Thanks Ligioner

A conference is on sale (DVD) that looks promising, to say the least. It's called The Power and The Glory, and features fourteen 45-minute messages:

Strange Fire (Ferguson)
I Will Be Your God (Wilson)
The Glory of God (Sproul)
In the Beginning: The Glory of God from Eternity (Mohler)
The Glory of God Through Man (Sproul)
The Glory of the Promise (Ferguson)
The Power of the Promise (Wilson)
The Myth of Influence (part 1) (MacArthur)
Questions & Answers
The Family As a Key to Reformation (Sproul Jr.)
The Glory of the Power (Ferguson)
The Myth of Influence (part 2) (MacArthur)
Questions & Answers
Beholding His Glory (Sproul)

It's selling for $68.00, which is down from $85.00. The link is on my title.

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

Every two years or so, I will run across a book that completely transforms the way that I view Scripture. The list so far includes Easy Chairs, Hard Words by Doug Wilson, Mere Christianity by Lewis, Images of the Spirit by Meredith Kline, The New Testament and the People of God by N. T. Wright (or Not Wright, as he is affectionately known: a common comment is "Leithart doesn't want your answer; he wants the Wright answer"), and, as I got lucky this year, Fruit of Lips by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy.

This book is phenomenal. It is comparable to Kline's Images in size: a mere 134 pages, and is staggering. He also appears to have a few problems, and his erudition can at times be difficult: his syntax is elevated, to say it nicely. But the content! The content is simply beyond anything I could have ever imagined. The book is on the four gospels, and why there are four. I think that there are a few "When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail" problems, but overall, his book is solid gold.

Click on my title to preview it. Then buy it. Then memorize the thing, and your time will not have been wasted.

Hallelujah!!!

I have a friend at school (difficult as it may be to believe) that is named Ashley Hoogendam. I took it upon myself to call her Nefarious Dam of the Hoogens, partly because it just made me happy, and partly because she reminds me of a mix of Ashley Menza and my dad when he's drunk: very happy, very sweet, loads of fun, and an absolute joy to be around while being kind of amusing by the very fact of her existence (I'll leave you to figure out which parts go with which), and all of that in the best possible sense. In a word, a really great girl.

Anyway, she decided to come up with a nickname for me. My hopes were not high, and I was rather amused, as no one has yet come up with a nickname for me that has stuck (save H, and hers were hers alone: my brother couldn't exactly call me Luv without generating confusion, mixed emotions and perhaps a crowbar to the head), but Nefarious Dam of the Hoogens has succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. I am:

Broussaardvark.

Not My Fault

I have a roommate, see? And he has a family, see? And every once in a while, they tell him something odd which he relates to me and I am ethically obligated to pass it on to you, see? So the following is not my fault: as Michael Scott says, "I'm just the middleman. You wouldn't arrest a guy who's just selling the drugs, would you?"

What is the difference between a Jew and a pizza? (No, it's not that vile answer that you've all heard.)

Pizzas don't hate Jesus.

Thank you Rob Linn, we are all inspired and deeply moved.

Response for Nate

Thanks to Nate for his comment, here's a prolonged response. He asked how we as Christians should think of earthly revenge.



The obvious answer is that we should avoid it, but I think it's slightly more complex.

In the Mosaic Covenant, the law prevented escalating conflicts by capping it at "eye for eye," etc, and that was extended by Christ with the blanket "turn the other cheek," which we all know. But the context of turning the other cheek assumes that the cheek is yours, and when it isn't, things do get a lot more messy really quickly: look at the Amish school shootings, or the "Deny Christ or I'll kill your son" scenario.

My personal standard on evil is that not all evil is an evil: there are many hard providences given to us by God, and we are to be stewards of them as much as of the blessings. (Which is why I hate Thomas Kinkade paintings with a passion. There is no conflict, no dragon to fight, and as such they are lies of a utopian world, and are a symptom of a generation of weak and cowardly Christians that fear pain rather than God and pine for the nursery while God calls for men to run with horses and love not their lives even unto death: look at His response to Job: "I make the young eagles lap up blood; I clothe the horse's neck with thunder...")

I would hold with Augustine's Just War theory so far as it goes--we don't fight the unarmed and the non-combatants, and we only fight to defend that which is ours and is being attacked--but when the attack has taken place and is out of our reach, I think that we are fully justified in exacting a punishment that meets the crime when the crime is against someone that is in our charge, though I don't think that we generally should.

The ideal situation is that we would have a just magistrate that wields the sword, and as a general rule, we should submit to the magistrate even when he is not just (such as our entire system), but I think that specific exceptions could arguably be made. The ones that come to my mind--the exceptions that I would be willing to make--are for rape and child abuse: were those committed against someone in my charge--against my wife or child--I think that I would be willing to kill the perpetrator, and I would consider it an execution. But for that I have no Scriptural leg to stand on, beyond the chasm between the actual law and our pathetic imitation of it.

