Orthodox Evangelicalism?

Sam Torode has written a great article discussing evangelicalism and orthodoxy. As someone who is torn between the two, this piece is very enlightening.

Here's a sample:

For all their diversity, evangelicals hold several principles in common. This list isn't exhaustive, but here are some key emphases of evangelicals:

(1) Salvation is by faith alone, not works.
(2) The Bible is the standard for Christian doctrine and practice.
(3) Everyone needs a personal relationship with Jesus.
(4) "The church" means all Christians everywhere, and there is no "true" or "perfect" church this side of heaven.

When I became disillusioned with the Baptist faith, I eagerly drank up the writings of Catholic and Orthodox apologists (often former Protestants themselves) who challenged these four principles. I took up their arguments and shot off combative e-mails to my evangelical friends. Among other things, I argued that:

• Salvation by faith alone is not biblical. The only time the words justified, faith, and alone appear together in the Bible, it's to say that "a man is justified by works, not by faith alone" (James 2:24).
• Sola scriptura (the idea that the Bible alone is our guide—not church tradition) isn't found in the Bible, either. Since Scripture doesn't interpret itself, we need an authoritative interpretive community to make sense of it.
• The evangelical focus on a "personal relationship" with Christ tends to obscure our corporate identity as members of the church. The New Testament writers don't say anything about "asking Jesus into our hearts." Instead, they tell us to repent and be baptized into the church.
• Jesus and the apostles founded a church, not a loose affiliation of freelance believers. The apostles laid hands on bishops to oversee this church, so as to keep the doctrine pure and prevent schism. This church must still be around today, because Jesus promised that the gates of hell would not prevail against it.

I still believe this critique has merit. (So do many evangelicals, who realize that their core principles need some qualification.) But when I consider the four evangelical principles today, I see more to applaud than to disagree with. Why the change?

The All Carlos Huerta Team

Explanation here.

A little background:

The NCAA usually allows a player to only have four years of eligibility plus a redshirt season. In extreme cases, a player might get a sixth year because of injury issues. Because of all the hype starting in high school, redshirts, injuries, freshmen eligibility and other factors, it sometimes seems like certain players have been around for ten years or more. Sometimes a player has only played for a few seasons but you can't imagine your college football life without him.

Every fan has a specific standard for the player who appeared to hang around college football forever. For me it was former Miami PK Carlos Huerta.

Huerta is the all-time leading scorer in Miami history with 397 points playing from 1988 to 1991. Because Miami was so good and was always on TV, the name Carlos Huerta was drilled into my subconscious after he was a part of just about every college football Saturday for four years hitting extra point after extra point for the high octane Canes. As years go by and the great Hurricane teams tend to blend together in memory, it seems like Huerta was there from the Orange Bowl win over Nebraska in 1984 through the Frank Costa years of the mid-1990s.

Two Sports...Two Worlds

Something is terribly out of whack here. Tyler Hamilton, an American cyclist, tested positive for blood doping last year. Even as he appeals, he is in the process of serving a two-year suspension. Rafael Palmeiro tested positive for steroids and endured a suspension of 10 days. The disparity in the penalties is simply ludicrous. Either the Olympic judgment, as meted out by the World Anti-Doping Agency, is too severe ... or baseball law is a joke.

I think both. I'd go with a one year suspension for a positive test.

Most Beloved Dead Celebrities

Here's the list from Marketing Evaluations, Inc.:

1. Lucille Ball
2. Bob Hope
3. John Wayne
4. Jimmy Stewart
5. Red Skelton
6. Johnny Carson
7. John Ritter
8. Jackie Gleason
9. "Peanuts" creator Charles Schulz
10. Michael Landon

John Ritter? Come on. And where's Peter Jennings? He was a brilliant, caring, handsome, man-of-the-people saint (or, at least that's what ABC keeps telling me).

What is Justice?

Chuck Colson explains.

400 Foot Waterfall Discovered...in California

I've always assumed that every inch of this country has already been "discovered." That is not the case. How cool is this.

WHISKEYTOWN, California (AP) -- Dick McDermott knows these parts as well as any man can.

The 92-year-old used to earn a meager living mining the creeks that meander through the deeply wooded hills. He has slogged through the brush and hiked overgrown logging roads, hunting deer and gathering wood for his homemade fiddles.

But McDermott says he's never laid eyes on the nearly 400-foot waterfall that park officials recently discovered in a remote corner of the Whiskeytown National Recreation Area, 43,000 acres of wilderness in northern California.

"Sure, I was surprised," he said from his home in the park, where he's lived for more than 70 years. "I've been all around that place, I never seen 'em."

Until recently, very few had seen the roaring water that tumbles three tiers before pouring neatly into Crystal Creek. That such a spectacle should evade even park officials for nearly 40 years is remarkable, said park superintendent Jim Milestone.

The Story of the Summer

I think most people realize that the Sept. 11 Commission was a complete fraud...Dem lapdogs trying to damage an incumbent Republican president and cover their former boss' (Clinton) ass.

Well, this is rather revealing.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Sept. 11 commission knew military intelligence officials had identified lead hijacker Mohamed Atta as a member of al-Qaida who might be part of U.S.-based terror cell more than a year before the terror attacks but decided not to include that in its final report, a spokesman acknowledged Thursday.

Al Felzenberg, spokesman for the commission's follow-up project called the 9/11 Public Discourse Project, had said earlier this week that the panel was unaware of intelligence specifically naming Atta. But he said subsequent information provided Wednesday confirmed that the commission had been aware of the intelligence.

The information did not make it into the final report because it was not consistent with what the commission knew about Atta's whereabouts before the attacks, Felzenberg said.

The intelligence about Atta recently was disclosed by Rep. Curt Weldon, vice chairman of the House Armed Services and Homeland Security committees. The Pennsylvania Republican has expressed anger that the intelligence never was forwarded by the military establishment to the FBI.

The discourse project, Pentagon and at least two congressional committees are looking into the issue. If found accurate, the intelligence would change the timeline for when government officials first became aware of Atta's links to al-Qaida.

According to Weldon, a classified military intelligence unit called ''Able Danger'' identified Atta and three other hijackers in 1999 as potential members of a terrorist cell in New York City. Weldon said Pentagon lawyers rejected the unit's recommendation that the information be turned over to the FBI in 2000.

According to Pentagon documents, the information was not shared because of concerns about pursuing information on ''U.S. persons,'' a legal term that includes U.S. citizens as well as foreigners legally admitted to the country.

Felzenberg said an unidentified person working with Weldon came forward Wednesday and described a meeting 10 days before the panel's report was issued last July. During it, a military official urged commission staffers to include a reference to the intelligence on Atta in the final report.

Felzenberg said checks were made and the details of the July 12, 2004, meeting were confirmed. Previous to that, Felzenberg said it was believed commission staffers knew about Able Danger from a meeting with military officials in Afghanistan during which no mention was made of Atta or the other three hijackers.

Staff members now are searching documents in the National Archives to look for notes from the meeting in Afghanistan and any other possible references to Atta and Able Danger, Felzenberg said.

Now this strikes me as kind of important, no? Oh, and by the way, I don't think those staffers will find any incriminating documents in the National
Archives. Why? Because Sandy Berger already removed them.

Sandy Berger, Bill Clinton's National Security adviser, pleaded guilty to stealing documents from the archives and hiding them in his socks. These were documents, if you will recall, that were to be presented to the Sept. 11 Commission and could have been embarrassing to the Clinton administration.

Why They Hate Us?

Apparently, because we intermarry.

AN American journalist who was shot dead in Basra last week was executed by Shiite extremists who knew he was intending to marry his Muslim interpreter, it has emerged.

Steven Vincent was shot a week before the planned wedding to Nouriya Itais and had already delivered a $2,500 dowry to her family.

The disclosure casts new light on the grip of Islamic religious sects in the British-run south- east of Iraq - raising concern that they will take control once troops start to withdraw. Mr Vincent was abducted from his hotel three days after writing a piece in the New York Times accusing British officials of allowing religious parties to infiltrate the Basra police.

In America, his death was taken as retribution for his article. But in London yesterday, British officials pointed out that the police in Basra believed it was retribution for his affair.

"We warned him to look after his security in a more professional manner than he was doing," said the official.

