The message of Easter

The other day we received some Easter cards to send to our sponsored kids. The message in the Easter card was wimpy, to say the least. Debbie felt prompted to write a letter to the sponsorship agency—a Christian one. Here is the content of the letter (warning, it's three pages long!):

Recently we received the Easter cards for our sponsored children. After reading one I was very grieved in my spirit. The last lines read, “Jesus is still alive today. He loves you and wants you to live with Him in heaven. That’s the story of Easter.”

Is it? Is that truly the story of Easter? That Jesus died so that we get a free ticket to heaven? And until then being a Christian means …”be good, read your bible, go to church, witness about Christ, etc., and someday you will grow into Christlikeness.

Please be patient with me as I share what the Lord has laid on my heart. Let me give my testimony. I accepted Christ as my Savior at the age of 16. For the next twenty some years I went to church regularly, read my bible almost everyday, witnessed, helped with music in some of the church groups throughout the years, prayed lots, etc. But throughout that time even with doing all these spiritual activities, I was not becoming more Christlike and yet I wanted to be more filled with Jesus. So I kept on reading, praying, etc., hoping that someday, somehow it would just happen. Well, when I was in my 40’s I started really hungering for God and His ways. I was tired of sinning (i.e., living in worry at times, getting impatient with people, wanting attention on myself, trying to be in control of my life and others’ lives sometimes, and so on…) I was sick of living in “the flesh” (as the bible puts it ), in the “old self,” in the sinful nature. When I sinned I would confess it to the Lord, thank Him for his forgiveness, and then find myself doing the same sins again. So I would go through the confession routine again…and on it went.

I wanted more. I wanted Christ’s holiness in me. I wanted God. It wasn’t happening by my doing all those spiritual exercises. It wasn’t happening by confessing sins all the time. I wasn’t getting any holier. And let me say that during all those years I did truly experience the Lord’s presence many times and did have his joy and peace and love. It just wasn’t continually. And as I got older I realized that how I had been taught Christianity wasn’t true Christianity. It was (and still is) man’s way of living the Christian life. “Do this, do that, read your bible more, pray more, serve in the church …Then you will become like Jesus.” NOT!!!!!!

So I finally got to the point of really calling out to God – seeking Him with my whole heart (which I thought I was doing in my earlier years, but God knows when we truly mean it from the depths of our soul). And Hallelujah! God is so patient and so faithful! He started really opening my eyes to what being a Christian means, not according to man, but according to the Almighty Holy God.

Many things He revealed to me – the heart of it all being this basic truth: God’s definition of Christianity is simple. It isn’t us trying and striving to be like Christ. It is God living His life in us. The Lord himself will live His very own life in us fully when and only when we say “yes” to our sinful nature being dead so that the Lord can be the only life of our soul, of our whole being. The bible teaches it very clearly, I had read it over and over all those years and yet I didn’t see it. Why? The Lord showed me that it was because I loved me more than God. I wanted to be god of my life (which is true of everyone who remains living with their sinful nature on the throne of their life instead of God living His life in them – totally and only God.) I didn’t know it in these words at the time but that is what I was living.

I’ve learned that what Jesus said is true, “By their fruit you will know them.” Whatever is inside us, whatever or whoever is the true god of our soul is what comes out in our attitudes, thoughts, behavior, actions, words, etc. If the sinful self is on the throne of the heart, the fruit of self comes out - sin. If the Lord Jesus is on the throne of the heart and He is the life of the soul, then the fruit of the Spirit comes out - God’s character. It’s that simple.

And another truth that is so awesome (of course all of God’s truths are awesome because He is awesome) is the fact that the sinful nature of man can only be dealt with by God Himself. Only He can put it to death. It is not a life-long process of dying to self. If it were, then it would be a matter of works. It would be us trying to crucify our sinful nature ourselves – which we could not and never can do. Only God can take the old self/sinful nature to death. And the good news is that He already did! It is done! In Christ it is finished! Paul talks about it quite extensively in Romans especially, and throughout the New Testament, how Jesus took the sinful nature of man to death with Himself when He died on the cross. And then raised us with Him to give us new life – His very life to live in us instead of the sinful nature! Amen! Thank-you, Jesus!

“I have been crucified with Christ and it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.” (Gal. 2:20)

We are now complete in Christ. It is Christ living His perfect, holy life in us. By God’s divine power we have all we need for life and godliness. We are temples of His Spirit. Christ Himself living in us – the hope of glory! And it is for now, not for some future date at the end of our earthly lives. All scripture that talks about these truths is in the tense of “has been” or “is”. For example, it doesn’t say, I “am being” crucified with Christ. Or I “will be” crucified with Christ. But it says, I “HAVE BEEN” crucified with Christ…Christ “HAS” taken the sinful nature to death, not “will” take the sinful nature to death. We “ARE” His temple, not “will be” His temple. Christ lives in me –NOW - not “will live in me someday.” Praise God!

Now perhaps you are asking, “If this is all true, why am I still experiencing “me” on the throne? Why am I still living in the sinful nature?” I’ve asked the Lord the same question many times at the start of my seeking Him. The Lord showed me that I was still experiencing the “sinful self life” because I hadn’t absolutely and completely surrendered my self (my sinful nature) to Him. I didn’t mean it when I said “yes” to its death. I thought I did. So God brought me to the point of seeing the detestable, stubborn, rebellious, proud nature of the sinful self and how much it immensely grieves Him. And as I’ve truly hungered for Him to be my All in All, to be the only Life of my soul – so that it would be, NOT I, BUT CHRIST living in and through me, I am experiencing His life in me more fully every day. By faith, Christ lives his very own life in me with the sinful nature dead and no more.

Sinful self is out – Christ is in.

It is a matter of believing, taking God at His word. Living by faith, not by sight. All of God’s truths are only ours by faith. We can’t experience His life in us until we believe that what He said is true. If we don’t believe, we are calling God a liar. We have to also be willing to die to self. Not as a process, but consenting to the fact that it is already done in Christ.

And as moment by moment I trust the Lord to keep me yielded to Him alone, He will continue to live His holy, loving, powerful, victorious, faithful ( and everything else that He is) life in me and through me to others.

Praise His holy name! Now I am truly saved. God is now total Lord and Savior of my life. Not just One who paid the penalty for my sins and bore God’s wrath for me – and praise God that He did! But also that He is my true Redeemer who saved me from my sinful nature, who saved me from sinning; from the power of sin. I am no longer a slave to sin. Hallelujah! I am a slave to God’s righteousness. Jesus is the life of my soul. It’s all Him. And all the glory goes to Him alone!

The message in the Easter card for the sponsored children reflects the decapitated gospel message that most evangelical Christians teach. And have for a long time. It’s only part of God’s truth. Praise God that Christ paid the penalty for our sins and opened the door for us to heaven. Amen! But even more so, praise God that He came to destroy the devil’s works, and took the sinful nature to death with Himself on the cross and gave us new life – His life to live in us. That’s the full gospel message. That is the story of Easter.

I pray that all who profess to be believers will hunger so much for God and His holiness, and for Christianity His way, that there will be true revival everywhere, starting in each and every heart that is willing to fully surrender to Almighty God – and say a hearty “Amen” to NOT I , BUT CHRIST!

In Christ,
Debbie

Things that make you wonder

I just saw this:

42.5% American congregations that spend less than 10 percent of their budgets on social services in their community.

12.2% Congregations that spend more than 30 percent.

Hmmm. Are we ingrown, or what? I wish they had shown what percentage of the budget was spent on the physical plant.

At the same time, I saw this by one of my co-workers in a list of reasons why the church should go underground:

1. Get the money out of the church
No more of the Big Green or the Bling Bling. No more big budgets, paid pastors who view ministry as a career path, no more expensive and divisive building projects, no more bright lights and neon signs, no more marketing and advertising budgets. Anything that needs doing can be done by those who give their time sacrificially.

He goes on to list 18 reasons the church should go underground, all of them good. I especially like number 17:

16. You have everything you need
Sure, books, sermons, DVD's, mp3's, etc. can be helpful. But let's ditch the Paperback Pope. If you've got issues/questions/struggles/opportunities the best thing to do is realize that the Spirit within is the main thing. Be rational and reflective. Trust yourself. Try. Fail. Love. Grow. Progress. Regress. You don't need to be a John Piper (or fill in the blank) Groopie [sic].

