Humorous Interlude

A visitor to my house yesterday afternoon would have seen a very muddy Colin trudging into his driveway after a 2-mile hike with a 23-pound pack, taken for exercise and to break in his boots for the upcoming ROTC summer course. But yesterday was dry and sunny here in Eastern Nebraska, so why the mud?

Well, to discover the reason, he must retrace Colin's steps about a half mile to the west, where he would find a small bridge (maybe 10-15 yards long) across a stream. An examination of the dirt beneath it would yield the conclusion that boots had climbed down from the road on the west side, stopped beneath the bridge a few yards from the bank, then reappeared on the eastern bank.

With the knowledge that, on his return leg of his two-mile runs and hikes on that route, Colin has been in the habit of hanging from one of the steel girders beneath the bridge and swinging across, the investigator could accurately surmise that Colin had done the same in this case, but would perhaps be confused by the reflection that Colin does not return from those runs so muddy.

So this is what happened...As usual, I jumped up and swung from the girder, making my way across. It had rained heavily two nights before, so the stream was somewhat higher (and a little wider) than usual, and the opposite side was a nasty bank of mud for a yard and a half beyond the edge of the stream.

If I had not had the pack on my back (and I usually don't) I would not have swung about so violently and had to expend as much energy in getting across.

If I was not still sore from upper-body exercises the previous day, I would have had a better grip on the girder.

If, when I felt my grip slipping, I had released with the forward swing instead of trying to hang on for one more reach, I would have fallen further forward.

As it was, all of those are purely hypothetical. My hands just beyond the eastern edge of the stream, I dropped from the backward swing; though I landed on my feet and hands, the mud was deep, and I sunk in to my knees and elbows and did a face-plant (my glasses stuck in the mud-bank aforementioned).

Since I rinsed off a bit at the stream, I don't know how bad I looked, but I can say that when I got back to the house and called inside for a towel, I still was nasty enough that my youngest brother could only ask "Colin! What happened?!"

I'd say the boots are pretty well broken in now. :-)

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."