Piety and Humanity

The Blessing of Strong Walls for a Holy Church

2011-11-27T14:34:00.000-08:00

Consider this lesson on the relationship between faith and politics from Nehemiah 8.

(These reflections are based on a sermon by Rev Benjamin Miller, "Holiday Cheer: What Happens When God Comes," at Trinity Church (OPC) in Huntington NY on November 27, 2011.)

Nehemiah has returned from Babylon to Jerusalem to lead Israel in rebuilding the city's walls. Only a week after the work was complete, the people called Ezra to preach to them in the open air, and Israel experienced remarkable revival.

Notice the timeline. First, with sword in one hand and trowel in the other, they build the city walls. They provide for their national security. God has not given them a metaphorical city, but a real one. And even though it is God's city, it nonetheless requires the ordinary defenses that any city requires: sword and stone. Only after that, living finally in peace, they turn their attention more fully to worship and study, and enjoy the spiritual fruits of those godly occupations. Political security, backed by ordinary defenses, permits the flourishing of church life.

We saw the same truths played out in the early church. The small vulnerable band of believers preached the gospel and lived in faith, and the church spread throughout the empire, even under ferocious persecution, and often because of it. "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church," said Tertullian. But it was only after Emperor Constantine lifted the hand of opposition and established security for the church to live out the life to which Christ has called it, openly and fully, that the church began to develop theologically and no doubt also in other ways.

But the rest of the story in Nehemiah 8 tempers any hasty and carnal judgment regarding a dependence of Christ's church on civic peace and security. In Ezra's reading of the Law that day, they discovered God's command that Israel celebrate each year a festival of booths during which they were to camp out as Israel had done in their wilderness wanderings. In this way, God reminded his people that while governmental protection is a blessing to the church, they must never forget that the Lord God--who preserved them in the wilderness where there were no walls--is their ultimate defense.

"[T]he joy of the Lord is your strength" (v.10).

Ascending the Christian Mountain

2011-11-27T13:33:00.000-08:00

When you read the Bible biblico-theologically, i.e., with attention to the unfolding themes and images in their didactic and Christological significance, it begins to make sense like never before and the excitement of reading it intensifies.

For example, there are parallels between certain events in Israel's Sinai moment and the layout of the temple. I found it eye opening.

In Exodus 19, just before we read the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20, we read of a remarkable communion with God before Israel receives the Law. "I...brought you to Myself" (v.4). "[Y]ou shall be a special treasure to Me above all people; for all the earth is Mine" (v.5). "[Y]ou shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation" (v.6). God wants Israel to hear what he says and to trust him (v.9), i.e., to live by faith in him.

In Exodus 24, we see a threefold progression of communion that parallels the pattern of the temple and even of the altar within the temple. God called Israel to gather at the foot of the mountain. He then called Aaron, Nadab, Abihu, and the 70 elders up the mountain (though not to the top) where they "saw God" and they ate and drank (v.11). Then Moses proceeded to the top, with Joshua, into the cloud and thunder where he communed with God and received the Law (vv.12-13).

This parallels what we see in the temple: first the outer court, then the holy place where we find the shewbread, then the holiest place with the Shekinah glory-cloud. In the central place, the altar itself has three ascending regions: blood is sprinkled on the the base and in the middle, and on top is the sacrifice with the smoke and fire.

The Bible often represents the fullness of God's presence with smoke and fire.

It occurred to me that the Christian life parallels, in a way, that three-stage progression. First we encounter the call of baptism. Yes, God gives his covenant people infant baptism. When one grows to the point that he or she can understand the gospel and affirm personal trust in it, there is communion, as the elders and Aaron the priest communed on the mountain with God. For the covenant child, this may come very early in life, perhaps 5 years of age, or perhaps 15 or 25. But this stage is further up the mountain from the time of infancy and the call of baptism. This is an argument against paedo-communion.

But professing one's faith and coming to the Lord's Table is not the peak of the Christian life and the fullness of Christian maturity. There is still more mountain to ascend. After justification comes the life-long process of sanctification, of growing communion with and obedience to the Lord. That process culminates in glory. Notice that it is wrong to look for remarkable sanctification as a precondition of communion, i.e., as an evidence of saving faith. This is an argument against putting off our young ones until they have shown the victory of faith over the temptations of teenaged life, i.e., against legalism.

Evangelical Worship

2011-10-09T14:03:00.000-07:00

My church has started a new congregation, Trinity Church, in Huntington on Long Island's north shore. What distinguishes it from many Orthodox Presbyterian Churches is the slightly more formal, more responsive liturgy that we employ. In Reformed circles, it goes by the name "covenant renewal worship." Today, in Sunday school, Pastor Ben Miller began teaching us why we are worshipping God this way, how it is biblical, how it is covenantal in particular, and how it is anything but novel.

First, he described what Christian worship is NOT. Evangelicals and specifically reformed people (at their worst) tend to see worship as essentially or primarily one of these four Es, though worship is in part all of these things.

Evangelism - Worship is not directed chiefly to the unbeliever in the pew. The worship should testify to such people, and we pray that the Lord would use the worship to impart grace to such people and bring them to conversion. But that is not the focus of the service.

Education - Some treat the worship service as though it is pre-game plus a sermon. If you come in late, but have not missed the sermon, then you haven't missed anything important. In this view, the sermon is not just central; it is all there really is or all there needs to be. Worse, it is an interesting and informative lecture. This is a terrible distortion.

Experience - This is the charismatic error. They distinguish between "preaching" and "praise and worship." Notice that receiving the ministry of the word is not worship. People who see worship as primarily an experience are often looking for a sort of ecstasy, a substantial anticipation of the beatific vision. And if they don't feel something strongly, they don't think (feel?) they have truly worshipped. This is an over-realized eschatology.

Exaltation - This is an overreaction to the "experience" error. People who hold this view claim that you should no consideration to what you "get out of" worship. It is all for God who should be your exclusive focus. But this makes light of worship as a means of grace to the worshipper. We glorify God by receiving what only God can give. We glorify God by enjoying him now and forever.

In covenant renewal worship, God's people re-enact the story of God's covenant. This is the pattern of the worship in the temple and it is the pattern of redemptive history. It has five stages.

1. God calls - The call to worship. Cf. God called Abraham, calls believers at baptism or at conversion.

2. God cleanses - Confession of sin & assurance of pardon. Cf. passover, the Red Sea, the cross, baptism.

3. God consecrates - The ministry of the Word. Cf. God speaking to Israel at Sinai, giving the covenant.

4. God communes - The Lord's Supper. Cf. the communion meal on Sinai.

5. God commissions - The benediction, the blessing for action. Cf. the Aaronic blessing.

This brought to mind what my co-author in Left, Right and Christ, Lisa Sharon Harper, said this week in summarizing what an Evangelical is. She drew upon David Bebbington's well known four marks of Evangelicalism from his book Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, viz. biblicism, crucicentrism, conversionism, and activism, known as Bebbington's quadrilateral.

