Part 1 in a series.

So what is up with the NPP? A few years ago a man named EP Saunders wrote a book about Second Temple Judaism. That kind of kicked off the whole thing and got a bunch of other books rolling. James DG Dunn wrote on the same kind of thing as well as NT Wright. Wright is the one who seems to have more of a popular appeal.

Anyway, what this has to do with anything is that Dunn says that the Reformers got it wrong. Jews at the time of Paul did not believe in a form legalism, the Reformers read the Roman Catholicism of their time into Paul and formulated a doctrine of justification based on a misunderstanding. Second Temple Judaism actually believe in what he termed ‘covenantal nomism’, that is you are made a member of the covenant by grace and you remain in the covenant by obeying the covenant’s laws. Christ then justifies the community so if you are part of the community, you’re justified.

What this plays out like is that there is no forensic justification in the classical Reformed sense. We are saved by grace and made part of the covenant community and therefore justified but then your works count. If you don’t have good works, you’ve violated the covenant and you’re out.

In some sense then, our works justify us. You can see where this would clash with the Reformed world view so how is it that NPP wound up in the Reformed tradition? Well, Wright and the others don’t take the Reformed tradition on directly, they reinterpret the significant passages in light of a different historical setting. Paul then was not fighting legalism, he was arguing Christology and against strict national identity by the Jews. Gentiles could be part of the New Covenant community as well.

But if they’re right, then how can we argue with them? Hadn’t we just adjust our reading and Reform the Reformation? Well, it isn’t that simple. D. A. Carson edited a massive book titled Variegated Nomism in which various scholars take on the issue. What they uncover is that indeed Second Temple Judaism included Covenantal Nomism. But is also included many other conceptions of the covenant as well. That throws a wrench into Dunn’s conception because it proves again that Paul may well have been addressing legalism. That means that the Reformers may well have been right and that means that Dunn and others may well be wrong.

This isn’t to say that these men are evil or deceivers. They have done their research and they remain convinced that they are correct. From all accounts NT Wright is a really lovable guy.

So why is this sad? Because some folks on both sides of the debate get ugly about it. It is also sad because the glorious Protestant doctrine of sola fide is eroded. Finally, I find it sad because in the Federal Vision, it leads to some practices I disagree with. Since Jesus justified the community and, according to Covenantal Theology children of believers are full members of that community… Well, you can see where that goes.

This was a very general summary and I fully admit that I didn’t give it a full nor really a fair treatment. I’ve simplified and generalized so don’t take this as a full definition and understanding. If you’re interested, read the authors I’ve cited and see what they have to say.

In another context I came across the part of the Covenant Theology that saddens me. I didn’t realize that it unsettled me till I saw it all lumped together:

• New Perspectiveon Paul
• Auburn Ave Theology/Federal Vision
• Paedocommunion
• Theonomy
• Extensive use of the Regulative Principle of Worship (mainly Psalms only in worship and no musical instruments)

These things are logical extensions of the presuppositions of Covenant Theology but they strike me as extensions that are not submitted to the regulation of Scripture but instead are allowed to regulate the interpretation of Scripture. I love Covenant Theology and hate to see it misapplied like this. Perhaps I will blog on my thoughts on each one of these in the future.

ADDED: A friend expressed to me some reservation at my lumping NPP in with Covenant Theology. I considered rewording this but I think I’ll let it stand. There are Reformed folks who would claim to be Covenant Theologians who hold to the Federal Vision and the New Perspective. Just to be clear though, I do not believe that Covenant Theology necessarily leads to these things, simply that these things exist in the broad circle of Covenant Theology.

ALSO ADDED: I fully plan on doing a follow up post on the Happy Part where I sing the praises of the things I love in the Reformed
tradition.

My Ray Boltz quip in the previous post probably bears some explaining. Ray’s song “Thank You” talks about a person going to heaven and learning about the impact of the little things s/he did. Unfortunately, it comes across in such a way as to make it sound like heaven is about us. People line up to thank us for the work we did. We have a crowd show up to tell us the impact of our good works.

As my wife has been known to say “there are no high fives in heaven.” We’re not going to be congratulating each other on the great stuff we accomplished. That isn’t to say that we won’t be aware of them. I envision us spending eternity recounting what God accomplished in the world. We’ll go over each person’s conversion knowing exactly how rotten they were and how opposed to the truth they were. We’ll be amazed over and over again at how God broke through such hostility and at how much sin Christ bore for that person. All of the good works that person did will be reviewed and God will be glorified since it is he who ordained these works for us from the foundation of the world (Eph 2:10).

