hate him! The magnificent hot-air balloon bursts.

Now I face the really desperate question: Whose fault is it if the scheme doesn’t work? There are two possibilities. Either I have not properly responded to or cooperated with the free divine grace, or most frightening of all, the God of election who presides over such grace has decided, in my case, not to give it. The scheme leaves me either depending on my own abilities to respond, to remove all obstacles to grace, to “let myself go” and so forth, or it leaves me with the terrors of predestination. Usually, of course, we recoil in horror from the very thought of predestination. We piously wouldn’t want to lay the blame on God—and besides, we would then lose all control of the matter!

So all things considered, we would rather take the blame for the breakdown of the scheme on ourselves. If it didn’t work, it must be because we didn’t do something right. We didn’t repent sincerely enough; we didn’t really and truly seek him; we didn’t wholly give our hearts to Jesus; and so on. But in that case, the more we talk about “free grace” the worse it gets. When the system doesn’t work, “grace is free” turns out to mean that there is no way we can put the blame on grace. But then no matter how much we talk about the grace of God, absolutely everything then depends on us, on our sincerity, our truthfulness, the depth of our feeling, the wholeheartedness of our confession and so on. The system simply turns against us. While we live as old beings in this age, we simply cannot escape the law.

So it is impossible to put God’s unconditional act of justifying sinners for Jesus’ sake alone together with our ideas of progress based on conditions. It doesn’t work either logically or in the life of faith. That is why Martin Luther came to see that we must take a radically different approach. In place of all ordinary understandings of progress and sanctification, the true Christian life begins when we see the simultaneity of sin and righteousness. God begins with us simply by declaring us to be righteous because of Jesus. We begin to see the truth of the situation when we realize that because God had to do that, we must have been at the same time sinners. God would be wasting his breath declaring people to be righteous if they were not actually and wholly sinners! Indeed, as Paul put it, “if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!” (Gal 2:21).

And there can be no cheating here. Since the declaration of God is total, and depends totally on what Jesus has accomplished for us, the sin simultaneously exposed is total. All the dreams, schemes and pretensions of the old Adam or Eve are unmasked in their totality. Sin, as a total state, can only be fought by faith in the total and unconditionally given righteousness. Anything other than that would lead only to hypocrisy or despair. If there is to be anything like true sanctification, it must begin with these considerations.

If our righteousness depends totally on Jesus, and is appropriated only in the relationship of trust (faith), then we can begin to see that God has two problems with us. The relationship can be broken in two ways. The first would be by our failure, our immorality, our vices. Since we lack faith and hope in God’s cause, the relationship is threatened or broken; we go our own way. That problem is usually quite obvious. But the second problem is not so obvious. It is precisely our supposed success, even our “morality,” our virtues—the relationship with God is broken to the degree that we think we don’t need the unconditional justification, or perhaps even to the degree that we think we are going to use God to achieve our own ideas of sanctity. The relationship is broken precisely because we think it is our holiness.

The first problem, our failure and immorality, is usually most easily recognized and generally condemned because it has consequences, both personally and socially. But the second problem, while generally approved in human eyes because it is advantageous and socially useful, is more dangerous before God (coram deo, as Luther put it) precisely because it is praised and sought after. It is the kind of hypocrisy Jesus criticized so vehemently in the gospels: “like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean” (Mt 23:27). No matter how good and useful such virtue is in the world (and we must not fail to see that it is really so and does have its place), it cannot be counted as sanctification. Those who blow their own horns when they give alms so as to be seen and admired by the public do indeed have their reward: the praise of others. But that is all they get. True sanctification is God’s secret (Mt 6:2-4).

So the first step on the way to sanctification is to see that, before the judgment of God as it comes through the crucified and risen Jesus, we are rendered totally just at the same time as we are exposed totally as sinners. Sanctification is thus included in justification as a total state. True sanctification is at the outset simply to believe that God has taken charge of the matter. ‘Where can there be more holiness than where God is revered and worshiped as the only Holy One? But God is revered as the only Holy One where the sinner, the real and total sinner, stands still and listens to God. There the sinner must realize that his or her ways are at an end. The final assault is under way. There the sinner begins to realize that neither virtue nor vice, morality nor immorality, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything before God, but what matters is the new creation (Gal 6:15). Sanctification is not a repair job. God is after something new. He wants his creation back as new as when it came from his hand.

Progress in Sanctification: The Invasion of the New

But is there not such a thing as growth in sanctification, progress in the Christian life? No doubt there is a sense in which we can and even should speak in such fashion. But when we do, we must take care, if everything we have been saying up to this point is true. If justification by faith alone rejects all ordinary schemes of progress and renders us simultaneously just and sinners, we have to look at growth and progress in quite a different light.

That brings us back to our thesis: sanctification is the art of getting used to justification. There is a kind of growth and progress, it is to be hoped, but it is growth in grace—a growth in coming to be captivated more and more, if we can so speak, by the totality, the unconditionality of the grace of God. It is a matter of getting used to the fact that if we are to be saved it will have to be by grace alone. We should make no mistake about it: sin is to be conquered and expelled. But if we see that sin is the total state of standing against the unconditional grace and goodness of God, if sin is our very incredulity, unbelief, mistrust, our insistence on falling back on our self and maintaining control, then it is only through the total grace of God that sin comes under attack, and only through faith in that total grace that sin is defeated. To repeat: sin is not defeated by a repair job, but by dying and being raised new.

So it is always as a totality that unconditional grace attacks sin. That is why total sanctification and justification are in essence the same thing. The total sinner comes under the attack of the total gift. That is how the battle begins. How then can we talk about the progress of the battle—the transition, let us call it—from sin to righteousness, old to new?

There are, I believe, two aspects of this transition we need to talk about. The first is that since we always are confronted and given grace as a totality, we find ourselves always starting fresh. As Luther put it, “To progress is always to begin again.”5 In this life, we never quite get over grace, we never entirely grasp it, we never really learn it. It always takes us by surprise. Again and again we have to be conquered and captivated by its totality. The transition will never be completed this side of the grave. The Christian can never presume to be on the glory road, nor to reach a stage, which now forms the basis for the next stage, which can be left behind. The Christian who is grasped by the totality of grace always discovers the miracle anew. One is always at a new beginning. Grace is new everyday. Like the manna in the wilderness, it can never be bottled or stored. Yesterday’s grace turns to poison. By the same token, however, the Christian never has an endless process of sanctification to traverse. Since the totality is given, one knows that one has arrived. Christ carries the Christian totally.

Looked at from Luther’s point of view of “always beginning again,” the transition is therefore not a continuous or steady progress of the sort we could recognize. It is rather more like an oscillation between beginning and end in which both are always equally near. The end, the total gift, is constantly and steadily given. But to grasp that we have constantly to begin again—we never can get over it! It is like lovers who just can’t get over the miracle of the gift of love and so are constantly saying it over and over again as though it were completely new and previously unheard of! And so it constantly begins again.

The second aspect of the transition of the Christian from old to death to life, is that all our ordinary views of progress and growth are turned upside down. It is not that we are somehow moving toward the goal, but rather that the goal is moving closer and closer to us. This corresponds to the eschatological nature of the New Testament message. It is the coming of the kingdom upon us, not our coming closer to or building up the kingdom. That is why it is a growth in grace, not a growth in our own virtue or morality. The progress, if one can call it that, is that we are being shaped more and more by the totality of the grace coming to us. The progress is due to the steady invasion of the new. That means that we are being taken more and more off our own hands, more and more away from self, and getting used to the idea of being saved by the grace of God alone. Our sanctification consists merely in being shaped by, or getting used to, justification.

Getting used to justification means that the old Adam or Eve is being put to death, and thus, as Paul put it, “being freed from sin.” How might we conceive of this? Here we must be careful lest in our attempts to describe the matter we once again get seduced into inflating the magnificent hot-air balloon. Being freed from sin by the unconditional promise means that the totality of it begins to overwhelm and destroy our fundamental scepticism and incredulity, our unbelief. Lord, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief?” becomes our prayer (Mk 9:24). We can see light at the end of the tunnel. We begin to trust God rather than ourselves. When Martin Luther talked about these things, he began to talk more about our actual affections than lists of pious things to do.

Under the pressure of the total gift, we might actually begin to love God as God, our God, and to hate sin. Think of it: We might actually begin to dislike sin and to hope for its eventual removal. Ordinarily we feel guilty about our sins and fear their consequences, but we are far from hating them. I expect we do them, in spite of all fears and anxieties, because we like them. Sanctification under the invasion of the new, however, holds out the possibility of actually coming to hate sin, and to love God and his creation, or at least to make that little beginning. It is not that sin is taken away from us, but rather that we are to be taken away from sin—heart, soul and mind, as Luther put it.6 In that manner, the law of God is to be fulfilled in us precisely by the uncompromising totality and unconditionality of the grace given.

Sanctification always comes from the whole, the totality. Whether it takes place in little steps, in isolated actions against particular sins, in those tender beginnings, it is always because of the invasion of the new. Always the totality is intensively there—the total crisis, the entire transition, the dying and becoming new.

What is the result of this? It should lead, I expect, to something of a reversal in our view of the Christian life. Instead of viewing ourselves on some kind of journey upward toward heaven, virtue and morality, our sanctification would be viewed more in terms of our journey back down to earth, the business of becoming human, the kind of creature God made. Our problem is that we have succumbed to the serpent’s temptation, “You shall not die, you shall be as gods.” Creation is not good enough for us; we are always on our way somewhere else. So we even look on sanctification in that light—our “progress” toward being “gods” of some sort. If what we have been saying is true, however, our salvation, our sanctification, consists in turning about and going the other way, getting back down to earth. The trouble we have is that it is a long way back for us. To get there we must learn to trust God, to be grasped by the totality of his grace, to become a creature, to become human.

What might that look like? When I think about such sanctification, I think about several things: spontaneity, taking care, vocation and attaining a certain elusive kind of truthfulness and lucidity about oneself. Perhaps I can end by saying a few words about these things.

Spontaneity

What is a truly good work, one that might qualify as the fruit of sanctification? One, I think, that is free, uncalculating, genuine, spontaneous. It would be like a mother who runs to pick up her child when it is hurt. There is no calculation, no wondering about progress, morality or virtue. There is just the doing of it, and then it is completely forgotten. The right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing. Good works in God’s eyes are quite likely to be all those things we have forgotten! True sanctification is God’s secret.

