December 2012

Public expressions of anguish over the Newtown, Connecticut, murder of twenty little children are telling in what they include, but more in what they omit. Take Ravi Zacharias, for instance: when he diagnoses the problem and its causes, there's no mention of how the slaughter of a million and a half babies a year contributed to this crime. Does the man think about or shed tears for these little ones whose murders dwarf Newtown every single day! It's hard to imagine how any man could cry over wanted children who are murdered without shedding even more tears over unwanted children who are murdered. Which has more pathos?

At times like this, we come to see how culturally aware and what sort of Christian discernment our leaders actually have--not how much they market themselves as having. Note that Mr. Zacharias features divisive political rhetoric as a principal culprit...

One of my favourite places to go is a good used book store. Dad used to say you could take the "intellectual temperature" of a city by examining it's used book stores. We used to love to go to them together. 

Maybe some of our readers can write and share great used book stores and deals they have gotten around and about. Any used book store stories will work. Here's my latest.

Last night Niek and Therese Schreuder hosted a party in celebration of the engagement of their daughter, Réze (pronounced reesa), to our son Taylor. What Christmas joy!

In Calvin's Geneva, couples were banished if their engagement lasted longer than six weeks. We held a family council some years back and decided the Bayly limit would be six months. A summer wedding is planned.

Someone commented under the previous post, "Pastors and their sinecures...," that the Reformed church today needs reform in the area of restoring Calvin and Luther's teaching on birth control. To which I respond:

The problem with the Reformed church today isn't our failure to teach or preach on this or that issue—even the refusal of the people of God to propagate for their Lord a godly seed—so much as it is an almost complete betrayal of the pastoral office. And this is true in our session meetings as much as the pastor's office and the pulpit. Sadly, it's true of our marriages and families, too. Men don't take responsibility for the souls God has placed under our care and we aren't vigilant in protecting the honor of our offices because we don't exercise our offices. Which is to say that our churches have no fathers. They have readers and debaters and curators and featherbedders and teachers, but no fathers.

Abortion and feminism are simply the best labs to observe how vacuous we have made the pastoral office today. Take abortion, for instance: lots and lots of loud condemnations within the Reformed world and church with not a word of...

SI'NECURE, n. [L. sine, without, and cura, cure, care.] An office which has revenue without employment; in church affairs, a benefice without cure of souls. [This is the original and proper sense of the word.] - Websters Dictionary, 1828 edition

And the evil spirit answered and said to them, “I recognize Jesus, and I know about Paul, but who are you?” - Acts 19:15

Whenever you read Luther and Calvin, you find them relentless in their attacks on the principal wickedness of their day. Whatever doctrine they're expounding, whatever text they're preaching, their swords are wielded against Rome. Their language is unseemly, their accusations strident, their metaphors make you blush, their condemnations unequivocal, and each attack very, very personal.

Church officers who miss it do so because their preference for calm and security has reduced their ministry to a Reformed curatorship. The director of a museum wants bloody reform on exhibit. Museums don't allow guns, let alone live ammunition. Such things would threaten their patrons' sense of security so it's perfectly understandable that curators are the sworn enemies of reform.

They fawn over each other's procurement of dead men's works. They're Christian scrapbookers pawing through manuscripts and photos of the deceased. They have the sort of character that finds theses unseemly. With tastes running in the direction of the patrician, they don't write theses; and if they ever chose to do so, they'd only produce two or three and it's inconceivable they would nail them to any door.

So I repeat myself: the Reformers are the sworn enemies of Rome. They never stopped fighting and they gave themselves to the battle with nothing held in reserve. They had not the slightest doubt where their age's breach in the wall was nor whose hands were bloody.

The wicked, godless, fat, corrupt, hellish, whorish, beast-like, arrogant, demonic wolf was Rome...