• On mythical Gentiles
• On Cornelius the Centurion

For example: Are the actual Gentiles who are more righteous than Jews relevant to Romans 2?

15 And as he reclined at table in his house, many tax collectors and sinners were reclining with Jesus and his disciples, for there were many who followed him. 16 And the scribes of the Pharisees, when they saw that he was eating with sinners and tax collectors, said to his disciples, “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?” 17 And when Jesus heard it, he said to them, “These people all completely agree with the Heidelburg Catechism. So they meet the conditions for my fellowship.”

…It is included in the acknowledgment that a body of Christians is a Church of Christ, that we should commune with its members in public worship and in the sacraments and allow them to commune with us. This follows from the spiritual unity of the Church; from its having the same faith and the same Lord and God, and from the conditions of Church membership being the same for all Churches. A member of the Church at Jerusalem was entitled to the privileges of the Church of Antioch. If he was a Christian in one place, he was no less a Christian in another, and the rights of a Christian belonged to him wherever he went. It is obvious that this principle, although true in itself, is limited in its practical application. There may be something in the mode of conducting public worship or in the administration of the sacraments that hurts the consciences of other Christians, and prevents this freedom of communion in Church ordinances. If a Church requires all who partake of the Lord’s Supper to receive the elements upon their knees, should any man conscientiously believe that this posture implies the worship of the consecrated bread, he cannot join in the service; or if a Church is so unfaithful as to admit to its fellowship those whom the law of Christ requires should be excluded, other Churches are not bound to receive them into fellowship. These and similar limitations do not invalidate the principle. It remains the plain duty of all Christian Churches to recognize each other as Churches, and hold intercourse one with another as such. And it is also their duty too make nothing essential, either to the existence of the Church or to Church fellowship, which the word of God does not declare to be essential.

Fortunately, Calvin’s conception of the relationship of baptism to other important doctrines of Scripture is not difficult to ascertain. The reason for this is found in his very detailed and lengthy response to the theology that developed from the Radical Reformers. In a passage from his discussion of infant baptism, Calvin assails the Anabaptists and others of similar conviction by claiming that their rejection of the equation of infant baptism and circumcision results in a horrible corruption of Scripture.

Read the rest: Calvin’s Covenantal Response to the Anabaptist View of Baptism.

Thanks to Scott Moonen for making this available

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I’m giving this two stars because it did have an interesting alternative world. I got about 2/3 or 3/4 through it and gave up when the girl kissed the bad boy. This is teen-girl-lit except I wouldn’t encourage any teen girl to read it. The descriptions of skin, jaws, eye-lashes, bred like maggots throughout the text.

And the similes! Who will save us from drowning in them? I can’t remember any thing or event in the book which wasn’t described as “like” “like” “like” x 50 billion something else. When I heard a sentence on how he or she “deflated like a balloon pricked with a pin,” I began striking my forehead with my fists, repeatedly, like a pinata with a layer of bone around the thick oozing candy.

And every single character who describes anything to anyone else also abounds in using the similes as well!

The combat scenes seemed bizarre because things that should have happened fast somehow allow for shouted warnings and elaborate evasions.

Hearing the story read put me in mind of Saturday morning cartoons like Super Friends. That struck me as an apt embodiment of the writing. Only with more boy crushes.

As a Christian, I didn’t approve of the pluralistic, agnostic stuff that coated the otherwise medieval urban fantasy. This did not offend me however since I didn’t expect anything else. I did not with satisfaction that for all the talk about how a mosque or synagogue would work just as well, readers got to tour a Roman Catholic Church to get weapons to fight against vampires.

By the way, vampires and werewolves as enemies is getting really old. And vampires are getting even older. I was glad that much of the story centered on demons rather than these other two.

To end this back on an positive note, I did think the actual story, as far as I got through it, was an interesting plotline.

View all my reviews >>

Read the whole thing: Why Wright is Right « City of God.

DugDownDeep_Carnahan.mov from Covenant Life Church on Vimeo.

N. T. Wright has really helped me see how the Christian life in Paul’s letters is all about “theology proper.” Who God is means something essential about who we are.

This was a great video. My only worry is that it is used to vindicate some rather dry and lifeless stuff–it can be used in a kind of bait and switch. You see this great video and it motivates you to go to a church or attend a class that trains you to be a first class Pharisee.  A vision of life pulls you into a community of arrogance and self-exalting slogans that you are proud to own because others don’t.

That’s not the video’s fault; just something I’ve grown to be worried about.

Especially insightful: the deconstruction of WWI and Woodrow Wilson.

That is why the ruling class is united and adamant about nothing so much as its right to pronounce definitive, “scientific” judgment on whatever it chooses. When the government declares, and its associated press echoes that “scientists say” this or that, ordinary people — or for that matter scientists who “don’t say,” or are not part of the ruling class — lose any right to see the information that went into what “scientists say.” Thus when Virginia’s attorney general subpoenaed the data by which Professor Michael Mann had concluded, while paid by the state of Virginia, that the earth’s temperatures are rising “like a hockey stick” from millennial stability — a conclusion on which billions of dollars’ worth of decisions were made — to investigate the possibility of fraud, the University of Virginia’s faculty senate condemned any inquiry into “scientific endeavor that has satisfied peer review standards” claiming that demands for data “send a chilling message to scientists…and indeed scholars in any discipline.” The Washington Post editorialized that the attorney general’s demands for data amounted to “an assault on reason.” The fact that the “hockey stick” conclusion stands discredited and Mann and associates are on record manipulating peer review, the fact that science-by-secret-data is an oxymoron, the very distinction between truth and error, all matter far less to the ruling class than the distinction between itself and those they rule.

via The American Spectator : America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution.

via The American Spectator : America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution.