restoring our biblical and constitutional foundations

                

home

welcome

about dave

on the road

the book box

columns & essays

reading room

contact dave

 

July 2008 Blog Archives

Saturday, July 26

7:34 AM I leave for Knoxville in a few minutes. It’s a lovely day and I look forward to the drive. For some reason my mind races to that great promise of our God, that if we seek His kingdom in the first place (and not the second or the third) and His righteousness, all these other things will be given to us as well. God has proven this to me over and over again this summer. Trials there have been, but I have never been happier in the Lord’s work. I am learning to wait upon Him for help and blessing. I am looking less and less to my own ability. The brethren are a constant encouragement to me (including you, my blogging buddies). Through grace I am learning to depend on Him alone. Soon I will return to Europe, Asia, and Africa to assist the brethren. I will not miss America very much; I have become too much of a pilgrim and stranger on this earth for that. I am eager to share Jesus’ love with the poor, as I did with these prisoners in Ethiopia last June. O, how God loves these people!

Amazingly, I am at the close of my 31st year of teaching. Lord willing, I’ve got 10 or 15 years of strength ahead of me to toil in the classroom. My sabbatical has just started and I already miss teaching. But the Lord has been so good to me. He has wonderfully blessed our farm. This year He crowned the prayers of Nathan’s parents by providing him with a helper and friend whom we love and cherish. Now, at last, the Lord has filled our life with every blessing, each of them undeserved. He has done far beyond what I could have expected in granting me the opportunity to teach and write and preach and travel. Even in difficult times, His grace has been enough. Even in Ethiopia, where no sooner is one demand met than another arises, God is faithfully providing for every care through the generosity of His people.

Forgive me for rambling, but this morning I am so impressed with the loving interest that the Father has shown in me and my family that I can’t help but say so. A great work of the Spirit has begun in my heart. The Gospel burns like fire within me. I live for nothing else. May God so bless my teaching that my students in Tennessee will leave the course more in love than ever with the Great Author and Subject of the New Testament, our reigning and returning Lord Jesus!

Friday, July 25

5:20 PM In case you’re curious, here’s the one quote I use from Greg Boyd’s The Myth of a Christian Nation (p. 30). I think it’s a classic.

This, in a nutshell, is the primary thing God is up to in our world. He’s not primarily about getting people to pray a magical “sinner’s prayer” or to confess certain magical truths as a means of escaping hell. He’s not about gathering together a group who happen to believe all the right things. Rather, he’s about gathering together a group of people who embody the kingdom – who individually and corporately manifest the reality of the reign of God on the earth. And he’s about growing this new kingdom through his body to take over the world.

4:54 PM Go Nathan!

Go Dad!

Man, that Jessie is some photographer. Only problem is: we have so much lumber now that we just HAVE to build us somethin’.

2:44 PM Whew! Just roughed out the entire first draft of my final chapter. I’m exhausted but the juices were really flowing so I couldn’t stop writing. Here’s a shot of the madness in progress:

And here’s what everything looks like after it goes into the pooter and comes out of the printer. What a metamorphosis.  

Right now it’s off to the local sawmill to get some lumber with Nathan. He needs the help. I need the break. 

7:15 AM Here’s the scene that greeted me this morning as I sat on the front porch sipping coffee and reading my Bible. Talk about a light show.

I’m in Romans, and this verse hit me square between the eyes: “I’m also convinced that you have all the knowledge you need and that you are able to instruct each other” (15:14). They must have had seminaries in Rome, I guess. Or at least Bible Colleges. Well, maybe just a lay institute., Where did these Christians get all this knowledge? Just read the epistle. We clearly see the relationship between obedience and knowledge. An education, even a good one, can never be a substitute for obedience. Neither can prayer. Along with education and prayer there is a need to take action. We must take on attitudes of humility, openness, and teachability. We must develop the right way of thinking by delving deep into the Scriptures. As Tozer (I believe) once said, “The fellowship of God is delightful beyond all telling.” Whether you have a Ph.D. or a modest education, have you taken time to feed on His Word today? Are you, am I, “able to instruct each other?”

Thursday, July 24

8:45 PM B & H Academic just sent me the new cover for my beginning grammar. A tip of the kepi to their art department. I think it’s a winner.

8:30 PM What a great day it’s been. And to top it all off, Becky and I just enjoyed some ice cream on the front porch. The weather is gorgeous. There’s even a little taste of fall in the air. This evening I read in one sitting Greg Boyd’s The Myth of A Christian Nation. You MUST get it and read it. I did a lot of underlining and even found one quote that I HAVE to include in my book. Speaking of which, I am determined to finish my last chapter between now and next Saturday. It will be a challenge because, unlike the other chapters, this one will be somewhat autobiographical. Not a tell-all, but still a tell-much. It’s been quite a journey and I hope to share with you some of the excitement! In the meantime I have to read the final page proofs of my book on theending of Mark (due Monday) and prep for my class next week. Right now, though, I am going to kick up my feet and finish Free as a Running Fox — for the millionth time.

O, Sheba is as fat as an elephant. Everyone is starting to guess her due date. I’m betting she gives birth next Friday.

And one more thing. As I watched the jets this evening cruising by at 29,000 feet in the blue sky I thought to myself, “There’s someone up there doing his or her job piloting that aircraft. We’re both earning our livings. I’m sitting here with my notepad and pen, he or she is sitting in an aluminum tube charged with the responsibility of getting 230 people safely to their destination. The main thing is that we’re both enjoying our work to the hilt.

7:59 AM How Reformed isbrother Lionel? A must read. Here’s a teaser:

I believe in a pure consensus ecclesiology. I believe in a plurality of Elders with all Elders being equal. Not to mention that these elders are equal with the body (Matthew 23). I believe in elder oversight not elder rule (as we think of the term rule). I believe that everyone has an equal voice within the assembly. If we truly hold toJames 4:1-3, andPhilippians 2:1-11 much of what we do could be solved very quickly (I had to learn this by personal experience quite recently actually).

7:53 AM 2,000. 

7:30 AM Fuller Seminaryblogs.

UPDATE: So does Asbury.

6:55 AM As I said, Becky and I spent the evening with our friends Sudie and Carolyn from Tabernacle Baptist Church. Both served with us in Alaba last year and are eager to return. They have an incurable love for Ethiopia and Ethiopians. Becky, by the way, is sporting the dress she sewed on her new machine. It takes her about one day to sew an entire dress. Amazing.

Today our daughter Liz and the boys are coming for a visit. Never a dull moment at Rosewood.

Wednesday, July 23

10:17 PM Becky and I enjoyed a delightful night out with two close friends (photos tomorrow). Right now the rain is falling, a lovely soaking sent straight from Heaven. Our crops and hay fields are getting a real boost from the warm weather and the rain showers. Governor William Bradford (Becky’s ancestor — hence “Bradford Hall”) once proclaimed a day of prayer and fasting to thank God for giving them desperately needed rain. I therefore declare the next 24 hours “Thanksgiving,” at least in this tiny corner of Virginia.

5:10 PM The legacy of George Eldon Ladd is rememberedhere.

It was Ladd who once and for all rid my theology of any vestiges of Dispensationalism.

Well, I may still be sympathetic toward dispensational theology, but that doesn’t lessen my appreciation for Ladd’s work, especially his magisterial Theology of the New Testament.

3:40 PM Here’s a suggestion if you work with children. Why not get some copies of VOM’s latest kids activity book? It’s called “Bold Believers in Ethiopia” and is chock-full of fun and information. It’s VERY interactive. Some of the stories came from my wife even. At any rate, here are some pix I took of the cover and the innards. The last photo contains contact information for the Voice of the Martyrs. Enjoy!

3:07 PM Boy have I been busy! Dallas Willardwould not be very happy.

Incidentally, I’ve only got two more chapters to write!

12:38 PM I’ll have to missthis because I’ll be teaching a coursehere. If you live in the greater Knoxville area, why not stop by and say hello? Better yet, see if you can register for the course by calling the Harvest Institute’s office. Class begins next Monday. We meet every night and all day on Saturday.

11:55 AM Quoteof the day: 

No Christian can claim to be a follower of Christ without … asking whether he or she measures up to the teachings found in the Sermon of the Mount.

11:21 AM The ETS annual program features a section called “Toward a Consensus on Exegetical Method: Definition, Purpose, Components, Sample Using Phil. 2:6-11,” featuring papers by Buist Fanning, Stan Porter, and Bill Larkin. Should be interesting. I only hope that someone points out that the paragraph includes verse 5. Or is that now up for grabs?

11:12 AM This quote by Alfred Vagts (A History of Militarism [New York: Meridian, 1959] p. 17) got me thinking:

Militarism is … not the opposite of pacifism; its true counterpart is civilianism. Love of war, bellicosity, is the counterpart of the love of peace, pacifism; but militarism is more, and sometimes less, than the love of war. It covers every system of thinking and valuing and every complex of feelings which rank military institutions and ways above the ways of civilian life, carrying military mentality and modes of acting and decision into the civilian sphere.

6:55 AM A tentative schedule of the ETS annual meeting in Providence, RI, is availablehere (.pdf).

6:43 AM A rider never knows what to expect. Anything can spook a horse. One day, while racing through the countryside, Traveler saw a duck and froze (while I kept going, right over his head and onto the ground). Inevitably, the day comes when you have to say goodbye to your favorite steed.This story about Olympic hopeful Karen O’Conner’s pony Teddy brought back many memories. I know exactly what she’s feeling like.

Tuesday, July 22

6:40 PM I received this wonderful email from a reader a few minutes ago:

I just finished reading your post on Erasmus and I believe the Lord has used it again to push me towards something I have been slow in doing. I want to learn Greek! I have studied theology, but due to some level of foolishness and laziness in my early college years I avoided a proper theology degree partly BECAUSE of the language studies!! So I have a BA in “Christian Ministry” instead. I am an associate pastor now, but I would like to go on to get my MA in theology, but I don’t want to wait for then to begin to study Greek. Is there a book or a program that you would recommend that I could use to get started?  Its a pretty overwhelming thing to look at from square one! and I just don’t know where to start…

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated,

Thank you so much!

Here was my response:

Sounds like the Holy Spirit has just clobbered you. Glad to hear it. There are many good resources out there to help you, so don’t despair. If you choose to use my beginning grammar, which is perfectly suitable for self-study, I have a pronunciation CD and a little workbook I can send you gratis. I can also answer questions you might have — when I’m not traveling, that is. Let me know. I’m sure you can learn Greek. Why not give it a try?

Cheers, Dave

It’s true. Anyone can learn Greek. It’s easy. It’s just us Greek profs who get in the way. As I said in my response, if I can help any of you get started, I stand ready to do so.

3:25 PM Help! I’m going crazy! Stark raving mad! I can’t even close my eyes without seeing beans. Long, pickable, green beans! Will it ever end? They’re after me! Help!

10:37 AM Becky’s Thinking of Christmas? has been added to our home page as well to ourEthiopia Files. I think it’s these “little acts of love” that make all the difference in the world.

7:54 AM The schedule for THE meeting of the year can be foundhere andhere.

6:56 AM Paul Proctor has some concerns aboutGoogle Earth.

6:32 AM TheJesus for President book tour arrives in Raleigh today. Check out CNN’s takehere.

6:25 AM Celucien Joseph links toThings I learnt during, and about, my PhD (which appeared originally atJamie’s Weblog). Three comments jumped out at me. For what it’s worth, here’s my response:

I remember hearing that, on average, 1.6 people will read your PhD thesis.

Well then, why not get it published? As I tell all of my students, if it’s worth writing, it’s worth other people reading. Personally, I will do anything I can to see that my students publish their work. My own doctor father in Basel, Bo Reicke, encouraged me along these same lines, and I will be eternally grateful that he did.

Supervisors are strange creatures. Some are like ghosts, appearing occasionally for a fleeting moment, and you’re more likely to meet them at a conference than at the University. Others are always around but they’re too busy running around like demented hamsters on a wheel – all motion and no progress. They’re disorganised. All of them will, at some point, forget what your project is about – and some will even forget who you are…

My own experience may be unique, but Prof. Reicke was always available for counsel, never disorganized, and invariably helpful though never over-bearing. The first month I lived in Basel I stayed in his home. I had personal access to his home library (European professors do not have on-campus offices as we do in the States). We often had coffee together. Not only did he never forget about my thesis topic, he was thrilled with it. So was my second reader, Dr. Heinrich Baltensweiler, an expert in Paul.

A PhD is a completely solo effort. There is no one you can ask advice of. No one can help you.

Again, what about your major professor? And are you married? Becky was my ever-faithful partner and confidant. She knew my dissertation backwards and forwards. She even typed it for me (on a thing called a “typewriter”). And then there was our church family: die Baptistengemeinde Basel (photo). Baptists in Europe are sometimes considered a cult, so there aren’t many of them. But our church family, all 35-40 of them, were an incredible source of support and encouragement both to me and to Becky. Many even attended my graduation.

In my book The Myth of Adolescence, I have a section called, “Teenagers Are Terrific.” I truly believe that the teen years can be the BEST years of our lives, not the worst (as they were for me). So it is with our doctoral studies. They can be the worst or the best of times. It’s really what YOU make of them, including the wise selection of a major professor. Please go slowly on this last issue. And you will certainly want to meet IN PERSON your advisor before ever studying with him or her. It’s called “chemistry.”

Monday, July 21

7:57 PM Here’s a big thank you to Lane Dennis, president and publisher of Crossway Bibles, for sending me prepublication materials for the new ESV Study Bible. It’s due out on Oct. 15. I was privileged to be a part of the team of 90 writers who contributed to it. I must say that the typesetting, cartography, etc. look like a first class job. If it can help us get into the Book of books, it will serve a useful purpose.

Right now it’s time to get the dogs, go sit on the front porch, and start reading the 7 books I received in today’s mail:

• The Road to Reality by K. P. Yohannan

• The Upside-Down Kingdom by Donald Kraybill

• Anarchy and Christianity by Jacques Ellul

• Violence by Jacques Ellul

• Christians and Politics Beyond the Culture Wars by David Gushee

• The Politics of God and the Politics of Man by Jacques Ellul

• Pagan Christianity by Frank Viola and George Barna

5:35 PM Becky writes:

Thinking of Christmas? Just moments ago we got a call from someone who is planning ahead. This year she’s decided to give gifts to needy people in third world countries, giving these gifts in honor of specific relatives here at home. In this way, those who really need gifts will get gifts, and they will be gifts that keep on giving, even into eternity.

What a GREAT IDEA! So she called us to ask if we could help her implement her idea.  Absolutely! We are taking a team to Ethiopia in November, and there are many gifts we plan to take with us. Would you like to help us?

For starters, how about money for seeds?  The Burji people are suffering severe drought; all their crops this year have failed. Not only is their crop gone for this year, but also they have no seed for next year. We will be doing a farming workshop in the villages, teaching them about how to improve their farms, and distributing seeds to those who attend. They must pass a “quiz” on the information we taught before receiving the seed, and of course, we will tell them about the Bread of Life when we teach them about their farms. We want to give seeds for Kale, Turnips and Field Peas.

Or how about food for war widows?  The Guji tribe has made war against the Burji tribe repeatedly in the past couple years. Each war leaves new widows and orphans in its wake. To lose the head of the household is almost a death sentence for these peasant families. Add to that high inflation, with food prices tripling in just 18 months! The Guji churches are collecting an offering for the war widows, and we want to supplement that offering and give a substantial amount of food to each of the widows. The Guji church leaders will present this food publicly, as a demonstration of the way of Jesus, who taught us to love our “enemies” and to make restitution to those we have harmed.

Or how about food for rural church leaders and evangelists? These men walk long distances into town for a 4-day Bible Conference. Last year they brought their own food and slept on the floor of the church. But the conference ended early because they ran out of food, and they walked home on empty stomachs. This year, in a year of famine, we want to provide the food they need, so they will not be weak during the conference and they can focus on the spiritual benefit gained at the conference.

Or how about wash basins and soap for peasant families? In the villages, we will teach the women, children, and men about hand washing. Poor hygiene is probably the #1 contributor to illness in Africa. And simply washing hands goes a long way in preventing sickness.  We can teach until we are blue in the face, but if they cannot afford a wash basin and soap the teaching accomplishes nothing. So we want to buy simple plastic wash basins and soap, distributing one per household. They must attend our teaching session and pass a “quiz” on hand washing before we give them a basin. And after we leave the village, the church leaders will visit the homes to check that the basins are being used correctly. We want to buy these basins in the Mercado (big market) in Addis, but we need to collect funds for them now.

So what is the cost for all these things? Based upon past experience, here’s what we estimate:

Seeds:  $700.

Food for Widows and Orphans: $1500.

Food for Bible Conference: $1000.

Wash Basins and Soap: $1500.

Are you tired of giving Christmas gifts that are quickly abandoned? Would you like to give a gift that lasts, a gift that really helps, a gift that may make the difference between life and death for some poor peasant?  If so, we welcome your partnership with the Burji people, for the Gospel’s sake. Make checks payable to BeckyLynn Black & send to 2691 White House Rd., Nelson, VA 24580. As always, 100 percent of your gift will go to the Burji people. In the Name of Jesus, we thank you!

11:45 AM We just emptied the manure trailer down in the Hidden Valley. (Doesn’t that sound mysterious?) Jessie took over my photographer’s duties. I thought I had much better form than Nathan today. Wouldn’t you agree? 

9:57 AM This has got to be thequote of the day:

We treat “church discipline” as we if are excluding someone from our club and we don’t care if they join another club as long as its not our club.

In Scritpure, what we call “church discipline” depends upon relationships, not organization.

9:42 AM Just back from spending 2 hours picking beans. I want to thank all my bee friends for being so kind to me today. They buzzed me a few times but must have realized I’m just trying to do my job, just as they are trying to do theirs. Let and let live.

6:45 AM Even ifthis happens, McCain will still not win. The reason is the two Bs: Barr and Baldwin (can you hear that siphoning sound?). Besides, the vote in November is not the one that counts. We vote everyday by where we place our allegiance, whom we serve, and what our priorities are. Pop evangelicalism doesn’t care, however. If Dobson be for us, who can be against us?

6:37 AM SEBTS student Andy Metzger has some GREAT thoughts aboutmediocrity:

It seems apparent that my generation at least has grown up in a culture that finds a certain satisfaction with living comfortable, nominal lives…andas long as we’re doing “ok” there’s no reason to complain. Of course, this worldview is never confessed. In fact, I think that for a few years of everyone’s life, the opposite is professed–perhaps it’s a desire to travel the world, accomplish great things, make something of themselves, serve the disadvantaged, etc. Eventually, though, the adventure novel is set aside (usually without even being cracked) and the safety of routine and normality is welcomed. How sickening.

I want the passion of Whyte. The refusal to settle for mediocrity. The perseverance to attempt great things, especially in service to our Lord and Savior. Anyone care to join?

Count me in, brother Andy!

Sunday, July 20

2:51 PM The edification-meeting today at Bethel Hill was superb. Shepherd Jason took to the floor (literally; he stepped down from the platform and “walked among us”) and shared about God’s amazing grace from Exod. 20. What? That chapter’s all about the law! No way. Just read verses 1-2, which is what Jason did. Then he asked for testimonies, and two of the sweetest, dearest ladies you’d ever meet got up and poured their hearts out in gratitude to God. I got three talkings-to from Jesus in one morning!

While driving there, the classical station was playing — you won’t believe this — Brahm’s German Requiem, IN GERMAN! Yes, I enjoy the English version, but you have got to learn German if for no other reason than to listen to this great piece in the original. It was performed flawlessly by the Berlin Philharmonic and Chorale.

I wondered afterwards, did any of the singers know what they were singing about? Nominal Christianity is everywhere in Germany. Were the singers all Namenschristen? I don’t know. But I do know that the best rendition of Handel’s Messiah Becky and I ever heard was performed by a secular kibbutz choir we heard in Jerusalem. Powerful! And I know these were not messianic Jews. Just think about it: singing about Messiah Jesus and probably not “understanding” a word you are singing.

It’s not much different with you and me, friends. Have many times have we read the New Testament and completely overlooked its obvious meaning? As I wrote earlier, Jesus is always full of surprises, and when you begin to follow Him, you have no idea what you’re getting into. Over and over again in the Scripture, Jesus warns us against the pride of achievement, of titles, of worldly status and attainment. Have we learned THAT lesson? I do not want to settle for a cheap Christianity that exalts the Bible as inerrant (which it is) without living out what it clearly teaches. Yet for most of my academic career that’s exactly what I did. All that is changing. I sense a new momentum in my life. I’m now an advocate for infectious nobodiness so that Jesus can have the status He deserves. Jesus calls us down from our raised platforms, calls us out from out behind our protective pulpits, so that we can walk and talk among the people just as He did. He tells us to refuse the chief seats, titles, prominence — all that earthly pizzazz. Amazing, isn’t it, that all of this is clearly taught in the New Testament yet we are so blind we can’t see it.

I imagine it’s like singing Handel’s Messiah without knowing the Messiah.

8:21 AM I don’t like to pretend that you might really be interested in knowing, but I thought I’d tell you what my new book is about. If you’re already bored, just drop down to the preceding blog post and read a very good book review I linked to there.

As you may know, I’ve been on a less-traveled road of late. In fact, for about 8 years. I tried to avoid the path for a long time, but I can’t any longer. It involves some pretty basic stuff: discipleship, ecclesiology, politics and war, feeding the poor. I haven’t yet sold all I have to follow Jesus, but I think I’ve started to get serious about being a radical Jesus-follower. How then to combine all these thoughts into a single rant?

I’m calling the book “The Downward Path of Jesus.” My goal is try and midwife the idea of Jesus’ kingdom for the here and now. I will probably raise more questions about the church and the world than I answer. That’s okay. We’re all in process since we’re all pilgrims and aliens on this earth. I’ve subtitled the book “From Cultural Conformity to Radical Discipleship.” Sounds pious, doesn’t it? Like I’ve really been doing it. But that’s hardly the case. I just think we should stop viewing the church as an end rather than as a means to an end. When I wrote in my book Paul, Apostle of Weakness that power is weakness and weakness strength, I meant to promote not otherworldly mysticism but the deepest reality of all: that the way up is down, that weakness wins, that the Lamb who was slain is worthy to receive power and might and glory and honor.

The title alludes to the way Jesus concluded His earthly ministry. He washed His disciples’ feet and then said, “I have given you an example so that you may copy what I have done” (John 13:15). This is the way Jesus sought to glorify His Father. It is the exact opposite of our human way. We seek glory by moving upward. Jesus chose the way of downward mobility, through suffering for us. Whenever He speaks about being glorified – being “lifted up” – He always refers to His death. It was through the cross that Jesus glorified His Father and made known God’s glory to us. The book is simply the story of my pilgrimage in becoming a more cruciform Christian, an extremist for God. I’m half way done writing it, and I want to complete it before I begin my foreign pilgrimages in mid-September.

Enough said. In case you’re interested, I’ve copied the table of contents below. I would ask for your prayers but I don’t need to. Jesus will lay that on your hearts if He desires. Meanwhile, let’s stop acting like sovereigns and start acting like scullery maids.

1. Introduction: The Downward Path of Jesus

2. The Liberated Church: Recasting Our Vision of Discipleship

3. The Radical Reformation: The Anabaptists and Suffering Servanthood

4. The Priestly Kingdom: Communal Ecclesiology and Every-Member Ministry

5. The Community of the Spirit: Leadership Jesus’ Style

6. The Politics of Jesus: Disarming the Principalities and Powers

7. The Future of Evangelical Christianity: Recovering the Ancient Faith

Select Bibliography

7:52 AM If you think opposing war is always liberal and shock and awe is always conservative, think again. Then read this review of Bill Kaufmann’s new bookAin’t My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism.

7:12 AM David Augsburger’s Dissident Discipleship arrived in the mail yesterday. Lots of good quotes. Here’s one of the best (p. 156):

Service that is necessary — required, owed, obligated, contracted — may be offered with genuineness, concern, compassion, and thoroughness. Or it can be done grudgingly, of necessity, under duress. One does what has to be done.

Service that is done voluntarily falls into a completely different category. It arises out of unbidden concern, undemanded interest, unowed compassion. This is the service that comes close to being the actions of love. It is offered by free choice because of the nature of the servant. One does what one sees as needed.

Our world is in desperate need of “servants by nature,” don’t you think?

7:05 AM Aussie John (who blogs atCaesura) sent along this wonderful testimony of God’s goodness to him and his family. I post it here with his permission.

I cannot tell you how much I was blessed and affirmed by your most recent comment on The Assembling of the Church. Your words reflected my continuing conviction over these long years.

Having been fully involved in church life since I was twelve years of age, I had seen many things which caused me concern. I had been preaching and teaching since eighteen years of age, but didn’t enter into “official” pastoral ministry until after college in my mid thirties, by which time I, one day, sat in my study asking God to show me what He wanted of me. I became deeply convicted that I should pray and ask Him to cause me to remain an ordinary man in the proper sense of the word “ordinary”. I trust that still applies.

Your question, “Do they ever talk about getting their hands dirty in the name of Jesus?” evoked some memories for me, because it involves my own understanding of the ministry of leadership demonstrated in the New Testament.

We (my wife and five children of high-school age and myself) were invited to a church in the south west of New South Wales, a farming and light industry town, where, during our time there, our Lord blessed the ministry of His people with many converts.  The denomination leaders gave the credit for that “success” to me, instead of the only One to whom it was due, and as was usual when they thought someone had found “the secret”, asked me to share “my strategy” with other western pastors. My “strategy”, I told them was, “to sit in the dust with the folk I ministered to, and to get my hands dirty alongside them”.  The response was one of disbelief.

One funny incident happened as I was helping a congregation member with a cow having trouble giving birth.  I had my arm inside the cow, up to my armpit, manipulating her calf.  I became aware of a neighbor staring at what was happening. As I looked around to him, he said, “I have never seen a priest doing anything like that!”

My prayer is that the many younger folk who read Alan’s blog will take great heed of your very wise words. I thank God for you and the lessons you have learned and are sharing with these who have obviously seen through the artificiality and pretense of much which is happening in Jesus precious name.

Yours in Christ,
John Gallimore

Frankly, I think if you’re getting paid to minister to other people, this “armpit strategy” would go a long way toward breaking down any barriers that exist between you and them.

Saturday, July 19

1:55 PM Greek students! Logos Bible Software has just announced166 Volumes of Greek Goodness! Also suitable for church history addicts.

1:37 PM Check out this fun blog post about thelinguistic landscape of Basel. The variety of languages spoken there was one of the main reasons Becky and I enjoyed living in that city so much. I knew a man who could even tell you what part of Basel someone was from by his or her accent. O, and if you’re considering doctoral studies in Europe, why not take a look at Basel’s Theologische Fakultät? It’s a fine school, though I am TOTALLY biased.

1:05 PM Since I’m currently writing a chapter called “The Priestly Kingdom: Communal Ecclesiology and Every-Member Ministry,” I thought maybe I’d jump back into the discussion going on atThe Assembling of the Church. The biblical doctrine of the priesthood of the believers (for heaven’s sake let’s always use the plural) has nothing to do with autonomous individualism. It is not a way of saying that each of us should look out for our own personal interests — which is forbidden in Phil. 2:1-4! It simple means that as Jesus-followers we are all members of one another in His kingdom. Harmony in the Body (e.g., between leaders and led) comes not from church “membership” or ministerial “authority” or the “sacraments” of baptism and the Lord’s Supper (amazing how people still use sacramental language to describe these simple acts) but comes when all of us at the Spirit’s behest aim to build one another up. And that, I think, is one key to understanding the problem of “pastoral alienation.” Pastors who are parachuted into a community and whose stay there is for all intents and purposes ephemeral can never be “one” with the people they seek to serve, at least not to the same high degree as the home-grown elders and deacons (this is a point often made by Steve Sensenig). Thus the entire unbiblical professionalized clerical system is called into question by the issues Alan is raising. What I love about Jesus is that He’s always calling us to deny ourselves. And He never called anyone into “the” ministry. If you still doubt that this is a problem, just read “Must the Pastor Be a Superstar?”, chapter 6 of Howard Snyder’s The Problem of Wineskins. I really don’t see how we can begin to turn the world upside down for Jesus until we turn the church right side up. Maybe the wineskins matter more than we think after all.

11:28 AM Rick Mansfield (who also writes atCooking in Cast Iron) plugs theNew Living Translation Blog.

11:09 AM TC Robinson has aproblem with second editions. So do I. I have to write them. Why? Ah, that’s why we have prefaces.

9:02 AM The latest addition to our home page is calledErasmus and You.

Friday, July 18

9:16 PM A day in the life….

Here’s what B. and I picked this morning. BEFORE it got hot.

Nate and I spent a couple of hours over at Hebron church cutting up this 150 year-old oak that had fallen (providently, right between the grave stones in the cemetery). Not a bad haul. Should keep Nate and Jess nice and warm this winter. And oak burns HOT. 

Have you noticed? The price might not change, but the quantity does. Becky bought this tub at the grocery store this afternoon. 

Bradford Hall 30 minutes ago. I snapped this while I was on the front lawn with the dogs. Magnificent topper to a great day. 

Sleep tight…. 

2:25 PM Good afternoon, bloggers and bloggerettes. Today I want you to meet a really great New Testament scholar. You’ve probably never heard of him before. But trust me, he’s an outstanding expert in the New Testament. His name? Nathan Black. You say, “Wait a minute! How can you consider Nathan a New Testament scholar? He doesn’t even have a post high school education!” Now hold on there. Nathan is VERY well educated, and I’m not talking only about the certificate in carpentry he received from our local community college. You see, it all depends on your definition of “educated” and “scholar.” (In Anabaptism, by the way, appeal was made to the plain man’s judgment, unspoiled by the university. Those who toiled with their hands [craftsmen] or who worked in the soil [peasants] were presumed to be more receptive and teachable than those who had been corrupted by the folly of worldly wisdom.) My translation of “New Testament scholar” is one who knows the New Testament backwards and forwards AND who follows radically the Jesus it talks about AND who lives according to its hard teachings. So just by having a doctorate in New Testament, just by holding a chair in New Testament, just because everyone reads your famous books about the New Testament, doesn’t automatically make you a “New Testament scholar.” Not in my book. Just go to some New Testament blogs. Do they ever talk about sharing their faith in Jesus with others? Do they ever talk about pledging allegiance to Jesus and His Church — the ONLY Christian nation that has ever existed? Do they ever talk about getting their hands dirty in the name of Jesus? Why are you staring blankly at me? Truth be told, you can be a full professor of New Testament in a prestigious university and still not walk or talk with Jesus! I recall being at a scholarly meeting a couple of years and listening to a newly-minted Ph.D. in New Testament refer to himself in his paper as “a New Testament scholar.” “As a New Testament scholar, it is my opinion that….” He did this consistently and quite un-self-consciously. I’m sorry, but I actually chuckled OUT LOUD.

Now let’s contrast Nathan. He and Jessie started attending a small church called Hebron after their wedding. Hebron was founded in 1880. (If you ever want to visit Hebron, here are the directions: just drive to Podunk and turn right.) The first Sunday there the people asked Nate to teach. He said, “Why not?” and he’s been teaching ever since. The meeting starts at 10:00 and goes to 11:00, or else to 11:30, or else to 12:00 —  well, you get the picture. (Ain’t nobody in no hurry.) They don’t really have “church” or a “worship service.” Just Bible study, prayer, maybe a hymn or two (Nate also plays the piano for them), and lots of talking. They wanted to pay Nathan but he just said, “Keep it.” He teaches only from the Bible — no notes, and no published curriculum. Deep stuff, yet simple. Right now he’s teaching through Hebrews. Or should I say leading the flock (all 13 or 14 of them, mostly farmer-types) in a discussion from the Bible about our Great High Priest, how we’re all priests in the kingdom of Jesus, how salvation is FREE (seems some folk think you need to get wet to get saved), how the Spirit lives in us so that we do not have to depend on the experts to explain what the Bible means, how the Church is more important than the church, how “believers” are a dime a dozen but “lovers” are few, and how people and not a building are the “temple” of God. They love it! Speaking of a building, the church meets in an old clapboard meeting hall off of a long gravel road. No restroom facilities, but there is a cemetery. I believe our world is in desperate need of such churches. And of such New Testament scholars. What an example that 25 year-old is to me!

