Ninetysix and ten

happy new year

2007-01-02T22:52:00.000Z

Friends, I'd like to wish you the very best for this new year.

I'd also like to invite you over to my exciting new blog at WordPress:

ninetysixandten.wordpress.com

At this stage you can be fairly sure the actual contents of what I say is unlikely to change, but there's a much nicer layout for you to look at and my writing experience from behind the dashboard is a bit more pleasant. (Plus, dear silent readership, the comment function is at least as easy to use ... nah, it's okay, I know you won't!)

Things might be a bit messy for a wee while until I'm completely happy with it, but please do change your bookmarks and feeds etc, as I'm not planning to write anything more at this site.

Come on over!

pondering

2006-12-27T12:25:00.000Z

Just wondering whether I should move over to Wordpress instead. I'm playing around with it but haven't completely decided. The biggest problem is that I've just switched to the beta version of Blogger. And you can't import your old posts into Wordpress from the new Blogger. You could with the old version, but as of several hours ago, that's not an option any more. We shall see.

a disturbed conscience

2006-12-25T20:53:00.000Z

Another quote from Robert Traill, from p84-85 of the Banner of Truth edition of his works. This time he's basically talking about the cure for a guilty conscience.

The sin is committed, the guilt is contracted, the conscience is defiled, the defilement is seen, disturbance and trouble is felt in the conscience; what should such a sin-sick soul do? Will anyone say to him, Wash thyself where thou canst, and cast away the burden of thy sin the best way thou canst, and then come to the throne of grace? This would be strange gospel indeed.

We know no other course a person should take in this case, but coming to the throne of grace, to have the conscience sprinkled with the blood of Christ, the only cordial for a disturbed conscience, and the only purger of a defiled conscience.

Therefore Peter was quite out in his prayer; he prayed backward, when he said, 'Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.' ... He would have said better if he had prayed, 'Lord, come near to me, and abide with me, and let me always abide with thee, for I am a sinful man. Where better for a sinner to be, than with the Saviour of sinners?' But Peter's prayer is the natural prayer of every one that seeth his sinfulness, and is ignorant of Jesus Christ. The publican understood prayer and plied it better, when he said, 'God be merciful to me a sinner.' 'I feel my sinfulness, I see thy mercy, Lord, let them meet; thy mercy shall be glorified, and I shall be saved.'

Whoever therefore are distressed with the guilt of sin in their consciences, or with the power of it in their hearts and lives, must seek all their relief at this throne of grace. It is only the power of the grace whichis revealed and dispensed at this throne of grace, that is too hard for sin and all its powers.

In other words, a guilty conscience should have the effect of sending a person to the Saviour, to get the reason for their guilt dealt with. Nobody needs to struggle on through life with a nagging conscience, as if they were consigned to do nothing but add to the reasons for their conscience to be disturbed. There is an alternative, in the gospel, and it's summed up in the prayer which Robert Traill quotes: God be merciful to me a sinner. Couldn't that be the first step to a person getting rid of their guilty conscience?

illegitimacy

2006-12-21T14:52:00.000Z

Something has been really annoying me, this 'festive' season. Several days ago the person doing Thought For The Day was drawing a somewhat stretched parallel between the misery and despair in the situation of women who end up as prostitutes (and the compassion with which we should regard them) and the situation of Mary in Bethlehem when there was no room for them in the inn. He'd been in a brothel in India, he said, and there was nothing glamorous about it: doesn't that remind you of the gritty realities that Mary faced, which don't quite match with the sentimentalised version of events portrayed in nativity scenes and carols.

As he pointed out, prostitution in Britain is almost always, in something like 90% of cases, linked with one or more of these three factors: addiction, abuse, and dysfunctional personal relationships. (This observation not only shows the futility of the arguments in favour of legalising prostitution in this country, but also highlights the sick desperation of the men who provide the demand in this exploitative trade: that by the way.) Prostitution is not a choice, in other words, for the majority of women involved - unless it's the choice between that and thieving, as one of the women recently murdered in Surrey was quoted in the papers as saying.

But my point is, basically, that the situation of these women is worlds away from how Mary was placed in Luke 2. There was no addiction, there was no abuse, and she was honourably engaged to be married to a very decent man. They weren't particularly well off, and a manger wasn't maybe the most luxurious of cots for a newborn baby, but everything was going according to plan and both Mary and Joseph were content with the situation.

All these associations which people try to draw between Mary and women in difficult situations today, don't really hold water. However old Mary was, she wasn't 'a teenage mum.' Although Joseph wasn't the biological father, the child was not illegitimate. They might have been poverty stricken, and only able to offer a pair of pigeons for a sacrifice, but it wasn't a poverty inflicted by substance abuse and inappropriate lifestyle choices.

It doesn't bother me in the least to think of the gospel message mingling with the grubby realities of our miserable contemporary society. That is, after all, what it's for - and the even more miserable, grubby reality of our situation is something called sin, and original sin at that, which tends not to come too sharply into focus when Thought For The Day types blether away about society's problems.

But the gospel message isn't primarily a message of sympathy - it's a message of rescue. It may well be helpful to a person with problems to know that someone else has gone through an equivalent tough time, but the gospel is better than that - a way of escape from our misery which is caused by our sin - and escape from the eternal punishment which is the consequence of our sin, and ultimately escape from our sin itself. The reason why the hope and joy of the gospel is lost has a lot more to do with the minimising of the problem of sin which it is designed to deal with, than a failure to find any meaningful parallels between a given person's situtation and that of some bible characters.

do you have your own bag with you today?

2006-12-21T14:40:00.000Z

It was with only the tiniest hint of accusation that the woman behind the till in Sainsbury's asked me this. Actually it's the first time I've heard it put like that: you must be more likely to say yes to this question than no to 'Do you need a bag?' Proud to say, I did indeed have space in another bag. Every little helps, we agreed, in spite of that being Tesco's slogan; she should technically have said, Try something new today. In fact (or so she implied anyway), I've just gained us 500 years longer as a planet by making this choice. Good to know eh!

christmas repeal

2006-12-18T21:47:00.001Z

Radio 4's Christmas Repeal is not, alas, proposing to abolish Christmas, as I thought for a mad moment of optimism. Instead it means you get to vote for the piece of legislation which you think is Britain's 'least useful or most damaging' law - the votes will be counted on New Year's Day.

The problem is, there's just too many to choose from.

The 1967 abortion act?
The ID cards act 2006?
The 1972 European Communities Act?
The Antisocial Behaviour Act 2003?
The Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006?

These are just the ones that spring to mind immediately.

And it's noticeable how recent they mostly are. It reminds me of this article by Nick Clegg (the Lib Dems' home affairs spokesman), where he says:

"The current Labour government is addicted to legislating; this has led to the curtailment of freedoms, confusion in business and crisis in our public services. In less than a decade in power the Blair government has clocked up over 50 Home Office Bills and created more than three thousand new criminal offences. They have added over a hundred thousand new pages of legislation to the statue book..."

How worried should I be, incidentally, to discover that I agree with almost all his Top Ten To Go?
1. Restrictions on protests in Parliament Square
2. Identity Cards
3. Extradition to the US without proper evidence
4. Police power to impose conditions on public assemblies of 2 people or more
5. Criminalising trespass in areas designated by the Home Secretary
6. Control orders
7. DNA retention of those not charged, or found innocent
8. Removal of the public interest defence for whistleblowers
9. Removal of the right to silence under arrest
10. Admissibility of hearsay evidence in court

not just liberals!

2006-12-14T23:39:00.000Z

A ridiculous starter question on a BBC Have Your Say discussion about some bizarre supposedly Christian video game where the post-"Tribulation" forces of good go out and fight unbelievers. The discussion question is: "Are liberal groups right to call for a boycott...?"

Nice that liberal groups care, but "liberal" is not the opposite of "weird". Plenty Christians right across the spectrum would be well within their rights to boycott this rubbish.

And here's a great comment on Have Your Say which makes exactly that point. Chris from Langley, BC will probably never read this, but it's the best of the comments so far.

As a Christian, I am deeply saddened that people would think that this game is in anyway a representation of Christianity or the message of Christ. Christ's call was to love one's enemies. I'm pretty sure loving your enemies means not killing them (someone might want to let Bush know this too...). This game is a horrible idea. It shouldn't just be Liberals protesting this game. Christians more than anyone need to reject the promotion of violence in the name of religion that this game offers.

Chris, Langley, BC

Whatever the detractors of the game have a hatred for, it would be good if they realised that it does not, as its makers suggest, represent anything like "biblical Christianity."

religious liberty again

2006-12-14T22:35:00.000Z

The Christian Institute are springing into action to ask for a judicial review of regulations which Peter Hain is overseeing in Northern Ireland, and which are due to come into force this New Year's Day. It's to do with outlawing discrimination in the provision of goods and services on the grounds of sexual orientation, which sounds awfully tolerant on the surface, but in common with a depressingly large number of pieces of legislation ("reforms") emanating from New Labour, it is so wide-ranging and loosely worded that it leaves itself wide open to abuse by anyone who might want to take advantage of its provisions.

Harrassment is defined in the regulations as conduct which creates "an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating, or offensive environment" for another person on the grounds of their sexual orientation (Regulation 3(3)). Since most of us tend to prefer to avoid creating hostile and humiliating environments for anyone, regardless of their age, gender, race, and regardless of their particular lifestyle choices, this sounds great. But the trick is that an 'offensive environment' can be perceived or identified when no offence was intended, or at any rate on less than objective grounds, and this problem is only exacerbated in Regulation 52, where the burden of proof is reversed (such that a person accused of harrassment will have to prove their innocence). All this is explained in this (pdf) briefing from the Christian Institute.

Apparently exemptions are given for churches for some purposes, but according to the CI's press release, "the homosexual harassment provision is so broadly drafted that it nullifies what partial exemptions churches are given. A minister can say to a practising homosexual (as he would an adulterer), 'I'm sorry, you can't be a member of my church until you repent and turn to Christ,' but his explanation could be the subject of a harassment claim if the individual is offended."

Whether or not you have moral scruples about people's sexual orientation, this proposed legislation clearly goes way beyond protecting people from discrimination and harrassment and gives a privileged status to one particular aspect of a person's identity. It's hard to see how its provisions could be seen as in any way necessary, even for the group who are most obviously in mind as its beneficiaries, and in fact considering how it aims to eliminate even conversations on topics which could in some way be perceived as offensive, it's hard to see how it can even be seen as helpful.

Peter Hain isn't, from what I can gather, one of Northern Ireland's best loved Secretaries of State, and this illiberal, far-reaching, discriminatory piece of legislation (which was arrived at after a consultation period lasting all of 6 weeks), is hardly going to win him any favour. That's his problem I suppose (although we were reminded in church very recently that one of Paul's epistles to Timothy mandates the church to pray for all those in authority, so that we can all live quiet and peaceable lives in all godliness and honesty ...). You can also contribute to the CI's legal defence fund, if you are so minded: click here.

getting the moon into orbit

2006-12-12T23:03:00.000Z

I don't remotely understand the physics involved, but if you're into this sort of thing, take a couple of minutes with this wee simulation to try and get the white ball to start circling the green ball following the red dotted line: How did the moon get into orbit? (Scroll down to read the instructions.)

You need to be using Firefox btw!

cold and wet

2006-12-12T12:26:00.000Z

Yuck. I slept in (machine died between one press of the snooze button and another) then ended up walking to my office in a raging gale and torrential downpour when the No 2 sailed past me just as I stepped out the door.

Now I'm here: forgot to get milk, feet are soaking, and someone who shall remain nameless amongst my officemates is insisting on having the window open again. So not only is it kinda chilly but I'll have to venture out again for milk before I can even begin to think about the comfort that only a cup of tea can bring.

Anyway, I do have one or two things to say which will hopefully be less moany, but I'm due to finish writing a report tomorrow and there are still some puzzling unanswered questions in the stats to grapple with first. I'll be back.

wugs for sale

2006-12-07T23:37:00.000Z

One of the most famous psycholinguistic tasks to have ever been done with children is the Wug Test.

First catch your child (aged about 4 for maximum effect), then show them a picture of a made-up animal-like object. Tell them, "This is a wug."

Then show the child a picture of two of those objects, and say, "Now there are two of them. There are two _____"

If the child knows how to produce regular plurals in English, they should reply, "two wugs."

So far, so obvious - but there's more to it than that. In English, there are at least three ways of pronouncing the plural marker which we write "-s" - either /s/, /z/, or /əz/, depending on the phonological properties of the word you're attaching it to.

If the word ends with a voiceless consonant, like cat, you use the /s/ version of the plural marker: /kats/.
If the word ends with a voiced sound (consonant or vowel), like dog or bee, you use the /z/ version: /dɔgz/, /biz/.
If the word ends with a sibilant, like horse, you use the /əz/ version: /hɔɹsəz/.

The different versions are called allomorphs - alternative forms of the one morpheme - and as you can see, the choice of which particular allomorph to use is rule-governed (or at any rate, it can be described in terms of fairly straightforward rules).

In the quest to find when and how children acquire this rule, Jean Berko Gleason came to fame with the wug test. As it explains in the Wikipedia article, it takes till about 5 or 6 years for children to master all the different aspects of this allomorphy - but the default /z/ form is usually acquired by the age of about 4. Meanwhile, the endearing little wug itself has taken on a life of its own and acquired an iconic status in the child language acquisition research community.

And in fact, so much so, that wug-based merchandise has in fact been recently made available from CafePress.com. You can get wug t-shirts, bags, aprons, and even a wug mug! It's so exciting, and all in time for you know what pagan festival as well.

So if you were, in fact, wondering what to get me ... well, first of all try Present Aid or Oxfam Unwrapped, but if you were still feeling generous after that, I really don't feel my life would be complete without at least, let's say, a fridge magnet to accompany Nelson Mandela's 'great generation' quote and the obligatory humorous 'sometimes I wake up grumpy' one. The perfect gift solution, as the saying goes, for the language acquisitionist in your life.

christians in politics?

2006-11-30T23:33:00.000Z

I took issue with a friend last week who was waxing lyrical on the potential benefits of the new(-ish) political party, the Scottish Christian Party. Hopefully it was more than mere argumentativeness, but I'm definitely open to challenge on this point (as at least that friend was distinctly unconvinced by all my arguments).

It worries me for one thing that a dedicated Christian party in mainstream politics might (might) be incompatible with the Establishment Principle. As I see it, a Christian Party would presumably be consciously and deliberately setting out to represent the Church, and presumably, the ultimate aim of a political party in the UK situation would be to get into government. An official representative from the church in government would mean (I think) that the state would have been intruded upon to some extent by the church, in roughly the same way that a government official sitting on a kirk session would represent the state intruding on the church. It would also mean, would it not, that in the unlikely scenario that a Christian party got enough of a majority in parliament, the church would effectively be ruling the country. Does this argument make sense?

Obviously I don't have a problem with Christians, as individuals, running for office and acting according to their Christian values in their attempt to represent their constituents. But I think that it's a different matter when a group of Christians band together to offer an official line from the church within the political sphere.

It worries me in addition that even supposing those quibbles about the establishment principle are not well founded, there is still a problem of what exactly a Christian political party can realistically hope to offer.

For one thing, I strongly resist the campaign slogans emanating from some Scottish Christian Party spokesmen along the lines that 'a vote for us is a vote for Jesus.' Assuming they're working from the best of motives, and don't really believe anything quite so presumptious, slogans like that are deeply cringe inducing and off-putting.

For another thing, I'm sceptical that a Christian party can truly offer anything beyone a moral or ethical framework while still remaining Christian. I mean: you can there are some contemporary moral issues, such as abortion, on which you can take a clear stand without alienating hardly a Christian in the land, but what on earth kind of a policy could a Christian party have on the NHS, for example? Policies on the war in Iraq, on immigration, on carbon emissions, on funding for higher education - you hardly need to look beyond your own congregation to know that people can be perfectly good Christians and yet differ wildly on their approach to issues like these. So in what sense could a Christian party, trying their best to implement Christian values, genuinely draw up a manifesto of concrete policies on issues like these? A disagreement between Christians on how to tackle third world poverty, or whether to build new motorways, would not by itself cause a rupture in the Church as such, but there are obvious serious implications for how effectively any group of Christians could represent "the Christian position" on exactly the kinds of issues which no serious political party can possibly fudge.*

Which brings me back to how incongruous it is for any party to canvass support on the basis that a vote for them is "a vote for Jesus," and from there I'd like to suggest again that if you take the establishment principle seriously, you probably wouldn't be wanting to even try and find a Christian policy for making A-levels harder and combating MRSA infections. Individual Christians who are good at that sort of thing are welcome to go for it, but the Church, as the Church, can't have (and shouldn't want to have) a say on any of these matters. If the government should leave the church to decide whether or not to kneel at the communion rail, the church should definitely leave the government to decide for itself how to "do governmnent."

* Do the Tories still count as a serious political party?

religious courts

2006-11-28T13:39:00.000Z

[Updated!]

I've been pondering a post about the Establishment Principle since a conversation about a week ago - this isn't it, but it's a stepping stone on the way.

This article in the BBC magazine raises the question of the place of religious courts alongside (in their case) English and Welsh law. How far can a religious court reach into the lives of the followers of that religion?

Within Scottish presbyterianism, there used to be (1600s-1800s) a well-worked out model of the relationship between church and state, whereby church courts were meant to have jurisdiction over spiritual matters, and civil courts had jurisdiction over everything else (including property and divorce, if I understand right). The two spheres of church and state were meant to co-operate wherever their jurisdictions overlapped (eg presumably a convicted criminal would undergo church discipline), but at the same time they had to mutually recognise that when there wasn't an overlap they would each defer to the other. The state wielded the magistrate's sword, and the church held the keys of the kingdom of heaven. The state couldn't dictate which liturgy the church should use or which ministers should be inducted into which pastoral charges, but the church couldn't meddle in political matters either.

They called it erastianism when the church was meant to be subservient to the state, and they called it romanism when the state was meant to be subservient to the church; both options were regarded as sub-optimal, but the use of that latter term only shows how unimaginable it was for them that islam would ever be a force to be reckoned with - how inconceivable that sharia law might ever be invoked in the civil sphere in the western world. The church does have the right to a voice in society, and an authoritative voice at that, but only within its own jurisdiction. I don't know if it's really adequate to talk about 'the church' in Islam, but the Establishment Principle does have something to say about Islam's locating of the interface between religious authority and secular authority; and what it says is that religious courts have no business encroaching on civil issues. That's as far as I understand it anyway.

If anyone is more clued up than me on the Establishment Principle I'd be very interested to know how sharia law could be implemented in the Scottish situation.

UPDATE: Thanks to all you readers who *didn't* spot the deliberate mistake in the second paragraph. At least in the Scottish situation, marriage and divorce does fall into the jurisdiction of the Church, as well as (?) that of the State. A better example of things within the remit of civil courts would presumably be property and financial matters, or something. But will this egregious error prevent me from speculating further about the usefulness of the establishment principle in contemporary Scottish life? I think not.

not able to answer

2006-11-22T23:24:00.000Z

I've just broken the back of that stack of assignments I've been feverishly marking for the past half week. On a tight schedule with unfamilar data it hasn't been the most tranquil of times.

I'll tell you what's the most distressing thing of all: it's seeing students who failed to venture even the attempt at an answer. Honestly, one student's paper looked like this:

6. Not able to answer.
7. Not able to answer.
8. Not able to answer.

I never used to know why lecturers spent so much time exhorting their classes not to leave blanks - I never really believed anyone did that. Not when the questions are worth ten marks anyway. Now I know, and it's not just for the student's benefit either. If they've written something, you can at least try and treat it sympathetically, or give them credit somewhere else seeing as how they've made an effort. But if you can't even see how their mind is working, they've left you with absolutely no option but to give them zero.

