Mark Byron

The Least Wonderful Time of the Year

For sports, at least.

Boston locked up the NBA title Tuesday, thumping the Lakers in game 6. Basketball is done for the time being, with only the NBA draft next week giving us some "hot stove league" (somehow that old baseball adage for off-season chatter doesn't work in 80-degree weather) stuff for basketball. Football won't start up for a month and hockey's done as well, not that hockey shows up in radar in a Versus-free TV set in Kentucky much.

We're left with baseball, and a Red-centric coverage on local TV, which is cold comfort for a transplanted Michigander. We've got the European soccer championships, with an intriguing Germany-Turkey semifinal (Turkey won their quarterfinal match with Croatia in a shootout); it will be interesting to see how the large Turkish German community interacts with the German Germans in the run up to that game. However, that's more interesting on a cultural and political basis (they let the Turks into European soccer but not the EU as of yet) than on a sports basis.

I'm not much of a generic baseball fan, modern tennis is rather dry and golf just got less interesting with Tiger's ACL surgery that will have him out for the rest of '08.

So, the month and a half before pre-season football and the Olympics is rather dry. Olympic trials, where Eileen will get to watch gymnastics without me itching to grab the remote this weekend, the British Open in golf (which is always interesting even sans Tiger) and Wimbledon will get some TV time in the interim. The latter two will see the remote stop from time to time, especially with my free-during-the-day teaching schedule catering to the +5 hours UK time frame.

Well, I could do more productive things with my time, like do more blogging and better prepping for my coursework.

"Obama-Yes, We're Loving It."

The political news of the week is that Obama's opting out of the federal funding system for the general election, passing on the $84 million that major party candidates are alloted in order to raise his own money.

Through April, Obama has raised a record $265 million for his primary campaign; the May numbers are due out shortly. If he can merely get his existing supporters to match what they gave in the primary, he'll have triple what McCain will have if he sticks with the government-financed program.

Obama's backers spent about as much getting Obama nominated as Southern Baptists spent on foreign missions; their 2006 International Missions Board budget was $282 million.

One of the things I was mulling over with Eileen over dinner is that Obama almost personifies the modern religious left, where one's faith is measured by what you do to help the poor and needy, promote international diplomacy and acceptance of all folks, be it with your own dollars or the dollars of government. Given the twin spires of orthorpraxy and universalism, it's far more important to do the right things than to believe the right things.

Since the right things mentioned above aren't exclusively Christian, it matters more that they get done than under who's banner they get done on. If they can leverage their giving by getting a godly liberal in the White House, they can control billions of dollars of tax money, control the foreign policy of the US and veer it away from the militarist stances of the recent past, and control the next four years of Supreme Court nominees and lock in a liberal working majority for another decade or two.

From a liberal vantage point, getting Obama nominated does more good than a cadre of 5000 missionaries preaching the Gospel around the world.

The daunting thought from my vantage point will be what would a half-billion dollar budget (if the Obama team can get all Democrats to match what they gave in the primaries) in a two-month window; the general election campaign only gets to spend money from after the convention in late August (25th-28th) until election day. Let's take McDonald's as a guide. They have an estimated $1.7B/year ad budget. If you shrink that down to a fifth of a year, they'll spend about $340 million in a 10-week span.

When you factor in the concept that political campaigns get the best available rate for a time slot, a half-billion dollars will buy a lot of air time, spending a lot of change we can believe in promoting Obama's Billion Dollar Menu. Obama will be more ubiquitous this fall than the Verizon geek. Yes, senator, we can hear you now, and I'm not sure that's good.

Edifier du Jour: Luke 5:27-32(NIV)

²⁷After this, Jesus went out and saw a tax collector by the name of Levi sitting at his tax booth. "Follow me," Jesus said to him, ²⁸and Levi got up, left everything and followed him.

