From page 153, in the margin, bottom half of the page, the paragraph entitled “Open.”
Don’t look now, but is your face shining. What makes it shine: Something your ate?
From page 481, in the margin, bottom half of the page, the paragraph entitled “Reflect”:
Does your money help or hinder your trust God more?
Have you found a typo in the Serendipity Bible? Let me know and I’ll change “A Typo” to “Typos” in the title to this page.
“You shall not make any cuts on your body for the dead or tattoo yourselves: I am the LORD.” — Leviticus 19:28 (ESV)
In light of Leviticus 19:28, is it forbidden for a Christian to have a tattoo? How we answer this question depends on how we understand our relationship to the laws of the OT. This relationship is a complex one, so for starters I’ll simplify. There are basically two approaches one can take to a text like this.
In the Christian Churches, the swath of Christianity with which I have the most experience, the predominant approach is to see all Old Testament commands as no longer binding unless they are repeated in the New Testament. The practitioner of this minimalist approach opens his New Testament, looks around, fails to find any prohibition on tattooing contained therein, and pronounces the prospective tattooee morally blameless. (In practice things are more complicated, and Christian Churchers are divided on both the moral acceptability and general advisability of tattoos.)
In certain Presbyterian circles about which I hope to have more to say soon, the opposite is true: all Old Testament commands are regarded as binding unless the New Testament sets them aside. These folks would look through the New Testament to see whether there is any relaxing of tattoo laws, and, not finding anything even remotely positive or permissive concerning tattoos, they would proclaim that it is against God’s will that any man should get such markings. As Gary North said,
Tell them not to get a tattoo. “Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you: I am the LORD” (Leviticus 19:28). This may not seem like much of an infraction. It is. It marks them forever as being lower class, even if they aren’t.
Independent of New Testament confirmation, is anything in the OT binding? This question is very important, but it is certainly not the end of the conversation. It is only the beginning, because regardless of which of the two one picks, there are a large number of other questions which must follow, and, depending on the answers, things can get so complicated that neither of the two answers really captures ones point.
In light of some recent conversation, I cannot help but wonder whether popular eschatology impacts the attitudes of Christians toward sloppiness. If the Church is a small remnant on the verge of being wiped out, if the Indians surround us on all sides and we’re in for maybe a few decades of dark days ahead at most, then unity is paramount. Put the wagons in a circle and buckle in for a rough ride. We must focus our energies on saving as many souls as we can before this show ends, and we must think short-term. Criticism of other Christians, especially if aimed toward promoting intellectually healthy debate, is counterproductive. So is long-term thinking. The most hoped-for thing is for revival to spread like brushfire in an emotional rush. Nothing else can help.
If, on the other hand, the Church is advancing to fill and transform the earth, we need Christians busily at work in all sorts of arenas — the business of the Church is not simply a last-minute rescue mission. We are not simply rescuing people from sinking ships; we are building new ships for the future. We need a great deal of work on Christian education, from the kindergarten to college levels. We need Christian economists, Christian psychologists, and Christian strategists. We need to work for the long-term future of Christianity. We need intellectuals to map out the relationship between theology and politics. We need a long-term commitment to raising up leaders. We need high standards for educational materials, and we need to constantly improve the quality of our efforts in all directions. Criticism, in this view, is a healthy and natural part of the long-term process of building the Church and storming the gates of Hades.
In short, a lot hinges on eschatology, which is essentially a fancy word for thinking about what the Church’s end-game looks like — about whether the Church or its opponents will be victorious in history.
If we subscribe to an eschatology of defeat, which sees everything as worsening forever and the world devouring the Church pretty soon, we need to throw quality control to the wind and start frantically working to save a few more souls. If we subscribe to an eschatology of victory, we have a lot of building to do.
It would be wise to give your eschatology a long hard look. A lot more depends on it than you might think.
Like a serpent in a garden, John Fensel has posed an old question in new garb: “Do Moral Obligations really follow from God’s Existence?“ In 1504 words, his answer is “No.” Attempting to answer questions including, “What is obligation?” and “What is moral?”, he neglects the big question: “What is God?”
The shorter Westminster Catechism replies, “God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.” John Hobbins, referencing Aristotle, likes to say that God is the source or embodiment of “the good, the true, and the beautiful.” (And by the good he means ethics and probably more.) Others would define God in a variety of ways, hopefully shedding light but inevitably obscuring truth: any short definition of a complex infinite being is bound to be reductionist. Regardless of its exact wording, any Christian definition of God must include the notion that God is the ultimate source and judge of moral good. Belief in God as the font of morality is present not only in Christianity but also in Judaism, Islam, and Deism.
