Old Is Better
Understanding the Times
Derek Thomas [reformation21.org]

A few days ago, a kind lady in the church called and asked if I’d come and examine her LPs (Long Playing Records). There must have been several hundred classical LPs in pristine condition reflecting years of careful purchasing. Bruno Walter, Arturo Toscanini, Otto Klemperer, George Szell, André Cluytens, Arthur Rubenstein, Glen Gould, Tatiana Nikolayeva … the names kept on coming. Naturally, I picked out some treasures and brought them home.

There was that déjà vu experience: holding the vinyl in my hands, the fabulous 200 gram black beauties transports you to another place and time, long before the record’s started playing. Memories of thirty, forty years ago flood back: the black velvet cloth to remove the dust from the playing surface; the sound of crackling as the diamond stylus hits that first groove; the stroboscopic light ensuring that the speed is exactly 33? revolutions per minute...And then the sound!

It had been a while since I’d played an LP. I’d forgotten just how “real” the sound was. Even the familiar hiss and the occasional pop added to what had been once the cutting edge of stereophonic sound. I was transported to my teenage years transported back to a cold, wintry day in 1974 when I tried to woo my, what is now my bride of thirty-two years, by playing for her my latest purchase – Pierre Boulez conducting the Cleveland Orchestra in Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring! The crazy things I did when I was twenty one!

You see, among these LP’s I had been so kindly been allowed to look at was a copy of this very LP that I had purchased thirty years ago. It’s too long a story now to tell, but it was just a few months after this attempt to win the love of my life to Stravinsky (it didn’t, by the way but she was very kind and said all the right things!) that I was persuaded by a zealous brother in the faith to part with all my beloved records as an act of consecration. Music and collecting LPs in particular, he said was “worldly” and if I was serious about my relation to Jesus (and I was), I would do get rid of them. All of them! And I did!

It was something I would quickly come to regret as a more informed world-view took hold of me, one which encompassed music as one of God’s gifts to be enjoyed and placed in proper perspective so long as I didn’t make an idol of it. And as I played The Rite once again, on the very same record as once I had owned – it wasn't exactly the same record, you understand, but to all intents and purposes I imagined it was – I found myself saying, nerd-like, “old is so much better than new.” Of all the many hundreds of CDs I own (a couple of thousand perhaps) none sounded as sonically real as this! I know this is not true. Deep down somewhere, this remark begged for re-evaluation. The convenience of CD or digital is in a different league. But I found myself agreeing with audio-geeks that there is something about vinyl that is more … what exactly? Something about the sense that among the background noise (and how quickly my ears adjusted to it), there is a sense that you are there and not cocooned behind some, albeit gossamer veil.

The old is better! I have reached the point where I now sound just like my parents. I had promised myself that I’d never be like that. But there a host of things which I would be willing to return to in a heart-beat: flying without security checks, fruit and vegetables that had taste even if they were occasionally blemished by spots; cars that had “character’ if not quite the fizz of their more modern cousins; and worship … well, I’d better not go there.

This all sounds impossibly Luddite. We are destined to progress, to “go boldly where no man has gone before” as Captain James T. Kirk might say. Cute as the Amish are, none of us wants to live like that for any length of time. We value our cell phones, iPods and modern means of internet communication too much to go back. When I was a student in the United States in the mid-seventies, phone calls to the “mother country” were impossibly expensive and letters took ten days to get there by air, several months if insufficient postage was applied and they were sent by sea instead.

Is this longing for the past merely a whimsical nostalgia for an age that seems purer to us than our present one? We are more than capable of romanticism with respect to the past that carefully blots out those features of it which were less than ideal, and if truth be told, down-right Neanderthal. For me, these include having to drink warm milk in school every day by order of the state; cod-liver oil syrup that was meant to make a scrawny, gangly child into something resembling superman (it didn’t!); and perhaps, especially, These are my memories of British life in the late fifties and early sixties that may not resonate with you, but you can provide your own list of howlers.

