Harry Potter trailer released

See it here. All very exciting.

But spot the Americanism on the lips of a British child, especially as he's meant to be a 1930s orphan.

Well done? You have been!

Anna Tims of the Grauniad relates some of the Great British customer service she's dealt with over her decade as that paper's consumer rights "agony aunt". I think my favourite is probably Seeboard's response to their engineers' impressive re-wiring of a lady's house.

Addition to blogroll

I just added a blog brought to my attention via the Motley Fool: Lidl Treats. We don't have a Lidl in York (not last time I checked, anyway) but as I mostly shop at Aldi, there'll be some material of use.

The content of the blog, which has only been going since July 13th, revolves as you might guess around the things which can be bought from Lidl. There are recipes, reviews, example shopping baskets and all sorts. Worth a look. [EDIT: I forgot to mention that it's an Irish blog, so the prices are all in Euros.]

In case you're wondering, this isn't a sponsored blog, and product reviews have come out to be negative—see, for instance, this review of Lidl's tinned salmon.

So if you shop at one of the discount Northern European supermarkets, you may find it some use. And if you don't, try it. Gone are those days when we schoolchildren would mock the quality of Aldi food: while some products are duds, most are as good as the normal supermarkets and considerably cheaper.

In ur systematix, dissin ur dispensationalism

Did I ever mention Dan Phillips' post, Twenty-five stupid reasons for dissing dispensationalism? I like to revisit it occasionally, because it's such easy fodder for good material to, er, diss dispensationalism. Of course, some of the twenty-five truly are stupid reasons, but here's a lovely little reason, number twenty-one in the set. He starts by quoting the objection in bold, then proceeds to tackle it.

"For all the promises of God find their Yes in him" (2 Corinthians 1:20a). As if there's a dispensationalist that disbelieves this verse. I'd suggest that it's the decoder-ring set that disbelieves it. Dispensationalists believe that Christ will make good on all the Trinity's promises, as He carries out all the will of the Father, and is King of the mediatorial Kingdom. It's the CT's who would turn this verse to "For all the promises of God find their 'Ha-ha, fooled you!' in him," or "For some of the promises of God find their No in him."

I'd like to explain why he's completely wrong on this point, but before I do, I'd like to mention a book. On my most recent travels, I've been reading Greg Beale's The Temple and the Church's Mission [1], and he has a couple of chapters (8 and 9) where he basically guts dispensationalism, head to toe. Although he never names the enemy directly, he clearly knows exactly whom he's targetting on at least some points [2], as he deals quite directly with the question of whether there is a Biblical command for Israel to re-build the Temple. Dan Phillips himself says that, in his estimation, this (under the guise of Ezekiel 40–48) is the biggest sticking point between dispensationalists and the rest of us.

Dispensationalists insist, according to their "grammatico-historical, normal" hermeneutic, that whenever the word "temple" is used, it must mean a construction of wood and stone, made by human hands. However, we claim that Christ is the true temple, of whom Israel's constructed temple is but a pre-figurement. What has this to do with the verse Dan quoted?

Simply this: that dispensationalists will argue that Christ will fulfill this promise by building a renewed Temple, whereas we say that Christ fulfills this promise by being the renewed Temple. In short, the dispensationalist must say that Paul really meant, "For all the promises of God find their Yes by him" (since the fulfilment is carried out by Christ, but that fulfilment lies outside him); only the Christ-centred redemptive historical hermeneutic is able to take Paul at his word when he tells us that those promises find their Yes in Christ.

Beale makes the very helpful illustration of a 19th-century father who promises his son, as a wedding gift, a horse and trap to get around. After a couple of decades, the son gets married and the father tells him he'll make good on his promise. As the bride and groom leave the church, they see the father's gift for them, waiting to take them to the reception. It's a recently-invented Ford Model 'T', superior to a horse and trap in every respect. What shall we say? Do we accuse the father of failure because a horse and cart has not been provided?

To sum up, then: dispensationalists cannot dismiss the fulfilment of promises in Christ with a wave of the hand, as if to say, "Yes, yes, we know all about him; but when's the cedar coming out, that's what I want to know?" [3] Instead, a proper application of the "dispensational" hermeneutic to this clear statement of St. Paul's would lead one to conclude that the dispensational expectation of a reconstructed Temple is faulty.

[1] I'd love to recommend it, but it's incredibly hard going. He slogs through loads of Ancient Near-Eastern parallels, which must be very interesting if you like that sort of thing, but I just find it tedious. On the other hand, as long as he's interacting with Scripture itself, it's generally quite interesting and the New Testament stuff is solid gold. So perhaps my recommendation is, "borrow a friend's copy, flick through the OT stuff to get an idea of the gist and then read the NT chapters." I may also post a few gleanings later on.
[2] Heck, the guy names names, although some of his adversaries were premillennial but not dispensational (e.g., Bruce, Morris).
[3] This line edited for accuracy. The temple was not, as I later recalled, ever built of gopherwood. I plead stupidity, m'lud.