Monday's happenings

An interesting new title from Zondervan:

Sing and Learn New Testament Greek
Includes 1 Audio CD and a 36-Page Guide
by Kenneth Berding
Zondervan Publishing Company, Forthcoming May 2008
Compact Disc (audio)
ISBN: 9780310280996
List Price: $14.99
Your Price: $12.74
www.eisenbrauns.com/wconnect/wc.dll?ebGate~EIS~~I~CDSINGAN

For those of you who haven't totally lost interest in the Talpiot Tomb media circus, some of the scholars involved in the recent conference have issued a healthy corrective here The final paragraph:

To conclude, we wish to protest the misrepresentation of the conference proceedings in the media, and make it clear that the majority of scholars in attendance – including all of the archaeologists and epigraphers who presented papers relating to the tomb - either reject the identification of the Talpiot tomb as belonging to Jesus’ family or find this claim highly unlikely.

Indeed!

More on Pagan Christianity at The Heresy, and a follow-up thought here

Sometimes you have to tell people the unvarnished truth regardless of how many people you tick off. I was thinking about this today as I pondered Frank Viola’s less than irenic spirit in Pagan Christianity. For years I’ve challenged people I’ve known personally in conventional Christian ministry. I’ve done my level best to be charitable, respectful and sensitive. After years of trying the net impact is still pretty much zero. If the issues you challenge people on go too deep they just ignore them no matter how constructive you are.

Again, indeed!

And how about efficiency versus acting as Jesus would? That's the question that Ted asked the other day:

I was raised in a strong work ethic inherited from parents who experienced the hard times of the American Great Depression. And probably influenced somehow by the strong Protestant work ethic, which in its place is good. On top of all of this is at least the factor of an efficient American way of activity in getting the most bang for buck. And with all this, even for me as a Christian, one can fail to really follow Jesus.

So as I stood there in our work with my younger brother and friend, it was like a revelation hitting me, small as it was, yet large in significance. I had to tell myself to let it go. And instead of making an issue of it, accept the inefficiency. Maybe, in love, there could be a time and place to make a general suggestion. But even in the fast pace of work life, and perhaps especially there, we need to take care that we be followers of our Lord, loving God and loving others over all else.

Amen!

Reader's Hebrew Bible review

Zondervan kindly sent me a preview copy of their forthcoming A Reader's Hebrew Bible (RHB). I asked for a sample page to put on our website, and they sent me the whole Bible! How's that for service? Anyway, I appreciate it and hope they don't regret doing it after they read this review :) Here are the bibliographic details:

A Reader's Hebrew Bible

Edited by A. Philip Brown and Bryan W. Smith
Zondervan Publishing Company, Forthcoming, May 2008
1680 pages, Hebrew and English
Duotone
ISBN: 9780310269748
List Price: $49.99
Your Price: $39.99
www.eisenbrauns.com/wconnect/wc.dll?ebGate~EIS~~I~BROREADER

I showed it to 4 other people here with varying degrees of Hebrew. It seems that the less Hebrew they knew, the more they liked it, which is a good thing, since it is aimed at those with weaker Hebrew skills. Personally, the first thing I noticed was the bleed through on the pages. I don't know if the page scans below will reflect it or not, but under normal room lighting, the bleed through from the opposite page is pretty distracting. However, when looked at under a bright reading lamp, it is barely noticeable. The bleed through isn't evident at all on the PDF on Zondervan's website, since it is a function of the thin bible paper they use.

I'm also not sure I like the gray screening of proper nouns occurring less than 100 times. I like the idea, since more than once I have spent a good bit of time looking for a word in the lexicon, only to discover that it is a proper noun, but the execution isn't quite what I would like it to be.

The vocabulary footnotes contain words occurring less than 100 times, with a 7 pages glossary with words occurring more than 100 times. A nice feature is that if the same word occurs more than once on a page, the same footnote number is used (provided the sense is the same). This is an improvement over the A Reader's Greek New Testament (RGNT), which footnotes each occurrence, even if on the same page. The foreword says that the glosses were derived primarily from BDB and HALOT, secondarily from Holladay and DCD.

The text has no masora or apparatus, but that is to be expected; it is a Reader's Bible, a fact they stress in the introduction. Qere and Ketib are marked in the text, which, by the way, is the Westminster version of Leningrad; the same text that BHS and BHQ use. This is a plus, since you can read with others; this is unlike the RGNT, which uses a different text than the N-A and UBS texts.

I found the introduction to be very good; I just hope others will read it. The editors very clearly state the goals and limitations of the work. They hope to encourage reading and warn heartily against using their glosses as definitions. They also recommend that you have a text with an apparatus available—something with which I heartily agree!

OK, the real question is, "Would I use it?" My answer is...No, I would not use it. Why wouldn't I use it? Because I know enough Hebrew to use a straight text with a lexicon. Also, because I prefer to look up words in a lexicon where I can get the fuller meaning that I can from a simple gloss.

BUT, I know lots of people who would use it, and I would definitely recommend it to them. I would recommend it more heartily if Zondervan had not used such thin paper (and if they had been a bit more careful about the word justification in layout; there are places where the words are way too far apart on the line. If they had just taken a bit more time...but for most that is a cosmetic issue that few outside of publishers would notice). As Rick Mansfield has said repeatedly, Zondervan seems fixated on thinline bibles. The HRB is about 25-33% thinner than the large BHS and weighs a bit less. Personally, I would rather have seen them use a thicker paper and eliminate the bleed through. Maybe UBS will do one and get it right, that's what happened with the UBS Greek New Testament. Zondervan took two editions, and still doesn't have it right; hopefully they will listen this time and get the Hebrew one right.


This is a scan of Chronicles, note the gray screened names


This is from Judges 3

What's going on?

Time for a quick round-up of some stuff I've run across this week...

Despite what some may think about cats, they are intelligent and relatively well behaved. In fact, according to this post academics could learn a bit from them:

Academic squabbles are often compared to cat fights, but as one who has owned cats for several decades, I’ve come to believe that such analogies are unfair to felines. Cats, for instance, instinctively know to terminate a chase when they would consume more calories than their prey would provide. And even the pugilist tabbies I’ve owned eventually learned to give wide berth to rivals who consistently bloodied them. All of this suggests that cats may be more evolutionarily advanced than a lot of academics.

He goes on to list 8 on-going arguments in academia. This article generated a good bit of traffic on the L-Classics list.

Don't think that military training carries over into civilian life? Check out this sad commentary in the New York Times

Another good review of Pagan Christianity just appeared at The M Blog. Maybe I should take Nick Norelli's advice and ask for a review copy for myself...

I just got the most recent Moody Press catalog. I don't usually see anything of interest, but this time there was a biography of A.W. Tozer advertised. It looks interesting, but if you notice, the link I gave doesn't take you to Moody's site; they haven't listed it yet! Isn't that basic marketing? Anyway, I think I will have to get it for myself. It's not the kind of thing that will sell at Eisenbrauns :)

Oh, I almost forgot this one...Apparently there is a synchroblog on fools right now. Anyway, Alan Knox has a good one here. I quote in part:

Once upon a time, God used a donkey. How foolish! Not today. Today, God has other means of transportation available to him. He uses nice cars - Cadillacs, BMWs, Mercedes, even limos. God even uses jet planes. Why would God want to use something as foolish as a donkey when he has planes available to him?

Once upon a time, God used pagan prophets and philosophers. How foolish! Not today. Nothing good can come from culture. Today, God wants his people to read Christian books, watch Christian movies, and listen to Christian music. If God has something to say, he would never be so foolish as to speak through a pagan.

He continues on. Very good food for thought.

And finally, I'm surely not the " only person over 15 who enjoys snow"!

We want our cake...

