family as idol

If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple.

Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.

He said to another man, "Follow me." But the man replied, "Lord, first let me go and bury my father." Jesus said to him, "Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God."

Let no foreigner who has bound himself to the LORD say, "The LORD will surely exclude me from his people." and let not any eunuch complain, "I am only a dry tree." For this is what the LORD says: "To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose what pleases me and hold fast to my covenant- to them I will give within my temple and its walls a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that will not be cut off.
And foreigners who bind themselves to the LORD to serve him, to love the name of the LORD, and to worship him, all who keep the Sabbath without desecrating it and who hold fast to my covenant- these I will bring to my holy mountain and give them joy in my house of prayer. Their burnt offerings and sacrifices will be accepted on my altar; for my house will be called a house of prayer for all nations." The Sovereign LORD declares— he who gathers the exiles of Israel: "I will gather still others to them besides those already gathered."

'I am to be the only inheritance the priests have. You are to give them no possession in Israel; I will be their possession.

Jesus replied, "I tell you the truth, everyone who sins is a slave to sin. Now a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. I know you are Abraham's descendants. Yet you are ready to kill me, because you have no room for my word. I am telling you what I have seen in the Father's presence, and you do what you have heard from your father."

"Abraham is our father," they answered.

"If you were Abraham's children," said Jesus, "then you would do the things Abraham did. As it is, you are determined to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God. Abraham did not do such things. You are doing the things your own father does.

"We are not illegitimate children," they protested. "The only Father we have is God himself."

Jesus said to them, "If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and now am here. I have not come on my own; but he sent me. Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say. You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father's desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies. Yet because I tell the truth, you do not believe me! Can any of you prove me guilty of sin? If I am telling the truth, why don't you believe me? He who belongs to God hears what God says. The reason you do not hear is that you do not belong to God."

"I tell you the truth," Jesus replied, "no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age (homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields—and with them, persecutions) and in the age to come, eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last first."

These passages interest me not merely in the context of culture wars Christians have gotten into about the family but because it seems that evangelicals have been so fond of promoting marriage and family as an alternative to worldly thinking that it seems like that all these things, valuable though they are, need a corrective. Perhaps not even much of a corrective, but a little teaching from Christ never hurts, after all. And the reality is that it doesn't matter what one's confessional alliance happens to be, family can be a pernicious idol

It was through family that the child of the promise was promised. It was through family that Abraham was told he would be a blessing to the whole world. It was through Isaac and not Ishmael that the promise was given. It is even this early that Scripture reveals to us that flesh and blood family is not the same as the family given to us by the spirit of God, though both are by no means without value. But it is God Himself who is more valuable than all the family in the world, God Himself who provides the promise of family based on His own goodness.

When the people of Israel presumed upon the basis of their family heritage to be right with God the Lord punished them for it. When they presumed upon the basis of their family heritage to even know God Christ Himself said they were sons of the devil. Rather than be confronted with the reality of not being part of God's family His opponents protested that they were descendents of Abraham even after the Lord told them that this in itself counted for nothing. Why? Simply because as far as they were concerned Abraham was their ancestor. Literally true, but not true at the level of the spirit.

Salvation is through Christ, and not family, which can be exceptionally difficult for a person with a close family to recognize. We may be in settings where a family may divide over an issue and we should remember that Christ is more important than family. Family reconciliation may one day come but it is of secondary importance to serving Christ Himself. If our sacrifices are at the altar of family then family is the idol we worship rather than worship given to Christ. It's very simple and tempting to do. As Scripture so eloquently puts it, it can be very easy to suppose our salvation comes from the family we're in, the family we're from, the family we've made, the family we've kept. Our salvation doesn't come from the children we have our defend, in fact our very downfall can come from them. Our salvation does not come from living in peace with brothers who obstruct us from the path to Christ Himself. Our salvation does not come from us walking in the same path as family but through Christ.

It can be easy to decide to hate father or mother but not one's wife or husband. It can be easy to decide to hate one's brothers or sisters but not one's own children. It can be easy to hate one's own children and not one's brothers or sisters. In short, it can be easy for us to try to bargain with Christ Himself about what family we can love or hate as a condition of serving Him. Those are not the terms. We must hate them all for the sake of Christ if all of them are obstacles to following Him alone. It was not without cause that the Lord made Abraham bind up the child of the promise and offer him as a sacrifice before Him. The child was spared only after Abraham demonstrated by faith that he was willing to make the sacrifice.

There are some families Christ came to mend and some Christ came to destroy. There are some families Christ came to reconcile and some He came to tear apart. Trusting Christ means a great deal of bearing of the cross and it can mean that we have to trust that He will destroy as well as create, uproot as well as plant. We cannot decide who He has made to be our fleshly family any more than we can decide who He has made our family to be in spirit. Both are, in their various ways, gifts from Him, gifts that admittedly may be hard to be thankful for.

Who easily learns how to be thankful for a pedophile father or a drunken mother or an abusive father? Who easily learns how to be thankful to Christ for a neglectful parent? And yet in His way Christ reveals that even these can be signs of His mercy. Decades in the wilderness are hard but life enslaved to other gods is worse in the end. The exodus itself was no great test of God's people as the decades of moving toward the promised land. It hardly seems a coincidence that Israel's problem was that they stuck closer together than they stuck to Christ. I suppose that might be why when the chips were down God destroyed that entire generation. They had made their own form of family identity greater in their hearts than serving Christ.

When we consider the legacy we have or receive or create in our own family to be the paramount manifestation of Christ as our inheritance we are on the knife's edge of idolatry. We only have these things as gifts from Christ Himself, which He may take from us at any moment as He did with Job. If Christ takes our family from us do we curse Him? We can bring our sense of loss to Him but can we curse Him if he takes our idols from us and family or prestige or honor is what we used to give value to our lives? Sometimes we sow to war and reap war, sometimes we sow to family and reap family, sometimes we sow to anger and reap anger, sometimes we sow to Christ and reap Christ.

If we define ourselves by anything other than Christ, even if we claim to sow to those things in Christ's name, we deceive ourselves, especially if we do so thinking we are doing so for the sake of Christ. That reveals the depth of our own idolatry, of our own willingness to use Christ as a means to our end. If we recognize that we have nothing to give to Christ that is our own (because no blessing we have is truly ours so much as that which is given to us by Christ Himself) except our own sin and our own gratitude that Christ is merciful (if that is indeed even possible without the help of Christ Himself) then we have something, which is namely just the gift of Christ Himself. If we have this we have no need of other things ... and yet we live day by day (I certainly do) with the awareness that the gap between this sense of ought and is can be remarkable. It is very easy for Israel to wander in the desert for decades being God's people but not acting like it and reaping the deadly harvest of that. I suppose that is the warning we receive in each generation.

sometimes I'm lazy, so here's a link to some stuff

http://trsbu.blogspot.com/2008/01/banned-from-church-abuse-of-church.html
A few notable excerpts:

Church discipline, however, is all too frequently viewed in an altogether
contrary way. Many pastors, who prove not to be truly pastoral at all, exploit
church discipline as a legitimate threat to hold over a congregation as a way to
manipulate and to control the people without any disagreement with him, however
small and legitimate disagreement may be.

Consequently, many evangelical churches are far more cultic than evangelicals are willing to admit. The origination of cults is not principally from errant doctrine but from errant behavior by charismatic leaders whose personal insecurities lead them, when their authority seems challenged even slightly (and usually legitimately), to
resort to desperate measures to maintain their grip upon their followers'
affections, if not blind allegiance and devotion.

... Only rarely have I witnessed an act of church discipline that led to
excommunication that actually followed the biblically authorized form and
pattern and was not incited by a pastor's animus springing from personal
insecurity toward a member who asked "the wrong question." Those legitimate
cases entailed actual, demonstrable, documentable cases of recalcitrant refusal
to repent for obvious sinful behavior.

Far more frequently, however, the church discipline cases that I have
witnessed entailed dismissal of godly Christians whose disagreements with the
pastor incited his personal insecurities, triggering his hostility and
revengeful and retaliatory campaign to purge the church of anyone who dared
disagree with him. ...

Seems straightforward, and is an interesting point. I'm not in a position to dispute the accuracy of the claim. I suppose for the sake of extending this observation it wouldn't surprise me if this sort of thing happened amongst pastors within denominational structures. In fact the Episcopalian church leadership has discussed disciplining priests who don't agree with them on a few things, a point I hardly think I need to refer to in any detail because if you do a tiny amount of on-line research the news virtually reaches you. This obviously doesn't mean church discipline can't be practiced.

My own view, for reasons I will not discuss as I find it too boring, is that this all reminds me of how the kingdom divided after the death of Solomon. His descendents had the opportunity to rule as servants and to rule in the way God advised but they didn't and they used the structures God provided as leverage for or against fellowship in either direction. The truth was that neither side of the divided kingdom was really the least bit godly or righteous but that has never, historically, stopped God's people from doing stupid things in the name of Yahweh or Jesus.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120061470848399079.html?mod=todays_us_nonsub_weekendjournal

http://www.founders.org/blog/2008/01/wsj-on-church-discipline.html

When the Wall Street Journal writes about church discipline you know it's an evangelical fad. :) I mean, really, that the WSJ covered this at all is sad. Never mind the questions about how biased it was. That a pastor called the cops on a little old lady who apparently objected that the pastor didn't see fit to install deacons according to the by-laws and the instruction of Scripture is sad. To claim that the woman was guilty of sinful divisiveness and discord for that is, well, even if I suppose the charge against the woman could even possibly be true (which I doubt) "church discipline" of that particular variety just shames Christ.

