The Power to Name

Genesis 2:19-20 (WEB):

Out of the ground Yahweh God formed every animal of the field, and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. Whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all livestock, and to the birds of the sky, and to every animal of the field; but for man there was not found a helper suitable for him.

It occurs to me that the one creature the man, Adam, was not given permission to name was himself. In this age of self-awareness, self-definition, self-esteem, and self-promotion, the one being over which the original father figure had no legitimate authority was the self. Adam had no actual claim on his own life or body; it belonged wholly and unconditionally to his Maker, for Whose pleasure He existed and to Whose voice he was made to hearken.

First Buttons: The Trinity

It's really important to get the first button right. If you don't, the whole shirt – the whole outfit – your whole day – will go off-kilter.

One of the first buttons for all consistent Christian thought is the Trinity. And I'm a little bit worried that some of the most visible faces of the charismatic movement in our day have such a hard time getting the first button right.

T. D. Jakes has received a lot of attention in the Christian press because he refuses to embrace the orthodox formulation of the trinity, preferring the unitarian language of three manifestations of one God (which suggests modalism, an ancient heresy). Interestingly, Joyce Meyer uses the same non-trinitarian language – "three manifestations" and "flesh-covered" rather than "three persons" and "fully man" – but I have yet to find a "heresy hunter" who has picked up on it. (Apparently they're too busy re-hashing disagreement with her over theories of the atonement and her "prosperity theology".)

A lot of people (and, particularly, a lot of women) have been affected, evidently for the better, by the ministries of these two. Consequently, some say this is a subject best left alone – don't go to them if you want to learn about the Godhead, but do listen if you want to learn about emotional healing. But I'm hesitant to treat something as basic as the Trinity as a secondary issue. It's not unwise to be guarded when it comes to learning about God (whether "who He is" or "what He does") from someone who has seen fit to disagree with seventeen centuries of consensus between the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant worlds. And when the disagreement is on a matter of basic ontological theology – "what is the nature of God" – it raises a serious question of whether we're even talking about the same god or not.

I say this as I'm starting to collate some notes for a message I'm eight weeks away from preaching on "the Holiness of God". It's one of those subjects that, at first blush, a lot of christians aren't terribly interested in, because it's not about them. Which is exactly the point – it's not about them, it's about Him. And it's the same kind of thinking – diminishing the importance of basic truths of God's Self – that leads to widespread acceptance and acclaim for those whose gospel, at its root, has deep differences with our own.

The Feminist Mistake

Read a few chapters of The Feminist Mistake by Mark Kassian last night.  She's now discussing former BC professor Mary Daly's contribution to the young theological feminism movement, 1968's The Church and the Second Sex.  The quoted excerpts and synopses make something very clear about Daly's philosophy – she may be brilliant, but her brilliance is not Christian; indeed, she is (at best) only a marginal theist.  She rests squarely upon the anti-theistic tradition of human self-definition (anthropocentrism/humanism) and extends it into gender group self-definition instead of confronting all attempts of human-kind and human beings to be the measure of themselves (or anything else).  It is for the Creator to self-disclose and to define His creation (theocentrism), and anything which does not begin there is the pot questioning the potter.

CrystalSpace 3D

Keeping my C++ skills sharp with a little CrystalSpace hacking… I was responsible for a major overhaul of the event system last fall, and corner case bugs are still turning up every now and then.