August 2005

Minutes ago at our dining room table, Nana, Tessa and Isaiah playing a game of 3-Back:

6-year-old Isaiah: My Sunday School teacher says we're going to marry Jesus. There's going to be a wedding in heaven.

85-year-old Nana, pausing, somewhat perplexed: Weeelll...the Bible says we're His Bride.

6-year-old Isaiah (outraged): I know! I can't believe boys are going to have to be brides!

Note in I Chronicles 13 and 14 (the account of the ark's return to Jerusalem under David) that the regulative principle of worship (RPW) extends far beyond what we normally view as its parameters: acts of formal public worship.

When David says of the death of Uzzah, "The Lord our God broke out against us because we did not seek Him according to the rule," he is admitting that all that took place on the trip bringing the ark to Jerusalem was part of "seeking Him." Thus, under the regulative principle, far more than formal public worship is comprehended. And, David's dancing in the street is part of what the RPW permits.

In fact, we must understand that the RPW encompasses all of life, not merely life in God's house. It also governs private devotions, family worship and festival days. So, the attitude toward the RPW which simply uses it to regulate public worship is often shortsighted and overly restrictive because it fails to see that the RPW does not stop and restart on the way from home to church and back.

Yes, worship in the church contains certain elements that cannot be done in the home, and vice versa, but the regulative principle applies to both.

What the RPW does not demand:

1) That we forego great joy. Joy so great that it leads to physical expression, even ecstatic dance.

2) Liturgy that is, from a human perspective, deep and sophisticated. Liturgy in the O.T. and the N.T. is a liturgy of blood. The profundity of true worship is all centered in the holiness and grace of God rather than in the liturgical sophistication of man.

This, from the BBC, on a study soon to be published in the British Journal of Psychology...

Academics in the UK claim their research shows that men are more intelligent than women.

A study to be published later this year...says that men are on average five points ahead on IQ tests.

Paul Irwing and Professor Richard Lynn claim the difference grows when the highest IQ levels are considered.

Their research was based on IQ tests given to 80,000 people and a further study of 20,000 students.

Far from being a revealing study, this is just another nail in the coffin of standardized testing. Believe me, I know a fair bit about scoring on these tests, and I've come over time to believe that nothing in all the world is less meaningful than a high score on an SAT or an ACT or an IQ.

We may believe in patriarchy, but no man of God ever believes he leads because he's smarter or better. Stronger, yes, in certain ways, but not smarter.

But let me tell you, I suspect that if standardized testing was initially developed by women they'd be the ones ahead. This just reveals that IQ tests cater to male strengths and that men and women are, as Scripture has already informed us, different. It says nothing at all about intelligence.

The other night, I was up in the bedroom writing while my wife, Mary Lee, was down in the living room reading Huck Finn to our twelve year old son, Taylor. It was kind of a drone until, several seconds after the sound waves had left the air, my mind clicked onto what had just been read. It's one of my favorite quotes: "Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain't that a big enough majority in any town?"

That pretty well sums up the defense of Shakespearean authorship within the modern academy. Those who remain skeptical are labelled as "nuts," "conspiracy theorists," or "elitists." Next subject.

Richmond Crinkley who was, at the time, the Director of Educational Programs at the Folger Shakespeare Library, was reviewing a book on the authorship question in the Shakespeare Quarterly and, summing up the debate, he acknowledged that arguments questioning whether 'Shakespeare' was really the author of the works "came early and grew rapidly. They have a simple and direct plausibility."

Summing up the defense of Stratfordian authorship within the academy, Crinkley also wrote:

The plausibility (of such arguments) has been reinforced by the tone and methods by which traditional scholarship has responded to the doubts.

For centuries this issue has been debated, with the best minds coming to opposite conclusions. A long list of those defending the man from Stratford would, it appears, include my good friend Ed Veith. Who would relish disagreeing with this faithful brother? Certainly not I.

Yet Ed's edict ought not to be allowed to intimidate inquisitive, but uninitiated minds. Skepticism concerning the authorship of these plays places one in (at least) illustrious company, including Walt Whitman, Sigmund Freud, Lord Palmerston, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Greenlief Whittier, Tom Bethell, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Joe Sobran, Charles Dickens, Henry James, Orson Welles, Benjamin Disraeli, Daphne DuMaurier, James Joyce, Clifton Fadiman, Louis J. Halle, Lewis Lapham , Abel LeFranc, Maxwell Perkins, William Lyons Phelps, Lincoln Schuster, Charlie Chaplin, Mark Twain, Sir John Gielgud...