Sat plene biberunt.That’s Latin for “shut up and sit down.” So I’ll keep my peroration short. Say you’re a New Testament “scholar” and you’re reading this right now and you are just furious. You’ve been taught to think, “Scholars don’t talk about their private lives. We need to keep Jesus out of the academic guild!” Honest to goodness, I once thought that way myself. But listen, it all comes down to the cross. As a much greater New Testament scholar than you or I will ever be once said, “We go hungry and thirsty, we are in rags, we are brutally treated, we are homeless…. We have become the scum of the earth, the garbage of the world” (1 Cor. 4:11-13). If that isn’t clear, then maybe some of us have been educated beyond our intelligence. The great French theologian Jacque Ellul put it this way: “Christians should be troublemakers,…agents of a dimension incompatible with society.” A DIMENSION INCOMPATIBLE WITH SOCIETY. Man, I like that. So, my dear scholar friends, keep on earning your doctorates (I have one myself), keep on writing your books (many of which I own), keep on lecturing at your conferences (I may attend one myself). But for Christ’s sake (I am NOT swearing), get radical for the Jesus of the New Testament or quit the moniker “New Testament scholar”!

Domenico’s Portrait of a Scholar:

The New Testament scholar à la Jesus:

 

Nathan installing bookshelves in a school in Burji, Ethiopia, in June 2006: 

9:19 AM Nathan in the great state of Tennessee sends along a link toTentmaking: Perspectives on Self-Supporting Ministry. Have any of you read it yet? It looks like a winner. From the table of contents:

• Ronald Hock: Paul’s tentmaking and the problem of his social class

• Rolland Allen: The maintenance of the ministry in the early ages of the church

• Desmond Fisher: Worker-priests once more

• John Nurser: To pay or not to pay

• Robin Gill: Theology of the non-stipendiary ministry

• Anthony Harvey: The workman is worthy of his hire: fortunes of a proverb in the early church

Whoa, heady stuff. I wonder, is it really possible to develop a giving-oriented community unless we nurture a culture of sacrificial giving from the “top” (pastors, elders, seminary profs) on down? Once again, we read the New Testament but don’t hear it, for it clearly teaches us that our resources are to go to helping the poor rather than toward buildings and staff. I’m not sure where we get the notion that we need huge and lavish physical plants, except from the Old Testament. After his conversion, Minucius wrote about the Christians he once despised: “Why do they have no altars, no temples, no images? … What temple shall I build Him when the whole world, the work of His hands, cannot contain Him?” No church I ever attended taught me that. It is much easier and more comfortable to talk about the “poor” only in the abstract. After what I’ve seen in this world, I’m sorry, but I can’t do that any more. 

Thursday, July 17

8:24 PM Who am I? That’s a silly question to be asking! But I’m writing the preface to my book on discipleship so the topic has come up, at least in my own mind. Am I a conservative or a liberal, right-wing or left? Though my theology is conservative, I’ve learned much from my brothers and sisters on both ends of the evangelical spectrum. Some of my friends think only about Israel, others only about Palestine. Some complain about the 3,000 unborn who are killed every day in America, while others focus almost exclusively on the 30,000 children who die of starvation every day in the world. I see no need reason to establish boundaries of love. If we mourn the loss of 4,000 U.S. service personnel in Iraq (as we should), we must also mourn with the same outrage and passion the life of every innocent Iraqi civilian who was lost. Some evangelicals believe that right-wing politics hangs the moon; others support the liberal left. I pledge my allegiance to neither. Folks, I just want to be a Christian — a simple, radical, marginal, downwardly-mobile follower of Jesus. There’s nothing unique or spectacular about being a Jesus-follower. You just remember that God’s love is borderless. You just declare the Good News to the poor, as He taught us to do. And it all happens through relationships, not programs or organizations. And here’s something strange: I am learning to fall in love with people and not just ideas. And I love ideas! Crazy people like Jim Elliott are finally beginning to make sense to me. I’m learning how to reprioritize my values and resources. Just think — the average American consumes as much as 520 Ethiopians do. Can we do anything about it? You bet! Because of our website Becky and I receive gifts for reading glasses and protein bars and pre-natal vitamins Bibles and meeting houses and evangelists’ salaries and equipment to show the Jesus Film with and food to feed hungry prisoners and on and on the list goes. No fancy organization, no 501 c(3), no overhead, no bureaucracy, no HQ. Just Jesus-people connecting with Jesus-people.

Man, am I becoming a Jesus Freak again like I was in the 60s?!!

4:31 PM I see I’m not the only one asking,When Will We Get Back to the Constitution? 

1:41 PM Alright, it’s time for a nap. I’ve been sitting at my computer nonstop all morning answering dozens of emails and typing my book and my back is killing me. I keep asking myself, Are you really writing another book? In this day of the internet? What is it about the codex that makes us go out and buy them by the hundreds? Far more people have read my blog than will ever read my hardcopies. Yet I still write books! If the codex is a dinosaur, it must be one of the Jurassic Park variety. Talk at ya later.

10:50 AM Help! Does anybody know where I can find a copy of Roland Allen’s The Case for the Voluntary Clergy?

9:57 AM Here’s aninteresting discussion of Bible versions — which is “best,” literal vs. dynamic, etc. The author mentions “Jesus wept” and “Jesus cried” as a case in point. I do agree that there are significant connotative differences between these renderings. Here’s my own suggestion, taking the verb dakruo and the inceptive aorist into account: “Jesus burst into tears.”

Incidentally, did you know that “Jesus wept” (John 11:35) is NOT the shortest verse in the New Testament in terms of word count?

9:42 AM Hey fellow pilgrims, Alan Knox has an excellent blog onwhy people feel so disconnected from their pastors. The comments are also well worth reading. One thing that hasn’t been mentioned yet: The fact that so much of our ecclesiology stems from the Old Testament rather than from Jesus’ New Promise. Alan alludes to this problem when he writes, “[Pastors] are not holy men doing holy work in holy places.” Let me just add one quote to the discussion. John Kiwiet (Pilgram Marpeck, pp. 101-102) summarizes Marpeck’s Anabaptist hermeneutics as follows:

Der alte Bund war eine Zeit des Suchens und des Dürstens und erst der Neue Bund eine Zeit des Findens und Stillens. Die Verheissung an die Alten geht im Neuen Bund in Erfülling [sic]. Die Finsternis wird zu Licht und der Tod zu Leben. Es ist wie der Unterschied zwischen gestern und heute; das Alte ist vorbeigegangen, und das Neue ist gekommon.

The Old Covenant was a time of seeking and thirsting and the New Covenant a time of finding and stillness. The promise to the ancients finds its fulfillment in the New Covenant. Darkness turns to light and death to life. It is like the difference between yesterday and today; the old has gone away, and the new has arrived.

According to Pilgram Marpeck, the Old Testament must be distinguished from the New Testament as the foundation must be distinguished from the house. Let’s not forget this important truth. It makes all the difference in how we “do church.”

8:35 AM Update: Iran and U.S. Signaling Chance of Deal.

7:55 AM Anyone interested in the concept of “regime change” and the problem of international conflict should note what Mary Caprioli and Peter F. Trumbore have to say in their essay, “Rhetoric vs. Reality: Rogue States in Interstate Conflicts,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 49, pp. 770-91. The authors state, “Overall, rogue states as a group are no more likely to become involved in interstate disputes in any given year, are no more likely to initiate military disputes, and are no more likely to use force first when disputes turn violent” (p. 788). Ostensibly, “regime change” serves to ensure democracy and human rights, but in reality it is often intended to ensure hegemony and egoistical national interests of major world powers. Moreover, if the definition of a “rogue state” is one that causes inter-state disputes, the “Axis of Evil” nations are not the only states to deserve that moniker.

When Ron Paul attempted to point this out during the Republican presidential debates in 2007 he was ridiculed for being anti-American and treated like a political leper by the mainstream media. His “crime” consisted of recognizing that certain motives and passions are driving terrorism worldwide. But he is right. To talk only about terrorists is to risk focusing solely on the symptoms of terrorism while ignoring altogether the more complex and deeply-rooted motivations behind terrorist attacks. As Yoder reminds us (When War Is Unjust: Being Honest in Just-War Thinking, pp. 70-79), the just war tradition automatically implies the legitimacy of conscientious objection to war. In other words, wars may be just or they may be unjust. Ron Paul may or not believe in the just war tradition, but it is not wrong for him (or anyone else) to suggest that a state can be waging an unjust war or to put the burden of proof on those who advocate the need for warfare in a particular case, since such reasoning is a logical implication of the just war tradition.

7:43 AM This weekend I’m reading everything I can get my hands on written by John Howard Yoder. Just as Yoder was a Mennonite who preferred to call himself an ecumenical neo-Anabaptist, so I am a Baptist who feels himself an heir to the Anabaptist heritage. I do not claim to be a thinker on the level of a John H. Yoder; I mention him simply to note that we share a passion to see the Anabaptist tradition rediscovered. (Coincidentally, we also have in common Basel doctorates). 

6:36 AM In his 2008 book A History of Iran, Michel Oxworthy offers his readers some advice (p. 289):

The present government in Iran is far from perfect, but there are other governments in the Middle East that are as bad or worse – on democracy or human rights – whom we have few scruples about describing as close allies. If we can deal respectfully with Iran as a partner and an equal – and not merely, as too often in the past, as an instrument to short-term ends elsewhere – we might be surprised at how far even the current hard-line regime would go in taking up the partnership. Then we would see the beneficial effects a better relationship could have within Iran.

I do not know whether Mr. Oxworthy is a pacifist or even a Christian, but his advice is something every follower of Jesus should be willing take seriously. Even as the centrifuges in Iran spin, the very least a peaceable Christian can do is demand that the administration in Washington make every attempt to resolve the impasse through diplomacy.

Today comes news that such a process may have begun. TheNew York Times is reporting that the Bush administration is beginning negotiations this weekend without insisting that Iran halt its production of enriched uranium. 

The presence of William J. Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, at the meeting with Saeed Jalili, Iran’s nuclear negotiator, in Geneva on Saturday, will send “a strong signal to the Iranian government that the United States is committed to diplomacy,” the State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, told reporters on Wednesday.

If both sides soften their stance, progress is possible, perhaps inevitable. Let’s pray for successful talks this Saturday. An unjustified attack on Iran will only take America further down the path of self-destruction and will make it even more difficult to penetrate the world of Islam with the life-changing Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Wednesday, July 16

1:19 PM Congratulations toMatthew McDill. He wasn’t the first one and will certainly not be the last one to add to the literature on Mark16:9-, but I’m glad he joined the discussion!

12:45 PM It’s time to move the herd to another pasture. Which means it’s fence walking time. It was in pretty good shape actually. A little woven wire here, a little barbed wire there. A little tree felling too. We’ll move everyone over this afternoon.

10:23 AM I was picking beans with Becky this morning and didn’t have a real chance to read the news much, but the best piece I’ve seen on the web today also has the most inventive title:Iran + Iraq = Ironic. The author is one tough, and wise, dude. Incidentally, I wrote about this very subject in my new book yesterday.

9:59 AM I hope it’s not sacrilegious to say it, but here’s a big shout out to the Lord of the harvest (small “h”) for providing us our entire supper last night from our farm: yellow squash, yellow and green beans (my personal favorite), tomatoes, cukes, and venison. Even the water came from the well He provided for us. Wow.

Tuesday, July 15

7:52 PM B & H Academic has just listed my Learn to Read New Testament Greek: Third Edition over atAmazon. If you can’t figure out the front cover, neither can I. Don’t worry; the publishers have agreed to redesign it.

7:44 PM I once caught a 5-foot sand shark while fishing in Hawaii. I let it go. Butthis story is creepy. 

7:38 PM This has got to be THE quote of the day:

Vote for whoever you like but don’t slander, backbite, gossip, and pass along lies that are propagated by the media, for Christians this is when we have crossed the line. Especially the Antichrist stuff and God is judging us by electing Obama. Because truth be told there are some old school solid men/women of God who feel the same way about Bush!

Readmore.

7:26 PM Thanks to Rod Decker I’ve added another free e-zine to my Favorites. Check it ourhere.

7:17 PM Well, Sheppie was able to walk. All Sheba could do was waddle, she’s getting so big. So Sheppie goes off gallivanting and brings home a big cow horn. He’s now making short order of it. Sheba’s resting.

1:51 PM Whew! Just finished typing chapter 7 of my book. The chapter title is “The Politics of Jesus: Disarming the Principalities and Powers.” Man was that a hard one to write. Time for a coke and a long walk with the pups.

How’s everyone else? Nate and Jess are down in Oxford painting a lady’s house. Becky is trying our her brand new super-duper state-of-the-art computerized sewing machine. Pix later.

7:55 AM From my trip diary # 13:

Tuesday, June 10, Alaba. Today I traveled many miles to talk about Jesus with an elderly man whom I dearly love. He is the head of his village and a good friend of mine. I always try and see him when I visit Alaba. His name has been on my daily prayer list for years. Thus far he has not acknowledged Jesus as Lord, a step that would cost him dearly. Today again he was indecisive, though I think he is close to the kingdom. I feel very sad, perhaps like Jesus felt when the rich young ruler whom He loved decided that following Jesus was too costly. The young man couldn’t let go of his concerns and his priorities and thus, downcast and disappointed, he left Jesus. Jesus was sad, the rich young man was sad, and today I feel sad because I know how much my dear friend in Alaba needs the Savior. Will he ever become a follower of Jesus? Many in his immediate family already have. I must continue to pray.

Hw many people do you know that are letting that “one thing” stand in the way of following Jesus? Are you praying for them daily?

7:36 AM Chuck Baldwin reports about the Ron Paul Freedom Marchhere. Don’t miss his peroration.

7:25 AM Just accepted an invitation to speak atVintage 21 Church in Raleigh on Sept. 9. My topic is “biblical criticism.” Times are 6:30-8:30 pm.

Monday, July 14

8:40 PM O, I bumped into my colleague Frank Catanzaro (“Captain Zorro”) on campus today. He and his wife just spent a week at the most perfect beach in the world: Kailua. I had put him in touch with a great rental house there. After all, that’s where I was raised and where Becky and I spent our honeymoon. Check out this great aerial photo.

In the foreground are the Mokulua Islands (“Twin Islands”). We would take a hobie cat there and then grab our boards and surf the reef break, shown in the center right of the picture. The beach in the center is called Lanikai, and to the right is Kailua Beach. In the background is the Koolau Range, deeply fluted mountains that form the western edge of a caldera (which means that Kailua sits in an extinct volcano!). When my family moved to Kailua from Waikiki in 1955, none of the houses you see here were in existence. Now Kailua is the second most populous city in the Islands. When I wasn’t surfing Kailua you could find me at the North Shore or else surfing Ala Moana or Flies on the leeward side of the isle.

Here’s the sunset we witnessed almost every evening. People have asked me, “Did you ever take the beauty of Hawaii for granted when you lived there?” The answer is: NEVER. I can honestly say that there was not a single day that went by when I did not consciously say, “Thank you, Lord, for your creation!”

7:16 PM Today I received a very nice letter (yes, a letter, not an email!) from Harold Greenlee talking about his new book and the Festschrift that I edited in his honor several years ago. Again I want to encourage as many of my readers as possible to check out Harold’sprimer on textual criticism, even though I disagree entirely with his approach to resolving textual issues!

7:05 PM Rick Saenz asks avery good question:

The important question is this: is the purpose of the homestead to provide comfortable incomes, even for multiple generations, or is it to create a context in which successive generations can live and thrive, i.e. reclaim an agrarian life?

I would say that our purpose is both (but please scratch out the word “comfortable” before “incomes”). Nate and Jess, as fulltime farm managers, would be very happy with a subsistence income and with being completely self-sufficient in the food department. Becky and I would happy with the latter, at the very least. For example, with the price of bread going up, Bec has decided to return to baking her own at the fraction of what it costs for a loaf in the supermarket. Meanwhile here are a few pix of what our kitchen has looked like for the past 3 weeks while Becky has been canning. I don’t know if this qualifies as “reclaiming the agrarian life,” but it’s probably the closest to agrarian living as we’ll ever come! (By the way, can you tell I like green beans and pickles?)

 

6:52 PM Just back from the seminary. It seems like years since I was last on campus. It felt GOOD. My sabbatical hasn’t even begun and I already miss the classroom. I don’t know how people can stand to take a whole year off from teaching. One solitary semester is almost unbearable for me!

8:10 AM I had to chuckle at Bill Walker’s latest over at LRC:They Didn’t Attack Switzerland. Actually, I have first-hand experience of what he’s talking about. In 1983, when I graduated with my doctorate from the University of Basel, part of the ceremony, which dates back centuries, was to place my hand on an ancient sword and swear (in Latin) to defend Basel against all her enemies should she ever be attacked. This is an old tradition that is still practiced today, long after the Swiss were known as the world’s most intrepid mercenaries. Today the populace is very well-armed (a deterrent, it is believed, to foreign invasion). To cite one example: Herr and Frau Schaub were members of our little Baptist Church in Basel. Herr Schaub would often regale about his WW II experiences. He used to say that was in uniform on active duty far longer than any other European — from 1936 to 1948 — without firing a shot. So Bill is right about the Swiss and active deterrents. I would only add 2 things: that Switzerland is NOT a member of the EU (membership was rejected by referendum), and that the Swiss confederation is so loose that most Swiss citizens could not tell you the name of their federal president.*

* Pascal Couchepin (careful how you pronounce it!)

7:35 AM The latest addition to our home page was written by Becky. It’s called Weeds. And no, it’s not only for gardeners.

7:26 AM Friedrich Nietzsche, the classical philologist, once quipped that it was extraordinary that God should have used such bad Greek in writing the New Testament.

I know of some New Testament scholars who find it easy to talk about “errors” in the Greek of the New Testament. No, not solecisms, or even barbarisms, but actual errors. Speaking personally, I have yet to find a singular error in the Greek of any of the 27 New Testament writings. I made this point rather emphatically yesterday at The Carpenter’s Shop, because I wanted people to see that the inspired Word of God, far from being just inspired and even inerrant, is profitable, useful, practical even. This is what 2 Tim. 3:16 teaches. I do not see how a writing can be useful if I cannot trust what it says. I have always been impressed by the force and finality of the Scriptures. And the cross of Jesus is the central theme of it all. It is a struggle in which there is no quarter: one must either accept or reject Christ unconditionally. And not only that: it is also a question of ultimate loyalty. One cannot proclaim Jesus as Lord and have any other lords. This includes the nation-state. With the conversion of Emperor Constantine to Christianity not only did the church become the state-church, the empire became a church-state. In this church-state the only ones who could interpret the Bible were those who had been professionally trained for the task. No longer was every member a Bible scholar. The priest abrogated the member’s responsibility to know God’s Word personally. Substitute “pastor” for “priest” and you have the modern problem of clericalism.

Let me repeat what I said to our friends yesterday. There is NO SUBSTITUTE for the Word of God. Not James Dobson. Not David Jeremiah. And certainly not Dave Black. With all due apologies to the brilliant Nietzsche, God made no mistakes in recording the words and deeds of our Savior in a language that every man and woman, cultured and uncultured alike, could read and understand. In the end, it does us no good at all to have a perfect source of truth and never bother to read it.

7:19 AM As we were processing our beans last night, Becky and I listened to Brahm’s magnificent German Requiem, which we sang years ago with the Northeast Piedmont Choral. That was mostly “BE” — before Ethiopia, when we had the time for rehearsals, performances, etc. I just had to chuckle to myself. Beans and Brahms in one fell swoop. We’re just weird, I guess.

Sunday, July 13

6:08 PM The apostle Paul never mentioned “dangers in the air,” but that was before the invention of manned flight. Becky and I have taken off and landed many times in Khartoum, which just experienced itsfourth fatal air disaster in 2 months. It’s eerie flying into an airport that is smack dab in the middle of a huge metropolis. As always, you just trust God, knowing that His timing is always right.

5:33 PM Here’s a huge shout out and thank you to brother Jimmy Chalmers and the good folk at The Carpenter’s Shop in Creedmoor, who made Becky and me feel right at home as I shared from the Scriptures about the — Scriptures!

My main assignment was to refute Bart Ehrman’s view of the corruption of the New Testament. Here I am holding up a piece of papyrus that I got in Egypt. It is the size of the average ancient letter. From there we talked about the history of the transmission of the New Testament text, how to resolve textual variants, and a little bit about the formation of the New Testament canon. Remember, folks, this was in “church”! I loved every minute.

Becky and I used to live near Creedmoor, so we saw a few old friends but mostly made lots of new ones. I thoroughly enjoyed the casual, family atmosphere of the meeting. It was very free-going. I imagine open meetings like that can get pretty rough-and-tumble at times, but the folks there spared me any embarrassment and even seemed to enjoy themselves. My greatest fault, I think, is that I talk too much and I talk too fast.

At any rate, the group meets in Jon’s Main Street Bar and Grill, and afterwards we enjoyed Jon’s new dinner buffet, which even included steak. (Try it out!) Having being forced to “buffet” my body, I came home and took a long nap but the beans and cukes are waiting to be canned so it’s back to work for the two of us. No rest for the weary!

8:50 AM Well, we finished the apples, then we went over to Nate and Jessie’s for supper. Afterwards we checked the progress on their parlor. This is one of four cabinet doors they are installing in their bookshelves. The doors date from 1832 and come from a historic building. The craftsmanship is outstanding, I think. Nate will leave the finish as is to preserve the old look.

One of Jessie’s jobs has been to remove the old cut nails from the lath boarding in the room. Again we’re looking at ante-bellum construction.  

They recovered several sizes of cut nails, which Nate proudly displayed for me. Here in Bradford Hall we used the big nails for all of our flooring, upstairs and down. The nails were so old that we often had to drill a hole in the floorboard before we could pound the nail. The flooring itself we cut off the farm, just like in the old days.

O, here’s a first at Rosewood Farm. Jessie cut her husband’s hair. Can’t have all them curly cues on her farmer man!

I was glad to surrender that duty to Jess, and the results never looked better. Here’s Lady Jessica with her Stonewall.

This morning Becky is picking beans, and then we’re off to “share in the life” with a gathering in North Carolina. It’s a Q & A session on how we got our Bible, the formation of the canon, textual criticism, and other various and sundry subjects having to do with the historicity and trustworthiness of the New Testament. Should be gobs of fun.

Saturday, July 12

12:39 PM Doug Kaufman is visitingthe oldest Mennonite church in the world. This is something I would sorely like to do someday.

12:39 PM Gary DeLashmutt discusses the role of ritual in the life of a new covenant believer.

It is important to note that Jesus prescribed very few rituals compared to the number in the Old Testament economy. It is also noteworthy that the way in which these rituals are to be observed is not explained in detail, again a sharp contrast to the Old Testament period. Since we live in the period of fulfillment of salvation rather than in the period of promise, ritual takes on a lesser role. This fact, together with Paul’s warning in Ga1.4:1 11, should teach the believer that ritual plays a relatively minor role in the Christian life compared to his/her personal relationship with Christ.

Read morehere. His essay might give you pause the next time someone is asked to pray during the Sunday meeting and says, “Dear God, thank you for allowing us to meet in your house on this Sabbath day to worship you.”

12:15 PM If you live near Columbus, OH, the Xenos Summer Institute might be something you’ll want to attend. The dates are July 23-25. Plenary speakers include Don Carson and Mark Driscoll. For the conference website, go here. Interestingly, the conference even has a “home stay” program where you can stay in people’s homes free of charge. You gotta love it!

11:59 AM I believe that the church gathers not to worship but rather to build one another up (1 Cor. 14:26). For what it’s worth, I said as muchhere. That said, I still believe in worship, as correctly defined.This essay helped me to see that worship is a lifestyle. Again, this lifestyle of worship is what made the early church so unique, and so different from our “praise and worship” oriented gatherings. Why should we have “worship” services and “worship” folders and “worship” leaders and “worship” teams when the New Testament teaches that all life is to be “worship”? Is our problem ignorance? Is it indifference? Is it disobedience? It is my hope and prayer that essays like the one I linked to above will be used of God to awaken interest in His Word and lead those who use it to a better understanding of what He expects of us today.

11:28 AM The web has helped me again (see entry below and the link on Spencer’s site). I’m ordering John Frye’sJesus the Pastor. 

11:19 AM What does “Jesus-shaped” leadership look like? Here’s Michael Spencer’sanswer.

11:13 AM Sen. McCain is a patriot. Kester Smithisn’t.

10:38 AM Kyle Osland is convinced that the church is a group ofexiles.

One would think that this reality of identity and vocation would be more prevalent and immediate to discern, but perhaps we have underestimated the power of spiritual formation of a secular culture and nation-state. For me, the exciting potential of being an exile is that we can serve our not-yet-Christian brother and sisters by offering new perspectives, fresh political imagination, and a critique to the culture that so conditions and governs our lives.

I think it was precisely because the early Christians had a pilgrim identity that they were so willing to take responsibility for each other. They could not bear to have too much when others had too little. Genuine Christianity is a lovely thing. It looks good. It is a band of exiled brothers and sisters living in reverence for Christ and living out that reverence in respect and care for others.

To be honest, I’m struggle with this perspective. For far too long I existed as an iceberg Christian. In the early church there was an engaging winsomeness on God’s people. They proved that Christianity was right by confronting people with the undeniable evidence of Christian character. They were literally unable to stop speaking about those wonderful things they themselves had personally seen and heard and experienced. They knew first-hand that it was true, and they were so certain of it they were willing to lose their lives for it. Their first concern was to put their Christianity into practical action by serving and sacrificing.

The believers in Ethiopia are very much on my heart this morning. They too are members of Christ’s Body. They too are exiles wandering this planet, living close to God and sharing His love with their neighbors. But the church is almost starving.Drought is everywhere. Inflation is rampant. When the church in Antioch heard about the famine in Judea, they knew they had to help. It was unthinkable to them that one part of the church should suffer and that another part of the church not do anything about it. How about it, American church? Will you at least pray for those who are suffering? Later I’ll present some specific steps that perhaps we can take to help tangibly. But my main thought now is this: Do we see ourselves as one Body — not members of the American church but members of the church of Christ? Is the life of an exile in Ethiopia as important to me as my own life? Am I willing to suffer and go without for their sake?

God help me.

8:55 AM The latest addition to our home page is calledWhy I Love the Anabaptists.

8:46 AM Today’s the day. Speakers include Chuck Baldwin, of course.

8:32 AM I see that the evangelical power basehas met to anoint John McCain over Sen. Obama. Wow, the suspense was killing me.

“People are not saying, ‘Let’s all go out and support John McCain,'” Burress said. “It’s more like, ‘We have to do what we have to do for our country.’ Basically, that boiled down to John McCain.”

Nary a mention ofChuck Baldwin. O well. The hawks won’t get their way this time. Meantime, I think I’ll watch Pride and Prejudice and reminisce about the “good old days” before American foreign policy dissed generations of resistance to preemptive and unilateral attacks.

Friday, July 11

8:34 PM Tonight I cooked Chinese stir fry. Even added some yellow squash Becky had just picked. Tasted great. You can see that we have our work cut out for us tomorrow with all these apples.

The tree we got them from is over 100 years old (below left). They are by far the largest and tastiest apples we know of in this entire area.

The tree is situated behind this old house, which is probably the most beautiful Victorian in all of the Piedmont. It’s even on the South Boston Walking Tour. For a cyber-visit, clickhere.

Thanks very much, Bob, for your generosity to us!

4:56 PM  Today we welcomed to the farm Jon Glass and family. Jon shepherds at Ca-Vel Baptist Church in Roxboro, NC. He will be teaching the book of 1 Corinthians this November in Burji. Right now Becky and I are leaving for South Boston to pick up more apples.

4:22 PM Theological German now links to a list of Super German Sites on the web. Man, I wish I had access to such resources when I was teaching myself German back in the 70s. I agree withAnthony Gregory that government has no business telling us what languages to speak and learn. I also agree that learning foreign languages is fun and useful. One example: What language will you use when you want to have a secret conversation in the presence of your kids? Becky and I use German. Then there are the surprises, like the time we had a friend from Switzerland who went camping with us in California. (I had been a student at the University of Basel from 1980-1983.) A group of Swiss tourists happened by, and before you know it we got into a long conversation (in German, of course). After a few minutes they looked at me and said, thinking I was Swiss, “How can you stand living in America?” When I told them I was an American, they had what can only be described as a major “oops” moment.

7:45 AM Yesterday an astute reader was kind enough to point out to me a gaff I had made in calling Alexander Hamilton “George” Hamilton. I see I wasn’t alone in the gaff department this week. (Just ask Jesse Jackson.) By the way, here’s one website I’ll miss after the elections.

6:12 AM Presidential candidate Chuck Baldwin has a special word for his Christian friendshere. I think he’s right. The true church will always be in conflict with the prevailing social and economic structures. So I think it’s commendable that Chuck has decided to enter politics to try and penetrate that world with biblical values. Jesus was often in the company of the Zealots. Obedience to Christ will often place the Christian in the midst of political pragmatists. The temptation, however, is to yield to pragmatic responses rather than seeking biblical alternatives. Political involvement may be good and praiseworthy but must of necessity return us to the challenge of the cross. If we attempt to move beyond the cross and use the same pragmatisms the world employs, we are tempted to compromise truth with what appears to be good political sense. Obedience gives way to expediency. As for the political system in the United States, Caesar does not need to be a Christian to be under God’s control. Any good end that the Constitution Party may serve (and I believe it does serve a good end) is a matter quite separate from the role of the people of God who are consciously dedicated to knowing and serving God. Heaven help us if the world concludes that the Gospel is only one more self-serving ideology among others.

Thursday, July 10

9:24 PM Feel up to a brief farm collage?

Our fields will soon be ready for a second cutting, Lord willing. So far He’s given us soaking rains to help our grass grow green and tall. We are very grateful. This time last year the drought had already started.

Our barns are gradually filling up. We’ll store the hay until winter, when the demand for horse-quality square bales is higher. 

Nate and Jess were working today on the bookshelves in their downstairs parlor. I think the fireplace and mantle already look fantastic. 

Everywhere you looked this evening the sky was full of colorful and unique cloud formations like this one. 

Here’s N. and J. 30 minutes ago, spreading manure on the “ripple field” as the sun was setting. When Sheppie saw his master, he took off running after him. Them boys sure is close!

O, more good news: Jessie’s foot is almost back to normal. 

Back to writing….

3:05 PM Did you know that the shortest animal gestation period belongs to the American opossum, which bears its young 12 to 13 days after conception? The longest is the Asiatic elephant, taking 608 days, or about 20 months. The gestation period for Shetland Sheep Dogs lasts just over 2 months. We are all looking forward to Sheba’s babies. Sheltie puppies are born in about half hour intervals. Since the average litter is 7 puppies, the whole birthing process can take 7 or 8 hours from the start of labor.

Here’s the happy mother:

And here’s Sheppie, the proud father: 

Time for me to take them on a long walk, get the mail, and check up on Nate and Jessie over at their farm house. 

11:28 AM Greek students! I hope you are planning on taking Greek Syntax and Exegesis in the fall. But if you have to postpone it, I wanted to mention that I will offer a section of the class in the spring. I’ve asked for the 12:30-3:20 time slot, but we’ll see. I do know the class will be held either on Tuesday or Wednesday. If you do decide to take the course with me, be forewarned: It is probably the most difficult class you will take in seminary bar none. The good news is that, if you survive, you will really KNOW your Greek.

11:12 AM Our modem went out on us last night. No storm, no nothing, just a brief electrical outage and poof — it’s gone. So yours truly drives all the way to South Boston, where NOBODY carries dialup modems anymore — not even Wal-Mart. All was well in the end, though. I took Becky to dinner at 220 Seafood Restaurant in Henderson and stopped in Staples to get their one remaining dialup modem. I also ordered two as backups. Bec and I had flounder and baked potatoes, with sides of good North Carolina slaw and hushpuppies.

Wednesday, July 9

11:01 AM The latest addition to our home page is by guest author Kevin Brown. His essay is called Rite of Passage: A Return to Scriptural Adulthood. 

9:48 AM Gary North’s take on the fallout of an attack on Iran is very interesting. The blue jeans revolution in that country would come to an end and the ante upped in our two current wars. The big question mark: what if the nation’s bellicose mood shifts? (I’m talking about our nation, not theirs.) North concludes that it would be terribly inconvenient but not disastrous if an attack occurs. Just be prepared to pay $10 a gallon for gasoline and watch your portfolio collapse. Either way, there will be a lot of bloodletting on both sides, which you will never see of course, because most of the gore and suffering is never shown on television, “embedded” reporters notwithstanding.

