Here’s a valuable article highlighting the author’s experience with Augustine during “a homiletical emergency.” David Neff writes in “Preaching Augustine” that the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL) “is heavily used by college and university teachers who want to assign classic spiritual reading without adding to their students’ already hefty textbook bills. The other main users seem to be people preparing sermons or Bible studies and those who simply want to read for edification.”

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Reuven Hammer writes about the rabbinic interpretation of the Ten Commandments in a Jerusalem Post article titled, “On Judaism: True Freedom.” He talks about a contemporary understanding of freedom as something that is simply free of all constraint.

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For its All-American Council in Toronto next month, the Orthodox Church in America has issued a study paper on its relations with sister Orthodox churches and the wider ecumenical community. While the paper is advertised as nothing more than "fodder for deliberations," it nonetheless makes a strong recommendation for cutting the ties with the National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches. Chiefly, the OCA notes that this pull-out makes sense in light of the "liberal advocacy role" of the ecumenists.

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You scored as Reformed Evangelical. You are a Reformed Evangelical. You take the Bible very seriously because it is God’s Word. You most likely hold to TULIP and are sceptical about the possibilities of universal atonement or resistible grace. The most important thing the Church can do is make sure people hear how they can go to heaven when they die.

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From Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Black Cat, first published in 1843:

And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of PERVERSENESS. Of this spirit philosophy takes no account. Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart—one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such? This spirit of perverseness…this unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself—to offer violence to its own nature—to do wrong for the wrong’s sake only…

This is one of the better prosaic descriptions of the theological doctrine of total depravity, commonly identified as one of the five characteristic teachings of Reformed theology.

The label “total depravity” can be somewhat misleading, however. For as Poe’s narrators tend to embody the worst possible traits to the greatest possible degree, the doctrine is more about the comprehensive effects of sin than it is about the qualitative corruption. That is, the doctrine of total depravity means most properly that no area of the human person or human life is unaffected by sin. It does not mean that every area of human life is as bad as it could possibly be. This latter misunderstanding of the doctrine of total depravity is apparently the one which C. S. Lewis works with, when he states in his The Problem of Pain,

I disbelieve that doctrine [Total Depravity], partly on the logical ground that if our depravity were total we should not know ourselves to be depraved, and partly because experience shows us much goodness in human nature.

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In case Clark Pinnock refuses to take theology lessons from Loretta Lynn, perhaps he might deign to do so from Luther. Here he is on Genesis 6:

But here another question is raised. Moses says: “God saw that all the thoughts of man were evil.” Likewise: “and He was sorry that He had made man.” Now if God foresees everything, why does Moses say that God saw only now? If God is wise, how can it happen that He repents of something He did? Why did He not see this sin or this corrupt nature of man from the beginning of the world? Why does Scripture attribute to God a temporal will, vision, and counsel in this manner? Are not God’s counsels eternal and ἀμετανόητα (Rom. 2:5), so that He cannot repent of them? Similar statements occur in the prophets, where God threatens punishments, as in the case of the Ninevites. Nevertheless, He pardons those who repent.

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Max Blumenthal has responded to an earlier post of mine, which criticized him for a misunderstanding of the nature of freedom.

He states that my response “basically proves” his point re: clerical authoritarianism. He then goes on to ask what I mean by “theological relatives.”

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A website of some interest has come to me today, Prayer Of Allegiance. Spurred on by the controversy surrounding the inclusion of the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, the author of the prayer states, “While I am proud and privileged to be an American, my allegiance ultimately is to God — and it must run deeper than two symbolic words in a patriotic statement. That epiphany inspired me to write the Prayer of Allegiance.”

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In the latest issue of the New York Times Magazine, the article “Monkey Business,” by Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt examines economist Keith Chen’s research with capuchin monkeys and money.

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‘God Makes No Mistakes’

You may not know it, but Loretta Lynn is a pretty good theologian. She’s so good, in fact, that some contemporary theologians, open theists like Clark Pinnock, for example, could take some lessons in orthodoxy.

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