Here in Land-In-Between we had five inches of snow this morning, and here it is already Spring and April is just a few days away. The robins are getting ready to lay their eggs, and they must be freaking out. How are they going to gobble up worms with all this snow on the ground?

I wish Al Gore would hurry up and push the global warming button.

Earlier I said I was reading "Pagan Christianity?" by Frank Viola and George Barna. Many other people have already reviewed the book. For example, Ariel Vanderhorst did what I thought was a fair review. There's not much I can add except for a few points:

• First, a person should be cautious when someone comes around claiming to have a radical new angle on Xnty which somehow eluded everybody else for the last 2000 years. Furthermore, in his book, Viola had a short chapter on XP being a "revolutionary" and then uses that to try to bolster his case. Anymore this is almost meaningless jargon, and it makes me immediately suspicious because it's a cheap agitprop device that amounts to saying: "Hey you over there! You had better pay heed to what I say because like XP I'm a farsighted revolutionary too and I therefore got Him on my side." For me this is just so much rhetorical baloney.


• Second, although their book is larded with footnotes, I thought that in many places they presented a over-simplistic view of church history, almost to the point of being ludicrous. The sections dealing with the patristic era and the Catholic church were especially weak. It was like reading warmed-over Hislop. In other places, while their presentation was interesting, much of the time I ended up saying "big fat deal, so what?"


• Third, it was disturbing to me that nowhere do Viola and Barna discuss the role of the H.S. in the church. This is the biggest problem that I have with "Emergents." For all their PoMo trappings, they are still very rationalistic. They just think they have discovered the better presentation, the better packaging, or the better branding.


• Fourth, Viola and Barna place an emphasis on the church planters' role in starting up these "organic churches" which they are advocating. Just read some of the materials at House Church Resource. The question I have is just who are these "church planters" and who picks them? If somebody is picking them, then somewhere behind the scenes we have an organization operating. And if an organization is operating, then somebody is paying for it. And so things may not be quite as "organic" as we thought they were.

While I thought Viola and Barna's book was disappointing in several ways, yet it was worth reading because, despite the book's deficiencies, they did manage to raise some worthwhile questions.

I've heard someone mention Rick Joyner's "prophetic bulletins", which come in downloadable Adobe reader pdf format. So I decided to check out the latest one for March 2008, available here.

I took a look and, for me, it was a little disappointing to discover that it consisted mostly of political bloviation. Now Joyner is entitled to his political views as much as anybody else, but I fail to understand why his personal opinions about government regulations, taxes, the size of government, guest worker programs, the economy, and so forth, qualify as needing to be dressed up in a "prophetic" mantle.

While he does criticize both parties, I daresay that some parts of it could just as well have been written by the RNC or by someone from John McCain's presidential campaign.

By the way, Joyner's organization has refurbished the wreckage of Jim and Tammy Baker's old Heritage USA project. It's now called Heritage International.

Today, I took the snow tires off the truck. Spring-like weather seems now to have arrived finally. And the snow has melted back from its previous abnormal Siberian level to what is now more normal for here in Podunk Resort City, Land-In-Between. The amount of snow still on the ground is more like what we would get in a normal winter. This year Nature had this perverse desire to go contrary to Al Gore "inconvenient truthiness". I welcome Spring, and the little birds are greedy for the food we put out in the feeder. Soon the multi-millionaires will be airing out their summer homes on the shores of Lake Ha Ha and cruising around in their enormous boats.

I am currently reading Darwin Day in America by John G. West. The books's subtitle is "How our politics and culture have been dehumanized in the name of Science", and it deals with how materialistic philosophy has infiltrated and corrupted pretty much everything, to put it briefly.

I haven't gotten too deep into the book but so far it's been very interesting. And some of the stuff West touches upon is so thoroughly evil that it beggers words.

"The shadow of that hyddeous strength sax myle and more it is of length" —David Lyndsay (1490-1555).