Bill, you have called me way too a-historical. That may be. But, honestly, while I like to think I am as historical as the next reformed confessionalist, I don’t know why everything has to be located so precisely. Seems…wooden. Maybe your cereal has too much fiber?

OK, forget defintions of consecration and transubstantiation. All I am saying is that there is are huge differences, I think, between “living quiet and peaceable lives as covenant-keepers” and “transforming the world.” The latter seems as silly–in all its forms, mean and nice–as thinking our chex are transforming into oat bran. Why do our Christian lives have to be translated into “transformation”? Why can’t we just be neck-deep in God’s world as quiet and peaceble pilgrims? Nobody, at least me, is against improving things or making things better to some extent. But why can’t we do it with more sobriety and sanity, as if our eternity *doesn’t* depend on it? To be honest, I change very little in my pilgrimage. Am I less spiritual? And for all the cheery rhetoric, I find those who want us to transform really effect very little themselves; they seem a lot like me, just trying to get to the next day and then te next Sabbath to receive the Gospel again.

OK, I can’t help myself: consecration seems to capture this notion of pilgrimage a whole lot better than transformation.

Steve

No, my chex don’t become cocoa puffs. That would be transubstantiation. Nor are the cocoa puff in and under the chex. But, in my mind, the chex are Spiritually the cocoa puffs. I am trying to make a point here… I think.

Anyway, how does Steve get to waive his wand and define consecration as “living quiet and peaceable lives”? Does he find that in Machen or did he pull it out of the Stevez lexicon?

Seriously, that is part of my point with all this language of transformationism. I asked Phil if he could use different language than transform. He said he could. But I don’t know how since the language seems to reflect well with what is being said. And it seems on par with making wheat chex into oat bran. There really does seem a difference between “living quiet and peaceable lives” (consecration) and “changing the world” (transformation).

Steve

Or Machen slipped one past Darryl. Of course, Darryl recently wrote somewhere around here that “there is plenty of transformationalist stuff in Machen.”

Steve

Then Darryl said, “Notice, that Machen didn’t mention politics or government…Machen did not talk about the consecration of politics.”

Like Cat Stevens said, “Trouble, oh trouble, please be kind; I don’t want no fight, and I haven’t got a lot of time.”

Bill said, “With the exception of the bible/prayer in the public schools (I do not have a position here)…” No position? Isn’t that…sort of…I don’t know…apathetic? Despite my (alleged) Chinese Wall, I find that I have a great, big, blustry position.

Steve

Although, I much prefer John Randolph or John C. Calhoun to Jefferson (in fact, I would prefer John Adams as well), I am happy to say a few nice things about Jefferson’s agrarianism and localism (I was born in Jeffersonville, NY you remember).

Maybe the sword does corrupt the discussion. How can we develop more agreement about Christianity and culture. Can we identify a common committment to Christian humanism? Christianity as the “mythic” metaphysical dream that unites the West? That has to beat any alternative, no?