Good Friday

The day of wrath, that dreadful day,
when God did have his final say,
His justice and mercy each had their way,

The wrath of man did but reflect
The wrath of God in this respect
Forsaken, abandoned — Divine neglect

What horror did then invade the mind
Of He who came His sheep to find
And who paid the debt, for His kind?

But no unwilling victim, this sacrifice
He staged the players as His device
To orchestrate His redemption price

Judas’ sordid kiss of treachery
The disregard of Pilate’s plea
The vision of Mary at His knee

Yearly we call this Friday “good,”
And mark His hanging on the wood
And are nourished with Him as our food

Divine jurisprudence satisfied
His death, the death that His people died
We are the blood flowing from His side

His work still doth intercede
For our access He still doth plead
And for our comfort He remains our need

Impervious to alien guilt and guile
Thrown at us by the Serpent’s wile
Animated only by forgiveness’s smile

Now, at the word of His command
We call for all to meet His demand
Be reconciled, that ye may in judgment stand

The day of wrath, that dreadful day,
when God did have his final say,
His justice and mercy each had their way,

The Brilliance Of Kagan?

In this piece,

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/05/us-usa-court-kagan-idUSBRE83410E20120405

Justice Elena Kagan is trumpeted as the second coming of Oliver Wendell Holmes on SCOTUS.

However, it strikes me that Reuters has not looked closely enough. Reuters zeroes in on this exchange as proof of the brilliance and tenacity of Justice Kagan. In this exchange with Paul D. Clement, a lawyer representing 26 states who have filed suit against Obamacare we see Kagan at her supposed best. In this exchange Clement vs. Kagan are debating whether the authority the federal government is assuming in Obama death care is coercive. Kagan thinks that it is not, because the federal government is giving states, in Kagan’s paralance, “a boatload of federal money for you to take and spend on poor people’s healthcare.” Clement counters that this boatload of federal money comes laden with coercive conditions, invoking the old, “he who takes the king’s coin is the king’s man” argument. Kagan then presents a hypothetical to Clement which leads to the exchange that Reuters finds brilliant,

JUSTICE KAGAN: Now, suppose I’m an employer, and I see somebody I really like, and I want to hire that person. And I say, I’m going to give you $10 million a year to come work for me. And the person says, well, I–you know, I’ve never been offered anywhere approaching $10 million a year. Of course, I’m going to say yes to that. Now we would both be agreed that that’s not coercive, right?

MR. CLEMENT: Well, I guess I would want to know where the money came from. And if the money came from–

JUSTICE KAGAN: Wow. Wow. I’m offering you $10 million a year to come work for me, and you are saying that this is anything but a great choice?

MR. CLEMENT: Sure, if I told you, actually, it came from my own bank account. And that’s what’s really going on here, in part.

1.) I’m not sure how this is brilliant since Kagan has sailed (keeping with her boat language) right past the fact that the Federal government has no money that it does not first confiscate from the citizenry. Kagan is creating a analogical scenario where someone is offered $10 million dollars a year of stolen money to be commissioned to do something that the prospective employer is not legally allowed to commission. The US Constitution does not allow the Federal Government to hire the States to taken confiscated tax dollars to run a death care program.

2.) Clements response was good but it could have been even better. He could have said,

“Thank you for your question Your Honor, however your analogy does not hold and is really an equivocation on what is being proposed here by the Obama Administration. What the Obama administration is proposing is to force, as contradictory as such a notion is, on the American citizenry a involuntary contract where they are forced to pay for something that they may not want. This is hardly parallel to the employee / employer potential relationship that you describe where the contract entered into has the voluntary character of all genuine contracts. You can not successfully analogize a voluntary contract of employee / employer with a involuntary coercive contract where the force of the State is binding the citizens.”

3.) Kagan’s analogy looks only at the side of the people being advantaged and so with her faulty analogy insists that there is nothing coercive in the arrangement. To look at the coercive side we might draw this similar analogy,

“Now, suppose I’m a Mafia thug, and I see somebody I really dislike, and I want to hurt that person. And I say, I’m going to take from you $10 million a year so somebody who has chosen to not work can come work for me. And the person says, well, I–you know, I’ve never had anyone offer to take that kind of money from me before. Of course, I’m going to say “no” to that. Now we would both be agreed that that’s coercive, right?”

If someone as dense as me, can see through the thickness of Kagan, I’m not sure why Reuters is arguing her brilliance.

The Relationship Between Theology And Language

‎”How do you get your systematic theology if it is not at first driven by understanding the language? In order to get your systematic theology, you first have to get to the meaning of the words. It cannot be the other way round for the obvious reason: it would imply that systematic theology is developed before you understand the meaning of the words in Scripture.”

Dr. Ian Hodge
Australian Theonomist and all round great guy

Dr. Hodge’s formulation is lacking my estimation. Language doesn’t come to us disassociated from a meaning that is driven by theology. Language is not a free floating independent category that can be worked out in terms of meaning without that meaning of the language being informed a-priori by some theology. What I am insisting here is that the search for meaningful language requires a theology of language, and if we must have a theology of language before we can rightly understand language then clearly there is some sense in which theology is prior to language.

