more Edwards quotes

The reason why men are not affected by such infinitely great, important, glorious, and wonderful things, as they often hear and read of, in the word of God, is undoubtedly because they are blind; if they were not so, it would be impossible, and utterly inconsistent with human nature, that their hearts should be otherwise than strongly impressed, and greatly moved by such things.

A man's having much affection, does not prove that he has any true religion: but if he has no affection it proves that he has no true religion.

If it be so, that true religion lies much in the affections, hence we may infer, that such means are to be desired, as have much of a tendency to move the affections. Such books, and such a way of preaching the word, and administration of ordinances, and such a way of worshipping God in prayer, and singing praises, is much to be desired, as has a tendency deeply to affect the hearts of those who attend these means.

Jonathan Edwards, The Religious Affections

Edwards - some quotes

True virtue never appears so lovely, as when it is most oppressed; and the divine excellency of real Christianity, is never exhibited with such advantage, as when under the greatest trials: then it is that true faith appears much more precious than gold! (ref to 1 Peter 1:8)

there never was any considerable change wrought in the mind or conversation of any person, by anything of a religious nature, that ever he read, heard or saw, that had not his affections moved.

And the impressing divine things on the hearts and affections of men, is evidently one great and main end for which God has ordained that his word delivered in the holy Scriptures, should be opened, applied, and set home upon men, in preaching. And therefore it does not answer the aim which God had in this institution, merely for men to have good commentaries and expositions on the Scripture, and other good books of divinity; because, although these may tend as well as preaching to give men a good doctrinal or speculative understanding of the things of the word of God, yet they have not an equal tendency to impress them on men's hearts and affections.

Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections

Computers

One at least one level, I really don't get computers.

• Why should taking my laptop apart, removing a small amount of dust, then putting it back together again solve not just the suspected hardware problem, but also a long-running problem with software consuming all the system resources?
• Why, when I was very careful to keep all the screws and to use long screws only when needed when putting it back together, do I have three missing?
• And why do I have four smaller screws left over, when they won't work in the holes for the longer screws and vice versa?

Brazil 9 - Football / Futebol / Idolatry

My host (and some of his family) very kindly took me to see a football game the other day. It was Santa Cruz v Campinese in the Brazillian 3rd division. Tickets, by the way, cost about £10 for a good seat, or about £2 for a standing place.

Santa Cruz seem to be a lot like Manchester United, except without the money and Sir Alec. In other words, they used to be successful, but have dropped two divisions in the last two years and are most notable for having the largest stadium in this bit of Brazil (though some of it is being refurbished, and other bits are closed due to having been trashed) and for being very nasty to opponents, often using Hell-type imagery.

This is the so-called "Inferno Coral", where the hardest-core fans stand. Note that in Portuguese, "Inferno" means "Hell". Lots of songs about doing nasty things to their opponents... Lots of drums, jumping, and waving big flags too. At times the whole area looked like a living organism, because everyone was jumping to the beat of the drums.

This is the top worn by many in the Inferno Coral. Note the loving attitude it displays to his fellow man. The snake, by the way, is the emblem of the club, but it doesnt't usually carry guns. Note how incongruous the state flag (at the top, with the cross and the rainbow) looks, just like Christians wearing a Man Utd shirt...

Lots of food and drink was available, some of the more conventional kind (crisps, popcorn, etc.) and some of the less conventional kind. This, for example, is raw sugar cane, which is meant to be sucked on, then spat out. Given the local industries, maybe eating so much sugar is simply a patriotic thing...

At half time, the score being 0-0, the players and officials went off. Please note the following security features:

• There are very few (if any) stewards in the crowd
• There is a deep moat between the crowd and the pitch
• On the other side of the moat, there are policemen with big dogs
• The referree has police with riot shields guarding him while he goes down his tunnel

After the break, Campinese scored with a free-kick.

But shortly afterwards, Santa Cruz were awarded a penalty. Full marks to the penalty taker for being cheeky. He stopped most of the way into his run-up, pointed something out to the goalie, then kicked the ball into the net while the goalie was distracted. The crowd went wild.

One of the good things about being in a different culture is that it gives me a good opportunity to reflect on my own. This was a regular Brazillian third division match, and they treated it like a cup final. Here, football often seems so clearly to be a matter of worship. And that got me thinking about England...

Is the reason that there are so many more women than men in church in England (and in Brazil) linked to the fact that so many men worship sports?

What does it mean to support a football team? If Liverpool and Man Utd swapped 60% of their players over a period of a few years, why would I still support Liverpool? Is it because what is actually happening is worship (however half-hearted) for something underlying what actually goes on on the pitch?