Taking Care

If we are turned around to get back down to earth by grace, then it would seem that true sanctification would show itself in taking care of our neighbor and God’s creation, not exploiting and destroying either for our own ends, religious or otherwise. It would mean concern for the neighbor and society, caring for the other for the time being. Here one should talk about the place of morality and virtue and such things. Although we do not accept them as the means by which we are sanctified, they are the means by which and through which we care for the world and for the other. This is what the Reformers meant when they insisted that good works were to be done, but one was not to depend on them for salvation.

Vocation

How does the one who has died and is being made new, the one who has been taken off his or her own hands, enter into the battle in this world? The answer comes in the concept of carrying out one’s vocation as a Christian in the tasks and occupations of daily life. We always get nervous about what we are to do, it seems. The magnificent hot-air balloon syndrome seduces us into thinking our sanctification consists in following lists of pious dos and don’ts. That always seems more holy. But it is in the nitty-gritty of daily life and its tasks that our sanctification is hammered out.

Precisely because of the totality of the gift, the new being knows that there is nothing to do to gain heaven. Thus the Christian is called to the tasks of daily life in this world, for the time being. Students, for instance, are sometimes very pious and idealistic about “doing something,” and so get caught up in this or that movement “for good.” It never seems to dawn on them that perhaps for the time being, at least, their calling is simply to be a good student! It is not particularly in acts of piety that we are sanctified, but in our call to live and act as Christians.

Truthfulness and Lucidity

In many ways, this essay has been an appeal for more truthfulness in our talk about the Christian life and sanctification. I think that should be the mark of sanctification as well. As Paul put it, we are not to think of ourselves more highly than we ought (Rom 12:3).

The talk of progress and growth we usually indulge in leads us all too often to do just that. But if we are saved and sanctified only by the unconditional grace of God, we ought to be able to become more truthful and lucid about the way things really are with us. Am I making progress? If I am really honest, it seems to me that the question is odd, even a little ridiculous. As I get older and death draws nearer, it doesn’t seem to get any easier. I get a little more impatient, a little more anxious about having perhaps missed what this life has to offer, a little slower, harder to move, a little more sedentary and set in my ways. It seems more and more unjust to me that now that I have spent a good part of my life “getting to the top,” and I seem just about to have made it, I am already slowing down, already on the way out. A skiing injury from when I was sixteen years old acts up if I overexert myself. I am too heavy, the doctors tell me, but it is so hard to lose weight! Am I making progress? Well, maybe it seems as though I sin less, but that may only be because I’m getting tired! It’s just too hard to keep indulging the lusts of youth. Is that sanctification? I wouldn’t think so! One should not, I expect, mistake encroaching senility for sanctification!

But can it be, perhaps, that it is precisely the unconditional gift of grace that helps me to see and admit all that? I hope so. The grace of God should lead us to see the truth about ourselves, and to gain a certain lucidity, a certain sense of humor, a certain down-to-earliness. When we come to realize that if we are going to be saved, it shall have to be absolutely by grace alone, then we shall be sanctified. God will have his way with us at last.

Notes

1 Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973), p. 58.

2 Alan Richardson, ed., A Theological Wordbook of the Bible (New York: Macmillan, 1960), p. 218.

3 Eric Gritsch and Robert Jenson, Lutheranism: The Theological Movement and Its Confessional Writings (Philadelphia, Pa.: Fortress, 1976), pp. 8, 42.

4 Martin Luther, Lectures on Romans, trans. and ed. Wilhelm Pauck, The Library of Christian Classics, vol. 15 (Philadelphia, Pa.: Westminster, 1961), p. 128.

5 Ibid., p. 370.

6 Ibid., p. 194.

http://mhadigital.org/index.php?post_category=podcasts

Here is a link to a different version of the same sermon: “Pity Not Them Who Rise With Christ”

…I spent last evening with Joel Osteen.

On a dark and stormy night I (and 10,000 others) came to see the charming preacher with bright eyes and a huge smile. I fought mile long traffic to be there…with Joel.

True confession: I came with expectations in hand that “An evening with Joel Osteen” would be bread and circus for the spiritually impoverished. If you want to know my conclusion you’ll have to keep reading through to the end, though in fairness I tried to leave my ref21 hatchet at the door.

I assumed that I would meet those unfortunate souls who at the opening of Joel Osteen’s fifteen city, four nation road show were what we (Reformed types) are so often befuddled by, those teeming hordes of sweet semi-Pelagians who seem to make up the bulk of the American Christian ghetto.

I was expecting to see the poor, uneducated and easy to command, as the Washington Post once famously described evangelicals. People who couldn’t help themselves from being there because they were put under a Vulcan mind meld from their local pastor. I expected to find ancient women with blue hair in attendance from nearby towns like Greer with pre-trib glossy magazines in hand connecting the “ten horns of Revelation” to the activities of nearby Bob Jones University.

I arrived early (taking “Jack Bauer type” precautions that I wouldn’t be followed, and notifying a Ruling Elder in my “CTU friendly” church a head of time), while searching in vain for someone who understood Carl Trueman and had heard of the Ante-Nicene fathers.

Just who exactly comes to a Joel Osteen confab?

I came expecting to find Benny Hinn people and I found instead a Tony Robbins seminar drawing a good representative sample of my community. Indeed, demographically speaking it was astonishingly integrated. It was full of upper middle class Gen X couples (and late boomers) with kids. They came in their tribes of tens and twenties with iPods rather than NIV’s.

My guess is that I was face to face with “Dog the Bounty Hunter,” free-market fundamentalists who were blissfully unaware of the Federal Vision, undecided on the importance of the OT, but definitely unamused by those rascally Calvinists causing trouble in the SBC. Simply because I could, I bought popcorn and Coke and enjoyed the spectacle of Christian roadies doing sound checks on the coliseum floor.

The overall production value of the stage, set and imagery was very good, while at the same time simple and in most ways not overly distracting. There was the obligatory dry ice machine, a few multicolored spotlights and images of the Osteen “rotating open globe thing” that seems to be the symbol of Lakewood Church. In the center of the stage there was RC Sproul’s famous nemesis, the dreaded “portable plexiglass pulpit.” It had one spotlight on it all times (except when the blonde worship leader was singing). There was a box of tissues inside its casing.

The pre-game music was surprisingly toned down (really not unlike that of an RUF meeting). I sensed that the organizers were more worried about turning folks off then they were about meaningfully engaging in crowd prep. I was somewhat proud that those present from my community were on the whole not participatory in the music and theater. Most did not know the words well enough to engage in correct contemporary praise posture. Maybe people at an Osteen event just come to watch?

Why were all these people here? What were they looking for? How had Joel Osteen come to be so important to them? These were the questions I was trying to understand.

My guess is that they came to see this strangely alluring man with his emotionally charged appeal for brotherhood, good works, and hopefulness, who is touching a raw post-modern nerve in the culture; that’s why I came. They also came –unknowingly I think—because Joel Osteen has found a new way to treat their spiritual maladies: ignore root causes and tackle the symptoms.

From the start of the event it was a family affair. The night was opened by Joel Osteen’s brother-in-law, and at different points most of his family present held forth on various matters. His mother, the Venerable Dodi, juxtaposed some classic old school “name it and claim it” with some new fangled power of positive thinking in a moral exhortation centered on recent health issues in her life. She had the line of the night, “If you have a problem, find a verse in there (the Bible) and tell the Almighty what you need.”

Victoria (the Difficult) spoke to us on the fascinating subject of what exactly it means to be married to Joel Osteen. Her story is complicated. She used to work in a jewelry store and then one day (((Joel))) came in to get a watch fixed. She ended up selling him a new watch and soon came marriage and a baby carriage. Joel’s brother (a doctor) asked people to give money to the ministry, after challenging those in the audience to give their tithes first to their local churches. At other points in the show his family in attendance including children, nephews and nieces were recognized to applause. The Osteens, it would seem are the Kennedy’s of the Charismatic Nation.

What would Joel speak about when all the introductions were over with I wondered?

Osteen would speak not once but many times throughout the evening in a succession of unscripted 10 minutes pick–me-up-talks. Each presentation was a variation on the previous theme: “Things are gonna get better… Keep positive.” It was almost entirely bereft of Scripture. In a superfluous way it was very encouraging! I found myself throughout the entire night waiting for the shoe to drop, and saying to myself is this it?

Osteen tells his life story, which in many ways is a classic American success story. He inherited his father’s position (without wanting to) and with one week of preparation takes over the family business. The church grows from 6,000 to over 40,000 in 5 years and has recently bought an $80 Million dollar sporting arena. Osteen strikes me as being amazed as everyone else at own his success and very proud of the family business, Lakewood Church of Houston, now the nation’s largest. Only in America.

The story of Osteen’s success would be a fantastic story of God’s providence if he believed in such a thing. For years he watched the ministry behind a camera, editing and overseeing the development of media. In many ways Joel understood the ministry better than most because he was involved with it in a way that would one day be instrumental in its growth. He also learned a good bit about the charismatic and Pentecostal way of preaching because he listened to these messages everyday in a studio, editing them for television and radio.

Joel’s own sermons are not like those of his fathers (the late John Osteen). They strike me as the next generation of the Charismatic movement. They aren’t about experiencing the power of the Holy Spirit in your life; they are just about encountering your feelings. He talks over and over again about your relationships with other people and in the end he doesn’t really ask you to do anything – except try to change. His language is a mix of manifest destiny and late night infomercial. If I had to characterize the 600 words “sermonettes” I heard I would say “Charismatic emergent, non-threatening, non-spritualized therapeutic language.” Maybe American Idol with Paula as the lone judge.

Never once did I hear the words Gospel, Jesus Christ, Trinity, Sin, Cross (except in Scripture songs sung by performers and in a video testimony played before the Osteens arrived in arena)

So what conclusions can be drawn from An Evening with Joel?

Joel Osteen is the slick and polished face of non creedal American Evangelicalism. Joel is youthful, exuding Opie from Mayberry, aw shucks Americana that is uplifting, believable, and even to this cynic, soothing. Joel Osteen is wonderbread.