I get a variety of journals related to marketing as part of my job. Sometimes they actually are interesting :)

Today one came that has an interesting article on eco-friendly travel. Here is an excerpt:

This October, the Travel Industry Association of America, an Orlando, Fla.–based partnership, issued the results of their "travelhorizons" survey. Some highlights included the fact that more than half of all American adults advocate environmental responsibility, but only 14 percent said it would influence their choice of travel suppliers. Just 13 percent said they were willing to pay higher prices to address their environmental concerns, although 56 percent said they might. Seventy-six percent said they would not pay more than 10 percent extra and the majority of that group said they would not pay more than 5 percent extra. Americans believe in supporting the environment as long as it's free or inexpensive to do—at least that seems to be the primary implication of this survey.

<idle musing>
Yep. All talk and no traction. That is the way we do things around here, isn't it? We want everything for nothing, even salvation. We want Jesus to die for us, but we don't want to die. We want heaven in the future, and our own way now. If the scriptures don't agree with that, we create a theology that allows us to man-handle them in such a way that they will...

If ever there was proof needed of total depravity, that has got to be one of them.
</idle musing>

Quote

“It can seem as if biblical scholars are the privileged interpreters of scripture. They alone can determine what the Bible means. But the Bible was written for believing communities, not critics, and real biblical interpretation when scripture does something to such a community. When the church places special emphasis on an academic and critical approach to scripture, it easily sets up a new of priestly control of the community by a guild of experts whose work is authoritarian, not in the sense that it cannot be questioned, but in the sense that it is the privileged responsibility of an elite.”—John Goldingay in Models of Interpretation of Scripture

<idle musing>
I like his emphasis on transformation: "real biblical interpretation when scripture does something to such a community." Without transformation, scripture is a dead stack of paper with letters on it—and transformation can only happen through the power of the Holy Spirit.
</idle musing>

Quote

Hey! This is a rare happening, I ran across a John Calvin quote over the weekend that I actually agree with:

“The scripture should be read with the aim of finding Christ in them. Whoever turns aside from this object, even though he wears himself out all his life in learning, he will never reach the knowledge of the truth.”—John Calvin

Weekly sale at Eisenbrauns

We are still rummaging around in the warehouse, finding more stuff to offer at great prices. This week is a real potpourri, ranging from Anchor Bible volumes to the Syriac New Testament; discounts range from 33% to 50%. Links to purchase items are here, but here is a list what's on sale:

"HarperCollins Concise Atlas of Bible"
Edited by James B. Pritchard and L. Michael White
HarperCollins Publishers, 2000. Paper. English.
ISBN: 0062514997
List Price: $25.95 Your Price: $15.57

"Exodus 19-40: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary"
by William H. Propp
Anchor Bible - AB
Random House, 2006. Cloth. English.
ISBN: 0385246935
List Price: $49.95 Your Price: $27.47

"1 Chronicles 1-9: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary"
by Gary N. Knoppers
Anchor Bible - AB
Doubleday, 2004. Cloth. English.
ISBN: 0385469284
List Price: $49.95 Your Price: $24.98

"The Gospel of Jesus: In Search of the Original Good News"
by James M. Robinson
HarperCollins Publishers, 2005. Cloth. English.
ISBN: 0060762179
List Price: $21.95 Your Price: $13.17

"The Reluctant Parting: How the New Testament's
Jewish Writers Created a Christian Book"
by Julie Galambush
HarperCollins Publishers, . . English.
ISBN: 0060596368
List Price: $24.95 Your Price: $14.97

"The Gnostic Discoveries: The Impact of the Nag Hammadi Library"
by Marvin Meyer
HarperCollins Publishers, 2005. Paper. English.
ISBN: 0060821086
List Price: $21.95 Your Price: $14.62

"Pocket Dictionary for the Study of New Testament Greek"
by Matthew S. DeMoss
IVP Pocket Reference
InterVarsity Press - IVP, 2001. Paper. English.
ISBN: 0830814647
List Price: $8.00 Your Price: $5.33

"Greek-English New Testament"
Edited by Eberhard Nestle, Barbara Aland, and Kurt Aland
German Bible Society, 2001. Cloth. English and Greek.
ISBN: 3438054086
List Price: $59.99 Your Price: $30.00

"Visual Education Biblical Greek Academic Study Card Set"
Visual Education, 1998. . Greek.
ISBN: 1556370075
List Price: $14.95 Your Price: $10.45

"Syriac New Testament with Psalms"
American Bible Society, 1985. Cloth. Syriac.
ISBN: 090018549X
List Price: $16.99 Your Price: $9.34

Quote

I ran across this a while back in Rome and Jerusalem, on page 348:

Knowledge is power, but the views of professors do not carry weight in all societies. Scholarship and philosophy were acceptable attributes among members of the political elite in Rome, but they were neither necessary accoutrements nor particularly helpful in establishing a politician's authority.

Hmmm...that could be said of a society closer to home, couldn't it?

By the way, this is a very good book. I have to admit that my reading time is near nil since we bought the house back in October, and it shows in my sidebar, doesn't it? No new books read since before that. Oh well, I am almost done with this one, and only have a stack about 10 high of books I need to read...

Pagan Christianity

Apparently Barna has a new book out, co-authored by Frank Viola. I briefly reviewed Barna's last book, Revolution back in August 2006. The new book, Pagan Christianity is generating a good bit of blog activity—some favorable, lots not. Here's an excerpt from a good post (with links) by The Heresy

Barna used to be a very popular man in the pulpits of North America. His primary role was surveying the spiritual and religious landscape of America. He has shared the fruit of his research through dozens of books, conferences and in academic institutions. His life, career and business were driven by the needs of conventional churches and para-church organizations. Over the years he identified several areas of deep concern for church and tried to be an agent of change. Despite becoming one of the most authoritative voices on the church in America his own research revealed there was very little positive change. He concluded that the average Christian in America was biblically illiterate, failed to hold to a biblical worldview (from an evangelical perspective) and lived a morally indistinct life. He discovered the impact of churches on society was dwarfed by that of the media. After years of trying to help conventional churches change he gave up. Unlike most of the church which keeps trying to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results he changed. He became an advocate of unconventional churches and a prominent voice in the simple church movement...

While I see lots of people coming up with all kinds of criticism (including a healthy dose of straw men and mockery dressed up as humor) of the book I’ve yet to find someone appeal to scripture to prove that contemporary church practices are biblical. The reality is most of conventional church practice has very little basis in scripture. In my very intentional efforts to study what the New Testament says about church I became more and more convinced of this. While a great many Christians are willing to split hairs over what the bible says about sexual ethics or the sovereignty of God most don’t care about what the bible says about the church. This is a huge HUGE mistake. The church in the western world is adrift and we still refuse to consider the possibility that guys like Jesus and Paul actually knew what they were doing. Meanwhile many churches in various cultures that more closely resemble the New Testament church have no problem making disciples.

Too true! I'm going to have to get the book and read it. Meanwhile, you can download a sample chapter here (warning, it's a PDF).

Yet another quiz

OK, I'm a sucker for them...blame Jim West! No real surprise in the results:

What's your eschatology? created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Moltmannian Eschatology Jürgen Moltmann is one of the key eschatological thinkers of the 20th Century. Eschatology is not only about heaven and hell, but God's plan to make all things new. This should spur us on to political and social action in the present. Moltmannian Eschatology 80% Amillenialist 65% Premillenialist 45% Preterist 40% Dispensationalist 20% Postmillenialist 15% Left Behind 10%

I'm not sure if that will appear correctly or not...

Got milk?

I was in Chicago last week until Sunday for AIA/APA. While there, I tried doing what I always do, ordering milk at a restaurant. I'm used to people giving me a weird look, but this one was a new twist...

Me: I'd like a glass of milk, please.
Waiter: A glass of what?
Me: Milk.
Waiter: What kind?
Me: Whole or 2%.
Waiter: Oh, you mean milk! I don't think we have any. Let me go check.
2-3 minutes elapse before the waiter returns.
Waiter: I'm sorry, we don't have any milk. We have [he lists the different types of soda they have], water, and coffee. Would you like one of those?
Me: No thank you, I prefer milk.

Now, what is weird is that I had been in this same restaurant 2 days earlier and they had found some milk for me... What's up with that?

This isn't the first time recently that I haven't been able to get milk. Going to AAR/SBL in San Diego, I normally get milk on the airplane. They didn't have any this time. I've been flying for well over 20 years, and that was the first time I couldn't get milk, except for short little commuter flights that just hand out bottles of water.