9:22 AM Tom DiLorenzo’s new book on Hamilton should be just as politically incorrect as his works on Lincoln. He talked about it today over atLRC. I believe there are numerous parallels between between Hamilton and George Bush, and havesaid so in public. I do not worship the U.S. Constitution. But it’s the law of the land, folks. And it’s really very simple. “Small government.” Ditto for the Bible. You don’t need to be a scholar to understand it. Just read it and obey it. If it says that every member of Christ’s Body is a minister, then be a minister and stop depending on others to do all the serving for you. If it calls you to sacrificial service, then by all means be willing to give up some of your comforts to do that. In public life as well as in church life, volunteerism is to be the rule and not the exception.

9:05 AM When he’s not feeding the fear and stoking homeland security, Sen. McCain hopes to establish a reputation as a standup comic. Hislatest idiocy (can you think of a better word?) would be like a wacky Peter Sellers satire if so many people didn’t die from smoking. I guess it’s his way of showing voters that his foreign policy is more muscular and “comprehensive” than Mr. Obama’s. If we can’t nuke ’em, we can always get ’em with the “tobacco strategy.”

Ha ha ha.

Tuesday, July 8

10:20 PM You won’t believe this, but Nate and I worked till after 8:00 pm today. We got the tin on the roof just like we hoped. Good thing too. It’s no fun getting all your things wet when the rain comes. It’s beginning to sink in, rather painfully, that my age has caught up with me. Tonight my back aches, my feet ache, my wasp sting stings, and I’m just pooped. It’s hard to fathom, really. Moi, the expert surfer dude and equestrian? I’ve been asking myself all day, What have I done for the kingdom? Shouldn’t real disciples be out preaching the Gospel or at least passing out tracts? So what have I really accomplished today? Well, two things come to mind. I let Becky have the pooter all day so she could finish her “Burji ’08 Ministry” paper. It zings, let me tell you. For example, wait till you hear about the “Burji Youth Corps.” (And no, they don’t get paid for helping, either.) She also wrote an article for the web. Plus many important emails. So I didn’t get any writing done. No biggie. Secondly, Nathan truly needed some heavy lifting help today. He was up on a barn roof all day, and if I hadn’t been there and done that, he’d still be there doing that. Man I wish I had taken the camera today. His work really looks good. Or should I say “our” work? And good work — even a new barn roof — reflects well on the Master Carpenter, don’t you think?

So there you have it — my “kingdom” work for the day. Well, its after 10:00 pm and I still haven’t checked my emails. Talk to you tomorrow!

6:53 AM Well, my fall sabbatical travel schedule is really starting to take shape. So far it looks like I’ll be traveling abroad, sharing the love of Jesus, for 10 out of the 16 weeks of the semester. I start back to school on Jan. 5 (J-term runs from Jan. 5-21), then the new semester starts the very next day, Jan. 22. Whew! Meanwhile I hope to finish my book project before I leave on my first jaunt in mid-September. Believe me, I’m writing this book more to understand than to instruct. I’m grappling with my own lifestyle, my own concepts of discipleship, ecclesiastical structure, and Christian witness. I really want the book to be more than just another textbook. I’ve written enough of those!

Speaking of writing, I thought you’d enjoy these pix from my last trip to Ethiopia. They were taken in Bahir Dar on Lake Tana. After a long day of teaching, my translator and I would often come here for some hot milk and to enjoy the gorgeous sunsets. He called the place “Little Hawaii.” I sure felt at home and got a ton of writing done.

6:46 AM So I’m writing my book and a question keeps popping up. Pacifism or antipacifism? Two flowers on a petal. She loves me, she loves me not. This is my latest dilemma. What to do with pacifism? I’m reading The Politics of Jesus and The Presence of the Kingdom, and I’m ordering the classics by Bainton, Beattie, Driver, Herschberger, and McSorley. At least with these authors no one can defend the proposition that pacifism is based on liberal theology. I’m also reading Elton Trueblood, one of my faves. Even men like Carl Henry who do not espouse nonresistance teach the need for greater concern on the part of evangelicals for the social teachings of Jesus. The key question for me is this: Do I really take the words of Jesus at face value? Menno Simons asked, “How can a Christian, according to the Scriptures, consistently retaliate, rebel, war, murder, slay, torture, steal, rob and burn cities and conquer countries?”

What to do with pacifism? 

6:35 AM Over supper last night Becky and I had a great conversation about risk-taking and the kingdom. Why, we asked ourselves, should Jesus-followers expect to live a long and happy life? Why do we think that longevity is a sign of blessing? If we are radical followers of Jesus and are seeking first His kingdom, maybe we need to adjust our expectation of longevity. Think about it. Here are some kingdom-building activities that might well put your life at risk:

• Working with the HIV-AIDS population as a witness to Jesus’ love

• Moving to the inner city or an urban ghetto to serve Jesus

• Ministering the Gospel to prostitutes and pimps

• Driving down the road in a third world country on a mission trip

• Sharing your faith in a Muslim nation

• Traveling to a malaria-ridden region of the world to live out your faith

If Epaphroditus could “gamble away his life” (the rendering “risk his life” is too weak — see the Greek of Phil. 2:30), why shouldn’t I? I find no better illustration of this than in the words of Menno Simons, who was a hunted “heretic” because he opposed Roman doctrines he considered wrong:

We desire with ardent hearts even at the cost of life and blood that the holy Gospel of Jesus Christ and His apostles … may be taught and preached through all the world.

Therefore, we preach, as much as possible, both by day and by night, in houses and in fields, in forests and wastes, hither and yon, at home or abroad, in prisons and in dungeons, in water and in fire, on the scaffold and on the wheel, before lords and princes, through mouth and pen, with possessions and blood, with life and death.

This is my only joy and heart’s desire: to extend the kingdom of God, reveal the truth, reprove sin, teach righteousness, feed hungry souls with the Word of the Lord, lead the starving sheep into the right path, and gain many souls to the Lord through His Spirit, power, and grace (Complete Writings of Menno Simons, p. 303).

WOW! Has it ever been said better? Friends, none of this is academic to me. It’s simply one more way Jesus is turning my life upside down. Do I have a burning zeal for evangelism set aflame by the Spirit of God? Am I willing and even eager to “gamble away my life” in order to show forth the way of true Christian discipleship in my home, neighborhood, relationships, travels?

6:22 AM Good morning, blog world! I’m sorry to start off with some disturbing news. But this is the real world, folks. And it has everything to do with Christian ethics. Even if you are not into politics, you must readthis essay by Muhammad Sahimi parsing the resolution on Iran that is now before the House. It is an eye-opener! The attack, according to people who should know, will take place just after the election. If it takes place at all. You know how I’m praying!

Monday, July 7

11:11 AM Look at what Nate and I just picked. Thanks for your help, son. I’ve had a sinus headache all morning but ran out of my medication for it. So it’s off to CVS to pick up my refill of Maxalt. Will stop by and check up on Lady Jessie on the way out. Her foot is much improved, thank God.

7:46 AM Good morning, bloggers and bloggerettes. I’m by my lonesome today, as Becky has gone off to baby-sit two of “our” grandchildren while their mommy and daddy take their middle son to Richmond for ear surgery (I’m praying for you guys!). Yesterday we had a wonderful day. We spent the morning at Bethel Hill BC, then had lunch with 3 very special friends of ours at a really good Mexican place in Roxboro. The afternoon was spent in canning apple sauce — 33 quarts full.

Today is hot and muggy. The only outdoors work I’ve got planned for today is picking green beans and possibly helping Nate on a construction job. Otherwise the ink will be flowing from the quill just as fast I can write. I’m not well-suited to being a polemicist but I must confess that my book has a bit of an edge to it. I’ve learned a great deal from the barrel-chested manifestos that evangelicals have written recently, but I’m not trying to emulate them. I am certain that pseudoradical ideas (including some ideas coming out of the emerging church movement) will not work because they have the same money, paid staff, buildings, investments, clericalism, and institutionalism as do most conventional churches. Why don’t we get real and stop viewing the church as an end rather than a means to an end? It is God’s means of sculpturing a new humanity, a spiritual kingdom out of the dross of humanity. I’m thankful for friends like the ones we spent time with yesterday, who are always available for kvetching and counseling and who make a very good sounding for my odd ideas about kingdom living. The big challenge is saying what I want to say and not fall back on Western bumper stick talk.

Pray for me. 

Sunday, July 6

7:58 AM The role of women in the church and the home remains a hotly debated topic in evangelical circles. You’ll appreciate the tone, then, ofthis recent essay on complementarianism.  It’s a follow-up of sorts to thepeace plan Timothy George offered a couple of years ago at CT. For what it’s worth, I’ve jotted down some of my own thoughts on the subject in an essay calledA Great Commission Marriage. And no, this is not a picture of Becky and me.

7:50 AM The new Apologetics Study Bible is reviewedhere by Celucien Joseph.

Saturday, July 5

8:35 PM I have often said that the heart of the book of Philippians is 1:27-2:18. And I’ve read and heard many good sermons from the paragraphs in this great section. But the kingdom emphasis found inthis sermon series is truly refreshing to see. Well done, Tony!

8:05 PM For all of you students of New Testament Greek out there, I’ve just sent in the contributors’ bios to the publisher for my latest book,Perspectives on the Ending of Mark. Amazon lists the release date as Nov. 1, but I’m hoping we can push that up to the beginning of September, just in case anybody wants to use the book as a classroom text this fall. We’ll see. B & H have a done a splendid job of typesetting. I think you’ll be pleased with the results.

7:32 PM Hey, fellow bloggers and kingdom lovers. If you haven’t done so already, check out Matthew McDill’s recent entry onchurch leadership. You gotta love it. And Matthew’s no armchair theologian. Every Sunday he and his friends attempt to flesh this stuff out in Boone, NC.

Here’s my favorite quote:

When we seek to function in this pattern (a congregation that seeks to follow Christ by consensus through the Word and the Spirit as they are led by a co-equal team of pastors), it will be difficult and inefficient. But the difficulties (produced by immaturity, selfishness, sin, individualism, etc) will reveal the real spiritual need. In the process of corporate decision making, the real needs can be addressed and discipleship takes place.

6:50 PM From my trip diary # 12:

Thursday, June 12, Alaba. Today I visited our son Mohammed in the Alaba prison. I know for sure that God has a very special purpose for this young man. When I look critically at my own life, I know in my heart of hearts that I could easily be in his place. There is a voice in me that says, “You are no better than a murderer, for you too have hated, have been angry without cause, have committed murder in your heart.” Even though I trust Jesus and His love, I hold so much back. But God is glad to receive us home even if we are murderers. Mohammed is very strong spiritually (thank God!). He spends much time in the Word, meets with his fellow believers for prayer at 6:00 am every morning, and is living for the kingdom. As I left he told me, “After this punishment I will go and preach the Gospel.” I hugged him, much like the dim-eyed old father holds his returned son close to his chest with unconditional love in Rembrandt’s painting The Return of the Prodigal Son. If I ever needed a concrete sign of God’s amazing grace, Mohammed is it.

4:29 PM Well, today I spent lots of time at Nate and Jessie’s house. Nate needed some fatherly help moving heavy furniture. Then Jess cooked up some scrumptious quesadillas. Right now they’ve gone off with Becky to pick apples in a friend’s orchard in South Boston. I have a sneaking suspicion mom is going to invite the newlyweds out to dinner afterwards. There’s a good Mexican joint there as well as a so-so Chinese place.

I did manage to get some thoughts down on paper today, especially as they relate to the themes of my new book. Until Jesus’ kingdom was subverted into its opposite (“Christendom”), believers’ only loyalty was to Jesus and to His kingdom. It should be the same today. If we are truly Jesus-followers we cannot have two loyalties or two masters. We are called to be revolutionaries by acting like Christ. Yet look at all the things that come between us and radical discipleship — education included. It hurts me to say this, since I’ve been a teacher for 31 years, but for many people, education is not a way to serve the kingdom but a path to upward mobility. And then there are all those things we give to Caesar that don’t rightfully belong to him. This is a point that many evangelicals fail to catch. They assume that the demands of the state are always to be followed. Indeed, the state is not even open to question. Then they commit the ultimate hermeneutical gaff — they “interpret ” the Bible in whatever way is necessary to make it fit with the government’s demands.

In the coming days I’ll probably be blogging more on this. Needless to say, right now I need to focus on exegeting the scriptural texts that have to do with radical discipleship, and there are plenty of these! In the meantime, remember:

Discipleship is always costly.

12:40 PM Exactly 3 weeks ago today our son Fasil was married to Rahel. They make a lovely couple, don’t you think? Fasil teaches Greek and New Testament at the Evangelical Theological College in Addis Ababa. He has translated for me on numerous occasions. He has a huge servant’s heart. Congratulations, you two. May the Lord richly bless your married life as you serve Him together.

12:29 PM Farm update:

1) Had a great time working with Nathan yesterday on a building project down in Carolina. He had me pounding nails. And more nails. I used to have calluses from this kind of work. Now I’ve got blisters. Shows what happens when you don’t do any manual labor for a couple of months. Then we swapped out trailers and unloaded manure. We topped off the day with an excellent supper of Mexican food that Becky had cooked up.

2) Jessie’s foot is on the mend! And not a minute too soon. She’s getting a foot soak three times a day and staying off it completely. The B-team will be glad to relinquish his position to Lady Jess once she’s healed up. Everywhere I went with Nathan people asked, “Where’s Jessie?”

3) Becky and I have been juggling the computer, back and forth, back and forth. A friendly game of see-saw. Such excitement! I’ve been writing, she’s been writing, and we’ve been getting some of the most amazing emails we’ve ever read. I wish I could tell you the details, but let’s just say that the Lord of the Harvest is continuing His good work all over the world. Much of Becky’s work concerns the clinic in Burji. I’m glad she’s got organizational skills, because I sure don’t. My own emailing has been finalizing my travel schedule for the fall. The doors keep opening worldwide, so it looks like a busy sabbatical — just the way I like it. 

4) We had a good rain this morning to help our parched soil. Looks like some more is in the forecast.

5) I just finished my study of 2 Corinthians in my morning devotionals. Let’s see, where to go next? I think I’ll study 2 Maccabees! (Just kidding.)

Friday, July 4

8:43 AM Good morning, fellow bloggers. And Happy Fourth of July.

What a great nation we live in! No, I’m not referring to the good ol’ US of A. Christianity transcends all boundaries — national, cultural, racial, geographical, natural, even educational. Think about it. This understanding of Christianity was commonplace in the early church. Only after Constantine did it increasingly become a minority position. Even the Reformers continued the church-state alliance. “Christian” warfare continued unabated, and the rise of nation-states only led to its increase. Go figure!

Today the American church is squarely aligned with the powers that be. I once supported the alliance. Not anymore. Radical disciples of Jesus embrace those on the other side of the dividing walls of hostility in our world, even including our “enemies.” Can I get an “Amen!”?

So today, on this Fourth of July, I am thankful to God as I see the growing number of saints who refuse to worship the nation-state and the pervading cultural infatuation with violence, who instead prefer the scandalous way of powerless love, who realize — whether American or Ethiopian or Chinese — that they are a pilgrim people who live in the world and yet have their real citizenship in a kingdom that is both partly present and coming in all its fullness.

Yes, what a great nation we live in!

Thursday, July 3

2:10 PM Got some great news from Ethiopia today. And I mean “great.” I’ll let Becky tell you about it. Here’s an email she sent out this morning:

Exactly 5 minutes ago, at 9:41am, Virginia time, we got a call from Oshe, a church leader in Burji….he was calling to report that just then the Government had handed them a license for the Galana Clinic!!!!  This is a great praise!  It has taken many months of negotiations, document collection, discussions with village people, etc.,etc….but now it is completed, and we can move forward with this work!  Rejoice with us!!  If our Lord is willing, we have figured that 75,000 people a year will hear of the Saviour thru this Clinic.  It is in a village that is primarily Muslim, but also has many animists (witchdoctor, African religion). The village is at a juncture between three tribes, which are often at war with each other.  So there is much opportunity for the Kingdom here!

Please continue to pray for the clinic.  God has given us a really good man who is well trained to supervise the clinic.  Now we will begin the reconstruction, gather of supplies, and hire other personnel.  This weekend the Burji Church Leaders are having their annual conference, and will choose the chaplain for the clinic.  Please be in special prayer for this decision, as he is a key part of the spiritual success of the ministry.

On another note, Oshe told me also that there is severe drought in the Burji/SW Ethiopia area.  At this time of year usually the rains have made the land to be fresh & green, but this year the crops are already brown & failing.  The Burji people are 95- subsistence farmers, so a drought has serious affects on the people.  And it also affects the income of the churches, which in turn support the ministry.  The drought also sparks tribal warfare, causing the loss of precious lives, creating widows & orphans, stopping transportation & commerce, etc.   The Burji leaders are asking us to spread the news: Please pray that our Lord will bring rain to the area.

May our Lord bless you for your prayers for these dear people!!

Many of you have prayed much about this clinic. Now it’s time for all of us to offer thanks to God. Let us also pray that the work of conversion might go on through the clinic operations, and for all those who will be involved in getting it operational. And please do pray for the Burji churches as this weekend they select the evangelist who will be working fulltime in the clinic. Thank God we have spiritually-minded leadership in Burji!

As you know, I was in Burji just two weeks ago. Would you like to take a brief tour of Galana, where the clinic is located? 

We’ve just left the town of Soyama, the only major population center in the district of Burji. Here’s the road we take to Galana, where the clinic is located. If we stayed on this road it would take us north to Amarro and from there to Yirga Chefe, where we could take the two lane (but paved!) “Pan-African Highway” to Addis.

After about a 20-minute drive we arrive at the village of Galana and take this side street past the local Kale Heywet church to the clinic site. Last year our Burji team from the States held several workshops here and showed the Jesus Film to large crowds, many of them Muslim. 

The clinic itself is situated on a large tract of land adjacent to the church property. The clinic has been run for several years with a limited staff and practically no outside assistance. The clinic is under the watch care of the Burji Kale Heywet District office located in Soyama.

The main clinic facility is in fairly good shape. This picture shows the waiting area. Our plans call for it to be expanded and for a covered shelter to be built on this side of the building with additional benches. It is here that our fulltime evangelist will be stationed.

The current nurse lives at the facility during the week and goes home on the weekends. We are hoping to add two more fulltime nurses plus a part-time lab tech, who will live in the Galana village or on the clinic site itself. 

This storage room houses most of the clinic’s meds and equipment. Our plans call for significantly expanding these services offered to the public. 

Our task in the coming months is to refurbish the existing structures and have them up and running again when our team arrives from America in November. You can see we have plenty of work to do.

We are thinking that the nurses can stay in this building once we repair it. For security purposes, we are hiring two full time security guards, one for daytime and one for the night shift.  

This is an example of poor construction. The interior sticks were placed directly into the ground without any foundational protection, thus permitting significant termite damage. 

This exterior wall has been mudded but still needs cementing. Sometimes the cement just falls off the building because it was applied when the mud was still wet.

When you arrive at the clinic, all the munchkins come out of the wood work, at first staring inquisitively, then becoming the best of friends. All it takes is a smile or, in my case, a smile plus a portrait of one of the children!

Remember what Becky wrote in her email: on average about 75,000 people will visit this clinic each year, including, I’m sure, some of these precious children. They will not only receive expert medical care, they will hear about the Jesus who loves them so much that He suffered on their behalf many years ago. Listen, this is what missions is all about. It’s not a program or a method. It’s just people. People in Burji, Ethiopia, and people in our own backyard. Will you pray that God would do a great work of redemption among the Burjis and the Gujis who will visit the Galana clinic in the coming years? Thank you.

11:17 AM This is not one of Ron Paul’sbetter speeches in the House, but it does get his point across:

H.J. Res 362… is a virtual war resolution. It is the declaration of tremendous sanctions, and boycotts and embargoes on the Iranians. It is very, very severe.

Paul is outraged, and well he might be. Basically, as I read it, so many who supposedly champion the cause of liberty detest liberty in any other country — it’s a nightmare for them from which history will ultimately bear them out, or so they argue. Such arrogant intolerance of those who wish to live in peace with other nations is not new. Just go back 6 years to the run-up to the Iraq War. May God bless Paul’s efforts.

10:12 AM The latest addition to our home page is calledThe Jesus Paradigm.

9:55 AM It happened 145 years ago today. I’m referring toPickett’s Charge, of course (aka Longstreet’s Assault). I’ve walked that bloody mile many times, once in full uniform. What awesome bravery, on both sides.

Fifty years after the battle, the veterans of Pickett’s Division Association and the Philadelphia Brigade Association shook hands in comradeship over the stone wall at the angle.
 

Which would you have rather witnessed — the battle or the reunion? I can tell you I would have paid a million dollars to witness the latter!

“God has done all this. He has restored our relationship with Him through Christ, and has given us this ministry of restoring relationships. In other words, God was using Christ to restore His relationship with humanity. He didn’t hold people’s faults against them, and He has given us this message of restored relationships to tell others. Therefore, we are Christ’s representatives, and through us God is calling you. We beg you on behalf of Christ to become reunited with God!” (2 Cor. 5:18-). God, the Great Re-Uniter!

9:46 AM I stayed up until midnight last night reading my escape story, Free as a Running Fox, by Tommy Calnan. Of all the escapes he attempted, surely the most interesting one took place from the POW camp at Schubin. This essay byPeter Liddle has a fascinating description of what it was like to be a tunneler working in the dirt of Poland.

Entering the tunnel was a daily experience of horror. Each trip down required a little more courage, and the need to blot out the thought of all those tons of earth pressing down on you, knowing that a cave-in would leave us trapped, breathing mouthfuls of mud and unable to go backwardsor forwards.

The presence of light became important, not just to work by, but to steady our nerves and remind us that there was a world above with sky and fresh air, waiting for us to return.

We worked on in stifling darkness, trying not to think about the amount of unstable earth directly above our heads. It is hard to convey the sense of claustrophobia that comes from an hour of stabbing away at a wall of Polish mud so narrow that you can only get one arm forward to work on the face and which stretches back behind you so far that it takes half an hour to wriggle back to safety and sanity at the tunnel start. The experience assaults every sense. We felt the cold clay around us, pressing in on us and seeping into our bones until we almost became part of the tunnel. The loss of sight in the darkness when the lights went out was total. No glimmer of light had penetrated that wall of mud in a million years. Even when the margarine lamp flickered, it only served to emphasise the blackness around it – what Milton once called “darkness visible”.

When a shower of earth fell from an unshored roof: it filled the mouth of an unfortunate digger, gaping wide for oxygen in the stale void of the tunnel.’

I’ll confess, I could never have done this. I am far too claustrophobic. What courage these men had. Later, Calnan successfully escaped from Stalag Luft 3 in Sagan, Poland, the site of the “Great Escape.”

9:35 AM Did you know thatlava produces vog? Neither did I. (Had to add that word to my spell checker.)

9:30 AM Students in Knoxville, if you’re taking my Gospels-Acts class in 3 weeks, I’m sending off the pre-reading assignments today. Check theHIBS website for details.

9:22 AM On my trip I took several “Nathan pictures.” Here’s one I think he’ll enjoy. And he thought he was the master dumpster diver! I took the photo while traveling in Addis.

Just so she doesn’t feel left out, here’s one for Lady Jessica, the ultimate animal lover. I snapped it on the path I took every day to and from my discipleship class in Gondar. What an amazing country of contrasts!

Wednesday, July 2

1:45 PM From Triangular Christianity comes this call to service outside of the four walls of our churches:

The default position of many (most?) churches is that a spiritually formed person will be very involved in the institution of the church (and not the other church across town, but our church!): attend the building. Give many to the building. Serve in the building. Invite people to the building. Do everything for the building. As McNeal summarizes, “we have made following Jesus all about being a good church member.” But is this what it means to follow Christ?

Read more aboutmissional church membership. This is a far cry from, “We need to know who’s on our rolls!” Call for the purging of exaggerated church rolls if you like, but I’ll stick to calling people to radical discipleship.

10:15 AM “Christianity without discipleship is always Christianity without Christ.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer. 

Fellow bloggers, I am profoundly convinced that we American evangelicals are facing our biggest opportunity since the Reformation for making disciples worldwide. Yet we are forfeiting it because there is too little engagement and too little burden for massive cooperation. Christianity demands that truth be done and not only known. Are we willing to follow the Lord of the harvest wherever He should lead us, even into dangerous places? I am asking myself this question afresh today.

8:44 AM From my trip diary # 11:

Tuesday, June 17, somewhere between Dilla and Burji. Am just now traveling to Burji. The mountains, the sky, the greenness — my God, it’s beautiful. Today in faraway America Becky’s mother is visiting the farm. Ironic — she the missionary to Ethiopia is in Virginia, and I’m in her old stomping grounds! I can see why Becky’s parents loved Burji so much.

On this trip I have been reading a biography of Spurgeon. I was struck by the fact that he was rarely in normal health and was often hindered by sickness. During my stay in Ethiopia I have had constant headaches caused by the change in barometric pressure. I can always tell when a storm is coming! I have felt unwell for most of the trip but — thank God — I’ve never been too tired or too sick to cancel an appointment. Still, I have never had a more arduous journey than the one I am now enduring. Our Isuzu truck is rarely out of first gear, the road is so bumpy. Even worse is witnessing the burned out villages and displaced people, the result of the tribal wars now taking place. Still, I am glad to be going back to Burji!

8:32 AM Jeff Neipp reflects onwhat he has learned since he graduated from SEBTS nine years ago. He wants to be a simple “Jesus follower.” So do I!

8:24 AM 10 random things I’m enjoying right now:

1) Watching the ducks on the pond.

2) Reading Douglas’sThe Nonviolent Cross.

3) Sipping out of my new coffee cup from Matt and Liz.

4) Planning for my fall trips.

5) Listening to Dupre’s Cortege et Litanie.

6) Grading my last term paper (an extension had been granted).

7) Ordering books on Amazon.

8) Going through my trip diary.

9) Praying for Nate and Jessie as they serve at the camp.

10) Enjoying watching Becky as she does all her little projects around the house.

8:12 AM From my trip diary # 10:

Friday, June 13, Addis Ababa. I just returned from a meeting with the Patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, H.H. Abune Paulos. The patriarchal palace is located on a hill overlooking the city. A new building houses the country’s archbishops in well-furbished apartments. Providentially, a year ago I had an invitation from the dean of the EOC seminary in Mekele to teach Greek there but had to decline. Enthusiasm for ecumenism is as much evident in Ethiopia as it is in the West and is of grave concern among the religious hierarchy. I understand that a large number of Orthodox believers are determined to reinforce the confessional stance of their church from an earlier period of history. Others are interested in dialoging with non-Orthodox in order to improve social conditions in Ethiopia. My meeting with the Patriarch went exceptionally well. Paulos is a Princeton-trained theologian (Ph.D.) and speaks fluent English. He was imprisoned for 6 years during the Communist reign of terror in Ethiopia, during which time the then-ruling Patriarch was executed by the government. Paulos has sought to use his office to improve relations between Ethiopia and Sudan and Eritrea. I hope to meet with him again when I return in November.

Earlier in the day I met with Archbishop Timoteos, the dean of Holy Trinity College, the main EOC seminary in Addis. I was able to donate several of my Greek books to their library (which is 90 percent in English). Timoteos, along with his associate dean, Abba Haile Mariam, are keen on improving their Greek instruction and getting ideas for their new Ph.D. program in theology. I was glad I could offer a few suggestions.

Wherever I go in Ethiopia and with whomever I speak, I try to be very careful about how I represent Jesus. The way of Jesus is not Western liberal democracy in which everyone seeks self-interest through a market economy. It is not a religious organization. It is a people marked by the Beatitudes, forsaking all lusts, giving up security, refusing to amass wealth, insisting upon love of enemies. Christ existed in the form of God yet He refused to exploit His equality with God, but emptied Himself. In that spirit Jesus ministered to all men and women — even to the outcasts, even to those it was considered a big taboo to associate with. Jesus refused to submit to such taboos, and so do I!

Tuesday, July 1

11:12 PM Becky prepared a most beautiful table this evening for supper. Here’s proof:

 

7:04 PM Nate and Jessie stopped by for lunch today. Becky had prepared some deeelicious barbeque sandwiches. Jessie’s foot is still very sore but she’s the world’s ultimate trooper. Nate gave us a full report of how the children’s camp went last night. He and Jessie are giving the kids a full-court press of love and attention, yet also requiring good behavior. Didn’t take them long to earn the kids’ respect. After lights out, Nathan told the boys “Henny, Jenny, and Penny” stories. Years ago I invented these 3 chickens, whose adventures regaled our own children during our many camping trips. There’s no telling what kinds of trouble HJP will face, or how they will get out of it. I had a blast listening to Nate describe their latest adventure, including a cameo appearance by Babbit the Wabbit.

Meanwhile, our missionary guests are finishing up their stay here. Father and son woke up early this morning and caught a couple of big ones in our pond. Nate taught Joseph how to clean them, while their daughter got a kick out of making the mouths “talk.” The Mosses leave here tomorrow for northern destinations, including DC, Pennsylvania (and Gettysburg), Ohio, then a trip out West to settle down in Southern California, whence they came. Alfie hopes to teach some Greek during their home assignment. I hope that works out for him; he loves the language.

8:50 AM If we do launch another middle-eastern war in the coming months, let’s place the blame squarely where it should be laid: onCongress. Thankfully, there’s an alternative to our one-party system. And it has everything to do with our Constitution:

Neither of the two major parties has any interest in bringing our troops home. No matter which of those parties wins the White House, our troops would continue to be used for U.N. missions all over the world. They would continue to stick our nose wherever it does not belong. They would continue our utopian plans of nation-building, empire-building and international meddling. When I become President empire building and playing policeman of the world will come to an immediate halt and the United States of America will once again begin conducting itself as the Republic it was meant to be.

Have we learned nothing from the Crusades, when we slaughtered the infidels and conquered heathen lands, torturing heretics to save their immortal souls? Am I naive to weep with Jesus in hoping that present Jerusalems might know the things that make for peace? If you think that peace has moved to front and center in my life and witness, you’re not far off!

8:27 AM From my trip diary # 9:

Wednesday, June 18, Burji. My last week in Ethiopia. I am seeking to remain focused. “Commit your works to the Lord, and your thoughts will be established” (Prov. 16:3). Good counsel as I meet with the civil administration today regarding the health clinic. How easy it is to be so active in service that we forget the One who ministers in and through us! I find it dreadfully difficult to maintain a time with God — to “commit my works to the Lord” — in the midst of such a busy schedule. Things move so fast that my soul is often left behind. Then my service becomes an empty parody of the real thing. O Lord, let me be led by Your Spirit each day I am here in Burji, and let my service to You be not mine but Yours through me.

7:39 AM From my trip diary # 8:

Thursday, June 19, Burji. This morning I leave to preach among the Gujis. No Burji can accompany me — I am told the situation is still too dangerous for that. My Bible reading this morning (2 Tim. 2:1-10) contained this verse: “Therefore I endure all things for the sake of the elect, that they may also obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory.” The only final solution to the Burji-Guji conflict is a spiritual one. Paul was able to endure his Roman chains because he knew that God’s work was continuing among the elect, whose salvation will bring them eternal glory. Paul — always the evangelist! I would be the same, whether among the Alabas, the Oromos, the Burjis, the Amharas, or the Gujis.

Here’s the first Guji home I encountered during my trek. It belonged to a Christian family with 9 children.

Inside we enjoyed coffee and bread, then the family broke out in spontaneous singing, praising God in beautiful Gujinya. They made me feel like a member of the family. I shared with them that I have 9 Ethiopian children, one of whom is in prison for murder. We thus share similar burdens.

The meeting hall is very simple and practical. Soon the word got around that a faranji had come to talk to them about Jesus.

The ladies and girls from the villages gathered first. I noted a girl who had Downs Syndrome (she is on the far left) and reflected that God not only blesses Westerners with such priceless human beings.

I brought a very simple message through my translator, who is an auto mechanic in the town of Agre Mariam. He sacrificed two days of his time and energy to accompany me. Our polite audience remained seated for 3 hours as various ones spoke. When we were done I suppose about 60-70 Gujis had gathered at the church site to hear the Gospel of peace.

How can I describe the effect my trip to the Gujis had on me? I worked in concert with believers from different denominations who have an ambition to preach Christ where He is not widely known. I rarely see in America this kind of unity, for it is forced by the onslaught of a very real foe. Like the church at Smyrna, the Guji church is pressed by tribulation, but her Lord took account of the faithfulness she had in trial. It is clear to me that the American church stands self-condemned for its worship of denominations and lack of cooperation, not to mention itsmindless support of war making.