On the other hand, how one responds to such unfair discipline can be just as stupid. It sometimes comes to my attention that this or that case of church discipline is inequitable and the solution is in some rare cases to hit the secular world, as the case linked to above, whether because a pastor calls the cops or because someone decides to leak a story about a church issue to the press from within the community (I'm thinking here of situations like the Overlake scandal in the Puget Sound region years ago).

It's possible in the process of objecting to injustice to perpetrate injustice, even of the same kind and degree that one is objecting to. When the kingdom divided Israel forsook the house of David and in objecting to the injustice turned to idols. The kingdom of Judah also turned to idols and in both cases both kingdoms claimed to worship the living God and this was essentially nothing more than a sham. That Christ came to the entire divided people of Israel and revealed to Jew and Samaritan alike their lost state is what interests me.

The distinction between church discipline and pastoral discipline interests me because it raises the natural question of whether pastoral discipline has any meaning without church discipline. If the pastors urge the body not to ostracize someone but the body ostracizes the member anyway then in effect the body is enforcing a level of church discipline the pastors didn't endorse. Whether or not the pastors or the congregants err in that matter is obviously subject to debate based on circumstance but I have no reason to suppose it isn't possible that either the pastors or congregants may err in choosing one way or the other.

I will freely admit that I tend to identify myself as a Protestant of the evangelical stripe but it seems like church discipline is the fad of the 00's the way courtship was a fad in the 90s. Every church epoch has it's own fads. For some epochs of the Church it was Russian Orthodox people persecuting Poles (but then, really, it seems almost everyone ganged up on the poor Poles who hardly ever seemed to deserve it so far as I could tell). There were strange fads like the curse of Ham or something like that which attempted to rationalize racism on the basis of an obscure biblical text.

Well, I'm off to bed soon.

family legacy, Christians, and mediocrity

Something that strikes me about Frank's almost agnostic tone in Crazy for God is that it at some point it doesn't matter who your parents were, it does not necessarily follow that a hero of the Christian faith will raise a child who is also a hero of the faith, too. Samson's parents raised a stupid horny brute of a man and while it may be tempting for people to say they dropped the ball in raising Samson this is reading into biblical text more than can possibly be warranted. Samuel was a man of God who raised horrible sons. Saul was an insecure, insane king who turned from the Lord who somehow managed to raise a son who was a great ally to David. David was said to be a man after God's own heart and yet many of his children were foul. Solomon had wisdom like no other and yet his kids were apostates of a peculiarly pathetic kind. As Paul put it, fleshly descent from Abraham hardly meant one is a child of the promise.

While some would see this as bad reasoning it's not unbiblical and more to the point, if children choose a path of sin after parents have done the best they can it's wrong to blame the parents. This doesn't excuse sin in the parents, of course, but as the Lord told Ezekiel, He will punish sons for their own sins and fathers for their own sins. Of course if the mystery of lawlessness weren't so mysterious we wouldn't need the greater mystery of Christ to save us from it, which is to say I'm not going to pretend to know much more than what I have learned studying Scripture and the lives of others around me, to say nothing of my own life.

Now, supposing for the sake of argument, Frank Schaeffer does not live up to his father's legacy this is a modern reminder that it doesn't matter how good a Christian you may seem to be or have been, it's no insurance policy on the faith (or lack thereof) in your children. As Ecclesiastes framed the matter so starkly, there is wisdom but the wisdom literature itself has limits. Job is a corrective to the idea that the Christian faith is based on what amounts to sympathetic magic. A Christian upbringing can increase the odds but is no substitute for the work of the Spirit.

So even if I suppose that Frank is not a chip off the old block or a disgrace to his father's name. Well, in a sense my response is "So what? This is what we see in Scripture." In Christ our family is not necessarily flesh and blood but those whom Christ provides us. Ideally it's awfully nice to have it both ways and to have flesh and blood family and family in Christ all at the same time but life and death are what they are and not everyone has the beenfit of Christian biological family.

Obviously Christians can and should raise their children to love the Lord but one doesn't even have to be a parent to observe that this an act of faith, not of certainty. I can't help but wonder since I am not a parent where the line is between really trusting the Lord that your kids will follow Christ and a form of religious inculcation that is essentially Pavlovian. Raising your kids to believe in Scripture, love Jesus, and avoid sin doesn't mean they won't end up becoming atheists or homosexuals or drug addicts. The world is just too mysterious and God's ways too mysterious. Raise up a child in the way that he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it but sapiential sayings have their limit. Wisdom from the Lord is not necessarily the same as a promise from the Lord. Job and his comforters discovered this, as did the Preacher. For Francis Schaeffer's legacy, not everyone who imbibed worldview discussions came out the end of it a Christan and Francis Schaeffer was always honest enough to admit that this was a real risk in that approach, a risk that some others may not have taken to heart.

Something that has been on my mind lately is to compare Crazy for God to Addicted to Mediocrity. I'm not going to beat around the bush, AtM was essentially an earnest mediocrity indicting mediocrity. It's not as though there is no place for that but I wonder if at some level the problem is in indicting mediocrity itself. How do we define mediocrity? Every Lutheran named Bach is a mediocrity in the wake of Johann Sebastian, after all. Is this why you could search high and low across Germany and possibly not find a single person named Bach who is a professional musician?

What did Frank actually accomplish writing Addicted to Mediocrity? I don't really know. Did converting to Orthodoxy change anything? Somehow I don't think that's likely. For that matter is the charge that mediocrity is bad entirely valid? If we are to not think of ourselves more highly than we ought what if some of us are mediocrities? Wouldn't it be fairer to have a realistic view of ourselves than to suppose we are more than mediocrities? If Frank thought evangelicals were not living up to the legacy of his father what was he doing? It might well have been the pot calling the kettle black. It might also have been the nose deciding it was not a part of the body because it was not an ear. Tough to say, but Frank's earlier book left me thinking that the objections against mediocrity were too passionate and repetitive to leave me thinking Frank had the actual answer.

So in a way Crazy for God is a relief to read. If Frank has come through the other side of Addicted to Mediocrity able to admit he has had at best a middling career is that bad? Since I haven't paid attention to anything he's done since Addicted to Mediocrity up until now I don't feel particularly bad saying that if Frank had done more I might have paid any attention. Now, to be fair, I have spent a lot more time watching anime, collecting Miyazaki films, importing chamber music for classical guitar from Europe, and collecting old blues recordings to pay much attention to Frank. At the risk of belittling him by taking his earlier argument seriously, I was too busy finding what was excellent to be distracted by a mediocrity (which is not to say I'm not a mediocrity myself, I'm probably less than that). But perhaps in that respect I did Frank Schaeffer the favor of ignoring him in favor of all the great music and literature I discovered that he had nothing to do with.

thoughts on Frank Schaeffer's Crazy for God, chapter 15

This chapter, particularly, interests me because it encapsulates one of the most important themes that comes across in the book, that those we revere as saints were just crazy, fallible people corrupted by sin. This does not, however, lessen their humanity or their capacity to influence people for good.

I had come across people complaining that this b0oks is poorly written and slags Francis Schaeffer. Since Francis Schaeffer is dead at any rate anyway I don't see how he would feel he has suffered any indignity through his son writing a memoir, even a memoir that mentions that his father was hot-tempered and abusive to his wife, or that his mother was often a self-righteous grandstanding woman and that the whole family was apt to judge people for not having the right doctrinal beliefs.

This can sound suspiciously familiar to someone who grew up in a background like that. What I find striking that is not borne out in Schaeffer's memoir yet (but suspect I will) is that children who grow up in such a setting tend to carry on that sort of legacy of a spiritual superiority complex that masks a virtually innate uncertainty about the reality of Christ. Doctrinal and political purity are necessary to ensure that one's faith is actually real, or one must search for that church which is the most real and apostolic and authentic and authoritative because the reality that there is no tangible evidence apart from the witness of the Spirit in one's own life is too disturbing a foundation for the reality of Christ. Not to say that there is no evidence whatsoever but a professor who was also a minister once explained to me that Christians can be tempted to explain faith in Christ on the basis of statistical rather than convergent probability. It is by faith we even accept that God created the worlds.

Schaeffer's most interesting comment is also patently obvious, every human has a dark side. In our desperation to have a hero, someone to look up to, we settle on amazingly fallible people, people who have grave and even terrible flaws. And we look to these people to be the voice of God to us within this life.

That we make the most important decisions of our lives with a paucity of information, decisions like where to go to college, who to marry, what our beliefs about the universe itself will be, that people hold up a man like Francis Schaeffer who had an honorary doctorate in theology that in itself was basically not worth very much as a hero of the Christian faith can't be avoided. That decisions that make the least sense rationally can work out the best could be chalked up to intuition, and some statistical studies have suggested that simple guesswork can be best--it may be that the brain can handle complex decisions more readily through hunches and guesswork than conscious thought because the brain cannot handle all of the mess of information in sequential order but can respond to, as it were, the gestalt presented.