Is it true, then, that old is always better? Let’s explore this a little asking ourselves a series of questions that arise from the Scriptures.

First, when it comes to a consideration of the history of redemption, what theologians sometimes refer to as ordo historia, is the old better than the new? The answer is decisively negative. The old covenant is not better than the new. Jesus is “the guarantor of a better covenant” (Heb. 7:22). All the sacrifices offered under the old covenant administration could only atone for the flesh, but were inherently ineffective to assure any lasting value. They had been offered repeatedly in a complicated daily, weekly and annual cultus involving the most rigorous detail. Only the blood of Christ can “purify the conscience from dead works to serve the living God” (Heb 9:9).

Not one worshipper under the Old administration could attain to the heights of assurance that those under the new covenant may boast: we have the right to call God “Father.” The “Spirit of adoption” enables us to refer to Yahweh or Jehovah (a name that no Old Testament Jew ever dared to pronounce) as “Abba” (Rom. 15; Gal. 4:6). At best, such a thing is only hinted at in shadowy lines of text that must have engendered more wonder and mystery than clarity and understanding.

John the Baptist was a crucial figure at the turning point of the Old Covenant into the dawning of the New Covenant. And Jesus would say of him: “Truly, I say to you, among those born of women there has arisen no one greater than John the Baptist. Yet the one who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he” (Matt. 11:11). The least believer in the New Covenant era is in a better position than the godliest believer in the Old Covenant.

The old is not better than the new!

Second, if we were to consider the application of redemption in our lives, what theologians sometimes refer to as ordo salutis, are we entitled to think that the old is better than the new? Once again, the answer is decisively negative. The “Old Man” is not better than the “New Man.” This is how the King James Version translates what the English Standard Version renders “old self” (Rom. 6:6; cf. Eph. 4:22; Col. 3:9). Perhaps in this instance, the old is better than the new! “Old Man” in these passages refers not simply to what I was before conversion – regeneration; it certainly has reference to this, but it is saying more than that. It is picking up (in the Romans 6 instance in particular) to the Adam-Christ parallel employed in the Romans 5.

What we are by nature is determined by reference to our union with Adam. The first man was established as our representative head. “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned” (Rom. 5:12). In Adam, we sinned. Paul isn’t saying here that as a consequence of our union with Adam we have fallen and therefore inherit a sin-nature which means that we also commit acts of sin. This is true, but it is not the truth that is being taught here in Romans 5:12. Rather, Paul is saying that when Adam sinned, we sinned. His sin was reckoned as our sin. We inherit as a consequence an Adam-like disposition so that prior to our conversion, we are “in Adam.”

But now that our hearts have been quickened (with new hearts, wills, minds and affections) we are “in Christ” – in union and communion with Christ. The Old Man (our identity in Adam) is gone! We are “in Christ now.” As Augustine said to one of his former female “acquaintances” pleased to see him again, saying “is it you, Augustine?’ he replied, truthfully, “It is not I, Augustine.” He was a “new man” now in the sense that Luther once quipped when the devil knocked the door asking for him, he would reply that Luther did not live there anymore; Jesus did!

The old is certainly not better in this instance.

Third, if we were to ask the question in eschatological terms, whether this world is better than the world to come, again we would have to answer that the old creation is not a match to the new heavens and new earth. For make no mistake about it, redemption – the work Christ accomplished on the cross – has in view more than the salvation of souls. It encompasses cosmic dimensions. Paul hears this old creation which has been “subjected to futility … groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now” (Rom. 8:20, 22). John Calvin comments on this passage: “God will restore the world, now fallen with mankind, into perfection … let us be content with this simple doctrine, that there shall be such a temperature, and such a decent order, that nothing shall appear deformed or ruinous.”

