Not What I Usually Quote on Here

Christopher tagged me with this interesting meme.

1. Grab the nearest book.

I walked over to the nearest set of books (not being in the middle of a research project, I don't have any books on my desk), which — as I quickly remembered — is my Scripture shelf. Between me and the shelf is a bunch of books, but these books are ones I ordered for classes this fall and have not unpacked yet, so I continued to go with looking on the shelf. Not wanting to type in Greek characters and thinking simply opening up an English Bible wouldn't provide anything terribly unusual for this little meme, I decided to grab the first non-Bible book on the shelf. Is that cheating? I went past the standard Bibles, past the Greek Bibles, past the Torah and Tanak, which took me into Other Scriptures (I try to be somewhat organized so I can find what I need when I need it, although I have a ton of books to reclassify at the moment). Ah, the first one there is the Qu'ran. (Penguin Classics' The Koran translated by N. J. Dawood.)

Ok, that should prove interesting.

2. Open the book to page 123 and find the fifth sentence.

“Then others succeeded them who inherited the Book and took to the vanities of this nether life.” (That's from 7.167, for those interested.)

3. Post the text of the next three sentences on your blog along with these instructions.

'We shall be forgiven,' they said. And if such vanities came their way once more, they would again indulge in them. Are they not committed in the Scriptures, which they have studied well to tell nothing of God but what is true?

4. Don’t you dare dig for that ‘cool’ or ‘intellectual’ book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.

Well, I provided the caveats to my selection above. I'll try again tomorrow and select a book without any caveats. To make sure I don't time my search so that I'm by “cool” books, I'll try to look at as close to 4:30 P.M. as possible.

5. Tag three people.

Ed, Eduardo and Mark. (All readers of asisaid should consider themselves tagged, for that matter.)

Chihuly at the Missouri Botanical Gardens

Today marked the second time I've had the pleasure of seeing an exhibit featuring the glasswork and paintings of Dale Chihuly, the Seattle-based glass artist. This time was a bit unique: the setting was at the Missouri Botanical Gardens, the beautiful park of exotic (and not so exotic) gardens founded by Henry Shaw over a century ago. Chihuly's works graced not only the main building, but also the gardens themselves, including the reflecting ponds. I did not pay the price of admission to go into the Climatron and see the main exhibit, although I plan to go back to see that.

I've posted some photos of the day in my photo gallery.

Bye Bye St. Charles VW

Well, perhaps the “Butler curse” extends to more than just stocks. Today, Volkswagen of America wrote to say that the dealership I bought my Beetle from has lost its certification to sell VW's. They pointed out the four remaining St. Louis VW dealers and mentioned vaguely trying to bring another one to St. Charles.

Unofficially, I'm told that it has something to do with the fact that St. Charles VW failed to follow through on its agreement with VoA to build a new $5 million dollar showroom. That might sound petty if it wasn't for the fact that the VW dealership shares a somewhat poorly maintained building with Hyundai, Isuzu and Suzuki, whereas their Nissan dealership sits next door now in a building that surely cost at least $5 million, but I bet more.

Oh well.

Late Night Haiku XV

XXXXI. A stream babbles on,
Night slips into a new morn,
It is time to move on.

XXXXII. Moving. Seem to be,
But wasn't I hear last year?
Maybe I've not budged.

XXXXIII. Five, Seven, Five. It goes
simply. The Haiku cares not,
It just records thoughts.

Karl Barth and Universalism

So, does Barth say that all are saved? No. In fact, the patient reader will find on page 417, of the English translation, that Barth explicitly denies a traditional universalist position: insisting that all are saved impinges on God's Freedom just as much as insisting He should save any one person or none at all. If there is one thing that holds together Barth's theology it is that God is “the one who loves in freedom” (c.f.19, 95, 99). Of course, if he stopped here, one might naturally ask why anyone would think Barth a universalist. The problem is that Barth sees God's freedom as so overridingly important that he essentially takes an agnostic position on the issue. God, he says, can make the circle of “frontier crossings” — that circle of people who cross from the rejected to the elected — as wide or as narrow as He wishes (417). In His freedom, God can do whatever He wants.

What we see here is not an admittance of universalism. Instead, Barth is essentially rightly saying he does not know the mysterious will of God. How can we? We know that Jesus is the only way to salvation and that salvation requires spiritual rebirth, but just watching a group of Christians debate whether this or that person is “Christian” shows that we really don't know precisely the point at which one crosses into the Church Eternal. We know the rough outline, but questions such as what to do with “virtuous pagans” who never knew of the Gospel shows how mysterious salvation remains to us.

Like I said, Barth shifts the focus. He prods us. Why are we worrying about the litmus test of salvation? Jesus never told us to speculate about who or how many would be saved, he told us to make disciples of all nations (Mt. 28:19-20). Instead of concentrating on the negative (rejection) we should exclusively concentrate on the “future faith” of those who do not now believe (295-96). As Bradley Hanson writes in reference to Luther's view, we ought to “focus on God's revealed intention that all should be saved” (Hanson 254).

“Peculiar Christendom, whose most pressing problem seems to consist in this, that God's grace in this direction should be too free, that hell, instead of being amply populated, might one day perhaps be found empty.” (Short 149)

That is, Barth does not promote universalism but questions any overriding concern in the condemned as condemned. Admittedly, as Brown jokes in his book, Barth will never face a heresy execution for “espousing a doctrine of limited atonement,” but that still does not make him a Universalist (95). Instead, he takes a more radical, yet more orthodox, position by simply rejecting the church's overactive interest in restricting God's freedom in the matter. God has told us our job (to preach the Gospel) and as such, as John Keats says, that is “all [we] need to know.”

Works Cited
Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics. Vol. 2.2 Trans. G. W. Bromiley, J. C. Campbell, Iain Wilson, et. al. Ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1957.

