Here’s a good note about the whole fuss with the cartoons of Mohammed. What does it say about the difference between the two religions, that nobody ever gets assasinated for showing disrespect to Christianity? If we did, we’d have to kill half the western world. But make fun of Islam a little bit, and there’s rioting in the streets.

It’s a childish stupid religion that cannot tolerate any dissent, that gets violent whenever anyone else fails to toe the line. And it’s only encouraging more of the same for anyone on our side of the fence to say we should give in and avoid offending them. Just being alive and not Muslim is an offence to them.

Religion of peace my foot. It’s the religion of illiterate babies. I know it hasn’t always been so. But it sure is now.

Two sermons have been uploaded. Both are from Acts 24. One is “Integrity in Adversity”, and is a comparison of the way the Jewish priests, Felix the governor and the Apostle Paul all behave when confronted with challenges and opportunities. The other is “The Resurrection from the Dead”, and is a demonstration of the hope that we have in eternity, the hope that motivated Paul to live the way he did. Link’s on the sidebar.

I have added two blogs to my blogroll, and it’s especially fun to me since they’re both RCUS blogs.

The first is Simplicity, from a member of my congregation. It’s full of the ponderings and experiences of a dear Christian lady who’s learned from experience to live her faith. I enjoy it; I’m sure you will too.

The second is Soli Deo Gloria, and I’m not as familiar with it as Simplicity. But it’s a thought-provoking read, exploring issues and thinking through passages. It’s been profitable to me so far.

I’m a very new pastor to the RCUS, but I was, as far as I know, the first RCUS blogger, starting all the way back in September of 2003. It’s nice to see more coming along all the time.

About a year ago, I posted an article regarding the salvation of Catholics, prompted by the death of John Paul II. I took the position that regardless of all the accretions and heresies that have accrued in Catholic theology, they still trusted in Christ for their salvation, and thus salvation might be possible for them, even for a knowledgeable Catholic. As I’m sure you recall, many of you took me to task for my views.

I decided to do some research on the subject, and since we were dealing with a particular man, it seemed to me most appropriate to address the writing of that particular man. Or actually, his speaking. I found a book call The Way of Christ, which is actually a series of lectures that the former Pope delivered to groups of college students at a retreat in the ’70s. It’s a little dated, but hopefully it will give us some insight into the beliefs of this man in particular.

From p. 72, on the subject of witness:

“This [Christ giving Himself to mankind] is constantly taking place through Christ, because he is constantly creating us, coming to us sacramentally and creating us from within, to the extent that we allow and in accord with the opportunities that we provide….

“However, there is a second aspect of this situation, inasmuch as we too create Christ. This is not an empty expression, for the Christ we create is known as the Church. We often hear it said that the Church is the mystical body of Christ and that we are part of it; we are its components, or, if we want to retain the anaolgy, its cells. So we can say in a certain sense that he depends on all of us. The mystical body of Christ, the Church, depends on us; it is our creation or our work. The action begins with him: he creates us, and we, who have been created divinely by him, in turn create him, the church.

“My dear ones, we create him first and foremost through the witness we bear him. I have said this in different contexts in the past few days. We create Christ above all because we bear witness to him.”

What follows from this is a discussion of the crucial role that the church, martyrs and Mass all have to play in “creating Christ”. The church, therefore, is in an ongoing process of creating Christ and recreating Christ through its witness, which puts the RCC’s reliance on tradition in a whole new light for me.

From p. 73:

“You may have been struck by the fact that at Mass the priest bends and kisses the altar. He does this because the altar contains relics of martyrs who bore witness to Christ with their death…”

The priest therefore consciously involves the worship of the martyr with the worship of Christ, since the martyr played a part in creating Christ, and in “a certain sense” WAS Christ, because the martyr bore witness of Christ, and it is bearing witness of Christ which creates him in us and us in him.