Peter expands our vision by urging by reminding us that “according to his promise” we are those we should be “waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells” (2 pet. 3:13; Isa 65:17; 66:22). Heaven (a renewed cosmos including a transformed earth) will be so much better than this one. For there, as Scripture promises, “‘He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.’ (Rev. 21:4). He intends to make all things new (Rev. 4:5).

It isn’t true, then, that old is always better! But sometimes it is, and a date with a vinyl edition of Mahler’s First symphony is beckoning, with Jascha Horenstein conducting. One more trip down memory lane…

- A new study conducted by researchers at Children's Hospital & Research Center Oakland is the first to discover that a chemical in cocoa beans can limit the development of fluids that cause diarrhea. Cocoa beans contain a large amount of chemicals called flavonoids. Scientists believe that these flavonoids can be used to create natural supplements to ease diarrhea symptoms. Dark chocolate contains high concentrations of cocoa and may offer mild relief.

The study, published in the October issue of The Journal of Nutrition, found that cocoa flavonoids can bind to and inhibit a protein in the intestines called CFTR, which regulates fluid secretion in the small intestines. The research was done in collaboration with scientists at Heinrich Heine University in Germany. "Our study presents the first evidence that fluid loss by the intestine can be prevented by cocoa flavonoids," said Horst Fischer, Ph.D., Associate Scientist, Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute and co-author of the study. "Ultimately, this discovery could lead to the development of natural treatments that are inexpensive, easy to access and are unlikely to have side effects."

Each year, Americans record an average of 2.4 million visits to their doctor with symptoms of diarrhea. Children younger than the age of five and the elderly are the most likely to develop grave health problems if their condition leads to dehydration. "Patients with diarrhea can lose dangerous amounts of fluids," said Beate Illek, Ph.D., Associate Scientist, Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute and co-author of the study. In severe cases children or elderly patients with diarrhea can die from dehydration within a few days.

History shows that the use of cocoa to treat diarrhea dates back to the 16th century by ancient South American and European cultures. Until now, no one knew exactly why the cocoa bean appeared to be a remedy. "Our research successfully proves that this ancient myth is really based on scientific principals," said Dr. Illek. For more than a year, scientists tested cocoa extract and flavonoids in cell cultures that mimic the lining of the intestine. All of the cultures reported lower fluid levels. Consequently, the tests confirmed that cocoa flavonoids are a possible remedy for diarrhea.

I've seen this list before, worth repeating for my own reference, and hopefully yours as well. Next, I'll find the 'Small List of Good Chocolate Books' :
A Small List of Good Books

Posted September 19th, 2007 by Tullian Tchividjian

  Carl Trueman is a great young professor at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia. I think he get to the crux of why heresies still exist just as there, unfortunately, are many forms of heretical chocolate [e.g. the 5th Avenue candy bar, my wife loves, is not, repeat not, true chocolate]. from reformation21.org:

Why and How I Teach Heresy
Wages of Spin
Carl Trueman

---

Teaching heresy is surely one of the most important things that I have to do in my classes at Seminary. Friends will at this point throw up their hands in horror; enemies will smile smugly to themselves and mutter `I told you so!’; but it is true. Teaching heresy is, for me, a crucial part of my responsibility as a professor. The reason, of course, is simple: in order to know what orthodoxy is, one needs to know what heresy is. Indeed, a study of the creedal development of orthodoxy, particularly in the early church, demonstrates time and again that the defining of orthodoxy and the defining of heresy is something which the church does simultaneously. This is hardly surprising: creeds establish boundaries, and so the establishment of creedal orthodoxy is one and the same act as the establishment of heresy.

So far, so obvious. That is the `why’ question answered. The `how’ question is a little more complicated. One obvious way to do it, and a way that certainly appealed to me as a younger Christian, was the `name it and shame it’ approach. You identify the heresy; then you proceed to tear it to shreds, using whatever apocalyptic language is available to you. Such an approach is certainly valid in many ways; after all, there are a number of examples of such an approach within the Bible itself. Heresy has the potential for damning souls; its consequences are eternal; and it should therefore be taken with the utmost seriousness. The doctrinal indifference of many in the church, combined with the aesthetic distaste of postmoderns for hard-and-fast doctrinal boundaries and value judgements (at least, those value judgements which are not primarily aesthetic in their content) indicates the existence of a potentially lethal theological trajectory which could well bear strange fruit in the coming years.