In terms of the “meaning of the words in Scripture,” it seems fairly obvious that the different conclusions (and so different translations) that people come up with in terms of word meanings reveals that language is theology (worldview) dependent. People will have disagreement regarding the meaning of language and at that point we begin to see that theology is the reason for that disagreement on the language.

I would argue that the particulars (language) and the wholes (theology) condition one another at every step of the way. I do agree with you however that paying attention to the language is key.

We might say that language without theology is blind while theology without language is empty. They need each other and are equally ultimate.

Dipping into some of my learning today — 04 April, 2012

I.) Library

http://www.vdare.com/articles/why-western-music-is-superior-to-eastern (Article Mentioned In The Wed. Classes)

Pseudo-Sciences: Sociology and Psychology….

http://www.reformed-theology.org/html/issue08/blumenfeld.htm

Marxist Revolution of the West

http://www.opc.org/os.html?article_id=302&cur_iss=Y (Maddening)

http://www.whitehorseinn.org/blog/2012/03/31/in-gods-name/ (slippery)

http://historiasalutis.com/2012/03/30/welcome-back-culture/

Jim Wallis: Consistently Applying the Two Kingdoms Theology

Confederate History Month 2012: Stephen F. Hale’s Letter To Kentucky

http://www.etherzone.com/2012/cron040212.shtml

http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit

http://reason.com/blog/2012/03/28/the-obama-administrations-limiting-princ

http://kevincraig.info/salvian.htm

That Which is Lost

II.) Audio

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgPwSwTGe5c&feature=relmfu

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVVc0Hh_DPc&feature=relmfu

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsY76EWmbWg&feature=relmfu

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UX4FexxpyjI&feature=BFa&list=PL1D4D78A93C500AF5&lf=results_main

A Few Words On Romanticism / Transcendentalism As A Worldview Of The West

In terms of worldview thinking Romanticism / Transcendentalism was the mystical new agey subjectivistic godless ying to the rationalistic objectivistic godless yang of Deistic Unitarianism. Romanticism / Transcendentalism flexed its muscle in New England with the take over of Harvard from the Deistic Unitarians circa 1840’s.

Whereas Unitarianism posited some kind of rational divine order that could be read via the use of autonomous right reason of a deistic natural law, Romanticism / Transcendentalism had a kind of Hegelian pantheistic feel to it as it thumped the idea of connecting with the divine oversoul in all of us. Unitarianism was very rationalistic oriented while Transcendentalism / Romanticism was given to the feelings and the senses.

Epistemologically speaking, Deistic Enlightenment Unitarianism insisted that man could know via reason discovering self-evident truths. Transcendentalism / Romanticism however made the Epistemological move to intuition as the basis of knowing. Rationalism gaves us the godless outward look, while Romanticism / Transcendtalism gives us the godless inward look. Ontologically speaking, the god concept for Deistic Enlightenment Unitarianism remained objective, however ontology for the Transcendentalist / Romanticism was not the god outside but the god in all of us. The American Transcendental movement’s philosophical pillar was that the individual is identical with the world, and that world exists in unity with God. Through this logic, it followed that the individual soul is one with God. Anthropologically speaking, Romanticism / Transcendentalism believed that man should be primarily thought of in terms of spirit or the divine spark. They believed that man was inherently good and that man had only to be educated into his inherent goodness.

As Romanticism / Transcendentalism gained a foothold in American culture one consequence was the rise of radial abolitionism. The Romanticist /Transcendentalist worldview, believing that all men share equally in their god quotient therefore believed that all men were perfectly equal and that the power of the State should be used to insure that all men were forcefully given their equality. Interestingly enough, Romanticism / Transcendentalism, as it informed the radical abolitionists worldview, served as one of the factors that set the Northern Yankee armies marching.

The power of Romanticism / Transcendentalism dissipated and eventually the rise of Darwinism as a worldview began to account for social order mythology that animated the West. Somewhere around the 1930’s – 1940’s the power of Existentialism as the guiding motif for the West began to pick up steam.

America has had basically 4 or 5 worldviews. Calvinism, Rationalistic Unitarianism, Romanticism / Transcendentalism, (which also explains the rise of the Jacksonian Democratic Revolution here), Social Darwinism, and Existentialism. Some would argue that currently we are in a kind of Nihilistic worldview, though Nihilism, what is styled as “post-modernism,” could also be argued as merely subsequent extensions of Existentialism.

Of course these matters are not always clear cut in terms of the exact dates in which they are hegemonic. For example, even though we are in kind of a Nihilistic mode right now, the relative rationalism of Darwinism still reigns supreme in the hard sciences. Also keep in mind that in the end there are only two worldviews. Biblical Christianity vs. some variant of Humanism.