How will the world judge God
when given the opportunity?

For God does know that in the day you eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. (Genesis 3:5)

You shall have no other gods before me. (Exodus 20:3)

Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I said, you are gods’?” (John 10:34)

The aim of the testing of Adam was to qualify him to be a co-regent with God. Rich Bledsoe argues that the question of God’s existence is not ontological but ethical at heart. History is Man’s attempt to either eradicate God’s rule, or to make God co-regent with Man.

The account given of the creation and subsequent fall of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis shows the beginning of ethical selfism. Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit, and God refers to them as those who have come to know good and evil. What this means is that they now have fallen away from knowing the will of God, and of being able to obey it, and they have now, like God, become the authors of morality. They themselves will be the determiners of what is good and of what is evil. Their own selves become the source, and this is now thrust upon them. From that time forward, the creation of morality will be an onerous, and impossible, human burden.

The modern world is now far more self-consciously “selfist” than the world was five minutes after the fall, and more so than it was in Jesus’ own day. The seed if implication has been developing over time. And just as selfism leads to darkness in regard to the very possibility of self-knowledge or of any knowledge of the world, it also leads to darkness in regard to actions that are good, and actions that are bad. The assumption behind human ethics now is that the world and humanity are self-complete without reference to God, and this always leads to self-looping vicious circles in regard to human actions, because humanity is not self-complete, but pretends that it is. We are saddled with this as a curse, but generally speaking, the human race understands it as its own highest glory.

…the Bible indicates that inquiries into the existence of God are never neutral theoretical musings. They rather always have a particular ethical edge about them. They are interrogations, and have the character of accusation about them. The deepest intention of questioning the existence of God is not ontological; rather, it is ethical. There is something prior to the question of existence, and the existence question is clouded. If I am god, and my determinations are final, then it is simply impossible for the God of the Bible to be God, or for Jesus to be God. The ethical accusation is that God is unjust, and has no right to be God since this is now my office. If he exists, then his sheer existence is blasphemy. If he exists, then he is my enemy. It is necessary either to mute his existence and remake him as less than the almighty God of the Bible, one who is smaller, who is satisfied to, at best, co-exist with me, or it is the case that he simply does not exist. If he does exist as the almighty God of the Bible, then this brings confusion and dissonance. If I cannot dismiss him, then I must accuse him. Dismissal is actually accusation, and in all likelihood there is a veering back and forth between the two. The mindset of fallenness is double-mindedness. In all cases, it is necessary to take things into one’s own hands, and become one’s own god determining good and evil for oneself.

Interestingly, God seems to take a step back and allow us to do just that. He says that he will give us a great privilege. He will allow us to create a law, and then he will judge us by that law. Whatever judgments we bring to those around us will become the same standard of judgment that he will test us by. We have accused God of being an unjust judge. So God allows the privilege, and lets us determine our own standard. Hence, Aristotle will be judged by his own golden mean, Kant by his own categorical imperative, Sartre, who wanted to legislate for the entire world in his every decision, will be judged in the same way. In other words, it is a very dangerous thing to have the very power of determining both good and evil; it is fraught with terrible ironies. Jesus warned us about this in one of the most misused and misunderstood of all biblical texts. “Judge not, that ye might not be judged” (Matt. 7:1). The modern world quotes this often as a biblical justification for complete ethical tolerance, but it means exactly what it ways. You will be judged as you judge, and we have now all had this burden inescapably thrust upon us.

…There is a further step to this quandary. Even beyond being judged by our own standards, God has said that he will even permit us to judge him. As a race, we have declared him “out of court.” We have determined that he is unjust. As we judge God, we too shall be judged, for we have declared that we are gods. “On that day when, according to my Gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus” (Rom 2:16). Jesus, who is the very word of God, was handed over to men to be judged. How will the world judge God when given the opportunity? Our judgment of him was self-damning. Here the reality of the divine law connects with the reality/unreality of man’s self-created law. On what basis of self-made law was Jesus crucified? Jesus was condemned because he claimed to be God, and because he claimed to be the true source of the judgment of good and evil. This was called blasphemy, and for this he was put to death. If this same standard is brought against his accusers, what is the result? It can only be death, for each judge tacitly made exactly the same claim. If you claim that God deserves to die because he claims to be God, then you too deserve to die because you make the same claim.

