Continuing with the
theme that is touched on by David's approach to his enemies in the Psalms and the word's of Christ that says we should love our enemies and pray for them, I present to you this: Read Exodus 20, specifically verses 13 and 15. Now read Deuteronomy 3:1-7. Here we have both murder and stealing. Of course, this is not the only example of this kind of "atrocity" in Israel's dark past.

What say ye? The apparent contradiction (God speaking with a forked tongue) as well as history scream out for an answer in view of the fact that these "crimes" have cast a long shadow down the corridors of time. Surely these Jews are not very neighborly.

How do you resolve
this glaring contradiction in the Bible? Read Psalm 69 especially verses 18-28. Now read Luke 6:27-35. How do you deal with this? This is a significant issue in light of the organic connection between David and the one who was to sit and now is sitting on David's throne.

I almost quit
school after a long dry spell in the spring of 2005 (when I sat out a semester). I had to muster a concrete decision to return in the fall of '05. As you know, I did go back. My specific reason for returning was that I wanted to learn of what Jesus referred to on the road to Emmaus when he stated that he was to be found in "Moses and all the prophets". (Also John 5:46).

In the context of how to "preach Christ from all the scriptures" that is exactly what I learned about in the fall class "Ministry of the Word". Little did I expect that that same theme would surface repeatedly in my spring class, Pentateuch. It came about in a little different way though. It became obvious that Jesus Christ is the second Adam. With a job to do. (John 17:4) What that job was is now referred to as His active obedience. This is the righteousness that is imputed to us by faith. Note: Paul wouldn't have been too out of line to refer to Christ as the third Adam. That claim is easy to make based on the well attested idea that Israel itself was a probationary group functioning in a theocracy, as was Adam, with a test to pass. Both failed of course. I guess the reason that Christ was not called the third Adam was because Israel was not really a single individual like Adam and Christ. As such, Israel had a typological role pointing back to the first Adam and forward to the second Adam.

There is a lot of other stuff I learned as well. Maybe next time. I always wondered about how the writer of Hebrews left us hung out to dry by talking about milk and meat. I concluded that meat was nowhere to be found. But that is not the case. The folks at Westminster Seminary have turned up a whole lot of it.

I am going back this fall, Lord willing.

Filler alert:
I thought I would cut'n paste this paragraph from a commencement speech made a while back by Steve Jobs:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Now I ask you - how can you obey this advice without at the same time disobeying it?

Pentateuch
final tomorrow. That is the reason for the lack of writing of late. I'll be back.

I am playing around with Picasa -
which is a photo management software offering from Google. It has a bunch of features that may be useful. One of them is an auto-blog feature that is hooked up to blogspot. It may be hooked up to others as well, but I doubt it. It may even be that Google itself will host blogs.

I haven't posted much lately. I am too wrapped up in reading to care much about some of the things that have come down my pike. I had thought about a post on Tiger Wood's dad and what he had prophesied about Tiger. I also considered a post on the 'cultural mandate'. I suggest you Google that topic and see what you think. I also had considered writing about the CRC synod statement on what constitutes a 'just war'. What actually happened to these ideas is that my mother's 'rule #2' took over. What is that rule you ask? "If you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything".

The photo you see here is the staircase in the San Francisco city hall. 

At 45 minutes past
noon on April 24, 2006, Robert Andrew Settergren was born. He wasn't all that little either. 9-2 and 21 inches long. Lots of pretty thick dark hair. We'll see how long that lasts. I'll make you wait for dad and mom to post their photos.

Here is a post geared
mostly toward my sister. I suppose many others might (and should) find it interesting because of what it pertains to. But in my sister's case, she should find it more interesting than others. When I was a senior in high-school, my sister, who I suppose had just come home for the summer from college, was reading a book which I think was titled something like "In the Twilight of Western Thought". It was written by a guy named Herman Dooyeweerd. I never, in all the 40 years that have transpired since that day, did read it or even ever figured out what good 'ol Herman was up to. Until last week.