Has sport provided us with a new pantheon of gods to worship, except where there is continually more information to process so that people don't get bored?

I can see that it can be right and good to enjoy watching people use the skills God has given them. But if supporting a football team is fundamentally about worshipping a non-physical entity, can a Christian consistently do it?

I know there's various reasons why people support the teams they do - attachment to roots, glory seeking, and so on. But they all seem like bad reasons to me.

So often we wrongly interpret the first commandment to say "You shall have no other gods before me" - i.e. "Make God number 1". But that isn't what it actually says. It actually says "You shall have no other gods before my face." It's commanding a complete absence of other gods, not just them being taken down to numbers 2, 3 and 4.

Why do people not see (a la Isaiah 44) that football is something people invented, and therefore it cannot be worthy of our devotion?

Why is it that the people at the top of the game (players, managers, etc) don't seem to show anywhere near the level of support or loyalty that the fans do? Answer - because they know it isn't worth it. For them it's a business - a way of making money.

Hopefully, it's kind of obvious I'm still wrestling with this question. Just to show how inconsistent I am, here's a photo of me with the European Champions' League Trophy...

And here's a good cartoon from Dave Walker on the subject.

Brazil 8 - Some Things I Like

I've been asked to say some things I like about Brazil. Here goes...

Fruit

There is lots of fruit, and it's readily available. Quarter of a watermelon, for example, costs about 20p. The bananas taste very different to in the UK (much better here) and don't bruise anywhere near as easily. And there's a good few fruits which don't seem to have an equivalent in England.

There's one called Acerola (or something like that), for example, which has wonderful juice when sweetened. Caju is great as well - both the juice and as an additive to chocolate...

Hospitality

By and large, the hospitality I have received has been excellent. My host, for example, has really gone out of his way to help me feel as much at home as is possble.

Male Apathy

Men here aren't afraid to appear excited or show affection (in the UK, this seems to be restricted to sports, of which more later). A handshake on greeting and bidding farewell to someone is considered the minimum, even a little cold.

Random tangent - in the UK the reason this doesn't happen is, I think, often down to a kind of teenage homophobia - people don't want to be thought of as gay. There might be various reasons underlying that; personally I suspect it's a twisting of the conscience into something nastier. That exists here too, of course - it was amazing seeing how reluctant teenage lads were to sit on each other's knees during a silly game we played at English camp (far more so than they would have been in the UK) - but it takes a diffeent form.

So Brazil just doesn't seem to be anywhere near as afflicted by the culture of male apathy for everything except sex and sport as the UK is.

Relationality

Linked to this is the fact that Brazillians seem to be much more innately relational than British men. I hardly ever see people saying they are too busy to talk. Far more normal to just stop for 30 mins or so and chat to people. I rather imagine this is linked to the Brazillian concept of time...

Weather

Of course. I think the temperature has occasionally dropped below 20C here, but it is the middle of winter. The rain also reminds me far more of Manchester than Oxford, except that it's much quicker to dry off here...

Getting on with it

Brazillians really don't seem to stop and get annoyed about how inadequate whatever facilities are or anything. Or maybe they just don't show it. What they do seem to do is try to get on with life, whatever the conditions.

Randy Pausch - Last Lecture

This video is really interesting...

Randy Pausch, a popular lecturer and expert in virtual reality, gives a lecture about what he wants to pass on, knowing he had only a few months to live.

As wordly wisdom goes, it's pretty good and interesting stuff. It's also over an hour long.

Brazil 7 - Eating Out No Brasil

These are things they don't say in any of the stuff I'd read on Brazil...

In Brazil, the portions specified on the menu usually serve far more than one person (but the menus don't tell you this or indeed how many they serve), and it is quite normal for a table to receive only one or two dishes of main course, and for the plates to already be on the table when the diners sit down.

They say in Italy that it is very hard to be a vegetarian and eat out. In Brazil, it is very hard to get vegetables at all when you eat out. I was at an upmarket Italian restaurant yesterday, and of 100 or so dishes on the menu, only one that I noticed came with vegetables. And because of the contraints hinted at above, none of the four main courses that were delivered to our table of 9 or so had vegetables. Potatoes of various varieties and rice are common, and some dishes contain beans and/or olives. But I mentioned to a Brazillian that in England we are supposed to eat 5 helpings of fruit or veg per day. He laughed and guessed that he ate 1. And that seems to be the expected norm.