Now I recognize that everyone (whether we realize it or not) probably has someone in their life like Joel Osteen, a relentless optimist, who simple mindedly prods one to excellence, selflessness, and endurance. I’m just thinking Joel Osteen is not actually doing this with his people. At the end of the day, Osteen encouraged his crowd not to seek Christ as the solutions to their problems but something else. That something else seemed to be a clever but highly charged view of self. Self-interest, Self-gratification, Self-fulfillment, Self-realization, Self-actualization, with a little bit of sanitized obligatory righteous buzz words thrown in to make it appear evangelically kosher for the uninitiated.

What took place at Osteen’s erstwhile crusade in my city can only be described as the next step in Post Modern Pentecostalism. It is the health and wealth gospel for healthy and wealthy people. If the Christian religion is medicine for souls that are poor and needy than Osteen is a bottle of vitamins in an operating room.

Mel Duncan’s blog can be found at http://riverandrhett.blogspot.com/

Wow! You are awesome! You are a true Biblical scholar, not just a hearer but a personal reader! The books, the characters, the events, the verses – you know it all! You are fantastic!

Ultimate Bible Quiz
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Old Testament Survey, by Douglas Stuart

Old Testament Theology, by Paul House

New Testament Survey, by William Mounce

Inductive Bible Study, by George Guthrie

Bibliology and Hermeneutics, by Michael Patton

History of the English Bible, by Daniel Wallace

Greek Tools for Bible Study, by William Mounce

Introduction to Theology, by Michael Patton

Systematic Theology, by Bruce Ware

Trinitarianism, by Michael Patton

Worship, by Gary Parrett

The World Mission of the Church, by Timothy Tennant

Christian Ethics, by Ron Nash

Apologetics, by Ron Nash

Educational Ministry of the Church, by Gary Parrett

Advanced Worldview Analysis, by Ron Nash

Islam, by Timothy Tennant

Hinduism, by Timothy Tennant

Biblical Theology Bulletin (Seton Hall University)

Biblica (Rome Pontifical Institute)

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society (Evangelical Theological Society)

Journal of Biblical Literature (Society of Biblical Literature)

Journal for the Study of the New Testament (Sheffield Academic Press)

Trinity Journal (Trinity Evangelical Divinity School)

Neotestamentica (New Testament Society of South Africa)

Filología Neotestamentaria (University of Cordoba)

Theology Today (Princeton Theological Seminary)

Kerux (Northwest Theological Seminary)

Denver Journal (Denver Seminary)

Southern Baptist Journal of Theology (Southern Baptist Theological Seminary)

Semeia (Society of Biblical Literature)

Journal for Baptist Theology & Ministry (New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary)

Criswell Theological Review (Criswell College)

Institute for Reformed Theology Bulletin (Union Theological Seminary)

Protestant Reformed Theological Journal (Protestant Reformed Theological School)

Western Reformed Seminary Journal (Western Reformed Seminary)

Currents in Theology & Mission (Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago)

The Master’s Seminary Journal (The Master’s Seminary)

Journal of Religion & Society (Creighton University)

Reformed Review (Western Theological Seminary)

Journal of Biblical Studies (exclusively online)

Journal for Christian Theological Research (Luther Seminary)

Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism (McMaster Divinity School)

McMaster Journal of Theology and Ministry (McMaster Divinity School)

Stromata (Calvin Theological Seminary)

Journal of Ministry & Theology (Baptist Bible Seminary)

Concordia Theological Quarterly (Concordia Theological Seminary)

TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism (Society of Biblical Literature)

Themelios (Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship)

Vox Evangelica (London School of Theology)

Bulletin for Biblical Research (Institute for Biblical Research)

Evangelical Quarterly (Paternoster Press)

I was finishing up When Time Had Fully Come: Studies in New Testament Theology by Herman N. Ridderbos, and I thought that the following topic could make for an interesting discussion. Ridderbos says, “The question arises, then, of the relationship of Jesus to Paul. When for example, the Sermon on the Mount greatly stresses compliance with the commandments, as we believe we are able to maintain, is it then at all possible to speak of a unity between the Gospels and the epistles of Paul, because the former stress is laid upon the positive meaning of the law, and in the latter upon the negative meaning? (pp. 61-62) I would love to read what others may think about the actual or so-called negative Pauline remarks of the law.

What a wonderful question and topic for discussion. Regarding Paul’s view of “the Law”, I believe his view depends upon what Law is being referred to in a particular context, because without defining our terms ambiguity will abound. I think that Paul makes a distinction between the Sinai Code/Law of Moses (Old Covenant/Letter) and law of God/Christ (New Covenant/Spirit).

In two specific sections in his writings he discusses at length historical-redemptive covenant theology in 2 Cor.3:1-18 and Gal. 3-4. In these passages, he gives his rationale for why the Mosaic Law offers only death and how the New Covenant transcends by it offering life. In 2 Cor.3:1-18, he zeroes in on the Letter/Spirit contrast resident in the two covenants. He even goes as far as to label the Law of Moses as “the ministry of death” (vs.7) and “condemnation” (vs.9) as it was, written on tables of stone. He contends that this “letter” brings death, surely drawing from his argument in Rom.7:7-11:

What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. Apart from the law, sin lies dead. I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died. The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment deceived me and through it killed me.

He likens the Law to the glory that was on Moses face which needed to be concealed to Israel by a veil over his face (vs.7). Even then, there was a veil over their hearts every time they read the Law (vs.15) because their hearts were hardened by it (vs.14). However, the glory of the New Covenant revealed in Christ is infinitely superior because it does not fade and has no end (vs.11). It is written not on a tablets of stone, but on the tablet of the heart (vs.3), drawing on Ezek.36:26 and Jer.31:33. Since this covenant is imparted directly by the Spirit on the heart with no outside mediator, those in it are now with “unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord and being transformed into the same image” (vs.18). So we can summarize by saying that the Letter/Spirit contrast is about the difference in the nature of the Mosaic and New Covenants.

In Galatians 3-4, Paul focuses on the purpose of the Mosaic Covenant in light of the New Covenant. He is trying to remind the Galatians very forcefully that no one will be justified by the works of the Law (3:11). In other words, no one can please God escatologically by trying to execute their duties as prescribed by the Law of Moses. The reasons for this are because no one is truly able to execute this covenant so we are cursed in trying to do so (3:10), and the purpose of the Law was to make transgression fully visible and never to offer eternal life (3:18-19). This covenant came to bring us into slavery and imprisonment so that we could be rescued by Christ (vs.23-24). So Paul is setting up two different covenantal strands that find their culmination in the allegory of Hagar and Sarah in 4:21-31. Hagar corresponds to the slavery that exists under the Mosaic Law and is demonstrated in the contemporary Judaism that is visible in Jerusalem (vs.25). Sarah corresponds to the freedom that exists under the New Covenant and is demonstrated in the promises God offers His people in the New (spiritual) Jerusalem (vs.26-28). So the Mosaic Covenant existed to serve as a physical template that would anticipate the spiritual realities to come in the new age that has been inaugurated in the death and resurrection of Christ. Thus, in order to partake of this inaugurated Covenant, we need to believe in what Christ accomplished on our behalf and so cast out the “slave woman” (the Mosaic Covenant) (vs.29-31).

In light of these passages, I think it is evident that the Mosaic/Old Covenant was an external code which does and can only demand. God designed it this way in order to magnify sin in Israel, as Israel is simply Adam on a corporate/national scale (Hosea 6:7). Neither Adam nor Israel could ever have kept, executed, or complied to the Law given to them. Even if they could have, there was no promise for eternal life. It wasn’t the function of the Law given to them. But, both Adam and Israel’s failure have become the canvas for God to promise grace in the death of Jesus. The death of Jesus ratified the New Covenant which does and can only promise eternal life. In the New Covenant there is no code to keep or demand upon us, but the promise of life in Christ itself produces faith in us which will result in us keeping the law of God/Christ, which is essentially loving God and loving our neighbors.

What did the resurrection and the glory of Jesus Christ that Paul saw in his vision reveal to him about where he stood in the history of God’s plan for His people and His creation?

The resurrection and glory of Jesus Christ revealed to Paul that he stood at the final leg in the history of redemption. Paul disclosed to Agrippa some the content of what Jesus told him in the initial vision in Acts 26:14-18. Jesus told him that he has appeared to him to appoint him as a minister and witness of all he will reveal to him (vs.16) to go to the gentiles and open their eyes so that they turn from darkness to light, from the dominion of Satan to God, and that they might receive forgiveness of sins and an inheritance as they are sanctified by faith in Jesus (vs.17-18). He also tells Agrippa that what was revealed to him which he had been proclaiming was everything that the Prophets and Moses said would take place (vs.22). In further discussion with Agrippa, Paul asks him bluntly, “King Agrippa, do you believe the Prophets? I know that you do” (vs.27). In an earlier account in Acts, we see Paul at Mars Hill sharing the very message that was revealed to him by Jesus (17:19-34). The climax of his message to the Athenians was the fact that God has fixed a day of judgment through Jesus, proving this by raising him from the dead.

In every encounter that Paul has with people in Acts, as well as every letter that he writes, this message of the death and resurrection of Jesus, which vindicates the judgment of God and forgives the sins of all who believe, is proclaimed and grounded in the fulfillment of the Law and Prophets (whether typologically or prophetically). Scripture drove his language and argumentation that Jesus is the end-times Messiah who ushered in the Kingdom of God through his death and resurrection. What is presupposed here is that all of the elements described in the message Paul preached about Jesus were written in the Scriptures of Israel when it spoke of the “latter days” or “end of days”. Passages come to mind such as Genesis 1-3, Exodus 19:5-6, Deuteronomy 30:1-6, 2 Samuel 7:5-17, Jeremiah 31:31ff, Isaiah 42:5-7, 52:13-53:12, Ezekiel 37:1-28, and Daniel 7:9-13. Paul drew upon these and many other texts to display his understanding that Jesus’ resurrection and glory signaled the inauguration of the final leg of redemptive history.

The response to my answer and follow-up was:

Let’s continue our discussion about inaugurated eschatology. Please turn to 1 Corinthians 7:29-40. How does this view of the shortness of our time onearth in light of the eternity of heaven impact your views not only of theissues discussed by Paul ­ which include marriage, death, happiness, and material goods, but also whatever else is on your mind?