²⁹Then Levi held a great banquet for Jesus at his house, and a large crowd of tax collectors and others were eating with them. ³⁰But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law who belonged to their sect complained to his disciples, "Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and 'sinners'?"

³¹Jesus answered them, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. ³²I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance."

That’s good to remember, since we draw away from God (and especially Jesus) when we’re in the most need of Him. When we’re down, we’re feeling unworthy and self-centered, often falling back into bad habits.

It’s then when Jesus comes along side, kicks you lovingly in the keister, and says “News flash, Sherlock; you’re not perfect. I already died for all that. Let’s get moving in the right direction rather than standing still.”

Todd Bentley Involved With Magic

These stories should confirm the worst fears of some critics of the Lakeland Revival; it seems clear that Todd Bentley has been working with Magic.

No such luck, folks; the links are to an Australian named Todd Bentley, who is a 6'7" center for the Moss Vale Magic in a regional basketball league in New South Wales. It's clear they're two different folks, since the Aussie Bentley missed at least one game with an injury; no healing outpouring down under, at least not in Moss Vale.

Oh, you were looking for someone who looks more like a nose tackle hailing from Canada? Can't help you there, at least not in a way that would vouch for the headline.

Johnny Hunt a.k.a. Willie Baptist

A few years back, I told the sad story of one William Baptist, a promising young scholar-athlete framed for robbery; signs popped up around south demanding that the authorities "Free Will Baptist."

We have echoes of Willie Baptist here in the new Southern Baptist president Johnny Hunt. While Bene Diction beat the Christmas rush and is on his case from the get-go over going by Dr. Hunt with only honorary doctoral degrees from academically-flimsy schools, Hunt will get more flak from the Baptist faithful for being an free-will anti-Calvinist. I'll have a second post on this coming up; as a homework assignment, think of free will and Calvinism as it applies to Schrödinger's cat, especially if God knows about the cat and we don't.

There's one good thing I see from the Hunt election; he doesn't like the mission board's take on private prayer languages. As long as the missionary keeps it private, it's OK with Hunt. Don't ask, don't tell?

In addition, he takes a proper take on alien (non SBC) baptisms

I am not sure that I fully understand all that the IMB trustee guidelines have said, however, if a person has received Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior, and has been baptized by a minister who embraces the Gospel and the Scriptures as we do, their baptism should count in our churches. If James Dobson desired to become part of First Baptist Church Woodstock, I would not require him to be re-baptized.

In short, he seems to come from the evangelical wing of the Southern Baptists rather than the Baptist wing on the Southern Baptists; neither are moderates in any normal sense, but the fights seem to be brewing on whether the SBC is to be more generically evangelical or whether it is to be more separatist, more Calvinist and more cessationist than the Baptist Faith and Message currently stands for.

Even with some bad use of honorary doctorates, Hunt may be a step in the right direction.

Obama, Stevenson and Bryan

I was reflecting this morning on the relative electoral inexperience of Barack Obama; he's working on only his fourth year as a US Senator.

If you look down the Democratic list of non-incumbent nominees of the last 60 years, they've all been veteran governors (Carter, Dukakis, Clinton, Stevenson, FDR) or senators (Kerry, Kennedy, McGovern) or VP/Senators (Mondale, Humphrey). Of that list, only Stevenson, who was elected governor four years prior to his 1952 nomination, has the same level of statewide elected office experience as Obama will have come November; everyone else had more experiences in statewide elective office.

Here's an interesting line from Stevenson's Wikipedia; after being told that Norman Vincent Peale had endorsed his foe, Stevenson quipped back-"I find the Apostle Paul appealing and the Apostle Peale appalling." So should most modern evangelicals that aren't in the Word of Faith camp.

By the way, here's the proper quote for the Stevenson classic-

During one of Stevenson's presidential campaigns, allegedly, a supporter told him that he was sure to "get the vote of every thinking man" in the U.S., to which Stevenson is said to have replied, "Thank you, but I need a majority to win.