Yesterday Becky spoke to a Burji church leader by phone. He reports that the situation is still very tense. Last Friday a believer in a Burji village was shot and killed by a Guji. The church leader asked us to hold a peace conference in the Guji region when we return in November. I (along with maybe one other faranji) will hike from village to village and then hold a meeting on the border where Gujis and Burjis can meet. The leader hopes a spirit of repentance and reconciliation will fall upon the region.

I am already praying about the peace conference. The peace we will be talking about will not merely be the absence of conflict. Peace is found where there is wholeness in relationships between people and with God. It is a dynamic situation in which people struggle through real (not imagined!) conflicts in ways that yield reconciliation rather than separation. Meanwhile, please join Becky and me in praying for the family of the leader who was killed and for the killer — in fact, for all these precious souls, Burjis and Gujis alike.

June 2008 Blog Archives

May 2008 Blog Archives

April 2008 Blog Archives

March 2008 Blog Archives

February 2008 Blog Archives

January 2008 Blog Archives

December 2007 Blog Archives

November 2007 Blog Archives

October 2007 Blog Archives

September 2007 Blog Archives

August 2007 Blog Archives

June-July 2007 Blog Archives

May 2007 Blog Archives

April 2007 Blog Archives

March 2007 Blog Archives

February 2007 Blog Archives

January 2007 Blog Archives

Nov-Dec 2006 Blog Archives

October 2006 Blog Archives

September 2006 Blog Archives

August 2006 Blog Archives

July 2006 Blog Archives

June 2006 Blog Archives

May 2006 Blog Archives

April 2006 Blog Archives

March 2006 Blog Archives

February 2006 Blog Archives

January 2006 Blog Archives

Nov-Dec 2005 Blog Archives

October 2005 Blog Archives

September 2005 Blog Archives

August 2005 Blog Archives

May 2005 Blog Archives

April 2005 Blog Archives

March 2005 Blog Archives

February 2005 Blog Archives

January 2005 Blog Archives

December 2004 Blog Archives

November 2004 Blog Archives

October 2004 Blog Archives

September 2004 Blog Archives

August 2004 Blog Archives

July 2004 Blog Archives

June 2004 Blog Archives

May 2004 Blog Archives

April 2004 Blog Archives

March 2004 Blog Archives

February 2004 Blog Archives

January 2004 Blog Archives

December 2003 Blog Archives

November 2003 Blog Archives

 

   restoring our biblical and constitutional foundations

                

home

welcome

about dave

on the road

the book box

columns & essays

reading room

contact dave

 

July 2006 Blog Archives

Wednesday, July 26  

10:59 AM I see that Europe’s MacDonalds are going gangbusters. When Becky and I lived in Basel in the early 1980s we would “splurge” by going to the MacDonalds at the Barrfuesserplatz every Friday evening for a little taste of America. If the weather was mild we would walk there from our tiny one-room apartment near the Rhine. Becky got a Big Mac while I always went for the Filet O’ Fish. What happy memories!

10:53 AM Fall semester update: I’ll be going to my Wake Forest office tomorrow to work on my fall syllabi. They should be posted by Friday at the seminary website. If you’re planning on taking my Greek exegesis course, I’ve chosen Philippians for our book study. Feel free to get a head start in translating it. Only 23 days before classes begin.

8:14 AM The latest addition to our home page is called A Lesson from the Garden.

8:10 AM Words can’t begin to describe the excellent job our editor in Dallas has done with our Greek DVD series. Becky and I kept saying “Wow” over and over as we watched the first two installments. We’ve given him the green light to proceed at full speed with the remaining lessons. He’s done such a good job I told Becky I may take the course myself.

Tuesday, July 25  

9:58 AM The latest addition to our home page is called Developing Biblical Convictions.

9:54 AM God has arms.

9:52 AM Greek students! Here’s some wisdom on language learning from one of your peers. It’s full of helpful tidbits, like this:

Until we have an expectation that students of Greek and Hebrew will be able to pick up their main text and read it at sight and understand it without translating, then Greek and Hebrew will continue to be arcane sciences concerned with deciphering ancient texts.

And this:

Because Greek Exegesis is so high a priority, 2nd Year greek here becomes entirely a cipher-game, as students are taught to analyse and classify every use of every word in a verse, and pin it down to one of 21432 uses of the genitive. The problem? No one used greek like that. While there may well be 21432 uses, the authors of greek texts simply used the genitive, because that was the right form to express their idea. They didn’t choose between the genitive of Type-X and the genitive of Type-Y, they simply chose the genitive.

What this seminary creates, as so many schools of greek do, is code-breakers, analysts of greek language. not people who can read and understand greek as a language.

You can read the whole article here.

9:43 AM Are you a missionary or a “stationary”? Either way, says Jay Bell, you are to be on mission for Jesus.

9:41 AM Over at Summa Philosophiae there’s an excellent review of Michael Green’s latest book, The Books the Church Suppressed: Fiction and Truth in The Da Vinci Code. Michael Green is an amazing, balanced New Testament scholar/churchman with a passion for missions and evangelism. My kind of guy exactly.

9:37 AM Wheaton College is seeking a teacher of Old Testament.

9:35 AM Tuesday shout-out to Steve Sensenig (author of “A Blogger’s Version of 1 Corinthians 13”) on the first anniversary of his blog. Heartiest congratulations.

Monday, July 24  

11:50 AM Stephen Orr just sent me a link to his excellent website devoted to aging parents. Stephen has just completed a book on the topic. To learn more, go here. Thank you, brother, for sharing your ministry with the blogging community.

8:54 AM More great news! Yesterday our son David presented to the elders in the Deda church the funds needed to complete the refitting of the foundation of their meeting hall. (You will recall that a faulty foundation led to termite infestation.) He also presented 200 Amharic Bibles to those who had completed their memory work. David reported to us that the church has grown from 300 to 400 members since Becky and I were there. Remember, this is in the Muslim province of Alaba. Amazing.

Here are the elders of the Deda church when we met with them last December. Deda is our David’s native village.

8:52 AM Great news! We just received the first 2 installments of my Greek course on DVD. I’ll be reviewing it this evening. If everything is running smoothly, we’ll give our editor in Dallas the nod to complete the series. It may even be ready this fall. If you’ve written to me asking about the DVDs, I’ve got your email on file and will contact you personally just as soon as I know they’re available. If you would like me to add your name to that list, I’d be glad to do so.

8:46 AM A gorgeous, sunny morning in southern Virginia. It’s nice to be blogging again. It’s simply amazing to me how quickly and easily the internet allows me to connect with people worldwide. I’m glad I can walk away from it for a week or two if I need to, but there is so much to say, and so many matters that need updating, that I end up posting at least once a day. Last week in Kansas City, when I was asked where I got my news from since we don’t watch any TV at the farm, my answer was simply: the internet. Here you can get the news you need when you need it, without the commercials (and with just the biases you want, I guess. All news is “biased”!). My students are also aware that some of the best research tools for studying Greek (or any other subject for that matter) are available, free of charge, on the web. One student wanted to teach himself German and asked where he could go. Another asked me about a parsing guide for reading his Greek New Testament. Still another wanted to know about European universities that offer accredited doctoral programs. All of this information is available at the click of a mouse. I even told them I was thinking of publishing my first internet book shortly. I keep thinking: What in the world did we do before computers? (I pause here and sigh, thinking about the first two books I wrote. They were done on a thing called a “typewriter.” Remember those?) A lot of you really should be on the internet, if for no other reason than it disciplines you to express yourself clearly and succinctly. It will also help you to develop your writing talent. And there is a ready audience waiting for you to say something interesting and edifying. So…?

Sunday, July 23  

6:52 PM Just a couple of quick notes.

(1) Becky Lynn and I had a marvelous time this morning at Antioch Baptist Church in Charlotte County, VA. It had been over 3 years since I was there. Once again they are without a pastor. Becky was asked to give an impromptu “children’s sermon,” which she did superbly and without any bells and whistles — just her Bible. I spoke on “Jesus, the World’s Greatest Missionary” from Matthew 9, and next week we’ll share about the work God is doing in Ethiopia. This afternoon while Becky was canning Nate and I drove out to a farm to see about purchasing their mower. It didn’t fit our tractor, so back to square one. I’m still talking about my trip last week. It was pure joy to fellowship with such a variety of students. On Wednesday Bill Victor drove up from southern Missouri to have dinner with me. Bill is a freshly-minted Ph.D. student from Southwestern Seminary and an up-and-coming New Testament scholar. By the way, Bill edits this interesting blog. 

(2) If you haven’t been keeping up with the unrest on the Ethiopia-Somalia border, go here and here. I would like to see thousands of Americans praying for the peace of that region in addition to the situation in the Middle East.

(3) Becky hopes to publish her next Ethiopia report this week. This issue will likely feature our tentative plans for our next trip and how you can help if the Lord Jesus tells you to.

Saturday, July 22  

6:38 PM Just back from Kansas City. At the moment I’m alone because Becky is working at the hospital and Nate is out on a job. I had one of the best classes I’ve ever taught as an adjunct. I can’t prove that scientifically, but the students went away, I believe, with a major recommitment to follow the Word of God and to wean themselves from man-made thinking. I spent a lot of time talking about the New Testament church and how simply it has been designed by its Founder. Congrats to all my students at Midwestern. You were a great group and I look forward to reading your term papers and exams. Right now I’m going to visit the animals, especially the Shelties. I’ll get to your emails tomorrow.

Friday, July 14  

4:10 PM The roof to the chicken mansion is done. Amen and amen. We worked in extreme humidity, and I mean extreme. Right now I’m indoors packing my bags. I’m amazed at how dependent I’ve become on air conditioning. Growing up in Hawaii I never noticed the humidity. But after I moved to California, where the heat is very dry, I noticed it on trips back home. Right now things are scattered all over the floor in my bedroom. Looks like I’ll have to check one bag. I don’t like to do that on short trips, but I’ve got so many teaching materials and books that it’s unavoidable. Lord willing, this time tomorrow I’ll be lounging in the campus guest housing. It’s called the “Vivion Farm Home.” Sounds cozy.

7:23 AM I’m on the road again. I leave early tomorrow for a week in Kansas City, MO, to teach a class at Midwestern Seminary. I’m taking tons of handouts for my students. My teaching schedule is 8:00 to 5:50 daily. If you write, I will have access to email, but it may take a while before I can get back to you. A friend said I will enjoy the campus. The weather promises to be clear and in the low 90s. Not bad at all. In class we’ll be discussing some important topics, including the husband of one wife requirement in 1 Tim. 3:2, the role of tongues-speaking in the church (then and now), the “Pauline” authorship of Hebrews, the Galatian heresy (and its modern counterparts), and the role of women in ministry. I’ll also be teaching my students how to go from biblical text to teaching outline, based on the 10 steps outlined here. Then they’ll do an exegesis of a passage of their choice from the epistles. Our reading will take us into some hotly debated issues such as the place of pseudonymity in the New Testament (Terry Wilder, of their faculty, is an expert on this subject), the use of the Old Testament in the New, approaches to the study of the Book of Revelation, and New Testament Textual Criticism. As always, I’m praying that I would get out of the way and let the Lord Jesus do all the teaching (1 John 2:27). Should be gobs of fun. I do plan to get some writing done every evening. I also plan to get a picture of me at the James’ farm. Hope you have a great week as well.

Right now it’s time to work on the chicken house.

7:17 AM The latest addition to our home page is called Men From Among You.

Thursday, July 13  

1:57 PM Mission accomplished. The tin is ours. ‘Nuff said.

6:45 AM Southeastern University in Lakeland, Florida, has an opening in missions.

6:39 AM It looks like today’s the day we’ll scavenge the tin. Yesterday Nathan wanted to take advantage of the good weather to do a job for a neighboring farmer — painting his roof, to be exact. We worked from 9:00 to 4:30 without lunch. I did the cutting in, Nate used the long-handled brush. Of course, I managed to get paint on the siding wherever I went, so back up the ladder with the white paint for some touching up. I don’t try to be a klutz. It just comes naturally. By the way, I survived my ascent to the rooftop just fine.

6:34 AM On the gardening front, I wonder what Becky Lynn has been feeding her hibiscus plant. Even in Hawaii they don’t grow this big.

6:26 AM Ingrid Schlueter has written an insightful article on Rick Warren’s upcoming trip to North Korea. Can we expect a strong evangelistic message emphasizing Christ’s Lordship? Sadly, I doubt it.

Wednesday, July 12  

6:48 AM Could your personal library use a little thinning out? If so, New Orleans Seminary needs books to replenish those destroyed during Hurricane Katrina. I just sent them the following volumes:

• How to Preach Without Notes (by Charles W. Koller)

• Introducing the New Testament (by Joe Blair)

• Revelation (by Preston A. Taylor)

• One Hundred Eleven Bible Messages (by Preston A. Taylor)

• Commentary and Reference Survey (by John Glynn)

• The New Testament: Its Background and Message (by Thomas D. Lea)

Go here to read more about this wonderful opportunity.

6:45 AM Intellectual midwifery.

6:42 AM Rhett Wilson has joined the blogging world. I love his blog name too. Remember, Rhett, blogging is like voting: do it early, and do it often.

6:37 AM Yesterday I ran into one of our Th.M. students who will be starting Ph.D. studies shortly and will need to take German, French, and Latin. For him (and others like him) here are a few suggestions on how to learn a foreign language. (Note: Do NOT seek to gain only a reading knowledge of modern languages, including German and French. By speaking the language you will not only be able to converse in that language should you travel or live abroad but improve your reading ability and your capacity to retain the grammar you’ve learned. Also: Machine translations aren’t worth the time or effort to use.)

6:32 AM The way back home. A marvelous poem.

6:30 AM And all this time I thought “dude” derived from the surfing subculture (as in “surfer dude”).

6:26 AM Palm Beach Atlantic University in Florida announces an opening in Christian Leadership.

6:23 AM Looking ahead to the fall, I’ll be teaching two courses of Elementary Greek and one Syntax and Exegesis class. My classes will fall on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. For the first time in many years I’ll be teaching a night class. Elementary Greek meets on Tuesdays from 6:30-9:30 pm. It would make a good class for those of you who commute to Wake Forest. I’d also like to see many pastors/elders audit the class if they haven’t already had Greek or need a refresher. I’m not sure when registration begins, but if you’re interested in any of these classes please contact our Registry at registrar@sebts.edu. I’ll post the course syllabi in August.

6:20 AM Yesterday a colleague of mine who has been to KC was telling me where I can get good barbecue in town. Meaning beef, of course, not pork. Only beef is real barbecue. Naturally the best barbecue is to be had at Rosewood Farm, Virginia. On Monday night Becky made the best baby-back ribs I’ve ever had. On Sunday I was talking to someone at Childrey Baptist Church who raises goats. “Not for meat,” she assured me. “You see,” she said, “we name all of our goats and we just can’t bring ourselves to eat our pets.” We don’t seem to have that problem on our farm.

6:14 AM Now here’s an inspiring story about learning Greek (even a shepherd could do it!) as told by Greek professor A. T. Robertson:

At the age of sixteen John Brown, of Haddington, startled a bookseller by asking for a copy of the Greek Testament. He was barefooted and clad in ragged homespun clothes. He was a shepherd boy from the hills of Scotland. “What would you do with that book?” a professor scornfully asked. “I’ll try to read it,” the lad replied, and proceeded to read off a passage in the Gospel of John. He went off in triumph with the coveted prize, but the story spread that he was a wizard and had learned Greek by the black art. He was actually arraigned for witchcraft, but in 1746 the elders and deacons at Abernethy gave him a vote of acquittal, although the minister would not sign it. His letter of defence, Sir W. Robertson Nicoll says (The British Weekly, Oct. 3, 1918), “deserves to be reckoned among the memorable letters of the world.” John Brown became a divinity student and finally professor of divinity. In the chapel at Mansfield College, Oxford, Brown’s figure ranks with those of Doddridge, Fry, Chalmers, Vinet, Schleiermacher. He had taught himself Greek while herding his sheep, and he did it without a grammar. Surely young John Brown of Haddington should forever put to shame those theological students and busy pastors who neglect the Greek Testament, though teacher, grammar, lexicon are at their disposal.

6:10 AM Alan Knox made this statement in the comments section over at Matthew McDill’s site:

If elders are not chosen from among the church, then the people will not consider them as part of the church. Thus, it is easy for an elder to leave one group for another, and for a church to “fire” an elder. Since there is only a short-term relationship involved, not much is lost. However, if the elder is part of the church (even before being an elder), then there is a much more intimate relationship involved. You will not be able to “get rid” of an elder just by firing him.

Wonderfully put, Alan.

6:04 AM Did you know the ancient Greeks had a word for “freckles”? They also had computers. Amazing.

Tuesday, July 11  

5:59 AM The latest addition to our home page is called Letter to My Greek Students.

5:56 AM Have you heard of the latest extreme sport? It’s called Extreme Scavenging. That’s what Nate and I will be doing this week. A neighboring farmer has 3 old barns that he is allowing us to tear down and salvage the roofing tin from. We’re doing this because we’ve run out of tin for our chicken mansion. The only problem is that all 3 of the buildings are completely covered with poison oak. This doesn’t faze my son in the least. That’s Nate for you. Completely fearless. He tells me he’s immune to poison oak as well as poison ivy. Me? We’ll find out I guess. Should be fun. If I survive.

5:50 AM Greg Linscott discusses the place of grace in blogging. His conclusion:

As this communication platform continues to develop, we must realize that concerns are warranted and precautions are necessary. However, opportunities also abound. Latest studies show that “nearly two-thirds of online Americans use the Internet for faith-related reasons. The 64- of Internet users who perform spiritual and religious activities online represent nearly 82 million Americans.” To overlook this opportunity to declare and communicate truth would seem a tragic oversight indeed.

Read the whole article, then go and start your own blog.  

5:42 AM Had a great conversation yesterday with Doug Richey, who pastors over at Pisgah Baptist Church in Kansas City, where I’ll be speaking on Sunday. Actually, the church is located several miles outside of the city in a place called Excelsior Springs. Thankfully, the directions sounded easy enough, though Doug warned me that the country is very hilly and there are no straight roads in town. I’m sort of used to this because I’ve taught twice in Seattle for Fuller Seminary and did a lot of driving in the very hilly Queen Anne district. Traveling so much to teach makes me think of the planetary system. Everything orbits for me around Wake Forest, my “earth,” but occasionally my teaching space shuttle visits some far distant planet for a few weeks. It’s always an enjoyable experience, but it’s good to get back home when it’s all over.

Monday, July 10  

6:35 AM We received a wonderful email from our son Nigussie in Ethiopia. Part of it reads:

Mam, thank you VERY VERY much for your sacrificial presence in our midst, all your provisions, and bringing Nathan and grand parents. My GREAT THANKS goes to my Papa for his sacrificial stay alone at home, which made your presence available among us. Mam, I kindly ask you to give great hag for Papa on behalf of me and tell him that it is from his son. Mam, thank you for doing that. I am very much longing to see and to hear his voices. I missed him a lot. I am overwhelmed with tremendous happiness when I read your plan to come to Ethiopia in December 2006.It gives us a time to see you once again and to serve the almighty Lord together in “green” Alaba. I love you VERY much. I am SO great full for the Lord for his love and grace up on you, as you are engaged in various responsibilities. We are praying about you and your ministry.

It’s because of men like Nigussie that the Gospel is going forth in such hard and difficult places like Alaba, and we thank God for the privilege of working alongside them. I think what God is doing among the most persecuted believers in the world is nothing short of miraculous.

Below right: Nigussie at his graduation banquet in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in June. Nigussie was the class valedictorian. Next to him is our other son from Alaba, David (formerly Ahmed). These men are at the forefront of evangelism in a province that is 99 percent Muslim.

6:23 AM Today concludes my 29th year of teaching New Testament Greek. I began my teaching career in 1976 at Biola College under the tutelage of Dr. Harry Sturz, who was kind enough to hire me to teach in the Greek Department. Our first year of instruction was in classical Greek, and we used a textbook that was designed for one semester at Harvard. We scraped by with two semesters. Eventually we began to offer Koine Greek in the first year. I have now taught New Testament courses and/or lectured on the New Testament in the U.S., Ethiopia, Germany, Switzerland, Holland, India, Korea, Britain, and Spain. I have to smile when I think that I lasted only 3 weeks before dropping when I took my first course in Greek. I am grateful to the many people who through the years took an interest in my career and encouraged me to study in Europe and even to write books on the New Testament. As a boy growing up on the shores of Oahu nothing could have been further from my mind than to be a Greek teacher. I shudder to think that I literally came “that” close to missing out on what has been a big part of God’s will for my life. This past week I was counseling a student who is contemplating going into full time teaching at the seminary level. In all honesty I had to tell him that it is a wonderful career choice. It’s clear to me that one of the best ministries I can have as I start my 30th year of instruction is to be an encouragement to the next generation of Greek scholars who are just now cutting their eye teeth in school. Along the way, if in His grace the Lord Jesus allows me to mentor a few more young scholars in the field, I will feel myself the most blessed man on earth. So, it’s onward and upward until the Lord comes or He takes me home. Really, all I can say is: Praise God.

Sunday, July 9  

3:09 PM Just back from teaching in two services at Childrey Baptist Church in northern Halifax County. Beautiful country. In fact, we once looked at buying a farm about 10 miles from the church. We dubbed it the “Five Fields Farm” because it had several large pastures along with an old (restorable) farm house. Special thanks to Grayson Francis of Childrey for treating me to a great buffet dinner after the service. Grayson’s family has lived in the area for generations and currently lives on his grandparents’ farm, where the old place (built before the Civil War) is still standing. Needless to say, we had lots to talk about.

Saturday, July 8  

7:56 AM A week from today I’m scheduled to fly to Kansas City, Missouri, for my New Testament class at Midwestern Seminary. My wife has some ancestors who lived in Clay County and I hope to visit some of those sites as well as Jesse and Frank James’ home place. Sunday morning I’ll be speaking at Pisgah Baptist Church.

7:52 AM We’ve been hosting Caleb and Isaac Rondeau for a few days while their mommy was having her baby. Micah Rondeau arrived on Thursday. In the meantime the boys have been a joy to have around and have pitched right in with the work, including taking the scraps to the chickens.

They also helped Mama B with her canning. Green beans and zucchini.

Papa B takes the boys for long walks. Isaac has enjoyed all the other “kids” he’s met in the pasture.

And Caleb loves to pick flowers for his Mama B.

Becky and the boys visited Liz, Matthew, and Micah in the hospital yesterday. Everyone is doing great and should be back home tomorrow.  

7:46 AM This weekend I’m having my Greek students read my book New Testament Textual Criticism. I jokingly call it the “definitive 80-page book on the subject.” It’s an overview, nothing more. But even first-year students need to know something about all those hieroglyphics at the bottom of their Greek New Testaments. On Monday we’ll have our last quiz, and on Tuesday the final. It’s still hard to believe that the course is basically over. How many students will continue in their Greek studies? How many will actually use their Greek Bibles in ministry and life? Will someone from this class end up going into fulltime college or seminary teaching in New Testament? (I’ve seen this happen several times.) Time will tell. All I know is that God will not forget their efforts. Neither will I.

7:40 AM Did you notice how pleasant the weather is? It’s sunny today but not too hot, perfect for working on the chicken house. I also hope to get a ride in. I love riding. As someone once put it, “The outside of a horse is good for the inside of a man.” We’ll see, though. Usually I’m too tired for riding after doing construction work. And you don’t want to ride Trav when you’re tired. Because he’s so high-spirited, he requires all the physical and mental energy you can muster. Incidentally, on a road near our farm they used to have horse races in the 1800s and early 1900s. They used this road because it had a mile-long straightaway. Now only a few neighbors have horses, and fewer still ride. People don’t know what they’re missing.

7:31 AM From the mailbag:

1) Matthew McDill writes to tell me that his article on the long ending of Mark has just appeared in Filologia Neotestamentaria. He has also posted an essay on “indigenous” church leadership at his website. Congratulations, Matthew, and keep up the good work.

2) Tony Sisk, who pastors at Hunting Creek Baptist Church, asked how it went two Sundays ago when I spoke there and if I’d consider coming back sometime. I told him I felt right at home. Let me know when you want me to return, Tony, and I’ll be there.

3) A DBO reader from Texas read my July 6 entry and kindly offered to transcribe for me the handwritten notes in my Greek New Testament. What an incredibly gracious offer. I told him my notes are too mundane and idiosyncratic to merit such treatment. But the thought was appreciated.

Friday, July 7  

5:39 AM Boys and girls, please help us welcome the newest residents of Rosewood Farm. These chicks are 4 days old today.

5:36 AM This email was a blessing:

My heart was truly touched by Mrs. Black’s Ethiopia reports. I literally got chills when I read of the possibility of placing the water wells closer to the dwellings. Thank you for taking the time to update us on everything. May the Lord continue to bless the work in Ethiopia.

Our ministry in Ethiopia continues to be a critical part of my life. This is precisely why I spend so much time talking about what God is doing in that land. There is nothing more satisfying or exhilarating as working together with a “band of brothers” to serve our Lord Jesus by sharing His goodness and love with others.

5:31 AM John Gallimore of Australia sent along this link on well drilling:

http://www.wellspringafrica.org/

Thanks, John. I agree 100 percent that wells are changing how rural ministry is done all over the world. Fanny Crosby put it so wonderfully in her poem, “The Water of Life”:

Jesus the water of life will give,
Freely, freely, freely;
Jesus the water of life will give,
Freely to those who love Him.
Come to that fountain, oh drink, and live!
Freely, freely, freely;
Come to that fountain, oh, drink and live!
Flowing for those that love Him.

Refrain

The Spirit and the Bride say, Come;
Freely, freely, freely;
And he that is thirsty let him come,
And drink of the water of life.
The fountain of life is flowing,
Flowing, freely flowing;
The fountain of life is flowing,
Is flowing for you and for me.

5:27 AM There were no 110 Award winners on the last exam, though one student made a 109. I think it’s only in my classes that students go away unhappy when they get a mere 100 on a test. The final next Tuesday should be a cinch – translation and parsing from a selected portion of 1 John.

5:24 AM Chuck Baldwin shows us in eloquent words just what’s wrong with our Republic. As he says, thankfully we have alternatives. But does anyone really care anymore?

5:20 AM Here’s a report on textbooks that flunk the test:

“There’s an incredible sameness about them. They’re following the same script,” she told reporters in a briefing on the study of a dozen American and world history texts issued Feb. 26.

In a 1,000-page textbook weighing almost eight pounds, “There’s so much included,” Mrs. Ravitch said. “They’re incoherent because of the pressure to include everything. They’re colorful but they have irrelevant graphics.”

Inspired by that, I would observe that seminary textbooks can be just an indulgent of group-think and menticide. I for one am grateful that at least some textbooks are willing to challenge the status quo when it comes to long-entrenched views, say, of textual criticism or the synoptic problem.

5:17 AM Have you checked the Dow lately?

Thursday, July 6  

5:50 AM I see I need to have my Greek New Testament rebound again. This will be the fourth time. It’s coming apart at the book of Philippians.

5:47 AM Wayne Lehman has some suggestions on how to choose a Bible translation.

5:43 AM What can happen when a church meets on Saturday.

5:40 AM Wedding bells rang last month for two of my Greek students, Josh Barela and Bernice Achumi. Bernice is from Nagaland in northeast India, and Josh just gave Becky and me a copy of her father’s book called Nagaland Revival Fire. It’s a history of the church in Nagaland and an account of the great revival that took place there in 1976. Thank you, Josh and Bernice, for this wonderful gift. Becky wants to write a similar history of the church in Alaba.  

Wednesday, July 5  

6:15 AM A big Wednesday shout-out to our friends at Childrey Baptist Church in Halifax County. I’m looking forward to seeing all of you again this Sunday. Hope your crops are doing well. I’m sure you’re as thankful as I am for the rain last night.

6:12 AM One of the things I mentioned in my Biblioblogs interview is our desire to dig wells next to every rural church in Alaba. Recent experiments in Ethiopia with a technology that involves no electricity have been successful. This technology has been in use for 20 years in Bolivia. Terry Waller, a Southern Baptist missionary there, has developed it. It’s so simple that any village community can do it. The actual striking part is made of spring leaf from old cars. Regular 1 1/2″ and 2″ galvanized pipe and fittings make up the drill shaft. After the first 10′ of pipe, all the rest of the shaft is PVC plastic tubing. The power is supplied by 4 or more people pulling on a rope to lift the drill shaft and then to release the rope so that the shaft drops into the hole. This requires a tripod made of any local trees and a pulley. Total costs: approximately $100 U.S. for the materials. This is an amazing God-send. Here’s a photo of the technique sent to us by a fellow missionary in Ethiopia.

Please pray for Becky and me as we consider how to best implement this technology in Alaba.

6:00 AM Good morning from beautiful Rosewood Farm in southern Virginia. What a busy “holiday” it has been. Needless to say, I’m eager to get back into the classroom. Today in Greek we grade our next-to-the-last exam. Can you believe we’ve come this far? I want to thank all of my students for their hard work. The big question, of course, is: Who will get the 110 Award today? I hope it’s you.

Tuesday, July 4  

5:28 PM Notes on a holiday:

1) The N & D Construction Company is pleased to announce that the framing of the new chicken hotel is completed. And you can’t beat the cost. The cedar posts cost us nothing, as did the pine rafters and the pine roofing slats. Even our nails were given to us by a friend cleaning out his stock. We did have to buy heavy duty spikes for the posts, and so we may have spent a grand total of $15.00 on the project. And the labor, of course, is free. Lord willing, tomorrow we’ll begin putting up the tin roof (from scavenged materials, of course) and the siding. Wait till you see the interior design. An architectural phenomenon.

2) Guess who’s cooking supper again? Tonight’s menu: farm fresh hamburger mixed with cream of mushroom soup, Jasmine rice, and country corn which we canned last year.

3) If you haven’t seen the great posts on the Fourth of July over at Covenant News you’re really missing something. Chuck Baldwin and Lee Shelton at their very best.

Monday, July 3  

5:08 PM Seems that Biblioblogs wants to interview me for their blogger of the month in July. I just received the questions. I look forward to answering them. Meanwhile, I’ll just say this: I wish every Christian man and every Christian woman would blog. It’s always a good thing to share with others what the Lord Jesus has been teaching us, and the cost is practically nothing. Well, I’ll try and get to the questions tomorrow. Right now I’m getting ready to cook my favorite supper, Chinese food, with, of course, my secret ingredient.

5:03 PM Today was the hottest day of summer by far. We worked in 100 degree heat, but the killer was the humidity. Still, we got all the holes dug and posts set for the new chicken hotel, and have begun setting the rafters too. As we were just starting our work day, Nathan said to me, “Dad, I’ve got a Ph.D. too.” “You do?” “Yeah, my post hole digger.” At the moment my hands have 2 major blisters, my arms are scraped up from dragging trees through the forest, and my flat Hawaiian feet are letting me know they’re there. I feel like I’m having my mid-life crisis. Hmmm, not a bad one to have, come to think of it. I’ve made it this far!

6:58 AM Did I mention my latest hobby — genealogy? I had no idea that a family tree could be so interesting. It’s like that first plastic model you put together as a child. You’re eager to finish it, but the real joy is in getting there.

6:52 AM Yesterday was one of the those perfect days that only the Lord could have arranged. It began at Union Chapel Baptist Church, one of the oldest congregations in our association and established (like our home church, Averett Baptist Church) as a daughter congregation of Grassy Creek Baptist Church in Granville County, North Carolina, founded in 1754.

Becky and I were there to give the congregation an update on the 2 Ethiopian congregations they have adopted. During the Sunday School opening, the missions director read an email we had sent the church earlier about the persecution taking place in Zobechame, where the believers have been violently attacked in recent weeks.

Later, Becky took 10 minutes during the main service to read a letter from the Alaba elders and to report on what she and Nathan had witnessed firsthand just a few weeks ago. Like many of our local Baptist churches, this one is very missions-minded and appreciates the personal touch a ministry like ours brings.

Two weeks ago the church had VBS and Alaba was their missions emphasis. The children raised $266.00 for Bibles. The photo below shows the VBS directors with their Ethiopia poster and Becky holding the letter from the Alaba elders. 

Pastor Earnie was on vacation and in his place our good friend Julian Motley brought the message. Julian shepherded Gorman Baptist Church in Durham for 30 years before “retiring” and joining our faculty at Southeastern. His message from Mark 7 meshed beautifully with what Becky had reported about Ethiopia. The church, he said, has the authority, by prayer, to assault the devil’s hold on this world. Prayer can remove the greatest of obstacles, including the wall of Islam, he noted. He also reminded us that “faith arises out of an environment of Scripture,” so that we must saturate ourselves in the Word of God daily. It was a wonderful message and Becky and I discussed it at length on the drive home.

