Betty’s analysis is spot on.

Once upon a time, there were lots of people who believed in religion. They were all really stupid. Then along came a man called Dawkins, and everyone saw the light. The more you think about it, the more it makes sense. There is no god at all, and Dawkins is his prophet. And they all lived in hostility for ever after. Amen.

Had a discussion with a friend recently, and was shocked and appalled to hear it suggested that knowledge is a hindrance to faith.

Not really shocked, obviously, as it’s a very common conception of what faith is. But the faith the Bible recommends, the faith that saves, is faith that has a thoroughly firm grounding in reality known and grasped with conviction. Faith always includes knowledge. You can’t rightly be said to believe in Jesus if you don’t know for a certainty that he is the Christ, the Son of God (and so on).

Certainly some things that faith (this faith, saving faith) lays hold on are unseen, beyond our senses, not amenable to empirical testing, beyond even our comprehension, and beyond what we could ever find out if they weren’t revealed in scripture. The fact that there are three persons in the Godhead is maybe the most important of these. (And of course there are many kinds of non-saving faiths which fix on propositions which are not even true – but that wasn’t part of our discussion.) But saving faith needs a foundation in reality – the reality, for example, that Christ is a suitable Saviour for exactly the kind of sinner that you are, the truth that there is mercy available even for the chief of sinners, the fact that he is able to save to the uttermost any sinner who comes to him. And the more the believer knows about these propositions the better – whatever faith builds on, is amply set out in the scriptures to be built on, and faith has nothing to fear from being increasingly better educated and more knowing.

Faith – saving faith – is completely different from ignorance, superstition, and wishful thinking. If it isn’t saying, We know and believe, it isn’t worth much.

A passing comment, arising after a sermon on 1 Cor 7, ‘the time is short …’:

Time is the only physical thing we can give to our souls.

(And the gift we give least often.)

True? false? debatable?

[Meanwhile, I'm catching a train northwards tomorrow lunchtime and web access is unlikely until the start of next week.]

Somebody reached this blog by searching for, “Is the word “just” a stressed syllable?”

No doubt they’re long gone, but what a question!

Stress is inherently relational: you can only identify something as stressed in comparison to something else.

When a word is monosyllabic, there is no question about where its lexical stress is located: on the only syllable there is. So in citation form, I suppose there could just about be a sense in which you could call it a stressed syllable. It’s stressed enough, I suppose, to make it utterable.

But considering citation forms isn’t the best way of going about any phonological analysis. You need to see (for which read: hear) the word in context, so that it can be considered in its relation to the surrounding words. Only then is it possible to decide whether it is stressed (in relation to the surrounding words) or not.

Syntagmatics is the way forward, folks.

Spotted recently, in a certain denominational magazine – a sermon by William Trail, minister of the Free Tron Church in Glasgow after the Disruption, where he discusses obstacles which a person might imagine in the way of believing, or being forgiven. Just thought it fits with a couple of earlier posts, here and here.

“Perhaps the two most comon obstacles with which an anxious soul obstructs its approach to Christ are: (1) mistaken views of a sinner’s warrant to come to Christ; (2) a dread that some unpardonable sin has been committed, or that he has gone to such lengths in wickedness that he has put himself beyond the reach of mercy. …

“(1) … My sole warrant to believe in Christ is God’s testimony in the Word. … The free invitation is sufficient warrant for you, or anyone else, to believe in Christ.

“(2) The alarmed soul says, ‘I have sinned beyond the possibility of pardon. Others may be forgiven, but I am beyond the reach of mercy.

When the sinner says that his sins are so many and so heinous as to put him beyond the reach of hope, are we to try to persuade him that he has an exaggerated view of his sins, that he is judging his heart too harshly? No, we are to strive to convince this sinner that it is impossible for anyone to exaggerate their sins, for they are far greater than they yet understand. So, when the sinner cries out, ‘My sins are as scarlet, they are red like crimson,’ we may, as it were, echo back his confession: Yes, your sins are as scarlet; they are red like crimson, but there is hope even for you, for ‘though your sins be scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.’