I noticed that the four marks correspond with four of these five features of covenant renewal worship.

In the call, you can see the Evangelical emphasis on the need for conversion, God's call to turn away from sin back to him. A covenantal view of God excludes conversionism, however, as it recognizes God's initiative in salvation, conversion as an act of God's free grace, and even the call of the covenant child in his or her baptism. Conversionism, as opposed to the necessity for conversion or spiritual rebirth, is essentially Baptist. It rejects the covenantal status of the children of believers and thus the special relationship they have with God simply by virtue of their place within his gracious covenant.

In the cleansing, you can see the Evangelical crucicentrism. Evangelical Christians are cross-centred, and there is no worship of God in spirit and in truth without the cross. It is the crux of everything Christian. Although in Evangelical worship, the cleansing is generally understood to take place at the Lord's Supper. Here we have introspection, silent confession of sin, and contemplation of the cost that Christ endured for our sins. This is fine, but it generally makes for something more akin to a funeral than a wedding feast and divine fellowship. Also, Evangelicals generally celebrate the Lord's Supper infrequently, at best monthly and perhaps even quarterly. So as far as cleansing in the weekly worship is concerned, it is generally not reaffirmed but taken for granted.

In the consecration, you can see the Evangelical confidence in the Bible. They are not only cross-centred but Bible bound. It is only through the faithful testimony of the Scriptures that we know the good news of the cross. Sadly, in all too many churches that consider themselves Evangelical, the Scriptures are not formally read. If they are, people are served up a verse or two. And then they can close there Bibles because the sermon will make no further reference to Word. Instead the congregation is treated to stories, psychology, cultural references, and whatever else passes as the pastor's wisdom. Many of my students at The King's College, a broadly though seriously Evangelical college, clearly do not know their Bible content.

The final mark in Bebbington quadrilateral is activism, which corresponds to God's commissioning. The difference, of course, is that godly activity is not activism, which by virtue of the "ism" implies a kind of ideology, a worldly hope through human action, a political gospel or what one might even call a "social gospel." Faith without works is dead, i.e, no living and saving faith at all. But while the living will love, it is not by the works of love that we will live, i.e., either justify ourselves or realize the hope of the God's kingdom. Activism seems to me just a poorly chosen word. Evangelicals have always been active in good works--the Genevan deacons, nineteenth century ministries to the industrial poor, Spurgeon's orphanages, Prison Fellowship, etc. But "activism" connotes the social gospel and, more recently, shrill political carping for evermore pervasive government intervention.

What is missing from Bebbington's quadrilateral is the fourth stage of covenant renewal worship: communion. This is no surprise because with such disagreement across the Evangelical spectrum from high to low church there is little agreement on the nature and practice of the sacraments. So they are de-emphasized. If they are inessential to Evangelical unity, they must be simply unimportant. Perhaps this is also why church government, and one of its chief pastoral functions, church discipline, are also widely neglected. Communing is what God's people do with their God. It is their great privilege in Christ who is Immanuel, God with us. God's great covenant promise is, "I will be your God and you will be my people." In the end, on the other side of Christ's second coming, we are told, "Behold, the dwelling of God is with men." This side of that day, it is not charismatic ecstasy.

The rediscovery and repositioning of the Lord's Supper, holy communion, as a means of grace and a covenantal, mountaintop meeting place is what I expect will be one of the great benefits of covenant renewal worship.

Tyranny, Freedom, and Divine Government

2011-06-01T07:55:00.000-07:00

Pastor Benjamin Miller at Relocating to Elfland posted this helpful reflection from Karl Barth.

[God’s] authority is divinely majestic just because it has nothing in common with tyranny, because its true likeness is not the power of a natural catastrophe which annihilates all human response, but rather the power of an appeal, command and blessing which not only recognises human response but creates it. To obey it does not mean to be overrun by it, to be overwhelmed and eliminated in one’s standing as a human being.

Obedience to God is genuine precisely in that it is both spontaneous and receptive, that it not only is unconditional obedience but even as such is obedience from the heart. God’s authority is truly recognised only within the sphere of freedom: only where conscience exists, where there exists a sympathetic understanding of its lofty righteousness and a wholehearted assent to its demands – only where a man allows himself to be humbled and raised up, comforted and warmed by its voice. (Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, p. 2.661–62)

There are those who hate the notion of God's sovereign rule over the universe. They find it dehumanizing, a denial of their human liberty, an assignment of slave status to the whole universe. Note that though some of these people are militant atheists, others are Arminian Evangelicals who treasure their modern notions of personal autonomy above the majesty of God.

It is true that the New Testament uses the word despotes, from which we get the English word despot, ten times to refer to God as sovereign ruler of heaven and earth and to the Lord Jesus Christ as master and owner of his church.

But to equate God's government of the universe and of his human creations in particular with the government of either a tyrant or puppeteer would be willfully and carelessly ignorant. For those interested in how the absolute sovereignty of God's divine government actually elevates and completes human liberty, Barth (heretic though he was in his Neo-Orthodoxy) here is a good place to begin.

It is also a worthwhile study to compare the holy sovereignty of God as he has revealed himself in the Bible with Allah of the Muslim Koran. The Muslim Allah is the divine tyrant. He is never described as being "love," and never displays any. "Islam" means "submission," but it is an entire moral universe away from the joyful obedience of the Christian to his Redeemer. Islam is completely indifferent to what Barth here calls "obedience from the heart," "freedom," "conscience," "sympathetic understanding," and "wholehearted assent."

Objections, whether by atheists or Arminians, to God's rule over his creation according to his sovereign will in both its decretive and prescriptive aspects, i.e., his providential and moral ordering of all things, misses this fundamental point and so battles a straw man.

There is so much more to say on this subject.

Argumentative Prayer

2011-04-22T20:21:00.000-07:00

Daniel's Prayer (1865) by Sir Edward Poynter (1836-1919)

Prayer is as natural to a child of God as breathing is. "While I breathe I pray," said Andrew of Crete in the eighth century. Yet we have trouble with it. We love God, but poorly. We see God, but through a glass darkly. So we are more focused on the pleasures and terrors of this world, a world that we see, or so we think, far more distinctly.

But we are not the first to face this problem. Christ's original disciples implored him, "Lord, teach us to pray" (Luke 11:1).

