This was on All Things Considered last night (original story here.)

We rarely get a glimpse of the profound effects of sin like this: human beings placing their most private, gnawing shames on display. Not that the effects of sin on are hidden from us. Creation groans with devastating, shuddering sobs. Depravity becomes clearly recognizable when silhouetted against blood stains on school floors, adulterous husbands starving inconvenient spouses, or governments starving inconvenient populations. But the sin, guilt and shame of the soul remains safely locked away. Invisible.

I admit that I routinely dismiss the spiritual needs of the wealthy. Their shiny new autos sport fine leather interiors and seat warmers. Their healthcare may be a bureaucratic maze, but there is no gripping dread when they hear their little child come running into the house crying. They need not pray for their daily bread.

Yet look at those postcards and remember how such comforts provide no buffer against the ravages of depravity. Our chrome-plated accoutrements are this century’s magic amulets worn for protection against the inner plagues. Still the conscience remains disfigured by buboes, clear harbingers of impending spiritual convulsions and inevitable death.

Here is where the power of God’s grace proves most miraculous and effective, lest we forget. Does the Gospel of Christ change wicked social and economic structures? Is it true that there is not a single thumb’s width of the universe over which Christ does not say, “Mine”? Yes. Without doubt. But the power of the Gospel begins with God’s reaching out to the souls of these postcards, those consciences which stand condemned, knowing the weight of guilt and shame. This Gospel is no simple prayer for God’s wonderful plan for your life: it is the genuine washing of the soul, the imputation of every node of guilt onto the innocent, holy Son. Wealthy humans may have difficulty responding to such grace, despising their comforts for the sake of their salvation, but our need remains as our gasping breaths grow ever more shallow and frantic. Jesus Christ is our true water, our light, our salvation from such a mire.

I read the whole paper pretty much every day (that is, if you use “read” in the loose sense of perusal). It has become a time-consuming habit, but still worth it, I think, to discover what is happening locally. Occasionally you get an article which lifts the curtain on cultural mores. Saturday we got three.

The front page news was Terri Schiavo. The woman is now being starved to death by her adulterous husband, who seems determined to ensure the woman’s death rather than wash his hands of her care by entrusting her back to her parents. Culturally there is much at stake with letting this brain damaged woman slowly die, and in contrast to the conclusions of some, this woman’s story provides the pathos and passion we need to put a face on the issue of life and cultural responsibility (see Dr. Groothuis’ piece for a well-written exposition of the social and moral issues working out here).

In Saturday’s paper, the social reaction to Mrs. Schiavo’s situation was buttressed by two almost surreal articles printed on the same page. The first piece talks about the surreal activities requested by Hunter S. Thompson with regards to his cremated remains. Evidently he would like the ashes of the body in which he refused to live shot from a bizarre 150’ tower topped with a double-thumbed fist. How eccentric! How charmingly odd! First the writer famous for his dependence on chemicals and alcohol bravely blows his brains out in the room next to his young grandson, and now he maintains his eccentricities from beyond the grave with this nonsensical “tribute.” Note the words of his widow at the end of the article: “You wonder if the joke is on us, don’t you?” I can emphathize with her: the woman’s husband put a bullet through his head rather than deal with the pains of living. But she and the others in the house poured cocktails and raised their glasses to toast the man in the same room with his gruesome, still-warm corpse. There was no sense of tragedy or loss. That bullet was just the inevitable gonzo exit of a man not bound by social or moral conventions. (Note Lileks’ commentary on Trudeau’s handling of the thing [the “WTH?” paragraph])

Perhaps the most disturbing article is this one. Here a brilliant young man takes his life violently, and his family endorses the action with brave resolve, replacing Thompson’s alcohol-soaked eulogies with New Age nonsense: “Brandenn was very deeply spiritual. His mind was too powerful for the limitations of the physical world. He knew it was his time and he needed to move on.” Look at all the good he did! He gave up his organs so that others could continue living. This was not a desperate, short-sighted act of an isolated teen: it was the inevitable spiritual evolution of a soul too wise for this world.