The result is that every god will damn himself and every mouth will be stopped, and all secrets will be judged by Christ Jesus.

Excerpts from Richard Bledsoe, Can Saul Alinsky Be Saved? Jesus Christ in the Obama and post-Obama Era, 26-31.

Those who “freed science from Moses” rejected true science.

One of the most underrated aspects of theology is the importance to God of legal witness. Not only is it rarely spoken about in evangelical circles but it is rarely mentioned as an answer to the scientistic objections of the day.

[This post has been refined and included in Sweet Counsel: Essays to Brighten the Eyes.]

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If there is a God, and there is, then atheism did not free our thinking. Atheism has a closed mind concerning anything beyond its own nose. Thus, rather than furthering the cause of science, it is more likely that it has a stranglehold on it.

The gifted minds of the new atheists were gifts from Christianity. As the Spirit of God vacates Western Culture, so does the “Word.” Our children become confused, illiterate, and incapable of logical thought. According to Bojidar Marinov, we are already seeing atheism’s effects in the field of mathematics.

In Math Education: Toward a Trinitarian Model, Marinov writes:

James Nickel’s book, Mathematics: Is God Silent?, is the only non-fiction book that I have read three times from cover to cover… it talks about mathematics from the perspective of the Trinity, the very foundation of the Biblical worldview. The two make an exciting combination, as far as I am concerned.

Nickel’s main point in his book is this: Mathematics is not neutral. Our view of mathematics depends on our general worldview; and therefore our understanding and development of mathematics depend on our worldview.

Different cultures do not have the same view of mathematics, neither do they have the same mathematics or math education. The partial successes of civilizations in history in the development of mathematics were due to the partial consistency of their religious worldviews with the Biblical worldview. But when those pagan worldviews grew epistemologically self-conscious and reached the point of final antithesis with the Christian worldview, mathematics reached a dead end.

The rationalistic Greeks and the pragmatic Romans are among the many examples. Other examples abound in the Muslim world, India, China, and other civilizations. It is only when Christendom consistently developed and applied the Trinitarian model to the fields of knowledge, science, and education, the world saw its first revolution in scientific advance and educational development.

Consequently, with the loss of the Biblical worldview in the West, mathematical thought and education gradually lost the momentum they had inherited from the Christian centuries. The old models of learning and education – rationalist and pragmatic, “Greek” and “Roman” – crept back in, and mathematics once again reached a dead end, and children come out of school ignorant about mathematics.

The ultimate question of any worldview and any philosophy is this: Is the world essentially “one,” or is it essentially “many”? Is unity or plurality ultimate? Is there an underlying reality that transcends all individuality and diversity, or is diversity reigning supreme, with no existing or recognizable patterns or principles that govern reality? The answer to this question will give us the answer to the foundation of our philosophy of math education.

Ed Harris then made some optimistic, if slightly wild, comments, but I think he’s right. Any “inspired” advance Man has made has been a gift of the Spirit of God. If we are faithful, Jesus will give us the keys. Here’s a few grabs.

Atheism is the closing of the mind. And yet atheism (I believe) has had a stranglehold on deeper understandings of the universe.

I believe that astounding breakthroughs await us in science. I have a hunch that our vision of the universe is limited by our theology…

Put bluntly, scientists cannot even talk like there is a real God in the equation without being threatened (read about Intelligent Design some time – or watch “Intelligence Not Allowed”).

Despite the incredible “J curve” of advances over the past century, and even the past five years (especially when it comes to pacemakers!), if it isn’t already, atheism and its trappings will very soon be holding us back.

“I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.” — Richard Dawkins

Well, there’s one statement I don’t understand, unless Mr Dawkins means every religion except Christianity. Modern science was born of a distinctly Christian worldview. This next quote is one I understand to a point, but only because Mr Dawkins has a broken worldview.

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” — Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion.

