Riverwood Presbyterian Church

Politics

Reactions to Saddam’s End

by Clay Staggs

Saddam has met his end at the gallows.

From where I sit, this can only be construed as good news. And I think that most folks would agree. But yet, there is a not insubtsantial segment, even of the non-arab/non-Muslim world, that is bemoaning this development.

First, and not surprisingly, is the fringe radical left. Somehow, they all see this as George W. Bush’s FAULT. You can find a good roundup of posts from the far left of the blogosphere here. A sample:

[P]lease tell me what [obscenity omitted] moral standing does the US (or any other country for that matter) have to go into another country and do what we just did to Saddam? The fact that it is the US - that “shining beacon of freedom” is even worse. What does that say? What message does that send? And who made us World Police anyway? This is a mockery of justice.

So, maybe that’s to be expected from the Daily Kos types. But then, the Vatican apparently has a not totally dissimilar position:

The execution is “tragic and reason for sadness,” the Rev. Federico Lombardi said, speaking in French on Vatican Radio’s French-language news program. In separate comments to the station’s English program, Lombardi said that capital punishment cannot be justified “even when the person put to death is one guilty of grave crimes,” and he reiterated the Catholic Church’s overall opposition to the death penalty.

Saddam terrorized his neighbors and his own people for decades, torturing his enemies (real and perceived) in the most horrific ways imaginable. He started at least two major wars. He was utterly unrepentant for any of it, even to the last. As long as he drew breath, Iraqis had sound reason to fear the possibility of his return to power.

I can’t see this as anything other than a merciful relief to folks who have suffered under this monster.

Website

Free Books

by Clay Staggs

This is pretty cool. Go to manybooks.net. There you will find a nice selection of books absolutely free to download to your computer, your PDA, or even to your iPod in Notes format.

I love the internet.

Politics

Clean-up On Aisle 9: The Working Poor

by Tim Lien

In 1969 America’s largest employer happened to be General Motors: Then CEO, James M. Roche made $4.2 million per annum. His average employee (adjusted to account for inflation) brought home $45,000.
Welcome to 2006.
Wal-Mart is now the nation’s largest employer. CEO H. Lee Scott takes home $23 million. (Which does not bother me.) The average Wal-Mart employees pulls down $18,000 a year. (Which bothers me)

Question: Why is this the case?

[from: Economist Paul Krugman’s book “The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century”]

Christmas

Is your gift from Christ still in the box?

by Jimmy Hopper

The Christmas thoughts below are from Elder Steve Nippert. Good words for us.

As we approach Christmas, the purchase of gifts is upon us. When Christ left this earth to be with the Father, He left us a gift.

Have you unwrapped your gift from Christ and are you using it? What gift you say? The Holy Spirit. Who is the Holy Spirit anyway? Jesus called the Holy Spirit the Paraclete, parakletos in Greek. What does Paraclete mean? Comforter, Counselor, Helper, Advocate, Strengthener, Supporter.

J.I. Packer says that becoming more like Christ demands a relationship with the Holy Spirit; we cannot become more sanctified without it.

How can the Spirit help me day-to-day? The Spirit provides the power we need each day to overcome the temptation of sin. The Spirit gives us comfort and reassurance in times of trial and need. The Spirit provides understanding of God’s Word. The Spirit enables us to share Jesus with others.

The Holy Spirit turned cowards and doubters in the book of Acts into lions for the faith. Who were these cowards and doubters? Christ’s Disciples. One day confused, afraid, and immature….the next day passionate and fearless believers who knew their destiny.

God gives the Spirit to each person that becomes a believer. Why don’t all of us experience the same presence of the Spirit in our lives….like that of the Apostles? Each of us must develop our own relationship with the Spirit. We must set down our pride and ask for help! We must walk humbly before our Lord. We ARE NOT the little engine the could. Without the Spirit we fail over and over. We fail because we do not seek the Spirit’s help in all we do. We fail because we rely on our own self-sufficiency. We fail because we just haven’t realized the essence of Christ gift. Is the Spirit active in your life? You want joy and peace? Get connected with the Spirit!

Christian Chaff

Jesus and Santa

by Clay Staggs

I ran across these “Christian” spoofs of the I’m a Mac / I’m a PC ads.