So in a way Ray is correct, we will probably one day review what we accomplished and the results. But Ray is wrong in that people won’t be lining up to thank me, they will all be turning to God and praising him for accomplishing his purposes perfectly through fallen and sinful people. It won’t be “Thank you for giving to the Lord” but “Lord God you are amazing that you used such a weak and broken vessel for such glorious purposes!”

Just back from two weeks in a “creative access” country. The trip went well and involved two different parts; evangelism and training. The city we did evangelism in had probably never seen 10 white faces at the same time before. The ‘soil’ was hard and I think what we mostly accomplished was to ‘break up’ a lot of it. We had meaningful discussions with over 100 people. About half way through the week, though, the national security folks caught on to us and started following us. That meant that we had to stop making new contacts and focus on those we’d already made. That was clearly according to God’s plan as it allowed us to go deeper with those who had expressed interest. In the end we had 4 professions of faith and conducted 3 baptisms. However, I think we helped many people take a step closer to faith.

The second part of my trip was difficult too. My pastor and I conducted theological training for underground pastors and translators. What we’d perpared our lesson plans for was not what we encountered in the classrooms. People were not as prepared as we’d been lead to believe they would be. We had to adapt on the fly. My pastor taught on the Trinity and God provided him the perfect translators. One man had a laptop and when he got a theological term he wasn’t familiar with (and he already had a very good theological vocabulary) he’t type it in and get a good translation. I taught on hermeneutics and made sure when I wrote my outline that I avoided technical terms. Likewise, I was expecting Bible School students and what I got was a much younger crowd.

In the location we taught, there was no AC and power was intermittent at best. We had to take security precautions coming and going. They drove us in every day via a different route and in cars with tinted windows. They pulled in to the garage and closed the door before we could get out. At my site I had to hide from the landlord twice. In the end, I think the church was strengthened there in ways we won’t really understand. Well, not till heaven if Ray Boltz is tragically correct. :)

We also made contacts for trips next year. There are so many opportunities, so much work to be done. The nationals are doing a lot on their own but sometimes having a foreigner tell the same story means that people will listen. When manfishing these days, Americans make good bait in some ponds.

“The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”

We recently renewed our contract with Verizon and upgraded our phones. We got Samsung A670s which have a built in camera. The problem was that to get the pictures off the phone, we’d have to pay Verizon 25¢ for each one. Also, we can customize the ringtones. But again, Verizon gets their pound of flesh. And they’re internet capable but, you guessed it, Verizon gets paid.

So I did some digging. There is a hack that allows you to get free internet service. Well, sort of free. You still pay Verizon air time and I don’t have a problem with that. And sort of a hack. It is perfectly legal, you just use a different IP address provider and a different WAP site than the one Verizon provides by default. So I figured out how to do that but that doesn’t solve the other problems. I did some more looking around and found that Radio Shack sells a USB cable for the a670 for $22. That is too much in my book so I checked the internet and found it for half elsewhere. Even with shipping it was less than I would have paid at Radio Shack before taxes. When I told the salesman that, he commented that I’d need software. That was $50 and I’m too cheap to pay that and it is Windows only and I’m all Mac. What I found instead was BitPim which does it all for free. I can pull pictures off the phone and upload ring tones. And that leads to the other issue: ringtones. There are thousands of sites out there that will sell you ringtones. All kinds of ringtones. Well, the truth of the matter is that are just MIDI files. So if you can find a MIDI of the song you like, down load it and send it to the phone. The a670 does not play polyphonic MIDIs but that’s okay with me.

So I have paid a grand total of $15 for at least $75 worth of phone stuff.

UPDATE: I added a link to the place I got the cable from. Also, I am investigating a lead on a format of polyphonic ringtones the phone will play. More when I get it.

Current Mactel status: Denial

I’m so conflicted about the whole “Apple on Intel” thingy. For me it isn’t that Intel is evil or anything, it is a philosophy issue. PowerPCs are RISC architecture. That means that the CPUs run more efficiently but have a smaller set of built-in computations. That is why a 1GHz G5 is actually faster than a 1GHz Pentium 4, the G5 is making better use of its time. Well, for the typical home user it is anyway. See, every instruction the CPU performs has to fit into the same number of clock cycles. So if the most complex instruction the CPU performs requires 24 clock cycles than the simplest instruction, which may only use 6 will have to take 24 anyway. That is the beauty of RISC. Most home users are never going to need the more complicated CPU instructions. Smaller is better.

