Meander - Volume 13, Issue 6

We are justified through faith, which is not the same thing as believing in justification by faith. There are those who believe in justification through faith who are not justified, and there are those who cannot formulate the doctrine properly who are. Of course those who muddle this central doctrine ought not to be teachers, but we may all be grateful that muddledness which disqualifies from ministry does not necessarily exclude one from salvation. After all, we are not saved by our own works. To say that checking off the right doctrine is the passport to heaven is actually a form of works-righteousness—even if the doctrine checked off is the doctrine that we shouldn't trust in our ability to check off doctrines.

God is our Savior. Christ is our Lord and Savior. It is He that has remade us, and not we ourselves.

I mentioned Bella Fleck and the Flecktones a while back. Another album of theirs worth getting is Live Art. One of the songs with lyrics has some real leftist silliness in it, but the music is quite good. Most of it is instrumental, and their bassist is just superb.

For those who have an interest in guitar chords, check out gravityboy.com. Really impressive.

In the first place, at the arche, in the place of preeminence, at the place where all things cohere, was the Word. The Word was with God, and the Word was God. That is, the Word is to be identified with God completely, and, at the same time, the Word is distinct from God in the sense that we are able to say He is "with" God. The Son is God, but the Son is not the Father.

Between God the Speaker and God the Spoken there is no degradation of meaning. The Word does not obscure meaning, but rather reveals it. This is a revelation of love. The connection between God the Speaker and God the Spoken is not a matter of mere data transfer. The Father and Son love one another with an everlasting love. This love is Himself a Person, the Holy Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit of the Word.

Thus, the Father speaks the Word in love, and the Word spoken reveals the Father in love. This is the unifying Spirit of love, the Spirit who is the reason why there is no degradation of meaning. How could there be? The divine hermeneutic is therefore the Holy Spirit. He searches the deep things of God. The ultimate hermeneutic is therefore a divine Person.

I recently saw the movie Shrek, which provides us with yet another example of grotesque metaphor-morphing. Basic mytho-poeic images of Western civilization are consistently under assault in our day. These images were inherited by us from the ancient world, and were guided and directed by scriptural boundaries. But a concerted effort is underway to reverse those images so that princes and princesses are typically hypocritical and bad, ogres are misunderstood and good, dragons are good, and so on.

The astonishing thing is that something so blatant can be missed by Christian parents—after all, the animation was clever, our little Christian kids won't get the flatulence humor, and so on. But the apostates know what they are doing. The modern church today hasn't a clue.

We need to run periodic worldview tests on ourselves, looking primarily for the residuum of Gnosticism. Many times we will find more than just residue. Call this process diagnostics. We have bodies. God likes matter. Our bodies are not disposable casings for cerebral events. But ask a typical Reformed church to have the congregation raise their hands during the Gloria Patri and see what happens.

Both fathers and mothers are tempted to be hard on their children, and can be unkind to them in various ways. Of course this is frequently provoked by the children, but whatever the excuses, it is never excusable. Though both father and mother can be tempted in this way, fathers, far more than mothers, are tempted to "solve" the problem by letting it "blow over." In other words, the harsh things are said, an unkind heart is displayed to all, but then the father, because of male pride, tries to smooth things over by "forgetting about it." But a man calming down is not the same thing as a man repenting. The seeking of forgiveness, the restitution, must be as public as the sin was. Only this addresses the central problem. And incidentally, men with a temper problem (that they have tried for years to control) may find out that several true instances of seeking full forgiveness does more to address the problem than countless resolutions to try to be better.

So Then