Go see it for yourself… and weep at the sorry state of Christendom.

They’re here.

Words fail me.

Movies

Guest Movie Review

by Clay Staggs

I think that many of the readers of this Blog will know the guest reviewer here, George Kelley. George emailed me a review of the new Mel Gibson film Apocalypto. I reproduce here his exact review, with his permission.

I saw Apocalypto tonight and I was blown away. From a technical sense, it is stunning; an outstanding feat in filmmaking, with realistic portrayals, costumes and sets. You actually felt like you were watching life in a Mayan village. It is beautifully filmed, but it is also gory, shocking, and violent; with rapes, murders, human sacrifice and war all portrayed in the most brutal fashion. It isn’t for everyone, but it is for me. I always resented sanitized violence imposed on society by the squeamish and prudish amongst us. I think it is more dangerous for society to show a Gunsmoke type villain clutching a bloodless chest while falling than a realistic depiction would be; as the family friendly version minimizes the physical and emotional consequences of said acts, while the brutality of realistic violence gives an unfiltered view of the real world and it is more likely to repulse and dissuade. But others have a right to disagree, and to them I say, avoid this movie.

Just as Gibson’s Passion of the Christ was an overtly Catholic movie with its emphasis on Christ’s suffering and the relationship with Mary, this is a protestant movie. Specifically, this movie seems to have been written by Calvin and Hobbes, and I don’t mean the stuffed tiger and his buddy. The movie reeks of John Calvin and Thomas Hobbes.

Addressing the former, the Calvinistic themes, the characters (and specifically the protagonist of the story) seem to be guided by some sort of destiny (if ones viewpoint is secular), or a sovereign God (if one’s viewpoint is Christian). God is not mentioned per se, but much like the Lord of the Rings (another God filled movie with no mention of God), one can very much feel the sovereignty of God in all of the plot twists. Did the book of Esther not establish this same device, with all overt references to the God of the Jews left out explicitly but at the same time indelibly woven throughout the story? Same device here.

The Hobbesian references are more observable. Hobbes’ descriptions of every man at war against man, with life being nasty, brutish and short are frequent and not subtle. Power is the device used for one culture of savages (to us the viewer) to conquer another. You see it happening and yet you know from history that the victory is short lived with the Europeans on the way, who possess greater power with which to force change upon the existing civilization.

So what Christian messages did I take away?

1. The depravity of man. This film did not in any way shape or form embrace Rousseau’s notion of the “noble savage”, where man was free and good until the corrupting effects of civilization took hold. This primitive world is harsh, murderous and just as exploitative as Wal-Mart ever thought about being. One can reasonably take away from this movie that there are no innocents, only fallen creatures that are incapable of making themselves better.

2. The theme of vanities of vanities, all is vanity. Here we have one society of savages, overrun by a slightly more advanced society of savages. The progressive bunch has superior weapons and culture, when they transport their newly acquired slaves back home, we see the high and mighty men, women and children of the advanced society bidding on slaves and celebrating pagan rituals on technologically advanced pyramids. I use the word “savages”, as that is what it appears to my biased eye, yet reality forces me to acknowledge that my world of flat screen TVs, laptops and playstations might seem frivolous and primitive to the next generation a hundred years forward. And how must it all appear to a God that created the universe and is by definition infinite and lists quite the impressive resume in Job 38? While we build our temples, towers and toys, we lose sight of the fact that they will crumble. We, just as the “savages” of this movie do, love to command all to “Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” but as the poet Percy Shelley reminds us, our proclamation ultimately will stand and mock our perceived greatness with the ruins of our own monuments.

Which leads me to the last point…

3. “Put not your faith in princes and in sons of men, for there is no salvation”. This movie is about change, and the major example of such is the change from one dominant civilization to another. One group of Mayans conquers another group, yet they all fall to the Spanish. History tells us that the Spanish lose dominance to the British, who lose their influence to the United States. Do we really think that the government of the United States is eternal, especially when the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks and Romans weren’t? The only constant in life, as in this movie, is the One who watches the sparrow when it falls, and allows the mighty to rise and fall under his eye.

Go see this movie, look past the gore and see its beauty and recognize its truth.

Politics

The Gospel According to Jimmy Carter

by Clay Staggs

Full Disclosure: I do not like Jimmy Carter. Those who think Jimmy Carter is such a great humanitarian as to be beyond criticism may want to skip this post.

I ran across a devastating review of Carter’s new book, entitled Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid, in the Washington Post. In fairness, I have not read this book, but based on what’s being said about it, it doesn’t seem that I’m missing much.

A couple of quotations pulled from the book and cited by the WaPo reviewer were absolute jaw-droppers. Check this one out:

On his first visit to the Jewish state in the early 1970s, Carter, who was then still the governor of Georgia, met with Prime Minister Golda Meir, who asked Carter to share his observations about his visit. Such a mistake she never made. “With some hesitation,” Carter writes, “I said that I had long taught lessons from the Hebrew Scriptures and that a common historical pattern was that Israel was punished whenever the leaders turned away from devout worship of God. I asked if she was concerned about the secular nature of her Labor government.”

Where, oh, where, to start with this? Should it be Carter, a Southern Baptist, lecturing an Israeli on the finer points of the Hebrew scriptures? Or, maybe the Democrat (the US’s more secular party) criticizing Meir’s Labor Party for its secularism? Or, perhaps worst of all, the Christian faulting the Jew for not sufficiently keeping the Law?

Unbelievable. Judging just from what’s cited in the review (and I can only imagine the corkers that the reviewer didn’t have space for), one has to wonder if the man isn’t addled. Case in point:

On his fateful first visit to Israel, Carter takes a tour of the Galilee and writes, “It was especially interesting to visit with some of the few surviving Samaritans, who complained to us that their holy sites and culture were not being respected by Israeli authorities — the same complaint heard by Jesus and his disciples almost two thousand years earlier.”

I suppose that the small historical footnote of the Roman Empire simply slipped the former president’s mind? Really, can these be the reflections of someone playing with a full deck, or, are they the crass attempts of an aging politican to manipulate history to serve his own egotistical ends? Lest you think that I, as an admitted Republican partisan, am just taking cheap shots, I’d point out that (1) former Clinton Adminstration envoy Dennis Ross has charged Carter’s book with plagiarism of maps, (2) liberal Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz calls the title of the book “indecent”, and (3) former Emory Univ. Carter Center Middle East Fellow Kenneth Stein resigned that fellowship, writing in his resignation letter that, “President Carter’s book on the Middle East, a title too inflammatory to even print, is not based on unvarnished analyses; it is replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions, and simply invented segments.” This is not a vast right-wing conspiracy.

Perhaps Carter, in years gone by, did some genuinely good deeds. However, this book is over the top on many, many levels and should be criticized and repudiated on political and theological grounds.

UPDATE: It just gets worse. Now Carter has met with a group of Rabbis, who were understandably angry about his book, and, according to the AP, prayed with them and “invited them to help him teach Sunday school.”

Oy.

General Theology

A Riff on Alcatraz

by Jimmy Hopper

Last week Riverwood published a poem in the Reflections page of the bulletin that has fascinated and even haunted me. The poet is Sharon Olds and it can be found in her book, The Gold Cell. It’s title is Alcatraz and is printed below.

Alcatraz

When I was a girl, I knew I was a man

because they might send me to Alcatraz

and only men went to Alcatraz.

Every time we drove to the city I’d

see it there, white as a white

shark in the shark-rich Bay, the bars like

milk-white ribs. I knew I had pushed my

parents too far, my inner badness had

spread like ink and taken me over, I could

not control my terrible thoughts,

terrible looks, and they had often said

that they would send me there-maybe the very next

time I spilled my milk, Ala

Cazam, the iron doors would slam, I’d be

there where I belonged, a girl-faced man in the

prison no one had escaped from. I did not

fear the other prisoners,

I knew who they were, men like me who had

spilled their milk one time too many,

not been able to curb their thoughts—

what I feared was the horror of the circles: circle of

sky around the earth, circle of

land around the Bay, circle of

water around the island, circle of

sharks around the shore, circle of

outer walls, inner walls,

iron girders, steel bars,

circle of my cell around me, and there at the

center, the glass of milk AND the guard’s

eyes upon me as I reached out for it.