The couple were found by Iraqi police after being shot by their captors. Medics managed to save Ms Itais.

Be Careful What You Say AROUND Your Cell Phone

From the London Guardian:

The main means of tracking terrorist suspects down has been the monitoring of mobile phone conversations. Not only can operators pinpoint users to within yards of their location by "triangulating" the signals from three base stations, but - according to a report in the Financial Times - the operators (under instructions from the authorities) can remotely install software onto a handset to activate the microphone even when the user is not making a call.

Five Jazz CDs You Must Own

From Terry Teachout, arts critic for The Wall Street Journal:

• The Essential Louis Armstrong (Sony). A brand-new two-CD set by the greatest of all jazz musicians, not perfectly chosen but full of good things and easy to find.

• Duke Ellington, Masterpieces 1926-1949 (Proper). An unusually low-priced four-CD imported box set that contains most of Ellington’s best pre-LP recordings.

• Ken Burns Jazz Collection: The Definitive Charlie Parker (Sony). An exceptionally good single-disc introduction to bebop’s key figure.

• Miles Davis, Kind of Blue (Sony). The most popular and influential jazz album of the Fifties.

• Pat Metheny, Bright Size Life (ECM). One of the earliest and most successful attempts to "fuse" jazz and rock. It still sounds fresh.

Pat Metheny is my favorite, and everything he's ever done is very good. But I'd have to agree that this is probably his best. Recorded in the late '70s, it sounds brand new.

My 'Canes and Eminem

Which rapper most resembles your favorite college football team. (Thanks to Johnny.)

Grace Over Karma

Or so says Bono.

Hunter Kelly, Rest In Peace

Hunter Kelly, whose battle with a nervous system disease inspired the charitable works of his Hall of Fame quarterback father, Jim Kelly, died yesterday. He was 8.

Hunter died at Women & Children's Hospital of Buffalo, Hunter's Hope Foundation spokesman John Dudek said. The cause was respiratory failure.

"He has been struggling for a while," Dudek said.

Born in 1997, Hunter Kelly was given no more than two years to live after being diagnosed with Krabbe disease, a rare inherited degenerative disorder of the central and peripheral nervous systems. The incurable disease hinders development of the myelin sheath, a fatty covering that protects the brain's nerve fibers.

The Hunter's Hope Foundation, established in 1997 by Kelly and his wife, Jill, has raised more than $6 million for research.

Kelly led the Buffalo Bills to an unprecedented four AFC titles in the early 1990s. He paid tribute to Hunter in his Hall of Fame acceptance speech in 2002.

"It has been written throughout my career that toughness is my trademark," Kelly said. "Well, the toughest person I've ever met in my life is my hero, my soldier, my son, Hunter."

Bring Back FDR and Truman

Michael Lind says the Dems need to become a socially conservative, economically liberal party to regain power. I agree.

Can the Democratic Party regain the kind of majority enjoyed by the New Deal Democrats between the 1930s and the 1960s? Not an occasional bare majority, but the kind of solid, enduring majority that permits the passage of major legislation?

The answer is yes--but only if the Democratic Party ceases to be defined by social liberalism. As a social liberal party with economic liberal and economic conservative wings, the Democrats are doomed to perpetual minority status. As an economic liberal party with social conservative and social liberal wings, the Democrats might have a chance--but only if the social conservative Democrats outnumber the social liberal Democrats in the Democratic Party itself.

Here's More

Civil rights activist Dick Gregory mocked the existence of African-American conservatives in America.

"They (black conservatives) have a right to exist, but why would I want to walk around with a swastika on my shirt after the way Hitler done messed it (the swastika symbol) up?" Gregory said in an interview with Cybercast News Service. (The swastika was an ancient symbol generally regarded an emblem of strength and luck before the Nazi Party adopted it in 1920.) "So why would I want to call myself a conservative after the way them white racists thugs have used that word to hide behind? They call themselves new Republicans," Gregory said.

Gregory trashed the United States, calling it "the most dishonest, ungodly, unspiritual nation that ever existed in the history of the planet. As we talk now, America is 5 percent of the world's population and consumes 96 percent of the world's hard drugs," Gregory said.

Reason #1 Why the Black Underclass...

