I have migrated

Because I have moved ministry settings and, in turn, have become a North Carolinian, I have migrated my virtual geography as well. I will be dwelling here from now on.

Are you ready for a Collision?

C.S. Lewis on masculinity

This quote is for every man out there who grew up wondering just exactly how to define masculinity. We had no Masculinity 101, no rites of passage, no Bible passage that clearly spells out a how-to-become-a-man recipe, no spiritual mentor to show us how to read between the lines to find instructions in masculinity, and only vague examples with very little (if any) explanation.  This is not to dishonor our fathers because they were in the same boat. After all, what man worth his salt wouldn’t want to train their sons in how to be a man… if they knew how?

So maybe this picture that Lewis paints will be our Masculine apocalypse.  Maybe one day when I grow up, I can be a knight, too.

“The knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs; he is also a demure, almost a maidenlike, guest in hall, a gentle, modest, unobtrusive man. He is not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth…”

…but…

“Knightly character is art not nature – something that needs to be achieved , not something that can be relied upon to happen.”

Is there such a thing as neutral ground?

Watch the first of several installments of Dr. Greg Bahnsen speak to a room of college-bound high school students about the intellectual battle they will be immersed in while at university and what they can do about preparing themselves.  Dr. Bahnsen went home to be with the LORD in the mid-1990’s, but is still a monumental figure in the area of defending Christian truth against the assaults of unbelief.

If you don’t want to wait for me to post the other videos, just go to youtube and search for “Bahnsen myth of neutrality”.

changing ministry settings

I have recently received a call to be the assistant pastor of a church in North Carolina, so, over the next several weeks/months I will be trying to re-orient the thrust of my blog to fit my new ministry context.  I have started with the title of the blog, which, if you haven’t noticed already, is “boat14nc” instead of the former “boat14va”.  I hope everyone will bear with me during this exciting transition time for my family and me.

A reunion of old friends

We have all read books or watched movies where good friends have had a falling out, traded embittered and hasty epithets, and been separated for many years.  But then something happens… something in the progression of life that reminds one of the other or reveals some great misunderstanding that has kept these friends separate, and they are brought back together again.  They might have to learn how to forgive, or be the first to step humbly forward and ask for forgiveness, or even find something new around which to rekindle the friendship.  But in any case, the barriers that were once high and thick between them are exacting too great of a price on both of them.  Their friendship is too precious to allow both to wither in separation.

I would propose that this is the story of science and the Christian faith.  Many modern day scientists see Christianity as a roadblock to an exuberant pursuit of scientific discovery and technological advance.  Many modern day Christians see science as the Great Atheist-Maker or a disease that is endemic to where on lives (like malaria) that must inoculated against in order to prevent infection.  But it was not always so.

An unconscionable federal healthcare reality

Here is an article by Congressman Ron Paul that gives us another reason to distrust (and be disgusted by) a big federal healthcare program.
The Immorality of Tax-Payer Funded Abortion

Review of Young, Restless, Reformed

How does a man visit six cities, interview everyone from the octagenarian J.I. Packer to nineteen year-old college Calvinists, cover church traditions from charismatic to seventh-day adventism, dip into the subcultures from deep south Bible-belters to postmodern Seattle hipsters, and then review it all in a coherent and engaging manner in less than 160 pages?  Well Collin Hansen, editor-at-large for Christianity Today has managed to do so in his Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist’s Journey with the New Calvinists (2008).

The way I see it, Hansen’s book divides loosely into 4 sections and are as follows:

• Chapter 1-3 … From John to Jonathan (Piper to Edwards that is)

• Chapter 4 … Battle for the heart of Baptist America

• Chapter 5-6 … Winsome Charis-Calvinism

• Chapter 7 … The Reformed Shock-jock

In chapters 1-3, Hansen starts with the Calvinist fruit that he finds, namely those young college and barely-not-undergraduates who’s hearts have been turned upsidedown by a God who won’t be tamed.  Hansen shows quite well how these young Calvinists are captivated, not initially by tightly argued theological systems, but by an empassioned, Christ-saturated beauty.  It seems that a younger generation has little patience for the Jesus-is-my-buddy pathos of their parents’ traditions and are in turn drawn to the gravity and joy that accompanies a full-bodied, unapologetic embrace of God’s sovereignty.  Hansen quotes John Piper (author of Desiring God and a staple at the ever-popular Passion conferences) as saying, “They’re not going to embrace your theology unless it makes their hearts sing” (p.17).

The Honest Atheist

In an age when it appears that public truth boils down to whoever has the best spin doctors, it’s comforting to know that there are some atheists who are publicly honest about the philosophical dividing lines between their worldview when compared to Christianity.  When atheists and Christians alike try to obfuscate or blur the lines of division between the opposing worldviews, then each side becomes suspicious that the other side is trying some intellectual hocus pocus on the other.  This suspicion quickly retreats into either public shouting matches (“We’ve got truth. Yes we do. We’ve got truth how ’bout you?”) or sectarian bigotry (“He’s obviously wrong because he listens to NPR”).  When public debate and discussion devolves to this point, very little can be said.  Chesterton likened this way of public discourse to walking near a cliff in a fog.  On a clear day, a man will walk right up to the edge of the cliff because he can see the exact point where gravity would take effect to his detriment.  But in a fog, a man will stay a hundred yards from the edge of a cliff because the dividing line between safety and a full-body cast has been obscured.  So in that spirit, I salute the following atheists (both living and deceased) for their public honesty concerning Darwinian evolution and what it has to say about who we are and what we should or should not believe.

“…matter is the ground of all existence; mind, spirit, and God as well, are just words that express the wondrous results of neuronal complexity.”  –Stephen Jay Gould, paleontologist

“…man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.”  George Gaylord Simpson, Harvard paleontologist

“Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion—a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality. I am an ardent evolutionist and an ex-Christian, but I must admit in this one complaint. . . the literalists [i.e., creationists] are absolutely right. Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today.”  Dr. Michael Ruse, author of Taking Darwin Seriously, Darwinism Defended, and a contributing author to The Companion to Ethics 

“Morality . . . is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends. . .  In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate.” -Michael Ruse

Commenting on how helping the poor, healing the sick, caring for the mentally ill, and inoculating people against small pox affects natural selection, the father of evolution wrote, “No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.” — Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

The Devil’s Dictionary continued…

I have been enamored for many years with Ambrose Bierce’s satirical lexicon The Devil’s Dicitionary in which he redefines words with a slightly sarcastic and sometimes darker meaning. So here are a couple that I have either picked from forgotten sources or created myself. Feel free to chime in with your own “devilish” definitions and look for future additions.

expectations: (n) premeditated disappointments

control: (n) a pleasant illusion granted by the Lord for brief periods of time. It is only claimed to be truly possessed by fools and the insane.