The one nominee that Obama does trump in elective experiences is William Jennings Bryan. He had but one term as a congressman before getting the Democratic nomination in 1896. I learned a few things about him today that I hadn't heard before, that he nearly got elected head of the PC-USA in the 1920s and that one of his best-read writings against Darwinism was delivered as the Sprunt Lecture at Union Theological Seminary in Virginia, Eileen's alma mater; the Sprunt Lectures are still a fixture at Union-PSCE.

Some other notes-

• Bryan was what we'd call today an old-earth Creationist, a bit to the left of folks who take the six days of Genesis as 24/6.
• He was very involved with the Social Gospel movement, which would make him a decent role model for Obama's liberal Christianity.
• He was a thinking pacifist, preferring diplomacy and rejecting colonialism, but serving in the military during the Spanish-American War (he was only 38 at the time; it's odd to see former presidential candidates young enough volunteer to serve in the military, but he's likely retired the trophy as the youngest major party nominee at 36). Here's a good quote-"Universal peace cannot come until justice is enthroned throughout the world. Until the right has triumphed in every land and love reigns in every heart, government must, as a last resort, appeal to force."

That last quote is worth pondering and applying for folks on both sides of the aisle. The kicker is deciding when the "last resort" has come.

Pre-Modern Preaching in a Post-Modern World

On our trip last week, we would up staying overnight in Pensacola. As we were having breakfast at the hotel, I saw a old-school Smyrna Baptist Church across the street. As I remember, the sign had out front had this 2-by-3 grid of distinctives.

Fundamental                           Evangelical

Independent                           Missionary

KJV 1611                               Traditional

Thanks for the last one, Sherlock; I wasn't sure if I might find a happening praise band in a King-James-only self-defined fundamentalist church ;-).

The Gospel is getting preached there, if their Web site is any indication. However, it doesn't exactly seem seeker-friendly, where people who don't come from a old-school independent Baptist background would be drawn to them.

The adjective "pre-modern" comes to mind for where Smyrna is at; their theology is flash-frozen at about 1930, where the majority of people in town were theological conservatives, modernity was seen as a corrupting influence, and new translations of the Bible were seen as corrupting and watering-down the Gospel, thus leaning them back to the un-watered-down King James as their linchpin. When most people bought into a old-school take on things, you can get by in your spiritual rhetoric to hearken  back to Biblical basic without having to do a lot of convincing.

One of the problems I see with a lot of Southern Baptist rhetoric is that they often come at things in such a pre-modern mind-set; "The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it." That's well and good, but such rhetoric will often leave a modern listener unmoved. The post-modern, who doesn't get the concept of the capital-T Truth that can be found in the Bible, has tuned you out five minutes ago. The modern listener, who goes by more of a scientific, hypothesis-testing framework, wants you to reason with them rather than get dictated to.

For instance, rhetoric on creation can leave people cold if they aren't being reasoned with; for a modern listener, discussion of intelligent design, where you can point out the ain't-gonna-happen odds of life developing on its own without some outside guidance, is going to work far better than pounding them over the head with Genesis. However, folks who learned their rhetoric in a pre-modern framework will tend to just state their chapters-and-verses a notch louder rather than try to reason with the modern listener.

That type of reasoning can be done within a orthodox Gospel-preaching context. One good book on that line is Josh McDowell's Evidence that Demands a Verdict, that looks to rationally walk through the Bible and supporting documents of the era to make the case for the Gospel. For instance, you can back up the Resurrection by pointing out that if Jesus' body didn't go bye-bye, somebody's got the corpse. If the Romans or the Jewish authorities had the body, they could squash the new Christian faith in the bud by producing the corpse of Jesus. If the early church folks hid the body, they died martyr's deaths for a bold-faced lie, which seems unlikely. That leaves the historic version of a risen Christ the past of least resistance, since any other option would have people acting very strangely if they were in possession of the corpse.