Most prayer is a self-centered worry list--letting God in on all our troubles, and whatever of other people's troubles comes to mind. One helpful discipline, however, is to follow the acronym ACTS: adoration of God, confession of sin, thanksgiving for blessings, and supplication.

How is this helpful? Beginning with adoration fills the believer's sights with God. So we sing, "Turn your eyes upon Jesus. Look full in his wonderful face. And the cares of life will turn strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace." Before taking up your requests, consider the one to whom you are bringing them.

As you confess your sins, you remind yourself that the terrible crisis of your sin against God that was surely to separate you from your eternal rest has been resolved in Christ by the amazing mercy of God. Before coming to your needs, remember your greatest need, and view your other needs in light of Christ's provision for it.

Following up with thanksgiving brings to mind the record of God's provision before getting to requests for further provision. Needs press in on us and fill our field of vision. You can hold up your little finger and blot out the sun! You may have hurt your little finger, but God has provided the sun and rain and many other tokens of his care. It is good to keep that in mind before petitioning him for help concerning your finger.

Only after these three comes supplication.

Apply these guidelines to the prayer that the Lord Jesus gave his disciples as a model.

Our Father who are in heaven. Hallowed by thy name. -- Adoration.
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. -- Supplication.
Give is this day our daily bread. -- Supplication.
And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. -- Confession.
And lead us not into temptation. -- Supplication.
But deliver us from evil. -- Supplication.
For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory. Amen. -- Adoration.

It is interesting that there is no thanksgiving in the prayer. Surely Jesus intends that we thank God for our blessings. But Jesus did not give the prayer as a fixed liturgy (though we are free to use it in that way). Any godly believer knows that one thanks God for his mercies. As the Apostle Paul told the Philippians, "Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God" (Php 4:6). Thank offerings were part of Israel's worship (Lev. 7:11-15; 2 Chron. 29:30-32).

As helpful as the ACTS outline is in structuring our prayers, Job (23:3) prompts us to pray with a slightly different understanding. When he approaches the throne of grace, this man who is so much in need does not just make his requests known. He marshals arguments. "Oh that I knew where I might find him, that I might come to his seat! I would present my case before him, and fill my mouth with arguments."

Job is not coming to Santa Claus with requests, otherwise he might just spout forth his list of requests. He is not supplicating pagan gods, such that he brings gifts to bribe them and pervert whatever sense of right they might have.

He is approaching Yahweh, the Lord. As he is fully aware, this is the God who made the world through the Logos, and who made us in his image. Thus, God said through Isaiah, "Come now, and let us reason together" (1:18). He addressed us through his prophets and left us a written testimony. He has made us promises with which he binds himself. That is no limitation on his sovereignty because his promises are fully consistent with his divine character, and he is constant in his character so that he delights to keep his promises. In promising, he utters conditional statements concerning which we can reason in view of our circumstances.

And so knowing who his God is, in the confidence of God's covenant love, righteous Job in his need approaches his God with arguments, and it pleases the Lord that Job does this. The Lord's character, self-revelation, promises, and dealings invite it!

We see this in the prayers of the saints that are recorded in the Bible, for example Daniel's prayer after learning from study that his people would be a total of seventy years in captivity (Dan. 9). He begins with adoration, but he is also setting up his argument.

He "keeps his covenant and mercy" (v.4). From verses 5-8, Daniel confesses his sin and the sins of his people in which he participates, and then returns to God's character: "To the Lord our God belong mercy and forgiveness, though we have rebelled against him" (v.9). He alternates between adoration and confession until verse 16 when he begins his argument.

O Lord, according to all Your righteousness, I pray, let Your anger and Your fury be turned away from Your city Jerusalem, Your holy mountain; because for our sins, and for the iniquities of our fathers, Jerusalem and Your people are a reproach to all those around us. Now therefore, our God, hear the prayer of Your servant, and his supplications, and for the Lord’s sake cause Your face to shine on Your sanctuary, which is desolate. O my God, incline Your ear and hear; open Your eyes and see our desolations, and the city which is called by Your name; for we do not present our supplications before You because of our righteous deeds, but because of Your great mercies. O Lord, hear! O Lord, forgive! O Lord, listen and act! Do not delay for Your own sake, my God, for Your city and Your people are called by Your name.

Daniel asks the Lord to spare Jerusalem and his people their present afflictions and desolations. Why should God do this? Because of his righteous character. It is God's own sanctuary, and so Daniel calls on the Lord to defend it for his own sake. The city is his own city. It is called by his name. Finally, he appeals to the Lord's mercy to which he has made reference twice before in this prayer. Specifically, he mentions forgiveness, an aspect of love that "belongs" to the Lord (v.9). "For your own sake," pleads the holy exile. Your city. Your people. Your name.

Notice that in the Lord's Prayer the final word of adoration begins with the little word "for," as in "because." We ask God to give us daily bread and the forgiveness of our sins so that his kingdom would cover that much more of the world, so that he would show his divine power by it, and so that he would be glorified.

When the wise Christian prays, the character and promises of God dominate his perspective. The record of God's provision is foremost in his mind. "You have done it, Lord," he says. "You have always done it; so, do it again!" Like Job, and also like Paul, he argues from the greater to the lesser, as when Paul says, "He who did not spare his own son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things" (Romans 8:32). Having met our greatest need by paying the greatest price, he will surely meet all lesser ones.

Praying in this saintly style builds our confidence to go to prayer and secures our peace coming out of prayer.

Charles Spurgeon, the great London preacher of the Victorian age, has a much better account of this passage in his sermon, "Effective Prayer."

The Limits of Our Demystified World

2011-03-14T17:58:00.000-07:00

“…I desire you to consider, I say, that these functions imitate those of a real man as perfectly as possible and that they follow naturally in this machine entirely from the disposition of the organs-no more nor less than do the movements of a clock or other automaton, from the arrangement of its counterweights and wheels.” René Descartes, L’homme

We live in Descartes’ world, but do we belong here? Is this the world as it ought to be?

Descartes wrote his Meditations on First Philosophy to prove (a) the existence of God, and (b) the distinction between the soul and Body. It was not out of great piety that he undertook this metaphysical task. He wanted to clear a space for the advance of the sciences by demystifying the physical world, reducing it all to mechanical bodies. Descartes is infamous for having conducted experiments on cats, dropping them into boiling water and watching their responses. He was at peace in his conscience because after all, given that animals do not have souls and that everything that does not have a soul is simply a mechanical body, animals must be simply mechanical automata. But of course, by that standard the human body is also mechanical.

