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  • When CMYK Separations Were Really Separate — Chet Aero Marine

    Anyone who has done any work with print is familiar with the CMYK (Cyan/Magenta/Yellow/BlacK) colour scheme. (Most web images are done with the RGB (Red/Green/Blue) scheme.) In either case the idea is that, by using a few colours and mixing them properly, one could produce the effect of many colours, thus making it possible to […]

    When CMYK Separations Were Really Separate — Chet Aero Marine
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  • Maybe a few Soviet Books Would Change Their Mind

    The Democratic Socialists of America are on a roll in Los Angeles, and the school system continues to decline:

    Minority students are disproportionately hurt by Los Angeles’s subpar public school systems. The DSA’s refusal to challenge underperforming schools in minority neighborhoods is a testament to its role as a mouthpiece for failed public-sector unions such as the UTLA. Despite cannibalizing almost half the annual state budget, California’s schools fail their students miserably compared with other states, with test scores near the bottom nationally. Yet public schools remain dominated by teachers’ unions, and their overflowing coffers make them the most potent political force in California politics.

    I’ve been criticised for unfavourably comparing American leftists to their Soviet (and Chinese for that matter) counterparts. In a rational world, these socialists worthies would want to imitate the state closest to their economic objectives, the Soviet Union. As someone who is familiar at least with the books they used, the Soviet educational system is far ahead of what these DSA types would have for us, as was their industrial base, something that’s paid off for Russia in its war with Ukraine.

    But this isn’t a rational world (or at least not a rational country.) American leftists are utopian, to use the Marxist criticism of other leftists in Europe at the time. They’ve also abandoned the class-based dialectic of the Marxists in favour of the race and sexuality one they’re obsessed with. The result has been that those who are on the wrong end of the economic scale suffer, which is the major reason why Biden’s poll numbers are so deeply upside down.

    The other thing that is driving the DSA’s agenda is the agenda of the teachers’ trade union, which has superseded that of student and teacher alike. That’s something that is going to be very difficult to fix.

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  • William Hamilton’s God May Have Died, Mine Did Not

    My parents divorced in the late 1970’s. That was back in the day before our tax code made inter-spousal transfers free of estate or gift taxes, so it was a mess. (Yeah, there was such time…) After it was done, she dated an English insurance agent. The relationship never got very far, although he found out how good my mother was at stringing him along…years later she told me that she didn’t “seal the deal” with him because he was an atheist. Serving in World War II, he had lost his faith in a God that didn’t prevent such an event. My mother had many faults, but not even her own brother being killed in the war changed her mind on that.

    I suspect that what happened to my mother’s boyfriend happened to William Hamilton, the Baptist theologian who was at the forefront of the “God is dead” movement of the 1960’s. His son wrote the piece When my dad killed God where he tells us the following:

    For my dad, the death camps of the Nazi regime posed the most difficult question about the nature and existence of God. We have only two options, Dad said. First, if God is not behind such radical evil, he cannot be what we have traditionally meant by an omnipotent God. Second, if God really is the architect of all things, then God is a killer.

    I well remember the furor over that. I don’t remember much about what my church had to say about it; it tended to be vacuous and liked to ride the fence. But I was between my own direct encounter with God, baptism and being confirmed an Episcopalian; I knew he was there and I knew he cared, even among the “miserable offenders.”

    Hamilton wasn’t the last person to be challenged by the theodicy issue. So was Bart Campolo. For some of us, however, Campolo’s attitude towards life and God wasn’t a possibility, as I noted:

    For me personally, it’s an entirely different ball game.  If I had ever asked the question at home  (and I can’t recall I ever did) “Why do bad things happen to good people,” the answer I probably would have gotten was, “So what? You just have to tough it out, and if you can’t, it’s too bad.”  And, as I’ve mentioned numerous times on this blog, the home I grew up in was anything but an “ideal” Christian home.  The difference between the two is significant.  While Campolo’s concept on the existence of evil focused on God, the one I was presented with focused on me.

    From another perspective, Giles Fraser notes the following:

    But this much is obviously true: evil and suffering have outlived the loss of faith. Once we had God to blame. But now that God has gone (… other explanations are available …) we have no one left to blame but ourselves. Not for earthquakes, but certainly for the horror of war. Humanists now own the problem of evil. So why don’t humanists more often experience some sort of loss of faith in humanity? Where is their existential crisis? I may be wrong, but it seems to me like it’s a dog that doesn’t often bark.

