Threads from Henry's Web

Author: henry

  • Rapture Foolishness

    There is nothing that brings out quite so much strangeness as discussion of the end-times. Nonetheless, I consider it fun.

    It has been commercialized in books, movies, and a video game, and now there is a special web site, You’ve Been Left Behind, which offers to allow you to send e-mails and files to unsaved friends who miss the rapture. (News story here, HT: Adventures in Revland.) Apparently God doesn’t have things quite under control, and thus it is necessary to try to communicate after you’re in heaven. One wonders if God does not, perhaps, have a purpose in not making this a standard thing.

    One of the things I suggest when teaching from Daniel or Revelation is that one should never stop with one commentary. The same thing applies to someone who is teaching a lengthy and details timeline for the end-times. Any one person can sound convincing, but timelines are generally built up from a wide variety of texts, often used out of context, or more precisely in a contrived context. Reading another writer, equally convinced and possibly equally convincing will show you how many different scenarios can be supported if one is just

    As an exercise, I suggest taking passages that one is applying to the rapture, tribulation, and millenium, and study them as part of the whole book. This can be done fairly easily with a book like Joel, or with several visions from Daniel, such as Daniel 7-9 studied together. You may find it quite interesting to note the difference in how people will understand certain end-times texts based on the original context versus how they are presented as part of an end-times scheme.

  • Working on Bloglines

    A reader told me that my feed wasn’t updating in bloglines. I have confirmed that indeed it is not. I’m trying a run through the claim process to see if it will repair itself.

  • New Blog – Clashing Culture

    Via Steve Matheson (one of the NCSE Steve’s), I found Clashing Culture, which looks like it will be a great group blog involving atheists and Christians discussing science and religion. I look forward to reading it regularly.

  • Louisiana Coalition for Science

    I’m a bit behind on this, but a group of citizens in Louisiana have formed the Louisiana Coalition for Science, which is responding to similar legislative efforts to the one that died at the end of the legislative session here in Florida this year. Both personally and as a board member of Florida Citizens for Science, I would like to express my support for their efforts.

    I will also be adding their site to my blogroll and continuing to watch.

  • With Critics Like These

    I will probably have to repent for posting this, but I can’t resist. Post in haste, repent at leisure–probably much leisure.

    I received the following comment on YouTube responding to my video Why I Hate the KJV.

    SHUT UP! “Thou fool”. The only obstacle is your own wickedness selfishness laziness and stupidity. The only hinderance is your nausiating self absorbed slop. Repent and get saved you ignorant unsaved pharisee!

    I guess that will teach me!

  • Gitmo Detainees have Rights

    Whoda thunk it? The Supreme Court has ruled 5-4 that the detainees have constitutional rights and can appeal to civilian courts, according to this MSNBC story.

    While I believe that extraordinary measures may be needed in war, there are several reasons why I don’t think that is the case here. 1) This has gone on for a long time. 2) We have a very stable situation, unlike a battlefield in a more general war, so there is no reason that hearings can’t be afforded. 3) It should require extraordinary circumstances, such as being under fire in a war zone, to classify people as enemy combatants. Errors have already been made. 4) Finally, reports from Guantanamo suggest strongly that accountability is a necessity. I do not believe this will compromise our national security as some predict.

    Considering this was a 5-4 ruling, it should remind all of us, on either side of this issue, of the importance of voting in this election and considering the type of justices that each candidate is likely to appoint.

  • Ordination and Impartation Questions

    I called to congratulate a friend and former student who was just ordained a full elder in the United Methodist Church at annual conference, and he said, tongue-in-cheek, “Yes, I feel much more powerful now!”

    So since some of the comments here (from PamBG [her comment], Diane R. [her comment] and Peter Kirk [his comment]) have brought up the issue of ordination and impartation, and because it’s a topic on which I don’t have extremely set views, I decided to pick my newly ordained friend’s brain. (Note that each comment I linked is part of a thread, and it would be well to read the whole thread before concluding you have the commenter’s viewpoint.)