What is most intriguing is how Schaeffer writes about the mysteriy of human need, how religious leaders must become in the mind of their devotees more than the sum of their fallible and even awful parts. What he writes is that this is not a sign of hypocrisy in the person who is made a saint, it is a sign of the sheer desperation of those who appointed them saints.

I am not at a point where I find much value in treating Christians of any kind as heroes to be looked up to. It simply isn't necessary in the sense of, say, a child looking up to his parents or wanting to be like Superman. That's not necessarily wrong to do and Scripture says in the Psalms that it is good to make the godly men and women of the land your heroes. But that is not the same as trusting in Christ himself. If we cannot love our neighbor who we have seen we most certainly cannot love Christ, whom we have not seen. If we cannot see Christ in our neighbor then will we see Christ? If we appoint fallible people as saints whether in our own hearts or at the acceptance of those who have come before us it is hardly a bad thing, but it does not benefit it us in any way to forget that the saints are no better than us. Their example is not in who they really were but in that they sought Christ.

I still respect the influence and legacy of Francis Schaeffer not because I would have wanted to meet the man (I basically wouldn't and would consider meeting him unnecessary); and not even because I agree with that much of what he had to say any more; but because of his eagerness to follow the Lord and to continue doing so. I think Frank Schaeffer's book is a necessary antidote to the kind of veneration of saints that Protestants pretend they don't do.

I don't think paying respects to the influence of godly men and women is in any way problematic but I don't think any saint's reputation suffers by pointing out that they dragged themselves through the mud. It is Christ's goodness imparted to the saint that makes them a saint, not the frequently corrupted and sinful desires of the saint himself. Even Scripture itself reveals that it is possible to become important in God's people simply for killing the right person at the right time but most people these days would not suppose you attain memorable status in the people of God these days just by killing the right uncircumcised Phillistine. A mudering philanderer who covers his tracks and brings disaster on his people be disobeying God is, nevertheless, described as a man after God's own heart.

So far Crazy for God is a bit sloppy but I don't expect precision in a memoir from the son of Francis Schaeffer. Schaeffer's own books were not really all that precise in the way that someone like Bonhoeffer or Stott or Augustine were precise, all in drastically different ways. What has interested me in the book is the fracas about how Frank, as described by reviewers, feels culpable for turning his father toward the Christian Right and having a disproportionally large contribution to the Christian rightwing evangelicalism he now detests. I can't help but wonder if a lot of clucking done about Frank Schaeffer's book comes from people who don't think he's theologically or politically conservative in the right ways. That Frank thinks the current war is stupid and illegal probably won't be welcome to any soldiers who support the cause but then this underlines my observation that saints (and I do not suppose Frank Schaeffer isn't one just because people have claimed he has disgraced his family legacy) are severely messed up people.

This is not the age of clowns for kids

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080116/od_nm/clowns_odd_dc

Maybe too many kids have grown up in the last sixty years watching Batman kick the crap out of a psychopathic mudering clown for clowns to have much PR with kids anymore? Or maybe clowns are just not that fun?

book arrived in the mail

Yeah, I know, big deal. Crazy for God just arrived in the mail for me this week and it's on the queue (sic) of books to get to. I still have Bauckham's book to tackle about the gospels as based on eyewitness testimony which sounds interesting but it's Bauckham so it's not the more literary of styles. I'm feeling like I need to return to fiction. Fiction engages a different part of the mind and heart than non-fiction does and it just seems I've been overdue for that for some years.

But Crazy for God is on the list of things to get to. I've been reading the forward and Schaeffer obviously regrets having what he felt was too formative and influential a hand in the development of the Christian right. He's obviously not agnostic or atheist or he would have made THAT clear. But he's obviously what a lot of politically conservative evangelical Christians would consider apostate. I've had enough friends who are theologically conservative but politically liberal over the years (i.e. Lutherans, a Catholic or two, et al. give or take the standard dividing issues that every Calvinist seems to feel are dividers) and I have no problem with someone being a Christian who is opposed to the current war. I'm apathetic about the current war because I tend to be more old school in my approach to conservative politics and foreign policy. I wasn't sure about the grounds but I thought Hussein should have been deposed at the end of the first Gulf War so it's hard to muster enthusiasm either way. I don't think there have been very fair handling of the soldiers' lives in the present outing but I admit that's a purely personal sentiment.

Since Schaeffer is so vehemently and publicly against the war and has said the current persident is on an illegal and idiotic misadventure costing the lives of servicemen and putting his own children in harm's way (one of his sons is in the service) I have a feeling that as with anyone opposed to the war there's going to be some fiery rhetoric somewhere in the book.

I have read folks say the book is problematic, for those who feel Schaeffer sr has been dishonored by it. Well, I have to admit I'm still curious. Schaefffer has been appropriated like a saint in evangelical circles and while Schaeffer had good points no saint really helps you become a better person if they're dead and you haven't met them, not in the sense of them being active to help you. On the other hand, reflecting on the life of a saint can help you focus on aspects of your own walk with the Lord. I have been of the mind that Protestants venerate saints the same way Catholics or Orthodox do but trick themselves into thinking that they aren't being idolators because they don't do it the same way. But my hunch is that when I get done with Crazy for God I may be a step closer to discovering that evangelicals can have the same problems with veneration of saints they claim Catholics have.

Since I've dug into the shifting exegetical and interpretive issues of the epistle of Jude I have been aware that Christians embrace traditions that are held to be sacred without recognizing that these traditions are a bit more, um, flexible than anyone is comfortable admitting. Where some lock down and attempt to say that this or that tradition is the authoritative tradition I notice that some things that date from the apostolic time, like the assumption of angelic human hybrids in Jude and the citation of 1 Enoch, others hold that that view is not to be held.

Others decide that with this apperance of shifting sands of Christian tradition to throw the baby out with the bathwater and embrace rationalism, atheism, or some other religious alternative.

I have wondered over the years if the problem for us is that we serve a living Lord and a living Lord is a moving target. The traditions that surround him can point to Him but are not themselves Him. Eugene Peterson's invocation of the dead bark of the tree that protects the living plant may be useful if reapplied. The bark of tradition itself may be dead but it can still point to the living Christ and it can do this regardless of which tradition is invoked. His kingdom is not of this world and if before His coming His kingdom was divided and splintered because His people were disobedient and idolators then it would stand to reason that what happened among sinful creatures before His coming could happen after His ascent upon rising from the dead.

And in the same way the tribes of Israel dispute who has the real claim to true worship of Yahweh while all sides reveal their being of His people and of being corrupted by sin. Fortunately we have the hope that Christ Himself will return, as His first coming was promised.

So, uh, that's my ponderings of late.

Man, I have so many books to catch up on it's embarrssing. I should spend less time on-line and more time with my nose in a book, huh? Not as though you few people who read this blog see much of me here, eh?

reasons it's good to not simultaneously be Christian, conservative, AND a Jack van Impe style dispensationalist

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/11/world/middleeast/11prexy.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/10/world/middleeast/10jericho.html?_r=1&ref=middleeast&oref=slogin

This would necessarily be damned if he does and damned if he doesn't because if he fails it was a fool's errand and a pipe dream but if he succeeds he's the Antichrist. As an amillenial partial preterist I've got no reason to suppose this dichotomy is even real but it's practically real if Christians voted for Bush and also believe that anyone who successfully brokers a peace deal between the Arabs and Israel is the Antichrist. On that score Bush has been promising to be the Antichrist since the start of his first term, more or less.

David and the census

2 Samuel 24 and 1 Chronicles 21 are interesting passages for providing different insights into the same event. Samuel reveals that God's anger was kindled against Israel and that He punished them by inciting David to take a census. The Chronicler reveals that Satan incited David to take a census. It is interesting that Gad is the seer of the king at this point when Nathan had done so much but that is another topic for another time.

What interests me is that God allows David to make a decision that brings catastrophe on His people. In fact God is the one who incites it in Samuel and yet it is the agent Satan, the accuser, who incites it in Chronicles. In the way of redaction criticism this explanation is simple, the Chronicler did not want to credit God with planning destruction for Israel in His anger. But in any case since both accounts cover the same waterfront I find it interesting that a leader is used as the means through which God's people are punished when God wills Satan to put a stupid idea into the leader's head.

Joab, normally anything but a paragon of righteousness, points out in advice "Hey, dude, this is a lame idea." David still does it and it is David who has to repent in order that the people of Israel might be spared. Interesting. We are not told why God visited this kind of mayhem on the people of Israel, are we? We're just told that God was angry at His people and apparently a great way to punish His people when He is angry with them is to make their leaders do amazingly stupid things. I suspect every variation of the Church has been subject to this at some point. Apparently what appeases God's wrath against His people is for his appointed leaders of said people to admit they're idiots who have sinned against the Lord and brought disgrace, death, and mayhem on His people. What is interesting is that God Himself ordains the leader to get this idea and to execute the idea against the better judgment of his closest advisors. Now that's interesting, I don't really know why, but it's interesting. How it could be applied in any way in a modern setting I don't presume to say, it just seems interesting to me.

Of course some of this is that it's close to bed time, really, and I'd need more time to consider the passage.

another clunky poem

I met the canary of the coalmine
and, considering the health of his song,
the mine is safer than some people say
and the miners do know when to listen.

There are sparrows who think they're canaries
and there are owls who believe that their songs
should be the portent of the darkened sun
and a seeping of blood into the moon

but neither of these are the canary--
though their songs have a certain poetry
they think too much of the songs that they sing
and that their songs stop won't clear out the mine.