It breaks my heart, it really does.

Unless, of course, they're the same people who who submitted their hand-ins with single spacing and font sizes less than 12 and not knowing how to spell "auxiliary". They, obviously, deserve everything they get.

not for a moment

2006-11-22T23:13:00.000Z

John Bunyan has a lengthy section in Come and Welcome where he demonstrates how impossible it is that a sinner going to the Saviour for salvation would ever be rejected - the thought shouldn't be entertained for a moment.

If Jesus Christ should allow us once to think that the coming sinner shall be cast out, then he must allow us to question his will, or power, or merit to save. But he cannot allow us once to question any of these; therefore not once to think that the coming sinner shall be cast out.

(1) He cannot allow us to question his will; for he saith in the text, 'I will in no wise cast out.'

(2) He cannot allow us to question his power; for the Holy Ghost saith, He is able to save to the uttermost them that come.

(3) He cannot allow us to question the efficacy of his merit: for the blood of Christ cleanseth the comer from all sin, 1 John 1.

The whole book is devoted to unpacking that one verse in John 6 - 'All that the Father giveth me shall come to me, and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out,' and it's done in the most homely and encouraging way imaginable, but in some ways just the title of the book is enough to know: Come and welcome to Jesus Christ. (The verse itself is written above the pulpit in our church, which should presumably make it easier for this congregation to remember anyway!)

intuitions on nasality

2006-11-20T20:37:00.000Z

I'm looking at the section on prosody in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. It goes through the standard aspects of prosody - intonation, rhythm, loudness, etc, and then there's a box at the side which talks about the "paralinguistic" uses of prosody, or the way that you can use those features of spoken language to send messages 'alongside' the actual words you speak (in much the same way as body language does).

So far, so uncontroversial, but I did have a question about one of the examples which was given to illustrate the use of 'voice quality':

The following examples of paralinguistic effects are accompanied by a gloss indicating the context in which they commonly occur.
* whisper - secrecy or conspiracy
* breathiness - deep emotion or sexual desire
* huskiness - unimportance or disparagement
* nasality - anxiety
* extra lip rounding - intimacy (especially to animals and babies).

Did anyone else think that nasality wasn't particularly closely connected with anxiety? or is it just me?

Presumably part of the problem is that the distinctions between, say, breathiness and huskiness, is left to the reader's own impressions, and I think it's fairly well recognised that ordinary language users can classify a startlingly wide range of speech phenomena as being "nasal," even when acoustically and articulatorily there's no nasality to be found. (The air coming out of the lungs in speech production flows out either by your mouth or by your nose - if it's flowing through the nasal cavity, that's when the sounds are nasal. It happens automatically with sounds like m, n, ng, but the suggestion here is that nasality would characterise a much larger stretch of speech as produced by an anxious person.)

It could well be a lack of imagination on my part, but I would be grateful if anyone could explain what might have been behind this claim.

David Crystal (1995), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge University Press, p248-249

specially welcome

2006-11-13T22:08:00.000Z

It's been dawning on me for the past few months that all the books I've personally found most helpful have been written by English authors - Ryle, Bunyan, also Thomas Goodwin although I don't mind admitting he was something of a struggle, and Spurgeon on and off.

Obviously, if a thing is true, it doesn't matter who said it. But I've been starting to feel I should make more use of more home-grown talent. Theologically speaking, I don't know if you can beat Thomas Boston or George Smeaton, but I should really branch out into other practical works in addition to The Christian's Great Interest.

So yesterday I had a look at the works of Robert Traill, which I'd heard good things about, and instantly gleaned some very heart warming things. He was talking about coming to 'the throne of grace,' meaning approaching God in prayer, and in more than one place in the couple of sermons I managed to read he made the point that some people were more specially welcome at the throne of grace than others. Those who come to the throne of grace early and often, he said, are especially welcome. Also those who come when they have no other source of support whatsoever. Although he said it was a sad sign of unbelief that people don't go to God for help until they have absolutely nowhere else to turn, he still said those people were welcome when they did come, because their faith would be the more undiluted, the fewer props were available to them.

Another category of people who he said were especially welcome at the throne of grace were those who come "to get, and not to give." You might think it was obvious that your prayer wouldn't include anything by way of self-help - by definition, it should be a going out of yourself to another for help. But he went on:

"Take heed to your spirits in this matter. When you come to the throne of grace, come to receive out of Christ's fullness, and come not to bring grace with you to add to Christ's store. He loves to give, and glories in giving, but he scorns to receive grace from you, and in truth you have none but what he gives. Bring your wants to him to supply, but bring not your fulness to brag of. Spread your sins before this throne with shame and sorrow, and plead for a gracious pardon, but take heed you bring not your sorrow, tears, and repentance; nay, your faith itself, as a plea for that pardon. How abominable it is to Christians' ears, and how much more to Christ's, to hear a man plead thus for pardon: 'Here is my repentance; where is thy pardon? Here is my faith; where is thy justification?' I know men abhor to say so. But take good heed, lest any thought bordering on it enter into thy heart. Faith is the tongue that begs pardon - faith is the hand that receives it, it is the eye that seeth it; but it is no price to buy it. Faith uses the gospel plea for pardon, but itself, neither in habit nor act, is the plea itself. That is only Christ's blood. Christ's blood goes for the remission of your sins, if ever they be forgiven, and it is the only plea to be heard at the throne of grace."

Traill was a covenanter and I think (if I remember) it mentioned in the brief account of his life that he was a friend of William Guthrie (author of the Christian's Great Interest). All I managed to read yesterday was Sermon I and Sermon II on the throne of grace, in the first volume of his works published by the Banner of Truth (ie, I didn't take a note of the page numbers, but that's where to find these quotes if you wanted to track them down!).

red and white

2006-11-11T15:07:00.000Z

I was all set to unleash a pompous post on the pseudo-controversy surrounding red versus white poppies the other day, but in the end I abandoned the effort. Then last night I finally sat down to read The Last Town on Earth by Peter Mullen - a novel about an American town which closed itself off in an attempt to avoid being infected by the flu pandemic during the First World War.

The book deals with the dilemmas arising from how to deal with a couple of soldiers who came to the town for refuge. One of the most interesting characters was Rebecca, the wife of the mill-owner whose progressive ideas about workers' pay and conditions had led him to establish the town in the first place. She was something of a socialist, her sympathies were anti-war, she was excited by this new movement called feminism, and she muted her dislike of the idea of shutting off the town so as not to disagree with her husband in public. She didn't want the quarantine imposed since, as long as the town was healthy, she thought they could have contributed to the welfare of the rest of society, rather than excluding themselves, turning their backs on everyone else in order to preserve their own privileged position. Unfortunately she fades from view as the central character, her adopted son, ends up confiding in a new found girlfriend instead - someone whose heart was in the right place but who wasn't so ideologically interesting, I thought.

Anyway, the point of bringing up the book was to say how blurry the lines between good and bad can get when they're drawn at the level of nations and international violence. The town was regarded with the greatest of suspicion by its neighbours for consisting of 'rapscallions and reds,' and there's also a nasty description of the experience of a conscientious objector in one of the army's training camps, in spite of how these people's experiences and beliefs don't seem to me to be particularly outrageous or alien. I don't really know enough about World War I to decide how far the patriotism was justified, versus the perception of pointlessness, the perception that it was a 'rich man's war': I just know I got a bit depressed, and in the end I decided I really didn't care about the colour of your poppy. One version might make more of a statement about the undesirableness of violence and conflict and express more forcefully a determination to avoid it, but if the other version references the stark cost and suffering, it's not by way of celebration but to serve as a reminder. So, pomposity aside, if I'd gone for one rather than the other it wouldn't involve a principle, just a question of emphasis. I think.

phobias, morality, the law

2006-11-11T14:28:00.000Z

I was impressed by a letter published in Edinburgh University's Student newspaper this week which addressed the validity of making moral judgments on homosexual activity - pointing out that if you believe that homosexuality is wrong, it doesn't automatically mean you're homophobic.

The author [of a previous article] also implies that moral disapproval of homosexual activity should be regarded as homophobia. The author's own perfectly sensible definition of a phobia as an irrational fear or hatred should demonstrate that this elision is also false. The judgment that a certain kind of activity is morally wrong is simply not the same thing as fearing, hating, or mistreating those who indulge in it. If someone who disapproves of homosexual activity is cruel to persons who are inclined to or indulge in such behaviour, this is a grave wrong; and it is in no way a necessary concomitant of the moral judgment about the activity in question.

It's a relief to see views like that being articulated - especially since it takes care to make the point that homophobia is actually wrong. A person's homosexual lifestyle is no reason for them to be ridiculed or insulted, and a professed belief in the moral wrong-ness of it is definitely no excuse for being offensive.

But what's maybe even more of a relief is to see views like this being published. The Christian Institute's latest email is about Joe and Helen Roberts, who want a legal declaration that it was unlawful for the police to interrogate them in their own home for two hours and threaten them with imprisonment after they had asked the council to display Christian leaflets in addition to literature promoting a gay-rights agenda. (Jonathan Freedland used the incident in an article back in January as one of several examples of free speech coming under direct attack in recent months, so it's not just religiously conservative people who care about this.) I think the Christian Institute have set up a legal defence fund to help with the Roberts case, which is intended to stop similar confrontations arising in the future between members of the public who haven't actually committed a crime and hyper-zealous police officers who seem to wish they had.

philosophical question

2006-11-09T16:05:00.000Z

Is it consistent with humility for a person to spontaneously announce to a roomful of people what was the greatest compliment they ever received?

I only ask because today, someone said to me .... nah, only kidding!

modernity

2006-11-06T21:48:00.000Z

Tony Blair wants us to think that identity cards are an issue of modernity, not about civil liberties at all. This is a pretty feeble line to take - as if it counts as an argument to simply say nice things about your own position and act as if all the criticism coming from wide ranging and well qualified sources doesn't really exist.

Even supposing that identity cards (and the associated national database) actually had the potential to bring about the magic cure for such diverse problems as illegal immigration and benefits fraud (not forgetting terrorism as well of course, and basically just 'crime' in general), there still remains a massive problem of trust. Does it make sense to trust this government with 51 categories of personal information? If you don't do anything wrong, maybe. But how hard has it been for this government to invent new categories of wrong-doing, such that people who wouldn't have been criminals ten years ago now find themselves on distinctly the wrong side of the law, whether they're autistic teenagers whose neighbours land them with an asbo for staring over the fence, or little-England parishioners who think that civil partnerships aren't somehow quite as valid as conventional marriage.

ID cards and the national identity register, if they go ahead, will not only be a massive waste of money but a massive intrusion into our privacy. There's nothing shameful about wanting your personal details kept personal, as opposed to collected minutely and held centrally and made to contribute to a society where your innocence needs to be established and the people become answerable to the state rather than the other way round.

Anyway, we have an overnight guest due to arrive shortly; beds need to be made; it's better that I step down from the soapbox for the time being.

incontestable and unquestionable

2006-11-04T21:45:00.000Z

This is a piece from Matthew Henry's Communicant's Companion - it's not the quote I'd intended to post next, but the one I'd made a mental note of, I can't actually find now that I'm looking for it.

Here [at the Lord's table] we must confide in his power, trusting in him as one that can help and save us. He has an incontestable authority - is a Saviour by office, sanctified and sealed, and sent into the world for this purpose; help is laid upon him. We may well offer to trust him with our part of this great concern [ie salvation], which is the securing of our happiness, for God trusted him with his part of it, the securing of his honour, and declard himself well pleased in him.

He has likewise an unquestionable ability to save to the uttermost. He is mighty to save, and every way qualified for the undertaking. He is skilful, for treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hid in him; he is solvent, for there is in him an inexhaustible fulness of merit and grace, sufficient to bear all our burdens, and supply all our needs.

We must commit ourselves and the great affairs of our salvation unto him, with a full assurance that he is 'able to keep what we commit to him against that day,' that great day, which will try the foundation of every man's work.

We must confide in his promise, trusting in him as one that will certainly help and save us, on the terms proposed. We may take his word for it, and this is the word which he has spoken - 'Him that cometh unto me I will in nowise cast out,' a double negation, 'I will not, no, I will not.' He is engaged for us in the covenant of redemption, and engaged to us in the covenant of grace, and in both he is the Amen, the faithful witness. On this, therefore, we must rely, the word on which he has caused us to hope. God has spoken in his holiness, that he will accept us in the Beloved, and in that 'I will rejoice...'.

There is not salvation in any other but in him; trust him for it therefore, and depend upon him only.

From Chapter 10, 'Helps for the exciting of those pious and devout affections which should be working in us while we attend this ordinance;' the second section.

in the field

2006-10-30T20:25:00.000Z

Borrowing equipment from the department to run experiments in places other than the official experiment room counts as going Into The Field!

Visions of tents being trampled by curious cattle in the early hours of the morning? Of sifting through artefacts in an ancient burial site? Of being speared by offended natives upon failing to use the correct honorifics for their most senior chief?

Sadly, the most demanding thing it means for me is negotiating room bookings on the campus of a different university. And to be honest, the only way in which this counts as demanding is because the room is only bookable for one morning a week, meaning I have to strictly ration myself to three participants per week on this campus ... demanding huh. Oh, and I did my ankle in, catching the bus out there the time before last, if that counts.

However, the rationing notwithstanding, data collection is progressing relatively well - I've nearly reached my quota for the number of participants in the experimental group, and recruitment for the control group will hopefully start in the next week or so. This means, that for the first time ever in nearly three years, something might actually go according to schedule, and I might just be able to start writing up early in the new year. Can't wait!

triplets: third attempt

2006-10-24T22:15:00.000+01:00

The first time I tried posting this something went wrong. The second time it published fine, but upon further reading it turned out to be so intensely dull that it even bored me. There's no guarantees that this will be any better, but at least I'll put in a bit more effort this time.

A while back I sneaked in some examples of what's known as syntactic (or structural) ambiguity. That included sentences like, Flying planes can be dangerous. The sentence is ambiguous because it could mean (a) it is sometimes dangerous to fly planes, or (b) when planes are in the process of flying they are sometimes dangerous. The ambiguity in this case doesn't arise from any particular word in the sentence, but rather from the construction as a whole, the way the words are combined.

A different kind of ambiguity is known as lexical ambiguity - when a particular word can have more than one interpretation. A textbook example is the word bank, which might refer to the side of a river, or, perhaps more likely, the financial institution. (Another example would be bat, either the flying creature or the thing you use for playing cricket.)

A question arose in my office the other day as to word-forms which can function as different parts of speech while retaining the same form. (If a real syntactician happened to drop by and read this, s/he might not agree that this is another form of ambiguity; but since I wouldn't have an answer for that, we'll just have to hope that no such creature ever comes this way.)* The kind of word-form I mean would be something like sink, which, when you consider it in isolation, just as I've written it there without any supporting context, could be either a noun (as in, My sink has remained unblocked for months now) or a verb (as in, My blog is starting to sink under the weight of so many ponderous opinions); another example would be elaborate, which could be either a verb (as in, Allow me to elaborate on this point), or an adjective (as in, That was a very long and elaborate sentence I just wrote).

There are lots and lots of words in English which can function as two out of the three main lexical categories, noun, verb, and adjective. But the other week, the challenge was on: how many word-forms are there which can function as all three of these categories? To find such words would take us a large step further in our capability to bamboozle first year syntax and morphology students, as well as whiling away a pleasant couple of hours in the halls of academe, given that we don't really have that much else to spend our time on.

One example of a word-form that can be used as either a noun, a verb, or an adjective is light. Exemplified as follows:

Another example would be cross.

There are also items like void and square, which I won't think up any illustrative sentences for just now, as well as a few more which we came up with after the office brainstorming session. I'm insisting on talking about word-forms, incidentally, because I'm not sure you'd want to think of cross 'irritated' and cross 'an X' as being related in any way beyond sharing the sequence of sounds c-r-o-s-s (/kɹɔs/ in IPA) - in other words you're looking for homophones, not necessarily words related in meaning or historical origin. And because you're looking for homophones, it doesn't matter if the word-forms don't share the same spelling: I think course/coarse and plain/plane could also go on the list even though they're not homographs.

So if anyone has time on their hands and diagnostic criteria for lexical classes, do feel free to advance the cause of science by contributing to the collection.

* Slogan spotted proudly displayed on a removals van: We drop everything for you! I won't hazard a guess as to what kind of ambiguity that is.

non-essential

2006-10-18T22:58:00.000+01:00

Various people have been commenting on the British Airways action against Nadia Eweida, an employee who refused to cover up the cross she was wearing.

The Barnabas Fund is one group who have pointed out the inconsistency in BA's policy - they disallow visible crosses since there's no biblical requirement to wear one, whereas hijabs are acceptable, even though not all Muslims themselves are agreed as to whether it should actually be compulsory.

The Barnabas article also gives examples of crosses as targets for violence and destruction in some parts of the world, saying that 'those who persecute Christians are very aware of the significance of the cross as symbolising the Christian faith,' and that 'in the Christian faith the cross is a symbol of the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ, God incarnate, and his resurrection, to take away the sins of the world, that is, a symbol of the most central doctrines of Christianity.'

This might well have something to do with my personal background, but, although the cross is indeed a symbol of Christ's sacrificial death, I don't think I'd feel very comfortable wearing a physical representation of it. Crucifixes are out of the question for other reasons, but I've always understood crosses to somehow trivialise what actually took place at Calvary, and, in spite of the Barnabas claim that they symbolise his resurrection as well as his death, they seem to focus too much attention on the Redeemer's state of humiliation, without being able to convey either the success of his work on the cross or what you might call the glory of his humiliation, even at its lowest point.

The obvious response to what I've just said would be that we're meant to boast in the cross, and little silver crosses around your neck (and large wooden crosses inside churches) are one way of doing that. But there's a quote at the back of my mind by some Reformed writer to the effect that you wouldn't want to wear something that symbolised the Saviour's greatest shame and disgrace, and the cruelty and wickedness of the people responsible for killing him - like celebrating the pistol that was used to murder one of your closest family members. It's not his sufferings in themselves that constitute his atoning sacrifice, it's what he was doing when he suffered, which is what you run the risk of overlooking, I think, when a cross is the symbol for your Christianity.

Having said all that, in the situation with BA and their employee, I think I'd still want to come down on the side of the employee - if Sikhs and Muslims are able to override the dress code in order to express their religious identity, it doesn't make sense not to allow different (and admittedly mainstream) varieties of Christians the same leeway, even if it's not a freedom I'd want to take advantage of personally. Is that a consistent position to hold?

updates

2006-10-16T22:44:00.000+01:00

The sidebar now contains links to a judiciously selected subset of the blogs I read. Not that the others aren't worthy of selection, I hasten to add for those authors who may be reading, they're just a bit more private. Or else they're linked by the ones I've listed. Let me know if I've missed anyone out.

this week

2006-10-14T22:36:00.000+01:00

Visitors, conferences, data collection ... I've a couple of things up my sleeve which I want to say but time is not on my side ... also managed to wrench my ankle, merely by elegantly tripping over my own feet ... Will keep you posted on all the exciting developments as and when they occur.

snippets from gurnall

2006-10-10T11:41:00.000+01:00

The Christian in Complete Armour is a huge volume and looks so daunting that it never used to cross my mind to open it.

The first time I did open it was due to it being the only book left in someone's bookshelf as they packed up their flat in a flitting. They probably planned to use it to squash a bulging suitcase shut later, or something. When I did have a look though, I thought it was really excellent - it was directly relevant to what I needed to read at the time, and sprinkled throughout with so many brief everyday metaphors, to do with kitchens and gardening and nurseries and things, which meant that its major metaphor - the Christian's armour and warfare, based on Ephesians 6 - didn't get too wearisome.

