Andrew Meredith > Recent Status Updates

"The non-Christian, of course, can accept an absolute only if that absolute is impersonal and therefore makes no demands and has no power to bless or curse. There are personal gods in paganism, but none of them is absolute; there are absolutes in paganism, but none is personal. Only in Christianity (and in other religions influenced by the Bible) is there such a concept as a "personal absolute.""

"Most scholars who write on religion and violence give no definition of religion. Others will acknowledge the now notorious difficulty of providing a definition of religion, but will give some version of the assertion that “everybody knows what we mean when we say ‘religion.’” This is a sign that something is probably wrong. One should react as one would when urged by a realtor to waive an inspection..."

"In this chapter, the heart of what I want to say about how union relates to an individual person’s justification is this: properly speaking, at the present time Jesus the king is the only person who has already been directly judged by God (the Father), found to be in the right (justified), and vindicated. His resurrection from the dead is proof of his innocence—that he truly has been justified."

"There is no transhistorical and transcultural essence of religion, and essentialist attempts to separate religious violence from secular violence are incoherent. In "Western" societies, the attempt to create a transhistorical and transcultural concept of religion that is essentially prone to violence is one of the foundational legitimating myths of the liberal nation-state."

"Secularism, I submit, is above all a negation of worship. I stress: not of God's existence, not of some kind of transcendence and therefore of some kind of religion. If secularism in theological terms is a heresy, it is primarily a heresy about man. It is the negation of man as a worshiping being, as homo adorans: the one for whom worship is the essential act which both "posits" his humanity and fulfills it."

Chapter 6: I disagree with Bates's interpretation of John's vision at the end of Revelation (see Leithart's excellent "On Earth as in Heaven").

Chapter 7: A chapter on man as God's idol. I could have written this chapter myself. It directly centers on one of my personal favorite emphasis.

It sounds like a paradox, but the basic religion that is being preached and accepted as the only means of overcoming secularism is in reality a surrender to secularism. This surrender can take place - and actually does - in all Christian confessions, although it is differently "colored" in a nondenominational suburban "community church" than in a traditional, hierarchical, confessional and liturgical parish.

Two more chapters down! On to Gollum.

It's my son's fourth birthday today!

So I got him the illustrated version of this masterpiece, and we are already two chapters in!

"In this world suffering and disease are indeed "normal," but their very "normalcy" is abnormal. They reveal the ultimate and permanent defeat of man and of life, a defeat which no partial victories of medicine, however wonderful and truly miraculous, can ultimately overcome. But in Christ suffering is not "removed"; it is transformed into victory. The defeat itself becomes victory, an entrance into the Kingdom."

On matrimony and priesthood.

"Baptism proper begins with the blessing of the water. To understand, however, the meaning of water here, one must stop thinking of it as an isolated "matter" of the sacrament. Or rather, one must realize that water is the "matter" of sacrament, because it stands for the whole of matter, which is, in baptism, the sign and presence of the world itself."

Bates has covered what pistis is not, now it's time to be constructive by determining what pistis is.

Right off the bat, "pistis" does not directly equate to "allegiance" as if one can just do a straight word-replacement of one for the other anytime "pistis" appears in the Greek. Although there is great semantic overlap between the meanings, the overall semantic range of "pistis" differs from any English synonym.

"The real tragedy of Christianity is not its "compromise" with the world and progressive "materialism," but on the contrary, its "spiritualization" and transformation into "religion." And religion - as we know already - has thus come to mean a world of pure spirituality, a concentration of attention on matters pertaining to the "soul.""

Nowhere is this more acute than the way we have come to perceive "time."

Does Jesus Himself preach the Gospel? And if so, what is the content of this Gospel that Jesus preached? How does it differ from what is commonly preached today? Bates covers all these questions in chapter 3.

When Christians gather together on the Lord's Day, "The purpose is to fulfill the Church, and that means to make present the One in whom all things are at their end, and all things are at their beginning." We, as the corporate Body of Christ on Earth, make present Christ on Earth by the very act of our intentionally gathering together.

One chapter in, and I can already tell that this is a book I'm going to really enjoy, even as I disagree with some aspects of it. There are times my highlights encompass multiple pages in a row.

Jesus died "for the life of the world," but what is this "life"?

"Liberation from the papacy was not substituted with a captivity to the individual but the freedom to interpret the Scriptures with the church catholic (universal), according to the analogy of faith."

In Calvin’s own words, “When I ponder the intended use of churches, somehow or other it seems to me unworthy of their holiness for them to take on images other than those living and symbolical ones which the Lord has consecrated by his Word.”

We've all seen the tracts, “How to Be 100% Sure of Heaven” detailing a five-to-six step program capped off by reciting the sinner's prayer. Perhaps we've been led or even led someone through "The Roman's Road" or "The Four Spiritual Laws."

But is the gospel primarily about our own salvation? How we can go to heaven when we die? Or is it somehow even bigger, grander, and more whole-cosmos oriented than this?

"If the contest were to be determined by patristic authority, the tide of victory—to put it very modestly—would turn to our side." - John Calvin

"The Greek word "pistis," generally rendered "faith” or “belief,” as it pertains to Christian salvation, quite simply has little correlation with “faith” and “belief” as these words are generally understood and used in contemporary Christian culture... At the center of Christianity, properly understood, is not the human response of faith or belief but rather the old-fashioned term "fidelity.""

Bates's Thesis: "The gospel is not primarily about the necessity of the human response of 'faith alone' in Jesus’s saving work, but rather about how Jesus came to be enthroned as Lord of heaven and earth. 'Allegiance alone' is required for salvation."

"If we are prepared to countenance the prospect that our religiously inclined forebears, the myriad adherents of religious traditions, and the vast bulk of past philosophers, are not our intellectual inferiors, we have good grounds for questioning our present naturalistic commitments."

The Anabaptists were an eclectic group of schismatics; some were unbelievably violent, some were seditious, most were separatist, some heretical, etc.

In short, they were everything Rome accused the Reformers of being. They threatened to legitimize every inculpation, and the Reformers strenuously opposed them for it.

A secular myth: Humanity is inevitably, successively progressing away from it's dark, animalistic origins toward a golden age of universal science, reason, prosperity, and felicity, but to do so, it must collectively learn to throw off the shackles of ignorance especially characterized by superstition (both primitive animism and religion).

"The Reformers would not recognize the modern impulse to keep doctrine at bay until the Scriptures are understood."

Word of the day: corpuscular.

"I testify on my part that I regard Zwingli as un-Christian, with all his teachings for he holds and teaches no part of the Christian faith rightly. He is seven times worse than when he was a papist."—Martin Luther