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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“Luther himself began with victory and ended in defeat, a self-tortured, guilt-ridden, and bloated man. He who had been the hope of the Christian poor had been denounced by them as Herr Luder, Mr. Liar, decoy, law scoundrel, or carrion. Luther could rightfully plead that his was not a theology of social revolution, but he had raised false hopes among the peasants. ‘Sola Sciptura’ was his standard: the word of God alone. This to the people meant not only justification by faith but also the sovereign law of God. To that law they appealed, and Luther denounced God’s law in favor of statist law. . . .
“Calvin also made possible the revival of natural law by his loose views of the law of God. The Puritans for a time saved Calvinism from itself by their emphasis on Biblical law, only to succumb themselves to the intellectual climate of neoplatonism and also the lure of the natural law. The Reformation as a whole moved form victory to defeat, from relevance to irrelevance, from a challenge to the world to a surrender to the world or a meaningless withdrawal from it. Rome, Geneva, Wittenberg, and Canterbury retreated also into an ineffectual pietism. They were all now of the world but not in the world.”[1]
See also:
Why I Am Not (Always) A Calvinist.
Calvin and Usury.
The Myth of Calvinism.
Neopolatonism and Calvinism.
[A message delivered at Christian Reformed Church, Charlotte, MI. Romans 3:1-31. Text used is the Complete Jewish Bible, Trans. David H. Stern, available here.]
Introduction
One of the very great problems in Christianity today is abstractionism. This is the concept that things or ideas are not related. You can take one thing “out of” an accumulation of things, and have some idea of what it might be.
Consider this illustration. You might take the battery out of a watch. Now, without any reference to the watch itself, you have to understand and explain what this thing is you have in your hand.
Quite impossible, you might say. And you are right.
In the case of the watch battery, abstractionism is bad enough, but if you take this idea to the Scriptures and attempt to “abstract” words from their context, you no longer have exegesis but random guesswork.
King John was in turmoil. England was under interdict from the Pope, and he himself had been excommunicated. There were threats to the realm from home and abroad. The new century was not particularly working out for him. By 1213, however, he had been absolved from excommunication, the clergy reinstated to their churches. But now a group of barons was breathing down his neck. They demanded his affirmation that he would continue “to maintain the ancient laws of the realm.” His track record on that score was not encouraging.
It is every Englishman’s heritage that Magna Carta established the rights and freedoms of Englishmen. But Magna Carta became the document that kings would use to destroy its very principles. Three months after the signing of the Great Charter civil war was still evident, over the principles in the Charter. In other words, the Magna Carta was never really implemented in its original form.
The years prior to 1215 were of great disturbance in England. The disturbance was over the extent of the power of the king. And there were nobles to the north of London who favored no increase in the monarch’s powers. Naturally, the king disagreed with this, and was willing to use whatever force was necessary to have his way. The issue was money — taxation.
The barons, however, were united in their views and willingness to do whatever was necessary to limit the king’s powers. They saw any increase as a denial of their freedom.
To understand this background, step back to Alfred the Great and his willingness to apply Old Testament legal requirements as the laws of England. Among these were a strong sense of property ownership, found in Exodus chapters 21-23.
[A message delivered at Christian Reformed Church, Charlotte, MI. Romans 7:1 - 8:8. Text used is the Complete Jewish Bible, Trans. David H. Stern, available here.]
Read Part 1 of this series on Paul and Law from the book of Romans, The Foundation of Western Culture
Introduction
We left our last time with the book of Romans at St. Paul’s statement in chapter 3:31, “Does it follow that we abolish Torah by this trusting? Heaven forbid! On the contrary, we confirm Torah.”
In this letter to the Christians at Rome there were a lot of Jewish believers in the Messiah. Jewish believers in YHVH had also accepted Yeshua (Joshua) – in our anglicized Greek, Jesus – as the Savior of the world.
But . . . there was a lot of confusion. It was confusion over their belief system as they understood it as over against the right understanding of what their Scriptures taught. And you see time and time again, that the New Testament never changes or alters the Old Testament, but it certainly corrects misunderstandings and misinterpretations of the Scriptures.
When William the Conqueror established himself on the throne of England he was left with an expensive exercise. Since he could not count on the allegiance of conquered peoples, it was necessary to maintain his military forces in England. This was not popular, because his troops had burned houses during his coronation ceremony and earned an even greater hatred by the English.
This only serves to illustrate that when you desire to rule, you can expect it is necessary to find some way to enforce that rule upon an unwilling group of people.
At least since 1688, it is evident that Parliament, not the king rules. Since Americans have broken the link between the English Parliament and themselves, Congress rules. Any talk about liberty and freedom needs to be seen in that context: freedom circumscribed by whatever Congress happens to dictate.
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