Then it was back home for some rest before wrapping up a few farm projects. We don’t normally work on the Lord’s Day, but the hay had to be gotten up, so into the fields we went.

Our Club Wagon has 200,000 miles on it, and has taken us from California to Gettysburg to Zion and Bryce and Mount Rushmore, but it’s not too proud to pull our Hardy trailer to get up our bales.

Life doesn’t get much better than this. Special thanks to our friends at Union Chapel for putting their faith to work on behalf of their brethren in the Horn of Africa.

Sunday, July 2

8:10 AM I just had a wonderful conversation with Fasil. It’s 3:00 pm in Addis. He tells me his Greek class is going gangbusters. This was the course I taught there a year ago. Many of his students are getting A plusses on their quizzes and exams. And he’s even more generous than I am. I give one extra credit point per correct word on the English-to-Greek extra credit. Fasil gives two. I promised him I would buy a United Bible Societies Greek New Testament for every student who made C or better in his course. It was good to hear Fasil’s voice again. I’m missing Ethiopia.

8:03 AM Yesterday morning Nathan worked me to death hauling cedars, so in the afternoon I decided I’d take it easy and snap a few pix. Everyone was in a relaxed mode. Here’s Trav with a big yawn. For the first time I noticed he had some gray hairs in his mane. Join the club, buddy.

Nate got out the rake. Don’t you just love the blue paint job? I may not know much about farm equipment, but boy can I paint. I don’t know why it is, but I love seeing freshly-raked hay in their neat rows. We’ll bale today or tomorrow.

Becky spent part of the day tying up her bean plants, which she’s already started harvesting. My job? I’m the mulch-bringer-inner.

Her rose bushes are also doing fine. Pink, red, yellow, and white. We debated whether to cut them and bring them inside. We decided to leave them be and enjoy them in their natural setting.

Later on I did an archaeological dig in our crawl space. Guess what I found at about the Crusader level? This was the last surf board I designed. Bill Stonebraker of Hawaii shaped it for me. It’s called a semi-gun and works both on medium-sized waves and big surf. Bill and I were in the Jesus Movement together. He’s now pastoring in Honolulu, still as excited about Jesus as ever. I think I’ll put the board in my office at school. You never know when you might meet a big-wave rider from Wilmington.

Saturday, July 1

6:59 AM Farm news and notes: Nate and I will be working at a neighbor’s farm putting up rain gutters and cutting cedars most of the day. He’s been fixing up the old place on the farm, a two-story beauty….Plans are to start building our new chicken house on Monday. From its size, maybe we’ll call it the chicken mansion….Becky starts canning vegetables today….We hope to bale hay on Monday also. The weather in southern Virginia is perfect for field work: dry and hot.

6:56 AM Anderson University in Indiana has openings in church history and theology.

6:53 AM Two quick notes for my Greek students:

1) Here’s an interesting link discussing the writing habits of ancient Greeks. It includes links to images as well. Fascinating.  

2) Click here if you’d like to begin reading the Didache in the original Greek. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how much of the vocabulary and grammar you already know.

6:49 AM No surprises here. Warren Buffet is planning on supporting Planned Parenthood, which performs 180 abortions for every woman it sends to an adoption agency.

6:45 AM Another nice note – this one from California:

Thank you! Thank you for the clarity and brilliance and wonderful reasoning of WHY FOUR GOSPELS. You said it all so well! This book is like a bubbling brook of clean living water in the bitter wilderness of New Testament scholarship! It’s what I’ve been searching for all these years — a clear concise statement that takes seriously the patristic evidence and what I myself see in the four gospels themselves! Thank you. 

Just another illustration of the power of the printed word to change (or confirm) people’s perspectives on important issues. That’s one reason I hope I will never stop writing and publishing books, even though I believe in the power of the Internet to reach a vast audience immediately.

6:36 AM In Greek class this week we translated a portion of the Gospels dealing with the crucifixion of Jesus. I was reminded just how very little is said in the New Testament about the bloodiness of the event, which is one of the reasons I didn’t care to see Mel Gibson’s The Passion. As an aside, it seems clear to me that Greek should have been spoken in the movie, but at least in one scene Gibson has Jesus speaking Latin to Pilate. Latin was but little known in Palestine and certainly was not the lingua franca that Greek was. The Archeology Institute of America discusses the languages used in the movie as well as other aspects of history here. It concludes, rightly in my opinion, that the movie is “unmoored from documentary realities” – which makes one wonder why it was touted by so many evangelicals as the most accurate portrayal of the crucifixion of Jesus ever made. If I were even more of a curmudgeon I would point out that the Latin accent used in the movie (judging from the trailer I saw) is the ecclesiastical pronunciation – an utter impossibility, as the Catholic Church did not exist at the time Jesus was put to death.

June 2006 Blog Archives

May 2006 Blog Archives

April 2006 Blog Archives

March 2006 Blog Archives

February 2006 Blog Archives

January 2006 Blog Archives

Nov-Dec 2005 Blog Archives

October 2005 Blog Archives

September 2005 Blog Archives

August 2005 Blog Archives

May 2005 Blog Archives

April 2005 Blog Archives

March 2005 Blog Archives

February 2005 Blog Archives

January 2005 Blog Archives

December 2004 Blog Archives

November 2004 Blog Archives

October 2004 Blog Archives

September 2004 Blog Archives

August 2004 Blog Archives

July 2004 Blog Archives

June 2004 Blog Archives

May 2004 Blog Archives

April 2004 Blog Archives

March 2004 Blog Archives

February 2004 Blog Archives

January 2004 Blog Archives

December 2003 Blog Archives

November 2003 Blog Archives

 

   restoring our biblical and constitutional foundations

                

home

welcome

about dave

on the road

the book box

columns & essays

reading room

contact dave

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

July 2004 Blog Archives

Friday, July 30

11:34 AM Have a great weekend! I leave you with the perfect wave:

10:45 AM Spurgeon on reading without understanding.

10:22 AM George Orwell is alive and well (unfortunately):

Schmidt urges Americans to listen carefully and critically to the often-duplicitous words that roll off politicians’ tongues. As George Orwell taught us: “The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

9:40 AM Anti-Girlie-Man Schwarzenegger is back in the news. Here’s the latest honor from Austria:

9:30 AM Devvy Kidd on how the military should be spending your hard-earned money.

9:27 AM Here’s a no-brainer. We cannot solve public problems simply by adding more restrictions to free speech.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

9:24 AM The CIA wasn’t the only federal agency guilty of incompetence. As Chambers once famously said, “The deadliest Pharisaism today is not hypocrisy but unconscious reality.”

9:22 AM Good for Italy for ending the draft. They couldn’t send draftees on foreign adventures anyway.

9:12 AM Right now we are in terrible economic straits. We owe $7 trillion that we admit to. We really owe more than that. It’s like a crazy aunt you keep in the basement – everyone knows she’s there but nobody talks about her. Even the best propaganda in the world can’t ignore the unbearable costs of empire. (By the way, there’s still not a dime’s worth of difference between the two “major” parties and their approach to the issue.)

8:43 AM From the mailbag:

Hello Professor Black.

I appreciate your web pages, especially your recent comments about women in combat, and about our need to turn away from the Republicans who have failed us in so many ways these past few years. The Constitution Party looks good to me. You may be interested to see this page I posted on my website today:

http://www.bible-researcher.com/women/why.html

Yours in Christ,

Michael Marlowe, bible-researcher.com

7:10 AM Rather than watching the Democratic love fest last night, as a family we read the biography of Samuel Lapsley, Presbyterian missionary to the Congo and part of my wife’s family tree. Lapsley, a white minister, and William Sheppard, a black minister, were sent by the Southern Presbyterian Church to spread Christianity throughout the African continent. Sheppard and Lapsley discovered that their differences had the quality of fitting together like cogs in a machine. Lapsley eventually succumbed to “bilious fever,” leaving Sheppard alone. His great sacrifice reminds me of one of Jim Elliot’s famous sayings:

Wednesday, July 28

4:17 PM Russ Reeves of Trinity Christian College just sent me a great redneck link. The check is in the mail, brother. By the way, Russ’s bio at the college’s website has this phenomenal statement:

“When people said, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ they were making a political statement as much as a religious statement. It’s easy to miss that significance without a good understanding of the cultural history, and that’s what I try to impress on my students.”

Russ is my kind-a-history-prof.

4:14 PM Demythologizing the Da Vinci Code.

4:01 PM Shouldn’t John Kerry be listening to Il Papa? Perchè non? E un cattolico.

The pontiff said that “in the face of such erroneous yet pervasive thinking,” visiting U.S. bishops should stress to congregations “their special responsibility for evangelizing culture and promoting Christian values in society and public life.”

“Rights are at times reduced to self-centered demands: the growth of prostitution and pornography in the name of adult choice, the acceptance of abortion in the name of women’s rights, the approval of same sex unions in the name of homosexual rights,” he said.

The Catholic Church forbids abortion and considers homosexual activity a sin.

Last week, John Paul warned another group of U.S. prelates that American society is in danger of surrendering to a “soulless vision of life.”

3:37 PM An Amish TV show is in trouble. This doesn’t surprise me. The Amish are a hard-working people who deserve their privacy. Their simple, family-oriented life-style is well worth emulating, in this redneck’s opinion.

3:35 PM Are you a true patriot? 

3:27 PM The 9/11 Commission Report can now be searched.  (Try “responsibility” on for size. Quite revealing.)

3:23 PM Will the RNC also employ the cage? Hardly. Security will be less obvious. Either way, we the people always get the government we deserve, having surrendered our liberties to Constantine. As C. S. Lewis reminded us, there are only two kinds of people: Those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, “Very well, then, thy will be done.”

1:33 PM C. H. Spurgeon’s sermon on the Laodicean Church has some mighty interesting parallels to the curse of our modern “Churchianity”:

They were not cold, but they were not hot; they were not infidels, yet they were not earnest believers; they did not oppose the gospel, neither did they defend it; they were not working mischief, neither were they doing any great good; they were not disreputable in moral character, but they were not distinguished for holiness; they were not irreligious, but they were not enthusiastic in piety nor eminent for zeal: they were what the world calls “Moderates,” they were of the Broad-church school, they were neither bigots nor Puritans, they were prudent and avoided fanaticism, respectable and averse to excitement. Good things were maintained among them, but they did not make too much of them; they had prayer-meetings, but there were few present, for they liked quiet evenings at home: when more attended the meetings they were still very dull, for they did their praying very deliberately and were afraid of being too excited. They were content to have all things done decently and in order, but vigour and zeal they considered to be vulgar. Such churches have schools, Bible-classes, preaching rooms, and all sorts of agencies; but they might as well be without them, for no energy is displayed and no good comes of them. They have deacons and elders who are excellent pillars of the church, if the chief quality of pillars be to stand still, and exhibit no motion or emotion. They have ministers who may be the angels of the churches, but if so, they have their wings closely clipped, for they do not fly very far in preaching the everlasting gospel, and they certainly are not flames of fire: they may be shining lights of eloquence, but they certainly are not burning lights of grace, setting men’s hearts on fire. In such communities everything is done in a half-hearted, listless, dead-and- alive way, as if it did not matter much whether it was done or not.

1:28 PM A reader responds to my review of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11:

Mr. Black,

Some random thoughts from someone who has just discovered the Constitution Party and your column:

It’s easy to criticize the ‘pragmatic’ conservatism of Bush and his administration, but I fear a number of Constitutionalists, libertarians, and federalists have fallen prey to assuming this all a big plot, and that Bush is lying through his teeth. I have not seen Moore’s film, but will eventually get around to it. But I can guarantee that Moore IS more biased than many other filmmakers. From what I know of the film, this is right up there with Oliver Stone’s ‘JFK’ in intentionally deceptive ‘history’.

You are obviously a committed and thoughtful chronicler of the political and cultural landscape. I have found a lot of merit in your thoughts. I hope that speaking the truth to power will not lead you into being so anti-Bush that every flaw is automatically seen as intentional evil.

Iraqi civilians needlessly killed? Unfortunately that does happen in war. Maybe we should not be in this war, but once we’re in this happens. Bush saying “He tried to kill my daddy” does not offend me. This is a Texan talking about an attempted assassination of a former President, authorized by the Iraqi government. Terrorism hoax? I believe we should extricate ourselves from most if not all of our international engagement, but it is still not a hoax. There is no reason for Bush not to make money from Saudi oil interests – that’s where most of the oil is. The U.S government let most of the bin Laden family out of the country after interviewing them after planes had been grounded and released. Usama has been disowned by most of his family. Any other apparently cozy relationship with representatives of the Saudi government are acceptable until we find out who did what to whom, knowing that some Saudis may be funding terrorists, but the Saudi government is no fan of bin Laden.

I do not believe Bush is guilty of fraud. He is guilty of spin. How many of us are innocent on that count? I believe he thought Iraq did have WMD and presented a present and future threat. I’m not sure he was wrong on either count. I do believe we need to stop schmoozing with anybody in other countries who meets our immediate needs, as we end up with another tyrant who will eventually turn against us.

Thanks for your time, and I really do hope this country listens to people like you and Michael Peroutka, and turns first back to Jesus Christ, and secondly back to constitutional government.

Sincerely,

Jeff _____.

Wimpy federalist and puzzled international observer.

Thanks for writing, Jeff, and for your concern that we return to limited constitutional government in our nation. I still think you would find the movie an eye-opener.  Best wishes, Dave.

12:56 PM How to revive your Sunday School class.

12:45 PM Pat Buchanan once called the two major political parties “two wings of the same bird of prey.” The latest case in point: Kerry’s doctrine of preemption (note the British source for this story.) “Just war” canards are worn like anvils around the necks of both parties, but does anyone in the American media notice? The U.S. taxpayers will ultimately bear the burden at a time when we are already spending far beyond our means.

12:10 PM Despite attacks, homeschooling is growing in Germany.

11:23 AM Walter Williams is an economist, not a theologian. But he has the courage to call our current socialistic government what it is: sin. (Link: Rachel Layne.)

An argument against legalized theft should not be construed as an argument against helping one’s fellow man in need. Charity is a noble instinct – theft, legal or illegal, is despicable. Or, put another way: Reaching into one’s own pocket to assist his fellow man is noble and worthy of praise. Reaching into another person’s pocket to assist one’s fellow man is despicable and worthy of condemnation.

For the Christians among us, socialism and the welfare state must be seen as sinful. When God gave Moses the commandment “Thou shalt not steal,” I’m sure He didn’t mean thou shalt not steal unless there’s a majority vote. And I’m sure that if you asked God if it’s OK just being a recipient of stolen property, He would deem that a sin as well.

10:45 AM Mr. Charles Porter responds to John Leone’s review of Why I Stopped Listening to Rush:

Dr. Black

I just got through reading Mr. Leone’s review of your book and I anxiously await my copy.  I ordered a copy about two weeks ago.  It’s a  crying shame that self-serving politicians have sold our great country down the drain.  I truly feel it will take a spiritually awakening such as we have never seen in this country to turn things around.  We have became a Godless nation. We have to get back to Christ.  I don’t see how things can get much worse.  I truly weep for the nation.  I know that in the end God will see us through this trying time in our nation’s history.  Thanks again for spreading the word of God through your wonderful website and showing the way He meant for our country to be governed.  God speed to you and your family.

Charles Porter

10:38 AM My good friend Mark Dankof always tells it like it is, as this email proves:

In Justin Raimondo’s article entitled, “Do We Want A War Criminal as President,” he correctly describes the difficulties in voting for either Kerry or Bush this fall.  But Michael Peroutka of the Constitution Party, a bona-fide anti-war, anti-Draft paleo-conservative is subsequently dismissed by Raimondo in the following paragraph from the article:

The antiwar Right is even more confused, given their electoral choices this year. Anti-interventionist conservatives and libertarians face an even bleaker prospect: without even the luxury of having a major party opponent of the Warmonger-in-Chief, the Anybody But Bush League of the Right has a plethora of bad options. They can choose one of the right-wing splinter parties on the ballot this time around, all of which are opposed to the Iraq war: unfortunately, the Libertarian candidate, in the unlikely event that he wins, could possibly be arrested for tax evasion before taking office. That leaves the Constitution Party candidate, what’s-his-name, who would probably have me arrested for just a few of the activities around my house this weekend. Which is not necessarily, in my view, a complete non-starter, because – oh well, we won’t go there. Suffice to say that, in any case, the right-wing ABB’ers are in a right quandary.

What, pray tell is Mr. Raimondo referring to?  And personally, I don’t think the Anybody But Bush Right Wing is in any sort of quandary at all.  The clear choice for us is, in fact, Michael Peroutka, without equivocation or apology.  The full page ad for Michael Peroutka running in Pat Buchanan’s August 2nd The American Conservative tells the story.  It is Peroutka and no one else for the Real Right this November.

Mark Dankof

10:35 AM Mr. Ruben Gomez posted this entry at his blog:

I must confess I’m not into the habit of checking where visitors come from on a regular basis. However, I just did today, only to find out that David A. Black has mentioned this little corner of cyberspace in his blog. I liked the little teaser he posted, which goes like this (sorry, I couldn’t spot any permanent link):

Not all Bible software is created equal. You can review the latest cybernetic Scripture helps here.
 

Incidentally, I have read quite a few of his books – some authored and some edited by him -, while still others are on my waiting list (which, I hasten to add, is a rather long one!). Anyway, I’m glad he referred to my site, and I’m also happy I came across his site.
 

I apologize for the oversight, Ruben. Your site is now linked in my Reading Room. Thank you for the service you are providing our students through your excellent website.

10:32 AM Spent yesterday at the farm working on some essays and hosting a home school family who, among other things, taught us how to make homemade wheat bread. They also helped my wife cut out flannel graph that she will use in telling children’s stories in Africa this fall. It’s been too wet to dig fence posts, so tomorrow we’ll probably work on getting lumber for our new barn.  

Monday, July 26

2:33 PM As an artist I appreciated this essay that appeared in the latest edition of the Founders Journal. 

12:48 PM O this is good.

Neither political party will come to grips with the employment implications of globalization. Neither party will acknowledge the fact that Palestinians are a captive people and that American indifference to their fate is the cause of Muslim terrorism. Neither party will address the domestic police state implications of the “war on terror.”

Neither candidate deserves to win the election.

Has America acquired Imperial Rome’s inability to produce leadership?

12:43 PM Join Fox News if you like sensational formulas stuffed with gossip, nonsense, and vain talk. In-depth analysis of the DNC is impossible for the mainstream press. I will be getting my convention news exclusively from internet sources such as LRC and Breaking All The Rules, not from some great sleeping sow that has been prodded into grumbling wakefulness. 

10:29 AM The Frenchman’s take on Lance Armstrong’s victory in the Tour de France? It’s all in the teamwork.

L’US Postal cultive l’esprit de corps et se cultive. L’équipe vit ainsi en marge des us et coutumes du Tour. Elle ne se déplace pas sans son propre part. A l’aéroport de Limoges, par exemple, le 11 juillet, après le transfert depuis Quimper, alors que le reste du peloton s’engouffrait sans distinction de maillots dans les cars mis à sa disposition sur le tarmac par les organisateurs, les US Postal ont réclamé leur propre autocar. Face au refus, ils ont préféré traverser l’aéroport à pied plutôt que de se mêler au reste du peloton.

9:57 AM Church sign of the month:

9:55 AM Check out this new Greek grammar.

9:52 AM No Q? No M? No L? No need for hypothecated documents? Occam’s Razor applied? Church traditions taken seriously? How about being just plain simple? That’s the view I hold about Synoptic origins. I know it’s boring, but I would hope that’s not a fatal flaw!

9:50 AM Not all Bible software is created equal. You can review the latest cybernetic Scripture helps here.

9:35 AM Look who’s seeking a divorce.

9:25 AM This promises to change people’s lives.

9:23 AM Elections can be very unpredictable. Here’s what happened to another popular  “war” leader on this day in 1945.

9:12 AM If conservatives are so tired of government gridlock in Washington, why are so many of them on the government dole? Have you ever heard our conservative president talk about the $7 trillion dollar debt? I haven’t. Have you ever heard any Republican come up with even a bad plan to work on it? Nope. All you hear is: “wonnerful, wonnerful, wonnerful.”

8:57 AM We are in the Middle East not for national security interests but rather for powerful commercial ones. The Iraq War was clearly unconstitutional because there was no declaration of war. It was also immoral because it was not waged for national defensive purposes. These are some of the major reasons why we are losing the war on terrorism. I agree with Charley Reese: It’s time to forsake imperialism.

7:05 AM From the mailbag:

Dear Dave:

On a pragmatic level, Perot gave us Clinton ! Do you want John Kerry to win in the same way ? Is the Democratic Party supporting your campaign to help him out using YOU guys as a spoiler ? What is really needed is the “Preferential Ballot” so we have a real choice ! I would put Peroutka #1 but it seems and sounds too much like “Perot”!

To which I responded:

Dear _____: Thank you so much for writing. Please don’t let a name stop you from voting your conscience. I agree with the perspective of this writer: a vote for Peroutka is not wasted. My very best wishes to you, Dave

6:45 AM Our goat population increased by three over the weekend. They are the cutest things you’ve ever seen. This week our goal is to begin construction on our new horse barn. Since the building needs to look old (1820s or so) we are scouring the neighborhood for old barns, outbuildings, etc. for wood. We think we’ve found an old house that will provide most of our studs and siding. With just my son and I working on it, this project may take a while, but what fun it is to work together! Today I’m reading and grading my as students’ term papers and other work for our Philippians class, something I thoroughly enjoy doing. Sample paper titles: 

• More Than a Joyful Thank You Note

• Paul’s Fourfold Definition of Christian Unity

• Humility: A Theme in Philippians

• Timothy and Epaphroditus: The Power of Humility

• The Role of Leadership Positions in the New Testament

Saturday, July 24

10:49 AM On youth ministry:

If we are to understand how to deal with our youth, we must begin by taking seriously this matter of adolescence. If Christian parenting is to be biblical, false traditions and misconceptions that have obscured childrearing must be challenged and exposed in the pure light of God’s truth. Holy Scripture is the surest foundation and blueprint upon which to build parenting reform, renewal, and revitalization. Reformation of Christian parenting and youth ministry can only begin when the distorted structure of human tradition is dismantled and replaced by a return to biblical origins. Such a reformation is not only possible, but absolutely essential.

Read more.

10:48 AM Michael Peroutka is a statesman, not a politician. There’s a world of difference between these terms. But in Washington today, a statesman is the opposite of what you and I might consider a statesman. Newspeak prevails!

10:45 AM For my students who recently had babies:

10:35 AM Alright, here’s the deal. Bush continues to dip in the polls while Kerry hasn’t received a correlating bounce. In the end it really doesn’t matter in the least which of them wins. Government will continue to get bigger, more intrusive, and less efficient. Now is the time for a good third party candidate to make his run.

If you had asked me in 2000 whether I thought voting for a third party candidate could make a significant impact on the political scene, I would have said no. Nevertheless, I haven’t given up on the viability of third party candidacies. My sense is that millions of Americans deeply believe it is time to forge a new coalition. Voters are fed up with the two main parties. They are also much more independent-minded about the quality of life they want for themselves and their families. The time is ripe for real change. Jesse Ventura proved it when he upset two highly financed political machines in Minnesota. Whatever the reasons—fallout from years of abusing the Constitution, the hubris of our politicians, or the general unease brought on by America’s foreign policy—voters are suddenly open to new voices, new ideas, new leadership. And remember, only about one third of all eligible voters bothered to vote in the last presidential election. All this leaves a huge number of people looking for a reason to vote.

From Why I Stopped Listening to Rush.

10:25 AM Looking for a model for reformation? Here’s one to consider.

10:22 AM Thank you, thank you, thank you, Carmon, for linking to this website.

10:11 AM Your “conservative” leaders support peddlers of death. Don’t believe me? Read this. 

9:40 AM Ron Paul continues to be about the only defender of the federal Constitution on Capitol Hill these days. When he demanded that the president seek a congressional declaration of war before attacking Iraq, he was told that this provision in the U.S. Constitution was no longer applicable because it was anachronistic. And now he is a lonely voice in Washington decrying how Congress is taking advantage of the fears of Americans. Friends, we don’t have to give up freedom in order to protect freedom. And we don’t have to give up our Fourth Amendment protections in order for government to take care of us.

9:36 AM Israel has every right in the world to to do whatever it must to defend its sovereignty. I supported its bombing the nuclear site in Iraq. But the Middle East should be dealt with by Middle Eastern countries, not by the United States of America – and not with American money.

9:33 AM Ho hum. The two “major” candidates continue their national tour saying nothing new and disagreeing only on minor points. 

Friday, July 23

5:20 PM Got 50 bales up this week, and will spend tomorrow fencing in more of our pastures. Hope you all have a great Lord’s Day. For your weekend reading:

CANDIDATES:
http://www.georgewbush.com
http://www.johnkerry.com
http://www.votenader.org
http://www.badnarik.org
http://www.peroutka2004.com/
http://www.brown2004.org/

PARTIES:
http://www.rnc.org (Republican National Committee)
http://www.democrats.org
http://www.gp.org (Green Party)
http://www.reformparty.org
http://www.lp.org (Libertarian Party)
http://www.constitutionparty.com

3:55 PM Thought for the day (Pat Buchanan):

For as Sun Tzu wrote: “Know thy enemy, know thyself, in a thousand battles, a thousand victories.” If we must fight these people the rest of our lives, we should know why they hate us – and we delude ourselves if we believe the slaughters of Sept. 11 came about because we are “good.”

3:04 PM The Pied Pipers of Purpose

The architects of church reform believe that it is possible to measure the intangible things of the spirit, to set behavioral standards upon which to judge effectiveness in spiritual matters, and to set criteria upon which “results” can be attained. Obviously, some people won’t measure up. They will not exhibit the proper amount of “spiritual” maturity (spiritual capital) to succeed in their local church. And what will happen to these poor servants, when they compare themselves with this elite corps of “leadership”? What will happen to those fragile sheep, newborns in the Word, who have never heard the Gospel of Grace but have only been taught Purpose-Driven, results-based Christianity?

Read more.  

1:43 PM I will have the privilege of preaching at my home church this weekend in southern Virginia and cordially invite you to attend if you live in the area and do not currently worship elsewhere: Averett Baptist Church, 2671 Averett Church Rd, Nelson, VA 24580, just west of Clarksville off of Hwy 49. Service begins at 11:00 am.

1:15 PM My good friend Mike Tuggle responds to the recent nonsense published at Reason Online. When it comes to honoring our Southern heritage, we must remember that the simple freedom to attend reenactments is not what is at stake. The devious, anti-constitutional spirit of our age has taken a different form than it would have assumed in the age of the Founders of our great nation. Our government elite would, for the time being, allow us to remember the past, but they increasingly resist the application of constitutional principles to our culture. We must stand against this with the same firmness with which the New Testament apostles stood against not being allowed to teach, heal, and congregate. By the way, Mike has written an outstanding treatise on free market principles, Confederates in the Boardroom.

11:45 AM From today’s mailbag:

Dr. Black,

Excellent conclusion yesterday on “The World from Washington.” 

Very well articulated- profound and eloquent.  Most of all, I thought it to be a Godly response…”we can not turn to science…nor politics…their arguments are worthless…religion holds no hope (with baptized pagans)…go back to Classic Christianity…” 

I will hope to go back and re-listen to the broadcast since I was only able to hear the last ten minutes having been with a client.  Good job, Dr. Black! 

I thoroughly enjoyed the interview with Steve Myers. He was a very gracious host and asked what I thought were excellent questions.  I look forward to further interviews with him as soon as he receives a copy of my latest book.

8:43 AM Ordering a pizza? Big Brother knows!

7:55 AM Carmon Friedrich is always insightful. Here’s her take on the professionalizing of the home school movement:

Because she has no initials after her name, she is ineligible to proctor testing for her children per the standards of the group providing the placement tests. Does this fit with the homeschool philosophy of educating-outside-the-box (as opposed to education-in-a-box)? In my fifteen years of home teaching, I have noticed that as homeschooling has become more “mainstream,” there is a definite trend toward professionalizing the whole movement. Read the bios of the speakers and authors on the homeschool circuit: the credentials are given top billing, especially if they involve advanced degrees in the area of education. This goes for the women as much as the men. My dream bio for a female homeschool speaker:

Mrs. John Smith has been homeschooling her 15 children for the past 30 years. Her children and her grandchildren rise up and call her blessed, and she is still busy training them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, with a special emphasis on the discipling of her daughters and daughters-in-law, teaching them to love their husbands and children and be keepers at home. This, along with being a help-meet to Mr. Smith, is a full-time job, and it is the reason she is only able to accept one speaking engagement per year. We are grateful she is with us at our conference this year. Note: it is requested that only women attend Mrs. Smith’s workshops, though tapes will be available so that husbands may check out the teaching their wives have received. More information is available at Mrs. Smith’s weblog, which she maintains mostly late in the evening, while her family is asleep ;-).

Someday I’d like to see a similar thing happen in one of our chapels when we have, say, a pastor who has had a heart attack, two strokes, is in his seventies, and for 30 years has pastored a church with 25 on Sunday morning – and who has faithfully loved and served his congregation all those years!  

7:46 AM Speaking of waves, here are two shots of beaches I’ve surfed many times. Note the hollow swells at the Pipeline on Oahu (this was a normal-sized wave during the winter on the North Shore):

Now contrast that with the smaller and colder swells at Huntington Beach in Southern California (this photo was taken on a really good day):

Anyone who has surfed can actually feel the difference between these two pictures. I enjoyed the surf in So Cal, but nothing can compare with a good North Shore swell.  

7:45 AM Every week two large ships are sunk by them.

7:30 AM Lewis Goldberg asks, Is the First Amendment Hypocrisy for Christians? Lewis edits The Patriotist and is a fearless critic of the myth of neutrality and the abandonment of our constitutional rights.

6:48 AM Somehow I managed to muddle through the 9/11 report yesterday. I kept thinking to myself, By their metaphors ye shall know them. The report is yet another “sane, middle of the road” pragmatist expression of our tolerant, pluralistic faith. Of course, neither side of the aisle will be held accountable for gross incompetence. I’m no fan of Badnarik, but on this issue he is absolutely right.

6:45 AM The Democratic Convention will talk about some issues but mostly put together 10-second solutions to very complex problems. The main goal? Not to portray Kerry as a liberal. Good luck.

6:35 AM Question: Who will you most likely be voting for this election?

30.9- George W. Bush 27.9- John Kerry 13.8- Michael Peroutka 13.5- Ralph Nader 0.5- David Cobb 5.5- Michael Badnarik 3.4- Other 4.4- I won’t be voting this election

Source: http://www.businessreform.com/SurveyResults.php

Thursday, July 22

1:10 PM Seems the only people who hate blogs are those who don’t have one. Read Another Village Let Their Idiotarian Slip Out.

1:05 PM “We did all we could” flies in the face of the facts:

Here are just a few of the warnings we’ve already culled from Paul Thompson’s 9-11 timeline (cooperativeresearch.org): In 1999, British intelligence reported to the U.S. embassy that Al Qaeda had plans to use “commercial aircraft” in “unconventional ways . . . possibly as flying bombs.” In June 2001, German intelligence warned the U.S., Britain, and Israel that Middle Eastern terrorists were planning to hijack commercial aircraft and use them as weapons. In late July 2001, Egyptian intelligence received a report from an undercover agent in Afghanistan that “20 Al Qaeda members had slipped into the U.S., and four of them had received flight training on Cessnas.” In late summer 2001, Jordanian intelligence intercepted a message stating that a major attack was being planned inside the U.S. and that aircraft would be used—the code name of the operation was said to be Big Wedding, which did in fact turn out to be the code name of the 9-11 plot. Russian president Vladimir Putin has said publicly that he ordered his intelligence agencies to alert the U.S. in summer 2001 that suicide pilots were training for attacks on U.S. targets. Five days before 9-11, a priest, considered a reliable source, heard from Muslims at a wedding of a planned attack in the U.S. using planes. This information may have come from a Milan-based Al Qaeda cell that forged documents for the organization’s operations. Wiretaps indicated that its members were aware of a plot very much like 9-11—a year before the attacks.

12:55 PM Just had a great lunch with three “Daves” on the faculty – Drs. Lanier, Hogg, and Beck. Dr. “Dave” Jones stopped by but couldn’t stay for lunch. Having the name Dave is almost a requirement to get office space in Stephens-Mackie!