Catherine Wilson informs me that Descartes caused quite a stir in his day for these views. This world is God’s world which he has ordered and which operates according to his good plan. People of the time viewed messing with it through technological science as impious, even demonic. Descartes’ project was to transform our view of nature—to demystify it—so that we could understand its principles of operation, rework it, and make ourselves masters and possessors of it, as he put it in part IV of his Discourse on Method.

I confess that demystified nature seems perfectly right and holy to me. This is a dimension of the medieval mind that I cannot fathom. It reminds me of my first (and last) reading of the Arthurian tale. People were slaughtering each other and throwing away their own lives for reasons of honor and medieval propriety that was completely beyond my ken and seemed tragically needless to me. Similarly, medieval notions of a physical world with moral and spiritual content, including notions of holy ground and holy space, strikes me a superstitious. The Temple and its contents in the Old Testament is different, of course. If God explicitly sets something or someone aside as holy then it’s holy.

In going down this road, Descartes was following Francis Bacon who was trying to accomplish the same goal and overcome the same opposition. We see this not only in his scientific writings included in The Great Instuaration, but also in the Essays. In “Of Riches” (#34) he promotes the view that anything can be bought and sold without impropriety, in contrast to Naboth’s view of his vineyard. Today, you can sell your church building or bulldoze it and put up a gas station. No problem. It’s just a building. Symbolically, it presents problems when what is architecturally a church building is transformed into an art gallery (Upton MA), a public library (Seacliff NY), or a café (Newton MA)

But am I missing something? In demystifying nature, Descartes made everything mechanical, even the human body, and thus the appropriate object of rational control. Yet, we have enough health left in us that we have not gone the whole distance in that direction. The human body is still holy in a sense. We speak of “desecrating” a corpse, an vacated human body. Is this just superstition? We might donate organs or even our whole body for research purposes. That required passing a significant threshold. But we would not donate our bodies for fertilizer in the family garden, or as food for the poor. The secret of Soylent Green was a horror.

We view other things as in a sense holy, or objects of reverence, such a things pertaining to civil religion. The flag requires particular treatment. You don’t throw it in the garbage. It must be disposed of with care and respect. We treat graveyards and battlefields the same way. Try building a shopping Mall or amusement park when the north and south spilled blood at Gettysburg or Antietam.

So are we being superstitious in these things—the battlefields and our bodies (for which we show greater respect when we’re dead than when we’re alive)? Should we fully rationalize and demystify? Or have we overly demystified? Have we hollowed out our understanding of some things that are actually more multidimensional? I think it is extremely unlikely that we have got it just right?

The Church's Praise and Mine

2011-03-05T11:57:00.000-08:00

Genevan Psalter, 1562

Ben Miller, my pastor, on his blog "Relocating to Elfland," has this helpful reflection on church music, pop culture, our narcissism, and our abandoned heritage. This helped me think about myself and my worship...or should I say the church's worship which, by God's grace, is mine.

The Songbook Comes With It

By Rev. Benjamin Miller, Franklin Square OPC

A few thoughts on singing, and particularly singing in the church, prompted by a second listen to Volume 88 of the Mars Hill Audio Journal:

Bay Psalm Book 1640

First, most people would agree that singing is a form of culture; but what we mean by “culture” has evolved dramatically in the last half-century, which in turn has changed the way we think about singing. In older usage, a culture was a set of traditions and forms among a particular people with a distinctive history; in more recent usage, culture is largely a conglomerate of consumable products (“pop culture” means basically stuff that is popular, i.e., what sells). Bach’s music, for example, was part of a Western culture that predated and outlived him; Bono’s performances are part of marketable culture driven by consumer demand. Celtic folk music was once an expression of a people and their history, the sort of thing one would find played and sung by the locals at a pub in a certain part of the world; Dropkick Murphys are “one of the best-known rock bands in the world, thanks in part to their ability to tap into the working-class and sports fan culture that permeates Boston and the New England area but even more so due to their reputation for phenomenal live shows” (this from their official website). The band has taken something from what was once a culture (in the older sense of the word) and gainfully commodified it for the international market (i.e., placed it in the conglomerate of pop “culture”).

Second, in the older understanding of a culture, singing was not predominately a spectator sport; it was not mostly something a crowd watched while a few performed. Rather, a culture had its songs, and the people in that culture sang them, together. This was true of the biblical Hebrews (e.g., Ps 137:3–4), it is true today in many cultures of the southern hemisphere, and it was true not long ago in the United States (one thinks of the forgotten genre of songs called Americana).

These are my observations, for which no one else is to be blamed; but now let me assume their validity and apply them to the church.

Antiphonal in Latin, 14th c.

When the average North American evangelical thinks of singing in worship, he or she thinks in the idiom of popular “culture,” that is, he or she thinks as a consumer. This is true not only of worshippers who expect to watch and listen to a praise band up front (whether such a spectator event qualifies as “worship” in any biblical sense of the word is a question I will not pause to address here); it is true also of those who expect to participate in congregational singing. The driving issue is whether “I like” this or that song, whether this music suits my tastes and meets my needs/wants. But we think this way about music and song because we think this way about culture in general. What is really radical to us is the idea that we should embrace certain songs – that we should learn not only to sing them, but also to love them – because they are a part of a culture to which we are coming (or better, in which we find ourselves) as God’s people. The Psalms are the songs of “our people,” and so we should love them, and sing them. Christians in the Reformation tradition are part of a heritage, a culture, that has bequeathed to us a wonderful corpus of music, and we should be learning it (not to mention songs of Christendom predating the Reformation, and some of much later origin). If we were honest, however, this makes about as much sense to us as the idea that we should sing certain songs because they are “American.” Says who? What if I don’t like these songs? It doesn’t fit our sovereignty complex with respect to “our” music. Who has the right to tell us what we must listen to, or what we must sing?

The question might be turned around: Who asked you whether you wanted to be an American? Or a Westerner, or an Easterner? African or Irish or Bolivian? And who asked you whether you wanted to be born among God’s covenant people? Short answer: nobody. These are your people, this is your heritage, your culture, your story. And the songbook comes with it. Which means that in the church we should pick up our songbook, dust it off, and start singing. Together. With gusto. A joyful noise, and all that. Thank God He’s the only judge here; all the others are over at American Idol.

