Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

p>Three Hierarchies makes the nice point that if you look closely, the Bible does not say that God directly created animals and plants, just that He created the earth, and that spontaneous generation– as opposed to God having created all living things directly— was long accepted by Christians and everyone else. It was only in the 1800’s that scientists showed that life comes from life, so that the origins of life became a puzzle: (more…)

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Peter Wilkensen preached on the Parable of the Sower at St. Ebbes today. Tho it was not his point, something new that struck me was that the wheat from the seed that falls among thorns does not die, as does that from the seed that falls on stony places. Rather, it is “unfruitful”. Presumably it lives, but so shaded from the sun by the distraction of the thorny weeds that it lives and dies naturally, but without fruit. This is quite different from the fate of the seed in the stones, but perhaps even sadder.

Here are the thorn texts from Matthew, followed by the text in full:

13:7 And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprung up, and choked them:

13:22 He also that received seed among the thorns is he that heareth the word; and the care of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, choke the word, and he becometh unfruitful.

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I notice something interesting from passages in Hebrews preached on at St. Ebbe’s today. Hebrews 2 has Jesus saying words that are from Psalms and Isaiah, and that the Holy Ghost said Psalm 95. These passages are more relevant to the issue of the internal claims to authority of scripture than the famous Timothy “God-breathed” passage so often quoted. Here is the first passage: (more…)

Luther was right to focus on indulgences as a sign of the corruption in the Roman Catholic Church, not because indulgences were being sold for moeny for improper purposes, but because the very idea of indulgences elevates works over faith and imputes cruelty to God and to the Church. The idea of an indulgence is that the Church can make a special offer that if I perform action X within time period Y, I will spend Z fewer years in Purgatory having my sins punished. This presupposes that the Atonement on the Cross was insufficient atonement for sins– they need to be punished by Purgatory too and in fact our sins are small enough that Purgatory is sufficient punishment. It builds on that to say that some relatively trivial actions while living– say, visiting a shrine– can atone for sins that were bad enough to need years of suffering in Purgatory. That becomes true only because the Church (delegated by God) gives a special allowance, however, which leads to the final implication: the Church (and God) could wipe out all the sufferig in Purgatory with no harm to the universe, yet it chooses not to.

The Roman Catholic church very much still believes in indulgences and offers them now and then. Here a story about a recent one. “Spiritual gift for Catholics in Phila. Archdiocese is offering plenary indulgences” says:

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What pleasures are good? One way to address the question is to ask:

“What pleasures bring us closer to God, and what pleasures take us further away?”

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A church constitution is useful for two things:

1. To resolve disputes over authority (if everybody agrees, it doesn’t matter what the constitution is— so design the constitution for when there is bitter disagreement). Don’t design a constitution for when the church is going well- design it for when people are behaving badly.

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We used this in Buffalo Rock State Park with 6
adults and 6 children around a picnic table. (more…)

The Far Left has a desire to suppress free speech that is ominous, in view of the authoritarian state that we would have if a party like the Greens ever won office. See this article about how a Green leader in Australia wants to punish Cardinal Pell for his views: (more…)

A readable e-version of the Book of John (English Standard Version) can be found here.

A good question. One might ask it about many cultures. This article in the American Spectator talks about it, not very usefully, but I’m glad it raised the question. Judaism and Christianity have humor even in the Scriptures, and the Vikings, Greeks, and Romans did. I’m not sure about ancient China, but certainly modern China does. How about the Mahabharata? Traditional Africans joke. People living under Communism joked. American Indians joked. Puritans and monks joked. (I of course do not mean that people don’t object to certain kinds of humor. Hardly anybody likes jokes made at their own expense. The question is whether *any* humor is allowed.) It would be amazing if Moslems, even Wahabis, did not joke, but maybe Islamists do try to suppress humor, as it seems feminists do, perhaps fearing it will be used against them.