12:08 PM Rachel Layne sent me this incredible link on our so-called “airport security.” Please take a few moments and read the entire article if you can. Mind-boggling!

12:05 PM Just finished our lectures/sermons on the book of Philippians and had a time of great sharing as my students related some of the truths they learned from this wonderful letter. Tomorrow they will be giving a summary of their term papers to the class. Today I also gave each student a teacher evaluation form to fill out. I’ve been doing this ever since I began teaching 27 years ago and I always enjoy (and benefit from) the students’ responses. Below is a copy (I call it “Striving for Excellence”):

“It is particularly significant that Christ’s people, who have tasted immortal knowledge, serve him with excellence.” J. Kenneth Grider.

 “The early Christian church conquered because the Christians of those days out-thought, out-lived, and out-died the pagans.” T. R. Glover.

“There is no such thing as Christian excellence, just as there is no Christian hamburger; but the Christian will strive for excellence with every task he attempts. It can mean making the very best hamburger you can.” Haddon Robinson.

“Excellence is doing all to the glory of God, which requires my best.” Hudson Armerding.

“Holiness is excellence, so there is no excuse for mediocrity.” Tony Campolo.

“Excellence is other-oriented living for the glory of God, by the power of Christ, and to the best of a person’s Spirit-given abilities.” Ted Engstrom.

 “Therefore, my dear brothers, be steadfast, unmovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that your work isn’t wasted in the Lord.” 1 Corinthians 15:58 (ISV).

All of us need people to tell us when we’ve hit the mark and when we’ve forgotten to load the gun. Your instructor is committed to high standards of performance and welcomes constructive criticism. Thank you. David Black.

• Semester:

• Course Number and Title:

• Your name (optional):

• Grade you expect to receive for the course:

• Please grade your commitment to excellence in this course (1-10, 10 being best):

• Please grade your instructor’s commitment to excellence in this course (1-10, 10 being best):

• Comments (continue on back of sheet if necessary):

7:43 AM Jacob Hornberger does it again.

7:38 AM The “deceitful promotion of the pending invasion of Iraq.” Whew! Who would utter such defamatory words? The same person who wrote this:

But to send a nation’s youth off to war based on the “faith” of a few men in the White House and their advisors is both unacceptable and, as we now know, extremely unwise.

7:35 AM Hmm, just a few pesos short. Who’s at fault here? I suggest we all go home and look in the mirror.

7:33 AM As I look at our country today I am reminded of the Roman Empire. Our nation is still fairly strong, but we cannot afford to mouth slogans at the problems we all know we face. If we do, we invite the kind of social and economic calamity that could take generations to fix.

7:32 AM Confused about Reformed Christianity? This article will help.

7:25 AM Are you a Prairie Muffin? Really, are you?

6:17 AM Received this very nice letter from Julie Austin of Austin’s Parenting with Purpose:

Hello Dr. Black,

I’ve had some hits on our website that were directed to us from yours.  Thank you.  I’m thinking it was due to a plug by Carmon a few weeks ago.

I enjoyed reading your bio.  I attended Biola in 1981 & 84. 

Thank you for your wonderful strong stands for truth!  I have added you to our links section.

Blessings,  Julie Austin

Thank you, Julie. Glad to hear from a Biola grad who believes in home education as strongly as my wife and I do.  

6:15 AM Update: My interview with Steve Myers on The World from Washington is today from 5:30 – 6:00 pm.

Wednesday, July 21

2:34 PM The Bible and the draft (hat tip: Debbie Hopper).

2:28 PM From the mailbag:

I received your book last evening when I arrived home from work.  I immediately began reading it and couldn’t put it down until I realized it was 2 am and I had to get up early to go to work! 

1:26 PM He was the hero of First Manassas, “Mens sibi conscia recti” (a mind conscious of its rectitude):
 

1:23 PM Ron Rhodes says it’s time to recover from the recovery movement. 

1:14 PM Here’s the next documentary I want to see: Riding Giants. A production photo:

1:14 PM These guys running for office must really think we’re stupid. In effect they’re saying, “We’d like to buy your vote with your money this year.” That’s a really bad joke.

1:10 PM We have dumbed down our public schools to the point where we have mathematics for non-mathematicians and grammar for non-grammarians. Our family has purchased the famous McGuffey’s Readers that were used on farms 100 years ago, when parents actually had the wisdom to teach their own children.

1:06 PM You know and I know that they’ll always get bodies to the surface. It’s just a question of how long it takes.

12:57 PM Quotes of the day (Samuel Adams, 1722-1803):

It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds.

A general dissolution of the principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy…. While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but once they lose their virtue, they will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader…. If virtue and knowledge are diffused among the people, they will never be enslaved. This will be their great security.

7:58 AM As a review of the life of Christ (whom Paul wanted to “know”), yesterday I gave my Philippians students a “fun” quiz. These are the ABCs of Christianity – very basic indeed! Below are a few of the questions. See how well you do!

In what year was Christ probably born?

Which Gospel records the story of Jesus’ birth from Mary’s perspective?

Luke 2:52 says that Jesus increased or matured in what four areas?

What event was the signal for Jesus to begin His public ministry?

Which two OT characters appeared at Jesus’ transfiguration, and what did each represent?

The name Jesus means _____________.

The title Christ means ____________.

Which chapter of John contains Jesus’ “High Priestly Prayer”?

Which chapters of Matthew contain the “Olivet Discourse”?

Give the book, chapter, and verse for the following:

I came not to destroy the law but to fulfill it.

Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel.

Before Abraham was, I AM.

You shall be my witnesses.

7:52 AM In remembrance of First Manassas (July 17, 1861) allow me to resurrect an essay I published last year: A War Lesson from First Manassas.

7:30 AM Looks like Iran is next.

7:25 AM The latest from the “I’m outraged about sodomite preachers but you’re not” file:

“Despite being offensive to those of us who believe that such a relationship is completely contrary to Holy Scripture, it is in complete contradiction to assurances you have made to a number of congregations in meetings since last year’s convention,” they wrote.

Read more.

7:23 AM Update: Why isn’t Michael Moore talking about the Halliburton-Iran connection? Why indeed?

7:20 AM I thought this was funny: Jesse Jackson’s new low-C.A.R.B. diet. Check it out.  Meanwhile, having done enough flying for two lifetimes, here’s one movie I do NOT plan to see.

6:30 AM Look who’s carrying an ad in the upper right hand corner of the American Conservative home page. Love it!

6:23 AM “Tally Ho!” – in India?

6:20 AM Why men are refusing to marry.

6:17 AM Is there anti-Christian bias in our public schools? Of course, but what about the anti-education bias?  Read How I Survived Government Schools.

6:15 AM Guess who’s returning to Iraq? 

6:11 AM Every true Christian should denounce the Brave New World being foisted upon us by our Washington know-it-alls. Case in point: our ridiculous color-coded “terror” alerts.

6:05 AM The logic of Congress escapes Dave Strittmatter, who sent me this email a few days ago. He makes a good point about the so-called Partial Abortion Ban:

I’ve been thinking a lot about the abortion issue lately. It’s one of the core issues that led me to the Constitution Party, a party that doesn’t play games with the issue. I, along with countless others in the pro-life arena, made phone calls to Congressmen and donated to state and national Right to Life and similar organizations to ensure passage of the Partial Birth Abortion Act. This barbaric procedure, like every abortion, is a whole lot more infanticide than abortion if the two need to be separated. Since the debate in Congress made it clear that our legislators supported abortion as a constitutional right, all that would be done is outlaw one way to do the deed. Not one abortion would be stopped; and all that would have to be done would be to take a short detour and do it another way. That is where the “What have we done?” bulb lights up.

Suppose for a moment that you oppose the death penalty and there are basically three ways that the federal and state governments carry out the sentence: 1. Burning at the stake, 2. Drawing and quartering, and 3. Firing squad. Now also suppose that a group of likeminded death penalty opponents decide that the best way to eliminate the death penalty was to chip away at it by supporting a law that would ban one form of execution. You choose the firing squad since you also don’t like guns and in a flurry of activity manage to succeed in banning the firing squad. Now imagine that you are on death row and scheduled to be shot, only now that option is gone. Would you cheer the success of the death penalty opponents now that the most humane and painless method of execution was gone?

If you substitute Burning at the Stake for Saline Abortion, Drawing and Quartering for Dilation and Curettage, and Firing Squad for Partial Birth Abortion you get the same result. The only way to fight abortions is by full frontal assault. The personhood of the unborn from the moment of conception needs to be declared and abortions along with post conception birth control need to be outlawed. A lot of activity was wasted on the wrong issue and the win was really a horrible loss.

5:45 AM Our seminary Outlook has blocked all off-campus incoming email for two days now. As soon as it is running properly again I will answer your letters.

Tuesday, July 20

6:48 AM From the pen of Charley Reese:

Whatever motive the Bush administration had for attacking Iraq, the safety of the American people was certainly not the reason. Attacking and occupying an Arab country has done exactly what experts about the area said it would do: It has inflamed anti-American feelings to the boiling point. Bush did exactly what Osama bin Laden wanted him to do, and now terrorists have no trouble at all finding new recruits.

Furthermore, Bush’s obsession with Iraq diverted resources from the hunt for bin Laden and the rest of the Taliban. Consequently, there are two unfinished jobs, Iraq and Afghanistan. The Bush administration’s rosy claims about those two countries are as inaccurate as its claims about weapons of mass destruction. There have been more, not fewer, terrorist attacks since the war in Iraq. Warlords financed by opium run Afghanistan, and there is no security at all in Iraq.

Read America’s Not Safer.  

6:45 AM This is a powerful story of grace amid suffering in Romania. I hope to conduct a a pastors’ conference in Romania next year.

Tson said he has learned that Christians suffer for two primary reasons: as witnesses to the Gospel and to perfect the church of Christ. He recalled being encouraged by a valuable truth that a British theologian taught him: The cross of Christ was for the propitiation of sins, but the cross each Christian is called to bear is for the propagation of the Gospel.

Believers must be ready to give their lives if necessary for the perfection of the church, Tson said, because God’s grace spreads when the church suffers in the manner of its Savior.

“It is the job of Christ to perfect His church but I [am to] come and say ‘My Lord, I give You my body to suffer through my body to complete Your sufferings for the perfection of Your body, the church,’” Tson said.

6:43 AM Iraqis celebrate Nusardil.

6:15 AM My how time flies. Below: 35 years ago today.

6:12 AM “We may have to disrupt the democratic process because terrorists want to disrupt the democratic process.” Say what?

6:10 AM From the mailbag:

Dear Dave:

I was catching up on your blog and several entries brought to mind a speech you may not be familiar with. It was delivered by Forrest McDonald, a member of that rare species of conservative historians, at his last class at the U of Alabama (McDonald was also recently featured on C-Span’s Booknotes). I think you’ll enjoy it is much as I did. It’s available as a .pdf file (the link is simply “The Speech”) here: http://www.as.ua.edu/history/mcdonald.htm

Blessings,

Russ Reeves

Russ is the Chair of the Department of History at Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights, IL. The essay he links is well worth reading.

Monday, July 19

11:25 AM I’m not the only one to discuss the unbalanced reporting at Fox News.

11:01 AM A student of mine sent me some photos of a break in Tahiti, including this phenomenal shot:

9:43 AM Greek students will find this review of Warren Trenchard’s A Concise Dictionary of New Testament Greek to be good reading.

9:35 AM I will have the privilege of being interviewed by Steve Myers on The World from Washington this Thursday from 5:30 – 6:00 pm.

9:31 AM Post-Nazi films on the rise in Germany.

9:25 AM I knew David Brownlow would be able to do what few others could: summarize the basic problem in Iraq in a succinct fashion, AND formulate a simple (though not easy) solution.  God bless you, brother Dave.

8:43 AM The great preacher Spurgeon has some encouragement for the depressed and comfort for the desponding.

8:38 AM This essay has a great definition of hospitality.  On the ministry of hospitality at beautiful L’Abri in Switzerland, go here.

8:35 AM The end of boasting. 

8:25 AM She used to make American presidents squirm during press conferences. Now Helen Thomas wonders if Bush has learned any lessons from the Iraq War. 

These allies trickle out as the White House and the Pentagon struggle with credibility problems created by their sorry record in truth telling about the war. One wonders if the administration can ever recover the trust it needs to rally the necessary public support for the war against terrorism.

Read more from Helen Thomas here and here.  

8:23 AM Even military flocking to see Fahrenheit 9/11.

6:05 AM Good morning! I trust you had a great Lord’s Day. On Saturday we attended the wedding of a former student of mine. It was held in our beautiful seminary chapel, and a wonderful service of worship it was indeed. The reception was held at pastor Scott Brown’s magnificent farm. (Scott and I will be speaking at the Uniting Church and Family Conference in St. Louis in August.) Sunday morning our men’s quintet sang Country Gospel at the local nursing home near our Virginia farm, and during the afternoon my son and I visited our shut-in neighbors. What a tremendous blessing!  This week concludes our seminary class on the book of Philippians. Visitors are always welcome.

Friday, July 16

1:47 PM Today’s the big day, folks. Reverends, start your engines.

1:45 PM Scholarly Smackdown.

1:43 PM Citizenship commission bans free Bible distribution.

1:40 PM There’s a new “biblical” theme park opening. Guess where?

1:34 PM From the First London Baptist Confession of Faith (please note the plural “elders”):

Being thus joined, every [local] church hath power given them from Christ, for their wellbeing, to choose among themselves meet persons for elders and deacons, being qualified according to the word, as those which Christ hath appointed in His testament, for the feeding, governing, serving, and building up of His Church; and that none have any power to impose on them either these or any other.

1:16 PM I just read about another pastor leaving the SBC. I hope he would have considered this first.

1:12 PM Some guys will surf anything.

1:10 PM From Gordon Clark:

The early American colleges were distinctly Christian institutions. But the public school system, unlike the colleges, was not so inspired. On the other hand, the public schools were not intended to be irreligious. In the readers of our grandparents’ time, God and Jesus Christ were mentioned. Today no such references can be found in the books of the public schools. The reason is not hard to find. The public schools were founded with the idea of not favoring one religion above another, and the result is that they now favor no religion at all. They are completely secularized.

Read more.  

1:05 PM Quote of the day:

A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary. -Thomas Caruthers

1:00 PM The new issue of Journal of Theological Studies is out.

7:03 AM Now I’m certain: The ECPA will never vote for one of my books.

6:55 AM George Bush is a master rhetorician, says CBS’s Dick Meyer.

6:27 AM Richard Weaver, prophet of the cultural crisis of our time.

6:25 AM Mr. Andrew Gettis writes from Minnesota:

Dave,

I suppose I’ve been an unofficial member of your Peroutka/Baldwin prayer team for a couple of months now, so let’s make it official and add my name to your list.

I really do enjoy your site and have given it a spot on my toolbar so I don’t forget to check in every once in a while. I sure hope your message reaches a lot of people, because your writing exudes Biblical knowledge and fidelity; I believe that God is speaking through your website. Thank you for having the faith to unashamedly spread the truth.

Many thanks for writing and, more importantly, for praying. Mr. Gettis has a website: StudentsforFamilyValues.com.

Thursday, July 15

1:10 PM Now this is dedication.

1:07 PM No one lied, no one needs to resign. Really?

1:04 PM O, this is really good.

I am concerned about many I see who have grandiose notions of the amazing academic achievements they have planned for their progeny. There is nothing wrong with pursuing excellence in all you do, but the goal is to raise godly men and women who will further the kingdom of God, not little professors who will be fit only for a career in academia.

Lady Carmon, I addressed a similar issue in The Arrogance of Scholarship.

1:00 PM Who is really responsible for the mess in Iraq.

Focusing on the existence of WMD and the CIA’s inability to get it right about Iraq misses the point. It’s too easy to lay the blame on the doorstep of the intelligence community. Perhaps the reason the Senate Intelligence Committee and Sen. Rockefeller are reluctant to take aim at the White House is because they know that they too must share the blame for bad decision-making.

It’s not because of bad information that Congress voted to support the Iraq war. It’s because Congress was unwilling to ask the right questions about how Iraq — even with WMD — was an undeterrable threat to the United States. If you don’t ask the right questions, you never get the right answers, regardless of the quality of the information.

6:15 AM As a guy who likes Hawaiian shirts, I can appreciated what Paul Proctor has to say about the CGM (hat tip: Rachel Layne):

It doesn’t take a prophet to see where the church growth movement is headed. Most of its participants, who joined the fad, will soon fall away when something new and more exciting comes along or their superficial faith is tested by the harsh realities of life. They will simply look back over their shoulder at the big empty building they once called their church and say to themselves: “Been there – done that – got the Hawaiian shirt” and move on to the next big thing.

Wednesday, July 14

3:44 PM Our Supreme Theologians.

3:37 PM Should your computer start making a hissing sound….

3:23 PM Republican Congressman Ron Paul on the danger of leader worship.

3:15 PM A Confederate soldier is remembered in Rappahannock. Speaking of the war, I am reading a biography of Jefferson Davis and am very interested in his legacy. If you know of any good links on the topic, please let me know. I had the privilege of visiting Beauvoir last summer – very impressive, to say the least.

1:30 PM Speaking of God as being the one who works in and through us to accomplish His good pleasure, I just read a fantastic sermon by the Prince of Preachers on this theme.

12:45 PM A great lesson from Philippians 2:12-18: When things go well, don’t boast (God is the one who is at work….); when things don’t go well, don’t complain (He is still at work). “Do all things without grumbling and complaining.”

12:36 PM Here’s a good review of a classic tome I recommended to my students today in our Philippians class as we discussed how Christianity relates to culture.

12:36 PM A healthy reminder to those of us supporting the Constitution Party and our so-called “lost” cause:

The greatness of Christian exiles is not success but service. Whether we win or lose, we witness to the way of truth and beauty and joy. We don’t own culture, and we don’t rule it. We serve it with brokenhearted joy and longsuffering mercy, for the good of man and the glory of Jesus Christ.

Read John Piper’s Taking the Swagger Out of Christian Cultural Influence.  

12:26 PM I didn’t say it, but I wish I had:

We must know how to teach God’s Word aright, discerningly, for there are divers sorts of hearers; some are struck with fear in the conscience, are perplexed, and awed by their sins, and, in apprehension of God’s anger, are penitent; these must be comforted with the consolations of the gospel. Others are hardened, obstinate, stiff-necked, rebel-hearted; these must be affrighted by the law, by examples of God’s wrath: as the fires of Elijah, the deluge, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the downfall of Jerusalem. These hard heads need sound knocks. — Martin Luther

12:24 PM Just as I thought. Kerry uses his “religion” as a political ploy. How many hasty, immature, superficial, and misleading “news” articles can the press get away with without any verification?

7:35 AM This essay is truly beautiful.

At first when we arrived in Virginia, I thought we had possibly made a BIG MISTAKE…but, I was mistaken. It took some adjusting and the culture shock was shocking. But it was shockingly good. We are now in a church filled with like-minded home schooling families. A church that views children as blessings. A church that feasts together, that celebrates life and cares for one another…without being prodded to do so.

As I see our church grow and children being added to families left and right….both through birth and adoptions…I can’t help but think of that phrase: “if you build it, they will come.” But in this case, it isn’t a stadium, nor even a building…but a body of believers who are dedicated to living their purpose. They are kingdom builders, who love God, fear God and serve God with their lives.

7:32 AM Don’t forget to check the Dow today. 

7:31 AM The seven myths of single womanhood.

7:08 AM Sobran thinks the U.S. Constitution is a dead letter. He’s right.

In his tour de force entitled Our Secret Constitution, Columbia law professor George Fletcher shows how the Civil War replaced the original charter with a second American Constitution, which he calls our “secret Constitution.” The Constitution of 1787 stood for a maximum freedom of expression of individual liberty, at least with regard to the federal government. The second Constitution is dedicated to organic nationhood and popular democracy, emphasizing not freedom from government but equality under the law. The state would now have to do more than leave us alone. It would have to ensure equal protection—and do it through coercion if necessary.

Professor Fletcher notes that although the original charter of 1787 officially remains in place, it has been so radically transformed by our secret Constitution that for all intents and purposes the old charter is a dead letter. Because of Lincoln’s war, the Tenth Amendment was effectively abolished, the conquered states were made into puppet governments set up by the Republican Party, and Lincoln succeeded in consolidating governmental power in Washington by military dictatorship.

This means that Americans today face a choice as to whether to defend the old Constitution or to follow the new, secret charter—that is, whether to defend the concept of a limited republic with maximum freedom for the people, or to acquiesce to the new consolidated concept of power that is prone to dictatorial and imperialistic expressions. It’s probably true to say that most Americans are firmly in the pro-big government camp. This includes the vast majority of Republican “conservatives.” They don’t mind sacrificing most of their earnings to unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats and unresponsive elected officials, nor do they mind relying on Washington for a host of taxpayer-funded benefits. And they are agreeable to the notion that personal responsibility and independence should be sacrificed for the “security” offered by politicians.

At the other end of the spectrum are people who believe in the old Constitution verbatim and who hold personal liberty and responsibility so dear that they dare to expect others to hold similar views. They abhor all but the most limited and narrowly defined forms of taxation because they believe their money belongs to them and that the federal government only needs enough funding to perform its few, narrowly defined, constitutional duties (that is, as defined by the “old” Constitution). They want leaders who can read the plain language of the Constitution and who understand that the words “Congress shall make no law” mean Congress shall make no law.

This small but vocal group of Americans is calling for the restoration of a republic founded on the ideals of the old Constitution.

This from my latest book, Why I Stopped Listening to Rush.

7:06 AM Man alive, yet another GOP basher! Come on, folks, let’s all try to calm down a bit, OK?

6:57 AM Boy, do I love the rural South! My drive to and from the farm takes me along winding country roads. Every driver I see greets me with a wave of the hand, and I them — black or white. We don’t mind talking with each other, and we are never in a hurry. I could go on and on, but I have already published on this subject.

6:55 AM You simply must visit Doug’s Blog and read his ode to Robert Dabney. This is one outstanding work of poetry! Dabney is the author of one of the finest treatises on the attributes of God. Read more about this great man of God here.

6:23 AM Anything Kelly McGinley writes is worth reading. Kelly is one of the few voices calling attention to the media’s mania for power and their discrimination against Christians and traditional American values. It is time to shed the naive idea that modern media exist only to perpetuate the free flow of information. They exist to perpetuate themselves and their view of the world, whatever the cost.

6:20 AM Why Jesse Walker is rooting for a sanctimonious statist blowhard like Kerry.

6:18 AM A high school senior predicts draft riots next year if Charles Rangel gets his way.  Quite the contrary: Most young people, confusing patriotism for nationalism, will lie down and roll over, along with their NASCAR dads and soccer moms. 

6:15 AM John Piper has some good thoughts about suffering for doing what’s right.  The secularist absolutist media will not get it, but those on the front lines will.

6:05 AM Good morning. I hope your day is off to a good start. My wife cooked a superb meal for supper last night consisting of farm-fresh sausage with freshly baked biscuits, wide a side of farm-fresh beans. Enjoying this sumptuous feast were myself, my son, and a seminary student who is staying with us for a few days for some R & R. After dinner I took my bride for a walk from Bradford Hall down to Maple Ridge, our son’s farmhouse, checking out the cows along the way and petting the baby goats. You should have seen Becky Lynn holding the littlest one in her arms. The evening was, well, simply beautiful.

Lobe den Herren, was in mir ist, lobe den Namen.
Alles, was Odem hat, lobe mit Abrahams Samen.
Er ist dein Licht,
Seele, vergiß es ja nicht.
Lobende, schließe mit Amen!

Tuesday, July 13

3:23 PM Our next Olympic sport? I’m ready…!

3:15 PM Guess what the world’s greatest thinkers were? 

3:10 PM Bishop blames parents for moral decadence of youth.

3:07 PM If you haven’t discovered the Jet Tour of the Bible yet, please go here.

2:59 PM Now this is a cool chart!

2:48 PM God has always ordained human leadership. And what I have noticed is that, given enough time, any organization becomes a reflection of its leaders. Paul wrote: “Join with others in following my example” (Phil 3:17). In other words, like pulpit, like pew; like father, like son. One of the great challenges of Paul in the book of Philippians is to stimulate Christian leaders to exercise Christ-like leadership in their ministries, and a great essay on how to do this is found here. I love interacting with my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, but I tend to be less enthusiastic about evangelism – at least in terms of personal evangelism. Because of my desire to please God with a balanced life, however, I realize that I need to constantly work on my priorities. Of one thing I am sure: Christ’s first and overriding command to us is that we love one another, be committed to one another, and strengthen and challenge one another. But I have also found that where a church is not first vertical, first rich in God, it will be thin and poor in its horizontal relationships. These priorities must all be active at once, and all the time. And that’s the challenge, is it not?

2:45 PM Check this out – a pastoral quiz for those who desire to be an overseer. It will blow you away!

2:37 PM Is Jesus God?

2:33 PM Here’s a great but brief biography of one of London’s greatest preachers – a Baptist no less!

2:25 PM The New York Times once published “Guidelines for Bureaucrats,” one of which was: when in trouble, delegate; when in doubt, grumble. You may have also heard about the medical survey that stated that chronic complainers live longer than people who are always sweet and kind. It claims that their mean spirit gives them a purpose for living. Each morning they get up with a fresh challenge to see how what they can find to grumble about, and they derive great satisfaction from making others miserable. Tomorrow in class we will be looking at Paul’s injunction to “do all things without grumbling and complaining” (Phil 2:14) and how it fits within the theme of the entire letter.

2:23 PM This morning we covered the great Christ hymn of Philippians 2:5-11 and the divine parabola that it contains (the way up is down). We also discussed the Athanasian Creed on the Trinity, which reminded me of John Calvin’s famous statement:

For we affirm His divinity so joined and united with His humanity that each retains its distinctive nature unimpaired, and yet those two natures constitute one Christ.

This essay by John Piper on The Pleasure of God in Bruising the Son also speaks volumes about this theme and about the Father’s mercy. By the way, I enjoyed the many visitors we had in class today, especially those wives who attended. You are always welcome to attend!

2:23 PM Here’s the classic definition of “thinking Christianly” by Os Guinness. Note the central relationship the Christian mind has to the Word of God:

Thinking Christianly is not simply thinking by Christians, nor is it thinking by Christians about Christian topics, nor is it thinking by Christians about or in order to develop a ‘Christian line.’ Thinking Christianly is thinking by Christians about anything at all in a profoundly Christian way. Where their minds are so informed and influenced by the truth of God in terms of their principles, perspectives, and presuppositions that they begin to see as God sees, though it will be in an imperfect way.

7:55 AM For what it’s worth, here’s an essay I wrote several months ago: Bush, Caesar, and Election 2004. In a similar vein, here’s an essay on what Bush should have said to justify his case for war.

7:32 AM Here’s a great American writer at his best:

Of course, today I would not call us a Christian nation, as there are more professors than practitioners of that religion. We no longer have the rule of law, either, since judges routinely legislate or amend the Constitution by interpretation while federal legislators and presidents ignore it. Intellectuals claim that everybody can be proud of his or her heritage – unless it is the heritage of the British Isles and Europe.

What made America was not multiculturalism, secularism or unrestrained tolerance amounting to license and an absence of standards. But those things will destroy America. You can put that in the bank.

7:31 AM For two outstanding essays on what Bush knew and when, go here and here.

7:25 AM Sheldon Richmond thinks the draft is fascist. I surmise that it will be the most important issue in 2005.

7:23 AM A student of mine sent me these excellent links:

Interview with Michael Peroutka http://www.chalcedon.edu/articles/0407/040701-3duigon.php   An article about third party voting: http://www.chalcedon.edu/articles/0407/040701terrell.php

7:15 AM Covenant News reports that Roy Moore opposes the Federal Marriage Amendment. He correctly notes what most New Right Republicans are ignoring: that our federal courts are out of control and thus ARE the problem.

Chief Justice Roy Moore does not support an amendment to ban gay marriage. He says renegade courts would cause problems. Moore believes that if marriage is constitutionally defined as between a man and a woman, some judge would allow a man to marry his sister or daughter. He believes a better solution is for Congress to pass the Constitution Restoration Act (PDF Format). This Act would stop courts from forbidding the acknowledgement of God as the basis of law. He says marriage between a man and a woman is what God intended.

Chief Justice Roy Moore — a respected voice among many conservative and religious groups — doesn’t think a constitutional amendment to ban homosexual marriage is the right approach. Such an amendment would not work, he says, because the real problem is renegade courts. If marriage was constitutionally defined as a man and a woman, he says some judge would probably let a man marry his sister or daughter. Moore says Congress would be wiser to pass the Constitution Restoration Act (PDF Format), which would stop courts from forbidding acknowledgment of God as the basis of law. He says marriage as the union of a man and a woman is a God-ordained institution. If that standard is destroyed, Moore says there is nothing to keep three men and a horse from getting married — or an entire city.

I tended to agree with the good Judge in my earlier essay, The Federal Marriage Amendment: Cure-All Or Band-Aid?

6:35 AM Kalimera sas! Ti Kanete? Last night we got another two inches of much needed rain at the farm, and I spent the evening memorizing Philippians (in Greek) while my lovely wife played hymns on our piano. In my devotions this morning I found these words of challenge and encouragement in the letters of Francis Schaeffer:

Mrs. Schaeffer and I have gone through many difficult times. But we would not give up these hard moments, for in them we found Him completely gentle and enough. I am glad that, by His grace, these difficult times did not come before my objecting to this matter, but that my objecting led to them. Indeed, how gentle He is.

Our class is learning from the book of Philippians the central importance of  moment by moment dependence upon the Lord, but at the same time with vital interaction with the world and its ideas. Oh to learn the practical leadership of the Holy Spirit in daily details!

Monday, July 12

3:25 PM Olympic horses in Athens will be examined for heat exhaustion, as well they should. I am particularly interested in the dressage events.

I will also be praying for several friends who will be in Athens sharing the Good News in the marketplace as Paul did in Acts 17. May the Lord bless their efforts!

3:20 PM The more things change….

3:14 PM Don Matzat, a Lutheran pastor, calls the seeker-sensitive movement, appropriately, “guiltless good news.” Read The Deformed Theology of Seeker Sensitivity.

3:12 PM If you have your kids in public school, you won’t like what Beverly Eakman has to say.

3:10 PM John Whitehead has a few words to say about the FDA Gestapo. 

2:30 PM Dear DBO readers:  Ideas are power. With the election growing ever closer, all of us need to be as informed as possible before casting our vote. Read these parties’ platforms for yourself before deciding which of them is more biblical.

• Republican National Committee
• Democratic National Committee
• Reform Party
• Constitution Party
• Libertarian Party

12:33 PM Calling all Hebrew students. Our seminary librarian just sent me this link: MP3 Recordings of the Hebrew Bible. 

10:48 AM John Piper on “success” in ministry:

There is a sad irony in the seeming success of many Christian churches and schools. The irony is that the more you adjust obscure Biblical doctrines to make Christian reality more attractive to unbelievers, the less Christian reality there is when they arrive… If you adjust your doctrine to fit the world in order to attract the world, sooner or later the world realizes that they already have what the church offers. That was the story of much of mainline Protestantism in Europe and America in the 20th century. Adjust your doctrine – or just minimize doctrine – to attract the world, and in the very process of attracting them, lose the radical truth that alone can set them free.

Read My Anguish: My Kinsmen Are Accursed.

10:46 AM When Mamma Wears Combat Boots. An excerpt:

If mothers go into the front lines in the same proportion that fathers do, we will be in serious trouble. Like it or not, the truth is that mamma isn’t replaceable. Daycare cannot do the job of the mother. We have the studies that show us the detrimental effects of daycare upon children, but we really do not need them. Deep down, we know that mothers are the best providers of care for their own offspring (with only extremely rare exceptions). No hired caretaker can love a child as much as his own mother does. No one else has that particular child’s best interests at heart — no matter how well intentioned that person might be. Mother love isn’t a commodity that can be bought or traded on the open market. And it is absolutely not dispensable.

10:43 AM If you are interested in the gender-neutral controversy, here are some excellent links.

10:40 AM Harry Seabrook at Little Geneva posted this link to some interesting pre-war chatter by Colin Powell and Condi Rice. Truly might makes right!

10:25 AM Hitler, Hitler Everywhere. 