I don't think the American Dairy Association's "Got Milk?" campaign worked very well...

Why milk? I don't know, I just prefer it. Debbie and I go through almost a gallon a day; she drinks skim, I drink 2%, almost a 1/2 gallon each per day. Maybe it is because we both have spent about 35 of our 50+ years in either Wisconsin or Minnesota? Or, maybe we just prefer it. It definitely is better for you than soda!

Resolutions, revisited

This ran across my screen over the weekend, while I was at the AIA/APA conference:

...resolutions often expose a self-sufficient, man-centered theology that will fail us by the time February rolls around.

"They make no reckoning with either the chief end of man, or the madness in our hearts while we live, or the inexpressible gift of God to sinful, dying people," Powlison writes. "Self-referential resolutions function within a self-salvation project, however noble and desirable the proximate ends in view."

<idle musing>
Yep!
</idle musing>

Photomosaic

I found someone with a USB cable and so got the pictures off the camera :)

For you enjoyment, here is a picture of the booth at a distance, and below it a closeup of the bust. There are about 9800 book covers in the banner, which is 6 feet long and 2 feet tall.

New monthly sale

Seems our e-mail system is being funky the last few days, so BookNews hasn't gone out yet. I'm in Chicago, so I don't know quite what is going on, but just so you know, here's the text that will eventually (I hope!) show up in your Inbox:

New Year's Overstock Sale — Up to 90% Off

Every now and then it is a good thing to go through your attic, garage, basement, or other storage area and clean things out. Well, that is what we just did here at Eisenbrauns; we found some overstock that we are going to let you have at very deep discounts, up to 90% off. Quantities are limited, so first come, first served.

In addition to the featured books, we have volumes and fascicles of Jewish Quarterly Review going back to 1931 that we are selling at the ridiculously low price of $3.00 per fascicle, or $5.00 per volume. If you are interested, please e-mail Customer Service with the volumes or fascicles you are interested in.

All the details are here

Revival

I ran across this in the print version of Christianity Today and have been waiting for it to come online, which it did a couple of days ago.

Joe Church, a missionary revivalist in Africa in the 1940s, had it right when he observed, "Revival is not when the roof blows off, but when the bottom falls out."

The bottom has been falling out all over the place. Last July, during an event named The Call, more than 70,000 students, young adults, parents, and ministers from all over the country met in Nashville to pray for 12 hours in a solemn assembly of confession and prayer for our nation...In addition, there will be a national prayer gathering of students and young adults called Paradise '08 that will take place in the middle of a Kansas field on May 25—no merchandise, speakers, or artists, just prayer, Scripture, and song.

...whenever permitted, I followed the simple patterns seen in so many revival meetings in church history. These always include worship, prayer, and a non-negotiable call to confession of any and all sin—whether those attending are professing Christians, ministers, students, completely sin-ridden, demon-possessed, or lost. The result is always the same—the bottom falls out. Confessions of pride, eating disorders, pornography, and sexual immorality rush out of the mouths of innumerable students, as well as confessions of unforgiveness, same-sex attraction, jealousy, and doubt.

...These scenarios have played out everywhere I visit, capturing Dietrich Bonhoeffer's explanation of public confession perfectly: "As the open confession of my sins to a brother insures me against self-deception, so, too the assurance of forgiveness becomes fully certain to me only when it is spoken by a brother in the name of God. Mutual, brotherly confession is given to us by God in order that we may be sure of divine forgiveness."

...Students tell me that spiritual mentors who are "on fire for Jesus," consistent in their walks with God, who remained sexually pure in their own dating and marriage relationships, and who lived full-of-the-Holy-Spirit lives in front of them are rare. But they are longing for, begging for, older Christians to be solid spiritual mentors and parents to them, to pray powerfully for and with them. They don't need more programs. They want prayer and revival for their generation.

I've been to dozens of campuses in the past three years and seen that the younger generation has started what Finney called "a new beginning of obedience to God."

Is my generation ready to join them?

Please read the whole thing; may the tribe of those repenting increase to include us all!

Snow pictures

I took these this morning in the chilly zero degree weather.

This is the view out my study window,; you can see the sunrise in the background


This is the backyard


This is the south side, looking toward the creek, with the glow of sunrise in the background

AIA/APA

I'm off in about 2 hours to Chicago for the annual AIA/APA ( Archaeological Institute of America/ American Philological Association) meetings. If you are there, swing by our booth and take a look. We have a new banner that we will be using. Andy ran across some photo-mosaic software last year, and we have been playing around with various ideas.

Just for the fun of it, we did a photo-mosaic of me. Here is the original picture:

Note how I am surrounded by books. Here is the photomosaic, using 1,860 book covers:

OK, not the best resolution, but we didn't want to overload your browser. The banner we made has over 5 times as many book covers (about 9800) and weighs in at around 100 Mb! Wondering what each of the covers is? Go here and hover the mouse over the various covers. It might take a few seconds for the server to catch up, depending on your connection.

I will post pictures from the conference, so you can get an idea of what the banner looks like. I think it's pretty neat :)

Update:
Here is a picture of the banner coming off the printer

More paganism

I saw this the other day, and then lost the reference until I saw it again in print. It seems to follow nicely from the guy who reads pigs' spleens:

1 in 5 Sports fans who say they do things in an attempt to bring good luck to their favorite team or avoid jinxing them.

1 in 4 College basketball fans who say this. They are the most likely fans to say so.

Interesting, isn't it? We laugh when we hear that sports events in the 2/3 world are sometimes canceled because of people attempting magical spells over the results, and yet 20-25% of the U.S. population is doing essentially the same thing!

How many times do we have to see stuff like this before we realize that unregenerate humanity is totally depraved; it is only by the freely available grace of God that anyone can be redeemed from their deadly curvatus in se (curved in on oneself).

Winter Wonderland

Wonderful! It started on Monday evening around 8:00 as a heavy wet snow that stuck to all the branches of the trees. Then, the temperature started dropping and the snow got lighter, but kept coming, piling higher on the branches. It kept coming all night and yesterday. It is still flurrying now, but no real accumulation has happened since last night.

I wish I had taken my camera home, it is a winter wonderland. Looking out our front window into the woods across the street is like looking at a picture, with the blacks of the trees, the greens of the pines, and the white snow all blending in a beautiful harmony of sight.

Jim Eisenbraun took some pictures out his window. He had 20 cardinals at their feeder at one time. We didn't have cardinals, but the goldfinch were everywhere. Here is one of Jim's pictures, if I remember to take the camera home, I will post some from our place tomorrow.

New year's resolutions

<idle musing>
Well, it is New Year's Eve, the day when everyone makes all kinds of resolutions, knowing full well that they will all be broken before the end of January—at best.

Like Ted, I have never considered resolutions to be terribly Christian. In fact, they are inimical to grace-based Christianity. Think about it for a second. Christians claim that it is only by the power of God (grace) that any good can happen in anyone's life with any consistency, so where does that leave resolutions? Exactly! On the scrap heap of "good" behavior.

If you insist on making resolutions, then at least have the good sense to follow the advice of Jonathan Edwards:

"Being sensible that I am unable to do anything without God's help, I do humbly entreat him, by his grace, to enable me to keep these Resolutions, so far as they are agreeable to his will, for Christ's sake."

Quote HT: Matt Harmon

So, how about these for resolutions that I can keep without God's help:
1. I resolve to fail repeatedly as long as I depend on my own strength
2. I resolve to be a royal jerk and pain in the behind, unless I live dead to self and alive in Christ
3. I resolve to acknowledge my total inability to do anything good apart from the abiding presence of God in my life

There. I can keep those easily—as can anyone else!
</idle musing>

Mere mortals?

"It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours."—C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, page 14-15 in my edition (1975), but now available online here

Inspiration?

The inerrancy wars rage on, and on, and on, and…

This month has seen a spate of inerrancy posts, no doubt inspired, at least partially, by Jim West’s provocative post on his definition of fundamentalism. Much heat, some light :) Good summary here.

One thing that bothers me about the debate is that infallibility is linked to inerrancy in most all posts. I would disagree. Someone (I lost the reference, sorry) on one of the blogs pointed out that inerrancy is a subset of infallibility. Correct! But, let’s take it a bit further: infallibility is a subset of inspiration.