What I liked best from the American Spectator article was this joke:

When I first saw the T-shirts and bumper stickers featuring Islamic Rage Boy and the caption “My child beheaded your honor student,” I got a chuckle out of it.

This is funny because one can imagine an Islamist wearing such a t-shirt proudly and without realizing the grim humor. Perhaps it would be “My children will behead your honor student,” though. Or, if I wanted to make a demographic point, it would be “My ten children will behead your honor student”.

For my small group at church, we are reading a Richard Foster book of excerpts. One (which by the way Foster rearranges without telling us) is excerpts from John Wesley’s sermon, THE FIRST FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT. It is a sermon worth pondering, on the topic of the effect of a Christian’s sins. His past sins are imputed to Christ and bear no condemnation, all agree. But what about present sins? And what about self-condemnation?

One thing I realized from this sermon is that when people talk of Wesleyan “perfectionism” as the idea that a Christian can avoid all sin, that can perhaps be true if “sin” is defined, as Wesley does below, to exclude inward and “involuntary” sin. It is a lax standard.

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Gary North has a book up on the web titled, CROSSED FINGERS How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church:

Presbyterian modernists had to deal with sanctions. This required a theory of sanctions. This theory was applied ad hoc, and it seems to have been developed ad hoc. It was a three-stage position after the McCune trial (1878): (1) evade negative institutional sanctions (1878-1900); (2) seek positive institutional sanctions (1901-1933); (3) deploy negative institutional sanctions (1934-1936).

Doug Wilson has wise things to say about the similarity between liberalism and evangelicalism:

The similarities between modern evangelicalism and liberalism are striking. Both emphasize an experience with Christ over the truth about Christ. Throughout history, some of course have made the opposite error, that of holding to bare propositions instead of holding rightly to the truth — but in our century few have gone in that direction. Our tendency is to exalt personal experience over dogma. Indeed, I at first hesitated to use the word dogma because in today’s climate, it is a dirty word. Taking all this together, I like to tell people that Christianity is not a relationship; it is a religion. Of course it is a religion with a covenant relationship at the heart of it. God promises to be our God, and we will be His people. But the liberal (and modern evangelical) emphasis is on what we are pleased to call a personal relationship (meaning private relationship) — and not the biblical notion of a public covenant relationship. When the relationship becomes “personal,” the truth that undergirds it becomes equally “personal.”

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The Catholic Encyclopedia says:

“Another statute, of the first year of William and Mary, prohibited Catholics from residing within ten miles of London…

In 1700 an Act was passed which, Sir Erskine May observes, “cannot be read without astonishment”. It incapacitated every Roman Catholic from inheriting or purchasing land, unless he abjured his religion upon oath…

Concerning this Act of William III Hallam remarks, “So unprovoked, so unjust a persecution is the disgrace of the Parliament that passed it.” But he goes on to add, “The spirit of Liberty and tolerance was too strong for the tyranny of the law and this statute was not executed according to its purpose. The Catholic landholders neither renounced their religion nor abandoned their inheritance. The judges put such constructions upon the clause of forfeiture as eluded its efficiency.” No doubt this is generally true. But as Charles Butler tells us in his “Historical Memoirs” (London, 1819-21), “in many instances the laws which deprived Catholics of their landed property were enforced.” He adds that “in other respects they were subject to great vexation and contumely”. They were a very small and very unpopular minority in an age when a common creed was regarded, in every European country, as the chief bond of civil polity and dissidents from it were more or less rigorously repressed. As a matter of fact, it is to a great English magistrate that we owe the ruling which placed an almost insuperable difficulty in the way of the tribe of informers. At the trial of the Rev. James Webb on the 25th of June, 1768, at Westminster, at the suit of a notorious common informer named Payne, Lord Mansfield told the jury that the defendant could not be condemned “unless there were sufficient proof of his ordination”. Such proofs, of course, were not forthcoming. Lord Mansfield, as Charles Butler relates in his above-mentioned “Historical Memoirs”, discountenanced the prosecution of Catholic priests and took care that the accused should have every advantage that the form of proceedings, or the letter or spirit of the law, could allow. And at that period the same temper animated English judges generally….

