Am I an evangelical?
September 7, 2006
I think I’m having an identity crisis. Within Christian ranks, where everybody seems to carry a label of some sort, am I an evangelical, a Calvinist, a progressive, a classical Christian, an orthodox Christian, a fundamentalist, a modernist, or “none of the above?” I suspect that the people I hang around with at church have formed their own ideas about which niche I belong in, and I’m also pretty sure that many of these perceptions would come as a shock to me.
Since “evangelical” seems to be the label du jour these days, I picked up a little book called Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism by George Marsden. He begins his book by saying, “A fundamentalist is an evangelical who is angry about something.” Hmmm. I don’t usually feel angry, but maybe if I read on I will learn something.
That seems simple and fairly accurate. Jerry Falwell has even adopted it as a quick definition of fundamentalism that reporters are likely to quote. A more precise statement of the same point is that an American fundamentalist is an evangelical who is militant in opposition to liberal theology in the churches or to changes in cultural values or mores, such as those associated with “secular humanism.” In either the long or the short definitions, fundamentalists are a subtype of evangelicals and militancy is crucial to their outlook. Fundamentalists are not just religious conservatives, the are conservatives who are willing to take a stand and to fight.
Well, that’s a starting point at least. It would be clearer if we knew exactly what an evangelical is.
To provide a little historical perspective, it turns out that American protestants of the Civil War and Reconstruction period believed that a Christian millenium was not far away. This was an age of revivals that seemed capable of bringing the majority of the citizenry to Christ. There were campaigns against drinking, sabbath-breaking, prostitution, and the Roman Catholic church. Only slavery seemed an obstacle to America’s becoming a righteous Christian nation.
What actually happened was the “Gilded Age” of evangelicalism.
The era marked by the assassination of two presidents and the impeachment of another, a stolen election, and a reign of rampant political and business corruption and greed, was well named by Mark Twain. A veneer of evangelical Sunday-school piety covered almost everything in the culture, but no longer did the rhetoric of idealism and virtue seem to touch the core of the materialism of the political and business interests. It was a dime store millenium.
Reaction set in and we entered the era of the crusades (1890-1917). Fundamentalism was the disappointed reaction of Bible-believers after World War I failed to usher in universal peace, and it came to be identified with literal Bible belief and a rejection of the modern culture. So we have a broad evangelical movement that includes angry fundamentalism at its conservative end and a Billy Graham style “peace with God” at the other. It’s interesting that denominations are not an important part of the mix.
Among evangelicals there is a general disregard for the institutional church. Marsden observes that, “Little seems to hold it together other than common traditions, a central one of which is the denial of the authority of traditions.”
I have come to the conclusion that I no longer strongly identify with the mainline (oldline) Presbyterian Church, it’s rich evangelical heritage in America notwithstanding. I am fairly comfortable with what I understand of the evangelical movement, more comfortable with the fundamentalist end of the evangelical continuum, which includes Reformed (Calvinist) theology.
Dave, who could have saved a lot of time by just saying “yes.”
Sorry, you can’t have the internet… you’re over 70
September 4, 2006
It would be worth the cost of a trip to England just for the fun of trying to “have the Internet.” It wouldn’t offend me at all to be refused service. I would love to talk to that young clerk. What a hoot it would be! I’d come away with enough material for a year of blog posts.
Sorry, you can’t have the internet… you’re over 70 | the Daily Mail
The 75-year-old would only be allowed to sign the forms for the Carphone Warehouse’s TalkTalk phone and broadband package if she was accompanied by a younger member of her family who could explain the small print to her.
Mrs Greening-Jackson, who sits on the board of several charities, said: “I was absolutely furious. The young man said, ‘Sorry, you’re over 70. It’s company policy. We don’t sign anyone up who is over 70.’
“Later a young lady said company policy is that anyone over 70 might not understand the contract. She said, ‘If you would be prepared to go to the shop in town and take a younger member of your family we might give you a contract.’