Yes, though your sin is a great evil, Christ is a still greater Saviour; his blood cleanses from all sin. And if you also, desponding soul, would only wash in it, these sins of yours will be so cleansed as to rival in whiteness the driven snow or the spotless fleece. To say that any sinner can be so vile that Jesus cannot or will not save him would be to pluck the brightest jewel from his crown as the Saviour of the chief of sinners.”

In Psalm 111, it says, the Lord “has made his wonderful works to be remembered: the Lord is gracious, and full of compassion.”

A question:
What is the link between the two statements? Does the psalmist exclaim over the grace of the Lord as an effect of remembering the Lord’s works? Or is it because the Lord is gracious that he has made his works to be remembered?

(Or does it matter?)

Well, the new router has arrived and has solved some of our internet problems, although frustratingly bringing new ones into the equation too. It’s failing to load up some sites properly – I can get Bloglines, Google, WordPress, the BBC, but not much else (Yahoo, Facebook, Language Log, anything with blogspot in it, any help pages that I google for). This can be for several hours with no apparent reason and then fine again for a while: very annoying.

On the plus side, I’ve successfully persuaded my dad to lend me a couple of aged tomes from his library, which means that I will be able to read up on Victorian ecclesiastical controversies to my heart’s content while the internet sorts itself out. If there’s anyone out there who understands and is willing to talk about the Establishment Principle, and how far it was/is shared by other countries of the Reformation (particularly perhaps the Netherlands), and what it means in today’s political (not necessarily ecclesiastical) context, it would be lovely to hear from you. A post on such matters may be forthcoming if rage at the tantalising lack of yahoo mail doesn’t consume me first.

[Excerpt from a sermon by Thomas Guthrie - colleague of Thomas Chalmers in Edinburgh in the mid-19th century.]

“Allow no difficulties about this or that doctrine to hinder you from giving instant attention, and earnest obedience, to these plain commandments, Pray without ceasing – Labour for the bread that never perisheth – Give all diligence to make your calling and election sure – Take diligent heed to do the commandment and the law, to love the Lord your God, and to walk in all his ways, and to keep his commandments, and to cleave unto him, and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul.

“Why is it that many, that perhaps you, are not saved? ‘Will the Lord cast off for ever, and will he be favourable no more? Is his mercy clean gone for ever? doth his promise fail for ever more? Hath God forgotten to be gracious? hath he in anger shut up his tender mercies?’ Is heaven full? Has the cry ceased, ‘Yet there is room?’ Has the blood of Christ lost its efficacy, or the heart of God its pity? No. Men carefully preserve gold and jewels, but throw away their souls, as of no value; – they are not saved; but why? They give themselves no trouble, take no pains to be saved. …

“I am persuaded that many more would be saved, if fewer abused the doctrines of man’s depravity, and God’s free, sovereign, saving grace. It is the gospel, that Without shedding of blood there is no remission; it is the gospel, that Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God; it is the gospel, that Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost; but remember, I pray you, that according to the same gospel, those who receive are those who ask, and those who find are such as seek. The door opens to the knocking hand.”

Things to read for light relief after ploughing through my last two monster posts:

• a new blog, written by a brother of mine, full of entertainingly grumpy rants – the redeeming defect

• reaction to the guidance published by the Director of Public Prosecutions on when to prosecute in cases of assisted suicide
• something John MacArthur said on different kinds of faith

One of the proposals in the government’s Equality Bill seeks to remove the right of churches to employ only staff whose lifestyle is consistent with the church’s teachings, specifically in relation to the church’s teaching on sexual behaviour.

My MP got a letter from me on the subject, pointing out that this proposal is extremely damaging for religous liberties in this country, as it will make it possible to force a church to employ people whose practice contradicts the church’s own teachings and beliefs on sexual morality.