Bremerton man erects Santa crucifix to protest commercialism at Xmas

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20071223/santa_crucified_071223/20071223?hub=TopStories

AP Photo/Kitsap Sun, Larry Steagall

This one speaks for itself, more or less. I mean I "could" go on a digression about Saint Nicholas but why? That's a cause for someone else to take up but I will say that there are multiple levels of resonance in the installation here.

The Wittenburg Door interviews N. T. Wright

http://www.wittenburgdoor.com/heavy-theological-dude-mistakenly-talks-us

Haven't reaad the Door in a while but I couldn't help but notice this thanks to BHT.

per BHT links, why does God favor the sheltered momma's boy?

http://theresurgence.com/ab_blog_2007-12-11_preaching_to_smothered_mamas_boys

http://threehierarchies.blogspot.com/2007/12/i-think-they-missed-crucial-point.html

The behavior of Jacob's parents may have helped lead him to become a passive aggressive deceiver, yet the same favoritism also lead Esau to be a fool with an unrepentant heart who sold his birthrate for a bowl of soup. If the upbringing of the twins is proof of parental wrong-doing this plays out in interesting ways because in the end neither son was that grateful to or attentive to the Lord based on the upbringing of their parents.

Jacob's tragedy was not that he grew up emasculated but that he grew up in a setting where he chose to take lightly the Lord's legacy, the same problem that Esau had. God in His mercy chose Jacob over Esau to reveal something about His character to us.

A father who shows favoritism to one son is not necessarily being more involved as a parent in a healthy way than the passive one. Passivity from a father is not just a categorical point but a relational point. A father can choose to be passive with one of his children and not the other but odds are decent a father who is passive with one child may be overly involved in the other. If Jacob was smothered by his mother then couldn't we suggest that Esau was smothered by his father? To go by the lack of gratitude both men displayed toward the Lord it doesn't seem entirely unreasonable.

And of course the thing about these twins is that you can have the same parents and the same upbringing but neither is by itself a matter to consider if the Lord has His own design.

Comfort

More or less, when Israel had grown sleek and fat, as one prophet put it. There are many things we would rather hold on to than the truth and comfort is one of them. No one wants to be in a position, least of all me, where I am not sure who I can rely on or who I can unconditionally trust. Conditional trust is problematic because it means it is performance derived and becomes a sort of works theology in the end, applied to everyone I know. If I trust people based on whether or not they come through for me I sit in judgment over them.

Naturally it's not smart to just trust any person without a good cause but I am considering the good cause with which I trust plenty of people. There are thousands of people who go into making a secure financial transaction on the internet. If I order a book from, say, Amazon.com, I know that many people worked to make that transaction secure so that in buying something from them I am not automatically and immediately compromising the safety and integrity of my financial information. If I make a donation to a church I am trusting that the money will actually be used to help someone and not just line the pockets of someone who is not doing the Lord's work. If I use a debit card to make a purchase I am trusting that the information on my card is secure and safe in the hands of the person at the check-out desk. If I get on a bus I am trusting the bus driver knows where he or she is going and that that person will get me there in a timely manner.

We trust people with things that are not our heart all the time. Understandably, though, a person wants to keep his heart safer than his checkbook in some things, though it is ideal to have both things kept safe.

The Lord warns against the dangers of comfort regularly in Scripture and it just strikes me at the mmoent that it is comfort the two kings of the divided kingdoms were really seeking. They wanted thing to remain as they had been, they wanted to remain comfortable in their knowledge, influence, power, prestige. They wanted to retain what they believed was their God-given right, and indeed God had through His providence provided them with what they had and it seems that they both recognized that at some level, and yet when pressed they both opted to lead God's people into idolatry for the sake of their own convenience and comfort. This may shed some light (or not) on what Scripture says in saying that this or that king did what was evil in the sight of the Lord. Idolatry is the great sin of man and it is man's sin not only because I forsake God but that through my example I encourage others to forsake the Lord, too. We are in that respect as Satan is, deceivers who are deceived and deceiving one another and I am certainly afflicted by this. I can truly believe I am telling the truth and understanding things as they are but not aware that I have been deluded by my older nature and not attentive to the Spirit that dwells within me.

And we are all so apt toward this that it becomes difficult to discern the folly in our own hearts even as we consider so readily and easily the folly in the hearts of others. We all bear traces of the divine image, however marred, yet we do not recognize it in each other and do not cultivate it in ourselves, nor can we apart form the work of the Spirit within us and yet we can, paradoxically cooperate with the Spirit who has sealed us for the Lord's purposes.

None of this is very simple in practice and all of it involves steps of faith that are far easier described than done.

To take comfort is to take refuge and it is sobering to remember that there are so many things a person can take refuge in before Christ--friends, family, work, pleasure, honor, distinction, service, none of them bad things but if I define my value through the friends I have, the family I have, the work I have done, the pleasure I derive, the honor I receive, the distinction I have been given, or the things I think I have done in service, these are all of no value. If I take comfort in any service I have rendered I am most to be pitied because service is of no account to the Lord not because it has no value but because the things that seem most humble are often least humble and the things that seem most truthful are often least truthful. I cannot trust myself and that is why it is easier in some sense to trust others, because the heart is deceitful above all things.

But in the end there is only one who tells the truth without the shadows of corruption and deceit and self-regard, that is Christ.

a short rumination about the division of the kingdom of Israel

There was a point in the history of Israel when the king had the opportunity to decide how he was to rule and he consulted with the old man of his father's household, those who advised Solomon, and asked them how he should rule. They advised to make the burden of the people lighter and to be merciful and generous. They said, "If you will be a servant to this people they will serve you for their whole lives."

But Rehoboam did not like this advise and went to the people who grew up with him in the king's court and asked them for advice instead. They advised him to make the task of being an Israelite harder not easier, even couching it in what may be termed a rather crude analogy along the lines of "My little finger is greater than my father's loins". At the word that he would whip them with scorpions and not whips the people rebelled and rejected his authority and left and the kingdom became divided.

When all Israel saw that the king refused to listen to them, they answered the king:
"What share do we have in David,
what part in Jesse's son?
To your tents, O Israel!
Look after your own house, O David!"
So the Israelites went home.

They all went to follow Jeroboam instead. Now Jeroboam was a man who had rebelled against Solomon, the previous king. Solomon tried to kill Jeroboam but did not succeed and the Lord gave Jeroboam ten tribes as promised. The Lord said "I will humble David's descendants through this but not forever." God promised that David's house would have at least one tribe so that His word would be kept.

Jeroboam feared that Israel would revert to the house of David if they worshipped at the Temple and offered sacrifices to Yahweh so he made new gods to ensure that loyalty would not bring his kingdom's subjects back to Judah. And so to secure his own rule he turned to idols.

Rehoboam planned to reclaim the ten tribes by force and prepared for war but the Lord stopped him. The Lord told him "Don't go to war against them for this is my doing." Rehoboam set up idols and was worse in idolatry than Solomon. It is curious to consider that to consolidate power over God's people both men turned to idols. It is hardly surprising but it is sad and it may serve as, so to speak, a parable about the history of God's people since the time of Christ as before. The Lord predicted division and strife within His kingdom before the time of Christ and so it is now since His coming. This may be taken, as it were, as a parable about the history of the Lord's people and those who are able to understand it will understand it well.

What I am struggling to understand is why Jeroboam and Rehoboam did not repent of their own sins. Why did Jeroboam choose to embrace his own power and influence rather than understand the kingdom had not been given to him over Israel forever? Why the lack of humility? Why did Rehoboam refuse to live as a servant in being king over Israel? Why did he choose to listen to the young men with whom had had grown up in the house of Solomon? Why did he make such a point of saying he was more a man than the leaders among God's people who preceeded him? His desire to rule powerfully divided the Lord's people when he could have chosen to be a servant and have reigned for his whole life in an era blessed by the Lord.

For reasons I can't really explain this has been on my mind a lot lately. Both kings who presided over the division of the kingdom, on either side, were finally crushed by the Lord, which is tragic because it was the will of the Lord to divide the kingdom. That was unavoidable and could not be stopped because the Lord called it in advance through a prophet. But the judgment turned out to not merely be against Rehoboam but against all of Israel.

Who are Jeroboam and Rehoboam today? Who has divided the house of the Lord to preserve their own station and respect rather than be a servant to the Lord's people? Who has horded up influence and power for themselves to defy what they have seen as an abuse of the Lord's people by those God has appointed? Are any of them above reproach in this story? It doesn't seem that they are, but all have the opportunity to repent and turn to the Lord who came and was the servant of all. It's a sad thing to see the Lord's people divided when the men who have power and influence seek to fight.

a clunky poem

So that he and his family would not wind up dead
All Elimelech’s house went to Moab for bread.
Naomi, Malon, and Chilion went with him
And left all the things they had known in Bethlehem
For the Lord had afflicted their home with a famine.
Now Isaac, ages before, had sensed the divine
Warning to not depart during the affliction.
Elimelech was of another disposition,
When wavering judges ruled over Israel;
And he had no father like Abraham to tell
Him, “God Himself will provide us our offering.”
Or of God’s promise and the decades of waiting;
Nor did he send his sons back to Judah for wives.
So his sons took the glances a Moabite gives.
There are no books that say what became of our friends
But we know most of them met some untimely ends
And Mara did not hide what she thought of her plight
She went out with blessing and returned from a blight.