Toast and gristle

Romanists see Mary in pieces of toast, but of course, good Muslims don't hold with graven images, so that's not an option. They go for the word Allah in a piece of meat gristle. Will wonders never cease.

But where does it lead you, O Ecclesia Anglicana?

Okay, this is probably my last post for a week and a half. Probably. Unless I get bored watching the Niagara Falls or something.

The BBC Magazine has an article by a gay man who left the Anglican clergy (where are the interviews with conservative Anglicans concerned that their church is ordaining men whose lives cause open scandal?) as he found that he couldn't, as he put it, "live a lie." That comment, in itself, is interesting, but what particularly struck me was this paragraph.

A priest, though, is called to preach a gospel of love. So when you are gay, this gospel traps you. You must keep tabs on who knows about the most immediate way that God's love comes to you, which is to say with someone of the same sex.

It sounds to me like this guy's main problem—you're going to say, "Duh!"—is that he never heard the Gospel, he'd never even got to notitia, the first stopping-point on the patristic and Reformational description of faith. And this paragraph on its own gives me enough to wonder whether this "gospel of sexuality" does not in fact and of necessity give rise to a Eucharistic heresy.

I think it's worth pondering, anyway.

Good news for the African savannah

The organisation PhytoTrade Africa must be feeling celebratory this morning, as through their good offices, farmers across the African continent will now be able to export baobab fruit into the EU. It cannot be imported whole, however: only the pulp will be allowed for use. Still, it is claimed to be nutritionally rich, and the potential market for baobab, as an ingredient in nutri-bars, smoothies and the like, is estimated at half a billion pounds. Very good news indeed for poor African families, who can harvest wild baobab (cultivation is unlikely, as the trees are very slow growers).

Of course, it's good that the barrier to trade has come down, but let's recognise that this is exactly what has happened: a barrier to one particular trade has (partially) come down. Would that more came down, more quickly and more fully.

Housekeeping: I'm on holiday for the next couple of weeks, so you can expect me to post even less than usual.

Recession-plagued nation demands new bubble to invest in

The Onion reports.

WASHINGTON—A panel of top business leaders testified before Congress about the worsening recession Monday, demanding the government provide Americans with a new irresponsible and largely illusory economic bubble in which to invest.

Of course, this being the Onion, American businessmen aren't really calling for these measures. And, for that matter, neither are ours.

They always raise the bet

Well, John, they'll do more than buy the left-over equity: the Housing Minister wants to buy the entire house of anyone caught in negative equity and unable to make the payments. As the Guardian's article laconically observes, "The scheme would be expensive." You don't say. Of course, it may, as the article says, save on social housing in the longer-term.

It goes on to report,

She has suggested that country landowners could be freed to build cheap houses for their workers on their own land, in a return to the system of 'tied cottages'.

Well, the Conservatives ought at least to support this bit: it's a 17th-century solution to a 21st-century problem. Ahem.

Deep in history?

The World at One today interviewed the Rt Revd Andrew Burnham, Bishop of Ebbsfleet, who made a statement calling on the Pope to make "magnanimous gestures" aimed at receiving Anglo-Catholics into the Roman Church.

During the interview, he came out with a rather interesting line, saying that this wasn't about women, but about the authority of the Anglican church to change, without the consensus of the wider church, "Scripture, sacraments, creeds" and so on. Given he's now looking to place himself under the authority of the See of Rome, I perhaps ought to remind the Bishop of one simple word: filioque.

Crack'd from side to side

A little while back, I was chatting with friends about the differences between Baptist and paedo-baptist theology. In a moment of lucidity, I realised that there's a deep crack which runs through the Baptist account of baptism: they say firmly, "you have to be baptised as a believer," but are profoundly unwilling to truncate that and say, "you have to be baptised."

A chintzy story

The Wikipedia article on chintz is a fascinating, if rather sparse, read. It's a tale of international skulduggery which could probably be turned into a decent little book, and it has a very helpful political application.

The story is that chintz was originally made in India using local materials. In 1680, it was in high demand, but expensive, and therefore [1] caused massive out-flows of gold from Western treasuries. Horrified at the waste, a law was enacted in France to ban the import of chintz [2]; a similar law was passed in the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1720. Loopholes, of course, meant that chintz was not completely removed from public use, but the majority of imports were stopped, which presumably resulted in significant losses of revenue for Indian weavers.

Research, industrial espionage and a fair bit of inspired guesswork went into trying to replicate the processes used to manufacture chintz, so that within forty years of the British ban, English and French textile mills were able to turn out chintz in the required quantities.