Where is the rage? Where is the trembling sadness? I can understand how various individuals and families might adopt varying and unorthodox mechanisms to deal with the sudden trauma of suicide and death, but the larger culture should not fail to mourn such losses and rage against the dying of their lights.

Now when Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet, saying to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled. And he said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.”

Jesus wept.

1. I have messy handwriting.
2. I met my wife in 7th grade.
3. We started dating in 10th grade. That’s more than half of my life ago.
4. We got married six weeks after graduating high school.
5. She was totally hot then.
6. She still is.
7. I have three children.
8. They are all homeschooled.
9. Most unbiased observers report that they’re well-behaved.
10. Well, yeah.
11. I was born in 1972.
12. I’m about 5′10″ tall, and around 165lbs.
13. I used to wear glasses (a very mild prescription).
14. As of May, 2004, I am a part-time M.A. student at Denver Seminary seeking a degree in Philosophy of Religion. I’m not anymore. Job+kids+school+no vocational reason for it=just too hard.
15. The label “Evangelical Christian” applies fairly well to me.
16. But labels are complicated. You have no idea.
17. I brew my own beer.
18. Most of the time it works out pretty well, no matter what Lileks thinks.
19. I have a dedicated refrigerator in the garage to hold the fruits of my labor. It was given to me by a teetotaler.
20. I have some hope for his eventual repentance.
21. It turns out that refrigerators assume that the ambient temperature in their operating environment will always be higher than their internal set point.
22. On a related note, a hot pad in a refrigerator during a January cold snap will keep beer from freezing.
23. I squeeze the toothpaste from the end. I even used a little plastic device to harvest the most possible toothpaste from the tube as it’s used.
24. This sort of anal-retentive behavior does not apply to the tidiness of my desk. Unfortunately.
25. I am the second of five children. Our birthdays span 14 years.
26. I have a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Engineering from the little-known Florida Tech.
27. I’ve been writing software for more than two-thirds of my life, professionally for one third of it.
28. I started when I was ten.
29. My first computer was a Vic 20, followed by a Victor 9000, followed by a Commodore 128, followed by an Amiga 500, followed by a succession of nameless, faceless, loveless, beige-box PCs.
30. My first real computer program was called “Cipher.” It would encode and decode text in Caesar’s Cipher and Railfence. It was written in BASIC.
31. String manipulation has come a long way since LEFT$(), RIGHT$(), and MID$().
32. I learned BASIC from a paperback book bought from a cheap little newsprint flyer from Scholastic Books.
33. Next was 8086 assembly language, which my dad taught me, with the help of a photocopied 8086 reference manual. Then came C, which I taught myself from the pedagogically unfriendly White Book (first edition) by Kernigan and Richie. Then came Pascal (college), Visual Basic (first consulting job), C++ (later consulting job), various microcontroller assembly languages (too many consulting jobs to remember), and Java (respectable day job that started as a consulting job). Nothing very exotic.
34. I am an Oracle user.
35. I am a Linux user.
36. I am an Enterprise Java developer.
37. To use Struts is not to love it. But I use it anyway.
38. I am an amateur astronomer and astroimager, but I don’t put as much time into the hobby as some people do.
39. I have turned out some decent images.
40. I drive a 2002 Toyota Tacoma. I have taken it off-road several times, loaned it for sundry moves and landscaping projects, and hauled various loads. It’s good to have a pickup.
41. I am not much of a video gamer, but I am a sucker for AOE. Still.
42. I have good friends in Mongolia, Spain, and a couple of Central Asian countries.
43. I have been to Spain, but not Mongolia, and not Central Asia.
44. I have been to Taiwan on business.
45. I’ve been to Mexico on pleasure.
46. It’s very difficult for me to eat a meal without reading something. I think I get this from my mother, who always read while she ate.
47. I was born in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania.
48. I was five when my family moved from there to Colorado.
49. My wife and I lived in Central Florida for five years.
50. My son was born there.
51. My wife loves the climate there. I hate it.