********************

I can add that when I first began attending church as an undergraduate in Toronto in 1983, I had no experience of church life. The hymnody of the church was alien to me, but it never crossed my mind to question it and suggest a musical style that was more familiar to me. If this is what Christians sing in church then I will sing this in church. And I discovered that it was a fine tradition of music anyway. "Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah" was very satisfying to belt out. I was used to listening to a wide variety of music, from Scottish folk music to jazz and classical to punk music like the Stranglers. The old hymns were just another pleasant dimension of the musical universe to discover. I have since developed my own tastes. I prefer Welsh hymns, anything by Johann Crüger (1598-1662), and the Genevan psalms using the tunes of Louis Bourgeois. But the church of Christ today should sing the praise of the church throughout the ages, otherwise, as Pastor Miller says, the church's worship becomes an extension of pop culture and commercial entertainment feeding what is already our appalling self-absorption instead of Christ-absorption as organic parts of his glorious body, the church.

Christ in the Old Testament

2010-11-13T08:34:00.000-08:00

This is a nice sketch of Christ as the Old Testament presented him to the Jewish people. I picked this up somewhere about ten years ago, though I made some improvements here and there. I have no doubt that I could improve it further as I grow in understanding.

In Luke 24, the resurrected Jesus walked along the road to Emmaus with two disciples, who did not recognize him at that point, and "expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself" (Luke 24:27). What he shared with them obviously went well beyond a few Messianic prophesies, such as in Genesis 3 and Psalm 110.

The Hebrew Scriptures continue to show us Christ and the gospel. Paul had the Old Testament in mind when he wrote to Timothy, "All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine for reproof. for correction, for instruction in righteousness" (II Tim. 3:16).

In Genesis, He is the Creator God, and the promised seed of the woman (3:15).

In Exodus, He is your exodus, your Passover, the bread which comes down from heaven.

In Leviticus, He is the Holy of holies & the mercy seat, your atoning sacrifice & your sanctification.

In Numbers, He is the water of cleansing & the bronze snake who was lifted up for healing.

In Deuteronomy, He is your legal righteousness.

In Joshua, He is the mighty conqueror.

In Judges, He gives victory over enemies.

In Ruth, He is your kinsman-redeemer.

In I Samuel, he is your champion. (ch. 17)

In 2 Samuel, He is great David’s greater son. (ch. 7)

In I & II Kings, He is the faithful & true King (I K. 2:2-4)

In I Chronicles, He is the one whose throne will be established forever. (17)

In II Chronicles, He is the one greater than Solomon

In Ezra, He is the Temple of God, the focus & center of your life.

In Nehemiah, He is your mighty wall of protection.

In Esther, He stands in the gap to deliver you from your enemies.

In Job, He is the arbitrator who removes God’s rod of judgment from you. (9:33-35)

In Psalms, He is the Holy One who will not see decay, the Shepherd who restores your soul.

In Proverbs, He is your wisdom for a disciplined & prudent life. (1:1-3)

In Ecclesiastes, He is the meaning of life, without whom all is vanity & a chasing after the wind.

In the Song of Solomon, He is your beloved, the Church’s bridegroom.

In Isaiah, He is the Prince of Peace, and the Suffering Servant.

In Jeremiah, He is the balm of Gilead (8), the Righteous Branch (23), the new covenant (31)

In Lamentations, He is the Lord’s great faithfulness (3:23).

In Ezekiel, He is life to dead bones, & the glorious new temple.

In Daniel, He is the Son of Man whose kingdom will last forever (7:13-14).

In Hosea, He is your faithful husband who forgives your adultery and redeems you from slavery to sin.

In Joel, He is the name of the Lord on which you call to be saved from judgment on the Day of the Lord.

In Amos, He plants his people and guards them in safety (9:15).

In Obadiah, He is vengeance on God’s enemies but deliverance for Zion.

In Jonah, He is the faithful prophet who brings the word of God’s compassion to the Gentiles.

In Micah, He is the shepherd of his flock & their peace.

In Nahum, He is a refuge to the faithful but an overwhelming flood to the wicked (1:8).

In Habakkuk, He is the Holy One.

In Zephaniah, He is the King of Israel who is with you & takes great delight in you (3:15-17).

In Haggai, He is the greater glory of the temple & the signet ring of God.

In Zechariah, He is the capstone, the plumb line, the gentle king riding on a donkey.

In Malachi, He is the Lord you are seeking, the messenger of the covenant

The Christian Philosophico-Political Problem

2010-10-05T04:52:00.000-07:00

Socrates on Trial

There is an interesting parallel between Peter in the Book of Acts and Socrates in the Apology. Both men are on trial, and they are on trial specifically for what they have been teaching. Socrates in put to death. Peter, at this point, is not, but one day he will be.

More substantively, however, each man explicitly recognizes himself as facing a fundamental and enduring political challenge.

In Acts 5, Peter is on trial for preaching Christ. The Jewish authorities led by the high priest, let's call them the city of Jerusalem to put a political face on them, told Peter to stop teaching in Jesus' name, or what the angel in v.20 called "the words of this Life." Peter of course was willing to bey in many things, but here he says, "We must obey God rather than men" (5:29). With this declaration he states what we call the theologico-political problem, one important aspect of which is the division of loyalty within the Christian between earthly civic authority and the higher authority of the King of kings.

In the Apology, the city of Athens, through the charges of his three accusers and the threat of death, tells Socrates to stop teaching what he does about the gods and to stop interrogating respectable citizens in front of the young. Socrates is also willing to obey the laws of the city in many ways, even to the point of submitting to death as he argues in the Crito, but on this point he says he must disobey. "I, men of Athens, salute you and love you, but I will obey the god rather than you; and as long as I breath and am able to, I will certainly not stop philosophizing..." (29d; West, transl.).

This appears to be a pagan form of the theologico-political problem, but it is a unique god that Socrates invokes. It is a god he alone recognizes. I suspect it is a god he has created for rhetorical purposes. Elsewhere, Socrates presents what drives him as being his philosophic nature, an erotic love for wisdom, for the truth, for the good. Thus, what we see here we may call the philosophico-political problem.

For a Christian, these problems converge. Devotion to Christ is not simply devotion to raw divine will. It is also devotion to the truth. The Lord is holy. He is not part of the cosmos, but the creator of the cosmos out of nothing. He is ground of all being and the author of all truth. Jesus says, "I am the way, the truth, and the life" (John 14:6; cf. John 1, Colossians 1). So devotion to Christ is inseparable from devotion to the truth in general. To be Christ centered in faith is to be truth driven in life.*

*Here, I paraphrase John Piper in A Godward Life (p.106): "Being God-centered in life means being truth-driven in ministry."

Philosophy is Your Calling

2010-09-15T04:13:00.000-07:00

At the very opening of the Bible, in Genesis 1, we see the foundation for philosophy. In verse 2, God speaks, saying "Let there be light." Through a rational articulation, he creates light. Thus, the creation is intelligible. He then separates the light from the darkness. He doesn't just cut the undifferentiated porridge of created stuff into blocks. He creates order, distinguishing discernible parts with an intelligible relation to one another. He then names the parts. The light he calls day, and the darkness he calls night. He proceeds this way for six days, and calls it "good," again speaking. Our world is ordered, intelligible, and good.

