Many evangelical churches (my own included) teach eternal security, otherwise known as once saved always saved or perseverance of the saints. I’ve been thinking about this teaching recently and came across a dilemma. I hope someone can help resolve this for me.

Eternal Security basically says that once you have been saved, you can’t be unsaved. Once God has adopted you into his family, nobody, yourself included, can undo that.

Now it is also my understanding that what Christ did was to make it possible to undo Adam’s act and return man to his original state of sinlessness, to become regenerate. So by accepting Christ and being saved we have the opportunity to become like Adam before he sinned. Hence Christ is spoken of as the second Adam.

So if being saved eventually takes us to a pre-sin state like Adam. What is to stop us from making the same decision that Adam took in his pre-sin state in the Garden of Eden by choosing to separate himself from God? In other words, if we take on the same state that Adam had in the garden, why could we not then make the same decision he made to eat the forbidden fruit?

My guess is that typical answers to this question will center around the concept of predestination. What this leads me to is that God predestining me to be saved presupposes that I was at one point lost. In other words, in order for me to be predestined to be saved, I also had to be predestined to be lost. Logically then (assuming the doctrine of original sin), Adam and Eve were predestined to sin. Did God predestine sin?

I recently decided my son Micah should be introduced to programming. He’s 9 now and being the son of a geek needs to know more than how to play games. I did a little research and found some useful learning tools.

I discovered a free online book called, “Snake Wrangling for Kids.” This is a great introduction to Python for kids 8 and up. I simply set him up with a PDF viewer and a Python shell in another window and let him go to work. I was simply there to answer questions and help if he didn’t understand things. It took a little bit to get him interested. You have to show kids what is possible because learning about variables and stuff is pretty boring if you don’t know their potential. I wrote a simple Python function (probably not the most efficient way to do this, but simple) to draw a Sierpinski triangle and even my 6 year old daughter became interested. Of course then we had to try running this with a hexagon instead of a triangle…

def sierp(turtle, size=200, sides=3):
    for i in range(sides):
        turtle.forward( size )
        turtle.left( 360/sides )
        if size >= 10:
            sierp( turtle, size/2, sides )

An even easier (and probably more fun) place to start is Scratch. Scratch is a visual programming environment based on the Squeak Smalltalk engine. (Note that the website only mentions Windows and Mac versions, but if you dig enough there is a beta Linux version as well.) Scratch is set up to allow sharing of your creations on the Scratch website. Micah’s first Scratch “program” (created with some help) is viewable online.

If I were in the mood to develop a new Church Management System, Google App Engine is the platform I would likely use.

If you’re from Crossroads and are interested in training for the Chicago Marathon you are invited to join our group on MapMyRun.

I use two tools that are a lifesaver in regards to browser testing. Wine and Browsershots.

One annoying thing about Internet Explorer is that once you upgrade to a later version of it, you can’t use the previous version. This means you basically have to have a different machine for each different browser version. Wine running on Linux allows me to have both IE 6.0 and 5.5 installed and running side-by-side. IE 7.0 doesn’t work yet, but I have a separate machine I can use for that.

For all else I use Browsershots. It is an amazing free service that will render any public webpage on an extensive list of browsers and operating systems.

Now I’ve done it. I signed up for the Chicago Marathon. I’ll likely be blogging about it over on Through the Cooking Glass.

Now I’ve just got to convince Pete to do it…

I’m getting ready to roll out Crossroads‘ new website and one of the last things on my list was to make a mirror of our content management system (which is on a different system than the public facing server) so that if the production one goes down I can easily switch over to the backup.

I was beginning to look into doing a duplicate installation of Bricolage on my desktop machine at home (which is actually beefier than the server),  but because of the fact that I’m running different releases of Ubuntu, it would have been somewhat difficult.

Enter VirtualBox. I considered Qemu and VMware as well. VMware, while cool, isn’t open source, so was lower down my list. Many reviewers seem to like the ease of VirtualBox and ease was what I was looking for so I thought I’d give it a whirl.