On the whole, however, this is not the approach I use in my classes. In fact, over the years I have noticed a slow confluence of my approach to heresy within my academic historical studies and that of my more ecclesiastical writings and lectures. Early on in my PhD studies, my supervisor told me that I did not have to keep telling him who the bad guys in the Reformation were; he knew I was a Reformed Protestant; and so I did not need to keep affirming that by telling him about how awful I considered the Catholics and the Anabaptists to be. More important, he suggested, was a solid exposition of what such groups believed, and how this shaped the development of the thinking of the Magisterial Reformers (or `the good guys’ as I generally thought of them).

My supervisor was himself a highly sacramental, Wesleyan Methodist who had spent his life studying the life and thought of Martin Bucer and Huldrych Zwingli. I asked him one day why he had chosen two theologians who shared neither his sacramental nor soteriological convictions. `Because I consider it a challenge to get inside the minds of men with whom I disagree, and to present their thought in a way that is accurate and fair.’ In retrospect, this was good advice: the temptation for a historian to twist the evidence to favour a character with whom one has a natural sympathy can sometimes be a powerful force; and, in my experience, one can be more easily aware of instinctive biases when trying to deal with a character with whose thought one has little or no agreement.

Such is my approach to academic history. I am not concerned to critique so much as to understand. When I write these days on the seventeenth century, I know that the Socinians (early Unitarians) are the heretics; I do not need to harp on about that; I need rather to understand them and how they impacted the orthodox through their writings and their social and political activities. I can only come to understand the nuance with which, say, a man like John Owen uses words like essence and substance with reference to the doctrine of God if I understand what those terms were originally used for and under what pressure they had come in the seventeenth century. Both aspects of this task require me to understand the heretical impulses throughout church history down to Owen's day, and the various orthodox responses and doctrinal refinements.

This approach is also most helpful when it comes to learning from heresies in the context of Christian education for the church. And we learn from heresies not simply by refuting them but also by first of all asking the critical question, `Is there a legitimate concern which underlies or drives this particular heresy?’ In almost every case, the answer is yes, and the orthodox can learn from the question as a means of critiquing, refining, and strengthening their own doctrinal understanding and commitment.

Take, for example, the archetypal heresy of Arianism. Most people who have read any history of theology will know that Arianism is the name given to a family of theological positions which basically reject the co-equality of the Son with the Father. The Son is, if you like, a creature, albeit highly exalted above all other creatures, and certainly not equally ultimate with the Father. When teaching on the early church, one could therefore pitch straight in by dismissing this as hopeless blasphemy and move straight on to the next big thing. In doing so, however, one would commit at least two mistakes which would impoverish what is taught. First, one would fail to demonstrate how and why classic Trinitarian language of three hypostases and one ousia (in Western/English parlance, three persons, one substance – although the application of the contemporary meaning of `person’ does not bring over all the nuances of the Greek) began. It was far from obvious to the church in 319 that what Arius was saying was lethal to a biblical understanding of God and to salvation; the process by which the church came to realize these vital truths is central to understanding the necessity of Trinitarianism. Thus, by failing to spend time expounding heresy, one has restricted through incompetent teaching the knowledge of what orthodoxy means, and why it expresses itself in the way it does.

Second, however, one would have failed to appreciate the legitimate difficulties with which Arianism was wrestling – and with which orthodoxy had to wrestle too, if its own answer was to be more satisfactory. Central to Arianism were two basic questions: what is the exact nature of the ontological relationship between the Father and the Son? And how are the biblical passages which speak of Christ suffering to be understood? No-one, no matter how orthodox, can deny that these are legitimate questions; and no-one should underestimate the difficulty, and the importance, of providing satisfactory answers to them.

