I have just received my 100,000th visit since I began keeping record on my 40Bicycles blog, a little over a year ago. The visitor came from St. Louis, Missouri, through a link from Barb’s blog.
This comes from C. Matthew McMahon of A Puritan’s Mind:—
I don’t want to be misunderstood – so I’ll try to be as clear as possible.
Wright is a heretic. A heresiarch. He will forever burn under God’s righteous wrath and under the solemn and scornful gaze of the Lamb of God for all eternity if he does not change his theological views before he dies, or rather, his lack of good theology! He is a false teacher, and one of the most influential heretics of the century because he affected people at the seminary level – where pastors are trained and scholars born – and has infected a good number of churches, right down to the layman and youth of the day.
You can read the whole discussion here. It seems to me that such inflammatory language is frequently used in order to force people to close their minds on a particular issue before they have anywhere near the relevant amount of information to intelligently make it up. Such a statement also betrays a lack of understanding concerning the character of saving faith, in the worst tradition of Reformed rationalism.
When I arrived back for the holidays I wrote a long post with all of my news. It vanished into the ether of cyberspace when I tried to post it. I could not muster the will power to rewrite it and so this, my second attempt, is rather belated.
I was relieved to reach the end of my first term as I was sapped of spirit and slightly depressed. When I am tired I can become wistful and melancholic. I feel like reading poetry and listening to bands like Coldplay, which is hardly healthy. The dearth of theological reflection on this blog over the last few weeks can be attributed in part to this; the end of my term was hardly busy.
My parents and irritating youngest brother (I love him really!) travelled up in the car to pick me up from university, which was awfully good of them really. Peter and my mother had not seen St Andrews before, so I was pleased that they could have an opportunity to check out all of its majesty. On the way back we stopped off in Edinburgh to visit a relation of my father’s (don’t ask me how he was related to my father: the whole second cousin, once removed stuff ties my head in knots). His name is Alasdair and he is probably partly accountable for my receiving the same name, albeit with a different spelling (not that the proper spelling of my name makes that much difference for most people in practice…). My father hadn’t met him for decades and it was a blessing to find out that both he and his wife are committed Christians.
It’s easy to miss home when you been away from it for long enough. The memories that reside furthest in our past are the most likely to be idealized. I hadn’t been away from home anywhere near long enough to really miss it. I don’t find it easy to relax at home, there are always things happening, there are always people around. One of the things that I love about university is that I can indulge my love of being by myself. However, it was nice to be home again. As usual I came down with a cold within the first day or so of returning.
Within a few days of returning, I managed to watch both King Kong and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (incidentally, kudos to Disney for not including a comma after the ‘witch’ in the title as an accommodation to the excessive demands of American English grammar!). I enjoyed both immensely and will probably watch at least one of them again when I return to St Andrews. I was especially heartened that the Christian message of LWW was not lost.
I was relieved to finish my Christmas shopping relatively painlessly last Monday afternoon. Shopping is the worst thing about Christmas apart from Brussels sprouts. The rest of the week I went to work, although I had a half-day on Friday. The sheer soul-crushing boredom of work made me more thankful than ever that I am at university. Fortunately, my brother Jonathan was working there for most of the week too and we were able to keep up each other’s morale. I also was able to get more reading done on the bus to and from work (although I felt nauseous from tiredness for the first few days and didn’t feel safe reading on the bus). I finished the final book of the Cornish Trilogy and read much of Bruce Malina’s The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology, all about honour (sorry, that link is utterly gratuitous) and stuff.
Joy of joys, my computer was fixed on Christmas Eve. Although Windows Media Player is being a bit temperamental at present, everything else seems to be in pretty good working order. Some time in the next few days I might even get around to catching up on some of my missed e-mails.
Christmas Day was very enjoyable. We had twenty of us for the Christmas meal: the family, Jonathan and Monika, Monika’s sister and brother-in-law (who had come over from Belgium), two ladies from our church, five Chinese students, a Malaysian friend, an Indian friend and a Taiwanese couple. It is always special celebrating Christmas with people of many different nationalities. The only blemish on the day was being soundly beaten at Settlers of Catan by Monika’s brother-in-law, Tim.
I am telling myself that all the food that I am eating at present is to compensate for the meals that I have to eat in halls over the next few months. It helps me to rationalize my current eating habits. I don’t comfort eat but I eat when I am bored, when I have a lot of time on my hands or when I have nothing else to do with my mouth. I probably eat twice as much during holidays than I do during terms.
Over the next week we have a number of visits to relatives planned, which should be enjoyable. I return to university next Thursday, after another couple of days at work (I will also be working for my father some of this week). Hopefully I will be able to relax a bit more then. My first exam is on the 11th, but I am not really that concerned about them. I have already passed all of my modules and there is only so much revision that you can do for an exam. I plan to take things as easy as possible and enjoy the exam period as much as I can.