That’s an interesting question, because I normally don’t assess my understanding of the “shortness of time” with how it impacts my views of the topics you mentioned. It seems that Paul is essentially driving at the concept of not wasting the precious time we have here on earth. His central ground in verse 31 is that “the form of the world is passing away”. I don’t know that he was privy to the fact that there would be 2000+ years of kingdom expansion ahead of him. I also don’t think the apostles expected to be alive when Christ returned due to the fact that both Paul and Peter had their suffering deaths revealed to them by Jesus. But it is apparent that both Paul and Peter were aware of the accelerated suffering that the people of God would undergo. Here in the context of the passage of discussion, Paul forms his reasoning by considering “the present distress” (vs.26) which he is trying to spare his readers from (vs.28). I don’t think he meant that “life is hard enough, marriage will make it worse”. I think he is appealing to the possibility of either you being captured, tortured, and killed or your spouse being captured, tortured, and killed. The only thing worse than suffering is seeing your loved ones suffering. I think Paul is trying to brace his hearers for pain for the sake of Christ. When he says, “the one who is married is concerned about the things of the world” (vs.34), I don’t think he means that it is “less spiritual” or “less godly”, but simply that human marriage does not continue in heaven the same way it is on this earth. Since the “form of the world is passing away” and is temporary, to marry is to invest in a temporary venture.

I also don’t think we should miss the subtlety with which Paul is disclosing his understanding of the purpose of marriage. He says, “One who is unmarried is concerned about the things of the Lord, how he may please the Lord; but the one who is married is concerned about the things of the world, how he may please his wife” ( vs.32-33). He is using the very same language of marriage for humans as for covenant in Christ, showing that he sees a vital connection between the two analogously. I find it striking.

Apple’s ‘iPhone’ is coming

Jobs announces ‘revolutionary’ device, confirms iTunes selling of Paramount films.

By Owen Thomas, Business 2.0 writer
January 9 2007: 1:48 PM EST

SAN FRANCISCO (CNNMoney.com) — Apple announced the long-awaited “iPhone” at its annual Macworld expo Tuesday.

Company chairman Steve Jobs also disclosed that Apple (up $5.33 to $90.80, Charts)’s iTunes will sell Paramount films, and that the AppleTV device will be available beginning in February.

Apple Chairman Steve Jobs showing the iPhone at the Macworld expo in San Francisco.

Video PC magazine’s Lance Ulanoff looks at cutting edge accessories for digital music players. (January 8th) Play video

In a move that could strike at BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (down $9.17 to $132.99, Charts), Apple will offer free push e-mail from Yahoo (down $0.37 to $27.55, Charts) on the phone device. RIM currently charges for its e-mail service.

Apple shares ralled $5.05, or nearly 6 percent, to $90.52 on the announcement.

Jobs called the iPhone is a “revolutionary mobile phone” that will feature an iPod, phone and “Internet communicator.”

The phone is rectangular, with the entire front surface a touch screen. The device is run entirely by touch. It runs the Mac OS X, scaled down to a cell phone.

“This is a day I’ve been looking forward to for two-and-a-half years,” Jobs told the crowd at San Francisco’s Moscone Center.

He especially touted the device’s Internet browsing capabilities.

“It’s bad out there today,” says Jobs of mobile Web browsers. “It’s a real revolution to bring real Web browsing to a phone.”

As a example, Jobs called up the New York Times Web site. The full page displayed, not a special version or oddly formatted page that most smartphones show.

He then called up Google Maps to find a nearby Starbucks. He actually prank called it and ordered “4,000 lattes to go.”

Jobs says the “killer app is making calls.” The iPhone will operate on the GSM protocol, but will not have third-generation broadband initially. It will sync with the Mac’s Address Book application.

Jobs played a voicemail on the phone from former Vice President Al Gore, a member of the company’s board, congratulating the Apple chairman on the new device.

The product formerly known as iTV will now be called Apple TV. This device has a wireless connection for up to five computers to stream or download movies and tv shows. It can connect to a large-screen hi-def television screen. The 40 gigabytes of memory can store 50 hours of video.

Apple TV will ship next month, and will sell for $299. Jobs said the company is accepting orders.

Jobs announced that there have been 2 billion iTunes sold for iPods. He said it took 3 years to sell the first billion and ten months to sell the second billion. He says 1.3 million movies have been sold for video iPods.

There was some question as to whether Apple would be able to use the iPhone name for the device. But Cisco Systems (down $0.19 to $28.44, Charts), which owns the rights to the iPhone name, said Tuesday it expects to reach agreement with Apple later Tuesday on using the name for its device.

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A Dissertation Concerning the End for Which God Created the World, by Jonathan Edwards
This work is perhaps the most poignant and important work we’ve come across that wrestles with the existence and purpose of creation. On so many levels this work is a chief influence on our worldview and theology. Please take the time to work through it carefully. Edwards’ thought is extremely complex in certain areas, which may require slow reading and re-reading, but it is so worth it. Here is a link to John Piper’s introduction to this work as The End is included in his book, God’s Passion for His Glory. You can read the entire book online for free at this link. For more of Edwards, check out the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale as well as Monergism.com’s Jonathan Edwards page.

Kingdom Prologue: Genesis Foundations for a Covenantal Worldview, by Meredith G. Kline (PDF)
Meredith Kline is essentially the father of Reformed Covenantal Theology in biblical studies and biblical theology for the 20th century. He is a study unto himself, as he has put together his open stream of thinking into what used to be his notebook for classes at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. It has been published both by Two Age Press and Wipf & Stock Publishers, and Two Age Press has made the PDF file available for free on their site for the past few years. Kline’s thought process can be very complex in certain places as he crafts his own terminology which becomes self-referential throughout and there are no footnotes. Very much like Edwards, this work demands slow reading and re-reading but will be gold for those interested. For more Kline, see the Meredith G. Kline Online page.

The Life of God in the Soul of Man, by Henry Scougal
This is a classic work by a little known Scotch Puritan, who died at the age of 28, about the nature of Spiritual life and the heart of true “religion”. This is a dynamite little work that has inspired the thought of many theologians, paricularly George Whitefield and John Piper. The very small Works of Henry Scougal are available for purchase through Ligonier Ministries.

Introductory Essay to John Owen’s The Death of Death in the Death of Christ, by J.I. Packer
Here is probably one of the best theological essays by J.I. Packer, who is an expert on Owen, as he whets the appetite for probably the best defense of particular redemption in the Reformed/Calvinist tradition. You can read the entire work of the Death of Death at CCEL’s website at this link. For a great introduction to John Owen’s life and works, check out www.johnowen.org.

Explosion rocks Danvers, several hurt, none seriously

By Kathy McCabe, Donovan Slack, Christine McConville and Kay Lazar, Globe Staff

A major chemical explosion at an industrial park in Danvers shook several North Shore towns this morning, knocking homes off foundations and damaging buildings up to 1/4 mile away, according to witnesses and fire officials.

At least 10 people have been taken to local hospitals, but no one was killed and none of the injuries are life-threatening, said Danvers Fire Chief Jim Tutko.

People felt the blast as far away as New Hampshire, and State Representative Theodore C. Speliotis called it a “miracle” that no one died. “There’s no other word for it,” Speliotis said

The explosion at about 2:45 a.m. at the CAI, Inc. company shattered windows, knocked in doors and leveled several homes and businesses, damaging an estimated 60 buildings. Fire has been restricted to the chemical plant in the Danversport industrial park where solvents and ink are produced.

Frances Fratus heard a noise that sounded like “thunder” that knocked her out of bed. She looked out her window about 500 yards from the explosion and saw “a giant ball of fire, going up about 100 feet in the air.”

“The impact blew in all our cellar windows and my front door was blown out,” said Fratus, 63.

A man who answered the telephone at CAI’s plant in Georgetown refused to comment on the explosion. He said that the company is waiting to find out more from investigators, and then hung up the telephone.

No one could be reached for comment at the Danvers plant.

The industrial park is along the Danvers River off Route 35, near the Peabody town line. At least three homes and several businesses were nearly leveled and dozens more homes were damaged, according to Town Manager Wayne Marquis.

Some of the homes near the blast site may need to condemned, Marquis said. Entire roofs were blown off the Danversport bakery and pizza factory.

“You won’t be buying your holiday rolls there,” said State Fire Marshall Stephen Coan.

Residents described an earthquake-like explosion. Authorities closed off nearby roads and tried to control the crowds as people wandered into the streets. Some described a huge mushroom cloud hovering over the area.

As the sun rose, homeowners began assessing damage. Cracks stretched across the walls of Richard and Cindy Parker’s house on Water Street, about a block from the explosion. Windows were blown out of frames, and Richard Parker had to axe their way out the front door because the force of the blast had twisted the frame. Objects fell off counters and shelves. The impact knocked ash out of the chimney, spewing it acorss the living room floor.

“It felt like something actually hit the house,” said Richard Parker, who was asleep with his wife in the second floor bedroom. The clock popped off the wall and stopped at 2:45 a.m.

Representatives from the state fire marshal’s office and the US Environmental Protection Agency were on the scene, along with state police, and firefighters and ambulance crews from Middleton, Wenham, and many other North Shore communities.

Alan Farell was sleeping in a downstairs bedroom about 100 yards away when the explosion blew in his windows.

“It was God awful,” said Farell, who ran outside because he thought his own home was on fire.

Tom Russo lives on Endicott Street about a half mile away when h his windows cracked and his doors flew open.

“I was in bed watching television. It rolled me right out of bed,” Russo said.

Residents are being evacuated by bus to Danvers High School, where the Red Cross is setting up a shelter. About 60 people from the nearby New England Home for the Deaf have also been evacuated. School in Danvers has been cancelled for the day.

Outside Beverly Hospital, Trisha Lynch, 22, stood wrapped in a blanket. Lynch and she and her fiancé, Fred Grenier, were asleep on the second floor of a home on Bates Street about 150 yards from the explosion. .

“I thought a plane had crashed,” said lynch, who had brought in a relative who needed stitches on her face.

Coan, the State Fire Marshall, said it was too early to speculate what caused the explosion.

(David Rattigan and Andrew Ryan, Globe correspondents, also contributed to this report.)

