Wells on Sin

Here’s another lengthy quote from The Courage to Be Protestant by David Wells. Wells makes the point that there is a difference between sin and evil. He writes:

Evil is simply badness. Sin, though, is altogether more serious because it sets up human badness in relation to God. It is not just the absence of good, or corruption, brutality, oppression, and nastiness, but is all these things, and many more besides, as they are understood in relation to God. They are acts of moral defiance of him. They are a rejection of his authority over all human life. That is the Bible’s perspective.

Our perspective on sin in America is different. Only 17 percent of Americans define sin in relation to God, so for the overwhelming majority sin has become a trivial matter, no more serious than having violated some church rule about something quite inconsequential. For most Americans the more serious word by far is “evil,” though when postmoderns it out of a moral world, it has no more than a passing emotional significance. I believe “sin” has far more gravity than “evil” because of the standard by which sinfulness is exposed.

Sin, biblically speaking, is not only the absence of good. It also entails our active opposition to God. It is, then, the defiance of his authority, the rejection of his truth, the challenge to his sovereignty in which we set ourselves up in life to live the way we want to live. It is the way we wrench ourselves free from obedience to him, cut ourselves off from his grasp, and refuse to let him be God. It is therefore all the ways we live life on our own terms, to our own ends, with accountability to no one but ourselves.

Thinking Biblically

The Biblical answer about why we have lost our center is rather straightforward. The center has not been lost. What has been lost is our ability to see it, to recognize it, to bow before it, to reorder our lives in light of it, to do what we should do as people who live in the presence of this center, this Other, this triune, holy-loving God of the Bible. For we start our life’s journey on the alternative premise that he is not there, or that he has not spoken, or that he does not care. We do not reckon on his providential and moral presence. We begin as if life were empty and without a center and as if we were empowered by our choices to make of life what we will. And so we create our own center, we create our own rules, and we make our own meaning. All of this springs from an alternative center in the universe. It is ourselves.

Paul’s statement is that, since the fall, we have “worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (Rom. 1:25). We will not reckon with our internal sense that God does exist. WE also try to ignore our own sense of the moral fabric of life (Rom. 1:18-20; 2:14-15). And we have also made some substitutions. We have replaced the actual center of life with one of our own making, substituting our interests for God’s, our perspective for his, our norms for his, our meaning for his, and our privatized truths for his absolute truth. All of this is the essence of sin. And the result, Paul says, is that our minds are now “futile” and our hearts are now “darkened” (Rom. 1:21). This is the unvarying perspective, the insistent proclamation, of the Bible.

Is it a great surpise, then, that we now see our world as empty? We have wrenched ourselves free from the hand of God. We are in flight from him. We reject reality as he has defined it. We redefine our world and ourselves to accomodate our rebellion. That is why life has lost any center other than ourselves.

               -David Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant, pp. 99-100.

Alien Thoughts…

… from the Vatican’s astronomer. 

This information has landed in the Basket:  The Vatican says it is okay to believe in UFOs.  Okay in the spiritual sense.  In other words, it is perfectly compatible with “The Faith” to also believe in ET:

The Vatican’s chief astronomer says there is no conflict between believing in God and in the possibility of extraterrestrial “brothers” perhaps more evolved than humans.

“In my opinion this possibility exists,” said the Reverend José Gabriel Funes, head of the Vatican Observatory and a scientific adviser to Pope Benedict XVI, referring to life on other planets.

“How can we exclude that life has developed elsewhere,” he said in an interview with the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, published in its Tuesday-Wednesday edition. The large number of galaxies with their own planets makes this possible, he noted.

Asked if he was referring to beings similar to humans or even more evolved than humans, he said: “Certainly, in a universe this big you can’t exclude this hypothesis.”

In the interview headlined, “The extraterrestrial is my brother,” he said he saw no conflict between belief in such beings and faith in God.

Well, isn’t that special!  I am not sure a Calvinist, with a firm belief in the headship of both Adam and Christ, can go along with Rome.  Jesus Christ, the Second Adam, had to come as a man in order to save mankind (Its all in Romans and Hebrews folks).  So, if there were other “brothers” out there, would he also have to come as the Great Gazoo?

A few more questions…  Who knew the Vatican had its own Astronomer?  Seriously, what other officeholders are there in Rome?  Is there a Chief Botanist?  Who would issue rulings on the potential for man eating plants from space, the astronomer or the botanist?  FEED ME SEYMOUR! 

UPDATE FOR SUSAN:  to show her that we at the basket still love her

We love you too Bucky, but I have no idea what you are talking about with those fanny aliens.  Enlighten?

al sends

Crazy Postmodern…

… or moderns on controlled substances.

