iMurphy

What am I trying to get at?  My past few blog posts have unleashed a furor of unhappiness from some quarters because of what I’m supposed to be saying.  A very important Christian concept is “Not Either/Or but Both/And“.  I think Kierkegaard came up with that formulation.  When I say I’m for right living and I poo-poo over-intellectualization, I’m not advocating cutting off your head.  My pastor, Rob Rayburn, gave an important lecture series on the Christian Dialectic.  (as opposed to the Hegelian idea of the same.)   He (Rob) addressed the specific problem of enthusiasm vs intellectualism in his sermon on Form vs. Freedom.  In short, I think all aspects of our personhood are important and we’re overemphasizing one of them.

On the surface, Presbyterianism seems like a good mix of heart and head.  Good theology, sensible worship and compassionate living all seem to get their fair shake.  However, in practical outworkings, it tends to be a bit more like “an orange on a toothpick:” a great, big head.  I can see how the current setup might work fine for people who grew up in the church, and already have friends and family to turn to.  But if you were saved out of the World, like me, discipleship and mentoring are very lacking.  I even know one pastor who said Elders in the Church aren’t Pastoring Elders, they’re Judging or Ruling Elders.  This means that the Pastor and the pastor alone is shephard of the flock and that Elders only need to get deep into their people’s lives when they’re screwing up.  Add this to the monomaniacal way pastors are supposed to pursue sermoncraft, making two beefy sermons per week, and their is no one left to hold the hand of people without family.

As a father of a new Christian family, I can appreciate the Doctrine of Covenant Succession, especially in our modern, Church climate of Revivalism.   I’m glad to know and achieve the right perspective that a majority of Christians throughout the ages have been nurtured, not evangelized in their Faith.  BUT, that is not me.  As it is, when my pastor doesn’t answer my emails, I’m out in the cold.  When an elder is put off by me personally, and so doesn’t communicate with me, I have nothing.  Without active, extensive discipleship and a heavy emphasis on being deep in the lives of others around us in Church, I end up with the same experience by going the Building to hear the sermon live as I do downloading it and listening to it on my iPod: right now, there is no difference in my life.

I don’t want to go to another denomination, because I believe the PCA is right on 99% of doctrine.  However, if somewhere else if more helpful to coverts from the world and not just its children, then maybe I need to until I grow up more.  I grew so much when my Assemblies of God mentors watched me and I had to express my faith to newer believers as I mentored them.  I read lots of books and hear lots of sermon/podcasts, but I feel a lot like a raw nerve dangling in space, without a tooth to sheild me.

I realize after my previous post why no one will ever join me at Reformed Word dot org: I don’t know how to say what I mean in proper theological jargon! I am also afraid that what I am advocating is unique, which is probably not a good sign that others will come to the same conclusion.  I’ve only made it half way through the Derek Thomas episode of Castle Church, but I have to write before it all slips away in a blur of work and children.  Being autistic, I am very bad at laying out my thoughts in a way comprehensible to others, but I must try.  I shall attempt to explain my understanding of Epistemology, what Dr. Thomas got wrong and what Church leaders ought to be doing.

When I read Van Til, I am come to a very different conclusion from many others, I think.  His invention is called “Presuppositional Apologetics”, but the apologetics parts doesn’t seem that important.  I boil down his approach to an extremely expansive take on Romans 1: that all people know God but willfully put down that knowledge, because they’d rather not.  Moreover, this is true of worldly-Christians (read Arminian) or even the best of us, in that we think we’re being logical, but really we using pseudo-rationality to further our own ends.  Van Til came to his conclusion rather alone because he has read so much Kant and Calvin, a rare combination.  Kant tried to show that we know nothing about the Noumenal world, only that which is mitigated through our senses, a Phenomenal world.  Van Til showed that even logic is not fool proof in the hands of the ungodly, and we must examine (like Kant) what are the necessary preconditions for Rationality to be possible, in order to maintain unassailable presuppositions.

What this means practically is that no system of thought is safe that does not rest on God’s Word, and even there we are prone to misinterpretation, and only by God’s grace do we know anything.  After all, our knowledge is analogous to God’s knowledge: it is not perfect or exhaustive like His.  God knows everything about everything, where it comes from, where it’s going, its actualities and its potentialities.  In the Garden of Eden, Evidentialism failed Eve because she held God’s word and Satan’s word in equal weight, and her own decision cast the deciding vote.  Absolutely Everything is moral and must always be regarded as such, even if we cannot decern the morality of it ourselves yet.  The Word of God must be our Norming Norm, and no intellectual endeavor is trustworthy alone.