God then made Adam in his image. He brought animals before him so Adam could name them. In other words, he called Adam to understand the creation, to distinguished between the creatures and understand the specific difference of each one. Naming is an articulation of that understanding. Adam's first task after he was created was philosophy.

Philosophy is a uniquely human activity. Beasts can't do it. It fulfils what is uniquely human in us: our rational and moral faculties. It is the fulfillment of our divine calling as human beings. (Philosophy per se is rare among us, but everyone does it somewhat. We all distinguish between things, and seek the truth at some level or another, just not honestly and rigorously.)

Through philosophical investigation, you glorify God as youy see the order in what he has created. The awe you experience when you see order and meaning where before you had not is, for those who know the Lord, a form of worship. When you see a deeper beauty or intelligibility than you had previously understood and your thoughts fly to the Creator, you magnify him.

Secondly, you take dominion in obedience to the creation mandate when you understand the nature of things created. We are accustomed to thinking of dominion in terms of technology, making the world do what you want by understanding the way it works. But what a thing is is more than just the way it works.

Lastly, through philosophy, you affirm yourself as human rather than bestial. If you live your life merely eating and passing what you eat, you are obviously not living a fully human life. Human being are made for than that. We are made for friendship, for worship, and for the rational understanding of our world in all its dimensions, viz. for philosophy. Understanding the world philosophically affirms the order and goodness of God's creation.

Remember, The Lord Loves This Man

2010-09-11T17:45:00.000-07:00

The Lord saves the simple and passes over the wise.

For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, "Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord."

-- I Corinthians 1:26-31

A Little BP in All of Us?

2010-06-17T20:06:00.000-07:00

No one disputes that BP did something terribly wrong--morally wrong--that resulted in eleven dead and the ensuing economic and environmental disaster. Some even see fault in the government restrictions on drilling that pushed the rigs so far out into deep water. But some are also pointing the finger at Americans in general, and the American way of life.

We're used to hearing this from Muslim jihadists and western leftists of all kinds. Even the American president himself, in his first Oval Office speech, accused us of being "addicted to fossil fuels." But here comes the Evangelical Christian mea cupla on behalf of us all: "Corporate Sin: We Wanted BP to Cut Corners." It's only a blog post from a Texas pastor at a happenin' church, but it doesn't surprise me either.

If we’ve ever complained about rising gas prices or the cost of air travel, we are participating in the world that drives companies like BP to cut costs. We want them to. We need them to. We don’t really want to know what BP is doing as long as it keeps our vehicles fueled and our computers powered. Not unlike Al Gore, who talks about the environment from the comfort of his personal jet, we love to talk about BP’s problems while consuming the product they provide at every opportunity.

In reality, more oil is spilled every year in Nigeria than what BP has spilled into the Gulf. We just don’t care because it doesn’t affect us. The BP oil spill, then, is not about the individual sins of a single, evil corporation bent on squeezing every last dollar out of the earth’s core. It is about the corporate sin of humanity bent toward selfishness at every turn.

A bit cynical. More than a bit.

Some Christians are never happy unless they are in the throes of conviction, preferably dragging everyone in with them, even if they have to invent the sin out of nothing. I understand that this man wants to alert is people and his readers to the idolatry that is throughout our culture. Good. But I think this spill is a poorly chosen lift off point.

Just because I drive a minivan and don't want to pay any more than I have to for gas does not make me in any way complicit in BP's wrongdoing. So too, my desire for inexpensive bread and clothes does not make me complicit in adulterated foods and illicit sweat shops. BP's motive not to mess up the Gulf should be good corporate citizenship if not enlightened self-interest. The same can be said of everyone. Bakers should not mix sawdust into their bread and textile manufacturers should not chain people to their looms. But because of the especially wicked among us, and also because of decent people who sometimes succumb to temptation, we add laws and regulations to supplement moral exhortation.

We all want a highly productive and efficient economy, and there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, it's godly! The Lord has set us in a potentially rich world, not a universal Chad. But we want that prosperity--and believe we can all achieve and enjoy that prosperity--justly.

When Science is in the Saddle

2010-05-05T17:06:00.000-07:00

To be modern is to live in a world of man-made marvels that continually astound, that give us ever-growing power over space and time, and yet that leave us perhaps more subjugated than we realize at first.

In The New Atlantis, Francis Bacon's fictional account of a land in full possession of modern science (or vice versa), Salomon's House is the research institution that controls nature through practically applied experimentation and that supplies a grateful and happy population with the benefits of that control. TIME magazine gives us a couple of examples of how our modern, dispersed Salomon's House has been supplying those benefits. The politics of it, however, requires a bit more unveiling.

Researchers have developed a kind of corn-based plastic ("The Promise and Pitfalls of Bioplastic," May 3, 2010). Your descendants won't find it in landfills a thousand years for now because it turns into corn mush forty days after you bury it.

Regular, petroleum-based plastic doesn't biodegrade. But this year's crop of Earth Day-inspired ads shows plant-based plastics doing just that: an empty SunChips bag fading into the soil, a Paper Mate pen dissolving underground.... Bioplastics could be really good for the environment — the manufacturing process produces fewer greenhouse-gas emissions than that for petroleum-based plastics, and these biomaterials don't contain an allegedly hormone-disrupting chemical, bisphenol A (BPA), that some regular plastics do. ...

Of the two promising new varieties of bioplastic, one type — dubbed polylactic acid, or PLA — is clear in color and costs manufacturers about 20% more to use than petroleum-based plastic. The other — called polyhydroxyalkanoate, or PHA — biodegrades more easily but is more than double the price of regular plastic. Both bioplastics are made of fermented corn sugar, and both come with a major benefit: if disposed of properly, they won't stick around in landfills for thousands of years.

Making a plastic pen from corn is an impressive feat, but the human factor is not as easy to engineer. The environmental advantage depends on people composting their SunChips bag. We don't have much opportunity for that here in the Empire State Building. Even at home, few people have a composting crib. Unless municipalities send around a composting truck to empty out specially colored cans from the foot of people's driveways on designated days of the week, that SunChips bag is going in the regular kitchen trash. So to take fullest advantage of this technological advance, we need a further advance in the administrative state, the socially all-seeing eye that is the other side of Salomon's House.

The conquest of nature necessarily points us, and without pausing for a breath, to the conquest of human nature. If the one is problematic, the other is treacherous at the very least.