I can understand this coming from someone raised in a Christian culture, where humanism has become secular. The values of the Law of Moses are still recognizable (compared to, say, certain tribes where young females’ teeth are knocked out so they don’t look like pigs, or Asian cultures where graveyards are guarded by malevolent ancestral spirits.) The problem with a humanism that is secular is its failure to take the existence and nature of sin into account, and to comprehend that a cultural awareness that sin needed to be dealt with was what made our great culture possible. Secular humanism requires superhumans, and the only truly super humans are Christians, those governed internally by the Law of God.

Jealous and proud of it
God is jealous as a husband is jealous for his wife and his children. This is not a difficult concept to understand, unless of course you intend to slander God, and hope none of your sycophants reads Bible passages in context.

Petty
The Old Testament Laws are very detailed, and the details mattered. However, the Law included a “when you sin” clause. The sins that were punished severely were the “high-handed” ones, where the sinners had not been led astray but openly, deliberately, repeatedly rebelled against what they knew.

Unjust
God is entirely just in the Old Testament. Certainly, Israel in the wilderness (and later, but particularly in the wilderness) was an object lesson to the nations, and to nations for all time. As a “childish” nation, when they sinned, they were spanked immediately. This is not the case once they were in the Land. But in no case is God ever unjust.

Unforgiving control-freak
Neither is God unforgiving. Israel knew what they signed up for. They said, “Amen” to the blessings and the curses of the Covenant. Then they directly went and sinned. The Jews who crucified Jesus made a similar Covenant with Pilate: “Let His blood be upon us and upon our children.” Jesus forgave them, but those who hardened their hearts like Pharaoh bore the curses. Josephus tells us what happened to their children. They were free to obey the gospel or disobey, as Israel was in the wilderness. Now, one might say, “What about the other nations?” Judgment begins at the house of God. The light exposes the darkness in God’s people first of all. We are given “sacramental doses of death” to keep us alive and able to minister. But the cup given to the godless nations is not a dose, it is a tsunami. Where are the Canaanites today? The Babylonians? All the great nations, and the up-and-coming ones, since Christ, have had this purifying yeast of God’s people within them.

Vindictive
God takes vengeance on the unrighteous. He waits for people — usually corrupt leaders — to fill up their sins, then moves in to rescue the oppressed. Yes, this is vindictive. God avenges the shedding of innocent blood. The reason Dawkins and his ilk can think of God as vindictive is because He is currently working in the nations like yeast, behind the scenes, as prefigured in the books of Esther. But we all know how Esther ended, don’t we?

A bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser
This one is laughable. Abraham proclaimed the Lord to the Canaanites, then God gave them 400 years to fill up their sins. Their execution under Israel’s sword was no different to the retribution in Egypt for the slaughter of Hebrew infants. It was judicial. And atheists who parrot “controversial” Bible verses like these seem to overlook the fact that God used Babylon to wipe out old Israel for their own bloodthirsty decadence. Only, Israel rose again.

Misogynistic
Dawkins — and moderns — don’t understand the different liturgical stations of men and women and what they image. Science can tell us what things are made of, but it cannot tell us what they are for. Nature is a feast, and moderns think a knife and a fork are the same thing. On top of this, which nations are the ones which do not mistreat women? Christian ones. Which people in Christian nations show a contempt for women (though often disguised)? Those who hate the Bible, hate God and despise His Christ.

Homophobic
I don’t think God fears gays any more than He fears liars, adulterers, murderers, shoplifters and the rest of us lawless bunch. He tells us that these things are destructive. Certain sins carried the death penalty in Israel because it was a church-state. The Jews did not have this power after the exile. The church only has the power to excommunicate. But the testimony remains that these sins are the serious ones because they are the most destructive, and they bring a culture to an end.

Racist
God split humanity in two when He called Abraham. In a sense, Adam was torn into church and state, to be united, married, by the Spirit of Christ. The bloodline was important only until the Christ, the promised Seed. Race was not the issue. Covenant was the issue. And the New Covenant multicultural people of God was promised and prefigured many times in the Old Testament — that is, if we are not so blinded by our hatred for God that we don’t understand what He was doing.