So when I hear Derek Thomas say that it’s right and proper for a pastor to be a lover of books, I’m a little mixed.  Surely this is adiaphoros, neither good nor bad on its own, merely part of Paul’s personality.  Peter said Paul’s writing were hard to understand, and though Paul wanted his parchments, John wouldn’t write with pen and ink what he had to say (3 John).  If it is possible to do a thing as a heathen, then we cannot call that thing especially Christian.  No unbeliever can preach a true sermon about Christ’s sufficiency.  No unbeliever can be joyful and sorrowful in the midst of affliction and persecution.  No unbeliever will reason that God breathed out His Word in the Bible or that His handiwork is on display in every atom and cell and galaxy.  On the other hand, scholarship and the academy are done MOSTLY by heathens in a heathen way.  Any study of books which can be done without drawing closer to Christ is at best adiaphora.  Christian’s should love God with the whole mind, but is that really what’s going on?  If you can do a thing and not feel convicted, awestruck and grateful, it is necessarily not a Christian thing.

Dr. Thomas calls this worldly aspect of theology “Philosophical Theology”.  I suppose I think too much of the word Theology to permit such vain, not-Christ-saturated things to be called Theology.  What I take from Van Til (and no one else seems to) is that we must make EVERY AREA of life inescapably Christian.  If we can do science without God, we’re doing it wrong.  If unbelievers can engage in New Testament Biblical Theology and Q-vs-Johannine Biblical Theology, then it’s not Biblical Theology.   Am I wrong?

So I got in a bit of a dust up with R. Scott Clark on his blog the other day. He quite pompously scripted a confession of sin for people who’d been suckered into the Federal Vision movement, which included a call to repent of paedocommunion. I’m no FV guy, but I am convinced of paedocommunion, so I asked him how his script applied to me. He called me an Eastern Orthodox, un-Reformed person and told me to get out of any Reformed denomination! Now I’ll admit, pro-paedocommunion is a minority position within Reformed circles, and my own denomination ruled on it, so I can’t practice it. But to say there is no diversity within the Reformed tradition, and that anyone who diverges from the Westminster Confession should just get out is pigheaded and mean-spirited.

This whole fight and my recent listen to the Castle Church podcast episode on Federal Vision have lead me to a conclusion: people who do theology have their head in the sand!  Above you can see I made a graph of how I perceive the spiritual and academic climate around myself.  Most people aren’t college educated.  Most people outside of the Bible Belt aren’t Bible literate.  Most people who are church attendees have no concept of church history.  A lot of people in mainstream denominations aren’t saved.  Most committed Christians who attend church weekly, read their Bible and are saved have no idea how to engage the secular culture.  And we spend our time using abbreviations like ST and BT for systematic and biblical theology?!

What is the point in being Reformed?  What is the point in being Saved?  To restore our fellowship with God, to redeem the world and pleasing God with our whole lives.  Ultimately, it’s about giving God all the glory, for He is worthy of it.  There are millions of dying people all around us, suffering horribly in this life and destined to suffer worse for eternity.  It is impossible to be so heavenly minded so as to be no earthly good, but it is possible to be so academically minded as to be no practical good.

Has anyone else who runs/uses a mediawiki site had common.js issues lately?  I’ve never been able to see, looking at the source code, where Common.js is loaded, but it’s always worked…until now.  All of a sudden, my navboxes quit working, as well as all the other functionality done in Common.js.  The file itself is unchanged and I can’t imagine what else I did do my site.  In case you’re curious, my mediawiki site is reformedword.org .

As you are no doubt aware, there is a large movement about in our time called Open Source.  With this tech industry movement came an entire culture, saying that knowledge ought to be free.  There is a small but present percentage of such adherents who are Christian, even some who believe that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God and the final, greatest authority for our lives, carrying the message of Salvation for all persons.  The Bible itself, both its original texts and ancient translations, is older than copyright and not subject to such laws.  Indeed, failure to transmit the Bible (with additions or subtractions) would be easily regarded as a sin by most devout Christians, going against the Great Commission.  As information is circulated more and more freely, some people who made their living in old ways are being displaced.  For example, as young people are more and more content to read documents online, places like the Gutenberg Project will displace publishers of public domain books to a greater and greater extent (though never entirely).  Already in your domain, the entire Greek Bible is available in parsed form, free, from places like unbound.biola.edu .  Perhaps you will never let down your “walled garden“, but it is only a matter of years before enough people “crowd source” the task and duplicate your data.  You do not nor can not own a copyright of the study of the Bible.  I wish you financial success and thank God for what you’ve done and what it’s done for pastors (mine!), but like all industries that make a living on stockpiling information, you will inevitably see that ours is no longer an information economy, but a service one.  One cannot make a living off of ideas for long, since they can not be contained and can always be duplicated.  Please consider contributing to the community of low-income Bible students and finding profit at a more lasting place on the value chain.

The previous was from a letter I sent to a professor at a Reformed Seminary, who makes a living off of royalties from Biblical texts.

I have found lots of extensions for Firefox (here), but my most recent is It’s All Text! It allows you to edit textarea’s in your favorite external text-editing program. I couldn’t get it to work, however! I read in the creator’s blog about how he seemed to solve the problem, but I still had to type the solution by hand into the preferences, as mentioned here. So, I’m reposting this solution in an effort to help the Mac community out. Blog on!