Heaven as an improvement of life: "earthly-mindedness projected into the future"

"In all the treasures and promises of religion the one valuable thing is this spiritual core. In the Word that God speaks we can taste all his goodness and grace. Hope itself is spiritualized, remaining no longer the hope of imagination but grasping in God the ideal root from which the whole future must spring and blossom in due time. The heavenly world does not appear desirable as simply a second improved edition of this life; that would be nothing else than earthly-mindedness projected into the future. The very opposite takes place: heaven spiritualizes in advance our present walk with God. Each time faith soars and alights behind the veil it brings back on its wings some of the subtle fragrance that there prevails.

…If there is danger of Christianity being temporalized, there is no less danger of its being materialized. How easily do we fall into the habit of handling the things of our holy faith after an external, quantitative, statistical fashion, so that they turn flesh under our touch and emit a savour of earth? If at any time or in any form this fault should threaten to befall us, let us revisit the tents of the patriarchs and rehearse the lesson that in religion the body without the soul is worthless and without power." – Geerhardus Vos, Grace and Glory, p. 121

"I know a picture of Jesus when I see one"

Man Says He Sees Jesus In Tire

Jim Morrison has been spotted again, and again, Jim Morrison has been mistaken for "Jesus". Brent Wisniowski, a CART racer from the Cleveland area says he can see Jesus in his racing tire. Wisniowski says he knows a picture of Jesus when he sees one. This would be news to historians who tell us that there are no known pictures of Jesus and therefore it is impossible to tell what he looked like.

But when there's a buck to be made, the emperor's clothes are anything one wants them to be. Wisniowski's friend, Shawn Kally, "saw the image as well.
'It took me a couple of seconds, but then you know I looked at it and said, ‘Holy cow, you're right ,you know, that does resemble the face of Jesus.' " Of course, Kally sees money in that there tire... it was Kally who put the tire on e-Bay, not Wisniowski.

NewsChannel5's Adam Shapiro is quite skeptical, asking the racer: "Why do you think when these kinds of things happen people always see Jesus -- they never see Buddha or Moses?" Good question, a question for which Wisniowski had no answer, except: "It looked like Jesus to me."

It's looks like Jim Morrison to me. Even Mr. Peanut is a likely candidate.

Bishop on politician: "he's sure no theologian"

Senator: God judging U.S. with disastrous hurricanes

An Alabama state senator finally stepped to the plate to utter the foolishness many suspected might be stated publicly after Katrina and Rita. Evangelicals have been quite consistent in flagging disasters as "God's judgment". In the immediate wake of 9-11, prominent evangelicals such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson suggested the terrorist attacks were God's judgment (they later apologized). It took a little longer than a few days for someone to use the j-word on Katrina (and that would not be "Jesus"), but it finally happened.

Alabama state senator Hank Erwin said in an editorial that he wasn't surprised at the devastation he witnessed in touring Biloxi and Gulfport. Erwin wrote: "New Orleans and the Mississippi gulf coast have always been known for gambling, sin, and wickedness. It is the kind of behavior that ultimately brings the judgment of God. Warnings year after year by Godly evangelists and preachers went unheeded so why were we surprised when finally the hand of judgment fell? Sadly, innocents suffered along with the guilty. Sin always brings suffering to good people as well as the bad. I am grateful that God was merciful even in his administration of judgment. Many more lives could have been lost in the wrath."

William Willimon, bishop of the North Alabama Conference of the United Methodist Church, was right when he told the Birmingham News, "I have no idea what sort of senator or politician Mr. Erwin is, but he's sure no theologian." Willimon went on to say that he expects "there is as much sin, of possibly a different order, in Montevallo as on the Gulf Coast. If God punished all of us for our sin, who could stand?"

Which was precisely Christ's point in Luke 13:4,5 in His own divine commentary on the tower calamity in Siloam: "Do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? 5 No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.”

John Piper notes: "Every deadly calamity is a merciful call from God for the living to repent. That was Jesus’ stunning statement to those who brought him news of calamity. The tower of Siloam had fallen, and 18 people were crushed. What about this, Jesus? they asked. He answered, “Do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish” (Luke 13:4-5). The point of every deadly calamity is this: Repent. Let our hearts be broken that God means so little to us. Grieve that he is a whipping boy to be blamed for pain, but not praised for pleasure. Lament that he makes headlines only when man mocks his power, but no headlines for ten thousand days of wrath withheld. Let us rend our hearts that we love life more than we love Jesus Christ. Let us cast ourselves on the mercy of our Maker. He offers it through the death and resurrection of his Son."