OK, what’s the point? Well, this whole debate got me thinking, and then I received an e-mail the other day that pulled me in a different direction. Now we’re talking exclusivity and the kingdom of God.

I think I can safely say that all Christians believe in the inspiration of scripture, after all 2 Timothy 3:16 (vulgate) uses the very word inspiro based on the Greek QEOPNEUSTOS. From there we have the subset of infallible, with a further subset of inerrant. Well, now apparently there is a further subset: 6 day literal creation. No adhere, no bother applying. No grandfather clause either, out the door. . .this e-mail told of the non-renewal of some contracts because of that, or at least implied that was the reason. Who knows, really. It might just have been posturing, or not.

But, it made me wonder what Jesus would have thought about our little word battles. He seemed more interested in love: “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another." (John 13.35) Not a word about doctrine—silly Messiah! Everyone knows you have to have a doctrinal statement! How else will we know who is in and who is out?

I think we missed it! We build our walls, God tears them down. We draw our lines in the sand, God crosses them. We build our institutions; God has the nerve to start a new work outside of them!

All I can say is, “Praise God!” I am glad he is bigger than our labels. Me, I don’t know what I should be labeled; all I want is to hear God say, “Well done, good and faithful servant” at the end of it all. So, I guess that makes me a servant. What about you?

Back to the future?

Seems that divination isn't dead yet. Apparently there is a gentleman who reads pig's spleens to forecast the weather. Just like the ancient world, only they read livers and didn't just look for weather forecasts.

It was in this world that the law and the prophets spoke against divination. Maybe we really are post-christian...

Effective Prayer

“If we really want to pray with power, we need to break through into greater holiness. We don’t need a formula or a method for praying. But we do need to live with purity and simplicity rather than with carnality, hype, and hardness as so many in our churches do today.

“When Samuel said, ‘Speak, for your servant is listening,’ he revealed the secret of what God is after. An attentive, willing heart is the great need of the hour. Programs, talent, and human energy will never accomplish what one man or woman in close fellowship with the living God can do. A young boy in Shiloh led an entire people back from ruin because he was willing to be a humble servant of the great and awesome God.

“Today too much of the church suffers from dull, mechanical Bible exposition that lacks the touch of the Holy Spirit. No matter how skilled the preacher, only the Spirit can direct us to the truths that most need to be proclaimed and enable us to apply them in a convicting manner. God is not searching for talent or intelligence on earth, because he is the Almighty One! He already has everything he needs—except our hearts. He wants us to be like Samuel, with a heart that waits to hear and swiftly obey his word. Our present lack of spiritual fruit and power doesn’t bring much glory to God.”—Jim Cymbala in Breakthrough Prayer, pp. 173-174.

Idle musings on a Friday morning

I wrote this earlier today...

<idle musing>
I am sitting in the waiting room of a car repair place, waiting for an oil change to get done. In the background is the obnoxious babble of a television. It is impossible to sit anywhere without its loud invasion of my senses. At least I can sit where it isn’t smack in my face.

Have you noticed how it is virtually impossible anymore to enter a place of business without being confronted with the television’s in-your-face babble? And the few places that don’t have the tube blasting at you instead have a music track blasting&mdashyes, blasting, not just as background music anymore, but blasting. Am I getting old, and so these things are starting to bother me? Or are they really getting more in-your-face? Interesting question; I haven’t seen any data, but I suspect the volume level has increased.

I am somewhat of a fitness/health nut. I want whatever I eat to be beneficial to my health. I don’t always follow that rule; I eat my share of junk food—especially this time of year : ) But, as a general rule of thumb I eat well—lots of fruits and vegetables, very little grease and oil, practically no corn syrup, etc.

I also like to control what I feed my mind. Whatever I consume mentally has an affect on how I act and think. In our culture, that can be/is a losing battle; the latest figures say that the average American is bombarded with over 15,000 advertising images per day. That’s a lot of subliminal (and not so subliminal) inducement to consumption! Have you noticed that we aren’t customers anymore? We are now consumers.

We can still control what we voluntarily feed our mind, but do we?
</idle musing>

Children must play

Our son, Ryan, stopped through again on his way back and forth. He spent the last two nights with us and we had a wonderful time. But, last night he and I decided it was time to do some building, so we proceeded to build a few buildings while we waited for dinner to cook. Enjoy!

Is reading dying?

I got an e-mail today mentioning an interesting article in the New Yorker Magazine titled Twilight of the Books: What will life be like if people stop reading? Here's a short quote from the article:

A reader learns about the world and imagines it differently from the way a viewer does; according to some experimental psychologists, a reader and a viewer even think differently. If the eclipse of reading continues, the alteration is likely to matter in ways that aren’t foreseeable.

You definitely should read the whole thing. There are some interesting data about the different ways the brain reacts to reading. Hey! That reminds me of a webpage I just ran across dating from April discussing television/video's "merits."

For your edification(?), here's an excerpt:

The commercial starts off by showing school kids, hopped up after a full day's learning and lunchtime Twinkies, bouncing off the walls of a school bus. A rather distressed looking adult enters the bus, assesses the situation and reacts by pulling down a tiny television monitor, at which point the kids fall into a zombie-like stupor.

A voiceover intones "When the kids get what they want, you'll get what you want." Great lesson, Dodge – and one that's repeated a few seconds later in the interior of a Caravan. In this vehicle, two children smile emptily in the back seat while mommy and daddy (or perhaps a pair of Yuppie kidnappers – the ad doesn't elaborate one way or another) exchange we-put-one-over-on-the-seven-year-olds-again grins...

In a moment of serendipitous timing, a commercial from Adbusters Media Foundation is touting April 23-29 – the last week of the Dodge Caravan DVD promotion – as "TV Turn Off Week." The Adbusters spot shows a series of heavy-lidded cherubic young 'uns, who are assumedly watching a television screen right in front of them, staring glassily and open mouthed at the viewer.

They look strikingly similar to the kids in the Caravan commercial.

What more can I say?

Quote

“Sound doctrine that yields faithless living and no prayer is no doctrine at all.”—Jim Cymbala in Breakthrough Prayer, page 97

Snow!

We got 15 inches of snow on Saturday and Sunday; it was beautiful. Debbie and I spent a couple of hours snowshoeing along the creek that runs past our house. We saw two deer beds, but we must have scared the deer before we saw them. Later, when we were coming back, we could see that the deer had already started to use our snowshoe tracks as their trail; there were deer tracks in our footprints.

The birds were thick around our birdfeeders all day. The wind was quite strong, about 30 MPH, so the birds would cling to the feeder and swing as the wind would make it sway. Once the feeder settled down again, they would resume eating.

I hope the snow stays, but today was 36 F, and they are predicting the same for the rest of the week. But, it is and was beautiful while it lasts :)

Prayer

"Prayer is not overcoming God's reluctance. It is laying hold of God's willingness."—George Mueller

Jerusalem

I read a good description of Jerusalem this morning in Harpers: “Jerusalem is as condensed, as self-referential, as a Rubik’s Cube.”

Prayer

“David was a man who prayed much and received much. In contrast, those who seldom ask receive in proportion to their little faith. Yet David’s faith was not in the power of prayer itself but in the God who answers prayer. That is the secret of every man and woman throughout history who has learned firsthand about God’s faithfulness—they knew to whom they were praying.

“Many Christians have so little faith that they soon buckle under the pressures of life, while others find the grace to live joyfully above battle even though they face far more daunting circumstances. As I counsel people, I have noticed that the same challenges that bring weariness and bitterness to some seem hardly noticeable to others who simply pray their way through them. Such are people are not operating out of a simplistic theology but a revelation of the character of God, who delights to display his faithfulness in answer to prayer.”—Jim Cymbala in Breakthrough Prayer, pages 50-51

Clever little ad

OK, this is my first attempt at embedding a video, and probably my last...But it is a clever little ad by a bookstore that is closing soon. Save their books!



HT: Andy Le Peau

Musings for a Friday afternoon

<idle musing>
A couple of things have run across my desk today that are worth musing on...