But RISC doesn’t mean that the chip will always be superior. Motorola has lagged in advancement of the PowerPC line. Steve Jobs hinted that this was the real issue when he made the announcement. He put up a picture of a G5 with “3 GHz” beneath it and said that a year earlier he’d promised that and they hadn’t been able to deliver it. Well, Apple couldn’t deliver because Motorola
hadn’t.

So that is what Apple faced. A CPU that is more efficient but the line was going nowhere or switch to the one they have baited in the past. Really, the only way forward was with Intel, everyone else seems to be asleep at the wheel. No, that isn’t right, the only way forward was with the x86 chips, the other developers were asleep. There is still AMD. But not for Apple.

Steve said and demoed that Mac OS X sings on Intel. It isn’t like we’re going to be stuck with beige boxes of ugliness or anything. It isn’t like spyware and virus are a hardware problem. It isn’t like an Intel chip will make OS X be as bad as Window. But there is something about eating crow that just doesn’t agree with me. I’ll keep my G4 Powerbook as long as I can.

One of the leading voices in the Emergent Church is Brian McLaren. He’s written a number of books proposing a new kind of Christianity. He’s a very good author and really, really readable and likable. He is not a theologian. That was pretty obvious to me. DA Carson has written a book titled Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church. It is first shot at the Emerging Church from the traditional evangelical perspective. In it, Carson is technically accurate in his assessment but, I fear, he still misses the point. Here is how I summarized it:

As we turn to consider criticism of the EC offered by D. A. Carson, it is necessary to stress once more that one must understand what it means to be missional in order to understand the EC. The subtitle of A Generous Orthodoxy consists of a long list of different categories McLaren considers himself to be (it is like a table of contents on the cover of the book). The very first item on the list is ‘missional’. Similarly, in his book The Church on the Other Side, self-described as a guide “for navigating the modern/postmodern transition” strategy (chapter) ten “Subsume Missions in Mission” is really a discussion of being missional. It appears, then, that McLaren considers missional to be an important part of his vision for the new, emerging church. And yet, Carson never really acknowledges it. In chapter six of Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church Carson offers a critique of McLaren’s A Generous Orthodoxy. Obviously he cannot interact with every chapter in McLaren’s book, but it is significant that he completely skips chapter five, “Why I Am Missional”. Furthermore, the word “missional” is not in Carson’s index. It simply does not come up in the book. Scot McKnight did an in-depth review of Carson’s book on his blog and said:

I don’t see enough in DA Carson’s book about [being missional], and for that reason alone the book is incomplete. It doesn’t undermine what he says about epistemology, but it makes one wonder why in the world he spent all his time on epistemology when the movement and its leaders constantly speak of holism and missional and the like. I wish we’d gotten more about this: maybe a whole chapter on “missional” and the “holism” of the Bible.

It appears that since Carson is very good with epistemology and has done a lot of interaction with post-modern thought, he has approached the EC as a church movement that is post-modern. This is a fair assumption since it is partially an accurate representation. However, since Carson skipped the issue of being missional, his criticisms fail to consider why McLaren might be saying some of the things he is saying. Yet Carson suspects that there is more to McLaren than meets the eye:

Though I have never met him, McLaren is, I suspect, a man it is very hard to dislike. There is a humorous cheekiness in him, a disarming self-deprecation, an over-the-top vitality to him. Not least when he is the most outrageous, you simultaneously want to wring his neck and give him a brotherly hug and say, “Aw, c’mon, Brian, be fair! That silly argument is unworthy of you!”?knowing fully well he’s likely to hug you back and say, with a twinkle in his eyes, “I know that. I’m not quite as stupid as you think. But I got you thinking about some important questions you’ve been ducking!” What do you do with a guy like that?

Carson then notes McLaren’s playful admission of intentionally being “provocative, mischievous, and unclear,” then following a longer quote from McLaren, he adds, “Vintage McLaren, this. The over-the-top mea culpa disarms you, then he slyly provides a prooftext and hints that he may be obeying Scripture after all.” In the end Carson remains unconvinced that McLaren is doing some of this on purpose and presses on with his critique.