I don’t usually think in terms of New Year’s resolutions. I make enough failed resolutions during the year without adding even more. However, I am planning to do a few more creative things next year. I am going to take up the guitar again and I may start working at my art. I also plan to knit a jumper. I have knitted three jumpers before, but they were all for young children. I will probably give myself a bit more of a challenge this time and knit an Arran sweater for my brother Mark. I might give a progress report from time to time (probably not, though). Most people are surprised when they hear that I am a knitter. I am unapologetic: it is very therapeutic, relaxing and enjoyable. It also keeps my hands busy whilst I listen to audio lectures, sermons and the Bible on cassette and trains me in the virtue of patience. Besides, if I wasn’t knitting I would be playing Tetris, which is hardly as productive.
Anyway, I must get to bed now. If I don’t I will be even more uncommunicative and irritating than I usually am tomorrow, hardly something that I want to inflict upon the relatives that we are going to visit.
One of the greatest journalists of the last generation, the late Bernard Levin, described how, when he was a small boy, a great celebrity came to visit his school. The headmaster, thinking perhaps to impress, called the young Levin to the platform in front of the whole school. The celebrity, thinking perhaps to be kind, asked the little boy what he’d had for breakfast.
That was easy, or so it seemed. ‘Matzobrei’, replied Levin. It’s a typical central European Jewish dish, made of egg fried with matzo wafers, brown sugar and cinnamon; Levin’s immigrant mother had continued to make it even after years of living in London. It was, to him, a perfectly ordinary word for a perfectly ordinary meal.
The celebrity, ignorant of such cuisine, thinks he must have misheard; he asks the question again. Young Bernard, puzzled now and anxious, gives the same answer. The celebrity looks concerned, and glances at the headmaster. What is this word he’s saying? The headmaster, adopting a there-there-little-man tone, asks him once more what he had for breakfast. Now dismayed, not knowing what he’s done wrong, and wanting to burst into tears, the boy says once more the only thing he can say, since it’s the truth: ‘Matzobrei’. An exchange of strange glances on the platform, and the now terrified little boy is sent back to his place. The incident is never referred to again, but it stays in his memory as a horrible ordeal.
The Jewish word spoken to an incomprehending world; the child’s word spoken to incomprehending adults; the word for food of which the others know nothing . . . it all feels very Johannine. What is this Word? ‘In the beginning was the Word . . . and the Word was made flesh.’ We are so used to it, to the great cadences, the solemn but glad message of the incarnation; and we risk skipping over the incomprehensibility, the oddness, the almost embarrassing strangeness, of the Word. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness didn’t comprehend it; the world was made through him but the world didn’t know him; he came to his own, and his own didn’t receive him. John is saying two things simultaneously in his Prologue (well, two hundred actually, but let’s concentrate on two): first, that the incarnation of the eternal Word is the event for which the whole creation has been on tiptoe all along; second, that the whole creation, and even the carefully prepared people of God themselves, are quite unready for this event. Jew and Gentile alike, hearing this strange Word, are casting anxious glances at one another, like the celebrity and the headmaster faced with a little boy telling the truth in a language they don’t understand.
…[F]inally, we return to the meal, the food whose very name is strange, forbidding, even incomprehensible to those outside, but the most natural thing to those who know it. The little child comes out to the front this morning, and speaks to us of the food which he offers us: himself, his own body and blood. It is a hard saying, and those of us who know it well may need to remind ourselves just how hard it is, lest we be dulled by familiarity into supposing that it’s easy and undemanding. It isn’t. It is the word which judges the world and saves the world, the word now turned into flesh, into matzo, passover bread, the bread which is the flesh of the Christchild, given for the life of the world because this flesh is the place where the living Word of God has come to dwell. Listen, this morning, for the incomprehensible word the Child speaks to you. Don’t patronize it; don’t reject it; don’t sentimentalize it; learn the language within which it makes sense. And come to the table to enjoy the breakfast, the breakfast which is himself, the Word made flesh, the life which is our life, our light, our glory.
That’s a taster from the beginning and the end: read the whole of Wright’s Christmas sermon here.
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.
Update: My little brother also has his own Christmas greetings.
After replacing the fan, the power unit and purchasing a new hard drive my computer is operative again.
Leithart has a very interesting post here. It doesn’t say anything that most of us didn’t already know, but it does say it very well.
James Jordan unmasks the evils of chinese food in this perceptive article. Please, take the time to read it and then pass it on to your friends. [HT: Mark Horne]
n. pl.
A miscellaneous collection of notes, remarks, or selections.
Alastair's Adversaria 