How's that, you ask? Well, his philosophy came up in our Pentateuch class. If you want to get a quick survey of Herman Dooyeweerd, go to my other blog where I record my class notes. (I do this so that I can always find them - plus the Biblegateway verse links are great). The notes for April 18 are what I am referring to. Don't just scroll to the bottom, unless you just can't stand this stuff. The gist is that the WSCAL prof. and the whole school as far as I can tell, has a two kingdom world view and rejects the transformationalist viewpoint that wants Christianity to do a makeover on the culture.

Put your comments if any on this blog. You will notice that no one has ever commented on that blog mostly because no one really is aware of it and getting dialogue going was never its purpose.

When I was a kid
growing up in the Christian Reformed Church, one of the things that all of us knew was that in addition to the authorized ten commandments, there were several others that were right up there along side them that were just as inviolable. These were, among others, dancing, movies, card playing and gambling. (To digress a bit, there was a whole set of rules that were a fallout from observing the Sabbath day. This resulted in nearly all commercial establishments being closed on Sunday. It also resulted in many paper boys not having to lug the Sunday paper around since the local CRC Dutchmen knew that God would frown on them causing these paperboys to work on the Sabbath).

I'm here to tell you that in less than a half century the denomination has swung from some seriously goofy legalism to what can only be described as new revelation from on high. According to an article in the April 2006 Banner, which is the official publication of the denomination, not only is there "no explicit biblical teaching that gambling is inherently wrong" but "what we search for in the game of poker is really just an expression of what we're meant to ultimately search for in life".

I can't spit out anything cogent having read this quote from a CRC pastor. But I don't need to. This guy said it better.

Please extend a warm
welcome to the newest kid on the block.

Here is some food:

Modernity has assured us that we are in the consummation, knowing good and evil without any ethical obligation except to be true to oneself. It is the autonomous voice or vision within, not the verbum externum, that we are told to heed. It is not surprising, then, that a theologian of glory like Hegel would find the faith of Israel so mundane. Vincenzo Vitiello notes, "Hegel recalls the disappointment of Pompey, who 'had approached the heart of the temple, the center of adoration and had hoped to discover in it the root of the national spirit... the life giving soul of this remarkable people... only to find himself in an empty room'". After generations had thought we were in the promised land of pure presence, postmodern thought has reminded us quite truly that "under the sun," we are in the desert, or worse, in the desert of deserts. Mark C. Taylor says that our existence is "endless straying," "erring," and "wandering." Biblical faith does not hesitate to affirm this as the form of life in this present evil age that refuses to meet a stranger, but it treats this as an ethical rather than a metaphysical problem. The pointless existence that Taylor celebrates is precisely this "empty way of life" passed down to us by our pagan ancestors from which Peter tells us we have been liberated (1 Peter 1:18). We may be in a desert, "exiles and sojourners" in this age, but Egypt is behind us even more fully than it was for the Israelites in the wilderness. The tomb is empty. We are not in an empty room but seated with Christ in the Holy of Holies. It is not a time for either the beatific vision or the funeral dirge, but for the songs of Zion as we make our way to the City of God, for the Stranger of the Emmaus road and the upper room still meets us, to bring us into his Sabbath joy by his Spirit through Word and sacrament. Even if we are in the desert rather than the promised land, it is not a desert of deserts. A theology of pilgrims will have to suffice - and does suffice, for meeting a Stranger.

from "Lord and Servant - A Covenant Christology" by Michael Horton

Here are ten questions
the likes of which will be on my upcoming Pentateuch midterm.

1. Describe and evaluate the criteria used in the Documentary Hypothesis for distinguishing the alleged Pentateuchal sources.
2. Present an historical survey of the literary criticism of the Pentateuch from Wellhausen to the present.
3. Discuss the interpretation of the chronological data in the Genesis Creation Record (e.g. the various views of the length of the days).
4. Develop a definition of the Berith (covenant) arrangements in which God was one party, including evidence of ancient Near Eastern treaties.
5. Discuss the works principle of kingdom inheritance as operative in the covenant of creation.
6. Discuss the concept of covenantal canon.
7. Describe and evaluate the modern critical view of the formation of the Old Testament canon.
8. Present an interpretation of one of the following passages:
1. Gen 3:8
2. Gen 3:14-15
3. Gen 3:21
4. Gen 1:2
9. Discuss the relationship of Science to Scripture, i.e., General revelation to Special revelation.
10. Discuss imago Dei.

