What does it mean to be Reformed?

I am now reappearing after a long hiatus, with the hope that as I prepare to re-engage the ordination process, I can reflect of substantive things along the way.

What does it mean to be Reformed? For many confessionally-Reformed folks (myself included), it means subscription to either the Westminster Standards or Three Forms of Unity. Lest some denigrate this position as mere verbal assent to an extra-biblical authority, these Reformed folks consider the confessions to be faithful summaries of the systems of doctrine espoused in Scripture--not as replacements for Scripture. Subscription to these biblical doctrines is also not an end in itself, but is meant to cultivate the theology, piety, and practice that is provided for in Scripture. In a sense, these confessions are the collective voice of the Reformed Church, declaring "These are the truths of Scripture. Our conscience is bound by them. We can do no other."

But what of the times when we are asked to express the distinctiveness of Reformed theology in a sentence or two? I was recently asked by a non-believing soldier "What is the difference between Presbyterians and Baptists?" To my shame, I was caught off-guard. I spoke of God's sovereignty over all things, including salvation (though my Baptist chaplain friend reads Michael Horton and R.C. Sproul and believes the exact same thing) and also mentioned church polity. Confessional fidelity would make no sense to this soldier as a matter of distinction, nor would it be an effective segue to the Gospel. At the same time, he is not asking why I am a Christian or what it means to be a Christian. Thus the gauntlet is laid down--one which I willingly take up.

On to the Dr. R. Scott Clark's book, Recovering the Reformed Confession.

Looking for Light in the Shadow of Death

It seems that Christmas is the time when people are at their most hypocritical. They beam smiles back and forth while grief consumes them. For most people, Christmas is anything but merry. It is the time when they remember that their family is not whole, their dead loved ones are but vaporous memories, their love echoed by a thousand betrayals.

More than anything, Christmas is the season of contrasts. Everything that is meant to be celebrated is scorned. I can picture the word irony in tacky little blinking lights.

Even at the heart of Christmas, the manger scene is a study in contrasts: unconquerable life in the midst of death and decay; light piercing darkness; innocence into guilt. Everything beautiful about Christ coming into this world often seems negated by this present darkness. It is especially pronounced on a day of supposed triumph.

Christmas becomes a dividing point between Christians and the rest of the world. For Christians, Christmas imbues pain with purpose; restlessness with resolution; pain with peace; hollow with hope. It points us onward, past a manger, a cross-strewn hill, and an empty tomb to a heavenly city placed upon the earth. For non-Christians, Christmas is littered with disappointment. It is utopia gone ugly--where all the good virtues of man are dashed upon the rocks.

This study is contrasts should provoke its own contrast in the heart of the Christian on Christmas: gratitude and empathy. Thus my day will be innundated with the knowledge of triumphs and travails, and my heart will feed upon my inward tears.

My God is For Me

Let me count the ways in which I don't love you...

God is an omnipresent reality, but so is sin. In fact, sin is much more real to me in many respects because I am it, in a sense. Although I was created in God's image, my identity since birth has been "sinner." It is impossible to avoid the reality of sin because it pervades the senses, even if the reality of God is elusive because we suppress the knowledge of Him in unrighteousness (Rom. 1). Perhaps that is why sin has always been the perfect platform for the Gospel. If you tell me about God, I'll have to take you at your word. You need not convince me of sin, however. It is all around me in a world wavering on the brink of chaos. It is in me. It is me.

And that is my reality today. I feel mired in sin. I wish I could feel mired in Christ. I don't want to pray or read God's Word; I don't want to feel, think, dwell inwardly. I have remained seemingly content with compartmentalizing the Gospel in my own life as I pretend to manifest it to others. I don't have time to "meditate day and night" on the Word of God and ponder its riches--I must work 9.5 hours, recover for .5 hours, prepare the next Sunday's lecture for 2 hours, and tend to my oft-neglected wife for the remainder. (She is so precious.)

At my wife's behest, I will take a moment to ponder a passage, and I choose Luke 13:34-35 and 19:41-45. Why? Because I will use those passages in an upcoming lecture, which makes meditating upon them pretty darn convenient.

"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not! Behold, you house is forsaken. And I tell you, you will not see me until you say, 'Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.'"