The only problem is that I've never subsequently been able to remember whereabouts I was reading that was so helpful. It was only a few pages I got through, and there were something like two books of 400 pages combined in the single volume my friend had.

Anyway, I was dipping into it again the other day (another friend's copy this time) and found something which reminded me of the piece by Dickson which I quoted before:

"Sincerity shows itself in the Christian's plainheartedness to confess all his sins freely, without extorting, and nakedly, without extenuation or reservation - when there is no false box in the cabinet of the soul to lock up a darling sin in."

He went on to say a few pages later, "It is not possible that a Christian should walk loosely all day, and be free and familiar with God at night." He spoke a lot about taking care to prepare for going to pray, reminding yourself what you're about to do before you actually get down to it, as well as trying to make sure you keep up an atmosphere of prayerfulness all day long, as much as possible. "He that watcheth his heart all day, is most likely to find it at hand and in time for prayer at night. Whereas, loose walking breeds lazy praying."

I have the feeling that the complete work might be available in separate volumes? which would make it easier to handle. These quotes came from p293, 296 and 362 of the single big volume.

for sinners only

2006-10-04T22:02:00.000+01:00

From Owen on Psalm 130.

The proposal of repentance is a thing fitted and suited, in its own nature, to beget thoughts in the mind of a sinner that there is forgiveness with God. Repenting is for sinners only. 'I came not,' saith our Saviour, 'to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.' It is for them, and them only. ...

O sinners, come and deal with God by repentance! Doth it not openly speak forgiveness in God? and, if it were otherwise, could men possibly be more frustrated or deceived? would not the institution of repentance be a lie? Such a delusion may proceed from Satan, but not from him who is the fountain of goodness, holiness, and truth.

His call to repentance is a full demonstration of his readiness to forgive. ... God deceives none: whoever comes to him on his proposal of repentance shall find forgiveness. It is said of some, indeed, that he 'will laugh at their calamity, and mock when their fear cometh.' ... But who are they? Only such as refuse his call to repentance.

From John Owen, Practical Exposition of Psalm 130, p203. What he's saying here is more or less an expanded version of what it says in the Shorter Catechism - repentance involves among other things, some glimpse or apprehension of the mercy of God in Christ. Your conscience could tell you that you should turn from your sins, but it's another thing to realise that there's the possibility of turning from them to God. But the gospel call on sinners to repent is itself an assurance that salvation is available, that sinners can be reconciled to God, that 'there is forgiveness with him,' as Psalm 130 says.

thundering nonsense

2006-10-02T20:04:00.000+01:00

Remember the scandal that erupted a few days ago about the conditions the prisoners were being kept in, in Pentonville? In the Times, the 'Thunderer' column was devoted to ridiculing the notion that we should be bothered at criminals living in cells without pillows and with rats and cockroaches for company.

It's so long since I've read the Times on a regular basis that I've forgotten whether the Thunderer is deliberately provocative and actually specialises in saying absurd things with extravagant pomposity and bullishness ... one can only hope so, because the alternative is that someone out there really thinks it doesn't matter how you treat criminals, just because they've committed a crime.

Having mentioned Josephine Butler the other day, this column gave me the perfect opportunity to talk about another brave woman, one of my childhood heroes, the prison reformer Elizabeth Fry.

Elizabeth Fry was a Quaker who was appalled by the grim conditions of the prisons in her time, and set about trying to help women prisoners in particular. People were imprisoned for offences which would now be considered fairly minor, if I remember rightly, and imprisonment was a fairly desperate fate in those days. Babies born to the women in prison might die of cold, they only had straw for bedding, there were lice everywhere, and they might even have needed to persuade other people to buy them food to eat (fraid I don't have the book to hand to check up, so feel free to correct any of this if it's wrong!).

One incident in particular which stuck in my mind (I hope I'm remembering it accurately) was when she and her friends got themselves organised and made little linen bonnets for all the women in the particular prison that they were working in - and then the women were able to shave their heads, to get rid of the lice, and wear the caps while their hair grew back. It was such a necessary practical measure, yet at the same time you can see the concern to allow these people to retain some dignity, and treat them with courtesy as far as possible.

Josephine Butler thought it was wrong to treat anyone like scum even if they were prostitutes: Elizabeth Fry thought it was wrong to allow her fellow human beings to wallow in misery and degradation even if they were convicted criminals. The self-congratulatory attitude that says certain types of people deserve whatever comes to them, no matter how horrible and demoralising it might be, is an attitude which fails to recognise that it wouldn't be in the power of any of us, really, not to end up doing the same kinds of thing (and how would you like it if you had to share with cockroaches!); and it fails to recognise that even when people have done something so bad in society that society needs to take steps to punish them, there's such a thing as doing it humanely and with a view to making them see the benefits of behaving in a moral and civilised way, as well as the bad consequences of behaving badly.

The Times article which made me so cross is here and there are a couple of articles on Elizabeth Fry here and here.

dickson again

2006-09-28T22:31:00.000+01:00

Another quote from David Dickson (who I've quoted from before). It's from the same book, but this time it's part of an exposition of Job 10.

We see here, that uprightness and a good conscience have boldness with God, and will get leave with confidence to lift up the face before him, and get his testimony and approbation.

An honest sincere man will be bold with God. An honest man is not a sinless man; but one who, as he shall answer to God, strives against all known sin in private and in public; and when he is overcome in sin, is never at rest, till he be sure that God is pacified, and has assurance of a remission granted. He tells God whatever he feels or fears, puts God on all his counsels, goes to him in all his distresses; counts God so merciful and good, that he will go to him; so constant, that he will not, nor cannot, change; and still justifies God, to be what he has spoken of himself in his word.

Such a man will get liberty to tell all his mind to God, and God will not mis-take him, or captiously snack at [check, snap at] his words, but expone them favourably. As he construes God according to his mind, so God construes him according to his aim and desire. Therefore, be honest before God, for the there is no beguiling of him. Those who promise to repent the morn beguile themselves, and not him. It were better that such persons should timeously take with their faults, and seek into his mercy then when he seemed angriest, yea count him their best friend; or when he curbs them most; for there are not passions in God.When any come into him, and make supplication to him, he can neither loosen his love from them, nor yet strike them in anger.

Therefore study plain dealing with God. If there be great wickedness in your heart, tell him of it. Tell him that it is stiff, stubborn, and backward; or that it is borne down with naughty burdens and will not take on a better burden. Let God be thy secretary [confidant] in all, and whatever thou would have close kept, commit that to him.

Taken from the Select Practical Writings of David Dickson (Vol 1). Issued by the Committee of the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland for the Publication of the Works of Scottish Reformers and Divines. Edinburgh (1845). p24.
PS: Words which strike me as possibly being old Scottish words, which possibly might not mean much any more, include expone for 'expound,' the morn for 'tomorrow,' and timeous for 'timely.' Also naughty is used in its old sense of 'evil.' The glosses given in square brackets were provided as footnotes in the 1845 publication.

an unexpected hero

2006-09-27T20:57:00.000+01:00

This post follows firmly in my tradition of not getting round to talking about newspaper articles until ages after they were printed. This particular article was in the Guardian (well, where else) and it was about a nineteenth century social reformer called Josephine Butler, described by the writer, Julie Bindel, as one of feminism's unsung heroes and the first publicly recognised feminist activist in Britain.

Josephine Butler (1828-1906) made her name by campaigning on a wide range of women's rights issues. Prior to women even getting the vote, she was active in the cause of putting an end to exploitatative practices such as prostitution (including child prostitution), legalised brothels, and sex trafficking.

An example of her dedication and persistence was the 16-year fight against one particularly discriminatory piece of legislation - the Congatious Diseases Act of 1864, which aimed to stop the spread of venereal diseases amongst the armed forces. Apparently, "Under these laws, any woman in designated military towns could be forcibly investigated for venereal disease. It was decided that men would not be examined because they would resist. Women believed to be prostitutes could be reported to the authorities, and those found to be infected could be imprisoned for three months in a secure hospital. There were instances of such women, many of whom were not prostitutes, being subsequently forced into the sex trade." The article explains, "The sexual double standard of the act, which Butler took to mean that men could use prostitutes with impunity while at the same time punishing the women, disgusted her, and she led a campaign to repeal it. After winning that battle - the law was repealed in 1886 - Butler took the campaign to India, where women were being sold into prostitution by the British army."

What was particularly interesting about this article in G2 was that the same woman (and the same biography of her by Jane Jordan) were featured in none other than the Christian Institute's Update magazine of Summer 2006: Josephine Butler was in fact a Christian, determined that nobody should be treated as 'scum,' not even 'fallen women,' as "everyone is equal under God" - and living out her beliefs through letter writing, pamphleteering, and public speaking, as well as intensely practical measures which went to the lengths of taking women dying of disease into her own home, before she raised the funds to set up a separate, nondenominational refuge or 'house of rest' for desperate prostitutes.

I doubt that even I would always agree with the Guardian's classification of people into the category of heroes, but this time I think it's safe enough. The analysis of 'sex work' as exploitative and degrading is accepted both by this journalist and the Christian Institute's researchers, and in both publications the point is made that, while Butler's achievements were radical and progressive and brought huge benefits not just to women but society at large, they're unfortunately under increasing threat of being dismantled now, only a couple of generations after Josephine Butler's.

A quote from Butler herself to finish off:

The degradation of these poor unhappy women is not degradation for them alone; it is a blow to the dignity of every virtuous woman too, it is dishonour done to me, it is the shaming of every woman in every country of the world.

Julie Bindel's article is worth the read if you have a minute, and the biography by Jane Jordan is on my wishlist.

what can you see?

2006-09-25T21:15:00.000+01:00

I'm not sure if this is a problem with my internet connection, or Opera, or Blogger, but publishing posts at this end is becoming a bit of a painful process. If you, dear reader, are seeing duplicates (or getting funny notifications) could I trouble you to drop me a line and let me know? Ta!

something for the ladies

2006-09-25T20:49:00.001+01:00

Into my inbox the other day came a lengthy article on the beauty of Marriage and the general splendidness of being a Good Wife.

In amongst the usual exhortations to various wifely duties there also appeared this gem:

Wives ought to reference their husbands.

Well, indeed! I thought. It's about time somebody alerted us to this sadly neglected conjugal duty. Because, after all, consider what the alternative would be. Plagiarism, girls, that's what - plagiarism! And people have been kicked out of universities for less.

In the spirit of mutual sisterly helpfulness, I'd therefore like to propose the adoption of the following citation convention:

Hubby, My (2006). Pers. comm. (Available upon request. Please do not cite without permission.)
I do hope that this reminder will be beneficial to some among my readers; and in the mean time I'll try not to notice any further trivial slips of the keyboard to make mountains out of ... this one was just too good to resist.

back to front

2006-09-25T20:43:00.000+01:00

I came across a comment recently which struck me as decidedly back to front. It was a recommendation to read a chapter about providence from a theology book, particularly emphasising the doctrine of sovereignty. The book was Louis Berkhof's Summary of Christian Doctrine, so that wasn't the problem. It was the portentous piece of advice which was meant to encourage you to read it, along the lines that 'If you don't understand sovereignty, you can't understand Scripture!'

I'm sure the comment was well meant, but it really doesn't make sense. Like probably most of the doctrines that are expounded in systematic theologies, you would have no way of knowing about them, or even guessing at them, if they weren't already in the bible. So far from needing to get your head round a doctrine before you can hope to understand the bible, the first step is always to acquaint yourself with what scripture says, in order for you to be able to evaluate whether a particular doctrine is in fact worth believing. What this person should have said instead is, 'If you aren't familiar with the bible, you won't be able to understand sovereignty!'

Of course the principle applies much more widely than just to the doctrine of God's sovereignty. (It strikes me that I've been writing here a lot recently on issues related to that; it's not intentional and I'll probably stop sometime soon.) Eg, as I was discussing with a friend recently, you wouldn't know what to pray for, if the bible didn't provide us (a) with examples of prayers to pray and (b) almost more importantly, with the assurance that God hears prayers. If you weren't familiar with the scriptures, you might be hard pushed to convince yourself that God would even listen to the prayer of a sinful human being, or that it was acceptable to address him in terms such as Hosea provides - 'Take with you words and turn to the Lord: say unto him, Take away all iniquity and receive us graciously...' In short, without knowing the bible you wouldn't know that there are three persons in the Godhead, or that there is such a thing as the Lord's day, or that such a weak instrument as faith can be the instrument of saving your soul, and so on.

I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say that reading the Bible is the most important of the 'means of grace', but it's worth affirming that the Bible is absolutely fundamental to everything we know about God and our relationship to him. Apart from the fact that there is a God, almost everything else I can think of that we know, we could never have known if he hadn't told us. It's just as well that he's formulated that revelation not only in writing, as a more sure word of prophecy, but also in a way that's suited to the state and condition of any person at all who reads it. If someone doesn't understand about sovereignty, or about atonement, or about repentance, or whatever - that's no reason not to read the bible - it's actually the very reason why they should read it. Both perspicuous and reliable: if you're not familiar with the scriptures, you won't be able to understand any of the things that you really need to know.

"Through thy precepts I get understanding ... Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path." Psalm 119:104-105

[PS: something went funny when I tried to post this the other day and I can't see it published even though it appears in my list of published posts, so apologies if you're seeing it twice over.]

all eeked out

2006-09-19T22:56:00.000+01:00

Got back from the office today to discover a monstrous spider nestling at the point where the wall meets the ceiling, directly in my line of vision as I came through the door. Nice.

Turns out it had previously been molesting James in the kitchen, before evidently taking itself up there. It was, seriously, like, this big. At least four inches across, and at least as big than the one which a dear brother of mine had noticed hanging around in the bathroom when I shared with uni friends a couple of years ago; and upon which he had replaced the toilet seat without troubling to alert any of us to the fact that it was lurking there. (It chose not to publicise itself for at least a day after that, and specifically not until I was on my own in the flat with nothing but a pyrex bowl between me and my worst nightmare.)

All this leads me on seamlessly to tell you about the only typo I've ever noticed in a dictionary. Not that I've ever looked particularly hard, I should stress, but I've always loved Derrick Thomson's English-Gaelic dictionary for its entry "eek" and collocation with "out." To celebrate, have a picture of today's spider, post capture and pre humane(-ish) disposal.

(Thanks to James for the gruesomeness; I've managed to upload it without looking too closely but I'm sure it's a fine photy. Go here for something a bit nicer.)

islam, violence, christianity

2006-09-16T10:20:00.001+01:00

There are two separate issues bound up in what the Pope's been saying. One is whether he's quoted a fair assessment of the use of 'the sword' in Islam. The other is whether he's got the right to present his comments as those of the world's most significant Christian leader.

Of course, all over the world, Muslims are protesting about the fact that a link has again been prominently made between Islam and violence. However, the way they choose to make this protest is, er, with violence. As in: You're just a big bully. No I'm not! And I'll hit you if you say that again! The caption attached to the second image on the BBC's In Pictures is hugely ironic - "Some Indian Muslims burnt an effigy of the world's Roman Catholic leader who quoted remarks which linked Islam to violence." At least it was only an effigy, I suppose.

However, it should be a worry that the Pope is being taken as a spokesman for Christianity, rather than just the spokesman for the Roman Catholic tradition. Muslim-Christian relations on the ground in Muslim-majority situations are already strained enough, without someone like the Pope handing out gratis further excuses to penalise and marginalise local Christians. You can read far more about that than you'd ever wanted to find out by going to the Barnabas site, where the latest report is of a convert from Islam to Christianity being shot and killed in Somalia, about a week ago. The plight of indigenous Christians is constantly being exacerbated by the actions of Western political leaders - they don't need spurious Christian leaders to make things worse.

That, of course, is completely without mentioning how a spokesman for the Roman Catholic church can imagine he has a leg to stand on in terms of criticising the use of violence to achieve religious ends, but that's a whole other issue, and I just don't have time right now!

If anyone has any thoughts on the Pope's perception of the relation between faith and reason, incidentally, it would be good to hear from you. That, apparently, was the main point of his speech after all.

sleeping rough

2006-09-13T22:34:00.000+01:00

This isn't what I'd intended my next post to be about, but you'll be interested (I'm sure) to know that I successfully managed to lock myself out of my flat on Monday and have only just got back in again.

Yes, it was all fun here, since my fellow occupants were located in a tent somewhere off the other side of the country, and it also happened to be the week that the two other people who have copies were out of town (to put it mildly).

It had struck me on Monday that by the time I write up my thesis, my Acknowledgements section will have to run to pages to capture a little of how much I owe to other people's generosity. (You know who you are..!) On Monday night, I thought I might as well devote a whole chapter to The Things Other People Do For Me. This was brought on by the fact that the friend I phoned (from the office phone, since my mobile battery was running down and my charger was, oh, locked inside my flat) not only agreed to let me stay overnight but offered to put me up the next night as well, when I was only obsessing about the logistics of travelling to the other side of the country to collect a pair of keys from the nearest, and yet so far away person who had a set, all before meeting my supervisor in the afternoon. And she even lent me some shampoo - which, I admit, officially means I was most definitely not sleeping rough.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, in particular the multiple amusing episodes with my ineptitude with borrowed alarm clocks, the long-awaited hand-over took place this evening when one of the key-bearers returned from their trip across the Atlantic today. My flat has never seemed so attractive (and neither, for that matter, has my phone charger). Maybe by tomorrow I'll manage to write something substantive, but meantime I'm being grateful for so many things, and plotting how soon I can make it to Timpsons, just to get one more extra precautionary set cut...

no such thing

2006-09-05T21:45:00.000+01:00

While I was away I got a quick read of a book containing sermons by David Dickson, the minister who was involved in one of the revivals in the 17th century which I mentioned a while back.

It included a sermon which he delivered as part of his congregation's preparation for a communion, on the verse that goes along the lines, 'the foundation of the Lord stands sure, having this seal, The Lord knows them that are his, and, Let every one that names the name of the Lord depart from iniquity.' He spoke a lot about adhering to Christ and "departing from iniquity" as two pieces of evidence that a person has been converted, which in turn is the proof that they were elect (the Lord knows them that are his).

But he also brought in another very interesting theme - having addressed the question of what constitutes a "mark of grace," or evidence of being converted (hence evidence of being among the elect), he added that people shouldn't find fault with the fact that there is such a thing as election.

What the Lord doth in the matter of election and reprobation, he doth it justly; for he says to man, Leave thy sins, and come to me, and thou shalt get heaven. Man answers, I will not leave sin. Then says the Lord, Thou shalt go to hell.
Is not this justice? From these words, no particular person can gather a mark of reprobation; but contrarily, there is here a mark of election. Why then should any quarrel with God, while he shows a possibility of election, and no mark of reprobation?

In other words, you can test to see whether you are elect by testing whether you're converted or not, and one of the tests of whether a person is converted is whether or not they're 'departing from iniquity.' But as he said, there's no such thing as a mark of reprobation. There's no way that anyone has the right to conclude that they're destined not to be saved. "It is not a mark of reprobation to be in an estate of sin," he said, "for one may come out of that estate."

It struck me as being a very encouraging thing to say - both from the point of view of an unconverted person wondering about the possibility of salvation, and from the point of view of Christians worried about unconverted people around them. Nobody has the right to conclude, "I am not one of the elect." And nobody has the right to conclude, "That person is not one of the elect." That's presumably why your lifetime is called "the ground of mercy" - as long as a person's alive on this earth, there's a reason to hope that they could still be saved.