My first exposure to this was on my car radio and Garrison Keillor reading it on his Writer’s Almanac program. I rushed to the computer and found it; reading and then hearing it again. I was amazed at the imagery and form, particularly from a poet whose name I did not know; and, if she is secular rather than Christian, the poem really is an amazing document in that it describes a totally Calvinistic view. However, on second thought, the Calvinistic/Christian view is the true view of the human condition, and is certainly accessible to poets.

In the poem, we see a young girl living in San Francisco whose parents tell her that when she does something wrong, does enough wrong, she will be sent to Alcatraz. She is sensitive (a poet to be) and when her parents drive to the city she can see the prison on its island in the bay. She sees herself as a (girl-faced) man, because she knows that she is guilty and only men are punished the way she has been told that she will be punished. The description of her “sins” is so accurate; “inner blackness had spread like ink and taken me over,” “terrible thoughts and terrible looks I could not control.” Then we have the brilliance of the small thing, spilling her milk, and we get the impression that her parents made a very large affair of every sin and shortcoming.

So she goes, in her mind, to Alcatraz. The magic words that send her, “Ala Cazam,” is split between two lines; the magic in the “Ala” and the slam of the iron door almost echoes in the “Cazam.” Here she is with her kind; with the sinners, those who do wrong and there is no fear of them. Her fear is inward, described as a series of ever decreasing circles, until it ends in the circle of the milk glass, and she is watched to see if she spills it. One of the images is the circle of sharks, and the prison itself is white in contrast to the inky badness in her; “a white shark in the shark rich bay.”

This is a very Biblical picture. The “badness” is inside; it is also outside in the tiniest of sins, even in spilling your milk. There is no hope for perfection, no chance to measure up to your “parents” standard. The poem doesn’t address the answer, and rightly so; it is not a religious tract and would lose the power of its picture, but we, trapped in our circles, inside ourselves; knowing of our sin as she knows of her sin, have the Gospel and have redemption. We are the ones who will escape from the place “no one has ever escaped from.” We will never be trapped in the circle of sharks and the circle of ourselves and our guilt, but have been freed.

Books

The Book Group

by Jimmy Hopper

Two or three posts down, I posted about an article reviewing “Christian” diet books, and I compared that concept with one in a book we had been reading and discussing in the Riverwood Book Group. This is not to re-hash that post but simply to note how the book and our book group conversation enlightened my thoughts on the subject. The connection noted in the blog post would probably not have been made without it.

I guess that’s what reading is about; to open your mind to possibilities and to the thinking of others about ideas and events. The Book Group does that in a rich, wonderful way. The group reads a book together and because, I believe, of a certain accountability inherent in the concept, gets deep into it. We then discuss it, always looking at it from each one’s own unique perspective but also from the well known “Christian world view”, since we are Christians. The books are not all “Christian” books; we’ve looked at secular fiction, social commentary, and other caterogories, but all are looked at from the perspectives described above. The results have really been great.

The Book Group was founded by Blake Johnson, who is currently doing his own “rigorous thinking” in the wilds of Kentucky, but will join us again at some point. We meet each Tuesday at 7 PM at Books A Million for fellowship, coffee (or whatever) and conversation. We have both men and women and everyone is welcome, so, if you are even the least bit intrigued, and certainly if you love books, come by and try us out. If you have friends who are non members of Riverwood but who would still be interested, bring them along. I think you will enjoy it, and I know you will be stimulated by it.