Moderns want to be reasoned with. Post moderns want to experience God, not just hear about him; for the post-modern, you're going to witness best with your life, letting the observers "taste and see that the Lord is good" through how you walk the walk.

Bloggers are used to debate and fact-checking; old-school Baptists sometimes aren't. That's probably why a lot of Baptist pastors and officials are uncomfortable with blogs, since they have to use lines of reasoning and presentation that they're not used to having to deal with. They're often used to dictating to people and have to adjust when folks don't say "How high?" when they say "Jump."

We're in a world where most folks have to be persuaded into jumping into the River of Life; drill sergeant preaching doesn't cut it anymore.

Going the Distance

I slept through most of the playoff and was running errands during the finish, but Tiger finally finished off Rocco Mediate, having to once again birdie 18 in order to send the playoff into overtime, then parring the first extra hole to send Rocco Balboa packing.

The background music to the fight in the original Rocky is Going the Distance; Mediate did just that, playing even up with golf's Apollo Creed for five days before losing a split decision. No one had ever left the ring standing with Creed before and no one had ever taking a final-round lead away from Tiger in a major; Tiger's streak of holding leads stands at 14, but not without 19 holes of OT.

All on a bum knee which had him wincing after most drives. Any questions as to whether El Tigre is the best golfer of his day? He's closing in on making that "best of all time" but has to get a few more majors under his belt and pass Jack Nicklaus for that honor.

Sunday Musings

I'm back in Lexington after an interesting trip; the last few days have been largely too busy visiting friends and driving to blog, and I'm rather exhausted after getting home yesterday afternoon.

That fatigued state left me in good stead to watch a lot of the US Open yesterday and today.. and possibly tomorrow, if I'm still too pooped to do much prepping for Summer term that starts a week from tomorrow. Yep, they'll be playing tomorrow, since Tiger drained a 12-foot birdie putt on 18 to force a playoff with Rocco Mediate tomorrow; all Mediate could do is watch from the clubhouse (he was in the next-to--last group and had already finished) and mutter "Unbelievable. I knew he'd make it." They play 18-hole playoffs the next day in the US Open, unlike the three-hole overtimes of the British Open and Masters and the sudden death of the PGA.

We've been talking a bit about Lakeland on the blog as of late, with Todd Bentley and Dontrelle Willis getting sent down to the Tiger's single-A farm club there; Mediate has Lakeland roots as well, having gone to college at Florida Southern in Lakeland. While the Bentley pilgrims would be more comfortable theologically with Southeastern College, a big AoG school in town, I'd recommend a visit to the Methodist-affiliated Florida Southern (not to be confused with the big public USF in Tampa)  and it's striking Frank Lloyd Wright designed campus.

______________

Speaking of the Tigers, they seem to have gotten their acts in order and have a six game winning streak going. They're now only 6 back of Chicago and have a fighting shot at winning the Central if people start playing up to specs.

_______________

I haven't gotten around to comment on Tim Russert's passing on Friday. He had Democrat roots, but could be depended upon to ask the tough questions of whomever was on his beat. If he skewered your guy, it was often due to the fact that he had it coming; you didn't wear any open-toe shoes on Meet the Press, for Russert would call you on each and every flip-flop in your wardrobe. Here's a good Red State obit and another good one from Get Religion.

Russert played things pretty much down the middle, with his blue-collar Catholic roots that stayed with him to the grave. Some people "outgrow" church when they mature, but Russert was a devout Catholic who's sense of ethics made him sure to call BS when it was needed.

Russert may well be the last of his generation of iconic network-news guys to leave the stage. All three of the network anchors of the 90s have moved on and Russert's top rival for best interviewer on broadcast TV, Ted Koppel, is retired. Cable TV has more must-see people that the network news does, even when you factor out the talk-show hosts; I'd be more inclined to watch Shepard Smith or Anderson Cooper than any of the big three network anchors.

That doesn't bode well for network news.