Infanticidal
Alright, the Lord asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. But He also stopped him from doing it. He was testing Abraham’s faith in God’s promise that all nations (there it is again) would be blessed through Isaac. Abraham obviously believed God would raise Isaac from the dead if He had to. He was, at one level, probably excited to see what God would do next. By this time, he had plenty of experiences with God to bolster his faith. He trusted him implicitly.
In Egypt, God’s “murder” of the firstborn was judicial, a payback for the Hebrew infants. And the Lord gave Pharaoh plenty of warning, didn’t He?

Genocidal
I suppose this is the Canaanites again. If we could send Mr Dawkins back in time to live with the Canaanites, he might understand why they were being cut out of history like a cancer. And we know the cancer spread to Israel. In Judges, God allows Israel to suffer under the nations whose gods they had worshipped, to get a better understanding of why this was prohibited. The God of the Bible is not anything like these false gods.

Filicidal
See Homophobic and Genocidal above.

Pestilential
The results of obedience or disobedience are “multitudes.” The choice is plunder or plagues. God plagued Egypt and Israel plundered Egypt. God plagued Satan’s house at the cross and Jesus is plundering his house. Atheism is thus a temporary pestilence.

Megalomaniacal
Megalomania: A psychopathological condition characterized by delusional fantasies of wealth, power, or omnipotence. Richard Dawkins vs. God. What can I say?

Sadomasochistic
It please Abraham to circumcise his household. It was a “sacramental dose of death.” It chased the Covenant curses away. It pleased the Father to bruise the Son. It pleased Him because it was a purchase. Most people could understand this even if they chose not to believe it. Only someone who was seriously deluded could misunderstand it.

Capricious
Yes, God changes His mind. He fully intended to destroy Nineveh, but then they repented. Some of these issues are purely historical-Covenantal. God forbade Israel’s eating of certain foods, but then He changed His mind. Childhood object lessons were over. Dad says you can’t travel on the train to the city on your own, but when you turn 16 he changes his mind. This is not caprice. It is parenting.

Malevolent
God has a long fuse, but He has a fuse nonetheless. The reason Jesus is my Saviour is because I needed saving from something called God’s just wrath. As someone wise put it, the real wonder is not that God sometimes lashes out and kills people, it’s that He doesn’t do it all the time.

Bully
How is this bad? Oh, wait.

Because he has believed the modern fiction, Mr Dawkins has God all wrong. Anyone actually familiar with God knows this very well. He claims to be a humanist, but he has misclassified humanity. By advocating the removal of the curses of God, he removes the blessings. Ours is a culture without hope, focussed on the short term, and unable to understand the Covenantal nature of reality.

Dawkins’ rage against God has inspired many people to be more vocal about their atheism, but he and they will all discover that the longevity of his ideas is a fantasy. The Dawkins meme has the logic of the darkened Adamic mind. It pontificates about God’s behaviour, and ends up as bones spread under the sun, moon and stars. The Jesus meme has the quickening Spirit of resurrection. It aligns our behaviour with God’s, whose followers become the sun, moon and stars.

God doesn’t fear atheism. Neither should we.

“If your eschatology sees something other than the progressive growth and universal influence of the Kingdom of God in time and history, the success and triumph of the Great Commission, then you’d better stop drinking the Kool-Aid.” George Shubin

That was my friend George’s comment after reading this article by George Weigel from First Things.

For 27 years, the International Bulletin of Missionary Research has published an annual “Status of Global Mission” report, which attempts to quantify the world Christian reality, comparing Christianity’s circumstances to those of other faiths, and assaying how Christianity’s various expressions are faring when measured against the recent (and not-so-recent) past. The report is unfailingly interesting, sometimes jarring, and occasionally provocative.

The provocation in the 2011 report involves martyrdom. For purposes of research, the report defines “martyrs” as “believers in Christ who have lost their lives, prematurely, in situations of witness, as a result of human hostility.” The report estimates that there were, on average, 270 new Christian martyrs every 24 hours over the past decade, such that “the number of martyrs [in the period 2000-2010] was approximately 1 million.” Compare this to an estimated 34,000 Christian martyrs in 1900.

