Safe Haven

It has been said by an endless parade of wise people that all they ever learned that was important was given them by someone else. I am certainly no exception, even if what I was given was a lesson in what not to do. In any case, the question of this blog in general is, "Who is Jesus Christ, and why does it matter?" Of course, you may have noticed that I've written many other things not concerned with that question, at least not directly. And that reason is that people are fascinating. God was so "fascinated" by us and in love with us that He became one of us, to rescue us from ourselves, from sin, and Satan. Life without the God who made us is utterly pointless, and quite literally impossible. Some of you begin to think I've become some sort of crazy person, becoming Catholic, and daring to insist that to be Christian is to be Catholic, eventually. It isn't my idea, and it isn't the product of me being a convert, or any faults of mine, real or imag...

 The reason there's an existential crisis in the hermeneutical process enshrined in Sola Scriptura is that the humility of submission to God is undercut and obscured by the fact that the final arbiter of what the Bible says is the individual. We can have lots of mediating authorities--the church as we understand it, creeds, and whichever parts of church history we choose to accept, but it's still on us, in this setting. The Westminster Confession of Faith says it this way: "The supreme judge by which all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits, are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture." [The Holy Spirit! See! Not me, not you!--ed.] Ah, but that's exactly where the Noltie Conundrum comes in, and makes the crisis acute. What Christian is going to say he lacks the Spirit's guidanc...

"Invest in green jobs"= pay off your campaign contributors .

I miss the old days. Close friends just a button-push away. That seems like lifetimes ago. Think I'd ask for some advice now. The "fan club" met together on Saturday when I was hoping to see her. The wrong one asked me to the movies. I said OK. It's "Brave," that new Disney/Pixar movie. It looks good. I'll go and have a good time. I think the one I like knows. [Why don't you just tell her?--ed.] How well has that worked out? I was just thinking today that I'm too old to play games, and too young not to care. Sorry to complain. I've done a lot of complaining. It gets in your head, being alone. I've felt really insecure about it and I've put it on others sometimes. I'm so sorry about that. I've been talking to "Mom" and St. Therese about the whole thing. I know they're holding me up so I don't lose my steps. You can take shortcuts, but the thing about Satan's shortcuts is they never make you happy, and the...

Well, I told you I'd tell the story of how I'm going to remember the Old Testament books. For some of you, the list may be painful, since you only recognize 66 books in the Bible. The first and best reason you're wrong is because Mother Church says there are 73. This may not be fair, but it seems like people said, "Let's come up with a completely arbitrary number less than 73, and blame the difference on Catholics and their weird doctrines." I digress. Sorry. Without further ado, the JK Story of The Old Testament: The first 5 books of the Old Testament are called the Pentateuch-- Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy . Moses died and left Joshua in charge. After that, "everyone did what was right in his own eyes" because Israel had no king. So God raised up the Judges . It was a sucky time in general, though highlighted by the story of Ruth . Well, Israel begged for a king, though God already was, so God gave them one with an assist...

It strikes me as important to say that why we hold something to be true is at least as important as the fact that we do, provided that thing we hold corresponds to true truth. Because the reason why will tell us if we are being principled and/rational in the holding. The whole Crossian notion of Protestantism as ecclesial deism rests on the claim/premise that to hold the Nicene Christology as true without the visible Church gifted with the charism that makes it true is unprincipled. To explore the basis for why Nicea is true is to discover the continuity at the heart of the Catholic Church. But look at it another way: to hold it without a principled basis isn't the end of the world; in fact, it may well save your soul. The bad part is, there's nothing in the principles of Protestantism (which ultimately reduces to the primacy of individual Scriptural interpretation) to prevent a very opposite conclusion. We're not saying--I'm certainly not saying--that every Reformed g...