Now, on p. 84, turning to the subject of prayer, John Paul II tells us that we pray because we know God exists, and everyone prays, whether they know what they are doing is prayer or not. Then, this:

“We can understand the expression ‘witness of Jesus Christ” in a very specific and literal way. We all know who Jesus Christ was, and we know how he gave his witness, a witness made up of deeds and words…

“The witness of Jesus Christ can be broadened to include all God’s revelation to mankind from the beginning to the end. Thus the witness of Jesus Christ contains both the original revelation which we find in the first chapter of the book of Genesis, and also later revelation, linked to the history of the People of God in the Old Testament…

“Believing means having the witness of Jesus Christ within oneself, and many people do have it. However, people have it and carry it within themselves in very different ways: Christians do so, as is clear from their name and from their baptism, but non-Christians also do so, in a different manner. Since the Second Vatican Council we have come to see this question more clearly and accept it with an open mind.”

The former Pope has therefore said that God communicates revelation to man in a variety of ways, that all of this revelation is “bearing witness” of Jesus, and that containing this witness within you is “believing” in Christ. Therefore, not just the church, but all of mankind, insofar as they believe anything true at all about God, are bearing witness of Christ, and per the previous section, are therefore creating Christ and being created by Christ. The witness of Christ includes what we see in the Bible, what we see in creation and what we see through the history of God’s people, both Old Testament Israel and New Testament church.

Having read this material, I believe I can now very safely come to the conclusion that the Pope was in fact teaching “another gospel”, and is therefore anathema. He has denied the importance of belief in the Gospel; he has denied that faith in Christ is the only way to heaven; he has blurred the distinction between God and man; he has mocked the need for Christ’s death. To what degree this theology is the theology of the whole RCC I am not perfectly aware, though the RCC certainly did say that people other than Catholics can go to heaven, and now I know what they mean when they say that.

I thought I’d throw in this gem, too: On p. 23 of the book, talking about Christ and turning his attention for a moment to Mary, he says this:

“When God first revealed his plan for the incarnation of his son, he spoke to the serpent about the Mother of God: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; she will bruise your head. (Genesis 3:15)

“She was with Christ at his birth and also at his death. Thanks to Mary we are with Christ. Through her, as her descendants; hers and his; his and hers.”

I bet you didn’t know that all our Bibles have Genesis 3:15 wrong. The Vulgate says, “_She_ will bruise your head, and you will bruise her heel.”

We can therefore add to the Pope’s crimes, that he denied that salvation was by Christ “alone”; it was in fact by Christ and Mary, according to him.

Instapundit quotes the New Republic [reg required] on the crisis in the education of boys.

I didn’t read the New Republic article since I didn’t bother to register. But it seems from Instapundit’s comments that it doesn’t say much about the causes.

I have a theory that has to do with the idea of “ghettoization”. I don’t know what the original source of this thinking is, but the idea is that as an activity becomes associated with one particular group, others who don’t want to be associated with that group eschew that activity. So for example, no straight man dare like Barbra Streisand because that is widely perceived as a “gay” taste.

This theory is already somewhat developed in relation to race in schools. Black students who try hard to excel at academics are often accused of acting white, if they are in certain kinds of schools.

My theory is, that academic success in school has become associated with “girlish” behavior so that boys stop trying. I believe this to be an inevitable artefact of mixed-gender mass education.

We all know that girls mature faster than boys. I taught high school briefly, and my experience (confirmed by all the more experienced teachers I knew) is that in junior high and early high school, most of the best students are girls. This is true in all subjects. I was a math teacher, and even though math is often though of as a more male discipline, my best seventh through tenth-grade students were almost all girls. By eleventh grade it started to balance out and by twelfth most of my calculus students were boys.

