Easter Sunday

Mixing Jackass, lighter fluid and genitals causes trouble

I'm not making this up.

Associated Press

EAU CLAIRE, Wis. — Attempts to duplicate a movie stunt landed one man in the hospital with burned genitals and another facing criminal charges.

The men were trying to do a stunt from one of the Jackass movies, in which a character lights his genitals on fire.

Jared W. Anderson, 20, suffered serious burns to his hands and genitals, according to the criminal complaint. Randell D. Peterson, 43, who sprayed lighter fluid on Anderson and lit him on fire, was charged with felony battery and first-degree reckless endangerment Tuesday in Eau Claire County Court.

Witnesses told police that Anderson, who was drunk, volunteered to do the stunt Sunday after watching the movie, the complaint said.

After Peterson ignited Anderson, he ran into the bathroom, jumped into the tub and put the flames out, according to the complaint. He was taken to Luther Hospital, and eventually treated at the Regions Hospital Burn Unit in St. Paul, Minn., for second-degree burns.

Anderson told police that he didn't want anyone to get in trouble because of the stunt.

Peterson was freed on a $2,000 bond. He has a hearing scheduled April 16. If convicted, he faces up to 10 years in prison.

Ouch.

TR, BR, CR?

If you're presbyterian/reformed and reading here, among the following three categories (defined below), how would you classify yourself? Please leave a comment and if you're comfortable doing so, identify yourself enough that I'll know who you are as you respond. Also, comment on how you perceive others in your circle of influence/observation to be.

• TRULY REFORMED
• BARELY REFORMED
• CATHOLIC REFORMED

And if you're not presbyterian/reformed and reading here, let me know what your impressions are of these different categories and how they relate to your own beliefs.

THE TRULY REFORMED (TRs)

The TRs are conservatives of the most intense sort; and they are fervently committed to the scholastic, Reformed orthodoxy of the 16th and 17th centuries. Almost all are “strict subscriptionists,” holding that statements of faith like the Westminster Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, the Canons and Decrees of the Synod of Dordt, the Belgic Confession, or the London Baptist Confession are virtually summary duplications of Biblical teaching. They are strongly committed to the scholastic formulation of Calvinist doctrine as it comes to the fore, to take an example, in the Westminster Larger and Shorter Catechisms.

THE BARELY REFORMED (BRs)

This group within the Reformed camp is much more committed to a broad evangelicalism than the confessional form of the Reformed Faith. The BRs are pragmatists (and sometimes admittedly so). They are strongly committed to reaching the unsaved, and therefore the evangel, the gospel, means a great deal to them. They often pastor or attend the largest conservative Reformed or Presbyterian congregations in the United States, and they are tireless in their efforts to win souls and increase the size of the congregation. They tend to be less concerned with what they consider secondary doctrinal disputes over literal, six-day creation; women in the ministry or in other church leadership roles; the inroads of Arminianism; evangelistic strategies; the nature of the sacraments; and so forth.

THE CATHOLIC REFORMED (CRs)

Catholic Reformed does not denote Roman (or Eastern) Catholicism, but the manifestly Biblical notion of the universality of the Faith and church (Eph. 4:4) and their description in the Nicene Creed and among the patristic church as “one, holy, catholic and apostolic.” CRs agree with the TRs in identifying three main problems in the modern church as evangelical Arminianism, Protestant liberalism, and Roman Catholicism. We agree that evangelical Arminianism has undermined the gracious character of the gospel; that the European Enlightenment, joining later with Romanticism to produce Protestant liberalism, precipitated a great crisis in the Western church; and that Roman Catholicism undermined the catholicity of the church by insisting on its hegemony and subverts a gratuitous soteriology by insisting that man in some way merit salvation. CRs agree with the BRs, however, in wanting to focus attention on the preaching of the evangel, the gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. We agree that incessant dispute over comparatively secondary doctrines to the exclusion of the energetic preaching of the gospel has things just backwards, though CRs by no means consider any Biblical doctrine unimportant.

The author is in the 3rd of these categories and is making a case for it. I am curious to know how each of you might classify yourself.

These categories are excerpted from an article I'm reading right now and I'm curious where different people I know fit into or respond to these ideas. You can read the article in its entirety here:

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We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

And all the time—such is the tragi-comedy of our situation—we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more 'drive', or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or 'creativity'. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

C.S. Lewis- The Abolition of Man