If adherence to Jesus and departing from inquity do evidence election both to the world and a man's own soul, then the soul that [lacks] these two, can have no comfort: they who have not fled to Christ, and have not put the back of their hand to sin, [lack] the comfort of election. I dare not say, they are not elected, for God can change a filthy sinner into a washen saint. But I dare to say, while a soul is separate from Christ, and adheres to sin, that soul can have no comfort in election, nor yet say that it is elected. If thou then would be out of the black band and rank of reprobates, haste in to Christ, and from sin, as thou would be free of hell and damnation.

NB, it was definitely David Dickson who made this point (not John Colquhoun, as I said to a couple of people a few days ago. Mr Colquhoun was another bit of holiday reading, but he happened to live in a different century and it wasn't a collection of sermons either). The book was Select Practical Writings of David Dickson (Vol 1), issued by the Committee of the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland for the Publication of the Works of Scottish Reformers and Divines. Edinburgh (1845); these quotes came from p103-104.

blogs i read

2006-09-04T23:46:00.000+01:00

I've been meaning to put these links down the side for ages but I just can't face messing around in the settings for the time being. Plus, I haven't written much for a while so this can double as a stopgap post until I recover that sense of the importance of my own view of things which drives all the rest of the stuff that appears on here. (My memoirs will be following shortly, watch this space.)

I should also warn you that I'm composing in Opera due to funny goings on with my Firefox, and the handy wee tools for making things like bulleted lists aren't available in Opera. In a choice between dodgy formatting and Internet Explorer, guess which wins out.

The Holdfast

Musings of an English Muffin

That'll do for starters, hopefully - I may (sometime, maybe, perhaps) put in some more later. And I'm always open to more suggestions for things worth reading.

by traill

2006-08-28T15:41:00.000+01:00

Here's a quote attributed to Traill, in the Gospel Standard magazine (March 2006). It's short on purpose cos something funny's been going on with the internet connection here.

What should a sinner do but go to Christ? What can come of a sinner if Christ receive him not? Yea, what is a Saviour of sinners for, but for receiving sinners and saving them from their sins? ... [However] no one can see any glory in that grace of Christ which he has no sight or sense of his own need of.

Robert Traill was a Covenanter (I think) and the Banner of Truth has republished at least some of his writings.

having scruples

2006-08-23T16:59:00.001+01:00

Here is a comment by Rev S Pike, who with S Hayward made up an interesting duo of London ministers in the 1750s. They held weekly lectures where members of the audience were able to submit questions about their religious experience and activities, and in 1755 they published the responses which they gave to some of those questions.

This one deals with the Christian attitude to 'diversions,' or ways of passing the time - if I feel uncomfortable about participating in a given social practice, do my scruples arise from an unnecessarily sensitive conscience, or a conscience which is being warned by God? NB, it uses the term "professor" to refer to 'someone who professes to be converted,' or claims to be a Christian.

[You can be sure that] This diversion, with every other, must certainly be evil when it unfits the soul for spiritual duties. It is readily granted that some diversions are certainly lawful; and it is as readily allowed that some diversion is really necessary: but then it is [necessary] only so far as it is suited to unbend the mind for a season from severer thought, or to relax the body to render it the more capable to perform necessary duty. Diversion is graciously allowed and designed to fit the body and mind for spiritual and natural duties.

But surely a gracious person must acknowledge the following maxim to be just: That whatsoever diversions do actually unfit the frame and spirit of the mind for devotional exercises, they so far [ie to the extent that they do so] prove themselves to be hurtful and criminal. And therefore, every person that has any regard for the power of godliness in his own soul must judge and condemn himself as guilty before God, whenever he engages in such diversions, or [engages in them] to such a degree as to unfit his soul for this communion with God.

And if every professor did seriously attend to this rule, and examine himself by this test, I doubt not but he would soon be obliged to decline this practice from his own experience.

The particular 'diversion' which was addressed in the original was playing cards, I think particularly when money was involved, but the bit I've quoted here outlines a principle which is valid across the board.

Pike and Hayward's original book, Cases of Conscience, was published in 1755. I've quoted this from the abridged version, published in 1968 by Free Presbyterian Publications (p36).

safety first

2006-08-21T14:47:00.000+01:00

You know those annoying little ties you get when you buy boxes of plastic food bags? Little pieces of wire wrapped in white plastic? I've always hated them. Always.

Today I didn't even notice one on the freezer bag which I was meant to pop in the microwave and defrost.

Not even when I got this whiff of Something Which Might Potentially Be Burning did it twig what might be going on.

But when I as a matter of course paused the microwave to check on its contents, it was to discover two spikes of bare metal cheekily appearing from the neck of the plastic bag.

The white plastic covering had completely melted away, sealing the bag shut at the neck and exposing the ends of the tie. Without any sparking and without any giveaway flames.

I'm assured that it's not the first time this has happened. But it's still scary, and it's definitely confirmed me in my campaign against these things. Fiddly, unnecessary, and indeed dangerous: I'll tie my freezer bags in knots, thank you very much.

silent reading

2006-08-09T22:52:00.000+01:00

One of my favourite journal article titles is: Writing is a Technology which Restructures Thought. It was written by Walter J Ong, who turned out to be a Jesuit priest, and it's full of fascinating insights into how much our understanding of what language is like is shaped by our familiarity with written language. It's roughly in the same category as Jack Goody's Interface Between the Written and the Oral, Marshall McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy and, even better for my purposes, Per Linell's Written Language Bias in Linguistics. It had such a reassuring and thought-provoking effect when I read it, and I read it at a particularly useful time for deciding what sort of things to do research about.

However, it turns out that there is one thing which Walter J Ong may have been misguided on, and that is his view of the way that people used to read their literature in ancient times. He suggested that people didn't use to read things silently to themselves the way we do - instead they would read out loud, at least till after printing was invented and printed text became more widely available.

This strikes me as quite a widespread belief - I'm sure I was vaguely familiar with the suggestion before reading it there, from sources outside of the linguistics world which I've no recollection of processing, and any fleeting scepticism I might have had would have been stifled by considering that silent reading must just be one of those skills of the contemporary world which is only easy when you know how.

But it turns out that the evidence in favour of this suggestion is really pretty scarce - and in fact it's probably not true at all. In the Books supplement of last Saturday's Guardian there was an article by James Fenton which puts the record straight. (Yes, I had been planning to say something about this since last Saturday.) He gives enough information in the article to make it possible to track down two published articles which argue that people like Augustine, Ambrose, and Alexander the Great were all in the habit of reading silently, and that it's a myth that their contemporaries were surprised to see it. He even mentions that a key moment in Augustine's conversion occurred through a time of silent reading (disappointingly, he doesn't say what specifically he was reading!).

I'm very much attracted to this version of events, partly because it rescues 'the ancients' from one more opportunity to denigrate their intellectual and cognitive achievements, but also because it's more consistent with the point (made from the 1910s onwards by an English scholar called Henry Bradley) that skilled reading does not necessarily depend on particularly close links between written symbols and their pronunciation - no transcription system known to mankind is capable of rendering speech exactly, and being able to produce a spoken version of printed symbols isn't even a particularly efficient way of recovering meaning from text.

James Fenton's article is available here, and these are the two articles which he cites:

AK Gavrilov (1997), 'Techniques of Reading in Classical Antiquity.' Classical Quarterly 47: 56-73
MF Burnyeat (1997), 'Postscript on Silent Reading.' Classical Quarterly 47: 74-76

(They're both in JSTOR, the digital archive of academic journals, but you'll need a subscription to access them.)

It's not exactly central to my thesis to establish the answer to this point definitively, but I'm already planning to get a footnote out of it somewhere along the line. If I ever get to the stage of writing up, that is.

the nobleman and the centurion: Trench cites Chrysostom

2006-08-08T17:59:00.000+01:00

Richard Trench has a chapter on the healing of the nobleman's son (John 4: 46-54) in his Notes on the Miracles of our Lord. He compares this incident with the one where the centurion came for healing for his servant (told in Matthew 8 and Luke 7). He says that when the nobleman asked for Jesus to come to his house, the reply he got ("Except ye see signs and wonders you will not believe,") shows that his petition was mixed with unbelief - in contrast to the centurion, asking on behalf of his servant, who believed with humility that Jesus was able to heal just by speaking a word.

A comparison of the Lord's dealings with this nobleman and with the centurion of the other gospels is instructive. Assuredly He has not men's persons in admiration who comes not, but only sends, to the son of this nobleman, Himself visiting the servant of that centurion. And there is more in the matter than this. Here, being entreated to come, he does not; but sends His healing word; there, being asked to speak at a distance that word of healing, He rather proposes Himself to come; for here, as Chrysostom explains it well, a narrow and poor faith is enlarged and deepened, there a strong faith is crowned and rewarded. By not going He increases this nobleman's faith; by offering to go He brings out and honours that centurion's humility. (p129)

There are several pairs of incidents like that which have some surface similarities but which are dealt with differently. Maybe the most noticeable of these comes out in the responses of Mary and Zachariah to the message of the angel in Luke 1 - they both responded with the question, How? But (as I've heard it explained anyway) Mary was asking for her faith to be supported, and so she was rewarded, but Zachariah was asking for his disbelief to be refuted, and he was censured.

Trench was an archbishop sometime around the end of the 19th century and early 20th. In my notes of lectures on lexicography in the Late Modern period, he is named as one of the prime movers behind the development of the New English Dictionary, having published two seminal papers on the inadequacies of existing dictionaries (or that's what it seems to say, now that I've deciphered the scribbly lecture handwriting). In addition to his Notes on the Miracles of our Lord he also wrote a book of Notes on the Parables of our Lord, and he also published books on New Testament Greek. In Christ's Doctrine of the Atonement, however, George Smeaton seems to politely disagree with some view that he held, which he seemed to mention in the same breath as some of the more dubious German theologians.

as bad as each other?

2006-07-29T22:44:00.000+01:00

If you were asked which was worse, Arminianism or Hyper-Calvinism, how would you respond?

I'll say straight out that my initial instinct was to say Hypercalvinism, but after discussing it with various people it seems that opinions are divided nearly half and half, and most of the time we end up saying it's a case of six and half a dozen.

To be clear, I'm thinking of the brand of Arminianism which teaches that God loves everyone, and/or Jesus died for everyone, and that everyone has the power to repent and believe for themselves. The advice of my hypothetical Arminian to someone who wanted to be saved would be along the lines that they should just believe that God loves them, and accept Jesus into their heart.

On the other hand, I'm envisioning Hypercalvinism as the teaching that God only saves the elect, meaning that the gospel is only concerned with the elect. The advice of my hypothetical Hypercalvinist to someone who wanted to be saved would be along the lines that they should just wait for the Holy Spirit to regenerate them, knowing that he only regenerates the elect.

(If either of these descriptions are exaggerated or inaccurate, I'll be glad to know, but this seems to be how the differing positions are conceptualised by the people I've been speaking to.)

The reasons why I suggested that Hypercalvinism was the worst of the two in the first place went something like this.

Hypercalvinism doesn't emphasise the duty to believe and a person's personal culpability and sin for unbelief. There is a tendency to encourage people to "sit back with their arms folded" and simply wait to be regenerated. When a soul isn't saved, it almost has the effect of putting the blame on God for not regenerating the sinner, since it provides no reason (or compulsion/obligation) for a sinner to take any pains at all about his or her own salvation. On the other hand, of course, Arminianism allows sinners to keep flattering themselves that their salvation is within their own power to achieve - that because the responsibility is all ours, therefore the ability must be ours too. (Does this make it worse than Hypercalvinism?)
Hypercalvinism over-emphasises the doctrine of predestination, thrusting it to the forefront of the gospel, neglecting the advice of, say, the Westminster Confession that the doctrine of this high mystery is to be handled with special prudence and care. In perpetually proclaiming the truth that God only saves the elect, hypercalvinism fails to proclaim the truth that all the elect are sinners, and that God saves sinners. On the other hand of course, Arminianism fails to make use of the link between regeneration and predestination and glorification, ie that it's all one golden unbreakable chain, providing salvation as a complete package, the purchase of eternal security in its entirety for definite persons. This, maybe, might make it worse than Hypercalvinism?
Related to the previous point, Hypercalvinism tends to give an austere view of the Saviour, minimising the graciousness of his sovereign purposes, and discouraging sinners from applying to him for salvation by the teaching that the gospel is only for elect sinners (rather than for sinners as such). Arminianism gives an artificially encouraging view of the Saviour, making out that he has saving love for everyone, but if you take the view that a seeking soul needs to be constantly diverted towards God, it is hard not to think that a teaching which provides an appealing view of the Saviour is less potentially damaging than one which provides the sinner with a reluctance to approach him, even if the appeal is over-exaggerated and sometimes misleading.
Finally, as a threat to the clear publishing of the gospel within reformed denominations, Hypercalvinism may be worse because in their haste to avoid Arminianism people may be less likely to notice the alternative errors of Hypercalvinism, and fail to recognise the seriousness of allowing the pendulum to swing too far away from the extremities of Arminianism into the extremities of Hypercalvinism.

Now let me hedge slightly here and say that I'm not wholeheartedly committed to any of these rose-tinted presentations of Arminianism. As someone pointed out when I discussed it with her, Arminianism is much more flattering to fallen human nature - it's arguably much easier to be attracted to and appeased with a false view of God's love than with a false view of God's sovereignty.

I suppose that the errors of both sides can be classified as mistakes regarding human nature and mistakes regarding God the Saviour. Arminianism over-emphasises the love of God and the spiritual powers of fallen human beings, whereas Hypercalvinism over-emphasises the sovereignty of God and the inability of fallen human beings in spiritual matters. So that whereas Arminianism could be said to offer sinners a false hope, Hypercalvinism can be said to offer sinners no hope. Either way, a massive obstacle is presented to the sinner in need of salvation: neither of these are teachings which are healthy for sinners to be exposed to.

Now, to avoid straining your patience with an excessively long post, go here for my best stab at the middle way, avoiding the extremes of both sets of unhelpful teachings.

a house with a door

2006-07-29T21:43:00.000+01:00

As a companion post to the question of Arminianism vs Hypercalvinism, this argument is based on the analogy of salvation as a house - one where you're safe inside and all your needs are met in ways much better than you could wish for, and you live in a state of reconciliation and friendship with the rest of the members of your family, with a Father, an elder Brother, and many many other adopted brothers and sisters.

Written over the entrance to this fortress-home are the words, "Whosoever cometh unto me I will in no wise cast out." These words (or others very like them) form the main reason why those who are inside the house were encouraged to come - they are the promise, the genuine invitation, the implied command, and the warrant which each of them used as the basis for their temerity to come like the beggars they were and knock on the door to ask to meet the head of the house.

Once these people come inside, it turns out that when they look back at the door they came in by, they see that the words written over the door from this side are: "All that the Father gives me shall come to me." These words are what provide their total security and safety - the explanation of why they were ever drawn into the house in the first place, and the guarantee that they will never be allowed to wander out of it, ever.

This is another way of thinking about the free offer of the gospel. It's not Arminianism in disguise, and it's not the teaching of Hypercalvinism. It's simply the presentation of the fact that God has provided a Saviour for sinners, the fact that this Saviour is exactly the Saviour who meets the needs of each and every single sinner, and the fact that any sinner whosoever who trusts in him to be the Saviour who he reveals himself to be will not be disappointed in their trust.

Now this needs to be elaborated in the following ways.

1. There is also the fact that the identity of those sinners who trust in him will be an exact match with the identity of those sinners who were elected by the Father and given to the Son in the eternal covenant. Nevertheless the gospel is not addressed the elect, but to sinners as sinners: it's not a case of establishing whether or not you're elect, in order to know whether or not to pay attention to the gospel. It's rather a case of recognising that you're a sinner who owes God obedience to all his commandments, including his commands to forsake sin and turn to him for salvation.

2. There is also the fact that no one is able to trust in God out of their own resources, nor are they willing - even faith itself is a gift, and one that's given merely out of the good pleasure of the giver, not for any deservedness about any of those who so desperately need it. Nevertheless this is not an excuse for sinners to do nothing but wait and see if they'll be given this gift. Sinners, whether or not they think they are elect, are required to make use of the means of grace, the means which God has ordained for sinners to use, and which he blesses in order to make them effective/effectual to salvation in the case of some of those who use them. For example, nobody has any excuse for neglecting to pray to him to have mercy on them, or for neglecting to read the bible when it's available to be read, or for failing to turn up to church to hear the gospel preached when there's a minister somewhere in the vicinity. The fact that you might not be "one of the elect" is no excuse for doing only what you ought to be doing. (See the quote from Boston in this previous post, eg.) This, I think, is where Hypercalvinism falls down.

3. Notwithstanding that everyone should make as full use of the means of grace as they possibly can, we cannot leave ourselves under any delusions that doing so somehow qualifies us for God to look at us approvingly, or that we can in any way infuse any spiritual life into ourselves by our activity, or that carrying out religious duties can be anything more than going through the motions, without the Holy Spirit giving us new life and enabling spiritual life to be exercised. (This must be why William Gurnall said, "Go and endeavour ... as if all were in thy power, yet looking to Him for the thing, as knowing that it must [all] come from him.") This, I think, is where Arminianism falls down.

By making the gospel something that's held out only for the elect, and discouraging sinners from engaging in any activity related to the welfare of their souls, Hypercalvinism ends up looking like a house which has no door - talking about God's salvation, but with no way for sinners to lay hold of it. Meanwhile Arminianism lets people initiate and maintain their own salvation, which makes it look like a wide-open door which leads to a house that's no house at all. The advice of a Calvinist to someone who wants to be saved will therefore run along the lines that they should use all the means of grace with the maximum diligence, acting on the truthfulness of God's revelation of himself as one who has mercy on sinners for Christ's sake, and depending on his Holy Spirit for all spiritual life and ability. Whoever you are, however bad a sinner you are and have been, Christ is a suitable and sufficient Saviour for you: trust in him to be to you the Saviour he declares himself to be, and you will be saved. This, as far as I understand it anyway, is the real door to the real house, the only way of offering hope to sinners while preserving the integrity of the Saviour.

autochthonous onomastic material

2006-07-24T20:45:00.000+01:00

Yep, this is what I've been finding out about today, in between spoonerising two-syllable words and recording men with Glasgow accents.

As soon as I read the sentence I just thought: ah yes, a word with four consecutive consonants. Haven't seen one of them in a while. And then I thought: What an excellent title that would be for a blog.

After a bit of work with the dictionary, it turns out that onomastics has to do with the names of people and places, while something that's autochthonic involves native/indigenous things. Knowing that the Cilicians were a non-Semitic group of people living in Asia Minor in some of the centuries BC, you should now have all the information you need in order to decipher this sentence:

"... the Phoenician writing system. It had been adopted by the Cilicians, but
they used it only for writing inscriptions in Phoenician which contain
authochthonous onomastic material."
Swiggers, P (1996), 'Transmission of the Phoenician script to the West.' In Daniels & Bright (eds), The World's Writing Systems. OUP

Which would presumably be similar to you and me using Japanese characters to write the name of Tokyo.

Meanwhile, some fun spoonerisms I've discovered:

deer, park -> peer, dark
daisy, log -> lazy, dog
gifted, sally -> sifted, galley

Anyone got any more?

flying planes can be dangerous

2006-07-20T14:04:00.000+01:00

As anyone with family knows, visiting relatives can be fun.

As anyone who's ever dabbled in linguistics knows, that sentence is syntactically ambiguous. Either I'm on a visit to spend time with my relatives, or my relatives are paying me a visit, and you don't know which unless there's more information in the context.

It's similar to the other textbook examples of the same thing:

Flying planes can be dangerous.

Changing schedules can cause confusion.

The shooting of the hunters is deplorable.

