So we are moving. We were hoping to have a contract by Tuesday, but maybe we’ll know if we can have on Thursday and get it Friday. That is just Colombia.

I think we’re going to enjoy our new surroundings, except that the view won’t be the same. We are hoping for less noise, a more reliable water heater, better administration, and a lot more things close. We have things close, and nice things close, but we will have more.

We will still have three bedrooms for all those visitors (in one year we have only had one of you ever visit, and that’s because we paid her way). We will be awfully close to the bus that connects us with the gateway to the rest of the city (I think that’s going to work out pretty well), and in a year or so, perhaps a connection to two of the gateways (hubs from which the big red buses depart for all the other hubs). We are feeling well connected to this place.

Might go down on the internet a few days because of this, though. Telmex apparently can take up to a week to getting around, and if they have to put in new wires, it will may be longer. So we will have to settle in and go for things and probably write.

I was writing the other day, having two arepas and two coffees all for the low price of 4800 COPs, which isn’t even $3, at old El Faro down near where they had the bomb recently. It went well, and I hope to persevere on that.

Reading? Orestes Brownson from the library, and he’s like Chesterton in such a way I think I might essay a speculative comparison. And all the assorted others from my own library I pick at slowly to make them last: Plato’s Symposium, Dawson on Christianity and Culture, Yeat’s marvelous prose, Boswell, Lewis, etc.

Studying? I have lived in repentance of having gone too fast last Sunday in my class and having overlooked something the significance of which still eludes me (the exchange of gegraptais which become eiretai—something is going on, but what?). So I’m going to just take the next two verses and work on relationships and implications. It has led me to remember how and why I identify myself nowadays: a Christian, a Protestant and a Baptist. I am not going to announce this in my lesson—though I don’t hide it—but I still don’t identify myself as Reformed and I am thinking I’m never likely to do it. It depends in what context, of course. There are people I would not hesitate to tell that I’m Reformed, but I don’t think what is usually meant by Reformed really is all that compatible with Baptist (interesting how it is Reformed Baptists who are backing off on the covenant of works, and I think there’s a logic to that). Reformed for people means connections with Geneva and I have the feeling that has to work out to paedobaptism and a more Presbyterian polity. I really think those who look askance within Reformed circles at Reformed Baptists have a point, though we have a whole lot in common. I am, anyway, a Baptist before I am reformed, and for me Protestant means everything Luther implies when he says Persuaded by Scripture and reason—marvelous, crucial statement.

It is interesting to think how easily I could explain it to a Reformed Baptist congregation. I was always, in fundamentalism, among people who considered themselves Calvinists without accepting definite atonement. Reformed Baptists would never consider that Calvinism (and perhaps the reason the term is used is that amyraldianism, with all its accuracy, doesn’t set things apart the way it is wanted; I know, they’ll argue that it really is Calvinism because it has most of the thing and is determinism, but remember I’m explaining to a Reformed Baptist congregation and they just don’t even think that way; whatever you think, I personally do not care for Calvin and have not read him or have interest in doing so except that I sometimes wonder if I’m not missing out on a good theologian, but I’m a determinist and what this world calls an infralapsarian, which in most places I’ve been is designated Calvinism, though infralapsarian is perhaps the more accurate term). Then explain that it’s something the same with the term Reformed when adopted in a Baptist context.

Obviously the term means the whole Reformation, but we don’t generally apply it to Lutherans, or mean it for Lutherans or even Anglicans, do we? In the same way, I wonder if it should be applied to Baptists, and I don’t really wonder. Protestant does me nicely.