A while back I heard a pastor go through the book of Ruth and the idea of writing a short narrative poem about this obscure fellow in the OT just wouldn't get out of my head. So this is my very forced, clunky narrative poem on the subject. No one in their right mind would attempt to make something rhyme with Elimelech unless you wanted to contrast him with Melchizedek (there, see what I mean?) and so I didn't go that route. The couplets are already pretty forced so I resorted to slant rhyme whenever possible. I think the slant rhyme works tolerable for the couplet about the wives with its forward allusion to Ruth joining the Israelite community through a second marriage to a Hebrew of more distinction.

Anyway, that's the poem. Not much to it is a poetic creation I suppose.

natural or social selection??

http://www.slate.com/id/2179998/fr/flyout

If Saletan is actually right, the subject of some discussion in itself, and the idea holds merit that what constitutes natural selection in human evolution may be less natural than social then his closing statement is merely an echo of sorts to a comment C. S. lewis once made, that every generation, within limits, gets exactly the kind of science it wants.

Schaeffer and Schaeffer part 3 (well, link discovered through iMonk)

http://www.rutherford.org/oldspeak/Articles/Interviews/oldspeak-frankschaeffer.html

Fascinating. Not sure that I have any plans to be Orthodox but reading this interview reminds me of how much I also feel Francis Schaeffer's real work has been distorted, misappropriated, and hijacked for political and culture war reasons that had nothing to do with what I felt was the heart of Schaeffer's real work.

Identifying the Christian Right as an activist right wing variation of the New Left makes sense. It's easy to see how the Christian Right has been attempting for the last twenty years to do what they feel the Left of the 1960s should not have done. Granted the Left of the 1960s advocated some stupid stuff, but that's not going to make the Right any better. I stand by my belief that Jesus was crucified by a bipartisan committee.

Fascinating interview. I agree with Michael Spenser that it's a must read. :)

Stockhausen dead

http://music.guardian.co.uk/classical/story/0,,2224073,00.html

Yeah, I know, lazy blogging to just link to a headline but Song of the Youths made a pretty big impression on me when I was a teenager and my brother brought it home one day, back when record players were still fairly commonplace. An amazing piece. Doesn't mean I'd own a ton of Stockhausen but I could never hear Revolution #9 (interesting as it was) as anything more than a Stockhausen knock-off of a good but decidely lesser order. What can I say? I guess I'm a music snob on that point. The Beatles were a great pop band that got dubbed a rock band but they were so open about who they copied I figure it's still good to tip my hat to the guy who inspired them and set them aside, so to speak.

But I couldn't blog anything about him or his music that couldn't have been blogged about more eloquently by others.

What!? Nasa made zero gravity guinea pig porn?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2000/feb/24/spaceexploration.internationalnews1

This is so weird that I just have to believe NASA actually did this!

Read on my friends. The Wittenburg Door has to put this in the category of "things we wish we made up".

No I suppose I can just take their word for it, whoever did this research, that sex in space is a very serious matter and necessary for ensuring that some decades long journey into space will ... man, there's just no figure of speech I can write now that won't seem unintentionally prurient. That's how crazy this story is.

The whole guinea pig thing is just SO ... LITERAL!!

If Joel, Tom Servo and Crow could only comment about headlines.

This here is a news story where it doesn't matter what year it happened, it's one for the ages!

In case you're wondering how I came across this, well, Wenatchee The Hatchet hangs out at discussion forums where people talk about comic books. Perhaps there's some poetic justice there but I won't elaborate.

culture war as jihad aspiration?

http://www.boarsheadtavern.com/archives/2007/12/04/1556752.html

Not necessarily making the point that Michael Spenser is saying anything of the kind, but that's what I'm pondering. I grew up in a church setting where culture war stuff came up. It wasn't as prominent as a quest for personal spiritual enlightenment and an inner communion with God but that depended on who I talked to. In others it was a matter of praying for revival so that God would heal the land (i.e. America). National idolatry seemed to be a big part of the enterprise. I don't see any biblically defensible argument that revival's goal should be renewal of the United States' cultural life. It's good to defend the United States and its people from attack, though. But the kind of cultural dominance many Christians aspire to in the United States is understandably the same aspiration toward dominance in the eyes of many a secularist that jihadists want. I think Christopher Hitchens isn't as brilliant as he obviously thinks he is but I'll give him the natural suspicion that Christians and Jews with a culture war mentality are the same as Muslims in spirit, assuming he grants the existence of spirit for purely rhetorical effect.

Christianity certainly has a long history in every tradition of this kind of behavior. We all know about the Inquisition. Polish Catholics were on the receiving end of their own variation from the Orthodox for a while and Protestants have the Puritans and Lutherans to thank for plenty of killing. There is no branch of Christendom that is immune from the use of violence to further a cultural or political end as though it were an aim of the Lord Himself.

The more difficult enterprise than getting energized and exercised about the faults within society is to recognize the depth of one's own sin and to work toward the creation of something that, should the Lord wish to do so, be blessed with the ability to be a part of culture. It probably won't do to say that those who can do and those who can't teach because teaching requires at last a nominal knowledge of the subject. In our generation and time it is probably more likely to be true that those who can do, those who can't teach, and those who could do either but won't or don't blog. I do not even suppose that those who teach can't do themselves, they just couldn't do it professionally full time. After all, it has been my experience that in music those who teach invariably also play music as a career. Those who can both do and teach. Those who can't do neither. But there's always blogging, at least for now.

Schaeffer and Schaeffer part 2

Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

That's the book and I plan to get to it. When reviewers lay into Frank Schaeffer for railing against Pat Robertson and George W Bush and the Christian Right and the current war I don't really care that much if that becomes the basis of a middling to bad review. Conversely, if the people raving about the book are secularists or on the Christian left that does not necessarily mean I have a reason to actually read the book.

No, I plan to get to the book because it seems interesting. If Frank Schaeffer is guilty of blaming a lot of his problems on the legacy of his parents he won't be any different from most Americans I've met. We live in a society where blaming family for our own abject failure is an easy temptation. But I don't have to assume that's what Frank Schaeffer has done in his book because a few Christians who don't want the late Francis Schaeffer taken down a peg by his own son don't think I should read the book. Conversely, I'm not so set in my politics at either extreme that I have a reason to think Frank Schaeffer must be a moron for opposing the current war or thinking that evangelicals are a bad joke. If Schaeffer is as bad as an agnostic or an atheist as some reviews I've seen on the net seem to think he is that won't be a surprise but I'm not sure it's a foregone conclusion. I'd like to read the book for myself to find out what I think. If Frank Schaeffer feels his father was led down a bad path by his friends and kids who changed him from a gift to the Church into a windy political pedant then I will very likely see in Schaeffer's memoir what I have seen in the last twenty years done with Francis Schaeffer's work.

Plus some of the more scholarly tomes I've thrown myself into just aren't feeling that winsom right now. I'll get back to Augustine and Bauckham later. Right now I'm sticking with lighter or more personable literary fare.

down time and more down time

the holidays are here and I am occupied. Yes, I know, lame. But I just don't feel inspired to blog. Then again, not lame. I have spent plenty of time with very good friends, some of whom I have not been able to visit in quite some time. That's better than blogging. While I have been repeating myself on a number 0f topics I consider worthy they shall most likely have to wait, again.

Schaeffer and Schaeffer

http://www.newstatesman.com/200710250048

Not sure I take the article hook, line, and sinker but it would not surprise me that Francis Schaeffer was as conflicted as any of us. What drew me into his work was not the exposition of doctrine, which frankly now seems a bit simplistic fifteen to seventeen years after I read his famous trilogy; or even his assessment of the arts. It really is possibly he completely screwed up Kierkegaard, for instance. His failure to grasp the difference between atonality and polytonality is understandable.

But in the end what still appeals to me about the work he did is that he bothered ... and by that I mean AT ALL to not just "engage culture" the way his self-appointed or somewhat more literal disciples have, he actually immersed himself in it. He obviously enjoyed all of the arts and did so as a Christian. There were times when he decided he had to not like things for what might be dubbed "theologically correct" reasons. I have had no problem enjoying the works of some modernists Schaeffer felt obliged to dislike. I don't necessarily enjoy the content of all of Dali's paints but his style was something else.

But where I DO agree with the gist of the article is that the Schaeffer that inspired me is obviously not the same Schaeffer that has inspired Tim LaHaye and others who have been identified with the religious right-wing movement. Schaeffer pretty much WAS drafted into a culture war--yet Schaeffer had already warned people in his prime had this culture war been so completely abdicated by Christians fifty years earlier that the battle was not to reclaim the culture for the Christian faith but to understand the culture and speak to it, to even begin to be able to speak to it.

It seems paradoxical for Christians to talk about engaging the culture because the separatist impulse is so strong for some of us that we are trying to reach into the culture while simultaneously pulling ourselves out of it. And in order to do that we have to be some Christian Mr. Fantastic with ever elongating arms.

We aren't in a cultural milleu where Christianity as a culture movement defines much of anything except reactionary and vestigially progressive politics. By so utterly subordinating any sense of art to another goal we get what one of my professors would have called, unflinchingly, ersatz. And it's true, that's what a lot of "Christian" art is, and a lot of Christian "cultural engagement".

