LibraryThing

Well, I have managed to catalogued most of the books that I have, except about 10+ which I have not read yet or are on loan to various friends. You can see the books that I have here. As it can be seen, there are various not exactly orthodox or even heretical books there (and I am not talking about Rick Warren, Geisler's Chosen But Free skubalon or even Pinnock's The Openness of God), like Benny Hinn's Good morning, Holy Spirit and Oneness Pentecostal background Tommy Tenney's The God Catchers, not to mention Reinhard Bonke's Evangelism by Fire. These are the type of books I was reading when I was a young Christian without any type of guidance from my church politicians "leaders" then. So what does a young Christian hungry for food do when he is not fed? Go to the "Christian" bookstores and feed your mind with so-much junk which all conspire to destroy my faith that is. If not for God's mercy, my faith would probably be shipwrecked thanks to the nonsense promoted by these false teachers.

Article: On singles who desire a spouse

Interesting article here.

Just fyi: Am starting to think about the issue seriously. Bottom line is that I will not get anyone who will cause me to directly or indirectly compromise my walk with God, and no one should know the exact criteria I'll use to judge, in order that nobody will get to 'act' in order to gain my approval.

The 'Ostrich in the sand' phenomenon

After being in the conservative circles for some time, I think I have noticed a discernable phenomenon within Conservatism which I would describe as the 'Ostrich in the sand' phenomenon. Adherents typically refuse to interact with the world, and the Christian world at large, unless forced to do so out of necessity. Rather, they look inwards only within the context of their local church and typically do not try to reach out to those inside and outside the Universal church. Maybe they think a holy huddle is kind of great...

Interesting verse...

I am presently in the process of trying to memorize the book of Romans, which would take rather long to do. Anyway, I was looking at Rom. 2:12 when I say something very interesting.

For all who have sinned without the Law will also perish without the Law; and all who have sinned under the Law will be judged by the Law. (Rom. 2:12)

Firstly, we can see here that Paul mentions that people sinned WITHOUT the Law, so therefore the Scriptures affirm here that even without knowledge of the law (or the gospel) for that matter, Man do sin. Sin is sin even when nobody knows it is sin! Sinners like e.g. sodomites can try to whitewash their sins, and even make their sin legal by enacting laws to protect them from so-called 'discrimination', and criminalize the Gospel, but God still calls it sin and they will ultimately be judged based on God's laws, not the laws of Man.

Secondly, those who sin without the Law will also perish without the Law. The main thing that can be seen here is that ALL who sinned apart from the law will also PERISH. This should silence all the universalists and inclusivists everywhere, but of course those heretics do not obey the Scriptures. From the rank liberals to the 'evangelical' liberals like Brain McLaren to the spineless Joel Osteen & Rick Warren, all of them deny this important Gospel truth, the latter when being given the public spotlight.

Thirdly, there is no partiality with God (v. 11). Those who have the law will be judged based on the Law of God which is revealed to them. Those with the Law should have known better, yet they continually violate the Law(Rom. 2:23-24), blaspheming God's name because they claim to follow God. And therefore,

All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Rom. 3:23)

which sets the stage for the proclaimation of the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. ...

Blogspotted

It seems that I was blogspotted by Elder Phil. R. Johnson of Grace Community Church and founder of Pyromaniacs here, although I aren't sure what to make of his comments. I also doubt whether anyone would be able to decipher anything much from that rant of mine.

Anyway, with regards to the issue of 'common grace' and the 'free offer of the Gospel', which Jenson brought up, I think I will deal with those issues soon.

Trivial thoughts...

After studying Japanese for one semester, I was trying out reading my Japanese Shinkaiyaku (新改訳) Bible this afternoon (just to relax), which is the version most Japanese Evangelicals used. (I got my copy during my trip to Japan, which is a Gideon NT 'half-Bible'). Anyway, with my background in Chinese, I was able to make some partial sense of some of the verses, through I could neither read most of the words in the verses nor the tenses *yet*. Interesting though... Especially reading the book of Romans. Here's a look at Rom. 8:30 & 35.

神はあらかじめ定めた人々をさらに召し、召した人々をさらに義と認め、義と認めた人々にはさら栄光をお与えになりました。（ローマ８：３０）

私たちをキリストの愛から引き難すのはだれですか。患難ですか、苦しみですか、迫害ですか、飢えですか、裸ですか、危險ですか、剣ですか。（ローマ８：３５）

And here are the verses in English (ESV):

And those whom he predestined he also called, and those who he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified (Rom. 8:30)

Who shall seperate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? (Rom. 8:35)

I would very much like to go into the whole concept of the doctrine of election being a source of confort for the saints, but that will have to wait. For now, I would just like to compare the different language versions as an exercise.

Let's look at Rom. 8:30.