Dave, admitting that there are days that I wonder about me and the Net.
Philippians 2:12-18
September 3, 2006
Lights in the World
2:12 So then, my dear friends, just as you have always obeyed, not only in my presence but even more in my absence, continue working out your salvation with awe and reverence, 2:13 for the one bringing forth in you both the desire and the effort–for the sake of his good pleasure–is God. 2:14 Do everything without grumbling or arguing, 2:15 so that you may be blameless and pure, children of God without blemish though you live in a crooked and perverse society, in which you shine as lights in the world 2:16 by holding on to the word of life so that on the day of Christ I will have a reason to boast that I did not run in vain nor labor in vain. 2:17 But even if I am being poured out like a drink-offering on the sacrifice and service of your faith, I have joy and rejoice together with all of you. 2:18 And in the same way, you also should be glad and rejoice together with me.
Somehow ‘fear and trembling’ sounds so much better than ‘awe and reverence,’ although the meaning is the same. Many of us memorized from the KJV, and the phrases tend to stick, even if the context fades. For any serious Christian, the hope of being transparent ‘children of God without blemish’ in a ‘crooked and perverse world,’ is extremely motivating. Paul holds this ideal up to them, even though he is ‘pouring his life out’ for their faith, in the hope that they can rejoice together. -sdg-
America’s longest war
September 2, 2006
Words fail me on this one, so I’ll just commend the article to your reading.
September 11th 2001 | America’s longest war | Economist.com
ON THE morning of September 12th 2001, Americans woke up to a changed country. They had seen the twin towers of the World Trade Centre reduced to rubble, the Pentagon aflame and a field in Pennsylvania transformed into a graveyard. Almost 3,000 people had been killed and twice as many injured, in the bloodiest day on American soil since the battle of Antietam in 1862. They had seen their president—the most powerful man in the world—flitting from pillar to post. And they had seen the face of a new enemy. Before September 11th few people even in the administration had heard of al-Qaeda. After that day there was no getting away from the images of Osama bin Laden and his agent, Mohammed Atta.
Dave, still too close to the event to quite know what he thinks about it.
The non-denial of the non-self
September 2, 2006
Ooooh, I just love this one. It’s a very welcome diversion for a lazy Saturday morning. Its subtitle is “How philosophy can help create secure databases,” but don’t let that worry you
Cryptography | The non-denial of the non-self | Economist.com
N THE 1940s a philosopher called Carl Hempel showed that by manipulating the logical statement “all ravens are black”, you could derive the equivalent “all non-black objects are non-ravens”. Such topsy-turvy transformations might seem reason enough to keep philosophers locked up safely on university campuses, where they cannot do too much damage.
Yes indeed. Now, the following is for you, Linda, to explain.
What interested Dr Esponda was how the immune system represents information. Here, “everything” is the set of possible biological molecules, notably proteins. The immune system is interesting, because it protects its owner from pathogens without needing to know what a pathogen will look like. Instead, it relies on a negative database to tell it what to destroy. It learns early on which biological molecules are “self”, in the sense that they are routine parts of the body it is protecting. Whenever it meets one that is “not self” and thus likely to be part of a pathogen, it destroys it. In Hempel’s terms, this can be expressed as “all non-good agents [pathogens] are non-self”.
Which leads the author to this thought:
A database of names, addresses and Social Security numbers (a common form of identification in America) might require only 200 characters to contain all possible combinations. That would limit the total number of character combinations. A positive database containing all the data in question would be a small subset of those combinations. The negative counterpart of this database would be much larger and contain all possible names and addresses that were not in the positive database plus a lot of gibberish. But it would not be infinite. By looking at the negative database, it would be possible to deduce what was in the positive database it complemented.
OK, Larry, it’s your turn. Is this something we should lose sleep over?
Dad, waiting patiently on the sidelines for illumination with Laura and Leslie.