10:15 AM Intelligence on Iraq was faulty from the get-go – so concluded the 9/11 Commission. Still, people seem to be blaming anyone but Bush, revealing the built-in prejudices of the legal and political communities today. The fundamental emphases of the Founding Fathers have been subverted – which always happens when the federal government is no longer denied those powers not specifically granted to it in the Constitution. Bush’s eagerness to start a war was not stopped by a weak-kneed and compromising Senate, and so we end up in this pickle.

8:23 AM FARM UPDATE: Got up 188 bales this weekend. Many thanks to a student of mine, Karl Hoffmann, for his help. Karl and his lovely wife and baby daughter joined us for lunch and fellowship on Saturday. I thank God for this committed Christian couple and for what He is doing in their lives. Elsewhere on the farm, a weasel killed 15 chickens on Friday. The trap has been set…. Meanwhile we continue fencing in our pastures this week in preparation to bring the horses up to the farm and to expand our goat population. Our new male will be arriving shortly, and with his arrival we can begin raising meat goats for sale. Perhaps the biggest event of the weekend was the soaking downpour we had last night, which watered our crops and softened the ground so that my son and I can place posts along the new fence lines. We had gone several weeks without any heavy rain when the Lord sent us this much needed thunderstorm. Thanks be to God!

Friday, July 9

1:33 PM An astute report from AlterNet: Facing the Enemy on the Ground.

Regardless of the number of troops the United States puts on the ground or how long they stay there, Allawi’s government is doomed to fail. The more it fails, the more it will have to rely on the United States to prop it up. The more the U.S. props up Allawi, the more discredited he becomes in the eyes of the Iraqi people – all of which creates yet more opportunities for the Iraqi resistance to exploit to their advantage.

The historical parallel that best underscores the current disaster-in-the-making is not the Vietnam War but rather Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Originally intended to rid Lebanon of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Israel’s subsequent occupation led to the creation of Hizbollah as a viable force of political and military resistance. The Hizbollah was so effective that Israel was forced to unilaterally withdraw its forces from Lebanon in May, 2000. The 18-year occupation not only failed to defeat the PLO, but it also created an Islamic fundamentalist movement that today poses a serious threat to the security of Israel and the Middle East region.

1:25 PM Now this means war!

12:58 PM One thousand.

12:52 PM Philippians students, please take a few moments and listen to this sermon on sanctification based on Philippians 1:6 and 2:12-13 by that humble man of God, S. Lewis Johnson (scroll down to no. 26). You will be amply rewarded.

12:48 PM Poor Berit Kyos – terrorist incognito.

12:45 PM How nice to be in a church last Sunday that did not have an “altar call.”

The invitation system, as we have seen, is riddled with one problem after another. Among the items noted, it violates the New Testament pattern of evangelism; tends to produce spurious converts; gives assurance to people who may not yet be regenerated; raises a superficial conviction of sin; equates the mere act of coming forward with salvation itself; and seeks to illicit a response through emotional and psychological factors.

Read more.

12:34 PM I agree totally with this writer:

As we enter the election season later this year, let us hope that the debates do include discussions about the shortfalls in military personnel and readiness. And for once in all of our lives, let the right thing be done for our fellow citizens in uniform. 

 

Let’s stop trying to do all things military on the cheap.  Let’s give our GI Joes and Janes what they need, who they need, where they need it and when they need it.  Let’s stop playing with the very lives (and livelihoods) of those folks who protect the lives of the rest of us.

12:18 PM It’s beginning to get ugly out there for constitutionalists like Roy Moore and Michael Peroutka. Since most Christians are constitutionally neutered, many will ask, What’s the point? The answer is obvious to anyone raised in the basic morality of the Scriptures rather than the pompous foolishness of today’s triumphant and arrogant secularism. Stand by your guns, gentlemen; I’ll be with you every step of the way.

12:14 PM What a wonderful Philippians class we had today, as we have had all week in fact. Our discussion today took us into deep waters – holding our ground against the world, strong in what the Lord has done for us, jointly working for the progress of the Gospel, being joyful by being of the same mind…. Next Tuesday we pick up again with the great Christ hymn of Philippians 2:5-11, whose Pauline authorship I defend and, more importantly, whose message of unity through humility is a responsibility that we fail at so conspicuously. A sister in the class will be singing her own rendition of the hymn with guitar accompaniment, and I will pass out two different versions of the hymn based on the ISV translation. Again, what a wonderful group of students you are, and I can assure you that your Savior loves you. And, by the way, so does this professor.

7:57 AM It’s perfectly alright to get mad at Bush’s tactics, as long as you ignore his unbiblical and unconstitutional polices. All of this under the aegis of “neutral” and “balanced” public affairs reporting. Well, I disagree:

I believe there are times in life when anyone with a shred of principle should be profoundly angry. This is such a time in our nation’s history. It is a lie and a deception to pretend that Bush’s religious convictions justify his unbiblical and unconstitutional vision of government. I am therefore convinced that the time has come to secede from “compassionate conservatism.” To be completely honest, I’ve had all I can take of George W. Bush and his officious strutting, of exaggerated intelligence reports “justifying” attacks on sovereign nations, of the distortion of facts and reliance on rumor to influence public opinion, and of Rumsfeld & Co. hiding behind a curtain of PR spin while sending hundreds of Americans to their deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq. I’m outraged by our self-serving promotion of “democracy” and our support of petty dictators and monarchs (as long as they continue to provide us with a steady stream of Middle Eastern oil, that is). I’m tired of duplicity, doublespeak, “embedded” journalists, contradictions in our foreign policy, Washington’s control over the media, and judicial activism run amok.

Just as troubling to me is the fact that the church in America has accepted the myth of neutrality. Never have evangelical Christians tried to be so “relevant.” Never have they been so irrelevant. Many theologians and pastors have cultivated a careful silence on the real issues facing America today. For all intents and purposes, God has become an adjunct of man, a help in the work of the church and in procuring victory in our man-made wars. The Power that humbled Job no longer finds an echo in the American mentality. Acceptance of the status quo has replaced principle. Ours has become a religion without deeds. Where, I ask, are the Christian men and women who will stand up and fight in the political arena without compromise? They are scarcely to be found.

That’s an except from my latest book, which attempts to expose our hypocrisy as “evangelical” Christians – we paragons of “pluralism” and “open-mindedness” who in effect say, “The Constitution doesn’t matter, but don’t worry, we have a Christian in the White House.” We Christians should be ashamed at our ignorance and apathy. It is time for a massive assault on this humanistic and bigoted culture of compromise.

7:55 AM If you’re a Reformed Baptist, check this new website out.

7:27 AM Ron Paul has the audacity to call for U.S. independence from the Blighted Nations. I’d be hard-pressed to come up with an organization that epitomizes the hard-nosed duplicity of our foreign policy that benefits from the myth of neutrality more than the UN.

7:23 AM Shades of Saddam! Democracy takes a hit by the new Iraqi (“sovereign”) government! Our mercenaries have let us down! Take a lesson from the Ruskies! Cancel your summer travel plans! Life and liberty have gone by the board!

7:10 AM Received this great letter from a libertarian today:

I came across your blog today, and just wanted to say that I am glad that there are those on the right who actually take principled stands on issues.

I’m probably as far to the left of the democrats as you are from the current republicans, and oddly I find myself agreeing with you (and the constitutional party) in certain ways. Like you, I absolutely abhor consumerist society and most of popular culture. It completely reduces human beings to spectacle watchers and passive, lifeless “consumers”. It is this dehumanization (and from my perspective the capitalist system which causes it) which is leading to a frightening decay of our entire society.

I have very strong values, I believe in individual freedom as well as social responsibility *and* the responsibility of society to make it possible, no EASY for individuals to *be* responsible. This is certainly not the case here at this time.

Anyhow, with the current band of intellectually dishonest thugs in power, I’m glad that you are upfront about your beliefs and stand by your principles.

I’m a civil libertarian and I completely disagree with the majority of your positions on social matters, but the common ground we share (I think) is that we both want a society in which people treat each other with respect and dignity. I want a society in which the society itself makes that easy to do, and this cannot be legislated, handed down by judges or proclamations from on high, but must come from “we the people” ourselves. That is democracy, anything else is a farce, no matter whether you call it conservatism, liberalism, socialism, communism…it’s a sham and a lie and a betrayal of all those ideals.

Ok, enough yakking, take care.

6:57 AM Here’s a letter from Patrick Johnson that deserves serious consideration:

Dear pro-life friends,

If you designed a pro-life ad and purchased commercial time to put the ad which included a photograph of an aborted baby or a video clip of an abortion on prime-time television, the bloody pictures would surely be edited out and you might not even be allowed to run the commercial at all. 

However, the law allows your pro-life commercials to be aired unedited if it is an ad campaigning for a Federal candidate.  This provides a unequaled opportunity to show the nation the victim of an abortion – to put a bloody face on the pro-choice debate.  These photos change minds and save lives – we’ve all seen it happen many times.  Now let’s do it on prime-time television!

I have designed a high-quality sixty second ad in support of Michael Peroutka with the Constitution Party.  He has a practical plan to stop abortion in the United States his first day in office, should God bless us with such godly leadership.  It will cost you a few hundred dollars to put this sixty second ad on your local television station, which could be witnessed by hundreds of thousands of people.  How many of you would spend a couple of hundred dollars to embark on a pro-life missionary trip to show photos of abortion victims to a thousand people driving past a busy intersection or going to a Democratic fundraiser?  Here’s an opportunity for you to show the photograph of an aborted baby to a hundred thousand people right after the 7 o’clock news for about the same amount of money. 

This ad is costing me at least $1000 to make, but I need pro-lifers and constitutionalist willing to put out some money to put it on the air in your city.  If you want to put it on the air in Ohio, mail me checks at 759 Quarry View Drive, Heath, Ohio, 43056.  All proceeds will go to getting the ad on the air.  If you want to put it on the air in your own state, send me $15 for a DVD of the ad and I’ll get it to you as soon as it is available to me. 

I pray that the Democrats will see this ad as a serious threat to George Bush in the battleground states, and that many leftists will begin to support the ad simply to help John Kerry.  Think of it!  Democrat pro-aborts paying to show ads on television that depict abortion as murder!  We’ve got to get this ad on in the so-called “battleground states”, states now considered too close to call in the presidential election. They are: Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Washington, Wisconsin and West Virginia.  Buy at least one sixty second ad for your city!

For strong reasons why Bush has ceased to be “the lesser of two evils” and “Why Christians should not vote for Bush”, read my article with that title at: http://www.wherethetruthhurts.org/tractsbooksread.php?w=59

6:45 AM Look at what Bill Frist and your favorite “conservative” Republicans are up to now. As long as they are in power, the (Un)Patriot Act will keep on strutting along, defiant of the U.S. Constitution. I say three cheers for the ACLU for suing the FBI over its powers to demand information from Internet providers about customers!

Thursday, July 8

4:43 PM I received this excellent email message from Michael Peroutka:

Dear Friends of the Constitutional Republic,

There he goes again. Several months ago, on this page, I took issue with the Rev. Jerry Falwell for saying, on national TV, that President Bush “is the personification of the ideal conservative.”

Now, once again, the Rev. Falwell has said, basically, the same thing. In a recent “Falwell Confidential” email, he begins by quoting John Adams as having said: “Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.” Then the Rev. Falwell says:

For conservative people of faith, voting for principle this year means voting for the re-election of George W. Bush. The alternative, in my mind, is simply unthinkable. To the pro-life, pro-family, pro-traditional marriage, pro-America voters in this nation, we must determine that President Bush is the man with our interests at heart. It’s that simple.

Well, I respectfully disagree. Things are not as simple as the Rev. Falwell seems to believe. The choice in this year’s Presidential election is not solely between Mr. Bush and John Kerry. There is a truly pro-life, pro-family, pro-traditional marriage, pro-America Presidential ticket and it is the Constitution Party’s ticket of me, Michael Peroutka, for President and the Rev. Chuck Baldwin for Vice President.

We are totally pro-life, with no exceptions, whereas Mr. Bush is not. We are totally pro-family and pro-traditional marriage — completely against homosexual “marriage” in any shape or form —, whereas Mr. Bush is in favor of “civil unions” between members of the same sex. And we believe we are even more pro-American — in the original sense of this word — because we believe the Constitution of these united States should be strictly obeyed, whereas Mr. Bush, by his actions, has shown that he does not believe this.

It is ironic that the Rev. Falwell should call for the re-election of Mr. Bush while simultaneously quoting John Adams on the necessity of always voting for principle, even if you vote alone, since such a principled way of voting means your vote is never lost. I say this is ironic because a vote for President Bush is a vote for a man who has forsaken Christian, Constitutional and conservative principles. Thus, a vote for Mr. Bush is a lost vote, a wasted vote.

There is a lot more to say on this subject. And elsewhere on this page, in a detailed and well-documented piece, Patrick Johnson says a lot more in an important article titled Why Christians Should Note Vote For George W. Bush.

1:50 PM George W. Bush: No abortion litmus test for judges.

1:48 PM David Brownlow on the age of lawlessness.

1:43 PM Karen De Koster chimes in on Moore’s war:

Fahrenheit 911 was an excellent movie, considering the yahoo who put it out. But Michael Moore was right. I’ve seen no good libertarian reviews of this movie whatsoever. Only Tom DiLorenzo’s post does any justice to the movie, as far as libertarians are concerned.

I’d love to review the movie, and I’d love to say more, but time constraints just won’t allow it. Let me add to Tom’s post……..there’s a great part in the movie where Moore, knowing that the Patriot Act was passed overnight – with no one congressman having ever even looked at it – takes to the streets around the White House, in a truck with a PA system, reading the Patriot Act aloud. Brilliant! Then there’s the fabulous sound bites of a near brain-dead John Conyers. Then there’s Bush bumbling his way through every media opportunity available to him. And how about the part where Marines are in Flint, Michigan, recruiting young, black men as cannon fodder, and talking frankly about it? I really get sick and tired of Moore’s constant infatuation with “racism,” and the big bad white guys that “oppress the poor blacks,” but in filming this candid footage, he is absolutely correct in what he is trying to convey. That cannot be intelligently denied.

8:30 AM The seminary’s Outlook is down again (so is our internet access), so it may be a while before I can respond to today’s emails. Thanks for your patience.

Wednesday, July 7

3:26 PM The LRC Blog has just published Thomas DiLorenzo’s review of Moore’s new movie. Very interesting….

I saw Fahrenheit 911 yesterday. Whooooo boy, Michael Moore really nails the neocon establishment’s coonskin to the wall. Great footage of the WMD/Iraq-bin Laden Connection lies; Bush as he is — a simpleton and a tongue-tied dunce; the KGB-like secret service harassing Moore for simply standing across the street from the Saudi embassy; members of Congress running away when Moore asks them why only ONE of their OWN children is serving in the military in Iraq; Iraqis loading the bodies of dead babies into the bed of a pickup truck shortly after a U.S. military bombing; the shattering sorrow of a poor woman from Michigan who realizes that her son died for no good reason in Iraq; Wolfowitz acting like a disgusting pig, putting his entire comb in his mouth before combing his greasy hair; the mutilated bodies of young American soldiers who increasingly understand they are NOT fighting, dying, and having their limbs torn off for any noble cause like defending their own country; Bush’s Lincolnesque Homeland Security secret police harassing and planting spies among groups of elderly people who simply meet socially to discuss current events; the complicity of Republicans AND Democrats in Washington in this unnecessary war; and Bush’s phony “victory” announcement and landing on an aircraft carrier last year.

The one thing missing was John Kerry, who not only supported the war as a senator but wants to send even more troops to Iraq.

The film portrays The Party of Lincoln as it always has been: A cabal of money-and power-hungry political hacks enriching themselves through the auspices of the state while masking their true intentions with the rhetoric of morality, freedom, religion, democracy, saving the world, and other audacious lies.

My wife Stacey thinks every American ought to see this move; they can judge for themselves what’s propaganda and what’s not.

1:56 PM My current reading potpourri:

• Endings by Morna Hooker.

• Junior High Ministry by Wayne Rice.

• The Use of PAS in the New Testament by William Johnston.

• From Eye-Witnesses to Ministers of the Word by Richard Dillon.

• Collected Studies by Jan Lambrecht.

• The Textual Tradition of the Gospels by Amy Anderson.

• Koinonia in the New Testament by George Panikulam.

• Directions in New Testament Methods by Martin Albl et al.

1:07 PM There is more than one way to skin an election year cat, says Charlotte Iserbyt.

12:57 PM It has been said that sermonettes produce Christianettes. C. H. Spurgeon would have agreed:

I fear there are some who preach with the view of amusing men, and as long as people can be gathered in crowds, and their ears can be tickled, and they can retire pleased with what they have heard, the orator is content, and folds his hands, and goes back self-satisfied. But Paul did not lay himself out to please the public and collect the crowd. If he did not save them he felt that it was of no avail to interest them. Unless the truth had pierced their hearts, affected their lives, and made new men of them, Paul would have gone home crying, “Who hath believed our report, and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?”…

Now observe, brethren, if I, or you, or any of us, or all of us, shall have spent our lives merely in amusing men, or educating men, or moralizing men, when we shall come to give our account at the last great day we shall be in a very sorry condition, and we shall have but a very sorry record to render; for of what avail will it be to a man to be educated when he comes to be damned? Of what service will it be to him to have been amused when the trumpet sounds, and heaven and earth are shaking, and the pit opens wide her jaws of fire and swallows up the soul unsaved? Of what avail even to have moralized a man if still he is on the left hand of the judge, and if still, “Depart, ye cursed,” shall be his portion?'” [“Soul Saving Our One Business,” The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Vol. 25 (London: Passmore and Alabaster, 1879), 674-76.]

12:55 PM Philippians students, please check out this excellent article by John MacArthur on biblical eldership. A key excerpt:

People often ask me what I think is the secret to Grace Community Church’s phenomenal development over the past two decades. I always point out first of all that God sovereignly determines the membership of a church, and numbers alone are no gauge of spiritual success. In the midst of tremendous numerical growth, however, the spiritual vitality of our church has been remarkable. I’m convinced God’s blessing has been on us primarily because our people have shown a strong commitment to biblical leadership. By affirming and emulating the godly example of our elders, the church has opened the door to extraordinary blessings from the hand of God.

12:45 PM Another reason I love living in Virginia.

8:20 AM Should the president be held to higher standards of diction than the average Joe Doe in America? Pieter Friedrich thinks so.

7:45 AM Why the GOP can’t be trusted.

7:40 AM Michael Takiff thinks moral self-congratulation is an addiction in our nation. Read “They Behead: We Do It With Smart Bombs.”

7:36 AM From today’s mailbag:

Dear Mr. Black,

I just ordered a copy of “Why I stopped listening to Rush Limbaugh”. I listened to Limbaugh during my transition from a long-time registered Democrat to a Constitutionalist. During the California gubernatorial campaign in 2002, I discovered the American Independent Party (www.aipca.org) and the Constitution Party; and I voted for Ron Gulke. During that time Limbaugh exposed his deep belief that those who voted for someone other than a Republican were fools who were wasting their vote. As a liberal, I thought that he was just a fascist windbag (Please note the well-composed liberal argument); however, as a Constitutionalist, I see him as merely a prominent supporter of the Republican Party who puts politics over principle. If I am a fool to him, then, “Nuts!” I will no longer be a fool to Him.

I enjoy your essays and look forward to reading your latest book.

7:30 AM Mr. Jared Henson sent me this link (which would be humorous were it not so tragic).

7:20 AM Meet the real Jesus. (Link courtesy of Paul Proctor.)

7:05 AM In keeping with today’s home page theme, I offer the following links on abortion from the Center for Bioethical Reform:

• Why Abortion is Genocide
• Planned Parenthood Exposed
• The AbortionNO Interactive Web Exhibit
• Abortion Hurts Women
• This Website is Changing Minds!
• Adoption Facts
• Abortion Facts
• Abortion Photos

Tuesday, July 6

4:40 PM One woman writes: As co-editor of the BeautifulWomanhood.org site, I receive dozens upon dozens of letters from readers each month. I’ve yet to hear from one woman (aside from the militant feminists) stuck in a “real” job who doesn’t long to return home. Read more.

4:35 PM John and Noel Piper offer some handy advice for parents who choose to keep their children with them in worship.

4:28 PM Spanking will remain legal in England – for now. Physical punishment of children is already outlawed in Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Austria.

4:04 PM William Lind, in a guest column at the Soldiers for the Truth website, reports on spillover. The money quote:

If we use our enemies’ map, it is difficult not to conclude that we are losing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition to increasing instability in Saudi Arabia, we see General Musharraf tottering in Pakistan, President Mubarak of Egypt flying to Germany for “back surgery” (is that diplomatic-speak for terminal cancer?), Islamic militancy rising in Europe, and who-knows-what in the way of terrorist incidents being prepared in the United States itself. 

3:45 PM On John Edwards, Kerry does yet another flip flop.

Now here’s a true Southerner and a VP candidate who merits your vote:

12:57 PM I can’t wait to get my uniform to do Robert E. Lee in the first person (rather than just talking about him and his Christian character). I already have a photo taken in the back of 707 Franklin Street – what a humbling and awe-inspiring experience that was for me! Yes, I know I’m 6 feet 4, but the general was himself a lot taller than most people realize.

12:55 PM Yet another reason why I can’t and won’t support seeker-sensitivism:

Bill Hybels, pastor of Willow Creek Community Church, has said on several occasions that he will never quote Charles Spurgeon in his public seeker services. Why? He confidently assures fellow ministers that Spurgeon is outdated and will not speak the language of their modern hearers. I for one am concerned that this creates, intended or otherwise, a “reverse elitism”: We are the ones who communicate with our age, but does it not follow from this that Isaiah, Jesus, Paul and John are also irrelevant? They did not have Subarus, after all. The unfortunate result will be a generation that thinks the evangelical movement came from nowhere–with no heritage or roots.

Read more here.  A balanced and thorough study concludes:

Certainly the idea of unity among all Christians is a noble concept when it involves agreement on the essentials of Biblical Christianity. The problem with the Willow Creek method, however, is that they have opened their doors wide open to ALL religious thought (including secular thought), and embraced them under the guise of Christian love and acceptance, even when it is diametrically opposed to the fundamentals of Christianity. This philosophy, unfortunately, is far beyond the boundaries of respectable ecumenism. (Of course, this is assuming that ecumenism is, in itself, respectable —which is very questionable.)

For example, G. A. Pritchard makes this sad assessment of Willow Creek’s practice of mixing humanistic psychology with Christianity: “Ironically, while Hybels is evangelizing those in the world toward Christianity, he is also evangelizing Christians toward the world. As the unchurched Harrys in the audience (10 percent) move closer to Christianity, the Christians in the audience (90 percent) are often becoming more psychological and worldly. … In the effort to become relevant Willow Creek ironically is in danger of becoming irrelevant” (Pritchard, p. 238-239).

Pritchard believes that this accentuation on psychology, “instead of encouraging Creekers to know and love God, encourages them to know and accept themselves and develop a strong self-esteem. The goals and means of one’s ethics change from a God-centered to a human-centered orientation. …” (Pritchard, p. 234).

Another Christian analyst, Dr. Jay E. Adams agrees with Pritchard’s conclusions. He states: “In my opinion, advocating, allowing and practicing psychiatric and psychoanalytical dogmas within the church is every bit as pagan and heretical (and therefore perilous) as propagating the teachings of some of the most bizarre cults. The only vital difference is that the cults are less dangerous because their errors are more identifiable.”

Yet unfortunately Willow Creek is dabbling in more than just psychology. As we’ve seen earlier, Bill Hybels has been all too willing to look the other way when people in which he associates promote false doctrine. Therefore, Willow Creek is almost practicing a much more severe and dangerous form of ecumenism call “syncretism,” which is the merging or union of conflicting religious beliefs which forms a new religious philosophy. By not openly rejecting these false teachings, Willow Creek has effectively hampered its Christian mission and damaged the ability of its leaders and members to discern light from darkness, wheat from tares, and truth from error. The result are Christians who have been indoctrinated to easily accept and incorporate ideas from a potpourri of false “isms”: Eastern mysticism, Catholicism, Mormonism, Humanism, etc.

In the end, this mixture of false beliefs with true Christianity eventually forms a new “Willow Creek Christianity” that bears little resemblance to the true Gospel. And with the international influence Willow Creek has built, they are essentially leading many churches into the same kind of error.

The antidote? Simple. Bill Hybels, Willow Creek, and all WCA member churches need to remember what the Bible clearly teaches and follow its dictates:

• We are to separate from those who are not sound in the faith (2Tim. 3:5).

• We are not to assist the cause of the ungodly (2Chron. 19:2).

• We are not to give honor to one who denies the faith (Gal. 1:6-9).

• We are to examine a person’s theological position and find it acceptable before cooperating with him in spiritual efforts (1Jn. 4:1).

• We are commanded not to join forces with unbelievers in the Lord’s work (2Cor. 6:14).

• We are not to emphasize unity at the expense of doctrinal purity (Jude 3).

• We are not to encourage or cooperate with persons of unsound doctrine (2Jn. 10-11).

(Our church) needs to review these scriptures, too, and decide where they stand in their official association with Willow Creek. Just look at these two facts that show two basic doctrinal differences that separate (our church) and Willow Creek:

#1: Willow Creek believes that woman can hold the position of overseer, which (our church) does not believe. Willow Creek, in fact, strongly promotes this belief and considers acceptance of female elders as a criteria for membership.

#2: Willow Creek believes that baptism by “sprinkling” (as an alternative to immersion) is acceptable, which (our church) does not believe.

Generally speaking, these two issues alone might be enough reason to feel that (our church) would be better off not officially associating with Willow Creek. I mean, are we really sure that (our church) leaders can go to Chicago, be trained by Willow Creek leaders, and not be influenced by some of their opposing doctrinal viewpoints?

And worse yet, what about the overwhelming use of humanistic psychology and worldly thinking that is sprinkled throughout almost every Willow Creek program and used to defend their pragmatic, ecumenical philosophy? How does (our church) leaders avoid being influenced by Willow Creek resources and seminars that may contain worldly, unbiblical teachings that are couched in Christian terminology?

Frankly, I believe that some of the Willow Creek pragmatism has already started to affect some of the (church) leadership. I can personally attest to a certain arrogance among some of the (our church) Creative Arts ministry leaders after they came back from a seminar at a “Willow Creek-like” megachurch in Texas called Fellowship Church. After returning from this Texas trip, the Creative Arts leaders conducted a (church) meeting to tout some of the new ideas they gained at Fellowship Church. Unfortunately, some of the new attitude that they wanted to pass on to the Worship Team were not edifying in the least.

One of the more disturbing attitudes they brought back with them, unhappily, was an almost callous acknowledgement that by implementing “Willow Creek/Fellowship” strategies into (our church), they would probably lose some valuable church members who didn’t like the “new” changes. They joked that these people might leave and (our church) would then be known as the “Church of the Blessed Subtraction.” In other words, we were to consider the loss of these people as just a necessary evil in order to bring in more Willow Creek-type “seekers” into our services. Personally, I found the insensitive categorization of offended brothers and sisters of our church as “blessed subtractions” to be a disturbing attitude that has obviously come from the Willow Creek/Saddleback mentality where “change theory” is king.

Don’t get me wrong; I am not saying there is a sinister Willow Creek “conspiracy” going on here. I am well aware that Willow Creek has a very strong desire to reach the lost for Jesus, and that is commendable. No doubt (our church) wants only to share in that kind of passion to bring salvation to others. But Willow Creek’s praiseworthy zeal for evangelism has been perverted by pragmatic and ecumenical leanings that have exposed them to the influences of the world and its false ideology. Unless and until Willow Creek changes their philosophy of worldly evangelism and returns to Biblical discernment and truth, I believe it would be in (our) Christian Church’s best interests to no longer financially support them, attend their seminars, or use their resources.

12:50 PM The “Dow” has a new web log.

12:20 PM Kelly McGinley writes:

I personally blame the people sitting in the pews of these mainline churches for allowing the sodomites to take over this country. What deviant behavior will the churches accept next, pedophilia? Let’s not forget these same churches also have been the culprit for the 46 million children slaughtered in this country.

The Word of God tells us that there will come a time when the pew dwellers will not endure sound doctrine. They will heap to themselves teachers who tell them what they want to hear. The pastors will promote lies and the people will love to have it so. This is the real cause of sodomite marriage in this country and the only cure is for God’s people to come back to His Word.

12:18 PM The decreasing popularity of U.S. presidents abroad.

12:15 PM I think what I wrote about John Edwards a year ago is still valid today, perhaps more so.

12:12 PM Chris Bowers thinks John Kerry should encourage third-party debate participation. Like, duh.

12:10 PM According to Icky, the top two female players at Wimbledon were homeschooled.

12:07 PM I hope you check out Pieter Friedrich’s new blog, Pumpkinhead (no, the title is not as self-abnegating as you might think). Great to have one of my favorite writers back in the blogosphere.

12:05 PM Our Philippians class, which began this morning, is off to a great start, having just completed a quick overview of the founding of the church at Philippi (Acts 16) as well as the structure of the letter (the theme: unity in the cause of the gospel, with unity being possible only through humility). Students are to memorize 1:27-2:11 by the end of the class, and, in addition, must fulfill three “servanthood projects.” We’ve got a total of 22 enrolled, but the more the merrier – all are welcome. For more information, please call the seminary’s registry at 919-761-2215.

7:15 AM Good morning, friends! Despite the heat and humidity yesterday (over 100 degrees) I was able to mow and edge our North Carolina property as well as get a good, long ride on my Arabian named Cody. Riding is a wonderful pastime and a marvelous exercise. What I love about this sport is that it involves the challenge of creating harmony between two living things so utterly different as man and horse. The interplay between them is so constant and varying and is made up of multitudes of little actions and reactions. In truth, the art of riding can never be taught either by a teacher or by a book. Cody is the most intelligent horse I have ever ridden. He can do everything I ask of him – including difficult side passes and canter pirouettes. My thoroughbred is bigger, faster, and more powerful and with an entirely different kind of action, low and long striding. I love riding them both. They are by nature very gentle; gentleness is indeed a horse’s more endearing and valuable trait. Horses also possess a marvelous memory. They never forget anything they have learned! It is also extraordinarily difficult to eradicate faults and bad habits once they have been acquired. Right now I am working with Cody on figures of eight; with my thoroughbred on the extended trot. There is always something to teach – and learn – both on the part of my horses and myself. What a sport!

Monday, July 5

9:43 AM Here’s a new search engine worth considering. 

9:35 AM I’ve often praised David Brownlow’s writing, and now here’s the latest from his meddlesome pen.

9:23 AM La Figaro asks: L’Amérique est-elle un monstre ou un modèle ? C’est la question posée par le Figaro Magazine aux meilleures plumes américaines. For the answer, clicque ici.

9:13 AM Look who’s espousing the use of condoms.   

9:10 AM Read a review of the latest tome on ancient Greek syntax (PDF).  

9:05 AM Woman killed over Bibles.

8:58 AM Now that I reside in the Old Dominion state, I hope to do this someday with my fearless charger Traveler.

8:45 AM This is sickening.

8:33 AM From the mailbag:

Dr. Black

Just got this from Jerry Falwell.  I have attempted to email him before, telling him Bush is not a conservative and I will be casting my vote for Michael Peroutka.  Never have I received an answer to any of my emails.  That Bush is attempting to pass himself off as a Christian conservative must be making Reagan and Goldwater roll over in their graves. God’s speed to you and your family. 

Deo Vindice

Charles Porter

The “this” Mr. Porter is referring to is an essay entitled “Time to open wallets for Bush.”

7:48 AM Please visit www.GetTheKidsOut.org to see reports on the SBC meeting in Indianapolis and why those involved consider it, in spite of electoral defeat, a major victory for advancing the GTKO cause.

7:45 AM Writes Ravi:

I thank God for pastors and for those who stay by the people in their hurts and needs. Pastoring is a vanishing reality in our culture. The pastor who comes near has become an endangered species. Amid growth and high-tech ways of communicating some pastors have become reclusive and distant. For the sake of our culture I would long to see their return. They are the shepherds that give us the rod and the staff—the warning and the care. They are the real heroes working behind the scenes away from the applause of the public. God’s heroes are developed in His own darkroom where exposure to the light would mar the real picture.

Read more. (Thank you, Rachel Layne, for sending the link!)

7:34 AM Yesterday I took my son Nathan to hear his favorite college professor and my dear colleague, Dr. Greg Harris, preach at Trinity Baptist Church here in Wake Forest. We had a wonderful time getting reacquainted with our good friend Pastor Scott Brown and his family-friendly congregation that meets in a local school auditorium. How delightful to see entire families in worship together. I imagine some may find the constant sound of infants and toddlers a distraction, but it was music to my ears. By the way, Scott is a leading proponent of age-integrated churches and has published numerous essays on the topic at his church’s website as well as at Doug’s Phillip’s Vision Forum. Scott will be speaking at the Uniting Church and Family Conference to be held in St. Louis this August.