But it is very hard for a boy to be bested by a girl at anything. Boys are very competitive generally, and it is hard on their fragile adolescent egos to be so completely dominated by girls at something. Further, the whole structure of school is geared toward rewarding more typical female behavior. Aggression and competition are both dirty words in most schools, yet these are the things that motivate males. So, I believe that out of defensiveness over their difficulty competing and their inability to fit easily into the modern school structure that seems at every turn to try to force them to act less like boys and more like girls, they opt out of the system entirely and bolster and affirm their manhood in other ways, ranging from the relatively harmless like video games, to the quite harmful like joining gangs and beating homeless people with bats.

We need to rethink our approach to education, especially of boys. Homeschooling and gender-segregated education both do a lot to address this issue, as there is no longer an unfair comparison being drawn between boys and girls generally in either system. The approach has lots of benefits for girls too I believe, though I’m not going to get into all that right now.

Education needs to be about more than just churning out lots of little cooperative worker bees. For boys, we ought to be engaged in training them to be men, and we ought to be thinking about the best way to do that. Encouraging them to be more like girls seems destined to fail, and it is.

I have often heard Christianity presented by the “God-shaped hole” image. Perhaps you’ve heard this? The idea is, we all have a hole in us, a hole that only God can fill, and we keep trying to fill it with other things like sex or drugs or work, but only God can fill that hole. I find this presentation of the Gospel highly problematic and objectionable.

It seems very much to me that the “God-shaped hole” presentation is essentially an argument for syncretism. Syncretism, as you may recall (if you don’t, go read the original article) is the attempt to mix the worship of God with the worship of other things. It is basically the fundamental sin of the people of God, that which leads the external body to apostasize over and over.

The “God-shaped hole” presentation is saying that there’s nothing wrong with my life per-se, there’s just something missing, and if I add that one thing, which of course is God, then everything’s going to be fine. But the call of the gospel is not to add Jesus to my life as-is. It’s to accept the need for my life to be radically transformed. This is why we call it being “born again”. Of course, we didn’t call it that first. Jesus did.

Spiritual rebirth is the basic way that Scripture talks about salvation. One aspect of salvation is inseparable with death, and the other aspect is rebirth. Jesus says that we must “take up our cross” and follow Him. Taking up our cross does not mean accepting some unpleasant burden, it means accepting our death. Paul talks about the putting off of the old man and the putting on of the new. All of these expressions talk not about the need to simply add something to our life, but about the need to be rid of the old nature and to accept a new nature from God.

To put it another way, salvation means accepting that our whole lives must be turned over to God for radical transformation. The “God-shaped hole” idea does not adequately express this idea.

As the old saying goes, you never get a second chance to make a first impression. The way that we first communicate the gospel to someone is likely to stick with them for a long time. When we convince someone to accept the gospel on false pretenses, specifically that they can simply add the worship of God to all of the idolatry and wickedness already in their life, then we are converting them to syncretism, and we leave them not really any better off. God can of course work through our weakness, and such a conversion may eventually result in a healthy mature Christian, but this is no excuse for bad theology going in.

The Bible is clear- the reason we need salvation is that there is no good in us, that is, in the natural man, the man as we are before salvation. All of that evil and rebellion must be destroyed by the salvation of Christ. We must be, in our entirety, nailed to the cross with Him if we are to be resurrected with Him. Yes, this is a much more confrontational model of understanding the gospel than the “God-shaped hole”, and I think this is one important factor explaining the popularity of that model. People can accept the idea that they just need to add God to their lives. This preserves their autonomy and concept of self-worth. But it is precisely this autonomy and perception of self-worth which must be destroyed. They are the primary obstacles to a true relationship to the God who created us.

Any presentation of the gospel which does not strike against man’s essential desire to remain in control of his life is not valid. Any presentation which affirms his value and worth apart from God is likewise not valid, and must be rejected. Just because an evangelical tool is popular and seems to produce results is no reason to accept it. Making a convert is not the goal. Making a convert to the truth is the goal. For we must ask, when we make a convert, what are we converting him to? Pray we are not like the Pharisees who make a proselyte, and when he is made he is twice the child of hell as we ourselves.