Posted by the Boston Globe City & Region Desk at 08:27 AM

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While I was gone, my wife Kalila was able to enjoy an October archaeology dig in New Hampshire. However, since it was 20 degrees in the evening up there, she brought back with her a mysterious virus that has slowly been bringing down the household. All the symptoms are creeping their way in: achy bones, sore throats, sneezing, coughing, runny noses, and fatigue. Please pray that God would be merciful to our souls in the midst of our oncoming illnesses.

One major thing that I’ve been busy with the past few weeks has been the development of local church community. God has indeed been gracious to knit a few of us like-minded friends together to start meeting as a house-group in Haverhill,MA. Danny, Cyndie, Jerry, Sue, Moses, James, Josephine, Jim, Allison, Paul, Kalila, and myself began meeting Wednesdays at 7:00 PM at Danny’s home on October 4th under the banner of the centrality of God in the heart of God. We truly believe that Jesus Christ is the most beautiful thing/being/reality in existence and that this is evident as we unfold each passage of Scripture. Our plan is for either Danny or myself to kick things off with an intentional working through of a text for 20, 30 or 40 minutes, while entertaining questions and appropriate discussion. From there, more fellowship, prayer, and perhaps communion as God may lead. We view this time as an extension of our friendship set aside for specifically focusing on God as he has revealed himself in Scripture and feasting on him together. In lieu of this, I have set up the site www.god-centered.com to serve as a way to introduce new people to the community, to provide relevant discussion stemming from our meetings, and to encourage the saints with a host of resources and links. The site is still in progress, so there are many things we are trying to do to get it tip-top. Let me know what you all think. I am really excited about what God has been doing as our recent gathering is in step with, and is overflow of what has been happening in our friendships for the last few years. Please pray that God would encounter us gloriously and delightfully.

Here also is the text version of the ETS message: “Training the Next Generation of Evangelical Pastors and Missionaries“

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Spoiler Alert

The principles of this movie are similar to that of Equilibrium: in the effort to prevent future war and social injustice/ills, a government tightens its grip of power by scaring its people into submission with manipulated media, and so producing a tightly regulated society, precluding religious, literary, and artistic freedom/expression. This movie highlights the corruption that led up to this system of control, and the main character “V” (Hugo Weaving) is out to knock off each person that was initially responsible for the current state. “V” is a wonderfully complex and mysterious character, although he is labeled as a “terrorist” by the state. He encounters an unasuming girl “Evey” (Natalie Portman) on the way to his first “event” and saves her as she was about to be raped by some members of the local law enforcement. The philosophical question pressed in this film is if there can be a “good” terrorism. Both the State and “V” carry forward “terrorism”, but can either one of these be justified. “V” believes that the corrupt state is simply reaping what they sowed, such that their terrorism toward him and the like caused his terrorism of them.

This movie was enjoyable to me on every level: dramatically, cinemagraphically, and philosophically. But I expect nothing less from the brothers Wachowski.

The following was written by Scott Hafemann for students at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in his class Interpreting the New Testament. It is included in the famed “Beale Packet” which began as a series of handouts that Greg Beale used to give out to students in this class when he was a professor at GCTS. It is now available at Roy Ciampa’s New Testament Resources site and is a required manual for most students who now take this class at GCTS. In the following, Hafemann assumes his students will be familiar with a method of close reading called “discourse analysis” that helps follow the flow of thought in a given text by tracing the connection of each proposition.

Once we have mastered the various logical relationships that can exist between propositions, we will be able to discover and determine which relationships actually do exist as the author’s argument unfolds. Therefore, our first task in exegesis will be to analyze the discourse by tracing the flow of the argument. Specifically, we will:

• Translate the passage from Greek into a literal English rendering.
• Go through the passage isolating the individual propositions. Remember that each proposition must contain both a subject and a predicate. If you deem it necessary to make a participial or prepositional phrase into a separate proposition, you must either convert the participle into a finite verb or supply one for the prepositional phrase.
• Next, attempt to relate each proposition to what precedes. Indicate your understanding of the argument by selecting a connecting word or phrase, which makes each relationship explicit. Whenever an author supplies such a connecting link (conjunction or phrase), remain faithful to it unless it seems absolutely impossible to do so!
• Finally, outline the argument in the margin by using the bracket method illustrated in class. When you are finished, you should be able to state the main point of the text and all of its supporting points.

But having paraphrased the text, we may be tricked into thinking that we understand what an author is up to (for after all, just to get this far is a major accomplishment!). Actually, we have just begun. We now have something to work with beyond just a vague feeling about the “meaning” of the passage. We now know what our author says, but if this is where we stop, all we have exercised is our memory and a few analytic skills. For in talking about the difference between memory and enlightenment, M.J. Adler writes:

To be informed is to know simply that something is the case. To be enlightened is to know, in addition, what it is all about: why it is the case,what its connections are with other facts, in what respects it is different, and so forth. This distinction is familiar in terms of the differences between being able to remember something and being able to explain it. Enlightenment is achieved only when, in addition to knowing what an author says you know what he means and why he says it. (How to Read a Book, 1972 ed., p.11)

How then do we move from memory to understanding or enlightenment? The answer is simple: ASKING QUESTIONS IS THE KEY TO UNDERSTANDING! This does not mean that the exegete has not already asked many, many questions in the process of analyzing the text. Discourse analysis demands that one ask questions of every individual proposition (See the separate hand-out, “Questions to ask yourself in the attempt to determine the logical relationship between propositions”). In the course of discourse analysis, perhaps six of the seven key observational questions will already have been asked (who?, what?, where?, when?, and why?). But even more specifically, all of the questions needed to come to grips with the argument will have been explored.

But now it is time to ask those questions that flow out of the seventh general category, “What is going on here?” In asking, “what is going on here” kinds of questions, we are not concerned with questions of significance (remember the key distinction between the “meaning” and “significance” of a text!). That will come last. At this point we are still working at the exegetical level. All of the questions we must now ask are questions that spring from the text and are to be answered from the same source.

And in asking and answering these questions, never go to a commentator until you have first allowed yourself the privilege of going to the author! And do not listen to gossip without a very suspecting ear. You will be able to tell if your questions and answers come from the text by whether or not they are phrased with and supported by ideas that have concrete expression in the text itself, the relevant historical background, or theological presuppositions used by the author (be careful with this last one, however, that what you think is presupposed is actually there).

“What is going on here” questions are questions that come about because one now understands what the author is saying, but what the author is saying seems to raise problems with what the author is saying! For as Dr. Daniel Fuller has rightly observed:

Whenever someone is imparting understanding, or insight, or a new way of looking at things, he will always say things which seem strange and, at the outset, incoherent with other things that he is saying.

Thus, for example, after analyzing Jesus’ words in Luke 12:1-7 one is troubled by the observation that Jesus commands his disciples to fear and not to fear God at the same time! How is it that Jesus can warn and comfort his “friends” at the same time? And how do Jesus’ words of comfort based on the comparison to the value of the birds hold up in view of the fact that God also throws people into hell? These are questions that flow out of the text and whose answers are essential to really understanding what is going on here! When we are done with our discourse analysis, it will be these “strange…incoherent…things” which will force us to think and understand our author.

Perhaps you are beginning to see how essential a part of reading it is to be perplexed and know it. Wonder is the beginning of wisdom in learning from books as well as from nature. If you never ask yourself any questions about the meaning of a passage, you cannot expect the book to give you any insight you do not already possess. (M.J. Adler, How to Read a Book, p.123)

These are profound words and they are certainly true of the book of books as well! When we come to the Bible, our goal is not to read our old, worn ideas back into the text, but to be brought along to new and deeper understandings of the inspired words of the biblical authors, This means that we will never be happy until we read the Scripture carefully enough to be troubled by what we read and then take the time to formulate our problems into questions to ponder and ultimately solve.

Reading = asking questions that you yourself must try to answer in the course of reading! Here are some general guidelines concerning formulating good questions that I have again taken with his permission from the unpublished work of Dr. Daniel P. Fuller, this time from a paper he wrote in 1977:

• Questions should evince troubledness. Ask questions which show, by the way they are stated and by their nature, that they arose from your being troubled by what you observed in the text as you analyzed its discourse. Experience proves that only when we are faced by a sharply focused question will our answers represent the sort of thinking that is worthy of studying the Holy Scriptures.
• Avoid asking a question whose answer is quite obvious or which makes others feel it is being asked primarily to provide an occasion for bringing out some insight that one thinks a verse or passage contains.
• Avoid vague, strange or abstract language in posing your question. When this kind of language is used, it constitutes evidence that the trouble or uneasiness one feels has not become sufficiently clarified. Remember, you are trying to pinpoint your problem with a question. Work for precision.
• Substantiate your troubledness where necessary, from inferences drawn from the text, not your own theological convictions or Christian experience. Primarily, we want to understand the biblical author better, not each other. Besides, you want everyone to feel your problem; otherwise no one will care about the answer. One of the best ways to both pinpoint a problem and evince to all your feeling of troubledness is to pose a question by asking which of two alternatives (both of which have some plausibility) is true.
• Avoid asking a question that involves some curiosity arising from something incidental to what is said in the text. If you have a hunch that others might think your question is trivial, when in fact it is vital for the way you see the authorÂ’s line of thought, then point out why it is indeed a vital question.

There are also good and bad ways to formulate your answers, either in papers or in the pulpit, or in your own quiet time when asking questions and answering is very important. Here are some criteria to keep in mind for having good answers:

• One part of the answer should be a direct affirmation answering the question. This often should be your first statement.
• Support your answer persuasively by arguments based on the data of the text, and/or some pertinent historical background information, and/or some axiom. Avoid arguing for answers by mere speculation. If we are going to persuade people, then we must base arguments logically on facts, and avoid so-called arguments that consist of speculative plausibility.
• Avoid verbosity in your question and answer. Confine your answer to the conclusion which answers the question and the arguments which support and lead to your conclusion. Many teachers and preachers loose their audience because they cannot keep to the point.

The Question of Significance

Of course, the final step in any exegesis done with an eye toward the Church is to ask “so what?” At this point we are now ready to span the centuries, with some help along the way (do not neglect the great theologians, commentators, and preachers through the ages!), by building the ties between the Bible and us.

Remember that here the key work is “correspondence”! Our significance will only be as good as the meaning upon which it is built and the analogies that bind our two times and problems together. But if we err, we usually do so at the exegetical end! Mining the meaning of the Bible is hard work. As Francis Bacon once said, “some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” There is no doubt which category the Scriptures fall into, or that they are worth our effort.

