Jake Wasdin

Feb 08 2010 ∞
“ Internalizing the work ethic of the industrial age, professional men dedicated themselves to self-improvement even in their leisure hours. They avidly read books and attended lectures on business or cultural themes. […] through their support for Sunday schools, factory owners sought to persuade workers to adopt middle-class norms of respectability and morality.
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— p 832 Traditions & Encounters by Bentley and Ziegler

This account of how the middle class was fueled in part by intellectual endeavor is indeed encouraging, but it seems to be falling away in some respects. Their is less interest now in reading and more toward less intellectually-stimulating means of filling free time (read: television and Youtube). While I believe the Internet has in part helped to save us from a Fahrenheit 451-esque society where nobody desires depth in knowledge anymore, it is interesting how much of what we in the middle class of the industrialized world do in spare time. Going to lectures sure isn’t something you hear about people doing very often in their leisure hours anymore—that much is certain.

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Are You Lost? Humble Yourself as a Child from I’ll Be Honest.

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Feb 07 2010 ∞

Free Audiobook: Religion Saves: And Nine Other Misconceptions by Mark Driscoll

After thoroughly enjoying the last book I read by Driscoll (Death by Love), I’ll be downloading this one to read… you may want to as well.

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“ In later life the navigator [Christopher Columbus] wrote a manuscript called The Book of Prophecies, casting himself as God’s agent and his westward sail as the fulfillment of divine mission. “All the sciences,” he wrote, “were of no use to me.” Rather, he was propelled across the ocean by “the Lord having opened my mind to the fact that it would be possible to sail from here to the Indies.” He also thought his voyage would bring about worldwide conversion to Christianity and the recapture of Jerusalem from Muslim infidels.
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Voyage Long Long and Strange by Tony Horowitz, p. 51

We never learned this about Columbus.. or at least I didn’t.. in school. In fact, this entire book has been very interesting in that the history of America is quite different than we gather from the tidbits we’ve learnt at school. Columbus was quite an…interesting…figure to say the least from what Horowitz has gathered. I’ll be posting more from this book as I read it, but I can already recommend it.

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Unlimited Atonement: Logical Issue

Yesterday I heard James White speak (prehaps I’ll post more on that later). In a Q+A session he raised an interesting point: if the atonement is unlimited, it is either just an act of love and not an actual forgiveness of sins (i.e. a symbol of God’s love and forgiveness) or if the sins of everyone actually are forgiven, then what is there left to suffer for in Hell? I had been leaning toward unlimited limited atonement, but now I am rethinking some things.

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Sometimes I fail to appreciate church. I too often fall to complaining about how mine falls short, but I really need to appreciate the opportunity where I can corporately worship God, commune with fellow saints, hear the Word preached, and learn. Praise be to God for this.

Have a blessed Lord’s Day.

“I have looked upon you in your sanctuary, beholding your power and glory” (in Ps. 63 esv)

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“ The preacher’s task, in other words, is to display Christ: to explain man’s need of Him, His sufficiency to save, and His offer of Himself in the promises as Saviour to all who truly turn to Him; and to show as fully and plainly as he can how these truths apply to the congregation before him.
— by J. I. Packer from an introductory essay

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Feb 06 2010 ∞
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Sewell: I don’t know whether or not God exists, let me just say that. I certainly don’t think that God is an old man in the sky; I don’t believe that God intervenes to give me goodies if I ask for them.

Hitchens: You don’t believe he’s an interventionist of any kind?

Sewell: I’m kind of an agnostic on that one. God is a mystery to me. I choose to believe because—and this is a very practical thing for me—I seem to live with more integrity when I find myself accountable to something larger than myself. That thing larger than myself I call “God,” but it’s a metaphor. That God is an emptiness out of which everything comes. Perhaps I would say God is “reality” or “what is.” You see, we’re trying to describe the infinite with the language of the finite. My faith is that I put all that I am and all that I have on the line for that which I do not know.
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A conversation between Unitarian minister Marilyn Sewell and infamous atheist Christopher Hitchens

Interesting to see this entire dialog between a unitarian and an atheist. My pastor quoted a unitarian universalist as saying in response to what his religion believed “well nothing really” which seems to fit quite well here. At least Hitchens has an actual belief.

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