    It’s one of those perennial questions, but for me the answer was clear when God was proclaimed dead by others and that answer still is now.

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  • How we became the dropout society

    With inflation soaring, trust in governments plummeting, and the global economy teetering on the brink of collapse, one might expect to see the …

    How we became the dropout society

  • You Think They’ll Ever Bother to Ask Christian Scientists About How To Approach Science?

    This book, for the most part, does the opposite:

    The goal of the book is to examine the “reception of the natural sciences among Protestant theologians in the modern era” (1). The editors picked ten influential theologians from various Protestant denominations over the past two centuries in Europe and America to analyze the way they have dealt with science.

    To be honest I am getting tired of the monologue that exists on this subject. Doesn’t it occur to anyone that the Christian scientists just might have something to say about the subject? The theologians and seminary academics, for the most part, live in their own bubble on the subject, doubtless afraid that real scientists and engineers would turn a few sacred cows into hamburger for the cosmic cook-out.

    For my part, I pursue my science and engineering on sites such as this, letting people know that I am a Christian and really don’t see the contradiction between my relationship with God and the engineering that I pursue.

    I think what we have going here is a turf war. If the theologians and our ministers continue to pursue it, they will set back Christianity, and, hard as they try, they won’t be able to blame the scientists and engineers they worked so hard to ignore.

    Note: a relative of mine, whose branch of the family has been plagued by the adherents of the First Church of Christ, Scientist, noted the confusion of the term “Christian Scientist” in my title. I had no intention of attaching that meaning to the phrase. I don’t think that the whole concept of the First Church of Christ, Scientist has theological or scientific merit.

  • Western Bankruptcy in Two Ways — Science Matters

    Walter Russell Mead explains in his Hudson Institute article End of the German Idyll.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds. H/T John Ray G7 leaders during a working session at the G7 summit in Schloss Elmau on June 28, 2022 near Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. (Photo by Stefan Rousseau via Pool/Getty Images) Germany looked normal over the […]

    Western Bankruptcy in Two Ways — Science Matters

  • Exposition of the Thirty-nine Articles – Article XVI (Part 2) — The North American Anglican

    Section II. — Scriptural Proof. THE first thing we have to show from holy Scripture is, that “every deadly sin committed after baptism is not unpardonable,” and that “the place of forgiveness is not to be denied to such as truly repent.” To prove this proposition, it will be desirable (1) to show that sins…

    Exposition of the Thirty-nine Articles – Article XVI (Part 2) — The North American Anglican

    I post this as a follow-up to this post on the subject. His exposition on sin after baptism and redemption from same is pretty thorough.

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  • Some Thoughts on the Church of God 2022 General Assembly Agenda

    It’s that time of the biennium (or quadrennium since we lost the 2020 General Assembly in the pandemic) to consider the agenda of the Church of God. A recent additional input to this process is the newly started Church of God Scholars Blog. However, since I’m a) in the Church of God and b) a scholar but c) am not a Church of God scholar, I’ll stick with this forum to express my views. The agenda itself can be found here.

    Tenure of Elected Officials

    For the newbies: the Church of God has a centralised, episcopal form of government, but the way it works is different from, say the Episcopal Church, the ACNA, or the Roman Catholic Church. We have a five-man (more about that later) Executive Committee, an Executive Council, and several department heads which are elected at our biennial General Council/General Assembly for two year terms until the next Assembly. There is an elaborate and complicated system of term limitation that goes with this. With the cancellation of the 2020 GA, the Executive Council decided to simply extend the terms until the next General Assembly, which is this one. The question remains: should the additional two years go against the term limitations of the office holders or not? That’s what this agenda item is all about.

    I can just about guarantee that this item will generate more time and heat than just about anything else. For my part I am neutral on it. The advantage of adding the “lost” two years is that we’d have more people going off of the Committee and Council sooner, and I suspect that this will, under the surface, drive most of the debate. Whether the Church will be better off one way or the other is something only God knows.

    Women in Leadership

    This isn’t what it looks like. The Church of God has three ranks of credentialed ministers: Exhorters, Ordained Ministers and Ordained Bishops. Women can be the first two, but until now only the third could sit in the General Council (which recommends items for approval of the General Assembly, which includes all of the ministers and lay people, men and women alike.)

    To directly quote the agenda, what is on the table is this:

    Under the proposed measure, only those ordained women ministers who fulfill the same age and years of experience qualifications stated for Ordained Bishops (including completing equivalency testing for General Council certification) would be eligible for participation in the International General Council.