Well, I don't feel like blogging THAT badly. :) Sure, I have a couple of lengthy treatises I'm considering that probably won't even turn into very lengthy treatises at all. I'm toying with an examination of Takahashi's comedic staple, the embarrassment of attachment she pins on to all of her characters. And I am still interested in writing a potentially windy treatise on depictions of child abusive dynamics in Eureka Seven. Hey, I freely admit to being a total nerd.

Now, see, the reason I feel okay saying all this is because I really think that what Schaeffer did so well that most of his self-proclaimed heirs really stink at is studying culture with an eye for the Gospel, finding places where they are not only speaking "to" the world around them about what is merely a presuppositional grid of what is or isn't great art and great philosophy or theology, but to actually LEARN. I have learned some rather startling things about myself and people around me through some of the things I have watched and read in the last year, stuff I never would have expected. If Christians of a broadly evangelical stripe and a cultural warrior bent can stop attempting to war with the culture they might find a few snippets of it to quote to the Athenians. It's possible to go so far that direction as to assimilate but then as Koholeth put it in an entirely different setting, it is good to hold on to one and not let go of the other and the man who fears God will avoid all extremes.

theological changes as an expression of personal change

Many, many years ago I was Arminian at an Assemblies of God church. I was persuaded that we had to have free will because if we did not how would God be just in punishing us for our sins? Over time I came to the observation that while we might be free at some level to choose SOMETHING, choosing Christ did not seem to be a strong part of that, and that even being in Christ one could still struggle plenty with sin. More to the point, if I am a slave to sin unless Christ makes me free then how free would I be to have chosen Christ if I was a slave to sin before He found me? And if I was a slave to sin before Christ found me then how would Christ make me free so that I could immediately choose, if I wished, to go back to sin? I began to wonder if the Calvinist side of things had something going for it.

But to say that I became a Calvinist because the propositional truths of the doctrines were truer and more scriptural is a pretty inadequate way of framing the conversion from one type of Christian theology to another. It would be far more accurate to say in retrospect that I changed horses mid-stream not because either one is an illegitimate expression of genuinely Christian thought but because I became acutely aware of a great failure on my part to appeciate Christ in my own life. This is why once I made the change from Arminianism to Calvinism I remained indifferent to what most of my convert to Calvinism friends obsessed about, proving that where they were formerly was wrong.

It is the common problem of the proselyte within Christendom, a tendency to blame the denomination I left for the spiritual problems of my own walk with Christ. It's a spectacularly obvious but easily missed distinction I have noticed with many an ex-Arminian. They will go through Scripture and claim that the only conclusion you can come to is that Calvinism is true. Yeah, well, if that were REALLY the case there wouldnt' be any Arminians at ALL would there? They'd have all stumbled on to the true inevitability of the Reformed understanding of Christ and gone with it. Yet it isn't so. Now I happen to be a Calvinist and a supralapsarian who holds to an amillenial partial preterist view (and that tentatively) but I see no reason to suppose that an Arminian somehow isn't reading exactly the same Bible any other Protestant (or even Catholic or Orthodox) Christian reads.

If converting from within one camp to another in Christianity helps you in your walk with Christ, cool. That's what I did when I switched from Arminianism to Calvinism. But I also hope that in the process of converting you don't forget that the body of Christ extends beyond the visible distinctions we have made within it and have then retroactively attributed to the sovereign hand and will of God. Despite my youthful opposition to any sort of ecumenism in principle I'll admit to being pretty ecumenical now. I am still pretty conservative in my theology but not quite so much in my politics and denominational distinctions are a rather low priority for me now.

The reason I am not likely to change denominational or doctrinal affiliations at this point is not bbecause I haven't done it in the past but because I know that doing so is not finally a matter of knowing Christ better (though it can help that process, obviously). And changing denominational links has not given me a lesser appreciation for where I have been. I still value the things I learned about Christ from my Arminian days and still have those blessings from Christ with me now. If I were to become Lutheran or Presbyterian over the next ten years I would not then regret the time I have been spending at the church I am at. I don't want to hold my ex-churches accountable for my own failure to seek and love Christ any more than I want to credit the church I am at with my love for and apprehension of Christ now. To do that would be to credit the Body with that which only the Head can provide. Certainly I appreciate the help I receive from my church but it takes discernment to know when the Church acts as Christ's body and when the Church is, well, the sinful yet to be redeemed Church.

If that were easy there wouldn't be so denominations across the world. But there were twelve tribes in Israel so if Israel is one nation with twelve tribes it's not that difficult for me to imagine that there are tribes within the Israel which has been redefined by Jesus. This is why most discussions of which branch of Christendom is the "one true Church" seem absurd to me, as it requires a willfully ignorant summarization of the history of God's people as being more uniform than it has ever been. Even within the time of the Mosaic covenant God added all kinds of people whom the Law would have prohibited from acceptance into God's people. In the same way, the body of Christ includes all kinds of people we Christians frequently don't want in the body because of issues like the nature of sacraments or the level of interaction our will does or doesn't have in bringing about either our justification or sanctification when the main thing that unites us is our king.

Uh, this just seems to constitute cruel and unusual punishment.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21492378/?GT1=10450

Sure killing your girlfriend's puppy is evil but THREE YEARS in prison for it!? If the guy pleaded guily and apologized what's with the three years in prison? What's wrong with levying a fine commensurate with the market value of said puppy. Dude, this is why the Mosaic law had lex talionis. An eye for an eye served the salutory purpose of people not being sent to jail for three years for pleading guilty to killing a girlfriend's puppy!

memory is a curious weapon

Memory is a curious weapon:
Whether in attack or defense it is
A weapon that wounds the one who wields it
as well as the one on whom it is used.

the glow of fresh shrimp

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/336716_shrimp25.html

I guess now's a great time to observe dietary laws about not eating shellfish if you're Jewish and haven't been observant!

when different gods attack

Isaiah 10:20
In that day the remnant of Israel, the survivors of the house of Jacob, will no longer rely on him who struck them down but will truly rely on the LORD, the Holy One of Israel.

Isaiah 19:22
The LORD will strike Egypt with a plague; he will strike them and heal them. They will turn to the LORD, and he will respond to their pleas and heal them.

This combination of verses in Isaiah has had me thinking about how when we rely on idols to help us we end up relying on those things and people which crush us. The Lord certainly crushes us to, but to build us up. When we rely on those things which are not the Lord, we are simply struck down. It is perennially sobering to realize that whatever we use and whomever we rely upon to define us that is not Christ himself becomes a burden to us, we become destroyed by what we think we ought to do and work ourselves to a point where we detest those things and people that in Christ we could love.

Our idols strike us down. We don't like to admit it. I don't like to admit it but the idols in my life have definitely struck me down and used me in the end when I thought that by turning to them I could be happy or at least forget unhappiness long enough to take some comfort. Learning to rely on the Lord even when He strikes you is self-evidently not easy, but it is an easier yoke to bear and an easier burden to carry than what my idols have asked of me in return for their receipt of worship.

new mode of birth control, genetic manipulation of eggs, in the works

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/oct/17/genetics

This would, if I understand it properly, deactivate fertile eggs. I'm not married and have no kids but this kind of thing creeps me out. It's not exactly that some people don't want kid. I get that. some don't. It's that directly shutting down fertile eggs by means of genetic manipulation of humans worries me. It seems that even in the case of modifying poplar trees I can get what the goal is but I can't help being cautious about the possibility of unintended side effects. A regular medication or genetic alteration that is supposed to promote infertility might work TOO well. Franky Idiocracy doesn't seem all that far fetched sometimes, even though I know it's a satire based on completely improbable events.

a prelude to the poems of Wallace Stevens

http://www.slate.com/id/2175940/entry/2176033/

Well, not really, but the idea that language and perceptive are like a cognitive lens through which we can see the world around us reminds me of his poems. I wrote a few poems a couple of years ago using water as a metaphor both for how it distorts and refracts light and how it is necessary for survival. My old poem "hand me your big black umbrella" had a line about being blinded by the tumbling clearness (i.e. water), or not, because of the umbrella. There are things we need that simultaneously limit but clarify our perception.

Since I go through most of my life seeing the world through one eye rather than two (the second one works, mind you, but I've never had truly binocular vision) the idea that what we perceive is not necessarily what is is not a new concept for me.

Plus this article explains why Yoda is a moron. ;)

Would someone stop Lucas, please?

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/tv/1401AP_People_Lucas.html

Can the franchise just die now? The best thing to happen in the Star Wars franchise was a recent Robot Chicken special. And before that the only thing that was actually cool about the franchise's recent entries was the animated Clone Wars series and even that, I must confess, too warming up to. 'Twas Gendy, though, and a guy who made Samurai Jack and directed oodles of Powerpuff Girls episodes was naturally going to make Star Wars cooler than Lucas has made it in the last decade.

Genetically modified poplar trees being designed for soil cleaning

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/335572_transgenic16.html

And some of the researchers, not incidentally, have been firebombed for make the effort. Splicing and dicing genetic material has already been happening for centuries in the form of developing particular breeds of dog and cat (i.e. pitbulls verses collies and main coons verses tabbies and Russian blues) but these modifications have been through traditional hybridization breeding. So people feel quite a bit more comfortable with that because mutations that can't survive won't. Developing new variations on species may provide a big "yuck" factor not just becasue the artificial nature of the hybrid is so apparent but also because it goes against all normal statistically proven ways of arriving at hybrids or new species, e.g. conventional microevolutionary processes leading to new speciation.