Because of that (and because it is easy to order), I tend to drink fruit juice when eating out. Now fruit juice comes in two major varieties. Normal fruit juice is sweetened, but occasionally you find somewhere that does very very nice unsweetened fruit juice, at which point it seems normal in Brazil to request extra sweetener.

And that brings me neatly onto puddings. I'm normally a big fan of puddings, and I often like them quite sweet, so one might think I'd be on to a winner here. What I wasn't prepared for was the sheer quantity of sugar...

For example, in a fairly upmarket restaurant, I ordered apple pie and ice cream. was glad that I had when I tried a friend's chocolate mousse, which seemed to consist almost entirely of sugar. But then this came...

Points to note:

• The "apple pie" consists mostly of confectioners' custard (sweeter than in the UK), with a small quantity of apple on top, matched by a roughly equal quantity of brown sugar on top of that
• The ice cream appears to be coloured by some bizarre synthetic chemical, and does not actually display evidence of having made contact with strawberries
• The glace cherry fragment was only added for aesthetic reasons - the whole ice cream was roughly as sweet as glace cherries usually are
• I did not manage to finish this pudding - the ice cream was too sweet
• There is a bottle of artificial sweetner liquid in the background.

It's also worth another comment on the phenomenon of sweet pizzas...

• Brigadeiro is roughly what was pictured in the previous discussion of this, except with condensed milk as well
• The bottom entry on that menu is caramelised apple and confectioners' custard pizza. Now, I know I'm a big fan of custard, but no. Just no.

If I had to make a choice now between being vegetarian for life and eating normal Brazillian food for life, I'd pick vegetarianism at the drop of a hat. It doesn't surprise me at all that there is an epidemic of diabetes among the middle classes here. It only surprises me that no-one seems to be trying to do anything about it except the manufacturers of artificial sweetener.

Brazil 6 - Competitiveness and Excellence

Brazillians are of course very competitive, especially when it comes to sports such as football and volleyball. Even teenage girls often seem to be keen and good players, though there are still a fair number of adults of both genders who aren't especially interested. I'd guess a higher proportion of Brazillian men aren't into football than of Mancunain men!

This competitiveness extends to all sorts of things - silly games, English competitions, etc, and doesn't seem to give up easily. For example, on English camp, one of the main afternoon activities was a kind of team competition at English, with spelling, anagrams, etc. The teams were all keen, even the ones with no realistic chance of winning three days in, which I don't think would happen in England.

In church, there seems to be competition for size of churches - it's one of the most common questions, and large churches are generally better regarded than small ones. (I'm reporting this, not agreeing with it.)

There's a lot of that sort of thing going on with status and money too (of which more later).

But there are some areas it doesn't seem to affect - food, for example (more on experiences of eating out in Brazil later), or cleanliness (or maybe that's just the people who were meant to be doing the cleaning on the English camp - we'd not have taken them as leaders on the camp I do in the UK...) I guess what I'm trying to say is that there doesn't really seem to be a conception of excellence apart from a conception of competition. People aren't driven to excel for the sake of excelling. Or that is how it seems to me, anyway.

Luther - Entrusting to God

I have held many things in my hands, and have lost them all; but whatever I have placed in God's hands, that I still possess.
Martin Luther

Hat tip to CQOD.

Dale Ralph Davis - The Word Became Fresh

Someone apparently said to Vaughan Roberts that the BST commentaries had "gold dust on every page", an assessment with which he seemed to agree. Vaughan's a very good preacher, and a great bloke, but I don't quite agree with him - there are some in that series which seem weak. But his quote is one I would certainly want to appropriate for this book.

Davis sets out to try to explain how to preach Old Testament narrative. It's not quite what the book ends up doing, but this is sill the best book I've read on preaching the Old Testament. I don't especially want to read Richard Pratt's He Gave Us Stories (which is usually heavily recommended for that), for the simple reason that when I heard Pratt preach, he seemed to spend most of his time arguing that the passage taught a spurious form of post-milleniallism which he made no effort whatsoever to reconcile with the many passages of Scripture which don't fit that interpretation. He seemed to be theologising too much from one passage without taking into account the whole counsel of Scripture. But Davis doesn't do that.

What Davis actually does, and does very well, is give lots of examples of different priniciples and techniques for the exegesis and application of Old Testament narrative. He typically spends half a page explaining the technique, then two or three pages giving a pithy and challenging summary of a sermon on a section of OT narrative which uses that technique. And it becomes not so much a textbook as a devotional guide, with the learning being learning by example.

I have one, and only one, major gripe with this book. There is no index of Scriptures used. I might have to spend some time writing one.