As for the interesting, try the aggregate numbers. According to the report, there will be, by mid-2011, 2,306,609,000 Christians of all kinds in the world, representing 33 percent of world population—a slight percentage rise from mid-2000 (32.7 percent), but a slight percentage drop since 1900 (34.5 percent). Of those 2.3 billion Christians, some 1.5 billion are regular church attendees, who worship in 5,171,000 congregations or “worship centers,” up from 400,000 in 1900 and 3.5 million in 2000.

These 2.3 billion Christians can be divided into six “ecclesiastical megablocks”: 1,160,880,000 Catholics; 426,450,000 Protestants; 271,316,000 Orthodox; 87,520,000 Anglicans; 378,281,000 “Independents” (i.e., those separated from or unaffiliated with historic denominational Christianity); and 35,539,000 “marginal Christians” (i.e., those professing off-brand Trinitarian theology, dubious Christology, or a supplementary written revelation beyond the Bible).

Compared to the world’s 2.3 billion Christians, there are 1.6 billion Muslims, 951 million Hindus, 468 million Buddhists, 458 million Chinese folk-religionists, and 137 million atheists, whose numbers have actually dropped over the past decade, despite the caterwauling of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Co. One cluster of comparative growth statistics is striking: As of mid-2011, there will be an average of 80,000 new Christians per day (of whom 31,000 will be Catholics) and 79,000 new Muslims per day, but 300 fewer atheists every 24 hours.

Africa has been the most stunning area of Christian growth over the past century. There were 8.7 million African Christians in 1900 (primarily in Egypt, Ethiopia and South Africa); there are 475 million African Christians today and their numbers are projected to reach 670 million by 2025. Another astonishing growth spurt, measured typologically, has been among Pentecostals and charismatics: 981,000 in 1900; 612,472,000 in 2011, with an average of 37,000 new adherents every day—the fastest growth in two millennia of Christian history.

As for the quest for Christian unity: There were 1,600 Christian denominations in 1900; there were 18,800 in 1970; and there are 42,000 today.

Other impressive numbers: $545 billion is given to Christian causes annually, which comes out to $1.5 billion per day. There are some 600 million computers in Christian use, up from 1,000 in 1970. 71,425,000 Bibles will be distributed this year, and some 2 billion people will tune in at least once a month to Christian radio or television. 7.1 million books about Christianity will be published this year, compared to 1.8 million in 1970.

The big lesson of the 2011 Status of Global Mission report can be borrowed from Mark Twain’s famous crack about his alleged death: Reports of Christianity’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. Christianity may be waning in Western Europe, but it’s on an impressive growth curve in other parts of the world, including that toughest of regions for Christian evangelism, Asia. Indeed, the continuing growth of Christianity as compared to the decline of atheism (in absolute numbers, and considering atheists as a percentage of total world population) suggests the possibility that the vitriolic character of the New Atheism—displayed in all its crudity prior to Pope Benedict’s September 2010 visit to Great Britain—may have something to do with the shrewder atheists’ fear that they’re losing, and the clock is running.

That’s something you’re unlikely to hear reported in the mainstream media. The numbers are there, however, and the numbers are suggestive.

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

Hence are we called atheists. And we confess that we are atheists, so far as gods of this sort are concerned, but not with respect to the most true God, the Father of righteousness and temperance and the other virtues, who is free from all impurity. Justin Martyr (103-165), First Apology VI

I should like to propose a thesis that may seem somewhat unlikely for a Christian theologian: namely, that the atheists are right.

Or, at least some of them are. Insofar as they contend against the existence of God, or attack the authenticity of the Bible, or pit faith against reason, I would say they are badly mistaken.

But there is another form of atheism, which Professor Merold Westphal of Fordham University calls ‘the atheism of suspicion’. This form of atheism is represented by the works of those great nineteenth and early twentieth century figures Nietzsche, Freud, Marx and to some extent Darwin (or at least, his descendants). The work of these scholars serves to expose the bad conscience of much religious belief.

They were less interested in evidence than in motives. In their different ways they believed that they could undermine belief in religious propositions by showing that believing often served less than pure ends. As Westphal puts it, “Its target is not the proposition but the person who affirms it, not the belief but the believer.”

Continue reading…

“The entire free world could be shipwrecked by a teleprompter.”

