9:58AM - Five Favourite Board Games #2: San Marco
San Marco is another game by Alan Moon, (this time with Aaron Weissblum), and is set in Venice. (That alone makes it very attractive.) You play cards that enable you to place men on different districts of the city, control of which scores you points.
The genius of this game, however, lies in how you obtain cards – it follows the "I divide, you choose" system. There are two types of cards – green "limit cards" which eventually send you bust, and blue "action cards" which enable you to place men and do cool stuff. Now, in the three-player game, for example, one player draws 6 blue cards and 4 green cards and divides them into three piles in whatever way she chooses. The catch is, every player chooses a pile, and the person who divided the cards gets the last pile. It makes for a lot of double-guessing – even psychological warfare.
10:35PM - Does James Clarify Paul?
At church last Sunday night we looked at James 2. The contradiction / tension between James and Paul is well known:
For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law. (Romans 3:28)
You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone. (James 2:24)
One possibility for harmonisation is to say that James is clarifying Paul. That is, James is reminding us that justifying faith is real faith – a faith that necessarily expresses itself in works. Faith without works is dead.
Now, it might be objected that James couldn't possibly be clarifying Paul, because he wrote first – in the 40s, whereas Romans was probably written in the 50s. Yet this gives us an opportunity to take seriously the order of the books in the New Testament. We can view James as clarifying Paul, since he comes after Paul in the Bible.
There certainly does seem to be a logic behind the order of the New Testament books, which is:
Gospels – Acts – Pauline epistles – Hebrews – James – Peter – John (+ Jude)
Acts might serve as a bridge between Jesus and Paul. Hebrews, meanwhile, seems to retain its ambiguity of authorship – we can view it as either the last of the Pauline epistles, or the first of the other epistles.
Finally, we see something very interesting when we look at the main four apostolic writers. They are all mentioned in the Book of Acts: Peter and John appear together in chapters 3 & 4, Peter features in chapters 10 & 11, while Peter and James are together in chapter 15. Hence, the logical order is John – Peter – James – Paul, which is the reverse of how their letters appear in the NT.