As to the first, the relationship of the Father to Son has immediate implications for understanding not simply God’s internal relations but also his relationship to creation. Is love essential to deity, or is God ultimately and essentially one and only one, and thus not essentially a being in relation, not a being who loves in his very essence. Then, it speaks directly to the identity of Christ: is Christ God or is he not? As Athanasius pointed out, a Christ who is not God cannot save, and so theological questions do not come any more important than that; and the best way to understand why that is the case is to see how the church wrestled with the questions which Arianism posed on precisely this issue in the fourth century.

Further, the issue of Christ’s suffering is again a hardy perennial for the church. Under the impact of the philosophy of Hegel, and the mediating theology of I A Dorner, suffering has become a significant leitmotif in modern theology, as in the work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and, above all, Jurgen Moltmann, for whom divine suffering is a central part of Christian response to the Holocaust. Yet the attraction of this notion in the modern era needs to be set against the background of Arianism for there is a sense in which the triumph of Nicene orthodoxy at the Council of Constantinople was a triumph over those who saw the biblical references to Christ’s suffering as penetrating to the whole of his nature and as precluding him from being god in the way that the Father was God. A study of this issue at least raises questions about the modern received wisdom on this issue, even if it is not, by itself, a decisive argument against divine passibility. Yet it is only as the heresy of Arianism is unpacked, if not sympathetically then at least accurately and without the intrusion of anachronistic knowledge or categories, that the questions it raised, the answers it offered, and the responses it elicited can be addressed, and only then that our understanding of, and appreciation for, orthodoxy is enriched and enhanced.

If this works for Arianism, it also works for other heresies too. Monophysitism and Nestorianism asked what it really means for humanity and divinity to unite in one person. Pelagianism asked what the grace of God really means. Socinianism demanded that the church really justify on the basis of scripture its Trinitarianism and its use of extra biblical terminology. Kenoticism demanded that the church address those passages of scripture which speak of the incarnate limitations of the Son. Each of them raised legitimate questions, and we cheapshot them, deride them, or ignore them at our peril.

When I first became a Christian, I found myself in a tradition which held that one should only read orthodox books; indeed, one should only read books with which one already agreed. I understand the logic of this position; and I appreciate the concern which it embodies to protect believers from being misled. Some of the most brilliant and persuasive people in church history have been heretics, and people can be led astray by reading them. Yet those called to be teachers in the church need a solid grasp of orthodoxy; and that demands by its very nature a solid grasp of heresy. That is why I teach heresy in my classes, and why I make sure I do justice to the legitimacy of the questions which underlie virtually every heresy of which I can think; for it is only then that I can truly explain orthodoxy to my students. And I also get a perverse pleasure from using heresy to do that which heretics most despise: promote sound, biblical, historic orthodoxy.

Part 3: gitten to the essence of chocolate

Making Chocolate

So far, we've taken the seeds of a tree, roasted them and ground them up. Now the process of making the chocolate we eat can begin, and it takes a lot of talent.

Photo courtesy Hawaiian Vintage Chocolate Discs of dark chocolate can be used for baking or can be eaten just as they are.

There are three basic things that must be done by the chocolate maker to make a chocolate bar:

• Adding ingredients - The chocolate that we eat contains sugar, other flavors (like vanilla) and often milk (in milk chocolate). The chocolate maker adds these ingredients according to his or her secret recipe.

• Conching - A special machine is used to massage the chocolate in order to blend the ingredients together and smooth it out. Conching can take anywhere from two to six days.

• Tempering - Tempering is a carefully controlled heating process. According to this Chocolate FAQ, tempering is "a process where the chocolate is slowly heated, then slowly cooled, allowing the cocoa butter molecules to solidify in an orderly fashion." Without tempering, the chocolate does not harden properly or the cocoa butter separates out (as cream separates from milk).