And what would you know! In 1759, the French ban was dropped, as French chintz mills were competing quite nicely against their Indian rivals. A similar story would be told about the British, I'm sure.

Of course, we cannot know definitely how the history of chintz would be written had the bans not taken place; nevertheless, it isn't too improbable to think that Indian weavers could have been a lot better off.

Had the bans not taken place, it should have been in the best interests of the British East India Company to have continued exporting Indian chintz, and if extra capacity were required, to build textile mills in India. As a result, Indian weavers (and thus India as a whole) would have been enriched by colonial trade, and not—as happened in history—mistreated and abused.

Anti-globalisation campaigners like to make a lot of their claim that it was colonial "free trade" policies which impoverished the Third World. However the story of chintz tells a different story: Western protectionism was quite certainly the real devil [3]. Why should we think that Western protectionism nowadays would do any differently?

[1] I am surmising, based on the prevailing mercantilist theory, how the Western treasuries reacted to this. Mercantilism was the theory that a nation was rich if it had a balance of payments which increased its stock of gold and precious metals.
[2] See? They've been at it for centuries.
[3] Someone may argue that it was mercantilism, since it led to protectionism. But it was the banning of imports which caused the problem; whichever economic lunacy is used to justify the policy is, in one sense, neither here nor there.

This is priceless

Don't you want them to stabilise the banking system then? Isn't that one of the functions of governments?

There's stabilising as in trying to keep a pig balanced on a flagpole, and there's stabilising as in not letting the pig climb up in the first place. Personally, I think the function of government is nearer the latter then the former.

There is also the question of if, having got yourself into a pig/flagpole vertical support situation, the best way forward is to expend a lot of time and effort keeping the pig up there, or if in the long term you are better off just letting it fall and sorting out the mess.

This may mean you have to buy a new pig, but it's not all bad: you'd be surprised how much bacon and sausages you'll be able to scavenge out of the old one.

Source: lizbubb at the Motley Fool boards on the best response of HMG to the credit crunch . (Link.) Some light editing applied.

Further round the wheel

…Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect, who was chosen before the creation of the world… (1 Pet. 1:19–20)

For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. (Eph. 1:4)

I've been trying to form a post on this, but I just can't get the words right. My point is that just as justification flows from union with Christ, so does sanctification. Note the parallel in the two verses I quoted above: Christ was elected before the creation of the world as the lamb without blemish or defect, and we are elected in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight.

That means justification—"holy in his sight"—but it means more than simply justification, it also means sanctification, in that we shall stand before God as sanctified people.

And it means that justification doesn't, in the strictest sense, lead to sanctification. It always precedes sanctification, but to assert that it therefore logically precedes sanctification is to commit the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc.

The picture often used is of the hub of a wheel and the spokes which extend from it: the hub is union with Christ, and the spokes are, variously, justification, sanctification and glorification and all the other benefits; the sum of which we call "salvation". And therefore, I would say of sanctification's relationship to justification that sanctification is simply further round the wheel.

Could this be the end of the Church of England?

As the General Synod meets this week in Central Hall, the BBC is reporting the whole mess. The Archbishop of Canterbury has said that Jesus would "feel the pain" of everyone involved, a true enough sentiment no doubt, but small comfort to those who wish to hold the line on the church's clerical admissions policy and small comfort to those who feel strongly that they are called to pastoral ministry and the church's rules are barring them from entry.

Two developments in the affair do not bode well for the Church of England. Firstly, there is the outcome of Gafcon, held recently in Jerusalem, which is the setting-up of the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans for conservative evangelical Anglicans. This body will remain within the Anglican Communion, in the sense that it retains its link with Canterbury, but it will break its communion with the North American churches, over the issue, at root, of the validity of same-sex marriage [1]. Although the Gafcon attendees loudly sounded their intentions to remain within the Anglican Communion, many observers have found this difficult to believe, at least for the long term.

Secondly, there is today's news that some Anglo-Catholics—perhaps more accurately, Anglo-Papalists—have been holding talks with the Vatican, presumably in case things don't go so well.

As if the Bearded One hadn't enough to deal with, Robert Key, Conservative MP and lay member of Synod, is warning that Parliament will not view this as a theological matter, but a political one of discrimination. Thus it could yet be that if the church takes the 'middle way' then a constitutional crisis may occur, as the church's Supreme Governor would be presented by Parliament with legislation to force the church down a path it has expressly refused to take. If she signs, then it may be that the church splits as historic Anglicanism is shown the door; or it may be that the church effectively disestablishes itself in order to ignore the law and keep the peace. If she were to refuse to sign, then we would have a full-blown constitutional crisis.

In short, I suspect that the Church of England as we know her could have her card well and truly marked.

