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Archive for December, 2011

The Bible and Immigration: A Few Preliminaries

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged on December 7, 2011| 4 Comments »

Your people shall be my people, and your God, my God. (Ruth 1:16)

 

Immigration. Mention the word in conversation and you’ll likely find few people lacking an opinion on the topic. It’s a hot button issue and one badly in need of a Scripturalist analysis. In the past I have made abortive attempts to write on immigration, but found the results unsatisfactory and thought it best to lay off the topic until I had the chance to do further study.

As if my ignorance weren’t enough of a hindrance, my plans to write on immigration have been further hindered by the bane of many an amateur scholar and blogger: a lack of study time. Work and school combined to play havoc with my schedule, but even so, I have had some opportunity to read and reflect on the subject. In light of this, it seemed best to at least get a few thoughts down in writing, if only as a starting point for further development.

One thing that has impressed me in my admittedly brief survey of Christian literature on the immigration: the lack of sound scholarship on the subject. This is disappointing. The world is in search of answers on the question of immigration, but Christians, who of all people should be able to provide the needed answers, are largely absent from the discussion. And what work they have done is, for the most part, not of high quality. For instance, in June 2011 the Southern Baptist Convention issued a resolution titled Immigration and the Bible, which the SBC leadership intends to serve as a framework for solving the immigration problem. Unfortunately, while I am sure the framers of the resolution meant well, their efforts miss the mark. For while this resolution is put forth as the answer to the nation’s immigration problem, in reality it addresses only the problem of undocumented workers already in the US, while failing completely address what caused that problem in the first place: a broken immigration system badly in need of reform. In other words, they have offered the American people a band aid when it needs radical surgery. For example, the resolution states,
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Who You Callin’ An Isolationist?

Posted in Politics, Uncategorized on December 6, 2011| 1 Comment »

George Will is a smart guy and widely recognized as such. He’s also to a large degree intellectually enslaved to establishment ideas about how the world works, or at least how it ought to work.

In a recent column analyzing various Republican presidential candidates, Will was quite good in his analysis of Newt Gingrich, saying that he, “was the least conservative candidate,” in the field and did a good job supporting this claim. According to Will, a vote for Gingrich is a vote for the status quo.

In general, Will was pretty good in his analysis of the other candidates as well, with one exception: his analysis of Ron Paul. Paul, in Will’s thinking, is an isolationist.
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Confessions of an Inadvertent Thomist

Posted in Scripturalism, Theology, Uncategorized on December 5, 2011| 1 Comment »

Beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit, according to the tradition of men, according to the basic principles of the world, and not according to Christ. (Col 2:8)

Before I came to the Scripturalism of Gordon Clark and John Robbins, my attitude toward philosophy was a mix of indifference, fear. Indifference, because I the little bit that I had been exposed to had left me baffled, fear, because I thought that I would be easy prey for deceptive teaching. So as is the case with many Christians, I labored hard to avoid the subject altogether, and Colossians 2:8 seemed make this avoidance easy to justify. “After all,” I thought to myself, “it tells us right there in Scripture not to be cheated by philosophy. So to ensure that I’m not cheated by it, I won’t study it at all.”

Of course, the verse says nothing about not studying philosophy, it simply enjoins Christians not to be cheated by it, which is a very different thing, so my conclusion really didn’t follow from the verse. But being ignorant of logic, it’s not surprising that I would fall into this common logical blunder.

Years later when I began to study Reformed theology, I met a Presbyterian fellow who intended to study for the ministry. He was in college at the time and studying, of all things, philosophy. This struck me as rather odd, since I had long considered philosophy the province of screaming atheist lunatics, not Christians. But while I was surprised at his major, I was intrigued by the fact that he believed training in philosophy would be helpful to him in his ministry. Not long after that, I was introduced to Gordon Clark’s work.
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