1. I was delighted to finally see someone publish the forgotten verses of "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing" on the web. Christianity Today's web only section gave a brief overview of the hymn: who did what, when, and why to its lyrics and tune. I knew that Charles Wesley had written it, but didn't realize that George Whitfield was the guilty party who took the knife to the last verses. Shame on him! Anyway, here are the missing verses, which are extremely rich theologically:

Come, desire of nations, come,
Fix in us thy humble home;
Rise, the woman's conquering seed,
Bruise in us the serpent's head.

Now display thy saving power,
Ruin'd nature now restore;
Now in mystic union join
Thine to ours, and ours to thine.

Adam's likeness, Lord, efface,
Stamp thy image in its place.
Second Adam from above,
Reinstate us in thy love.

Let us thee, though lost, regain,
Thee, the life, the inner man:
O, to all thyself impart,
Form'd in each believing heart.

Too bad more people don't sing them. We made up a Christmas songbook (all public domain stuff) a few years ago for caroling, and I included these verses, but I have never seen them in a published hymnal.

2. Jim Martin has a post discussing the recent MLB steroids report. It doesn't matter if you follow professional sports or not (I don't), his observations are spot-on, in my opinion:

All I am suggesting is that we have a way of rationalizing and justifying our behavior if in some way it enhances our performance. We are tempted to do whatever it takes to give us the advantage.

Meanwhile, we are invited to do what may seem irrational at times. We are invited to trust God with our lives. We are urged to turn the management of our lives and our future over to him. So often, we just don’t trust God. We do not trust that he will take care of us if we do the right thing. We do not trust him with our future. So, we take over and "do what it takes" in our attempt to manage our own lives, regardless of the dishonesty that may be involved.

Very good observation; God calls us to a higher life in him. Operative words here are "in Him." Aside from him, death and destruction; in him, life and peace.

3. I was setting up a new book from Mohr Siebeck in our system. The title had me laughing...

Einleitung in das Neue Testament
Seine Literatur und Theologie im Überblick
by Petr Pokorny and Ulrich Heckel
Mohr Siebeck, 2007
xxix + 795 pages, German
Paper
ISBN: 9783825227982
Your Price: $65.00
www.eisenbrauns.com/wconnect/wc.dll?ebGate~EIS~~I~POKEINLEI

So, what's the joke? Only a German publisher would have the nerve to subtitle an 800 page book "At a Glance" (im Überblick).

4. This is a bit old, but I'm about that far behind in blog reading... The Heresy has a post on Brian McLaren's latest book, CD, and tour...

In Brian McLaren’s Christmas message he starts out by telling people to buy the CD he produced, then he tells everyone to buy his book and give it away. Later on he points out that "Consumerism is the notion that the more we consume the better off we will be. As I explain in the book, it’s the supreme idolatry of our times."

You can also spend $100 to register for "everything must change tour". This tour is part of "this emerging movement of transformation and this growing revolution of hope."

I don’t get it. How can anyone say buy my stuff and give it to your friends and then say consumerism is the supreme idolatry of our times?...

The deception of consumerism runs deep. I see it all over the place as the church drifts towards fee-for-service ministry. Increasingly we have adopted the marketplace as tool to further our objectives somewhat blind to the reality that the marketplace changes us. In this era of ecclesial relativism people buy in to whatever works to bring people in to the building or provide anecdotal success stories.

Scary stuff! Read the whole thing, and don't be too hard on McLaren until after you've examined your own heart and motives; total depravity is quite all-encompassing—I guess that is why it is called total depravity and not partial depravity, eh?
</idle musing>

OK, that was four, not just a couple. But, you could think of it as a Christmas gift, 4 for the price of 2 :)

Mysticism...

Kevin Edgecomb has a nice quote from The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys over on Biblicalia. Here is an excerpt:

...what we find in the Fathers undermines any tendency toward seeing mysticism as an elite, individualist quest for ‘peak’ experiences; rather for them the ‘mystical life’ is the ‘life with Christ hid in God’ of Colossians 3:3, a life which is ecclesial, that is lived in the Body of Christ, which is nourished liturgically, and which is certainly a matter of experience, though not of extraordinary ‘experiences’.

<idle musing>
I like that. It speaks of God's abundant grace, poured out on all who want it. The only qualification is faith, which God gives, if we allow him to. And it is lived out in community, not in the individualistic—I would even say narcissistic—way that so much of evangelical christianity seems to prefer.
</idle musing>

Music

We finally got to unpacking our music. The box of CDs was in the room with my boxes of books, and finally got moved to the living room this weekend and unpacked Sunday night. At the same time, I found my headphones. I had missed being able to workout with music going in the background. Since I workout in the early hours of the morning before coming in to work and I don't want to wake up Debbie, I use headphones. Well, no headphones—and no CDs—equals no music.

<rabbit trail alert>
I am a fan of many different kinds of music, from Classical to contemporary stuff. About the only things I don't enjoy are opera and gangsta rap—the latter more because of the content than anything else. Opera just has never grabbed me, which is strange since my favorite piece of music of all time is Handel's Messiah which is oratorio, a close cousin of opera.

Anyway, I have always enjoyed what is now called "Jesus Music," the music of the early 1970's Jesus Movement, and one of my favorite groups was the Messianic group Lamb. The group was just 2 people, Rick "Levi" Coghill and Joel Chernoff. They put out several records and then kind of disappeared in the late 1980's. Last year I was looking for a CD of the early Lamb stuff and ran across a CD that was done by Joel Chernoff in the late 90's entitled The Restoration of Israel and purchased it. It has become one of my favorite CDs.
<end rabbit trail>

So, Monday morning I grabbed the Chernoff CD and put it in the CD player and the second song grabbed my heart: Lay your hands on me. The song is a cry from Joel's heart for a closer walk with Jesus. I wish I could find the words on the Internet, so I wouldn't have to excerpt it...

Abba, Father, lay your hands on me.
Holy Spirit, set this captive free
From the chains that are holding me.
Lay your hands on me.
Precious Father, how my spirit prays,
More to yield to your love and grace
More to bow down before your face
Lay your hands on me

All that I need is to touch
The hem of your garment, I pray.
All that I need is your touch
To raise up my life from the dead.
Lay your hands on me...

It goes on for another 3 minutes, but I don't have the patience to transcribe it all.

I wish I could give you an idea of how this song ministered to me Monday morning. Of late I have been so concentrated on getting stuff done on the house and at work that the intimacy of God has been slipping away. It's not like I have lost touch with God, but it is more that I needed a fresh touch, a fresh awareness of how near he is. This song distilled the essence of what I was feeling and became my prayer.

Hopefully it was answered in a way that is evident to others...

Plumbing again

OK. This will be the last plumbing post, I hope! I don't want this blog to become another installment of This Old House :)

So, this weekend I redid the drain from the kitchen sink. If you remember, it was serving as a vent for the sump pump, resulting in sewer gas smell in the kitchen. My project was to cut the kitchen drain off at the base of the basement ceiling and run it over to the main drain about 8 feet away.

No problem, you just cut the PVC drain pipe off and cement a new piece on. Wham, bang, a few elbows and done, right? Almost. I had to cut into the main 3 inch drain from the upstairs bathroom, cutting a big chunk of it out so the reducing "T" could fit in. In order to make the "T" fit, I had to push the whole drain pipe over about 3 inches while slipping the "T" in. It actually wasn't so bad, but I forgot that when you cut into a drain pipe two things happen...1. all the water that didn't go all the way down will leak all over you and the floor! and 2. Sewer gas will start invading the house. Can you tell I'm not a plumber?

At least I remembered to have a rag with me and I was able to stop the flow of water long enough to grab a bucket and put it under the pipe while it drained. Once the bucket was catching the water, I used the rag to plug up the septic tank end of the pipe. In the end, the whole project took about an hour and a quarter. Of course, while this was going on, you couldn't use the water, since I didn't want water all over the floor :)

I have to say, the plumbing does look very good now. Here are two pictures of the new piping. I didn't get pictures of the drain. Now, on to the electrical mess...wires hanging, electrical boxes dangling, taped wires feeding the water pump...Isn't owning a house fun?


This is the spot that used to have about 5 different pipes sticking willy-nilly all over. The holes in the wall are where the washing machine feeds went through the walls.