This of course breezes by all of the possible factors: how much time has elapsed, who it was that committed the crime, was it an ongoing pattern, what was the nature of the crime, and on and on.

I guess that the bottom line for me could be summed up as follows: I would be willing to enforce God's law when it comes under my authority and when it is a hill that I'm willing to die on, so to speak.

Taken

I just went and actually spent money to go see a moving picture in the place with the really big TV and all the strangers loudly eating popcorn. The movie was Taken, and it was simply magnificent.

First, the disclaimers: the movie deals with girls being sold into the sex trade, and there are a few scenes that pushed the envelope in that arena (two scenes of girls being displayed in skimpy clothing come to mind), but it was done in a way that was the opposite of titillating: it was, to be honest, more reminiscent of Tom Wolfe's I am Charlotte Simmons than anything else. It was designed and effectively used to build up a very real hatred of the villains.

Also, there is an off-color joke in the beginning of the film, but one that would go over the heads of most younger viewers, kinda like when Holly watched Lady and the Highwayman and thought that "Carnival of pleasures" included a merry-go-round and cotton candy. There is a smattering of language, noticeable at the same time as the joke. This was the most awkward part of the movie, as it develops the lead character in a great rush: ex CIA, trying to reconnect with his daughter, to whom he has been a real jerk of a non-father. This section lacks continuity, but rapidly smooths itself out, and is not that bad anyway: it isn't to the point of distraction, it just doesn't have the same finesse as the rest of the movie.

Finally (on the objection front), is the most serious of the objections, and the only one that I could see actually posing a real problem: the ethical question of some of the violence used. The vast majority of it was necessary, and was done tastefully, not graphically. But there were a few parts where Neeson fudges the line between combat and simple brute violence to get done what needs to be done. The gray areas are absorbed into the white, and it is something that should be taken into consideration.

With that out of the way, let me say that I loved this movie, far more than I thought I would. The characters are developed so that we actually care about them, instead of the usual mild warm and fuzzies that we have toward the victims, we have a real sympathy and connection with the somewhat gangly, emotional and almost awkward daughter wearing lo-top converse with shorts on under her summer dress as she ecstatically tackles her dad in a very sweet scene. We respect and like Neeson, as he rapidly adapts to any situation, and uses his connections to try to give his daughter whatever he can, and we understand his ex-wife (which I had not expected).

Then, the movie takes off. Neeson is shown to be a very calculating beast of a man willing to do anything, to break any rule to recover his daughter. The phone conversation will become infamous, though to be honest, it could have been improved. The action picks up, the crooked cops, the hunting, the fighting, the interrogations, and the all-out war: "You don't remember me. We spoke on the phone two days ago. I told you I'd find you..."

It is brilliantly done, and is a very sweet movie in a very odd way. Neeson's magnificent voice and commanding presence make the movie what it is, as does the daughter's naive sweetness. It was a great, fun movie. It wasn't pretentious, and, incredible for it's genre, managed to (mostly) suspend disbelief through the one-man holocaust that is visited upon the evil sex-traders.

And, topping it off for me, it had some very satisfying scenes: the spotter that "got away," the rather expensive electric bill, the personal touch in an elevator, and the negotiation on a boat were all times when I felt like applauding, and the random guy sitting next to me felt like moving a few seats down.

Very fun, very good, and a very needed break. I highly recommend this movie.

Nice...

"I'm not gonna lie to you. If you want to make an omelette, you gotta kill some people."

Wilson

Taken from: www.dougwils.com

Unless They Don't Need It
Topic: Parable

Once there was woman who would get overwhelmed with her housework from time to time. She was industrious, and not lazy at all, but there were times when it just got away from her. Her husband was considerate and thoughtful, and so he surprised her one day with the news that he had hired someone to come in every Tuesday to clean for her, to help her keep on top of things.

She was very grateful, at least in terms of what she said, but he did not notice the look of reserved and quiet panic in her eyes.

The following Monday when he came home from work, he noticed that the house was sparkling and his wife exhausted. "What happened?" he asked. "Did she come a day early?"

"No," she said. "She will be here at 8 tomorrow morning."

"Why?" he said. "This place is spotless."

His wife looked indignant. "You don’t expect that I would let someone else see the house in the condition it was in, do you?"

"Umm," her husband said.

And so it is with everyone who won’t get help unless they don’t need it.

Confession

I confess: not only did I watch the Super Bowl, but I actually enjoyed myself. But don't worry: I'll wear my hair-shirt for a month as well as increasing the self-flagellation from one hour to two.

More Great Music

I should have more nights where 350 pages of reading is assigned: I get so much more posting done. A magnificent album that is very worth the price I paid for it eight years ago is Don Potter's Facing the Wall. It is instrumental, and possibly not for everyone, but is a display of absolutely magnificent guitar music in various genres. It has crept into almost every playlist that I have, and I've yet to tire of it. Terrific album. Click on my title.