神はあらかじめ定めた人々をさらに召し、召した人々をさらに義と認め、義と認めた人々にはさら栄光をお与えになりました。（ローマ８：３０）

And those whom he predestined he also called, and those who he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified (Rom. 8:30)

The first character 神 (kami) refers to God. は is here saying that God at least is ... I can't make up the meaning of the following words. However, I do see the character 定 there, which is used as in 定食 (teishoku) or set meal, and thus the character means something like set. Adding the meaning of the character in Chinese gives the idea that something is already set and decided before, and thus could legitimately be inferred to be referring to the doctrine of predestination. In 人々, the first character refers to people and the second is sortof repeating the concept of the first word, thus it probably means all of the people, thus showing us that the act of what God has done which is stated in the later part of the verse applies to ALL which God has predestined (first part), probably showing the unbreakable 'golden chain' of redemption in Rom. 8:30 itself, especially since it is repeated many times throughout the verse. Next, we see the character 召, which in Chinese refers to a call which is active as in a call which draws and compels the listerner to obey. This probably refers to the calling of God which actively works in bringing people to Christ. It is also used in the same verse in the Chinese Bible (和合本） to refer to the calling of God of His elect unto salvation.

The characters 義と認め is next seen, which probably is the Japanese words meaning justified. This can also be seen in the character 義, which in Chinese means righteousness. In fact, the term justification in Chinese is 称义 (义 is 義 in simplified form) or to be counted righteous (imputed righteousness).

The last noun seen there is shown in the characters 栄光 which in Chinese means (literally) the 'light of glory'; i.e. glory, glorified. This thus fits in nicely with the meaning of the corresponding verb in English.

Last of all, we can see the verb form modifying all the nouns in the characters なりました (nari mashita). The 'mashita' form indicates a past tense, thus showing that all these actions happened in the past, so to speak. (It is considered as done already in Christ, thus the past tense) This of course is a strong proof for the action of predestination and election happening before the beginning of the world (contra Open theism for example) and since it is an unbreakable chain, it falsifies Remonstrant Arminianism which denies the eternal persevererance of the saints (i.e. Dan Corner of so-called 'Evangelical Outreach')

OK, let's move on to Rom. 8:35.

私たちをキリストの愛から引き難すのはだれですか。患難ですか、苦しみですか、迫害ですか、飢えですか、裸ですか、危險ですか、剣ですか。（ローマ８：３５）

Who shall seperate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? (Rom. 8:35)

The first three characters 私たち (watashi tachi) means we. を is a phrase particle here. キリスト (kirisuto) = Christ, の = (noun after) belonging to (noun before), 愛 (ai) = love, から (kara) = from; because. Thus, the first part of the sentence is literally translated something like "we, because of Christ's love for us". I don't know what 引き難 exactly means, but from Chinese, it seems to mean something like caused or lured (departing) (引) difficulty (難). だれ (da-re) = who?, used to demark a 'who' question, which is confirmed by the characters ですか. 患難 in its Chinese (simplied) form (患难） means having severe troubles or problems caused by something like a disaster, which does carries the idea of tribulation well. ですか shows that a question is being asked. From the other characters in this verse, from my knowledge of Chinese characters, I can sortof understand it. So, therefore, the verse translated literally from the Shinkaiyaku would read something like this, I think:

We, because of Christ's love for us, who (then) can create a difficult departure between (Christ's love and us)? Severe suffering? Hardship? Persecution? Hunger? Nakedness? Danger? Sword?

OK, I know my translation is bad, but anyway these are just trivial thoughts.

Chinese theological words...

Just for some fun, I would like to post some names and theological words in Chinese. [Note: Chinese (simplified) font must be enabled to see them]

John Calvin = 约翰 。 加尔文

James Arminius = 雅各 。 阿民念

Calvinism = 加尔文主义

Arminianism = 阿民念主义

Reformed = 改教

Reformation = 改革时期

Puritan = 清教

Canons of Dordt = 多特信条

Heiderberg Catechism = 海德堡要理问题

Belgic Confession of Faith = 比利时信条

Westminster Confession of Faith = 韦斯敏斯德信条

Monergism = 神恩独作论

Synergism = 神人合作论

For the last two, I sortof coined them on the spot. Perhaps there already exists translated words for these two. If so, does anyone know of them?

Musings: Interesting statistics

I jst have a look at the statistical data of the people who frequent both my website and my blog. Here is what I saw, as of today April the 5^th:

Fig.1: Visitor statistics for my blog according to country

Fig. 2: Visitor statistis for my personal website according to country

Fig. 3: Recent most frequented webpages on my website

This looks interesting. (The visitor count is not correct, btw, since my log size is only 100 per site and therefore only a random sample of 100 visitors were used.) It seems that my blog attracts mainly Singaporeans while my personal website attracts a significantly large number of Americans. Also, judging from the popular pages on my website, it seems that the article on whether judging is correct seems to be the most popular, followed by my review of Richard Abanes' book Rick Warren and the Purpose that Drives him, and then my review of Rick Warren's Purpose Driven Life itself (nevermind my home page). As I have said, interesting.

Musings: Some consolidations of my beliefs

OK, I am just using this place to consolidate what I believe and what I tentatively hold to at this moment.

I am a Protestant, 'old-time' fundamentalist (of the 1920s sort), traditional evangelical and reformed Christian. Soteriologically, I hold to the 5 points of Calvinism and hence am a strict Calvinist. I have no stand on the infra/supralapsarianism issue at the moment but am more symphatatic with the supra- position. On the issue of creation/evolution, I am a YEC ('young-earth creationist'). On baptism, I tend to the paedobaptist side but am open to the opposing view. I tentatively hold to the Puritan version of postmillinianism at the moment, thanks to Iain H. Murray's book 'The Puritan Hope'. I guess that sums it all up.