I remember Carl Sagan commenting on the oddness of books, a collation of leaves covered in squiggles, in symbols. This is only odd if you are a godless fool (biblically defined) whose worldview is entirely at odds with reality.

Sadly this applies to many Christians, who have compromised the foundations of their faith, and pass this corruption on in many Bible colleges.

Man makes symbols because God makes symbols. Man is God’s symbol, God’s logo, pointing to God. Man chose to become a defaced symbol and made bad symbols. God became man to point man back to God, to restore the image. Redemption is the high art of the Logos. It is the men without true symbols who are weak, who are, in the end, less-than-men, men with symbols that mean nothing, despite the chaos and carnage they create in the meantime. James Jordan writes:

The study of symbolism is seen by some as a curiosity, rather far removed from the central matters of life. Anyone who spends time studying Biblical symbolism may well be getting into a “dangerous” area. Persons who engage in an “overly symbolic” interpretation of Scripture are to be regarded with suspicion. What matters is the study of reality; symbolism is secondary.

From the Biblical point of view, however, the reverse is the case. Symbolism is more important than anything else for the life of man. Since this is a manifesto, let me repeat that statement in italics: Symbolism is more important than anything else for the life of man. Anyone who does not understand this has yet fully come to grips with the philosophy of Cornelius Van Til, or more importantly, with the biblical doctrine of creation.

How can I write this so confidently? Simple. The doctrine of creation means that every created item, and also the created order as a whole, reflects the character of the God Who created it. In other words, everything in the creation, and the creation as a whole, points to God. In short, everything is a sign or symbol of God. The idea that everything is a symbol of God, His character, nature, ways, etc., is the foundation stone of the philosophy of Cornelius Van Til. The doctrine of creation ex nihilo is the basis of the Vantillian doctrine of natural revelation.

And not only so. Just as everything in creation is a general symbol of God, so also man is the special symbol, for man and man alone is created as the very image of God (Gen. 1:26). Each individual human being, and the race as a whole (Gen. 1:27), symbolizes God in a special way. What is this special way? Theologians have debated the issue, and no one will ever fully understand it (since to do so we should have to understand fully the nature of the God whose symbol we are). All the same, this much can be said: Man is the only symbol which is also a symbol-maker. Since this is a manifesto, let me say that again: It is of the essence of man’s divine imagehood that he is a symbol-making creature.

(The safest way to precede is to note what is said about God in the preceding verses of Genesis 1. This is the context in which it is then said that man is the image of God. God has been presented as one who determines, creates, evaluates, names, takes counsel among Himself, etc. These things are what man uniquely images.)[1]

If you believe Pink Floyd, the only factor that differentiates humans from apes is our ability to talk. [2] In fact, it’s not near impossible for this to have evolved, it is absolutely impossible. If natural selection were actually capable of producing progress (it isn’t) and might is right, why do words have so much power? It is because they did not come at the end; they came at the beginning, “at the (river)head” as Genesis 1:1 says. Adam could hear, speak, and, most likely, write. Language is not a new development. It is the way it has always been. Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, and this practical knowledge of the truth brings dominion. Fictional 12-year-old prodigy (and atheist) Paloma Josse notices this discrepancy between evolutionary theory and reality, and writes,

“The strong ones
Among humans
Do nothing
They talk
And talk again”

“…nothing is harder or more unfair than human reality: humans live in a world where it’s words and not deeds than have power, where the ultimate skill is mastery of language. This is a terrible thing because basically we are primates who’ve been programmed to eat, sleep, reproduce, conquer and make our territory safe, and the ones who are most gifted at that, the most animal types among us, always get shafted by the others, the fine talkers, despite the latter being incapable of defending their own garden or bringing a rabbit home for dinner or procreating properly. Humans live in a world where the weak are dominant. This is a terrible insult to our animal nature, a sort of perversion or a deep contradiction.” [3]

In the beginning was the Word. The Creation order was spoken to, delegated to, the Son, by the Spirit. The Son’s obedience bore fruit, by the Spirit. Ideas have consequences precisely words take on flesh, because electricity moves the muscle; the elite control the workers.