Hello, my loyal readers! If you’re still checking in with us, despite this blog not having been updated in close to a month, thanks very much. Christmas break has extended somewhat beyond Christmas, but I’m ready to get back to some serious thinking again.

I’ve posted four sermons. Three of them are from Acts and one is one of my Christmas sermons. There’s a sermon on slander, one on the origin of Paul’s ministry and the way he defends that ministry to the Jews, and one on Paul’s efforts to reach his final destination to Rome. My Christmas sermon is on the complete nature of Jesus’ redemption. God bless you all in the new year!

The Old Testament prophets spoke frequently of the coming of the Messiah. Here’s one such promise, from Isaiah 61:
1 The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound;
2 To proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD, and the day of vengeance of our God…

Like many of the passages that speak of the coming of the Messiah, this one associates God’s vengeance with the coming of the Messiah. The one who is sent by God will bring vengeance on God’s enemies.

God makes these kinds of promises very often in the Old Testament, promising that He will save His people from their enemies, and keep them safe when the Messiah comes. He promises that He will vindicate His good name and destroy God’s enemies, who are also the enemies of the people of God. And it was for this reason that Christ came into the world, according to Mary’s song of thankfulness to God recorded in Luke 1:46-55.

Now at the time that Jesus was born, the Roman Empire held sway over the Mediterranean world. The Roman Empire was probably the most powerful empire that had existed up to that point. And considering the technology that they had to work with, you might make a case that they were the most powerful empire that has ever existed. They were proud and cruel. They had destroyed many nations, and put many other nations under tribute. They were the uncontested masters of the Mediterranean world for over four centuries.

And besides the Romans, there were many other groups that hated God and His people. There were the Syrian kings who ruled Palestine in the name of the Romans, of whom Herod is the best known. There were also the Jewish religious rulers of the day, the Pharisees and the Saduccees, who would so often come into conflict with Jesus during His ministry.

The nations of the world were under the sway of Satan, and many of Israel’s own people were under Satan’s sway as well.

But God is God, and of course He will vindicate His good name. He has the power to flood the earth, send fire from heaven, strike men dead of disease or send His mighty angels to earth. One angel was sent against the Assyrian king Sennacherib, and in one night killed 185,000 of his men (2 Kings 19). He could send whole battalions of angels with shoulder-fired rocket launchers against His enemies if He so chose. But what did He do?

He sent a baby.

You are perhaps familiar with the expression, “I’ll beat you with one hand tied behind my back.” Competitive people sometimes seek to prove their superiority by winning even while handicapped in some way. When God seeks to demonstrate His awesome power, He decided to destroy the nations of the world with only a baby.

There’s nothing more helpless than a baby. The infants of the animal world are very often able to fend for themselves from the moment of birth. But a human baby will die in just a few hours without constant attention. It takes years before a baby is able to do the simplest things for itself.

And this particular baby was born to a poor couple away from home, in the territory of a king who so desperately wanted to hold onto his own power that he ordered all the babies from that region killed.

At Christmas time, we often focus on the nostalgia of childhood, the cute images of baby Jesus, the trappings of a sentimental religiosity. But God did not send Christ into the world to give us an appealing target for our nostalgia. He sent Christ into the world to save His people and destroy His enemies. And to demonstrate God’s awesome power, He did all of this with the weakest of things, an infant.

Even when Christ grew, with all of His incredible power, He never used it for His own benefit. He never used it to strike down His enemies, as I very often want Him to do when I read the gospels. When conspired against by numerous powerful enemies, when betrayed and abandoned by His friends, He did nothing to defend Himself, but went as a lamb to the slaughter, looking to all the world as the weakest and most despised of men. And it was in this moment, of His greatest apparent weakness, that He struck the shattering death blow against the powers of all the world and Satan together.

