April 2017

A FB friend just asked my thoughts on the thrashing Vice President Michael Pence has been receiving for observing "the Billy Graham rule" in his relations with women other than his wife. What is the rule? I mention it in this Baylyblog post from January 20, 2005. First the post, then some comments on the present controversy...

Some lives never make sense until we realize the man can't get out of his nuclear reactor mode. The choices of such men concerning their religion only begin to be comprehensible when we understand this man is one of the many today who can never get far enough away from the indignities he suffered being raised Baptist. The simplicity of the Biblical Christian faith his father and mother subjected him to as a child is so embarrassing he can't seem to do enough to heal his humiliation.

He keeps running and running away, almost always toward that first choice of the superstitious man with a tender conscience—sacramentalism. Typically, these men start transitioning by becoming Presbyterian. If their new Presbyterian pastor and elders are themselves former Baptists also, the man may find his sacramentalist itch scratched sufficiently that he's able to stay in his new church. If his new pastor and elders are historically Reformed, though, and have read the Reformers, after a little while the man will not be able to stand the Reformed church's fencing of the Lord's Table and he'll start to howl in anger over...