Great Warm Up for the Superbowl

Published on by D. G. Hart

Kevin D. Williamson by way of Ian Tuttle:

The annual State of the Union pageant is a hideous, dispiriting, ugly, monotonous, un-American, un-republican, anti-democratic, dreary, backward, monarchical, retch-inducing, depressing, shameful, crypto-imperial display of official self-aggrandizement and piteous toadying, a black Mass during which every unholy order of teacup totalitarian and cringing courtier gathers under the towering dome of a faux-Roman temple to listen to a speech with no content given by a man with no content, to rise and to be seated as is called for by the order of worship — it is a wonder they have not started genuflecting — with one wretched representative of their number squirreled away in some well-upholstered Washington hidey-hole in order to preserve the illusion that those gathered constitute a special class of humanity without whom we could not live.

It’s the most nauseating display in American public life — and I write that as someone who has just returned from a pornographers’ convention.

16 thoughts on “Great Warm Up for the Superbowl”

  3. Mark, you win, I’m stumped.

    I just try to set my day aside to focus on Christ. I’m open to your enlightenment here. Where you going with this, yo?

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  4. Mark,

    I tried to answer your question using my church’s website, and I came up empty. I personally think it starts when the alarm goes off, and finishes soon after i set the alarm, depending on how long it takes my sleep cycle to start.

    Here’s the best of what i found (emphasis mine:

    The consensus on the Sabbath represented in those articles would undergo a stiff test in the 1970s, when two matters came before the OPC’s General Assembly. In 1973, a special Committee on Sabbath Matters presented a divided report on “the extent to which the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms faithfully reflect the Scripture teaching in regard to the Fourth Commandment.” The majority report (the recommendations of which were adopted by the Assembly) found the Confession’s teaching on the Sabbath to be in essential harmony with Scripture, and it argued that “so far as the teaching of our secondary standards regarding the Christian Sabbath or Lord’s Day is the teaching of Scripture, its acceptance is required by the second ordination vow” of church officers. Thus the Assembly upheld the strong Sabbatarianism of the Confession of Faith. Four years later, the General Assembly denied an appeal from a minister who had been suspended by his Presbytery for playing semipro soccer on Sundays. The Assembly reasoned that the Presbytery had the right to take such action “in seeking to uphold the teaching of Scripture and the confessional standards relevant to the Sabbath and its observance.”

    These decisions reiterated the centrality of the Sabbath to Orthodox Presbyterian piety. The church insisted on adherence to Scripture and Confession with respect to the moral law, refusing to soften its corporate witness on the Sabbath and declining to follow the path of mainline and evangelical churches.

    But how does that profession compare with practice? An indication of Sabbath practice in the OPC can be obtained by studying congregational habits with respect to evening worship. The sentiment was frequently expressed in the Presbyterian Guardian that Sunday evening worship was a good indicator of the extent to which Sabbatarianism was practiced in American culture. If we look back fifty years to 1958, we find that 95 percent of our congregations had two services on Sunday. According to the 2008 OPC Directory, that percentage has dropped to 70 percent. That is still a large majority which indicates that a strong Sabbatarianism still pervades our denomination. But signs of decline, or at least a weakening of the consensus, may be emerging.

    http://www.opc.org/nh.html?article_id=599

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  7. Good reading, here (emphasis mine):

    For instance, our confession teaches that the visible church “consists of all those throughout the world that profess the true religion; and of their children: and is the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ, the house and family of God, out of which there is no ordinary possibility of salvation” (CF, 25.1).

    One way of reading that affirmation is to regard the visible church as the primary locus of God’s saving activity in the world, as opposed to religious organizations that do not bear the marks of the church. Our confession goes on to explain why the visible church is so important to God’s plan of salvation: “Unto this catholic visible church Christ hath given the ministry, oracles, and ordinances of God, for the gathering and perfecting of the saints, in this life, to the end of the world: and doth, by his own presence and Spirit, according to his promise, make them effectual thereunto” (25.3).