This is the feed for the hot water heat boiler. It used to be a piece of copper piping that sort of arched above the door, waiting to booby-trap you as you walked through

Kitten

OK, for all you adoring fans of kittens out there. I got Debbie to corral the kitten, alias Fuzzy Motor, FM for short, so that I could get some pictures. It was dark outside, and there is no power in the barn, so we took the pictures in the garage. It has almost doubled in size since we found it.


The kitten climbed on my shoulder for this picture.


Playing in the wagon

"Q"

I periodically get a shipment of new Paternoster titles from England. Some of them contain some real jewels. This one is from The Three Gospels, page 91:

I think it may be stated without exaggeration that Q is the most successful fallacy in the history of scholarship. It owes its success to the fact that it has acquired a name – the letter, ‘Q’ – which can be, and has been, reinterpreted every time the current theory encounters a problem. So ‘Q’ has a wide variety of meanings, any one of which can be called upon when required. It has thus the nature of a hydra, each of whose heads has to be cut off before it will die.

This same shipment contained a book titled Eschatology and Pain in St. Gregory the Great. Isn't that an intriguing title?

Much Grace

I was reading in the TNIV this morning in Acts 4. The TNIV uses a different punctuation in verses 33-34 than most translations. Here is how it reads:

And God's grace was so powerfully at work in them all that there were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need.

I like that; it speaks to the social and community nature of the church as God intended it to be. We've lost a good deal of that in the U.S. with our over-emphasis on personal salvation—but how can one be saved personally and not allow it to impact their social and relational life?

More plumbing...

I forgot that today was Thursday. On Thursdays I come in before the sun comes up to read either Greek or Hebrew, consequently it was still dark and no photos. But, the snow is still beautiful and everything is white—at least for a while.

Well, over the last few days I took care of the laundry drain problem. It has been draining into the floor drain, and then running into the sump which empties into the septic (I know, but that isn't going to change!), but the lint from the washer was clogging up the drain and causing it to back up onto the floor. Result: wet basement floor :( So, I took it upon myself to run the line directly to the sump. The only problem was the cement dividing wall between the washer and the sump. My tools were a small masonry bit, chisel, and hammer.

Three hours later, I was about 1/3 done. Time for a bigger bit, but the stores were closed. So, the next day, I bought a 5/8 inch masonry bit. Armed with the bigger bit, I managed to get through the wall and expand the hole to 1.5 inches in about an hour. Of course, I burned out both batteries in the process—no problem, that's why I have a fast charger.

The next day, I put in the pipes and hooked everything up. Voila! No more drainage problems. But, last night a new problem reared its head; whoever did the plumbing had hooked the kitchen sink into the same pipe going to the septic as the sump. Result: the kitchen drain became the vent for the sump. Translation for those of you who don't know about venting: Sewer gas in the kitchen. Not acceptable!

So I now have a new plumbing project for this weekend...stay tuned :(

I now know more about plumbing than I ever wanted to and I have now run more drainlines and hot and cold water feeds than I ever dreamed possible. But, you know what? I no longer hate plumbing! I find that I actually am looking forward to this weekend's project. Now that is the grace of God!



Tools of the trade. The small bit is what I started with, but the big one is what did the real work.


Ready for the pipe!

Snow!

Yes! It finally snowed. OK, it is only December 5, so I guess that isn't so late :)

It started snowing last night around 7:30 with a few flakes, but by 9:00 it was really snowing. We went out for a walk around 11:00—how can you stay in when it is so beautiful? We walked for about an hour and didn't see a single car. It was beautiful with the snow falling in big crystals. Debbie's hair looked like she was wearing a crown with all the snow on it. There must have been a good 4 inches on the ground by the time we got back.

We saw deer tracks across the road in several places. Because it had rained recently, the creek was making all kinds of noise. The pine trees were dipping their branches from the weight of the snow on the boughs. In the distance, you could hear the train as it blew its horn at the crossings; otherwise it was silent.

This morning, all our tracks were covered and it was still flurrying a bit. It was hard to come in to work—not because of the roads, which were just slippery, but because I would rather be out snowshoeing or skiing in it :)

When I got to work, there was significantly less snow, probably only about 3 inches. I would say we had about 6 inches at home. Strange how 5 miles can make that big a difference.

I need to remember to take the camera home tonight and get some pictures of the creek and the yard. With all the snow, it looks like a winter wonderland. I hope it doesn't melt anytime soon!

Koine Greek Reader

At AAR/SBL this year, Bobby from Hendrickson gave me two books:
A Patristic Greek Reader and Philippians. Nice looking books (thanks, Bobby), but I didn't even get a chance to look through them before Matt (Grace Seminary Greek prof) borrowed them to look over. He promised to return them this week, but he left me with Koine Greek Reader from Kregel—which I have to return to him this week. Anyway, I spent a bit of time over the weekend looking through it, in between house projects. Here are some thoughts...

I like the general layout, nice font size, good organization. His recommendations for reading the Greek through just to hear it, then a second time using the vocabulary notes, then a third time with BDAG are good. Finally, go through it a fourth time for grammatical stuff. Now, if he can get students to do that... His notes and questions are good, too.

The book is separated into two sections, Part 1 is NT, Part 2 is Septuagint and Church Fathers, with extensive lexical notes and parsing of verbs in part 2. The choice of readings in both sections is a good cross section of Greek, some more difficult than others, which is what you want in a reader.

What did strike me was that he says this textbook is adequate for an entire year. Now, I haven't taught second year Greek for quite a while, but there is no way that it should take that long to get through this book. I would have pegged it as a semester long course. Am I that out of touch with the real world?

Also, is a reader for the NT necessary? Wouldn't it be better just to take the NA 27 or UBS text and run with it and supplement it with grammatical and lexical notes? I liked part 2, and his notes on using BDAG, but I really wonder about the necessity of putting all those NT passages in a reader. Once I get A Patristic Greek Reader back from Matt, I'll look through it. Perhaps that is closer to what I am talking about.

Christmas quiz

Rick over at This Lamp has his Christmas quiz up again this year. But, be careful, the program is sneakily changing your answers! Rick promises to get it fixed, but meanwhile caveat emptor.

Eisenbrauns December sale

For the month of December, take 20% off the already-low prices on Eisenbrauns wide selection of used books. The sale price will not appear when you check out, but the amount will be adjusted before your credit card is billed.

Since there are well over 2000 used titles in stock, there isn't a good way to represent all of them. Eisenbrauns offers several methods to find the books you're looking for:

* The Used Books feature page
* Search for "USED" under Item ID (without the quotes)
* Search for titles and topics you are interested in; used books will appear in your searches along with new titles.
* Download a complete listing in either text (.txt) or spreadsheet (.xls) format from out home page (updated hourly).

Have fun!

Idle Musings on moving

<idle musing>
We moved three weeks ago on Saturday. Here are some idle musings on what has been happening since. . .

• Moving on a Saturday and Sunday and then leaving for a week the following Thursday is not the wisest thing in the world! But, AAR/SBL didn’t think my moving was important enough to cause a rescheduling—imagine that, the world doesn’t revolve around me.

• Plumbing is a pain. Enough said.

• Cats don’t like people who make loud noises. I have been trying to get a picture of the kitten, but it is afraid of me and hides. I suppose it doesn’t help that I am the one who always makes the loud noises by moving stuff around.

• Dial-up can be excruciatingly slow. Dial-up was slow at the other place, but at least it was in the 48000 range. Here the fastest I have ever gotten in 26,400. Ouch!

• Friends are wonderful, especially when they have lots of tools you can borrow : )

• Plumbing is a real pain, or did I say that already?

• Always make extra keys and make sure that you don’t give the extra to someone who is 300 miles away when you need it!

• Moving causes major schedule interruptions. I haven’t been able to read, except at lunch, for about 3 weeks now. I am feeling withdrawal pains. And my blog reading is hopelessly behind—between 300-400 posts. Maybe over Christmas...

• God is abundantly faithful—even in plumbing problems.

• I need to remember/learn how long it takes to get to places from here. I was late to a breakfast meeting with Jim on Friday because I forgot about the extra time—made worse by a 3 mile detour between here and there.