One cannot help but think that had Carson grasped the significance of being missional, that is to be a cross-cultural missionary in your own country, his critique may have turned out differently. Indeed, I strongly suspect that there is more going on with McLaren than meets the eye. I cannot help but think that if you scratch his post-modern paint, beneath you will find an orthodox evangelical. But McLaren, considering himself to be a foreign missionary, will not allow his true colors to show for fear of losing a hearing with his target people group. Further, as Carson intimates, McLaren’s vagueness may also be intended to shake lose some of the unhelpful cultural accretions that have grown up around evangelicalism (especially, I think, since the 1980s) so that the movement does not become stagnant and irrelevant. If that is the case, the McLaren would do well to listen closely to Carson’s critique of the EC (mis)understanding of post-modernism. Not everything McLaren is reevaluating is unhelpful accretion; some are solid, necessary, helpful doctrines.

I’ve been involved in discussions, research, thinking about the Emergent Church. I even wrote a paper that was partially on it. I’m not Emergent but I am sympathetic to what many of them want to do. They are trying to engage post-modern people. The typical Evangelical church is not particularly good at this. The cultural differences are just too much for post-moderns. Anyway, here’s how I summarized it in my paper:

Attempting to summarize the Emergent Church can be compared to thumbtacking Jell-O to the wall. As the name implies, it is a movement that is still in process, it is still emerging. Furthermore, one of the movement’s key characteristics causes it to be difficult to define: the Emergent Church is missional. It is my opinion that to understand the Emergent Church, one must understand what it means to be missional. The way ‘missional’ is used in the Emergent Church, the term means doing cross-cultural missions within the Western culture. Tim Keller (PDF) explains ‘missional’ this way:

The British missionary Lesslie Newbigin went to India around 1950. There he was involved with a church living ‘in mission’ in a very non-Christian culture. When he returned to England some 30 years later, he discovered that now the Western church too existed in a non-Christian society, but it had not adapted to its new situation… Some churches certainly did ‘evangelism’ as one ministry among many. But the church in the West had not become completely ‘missional’? adapting and reformulating absolutely everything it did in worship, discipleship, community, and service–so as to be engaged with the non-Christian society around it. It had not developed a ‘missiology of western culture’ the way it had done so for other non-believing cultures.

Generally speaking, the Emergent Church sees itself as the witness to the emerging, post-modern culture in the West. As we get over the (false) scientific surety of modernism, things are changing. The Emergent Church, then, is an attempt to be the Church of that emerging culture. To say that it is a ministry to “post-moderns” would be a gross oversimplification. The difference in approach would be comparable to a church establishing a Chinese ministry by adding a Chinese language service on Sunday morning and what Hudson Taylor did in China. While the church may have a Chinese ministry, Hudson Taylor’s work was to be the Chinese church.

As the Emergent Church reads Western culture, they try to speak with, not to or at, post-modernism. Therefore, the movement embraces eclecticism, intentionally stretching its arms around a wide variety of different thoughts and moods in Christianity. Some Emergent churches include ancient liturgies such as the Stations of the Cross but re-imagine them via modern art and poetry. The goal is to portray truth and beauty in other ways than just propositional
speech.

I’ll be doing more observing and commenting on the Emergent Church in my blog. Again, I’m not completely in to it but I do admire some of what it is trying to do.

I updated to Tiger last night. Update went very smoothly. After the upgrade I tended to get the spinning beach ball a lot so I repaired permissions and rebooted. That didn’t seem to help so I zapped the PRAM and things are now great.

Couldn’t wait to try Dashboard and play with some widgets. The ripple effect doesn’t work on my TiBook. Not enough video memory I guess. Oh well. Safari 2.0 is much faster. Spotlight is what finally turned my head. I thought it would be Dashboard but I already have Konfabulator so that wasn’t such a lure. With Spotlight I can declutter my desktop and still quickly find my stuff. And I really like the new, clean look of Mail!

I also installed iWork. Keynote is just awesome. It looks great. I mean everything is top shelf. Now I can’t wait to do a presentation in order to use it! Pages is good too. It seems to have everything Word has (minus the format painter as far as I can tell). The tools are better organized. I had it open a rather complicated Word document from my Hebrew class and it did it perfectly. Formatting was exactly the same. That is cool. Could this be goodbye to Word and PowerPoint? Still need to keep Excel though I guess.

The Star Wars saga has its ups and downs. One author found something to hang on to.