Sunday, February 28, 2010

Lest we over-react

As a matter of untrained, meager observation, it's somewhat safe to say that the sacrament of the Lord's supper is receiving some long-over due attention in orthodox reformed churches. Perhaps it is due to a strengthening of John Calvin's influence, versus his reformed predecessor Ulrich Zwingli, whose legacy is a bit more narrow to our faith.

Zwingli seems to have been a bit of a reactionary -- being so adamant in his opposition to Rome that he preached a mere symbolic presence of Christ in the sacrament of the Lord's supper, becoming an arch rival of both Rome and Luther. A lesser known fact is his influence on frequency of celebration.
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Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Color me confused

Several times recently, I've run into people who claim that red has always represented Republicans and blue the Democrats. There was just one problem in my mind. I don't remember that being the case. While allowing that my young age prohibits any amount of certainty in my memory, I do remember watching returns from the 1992 presidential election. The news anchors were showing state-by-state results in bar graphs which were red, blue and yellow. That was Perot's year, hence the third color. If I remember correctly, the colors were either shuffled from state-to-state or were uniformly Bush=red, Clinton=blue, Perot=yellow.
I don't remember getting the impression at that point that the colors were set in stone. It's only recently that the results have been color-coded so consistent using GOP red and Democrat blue.

Now people have often noted with irony, whether interested in the history or not, that the colors really should be reversed, if we are going to be consistent with the consistent world-wide use of red by leftist regimes. My observations of Canadian politics follows that train of thinking as well: The Liberal Party has an official color of red, the Conservatives of blue (hard to take too seriously though since they have party logos that remind one of sports teams).

The political parties in the United States have never felt bound by such delineations, though. Remember, our party symbols are animals and the artistic impressions of them are both red, white and blue.

So what inspired this post? Well, someone is upset, or at least a little irritated with the current arrangement and decided a t-shirt was one way to express it in fine detail. Their history is correct. The Reagan victories (or at least one of them) was illustrated by the media using "Reagan blue." That's just fact.

Frankly, I wonder whether the maker of the t-shirt is more upset by being designated by the color red than by that arbitrary decision being made by random news media producers.

Here's his suggested Obama victory map:
Yeah, a little over the top, but oh well.

So the question:
Do you care enough about this issue to by a shirt and wear it proudly around your fellow political nerd friends?

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Thursday, February 18, 2010

The American Patriot's WHAT?

I'm trying really hard to understand how this could possibly be a beneficial publication. What was Thomas Nelson publishing thinking by creating an American Patriot's Bible?

Since when is there a version of the bible best suited to a particular group of people? I thought the Word was the Word, the gospel is the gospel, and that Christ's kingdom is not of this world. Best explanation I guess is this quote from the Web site:

The American Patriot's Bible intersects the teachings of the Bible with the history of the Unites States while applying it to today's culture.
This kind of thing irks me in the same way that "conservative" pastors do when they complain that they can't make political endorsements under their nonprofit status. Frankly, I think every minister of the word, regardless of his political affiliation, should be too in love with the gospel to preach anything else.

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