Joe Rigney: Stages of idolatry and Staying two months pregnant

Joe Rigney, a professor at the Bethlehem Institute, wrote two articles on stages of idolatry, earlier this year. He explains how we worship God and receive his gifts, then value the gifts for their own sake, then worship other gods while still enjoying the gifts, and finally rebel against God so far that he takes the gifts and idols away. Then we long for the good old days, when we could worship the idols and enjoy the gifts, and we go to God, begging for him to return the idols. In the second article, he links the early stage of idolatry with Red-states and the later stage of idolatry with Blue-states. The trouble is, when you're pregnant with evil, you can't stay pregnant forever. You have to either give birth to death or miscarry.

Go read it.

Stages of Idolatry
Become Two Months Pregnant and Stay There

Pelosi visits Seattle

Scott St. Claire reports for the Evergreen Freedom Foundation on Speaker Nancy Pelosi's press conference at Sweedish Hospittle in Seattle. Washington congressmen Jay Inslee and Jim McDermott were also present. This was Pelosi's first public appearance since passing the House version of the health care reform bill Saturday night.

Choice quote:

Cong. Inslee... said that the number one benefit of the Pelosi plan will be increased wages for health care workers in the Pacific Northwest. Who knew? No more, he said, would they lag behind those paid in other parts of the country – everybody gets a raise!

Click to read about Chao Yuenren. His autobiography is called Life With Chaos. Before he wrote it, his wife wrote her story in Autobiography of a Chinese Woman, and said (in a chapter entitled "THE REPATRIATION OF AN EXPATRIATE") "I want to borrow a chapter from Chao Yuen-ren's autobiography. But he has not written any."

They both had wit.

How could I help thinking of "her"?

I found this man's entry in Wikipedia while reading about his friend Chao Yuenren, who wrote A Grammar of Spoken Chinese (U. California, 1968) and invented Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the geeky Chinese romanization scheme that represents the five tones with variant spellings.

Notice that Liu invented the Chinese feminine pronoun... what an accomplishment! I thought the feminine pronoun would have been more organic. I guess Chinese was even less inflected than I thought.

What a way to die, too.

Liu Bannong
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Liu Bannong (Chinese: 劉半農) or Liu Fu (劉復) (1891 - 1934) was a Chinese linguist and poet.

A native of Jiangsu, he was an important contributor to the influential magazine La Jeunesse during the May Fourth Movement. He began writing poetry in vernacular Chinese in 1917, and was credited with having coined the Chinese feminine pronoun ta (她), which he made use of in his poems. The usage was popularised by the song Jiao Wo Ruhe Bu Xiang Ta (教我如何不想她 "How could I help thinking of her"), a "pop hit" in the 1930s in China. The lyrics were written by him and the melody by Yuen Ren Chao.

In 1920, he left China to study linguistics abroad, first in London, then in Paris. He gained his PhD at the University of Paris, with research done on Chinese tones. During his time in Paris, he compiled Dunhuang Duosuo (敦煌掇瑣 "Miscellaneous works found in the Dunhuang Caves"), a pioneering work about the Dunhuang manuscripts.

He returned to China in 1925, and began teaching in colleges. He collaborated with Li Jiarui (李家瑞) to compile Songyuan Yilai Suzi Pu (宋元以來俗字譜 "The vernacular characters used from the Song and Yuan dynasties onwards"). Published in 1930, it was a key work in the standardisation of simplified Chinese characters. He died of acute illness after a linguistic field-trip, at the age of 44. Lu Xun wrote a short memoir about Liu (憶劉半農君) after his death.

Vindit to self

You're a man, not a victim.

If you were a victim, you'd be a sacrifice.

But if you are a sacrifice, you've long since stepped off the altar.

[equivocation on the meaning of victim]

In Memoriam: William Empson

I picked up Seven Types of Ambiguity by William Empson off the shelf again today. I got the book a year ago after I first read about him in a survey of modern literary critics. He wrote it at age 22 while studying at Cambridge… it's a "niggling" account of double meanings in all kinds of classic English poems. Sort of a virtuosic experiment in semantics, half factual, half creative.

The way he teases out the things about a piece of writing that give it an ironic effect on certain readers endears Empson to me, especially the care with which he examines so many facts.

There on the flyleaf I read his short biography:

___________

William Empson, born in England in 1906, was educated at Cambridge University. Associated with the Auden group of young poets, he published several volumes of poetry in the 1930s and then turned his interest to literary criticism. He is best known for… etc.

Before World War II he taught English in Tokyo and Peking, and during the war years he was Chinese Editor for the BBC. In 1947 he returned to a teaching post at Peking National University and since 1953 has held a professorship at Sheffield University in England.