I am reading Peter Leithart’s excellent book Solomon Among the Postmoderns and let me say again, it is excellent.  Let me give you a bit of Dr. Leithart that may cause a stirring in your “gotta read it” gullet:

Modernity is the civilization that attempted, with quite astonishing successes but also blatent failures, to manage and shepherd the vapor of time, society, and nature.  Postmodernity is vapor’s revenge, the recognition of modernity’s failures and an embrace of the fragmentation and dissolution of politics, self, language and life. (pg 39)

 Leithart translates the Hebrew word hebelin Ecclesiastes this way:  Vapor of vapors.  All is vapor. (Eccl 1:2 and 12:8).  It is steam coming off a bowl of stew, visible just a few inches from the surface.  This vapor is what modernity has tried to capture and tame, desiring that it stick around and do our bidding at dinner.  One of the right things about postmodernity is its recognition of modernity’s hubris. 

Here is the thing moderns (and postmoderns for that matter) don’t get… God provides us with a paradox of sorts in Ecclesiastes.  Life is a burst of vapor and yet the world continues as it did before we ever exhaled.  The Sun rises and sets with a monotonous regularity (monotonous if all you have is a stopwatch); and we are violently born and at times violently die. These two, the unchanging and impermanence together, will wear us out.  

Leithart says, “The weariness that Solomon describes (2:17) comes about not because of change alone or permanence alone, but because of the dynamic interaction of change and permanence. (pg 68)”  Neither change nor permanence by themselves would be frustrating, but the two together cause all manner of angst.

Modernity tells us that we can corral change.  That we can as Leithart translates Solomon, “Shepherd the wind.”  So that all is now or can be permenant and stable.  Call this the Ted Williams philosophy.  Embrace it and go freeze your head.

Russian Cowboys…

…with hair circa 1980’s B-52s.

UPDATE:  Apparently these guys are Finnish and not Russian.  Thanks to Gianni in Doug Wilson’s combox.

al sends

Twins…

… turned 17 the other day.  I have such wonderful children.  These two bring me much joy…

Guess which one wants to be a ballerina and which one is the aspiring poet…

al sends

Relics And…

… other posts I am avoiding.  All to bring you this quote from William Paley:

If He had wished our misery He might have made our senses instruments of pain to us.  He might have made every taste bitter, every touch a sting, every smell a stench and every sound a discord.

William Paley was a British Enlightenment Philosopher and appeared to have some quirky ideas about church life and what not.  I don’t really know that much about him, but I thought this quote out of Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy was particularly stirring. 

Here is my question for you…  I have quoted this bit of wisdom in a Bible study, but I had it belonging to a Puritan writer.  The problem is I do not recall who that was.  Anyone ever see this quote attributed to someone else?

al sends

 

Pretty Is As Pretty Does…

… but he might be our next president.

AllahPundit over at HotAir said this of the Time cover:

 All that’s missing is a milkshake with two straws in it and the headline, “You have beautiful eyes.”

And that is one funny line…

al sends

Gassy…

… and Tums wont help.  From the UK’s Daily Mail:

Is the hot air emitted by celebrities when they spout ecological platitudes a greenhouse gas?

If so, then the melting of the polar ice caps just moved a step closer, following calls by Trudie Styler, a leading celebrity ecological hypocrite - call them hippy-crites for short - for the general public to eat more locally grown vegetables.

Reading that piece on Dale Courtney’s Blog made me want to rip off Joyce Kilmer…

I think that I shall never see,
A Hypocrite as grand as thee.

A man against you never bet,
Love is proved - the carbon offset.

Yer close to God, traveling near,
Thy arms are spread by the Jet Lear.

You beat us down and hate the poor,
Not wanting wind farms right next door.

In your bosom children slumber,
Fresh Arugula in Summer.

You point us to your fresh dug pit,
God pushes in the Hypocrite.

 al sends

Shoo In Momentum

A shoo in means that one is expected to win easily. It’s derivation, as I understand it, is that a horse, under less than honorable circumstances, is essentially counted the winner before the race is even run. The horse is “shooed in” to the winner’s circle. This is the case with Hillary Clinton in the primaries. She was early considered a shoo in (under what sort of circumstances I’m not in any position to say). Which is all well and good…except that there is a general election in November. She needed psych-out power over McCain and Joe Lunch Bucket. She needs to actually look like a runner. And she needs someone to beat to pull this off. And Mr. Obama is doing his part at just the Wright time.

Even though John McCain isn’t much of a challenge, it isn’t likely that he’ll just roll over. And anti-Hillary sentiment isn’t isolated to a small town in southern Alabama. So in order to really show well in November, she needs mo — and I’m talkin’ come-from-behind, Yo-Adriane-I did-it mo. She needs to show that she has, um, guts enough to stay in there and duke it out and win. And in so doing she earns formidablility cred, she gets media hoo-ha, and, having impressed the American people, she wins in November. Easy-peasy-Mac-and-cheesy.

In the end, everybody wins.

1. Hillary Clinton wins the White House.
2. Obama gets to look like he missed the White House by “that much”, and, before getting ushered off to Palookaville, gets an extra fifteen minutes wherein he gets to look gracious.
3. McCain gets to look like he missed the White House by “that much”, and, before getting ushered off to Palookaville, gets to suck the life out of a few more rooms in which people are chanting his name.
4. America gets yet another World Wrestling Federationesque presidential election (which we love!), and (at least) four more years to moan about how horrible the president is.

Cue Lee Greenwood.