In terms of theology this would seem to go back to the prohibition against mixtures of crops but since in Christ the law was considered abolished and fulfilled at the same time how does a Christian investigate this matter? On the one hand Jesus fulfilled the purpose of the Law and set aside as an obstacle barring entry of the Gentiles into God's kingdom so doing. It may be there is a purpose to such laws that is preserved even though the law itself is no longer an impediment to Gentile entry into the kingdom of God.

Deut 22:

6 If you come across a bird's nest beside the road, either in a tree or on the ground, and the mother is sitting on the young or on the eggs, do not take the mother with the young. 7 You may take the young, but be sure to let the mother go, so that it may go well with you and you may have a long life.

9 Do not plant two kinds of seed in your vineyard; if you do, not only the crops you plant but also the fruit of the vineyard will be defiled.
10 Do not plow with an ox and a donkey yoked together.
11 Do not wear clothes of wool and linen woven together.

These are the passages that, conceivably, might prohibit genetic engineering. The extrapolation is rather broad and probably forced, though. On the other hand, it is a pattern that can be extrapolated from these. Verse 9 warns that any intermingling of crops within a vineyard defiles all the fruit of the vineyard. It was against Mosaic law to plow with an ox and a donkey yoked together, which implicity argues that only two oxen should be yoked together. The matter that clothes of wool and linen woven together probably speaks for itself as a prohibition but conceptually the verse cumulatively speak against treating things as though they could be intermingled against their normal pattern.

In this respect a person could make the case that dog breeding does not violate the principle behidn these laws because dogs are simply being bred after their kind. hybridization of crops within a family would not be considered bad but interpolating genetic material from a rabbit into a tree would. INterestingly scientists have said they interpolated the rabbit gene because they have been unable to locate the gene within the tree's genome itself that performs a similar function. Would Christians object if scientists figured out how to activate the tree's own genetic capability of filtering toxins or would this still be playing God? I can see how both might be the case.

Conversely, if the tree is having its own genetic material shuffled or activated or deactivated or reactivated to cleanse the soil would that be wrong? Would it be wrong on principle or wrong because it could be considered a substitute for polluting less. Besides not polluting less could we genetically re-engineer the world to purify the environment of the toxins we pour into the world around us? If that's the case then I suppose a century from now Miyazaki's manga Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind could still be pertinent to these ethical debates, since Nausicaa must in the end confront the grim reality that the world she is trying to save was genetically re-engineered from the ground up by long lost generations of men not only to cleanse the world of the pollution humanity but to run its course and then self-destruct so that the humans who polluted the world to begin with could come back and reclaim it as their own. For a comic book two decades old it poses some ethical questions that are still pretty interesting (questions that really never come up in the anime).

Condi is back to what the administration talked about before 9/11

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1107AP_Mideast_Rice.html?source=mypi

Namely pushing for a separate Palestinian state. If certain terrorist attacks hadn't happened there might not have been a six year gap between the last serious overture toward a separate Paelstinian state (if no more than in pro forma diplo-speak) and now. Not that this means a Palestinian state will happen or that it's even necessarily a good idea but Clinton didn't set one up thanks to Arafat not wanting anything less than "complete" success, as opposed to 90% success. Of course if success is annihilating Israel as opposed to an actual Palestinian state that's another matter, too.

Since I'm not a dispensationalist/futurist I don't particularly care if this is seen by the Hal Lindsey/Jack van Impe troupe as a sign of the coming apocalypse that has been set to happen within the generation that settled Israel for three generations.

honor as an extrinsic quality in biblical literature, a sloppy rumination

Luke 14: 7-11

When he noticed how the guests picked the places of honor at the table, he told them this parable: "When someone invites you to a wedding feast, do not take the place of honor, for a person more distinguished than you may have been invited. If so, the host who invited both of you will come and say to you, 'Give this man your seat.' Then, humiliated, you will have to take the least important place. But when you are invited, take the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he will say to you, 'Friend, move up to a better place.' Then you will be honored in the presence of all your fellow guests. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted."

And after this, of course, there is Jesus' retort by way of parable to the one who said, "Blessed is the man who will eat at the feast of God." Jesus more or less says, "Oh yeah but it's not who you think it may be."

Both parables deal with the matter of honor, where it comes from, who it comes from, and what Jesus has to say about that. It seems that honor is a basically extrinsic thing here, something that can only be received and is not inherent. We can accept honor that comes from God or, more often, reject it, just as we can accept honor that comes from men or reject it or, alternately accept it or even obsess over it.

Whoever said that it would be an honor to feast with God gave Jesus the perfect opportunity to mention that the honor has been rejected by those who were initially invited and so the invitation goes out to anyone and everyone who was not first invited. The eschatological and national implications are so obvious as to need no explanation, but as a continuation of teaching about seeking honor for oneself it is interesting to consider how the honor that God gaves us through Christ we can often refuse while the honor we seek for ourselves distances us from God.

As Proverbs puts it, it's bad to eat too much sugar and it is dishonorable to seek your own honor. Let another praise you and not your own mouth, someone else and not your own lips. A crucible is for silver and a furnace for gold but a man is tested by the praise he receives.

It seems as though things like honor and integrity are things that should speak for themselves through action or not at all. When the apostles defended the gospel they were not necessarily defending themselves. Jesus did not defend himself when he went to trial. When Paul defended his apostolic vocation he did it by boasting in his weakness and the physical punishment he received for being a minister of the Gospel, and pointed to his credibility as a Jew among Jews only to say that his credentials by themselves were actually demerits in the sense of securing any true favor with the Lord.

When Paul defends his position as an apostle he repeatedly says he is speaking as a fool, suggesting that to even defend his reputation might as well render his reputation null and void. He stoops to it only because he is tired of being compared to the super-apostles and inverts the measure of honor and glory by appealing to his sharing in the suffering of Christ rather than the greatness of his prose or learning. He does not even really appeal to his own character but to what Christ providentially brings to him that allows him to share in the suffering of Christ. He even boasts in a prayer that God refused to answer and answered with the explanation that His strength is made perfect in weakness. An apostle boasting of a prayer that God didn't answer is a strange boast indeed! And that is what Paul does when he feels that he has to redefine what greatness is.

So even in his boasting Paul says it is acting like a fool and chooses to boast in what Christ has given him through suffering rather than in his learning or the power of the Spirit given to him to cast out demons or raise people from the dead or to be bitten by venomous snakes. He doesn't boast about any of these things when defending his apostolic credentials. And he does not boast of anything that he chose to do or appeal to them as a measure of what he should boast about, only about the things done to him in opposition to his taking a stand for the Gospel and the things he faced from persecution at the hands of Jews and Gentiles alike.

Yet in the end Paul also argues that there is finally nothing to boast about even in this, essentially, saying "Woe to me if I don't preach the good news." It is not even something to boast about since it was what he was called to do. Despite Paul's sometimes harsh or hectoring tone in polemics he can be a startlingly self-negating man in his letters.

Any attempt we make to defend our reputation has limits to what it can accomplish, and since honor is bestowed upon us by men or by God or possibly by both we cannot defend for ourselves what can only be given. There is, in a sense, not much point in defending that which we feel we are due but cannot receive except providentially by God's hand. By violence of some kind we can reach out and grasp at what we feel we deserve and in the process lose the very thing we felt was our due, and perhaps that simply proves we do not deserve the honor that we crave.

And if Jesus taught us that we are blessed if we are reviled and persecuted for bearing his name and having false things said about us then perhaps it is in part to tell us that what the world considers honor is not especially important. He spoke against those who prized the honored seats at synagogues. Those who seek honor for themselves or prize it have some opposition from the Lord. Those who do not seek it, paradoxically, receive it.

In the end one's reputation is only important in so much as Christ is revealed in it and beyond that it is of no value whatsoever. Certainly a person's reputation is of value but it can be valued in the wrong way. The Psalmist in various laments appeals to God as his vindicator even when he trusts he is blameless in a matter because he understood that the honor that comes from God is more valuable than the honor that comes from men, even if that latter honor is not entirely without some value among God's people. After all, he writes that the godly men and women of the land were heroes to him. But this is enough rambling on a topic.

editing music, part 4

Battling other things than dead printers this time, like updates that I couldn't get for my computer because the wi-fi wasn't working so well.

Been revisiting some of my favorite comics lately, Takahashi stuff, and mulling over how as a general leitmotif across her serialized work she explores what might easily be called the embarrassment of attachment, how we become more attached to people, places, and things than we are comfortable admitting to ourselves, let alone others. It's interesting (and since I'm talking about Rumiko Takahashi, hilarious) that she has gotten thirty years worth of mileage out of such a simple observation about the human condition.

But mainly I am also thinking about editing music scores and reading the Bible a bit, particularly 1 Peter, Isaiah, and the Psalms. I could write more but at this point I don't feel a need to.

the poem in the link is just too funny!

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=869

I'm sorry, I just couldn't help but laugh out loud reading this most awesome take-down of an author I'd often heard about but could never understand or appreciate. Maybe it's because I'm some kind of supralapsarian amillenial partial preterist TULIP with an affinity for Anglicans and Lutherans and Pentecostals? Meh, it's bedtime anyway.

music and writing

I've been not doing a ton of music writing but have been doing a lot of editing, editing, editing. Maybe fifty-five pages last weekend and twenty-one pages this weekend and all to the end of creating work that reads cleanly and neatly and makes sense.