_____

Can you imagine my excitement? A young brainy literary hack, who went to China. And during the war years, too… such an interesting time. Could he be a role model for me?

Well, he turned out to be a dogged antichristian, and an enthusiastic bisexual… two things that I have to guard myself against.

What a bummer.

How do I characterize him but as an interesting, gifted, fanciful man, whose life. was. futile?

I dread reading the racy parts in his two-volume biography, but look forward to the parts about typing out a play from Shakespeare for his students from memory during the siege of Peking. How did he do it?

He jostled elbows with Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, and C.S. Lewis. When the Queen of England came to see him at the University of Sheffield, he wrote a masque to be performed in her honor.

You won't see his like again. And my paperback copy of Seven Types of Ambiguity even has sewn binding.

See:

John Haffenden, William Empson: Among the Mandarins (vol. 1)

William Empson: Against the Christians (vol. 2)

Selected Letters of William Empson

Abraham's faith: eternal or temporal?

Soren Kierkegaard wrote in Fear and Trembling:

By faith Abraham received the promise that in his seed all races of the world would be blessed. Time passed, the possibility was there, Abraham believed; time passed, it became unreasonable, Abraham believed....

...Abraham became old, Sarah became a laughing-stock in the land, and yet he was God’s elect and inheritor of the promise that in his seed all the races of the world would be blessed. So were it not better if he had not been God’s elect? What is it to be God’s elect? It is to be denied in youth the wishes of youth, so as with great pains to get them fulfilled in old age. But Abraham believed and held fast the expectation.

If Abraham had wavered, he would have given it up. If he had said to God, "Then perhaps it is not after all Thy will that it should come to pass, so I will give up the wish. It was my only wish, it was my bliss. My soul is sincere, I hide no secret malice because Thou didst deny it to me" -- he would not have been forgotten, he would have saved many by his example, yet he would not be the father of faith.

For it is great to give up one’s wish, but it is greater to hold it fast after having given it up, it is great to grasp the eternal, but it is greater to hold fast to the temporal after having given it up....

"And God tempted Abraham and said unto him, Take Isaac, thine only son, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah, and offer him there for a burnt offering upon the mountain which I will show thee."

So all was lost -- more dreadfully than if it had never come to pass. So the Lord was only making sport of Abraham! He made miraculously the preposterous actual, and now in turn He would annihilate it....

And yet Abraham was God’s elect, and it was the Lord who imposed the trial. All would now be lost. The glorious memory to be preserved by the human race, the promise in Abraham’s seed -- this was only a whim, a fleeting thought which the Lord had had, which Abraham should now obliterate.

....Yet Abraham believed, and believed for this life. Yea, if his faith had been only for a future life, he surely would have cast everything away in order to hasten out of this world to which he did not belong. But Abraham’s faith was not of this sort, if there be such a faith; for really this is not faith but the furthest possibility of faith which has a presentiment of its object at the extremest limit of the horizon, yet is separated from it by a yawning abyss within which despair carries on its game.

But Abraham believed precisely for this life,
that he was to grow old in the land,
honored by the people,
blessed in his generation,
remembered forever in Isaac, his dearest thing in life, whom he embraced with a love for which it would be a poor expression to say that he loyally fulfilled the father’s duty of loving the son, as indeed is evinced in the words of the summons, "the son whom thou lovest." Jacob had twelve sons, and one of them he loved; Abraham had only one, the son whom he loved. Yet Abraham believed and did not doubt, he believed the preposterous.

Now that you've skipped down to my commentary, go back up and glance at the words in bold.

Good.

Can you explain to me why Kierkegaard's idea of Abraham's faith sounds like the opposite of that in the book of Hebrews?

Hebrews 11:8-19

⁸By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. ⁹By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. ¹⁰For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.

¹¹By faith Abraham, even though he was past age—and Sarah herself was barren—was enabled to become a father because he considered him faithful who had made the promise. ¹²And so from this one man, and he as good as dead, came descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as countless as the sand on the seashore.

¹³All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance. And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth. ¹⁴People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. ¹⁵If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. ¹⁶Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.

¹⁷By faith Abraham, when God tested him, offered Isaac as a sacrifice. He who had received the promises was about to sacrifice his one and only son, ¹⁸even though God had said to him, "It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned." ¹⁹Abraham reasoned that God could raise the dead, and figuratively speaking, he did receive Isaac back from death.

This was troubling to me: why is there such an emphasis in the Torah about the worldly benefits of believing and obeying God? The Ebal blessings and Gerizim curses in Deuteronomy 28 are the quintessential expression of this philosophy. If the patriarchs were really looking forward to a heavenly city, then why did God give them all kinds of livestock and servants?

Moses never said anything about eternal life... he only talked about enjoying long life in the land of one's own inheritance.