    I went to it directly. “I know you were joking, but do you believe that there is some kind of impartation involved in ordination?” He said he did, and pointed out how the ordination certificate, on the back, shows the number of generations of laying on of hands back to John Wesley, and then back through church history. That’s the Methodist version of apostolic succession, which, according to the Catholic church, we do not actually have.

    I thought I’d open this up to questions. I’m going to ask this young man who is very well versed in theology and especially interested in the early church, its practices, and traditions, just what he meant by that. What is imparted, and how? I’d like to see some comments. I’ll be meeting him the middle of next week.

    In the meantime, I had a conversation with my wife, and we’re more comfortable with the notion that God imparts, and the particular person or place is a matter of obedience. Take Gehazi, for example. He goes to dip in the Jordan River. Was the river water particularly efficacious? I’d tend to think not. What was efficacious was obedience. God could heal at any place and in any way he chose, but he chose that way and that place. Similarly, I think God could make someone a fully called and empowered minister without external events. He just chooses to work through the church.

    I’m not sure that’s actually different in substance. It’s just a bit different of a way of talking about it. I still have a great deal of question about just how important the way we talk about this is. I’ve been around someone who thinks that if you haven’t received prayer from someone with a particular anointing, say an anointed revival speaker, you will not have anointing. Another friend and pastor effectively denies that the laying on of hands is of any efficacy whatsoever. It’s just a symbol.

    Included in this question would be the relationship between ordination and the type of impartation involved in some modern revival meetings. I haven’t seen it myself, but I think there’s a similarity in Lakeland and what we had here ate Brownsville in that hundreds of people are touched physically during the prayer time, and that is frequently regarded as a time of impartation. I’m not trying to challenge that idea, even though you can probably tell I’m not entirely comfortable with it. Yet there is scripture that seems to back that up to some extent.

  • Explaining a Quiet Week

    I got to my office this Monday morning following my week in Niagara Falls for my mom’s 90th birthday, and discovered that my hosting provider, had finally moved my main and oldest site, Energion.com to its new server.

    I understand quite well why it took them some time to move. The site is complicated and large, in no small degree because I have been adding pages to it since the mid 90s, and if there is any bad coding practice I have ever used, it’s going to be somewhere in there.

    Unfortunately, though they did a good job overall, they broke one key point, the access to SOAP. They did so by simply starting to use the PEAR SOAP extension rather than the built-in ones from PHP. The result was that a good portion of the site, specifically anything that used the Amazon Associate Web Services died immediately. So besides trying to catch up on the inevitable stuff that gathers in one’s office while one is gone for a week, I had to translate that code. In the end, while it should have been simple to change the built-in SOAP stuff to PEAR, I chose to change the whole thing to use REST, which I have wanted to do, but never got around to.

    That, in turn, led me to work on a number of other annoying things, and one thing led to another. The site is not only my oldest, but it often gets the least maintenance. When I’m about nose deep in PHP code, I rarely think about things concerning which I might blog, and thus, well, I didn’t blog. I know this was a severe disappointment to my large[ly imaginary] audience, but I had to do it–I just had to!

    So here I am, beginning to pretend there’s a universe out there again. Hello World!

  • McCain Supports Warrantless Wiretaps

    . . . according to a letter on NRO reported in this MSNBC story. He gets worse as he runs. Too bad. In 2000 I supported him.

  • Starting User Input Update on MyBibleVersion.com

    For the eager multitudes (even if they are only “eager” and indeed “multitudes” in my imagination!) who have been awaiting the changes to MyBibleVersion.com to allow personalized lists of versions, I have an announcement . . . [cue trumpet fanfare, imaginary like the multitudes]

    The site has finally been moved to the new server, thus removing my excuses for putting it off. It’s up near the top of my list for the coming week. I’ll get to it. Really.