Philosophaster

My Attempt: By his own admission, my brother is a philosophaster. But he should philosophaster!!

Ben’s Version: The young philosopher Wittgenstein developed very fast. But my brother is philosophaster.

Oh, never mind.

… what the names of the three Smith kids mean. All of us have Hebrew names which our parents chose for us from the OT. Let’s start with the youngest and work up.

Berek Qinah Smith
berek => “knee” (as in “bow the knee,” i.e. worship)
qinah => “jealousy” or “zeal” (of God, as in the Second Commandment)

Ben Zedek Smith
ben => “son of” (anybody remember Judah Ben Hur?)
tsedeq => “righteousness”

Emeth Hesed Smith
emeth => “truth”
hesed => “covenant loyalty” (translated as “mercy,” “kindness,” or “lovingkindness” in the KJV)

My children (d.v.) will all have Hebrew names that will be available as dot coms. No offense, but when I’m teaching and half the people in the class have the same first name, it makes me want to name my children names that nobody else in the world has ever had. You don’t know how utterly crushed I was when I was a kid and found out “Emeth” is the name of a character in one of C.S. Lewis’ books. (I won’t say which one because if you truly know and love CSL, you would know. )

My youngest brother Berek’s blog is up and running. He is an budding philosopher. I don’t know if he has written anything worth reading, but ya’ll be nice and go take a look, now, go on.

I can’t believe it’s past 3:30 AM … AGAIN. Aiyaa.

:: scream :: Just one more day, one more day of work at the school I work at, and I’m free from it for 8 weeks!! 11 hours there tomorrow, and I don’t go for the rest of the summer!! Private classes end next Wednesday. Then I’ll be free until the end of August.

:: whisper :: I’ve got so much study to do this summer…. I must get all that broken English out of my head and get back to doing some serious reading.

One of my students cancelled her class with me today, so I had an extra 90 minutes to work at home!! Papa’s third essay is up.

The Trinity and Contextualization
It has been often asserted that the doctrine of the Trinity is an example of “contextualization.” This essay tries to show that this is an overly simplistic and basically inaccurate representation.

Tonight, I set up Berek’s blog and finished another of Papa’s essays. Time to sleep.

Worldviews and Culture: Interacting with Charles Kraft, N. T. Wright, & Scripture
Charles Kraft’s views on culture and the Gospel have been influential in Christian missions for years, but a careful consideration of his views suggests that they are relativistic, in part because they are built upon fundamental misconceptions of the relationship between culture and worldview. N. T. Wright offers a more Biblical perspective
on the meaning of worldview and the importance of narrative for Christian theology. This essay suggests the addition of a covenantal perspective on the subject.

One Down, Two To Go
The reason I haven’t been writing in my blog for the past few nights is because I’ve been working on three new essays written by Papa for the Berith.org site. I’ve been up the last three nights creating new templates, formatting DOC and PDF versions. Tonight, finished the HTML version for one essay. I’m too tired to finish the other two tonight. Maybe tomorrow night.

One reason this process took so long is thanks to some miserable, pre-historic Mac software. Anybody ever heard of WriteNow 4.0? It’s about 10 years old, I think. We used to use it on our old Mac SE. Despite my intense dislike of XP (I use 2000), and despite knowing how much some of you detest M$ Windoze products, I’m so happy Papa finally started using Word a couple days ago. My life will become so much easier.

If you’re reading this tonight, you’re among the first to know about this essay. If you want to know when there are additions to the Berith.org site you can join the Berith Updates group … or you can keep an eye on this blog.

Adam, Noah, and the Kingdom: The Covenants of Genesis and Consistent Eschatology
Eschatology is not the teaching of a few passages of Scripture, it is essential to the whole Biblical message from the very beginning. That means understanding the importance of the covenant with Adam and its renewal in the covenant that God gave to Noah is basic to eschatology. The covenant with Noah, in particular, sheds light on the question of which of the three predominant eschatological schools is in line with the historical development of the covenant.

Ben ripped my Hamlet CDs and put them on my iPod for me, so I’ve been able to listen to them every day this week. King Lear (it says “abridged” at Amazon but it’s actually not) and Romeo & Juliet should be on their way to my iPod before long. I’ve hired him to rip my entire CD collection. Thank you, Ben!