    I’ve said many times that our whole paradigm of authority in churches like ours is totally screwed up, especially for a church with a Wesleyan heritage and a Pentecostal concept of a Spirit-led church. This should be passed. The Assemblies of God have lived to tell about this and prosper, so can we.

    Meaning and Usage of the Title Ordained “Bishop”

    I actually explained what this means in the previous section. For the rest of the world, “bishop” implies a) some territorial oversight and b) rank over ministers of, say, local churches. (Our state overseers have the formal title of “Administrative Bishop” and that makes sense.) The Church of God adopted this because some of its communities use the title “bishop” for local church pastors as well. I hope that the ministers fix this problem and vote to change the title “Ordained Bishop.” The resolution kicks the can down the road on what would replace it, but at least it would get the can moving.

    Resolution Concerning Human Identity and Sexuality; Biblical Fidelity in Gender Identity Affirmation

    This is something ACNA types will immediately recognise. I think both of these should be passed. I know there have been cautions out there about this, but hey, the laity has to live in the world, so can everyone else. I do not think that our entire lives should be consumed by wondering what we will do with our genitals next, up to and including changing them out. I wish that the resolution had put some emphasis on that simple fact; Christianity was in some ways a revolt against that kind of thinking in the classical world.

    Entry Level Ministry Title

    This would change the title of “exhorter” to “licensed minister,” which is what is now “ordained minister” used to be called. It’s a step in the right direction, but as I said above, maybe someday we’ll be more in sync with the rest of the church on this issue.

    International Executive Council Expansion

    They’ve been debating this for a long time. Personally I think the only tangible result of this would be to increase our travel budget, and it’s big enough as it is. I think this should be turned down unless we go to a quadrennial Assembly, and that’s not likely.

    Usage of the Titles of God

    This is another item ACNA types will find themselves all too familiar with. I think this should pass although, contrary to what some people say, I think that God is beyond gender (although he’s fertile.) For the lefties, masculine pronouns are his preferred pronouns, right?

    Ordinances of the Church

    This would clarify the church’s stand of “open communion” and for that matter “open foot washing.” (which is an ordinance in the Church of God.) I know that ACNA types will immediately think of “communion for the unbaptised,” but to be honest the Church of God’s attitude towards baptism is so “loosey-goosey” that there’s really no comparison. What I’d like to see is a clarification on whether we observe ordinances (like the Baptists do) or sacraments (like the Anglicans do.) The resolution displays the irritating Church of God habit of conflating the two when they’re very different, which becomes especially apparent when you consider Bill Clinton’s Eucharistic Theology: It Depends on What ‘Is’ Is.

    Sexual Abuse/Sexual Exploitation of a Minor in Church Membership Consideration

    This is a hot topic these days. This should be passed. The Church of God has turned out people for all kinds of reasons; this one makes sense. This applies to members, not ministers. The Church of God has a system for disciplining minsters and their restoration (I’m on the board that oversees the latter.)

    Other Items

    There are other items which I will pass over in silence. How much of this agenda (which is lengthy by Church of God standards) will actually be debated and voted on in the General Council is hard to say; I doubt they will get to all of it.

  • Nazi Rocket Scientist Wernher von Braun Converted to Christ, Interviewed in 1966 by C. M. Ward — Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center

    C.M. Ward interviews Dr. Wernher von Braun (center) in his office at the Space Center headquarters in Huntsville, Alabama, May 9, 1966. Lee Shultz (right) looks on. This Week in AG History — June 26, 1966 By Darrin J. RodgersOriginally published on AG-News, 30 June 2022 Wernher von Braun (1912-1977), one of Nazi Germany’s leading […]

    Nazi Rocket Scientist Wernher von Braun Converted to Christ, Interviewed in 1966 by C. M. Ward — Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center

  • In Celebration of the Ordination of Calvin Robinson – a brief catechesis following St Luke- Gavin Ashenden. — Gavin Ashenden

    Following this reading from the Gospel: Luke 2:41-52 The Boy Jesus in the Temple 41 Now his parents went to Jerusalem every year at the Feast of the Passover. 42 And… Continue reading → In Celebration of the Ordination of Calvin Robinson – a brief catechesis following St Luke- Gavin Ashenden.

    In Celebration of the Ordination of Calvin Robinson – a brief catechesis following St Luke- Gavin Ashenden. — Gavin Ashenden
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