When naive becomes criminal

My goodness. Michael Horton has no understanding of the 'invisible hand' of the market. He speaks of it as if it is some kind of idol that "capitalists" worship. His cohorts at the Whitehorse Inn seem to be in similar ignorance. Credentialed, not educated. It's amazing the level of ignorance of politics and economics there is among Christian leaders and educators.

In God's Kingdom the first will be last, and the last first.

I've found this to be true

Suffering is God’s surgery that leads to health when we respond by faith. —Ed Welch

Death is the wages of sin, so I don't want to leave an impression death can be sidestepped, but with my inevitable death in mind, short of it I find the above quote to be true.

Seeing the hidden obvious

We’re all going to die, so it’s helpful to think in terms of cosmoses (look at one of those NASA Blue Marble photos of Earth if you want to see a living cosmos in full) when we engage biblical teaching and think about life and death. It really is about cosmoses and connection, or union, and mystical change and cosmic warfare; only when it is the true, or pure religion, i.e. on-the-mark biblical Christianity, it is real. Everything else is just screwing around in hell.

In other words, we show interest in esoteric material that gives us knowledge of the mystery of our existence and so forth, but right under our noses, if we can scrape away accumulated impressions that negate it all, is the actual revelation of our Creator, the Bible; and, here's the big point: it speaks in similar terms - language of cosmoses, union, a mystical process of being called and drawn upward, and having our will changed and so on, and yet it is the truth. And it repulses us the most at first because it is the truth, and the truth is not what our fallen nature wants to hear. But in a mysterious way we are effectually called.

At this point the theologians lose their confidence in what takes place next. They are confident in worship practices (though they vary with each other), but anything else, things especially which require a lot of separation from the world and unique effort they are not as confident about. We are really kind of on our own. We and the Holy Spirit. Not really on our own, that puts it wrong, but needing to be prophets, priests, and kings in a real way ourselves.

I found so-called Neanderthals in Plutarch

I was reading Plutarch's Life of Theseus when I came upon this passage that to me describes so-called Neanderthal man (who was a human). For context, Theseus has just come of age and is going to Athens, but his mother and grandmother and others implore him to go by sea because the land is infested with robbers and bad men. So Theseus decides to go by land because he wants to emulate Heracles. Now here is Plutarch's description of the men who inhabit the land and who cause all kinds of trouble. Notice they are humans:

"For it was at that time very dangerous to go by land on the road to Athens, no part of it being free from robbers and murderers. That age produced a sort of men, in force of hand, and swiftness of foot, and strength of body, excelling the ordinary rate, and wholly incapable of fatigue; making use, however, of these gifts of nature to no good or profitable purpose for mankind, but rejoicing and priding themselves in insolence, and taking the benefit of their superior strength in the exercise of inhumanity and cruelty, and in seizing, forcing, and committing all manner of outrages upon everything that fell into their hands; all respect for others, all justice, they thought, all equity and humanity, though naturally lauded by common people, either out of want of courage to commit injuries or fear to receive them, yet no way concerned those who were strong enough to win for themselves. Some of these, Hercules destroyed and cut off in his passage through these countries, but some, escaping his notice while he was passing by, fled and hid themselves, or else were spared by him in contempt of their abject submission..."

I will be submitting my research to the peer-reviewed Journal of Finding Obvious Things that are Obviously True.

Carl Trueman and Andrew Sullivan

Carl Trueman sometimes to me reads and sounds like ex-Brit leftist gay blogger Andrew Sullivan. That's not good for a theologian.

I mean, for one he moralizes like Andrew Sullivan about America. On Dabney, for instance, the British Empire starts slavery all over our geographical neighborhood, the *worst kind*, i.e. the worst slave codes, then *imports* that worst kind to the American south, everybody's stuck with it, and Carl Trueman blames R. L. Dabney.

An aside: Trueman once compared King James I to Adolf Hitler (because, you see, Trueman can't just simply mock the King James Version, which is what he was doing on the Reformed Forum podcast, he has to some how smear it with the name Hitler).

Also, like Andrew Sullivan, Carl Trueman has that *please me* thing going on. "I don't like this. I like this. I use to not like that, but now I like it, so it's OK for all of you to like it now too." Really, Carl?