52. I love the climate in Colorado. She hates it. (I could handle a little more rain, if it didn’t mean increasing the humidity and the bugs.)
53. Only in my early twenties did I finally start eating hamburgers with cheese on them. I’m just now starting to experiment with tomatoes and onions, but mushrooms and ranch dressing are welcome additions anytime.
54. Only in recently have I developed a taste for Asian food.
55. People of informal theological education would call me a “Calvinist.”
56. People of formal theological education wouldn’t use the term without the quotes.
57. I believe that God freely and immutably ordains all things that come to pass from all eternity.
58. I believe that I am always free to do what I want to do.
59. I believe that I am never free not to do what I want to do.
60. I believe that negative consequences obtain if I do things that are unethical or illegal.
61. I believe that I have a duty to do what is right.
62. I believe that I wouldn’t have wanted to follow Christ if God had not specifically enabled me to want to.
63. I am an amillennialist, although hardly the best-informed one in Christendom.
64. The label “complementarian” applies fairly well to me.
65. Yet I would also be okay describing my union with my wife as an “equal regard marriage.”
66. This is a labeling problem, not a self-contradiction, nor even a significant internal tension.
67. I do not prefer the label “traditionalist” or “phallocratic misogynist.” (I’m just saying, is all.)
68. I do not use the term “traditional” as a pejorative.
69. I have been known to teach adult Sunday school occasionally.
70. I think the Calvinist doctrine of the Lord’s Supper is a basically a good option.
71. In the past I have been disenchanted with all known theologies of baptism, but I’ve finally allowed myself to be a paedobaptist. It’s a huge relief.
72. I did kind of wait until all of my children profess faith to make this change, so my conversion isn’t exactly the weightiest ever.
73. I take a fairly sacramental view of worship.
74. I think the Emergent Church movement does a decent job identifying some of the problems in evangelicalism.
75. But it has no clue what the solutions should be.
76. Yet it pretends to.
77. And its positive philosophical program is straight from the Pit.
78. I am a foundationalist of one kind or another.
79. I know this makes me uncool in some circles.
80. I am pretty experienced at being uncool.
81. I do not recall ever having voted for a Democrat.
82. I believe that party trumps person in the two-party system, so I’m not too upset about the previous point, nor do I think it is indicative of an insufficiently reflective political mind. Quite the contrary, in fact.
83. I look like my father. Especially with the beard.
84. I was a pretty little girl. My youngest daughter looks a lot like me.
85. Her sister looks a lot like her mother.
86. I’m not afraid of the color purple.
87. I do not see dead people.
88. I generally like open-source software. Given the choice between open source and a proprietary solution, I’ll probably want the open-source one, all things being equal.
89. Of course all things usually aren’t equal. But when it comes to software components of interest to enterprise software development, open-source solutions usually have meaningful qualitative advantages over their proprietary counterparts.
90. I am almost never interested in modifying the source code. Life is too short.
91. Life is, in fact, short.
92. My affinity for open source software is not because I’m a Marxist.
93. I am a capitalist. This means I believe that private property traded in free markets is in general the most just and efficient means of allocating scarce resources and creating and distributing wealth.
94. It seems to me that capitalism requires some public-sector regulation in order for markets to remain free. Antitrust laws, workplace safety laws, and environmental protection laws may be good examples.
95. I expect that the project of strong artificial intelligence-the creation of a sentient computer program-will result in a perplexing failure.
96. But I’m excited to see how close we can get.
97. I believe big-bang cosmology is fairly easy to integrate with the evangelical faith.
98. I do not believe evolutionary biology is as easy to integrate.
99. Absent the assumption of naturalism, I don’t think evolutionary biology is all that great of an account-although it is not as laughably bad in all cases as some may suppose it to be.
100. In any case, I’m not on board.
101. I don’t always mind anticlimactic conclusions. That’s just how it is sometimes.