All of God’s speeches are carefully deliberated and meticulously structured. When the Father issues a command, He never wishes He hadn’t pressed “Send.” All His Words, even the curses, are blessings in the long-run. The words of sinful man also build up and cut down. Words are power; words are crucial. The entire free world could be shipwrecked by a teleprompter.

The 5-fold Covenant model and the 7-fold matrix each have words at every point. The source-Word from God to His delegated Head, the delegate’s word to the body, the body under the word, the body’s witness to the truth of the word, and the totus’ oath at the marriage supper on the garden spring, leading to children carrying the word as rivers into the nations. God-Dad-Mum-Kids, God-Dad-Mum-Kids, God-Dad-Mum-Kids…

James 3:1-12:

Creation – Source of Word (Genesis)
My brethren,
…..let not many of you
……….become teachers, (Law given)
……………knowing that (Law opened)
……….we shall receive (Law received)
…..a stricter judgment.
For we all stumble in many things.

Division – Delegation of Word
If anyone
…..does not stumble in word,
……….he [is] a perfect man,
……………able also to bridle the whole body.
……….Indeed, we put bits in horses’ mouths
…..that they may obey us,
and we turn their whole body.

Ascension – The Altar-Land above the Gentile Sea (man as Covenant Head)
Look also at ships:
…..although they are so large
……….and are driven by fierce winds,
……………they are turned by a very small rudder
……….wherever the pilot desires.
…..Even so the tongue is a little member
and boasts great things.

Testing – Discerning the Spirits
See how great a forest a little fire kindles!
…..And the tongue [is] a fire,
……….a world of iniquity.
……………The tongue is so set among our members
……….that it defiles the whole body,
…..and sets on fire the course of nature;
and it is set on fire by hell. (BAD Shekinah)

Maturity – Swarms/Armies (Covenant Body)
For every kind of beast and bird,
…..of reptile and creature of the sea,
……….is tamed and has been tamed by mankind.
……………But no man can tame the tongue.
……….[It is] an unruly [lawless] evil,
…..full of deadly poison. (Cup of Sanctions)

Conquest – Coverings and Sanctions/Oath
With it we bless our God and Father, (Transcendence)
…..and with it we curse men, (Hierarchy)
……….who have been made in the similitude of God. (Ethics)
…..Out of the same mouth proceed blessing and cursing. (Sanctions/Oath)
My brethren, these things ought not to be so. (Continuity)

Glorification – Covenant Succession
Does a spring send forth
…..fresh and bitter [water]
……….from the same opening? (Singularity)
……………Can a fig tree,
……….my brethren, bear olives, (Plurality)
……….or a grapevine bear figs?
…..Thus no spring yields
both salt water and fresh.

Our words are barrenness or fruitfulness, Eve offspring or serpent offspring.

_______________________________
[1] James B. Jordan, Symbolism: A Manifesto. [PDF]
[2] Pink Floyd, “Keep Talking,” The Division Bell.
[3] Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, p. 53.
Thanks to my atheist friend, Mitch Griggs, for pointing out the video.

Many atheists think it is their void-given right to make disrespectful, insulting or condescending remarks about religion. One I have heard a number of times is a common atheist response to “Your atheism is a religion”: If religion were a hair colour, then I am bald.

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“This book is a gem. Through letters of advice from A.F. Christian, an enthusiastic convert to the cause of the new atheists, Mary Eberstadt deftly exposes the flaws in their views. Using the lingo of pop culture to hilarious effect, she offers a scathing satire of their question-begging arguments and shows with great wit that they are not just wrongheaded but downright laughable. Yet this spirited defense of Christian faith is also a poignant commentary on what it means to be human.”

– Fr. Peter Ryan, SJ, Professor of Moral Theology, Mt. St. Mary’s Seminary

From the foreword:

An open letter to those spokesmen for the new Atheism who have labored mightily these last few years to sweep aside religion’s paralytic webs of superstition and prejudice, and to liberate the rest of our Species via Science and Enlightenment:

Dear Sirs,

Speaking just for this Atheist convert, congratulations, guys — You really did it! Thanks to all Your hard work, the rest of us know once and for all that the so-called “God”, that Loser, is everything You say he is: the biggest fraud of all time, cosmic zero, ultimate no-show — and after all those centuries and promises too. It’s like throwing the biggest rave ever, only to cancel at the last minute after everyone’d already bought tickets and drugs for it. What kind of deity does that, anyway? If this were Facebook, no one would be friending him now.

