Hip and Thigh: November 2006

My birthday is the 25th of November (I turned 38). That means it is celebrated during the week of Thanksgiving and occasionally, sometimes on Thanksgiving day itself.

Because of this occurrence, my grandmother (my father's mother), used to bake me my own personal mini-pumpkin pie instead of a cake. I always thrilled at having my own miniature pie.

My dad's birthday was the day following mine on the 26th.

I always thought that was kind of cool, too. Last year, on the 24th (Thanksgiving day). I was hoping he would stay put because I wanted to share my birthday date with him.

My wife thought that was strange, because she likes having her birthday date all to herself shared with no one else in the family. At least my third son will be the day before mine like my father and me.

This year my birthday was on a Saturday.

My wife had asked me a month or so before what I wanted for my birthday. I looked at her square in the eye and replied, "I want to go to Archives by myself and browse the book shelves."

Now, what the heck is Archives?

If you live in the So Cal area and are theologically astute or a seminary student, you know about in Pasadena. It is one of the largest used Christian books stores in America. I mean good Christian books, like commentaries and Puritan theology.

Not Beth Moore and Joel Olsteen style books you find in the popular retail type stores, though they may sell Beth Moore's books in the discounted area.

When I first visited Archives it was back in 1992. At this time, the shop occupied two store fronts on the street opposite their current day location.

They had books crammed on shelves in essentially two stores with a large door frame cut in the wall between the two. It was almost near impossible to go to a shelf and locate anything alphabetically. Though they had all the "Ps" and Ms" together, they weren't in any order, but shelved randomly.

One of my class mates at seminary upon hearing of us planning our first trip to Archives told us with bitterness in his voice, "I hate going to that place; I can't find nothing." Undeterred, my friends and I made the 25 minute drive down the 134 east, onto the 210 east, exited Hill drive and turned north to Washington ave. where Archives was located (at that time) on the north side of the street.

The place was just like my friends had described it: Ceiling high bookcases stuffed with dusty old theology books and tight fitting, narrow aisles in between them. Oddly, the folks running the place were a bunch of hippie moonbeams. They looked like they had just come from a protest rally in San Francisco.

They played mellow, classic rock over the sound system in the store. It was a bit odd browsing the Romans commentaries while listening to Starship Trooper performed by Yes playing in the background.

It took me nearly two hours to comb all the shelves, but I walked away with a couple of A.

W. Pink books I didn't have. They were all I could afford at the time, and even then, just like today, Archives was a bit pricey for a used book store.

I tried to make it over there at least once, if not twice a year, and each time I was as excited on going there as a kid would be for Disney Land.

Sometimes in the late 90s, they bought a large store across the street and moved the entire collection there. It was a much needed improvement.

Lots of room to spread out, wide spacious aisle between shelves, and the books were alphabetized! Even more glorious was a bathroom, the sound system played classical music now, and they even provided little plastic shopping baskets to carry your books in.

So, the past Saturday, after the kids gave me my presents consisting of a large bag of dark chocolate M Ms and a two disc set of Resphigi's Pines of Rome, my wife made me an omelet breakfast with homemade biscuits and I headed off to Pasadena.

Now most folks in this world would think spending all morning in a used theology bookstore for your birthday is weird. But there is something moving about walking through those doors and breathing in that "book" smell. Every person has to have a plan of attack when browsing a book store, especially one like Archives.

I begin on the far wall to the right which is old and new Bibles, lexicons and biblical language books. I then move to the shelves opposite those which begins the OT studies and commentaries. Around the corner begins the NT studies and commentaries, then the large sets and Church History.

Then moving around those shelves begins the theology section, probably the largest section in the place. They have a section devoted to Luther, Calvin and of course, Barth. (The management thinks Barth is tops).

There is also a large collection of what I call low end theology books that is significantly discounted. You know, the liberal stuff written by Methodist women pastors and the effeminate Jesus Seminar guys. I saw several copies of The Book of J, books by Spong, Borg and plenty of Paul Tillich's works.

However, mixed in with all the junky liberal books are some good ones, perhaps too slightly damaged to sell on the regular shelves. I found all my Lloyd-Jones Ephesians commentaries in that section, along with a copy of Iain Murray's Revival and Revivalism. It takes me a good 45 minutes or so to look through that section because the books are randomly placed on the shelves.

Usually I have a crick in my neck when I finish, but I always find something to pick up.

With this visit, I went away with four books: Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism by George Marsden, God's Hammer by Gordon Clark, and two books by Ronald Nash, Faith and Reason and Worldviews in Conflict. It was terrific.