The highlight of the service, for me at least, was the time of communion that took place after Greg’s message. Following communion we had a great fellowship meal in the adjacent auditorium. I thought to myself: How much like the early church, which met together for the Lord’s SUPPER (the Greek word refers to the main meal of the day, not to a wafer and a thimble of grape juice!). Why, then, couldn’t these be combined, making the communion elements part of the believers’ fellowship meal? And why not use ONE LOAF, as the Scripture seems to teach (see 1 Corinthians 10:17: “For we, though many, are one bread and one body; for we all partake of that one bread”). The one loaf could easily be passed from believer to believer as a symbol that we all partake of the one loaf just as we are all one part of one body. Keep in mind, also, that the Lord’s Supper was the centerpiece of early Christian worship, not an appendage to worship. Gathered around one table, Christians met with their common Lord and with each other in unity and love. Christ Himself had expressed this kind of humility and unity when He instituted the Supper (see Matthew 26:26-30). Finally, according to Acts 20:7, believers met on Sunday specifically TO BREAK BREAD (the infinitive of purpose). In other words, the PRIMARY purpose of the gathering was the Lord’s Supper, which was a WEEKLY observance. How far we have departed from the clear pattern of the New Testament!

If you are interested in reading more about the weekly observance of the Lord’s Supper, which anticipates the time when, together with the Lord, we shall all partake of the Great Marriage Supper of the Lamb, please see my web page entitled Unleashing the Church.

Thursday, July 1

2:56 PM My son just called from the farm and informed me that my favorite hen, Little Feather, has died (of what, we don’t know yet). Out of several dozen chickens she was unique – she always greeted me when I came home by flying up and landing on my arm or shoulder, eager to be petted. Chickens are, I think, great pets for children. Long before we got our horses or cows or goats or even dogs we had chickens. I well remember the boys cuddling with them when they were toddlers. I will miss Little Feather greatly….

1:25 PM FARM UPDATE: We are currently trying to fence in all five of our large pastures at Rosewood Farm before winter so that our goats will have some fields to saunter in and nibble. We are using woven wire with one strand of barbed wire on top both to keep the deer out and our animals in. Needless to say, this is a very tiresome and tedious task but something that needs to be done.

Last week the seminary’s publication OUTLOOK ran a very nice article about the farm and Bradford Hall featuring my son Nathan, who both designed and constructed our new home. Many thanks to writer Kyle Smith and his photographer wife, who were with us for the official dedication service in March.

1:22 PM Here’s something I wrote on women in combat at the start of the Iraq War and for which I received some flak from the Christian Right. For more on this subject, see Doug Phillip’s excellent discussion here.

12:20 PM Izzy Lyman of The Homeschool Revolution has written an interesting article on blogging that appeared here.

12:05 PM Are you a neocon nit-wit? Find out here. And here.

11:40 AM The Pen and the Sword has had a facelift. Nice touch, Ben.

10:55 AM Paul Conners hates to admit he’s right.

10:35 AM This one speaks for itself.  

10:33 AM The second issue of the Reformed Baptist Theological Review (RBTR I:2) is now available for purchase and should be mailed by August 1st, 2004. This edition includes the following articles: “The Remaining Sabbath for the People of God,” Robert P. Martin; “John Owen and New Covenant Theology,” Richard C. Barcellos; “The Antipaedobaptism of John Tombes,” Michael T. Renihan; “The Means of Grace in the 2nd London Confession of Faith,” James M. Renihan; “The Emotivity of God,” Gregory G. Nichols; “The Newness of the New Covenant,” James R. White; “THE CALVIN OF ENGLAND: Some Aspects of the Life of John Owen (1616-1683) and his Teaching on Biblical Piety,” Michael A.G. Haykin. Book reviews include one by Tom Hicks on N.T. Wright’s “What Saint Paul Really Said.”

For ordering and subscription information go to www.rbtr.org.

10:32 AM Homeschool mom and blogger par excellence Carmon Friedrich shares her thoughts on the acceptance speech of Michael Peroutka at the Constitution Party National Convention last week. 

10:30 AM Just had a very nice 30-minute interview with the Religion Editor of the Journal Star in Peoria, Illinois. He asked a lot of questions about my website and my recently released book, Why I Stopped Listening to Rush.

10:00 AM David Brownlow on the costs of compromise.

9:10 AM How to turn a DVD into a Peroutka 2004 Campaign Home Headquarters.

9:07 AM Radio coverage of last week’s Constitution Party National Convention continues this week on Kelly McGinley’s program from Mobile, Alabama. People all over the world can listen to the speeches via the internet on her website.

9:05 AM When we forget history. (Link from Rachel Layne.)

8:47 AM From the mailbag:

Dave:

I was recently introduced to your website by a friend and I have found it to be an absolute blessing. I wanted to take this opportunity to introduce you to Pastor John Weaver a dear friend of mine. Pastor Weaver is the national chaplain of the Sons Of Confederate Veterans and Pastor of Freedom Baptist Church in Waycross GA. The sermon I have e-mailed you is the 1st of a 14 part series entitled Where We Are & How We Got Here. This is a wonderful series both biblically and historically. There are over 80 sermons of his on sermonaudio.com. I hope you enjoy. Thanks for you website. May God bless you and your family. To listen to this sermon please click on the link below:

 http://www.sermonaudio.com/sermoninfo.asp?sermonID=11504134153

Many thanks for the letter and the link. I have long been a great fan and admirer of Pastor Weaver. His courage, knowledge of theology, and biblically accurate interpretation of history are exemplary and could be imitated with profit by every pastor in America.

8:04 AM Open Debates (www.OpenDebates.org) is a ten-month old nonprofit organization that is engaged in a national campaign to reform the presidential debate process. It has formed a nonpartisan Citizens’ Debate Commission to sponsor future presidential debates that address pressing national issues, feature innovative formats, and include the candidates that the American people want to see. Seventeen national civic leaders from the left, center, and right of the political spectrum serve on the Citizens Debate Commission (www.CitizensDebate.org), and over sixty diverse civic organizations serve on the advisory board of the Citizens’ Debate Commission. Now President Bush and Senator Kerry must decide whether to participate in real and transparent presidential debates that maximize voter education, or stilted and deceptive bipartisan news conferences that maximize major party control. The Republican and Democratic nominees will only participate in debates proposed by the Citizens’ Debate Commission if the political benefit outweighs the political cost, and that calculus will only be achieved if sufficient voters demand democratic debates from them.  Please visit their website – www.OpenDebates.org – sign their petition, and make a financial contribution. 

7:53 AM Scott Whiteman, campaign manager for the Peroutka campaign, ably defends interposition in this essay on abortion. 

June 2004 Blog Archives

May 2004 Blog Archives

April 2004 Blog Archives

March 2004 Blog Archives

February 2004 Blog Archives

January 2004 Blog Archives

December 2003 Blog Archives

November 2003 Blog Archives

 

   restoring our biblical and constitutional foundations

                

July 2010 Prayer Itinerary

Becky Lynn Black  

Wed-Thurs, June 30-July 1…Travel of Burji Team to Ethiopia.  It takes about 28-30 hours total time from our homes to the guesthouse in Addis.  Pray for safety, for going to Customs (no fees), for emotions after leaving families. Pray for our wives & little ones left at home.  We have 4 unusually tall men that don’t fit well in the small airline seats; pray for them physically. Pray for those who struggle with fear of flying. Dave will fly separately, on stand-by; pray that he is able to get all his flights & connections. Pray for ease in handling 42 pieces of luggage… no lost or overweight luggage, no thievery, no strained backs.  We’ll check into the Guesthouse late Thursday; pray for electricity & hot water for showers 🙂  As we are traveling to Ethiopia, the Burji truck is coming up from Burji to Addis; pray for safety for them also.  Also pray that the construction of the new clinic building in Soyama will be completed, despite the unusual rains.

Fri, July 2…This is a very important day of cramming lots of activity into 12 hours! We’ll go in 3 different directions. Becky & the Construction Team will shop all over Addis for supplies.  Dave & the new team members will finish orientation at a museum & church.  Kevin & the veterans will travel to Alaba to see the work there.  Pray for safety, for God to make our way straight & guide us in purchases, for clear vision of the Alaba church situation, for coping with jet lag.

Sat, July 3…”Burji or Bust” is our theme today.  Those in Addis will load into Demissie’s bus, departing at 3:30am. 

We’ll carpool with the Burji Truck, loaded with supplies and our ministry suitcases.  We’ll meet up with the Alaba crew in Shashamanee Town, where they will board the bus.  We’ll drive as fast as is safe to get to Soyama Town before dark, if possible.  It is usually a 17-19-hour trip, dodging animals & people.  If there is still unrest in Ethiopia because of the elections, there will likely be many police road blocks. Pray for safety, for Demissie as he drives, for us coping physically with a cramped bus & fatigue.  “How much longer to a potty stop?”  This trip I am refusing to answer this question….I’m referring it to the veterans!  Why?  Because in Ethiopia a clock & estimation of time is almost worthless! (Pray for the sanity of the veterans as they cope with the questions 🙂

Teams:

Medical: Dr. Rick, Lynette, Dale & Becky

Nedele Villages: Jon, Matthea, Humphries family/Nicole&Kaleigh

Mountain Villages: Cindi, Kevin, JasonH, Kimberly

Gomeda: Dave, Ben, Jamie, Nicole, Kaleigh

Construction: Ed, JasonE, Danny, Humphries family

Guji: Dave, Ben, Dr. Rick, Jamie, Becky

Sun, July 4…Hopefully, we had a good night’s sleep, and are ready to get in position for our ministries.  We’ll divide into our teams. The 9 people on two of the village teams (Nedele & Mountain, led by Jon & Cindi) and the 4 people on the Medical Team will go to their villages to join the churches for their morning service; the rest of us will stay in Soyama getting our supplies in order.  Pray for us as we split up; already we’re well-bonded & it’s hard to say good-bye;pray for good working relationships with our translators, the youth corps helping us & the church leaders. Pray for Jon & Cindi as they guide their teams, to rest in the wisdom the Lord provides to His people.Pray for Demissie as he returns to Alaba with the bus.

Mon, July 5…Today the 5 people on the Gomeda Village team (led by Dave) will get into position; it is a 6-hour drive over rugged roads on the back of an open truck to get there.  En route they will drop off the 3 men on the Construction Team at a rural church to install their solar powered loudspeaker & lights.  Please pray for safe, uncomplicated travel & that the truck will get back in time to collect the Construction Team & bring them back to Soyama for the night.  Pray for the Lord’s hand to be upon the Construction Team in their work.  The Nedele & Mountain Teams will start their ministries in their villages; each church will be a 3-ring circus with men’s, women’s & children’s classes happening simultaneously, and with eyeglass distribution.  One of the great highlights is the distribution of Bibles to those who have completed the memory program. This year we are trying sunshades at the churches, since there are no trees for shade from the hot African sun; pray that these work well. Pray for there to be no rain during the daytime.  The Medical Team have a very high learning curve today, as they adjust to doing medicine in a third-world setting; pray for good relationships & communication with the clinic staff. 

Dale will travel with the clinic chaplain to visit patients;pray for ease & comfort as he works apart from the team.  The last person on the team is Becky, who will start recording Bible classes in the local language, using some great veteran believers; pray that she will remember all the practice she has done.

Tue-Thurs, July 5-8…Ministry in place.  The Construction Team, the Nedele Team and the Mountain Team will be moving about, from place to place for their respective ministries.  Continue to pray for them, as they “gel” in their work.  Pray for health, for wisdom, for grace, for Spirit-filling, for good communication, for good response to their work, for relationships with translators, etc.  In some ways, these are the “high” days of the trip, before fatigue sets in. Also, pray for the translators and the  Youth Corp that is working with our team members in the villages.  This work requires not only the sacrifice of our Team, but also of many Ethiopian believers who sacrifice to make it happen.  Pray that the bonding of the team with the helpers will produce spiritual fruit. Continue topray for the Medical Team; we will have TONS of patients, because this is malaria season, and because word has gone out that a doctor is here.  Pray for stamina as they see patients all day & then do in-service training for the staff in the evenings. Pray the staff will absorb the instructions. Pray for health in the midst of infectious diseases & for wisdom in coping with serious illnesses.

Fri, July 9…Shifting around.  On this day, the Gomeda Village team returns to Soyama and splits up.  Pray for safety in travelling the long, rough road back to Soyama.  Nicole & Kaleigh will swap places with the Humphrey family on the Nedele Team; the Humphrey family will join the Construction Team, which will begin work in earnest on the new clinic building; pray for safety, wisdom & God’s grace to multiply the materials for the work. 

Pray for adjustment to all the changes & new partners in ministry.  About now, the Team will be getting tired; we have been pushing our bodies hard for the sake of the Kingdom, but we need to finish the race well.  Pray for self-discipline & diligence in ministry.

Sat, July 10…Guji ministry starts.  Today several of us will meet up from the various teams to go to the Guji Tribe.  Bible teaching, mobile medical work, evangelism, & relationship-building/encouragement will be our focus.  We’ll also distribute the first Bibles to those who have completed the memory program in the Guji tribe!  Praise God for this new outreach, which began in Nov, 08 with the trekking of Dave & Jason & (now martyred) translator James.  (I think James would be very happy to see this result of his ministry.)  Pray for good translators, for effective ministry, for good working relationships and for spiritual fruit.  Today the Nedele & Mountain Village Teams move to their third village; pray for dealing with fatigue.

Sun, July 11…On this day of rest & worship, the Construction Team will be in Soyama Town, the Nedele & Mountain Village Teams will be in their villages & the Guji Team will be in Gujiland.  Pray for good rest, spiritually & physically, for translators, youth corps & team alike.

Mon-Tues, July 12-13…Finishing ministry.  All the various Teams will complete their work and make their way back to Soyama; they will be very tired, ready for a bath, ready to be reunited.  We will meet with the church leaders & have our last evening all together; pray for wisdom. Pray for Demissie as he returns with the bus.

Wed, July 14…Return to Addis guesthouse.  The long road back, we basically sleep the whole way!  Few people ask when is the next potty stop 🙂 Pray for safe travel, for Demissie, for the bus operation…and also pray for the Alaba Team & the Ultrasound Team that are departing USA today.  This is the day to pray for safety and wisdom in travel…all over the globe!

 

Thurs, July 15…The day is spent in shopping, chilling, tying up loose ends.  A final supper together with our Ethiopian helpers, then to the airport. Pray for safe travel, good seats, no lost luggage, leg room for the tall men,  etc.  As load the Burji Team onto the airplane, we receive the Alaba Team and the Ultrasound Team off the airplane! Pray for ease thru Customs, no lost luggage, etc.

Fri, July 16…Arrivals & departures.  The Burji Team arrives back in North Carolina, the Alaba Team explores Addis with Dave, and the Ultrasound Team travels 17 hours to Burji with Becky.  Keep praying for all of us!  Don’t give up now!

Alaba Team: Alan, Danny & Dave

Ultrasound Team: Connie, Patsy, Babs & Becky

Sat, July 17…The Alaba Team travels 6 hours to Alaba & gets settled. Pray for good travel & the establishment of good working relationships with translators.  The Ultrasound Team starts teaching the clinic staff about sonography. Pray for good communications, rapid understanding, good relationships.  The clinic staff might be tired, having just had the Burji Medical Team on site for 1 1/2 weeks;pray for diligence to learn.

Sun-Sun, July 18-25…Ministry days.  In the Alaba Team, Alan will be teaching I Corinthians to all the church leaders, Danny will be teaching I Timothy to prisoners, and Dave & Danny will be going village to village teaching. 

On Sundays, they will each be preaching in various churches. Pray for good receptivity, for organization (Alaba’s culture is fairly unorganized), for Spirit-guidance, for team-work.  Meanwhile the Ultrasound Team will be teaching sonography all day, with lectures and hands-on learning. Pray for the staff to understand & ‘get the hang of it’ quickly.  We have only 7 days to teach them; it’s a high learning curve, and we need the Spirit’s help!  As the days pass, the fatigue sets in & self-discipline becomes crucial. Pray!  For everyone, Ethiopians & Americans, pray for health.

Mon, July 26…Tying things up.  The Alaba Team will have one last day to connect with the evangelists that have been their prayer partners, and to meet with the elders. 

Pray for wisdom & bonding.  The Ultrasound Team will spend all day traveling back to Addis. Pray for safety in travel.

Tues, July 27…The Alaba Team will join the Ultrasound Team in Addis; they will have a few hours to shop, and then will have a last supper together before we all board the airplane.  Pray for Dave & Becky as they have last meetings & tie up loose ends. Pray for safe travel; again, Dave will fly separately from the rest of us.

Wed, July 28…Everyone will, Lord willing, arrive safely in their homes in the USA. Pray that the seeds of truth & training will remain in the hearts & minds of the Ethiopians, and that God will bring Himself glory as His Word accomplishes His purposes. Pray for the clinic staff to retain & practice what they have learned.  Pray for the Ethiopian church leaders, translators & youth corps as they recuperate & absorb their ministry experience.  Pray for all your prayer partners that are around the globe; thank God for their faithfulness alongside of you, in upholding this work.

And thank God for the absolute privilege you have had in being a part of the Ethiopia Team of July, 2010!

 

(For possible updates during our trip, visitwww.daveblackonline.com & check the blog.)

June 28, 2010

Back to daveblackonline

   restoring our biblical and constitutional foundations

                

Judging Riders – and Politicians

 David Alan Black

I enjoy attending horse shows, particularly dressage competitions. What a judge looks for during a competition may have some bearing upon the way we evaluate candidates for political office.

The first thing I’ve noticed when attending dressage competitions is how a judge always tries to distinguish between what is good and what isn’t. To do this he must watch the competitor very closely, then try to analyze why things went well or not. I do not want to preach to anybody, but don’t you think it might be a good idea for us to closely evaluate candidates before deciding who to vote for? I have found that, when we do so, we are usually faced with incontrovertible facts – facts that we cannot alter and that we shouldn’t try to alter, simply because they are a matter of fact. At least that’s the way a judge should think.

I have also noticed that the more experienced the judge is, the easier it is for him to make an accurate evaluation of a ride. It always helps if he has been a rider himself. But even if he has never ridden, he can study very carefully to acquire the necessary knowledge. I have been studying politics for only a few short years, and can hardly claim for myself any sort of expertise in the matter. I guess I try to make up for that by avid reading and study.

Judges must be completely detached from the riders. They must not take any notice of past reputations or of which rider is in the ring. They must judge what they see then and there, with no thought of “Well, he did much better/worse the last time.” This is very difficult, and can only be done with concentration. In an election, of course, we must evaluate the past every bit as much as the present; but I think the point is still well taken: we must be absolutely honest and assess what we see before us with no thought for anything else.

Judges, at least at major dressage competitions like the Olympics, do not get too carried away with small technicalities. They never concentrate, say, on the front legs of the horse and ignore the hind legs. They try to see the whole horse and put it all together. As I said above, the more judging (and riding) one has done, the better one will be able to judge what is important. That’s why it’s so important for all of us to be good students of politics and society if we are to judge politicians aright.

In dressage, it’s not about winning as much as it’s about doing better next time. The judge therefore tries to point out to the rider what was good and what needs improving. If he is a good judge, he will be reasonable in his remarks and stick to the performance. He will avoid being sarcastic (at least too sarcastic). He also tries not to be too dogmatic. He knows he is a fallible human being.

In short, the more knowledge you have the better it is when it comes to assessing riders – or politicians. If you make some misjudgments at first don’t be disheartened. We all make mistakes. So let’s learn from them. It is simply a matter of practice to get really good at judging good from bad. Probably the hardest thing to do (I know this is true for me) is to detach yourself completely. You should be able to judge fairly even if your own son or daughter is running for political office. That is where the difficulty lies. It is more important than anything else that we should be absolutely honest, and correct, and try as hard as we can to make godly choices, remembering it is not our job to get someone elected (that’s the Lord’s business) but to vote our consciences.

September 29, 2004

David Alan Black is the editor of www.daveblackonline.com. His latest book is Why I Stopped Listening to Rush: Confessions of a Recovering Neocon.

Back to daveblackonline

   restoring our biblical and constitutional foundations

                

Judge Moore Is Right to Oppose Judicial Tyranny and Deserves Our Support!

 David Alan Black

How I thank God for Jerry Falwell, Alan Keyes, and Howard Phillips! They were among the speakers at the Alabama State Capitol last Saturday to show their unwavering support for Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore and his refusal to move the Ten Commandments monument, despite the fact that he faces fines and even jail time if the monument remains. Why is Moore so adamant? It’s simple. Removing the monument would violate his oath of office to the Alabama Constitution, which specifically declares the state laws to be under God, and would grant jurisdiction to a federal court that is acting beyond the scope of its lawful jurisdiction.

Folks, if you think Judge Moore is out of line for defying a federal court order, think again. Even better, read the Book of Acts. From beginning to end it contains a large number of public controversies in which the principal leaders of the Christian movement became involved. I’m not talking about common church-goers, but the apostles themselves! Far from caving in to government-sponsored tyranny, they came into serious conflict with the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem because of their public activities. Paul’s activities also resulted in major controversies within Gentile settings.

Unlike many church-goers today, the leaders of early Christianity, while not anti-Roman, were completely devoted disciples of Christ who refused to be dissuaded from preaching in His name despite the fact that controversy and turbulence ensued. Paul was no “law breaker,” but he was constantly embroiled in public controversy. Why? It was a matter of his loyalties. Paul’s references to Jesus as “Lord” served to circumscribe his loyalty to the state. In contrast to Lysias and Festus, he refused to take the emperor as his ultimate sovereign. This could only have proved troubling to the Roman authorities who were accustomed to think that a loyal citizen’s first allegiance belonged to the emperor and his decrees. How much like those evangelicals today who condemn Moore for his “activism”! The Paul of Acts was independent and assertive—indeed, far too independent and assertive for the Roman bureaucrats!

To those who criticize Judge Moore for asserting the lordship of Christ over human judges, I would ask: What Roman official reading Acts would not have been jarred by Luke’s report that Paul lectured Felix, governor of Judea, on “justice, self-control, and the judgment to come” (Acts 24:25)?  Moreover, just as Moore has appealed his case beyond the federal appeals court to the U.S. Supreme Court, so too Paul was convinced that he would never receive justice if he allowed Festus to retain jurisdiction over his case. In appealing to Rome, Paul made no reference to the emperor’s justice, nor did he state that he thought his chances for acquittal were better with the emperor. Instead, he simply stated that his decision was forced upon him by the circumstances—just as in the case of Judge Moore! In fact, if Roy Moore is to be condemned for engaging in civil disobedience, then what about the apostles who said to the political authorities, “Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge; for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:19-), and who later said, “We must obey God rather than men!” (Acts 5:29)?

My friends, Judge Moore’s line-in-the-sand attitude is completely consistent with Luke’s narrative, which shows the apostles obeying and witnessing to the truth of God’s Word without regard for the concerns, and even the harsh reactions, of the authorities. Given his other reports regarding the misconduct of Roman officials and the lack of the resolution of Paul’s case, it’s clear that Luke did not write in order to persuade his fellow Christians to blindly follow the Roman authorities!

Jesus explicitly predicted that His disciples would have experiences comparable to His own at the hands of the Roman authorities. He also gave them specific instructions regarding the approach they should follow upon such occasions. But whatever their trials, both Jesus and the apostles remained steadfast in their witness. This faithfulness to obey God rather than men was, in my view, the quality that Luke wished to have his readers appreciate above all else.

At the Jefferson Memorial in Washington are the words of that great American chiseled in the marble frieze: “I have sworn on the altar of God eternal enmity against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” Ladies and Gentlemen, in my opinion Judge Moore deserves our wholeheartedly support for standing against judicial tyranny!

August 20, 2003

David Alan Black is the editor of www.daveblackonline.com.

Back to daveblackonline

   restoring our biblical and constitutional foundations

                

The Joy of Volunteering

 David Alan Black 

Increasingly I have come to see just how practically relevant the New Testament is for life and ministry. Just this past week I was reminded of Paul’s view of missionary finances while studying Phil. 1:3-11. Paul’s normal policy was to refuse support lest anyone should accuse him of selling what is absolutely free – the Gospel of grace. Thus his habit was to work night and day with his own hands so as not to be a financial burden on others. Yet for the Philippians he had waived his policy of independence and had readily accepted monetary gifts from them, impoverished though they were. This was because, in a unique sense, they had agreed to “partner” with him in the Gospel and had become “sharers of grace” with him as he went about evangelizing and teaching.

Taking a lesson from Paul, I do feel there has been something wrong with our whole approach to ministry finances – not just recently but extending back to the early period of our nation. It is not that I am opposed, per se, to congregations supporting their workers monetarily or in other ways. I am concerned, however, that rampant careerism is becoming a major problem in our churches. It seems to me that we have come a long way from the simplicity of the New Testament pattern of volunteer leadership. I doubt whether pastoring was ever considered a career in the apostolic era, when elders were home grown men with occupations, homes, and roots in their communities.

An analogy might be made to modern-day politics. Our cadre of career politicians (senators and congressmen) is a far cry from those who led America when our nation was established. Our Founding Fathers believed that those who held public office should do so as a public service, not as a profession. The men who governed our nation already had successful nonlegislative careers in farming, shipbuilding, commerce, or some other enterprise. They saw themselves as volunteers, and for them it was unthinkable to consider public life a “job.”** Likewise, in early America many Baptist congregations frowned upon paying their elders a salary. Pastors and others who received payment for their services were often considered “hirelings” – a term taken from Jesus’ statement in John 10:12.

I would not presume to tell others what I even might imagine they should do. Each of us must stand before the Lord Jesus. I will just say that for Becky and me being financially independent vis-à-vis our ministry in Ethiopia has been a wonderful blessing and has given us great freedom to minister as the Holy Spirit directs us and also as He directs the church elders with whom we work. We have discovered what Amy Carmichael discovered so long ago: that the plans and decisions of a work of God demand that the One who directs it be constantly present. We have been overflowingly busy with our professional responsibilities as teacher and nurse, and in this way the Lord has supplied both our own material needs and the many expenses associated with our mission trips. He has also wonderfully sent in many of the funds needed to meet the needs of the Ethiopian churches with which we have the joy and privilege of working. For ourselves, we are sure He has led us in this direction. Without going into the details, we have seen many times how the Lord has sent just the amount that was needed at just the right moment to meet a special need in Ethiopia. It really is amazing to see the way everything has fit together since we began going to Ethiopia several years ago.

I need not tell you that Becky and I feel the need of prayer greatly. On the other hand, no one has ever been more blessed by the Lord or more graciously treated by others. It seems to me that we who are alive today will have the joy of seeing more and more “lay” missionaries stepping out in faith without any promise of financial support – indeed without asking for any. Through hard work and thrift they will seek to fund their own endeavors and allow the church’s resources to go where the needs are far greater. Thus I have a new reason not to have changed my mind concerning the dangers of careerism and professionalism. But I have changed my mind as to the reality of the Holy Spirit in leading each of us individually in these matters of personal conviction. And I might add that I am glad that I am spending less of my time in using my own strength and misplaced zeal, like Peter’s sword-wielding episode, in defending the One I love and more of my time in quietly trusting Him.

**Another example might be the volunteer fire companies we have in the rural south. When we first moved to North Carolina I joined the local volunteer fire department. The question was: Who would fight fires in our community if we did not do it ourselves? For 4 years I spent hundreds of hours in meetings, training sessions, and fighting fires, without of course being paid anything at all.

September 4, 2006

David Alan Black is the editor of www.daveblackonline.com.

Back to daveblackonline

   restoring our biblical and constitutional foundations

                

The Joy of Running

 David Alan Black 

Someone texted me with the news that famed rock climber Alex Honnold just climbed Yosemite’s 3,000-foot El Capitan rope-free. This is a first in history. I just hope Mr. Honnold feels good about his accomplishment. After all, if what you do isn’t fun, it’s not worth doing in the first place.

Sometimes I sense that the elite runners I see on a course don’t enjoy running very much. I’ve read some of their blogs. They berate themselves for not winning. They’re dissatisfied with what they can achieve. I’m not going to judge them. All of us have (or should have) high expectations of ourselves. But as far as I’m concerned, the runners who come in last in a race are as much athletes as the winners. I’m not a runner because my resting heart rate makes me one. Or my overall level of condition. I run because I enjoy it. The very activities that I once worked hard to avoid I now seek.

Take yesterday’s half marathon in Raleigh, for example. The physical and mental toll exacted by the final three miles of a half marathon is enormous. Eventually you end up running on auto pilot, picking up one foot and putting it down just one more time. But when I crossed the finish line yesterday, I did so with a huge smile on my face, arms high in the air.

There may be many ways to find that sense of accomplishment – like when you conquer your first mountain in the Alps – but for many of us, nothing works as well as running. It has nothing to do with winning or losing. It has to do with your being your very best and being grateful for that.

I once hated running. Today I welcome the challenge and the miles. And everywhere I go, I find people who share my love of running.

Running teaches you to enjoy the life God has given you. You learn to live in the moment. Running teaches us that our potential is limitless. Running is a chance both to be yourself and to be who you want to become.

June 4, 2017

David Alan Black is the editor of www.daveblackonline.com.

Back to daveblackonline

   restoring our biblical and constitutional foundations

                

Wedding Attire

March 30, 2008

Back to daveblackonline

   restoring our biblical and constitutional foundations

                

Jon Stewart Fails to Save the World

David Alan Black 

Jon Stewartbemoans the futility of his 16-year run as host of The Daily Show. “The world is demonstrably worse than when I started. Have I caused this?”

If you will, here’s my take. We are a living at the close of one age and the beginning of another. It is a momentous hour in world history. The tragedy of our times is that we are failing to get to the bottom of our troubles. Nothing is so popular today as the intoxications of Satan. The unregenerate try to remedy the condition with temporary palliatives such as comedy and entertainment. It’s like trying to cure cancer with an aspirin pill. Even in the church, modern religious fads such as the prosperity gospel only further the deception. In his final show tonight, Jon Stewart wants to come across as the neurotic pessimist whose “rousements” sadly failed to improve our lot as human beings. He is unaware that God has provided a true stimulant. All the well-meant comedians in the world cannot make us equal to the opportunity. Sin is our problem, and nothing less than the divine cure will alleviate it. There can be no revival in the land until we turn from amusement to amazement. We will first have to ask in wonder, “What must I do to be saved?” Chase fleeting fame and you have your momentary reward. Just ask Johnny Carson or Jay Leno or, now, Jon Stewart. If you want to outlive yourself, you must first come to Christ. Dead with Him, you live to walk in newness of life. There is no other way.

Stewart ends his show on a depressing note. As the studio goes dark, he will pick up a skull and, in his best Hamlet voice, ask, “Hath my efforts all be for naught?” It is our task as Christians to answer this question. We must think critically about culture and about the world views our kids are formulating by watching TV. “If anyone is thirsty, let them come to Me and drink,” says Jesus. Not only is Jesus the cure to our spiritual cancer, He transforms us into people with living water flowing in our innermost beings. As individuals, this is the only way forward. Even as churches and congregations, the solution is no different. Might I suggest that the next time your church has a business meeting someone make the following motion: “I move that we call as our senior pastor Jesus Christ.” Folks, we need Someone greater than ourselves to forge a new sense of unity in our midst. Robert’s Rules of Order will not cut it. Until that happens — until Jesus Christ is given His rightful place as Head of the church, the only Senior Pastor, He will not have preeminence in all things (Col. 1:18). Until then, our religious enthusiasms will only exhaust us more.

This morning I was trying to envision God on His heavenly throne. What is He thinking about all this? Is He laughing? Is He weeping? “It is said of God that no one can behold his face and live,” said Nicholas Wolterstorff. “I always thought this meant that no one could see his splendor and live. A friend said perhaps it means that no one could see his sorrow and live.” When Jesus arrived at the tomb of his friend Lazarus, John records that He “burst into tears” (John 11:35, ISV). There are indeed serious implications in evil’s advance in our day and in our nation. “A sword, a sword is sharpened. Should we then make mirth?” (Ezek. 21:9). Yet there is hope. Jesus can breathe life into death. And the good news is that He is yet willing to do so.

August 6, 2015

David Alan Black is the editor of www.daveblackonline.com.

Back to daveblackonline