Holy Week Music

 Mache Dich at 17:33 is balm for the soul.

The Flat Earth Temptation

"There comes a point at which those of us who live on the theological fringe must begin to resist the short-term ecstasy of embracing, in knee-jerk fanatic fashion, every anti-establishment fad that comes along. We must resist what I call the Flat Earth Temptation. There is more to the Christian walk than grabbing insatiably at every screwball theory that gets offered to us by self-designated experts in the name of biblical orthodoxy. This lust for the epistemologically bizarre is the Reconstructionists’ version of the charismatic’ endless quest for the “new thing.” We must remind ourselves: He who lives by the bizarre dies by the bizarre."

- Gary North

How to DOMINION

Okay now, the hand is very prominent here. The hand of power. We see here

that faithful slave service to the master is the road to dominion. That's

true in all of life. Anybody who's ever worked for anybody else knows that it's

very easy to get an attitude when you're under somebody else's authority of doing

the minimal to get by. If you do that, you don't acquire dominion. If you do the

best possible job, trying to do a good job to the Lord, you do acquire dominion.

That's just true in all of life. People chafe under authority. They go get a job and then they chafe. They don't like being told what to do. And they squirm around. And then, as a result, they lose dominion and authority. I used to see this in the military all the time. Guy is always doing the least. Now the Bible says serve your masters not just with eye service but unto the Lord. And Joseph is a great example of that. We don't see Joseph chafing under slavery. We see him as a slave doing the best possible job. Serving his master. Jesus says ‘Those who would be great among you must be slaves of all. Those among the Gentiles love to lord it over them.’ Faithful slave service is the road to dominion. Revolution is not the road to dominion. Defying authority is not the road to dominion. Letting the government know how much power you have as an individual is not the road to dominion. Service is the road to dominion. Now that makes sense because in service you learn how to conduct dominion. You don't learn how to do dominion by defying authority, by asserting your rights. You learn how to do dominion by working. Forget your rights. Christians don't have rights. There is no place in Christian theory for a doctrine of rights. Christians have duties. There is no place for a doctrine of human rights and Christian faith. If you're created by God, you don't have rights. You don't have inalienable rights. You don't have any kind of rights. You have duties. One of the sicknesses in American political theory from the beginning was the adoption of the rhetoric of pagan thinking. Only God has rights because only God is self -contained. Men don't have rights. They have duties. It's best not to use the word "rights," best not to think in those categories. Why don't we do some things the government tells us to do, because we have rights? No, because God commands us to do certain duties. And God's command of those duties takes precedence.

- James B. Jordan, Studies in Genesis, chapter 39

A Biblical View of Women

"From the enlightenment on a disregard for women has been basic to philosophy. The debasement of women was an Enlightenment fact. Women were assumed to be like children, emotional rather than rational beings. Their social and intellectual status was thus downgraded. Biblical thinking bars women from authority in the church and headship in the family but Proverbs 31:10-31 is very clear about the managerial and economic abilities of women in business and in other fields. To assume the Enlightenment view as a Biblical one is absurd."

- RJ Rushdoony, "The Preaching of the Cross"

from https://www.lambsreign.com/mcdurmon/rushdoony-and-womens-rights

Worldview Cleanup in Aisle Five ...

When Boris Yeltsin visited the United States in 1989, he made an unscheduled visit to a US grocery story called Randalls outside of Houston.  Later, he wrote: “When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons, and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people…That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it.” 

When he asked the supermarket manager how many items they stocked, the man apologetically answered "Only 30,000 in this store."

“Even the Politburo doesn’t have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev,”

He told a close associate “the last vestige of Bolshevism collapsed” in
him and his "worldview changed" inside the Randalls that day. 

The Gospel According to Your Baptism ...

 

"The gospel is our power to know that the death and resurrection of Jesus actually accomplished our own death and our own resurrection.  Jesus did not die that I might live.  We say that as a wonderful shorthand, but taken by itself, it's not true.  Jesus did not die that I might live.  Jesus died so that I might die.  Jesus was buried so that I might be buried.  In Jesus, that's where I left all my guilt; all my shame; all my sins; buried there in that tomb two thousand years ago, abandoned.  And if I have died and been buried with Christ, that means I have been raised with Christ.  I am no longer beneath the domain of sin; beneath the tyranny of death.  I have been raised to new life in Him; with Him."

- Pastor Joe Carlson

A Meditation with both Palm Sunday and Good Friday in Mind ...

 

"My thesis that the practice of nonviolence requires a belief in divine vengeance will be unpopular with many Christians, especially theologians in the West. To the person who is inclined to dismiss it, I suggest imagining that you are delivering a lecture in a war zone (which is where a paper that underlies this ... was originally delivered). Among your listeners are people whose cities and villages have been first plundered, then burned and leveled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, whose fathers and brothers have had their throats slit. The topic of the lecture: a Christian attitude toward violence. The thesis: we should not retaliate since God is perfect noncoercive love. Soon you would discover that it takes the quiet of a suburban home for the birth of the thesis that human nonviolence corresponds to God’s refusal to judge. In a scorched land, soaked in the blood of the innocent, it will invariably die. And as one watches it die, one will do well to reflect about many other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind."

- Miroslav Volf 

Exclusion and Embrace pgs. 303-304