"Sunday's Coming" Movie Trailer

I watched this trailer, but realized ...i have already seen that movie a hundred times

I think i even made part of it.

"Sunday's Coming" Movie Trailer from North Point Media on Vimeo.

Here is a good discussion about it by Bob Kauflin.


HT Justin Taylor

to be God alone in the eyes of all the world

"The American church is weary with having man and his relationships and feelings and self-concepts at the center of our attention for so long. We are bored with the very un-amazing results of standing in front of the mirrors of psychology and anthropology and sociology. And it is time that, at least in the church, we hold our eye to the telescope of theology. Untold numbers of puny personal problems would be swallowed up if we could learn to stand atop the Mt. Palomar of divine revelation and gaze at the God whose purpose is to be God alone, and before whose unutterable majesty every knee will bow whether in heaven or on the earth or under the earth. ... The first lesson of the prophet Joel for our man-centered 20th century is this: From devouring grasshoppers to vanishing galaxies God has a purpose, and he will achieve it—to be God alone in the eyes of all the world."

John Piper on Joel ch 2

I came across this quote in my studies for my OT prophets class. Had to share it.

Ukraine Elections

"...courage in Kiev, restraint in Moscow, and strategic thinking in Brussels – qualities currently in short supply."

Here is a realistic yet somewhat hopeful article on Ukraine's recent elections from Canada's Globe and Mail.

Help sombody save me! "Dup da da DA!!! ... U.N to the rescue!!!

Consider this list of propositions about climate change by Kevin Williamson of National Review; they are arranged in “ascending order of unlikeliness”:

1. The planet is getting warmer.

2. The planet is getting warmer, and human activity is the reason.

3. The planet is getting warmer, human activity is a main factor, and the consequences will be catastrophic.

4. The planet is getting warmer, human activity is a main factor, the consequences will be catastrophic, and some U.N.-style climate policeman is going to be able to manage a mitigating response.

5. The planet is getting warmer, human activity is a main factor, the consequences will be catastrophic, and some U.N.-style climate policeman is going to be able to manage a mitigating response — in an economically efficient manner.

6. The planet is getting warmer, human activity is a main factor, the consequences will be catastrophic, and some U.N.-style climate policeman is going to be able to manage a mitigating response — in an economically efficient manner that also is consistent with our political liberties and national sovereignties.

consider this: "The international community has very little credibility in dealing with real and present danger — such as Pyongyang’s nuclear arsenal and Tehran’s ambition to possess one — and so it seems unlikely that they will be effective in dealing with a less concrete, less immediate, more complex set of challenges, particularly one in which the various members of the international community have different and often conflicting economic incentives."

Read his whole article for the evaluation of each proposition.

RC Sproul on future challenges in Theology

Check out this thought provoking video. Obviously these challenges are always present and every generations needs to pay attention. I wish he could have gotten more into the specific challenges.

It would have been a great to hear a whole conversation on this.

Another provoking thought for me is ...what's it really like to have Driscoll and Sproul in the same room together?

Agitprop, Thoughtcrime, Re-education and a few other proposals for public education in Minnesota

A post at the National Association of Scholars web site pointed me to an article about a new report/proposal from the Teacher Education Redesign Initiative at the University of Minnesota.

The report advocates making race, class and gender politics the "overarching framework" for all teaching courses at the U. It calls for evaluating future teachers in both coursework and practice teaching based on their willingness to fall into ideological lockstep.

The first step toward "cultural competence," says the task group, is for future teachers to recognize -- and confess -- their own bigotry. Anyone familiar with the reeducation camps of China's Cultural Revolution will recognize the modus operandi.

The task group recommends, for example, that prospective teachers be required to prepare an "autoethnography" report. They must describe their own prejudices and stereotypes, question their "cultural" motives for wishing to become teachers, and take a "cultural intelligence" assessment designed to ferret out their latent racism, classism and other "isms." They "earn points" for "demonstrating the ability to be self-critical."

The task group opens its report with a model for officially approved confessional statements: "As an Anglo teacher, I struggle to quiet voices from my own farm family, echoing as always from some unstated standard. ... How can we untangle our own deeply entrenched assumptions?"

The goal of these exercises, in the task group's words, is to ensure that "future teachers will be able to discuss their own histories and current thinking drawing on notions of white privilege, hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity, and internalized oppression."

I encourage you to read the whole article and see the postmodern-leftist-GLBT thought police at work. The goal is to ensure that all licensed educators are indoctrinated in their "Newspeak" and will be "ideologically and politically reliable" when they walk into a class room to "educate" our children.

That's our tax dollars at work in our higher education system to train the teachers of our education system...

They seem to understand public education's power. Do we?

Sesame Street and Settlers of Catan

I am working on a couple of ideas for a reading/research project for school and one of the areas I am thinking a lot about is the current challenges in Ecclesiology.

In the past day or so four or five great articles on this subject have appeared on my blog reader, and yesterday was a great Systematic Theology class that touched on some related issues.

I am too busy with papers and tests to develop this or blog on it right now, but just wanted to pass on some great articles on the church.

What the Church can learn from Sesame Street

Settlers of Catan and Church membership

Two views on Christless Christianity

2 articles, 1.5 questions

I'm going to ask you to do something odd,

I want you to read two short two posts in the order that they appeared to me as I was scrolling down my google reader today, and see if the same thing happens to you.