Frankly, this scares the crap out of me. Why? Because of how much time it will take to prepare for this. These questions are only representative of what may be on the test. What usually happens is that I, as test taker, will not actually directly address a specific question, unless I actually know what to say. Rather, I will just kind of give a brain dump of material that more or less is tangent to the question. But the real problem is that these questions won't necessarily be on the test. So, all my prep on these questions only will help tangentially.

Gotta stir up a little
action around here. Who knows the answer to this?
Supply the missing number in this sequence of fractions:
2/5
7/3
5/10
15/9
17/?

Just give me the number. Save your explanation for later so as not to spoil it for all the whizzes amongst my readers.

Another memory from my past:
This one is not quite as deep (if even the last one was). One of the things I always wanted as a kid was a walkie-talkie set. I couldn't imagine a cooler device. The thought of talking to a buddy who was a block away just enthralled me. Now, I could have gone into our dining room and made a phone call (the phone was on the wall by the back bay window) but my buddy would pretty much have to go back home to his phone so I could 'walkie-talkie' him. No fun.

I made the two soup cans connected by the string deal many times. It worked, sort of (but only if the string was held taut. Kind of limited the range). But it was free. But the real McCoy, which I know I found in catalogs, was out of my price range.

Where did this memory come from? I went to the gym today and on the tread-mill next to me was this 25 year old babe who had this super high-tech cell phone. It was definitely a case of 'look, Ma, no hands." I still don't really know what was going on. The phone itself was laying in the tread-mill junk tray. But she had some kind of giant ear-ring on that must have been a phone (a walkie-talkie of my dreams).

I know all this because she was committing the cardinal gym sin - using the cell phone while working out. Not only that, but she was having a fight with her boyfriend on the phone!

Now here is the odd part. I don't have a cell phone. It never occurred to me to get one. I guess it goes along with the modern-day definition of hermit, "someone with out a cell-phone".

Now, where are those soup cans?

They say that your
life passes before your eyes at some point during a trauma where death seems immanent. I have my doubts about that since during my traumatic death engaging moment, nothing of the sort occured. (A later post, perhaps?) If it were true, however, I wonder if the specific scene I have been reflecting on would show up.

I remember how much I liked church on Sunday night. Not the preaching, not the praying, not even the hymn singing. It was the atmosphere, the lights, the quiet, the reverence, even the sleepiness. The seven-fold Amen at the end was the cherry on top of one hour in God's sanctuary. This is all true even though I probably whined about going.

For this blessing I have my parents to thank.

A little quiz for my readers:
True or False - 50% of the population is below average when it comes to having a grasp of statistics.

In God's providence,
I had a brief discussion with a friend on the day before the Pentateuch class began. In this conversation, he told me that his belief was that the Old Testament was fiction. While I stated that I didn't hold that view, I was not really equipped with an apologetic that could effectively counter his position.

Kenneth Kitchen's approach (in his book, The Bible In Its World) is largely to rebut the detractor's insistence that the patriarchal documents are anachronistic and therefore fiction. In order to advance the belief that the patriarchal material is of late origin, historians posit that an author or authors fabricated narratives projecting fiction into the past while relying on cultural material that was extant at the time of the composition by these authors. However, historians relying on positive parallels between patriarchal elements with late Nuzi material in support of this view wind up 'hoist with their own petard' in effect. This is true even without questioning the veracity of the supposed positive parallels, which, as Kitchen points out, have problems. Demonstrating the existence of positive parallels with much earlier material forces critics, using their previously avowed hermeneutic, to side with the Kitchen's many observations, thus crippling their original position.

By identifying personal name similarities used in the patriarch narratives which are also seen in other culture's documents (Mari, Ebla, Egypt, Babylon and others) the claim of anachronisms is weakened. Abraham's conduct within his family unit is consistent with early 2^nd millennium BC social and legal customs among family members. Abraham's involvement in the battle of the kings related to us in Genesis 14 is corroborated by the existence of numerous city-state coalitions for which Kitchen suggests a date between 2000 and 1750 BC. This also, then, helps to undermine the anachronism argument.