If John is asking whether God is the source of moral obligation, any believing Christian, Jew, Muslim, or Deist is bound to reply, “Yes. That’s who God is.” To say that the existence of such a God does not lead to moral obligations is an oxymoron. So when John asserts the impossible — that “we have no obligations to God whether or not God exists” — he is really saying that God (as the majority of both believes and infidels use the term) does not exist.
Why the long convoluted argument instead of a straightforward denial that the Ultimate Judge exists? Perhaps he has not thought out the implications of his beliefs about the neutrality of ethics vis-
Sometimes the Bible must simply be allowed to speak for itself. Until such time as an adequate Bible free of copyright restrictions is available, it will do much of its speaking in the KJV, sometimes lightly edited. (In this case, no editing has been done.) Read More
[Update (7 Jan 2012): Both of Bauman's blogs are offline. I don't know what, if anything, this article had to do with it. Either way, perhaps it is for the best.]
Over and over, otherwise bright, sane, conservative Christians all over the Internet start foaming at the keyboard the moment Muslims come to mind. This seemingly uncontrollable affliction, a sort of intellectual epilepsy, leaps apparently at random onto right-wing intellectuals, even when they’ve been previously warned about their behavior. Dr. Michael Bauman, professor of Theology and Culture at Hillsdale College, is the poster-child for this sort of irresponsibility. To be blunt: reckless paranoia about Muslims makes Christians look stupid. Read More
Around 2 a.m. a month ago, in a smoke-filled hookah bar in Orlando, Florida, I found myself engaged in a conversation about religion and politics with a man who spent his career at the intersection between the two (I count his brief stint as a bar-tender as religious/political work in addition to his more overtly religious and political work). I asked whether there were any books he’d recommend on the intersection between the two divisive fields, and he recommended Oliver O’Donovan’s The Desire of the Nations, which I have finally gotten around to reading. It has not disappointing, so now I intend to begin reading the approximately thirty other titles that rapidly spilled out from between his moustache and goatee over about the next half-hour. Read More
Assuming positive interest rates (dangerous though that may be in today’s topsy-turvy economic climate) one of the things one notices right away is the tension between the short-term and the long-term in spending power. If you and I both make $30,000 per year, and you spend 40,000 by borrowing 10,000 per year while I spend 20,000 and save 10,000 per year, your results will initially look better. You will drive a nicer car, eat at nice places, and live in a nicer house. I will drive an old clunker, cook my own food, and live in an low-rent apartment with a roommate. You know the rest of the story — your means become more and more restricted while mine become more and more substantial. The moral: unsustainable action may look more impressive, but it will burn itself out. Sustainable action may seem less glorious, but it can be built upon step by step. Read More
I was recently involved in a conversation with an otherwise respectable and sane community leader about Muslims and the future of the United States. Part of the conversation went something like this.
HIM: “The Muslims are going to take over the US.”
ME (eyebrows raised): “You think the Muslims are going to take over the US?” Read More
Bitcoins are on the way back up.
I’ve written about bitcoins before, so I won’t retread all that ground. (My favorite article I’ve written is this one. The rest of the articles are available here.)
Long story short — bitoins are a ground-breaking but fringe-movement
attack onalternative to the dollar, because the dollar is has been standing on sinking sand since 1971. They’re an internet currency, and as nutty as it sounds they went from selling for fractions of a cent in 2009 to about $30 a piece this summer — meaning that there were something like $180 million dollars worth of bitcoins in existence.The coins had skyrocketed in value so rapidly that a correction was to be expected. More than 3 billion percent price deflation in a currency in two years is, to put it lightly, an unstable situation. Freedom-hating senator Chuck Schumer started ranting about them in a most paranoid way, threatening to outlaw them, while in an almost perfect storm a bitcoin heist at the most respected bitcoin exchange prompted a wild crash in its value.
Ha! cried the naysayers. The bitcoin is dead! The spoke too hastily. The bitcoin subsequently stabilized around $3 a pop — still well over 300 times its value just two years earlier. That’s still pretty impressive growth.
Lately, maybe over the last week or so, bitcoins have been marching back upwards. Other than gold and silver, the fundamentals underlying the bitcoin supply make it (at least in theory) the strongest currency in the world today. They’re back up to $6.67.
Until government or gold gets in the way, bitcoins will generally trend upwards. Were they to displace the dollar today, they would sell for something like $100,000 to $150,000 per year. But gold or government will intervene first.
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