Anyway, the point is, blogging output is limited at the moment due to the fact that, unambiguously, I've got family staying. Back later.

transplants save lives

2006-07-12T22:52:00.000+01:00

An appeal for blood donors on the radio has just reminded me to become an organ donor. (For blood-related issues, see previous post.) If you haven't registered for this worthy cause, do it here, quick and easy.

ryle quotes flavel

2006-07-12T22:31:00.000+01:00

From JC Ryle's Holiness, first chapter, p9.

"I say, then, in the first place, that a scriptural view of sin is one of the best antidotes to that vague, dim, misty, hazy kind of theology which is so painfully current in the present age. It is vain to shut our eyes to the fact that there is a vast quantity of so-called Christianity nowadays which you cannot declare positively unsound, but which, nevertheless, is not full measure, good weight and sixteen ounces to the pound. It is a Christianity in which there is undeniably 'something about Christ and something about grace and something about faith and something about repentance and something about holiness,' but it is not the real 'thing as it is' in the Bible. Things are out of place and out of proportion. As old Latimer would have said, it is a kind of 'mingle-mangle,' and does no good. It neither exercises influence on daily conduct, nor comforts in life, nor gives peace in death; and those who hold it often awake too late to find that thye have got nothing solid under their feet."

The quote comes as part of his application or the conclusion to the rest of the chapter, where he's just finished saying this:

"There is a remedy provided for man's need, as wide and broad and deep as man's disease. We need not be afraid to look at sin and study its nature, origin, power, extent and vileness, if we only look at the same time at the almighty medicine provided for us in the salvation that is in Jesus Christ. Though sin has abounded, grace has much more abounded. Yes: in the everlasting covenant of redemption, to which Father, Son and Holy Ghost are parties; in the Mediator of that covenant, Jesus Christ the righteous, perfect God and perfect man in one person; in the work that he did by dying for our sins and rising again for our justification; in teh offices that he fills as our Priest, Substitute, Physician, Shepherd and Advocate ... in all this, I say, there is a full, perfect and complete medicine for the hideous disease of sin. Awful and tremendous as the right view of sin undoubtedly is, no one need faint and despair if he will take a right view of Jesus Christ at the same time. No wonder that old Flavel ends many a chapter of his admirable Fountain of Life with the touching words: 'Blessed be God for Jesus Christ.'"

I've quoted from Flavel here and here already - not from The Fountain of Life, but I think the phrase rings a bell from The Method of Grace too.

strong burning language

2006-07-12T22:03:00.000+01:00

From Ryle's paper on 'The Unsearchable Riches of Christ' in his book Holiness, first published 1879. He gives five things which might have been in the apostle's mind when he used that phrase in Ephesians 3. There are unsearchable riches, he says, in Christ's person, in the work which Christ accomplished for his people, in the offices which Christ at this moment fills, as he lives for us at the right hand of God, and in the names and titles which are applied to Christ in the scriptures. Finally he says this.

Set down, lastly, in your minds that there are unsearchable riches in the characteristic qualities, attributes, dispositions and intentions of Christ's mind towards man, as we find them revealed in the New Testament.

In him there are riches of mercy, love and compassion for sinners; riches of power to cleanse, pardon, forgive, and to save to the uttermost; riches of willingness to receive all who come to him repenting and believing; riches of ability to change by his Spirit the hardest hearts and worst characters; riches of tender patience to bear with the weakest believer; riches of strength to help his people to the end, notwithstanding every foe without and within; riches of sympathy for all who are cast down and bring their troubles to him and, last but not least, riches of glory to reward, when he comes again to raise the dead and gather his people to be with him in his kingdom.

Who can estimate these riches? The children of this world may regard them with indifference, or turn away from them with disdain; but those who feel the value of their souls know better. They will say with one voice, 'There are no riches like those which are laid up in Christ for his people.'

For, best of all, these riches are unsearchable. They are a mine which, however long it may be worked, is never exhausted. They are a fountain which, however many draw its waters, never runs dry. The sun in heaven above us has been shining for six thousand years, and giving light and warmth and fertility to the whole surface of the globe. There is not a tree or a flower in Europe, Asia, Africa or America which is not a debtor to the sun. And still the sun shines on for generation after generation, and season after season, rising and setting with unbroken regularity, giving to all, taking from none, and to all ordinary eyes the same in light and heat that it was in the day of creation.

Just so it is, if any illustration can approach the reality, just so it is with Christ. He is still 'the Sun of righteousness' to all mankind (Mal 4:2). Millions have drawn from him in days gone by, and looking to him have lived with comfort, and with comfort died. Myriads at this moment are drawing from him daily supplies of mercy, grace, peace, strength and help, and find 'all fullness' dwelling in him. And yet the half of the riches laid up in him for mankind, I doubt not, is utterly unknown! Surely the apostle might well use that phrase, 'the unsearchable riches of Christ.'

Phrases such as 'the unsearchable riches of Christ' are, says Ryle, "the strong burning language of one who always remembered his debt to Christ's mercy and grace, and loved to show how intensely he felt it by his words. ... He is not content to say, 'Grace is given me to preach Christ.' No, he amplifies his subject. He calls it 'the unsearchable riches of Christ.'" This is from p277-280 of my copy (Holiness, Evangelical Press 1995)

somewhere north east of gandhi

2006-07-05T21:26:00.000+01:00

I've located myself on the political compass at coordinates -3.13, -2.92, or mildly to the left economically and faintly libertarian. I'm not sure whether I should be pleased or not. Answer the questions for yourself and see whereabouts you end up (although be prepared to go into some detail) - then let me know, so that I can decide whether to be alarmed or reassured.

After you've done that, drop by here and read an article on Tony Blair's skill at boiling frogs. Don't let the source of the article put you off, even if you'd prefer your coordinates to be firmly in the authoritarian right, because it's talking about issues which should bother anyone who cares about democracy. (It even quotes Ken Clarke and David Davis ...)

Finally, I somehow came across this campaign, dramatically named saveparliament.org.uk. Except it's not so laughable when you find out what it's all about: the legislation which the government wants to bring in under the guise of cutting red tape, but which actually gives any minister the power to change almost any piece of legislation by him/herself, without consulting parliament. I can't remember if I've written about it here before - I've a feeling that an awareness-raising article about it by the Lawyers Christian Fellowship was featured in the English Churchman several issues back (I know I couldn't find the issue in question when I looked for it some time ago, which suggests that I might not have taken the risk of quoting from memory.) But again, the fact that the English Churchman and the Independent are singing from the same, erm, hymnsheet on this one goes to show that these issues cut across traditional divides, and indicates there are some pretty serious problems developing on our collective hands.

in the post

2006-07-03T22:15:00.000+01:00

I got back from a weekend away to discover an item of mail with disturbing contents.

It was a newsletter from a doughtily conservative denomination, but to say so belies its message. As I reached the second paragraph on the first page, I was confronted with a startling proclamation of the view that "the holiness of the children [of one or more believers, as mentioned in 1 Cor 7:14] is real, inward, infused, spiritual holiness or sanctification (...) whereby they are cleansed from sin and consecrated to God by the Holy Ghost."

After presenting some arguments in favour of this belief it concluded as follows: "How are believers ... to view their children? Not as unholy, little vipers but as 'holy by supernatural grace' possessing 'the new spiritual life' (Calvin, Institutes 4.16.31). For God sovereignly makes a difference between the children of believers and the children of unbelievers by His eternal covenant of grace."

Whiffs of this idea have come my way more than once recently, but this is the first time I've seen it explicitly set down on paper. And unfortunately, being put down on paper, it only gains concreteness, not credibility. It struck me that the main way it seems to fall down is by stretching a couple of uncontroversial views just a bit too far. This comes out in two points anyway.

One point is this: it's evident that some children of some believers are elect just like their parents (and end up being converted in due time). But the view put forward in this article seems to be that children who are born to a believer should be viewed as having been "cleansed from sin" etc simply by virtue of having been born to a believer. This is problematic, partly (a) because it discriminates between some members of the human race and others, whereas all mankind descending from Adam by ordinary generation are equally lacking in original righteousness, equally sharing the same corrupt nature, and equally in need of salvation. (b) It also makes your parentage a reason for your salvation, whereas not even a pharisee of the pharisees gains any merit from being one of Abraham's children. The sovereign difference that's made in the covenant of grace isn't really between the children of believers versus the children of unbelievers, but between some sinners of the human race versus other sinners of the human race, regardless of anything about them, any characteristics or privileges or family members they may have (grace doesn't run in the blood).

The second point concerns cases of individuals who were regenerated before they were born. It isn't controversial to believe that in itself (Jeremiah is an uncontroversial case anyway). But in the article this is stretched and stretched so as to imply that children being regenerated in the womb is actually part of the promises of God to believers for their children. This misses out a whole massive step in the argument though. It's one thing to show that infant regeneration can happen - but they still need to show that it's the norm for the children of believers, far less that it's an outright promise.

There are also bigger issues surrounding our understanding of "the covenant of grace" and the nature of the privileges belonging to people who are baptised, which I'm not going to venture into within the space of one wee blog (oh, and the issue of when and where it's legitimate to quote snippets from Calvin's Institutes). But to wrap up for the night, the main point would be that phrases like "holy children" and "our elect children" can only refer to a subset of children born to believers, not all children born to believers. Many people who have been saved have come from families where one or both parents was born again; but before they were saved, they were just as much "little vipers" as anyone else, with the same corrupt nature and the same enmity against the gospel as anyone else's children. We're all Adam's children after all. People aren't saved because they had godly parents, or for any other human reason: the reasons for salvation are all in the Saviour.

"The Lord did not set his love upon you nor choose you because you were more in number than any people (for ye were the fewest of all people) but because the Lord loved you ..." Deuteronomy 7. "For he is not a Jew which is one outwardly, neither is that circumcision which is outward in the flesh; but he is a Jew, which is one inwardly, and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit and not in the letter, whose praise is not of men, but of God." Romans 2.

compound stress

2006-06-28T22:57:00.000+01:00

Here's an interesting and timely article from Language Log: Chinese takeout and Watergate: Discuss. (Language Log should really go in my links section, but it'll have to wait till my next bout of updating.) It's about the way that words in a phrase can sometimes combine into a single compound word, which is a syntactic change that's associated with a change in stress pattern.

The article mentions the textbook example of the phrase black bird, which refers to any bird that's black, versus the compound blackbird, which is the name of one type of bird in particular, like sparrow or eagle (and the females can actually be brown, I think). If you'll excuse the boldface attempt to represent stress, you'd pronounce the compound something like blackbird, and the phrase something like black bird.

It intially sounds like a neat and tidy process of lexicalisation (things are lexicalised when they enter the vocabulary/lexicon) - the phrases become compounds and get kitted out with the appropriate stress pattern to match their new status. But inevitably it's slightly more complicated than that - there can be compounds with mismatched stress. Eg some people would say that things like red herring are compounds, but they don't have so-called compound stress (kudos if you can spot a possible flaw in that argument btw) and again you don't have the expected stress pattern in words like player-manager either. Stress is arguably only a rough guide to compound-hood, in other words.

smeaton quotes macdonald

2006-06-26T22:53:00.000+01:00

From George Smeaton's book, The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit, p366-368

The Church of God is in her right attitude only when she is waiting for the fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit, who comes from Christ and leads to Christ. We see combined in all successful preachers of the gospel right views of the Spirit's operations, an undiverted gaze upon the cross, and a proclamation of the fact that the Spirit comes to glorify the Son in his Person and in his offices. Thus we hear one exclaiming: "Spirit of preaching, that is, Spirit of Christ, come down upon me." [The missionary Macdonald.] They have always set forth that spiritual life flows from the historical Christ the Surety through the Holy Ghost, and that though the Spirit comes not of necessity, but of free condescending love, he comes as the Spirit of our risen Lord, the organ by which he acts, the executive by whom he rules, the comforter sent in Christ's name. ...

With regard to the spasmodic efforts to awaken by human appliances a religious interest in the minds of others, we must distinguish two things that differ. There is, on the one hand, a noble revival spirit, burning with a pure and steady flame, which is kindled and kept alive in proportion as the Holy Spirit inhabits and quickens the Christian heart to sustained and strenuous efforts for the salvation of others. It springs from the Spirit of grace: it leads to dependence on the Spirit's supernatural operations; and they who cherish it never forget that success is not by might nor by power, but by the Spirit of the Lord (Zech 4:6). But, on the other hand, there is effort of a different sort - spasmodic and fitful, from self and for self, arguing impatience at the slow progress of the kingdom of God, and prompting measures of the earth, earthy."

This book starts by going through the Bible expositing the various references to the Holy Spirit, then devotes the second section to different themes or aspects of the doctrine, and finally concludes with a historical overview of the development of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit in the Christian church. I found it very interesting and helpful. It's not terrifically quotable, because the arguments are so detailed, but that's hardly a criticism. Smeaton (d 1889) was professor of exegetics in the New College, Edinburgh, and was a friend of Hugh Martin and James Begg. His books on the atonement are being recommended in the light of the ongoing controversies about penal substitution.

what am i doing again

2006-06-23T20:51:00.000+01:00

One thread I'm trying to follow up at the moment is the overlap between spoken language and written language. People who are literate have a different perspective on spoken language compared to, eg, people in cultures where literacy doesn't feature. One significant characteristic of people who are literate is that they conceptualise spoken language as if it was written - you hear speech as consisting of words and sentences and letters. But this isn't actually a very realistic idea of spoken language, as you can tell by listening to someone speaking a foreign language - it all flows out in a continuous stream, and you can't tell where one word ends and the next begins. You can also tell by recording speech and graphing, say, loudness/intensity (in decibels) against time - the gaps in the waveform won't necessarily correspond to the boundaries between words or sentences.

One of the major issues in linguistics, particularly developmental linguistics, is how people manage to end up perceiving the continuous stream of spoken language as if it consisted of units - like sentences, words, and smaller segments like syllables and phonemes. And one of the major factors, it turns out, is people's process of learning to read and write. That's what makes people so good at knowing the difference between a "t" and a "p", even though they're acoustically pretty similar. (It's also what makes it so hard for people to believe that there's a "t" in pencil and a "k" in taxi.)

So given the influence that written language has on people's (conceptualisation of) spoken language, what can you make of the argument that people who have difficulty in learning to read and spell must have problems in their spoken language skills? That's the predominant explanation for the difficulties experienced by the roughly 5% of the population who have dyslexia - their literacy difficulties must be caused by a linguistic impairment. It's backed up by countless studies which unanimously report that people with dyslexia aren't as good as non-dyslexics at counting the number of sounds in a word (eg three sounds in t-o-p; four sounds in s-t-o-p), or judging whether light rhymes with might. This is called the phonological deficit in dyslexia.

The difficulty with those kinds of study is that you could equally argue that it's only if people are good at spelling that they'd think of top as having three sounds in the first place (rather than, say, five, as in t-h-o-p-h, or two, as in t-op). So if someone gives you an unexpected answer to the question of how many sounds are in a word, you can't tell whether they got it "wrong" because of a difficulty processing spoken language, or just because they're not too competent at using alphabetic letters.

In order to investigate whether the phonological deficit in dyslexia is really phonological (really comes from a spoken-language deficit) or whether it's a re-statement in different words of what we knew already (that people with dyslexia have difficulty with reading and writing), we basically need to look at areas of spoken language that don't have a counterpart in written language. And this, dear chaps, is where the toy factories come in. But I've gone on too long already, so will have to break here for the night.

What a cliff hanger eh!

wato newsletter

2006-06-23T20:31:00.000+01:00

Shaun Ley's newsletter this week features correspondence they received after the archbishop's call to reduce the time limit for abortions, now that we're better able to treat premature babies. Some bright spark wrote in to say that that's not a reason to change the time limit - since an infant "has no memory or awareness of what's happening until about three or four years of age," it doesn't matter when the termination takes place.

It's a flawed argument anyway developmentally - just because an adult doesn't remember back to when they were two years old, doesn't mean that two-year-old children fail to experience things at the time. Nor does your inability to remember your past experiences prevent them from having repercussions on your later life. (It's the same in principle actually for foetuses before they're born - just because you don't now remember what it was like, doesn't mean you weren't experiencing things then, and doesn't mean that your experiences in the womb don't have any lasting impact on you. Remind me to tell you about the language abilities of newborns sometime.)

But what's really absurd about this guy's argument is that it's something you'd never say about any other thing that you could do to an infant. Parents who batter their pre-school children can't justify themselves by saying it doesn't really matter because children have no memory or awareness of what's happening till they're three or four. It's basically only an ad hoc justification for this one type of violence, ie 'termination,' and it only needs to be stated for its absurdity to become obvious.

preliminary findings

2006-06-21T22:58:00.000+01:00

Okay, I couldn't quit writing even though I tried. So I've started running experiments this week. To date I've learnt the following.

1. Students will do *anything* if you pay them, including sit in front of a computer listening to random words and pushing buttons when they see funny pictures.

2. Not all students appear to observe an adequate hygiene protocol prior to turning up in the experiment room. The experiment room being small, in the basement, lacking windows, and not ventilated.

3. Booking systems are very fragile things. When one person gets it wrong, anything up to three researchers may all turn up at the same place wanting to run multiple participants at the same time. In the basement, in a confined space, lacking in windows and ventilation.

4. The phrase "native speaker of English" can take on unexpected nuances when it becomes part of a list of criteria for giving money to students (see (1) above). I'll know for next time to clarify that as "someone whose only or dominant language has been English from birth; late bilinguals need not apply."

5. It is within the realms of possibility to survive for many days on less than one square meal per day and less than one full night's sleep per night, given the right dosage of coffee and apricot flapjacks.

6. On the other hand, too much coffee can give you the illusion of being able to anything at all at any time of the day or night, regardless of how inappropriate it would seem under a rational approach, even include your blog in your to-do list.

a sad state of affairs

2006-06-17T19:20:00.000+01:00

This time last week I was planning that today would be spent sitting in the garden and seeing what I could do about developing a tan. Alas, it was not to be.

For one thing, there was the weather, which drizzled all morning and is still a bit humid. Even more significantly, there was also the series of last-minute minor changes which had to be made to the experimental procedure which I'm scheduled to unleash on some (paid) volunteers on Monday. It was ready on Friday, as I thought, to show to someone for a second opinion, and that wasn't exactly painless either. But by Friday lunchtime I had a list of these supposedly minor things to fix, a list which just kept growing, and right now I'm too scared to calculate just what proportion of the past week I've spent down in the basement lab, deprived not so much of natural light as fresh air, twiddling things in various pieces of software which I'm not even particularly confident about using, and negotiating room bookings and when and where to meet the kind folks who're due to lend me their language-related skills for the purposes of this research project.

Upshot: maybe once I've caught up on sleep and reading I'll be back at the blogging keyboard. But this also seems a good time to flag up the growing pressure to allocate my energy to other things & places ... all I can say is, sign up with bloglines and you'll get notified when I add something here ... which hopefully won't too seldom, cos blogging is fun, but I better not promise, because stamina never was one of my strong points =)

the uses of apricot jam

2006-06-12T22:27:00.000+01:00

I used to have one fool-proof recipe for chocolate cake which served me well for, ahh, many years. It came from the Be-Ro cookbook, the edition whose cover picture is three generations of smiling women in a kitchen surrounded by assorted tempting pies, cakes, and flans of various descriptions.

Now I have a quicker and easier recipe (from a book with an only slightly less cheesy front cover) which involves putting all the ingredients into one bowl together, beating it up for a couple of minutes, and baking in two 8-inch tins for 25 minutes at 180 C. Specifically, you make a paste of cocoa and water (1.5 and 3 tablespoons respectively), then you just add 6 oz each of butter, sugar, and self-raising flour, plus three eggs and a teaspoon and a half of baking powder. Easy as that.