The very next story in the print edition of TIME reported on a Tulane University study published in Pediatrics that supposedly proves scientifically beyond any reasonable doubt that spanking children inclines them to violence in their later years ("The Long-term Effects of Spanking"). As this confirms every liberal instinct, the story has been picked up and proclaimed by major news outlets as though they were announcing VE Day (Newsweek, New York Times, CNN). But studying human beings where it involves moral issues is a lot trickier than studying the composition and industrial applications of corn.

The study, led by community-health-sciences professor Catherine Taylor, makes an effort to account for factors that may distort the findings: “a host of issues affecting the mother, such as depression, alcohol and drug use, spousal abuse and even whether she considered abortion while pregnant with the child." Nonetheless, the study compares the behavior of five-year-old children who were spanked from the age of three at least twice a month with children who were not. From what TIME reports, Taylor does not study children at the ages of, say, ten, fourteen, and eighteen who had been spanked throughout the age range when spanking is appropriate. Age 5 is hardly “the long run” for observing the fruit of discipline. Furthermore, she does not distinguish between wise and unwise spanking, i.e., spanking accompanied by age appropriate instruction, and other variables.

CBS gave a more thoughtful report on a 2002 study ("Spanking May Cause Long-Term Harm," June 26, 2002). It included this exposure to the other side of the issue.

Robert Larzelere, a psychology professor at the Nebraska Medical Center, was one of the three experts critiquing Gershoff's findings. He noted that while she found links between spanking and negative behaviors, she did not assert categorically that spanking caused those behaviors. Larzelere, in an interview, said he remains convinced that mild, non-abusive spanking can be an effective reinforcement of nonphysical disciplinary methods, particularly in dealing with defiant 2- to 6-year-olds. He shared concerns about spanking that is too severe or too frequent.

Lloyd de Vries, the CBS reporter, added that Elizabeth Gershoff, a researcher at Columbia University's National Center for Children in Poverty who authored the 2002 study, "cautioned that her findings do not imply that all children who are spanked turn out to be aggressive or delinquent. But she contended that corporal punishment, on its own, does not teach children right from wrong and may not deter them from misbehaving when their parents are absent." Obviously.

Here, scientific research is said to have proven that certain methods of nurturing are significantly more likely to produce people of a certain desirable sort (it's not yet an exact science), and other methods are more likely to produce violent, anti-social behavior. Yet the human factor in the process of studying matters of this sort still distorts the conclusions that researchers draw. This must account for the striking discrepancy between common sense and these grand scientific pronouncements. Everyone has observed the difference between the unspanked or cruelly spanked little wretches kicking up a fit in WalMart and the well-behaved, wisely paddled young homeschoolers in the same setting.

Then there's the politics. You know that once "the science is settled," the next step is public policy, i.e., European-style laws that make spanking a criminal offense and grounds for placing your children in government-regulated foster care. Science removes a question from the political realm of judgment to the objective realm of administration. It gets us, as President Obama has said, beyond left and right, Democratic and Republican, and the old disputes of the culture wars into the post-partisan happyland.

But politicians often appeal to science to justify a power grab under the guise of just doing what they're told by the high priests of general revelation whose word is, of course, beyond question. Here are some New York politicians (no surprise there) doing just that ("Zapping NY's Economy," New York Post, April 12, 2010).

At the onset of the Easter weekend -- i.e., when they thought no one would notice -- the eco-apparatchiks at the state Department of Environmental Conservation denied Westchester's Indian Point nuclear power plant a key permit it needs to operate past 2013. DEC decreed that it was using too much water from the Hudson River to cool its two reactors, to the detriment of fish eggs and stuff.

Fish eggs? Forgive us, but we don't care about fish eggs. We care about people -- and jobs. Fact is, Indian Point produces nearly one-third of the electricity consumed in New York City and Westchester. Without it, the entire metro-area economy goes belly-up. And without DEC approval, Indian Point's two reactors can't secure federal operating license renewals when their current ones expire in 2013 and 2015.

[Governor David] Paterson's response? The DEC decision came from "a non-political process" run by "scientists," a spokesman said. "The [executive chamber] isn't going to weigh in on science decisions by agencies." Not even when the "science decisions" imperil the state's economy? Really, doesn't Paterson understand that his job requires "weighing in on" -- indeed, directing -- the decisions taken by the executive branch?

Of course he understands that. And he weighs in and directs only when it's politically useful to do so. Other than that, there's no one here but us enlightened respecters of science.

In Bacon's New Atlantis, the relationship between Salomon's House and the "king" or "state," which are mentioned but never seen, is a murky one. Bacon leaves it that way because as technology enhances human power over the universe, political authority will be sure to use it to enhance its power over all things human, but will veil that power. When the pronouncement of scientific researchers puts a matter beyond discussion, beyond public deliberation, it leaves open the manipulation of such pronouncements for political advantage, either by politicians themselves or by politically motivated scientists.

As we have discovered in the global warming controversy, whenever people try to get quickly past public discussion to public policy with the conversation-stopping phrase "the science is settled," you can be sure that there is more than dispassionate science at issue.

Faith in Technology

2010-05-05T04:36:00.000-07:00

The narrator in this video calls it "faith in technology," as indeed it is. Perhaps you know someone who has hit his thumb with a hammer, nailed his leg with a nail gun, or taken off a finger with a table saw. Perhaps that person is you!

Well this clever fellow has developed a table saw that stops in1/1,000th of a second when it senses conductivity in what it is about to tear through. Wood is a very poor conductor of electricity, whereas fingers...well, you can see it on the video that includes real fingers and high speed cameras.

Are they working on a hammer that avoids thumbs? Perhaps they're working on a thumb that repels hammers.

Sunday School Lesson on Taxes

2010-04-28T13:38:00.000-07:00

The Elders of Israel Confront Samuel

I Samuel 8:4

I try never to miss Sunday School in my church, Franklin Square Orthodox Presbyterian Church on Long Island. Our pastors have a way of engaging serious questions while elaborating the teaching of the Bible but in way that ordinary people can grasp. I always learn something of great value. Sometimes it shows up in my classes. Sometimes it shows up on my blog. Last Sunday, as part of a (blissfully) long series on The Westminster Confession of Faith, Pastor Ben Miller took us to I Samuel 8 to consider the relationship between the fifth commandment, pertaining to obeying authority, and the seventh commandment regarding stealing. This got me started. This is where I ended up. (I am to blame for all these thoughts, however.)

If you would like to read my thoughts on "all-volunteer war-funding," i.e., the way we pay for political campaigns, go to the full article at WORLDmag.com. This post is dual-posted at Principalities and Powers for obvious reasons.