This is the part about being a musician or composer that's least glamorous. There's just nothing cool about combing through every note and every articulation marking and every dynamic marking and every string indication and every stacatto or tenuto marking and every fingering indication for the left hand or the right hand, let alone dastardly ossia segments. But it's the stuff that needs to be done to make the score clear and sensible. One of my professors said to me that the most important thing for an artist is not to be understood but to ensure there is no misunderstanding. If a musician doesn't like my music that should be because the score makes sense, is easy to read, and the musician just doesn't dig it. If a musician doesn't understand what the score asks of him or her then the problem is all mine because they might really like my music if they could only read it clearly.

But it's something I've learned to appreciate not as an end unto itself but as a part of the process. I didn't have any significant formal music training as a kid. I was shown some basics of music and it just seemed silly to me when I was eight years old. I wasn't sure what the deal was with the notational conventions. In fact why public schools in my home town had music education almost seems like some nebulous pre ballot measure 5 Oregon for some reason. Maybe there's more music education out there than I've imagined.

Well, anyway, I have been thinking lately about art and perception lately, particularly after coming across this article:

http://www.slate.com/id/2175311/pagenum/all/#page_start

I think that Tom Wolfe was right to snipe that if he didn't have a theory of seeing he couldn't even see a painting, but Wolfe also didn't understand, perhaps, that he was justifiably making fun of that half of the truth taken too far but failing to grasp that that point was still half of the truth about art. Art is never just about the artist but the connection between the artist and audience. If you have no audience then there's no need to kowtow to them. But if you have no audience then who are you communicating to? God? Cool. Yourself, not quite so cool but still perfectly justifiable. Your husband or wife? Sure.

The old battle of aesthetic schools never goes away because each of them has part of what I consider to be the truth. There is such a thing as beauty that can be measured and defined in the world around us but there is variance, there are too many ways in which the world is ugly and beautiful for us to find one paradigm that exhausts all that beauty.

I suppose what I'm most thinking of when conservative Christians bemoan modernism in the art it's that they're only half right. They don't understand that artistic excellence is not JUST about aesthetic standards but about the cognitive moment of perception itself. Is art something you see out there or something you see from within yourself? It's pretty obviously both. If you don't look at the world around you, both the natural and man-made, and see beauty in that then the problem is not that there is no art around you but that you've done nothing to cultivate a perception of art in your mind.

In this respect it's easy for people to stop thinking like artists because they decide it's all been done, a la Ecclesiastes, and there's nothing new under the sun so stick with what works. That's why being finite and fallible is fun, because it means we can continually discover things WE haven't seen or heard or sensed or thought before. A principle can be expounded and expanded in all kinds of ways. If the old were intrinsically beneath enjoyment and if the old had no promise of new, as yet unexplored possibilities no one would stay married, ever, no one would keep in touch with their kids or parents to keep learning. The old renews itself and the new can meet us with the marks of familiarity.

I don't think we live in a time when the arts are at a loss because of consumerism or lack of aesthetic standard. I don't wish to live at any time earlier than where i am at now. I am grateful the Lord has given me the time and place to be a composer, a musician, even if I'm not in any way making a living at it. I am glad, though, to be able to write my music and blog a bit once in a while and have a sense of appreciation that things may sometimes be difficult or horrifying, even, but that Koholeth was right to say that a living dog is better than a dead lion because the dog is alive. It is better to stop a moment and recognize that all is a puff of air, a breath. Sure, I spent hours editing a bunch of music this weekend but that makes it fun to sit back and just lazily blog about it, too. It will be even more fun if someone likes my music enough to play it, let along record it or publish it. I'll just have to see how that goes.

as an amillenial partial preterist I find this amusing

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/horsey/viewbydate.asp?id=1650

Not that all social conservatives are dispensationalist but the ones with the most prominent roles in the team seem to be. I mean, really, does ANYONE who isn't already more than a little paranoid seriously consider any variation of Christian Reconstructionism or any variation of its adherents to be actually politically viable?

and these people are ... ?

This link I saw through BHT reminded me of how of these people I've even heard of

http://www.ecpa.org/elink/2007/09/authors.php

Alcorn, Randy C. (who?)
Alexander, Shaun (who?)
Arterburn, Stephen (who?)
Beers, Ron (who?)
Bell, Rob (who? not that late night radio guy is he?)
Blackaby, Henry T. (uh ...)
Brunstetter, Wanda E. (who?)
Chapman, Gary (uh ...)
Cloud, Henry (Boundaries dude, I actually have heard of this guy but never read him)
Colbert, Don (no relation to Stephen, I assume)
Collins, Brandilyn (uh ...)
Dekker, Ted (novelist, I've heard of this guy but never read him)
DeMoss, Nancy Leigh (who?)
Dungy, Tony (who?)
Eggerichs, Emerson (who?)
Eldredge, John (Wild at Heart dude, right?)
Ethridge, Shannon (uh ... )
Feldhahn, Shaunti (gender differences author that I've heard of because I've got married friends)
Gregory, David (uh ...)
Hagee, John (he's on TBN so I wish he had no publishing career)
Heavilin, Marilyn (no idea)
Henderson, Dee (no idea)
Hybels, Bill (heard of this guy but don't even remember why)
Jakes, T. D. (I wish I HADN'T heard of this guy)
Jeremiah, David (uh ... )
Kilgore, Kay Wheeler (Apocalypse Now is all that comes to mind)
Kingsbury, Karen (who?)
LaHaye, Tim (Battle for the Mind was a watered down reappropriation of Francis Schaeffer and I can't help but know about the Left Behind books even though I'm an amillenial partial preterist)
Lewis, Beverly (uh ... )
Lucado, Max (I've heard of this guy but don't recall ever reading anything by him)
MacArthur, John (Charismatic Chaos was crap research and he'll never live it down, ever, but I hear he's helpful to some folks)

McGraw, Robin (who?)
Meyer, Joyce (urm, can't say I'm a fan)
Miller, Donald (I know OF this guy but have never read him)
Moore, Beth (sounds familiar for reasons I don't recall)
Oke, Janette (who?)
Omartian, Stormie (who? cool sounding name though :) )
Osteen, Joel (never bothered to investigate this guy)
Piper, Don (no relation to John I assume)
Rice, Helen Steiner (who?)
Rivers, Francine (uh ... )
Rosenberg, Joel C. (uh ... )
Shepherd, Sheri Rose (never heard of them)
Strobel, Lee (read one or two books, light but interesting)
Warren, Rick (heard of him, never read him)
Weaver, Joanna (who?)
Wick, Lori (who?)
Yancey, Philip (lighter reading but some okay stuff).

See I guess I've been mainly reading Richard Bauckham, N. T. Wright, John Piper, Bonhoeffer, Augustine, John Stott, tiny bits of John Murray and stuff like that. And I've read me some Wayne Grudem and Gordon Fee. Most of these authors in the above list I've never even heard of before. The two most recent books I picked up are by Bauckham and Wright.

I guess I still consider myself evangelical but I'm just curious as to what these authors have their reputations built on and in the case of a couple of them I wonder what on earth makes them evangelical.

end of vacation

Well, I just wrapped up a vacation. It was mainly a vacation, honest, but I also made squeaky clean copies of a piece to send off to musicians. It's a sonata for oboe and guitar I wrote a few years ago and I just spruced up the full score and the part extractions for both instruments and they're ready to print and send in the mail. The total number of pages is fifty five and I feel like I just spent the better part of a weekend knocking these fifty five pages out to be ready for mailing. I'm glad I didn't get so delusional as to try editing the full score and parts for the other FIVE sonatas I thought I was going to edit over vacation. Editing unpublished scores of pieces I've written is not my day job ... at least not yet. We'll have to see if perhaps I can get to that point, though, where doing that might be part of my day job.

Man, no one tells you enough that the nastiest work isn't the music-writing itself but getting the stinking materials clean enough and readable enough to, as they have it, send it off to the engraver. Not that that's happening by a long shot but I speak figuratively. What's REALLY happening is I'm sending a sonata to a few interested parties because while I have the email addresses of someone in every oboe and guitar duo on the face of the earth (trust me, they aren't that numerous) I can't exactly hold my breath waiting for each and every (or any) given one of them to play my piece. That's not really how the music business would work, assuming it works.

Plus I've discovered that the time it takes between receipt of a score and actual work on it can be, well, spectacular. One ensemble got my sonata about two years ago and I honestly have no clue if they've looked at it. The other ensemble that has had my sonata for two years ago HAS looked at it and even played through a movement (cool!) but they're not sure how much longer they'll be playing as an ensemble so, unfortunately, I have to more or less write them off even though I'd love for them to be able to play through the piece. Obviously I'd think it's cool if ALL the oboe and guitar duos I've sent my music to get around to playing it but since I don't know which I can never be hurt by sending my music to anyone who might take an interest in it.

So much for Jude. I've just had other things going on. Having an actual social life has mitigated against some of the more ambituous writing and reading projects I've wanted to take on, which might be just as well. Before I bother to get into that whole exposition on child abuse in Eureka Seven I probably better actually finish watching the rest of the show to find out how it ends. Will probably be able to get to that when the last DVD comes out.