These posts are short, like 90 seconds or so, and painless... though it might involve thought.

But if 90 seconds, or thinking seems a burden, then just click to the next click or tweet or whatever is next in your life, there is nothing to see here, good bye have a nice day.

But if you want to think about something with me, then read this post. It references another article which you can read later, but for now just the summary, then i'll see ya back here. back here.

Ok, Click and GO!

.... are you back? (... hey! party poopers who didn't read the first link ... no one is making you do this. you are free to leave, really, It's OK, you have already answered my final question.)

....Still with me? OK,, here is the second one. ...just read the lead in from Tullian and look at the list and consider some of the titles and authors, an come on back. I really am not trying to be tedious, i am just wondering if the same thought/question appears to anyone else when they read this second one.

....OK, you're back. ....Here is the .5 question: Did you see a connection?

Here's the question that burst on my mind as I read the second post, with the first one still on my mind:

How is the hyper-socialized, "what are you doing right now?", 140 character, txt communication culture mentioned in the first post even going to engage the significant thought life of the Christian mind and history represented in that list of books? or become wise in the way Tim Keller suggested?

Call me a pessimist, a Luddite, or just dismiss me as a retrogrouch, but heres my answer: they aren't.

A brain trained to 140 charachters with an attention span to match is simply not going to read the significant thought life world represented in that list...and it sure as heck will never write anything approaching that kind of significant thought life.

What are the implications for the Church? ....OK, no fair! that's a third question.

well, I'm gonna risk that third question, and a thought:

There are two responses for Church and Christians to take: keep drifting down stream till your mind, your Gospel and your church are small enough to fit in the same 140, culturally conforming, and similarly irrelevant charecters. Or....?

Are you a Modern Pagan?

Don't answer that one too quickly.

Scrolling through my reader this morning I was excited to see Justing Taylor's recommendation of one of my favorite books: Peter Kreeft’s Christianity for Modern Pagans, Pascal’s Pensees Edited, Outlined, and Explained.

It has been a while since I have read Kreeft / Pascal (I had to leave my latest copy to friends in Hungary... I hope some one actually reads it.) But Pensees was a book that grabbed my thoughts in my 20s and really provoked my Christian thought life. Finding Kreeft's work some years later really helped me understand the Pensees better.

So, I thought I would pass his along Taylor's post which you can read here, and add my own ...not that my recommendation and Taylor's carry the same weight. I'll just say I have really benefited from the book, and add that, ... even if you are not a Modern Pagan ...or at least don't think or realize that you are yet, read Pascal with Kreeft's help, and prepare to be provoked in your Christian life and thinking.

For all the Saints who from their labors rest

Two excerpts from the blog of the editors of Touchstone on this Reformation Day.

Reformation Day for a Mere Christian

by Russell D. Moore

What I do know is that, whatever your view of the Reformation, it's obvious to see that some of the things that drove Luther to anger (and to despair) are everywhere present, to this day, often even in the most "Reformation-centric" evangelical churches.

Hardened rebels against God rest easy in a prayer said at Vacation Bible School, or a card signed at confirmation class. And guilty consciences stand paralyzed outside, fearful that Christ can only save those who look or dress or speak a certain way. And, through it all, American Christianity has become a vast conspiracy to sell one another products.

The combination of the damning power of cheap grace with the accusing agony of performance-based righteousness before God exists in every wing of the church. That's because it's not a medieval problem, but a primeval one.

Reformation Day Reflections on Calvin and Calvinism

by Jordan Ballor

Earlier this month Dr. Richard A. Muller, the P.J. Zondervan Professor of Historical Theology at Calvin Theological Seminary, gave a lecture in which he asked and answered the question, "Was Calvin a Calvinist?" In this far-reaching and comprehensive address, Muller succinctly summarized his decades of work demolishing the myths and historical fallacies of a great deal of secondary research.

A basic way in which the relationship of Calvin to the broader Reformed tradition has been misconstrued, including his relationship to predecessors, contemporaries, and followers, is in the idea that Calvin's work, or a particular aspect of his work, serves as an index for judging the rest of so-called Calvinism. Calvin’s theology (or a part thereof) becomes the sole standard of arbitration, the gold standard of determining the level of some contemporaneous or following figure’s adherence to Calvinist orthodoxy.

As Muller contends, such elevation of Calvin’s work mistakenly “assumes that later Reformed theologians either intended to be or should have been precise followers of Calvin rather than also followers of Zwingli, Bucer, Oecolampadius, Bullinger, and others, and not merely followers of Calvin in general or Calvin of the tracts, treatises, commentaries, and sermons, nor the Calvin of the 1539, 1543, or 1550 Institutes, but the Calvin of the 1559 Institutes.”

A related error is that figures like Bucer, Bullinger, Vermigli, or Wolfgang Musculus, all of whom were older contemporaries of Calvin and who disagreed with him sharply on such important issues as the relationship of the civil and ecclesiastical magistrates, the use of excommunication, and the doctrine of the Lord's Supper, either did or ought to have judged themselves in relation to the work of their junior colleague in Geneva, who was younger by some decade or more than many of these other eminent figures.

So, Semper Reformanda I guess.