Let us set ourselves to the task with dedication and anticipation. We have much to learn and the Church has much to gain from it.

For reading is learning from one who is absent. If you ask a living teacher a question, he will probably answer you. If you are puzzled by what he says, you can save yourself the trouble of thinking by asking him what he means. If, however, you ask a book a question, you must answer it yourself when you question it, it answers you only to the extent that you do the work of thinking and analysis yourself. (Adler, How to Read a Book, p.15)

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1. Define exactly what it is you want to know. This involves categorizing all the concepts in your head. Once you have the concept you are unsure of clearly in your head, then you can begin. Don’t ask a question just for the sake of it.
2. Never ask a question in an aggressive manner that indicates you are only asking the question to prove to the other person that you are right and they are wrong, unless they are wrong and refuse to admit it. Ask because you are genuinely interested.
3. Start off with something simple that lets them know that you are about to state your opinion, but realise it is not complete and you are hoping they can fill in some gaps.
4. Lay your concepts/ideas and assumptions on the table taking care to make sure that the other person is fully aware of exactly what your current thinking is, and why you think it.
5. Pleasantly ask for the gap in your knowledge to be filled, and if appropriate, ask them how they know this and what the general trend is that would short cut path to that knowledge. i.e. no use in asking “is that alive? is that alive?” to everything you see, when the general trend is “if it grows and/or moves independently, then it is. otherwise, you can take it as a given that it is not.”
6. Thank the person. Try and return the favor sometime.

Tips:

• Example: “well, up to now, i’ve always thought that classical music was awful music and not worth listening to. Maybe it’s because all my friends hated it. But if musicians and educated men and women enjoy it, there must be something to it. I know you like it, so can you tell me what there is to appreciate?”
• Incorporate the audience into the question. Invite them in with phrases such as- “did you think about..” or “Have you considered this question…”
• Try and read more so you have substance to what you are actually saying.
• Don’t use huge words. They’ll make you sound pretentious. Just tap into your intellectual but friendly side, and don’t worry too much about coming off as brilliant.

Warning:

Watch out for getting aggressive at the response you get if you don’t like the answers you get. If you’re not willing to receive any and all answers, don’t ask the question. Sometimes a person can answer aggressively to your innocent query. Don’t fret. They just think the question was beneath them, and that you are stupid to ask it. You’re not. They are just bitter and have forgotten what it’s like to search for answers. Basically they think they know everything. You know you don’t. You’re the tortoise. They are the hare.

George Mendenhall’s groundbreaking work (”Covenant Forms in the Israelite Tradition,” Biblical Archaeologist 17 [1954]: 50-76) on the parallels of Ancient Near Eastern covenant forms in the Old Testament have greatly nuanced the way we understand the nature of God’s relationship to Israel. It has helped us to put Israel in a more precise historical context among contemporary nations, as well as to see how much differently Yahweh is from the gods of the other nations. Although the structure of Later Bronze Hittite covenants had already been present in Ancient Near Eastern studies, Mendenhall was the first to point out the similarities of structure to portions of the Old Testament. The structural features in which he observed these commonalities were: 1. Identification of a Covenant Giver, 2. An Historical Prologue, 3. The Stipulations, 4. Provision for Deposit and Public Reading, 5. A Listing of Treaty Witnesses, 6. The Blessings and Curses, 7. A Ratification Ceremony, 8. Imposition of the Curses. These are obvious features to observe in the Pentateuch/Torah, which is why there has been very little objection to Mendenhall’s findings. In fact, Meredith Kline has shown at great lengths that Deuteronomy itself fits this structure as exactly as any Late Bronze Suzerain-Vassal treaty. Essentially, a Suzerain-Vassal covenant is a binding oath between a larger ruler (suzerain) and protected nation (vassal) sometimes issued when the larger ruler/nation steps in to help the other in a military campaign (see 2 Kings 16:1-8). Upon the victory of that campaign, the vassal is bound to the stipulations of the treaty in order to maintain the continued support and protection promised by the suzerain. This was ratified by the sacrificing of an animal, as it was normally cut into halves and each party would walk between the halves, symbolically invoking death upon the disobedient party. There would be two copies of the official document drafted, one to be placed in the respective temple of each nation. The covenant at Sinai encapsulates all of these occurrences, and we get a snapshot of this in Ex. 19-24.

Perhaps the reason why “covenant” slips under the radar in modern Pauline studies in the way we are describing may be the relatively few uses of the word diatheke, “covenant,” in his letters. He only employs it 9 times. This may be an indication to some of its de-emphasis because its Hebrew counterpart berit is used about 286 times in the Old Testament. However, we should be careful not to be guilty of the “Word-Thing” fallacy, assuming that just because a single word is not used often that a concept is not fully present. This is particularly relevant considering recent articulation of the phenomena of intertextuality that is littered throughout Paul’s epistles with the Old Testament. Paul was a burgeoning Pharisaic Rabbi before the Damascus Road experience, and he had devoted his life to study the Torah. So although he might not have used the word all that much in his writings, it cannot be overlooked that his entire framework for understanding the nature of theology and ministry was covenantal. We cannot escape this because the Mosaic Covenant/Old Testament had even created the theological terminology that he uses to describe what has taken place in Christ. Consider the following covenant words/themes found in Paul:

•  mediator (1 Tim.2:5)
• minister/servant (Rom.15:8,16; Eph.3:7)
• law (Rom.2:12; 3:19; Gal.2:16)
• commandment (Rom.7:13)
• bless/curse (Rom.12:14; Gal.3:10)
• righteousness (Rom.4:3: 2 Cor.3:9)
• eat/drink (1 Cor.10:3-4; 11:23-26)
• Father/Son (Rom.1:3-4; Phil.1:2; Col.1:2)
• sin/transgression/iniquity (Rom.3:23; Gal.6:1; 1 Thes.4:6)
• atonement/propitiation (Rom.3:25)
• temple (1 Cor.6:19; Eph.2:21)
• Sabbath (Rom.14:4; Col.2:16)
• kingdom (1 Cor.6:9; 15:24; 2 Tim.4:18)
• heir/sonship/adoption (Rom.4:13; Gal.4:7; Eph.1:5)
• redeem/redemption (Gal.4:5; Tit.2:14)
• witness (2 Cor.1:23; Phil.1:8)
• offering/sacrifice (Eph.5:2; Phil.2:17)
• know/knowledge (Phil.3:10; 2 Thes.1:8)

Surely we should be sensitive to the contemporary expression Paul had available to him the Greco-Roman world in which he lived. This serves to magnify the fact that Paul communicated with biblical/covenant language when crafting his more poignant theological dialogue, even to predominantly Gentile communities.

In two specific sections in his writings he discusses at length historical-redemptive covenant theology in 2 Cor.6:1-18 and Gal. 3-4. In these passages, he gives his rationale for why the Mosaic Law offers only death and how the New Covenant transcends by it offering life. In 2 Cor.6:1-18, he zeroes in on the Letter/Spirit contrast resident in the two covenants. He even goes as far as to label the Law of Moses as “the ministry of death” (vs.7) and “condemnation” (vs.9) as it was, written on tables of stone. He contends that this “letter” brings death, surely drawing from his argument in Rom.7:7-11:

What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. Apart from the law, sin lies dead. I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died. The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment deceived me and through it killed me.

He likens the Law to the glory that was on Moses face which needed to be concealed to Israel by a veil over his face (vs.7). Even then, there was a veil over their hearts every time they read the Law (vs.15) because their hearts were hardened by it (vs.14). However, the glory of the New Covenant revealed in Christ is infinitely superior because it does not fade and has no end (vs.11). It is written not on a tablets of stone, but on the tablet of the heart (vs.3), drawing on Ezek.36:26 and Jer.31:33. Since this covenant is imparted directly by the Spirit on the heart with no outside mediator, those in it are now with “unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord and being transformed into the same image” (vs.18). So we can summarize by saying that the Letter/Spirit contrast is about the difference in the nature of the Mosaic and New Covenants.

In Galatians 3-4, Paul focuses on the purpose of the Mosaic Covenant in light of the New Covenant. He is trying to remind the Galatians very forcefully that no one will be justified by the works of the Law (3:11). In other words, no one can please God escatologically by trying to execute their duties as prescribed by the Law of Moses. The reasons for this are because no one is truly able to execute this covenant so we are cursed in trying to do so (3:10), and the purpose of the Law was to make transgression fully visible and never to offer eternal life (3:18-19). This covenant came to bring us into slavery and imprisonment so that we could be rescued by Christ (vs.23-24). So Paul is setting up two different covenantal strands that find their culmination in the allegory of Hagar and Sarah in 4:21-31. Hagar corresponds to the slavery that exists under the Mosaic Law and is demonstrated in the contemporary Judaism that is visible in Jerusalem (vs.25). Sarah corresponds to the freedom that exists under the New Covenant and is demonstrated in the promises God offers His people in the New (spiritual) Jerusalem (vs.26-28). So the Mosaic Covenant existed to serve as a physical template that would anticipate the spiritual realities to come in the new age that has been inaugurated in the death and resurrection of Christ. Thus, in order to partake of this inaugurated Covenant, we need to believe in what Christ accomplished on our behalf and so cast out the “slave woman” (the Mosaic Covenant) (vs.29-31).

One of the New Covenant symbols we carry forward in this inaugurated age is the Lord’s Supper. We don’t often think about it in covenantal terms, but it is very clear in 1 Cor.10:1-11 that it is a covenantal oath-sign. In 10:1-11, we are typologically linked to Israel as they came under the Sinai covenant through Moses in the desert. He points to the way they “ate and drank” and rose up to idolatry (vs.7). Paul’s use of “eating” and “drinking” together in light of the context inextricably link to the Lord’s Supper. This sacrament is brought to light at the start of the next section in 10:16 (”cup of blessing,” “bread which we break”) for the purpose of demonstrating to the Corinthians that there is a spiritual connection between God and his people as expressed in eating and drinking (10:16-22). The tie that may, perhaps, bind the picture of “food and drink” in Israel’s Exodus with the Lord’s Supper is the concept of covenant. “Eating and drinking” was a common oath-sign in Ancient Near Eastern covenant forms, and Israel partook of such “communion meals” during the Exodus period. Paul uses “eating and drinking” this way in 10:7, as quoted from Ex.32:6 where Israel, offered sacrifices and had a “feast to the LORD” (Ex.32:5) after ratifying their covenant with God (Ex.24:7-8). This squares with the Lord’s Supper as the proclamation of the New Covenant death of Christ (11:23-26), and accounts for the severe penalty for eating and drinking unworthily (invoking curse; 11:27-32). Paul argues on both sides of our passage that one is a “sharer,” or “partaker” of the sacrifices from which they eat (9:13; 10:17,18,20). It is the partaking of sacrifices that bind people to their gods/God covenantally, which is why he is so adamant that they should not knowingly eat what is sacrificed to idols (10:22).