It’s not that I find any problem with Zondervan’s choice of flower for the cover of their new gender-specific edition of their gender-neutral translation. But don’t you think it just a little bit odd to pick the one flower that has become the central symbol for a Certain Adherence to Logic and Veracity from Inner Netherlands? And (ahem!) five of them? Perhaps I have just come to assume that any given behemoth publishing house (especially one directed by less than theologically-sound parents) would avoid such direct and confrontational symbols on the front of their niche bible.

(On the other hand, what Keswick -inspired man, surrendering to the Holy Spirit’s power and purification, would touch this with a ten foot pole? [or an 8′ 7″ Ukrainian , for that matter?] And what do you think all those high-voltage power lines are supposed to mean?

“Johnson, let’s see your layout design for the new men’s edition of our Emasculated Line.”

“Right. Well, um, here goes: Tah-dah! Whaddya think, chief?”

“Hmmm…‘Strive’…Good, good. Those holiness jacks only buy our KJV stuff anyway…‘real life issues as a man.’ I like that. Good. Now, tell me, Johnson, why is this guy taking a leak over this little hill here?”

“Oh! Well, boss, we just thought that it would appeal to the manliness of our demographic. Studies show that many, many of them, especially given recent publishing successes , feel that urinating out of doors is the key identifier of themselves as men.”

“Well, be that as it may I don’t think that little Edna will appreciate seeing a tinkling fellah on display when she shuffles into the store to buy her new Kinkaid figurine. Howzabout we just airbrush out that actual golden shower? The men will be smart enough to see what’s really going on, won’t they, Johnson?”

“Oh, sure, sir. You bet. This is one sharp demo we are dealing with.”

“Grood. I mean, good…nicely done, Johnson.”

“Thank you sir.”

“Oh. One more thing.”

“Yessir?”

“Power lines.”

“Power lines, sir?”

“Give me some high-voltage power lines across here. Lots of them. I want to men to hear the hum of God’s power when they glance at this cover, gahdammit. I want ladies with hairy underarms to demand more health studies when they walk by the display.”

“Yessir. Right away. Powerlines. You think five or six?”

“Johnson. If I see less than 18 power lines on that cover when it rolls off the presses, let’s just say you will be our poster child for gender neutrality.”

Here’s the final version of the draft I posted last week. I’ve posted it as a PDF, as it has 41 footnotes, and I don’t yet have a convenient means of translating Word footnotes to cross-browser HTML.

Again, we kick the title Puritan-style. Why? Because it’s more fun, that’s why.

Being A Brief Treatise on the Most Glorious Doctrine of Divine Providence, With Due Consideration Given to the Stark Contrast Between the So-Called Relational Theism of John Sanders and the Reformed, Orthodox, and Apostolic Teaching of Bruce Ware, With Most Careful and Earnest Exposition on the Implications of these Weighty Matters in the Life of the Covenant People of God

Back with more cheap (but fun) blogging. Here are a few more in the “I do not think it means what you think it means” category.

Dioecism, a plutonian philosophy, illustrates Christ as all divine only appearing as human…Aryanism views Christ as partly human and partly divine.

Let me try to paraphrase this rather complicated sentiment: “The dominant worldview of the Hellenistic netherworld—Pluto’s kingdom of dead souls—finds its roots in the notion that a given plant species has its male and female reproductive organs in separate plants. This, of course, leads one directly to the conclusion that Christ’s humanity was merely an illusion…In a similar vein, invaders of the Indus valley in the third millennium B.C. [unclear here: the writer could be employing a less technical use of the word and refer rather to Nazi usage wherein ‘Aryan’ assumes racist overtones. This could would significantly alter one’s understanding of this statement, and scholarly opinion remains mixed] looked ahead to a later Hebraic personage and preemptively broke with the Chalcedonian and Constantinian formulations.”

Jim Elliot, an infamous American missionary to the Auca Indians in South America, recorded these words.

Infamous?

Ah! Infamous is when you’re more than famous! This missionary Jim Elliot is not just famous, he’s IN-famous! Turns out that old Ms. Elizabeth hasn’t been telling us the whole story, now has she? Ol’ Jimmy could evidently whoop it up pretty good there in the rainforest.

I see the body, soul, and spirit as a triadic structure and not didactic.

It baffles me that some people see theology as a cold, logic-bound enterprise. Such individuals clearly don’t see the musical implications in human constitution. Let us be very clear on this point! Human beings are not simple monotones or complicated, angst-ridden 7th’s! And heaven knows we are NOT, in our very makeup, morally instructive.

Is election corporal?

Yes. Yes it is, actually.

Next time: new vistas in theology through typos!

Adeodatus