Entries from December 2007 ↓

I’m sitting in on classes of the new faculty members here at Patrick Henry College to see how they are doing. Here are some things I picked up from Dr. Stephen Baskerville’s class “Freedom’s Foundations I,” a core “Great Books” course. The class was reading Edmund Burke, hailed as the father of modern conservatism. I learned that there really was no “conservative/liberal” distinction before the modern era, specifically, before the French Revolution. Also that in the modern era, political writings have to do with the exercise of power. Before that, political writings were always about the exercise of justice.

Thanks to Frank Sonnek in a comment yesterday for alerting me, via Cyberbrethren, to Charles Arand’s article in “Lutheran Quarterly” a few years ago entitled Two Kinds of Righteousness as a Framework for Law and Gospel in the Apology. A sample:

What is meant by two kinds of human righteousness? Theologically, to be
righteous is to be human as God envisioned in creation, and again in redemption. One might modify the Athanasian dictum to say, ‘‘God became fully human that we might become fully
human.’’ The distinction between two kinds of r ighteousness rests upon the observation that there are two dimensions to being a human creature. One dimension involves our life with God, especially in the matters of death and salvation. The other dimension involves our life with God’s creatures and our activity in this world. In the for mer we receive righteousness before God through faith on account of Chr ist. In the latter, we achieve righteousness in the
eyes of the world by works when we carry out our God-given responsibilities.

This concept of two kinds of righteousness, sometimes called among other terms “civil righteousness” and “inner righteousness,” is closely related to the doctrines of the Two Kingdoms and Vocation. Lutheranism has much to say about “civil righteousness,” and it is not just do whatever your government says; rather, it is a critical and positive concept about what life in the civil sphere must be. Not just that, these teachings are enshrined in our confessional documents, which are authoritative for all Lutherans, specifically, in Melanchthon’s “Apology to the Augsburg Confession,” the often-neglected sections XXII-XXVIII.

Civil righteousness has to do with God’s created order in all spheres of life (so ideologies that deny God’s creation and its objective order, whether in the realms of the true, the good, the beautiful, or the political are in violation of this teaching). Melanchthon’s doctrine of civil virtue is Aristotelian; he affirms reason; he insists on cultural engagement; he establishes the basis for classical education; and he even affirms cultural differences. His treatment is remarkably sophisticated and relevant for the issues Christians are struggling with today. I don’t know of any other theological tradition that has such a thorough and positive theology of culture than confessional Lutheranism, and I think it is something that all Christians can draw from.

Not only did the people of Venezuela thwart the power grab of their socialist leader Hugo Chavez, but now we learn that maybe Iran is not close to having a nuclear bomb after all. Most people, I suspect, greeted that latter revelation from a new intelligence assessment with a sigh of relief. The way it is being spun, though, in the media is that this is a “blow” for the Bush administration! Does anyone think that President Bush relished having to deal with this intractable problem? Oh, yes, I realize some people do. But I would just like to observe that the intelligence finding came from the Bush administration. Perhaps the partisans should be suspicious of this good news, as various foreign policy nightmares are apparently getting resolved.

A new study has found that divorce is harmful to the environment, since separate households use more resources and are less efficient than one (the study finding evidence for the perfectly obvious). But maybe these findings will do some good, at least with those with a postmodern sense of morality. Those with troubled marriages often no longer are persuaded that they should stay together for the sake of children. Maybe they will stay together for the sake of the environment.

Charles Krauthammer, who was a medical doctor before he became a pundit, says that the newly discovered way of making “pluripotent” cells from ordinary skin cells is going to be easier, cheaper, and better than harvesting stem cells from unborn children. He credits the pro-life policy of George Bush for pushing the research in this direction. High moral standards have actually HELPED science.

That human life begins at conception is an implicit, but foundational doctrine of Christianity, according to this LifeQuotefrom Lutherans for Life:

“To deny full humanity to a conceptus [embryo] is to deny full humanity to the Savior, ‘qui conceptus est de Spiritu Sancto, natus ex Maria virgine’ (Latin). We worship the coming Savior, we worship the ascended Lord, we worship the resurrected Son of Man, we worship the crucified Lamb, we worship the Boy in the temple, we worship the Babe in the manger, we worship the Conceptus in the womb of the Mother of God. Amen.” Posted on Cyberbrethren a Lutheran Blog.

This is brilliant, decisive, and theologically unanswerable. The Son of God was incarnate when, in the words of the Apostle’s Creed, He was “conceived by the Holy Ghost” and later “born of the Virgin Mary.” If the fetus becomes a human being at some later point–when the soul enters the body, or when the fetus shows brain waves, or some other point–how does that apply to the Incarnation without falling into some kind of modalism or other heresy? Anyone who confesses the Apostle’s Creed must be pro-life when it comes to abortion, embryonic stem cell research, and the rest of it.

And here is a fitting devotion during Advent: Adoring Christ the Embryo.

It isn’t computers but the human factor that is messing up the final BCS football rankings. To the human attention span, old losses do not count as much as recent losses. Poor Missouri was number 1 just a few days ago, but after losing to Oklahoma, they plummeted to number 6 and are completely out of all of the BCS bowls. Yes, they have two losses, but those were both to the same team! Meanwhile, arguably lesser teams with two worse losses got into the big bowls.

Can there be a playoff? These players are all college students, though it is easy to forget, and we have to consider finals, Christmas break, etc., etc., so the argument goes. But here is my solution: Make a shorter season to have room for a series of playoff bowls. This can be done by getting rid of the pre-conference powderpuff games at the beginning of the season. Play only the teams in your conference. Then have the winners of each conference play each other in a tournament set-up until only two are standing, to end it all on New Year’s Day. (With most teams ending their season in November, this would give most players much more time for finals!)

Notice the Cranach blogroll below and to the right. This is a somewhat unique one, since it mostly consists of the blogs that are run by this site’s readers and commentors. If you are intrigued by someone’s comments, see if they have a blog and get more.

I also transferred MOST of the “community blogs” from the old site at WORLD. Again, some of the links were dead and some of the blogs were apparently discontinued, with no posts except from long ago. If you were on that roll and have an updated location, send it by putting up a comment on this post. Also, most of those sites have not updated their links to this new Cranach site! Let’s follow the Golden Rule here, folks, so link unto my site as I have linked unto you.

And I am aware that this roll is not complete. If you are a reader and want your blog included, post a comment with your link here and I’ll probably add you.

But also browse through these blogs. You are likely to find some you really like. Interestingly, they are not always about theology and culture, though many are. Some are about science, education, high-tech, and just life. That is to say, they are have to do with the doctrine of VOCATION.

I keep saying what a good preacher our pastor is. Now you can see for yourself. I just learned that Pastor Douthwaite runs a St. Athanasius blog on which he posts his sermons, as well as devotional materials for the congregation. Check out, for a sample, his sermon “A King Who Works for You,” which nails perfectly both our culture of pragmatism and the Theology of the Cross. This is a blog you can read, mark, and inwardly digest; and it could be a lifeline for those of you without such satisfying fare.