After a little reading I came up with this single line to extract the live image from the disk, move it to my desktop machine, and convert it to a 20G VirtualBox image:

sudo dd if=/dev/hda | ssh brian@10.0.0.100 vboxmanage convertdd stdin bric.vdi 21474836480

A while later…

I run virtualbox and create a machine, specifying my bric.vdi as the primary master disk. It boots up and I have a backup server I can run if I need one.

Getting networking going was a bit more involved. I had to follow the directions in the manual for creating a network bridge and such, but the instructions are very clear and work.

Initially I used the version of VirtualBox in the Ubuntu repositories, but I couldn’t get that one to work with the host based networking and bridging. I installed the version from VirtualBox’s site and it works great.

Stay tuned for a series on the hows and whys of how we developed our new site…

Most people who read my blog are geeks. My guess is that most of them are church geeks like myself who either volunteer or work full time doing IT work for their churches. I think we’re a pretty diverse group as far as denominations go, but I would guess that the largest contingent of church IT geeks who occasionally visit my blog come from some sort of evangelical protestant background. I do know that there is at least one representative from Orthodoxy (hi Andrew) and I recall communicating with at least one Roman Catholic IT geek. I myself belong to an evangelical quasi-Baptist church after having made an exodus from Seventh-day Adventism.

One thing I have noticed is that we as a group tend to talk mostly about geeky things even though we identify ourselves as Christian geeks. I’d like to change that. Geeks need other geeks to discuss theology with.

I have been thinking a great deal lately about tradition (see my food blog) and its tremendous value. I have thought much about what protestants threw out in the protestant reformation and why we did so. There seem to be three groups (Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and to a degree Anglican/Episcopal) that retain ties to the traditional heritage of the church. Most others seem to have discarded it without reservation.

The dividing line seems to be the protestant doctrine/teaching of Sola Scriptura. That is, that doctrine should be established purely from the written word of God and not from the traditions, oral or otherwise, of the church. That the written word of God is a tradition kept on paper rather than in our hearts, minds, practices and speech is often left unsaid. At this point I’m not even sure that such a doctrine can be supported scripturally (which would be a fatal flaw). It even seems that Sola Scriptura could be blamed for the creation of heresies like Seventh-day Adventism.

Now I am not saying that I think Catholicism or Orthodoxy are perfect and that we protestants should all jump ship. I believe the reformation was an important and necessary event. But however much benefit it has brought, it has caused at least as much damage. The church is in a multitude of fragments and there is not much that can be done to put the pieces back together. As Paul said in Romans 16:17, “I urge you, brothers, to watch out for those who cause divisions and put obstacles in your way that are contrary to the teaching you have learned. Keep away from them.”

My intention is not to cause division among us, but I would like to hear from like minded geeky individuals from other backgrounds on why Sola Scriptura does or does not make sense. My hope is that as geeky IT people, your thoughts will be logical and rational.

Thoughts?

I’ve been using ScrubIT for some time now. A few weeks ago I decided to try out OpenDNS at home to see how they compare. One of the reasons for my dissatisfaction with Scrubit is that I have absolutely no control over what sites are blocked or open. Every so often some site that was perfectly clean and was something that needed to be viewed would be blocked and there was nothing I could do to fix it other than changing our DNS server temporarily. I signed up many moons ago for ScrubIT’s beta program for more fine-grained control, but I’ve never heard back from them. I decided I was tired of waiting and tried out OpenDNS.

The first and only problem I had was that within the first 4-5 hours of having registered, none of my blocked sites were actually blocked. After that initial delay I haven’t had a single problem. The fine grained control is excellent and reliability seems to be high. I will be switching the Crossroads office over to OpenDNS on my next trip to the office.

One minor tweak I made was to set my primary DNS server to OpenDNS and my secondary to ScrubIT. Both OpenDNS and ScrubIT offer secondary DNS servers, but my guess is that if one goes down, the other may too. Why not increase reliability by using a completely different provider for the secondary?

Now don’t take me wrong. I’m not knocking ScrubIT. ScrubIT has served us well for quite some time, is reliable, and does the job. In fact, I would still recommend ScrubIT for home users who don’t want the added complexity that comes with OpenDNS’s  flexibility.

Pete Bishop has posted details on the media related software we use.