radical and partisan invective

If (a) an unsympathetic non-Christian describes the activities of a Christian campaign group as "radical and partisan invective," and if (b) you feel slightly inclined to agree with that description, and yet if (c) the invectivous Christians are in general standing up for what's right, then, I think I just made up a word there, but how do you rationalise your contact with said campaign group?

The options which I can see are: either you side with them under the same "Christian" umbrella in the interests of avoiding divisiveness and increasing the strength of numbers, hoping that their good points will outweigh their bad points; or alternatively, you take a separatist line, disown all association, and try and put your points across, to the shared opposition, from an aloof-but-invective-free position. How bad does someone's reputation have to be, before you decide they're more bother than they're worth?

more problems with asbos

Asbos keep getting issued in ever increasing numbers. This is a worry for a couple of practical reasons - because they keep being issued to children, including children and/or people with behavioural disorders or mental health problems, and because if you breach your order, you face a jail sentence, even if the reason it was issued was for a non-criminal offence (such as being autistic and persistently staring over your neighbour's fence). In other words, they have the effect of criminalising people for non-criminal behaviour, and that often includes vulnerable people, who need help and support not punishment under the law.

But even the rationale behind asbos worries me. Hazel Blears is quoted as saying that "no one should have to endure" being on the receiving end of anti-social behaviour. This is obviously true, but the problem is that you can't make laws against every kind of experience that you don't enjoy experiencing. Like laws against "inciting religious hatred," laws against "anti-social behaviour" are inherently heavy handed, because not all unpleasant things should be illegal. It's high time this government started to realise that they're not going to achieve utopia through legislating against inconveniences: anti-social behaviour comes from cultural and social breakdowns which aren't going to be remedied by passing more restrictive laws.

it's an earnest and genuine call

Here is a quote from Dr John Kennedy, minister in Dingwall, Scotland (sometime in the nineteenth century). He addresses two questions: "1. Why, if God designed only the salvation of some, does he address the gospel call to all without distinction? And 2. How can an earnest call be addressed by God to those whom he does not love?" This is his answer to the second question.

Genuine and earnest the gospel call must be, (a) because it presents a claim in behalf of Jesus Christ. He is infinitely worthy of confidence. He is so in the view of God. His eye rests on the glory of his beloved Son as Jesus Christ when he calls sinners to believe in his name. Till I suspect that God is not in earnest in saying, "this is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased," I cannot suspect his earnestness in saying, "Kiss ye the Son."

It must be so, (b) because it is a call to accept of Christ as a Saviour in whom the love of God is free, and delights to save all who come to him. His call to me as a sinner, as it points me to salvation by grace in Christ, is expressive of all the earnestness inspired by God's delight in mercy.

It must be so also (c) because salvation by grace is to the praise of his glory. This is the terminus to which he calls the sinner. His call is therefore expressive of all the earnestness of his zeal for his own glory.

And it must be so (d) as a call to believe, because once it has pleased God to testify regarding Jesus Christ, it cannot be a matter of indifference to him whether men believe or not. His zeal for the claims of his own truth, and for the honour of his name as the God of truth, pours an infinite tide of earnestness into "the word of faith."

(Quoted from Man's Relations to God, p46-47 in the edition published by the James Begg Society)

In other words, the gospel has relevance to everyone who hears it, not because they might be elect, but because it is God's truth, which they are obligated to believe, just because it is true, and because it has God's authority behind it. This might not be the clearest way it's been expressed, though, so if I find someone else saying the same thing, I'll let you know.

back again

Well I'm finally back from the big skive down south (or oop north, depending on your perspective).

Yes, it rained, but it wasn't too cold, and I met some lovely people who more than compensated for the weather situation.

What sticks in my mind is a sermon on, "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world." He takes away the sin of all sorts of people in all times and places, and he takes away all sorts of sin that have ever been committed by anyone in the world. Whatever you can say about your sin, you can't say that it doesn't fit in the category of 'the sin of the world,' and that's just the kind of sin that the Lamb of God takes away. As he says, "Look unto me, and be ye saved, all ye ends of the earth, for I am God, and there is none else."

cranmer anniversary

Thomas Cranmer was executed four hundred and fifty years ago today, on 21 March 1556. He was Henry VIII's archbishop, who came round to more or less reformed views on the nature of the Lord's Supper and rejected the authority of the Pope. When Mary became queen he was tried for heresy and actually recanted, but later he recovered his courage, repudiated his recantation, and ended up being burnt at the stake (after witnessing Latimer and Ridley being put to death the same way). By then he was firm enough in his beliefs that he put his hand which had signed his recantation into the flames first of all so that everyone watching would know how ashamed he was of recanting.