• Maybe this week the kitten will let me take its picture
</idle musing>

Conferences

A few customers have expressed surprise at how much it costs a bookseller to attend a conference. Apparently they had assumed that their admission fee paid most of the expenses. Once I explained a bit of what it involved and asked if they felt it would be worthwhile to put up on the blog, they said definitely. So, here goes :) Everything I list below is a matter of public record, unless I specifically say otherwise. You can find out the information usually by clicking the link that says Exhibitors—for example: For SBL, go to www.sbl-site.org and click on Meetings. On the Meetings page, there is a link called Exhibitor and Advertiser. This link takes you to another set of links that takes you to the PDF of the actual information. Convoluted? Yep.

Anyway...For SBL, a 10 x 10 booth costs $1500, corners are $150.00 extra—and don't forget that premium booths are an extra $600.00. Just to put that in perspective, Eisenbrauns had 8 booths this year, with 4 corner booths. While that is a significant chunk of change, there are other expenses that add up very quickly. In order to run a booth, you need electricity ($275.00), phone line ($245, plus a surcharge for each call. The phone line is needed for credit card purchases.), tables ($40-$75.00 each, depending on size), chairs ($40-$60 each, depending on type), carpeting ($121.00 per 10 ft booth, for the basic unpadded carpet. Premium is about twice that). There are other options that we don't use, but others do, such as back drapes (we bring our own), table risers, draping (we bring our own), etc.

That was just the furnishings. We are also charged a significant chunk of change for freight handling. I'm not talking about the cost of shipping the freight from Indiana to the convention, but the charge of moving it from a warehouse to the convention center. This charge varies depending on the city and unions, but for San Diego it was $62.65 per 100 pounds, which is about normal. Books are heavy, in case you hadn't noticed :) We shipped about 4000 pounds of books this year. Ironically, it costs more to move the freight across town than from Indiana to the convention city!

OK. I think we have covered most of the booth costs. Now add in the advertisements in the program books (about $750 for each one), any special fliers you make up (cost varies), the order forms, and catalogs, etc. Then there are the personnel. You will probably have to fly everyone in, and house them, and feed them. Oh, and don't forget the preparation time. It takes at least a week to pick and price all the books. Real costs, but hard to get an exact figure on. Then whatever didn't sell has to be unpacked and unpriced and reshelved back at the warehouse.

Does this sound like I am complaining? I'm not. I thoroughly enjoy conferences, even though they are tiring. I enjoy meeting customers and discussing with them what they are reading, researching, and teaching.

Is the cost worth it? Yes; definitely. That's why we keep on doing it. But, don't think that your $135.00 SBL admission fee is paying for the conference; it is the exhibitors who bear the brunt of it. So, next year you owe me lunch—just kidding.

Pictures

I took the camera home yesterday to get the oft-requested picture of the kitten. Although, I must admit I was somewhat disappointed that no one asked for a picture of the plumbing, but I guess kittens are more photogenic than plumbing.

So, this morning, I get out the camera and turn it on. Blank screen. The light is on, but nothing shows up. Well, I think, I'll try taking it anyway; it's just a point and shoot digital. Light goes out, lens stays out, dead. Totally dead. The batteries are gone. So, no pictures. Sorry. But, I replaced the batteries today and will try again. Maybe tomorrow?

Oh, and another plumbing note: The drain on the washing machine isn't working right...

Plumbing

Of all the jobs in owning a house, the one I always liked the least was plumbing. Now that we own again, that feeling has been compounded. This house has two bathrooms, one upstairs and one downstairs, so that means twice as many chances for plumbing to go wrong—and sure enough, it did.

When we moved in, both tub faucets leaked, the hot water supply line leaked on the downstairs faucet, as did the cold water handle. No problem, usually! Just replace the cartridges in the faucets and put on a new supply line. Right! The upstairs tub faucet was so corroded that in removing the cartridge cover, the copper supply lines bent and cracked. Ouch—time for a new faucet. Well, that would be easy if the access door had been intelligently placed, which it wasn't. I was working at a 90 degree angle with CPVC piping, and the old faucet had to be chiseled out, since they didn't use the correct spacer on the back, but put fiberglass resin around it in the front to build it up. I got it all done in a day and it works well. Since we aren't using the downstairs tub, I just capped it for now.

The downstairs faucet was another story. The supply line was so corroded that I had to take the sink off the wall in order to get enough torque on it. But, it finally came off and I was able to replace it. The cold was a different story. It, too, was heavily corroded. So heavily corroded that I ended up having to just replace the whole fixture :( But, hey, that's part of owning, right?

So, both bathrooms are fixed and working. Now for hooking up the washer...R-i-g-h-t! I don't know who plumbed the basement, but it wasn't a plumber! The supply line to the hot water heat boiler was a copper line that just kind of curled over the doorway about 2-3 feet away from the wall, extending into the doorway on the left side about a foot with an icemaker tube coming off of that. Of course, the tubing was just floating freely in the air at about the correct height to strangle the unsuspecting person. On the other side, there was a plastic line that came off the main feed from the water softener and careened up into the floor joists before connecting to the kitchen supply line. Next to that was a line that fed everything else in the house, except the washer. The washer supply consisted of 2 faucets, one on each side of the basement dividing wall, with an extra 3 inches of pipe so that it extended into the other room. This was stabilized, if you can call it that, by winding a coat hanger around it and the hot water supply.

The hot water supply was in the form of copper tubing that snaked around the basement ceiling just below the floor joists for about 10 feet. There was no strapping on any of it. And, all four of the washer faucets leaked, a lot. Weekend project: clean up the plumbing in the basement, but AAR/SBL intervened first.

Afer AAR/SBL, both Ryan (our son) and Joel (our son-in-law) agreed to help me fix the mess. Now, bear in mind that none of us are plumbers. Joel is a carpenter, Ryan is an IT guy, and I'm a bookseller who has worked as a handyman throughout my varied career :) We put up the replacement lines on Friday, figuring to cut the old lines out and the new ones in on Saturday. We figured it would be about a 1 hour job. Hah! Were we ever wrong! Three hours and two trips to the hardware store later, it was done.

By now, I am sick of plumbing and don't want to even think about it for a while. Guess what? I come back upstairs, and Debbie shows me the cabinet under the kitchen sink. Yep, water, significant amounts, leaking from the drain and the faucet. That will wait until after Joel, Renee and the grandkids leave! Ryan and I will tackle it.

So, Sunday evening we began. We loosened the faucet and put plumbers putty under it. That was easy and stopped the leaking from it; the source of water from it had only been runoff from the sink itself. Now for the drain. Hmmm. No metal washer between the rubber gasket and the washer, which had caused the rubber gasket to come loose and allow the drain to leak. No problem...except that the drain had become so corroded and rusty that it took about 1/2 hour to get it loose. Talk about prayer! I certainly didn't want to have to replace the whole sink! OK, I admit it, I didn't start out praying, but I should have. I thought I knew what I was doing and didn't need God. Talk about a dichotomy! Anyway, Debbie, ever the observant one, said, "Why don't you pray?" Mumble, mumble, grumble, grumble...OK. "Lord, make this drain come loose. Thanks." Real spiritual prayer, right? 45 Seconds later, it came loose! I know, sounds trivial, but our God is in the trivial—and the big.

This is getting long, but we managed to clean everything up nicely, but by then everything was closed, so we had no kitchen sink until last night, when I was able to get the parts and put it back together again.

That only leaves one bathroom fixture and the two toilets that I haven't had to do any plumbing on...Please, Lord, no.

Now do you see why I dislike plumbing?

Kitten update

I had several people ask me at AAR/SBL about the status of the kitten. I am very happy to inform you that the kitten has become very healthy and is no longer just fur and bones. In fact, it tried to climb a tree the other day; quite a change from what it was like when we found it.

Joshua, our grandson, had a good time playing with it over the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday. It still lives in the barn, so when Debbie went out to feed it, Joshua would go along. The first day Joshua was here, Debbie brought it back to the house and we allowed it to be in the kitchen for a few minutes. It enjoyed climbing all over Joel, purring loudly, prompting Joel to name it FM for Fuzzy Motor. I don't know if the name will stick or not...