And when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, "Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation."

Will He weep for me? Will He weep for the one whose tears dried up in the barren wasteland of a savage childhood. He weeps for the lost and perishing, but what about those who remember the pangs of the brokenness and can't shake it? Will He gather me like a hen gathers her chicks, though I feel barricaded by the enemies of my soul? I know "the things that make for peace," but I keep those things from myself. I want war. I want my enemy cast down, but my enemy is me. No one can snatch me from the hand of God, but I can refuse to feel His embrace.

I was often told when I was younger that my sin grieves the Spirit. I always pictured the Spirit as One ashamed and disappointed in me. Perhaps I cast my own fears and my own pitiful self-image upon the mind of the Spirit. But as I force myself back into Scripture (or am drawn?), I think for just a moment that Christ's Spirit is not aggrieved by my sin in the same way as He is over the unrepentant sinner. What if He grieves with me and for me? What if His heart breaks over mine and pours out with grief over the reverberating pangs of death. What if I am not shaming Him, but grieving Him? And what if my grief over sin is not merely a shallow attempt to follow my culture's perpetual self-victimization, but a grief that recognizes that I am simultaneously transgressor and victim?

What if I am the resurrected Lazarus, slowly being stripped of the grave clothes that wrapped my old body of death? What if the tears of Christ for His elect friend are not the acids of retribution, but the cathartic salve of grace? What if God really...really...is for me, not against me? Can I finally live like I am alive?

The Wonder of War

The wonder of war. The sharp edge of the razor of evil that scrapes and scars the face of the earth.

Words can do no justice to the horrors of war--especially those penned by one who has never entered into those horrors. But I can remark on the wonder. It is in war that we see the very worst of fallen mankind. On occasion, however, the tide of evil is met and rolled back by mankind at its most noble.

Men (like those pictured above) left the safety of these transports in order to wade through water, trudge through sand, and scale cliffs under merciless enemy fire. They willingly offered themselves to certain death--like sheep to the slaughter--in order to subdue a tyrant who wished to subdue the earth.

They are our heroes. What would lead a man to throw himself into death so that others may live free? Pure moral fiber. It is the epitome of courage: Sacrificing oneself for no immediate or certain gain, but for the possibility of a better world for one's posterity.

And I am left in wonder.

Reclusive No More

Dear Friends--none of whom likely read this blog anymore--I am coming back online. I disappeared for a whirlwind engagement, months of Army training, and a new marriage. My professional writing opportunities may be frustrated for a time, but God gives us alternative outlets. May God bless whoever amongst you happens to stumble upon this forsaken blog once more.

Your Friend,

Stephen

A Boon to Pickens, the Free Market, and American Pride

Gal Luft, the executive director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, lambasted oil man T. Boone Pickens in the LA Times today. While Luft may have made some valid points in his critique of Pickens' proposal, his disparaging of Pickens, the man, for his pursuit of profit is discouraging. In a recent interview, a reporter asked Pickens about the allegation that he is trying to pursue a profit, to which he essentially answered "Of course!"

Since when has "profit" become anathema to the American mind and a curse word in the American vocabulary? We have a free-market economy, where success in productivity and innovation is rewarded. The American economy is rooted in the idea that there is no greater incentive for individual and corporate success than a potential profit. If a person becomes a mere cog in a nationalized economic machine, that person performs their function and nothing else. Yet if a person is allowed to run her own machine, maintain it as she sees fit, and even create a new machine, then she will strive do do so.

Boeing and Northrop Grumman are competing to build a new tanker for the Air Force. The winner of that competition will earn a government contract, which will provide better equipment for the defense of our country and a good deal of money for a private corporation. While our government squabbles over how best to punish corporations and regulate our way into a more sound energy policy, they should look to people like T. Boone Pickens for inspiration. He represents old-school American ingenuity. In his proposal, Americans are presented with the mentality that made American great--one which seeks to harness the power of the free-market to create and make a profit.

If the Pickens Plan is not one's cup of tea, new proposals should be put forth by the private sector, with the promise of government awards for success. I would love to see the federal government present Pickens with a monetary reward for his work on the issue and persistence in bringing it before the public. The government should offer free-market incentives and avoid regulation and taxation, lest their incompetence erode the foundations of our economy. Let the competition begin! Gal Luft would have a fit, but the economy that is the pride of America and the beacon for the world will breathe a sigh of relief.