In this year, 1778, the first Catholic Relief Act was passed. It repealed the worst portions of the Statute of 1699 above mentioned, and set forth a new oath of allegiance which a Catholic could take without denying his religion.

Pastor Doug Wilson says:

… Hitchens is unlike other atheist writers in his ability to write. But in one sad fact, he is just like them. He is morally indignant. Instead of taking refuge in the (comparatively) strong fortress of nihilistic relativism, and laughing at all the poor blinkered dopes who still think that truth and beauty are still ambulatory in this sorry world, Hitchens (like all these other recently published guys) calls us and raises us ten. “You have puritanical indignation at our unbelief? Well, watch this.” And the atheist, a complex chemical reaction according to the best contemporary science, uncorks with scathing observations on the hypocrisies of other complex chemical reactions. Hitchens does this in the first five lines of his book, and shows no sign of letting up. Given his premises, it is like being indignant with a tornado, or vegetable soup, or sand on the beach — but Hitchens does it. They all do it.

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I was just reading some old posts on patristics at Professor Atwood’s Three Hierarchies that sparked some thoughts. It is common for people to want to rely on the early Church as an example. This is done in two ways. The churches of Rome and Greece argue that the early Church was pure and passed down those pure traditions across the ages. Some Protestants argue that the early Church was pure and we should figure out what it did and return to those pure practices.

Both are wrong, because their premise is wrong. Why should we think the early Church was pure? Why should we think that it knew good doctrine or practice any better than we do now? Why should we think that its members behaved better than we do now?

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I’ve just decided to learn the Lord’s Prayer in Greek. Here is an excellently designed site made just for that purpose, with the Greek text, Roman-letter pronunciation, MP3s, and grammar notes.

I was very tempted just to learn it in Latin, which has great historical and literary value, but that isn’t really any more relevant than learning it in Swahili.

I enjoyed the Christianity Today debate between Hitchens and Wilson because my guy was winning, but Hitchens was too easy a target. He embarassed himself by misunderstanding The Good Samaritan and he apparently hadn’t ever asked himself about the basis for his moral opinions, which he thinks are both self-evident and universally shared.

Here’s what he should have said to defend his position, an argument harder to attack. (I cross post this as a comment on Wilson’s blog, BLog and Mablog)

“Human morality is the result of evolution. We all share brain wiring that makes us feel guilty when we murder our fathers, steal from our sisters, and lie out of pure malice. Therefore, a human is well advised not to do these things. That is why I call them immoral. Also, our wiring makes us feel happy in condemning them, so I do.

I admit that our hard-wired morality won’t take us as far as I’d like. I can’t really say that infanticide or genocide are wrong, because too many people do these things without guilt, if the context is right. Our innate morality is designed for small groups of hunter-gatherers. But on top of that, we have the norms of our society, and the laws. My parents taught me to feel guilty if I stole even from strangers, plus I might get caught, so I don’t do it. Someone from India might well disagree, but I will cheerfully stand by my society’s principles and condemn him to other people in my society, at least. That’s fine for keeping me happy, even if it’s not universal.”

That argument require admissions of relativism and lack of personal autonomy, but it’s an argument, which Hitchens didn’t have. Also, I’m afraid that it does cause a collapse of the silly side Hitchens is defending in the debate, that Christianity has been bad for the world. A lot of his morality is society-linked, not universally human. His problem is that as a moralistic atheist, he really ought to concede that Christianity is a huge influence on his personal notion of morality and that Christianity’s influence is why he prefers the moral climate in England to that Iraq or India. His preferences (as I imagine they are) for things like equality, truth, respect for human life, and democracy are not universal.