People so often boast against God, if not in words then by our actions. We so often believe we can escape judgment, that we can defy God’s laws and create our own kingdoms on earth free of His rule. When God moved to demonstrate the utter foolishness of trusting anyone or anything other than Him, He showed His immense power by laying in the dust all of the glories of earth. And He did it with the weakest of all things. No chariots, no horses, no armies. No lightning bolts, or fire and brimstone. No huge marketing campaigns, grand taxpayer-funded schemes, or well-funded lobbyists.

Just a baby.

Discussions about Christian liberty all too often seem to focus merely on what it’s not. I sometimes feel that the only thing some folks understand about liberty is not using it as an occasion to the flesh. “Liberty doesn’t mean you should do whatever you want.” OK. I agree. But what does it mean?

Unfortunately, Christian liberty often seems to be presented as merely a matter of ethics, what we are and are not allowed to do, and as a secondary issue to the core of the faith. But Scripture says different. Our liberty is the core of the gospel. It is the gospel.

Galatians 5:1- “Stand fast therefore in the liberty by which Christ has made us free, and do not be entangled again with a yoke of bondage.”

What is the bondage that he is contrasting our liberty with? The previous passage speaks of the analogy of Hagar and Sarah, teaching that Hagar (Sarah’s slave, given to Abraham as a concubine to try to achieve the promised offspring a different way since Sarah was too old to have children) is representative of the bondage to the law. This analogy is made explicitly. Hagar represents a covenant, made on Mount Sinai. That covenant was the Ten Commandments, and the whole system of law and religion that arose out of that. That covenant gives birth to bondage according to Paul.

Why is this so? Did God make a mistake? Did He give us something bad? Of course not. May it never be, as Paul says in another place. The fault, of course, lies in us. We are sinful, carnal, unable to keep that covenant. But Paul attributes our bondage to more than simply the obligation before God to be righteous, which we could never keep. He attributes it to circumcision, which is the emblem of the religion of Moses.

The Mosaic system was a system built around guilt. Every sin, every defilement, every shortcoming had to be faced, called to attention and dealt with. In every aspect of life they were reminded of their wickedness and their uncleanness, and had to constantly pay attention to every detail of their lives to avoid coming into contact with defiling things. All of the ceremonial aspects of the law simply called attention to the fact that they lay under a great weight of sin, a weight which was constantly accumulating. The only possibility for dealing with this sin was in throwing oneself on the mercy of God.

Those Old Testament saints who had faith in God’s word knew this. They knew that the sacrificial system was not a way of clearing away their sin debt with God. The sacrificial system could not reconcile them with Jehovah. Their sins had not been ceremonial sins; how could they be reconciled to God with ceremonial observances? And so David says, after his terrible lapse, Psalm 51:16-17
“For you do not desire sacrifice, else would I give it: You do not delight in burnt offering.
The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, A broken and a contrite heart — These, O God, You will not despise.”

The sacrificial system, rather, kept in front of them their guilt. It highlighted to them the impossibility of ever achieving freedom. It brought them into bondage.

Abraham, unable to father a child through Sarah, attempted to father a child through Sarah’s slave, Hagar. The result of this union was Ishmael. Ishmael was not the child of the promise, and in fact mocked Isaac when he was born and was an oppressor and enemy to Israel all their days. Sarah said, when Isaac was born, that the child of bondage shall not be heir with the child of the free, and Abraham, recognizing the wisdom of this statement, sent Ishmael and Hagar out of his house.