Here's the key, I think.

Hebrews 11:39-40

³⁹These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised. ⁴⁰God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect.

In earlier chapters in Hebrews, it mentions that we have inherited promises better than they had under the old covenant. Could it be that eternal life is only guaranteed in the New Testament, so that only together with us would the patriarchs be made perfect?

Then, the promises of worldly prosperity were types and shadows of the real things which Christ won for us.

But where does that leave Kierkegaard's analysis of Abraham's faith?

Let me look back a second....

Ah, he errs in making eternity with God seem far away. For anyone, though, death could be imminent.

He also errs in making eternity with God seem small. It does seem small and irrelevant, but according to Hebrews, it was the thing that motivated him in all his wanderings. Lest it seem small, compare your perspective on eternity with your perspective on the sky when looking up through a skylight. You might only see 40 degrees of angle, but at night with a high-powered telescope you could see thousands of stars in that 40-degree sweep. Then realize that if you stood on the roof you could see 180 degrees of horizon in all directions. Then realize that it's only half of the dome, since the other half is facing the other hemisphere of the world. So... open your mind.

Third, he is too vague with the idea of "believing in the preposterous". Abraham did have tremendous faith, and he was expecting something preposterous, but only because he considered faithful the One who promised.

But Kierkegaard does get one thing right when he talks about faith for this life. If God promises something tangible, we ought to expect that tangible thing, even when it appears absurd. If not, we are kidding ourselves to think we have really believe the intangible promises.

John 3:12

I have spoken to you of earthly things and you do not believe; how then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things?

I want to go to Malaysia. Especially when I hear songs like this. You'll notice some people holding up a sign, "We the Rakyat lah". The Rakyat is the people of Malaysia. Lah is a delightful intensifier originally from Chinese that hops onto the end of every sentence. Also, the three languages rapped are Bahasa Malaysia, Mandarin, Tamil, and English.



Thanks to Malaysian Artistes for Unity for free downloads.

Playlist

Felix Mendelssohn - Elijah Oratorio, Is not his word like a fire?
Monkey Majik - Change
Ralph Vaughan Williams - English Folk Song Suite
Guang Liang - Tong Hua
Orson Welles, The Mercury Theatre on the Air - The Man Who Was Thursday

A kingdom of priests

1 Peter 2:9

But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.

This fulfills the mission statement of the nation of Israel.

Exodus 19:1-6

On the third new moon after the people of Israel had gone out of the land of Egypt, on that day they came into the wilderness of Sinai. They set out from Rephidim and came into the wilderness of Sinai, and they encamped in the wilderness. There Israel encamped before the mountain, while Moses went up to God.

The LORD called to him out of the mountain, saying, "Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob, and tell the people of Israel: You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles' wings and brought you to myself.

Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. These are the words that you shall speak to the people of Israel."

Submit your suggestions for the new NIV

Here is your chance to offer suggestions for the new 2011 revision which will replace the NIV and TNIV Bible translations. My family has used the 1984 NIV Bible for as long as I can remember, so this is mildly earth-shattering to me. Have you found a verse that doesn't make sense, or is poorly worded? Post a comment here.

Courtesy of Better Bibles Blog.

Are his riches exhaustible?

Speech is the channel of relationships
Language is the study of speech.
Does analyzing language demythologize relationships?
Does it make them any safer? Does it unsheathe those events that we look on with wonder, and pull the meat off of them until we wonder how anyone could fall for those cheap tricks we called love and hate? Is that why I adore linguistics? From now on, any emotional or relational reductionism will come back to bite me. Rats.

Does critical study of the Bible demythologize revelation?
In both language and God's word there remains plenty of mystery for us all. But is it atomistic, emergent, or multi-faceted? If the mystery were atomistic, we'd study phrase by phrase, sniffing out every connotation, and tracing the relations between each phrase. If the mystery were emergent, we'd have to recognize it as it arises from simple parts that emit complex meaning when brought together. If the mystery were multi-faceted, it would be in every aspect, every relation, and then in the discourse styles, and the relations between different texts... in short, everywhere in abundance of complexity, visible tangles or no.

But -- treat your subject arrogantly and you'll be sent away empty, thinking there was nothing there in the first place.

Aaron was whose uncle?

Yes, Aaron the high priest and brother of Moses was uncle to Rahab's husband.

And while we're at it, how do you think Amram, Moses and Aaron's father, reacted when he heard that God disapproved of marrying one's aunt? It's possible that Amram was there at the foot of Mount Sinai when the law was given. He lived 137 years, and supposing he had Aaron at age 27 and Moses at age 30, Moses would have been 81 when the law was given and Amram would have been 111.

Lev 18:12 'Do not have sexual relations with your father's sister; she is your father's close relative.'