The chocolate in this cake tastes very different from pure, unsweetened chocolate.

These three steps, along with the blend of cocoa beans chosen at the start and the way they are roasted, are the art of chocolate making. The steps control the quality, taste and texture of the chocolate produced, and are often closely guarded secrets!

Types of Chocolate
Baking Chocolate	Pure cocoa liquor with nothing added
Cocoa Powder	Cocoa bean solids; cocoa liquor pressed to remove the cocoa butter
Semisweet Chocolate	Pure cocoa liquor with extra cocoa butter and some sugar
Milk Chocolate	Pure cocoa liquor with extra cocoa butter, sugar and milk solids; more milk than chocolate liquor
White Chocolate	Cocoa butter with sugar and milk; no cocoa bean solids

Part 2 of figuring out why chocolate is chocolate:

Roasting Cocoa Beans

The chocolate maker starts by roasting the beans to bring out the flavor. Different beans from different places have different qualities and flavors, so they are often sorted and blended to produce a distinctive mix. Next, the roasted beans are winnowed. Winnowing removes the meat (also known as the nib) of the cocoa bean from its shell.

Photos courtesy Hawaiian Vintage Chocolate Seeds are fermented (above) and dried (below) before they are roasted.

Once roasted, winnowed and blended, the nibs are ground, and the ground nibs form a viscous liquid called chocolate liquor (the word liquor has nothing to do with alcohol -- that's just what it's called). All seeds contain some amount of fat, and cocoa beans are no different. However, cocoa beans are half fat, which is why the ground nibs form a liquid. If you have ever ground up peanuts to make real peanut butter, that is similar -- real peanut butter is a thick liquid. The difference between peanut oil and cocoa oil is that peanut oil is liquid at room temperature while cocoa oil is a solid up to about 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 degrees Celsius).

Chocolate liquor is pure, unsweetened chocolate. Eaten in this state, it's pretty nasty because it is bitter, but it's possible to acquire a taste for it.

You can do two different things with chocolate liquor. You can pour it into a mold and let it cool and solidify. This is unsweetened chocolate. Or you can press it in a hydraulic press to squeeze out the fat. When you do that, what you are left with is a dry cake of the ground cocoa bean solids and cocoa butter (useful in everything from tanning products to white chocolate). If you grind up the cake, you have cocoa powder. You can buy both unsweetened chocolate (baking chocolate) and pure cocoa powder at the grocery store. What you are buying is ground cocoa beans, either with or without the cocoa butter.

Next, we'll see how the chocolate maker turns this unsweetened chocolate into the chocolate we eat.

From: Howstuffworks.com - How chocolate works [http://www.howstuffworks.com/chocolate.htm]

The Cocoa Bean
Chocolate starts with a tree called the cacao tree (Theobroma cacao). This tree grows in equatorial regions, especially in places such as South America, Africa and Indonesia.

Photo courtesy Hawaiian Vintage Chocolate This cacao tree seedling grows into the tree that will yield the cocoa beans.

The cacao tree produces a fruit about the size of a small pineapple. Inside the fruit are the tree's seeds, also known as cocoa beans.

Photo courtesy Hawaiian Vintage Chocolate The ripe fruit of the cacao tree is about the size of a small pineapple.

Photo courtesy Hawaiian Vintage Chocolate Inside the ripe pods are the cacao tree's seeds: the cocoa beans.

The beans are fermented for about a week, dried in the sun and then shipped to the chocolate maker. 

The cocoa bean may have given us the ultimate of all forms of chocolate: dark chocolate, but our Creator, the Triune God, created the cocoa bean.
It is my theological judgement that when it was created before the Fall, if Adam had eaten of it right off that tree, he'd still be in that Garden...and of course Eve would have discovered it first, as she was obviously searching for that food that opens one's mind to all knowledge that is necessary....forget that fruit that dealt with knowing Satan's view of the world.