Counting Down

2 exams and 1 paper down, 1 exam (Geometry) and 1 paper (Freedom's) to go...Hua!!!

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I'll be done with the semester by Wednesday, and am planning to go up to Carlos O'Kelly's today to see about working again for them over the summer, starting next week.

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So...plans for the summer: work, go to LTC, spend as much time as possible with Nebraska friends (guys, I want to go hiking!!!!), leave around August 12th or so to drive out to Virginia.

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I recently remembered a debate on the Civil Rights Act from US History...the Civil Rights movement was indubitably good, but the Act itself was debatably so, definitely on constitutional and arguably on political grounds. That is probably going to turn into a post, and one on which I'd like discussion.

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On that note, please read this speech by John McCain on his philosophy of the judiciary. It is very encouraging to hear this, and I completely agree with it.

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Summer reading list:
--Les Miserables (I finished Martin Chuzzlewit last week)
--Getting the Gospel Right (and discussing that with the friend who is graciously allowing me to borrow it)
--Pick Death of Death in the Death of Christ back up, and finish it.
--Finish The Perfectibility of Man
--Finish Calvin's Institutes...hopefully.
--Finish the Hornblower Series? Possibly?
--Finish Lone Survivor, on a Navy SEAL fighting in Afghanistan.

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Mother's Day was great--the men made a church breakfast for the ladies, which was quite fun.

For the service, we had an "open letter to my Mom" day. I had not written out a letter beyond the card I got her (and gave her the day before), but I wrote down some points and practiced my extemporaneous speaking (Dr. Tallmon would be proud).

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Mother's Day morning: My mom was playing Command and Conquer: Renegade, and picked up a flamethrower, when I insisted she wanted a more long-range weapon. So then I took the open elevator to the next floor (past the sniper who was stuck facing a wall), but it didn't go all the way up. I had to jump up and pull myself out of the shaft--but while I was trying to do so, my brother climbed on my back and clambered over me. All the while the bad guys on the next floor were looking at me with rather bemused expressions.

But I climbed up and started flaming the baddies with my own flamethrower, except they didn't fall. I realized that my hands were empty and I was making the "whoosh" sound with my mouth. The people didn't even look like bad guys anymore, but were still looking at me funny.

Then I woke up.

The weird thing is that I don't even play Renegade (let alone my Mom): I prefer the strategy style C&C games.

Anywho....

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Something else kind of weird:

I think I went from being a covenant credobaptist with paedobaptist sympathies to a covenant paedobaptist with credobaptist sympathies Sunday afternoon...I have yet to awaken from that one. I'm still searching the Scriptures on that, but I think it finally sort of clicked.

By "covenant" baptist, generally, I mean the idea that baptism is a sign and symbol (signifying the spiritual reality) of God's covenant with His elect, the covenant of grace, which we receive by imparted faith. I still reject regenerative baptism of all sorts (Lutheran and Romanist) and think that the idea that baptism is a statement of the "commitment we've made to Christ" is just really shallow theology...

The difference between covenant credobaptists (Reformed Baptists) and paedobaptists (Presbyterian/Reformed) is fundamentally on if the children of believers are in some sense comprehended under the covenant of grace and are part of the visible church. The credobaptists say they are not in any sense under the covenant if they are not elect. The paedobaptists would not say that the children are necessarily elect, but are still a part of the covenant, much like all the Israelites were under the covenant without all being elect. In fact, they often draw a comparison between circumcision in the OT and baptism in the New (that's the part I'm still checking on).

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I was asked last Monday if I believed in Limited Atonement or Unlimited Atonement. And I didn't realize until then how frustrating a question that is...phrased in those terms, there is no short answer. I would agree with Spurgeon that it is the atonement unlimited in extent that actually limits the effect of the atonement, so calling "Particular/Definite Redemption" "Limited Atonement" rather weights the question.

Short answer (free of the terms governed by polemical history) is this: I believe Christ died to redeem His spiritual Israel (the church), and He accomplished His purpose at the cross. I take this view from Scripture as a whole: from the Old Testament prophecies and the New Testament teaching on the intent and accomplishment of the atonement. Granted, there are several NT passages speaking of "all" and the "world," but the Greek words are not consistently used in a universal sense. On the contrary, in most of the passages that are not under debate, they are NOT used in a universal sense...in the context of the clear OT and NT teaching on election, and the teaching on God's purpose in the atonement, and in the context of the verses themselves, it is perfectly acceptable (I believe) to take the more specific application of the Greek words.

That said, I do believe that Christ is truly offered to "whomever will believe." The extent of the atonement one way or the other is never made the basis for NT evangelism, so the argument that we ("Calvinists" so-called) can't evangelize because we believe Christ did not die for all doesn't hold. Everyone (in this particular debate) agrees that everyone who believes is redeemed and everyone who does not believe does not receive the benefits of Christ's death. Though we disagree on the order (redemption or belief, and regeneration or belief), we agree on that much, at least.

Okay, I'm going to stop before I write another paper on this....

An interesting passage from my Freedom's Foundations II reading...I have often pondered some of the problems of the modern evangelical church, and while I don't think all of them are directly traceable to this point, a good many are. As J. I. Packer wrote in his introduction to Luther's Bondage of the Will, it is debatable whether Luther and the other Reformers would even claim the "evangelical" church as their descendants--indeed, the Synod of Dordt (1619) declaimed the Arminian Remonstrance as a return to Romanism in its central principle. The Arminians (and free-will theologians generally) claimed to retain the Protestant principle of justification sola fide without works, but, by making faith an act of man's will rather than a gift of God, essentially made it into a work (and it's worth noting that the word translated "work" in Ephesians means any action, not just "works of the law"). Anyhow, from Russell Kirk's Roots of American Order (pp. 232-233).



"What were the knottiest questions dividing the Catholic establishment and the Reformers? The Protestant leaders, though they attacked the corruptions of the sixteenth-century Church, argued that the visible Church's moral decay was the result of theological errors into which the papacy and the heirarchy had fallen. Both Martin Luther and John Calvin declared that the profoundest difference between Papists and Protestants was the question of freedom of the will. Luther debated this subject with the Dutch humanist Erasmus, in 1524. Is the will free or enslaved? This is "the real essential thing, the real knotty problem," Luther said; "instead of...tiresome trifles about the papacy, purgatory, indulgences, and other futilities of the same order."

Now the medieval church, with Aristotle as its classical philosophical authority, gradually had modified St. Augustine's doctrine that man is wholly corrupt--that so far as man has free will, this is opportunity only to choose among evil acts. Man is a creature of mingled good and evil impulses, the Church had come to teach: in the depths of the soul, there lingers an essence or spark of divine substance, potentially enabling man (if given grace) to exercise his will for good. This medieval teaching...the Reformers denied utterly; they returned to the stern teaching of St. Augustine. "For man cannot but put self-seeking first, loving himself above everything else," said Luther: "this is the root of sinning."

Because man is utterly corrupted by self-love, the Reformers reasoned, man enjoys no freedom to act for the good. He can be saved from his total depravity only by the arbitrary grace of God. Because the Church, or rather its heirarchy, had fallen away from this dogma, the Reformers continued, the Church had been corrupted; the notorious system of indulgences for money was merely one of many abuses resulting from abandonment of the pure doctrine of original sin. Therefore the Church might be purged of corruption only if its ancient dogmas should be restored."