So we have provided an orientation for grasping how the concept of covenant was understood and adapted by Paul. This, of course, is short in nature, but perhaps may help percolate thought on further studies for this in his writings.

For Further Study:

Beale, G.K. (ed.). The Right Doctrine from the Wrong Texts: Essays on the Use of the Old Testament in the New. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994

Dunn, James. “Did Paul Have a Covenant Theology? Reflections on Romans 9:4 and 11:27.” The Concept of Covenant in the Second Temple Period. ed. By Stanley Porter & Jacqueline C.R. de Roo. Supplements of the Journal for the Study of Judaism Vol.71. Leiden: Brill, 2003

Gallant, Tim. “Paul and Torah-An Introductory Overview.” forthcoming chapter in his book These are Two Covenants: The Mosaic Law in Paul’s Thought. Monroe, LA: Athanasius

Hafemann, Scott J. Paul, Moses, and the History of Israel: The Letter/Spirit Contrast and the Argument from Scripture in 2 Corinthians 3. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament Series 2 Volume 81. Tubingen: J.C.B.Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1995

Hahn, Scott. “Covenant in Old and New Testaments: Some Current Research (1994-2004).” Currents in Biblical Research 3.2 (2005): 263-292

Hays, Richard B. Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989

Hugenberger, Gordon. Marriage as a Covenant: Biblical Law and Ethics as Developed from Malachi. Biblical Studies Library. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1998

Kline, Meredith G. The Structure of Biblical Authority. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1975

——–. Kingdom Prologue: Genesis Foundations for a Covenantal Worldview. Overland Park, KS: Two Age Press, 2000

Mendenhall, George E. & Herion, Gary A. “Covenant.” Anchor Bible Dictionary. Vol.1. ed. by David Noel Freedman. New York: Doubleday, 1992

Porter, Stanley E. “The Concept of Covenant in Paul.” The Concept of Covenant in the Second Temple Period. ed. By Stanley Porter & Jacqueline C.R. de Roo. Supplements of the Journal for the Study of Judaism Vol.71. Leiden: Brill, 2003

Wright, N.T. The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991

Thanks to Lisa for tipping me off to this.

The new fantasy rules 

By Bill Simmons
Page 2

Editor’s note: This article appears in the July 31 issue of ESPN The Magazine.

You’re not allowed to complain about four things in life: nudity, free food, free drinks and fantasy football. So why would I want to tinker with the latter, a multibillion-dollar business that brings us so much joy? Because we screwed this up from the beginning, that’s why.

You know how pro sports were totally messed up in the ’40s and ’50s, back when the NBA had no shot clock, hockey goalies didn’t have masks and football players went all 60 minutes? Back then, fans thought everything was fine, right? That’s where fantasy is: great concept, semisuccessful execution, tons of potential. It’s not Kathy Griffin’s face; we don’t have to renovate everything, we just need to make some adjustments. And I’m more than willing to be the Winston Wolfe of the whole thing.

Here are the biggest problems, with my solutions:

PROBLEM: Every league has different rules.

Imagine that you and your friends belonged to various bowling leagues, only some used extra-big balls, some used 12 pins instead of 10, some counted strikes as 15 points and so on. How could anyone ever brag about a 300? You’d spend more time explaining your rules than anything else. Well, isn’t that what happens with fantasy football? Some leagues start eight guys, others start 12. Some leagues start multiple QBs, others start one. Some leagues count stats for individual defensive players, some don’t count defense at all. When a buddy tells you a war story from his league, he always has to spend 45 seconds explaining his rules. Complete waste of time.

SOLUTION: The Sports Guy’s rules.

They’re logical. Plus they give me a chance to refer to myself in the third person, like Rickey Henderson. I’ve always wanted to do that. In order …

1. Ten or 12 teams per league, 15 players per teams.

2. Every week you start a QB, two RBs, three WRs, one TE, one kicker, one defense and a 10th man from any position. For that 10th-man spot, only six times can you start a QB, RB or WR. So there’s additional strategy involved: Not only do you need depth, but, since QBs always get the highest points, when you play the “second QB” card one week, you’d better need him.

3. Standard scoring: six points for rushing/receiving TDs; four points for passing TDs; three for FGs; one for PATs; six for defense/special teams TD; one for sacks/fumble recoveries/INTs; two for safeties; one for every 20 passing yards; one for every 10 rushing/receiving yards; 20 points for an arrest. However, there are wrinkles:

A) Five-point bonuses for 175 yards rushing/receiving and 350 yards passing. If somebody has a big day, that should be rewarded. Plus, it gives the “guy who loves to complain about everything, even if his team exploded for 200 points” a chance to complain when one of his players falls a yard shy of the bonus.

B) Shutouts count for 10 points, holding an opponent to seven or less counts for five and holding the other team to under 200 total yards counts as another five. Defenses don’t matter enough in fantasy. In what other scenario is a tight end more important than all 11 guys on the opposing defense? I mean, except for Ben Coates in Madden ‘97?

C) Interceptions, fumbles and missed kicks count as minus-one; any pick returned for a TD counts as minus-six against your QB. We don’t penalize for incompetence often enough. If you were so desperate you had to start Drew Bledsoe, then you should constantly be terrified of his trademark hanging floater toward the sideline that gets picked off by a cornerback running the other way. In other words, it should be like real life.

PROBLEM: Nobody can pull off a schmuck-free league.

Look, the duties of an owner are simple: Don’t bring your girlfriend/wife to the draft; don’t draft someone that was already drafted; don’t draft an injured guy (leading your buddies to be thrust into an awkward position of either screwing you or giving you a do-over); try to field a competitive team; create an offensive team name; start a lineup of healthy players every week; return e-mails or phone calls within 24 hours unless you’re trapped under something; and, when all else fails, at least come up with an occasional funny e-mail or message-board post.

But what about owners who bring nothing to the table and do a terrible job with their team? For whatever reason, it’s less awkward for guys to dump a girlfriend than to discard a deadbeat fantasy owner. There’s always some crazy reason to keep him around, like “It would be awkward for the commissioner to run into him at work” or “Let’s cut him some slack, he’s going through a divorce.” Ridiculous. We already have to deal with too much dead weight in real life, we don’t need it in our fantasy lives.

SOLUTION: The “three strikes and you’re out” rule.

Here’s how it works: During the draft, if you don’t make any jokes and sit there looking like Mike Holmgren watching the Super Bowl XL video, that’s a strike. If you repeatedly take too long to make picks, to the point that everyone is screaming 12-letter expletives every time you’re on the clock, that’s a strike. If more than twice you draft someone who was already drafted, because you aren’t paying attention, that’s a strike. If you draft an injured guy (leading to the aforementioned “should we or shouldn’t we give him a do-over” intervention), that’s a strike. If you spend the entire draft whispering on your cell phone to some unseen partner and ignoring everyone in the room, that’s a strike. If you’re too cheap to buy your own magazines and ask to borrow someone else’s, that’s a strike. If you forgot to bring money to the draft, that’s a strike.

But wait, there’s more. After the draft, if you don’t return an e-mail or a phone call within 72 hours and can’t come up with a valid excuse, that’s a strike. If you go more than a month without sending a group e-mail or making a message-board post that belittles the credentials of someone else in the league, that’s a strike. If you belatedly respond to someone’s e-mail or phone call with a snarky comment like “Sorry I took so long to respond — some of us actually have jobs” or “Just in case you forgot, there are more important things in life than fantasy football,” that’s a strike. If you started someone who’s out for the season, or if you didn’t use the waiver wire to try to replace that person, that’s a strike. If you make a horrendously shady trade, even, if it gets overturned, that’s still a strike. Three strikes and you’re out. Simple as that.

(One other note: If you don’t show up for the draft, can’t do it by phone and have the gall to send a lackey with some half-assed list you make to pick your team, that’s three strikes. Go away.)

PROBLEM: It’s impossible to make it through a season without a one-sided trade causing complete chaos.

We all know that the wrong trade can divide a fantasy league faster than the Spelling family fell apart. In my West Coast league a few years ago, the first-place team had Brett Favre and Peyton Manning. It needed a receiver and traded Manning straight up for Amani Toomer. You read the correctly. Nearly 700 angry e-mails and five near-fistfights later, the trade was somehow approved. If that wasn’t bad enough, the first-place team won the title — Toomer filled a gaping hole at receiver — and Manning’s new team finished second. From then on, we called it Toomergate. And, honestly, I never want to go through anything like that again. It was more traumatic than the last 20 minutes of “American History X.”

SOLUTION: Form a trading committee.

Enlist three unbiased outsiders who aren’t in the league but are friends with a few of the owners. It’s not like you’d have trouble convincing them. They’ll be delighted to kill a few minutes at work arbitrating. And you think I’m kidding. They’ll be like, “Wait, you want me to be on your league’s new trading committee? Sure, I’m available!”

PROBLEM: The free agent system is a complete failure.

You know how someone does a brutal job picking his team and gets rewarded with first choice on the free agent wire every week? “Congratulations, you stunk out the joint; now you get to add a receiver who just exploded for 190 yards and a TD last week!” How does that make sense? You’re almost better off tanking Week 1. Anyway, those days are over.

SOLUTION: A weekly auction.

Give everyone a budget of $100 to spend on free agents. Every Thursday, if you want someone, you bid for him; highest bid wins. Not only is it more fun than humans should be allowed, but there’s some genuine strategy here. Let’s say nobody picks Bethel Johnson, who busts out with a 160-yard game in Week 1 after Joe Horn breaks his collarbone patting himself on the back. And let’s say you need a wide receiver because Chad Johnson blows out his knee dry-humping the upright. What do you bid for Bethel: $15? $20? $25? Isn’t this more exciting than everyone putting in for the same three standouts, followed by the three most incompetent teams landing those guys?