In fact, one of Ed's Lutheran colleagues who serves as Chairman of the Department of English and Director of the Shakespeare Authorship Studies Conference at Concordia University in Portland, Oregon is a skeptic: Professor Daniel Lee Christopher Andrew Rupert Wright. Among thousands of web pages devoted to this debate, one might begin the journey with these pages maintained by Professor Wright's Institute.

The last word goes to historian David McCullough:

The strange, difficult, contradictory man who emerges as the real Shakespeare, Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, is not just plausible but fascinating and wholly believable. It is hard to imagine anyone who reads the book with an open mind ever seeing Shakespeare or his works in the same way again." (From the Foreword to the second edition of The Mysterious William Shakespeare by Charlton Ogburn.)

Speaking of the Christian vs. secular college debate, a valid alternative to choosing a Christian college is choosing a secular school based on the churches/campus ministries resident on or around that secular campus. For instance, my denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America, has a campus ministry called Reformed University Ministries. RUM's work is called Reformed University Fellowship on each campus. Of course, this work is better on some campuses than others. It's excellent at Vanderbilt.

This was a prominent factor in our encouraging our second child, Joseph, to consider Vanderbilt.

RUF is self-consciously church-based and biblical exposition forms the centerpiece of their on-campus weekly meetings. Much different than every other evangelical parachurch campus ministry (trust me), RUF doesn't just pay lip-service to the local church but it pushes its students to be committed to a church--and not as secondary priority after their involvement in the RUF campus ministry, but as foundational to Christian discipleship.

On to a story. Joseph narrowed his choice down to Covenant College or Vanderbilt. He and I visited both of them and Joseph still couldn't choose. When we visited Vanderbilt, Marvin and Susan Olasky's son (Joseph, I think) hosted Joseph overnight and gave high marks to his experience there. Eventually, Joseph chose Vanderbilt.

So with some fear (but always faith), in the Fall of 2000 our family piled in the car and took Joseph to Nashville. We stayed at our son-in-law and daughter, Doug and Heather's, on Friday night and Saturday morning got in the minivan to move Joseph into his dorm room about half an hour away.

The building had only singles and was a pit. It's never easy to let a child go so I was feeling some gloom as we finished carrying boxes and clothes up to the room. The time came to leave and, after praying and giving him a kiss and a hug, we walked out of the room and headed to the staircase. Turning left out of his room and starting down the hall (with tears in my eyes, I admit), I was startled to look in the next door and see, exactly at the same place in the bookshelf over the desk, the same two-volume set we had just placed in the same position in Joseph's room: the Banner of Truth two-volume set of the Works of Jonathan Edwards.

I did a doubletake and looked again, thinking I'd likely been doing the moonwalk and not actually moving down the hall at all as I walked. I must still be looking through Joseph's doorway. So I looked more closely and saw through the door a stranger and his mother. I walked straight into the room and asked the young man, "What in the WORLD are you doing with a two-volume set of Jonathan Edwards on our bookshelf!? Come here, I've got to show you something."

We walked out the door and, turning right, I had him look in Joseph's room and see what he had on his shelf. Then it was time for our new-found friend to do a doubletake. Joseph's next door neighbor then told me how he had an older brother who had gone off to college--a non-Christian school by the way--and been led to faith in Jesus, there. His brother came home and told him about Jesus, at which point he too placed his faith in Jesus Christ.

His brother also turned him on to John Piper, so this younger brother began reading Piper. And he noticed in the footnotes that Piper drank waters from Edwards' well, so he went out and bought this set of Edwards and brought it to school so he could read it. Cinching the matter, he told me his name was Joseph--my son's name, also.

Praise God for His loving provision for His children, even down to determining among thousands of students that two students matriculating at Vandy who love Him would have adjoining rooms and doctrine.

Both Josephs attended RUF which was absolutely critical in their spiritual lives while at Vandy; both grew stronger in their friendship and faith while at Vandy; and our family's faith was strengthened as we saw how much God protects those who belong to Him, including their children.

Incidentally, it turned out that their dorm was sort of a self-selective group of sold-out Christians because all the men living there had asked not to be placed in a co-ed dorm.