"Fixing" the news

Evangelicals have a 24-hour presence

Knight Ridder's Paul Nussbaum has written an interesting piece on religious media programming.

Among the highlights, Pat Robertson's quote about how he sees his own news operation: "We don't just report problems on our news. We try to fix them."

Nussbaum then adds this appropriate piece of information: (Robertson recently sparked controversy by calling for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez; Robertson apologized the next day.) "Fixing the problems" apparently includes assassinating heads of state.

Focus on the Family continues to believe that "a desire for wholesomeness is returning." Yet, Eminem still tops the charts and Grand Theft Auto continues its dominance of the X-box. Of course, the false presumption is that "wholesomeness" was at one time the preference for Americans. If we were to align our opinion of our culture with scripture, we would understand that Ward and June Cleaver were merely external window dressing for hearts that are only evil continually.

And Bill Leonard, dean of the Wake Forest Divinity School and a professor of church history has this damning observation: "Evangelical TV mirrors the larger culture." And we thought Christian media was supposed to "transcend culture". Leonard notes: "(Evangelical TV) takes the same elements and Christianizes them. You have Christian soap operas, dramas, talk shows, music - even Christian heavy metal." (Leonard is being quite generous in one respect. Christians not only copy the culture, they do it quite miserably. Christian TV is bad TV... not much has changed since the bar was set for Christian media in the "Thief in the Night" series. Those movies had "quality" stamped all over them.) All of which further exemplifies Os Guiness' observation: the church is irrelevant in our culture.

Nussbaum also quotes Quentin Schultze, who, IMHO, is always a good read.

Lints on Vos: "Scripture sets its own agenda"

Richard Lints, in an article for the Westminster Theological Journal, writes:

"(Vos understood that) *the text* must be allowed to define its own framework. The framework for understanding the organic unity of the revelation as a whole is to be discovered on the pages of *the text* itself. The philosophy of history *present in the Scriptures* and the organizing principles of that philosophy of history are discovered *in the text* itself. “The Bible is, as it were, conscious of its own organism; it feels, what we cannot always say of ourselves, its own anatomy.”

"The historical progressiveness of the revelation process manifests itself most clearly in the different epochs found *on the pages of Scripture*. These epochs are not creative impositions on the text but rather are located “in strict agreement with the lines of cleavage *drawn by revelation itself*.”…these doctrinal themes must “not be imported into the minds of the original recipients of revelation.” Vos’ concern with biblical theology is to *permit Scripture to set its own agenda.* Theology, in its content and form, ought to be *what the Scripture irresistibly demands.*

"For Vos, the epochal character of the Scriptures was *absolutely essential to the exegesis of the biblical text*. The *meaning of the text* was wrapped up with both its actual historical context and also its place in the epochal unfolding of redemptive history. *The part has meaning within the whole and the whole gains its meaning from the parts*…The “horizons” in Vos’ project are *an individual text and the entirety of the text*. The biblical theologian must allow *the two* (individual text and entirety of the text, crb) to dialogue continually with one another, helping to explain and clarify the meaning of each other.

"The impact upon Vos’ actual *practice of exegesis* is enormous. *Texts do not stand in isolation*, only later to find their correlation and concatenation in the theological vision of the church. Rather the texts stand in a teleological relation to one another because they have one divine author who has brought the facts of history into teleological relation to one another." (The highlights are mine). – Richard Lints, “Two Theologies or One? Warfield and Vos on the Nature of Theology”, WTJ, Fall - 1992

Vos understood BT to be exegesis. It’s why his own placement of biblical theology as he understood his task as the chair of a new department at Princeton was that it belonged within the exegetical discipline or branch of theology.

Scripture interpreting scripture isn’t merely the collection of scriptures thoughts about any particular subject. Vos went further than that. Vos insisted that the exegetical process *itself* took the whole of the canon into account (because of the progressive, organic nature of revelation itself).