Once it's cooled, you make a fudge icing by melting butter (2 oz) with cocoa (1 oz), adding a couple of tablespoons of milk, and whisking in 8 oz icing sugar. It's the most successful icing I know, and there's enough to sandwich the two layers plus the top.

By now you can tell that mentioning the apricot jam was only an excuse to talk about chocolate: but there is actually a link here, because this particular recipe also features a use for apricot jam, which I think I've only ever experienced in its function as leftovers of a chocolate cake ingredient. You put several tablespoons of apricot jam through a sieve, perhaps warming it slightly first to make the sieving process easier, then spread it over the top of the cake and down the sides (as well as in the middle if you remember to do it before the icing). And as well as being most delicious, it also keeps the cake moist inside - which is highly convenient, if you're the type of person who ever has to store their chocolate-related baking products for any length of time.

fascinated, breathless and awestruck

2006-06-12T22:17:00.000+01:00

This isn't so much a carefully crafted critique as a tetchy sort of grumble, so if you're not in the mood, look away now.

Several weeks ago I took a deep breath and bought the book Women's Ministry in the Local Church (by Ligon Duncan and Susan Hunt, 2006). Maybe some time I'll get round to talking through some of the issues which it raised, although that seems like too much of a can of worms to be a particularly attractive prospect at the moment.

In the meantime, what set me off on my grumble was the slighly irritating way that the argument was presented in Chapter Five (on Submission, by Susan Hunt). After writing out the passage 1 Timothy 2:9-15, the comment which immediately follows takes the following form:
"I am fascinated by the fact that [...]."
New paragraph. "Another fascinating fact leaves me breathless: [...]."
New paragraph. "Finally, I am awestruck that [...]."

Regardless of how valid and worthwhile the facts which she presents may be, it leaves the door wide open for the reader to simply say, "So what?"

If Ms Hunt gets fascinated by some doctrine, and if some other doctrine leaves her breathless, how exactly is that meant to help you and me? What you're left to evaluate is not the validity of the doctrines which she's outlining, but the likelihood of whether or not she did experience those particular emotional states on being confronted with this or that fact. Even though in this case I don't think there's anything suspicious about the technique, that trick of embedding the argument within the shell of a statement about the writer him/herself is actually a great way of distracting the reader's attention away from the content of the teaching which they're being presented with, and leaving them with an entirely uninteresting and worthless comment about someone's subjective experiences.

Much as it might make the whole book and its arguments more friendly and persuasive, it's definitely not a style to overuse. It runs the risk of being perceived as patronising - as if the reader can't decide for themselves what reaction to take to, eg, the fact that there are no aberrant ideas in the bible - does it leave you breathless? and what would it say about you if you didn't go breathless when you thought about it? It also tends to trivialise the matter under discussion - as if the doctrines can somehow gain validity or credibility by the recounting of that writer's subjective response to them. And of course there's always the embarrassing possibility that the feverish girlyness is only on display to act as proof that intelligent and well-respected women don't mind conforming to the doctrine of submission. But surely that is too embarrassing to be true.

omnipotence

2006-06-05T21:56:00.000+01:00

For some reason I was dipping into AA Hodge's exposition of the Westminster Confession the other day, and came across this passage which it might be worth sharing.

"The power of God is the power of his all-perfect, self-existent essence. He has absolutely unlimited power to do whatsoever his nature determines him to will. But this power cannot be directed against his nature. The ultimate principles of reason and of moral right and wrong are not products of the divine power, but are principles of the divine nature. God cannot change the nature of right and wrong, etc, because he did not make himself, and these have their determination in his own eternal perfections. He cannot act unwisely or unrighteously; not for want of the power as respects the act, but for want of will, since God is eternally, immutably, and most freely and spontaneously, wise and righteous." (AA Hodge, The Confession of Faith, Chapter 2, p 52; on WCF ch 2, sec 1-2.)

The bits that were particularly striking were the statement that moral right vs wrong is not a product of divine power, but comes from the principles of the divine nature, and the last few phrases, "God is eternally, immutably, and most freely and spontaneously, wise and righteous."

Hodge was an American theologian of the nineteenth century (1823-1886); he succeeded his father Charles as professor of sytematic theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, and was famous not only as a speaker, writer, and preacher, but even as someone who was able to popularise theology, making it clear and accessible without compromising on depth and spirituality.

that's not the point

2006-05-30T20:22:00.001+01:00

When a crime is committed, of course it must be some comfort to the victims to know that it will be investigated and the perpetrator/s brought to justice - much preferable, obviously, to being the victim of a crime and voiceless, unable to get redress.

But when the crime is committed against you by someone from an organisation which claims to be acting in your best interests, and as the outworking of the highest ideals of enlightened principles, it makes the crime much much worse, and the comfort of being told by that organisation that the perpetrator will be brought to justice becomes somewhat cold, one would expect.

If you haven't guessed already, I've just been reading some of the reports of the alleged killing of civilians by US troops in Hadith, Iraq. And not only that, but Hilary Benn's almost incredibly unhelpful explanation that this actually represents progress for Iraq, because they can now complain about it.

This argument is perhaps most politely described as disingenuous. If all this so-called openness had arisen under Saddam's regime, then you might have considered it progress. But the point of the so-called liberation of Iraq was meant to end all this violence and undeserved bloodshed. When it turns out that the liberators themselves are basically as violent and bloodthirsty as the dictatorship, I'm afraid that's not progress. Given that the stated purpose of America going into Iraq in the first place was to bring in an idealised version of the freedoms that we enjoy in the West, it's completely beside the point to talk about the opportunity of "due process" when the very people who were meant to be introducing human rights are flouting them at will. All they're doing is perpetuating the misery that the population was already experiencing, with the only difference that they're now giving Western democracy a bad name while they're at it.

what did peter know about the trinity?

2006-05-29T23:32:00.000+01:00

I’ve started reading a book about Simon Peter written by Ted Donnelly - Peter: Eyewitness of his Majesty (Banner of Truth 1998), and it’s just reminded me of something which I was going to write a long time ago – about the nature of the faith that believers had in the Old Testament (already mentioned here).

A couple of paragraphs in Chapter 3 of this book are devoted to demonstrating how thoroughly and dogmatically the Jews were monotheistic. Then comes this paragraph:

“Peter shares this faith of his fathers. But he and his friends have come to believe also that Jesus of Nazareth is related to the living God in a unique and intimate way. We cannot be sure how much he understood when he called Jesus ‘the Son of God.’ What did he know of the Trinity? Had he been taught about the eternal Son, creator of the universe?”

What did Peter know about the Trinity? Quite a lot, actually, simply from being familiar with the Old Testament scriptures. He would of course have known about the First Person of the Godhead (this presumably doesn't need to be elaborated on). But he would also have known about a divine person called the Spirit of the Lord, who inspired the prophets (2 Samuel 23, Ezekiel 3) and enabled them to work miracles (Judges 13-15) and whose presence was necessary for spiritual life (Psalm 51); and thirdly he would have known about another divine person, the Son of God (Psalm 2). By reading the scriptures, any Jew of his era should have known that there is one God, and that he is one (Deuteronomy 6), and yet that there are three persons in the Godhead. This truth was clearly available in the Old Testament for the OT believers to lay hold of (for further examples, take Isaiah 11 where there is the rod of Jesse, the Lord, and the Spirit of the Lord; in Isaiah 59 there is the Redeemer, the Lord, and the Spirit of the Lord; and in Isaiah 61 there is the anointed one, the Spirit of the Lord God, and the Lord).

By calling Jesus “the Christ, the Son of the living God,” Peter was identifying the man he was speaking to with the promised Messiah – and there was nothing vague about the characteristics that would identify the Messiah when he came. From the very start of the Old Testament Scriptures, the Saviour who was promised is not only really human (the seed of the woman) but also more than human (with power to bruise the head of the serpent).

the seed of Abraham in whom all the nations of the world would be blessed
a kingly priest after the order of Melchizedek
the New Testament Joseph going ahead of his brethren and out of his overflowing storehouses sustaining them in life (I'm reading in Genesis just now)
a prophet who was like Moses but greater than Moses
a priest greater than Aaron
a leader and commander to the people, greater than Joshua
David’s son and David’s Lord
a greater than Solomon, wiser and richer
the fulfilment of all the sacrifices of the tabernacle and the temple
the suffering servant
the victorious conqueror
the child who would be born and the Son who would be given, the Mighty God (Isaiah 6)
the man who is God’s fellow (Zech 13)

Of course, many of the clearest revelations of the three distinct persons in the Godhead come from the prophecies which were written later in history, ie as the details of the salvation God was providing were enlarged on and added to. If the question had been about someone who’d lived earlier in history than Peter, ie before the Old Testament scriptures were complete, they wouldn’t have had the same amount of knowledge as this. Someone who had lived and died without witnessing the unprecedented splendour of Solomon’s times, for example, wouldn’t have been able to point to all that grandeur and say, The Messiah is greater than all this.

But would they have known the Trinity? Yes, they would still have known the essentials – the bare facts which at the end of the day are both as much and as little as believers know in the New Testament – there is one God, and there are three Persons in the Godhead, and these three are one God, the same in substance, equal in power and glory. And would they have known the Eternal Son? Yes, that believer would still have known that the Messiah was going to be of the seed of Abraham according to the flesh, and was going to be equipped by God with the power to bruise the head of the serpent: and their faith in that promise would have saved them, just as surely as a person today is saved by faith in the same promises now fulfilled.

Now I'm going to put this behind me and see how the rest of the book pans out - hopefully this will be my only quibble with it.

well just fancy that

2006-05-26T17:23:00.000+01:00

Two quizzes from Highland Host. My astounding results are as follows. Who and what are you? =)

You scored as Free Presbyterian Church. You are Free Presbyterian. You believe that the Scottish Presbyterian tradition ought to be upheld, and you are a strong upholder of the Westminster Confession. Frankly, others think you're fossilised.

Disruption Free Church

93%

Free Presbyterian Church

93%

Reformed Presbyterian

65%

Auld Kirk

60%

United Presbyterian

48%

18th Century 'Moderate' Auld Kirk

15%

What Scottish Presbyterian Church would you feel at home in?
created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as John Knox. You are John Knox. You are implaccably opposed to the Pope and the 'monsterous Regiment of Women'. You uphold classic Presbyterianism.

John Knox

95%

James Orr

95%

Thomas Chalmers

85%

Thomas Boston

80%

James Denney

65%

Which Scottish Theologian are you?
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quarried stones can't lift themselves

2006-05-25T22:44:00.000+01:00

I'm quoting this from memory - something I heard this evening and have to write down before I forget.

In a sermon on Mark 13:34-37, Robert Murray McCheyne talks about Christ as the Builder of his house, the Church, and (possibly with a reference to the verse about 'living stones' in Peter, although I don't remember that specifically) he said that Christians before they were converted were firmly embedded in the quarry of the world. It took the power of the Holy Spirit to dig them out of that quarry. But then, he said, even stones that have been quarried are completely unable to move themselves - they need to be lifted and carried by the Builder, and the Builder places them exactly where they should be.

(In case you're wondering how stones and buildings come into Mark 13:34-37, this was just a passing comment under the point that in this parable the Church on earth is said to be like a house, and Christ is the master of the house - the foundation of it and also the builder of it.)

the hundredth

2006-05-23T22:30:00.000+01:00

Well, here's a milestone in literary history ... I think this is post number 100. Behind the scenes at blogger they tell you how many posts you've done, but my number isn't exact cos there are a couple of unpublished drafts in there for when I feel like a 'here's one I made earlier' moment. Anyway, instead of writing anything original I'm just going to direct you away to someone else instead. This post at The Holdfast is full of things to think about. It also fits in quite well with a discussion I had at the weekend with someone who had some remarkably coherent thoughts on the damage that you can do to yourself by thinking too deeply about negative things, like sin and temptation. Not that you shouldn't think about them at all, but you can't help being dragged down when you do focus on them unnecessarily long and hard, and we agreed that it's better to fill your mind with good things instead. Or if not exactly instead, then maybe perhaps at least as well, ie keeping things in perspective.

I do hereby renounce all my rights...

2006-05-23T22:02:00.000+01:00

After you've got over the hurdle of enticing people to come and participate in your study in the first place, you then have to wangle their permission to (a) keep and (b) use the data that they've provided you with.

You'd think that the mere fact that they've volunteered to take part would be enough - but that doesn't take into consideration the myriad ways that researchers and their departments might possibly want to use the data into the future. There's an urban myth about a child who was taped as a toddler learning to speak, only to grow up and take a language development course at university in later life, and experience the horror of discovering that that recording of herself was being used in that course as a teaching resource. Whoops. A less than ideal situation in many ways, not least given the fact that the recording must have been at least 15 years old by that stage. Anyway, what should have happened was that that child's parents should have been asked to give their consent to the recording not just being used for the immediate project, but also kept for an indefinite period and made available as a teaching resource.

Well, there was a discussion which clogged up our department's email list for nearly two days with a to-and-fro about drawing up a generic consent form so that everyone who's recorded by anyone in the department will be able to say whether they're happy for the recording to be archived, and select options for the future use of the recording.

But there are competing interests at stake, as different projects have different priorities for how they use their data. Obviously (as far as I'm aware) the default is to anonymise the data, ie you refer to speakers by code numbers or random capital letters, so that none of your participants can be readily identified when you write up the project: an assurance of confidentiality has to be ironclad. But in my case, some of the data I've been collecting has come from people who've had to disclose a disability, and in that case it's completely understandable if people only want you to use their data for a particular specified purpose. But other people in the department work with speakers of endangered languages, say in Australia or the Sahara, and have a real interest in preserving the data in an archive that's as widely accessible as possible. For them, it would be pretty unhelpful if, say, one of the eight remaining speakers of an aboriginal language requested for the tapes to be wiped after two years.

So there are lots of issues around how you phrase the consent form - unrestricted availability is obviously much more convenient for the research community, but participants are few and far between as it is, and the last thing you want to do is make it sound like people are being awkward for wanting to limit the use of their personal data. The debate continues.

forecasts for the day

2006-05-15T22:55:00.000+01:00

I'm not the only person who thinks the letters of John Newton are extremely helpful. The other day I was dipping into my copy again (the short version, I haven't actually read any of the longer ones) and had a look at the letter titled "How to keep close to the Lord," which as he says is both "our bounden duty and the highest privilege we can propose to ourselves." He ends by mentioning three means which we should use in order to have this privilege, one being prayer, another being attention to scripture, and the third, consideration or recollection.

By the third, he means that we should carefully observe the things that happen to us, and the particular temptations that individual people are vulnerable to. He also gives a down to earth piece of advice: "it may be well, in the morning, ere we leave our chambers, to forecast as far as we are able, the probable circumstances of the day before us." This would be with a view to not just preparing yourself mentally for them, but asking for help to deal with whatever comes your way. Confronting potential worries before they happen and facing them down is one thing, but ideally it would be a case of praying, knowing that we are not only subject to be tempted, and forward to expose ourselves unto temptations, but also unable and unwilling to recover ourselves out of them - Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

Anyway, the reason I noticed that comment in Newton was because Philip Doddridge says the same thing in the Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul, and under the same general heading - Chapter XIX, Some more particular directions for maintaining continual communion with God, or being in his fear all the day long. He says:

"It may be proper after this [ie your personal devotions first thing in the morning] to take a prospect of the day before us, so far as we can probably foresee, in the general, where and how it may be spent: and seriously to reflect, 'How shall I employ myself for God this day? What business is to be done, and in what order? What opportunities may I expect, either of doing or of receiving good? What temptations am I likely to be assaulted with, in any place, company, or circumstance, which may probably occur? In what instances have I lately failed? and how shall I be safest now?'

"After this review, it would be proper to offer up a short prayer, begging that God would quicken us to each of these foreseen duties, that he would fortify us against each of these apprehended dangers, that he would grant us success in such or such a business undertaken for his glory; and also, that he would help us to discover and improve unforeseen opportunities, to resist unexpected temptations, and to bear patiently and religiously any afflictions which may surprise us in the day on which we are entering."

Probably different people would find that kind of advice helpful in different degrees ... as Newton adds as soon as he says it, "the observance of this, as well as of every rule that can be offered, may dwindle into a mere form." However, he says to his correspondent, "I trust that the Lord, who has given you a desire to live for him, will be your guard and teacher." ... Lord, teach thou us / Our end in mind to bear, / And so to count our days, that we / Our hearts may still apply / To learn thy wisdom and thy truth, / That we may live thereby.

keyboard issues - resolved!

2006-05-11T14:03:00.000+01:00

Just had a lovely positive experience digging through the innards of my laptop this lunchtime.

Remember my problem? Well, I finally dug out my invoice from Dell so I could confirm the machine was still under warranty, and got on the phone ... navigated through the usual helpline options ... and ... spoke to someone who initially didn't understand my problem. Let me outline the problem, and then you can probably sympathise with him: A slightly annoying thing about the layout of my keyboard is that the delete key is at the bottom right hand side, instead of the top, which means it's right beside the "INS" key which activates the OVR overwrite function in Microsoft Word. Now it wasn't just that the down-arrow and the right-arrow had combined functions, but the Del button and the Ins button had done the same thing: every time I deleted a character in Word, the overwrite function was activated too: you can imagine how frustrating that was. The thing is, I've never been able to find a use for Ins in, say, Notepad, so I tried explaining how the problem manifested in Word. Bad idea: one mention of the M-word and I was getting told patiently that this was the hardware helpline and if I had a problem with applications I'd need to go somewhere else. Ok, I might not have the world's most competent grasp of computing issues, but I did know this much.

Anyway, after I managed to convince him on that point, things speeded up. He talked me through taking my laptop to pieces, I nervously disconnected some scary bits, and, in short, the problem was fixed! Yay! With a little bit of help from James and a screwdriver in the background I should add. But mainly, what a nice chap he was on the end of the phone, guessing the problem, explaining the procedure calmly, and above all sparing me the nightmare of spiriting my laptop away for the repairs instead. Otherwise I might have had to start inhabiting my office again on a regular basis. Phew.

which secular britain hasn't woken up to yet

2006-05-11T11:01:00.001+01:00

On Radio 4 they're trailing a program (airing tonight I think) where an intrepid journalist ventures into exotic communities of Religious Believers in the Inner Cities, to investigate a world of strongly held religious convictions, and the trailer ends with a comment along the lines that this is a phenomenon which secular Britain hasn't woken up to yet.

But I find this a slightly misleading description of the state of affairs. It makes it sound like "secular Britain" is the norm, the way it's always been, and creeping waves of religiosity are just starting to infiltrate this nonreligious society. They're completely avoiding the realisation that this isn't so much secular Britain as secularised Britain - dogmatic varieties of religion have had a long and respectable history here, and the cultural change which we've undergone isn't so much religion springing up as conventional religion dying out. The thing to wake up to is that when you do abandon that solid background of a national reformation of religion, then it's hardly surprising that all sorts of intellectual and spiritual oddities will spring up to fill the gap. As they say, when you decline to believe the truth, you don't just end up believing nothing, you'll believe anything.

lamb chops: a cry for help

2006-05-09T11:59:00.000+01:00

An urgent and pressing question has arisen. Think of the food you eat with mint sauce: say it out loud, maybe in a convenient sentence such as, "Look at the lamb chops there." Now think of the hairstyle. Say it out loud: "Look at the lamb chops there."

The question is, do both those sentences sound identical when you say them aloud? Thinking particularly about which of the words in "lamb chops" gets more stress - are they identical, or is there a slight difference in where you place the emphasis, depending on which meaning you intend?