Education

The edges of truth

by Peggy Drinkard

My eighth grade son and I have the privilege of participating in a trial run of Patria Institute’s first upper level mathematics course. It is taught by James Nickel, author of MATHEMATICS, IS GOD SILENT? (a book I recommend to anyone, but especially those involved in any aspect of education.) Yesterday’s lecture was on the Pythagorean theorum. As background, Mr. Nickel gave some historical information about Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans (his discipuli). In essense, Pythagoras recognized that the cosmos is full of mathematical “harmonies” (patterns, schemes) but did not acknowledge the One behind the harmonies. There were, at that time, many synagogues in Greece where the Living God was proclaimed, but Pythagoras did not accept this knowledge. The creed of Pythagoras became, “Numbers rule the universe,” and a somewhat mystical brotherhood was created around this creed. Dr. Nickel explained that a tool , numbers, God gave to us for understanding and describing his works, was turned by Pythagoras and his followers into something divine in its own right, and that man does this with many things. For the Greek philosophers, it was reason….for modern man, perhaps science or money or fame or etc. This information was followed by the demonstration of two proofs of the Pythagorean theorum…2 out of over 370 such proofs. (Here Mr. Nickel explained how the many approaches to demonstrating one truth reflected another pattern built into the universe; that of unity and diversity, reflecting the Trinitarian nature of God.) All of this was fascinating study, but I especially appreciated a quote he gave of Bernard Ramm. ” If we do not fear God, we shall forever be at the edge of truth, and to crown our folly, we shall view the edge of truth as the center.” Viewing the edges as the center is a concept I’ve been meditating on since. It relates well to the contents of a Tim Keller sermon as related to me recently, titled “The Girl Nobody Wanted.” The text was the marriage of Jacob to, supposedly, Rachel, but in fact, Leah. In essence the theme was that anything we put as the focus of our lives….that one thing that we think will fulfill all our needs, and look to it as opposed to our Maker for this fulfillment, will always let us down. Jacob had such a driving focus on Rachel, but he awoke to Leah. If I remember correctly, Mr. Keller’s analogy was that when we create these idols, we are always going to “wake up to Leah”. Our idols not only let us down, but create for us many woes and sad consequences we can’t foresee. I’m sure we all know something of this from our own life experiences, (i.e. that plasma TV is going to be outdated by the time we can afford it, ha!) but it was good to hear it all put so succinctly.

Culture Wars

Diets and Faith, or “What Would Jesus Eat?” and Other Things

by Jimmy Hopper

Years ago now, in my early days of being a Christian, I stood before a groaning buffet table with my pastor, Dr. Robert Ostenson, in his home at Christmas. As we stared at what seemed to be acres of delicious food, I remarked jokingly, “Dr. O, I don’t think I’ve ever heard you preach on gluttony.” He replied with a twinkle in his eye, “And you never will.” That incident crossed my mind a few days ago as I read an article in the Tuscaloosa News about “Books that rely on faith to sustain dieters.” The reviewer, a woman from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, looked at five books, all the while noting that it was only a sampling of many, that connected a successful diet with religion, or, as the reviewer put it; “when the Ben and Jerry’s in the freezer is calling your name, you gotta have faith. Or a dash of old-time religion.”

The books range from an irrevant Our Lady of Weight Loss to the spectacularly sober Living in Divine Health (by the author of the best selling What Would Jesus Eat, and with a foreword by Benny Hinn.) All of this is relatively harmless, although apparently, given the number of entities hinted at in this field, extraordinarily profitable but this time it brought me up short. In the Riverwood Book Group, we have been reading and discussing Marilynne Robinson’s wonderful book of essays, The Death of Adam. In her essay, “Puritans and Prigs,” she discusses the negative (and false) connatations attached to the word, “Puritan” in our culture. She says that priggishness has replaced puritanism, and that it is “useful in the absence of true morality.” She defines this trait further as being “highly predictable because it is nothing else than a consuming loyalty to ideals and beliefs that are so widely shared that the spectacle of zealous adherance to them is reassuring.” As an example, Ms. Robinson speaks of modern dietary “laws,” i.e. what foods are considered healthy by the “in” group. She speaks of this tendency to zealotry as “archdefenders of the obvious” and “simple snobbery.” In short, the new zealot is a prig rather than a puritan, and these types of things have become the new secular “religion” and have replaced the more rigorous puritanism that is so out of favor that the word itself brings up certain unacceptable connatations.

This obviously came to my mind as I read the newspaper article. The extreme religious group that partakes of Tim’s “Christian Chaff” and can’t eat in moderation and excercise apparently need to adopt a Christian zealotry to their attempts instead of simply doing what they know they need to do to lose weight. This strikes me as being on something of the same level as praying for a football victory against the “enemy,” another high school team, as depicted at a Birmingham high school recently on MTV. I’m sure God’s love for you is not dependent on your weight and that “Divine Health” is almost certainly spiritual and is centered only in Christ and the Gospel. Thus, if Ms. Robinson is correct, this entire business has only to do with self satisfaction and snobbery. It is often amazing how well the church has adapted to the mores of the world. Perhaps next we will see a tome on “Spiritual Shopping.” Wearing out of style clothes certainly lends itself to snobbery and prigishness.