It was after the birth of Ishmael, when God told Abraham that the child would come by Sarah, and by promise, not by the works of the flesh, that God gave the rite of circumcision. Circumcision, according to Romans 4, was a sign of Abraham’s faith in God’s promises, but it was not given when he first showed that faith, but rather when he attempted to accomplish God’s promise by his own efforts. It was therefore a reminder to Abraham that he could not make God’s promise happen by his own effort. It was a reminder of guilt. And so, Peter says in Acts 15 that circumcision, and the whole regime which it symbolized, was a burden which neither he nor his fathers could bear, and Paul says in Galatians 5:2 that if we are circumcised, then Christ does not profit us. Not that the physical act itself has significance, but that if we look to circumcision and the observance of the law as the means by which we will achieve the promise of God, then we fail to understand circumcision, we fail to understand our need for a redeemer, and that redeemer who has come will not benefit us at all.

The child of the promise, the child of the freewoman, was Isaac. Isaac came by the power of God alone, miraculously rejuvenating Sarah’s body who was far past the time of childbearing. We become free when we recognize that it is God’s power which accomplishes God’s promise.

But every creature of God has an intended purpose. Our purpose was to glorify God by reflecting His image. Being free means being at liberty to be what we are intended to be. We don’t make a fish free by throwing him up on land. The fish is free when it’s in the stream, where it’s supposed to be. When Christ freed us, he freed us from the curse of the law, and from the bondage of sin. No longer does Sinai loom over us constantly reminding us of our worthlessness and defilement. But does that mean we can now revel in our worthlessness and defilement without worry? If we understand our liberty, we understand that it means that having been freed from that condemnation, the way is now open to us through Christ by the power of the Spirit to become what we are supposed to be.

Romans 5:14ff makes it clear that men were in bondage long before the law of Moses was ever given. This is because the Law of Moses was simply the amplification and restatement of the law of God which is written on the hearts of men. To be free from that law requires being free from sin itself.

Jesus says that he who sins is the slave of sin. Being free in Christ must ultimately mean being free from sin. But if we go back to the law as the means of achieving that freedom, we again come into bondage. The law teaches us about the moral nature of God, and when freed from the curse of condemnation, the law plays an important part in the life of the believer, showing us that intended state. But it will never provide us with the power to achieve that state. It is the gospel of Christ, ministered to us by the Spirit of God, which provides that power.

So if we were to use our liberty as an excuse for vice, it is not that we are taking liberty too far. We are failing to understand liberty. We are failing to understand what it is that we have been freed from. We are not called to be free just a little bit. We are called (John 8:36) to be free indeed. That is, not freed just partially, not freed just in some respects, not freed just in appearance. Free indeed, in reality, completely. Free to be what we are intended to be.

And to do this, according to Paul in Galatians, it is necessary to cast out the bondwoman and her son. What is the bondwoman? The covenant on Sinai. What is her son? Bondage engendered by that covenant. Guilt. A covenant is a means of disbursing some benefit or blessing. The blessing promised by the covenant was perfection and fellowship with God. The means of achieving that was law-keeping (Exodus 19:5; Deut 4-6). We must accept the New Covenant, which is in the blood of Christ (Matthew 26:26; Luke 22:20). The end is exactly the same- fellowship with God and perfection. But the means could not be more different. It is accomplished by God’s promise of grace and forgiveness, not by our righteousness.

The New Testament worship reflects this. We have a worship focusing on grace, not on guilt. We have a worship constantly holding before us the forgiveness of sins, and the new glorious path of freedom which now stretches before us, the path which leads to heaven and perfection, and fellowship with Christ.

Katie was helping Andrea put away the groceries tonight. She was carrying in a box of crackers, which I was explaining were fancy crackers. She said some were for her and some were for me. Then she sneezed. She’s not great about covering her mouth under the best of circumstances, but with her hands full, the cracker box bore the full brunt of the sneeze.

I said, Oh, now they’re sneezed on.

She said, It’s OK, it’s just a little sneeze water.

I said, Oh, good, that’s a relief.

She sneezed again. (Her old man’s a double sneezer too.) But apparently she sensed a difference this time.

That was a booger sneeze, she said.

Remember people, she’s only three and a half. Don’t condemn her. If you have to condemn someone, condemn me. But a kid needs encouragement at that age.