    In other words, the visible church possesses the ministry of word and sacrament, the means of grace that God uses to save his people. In addition, as he has promised, God has sent his Spirit to bless and make effectual the church’s ministry, as opposed to other organizations that pursue religious endeavors.

    As clear as these convictions are in the OPC’s doctrinal standards, Protestants with a high view of the church have had to affirm these teachings in remarkably diverse historical circumstances. For instance, at the time of the Westminster Assembly in 1640s London, the visible church was part of the political order in England and Scotland.

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  8. Mark, my understanding is that the morning and evening services frame the Lord’s Day. (Gen. 1:5) A little bit of difference between now and the first century or earlier is that the hours of the day lengthened or shortened based on the time of the year as the sunrise and sunsets change. Also, the Jewish idea that the Sabbath begins at Sundown on Friday night and ends at Sundown on Saturday night comes from a misinterpretation of a Leviticus passage.

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  9. The best part of watching your team lose the game leading up to the super bowl is no temptation exists to break that 4th commandment. God’s looking out for us, it might seem..

    I’ll be where I need to be Sunday. Will you?

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  12. The whole original article is a rhetorical masterpiece.

    And I appreciate Andrew’s apt linkage. If only the general population would wake up to realize that tHG isn’t a parable of a future possible-world (where they identify with the heroine), but a impressionistic rendering of today’s bread-and-circuses redux; and they are the breathless consumers of the statolatry.

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  13. The Sabbath, like all other days of the week, is 24 hours long and is to be measured as all other days of the week: from midnight to midnight.

    John Brown of Haddington on the fourth commandment in his commentary on the SC:

    Q. How much of one day in seven is to be kept as a Sabbath to the Lord?
    A. The whole natural day, consisting of twenty-four hours, Deut. v. 14

    Q. When doth the weekly Sabbath begin?
    A. In the morning immediately after midnight.

    Q. How prove you that?
    A. As Christ rose early in the morning, and the evening after is called the evening of the same day; and Moses said, “To-morrow [not this night] is a Sabbath to the Lord”, John 20:1, 19; Exodus 16:23

    Q. How then is it said, Lev. 23:32, “From evening to evening shall ye celebrate your Sabbath”?
    A. That related to the ceremonial, not to the weekly Sabbath.

    Fisher in his commentary makes the same points, as does Thomas Vincent in his, where he also makes the argument, based on Matt. 28:1, that the end of the Jewish Sabbath was when it was beginning to dawn towards the next day, which must needs mean the morning for if it were the evening then it would be getting darker; and since the ending and beginning of the Sabbath- as any day- must needs be around the same time then the beginning of the Sabbath is in the morning, not the evening.

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  14. tHG isn’t a parable of a future possible-world (where they identify with the heroine), but a impressionistic rendering of today’s bread-and-circuses redux; and they are the breathless consumers of the statolatry.

    PuddleG,

    Dunno ’bout any of this, but then again, I have a cartoon brain. I simply identify with the character: What’s a girl to do:

    For what Collins adroitly did was place a kind of High School Confidential in very particular circumstances. Katniss, the very picture of self-sufficiency, can’t make up her mind between two very different, very cute guys vying for her affections: old flame Gale (Liam Hemsworth) and new guy Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), whom she had to very publicly pretend to love in order to survive the games. Worse than that, Katniss is so stressed out by her experiences in the games she can’t decide if she’s in love with anyone. What’s a girl to do?

    Also very appealing to the intended demographic are two key aspects of Katniss’ personality. On the one hand there’s her youthful idealism: Katniss burns with fury at the depredations of Panem’s ruling class, epitomized by the oily, manipulative President Snow (Donald Sutherland). On the other hand, her natural self-effacing modesty restrains her from taking a leadership role in the incipient rebellion that her actions in the games seem to have precipitated. Again, what’s a girl to do?

    movies rock, yo.

    PS your moniker wants me to go back and read Til we have faces. It’s my kellerism that won’t let me leave my lewisism

    cheers

    PPS what’s a girl to do – a good riff for Cletus van Winkle, Big D?

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