Goldberg on the Postmodern Obama

One on my favorite political writers, Jonah Goldberg of National Review, wrote a column today on "Obama, the Postmodernist." As usual, Goldberg offers helpful philosophical insights into that amorphous concept we call "postmodernism." In addition, he does well in showing that Obama in many ways is postmodernism personified. What isn't as usual for Goldberg is that he fell short in two regards: One, our society as a whole can be generally labeled "postmodern" (perhaps even Goldberg himself). Two, that isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially compared with the worldview that is riding in on its coattails.

As a general point, we imbibe our thought patterns in large part from the philosophical currents of the day. Even in critiquing postmodernism, we are simultaneously immersed and heavily influenced by postmodernism. Postmodernism in is no way an exclusive trait of the Democratic party. Even in rejecting certain implications of postmodernism (i.e. moral relativity), Republicans and other traditionalists do so for reasons influenced by postmodernism. Often, traditionalists embrace and defend moral absolutes for pragmatic reasons, such as maintain social order and good governance. In justifying truth claims for pragmatic reasons instead of philosophical, traditionalists display their part in the postmodern milieu.

Postmodernism is not a clearly definable concept, let alone an inherently evil one. According to scholars like Thomas Oden, postmodernism is best defined as that which is not modern. It is more a reactionary movement than a progressive one and has no cohesive agenda other than to undermine the modern worldview. The work done by postmodernism has actually done much to help conservatives. Twentieth-century modernism attempt to construct an edifice of truth to compete and eventually annihilate a Christian-revelatory truth. It embraced Darwinism as the authoritative scientific paradigm, "progress" as the authoritative social paradigm, and therapeutic-victimization as its psychological paradigm. In all of these ways, it made itself a competitor to Christianity and natural law governance, believing that these worldviews would not be able to survive their competition with "the fittest."

Postmodernism is America was largely precipitated by Vietnam and hippie disillusionment. The secular truth paradigms had largely failed in morally advancing the human race and a vacuum was created that created mass soul-searching. Christianity was not able to fill this void as it had largely capitulated to the modern worldview. In particular, Protestant Christianity had failed in bringing the Christian worldview to bear. "Christian" modernists continued to work in the intellectual realm, but without anything distinctively Christian; Christian fundamentalists had largely retreated from the intellectual realm.

Postmodern philosophy, vacuous in its own right, stepped into the void and began demolishing the secular edifices. Darwinism, "progress," and modern psychology had all failed in their promises for Utopian existence and had largely ignored their own philosophical assumptions along the way. But postmodernism by definition is not able to create anything, let alone an ideology. It has done positive and negative work in its deconstructing of truth paradigms (throwing the Christian baby out with the bathwater) and now leaves its own void.

As Christianity still struggles to regain its voice in America, it has largely left the work of reconstruction to neo-paganism. Instead of banishing God through pride in the intellect (like modernism), neo-paganism instill godlike spirituality into every crevice of this world. This modern pantheism, in its decimation of the transcendence of the Creator over His creation, subsequently blurs all other lines instituted by God (man/woman; human beings/animals/nature; etc.). As Goldberg helpfully notes, it also discards the quest for truth in employing empty rhetoric which is devoid of a telos.

Barack Obama is encapsulates the postmodern vacuum, but more importantly, the neo-pagan reconstruction. For that matter, President Bush displays similar characteristics (belief in human goodness, denial of Christianity exclusivity, etc.). The problem we face now is philosophical, not political. We have a captivating political figure rising on the wings of an ancient philosophy, which is soaring over the heights of all political factions (and even many religious traditions). There is a reason Obama has special appeal to the young, who largely belong to this new worldview. Traditionalists should not target Obama, the postmodern, but Obama, the neo-pagan. In order for Obama's messiahship to be made palatable, people must first come to view their need for this type of new-age messiahship. Let the Christian reconstruction of the postmodern intellect begin with haste before this pagan messiahship is realized and the kingdom of the pagan gods is brought to earth.