If you happen to read this in the next day or so, please let me know what you think! Your intuitions will be invaluable. (This is state-of-the art linguistics methodology you know. Got a problem - ask the nearest native speaker.) (If you didn't know there was such a hairstyle as "lamb chops," by the way, I'm afraid you were clearly just born in the wrong decade. Sorry.)

a triple metaphor for conversion

2006-05-08T21:19:00.000+01:00

Commenting that "the drawings of the Father are very powerful," John Flavel expands on the descriptions that the Bible gives of how souls are converted.

"The Scripture expresses the work of conversion by a threefold metaphor, namely, that of a resurrection from the dead, Romans 6:4; that of creation, Ephesians 2:10; and that of victory or conquest, 2 Corinthians 10:4-5.

"All these set forth the infinite power of God in this work, for no less than almighty power is required in each of them, and if you strictly examine the distinct ideas, you will find the power of God more and more illustriously displayed in each of them.

"To raise the dead is the effect of almighty power; but then resurrection presupposes existent matter. In the work of creation, there is no preexistent matter; but then there is no opposition; that which is not, rebels not against the power which gives it being. But victory and conquest presuppose opposition: all the power of corrupt nature arming itself and fighting against God, but yet not able to frustrate his design." (The Method of Grace, p83)

(I quoted before from the same book, the section on receiving the gospel offer.)

In terms of what use can be made of these observations, I was dipping into The Christian in Complete Armour yesterday and found Gurnall speaking along the same lines.

"O how unbecoming it is to have a great God, and a little faith on that great God! a strong God, and a weak faith on his almighty power! ... Obliterate that word, 'Is he able?' Away with that question which so grates on the ears of the Almighty: Can he pardon? can he purge? What cannot he do that can do what he will?"

ornaments to their profession

2006-05-08T21:08:00.000+01:00

A couple of posts ago I outlined what happened at the revivals of Stewarton and Kirk of Shotts. It's also interesting to see the way that different personalities and their actions contributed to the set of circumstances that the revivals came from, and in both cases, there was a significant contribution from the contemporary women.

In the case of Stewarton, the minister whose work was used to bring about the revival was David Dickson. But prior to the work beginning, Mr Dickson had been banished from his parish up to Turriff, in the north of Scotland, because of his opposition to the Five Articles of Perth (among other anti-presbyterian measures which the church was battling with at the time). Dickson was brought back to Irvine through the efforts of the Earl of Eglinton, according to McCrie. And interestingly, in a parenthesis McCrie manages to talk much more about the wife of this man, rather than the man himself. Apparently, after an unpromising upbringing, the Countess of Eglinton had been converted and was "an ornament to her Christian profession," someone who "exerted all her influence for the promotion of religion and the protection of its faithful ministers."

Then at Kirk of Shotts, as mentioned previously, the revival started after the Monday of a communion. But in terms of the ministers who were present at that communion, it's interesting to see that they were there by invitation, on the request of a group of ladies who were friendly with the local minister, Mr Hance. When their carriage broke down one time as they were passing, Mr Hance put them up until it was repaired - in return, they clubbed together to build him a new manse. It was out of gratitude for that kindness that he asked what he could do for them, and their response was to ask him to invite to the communion some ministers of their choosing. This was a way of being able to hear some of the ministers who (like Mr Dickson) were undergoing difficulties for their commitment to gospel principles, and the selection included the "venerable" Robert Bruce, a longstanding faithful minister who was by then in his 70s, as well as John Livingstone, the 27 year old minister who eventually preached on that Monday. As a final footnote, it's worth mentioning that Livingstone was at that point the chaplain of the Countess of Wigton: the episcopalians had blocked every attempt to induct him as minister to any particular parish, but she and her husband took him into their home as their chaplain, to preach there according to opportunity.

In DP Thomson's book, Women of the Scottish Church, he gives case after case of women advancing the cause of the gospel in whatever way was open to them. Sometimes that meant giving support and encouragement to their own husbands in difficult situations (like in the covenanting period, a couple of decades after these revivals). But there were more than a few instances of women in the nobility using their influence in various ways - such as appointing chaplains as in this case, or giving the ministers financial help, and generally making their resources available to the cause.

When you look at the revivals themselves, it's also noticeable that nobody had to do anything out of the ordinary as a prerequisite for the blessing being poured out. The Earl and Countess of Eglinton were only doing what anyone in their situation would have done, when they worked to have Mr Dickson recalled. The ladies in Mr Hance's case ditto (hmm, who would you choose, if you got the chance to pick your own ministers for a communion...). They were just going about their ordinary ways, doing sensible Christian things based on straightforward Christian principles, and as it worked out, their actions contributed to the network of circumstances that were used as a means of bringing blessing to themselves and others.

"The Lord's hand is not shortened, that it cannot save, neither is his ear heavy, that it cannot hear, but your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you..." Isaiah 59. "Wherefore it shall come to pass, if ye hearken to these judgements, and keep and do them, that the Lord thy God shall keep unto thee the covenant and the mercy which he swore unto thy fathers, and he will love thee, and bless thee, and multiply thee..." Deuteronomy 7. "Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in mine house, and prove me now herewith, saith the Lord of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it." Malachi 3.

more and better palliative care

2006-05-06T14:57:00.000+01:00

It's getting a bit late, but I've just written a letter to a selection of peers about Lord Joffe's bill, Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill, which is due to have its second reading in the House of Lords on May 12th (ie this Friday coming).

It aims to make physician-assisted suicide legal for adults undergoing "unbearable suffering," but it comes with all the usual problems and flaws of this kind of thing. There aren't enough safeguards to ensure that vulnerable people won't be subtly pressurised into asking for their lives to be ended - it doesn't have an adequate definition of "suffering", and it doesn't require any psychiatric screening (people are more likely to ask for euthanasia if they're depressed), and so on.

In the light of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society's recent rebranding of themselves under the title Dignity in Dying, it's also worth considering which option really ascribes more dignity to human beings in need - the approach that thinks it's better to get them killed to get them out of their needy situation, or the approach that wants to meet those needs and address the reasons why they're suffering. We don't need easier earlier deaths, as if that's somehow helpful to anyone: what we need is more and better palliative care, and greater efforts to care for terminally ill people to allow them to live out the rest of their natural lives in circumstances that are as comfortable as possible. See the Care NOT Killing alliance's site for much much more in the same strain.

electorally credible

2006-05-05T13:26:00.000+01:00

I'm listening to the World at One and they've just had a pundit from Strathclyde pointing out that Labour can't rely on the electorate's continuing dislike of the Tories - the results of the English local council elections have been surprisingly good for the Tories, and Labour has taken a big kicking. That could be because of the bad publicity they've gone through over the past week or so: or it could just be because of their bad management of the country, domestically and internationally, for the past nine years.

But however unattractive the idea of a Tory revival may be in some quarters, it's much more disturbing to see that 'electoral credibility' is being gained by none other than the far-right British National Party. Who are racist, in case you hadn't noticed. It's a huge credit to Scottish politics that the BNP hasn't managed to get a foothold up here so far (although they are trying), but until recently you wouldn't have expected such success for them in England either. We all know that New Labour is a mess, and we all know there isn't much in the way of alternatives, but surely we can't turn to thuggish white supremacists to help us out of this dilemma.

two revivals

2006-05-04T23:37:00.000+01:00

In The Story of the Scottish Church, Thomas McCrie mentions two 17th century revivals - one in Stewarton (Ayrshire) and one in Kirk of Shotts (outside Glasgow).

In the early to mid 1620s, David Dickson, minister of Irvine in Ayrshire, began holding lectures every Monday in Irvine (that was the weekly market day). The meetings were held in a hall in the manse, and over a hundred people would attend - including visitors from nearby Stewarton, encouraged by their own minister. It was as a result of concerned hearers attending these meetings that the revival began to spread throughout the Stewarton area, affecting "multitudes" according to McCrie, including some people who had previously been very hostile and derogatory towards the gospel. The features which McCrie mentions are these people's concern about sin, which brought them to listen to Mr Dickson's lectures in the first place, and the resulting "solid, serious, and practical piety" which characterised these people as the work proceeded.

Then in 1630, the sacrament of the Lord's supper was dispensed at Shotts, attended with an unusual "spirit of light and love." The people in general, it seems, felt constrained to hold an extra service on the Monday of the communion, and a young minister called John Livingstone was persuaded to preach. He took the verses in Ezekiel 36:25-26, "Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you ..." and spoke for an hour and half. Then as he was about to close, he was led to speak on for another hour, accompanied with what he himself described as such liberty as he never experienced in his life before or after: and according to McCrie, no less than five hundred people traced their conversion to this sermon. Again, a new seriousness, a readiness to pray, and a subsequent life of 'soberness, righteousness, and godliness,' were among the characteristics of the people who were affected at this time.

I wrote something previously which was sparked off by McCheyne's comment that revivals are typically preceded by a spirit of praise. It is still hard to look at circumstances in the church, never mind in society at large, and find anything very positive to rejoice in: given the sorry state we're in, how can there be anything other than shamefacedness. But even if we didn't have the example of how things happened in the 1600s, in times of perhaps greater harrassment of Christians and less of a heritage to appeal to - there's still the fact that although we have destroyed ourselves, in the Lord there is help: Hosea 13:9. Or as it says in Psalm 95:

1 O come, let us sing to the Lord:
come, let us every one
A joyful noise make to the Rock
of our salvation.
...
3 For God, a great God, and great King,
above all gods he is.
...
6 O come, and let us worship him,
let us bow down withal,
And on our knees before the Lord
our Maker let us fall.

keyboard issues

2006-05-02T10:39:00.000+01:00

A weird thing has started happening with my laptop. My cursor keys have combined roles, or something - whenever I press the down-arrow, the cursor jumps down AND right: same if I press the right-arrow. This is incredibly annoying, cos I'm working in Excel at the moment inputting pitch and duration measurements for yet another batch of sound files, and it means I can't use the arrows to navigate around half the directions I need. It's not so much fun editing text documents either. This is probably an indication of how I should work at the office with a desktop maintained by real live tech support, rather than lurking in my "home office" with nothing but an internet connection to any outside world. Hmm, once my hair's dry, maybe I'll do something about that.

a day to work from home

2006-05-02T10:28:00.000+01:00

I got a phonecall this morning to cancel the meeting I was supposed to have at 11am. Which was just as well, as it turns out my hairdryer was on its very last legs. When I switched it on, it just started smoking and died. Serves it right for smoking! I hear you cry. But it also gives me the perfect excuse to hibernate in the flat instead of going to the office, again. Once it's safe to venture forth without looking like a drowned rat, I'll go and buy a new one - on route to the office, of course.

the gaelic for ouch

2006-05-01T20:39:00.000+01:00

Since I have no idea how to spell it, I'll give a stab at a phonetic transcription: the Gaelic for ouch is: [ɤ:v].

Just for completeness, and to be honest, just to show off my newly acquired ability to make IPA symbols appear out of HTML, a rough transcription of (Scottish) ouch would be [ʌʉʧ].

A related piece of linguistic trivia is the variation in onomatopoeia across languages. The trusty old textbook which I've had since first year gives the following examples.

(O'Grady et al 1996, p159)

I also want to write a post sometime soon on the issue of where different regional accents come from, but first I have to quickly read up on some stuff, just to make sure I make sense.

perhaps he shouldn't

2006-04-29T11:22:00.000+01:00

Things you have to laugh about. Election leaflets in John Prescott's constituency have included one with a picture of him and his wife in 'domestic harmony,' according to this report - more than slightly unfortunate given the recent publicity over his affair with a secretary.

The local council leader defended Mr Prescott by saying that public opinion remained fairly positive. "People have said he shouldn't have done it and perhaps he shouldn't but it's done now isn't it."

Yeah, perhaps, on reflection, he shouldn't have cheated on his wife with a woman who was going to marry another man. Maybe that was a bit, you know, iffy. Perhaps he did slip up a wee bit there.

But it is done now, isn't it. So now we see the deputy prime minister in a different light - as someone who can't be trusted to behave honourably towards his own wife or treat his office staff with decency. It's no excuse to say that these things only happen in people's personal lives - it's the personal lives of public people who expect us to trust them to run the country. If it was scandalous in the Tories, it's every bit as scandalous in New Labour. Time for a change, methinks.

it's not just the guardian

2006-04-25T21:57:00.000+01:00

In the Guardian recently, one Jenni Russell nicely described the creepiness of this government's attitude to civil freedoms. Nothing unusual there I suppose, but the encouraging thing is that it's not just the usual suspects who are getting progressively worried about the way that things are being put in place which will make it easier for democracy to be stifled in this country.

As just one example, the Russell article articulates the same concerns as are held by the Lawyers Christian Fellowship about the powers which the government is wanting to take, which will allow government ministers to change laws "by order, rather than going through parliamentary procedures." [I can't lay my hands on it right now, but a couple of issues ago the LCF had a statement in the English Churchman about this.]

But as has been gleefully pointed out on one of the Guardian's comment pages, it's none other than the crusty old Telegraph itself that's laying into the Home Secretary and the government at large, for introducing "illiberal measures," "undermining our democracy," and in general having a "disregard for our liberties." Strong words from such a source, as a Guardian reader might see it.

Along the same lines, there was an interesting article in my paper copy of today's Scotsman, about Asbos. It was by columnist Peter Jones, and although the piece itself devoted much more space to the supposed plus points of the asbo scheme than to its disadvantages, it was still encouragingly tentatively negative overall. The scenario which he conjured up about the ineffectiveness and counterproductiveness of the orders doesn't seem too implausible - and if it comes about, he says, it would show that "civil libertarians will have been correct that liberties have been needlessly eroded." Apparently it's only 5% of the population who have any concerns at all about civil liberties being compromised by asbos, but you never know - plant a seed of doubt, and hope that the general lack of concern comes more from lack of awareness than real disregard for democratic freedoms.

And on that uncharacteristically optimistic note ...

bookish successes

2006-04-25T20:00:00.000+01:00

Trust it to be books that cheered me up today.

In the morning a parcel arrived containing Matthew Henry's Communicant's Companion, newly republished by Solid Ground Christian Books. I'd nearly given up hope of getting it, since I ordered it a whopping two months ago - but I needn't have worried. I've already quoted it here actually (this bit from the first chapter) and it was so good all the way through that I just had to stock up on another couple of copies. I got it from here: it's got a nice new cover, although inside it's a facsimile of a nineteenth century edition, but as it says in the introduction (by Rev John Brown of Edinburgh, 1825), its contents are "very plain, very pious, and very practical." Definitely worth the wait.

Anyway, then this afternoon I had to pass a Barnardo's shop near my office and they had a box of 'Religion and Theology bargains' outside. And there I picked up Redemption: Accomplished and Applied by Prof John Murray and Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger by Ronald J Sider - for the eminently reasonable price of 50p each.

And in between all that, I even discovered that a whole issue of the journal Reading and Writing was devoted to reading/writing in non-alphabetic scripts (like Chinese, Arabic, Urdu, etc), which hopefully doesn't sound too obscure, as it's exactly what I'm going to be spending the next wee whiley thinking about.

best year ever

2006-04-25T11:04:00.000+01:00

I'm the 11,405th vote in the BBC poll: Is the Health Service having its best year ever? Eighty eight percent of respondents have voted no, which is hardly surprising: obviously nobody's taking Patricia Hewitt seriously.

You've got to wonder what's the point of extravagant claims like these. If the government were just arguing that things aren't as bad as we think, that would be more convincing than announcements like "the best year ever" which are blatantly counterfactual.

Meanwhile, in an attempt to convince you that I do do work sometimes, I'm trying to decide what to make of this thing that an interviewer said on the radio yesterday evening. Speaking to her interviewee about the Health Secretary she said, "(Health service workers) don't feel as optimistic as you sound and as she does." I feel there's something unexpected in that use of "does" right at the end - even though, being but a humble phonologist, I can't quite put my finger on the syntactic reason why. It could be because the first comparison is between "don't feel as optimistic as you [do] sound," and both the verbs are lexical verbs, then the second is between "don't feel as optimistic as she does [feel]," where the first verb is lexical and the other is an auxiliary (or dummy?) verb. Never mind - it makes perfect sense, and in my linguistic world, meaning gets priority over syntax, so, please, don't let it worry you too much.

we had more freedom

2006-04-17T22:14:00.001+01:00

The BBC is reporting on violence and murder being committed against homosexuals in Iraq. Under the local interpretation of Islam, homosexuals deserve to be killed "in the harshest way," and people are accordingly being murdered. The most frustrating thing of all is the quote right at the end of the article:

"Saddam was a tyrant, but at least we had more freedom then," said Hussein. "Nowadays, gay men are just killed for no reason."

But this isn't the only group which has been experiencing greater intolerance from Islamists now that Saddam has gone. Christians in Iraq were scapegoated right from the start of the campaign for regime change, and it's not getting any better as time goes by. In another article from the BBC, it's reported that "in Iraq, the Christian middle class is emigrating in droves, fearful of the daily violence and the hostility it now encounters from Islamists," and throughout the Middle East, "says the Lebanese journalist Hazem Saghieh, 'being anti-Christian is a way of showing what a good Muslim you are'."

Whether or not there was any justification for invading Iraq in the first place (you probably know what side I come down on there), the outcome has only been to initiate the replacement of a one-man secular dictatorship with an equally repressive tyranny differing only in its religiousness, and, arguably, its thin veneer of democratic legitimacy. It's not a good thing.

holier than us

2006-04-17T22:14:00.000+01:00

I'm still pondering a discussion which I listened to the other week, where people were talking about believers in the past, and how they were overall more holy than believers are today, as evidenced for example in their greater diligence in praying, fasting, self-examination, etc.

The comment which stuck with me was when someone said that if we were as holy as them, then we would pray more and fast etc as well. In the past, people would fast much more often, and pray for hours on end, and hang on a preacher's every word throughout hours-long sermons. So the reason why we don't fast so much (etc) today is because we aren't so holy.

But I've been wondering whether that might actually be putting things back to front. Prayer, fasting, church-attendance, etc, are all means of grace, and maybe, if believers today were more diligent in making use of these means, that itself would lead to increased holiness in the lives of contemporary Christians.

I know that two essential things are gifts, namely diligence and sincerity. But doesn't it come back to what Thomas Boston said to dissuade people from making inability an excuse: we have to make use of the means which are available, and maybe God will have regard to the means which he himself has appointed. Merely using the means won't lead to an automatic increase of holiness, but surely on the other hand, neglecting the means will lead to an automatic decline in holiness.

"[People] do not act rationally unless they exert the powers they have, and do what they can. ... Therefore pray, meditate, desire help of God, be much at the throne of grace supplicating for grace, and do not faint. Though God regard you not, who in your present state are but one mass of sin, universally depraved, and vitiated in all the powers of your soul, yet he may regard prayer, meditation, and the like means of his own appointment, and he may bless them to you. Wherefore, if you will not do what you can, you are not only dead, but you declare yourselves unworthy of eternal life." Thomas Boston, Human Nature in its Fourfold State, from the end of chapter 2, 'Man's Utter Inability to Recover Himself.'

the discovery of forgiveness

2006-04-17T11:11:00.000+01:00

This is from John Owen's 'Practical Exposition on Psalm 130,' the part where he reaches verse 4, and starts to talk about the way that forgiveness is "discovered to" people who are burdened by the guilt of sin. (I wonder if the word must mean having it revealed, or dis-covered or un-covered to you, not so much finding it out?)

... this discovery of forgiveness whereof we speak, is indeed no common thing, but a great discovery. Let men come, with a sense of the guilt of sin, to have deep and serious thoughts of God, they will find it no such easy and light matter to have their hearts truly and thoroughly apprehensive of [able to grasp] this loving and gracious nature of God, in reference to pardon. It is an easy matter to say so in common, but the soul will not find it so easy to believe for itself. ...