General Theology

Be Fruitful And Multiply, But Only If It Won’t Mean Taking More Than Your Share Of The Earth’s Resources

by Clay Staggs

I ran across this article by Mark Steyn, who I believe is one of the best opinion writers in the business. What I found fascinating about it was the quote from the newly installed presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church USA, Katharine Jefferts Schori. The original is on the NYT’s paid site, but here’s Steyn’s write-up, including the bishop’s quote:

Bishop Kate gave an interview to the New York Times revealing what passes for orthodoxy in this most flexible of faiths. She was asked a simple enough question: “How many members of the Episcopal Church are there?” “About 2.2 million,” replied the presiding bishop. “It used to be larger percentage-wise, but Episcopalians tend to be better educated and tend to reproduce at lower rates than other denominations.” This was a bit of a jaw-dropper even for a New York Times hackette, so, with vague memories of God saying something about going forth and multiplying floating around the back of her head, a bewildered Deborah Solomon said: “Episcopalians aren’t interested in replenishing their ranks by having children?” “No,” agreed Bishop Kate. “It’s probably the opposite. We encourage people to pay attention to the stewardship of the earth and not use more than their portion.”

Wow. I’ll leave aside for a moment the incredible arrogance of that statement and concentrate on its substantive implications. For a long time, I have thought that the ECUSA’s train was off the tracks, but I had no idea that it had come to this. It’s bad enough to completely abandon everything that your church has stood for theologically in some misguided attempt to curry favor with the sundry liberal interest groups (read: the world). However, consciously deciding to commit demographic suicide in the name of saving the planet is, well, just plain old crazy.

The argument has been made that political liberals (and states with higher concentrations of them) have lower fertility rates and political conservatives (and their states) have higher fertility rates. Given the bishop’s comments, perhaps this trend extends to liberal and conservative Christianity too.

In my view, this is a sad, sad commentary on the state of mainline Christianity. In Tim’s sermon a couple of weeks ago, he said that God was terrible, but good. My perception is that liberal Christians, who believe that God is the exact opposite - some kindly celestial grandfather, but detached, uninvolved, and maybe even powerless over what happens on earth - don’t really want to bring children into the world as they see it. Those who hold to the terrible/good view, though, have less (or no) problem with this because they believe God’s promises, made to them and to their children - and that He has the power and the desire to carry those promises out.

Assume for a moment that the bishop’s comments are predictive of the demographic future of liberal mainline protestantism. Now apply a Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest analysis to the overall protestant church in the US. If those that are reproducing hold to a more orthodox Christianity and those who fail to reproduce are theological liberals, given that the liberal mainline denominations aren’t adding members from the outside, what is the long-term viability of the mainline protestant denominations in the US?

Not that you wanted to know, or “misery loves company”

by Peggy Drinkard

Life’s been pretty hectic around our house the last few weeks since my mom had a fall, so I was enjoying just staying in this morning, drinking my coffee and staring at our Christmas tree. I began to peruse some catalogues for Christmas crafts to use for the covenant kids’ Christmas and Craft day. The following items kind of soured my Christmasy mood. Just HAD TO SHARE and confirm what you already know about modern Christian gullibilities and sensitivites. Do they really have purchasers for these? 1. A coffee mug that reminds you, “God loves you a latte.” 2. a snowman ornament proclaiming “Jesus loves you snow much!” 3. a “plush stuffed bears nativity scene ” (I.e. little stuffed bears dressed like Joseph,Mary,baby Jesus bear, etc. 4. a vinyl nativity rubber duckies scene (same as above but little yellow bath ducks dressed as wise men, Jesus, Joseph, sheperds, etc.) 5. Little packages of gummy reindeer proclaiming “Jesus is deer to me.” (get it?) 6. And, of course, several varieties of cross-shaped Christmas lollipops in…peppermint, etc.)

Well, I could go on. These are only a sampling. Cha-ching! Cha-ching! What suckers we evangelicals are!