[1] You could argue that it is over the issue of gay clergy, and that's certainly the material cause. But a male ordinand sleeping with his girlfriend could, in principle at least, be told to marry her; the traditionalist point is that the same could not possibly be said to one sleeping with his boyfriend. Hence, the real issue is that validity of same-sex marriage, and the related issue of the willingness of the American dioceses to ordain ministers whose lives cause open scandal within the church.

Why, oh why, oh why?

The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. (J. M. Keynes)

Marks & Spencer announced this morning that UK like-for-like sales had fallen 5.3%, although group sales were up 1.3% after a particularly strong showing from the international side of the business. "Like-for-like" means that the accountants strip out the effects of opening new stores and closing old ones etc.; UK sales in general only fell 0.5%.

Since costs must be removed from sales to obtain profits, a small change in sales can be magnified into a large change in profits, although that isn't, of course, guaranteed as a perusal of last year's Marks & Spencer results would show. But given that group sales are up 1.3%, why did the market decide that today was the day to put the shares on "buy three, get the fourth free"? And more to the point, why did I buy my Marks shares last week?

Why do they say that?

Why is it that "left-liberals" (to explain that I'm using the American, rather than the European, sense of the word "liberal" in this post) are thought of as believing that people are fundamentally good? The conservatives like to make the charge (and bizarre as it may seem, some liberals proudly claim it), but it's quite plainly not true. If people were as good as all that, then they'd do "the right things" without co-ercion, thus rendering co-ercion unnecessary, time-consuming and offensive. But liberals are the architects of policies which interfere with people's freedoms (take smoking bans), directing people's behaviour precisely because they aren't fundamentally good.

Even if liberals don't like to say so out loud, we have laws to control people's fundamental badness, not to encourage their fundamental goodness, since any goodness which would need a law to bring it out isn't worth the name "good".

Stock portfolio, 2009Q1

The main portfolio page has been updated.

Commentary

There was quite a bit of action this quarter, as this credit crunch caught up with various banks. After denials of the need to improve their capital situation, first RBS, then HBOS and now Bradford & Bingley have passed the begging bowl round to shareholders, holding rights issues and converting dividends to scrip, which means that instead of cash, we get paid in shares. In my book, that's all right provided it is (a) a one-off, and (b) they don't mess around with the dividend per share to "compensate".

Apart from that, LogicaCMG changed its name (a result, like so many odd company names, of a merger between Logica and CMG) to Logica, which is a far nicer name to deal with. Perhaps one day, Lloyds TSB will get around to dropping the TSB bit; after all, it's not like anyone remembers the Trustee Savings Bank any more.

Dividends were also in full flow this quarter, as April is the end of the financial year for many companies. The Bradford & Bingley (0.62p per unit) and Lloyds (0.57p) dividends, the process for which started last quarter, were paid this quarter, as well as the Barratt Developments (0.23p) and Trinity Mirror (0.39p) dividends announced last quarter. Logica (0.30p), whom I only bought last quarter, had also released results and paid out their final dividend, and Marston's paid out just at the end of June (0.20p). The total dividends received over the quarter were 2.32p per unit.

As a result, another nicely-earned teaching bonus combined with the dividends meant that I was able to buy another three shares this quarter. They were Old Mutual, an insurance group with activities in the US and South Africa as well as the UK; Brixton, a company which lets industrial and warehouse properties around the UK; and Home Retail Group, the company responsible for Argos and Homebase.

Activity report

Apr 08
No activity of note.

May 08
Receive dividend 14.3p per share from BB.
Receive dividend 24.7p per share from LLOY.
Receive dividend 3.5p per share from LOG.
Receive dividend 12.23p per share from BDEV.

Jun 08
Receive dividend 15.5p per share from TNI.
Receive dividend 4.8p per share from MARS.
Buy OML (Old Mutual) at 92.84p.
Buy HOME (Home Retail Group) at 213.00p.
Buy BXTN (Brixton) at 234.83p.

Outlook

There are dividends already announced to be paid in 2009Q2 from Tate & Lyle, United Utilities and BT; these total 0.76p per unit. Additionally, United Utilities disposed of its electricity arm recently, and is returning the capital to shareholders, so I'll have some extra money to work out what to do with. It won't be noted as a dividend, but will be noted as a buy. I think my best idea so far is to send it into National Grid, which pays a dividend and will replace the area of business lost by the sale.

Gospel-centred, logically speaking

I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes. (Rom. 1:16)

Paul couldn't be plainer: the gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes. So here's a simple bit of Aristotelianism for you.

1. The gospel is the power of God for salvation.
2. Salvation includes sanctification.
3. Therefore, the gospel is the power of God for sanctification.

Why would anyone think it's any more complicated than that?