I then got a letter back, enclosing a response from the Parliamentary Secretary for Equality. According to this gentleman’s letter, the government’s position is that “churches … can require an employee to be of a particular sexual orientation for ‘employment for the purposes of organised religion’. This covers a narrow range of posts such as ministers of religion or others mainly involved in the promotion or reprepresntation of religion. … Ultimately the requirement depends upon the nature of the specific job. So a church could be permitted to require a youth worker to be heterosexual if that youth worker’s job mainly involved explaining Christiainty. But it could not require a youth worker to be heterosexual if that youth worker’s main responsibility was organising sporting activities.”

Obviously, this response entirely avoids providing any justification for the government’s assumption that it has the right to override the Christian conscience, the Church’s orthodox teaching, and the teaching of the Bible, in matters of morality and ethics. There is also plenty scope for challenging how – on what grounds – the government has either the right or the ability to judge what does and doesn’t fall within the said narrow range of posts which “involve the promotion or representation of religion” (or indeed to define things in those terms at all). It seems to involve an implicit admission that freedom of conscience will indeed be damaged by the government’s equality agenda, and that with little compunction.

But I’m interested too in how the current state of affairs in the visible church leaves us, in some respects, wide open to this kind of state intrusion. If you remember this brief and simplistic description of the Establishment Principle from a wee while ago – virtually everything that is distinctive to this historic understanding of the right relationship between church and state assumes a set-up which has by and large been abandoned in today’s situation.

This can be seen primarily, I think it’s only fair to say, in that the Reformers, Covenanters, and Disruption Fathers give no indication anywhere that they knew what a youth worker might be. So while the Church in 1842 unwaveringly stood on its right to decide whether or not to proceed with disciplinary action against a thief and a fraudster in the ministry and a licentiate accused of drunkenness and obscenity, in various cases where the civil courts contradicted (interdicted) its ecclesiastical rulings – can it be said that the Church today has as firm a grasp of the power of the keys when it comes to the manifold ministries which individuals seem to perform while attached to the church but not particularly as functions of either the eldership or the deaconate? Does the church’s right to hire and fire Sunday School teachers (if they’re not voluntary any more), cleaners (if the hoovering and polishing isn’t an automatic unpaid rostered delight of every able bodied member of the congregation these days),  “worship leaders” (if they’re not just run of the mill teaching elders), small group leaders, football organisers, and any other ministry which I may have inadvertently overlooked – does this right really fall under its powers in sacris in any case? Office-bearers in the church – teaching and ruling elders, and deacons – have a calling, a vocation, to their office, and the appointment, admission, ordination, suspension, and/or deposition of individuals to or from these divinely ordained offices is and must be civilly recognised as the ‘power of the keys’, belonging to the church and not in any sense to the civil authorities – but when the church becomes an employer, things seem to become rather more murky.

Not, of course, that this in any way excuses the state taking advantage of the church’s sloppy attitude to its officebearers (and its often unnecessary impluse to provide a sanitised churchy version of every legitimate kind of social activity within its own pale; who really needs a youth worker to organise football anyway). The Disruption fathers might have been tempted to say that when the church starts to fail in its responsibilities, the state has more and more of an obligation to rebuke and remonstrate as best it can from the sidelines, and provoke her to love and good works all over again.

No. The government’s Equality Bill is no remedy for the ailments of the church. Instead it will only contribute to an atmosphere where the message of the scriptures is more and more suppressed, the gospel trumpet increasingly muted, and most objectionable of all, where the powers of the state are misused to restrict freedom of conscience and freedom of religion. This is good neither for the church nor for society, and it’s a retrograde step for the state too. The government may not like the church’s teaching, or her insistence that those who assist her work of preaching the gospel – in more and less direct ways – should live out their lives in accordance with the scriptural pattern. But it is going well beyond its rightful jurisdiction when it attempts to force its secular, politically correct agenda on people and organisations against their scripturally-informed consciences.