Great Music

The Shoemaker Brothers are a band that is fairly local to our Moscow area, though they will be touring the west coast shortly. Their music is acoustic rock in the best sense: violins (yes, that's plural), guitar, piano and drums or bass. Each of the four brothers plays all of the above instruments, and that quite well. The vocals are in some places iffy, and in others downright distracting, but all in all it is very worthwhile. Click on my title for their link.

Hermeneutics: "Apocalyptic"

Tonight, or early tomorrow as the case may be, I will finish N.T. Wright's tremendous book The New Testament and the People of God. This 400 page magnum opus serves as his introduction to Jesus and the Victory of God, and its magnificence is hard to overemphasize. It reinterprets everything from the Pharisees to the Macabaeans and Hasmoneans, and all done exegetically, soberly, conservatively, and eruditely. Of all the books that I have read in my NSA career, this one has been the most illuminating (save perhaps Capon's eloquence upon the onion) and the most paradigmatically momentous. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Among all of this brilliance, he has a magnificent throw-away paragraph on the exegeting of Apocalyptic literature:

"We do this all the time ourselves. I have often pointed out to students that to describe the fall of the Berlin Wall, as one well might, as an 'earth-shattering' event might perhaps lead some future historian, writing in the Martian Journal of Early European Studies, to hypothesize that an earthquake had caused the collapse of the Wall, leading to both sides realizing they could live together after all. A good many readings of apocalyptic literature in our own century operate on about that level of understanding."

N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, page 282: Part III: First-Century Judaism

Ouch.

"But no matter how many helpful things you say, if you leave the really huge question out, then all you are really displaying is a real loss of proportion. "Well, other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?"

--Doug Wilson
click my title

Intriguing Speech Compilation

This speech compilation is actually really funny: "Shame on you..."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6wRkzCW5qI
or click on the title.

Enjoy.

Absurd Levels of Design

In his very enjoyable book Blink, Malcom Gladwell comments that there was a group of people in WWII assigned to intercepting messages in morse code. They did not understand them at all, as they were in German and in code that we hadn't broken, but they were able to figure out who was sending them simply from the sound of the tapping. Each of the thousands of different Germans sending messages had a distinctive way of doing so: not a distinctive pattern of speech, but a distinctive pattern of tapping. We assigned people to follow each of the senders, and after several weeks, in a mix of several thousand messages, one person could be picked out. This enabled us to track them all across Europe, and, if we knew who they were traveling with, we would know what groups of infantry, what tank divisions were being moved where.

Lewis Thomas' book The Lives of a Cell, in which he employs his delightful prose on an incredible range of topics, offhandedly mentions that termites have an odd method of communication: tapping: "From time to time, certain termites make a convulsive movement of their mandible to produce a loud, high-pitched clicking sound, audible ten meters off..." Along with this there are the whale-songs, the "strange, solitary and lovely bell-like notes" produced by bats, the prairie rabbits, hens and mice that all drum their feet, "Fish make sounds by clicking their teeth, blowing air, and drumming with special muscles against tuned inflated air bladders... Even earthworms make sounds, faint staccato notes in rhythmic clusters..."

The list is literally endless. And no two of these would have the same exact sound, and not one of these was not planned from before the foundation of the earth. "The more we know, the more we realize we don't know, and we're learning so fast, it won't be long before we know nothing at all." We learn to sing that we might glorify God, but are still being out-done by earthworms. And how do they even make a sound? With what?

Quotes

Some Christians hold, thorugh a misunderstanding of this passage (1 Peter 3:3), that 'it is a sin to wear make-up.' Peter is teaching that it is a sin for a woman to look like she fell face-down into her make-up, or like she puts it on with a trowel" (Her Hand in Marriage, p. 50).

Wilson vs. Hitchens: CBN News

Fairly nice.

Ontological Suicide

"In the New Testament field, some critics have made a great song and dance about the fact that the details of Jesus' life, or the fact of his resurrection, cannot be proved 'scientifically'; philosophical rigour should compel them to admit that the same problem pertains to the vast range of ordinary human knowledge, including the implicit claim that knowledge requires empirical verification."

--N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, page 34.

Always enjoyable to watch an opponent fall on his own sword.

Pining for Mount Doom

Craig, James and I are currently sitting in James' and Sproul's room. Why? Because it is toasty warm, and all of the other rooms are so cold. Outside, it is four degrees (with a wind chill), and it got up to sixteen degrees in town today, though at our house, only up to twelve. My goatee has frozen on five different occasions. Our water pipes froze (despite being insulated), and will not be thawed till tomorrow. To top it all off, our furnace has broken. How warm is it in our toasty-warm little cave? With our mighty space heater on full blast, it just crested freezing.

NSA Choir Christmas Concert

This is the NSA choir (not the entire school--two seniors are missing), and our first big performance. It actually turned out rather well, and there should be a higher quality video coming out before too long.