Maybe I am a geek, but I had a awesome, thanksgiving filled birthday.

I come again to my review of Chaz Bufe, the Christ-hating anarchist and blues guitar playing atheist, and his . He devotes two entire points to the subject of Christians and sexuality and in doing so demonstrates a triumphal ignorance in what he criticizes. This is seen within the second sentence of point 9 when he writes about the numerous "thou shalt nots" relating to sex in the Bible, particular the 10th commandment which forbids coveting your neighbor's wife.

I had no idea that Chaz was a wife-swapping swinger as well.

In order to save time, I thought I would cover his two points into one post.

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Today, judging from the pronouncements of many Christian leaders, one would think that "morality" consists solely of what one does in one’s bedroom.

The Catholic Church is the prime example here, with its moral pronouncements rarely going beyond the matters of birth control and abortion (and with its moral emphasis seemingly entirely on those matters). Also note that the official Catholic view of sex—that it’s for the purpose of procreation only—reduces human sexual relations to those of brood animals. For more than a century the Catholic Church has also been the driving force behind efforts to prohibit access to birth control devices and information—to everyone, not just Catholics.

As I have noted in previous articles, Chaz has the annoying habit of equating historic, Bible-believing Christianity with the Roman Catholic Church. This misnomer permeates his entire tract. In fact, I would say his overall pamphlet would be more aptly titled 20 Reasons to Abandon Roman Catholicism.

At any rate, Chaz can't be faulted too much, because it is typical of many critics of religious faith to make this mistake either out of ignorance or intellectual laziness. I would expect more from Chaz, however, because he is making the Christian faith the object of his scorn.

That being said, I would agree with Chaz to an extent that Roman Catholicism has taught a warped view of human sexuality.

Yet this is not derived from scripture as Chaz would have his readers believe, but from a mingling of Gnostic ascetic beliefs with early Christian mysticism. This philosophical combination produced an entirely unbiblical view of Christian sexuality; one that is no where taught in the whole the Bible.

Many early Church fathers, including those who followed into the Medieval times, held to a false dichotomy between the spirit and flesh, with the spirit understood as being pure and the flesh evil.

They would then impose this view upon the Bible and force the text to teach something totally different than what it was meant to convey. This false understanding of God ordained sexuality has sadly produced two millennia of misguided Christians. Many of them taught that marriage should not be for anything but procreation and virginity was the highest of spiritual virtues.

The systems of the monastery and convent were developed as a place where single, chaste men and women could live out their spiritual lives away from the temptations of the world.

However, thanks be to the spiritual revival that took place under the Reformation, Christians broke away from this false teaching and returned to the teaching of scripture. Another common myth among religious critics is the notion that Puritans were dour, sexually repressive individuals.

But this is utterly untrue. It was the Puritans who recaptured a biblical vision of God ordain human sexuality as the Lord had intended sex to be. As Leland Ryken shows in his wonderful book, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as the Really Were, the Puritans celebrated sexuality through out their literature and sermons.

Think about it: Puritans had massive families. Obviously they had to have liked sex.

God loves sex, simply because He created it for men to enjoy.

The only stipulation is that sex is to be enjoyed with in the boundary God has set, that being a marriage between one man and one woman. The Lord declares in Hebrews 13:4 that marriage is honorable among all, and the bed is undefiled..

. Proverbs 5:18,19 frankly states, Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice with the wife of your youth. As a loving deer and a graceful doe, let her breasts satisfy you at all and always be enraptured with her love.

And the Song of Solomon is a long, semi-erotic love poem expressing the blessedness of martial sexual relations between a man and woman. So this idea Chaz is attempting to set forth to his readers that Christianity is sexually repressive is non-sense.

What Chaz doesn't like is the stipulation God has placed on sex; i.

e., only being between a man and a woman who are married. Chaz boasts of being a "free thinker" and historically, free thinkers are notorious womanizing sex perverts.

As we will see in more detail when we come to Chaz's complaint that Christianity is misogynistic, one of his intellectual heroes from times past, the poet, Lord George Byron, toured the European continent sleeping with countless women and impregnating a good deal of them, leaving a wake of illegitimate children. I would imagine Chaz dreams of a life like that.

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In addition to the misery produced by authoritarian Christian intrusions into the sex lives of non-Christians, Christianity produces great misery among its own adherents through its insistence that sex (except the very narrow variety it sanctions) is evil, against God’s law.

Christianity proscribes sex between unmarried people, sex outside of marriage, homosexual relations, bestiality, and even “impure” sexual thoughts. Indulging in such things can and will, in the conventional Christian view, lead straight to hell.