But You have to admit: that same Loser sure has been great for the book business — including and especially all those books on the new Atheism, I’m happy to say. Almost a million volumes sold in twelve months’ time; covers in every major newspaper and magazine; publicity on all the best talk shows and Web sites and campuses; national and international book awards up the wazoo — talk about knowing how to make “something” ($$$) out of “nothing” (Loser)!

It really is marvelous — sorry; I almost said “miraculous” there (I’m new to the Atheist party and hope You’ll pardon any slips) — how Your ideas have taken so much of the Western media by storm. You’d almost think Atheism had friends in some pretty high places! Whatever, You probably think we Atheists have earned the right to sit back and chill. I mean, it’s pretty clear we’ve won by now — isn’t it?

Except, well, maybe not — and that’s why I’m writing You this letter. Because there’s one thing that’s still missing from Atheism’s final victory, and it’s something that just can’t be sugarcoated. Ahem: apart from me, where is the testimony of anyone Your writings have actually convinced? After all, as one of You said somewhere and all of us want to believe, “If this book works as I intend, religious readers will be Atheists when they put it down.” So where are the rest of them, I’m starting to wonder — these other converts (like me!) to the new godlessness?…”

Here’s another snippet…

“Please understand that I’m not criticizing here! Cheering for pornography and omnivorous sex and, by extension, broken homes and abused and screwed-up kids and all the rest of the Sexual Revolution’s fallout may not be everyone’s thing; but most of You new Atheist guys have definitely made it Yours. I respect all that! I’m just saying for now that we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that the believers’ sexual codes are an unmitigated bad on them and a plus for us, when most evidence suggests it’s quite the other way around.”

The Loser Letters website here.

Last night I watched a 2007 debate between Richard Dawkins and John Lennox on 5 of Dawkins’ theses from his book The God Delusion. Lennox (who recently visited Australia to speak at the Easter Convention here in Katoomba) was delightful and made some strong statements. Dawkins was, to me, surprisingly earnest. But I did see in Dawkins’ responses to Lennox support for the observations of David Bently Hart that I read in a recent post by Justin Taylor. The new atheists are not the same as the old atheists:

David Bentley Hart, author of Atheist Delusions (Yale University Press, 2009), reviewing 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists, laments:

How long should we waste our time with the sheer banality of the New Atheists—with, that is, their childishly Manichean view of history, their lack of any tragic sense, their indifference to the cultural contingency of moral “truths,” their wanton incuriosity, their vague babblings about “religion” in the abstract, and their absurd optimism regarding the future they long for? . . .

A truly profound atheist is someone who has taken the trouble to understand, in its most sophisticated forms, the belief he or she rejects, and to understand the consequences of that rejection. Among the New Atheists, there is no one of whom this can be said, and the movement as a whole has yet to produce a single book or essay that is anything more than an insipidly doctrinaire and appallingly ignorant diatribe.

If that seems a harsh judgment, I can only say that I have arrived at it honestly. In the course of writing a book published just this last year, I dutifully acquainted myself not only with all the recent New Atheist bestsellers, but also with a whole constellation of other texts in the same line, and I did so, I believe, without prejudice. No matter how patiently I read, though, and no matter how Herculean the efforts I made at sympathy, I simply could not find many intellectually serious arguments in their pages, and I came finally to believe that their authors were not much concerned to make any. . . .

I came to realize that the whole enterprise, when purged of its hugely preponderant alloy of sanctimonious bombast, is reducible to only a handful of arguments, most of which consist in simple category mistakes or the kind of historical oversimplifications that are either demonstrably false or irrelevantly true. And arguments of that sort are easily dismissed, if one is hardy enough to go on pointing out the obvious with sufficient indefatigability.

You can read the whole thing at First Things. He goes on to examine the “anecdotal enthymemes” of Christopher Hitchens, and later argues that “The only really effective antidote to the dreariness of reading the New Atheists, it seems to me, is rereading Nietzsche.”