...is still the black underclass.

Atlanta (CNSNews.com) - A featured speaker at Saturday's civil rights march in Atlanta said the Bush administration and Republican Party leaders are "thieves" who "need to be locked up" for stealing the past two presidential elections and presiding over federal budget deficits and the war in Iraq. "They all need to be locked up because they are all criminals and they are all thieves," said Judge Greg Mathis, the star of the syndicated television program "The Judge Mathis Show."

Mathis made his remarks to an enthusiastic crowd assembled in Atlanta to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Participants are launching a two-year campaign to extend and strengthen key aspects of the act when it expires in 2007.

"It is indeed criminal to steal an election and within two years run up a federal deficit of half-a-trillion dollars, send our young people over to Iraq to die for an unjust war. What they are doing is criminal," Mathis said to loud cheers.

The march was sponsored by the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition and included leaders from the National Urban League, The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the NAACP, and the AFL-CIO.

Entertainer/activist Harry Belafonte also used charged rhetoric during the march when he referred to black members of the Bush administration as "black tyrants." Mathis, whose speech drew the largest and most raucous reception from the crowd, also chastised the Supreme Court for its role in the 2000 presidential recount. "[The] Supreme Court was an accomplice to the biggest election crime in history in 2000. And I call it a crime because indeed that is exactly what it was," he said to applause.

The Bush administration was equated with past policies of slavery and segregation and labeled "the enemy of our (black America's) progress" by Mathis. "They shot and missed when they enslaved, segregated and oppressed our people. They shot and missed when they stole the past two presidential elections. They shot and missed when they denied our right to vote," Mathis said.

An extension and strengthening of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is imperative to ensure black Americans the right to vote, according to Mathis. "The enemy of democracy continues to attack voting rights here, while they try to fight for democracy in Iraq," he said.

'Intimidation and discrepancies'

Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California appeared at the march and noted that minorities may not have had full voting rights in the last two presidential elections. "Some changes have to be made so we don't have a repeat of 2000 and 2004 where there was intimidation and discrepancies at the polls," Pelosi told Cybercast News Service during the voting rights march. "In the state of Ohio, where they had fewer voting booths and long lines in minority neighborhoods and no lines and many voting booths in white neighborhoods, that the balance is not what it should have been," she added.

U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) echoed the accusation of many at the march that Bush was an illegitimate president. "The last two elections were stolen. They were stolen and so we will not rest until we reclaim our democracy and this is what today is all about," Lee told the crowd gathered. Lee also called the war in Iraq "unnecessary, immoral and illegal" and added "our nation was lied to in order to justify this invasion and occupation."

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) made it clear who the marchers were directing their anger at on Saturday.

"We are here to take on President Bush, [Vice President] Dick Cheney. We are here to take on [House Majority Leader] Tom DeLay. We are here to take on the new appointee to the Supreme Court, John Roberts," Waters said from the podium to cheers from the crowd.

'Cause Mother Earth so much pain'

Musician Stevie Wonder addressed the marchers demanding that the Voting Rights Act be extended and strengthened. "Having to demand that we have a bill that will guarantee the voting rights of all American citizens forever is ridiculous," Wonder said. He also read the lyrics of an upcoming song to be released in September. "At this time we have a choice to make. Father God is watching while we cause Mother Earth so much pain. It's such a shame. Not enough money for the young, the old, the poor, but for war there is always more," Wonder said.

The Bush administration was also targeted by Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), who declared that the president's "record against human rights, civil rights, economic rights, is absolutely terrible."

Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) said America was being ruled by the "Bush mentality," where "crony capitalism" was supreme.

Jesse Jackson said the Voting Rights Act extension is critical because "the same old enemies of civil rights and voting rights will always keep up their ugly activities. "Race baiters and discriminators may go underground, but they never move out of town," Jackson said.

The organizers of Saturday's march want to strengthen and preserve Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which maintains that states with a discriminatory past must submit all changes in voting procedures to the U.S. Department of Justice for approval in order to ensure the changes do not have racially discriminatory effects or purposes.

While the Bush administration and House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) have indicated that they would support full reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act provisions in 2007, the organizers of Saturday's march believe they must begin acting now to ensure their goals.