To make an á priori assumption that the narratives are fiction without admitting to a presuppositional bias can only be done by ignoring the evidence that is available. The existence of at least three genres of written material in Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, and the Hittite empire provides multiple samplings of work against which the patriarchal narratives may be contrasted. These genres are the autobiographical, the quasi-historical legend (characterized according to Kitchen by a poetic epic style) and what is easily identified as fictional tales marked by a lack of detail and character placement and possessing an obvious entertainment value. The patriarchal narratives in their inherent composition do not resemble those legends which have been uncovered from the Ancient Near East. To such an extent do these narrative possess the aura of real history, that to suggest the existence at any date from1000 BC and earlier of a never before seen genre consisting of “realistic-fiction” merely exposes the depth of one's bias.

The conclusion remains with the orthodox viewpoint which is that the patriarchal narratives were written as historical documents, recording events that actually happened.

You know I don't do
this very often. But here is an interview done by one WSCAL Seminarian (whom I don't know, really) of another Seminarian (whom I do know - an MIT grad who I respect quite a lot). I read it twice and find it helpful for someone trying to make sense out of how the church is supposed to relate to the culture, as inspired by an informed reading of the Bible.

If you are interested (or incensed) and want to read more, either for your own edification or to confirm your suspicion that I am not in Kansas anymore, go to this article, written by a WSCAL fellow. This links a very short write-up that is the first of about 5 articles that go into the topic more deeply than the linked interview above.

Who can identify this one:

I lost my mind so long ago
I wanted everyone to know
I wanted everyone to see
My broken heart belong to me

I go beyond the thought of you
And a broken heart was nothing new
I wanted everyone to see
My broken heart belong to me

And now as autumn fills the air
I feel your spirit every where
Now my fears are coming true
My broken heart belongs to you

And now as autumn fills the air
I feel your presence every where
Now my fears are coming true
My broken heart belongs to you

Now my fears are coming true
My broken heart belongs to you

Another reason to eschew
CCM in preference to your garden variety hymn of yesteryear:

Lead on, O King eternal,
The day of march has come;
Henceforth in fields of conquest
Thy tents shall be our home.
Through days of preparation
Thy grace has made us strong;
And now, O King eternal,
We lift our battle song.

Lead on, O King eternal,
Till sin’s fierce war shall cease,
And holiness shall whisper
The sweet amen of peace.
For not with swords’ loud clashing,
Nor roll of stirring drums;
With deeds of love and mercy
The heavenly kingdom comes.

Lead on, O King eternal,
We follow, not with fears,
For gladness breaks like morning
Where’er Thy face appears.
Thy cross is lifted over us,
We journey in its light;
The crown awaits the conquest;
Lead on, O God of might.

Here is a quote:

"From the first, therefore, I have always said to myself, "if the battle is to be fought with honor and with a hope of victory, then principle must be arrayed against principle; then it must be felt that in Modernism the vast energy of an all-embracing life-system assails us, then also it must be understood that we have to take our stand in a life-system of equally comprehensive and far-reaching power. When thus taken, I found and confessed and I still hold, that this manifestation of the Christian principle is given us in Calvinism. In Calvinism my heart has found rest. From Calvinism have I drawn the inspiration firmly and resolutely to take my stand in the thick of this great conflict of principles."

This statement of Calvinism being a dominating principle may confuse some who only think of Calvinism in a context of TULIP, or Calvinism as a doctrine of salvation. But in actuality, Calvinism is not just "one man's opinion" about salvation but the dominating principle that in the widest possible cosmological sense, the Triune God is Sovereign over the whole cosmos, in all its spheres and kingdoms, visible and invisible.

The funny thing is that just as this battle was being won, the enemy changed uniforms. It is now not modernism that is arraying its forces against truth, it is post-modernism that we battle. In post-modernism (definitely I am no expert) the idea is that truth is variable and, as it relates to scripture, the text contains no inherent truth but it becomes true, variable, for each person, uniquely, as he encounters the text in his own way and time.This next quote seems to suggest that this approach to scripture is bankrupt from the start:

"For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world- to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice."