Protected: Family Christmas Letter 2009

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Subtraction

So the other day, #2 was doing a math worksheet for fun (yeah, for fun! I wonder where he gets it)! He asked me, “Hey Daddy, what’s 6 minus 5?” I asked him,

“If you had six candies, and then I took five of them away, how many would you have left?”

“Six?”

“No, six is what you had in the beginning, before I took five away! Go get six coins from my coin cup”

…

“OK, so now you have six coins, and I take away one, two, three,…”

“Oh, it’s one!”

The next day, in the car after school, I hear #2 from the back,

“What’s 8 minus 6?”

“Why don’t you figure it out?”

A little time goes by, and then I hear him say,

“I need six more pencils.”

“Why, how many do you have?”

“Two.”

Sabbath and Industry

Near the end of the debate (starting at 1:01:27 in the .mp3) I presented a very abbreviated version of an argument that Sabbatarianism is not consistent with use of electricity on the Sabbath.  To quote prominent Sabbatarian Joseph Pipa,

It is a lame excuse to say ‘They are going to be there anyway, so it really doesn’t matter what I do.’…If you use a person’s services, you are partly responsible for that person’s working on the Lord’s Day.

Or even quoting Kazooless (18:49):

Every time we pay for a service, there is a servant filling that need.  … You might argue that “they are going to do it anyway” but I say to you that even if that were true, we should not participate in their sin. Just as it is morally wrong to purchase a stolen item when you know that it is stolen, paying someone else to break the Sabbath for you is equally wrong.

So if Kazooless considers this standard worthy of condemning restauranters with, he should not shy away when it is applied to himself. 

Ignorance Negates Responsibility

We Reformed types know very well that “inability does not negate responsibility.”  The very opening words of WCF 1.1 are in this vein: “the light of nature, and the works of creation and providence do so far manifest the goodness, wisdom, and power of God, as to leave men unexcusable,” and of course, at the core of Paul’s arguments in Rom 1-2 is that man knows the moral law by natural revelation, and stands in condemnation for violating it. Paul’s justification for “God’s wrath is revealed from heaven” is not “that’s just the way it is”, but “what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. … ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.”

Paul’s argument, however, does not apply to the 4th commandment (note Paul does not accuse natural man of Sabbath-breaking here or anywhere else), because it is not a part of natural revelation.  

Sabbath Reflections

A few thoughts coming out of last night’s H&S:

First of all, the term “Creation Ordinance” gets tossed around a lot in discussions of the Sabbath.  It seems to me that “Creation Ordinance” is not particularly-well defined.  Kazooless and I may have been working to different definitions.  K is probably thinking “Creation=Universal” and “Ordinance=Commandment”.  But for me, calling the Sabbath a Creation Ordinance has nothing in particular to say about its nature, but only when it was instituted, i.e. in Creation.  In fact, I think the term “Creation Institution” works better for the Sabbath than “Creation Ordinance”.

Another thought is that the fatal flaw of the Westminster/Sabbatarian position is that they approach the whole day from a Regulative perspective.  Which means that questions of the form “is X permissible” are not even meaningful; only “is X commanded?”  And there are only 4 things commanded by Westminster: public worship, private worship, works of mercy, and works of necessity.  Any further questions “is X permissible?” are answered only with “no works, words, or thoughts concerning your own employments or recreations.”  But one point I had in my notes, but didn’t have time to articulate, is that this strict stance is entirely reasonable within a worship service — i.e. in the context where the Regulative Principle applies.  But Westminster goes that extra distance of extending the RPW to the whole Sabbath Day, whereas I would confine it (like the external observance of the Sabbath) only to corporate worship.

Hoagies & Stogies: Sabbath

MP3 are up!  Come & get ‘em!

• Part 1 (Debate) 1:15:08, 17MB
• Part 2 (Q&A) 21:40, 5MB

Thanks to Jeff for hosting the audio, and of course thanks more for a good discussion!

Everybody mark your calendars for the next event: the date is as easy to remember as 1/23!

Leapin’ Lizards! Fun Facts about Puerto Rico

We got back over a week ago now, so I wanted to just jot down a number of curious oddities I learned there.

Unlike the pedestrian alligator lizards we see around here in San Diego, Puerto Rican lizards can jump surprising distances, over a foot from plant to plant, or from ground to wall.  We also saw a number of very large iguanas (maybe 4 ft nose to tail), but apparently those are non-indigenous abandoned pets — like pythons in the everglades and mythical New York City sewer gators.  Also, the snails are larger, with flatter, cinnamon roll-like shells, rock-hard compared to the paper-thin-shelled garden snails we get around here.

Although there are other species of “coqui” frogs, only Puerto Rican coquis actually sing “coqui” every evening.

There is no longer any U.S. Navy presence in P.R.!  Despite everything I had heard about P.R. from all the navy brats I know that lived there at one time or another, now all that is left is the Army’s Ft. Buchanan.

Puerto Ricans don’t drink Bacardi.  They prefer DonQ.  (Pronounced “DonKoo”, not “DonKew”)  Apparently Bacardi has more Cuban than Puerto Rican roots.  And DonQ is preferred for having less flavor (I guess like vodka).

Who knew? They still make cars without central locking (I don’t mean Puerto Rico, but due to the driving habits of Puerto Ricans, it seems the rental agencies stock the truly cheapest cars possible).  I don’t mind rolling down windows (they stayed up to keep in the max A/C all the time anyways), I don’t mind not having remote locking.  But can you remember the stone-age ritual of getting in the car and leaning over to unlock the passenger door, and twisting around to unlock the back door?  Or having to make the walk of security to double-check all the doors got locked when everyone gets out?  What a pain!  (However, the Toyota Yaris did have not only a CD player, but an MP3 player — which did not at all make up for the fact that it was lacking an engine)

Speaking of cars, Puerto Rican roadways are oddly half-metricized.  Speeds are posted in MPH, and distances to exits and cities are in miles, but instead of mile-markers, they have KM markers.  And gas is sold not by the gallon but by the liter.  And at every gas station I saw, from Fajardo to Areceibo, the prices were augmented with a tiny little “7/10″ of a cent.  I can only imagine that the industry that manufactures those numbers for gas station marquees sells “Continental” packages with extra 9’s, and “Puerto Rican” packages with extra 7’s.  And can you imagine the uproar when Puerto Rican gas must have topped $1/liter a few years back?  How many gas stations didn’t have enough digits for their signs?

Family Tidbits

A while back, Mrs. Rad rightly complained that my blog doesn’t have any family stuff anymore, just theological fighting.  Since then, even that has mostly migrated to the Outhouse — I suppose one could thus say that this blog’s gone to the crapper! So for a while I am going to try to refocus this blog on little family anecdotes — the kind of little tidbits that just fall through the cracks otherwise.  (I’m not making any promises though, that’ll get you killed!)

Saturday morning I made a quick trip to the store with #3, who was up early (earlier than the other boys, anyway).  I remarked to him how cheerful he was, especially in comparison to how grumpy he was at bedtime the night before.  ”Do you remember how grumpy you were last night?” I asked.  ”Yes, I was this grumpy,” he replied, holding his hand about nose-high.

We have this children’s book in Spanish called “Perros! Perros!”  One of the objectives of this book must be to teach kids how to roll their r’s.  #2’s gotten pretty good at it, but he’s gone a bit overboard.  Lately, instead of calling me “Dadda”, the d in the middle gets trilled, like “Darra”.  (He’s also very proud that he learned to snap, and he’s this close to whistling.)

On Sunday night, after some initial squirreliness, I had to sit right on top of #1 to make him pay attention in church, instead of playing the “don’t cross this line” game with #2.  And pay attention he did!  His verdict afterwards was “A good pastor, with even a very simple text, can make quite a good sermon!”  Judge for yourself!  (Or should I say Judges 10:1-5; 12:8-15 for yourself?)

Calvin on Anabaptists

Just ran across a nice quote from Calvin showing what he had to deal with in his day:

Certain Anabaptists of our day conjure up some sort of frenzied excess instead of spiritual regeneration. The children of God, they assert, restored to the state of innocence, now need not take care to bridle the lust of the flesh, but should rather follow the Spirit as their guide, under whose impulsion they can never go astray. It would be incredible that a man’s mind should fall into such madness, if they did not openly and haughtily blab this dogma of theirs. The thing is indeed monstrous! But it is fitting that those who have persuaded their minds to turn God’s truth into falsehood should suffer such punishments for their sacrilegious boldness. Shall all choice between dishonest and honest, righteous and unrighteous, good and evil, virtue and vice, be thus taken away? “Such difference arises,” they say, “from the curse of old Adam, from which we have been freed through Christ.” Therefore, there will now be no difference between fornication and chastity, integrity and cunning, truth and falsehood, fair dealing and extortion. “Take away,” say the Anabaptists, “vain fear — the Spirit will command no evil of you if you but yield yourself, confidently and boldly, to his prompting.” Who would not be astonished at these monstrosities? Yet it is a popular philosophy among those who are blinded by the madness of lusts and have put off common sense.

Tossed about by every wind of doctrine.

H&S: Confessionalism Afterparty

Nothing too organized here, just some post-debate thoughts:

• Everybody there had an astounding time!
• One thing you can’t get from the audio: a couple of times, Davie said “scripture” or “my bible”, and reflexively held up his iPod.  I’m not saying it’s bad to read the bible on an iPod, it’s just funny.
• Also, when Davie recommends that all the heads of all the denominations in the world be locked in a room with only bibles until they come to an agreement, the hilarious interjection of “they’d write a confession” came not from Brian, but from Blogorrhea regular, Kazooless, a.k.a. The Onomist, sitting with me in the front row.  Audio listeners will miss out on the look on Davie’s face.
• On that topic, I thought the whole “lock ‘em in a room” idea was pretty silly (or at least naive).  Even without their confessions, the heads of all the world’s denominations would still be bringing in their disparate hermeneutics and interpretations, which are equivalent to their confessions, which is the whole (correct) point of Brian’s argument that confessions are like bellybuttons: everybody’s got one.  (And for that matter, why doesn’t Davie want to lock the heads of all the world’s non-denominations into that room too?)
• I’d like some historical backup for those claims about Calvin and Zwingli executing people.  I know what was going on with Servetus in particular, but I had never heard those charges about so many others.

So if you were there, or if you listened to the .mp3s, what did you think?