It was actually Thought for the Day which reminded me about him, strangely enough.

too black and white

After narrowly escaping being made secretary of a prolife organisation last night, I managed to embroil myself in a fraught moral debate about babies born brain dead with my officemate. Highly relieved at the first of these; not so happy about the second.

One thing that kept coming up was this accusation that my position was "too black and white". It's not the first time she's made this comment, but when it's only about intense issues in linguistics it's somehow not so hard to take.

But why should 'being black and white' be a problem to her? Why are people afraid of clarity and certainty? It's hard to see the attraction of vagueness and being unsettled about important issues, beyond (if it isn't too harsh) the escape that it gives you from thinking seriously about them.

Whether it's points of doctrine or moral dilemmas, there always seem to be people who prefer to keep things fuzzy, undecided, and treat certainty and conviction as unattainable. Certainty might be hard to achieve: I'm sure it often is; but that doesn't really mean that we should give up searching for it.

OT believers were saved the same way

I keep coming across the idea that Old Testament believers didn't need to know (a) God in three persons or (b) Jesus Christ himself, in order to be saved - as if, prior to Christ's coming, it was enough for them to know (i) there is one God and (ii) he is Jehovah. But this is a very misguided idea, as you can tell from both the NT and the OT. I might try some other time to talk about the Old Testament evidence that salvation prior to the incarnation was nevertheless only by faith in Christ, but for the time being, here are some points thrown together on the evidence from the New Testament.

1. We know from the New Testament that nobody in the history of the world has ever been saved without a personal faith in Christ the Saviour: so, if the people in the Old Testament didn't know about Christ, they couldn't believe in him- ie, they couldn't have been saved (even the term 'Old Testament believer' wouldn't make sense). But some people in the Old Testament were saved; therefore, they must have had a personal faith in Christ the Saviour, just the same as believers in the New Testament.

2. We have Christ's own word for it, that the Old Testament Scriptures testify of him. In addition, he gave the instruction to his contemporary Jewish hearers to search their own scriptures in order to find him - which assumes that he can actually be found there, to Old Testament eyes and Old Testament understandings, ie himself as he really is: distinct from the Father, yet God himself, and the Saviour who is revealed to be believed in.

For a specific example, Christ said that in the Old Testament times, before he actually came to the world, Abraham saw his day and was glad for it - and that's not just the historical time, but the day which belonged to this person Christ.

3. The faith that Abraham had in God is given by Paul as an example for NT believers to follow: we walk in the steps of the faith of our father Abraham, Rom 4:12, and, this faith is the faith of Jesus Christ (Rom 3:22). It's even more explicit in Galatians 3: those who are of faith (ie, believers) are blessed along with faithful Abraham (v9 & 7): Christ has redeemed us so that the blessing of Abraham would come through Jesus Christ (v13-14). The promise of a seed which was made to Abraham was in fact the promise of Christ (v 16). There are two parts to the argument Paul's making - (a) that if a person is going to be saved by faith, it has to be the same faith as Abraham had - and (b) equally strongly, that the only faith which saves is faith in Christ the Saviour. In other words, when he encourages NT believers to have and follow in the same faith as the OT believers had, he was only saying the same as he said elsewhere encouraging us to have faith in Jesus Christ.

Similarly, the faith that Abel had is given in Hebrews 11 as one of many examples of people who had the faith that justifies: reading from ch 10 v23 (The just shall live by faith), the argument is that just as we believe to the saving of the soul, so Abel had faith. The faith that all the OT believers had, is given to the NT church as an example of the exact same faith that we should have: the people cited are Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Rahab, Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthae, David, Samuel, the prophets and a host of other men and women. Their histories are provided so that they can be examples of witnesses for us, us in the New Testament, so that we too would be encouraged to look to Jesus, the author and finisher of the very same faith.

4. When expositions of the OT scriptures are given in the NT, they focus on identifying Jesus Christ as the same Messiah as was believed in under the OT. Paul told Agrippa that he said none other things than those which the prophets and Moses said would come to pass: namely that Christ would suffer, and rise from the dead, and show light to the people and the Gentiles, Acts 26:22-23. Isaiah saw his glory and spoke of him, John 12:37-41. As early as the seventh generation after the creation, Enoch prophesied that the Lord was coming, Jude 14-15. David spoke concerning him, I saw the Lord always before my face ... (Acts 2:22-28). In fact, Let me freely speak to you of the patriarch David: David being a prophet seeing this before spoke of the resurrection of Christ, ie this Jesus who God has raised up, Acts 2:29-32.

A couple more quick points to finish up with.

- Of course this doesn't mean that all the OT believers had the same quantity of knowledge as we do, in the sense that, if they gave a list of all the facts they knew about the promised Saviour and explained how those facts fitted together, that would be a shorter list than we could give and an explanation with more bits missing. But the facts which they did know, were the crucial facts to know about the Saviour: that he would be man as well as God and that he was to die for the sins of his people. The Lord Jesus Christ is exactly the Messiah who was promised in the Old Testament, and just as today, he is the person who everyone had to believe in if they were going to be saved.

- Calling the faith of the OT believers "the very same faith" as that of NT believers does not mean "the same" by virtue of just being a vague understanding that there is one God. It means it was a laying hold of Christ the second Person of the Godhead as he was appointed by the Father to the work of Saviour and as the merits of his saving work were applied by the Holy Spirit. If they had only known the fact that "there is one God", that wouldn't have saved them: lots of people honestly believe that God exists and that there's only one God - that's not good enough to save them. The only way of salvation, the only way of access to God for sinners is through a Mediator, someone who is himself great enough and holy enough to approach God, and yet, someone who understands and can stand for the creature. The only person who fits these qualifications is the Lord Jesus Christ, who is God and man, in two distinct natures, and one person, for ever - that's who all the Old Testament believers believed in for salvation, and that's who people have to believe in now, today, now that he has come as promised.

preparation time: five days

I'm looking for recipes for lamb for a birthday related dinner in a day or so, and came across one that involves shoulder of lamb plus baked tomatoes and a concoction with butter beans on the side. Serves six. Only problem is that you should start making it five days in advance - mainly because you have to massage salt into the chilled uncooked meat every twelve (12) hours for three days, before you even think of poaching it, for nearly two hours, cooling again, and refrigerating for a further day or two.

I'm not going to tell you where this book comes from: the snobbishness of it scares me a lot: and you, gentle reader, might be stunned. However, it does have a couple of lovely puddings, including the extravagant but worth-it chocolate caramel pots, so I suppose I can forgive the odd freaky digression into a world that I can't imagine. Would my fridge even have space to keep that much meat just chilling, soaking up salt for three days?

so much depends

For some reason today someone said something that dredged up a memory of this poem:

So much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

It's by William Carlos Williams, a Puerto Rican poet who was a doctor in his spare time. It's apparently intended to be simple and direct, in contrast to the writings of his contemporaries, big on allusion and remote from everyday life. Look how stark and vivid the colour words are, red and white, and how ordinary the wheelbarrow and the chickens are, until the rain provides a glaze.

But the reason why I ever came across it, avoiding literature as much as possible as I did, is because of the sounds not the imagery. In class we noticed how all the second lines consisted of two-syllable words. We observed the consonant clusters at the end of depends /nz/, and chickens /nz/, and in the pivotal word glazed, /gl/ and /zd/. Then we graphed all the symmetry in the vowels, and made inventories of the voiceless consonants. In short, we established that the reason why it's such a masterpiece isn't just the pictures it conjures up in your head, it's because it pleases your ear too.

See, you thought it was images that made poetry, but really it's the words that evoke the images that have to go together right.

And it's still not certain what all depends.

Bunyan's Come and Welcome

Here's a quote from John Bunyan's book with the wonderful title, 'Come and Welcome to Jesus Christ.' It's from the part where he talks about the meaning of the words "to me" in the verse which the whole book is based on, "All that the Father giveth me shall come to me, and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out." The person speaking is Jesus, and coming to him means of course the same as having saving faith.

[These words "to me" are] very warily put in, and serve for caution and encouragement: for caution, lest we take up, in our coming, anything short of Christ; and for encouragement, to those that shall, in their coming, come past all till they come to Jesus Christ. ...

The man therefore that comes aright, casts all things behind his back, and looketh at nor hath his expectations from aught, but the Son of God alone ...

[The one who truly] comes to Christ, is one that hath had deep considerations of his own sins, slighting thoughts of his own righteousness, and high thoughts of the blood and righteousness of our Lord Jesus Christ. Yea, he sees, as I have said, more virtue in the blood of Christ to save him, than there is in all his sins to damn him. He therefore setteth Christ before his eyes: there is nothing in heaven or earth he knows that can save his soul and secure him from the wrath of God, but Christ: that is, nothing but his personal righteousness and blood.

It's one of my longstanding dilemmas, the question of which I like better, The Pilgrim's Progress or The Holy War. Meanwhile Come and Welcome is another acquisition from Peter and Rachel Reynolds - not such a recent one by now, but I'm taking my time with it.

Right to Justice campaign again

Remember I talked about this campaign before - now I've added this cool image to my sidebar to link to the Right to Justice petition:

They've counted over ten thousand signatures so far, so if you haven't signed it yet, do it online from here! And if you explore their site, there are guidelines for writing your MP to raise the issue with them too ... mine's is probably sick of me by now but one of these lazy Saturdays I'll get round to it.

iron woman

On the spur of the moment I went to give blood yesterday afternoon - something I've been meaning to do for ages, especially now that I walk past the donor centre nearly every day. But it didn't go terribly well. On the first test they suspected my iron was too low, then they checked with another test requiring a bigger sample from my arm, then the first arm didn't work so they went for my other arm instead. Yukky eh. So my iron was too low and my veins were too narrow, and then I fainted once I got my cuppy tea, so all in all, I spent the rest of the night feeling very groggy and contemplating starting a whole new broccoli diet to get those iron levels up. Hmm. We shall see.

think lucky

One of the recordings by comedian Linda Smith which was played repeatedly last week was her comment on the National Lottery:

"I don't do the lottery; which makes me marginally less likely to win than someone who does."

Which is an excellent attitude to take, imo.

Meanwhile, in a forlorn attempt to help me concentrate, on the day that the AUT lecturers are on strike, I'm listening to Classic FM and they keep playing adverts for the lottery with the slogan "Think lucky." I've never regarded statistics as a particularly strong point of mine, but even I know that feeling lucky has no bearing whatsoever on the actual probability of a desired event occurring. Of course I'm sure everyone else knows it too, deep down, but it's just something getting on my nerves right now. And having got it off my chest, now I'll try and get back to these papers on the putative causal links between phonological awareness and successful literacy acquisition. What fun.

yeah right

Ten minutes old news - Blair says he prayed to God before going to war with Iraq! Report here. I have to say I'm shocked. Not only the fact that it totally makes him sound like Bush's poodle (remember the laughs over Bush's direct line), but it's bound to play right into the hands of those who want to make the war on terrorism a Muslims-vs-Christians affair. When it's not. Christians don't want Muslims killed. But even on top of that, does he honestly think we're going to swallow this? He went down on his knees, and then what? Suddenly he got authorisation to go ahead with his shameless lies to parliament and the public, and start an illegal war? Looks like there's no depths he won't sink to. Move over Mr Blair, we're tired of you.

the towel wash, at last

On Tuesday someone finally came round to fix our washing machine. It's been out of action for over a month, and for the past four weeks that has been due to the failure of the engineers to turn up and fix it as promised. We survived with many many thanks to kind friends who did batches of laundry for us throughout those six weeks or so. The engineer (the one who actually came) said I must have a very sad life if the sound of the water draining out of my washing machine cheered me up. This is no doubt true, but I still don't think he fully realised how long we'd gone without it.

Having got over that hurdle, our current domestic trauma revolves around the fact that they're resurfacing the road outside the flat, through the night. Since it's such a busy junction they can't do it during the day, or indeed in the evenings, so they've opted for that convenient 11pm-7am option instead. See that double glazing that the previous owners put in in the bedrooms? I can't imagine how we'd cope without it. But at least we can wash our own clothes now.