PROBLEM: There are never enough trades, and the trade deadline isn’t exciting enough.

Tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about.

SOLUTION: The deadline is Thursday night, 3 a.m., right before Week 11.

Here’s the catch: On that night, every owner needs to go out drinking with his fellow owners. Nothing greases the skids for blockbuster trades like a few rounds of tequila shots. (I wish we could make this mandatory for pro sports as well.) And if somebody doesn’t show up for the deadline bash and fails to provide a good excuse, that counts as a strike (see three-strike system).

PROBLEM: Unless you make the playoffs, your fantasy football season is done by Week 14.

Everyone willingly accepts a shorter season. Why? Because that’s the way we’ve always done it. Well, isn’t it possible we messed up from Day 1, like when HBO greenlit “Arli$$” and kept it on for seven years?

SOLUTION: Make the regular season last 17 weeks.

Why? BECAUSE A 21-WEEK FANTASY SEASON IS MORE FUN THAN A 16-WEEK FANTASY SEASON, THAT’S WHY!

Here’s how this works:

1. The top four teams advance to the playoffs.

2. Playoff teams can protect just six players from their roster, which makes the original September draft more interesting. Now someone like Tom Brady is worth more than someone like Drew Brees, because of his playoff value.

3. Playoff rosters increase to 11 men: one QB, two RBs, three WRs, one TE, one kicker, one defense and two extra guys (any position). To fill out the last five spots, you hold another, minidraft, via e-mail, in which the playoff teams pick from the teams that fell short. Best record gets the first pick every round, second-best picks second and so on. Regular-season champs get an edge, but not an insurmountable one. Also, there’s a skill to picking the playoff guys: If you like a wild-card team — like Pittsburgh last season — do you load up on those guys or play it safe with the top seeds?

4. Scoring is cumulative through the four playoff rounds. Highest total points wins.

Think about how your life would change with the 21-week system. You get a minimum of three extra fantasy weeks. The whole “fantasy teams getting screwed in Week 16 because contenders rested their guys” debacle is gone. Make the playoffs and you get to prepare for an e-mail minidraft. Like you wouldn’t love that? And in January, not only do you get to watch playoff football, but there are fantasy implications with every game! What’s better than that?

Remember, the whole concept of fantasy is based on procrastination: guys wasting incredible amounts of time preparing to pick the team, then picking it, managing it, arguing about it, following it, rooting for it and alternatively bragging/complaining about it. That’s why we’re involved. We should keep tinkering with the product until we get it right.

If that makes me a world-class complainer, so be it.

Bill Simmons is a columnist for Page 2 and ESPN The Magazine. His new book “Now I Can Die In Peace is available on Amazon.com and in bookstores everywhere.

Everybody knows that they’re guilty
Everybody knows that they’ve lied
Everybody knows that they’re guilty
Resting on their conscience eating their inside
It’s freedom, said it’s freedom time now
It’s freedom, said it’s freedom time now
Time to get free, oh give yourselves up now
It’s freedom, said it’s freedom time

Yo, there’s a war in the mind, over territory
For the dominion
Who will dominate the opinion
Skisms and isms, keepin’ us in forms of religion
Conformin’ our vision
To the world churches decision
Trapped in a section
Submitted to committee election
Moral infection
Epedemic lies and deception
Insurrection
Of the highest possible order
Destortin’ our tape recorders
From here and like under water
Beyond the borders
Fond of sin and disorder
Bound by the strategy
It’s systematic deprivaty
Heavy as gravity
Head first in the cavity
Without a bottom
A fate worse than Sodom
What’s got ‘em
Drunk of the spirits
Truth comes, we can’t hear it
When you’ve been, programmed to fear it
I had a vision
I was fallin’ in indescision
Apollin’, callin’ religion
Some program on television
How can dominant wisdom
Be recognized in the system
Of Anti-Christ, the majority rules
Intelligent fools
PhD’s in illusion
Masters of mass confusion
Bachelors in past illusion
Now who you choosin’
The head or the tail
The bloodshed of male
Or confidance in the veil
Conferences of Yale
Discussin’ doctrines of Baal
Causin’ people to fail
Keepin’ the third in jail
His word has nailed
Everything to the tree
Severing all of me from all that I used to be
Formless and void
Totally paranoid
Enjoy darkness as the Lord
Keepin’ me from the sword
Blocked from mercy
Bitter than cerasee
Hungry and thirsty
For good meat we would eat
And still, dined at the table of deceit
How incomplete
From confrontation to retreat
We prolong the true enemies defeat
Destitute a necessity
Causin’ desperation to get the best of me
Punishment ’til there was nothing left of me
Realizin’ the unescapable death of me
No options in the valley of decision
The only doctrine, supernatural circumcision
Inwardly only water can purge the heart
From words, the fiery darts
Thrown by the workers of the arts
Iniquity, shapen in
There’s no escapin’ when
You’re whole philosophy is paper thin
In vanity
The wide road is insanity
Could it be all of humanity?
Picture that
Scripture that
The origin of man’s heart is black
How can we show up for
An invisible war
Preoccupied with a shadow, makin’ love with a whore
Achin’ in sores
Babylon, the great mystery
Mother of human history
System of social sorcery
Our present condition
Needs serious recognition
Where there’s no repentance there can be no remission
And that sentence, more serious than Vietnam
The atom bomb, and Saddam, and Minister Farakkhan
What’s goin’ on, what’s the priority to you
by what authority do we do
the majority hasn’t a clue
We majored in curses
Search the chapters, check the verses
Recapture the land
Remove the mark from off of our hands
So we can stand
In agreement with his command
Everything else is damned
Let them with ears understand
Everything else is damned, let them with ears understand

It’s freedom, said it’s freedom time now
It’s freedom, said it’s freedom time now
It’s freedom, I’ma be who I am
It’s freedom time, said it’s freedom time
Everybody knows that they’ve lied
Everybody knows that they’ve perpetrated inside
Everybody knows that they’re guilty, yes
Resting on their conscience eating their insides
Get free, be who you’re suppost to be
Freedom, said it’s freedom time now
Freedom, said it’s freedom time
Freedom, freedom time now

by Lauryn Hill

Sorry, I’m on a music kick lately. This song is from Lauryn Hill’s performance on MTV Unplugged from 2002 which is absolutely brilliant. Before I heard it, I only new her as the girl from The Fugees and that Nas video. However, I was blown away by her transformation from pop to folk, or more like gospel folk. She has gone from Hip Hop and flashy dancers to sitting on a stage by herself singing with just her guitar and letting the lyrics speak for themselves. I have never heard of a person of her caliber to call for repentance in their songs. In one of her interludes she comments, “I know a lot of the content of these songs is heavy…”, which is a severe understatement. It is quite obvious to anyone who has heard these songs that she has undergone a major spiritual adjustment of a divine nature. She is now a folk prophetess. Just take a look at the track listing of this double volume:

Disc One
1. Intro
2. Mr. Intentional
3. Adam Lives In Theory
4. Interlude 1
5. Oh Jerusalem
6. Interlude 2
7. Freedom Time
8. Interlude 3
9. I Find It Hard To Say (Rebel)
10. Just Like Water
11. Interlude 4
12. Just Want You Around
13. I Gotta Find Peace Of Mind
Disc Two
1. Interlude 5
2. Mystery Of Iniquity
3. Interlude 6
4. I Get Out
5. Interlude 7
6. I Remember
7. So Much Things To Say
8. The Conquering Lion
9. Outro

Anyhow, she has been virtually unnoticed recently, so I thought I would mention her because what she is saying should not be overlooked or ignored. Take a listen at Amazon or LegalSounds.

If you twist and turn away.
If you tear yourself in two again.
If I could, yes I would
If I could, I would let it go.
Surrender, dislocate.

If I could throw this lifeless life-line to the wind.
Leave this heart of clay, see you walk, walk away
Into the night, and through the rain
Into the half light and through the flame.

If I could, through myself, set your spirit free
I’d lead your heart away, see you break, break away
Into the light and to the day.

To let it go and so to find away.
To let it go and so find away.
I’m wide awake.
I’m wide awake, wide awake.
I’m not sleeping.

If you should ask, then maybe
They’d tell you what I would say
True colours fly in blue and black
Blue silken sky and burning flag.
Colours crash, collide in blood-shot eyes.

If I could, you know I would
If I could, I would let it go.

This desperation, dislocation
Separation, condemnation
Revelation, in temptation
Isolation, desolation
Let it go and so to find away
To let it go and so to find away
To let it go and so to find away

I’m wide awake, I’m wide awake, wide awake
I’m not sleeping
Oh no, no, no.

Lyrics by U2

I know it is widely acknowledged that this song is about Gareth Spaulding who was a friend of Bono that died because of a heroin overdose: “I wrote the words about a friend of mine, his name was Gareth Spaulding. And on his twentyfirst birthday he and his friends decided to give themselves a present of enough heroine into his veins to kill him. This song is called ‘Bad’” (comments Bono made at a show in Sweden in 1987). However, I cannot escape a simultaneous connection with the experience of the apostle Peter after he tried to protect Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. “Where in the world are you getting that?” you may ask. Well, picking up on the Judas experience in “Until the End of the World” from Achtung Baby, I thought it wouldn’t be strange for Bono to identify failings and regrets of others around Jesus, particularly those viewed positively. What really hit me was the refrain “I’m wide awake, I’m not sleeping”. At first, I began to think of the Transfiguration, where Peter, James, and John fell asleep praying (see Luke 9:30-33). But then I also thought of the other occurrence of sleeping during prayer while they were in the Garden (see Luke 22:44-46). Thus, I got the thought that perhaps “Bad” was Peter rehearsing after the fact what he would do if he could do it again. He had limited his scope on Jesus and the nature of his kingdom to the extent that in both of the events mentioned above, he ends up making suggestions that in restrospect are so bone-headed both of which are intended to keep Jesus around rather than let him go. Anyway, that seemed to fit with the verbage of the song, particularly the fact that he was now “wide awake”. Perhaps I’m wacked out, but Bono is accustomed to weaving different layers into his lyrics so I personally wouldn’t put it past him. I also wouldn’t bank on it. But, whatever.