China's One-Child Policy

I found this interesting piece about a recent Chinese governmental birth control raid in southern China. Here's a few excerpts:

Residents of this southern China county on Thursday angrily accused authorities of forcing women to have abortions and vandalising homes in a brutal campaign to enforce birth-control policies...

Authorities had even forced women pregnant with their first child to undergo abortions merely because they had not completed paperwork required before getting pregnant, said a woman surnamed Xu, a waitress in a Bobai restaurant that was deserted at lunchtime due to fear pervading the district.
"This has been going on for about three months. The one-child policy is wrong. We are totally against it. I know a woman who committed suicide by jumping in the river because she did not want to be caught by the work teams," Xu said.
A feeling of palpable tension has gripped the area, where deserted roads contrast with bright red-and-white banners and billboards bearing government slogans such as: "Support the one-child policy" and "Happiness is to have one child".

More than a year ago, I posted an entry about this alarming statistic: by 2020, 40 million frustrated Chinese bachelors will have no one to court and marry due to the one-child policy in their country.

The scary thing about China and their desire to modernize and be progressive (and yet still hold on to their nationalistic ideas) is the lack of foresight they exhibit and the seeming inability to learn from history (perhaps because theyhave been closed off from Western history for so long--I don't know). We in the West have learned what happens to over-masculinized (in China's case, literally over-masculinized) cultures: it's called Nazism--with its desire for a perfect race, its nationalistic pride and devaluing of the feminine virtues and so on.

An Opinion Piece about "God's Prior 'Yes'" by Peter Leithart

Here is a very interesting article I found at Reformed News (reprinted there with permission from Leithart's blog). It's an opinion piece by Peter Leithart (Side note: perhaps I read too much Leithart, but most of what he says has the "ring of truth" to me). He says that the fundamental issue between the Federal Vision crowd and their opponents is an understanding of creation. This is a thought I have had myself, but I will let Leithart say it better than I can. Here's an excerpt, but by all means, do read the whole piece.

Before God prohibited Adam from eating the tree of knowledge, the Eternal Word had already spoken Adam into existence. Before God's No He had already spoken a preexisting Yes, and the Yes set the context for the No. The sheer fact that there is something rather than nothing is testimony to God's prior Yes.

Every No from that time on is set within the context of God's Yes: God says Yes to Noah, and then commands him not to eat blood. God says Yes to Israel in bringing them out of Egypt, and then issues the Ten Words. Every command that God issues presupposes His preexisting Yes, because unless God was committed to preserving a people He would not warn them off the way of death.

For a certain brand of Reformed theology, such talk amounts to denying the gospel because it denies what is thought to be the sub-stratum on which the gratuity of the gospel depends.The Federal Vision controversy is, from this angle, more about creation than about soteriology or sacramental theology. Far be it from me to accuse those who oppose the Federal Vision of "denying creation," but they are, in my view, failing to work through a fully creationist theology. Dare I say, they have failed to think through a fully evangelical theology of creation.

Well said.

A funny thing happened on the way to the academy this morning...

Because I ride the bus to work everyday, I do a lot of observing. I peer out a frame created by the massive rectangular windows every morning to see my bustling little sector of Dallas on their way to work, walking their kids to school, stopping to fill up the gas tank.

Yesterday morning, I did a double take as my number 51 bus came near a Target store. There, in the the parking lot, I got a glimpse of an hunter orange-vested cop issuing a citation to a full-size Chevy pickup truck driver. As the image began to make the trek into my memory, I saw with my mind's eye that there was no police car any where near the scene. Luckily, we were at stop sign, and as I curiously pointed my eyes back to the parking lot, I saw something I'd never seen before: the cop was on a Segway. Whha-a! I couldn't help but emit a small chuckle as I mused upon the event: "How embarrassing! To have this truck with probably a V-6 like engine and to be ticketed by none other than a Segway cop!"

A Difference in Imagination

As I finished up the PCA's ad interim committee's report on the Federal Vision, etc., I could not help but think of how it seems to be missing a fundamental, philosophical assumption of FV. But then I thought, "No, philosophical assumption is not quite right. It's something perhaps more basic." Then I found this from Peter Leithart's blog. There is a fundamental difference in how each group sees the world: that is, there's a fundamental difference in imagination. That's what I was looking for: imagination. From Leihart's post:

One of the differences between those associated with "Federal Vision" theology and those opposed to it is a difference of theological imagination. The opponents operate with a theological imagination that distinguishes and clarifies; ontology is distinguished from relationality, nature from supernature, ecclesiology from soteriology.

Leithart goes on to describe what he calls the perichoretic imagination that one tends to find among the proponents of FV. Perichoresis was an ancient Christian way of attempting to describe the relationship of the three persons of the Trinity. Read more about perichoresis here and here.

John Calvin: Catholic with a little "c"?

I've been reading the PCA ad interim study group's findings on the Federal Vision (FV), New Perspective on Paul (NPP), and Auburn Avenue Theologies (AAT). I will have more to say about this document in future posts. In the meantime, I found this comment interesting by a Dominican professor who teaches at the University of Virginia.

Contrary to the false interpretations of Calvin on grace and the sacraments that are retailed by some of the Reformed, Calvin was, I would say, the one catholic writer among the Protestant reformers.

To me, this seems similar to what is being said among some of the Federal Vision folks. This comment was made by Fr. Augustine Thompson, O.P., at Francis Beckwith's blog:the Francis Beckwith who just recently resigned his post as President of the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) because of his recently being received back in to the Roman Catholic Church.