Though men profess that God is gracious, yet that aversion which they have to him, and to communion with him, abundantly manifests that they do not believe what they say and profess. If they did, they could not but delight and trust in him, which they do not; for "they that know his name will put their trust in him." So the slothful man in the gospel said, "I knew that thou wast austere," and not for me to deal with; it may be he professed otherwise before, but that lay in his heart when it came to the trial.

But this, I say, is necessary to those to whom this discovery is to be made: even a spiritual apprehension of the gracious, loving heart and nature of God. ... And he that really considers forgiveness, and looks on it with a spiritual eye, must conclude that it comes from infinite goodness and grace.

And this is that which the hearts of siners are exercised about, when they come to deal for pardon. "Thou, Lord, art good, and ready to forgive." Psalm 86:5. "Thou art a God ready to pardon, gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness." Nehemiah 9:17. And, "Who is a God like unto thee, that pardoneth iniquity? - because he delighteth in mercy." Micah 7:18. And God encourageth them hereunto, wherever he says that he forgives sins and blots out iniquities for his own sake, or his name's sake: that is, he will deal with sinners according to the goodness of his own gracious nature.

... To have all the clouds and darkness that are raised by sin, between us and the throne of God, dispelled; to have the fire and storms and tempests that are kindled and stirred up about him by the law, removed; to have his glorious face unveiled, and his holy heart laid open, and a view given of those infinite treasures and stores of goodness, mercy, love, and kindness, which have had an unchangeable habitation therein from all eternity; to have a discovery of these eternal springs of forbearance and forgiveness - is that which none but Christ can accomplish and bring about.

That comes from p136-138 of my secondhand 1836 edition - I chopped out a fair bit (and they're only small pages!), so I hope it isn't too long.

uncomfortable in the modern world

2006-04-17T10:55:00.000+01:00

On Saturday morning there was an interview on the radio with a Roman Catholic archbishop, and the interviewer put it to the archbishop that the Pope's Easter message had revealed a man who was "uncomfortable in the modern world," and didn't think it was a very happy place to be.

Well, the Pope's comfort or discomfort in the modern world is really his own problem, but one thing that his spokesman didn't challenge, was the assumption that the modern world is indeed a happy place to be. I might have been slightly depressed when I wrote the post before last, but even in the cheerfulness induced by the first real days of spring and sunshine, you've got to admit that people could well be forgiven for not finding the modern world such a happy place after all.

Having said that, I thought the archbishop did quite a good job of presenting the case against rampant abortion, genetic engineering and similar issues; which is not to be sniffed at, in the contemporary situation.

the problem that languages solve

2006-04-14T16:53:00.000+01:00

Believe it or not, the question of what language really is can be quite contentious within linguistics. Here's one statement:

"Languages represent a class of solutions to a problem that is undeniably unique in its scope and nature: the problem of mapping a hyperdimensional meaning space onto a low-dimensional channel."
(Bates et al (1998) in Bechtel & Graham (eds), A Companion to Cognitive Science, p595)

I have a lot of respect for Bates et al, but on this occasion I think I have to disagree. I don't think that providing a mapping between meaning and sounds is really the core problem that languages solve. Rather, I would suggest, the problem is communication, and the links between sound and meaning are only the means of solving that problem. To me anyway, it makes more sense to think of things that way round.

treacherous friends

2006-04-14T16:51:00.000+01:00

In a post back in December I was having a wee think about the weak and exploited state of the church, and now I've just rediscovered the draft of a post following up on that. Here it is polished up and up-dated a bit - a train of thought sparked off by Jeremiah saying about the church, "all her friends have dealt treacherously with her, they are become her enemies." (Lamentations 1:2.)

There are several one-time friends which might be identified, which have turned traitor on the church since they used to be friends.

One friend which the church used to have is the state. You used to be able to expect the state to support the work of the church in things like general morality and law and order, say. But not any more, not when the government doesn't care about morality, and is in fact at the forefront of introducing things like super casinos and twenty-four hour licencing for pubs, and neglecting to support the traditional two-parent family, and lying to us about going to war. Not when law and order becomes a matter of unchallengable control orders, and attempts to restrict freedom of speech through legislation like the "glorification" of terrorism law, and implicit intentions to hold us all accountable to the state (forgetting that it's the state who should be accountable to the people, not the other way round).

Another friend to the church could have been technology. In a time of instant mass communication, for example, it should be easy to transmit the gospel message far and wide - reaching far more people more easily than they did when the printing press was invented, and publishing was a laborious, lengthy procedure. Instead, this technology gets put to use for things like entertainment - for surrounding you wherever you go with music and images and print which are hardly supportive of a wholesome environment - hardly productive of thoughts on things that are true, honest, just, pure, lovely, or of good report.

The third friend would be science and learning. Whatever you learn, in a world that God created, if it's not something about God himself, then it's something about what he has made. So in the hard sciences, you're only finding out about how the created world works; in history you're only looking to see how providence has unfolded; and in psychology you're only coming to understand about how fearfully and wonderfully made we are ourselves as human beings. But, treacherously, scholars in every field prefer to use their scholarship as a reason not to believe in God, and not to go to church, and in general, they tend to use these advances in science and learning to disparage even the idea of a designer.

If these friends were still with us, like they were in the seventeenth century, and the eighteenth, and even the nineteenth, maybe we wouldn't be in such a solitary and desolate situation now.

But you also have to wonder - maybe part of the reason why the friendship of these sources has drained away is because the church for her part didn't treat them right either - when they started to promote their tendencies to forget the ultimate authority and ultimate wisdom, she should have stuck to her guns and held on to the absolutes, instead of watering down her critiques to suit their tastes and letting their mistakes seep into her own doctrine and practice, muting her proclamation of the gospel. It's not an excuse, but in a way it's no wonder really if they were disappointed and turned away.

guess what?

2006-04-12T20:29:00.000+01:00

Before you skip down to look at the answer, read this quote and see if you can guess which outstanding advance in human history took place under the following conditions:

X was invented "within the framework of a rapidly expanding urban environment, social stratification, technological specialisation, the emergence of a politically powerful nobility, large-scale community labour projects and commodity distribution, and intercity and international exchange networks."

The question is: Has anything that's ever been invented, not been invented in a context like this?

Just for the record and so I'm not guilty of plagiarism, this is the scholar Margaret W Green talking about the invention of cuneiform - the earliest ever writing script, developed by an ancient people called the Sumerians over five thousand years ago. Rapid urban expansion, social stratification, technological specialisation ... it seems so contemporary, but it seems like you can use the same terms to describe virtually any period of human history there's ever been. Unless you can think of something I can't?

MW Green (1989), 'Early cuneiform.' In WM Senner (ed), The Origins of Writing. University of Nebraska Press, p43.

consciousness of need

2006-04-10T10:31:00.000+01:00

Linguists might not be in the news, but old Scottish Free Presbyterian ministers are:
"Genuine Revivals are Always Accompanied by Conviction of Sin."

linguists really not in the news

2006-04-08T21:13:00.000+01:00

Upon reflection, there really couldn't be anything more misleading in the title "Linguists 'have different brains'," which I mentioned already. It's definitely not linguists that the study was looking at, and now I'm not even sure that it was even about "language learners". Until I actually read the journal article itself I can't be sure, but it sounds more like a sound discrimination task, where people are asked to say whether Sound 1 is the same as Sound 2 - the only novel aspect being that the people in question got their brains scanned at the same time. If anything else exciting comes out of this, I'll make sure and let you know.

and no role play either thanks

2006-04-08T21:08:00.000+01:00

This follows on from the "no graven images" issue and goes into one futher aspect of it which is maybe more relevant in the contemporary situation than the drawings-or-sculptures type of image. It's to do with the trend for producing films where an actor plays Jesus, and then for these films to be tolerated by Christians and sometimes even welcomed within the Church as evangelistic tools.

There are different kinds of ways of attempting to make an "image" of God - portraits on paper, stained glass, crucifixes, statues of madonna and child, etc, but they're all just ways of making the attempt to represent God in some physical way. In getting an actor to attempt to play Jesus, it's only one step further - it involves a living human being rather than a statue, but it still falls into the category of making an "image", because it's an attempt to represent him physically, visually - somehow other than spiritually. Whether it's a 2D picture-image, a 3D statue-image, or a living moving human-image, these are all ways of in effect bringing God down into the realm of things which we can get a hold of, changing the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man.

Films are favoured as teaching tools because of the way they can convey their message much more powerfully than conventional media. But when you present someone with an actor attempting to play the role of Jesus, the message that that conveys is wrong from start to finish.

It's wrong ultimately because it contravenes the second commandment, but it's wrong too in the sense that it gives the viewer a fatally distorted idea of what this person Jesus Christ is really like. Here's a short, three-pronged explanation of how.

(a) For one thing, although Christ Jesus was of course a real human being just like all the rest of us, yet he was also God, and that's really the vital fact that we need to know about his person. He was, and is, a divine person, even though he has a human nature united to his divine person. The implication of this is that anything that's merely human must inevitably fail to convey the most important thing about him. In fact, I think it's safe to say that any actor who tries to do this, is really behaving blasphemously.

(b) For another thing, I might even say that in one way it's much worse to act as Jesus than to make an image of him from wood or gold or other physical material, because it much more forcibly makes him seem "altogether such a one as ourselves," Psalm 50 - altogether as merely-human and sinful as any one of the rest of us. In itself it is just staggering that any mortal fallen human being would take it upon themselves to impersonate the eternal Son of God in our nature, considering he is absolutely holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and made higher than the heavens - but quite apart from that, when it is done, it taints our understanding of him with human frailties and sinful imperfections much more subtly and insidiously than mere objects do. You can grant that "ordinary" graven images come from the best intentions of misguided religious people using their natural skills to create a thing of beauty - their creations are still blasphemous and conducive to idolatry, but in themselves they're only pieces of wood and metal or stone, without any moral properties of their own, in contrast to whatever human being you pick in the whole world, whose person must be sinful.

(c) One more reason is that no piece of acting can convey what he was doing in the world at all. Unlike every other human who was ever born, he came deliberately according to his own will, and on purpose to do a work. The details of what he did, and the success of it all, is something that no one can ever convey by attempting to act out any part of his life. It has to be said too that the attempt to do so casts obscurity onto his uniqueness and the fact that he is a real Saviour, and again, it can really only be described as blasphemous.

Finally I'll just refer you to a helpful article on this general issue dating from the release of the "Passion" movie - available here - which I found useful at the time, as something of a lone voice on the huge problems associated with treating that film in particular with approval.

no pictures please

2006-04-08T21:04:00.000+01:00

God is infinite, absolute, and eternal, and beyond the reach of human beings to comprehend. For these and similar reasons, it is not possible for us to make any sort of visual or pictorial representation of him. Attempting it inevitably and necessarily comes short of who he is, and by reducing him to the kind of thing that can be adequately modelled by human beings, it has the effect of denying these essential aspects of the glorious being that he is. This holds true for God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

In addition to this, he actually forbids us to make images of him. So that, even if it was possible for finite and sinful human beings to capture the qualities of divinity in the productions of our finite and sinful creativity, it would still be wrong to do so.

The wrongness of it can be seen (a) from the second of the ten commandments, which explicitly forbids any attempt at worshipping him in any way that he has not appointed, including "the making [of] any representation of God, of all or of any of the three persons, either inwardly in our mind, or outwardly in any kind of image or likeness of any creature whatsoever" (as the Westminster theologians agreed in 1647).

(b) It can also be seen from the prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah (eg chapters 40 and 10 respectively), where the people are condemned for their idolatry. Compared to the reality, and the omnipotence, eternity, and uniqueness of God the Lord, the absurdity of constructing images from wood or gold for worshipping, should be self-evident. And although the call might be primarily to abandon the false gods in favour of the one true and living God, it noticeably doesn't advocate building images of God to replace the images of false gods - it's a call to abandon all false worship of all kinds, and return to the spiritual worship of the living God, free from props and material aids of any sort.

(c) It can also be seen from the New Testament. We ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold or silver or stone, graven by art and human imagination (Acts 17) - it's not even legitimate to conceptualise him like that, far less to implement that wrong idea concretely in pictures or sculptures or anything else. In Romans 10 it was one of the grossest symptoms of the "ungodliness and unrighteousness of man," that they changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of an image of corruptible man.

Noticeably, the prohibition on representations of God includes pictures of the Son of God. Even though he became man, a real man, that doesn't detract from the fact that he was never a mere man - he was still a divine person, the Second Person of the Godhead, and all these arguments apply to him just as much as any of the other persons. In fact, after his resurrection, he specifically taught his people that they would no longer have him physically present with them. As he told Thomas, "Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have believed," John 21, and Peter says the same thing - "Jesus Christ, whom having not seen, ye love - in whom, though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory." 1 Peter 1.

"For what nation is there so great, that hath God so nigh unto them, as the Lord our God is in all things that we call upon him for? ... Take ye therefore good heed unto yourselves: for ye saw no manner of similitude in the day that the Lord spoke unto you in Horeb out of the midst of the fire, lest ye corrupt yourselves, and make you a graven image, the similitude of any figure, the likeness of male or female ... Take heed unto yourselves, lest ye forget the covenant of the Lord your God, which he made with you, and make you a graven image, or the likeness of any thing, which the Lord thy God hath forbidden thee. For the Lord thy God is a consuming fire, even a jealous God." Deuteronomy 4.

tourism strikes again

2006-04-07T19:49:00.000+01:00

It was disappointing today to hear that the High Court has decided Dan Brown didn't plagiarise the Leigh et al book after all. Not that the fantasies aired in either book are worth defending, but, if they'd ruled that there had been plagiarism, it would have at least postponed the release of the film.

But here's an article on marketing Scotland as part of some sort of Da Vinci experience, because of how bits of it were shot in Rosslyn Chapel, outside Edinburgh. If only we could entice more wealthy Americans to come and visit, imagine how much income we could generate.

Pandering to tourists is something we're unfortunately getting good at, with tourism currently being made an excuse for controversial seven-day ferry sailings in the islands, for example. It's just a bit depressing that we're now hoping to make money out of something as untrue and scandalously pointless as the Da Vinci Code. (Maybe that should be pointlessly scandalous?)

Dan Brown is very readable and popular: it's just a shame that he wrote all this rubbish about people and things which there's no real doubt or confusion about whatsoever. Even when people read it knowing that it's not all true, bits of the misrepresentation always stick in your mind, and can't help colouring your perceptions about the persons involved. That's not something you can really afford, given who these persons actually are. And no, we don't want hordes of tourists turning up to celebrate their dubious ideas about bloodlines and whatnot. But come August, I'll probably have plenty more to say about the tourists at the Festival, so I'll leave it there for the time being.

a research finding

2006-04-07T16:48:00.000+01:00

A finding, at last! At the start of this week I finally got enough numbers together to qualify for doing some statistics, and can now exclusively reveal that (a) people speak at different rates of speech and have different ranges of pitch, and (b) notwithstanding the individual differences between speakers, they all show the same trend of producing one linguistic pattern with one combination of pitch & duration, and the other pattern with a different combination. Good news!

linguists not in the news

2006-04-07T15:54:00.000+01:00

The BBC is reporting an interesting study under the title "Linguists 'have different brains'." It's actually about language learners, not linguists, I feel I should point out though. I doubt my Heschl's gyrus would be very different from yours, all my, ahem, years of linguistics notwithstanding.

Never mind - there was one piece of linguistics there - they talk about the difference between the "d"-sound that you get in French by your tongue making contact with the ridge behind your teeth, versus one of the "d"-sounds in Hindi, where the tongue is curled back on itself and makes contact further back in your mouth. The study was looking at how quickly native speakers of French could pick up on this difference, and looked at the structure of their brains at a place called Heschl's gyrus, which is known to be important for processing sounds. They found that the size and shape of Heschl's gyrus in the fast learners differed from its size and shape in the slower learners. Now isn't that interesting.

forgive me, natasha

2006-04-01T15:44:00.000+01:00

A friend lent me this book, Forgive Me, Natasha - the autobiography of a young Russian man called Sergei Kourdakov, born in 1951 and brought up in children's homes from the age of six. He was athletic and intelligent, highly ambitious, and worked hard for himself. He really believed in communist ideals and made it his goal to excel in the Communist Party, and they singled him out from an early age as "just the kind the state needs." In 1969, when he was in his late teens, he was promoted to head of a police squad consisting of over a dozen other young men, hand picked by himself from among his cronies for their physical prowess, specifically their boxing and martial arts skills. They were initially responsible for jobs like breaking up brawls in pubs, jobs where brutality was encouraged and the people they targeted often ended up beaten to a pulp.

However, it turned out that much more menacing enemies to the state came in the form of Believers - and interestingly, not religious people per se, since religion and the church could be managed well enough, but people who believed in God. "Comrade Lenin said that we can close the churches and put the leaders in jail, but it's very hard to drive faith and belief from the heart of a man once he is contaminated by them. ... This is why we don't call them Christians or church-goers. We call them Believers. They believe inside, and to root this belief from their hearts is a very difficult task."

Sergei and his squad were sent on missions to break up meetings of Believers, groups of ten to fifteen who gathered to pray and sing. They were savagely beaten by these young men, who often got partly drunk before they set off. Their literature was taken away and most of it burnt - Bibles which had been smuggled in, or copied out by hand.

Sergei was struck by the beauty of one girl, Natasha Zhdanova, who they found at a meeting and battered severely. But they kept discovering her at other meetings too, and in fact he beat her himself one time, repeatedly until he was exhausted. The brutality of those big drunk young men didn't stop her gathering to worship - and overall in fact, it was impossible to stem the numbers of people all over the country who were becoming Believers (or refusing to abandon their faith maybe).

The perseverance of Natasha and the other believers (and also it has to be said, their submissiveness under these physical attacks) started to make him think, and one day he took a look at one of the bibles before throwing it in the fire (a handwritten copy, with some verses missing). He tore a couple of pages out of Luke's gospel, around chapter 11, and took them back to his room to read. "I opened up those pieces of paper and began to read them again. Jesus was talking and teaching someone how to pray. I became more curious and read on. This certainly was no anti-state material. It was how to be a better person and how to forgive those who do you wrong. Suddenly the words leaped out of those pages and into my heart. I read on, engrossed in the kind words of Jesus. This was exactly the opposite of what I expected. My lack of understanding which had been like blinkers on my eyes left me then, and the words bit deeply into my being. It was as if someone was in the room with me, teaching me those words and what they said. ... I read them again and again, then sat thinking, my mind lost in the wonder of it all."

It was because the words from the scriptures took hold of him that he gave up the police work (which had been work on the side for them anyway) and concentrated on getting ahead in the Navy instead. This was in late1970, so after doing this work for the police for about eighteen months, and at a rate of one raid every 5-6 days. On his first assignment at sea he was transferred from vessel to vessel, and eventually ended up on a ship off the American coast, where he made up his mind and jumped off the ship somewhere off the coast of Canada. Amazingly he made it to the shore, and set about building a new free life, finding help in spiritual matters from the pastor of a Ukrainian church. However, the book ends with a publisher's note to the effect that in January 1973, shortly after the draft was completed and some 15 months after reaching Canada, Sergei died by being shot - accidentally, according to the inquest at the time, but it's reported in the book with the implication that it was really a revenge attack by the Soviet police.

The biggest part of the book deals with his harsh and violent experiences and activities within the communist system, and the savagery of the treatment which was dealt out to believers comes across clearly. But so does their courage and tenacity and the way they didn't fight back, and the way they even tried to talk to their persecutors about the reality of God, and the fact that they met for prayer around their bibles. And what moved Sergei in the end was not just the witness of the believers, but scripture itself, which came with power even to the heart of a man who was as godless and brutal as this. "I must show people, especially young people, that there is a God, and he can change even the worst life, as he has mine."