Biblical Landmarks

Archive for January, 2010

If you leave out an important ingredient, your best cooking efforts are doomed.

This article was written while I was in Nova Scotia and had just returned from having supper with a local family.

This part of the world, Clare County, has several municipalities that are Old French culture and language. The schools in these municipalities hold their classes in the old Acadian language, while the municipalities either side are English. In the seventeenth century, the French living in the valley of Nova Scotia were forcibly relocated by the British. Some found their way to the western shores of Nova Scotia while others were settled in Louisiana. The Cajuns and the Acadians are linked culturally — and share an understandable attitude towards the British. In Nova Scotia, the Acadians have been promised an apology from the monarch of England, but it is yet to arrive.

This caused me to reflect on the turmoil of Europe at the time of their dislocation. The Acadians, French in origin, tried to remain neutral in the struggles between Britain and France. They were not permitted to do this. Read the rest of this entry »

If you only read ONE history book in your lifetime, read this one.

You cannot understand how far we’ve come away from Christian culture until you realize what was necessary to get our non-Christian culture. And this little book helps explain the necessary steps to abolish freedom and Christian culture.

Read it!

Living with a Reformed Baptist family, as I have been doing, has given me the chance to exercise some discussion on the topic of baptism. In that discussion it has become increasingly clear to me why Reformed Theology in general and Christian Reconstruction in particular are not really winning the intellectual war. They certainly win some of the skirmishes, but the war itself is far from over. And it will remain so until the unassailable Word of God is brought to bear on the enemy. Here’s the problem.

In my discussions with my host it was evident that he relied completely on a New Testament theology. No matter how many times I tried to get the discussion going from the Old Testament, my host would say words like, “That’s fine, but the New Testament says . . .” And off he would go quoting the New Testament.

As I thought about this, I realized something that had not been so clear before. It was the willingness of my host to hold not just to the Bible in general, but to the idea in particular that irrespective of what might be taught in the Old Testament, the New Testament now offered a “correction” to the older Testament.

Who is the wise man?

As a young boy in a small Baptist church in rural Australia, I was taught to sing:

The wise man built his house upon the rock,
The wise man built his house upon the rock,
The wise man built his house upon the rock,
And the rains came tumbling down.
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No, this is not a math lesson!

In my essay “Unequal Testaments” I explored the question of how and where does the New Testament get its authority. Here’s something else to add to those comments.

Consider the teaching of the Old Testament itself in one of its key passages, Deut. 4:2. “You shall not add to the word which I command you, nor take from it, that you may keep the commandments of the LORD your God which I command you.” Thus spoke Moses.

It is an interesting fact, according to McDonald, that “All Scriptures after the Torah received their authority from the Torah and were always viewed in relation to it” (Lee McDonald, The Biblical Canon, p. 176). Now the Torah was the Law of God as found in the first five books of the Bible. And here we see a consistent pattern of scholarship:
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IN one of the western counties, the writer of this paper was recently present at an evening Evangelical prayer-meeting. The congregation were partly church-goers, partly dissenters of various denominations,
united for the time by the still active revivalist excitement. Some were highly educated men and women farmers, tradesmen, servants, sailors, and fishermen made up the rest: all were representative specimens of
Evangelical Christians, passionate doctrinalists, convinced that they, and only they, possessed the ‘Open Sesame’ of heaven, but doing credit to their faith by inoffensive, if not useful, lives. One of them, who took a leading part in the proceedings, was a person of large fortune, who was devoting his money, time, and talents to what he called the truth. Another was well known through two counties as a hard-headed, shrewd, effective man of business; a stern, but on the whole, and as times went, a beneficent despot over many thousands of unmanageable people.

The services consisted of a series of addresses from different speakers, interchanged with extempore prayers, directed rather to the audience than to the Deity. At intervals, the congregation sung hymns, and sung them particularly well. The teaching was of the ordinary kind expressed only with more than usual distinctness.

Destroyed From Within — Not Without

The other night I was speaking with a friend, John, who’s a member of this list. The topic: the canon.

I keep asking the question: what is the authority that determines the canon? The question really needs to be split in two: What is the authority that determined the Old Testament canon? What is the authority that decide these 27 books were the New Testament canon?
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ELIMINATE MASCULINITY IN THE CHURCH

I’ve a confession to make. If you’re like me, you go to church, sing some hymns or spiritual songs, listen to a sermon, listen to someone else pray (except when you’re in a church that allows congregational participation) then go home and forget the experience.

Take this morning for example. The song leader extols the virtues of “He loves me” repeated many times. Now you could be forgiven for making a mistake on the meaning of these words Read the rest of this entry »

STEP TWO: FEMINIZE THE CULTURE WITH MUSIC

In the first part of this discussion topic, I highlighted the feminization of culture with hymns. Here, I want to look at music.

If your life is similar to mine, then we’ve both spent an awful amount of time trying to make up for a bad education. Public schooling was my background. It was not good. Here’s why. Being hostile to Christianity, public school secular education left out Read the rest of this entry »

Step 3: USE MUSIC FOR THE MORAL REVOLUTION

In this series on the feminization of culture, I’ve wanted to get you thinking about communication. In particular, communication with music.

First, I highlighted how hymns were used to help eliminate a rigorous intellectualism in the church and replace it with a more emotional environment.

Second, I drew your attention to how music is an important ingredient in communication, and how we can contradict ourselves by having the wrong music with the right words.
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