Brown, Robert McAfee. The Collect'd Writings of St. Hereticus. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1964.

Hanson, Bradley C. Introduction to Christian Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997.

Short, Robert L. The Parables of Peanuts. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2002.

QOTW: Adopt a Theologian

I decided to revive my old Question of the Week meme once again. Let's start out with a bang.

Q - What theologian would you say you align yourself most closely to?

O - What appeals most about this theologian's theology?

T - How would you respond to those who disagree with that point?

W - What do you find yourself disagreeing with this theologian on?

Day After Tomorrow

Thanks to an airing on one of the Cinemax channels that I was able to nab via DVR a few weeks ago, I watched the Day After Tomorrow tonight. Given the critical thumbs down it seemed to receive, I did not have very high expectation for it, but it was able to exceed those expectations.

Note: this post is a spoiler on a number of plot elements.

This movie, in my opinion, shares a lot with the Da Vinci Code. Yes, more than that I happen to disagree with the world view displayed in each. More importantly, both dabble on the line between truth and fiction, and as such, probably mislead a lot of people unable to deal with such blurrings. In both cases, the fiction/fact blending is what makes the storyline compelling, so I'm not saying that such a mix is a bad thing, only that people need to be cautious.

Having watched the latest iteration of War of the Worlds a short while back, I couldn't help but see much of the plot as the same. An invasion from the skies, something covering most surfaces, cities utterly destroyed across the globe — in short, simply good summer mega budget movie fodder. The difference between the two movies is that far more people, people I'd not question the mental state of, believe in the eventual reality of Day After than of War of the Worlds. Aliens with tripods probably won't invade, but perhaps the Atlantic conveyer really will shut down.

If we get past that and put the two films on the same level, science fiction, then I would say that Day After Tomorrow offers a much more compelling version of the cataclysmic than does War of the Worlds. The acting was good and the characters were well written, likable people. While Tom Cruise never managed to make me care about his character's fate, Dennis Quiad did so early on in Day After. Both are men that are absorbed in their own projects to the detriment of their children, but Quaid's Jack Hall comes off as misguided, not just a jerk.

No, I don't think tomorrow we will face “super-cool” winds that will instantly freeze everything. But just because I don't expect something to happen doesn't mean it can't make for good fiction. We just have to remember it is fiction.

Other Notes of Biases: One other thing should be said. The film is politically tilted about as far as it could be without donkey logos flashing on the screen. The well meaning, if not terribly fast to respond, president looks very much like Al Gore, suggesting all kinds of possibilities. (“This is where Gore should be,” perhaps?) Likewise, the evil vice president, who later sees the light, has a Cheney-esque air to him, though not as much as the president matches Gore. More importantly to the story, the global cooling seems to stop for the most part precisely at the U.S. border, allowing Mexico to be the “good guy” that allows all of the “illegals” to come from the U.S. fleeing the storm. At the end of the movie, when the vice president has become president, he spells this out, noting the “hospitality” of the countries that we previously looked down on as “third world.” Finally, the last remarks from the space station note how clean the earth looks now that the Northern Hemisphere is shut down, but that seems unrealistic both because pollution wouldn't disappear that fast, and (here's what Hollywood doesn't want you to know) the worst pollution comes from newly industrialized countries such as the ones hosting the refugees.

Independent Democrat

That's what Sen. Joe Lieberman is running as now that he lost the Democratic primary. I have to feel sorry for him — it surely is pretty bad going from being the VP nominee of your party to losing the primary for your seat that you've held for 18 years in just six year. Ouch!

Nevertheless, I wonder if there is room for the Joe Liebermans of politics in the country we live in. Social conservatives such as myself would not vote for him because of his pro-choice position on abortion. Conversely, Democrats despise him for his support of the Iraqi war and his generally friendly attitude toward more conservative politicians. His seemingly genuine adherence to nearly-Orthodox Judaism has made him unusual among the powerbrokers of the Democratic party, and probably hurt as much as it helped.

It'll be interesting to see if a Lieberman unencumbered by a particular party is able to win, and if he is, whether he moves right at all.

Late Night Delivery?

I ordered some books through BN.com the other day, and they were scheduled (according to UPS) to arrive today yesterday. As of midnight, they are still being shown as “out for delivery.” Think I should expect a really late night delivery?

Testing the Waters: Reseller Accounts

I've purposely tried to keep my company's hosting business small: I'm the only person around to interact with customers (even though there are technicians at my datacenter who monitor the server and occasionally work on it), but I've tinkered with the idea of offering reseller accounts. Primarily, I envision offering 1 GB to 5 GB of storage space that the individual reseller would be free to divvy up as he or she pleased. You could give away accounts, charge whatever price you liked, etc.

Imagine some theoretical plans, such as:

• 1 GB of space/30 GB of transfers.
• 2 GB of space/60 GB of transfers.
• 3 GB of space/90 GB of transfers.

Plus the following standard features: weekly off server backups, Web Host Manager access so that the reseller can create custom hosting plans to subdivide the space and manage those plans, CPanel access for each sub account, etc. Essentially, this would be very much like a VPS, except that it wouldn't have its own root; because of the way WHM is setup, you would get access to many of the tools I have access to however.

What if I left the transfers as noted above, but doubled the disk space on each of those accounts? Then how much would it be worth?

Any thoughts on what such a service might be worth? Anyone actually interested in such a service (no pressure, just curious if I'm thinking about marketing something no one would want). I'd probably want to sell no more than five of these types of accounts, because one of my primary goals is to insure that the server is not oversold (most hosts sell more service than they can provide, based on the fact that almost no one fully utilizes their account; however, I'm not interested in doing that).

Thanks for letting me pick your collective brains.