*********************

"The Prophet Speaks for Low Taxes"

We are still in the shadow of Tax Day, perhaps still smarting from it. But even if you did not pay taxes or are getting a big tax refund, you would nonetheless be legitimately concerned about the trillion of dollars the present government is adding to our national debt, and the corresponding expansion of government involvement in the economy and in each of our lives.

Notice what the prophet Samuel says about taxes when—in describing the model of pagan kingship—he warns Israel against their desire to have a king “like all the nations”:

“So Samuel told all the words of the LORD to the people who were asking for a king from him. He said, ‘These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen and to run before his chariots. And he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his servants. He will take the tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and to his servants. He will take your male servants and female servants and the best of your young men and your donkeys, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the LORD will not answer you in that day’” (1 Samuel 8:10-18).

This rapacious king will take a 10th of their grain and flocks. Samuel implies that 10 percent is more than enough for government to finance all its legitimate responsibilities. If it claims to need even that much, then either it is doing what it has no business doing, or government leaders are serving their selfish advantage with public funds as we see in the 1 Samuel passage. While it may be overburdening the passage to see an implicit prohibition from God against an average tax rate of 10 percent or more, it is instructive nonetheless.

One might object that modern life is vastly more complicated than Samuel’s nomadic social and economic state, and so a larger, more expensive administrative state is required. But a more complex economy is also a vastly more productive economy. A flat tax of 10 percent would be a generous sum of money to pay for good government in modern America.

Bear in mind that the presupposition of “the administrative state” is that there is no legitimate limit to its administrative reach. It has inherently totalitarian tendencies. Wherever there is a good to be done, it sees a need for at least government regulation, and perhaps also government service providing the good itself. By contrast, the Apostle Peter tells Christians that the purpose of government is to punish evildoers and praise those who do good:

“Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good” (1 Peter 2:13-14).

Unlike the libertarian, Peter sees a moral relationship between government and the people it governs, and amongst the people themselves as a political community. Healthy civil society is a network of consciously benevolent relationships, and government has an important role in encouraging (certainly not hindering, as activist government does) that mutual well-doing. Government is not to grow impatient or cynical regarding private benevolence and substitute government services in its place. But the administrative state attempts to accomplish by public authority what is legitimately and most productively accomplished only by private means.

One might also suspect that restricting taxation levels to below 10 percent does not account for emergency situations such as war. But if a free people who believe in their country have an all-volunteer army precisely because they are free, why not also all-volunteer war funding?...

If government were limited to a flat tax, or an average tax, of no more than 10 percent, we would establish a moral principle concerning limited government and personal responsibility, and we would have serious public debates concerning spending priorities, living within limits, and the legitimate role of government among a free people.

Sojourners from the Start

2010-04-16T16:58:00.000-07:00

As much as I disagreed with what Stanley Hauerwas said at this year's "Interregnum" at The King's College ("Entertaining Hauerwas"), he and the people who contend with him have been endlessly thought provoking.

In the May 2010 issue of First Things, Gilbert Meilaender reviews Hauerwas's autobiography in the form of a personal letter to his old friend Stan. Commenting on Hauerwas's journey from his working class home in Pleasant Grove, Texas, to the stately academic world of Duke University in South Carolina, he writes, "Of course, leaving home for a new world is in some ways a distinctly American theme. But it is also...the warp and woof of human life."

This set my wind to wandering.

Life is a sojourn from the start. We enter life torn from the warm and familiar, leaving the embrace of mother's protection and setting off in varying degrees of independence and loneliness, seeking friendship and communion from that time on. So Adam began the human journey as we know it cast out of the garden. A later Adam, Noah, preserved life as one cast upon the wilderness of waters. Abraham, the father of the faithful, left behind his life in Ur of the Chaldeans in pursuit of life and friendship with God. Christ left the divine fellowship to sojourn among us, and was even estranged from his Father in darkness of grief, for our life's sake in communion with God. For that life's sake we are called out of the world we called home. In birth and in second birth we are forced into exile, but with no desire to return, pressing on in hope of better comforts.

Wendy Goes to Church

2010-02-26T05:11:00.000-08:00

Wendy was raised in a Christian home. She attended church with her family every Sunday morning, unless there was a gathering with extended family, a sports event, vacation, or people were just tired. During worship, once she outgrew the nursery, she she spent the hour in junior church, and then graduated into youth church. If on ocassion there were no youth church, she would join the main worship service, but of course she sat with her friends in the balcony.

College disrupted that pattern of life. She was on her own, an adult in a city and community of her own choosing. Many other choices confronted her immediately. Early rising or sleeping in? Fast meals or sit down? And worship? What would that look like? Would it have a place at all? At home, she was carried along by the current of family life. But now she had to steer her own boat, and perhaps even dig her own channels. For the first year, she just followed the new currents. Those were established by (she would later admit) laziness (she would sleep in on Sundays, having been up until 3 a.m. the night before) and the hurriedness of life at an academically demanding college.

As Wendy began her sophomore year, she decided she had to become more serious spiritually and, as she put it, "make time for God." She began reading the Bible each night before bed (something she had never done with any regularity), and she also began attending a Bible study in her dorm. A whole new dimension of life opened up. It was like emerging from the forest and seeing the sky for the first time. God was speaking to her through his word. They Holy Spirit would apply passages, illuminating circumstances and troubling her conscience in ways she had never experienced before. She started praying regularly. She realized that her Christianity had been like a new car sitting in the garage, owned but never operated. Now she found that a driving faith is what faith ought to be, and driving felt good.

By her junior year, Wendy was no longer "making time for God." That is, she saw that it was not good enough to give God a small guest room in the mansion of her life where she could drop in on him from time to time. She had grown beyond that. She had learned in her study of Paul's Letter to the Romans that Christ had redeemed all of her, that he had redeemed her from the life of self-focus and to the life of Christ-focus. People are either "slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness " (6:16). As someone put it, if Christ is not lord of all, he is not lord at all. She knew in her heart that this was true. That little room in her mansion was no good. The whole mansion had to house him. "From him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever!" (11:36).

That year, all sorts of things changed in Wendy's life. Relationships. Language. Even eating habits. The Lord lifted burdens of bitterness from her heart because she asked him to. And she asked him to because she knew there is nothing that is not his business and his sphere of blessing. Wendy was changed, and people could see it the way they could see the sunrise.

But her senior year was a time of growth in yet another essential element of the Christian life. Her Bible study group had finished Romans and moved on to the Gospel of John. In chapter four, the Holy Spirit startled her with these words: "Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth" (4:23-24). She worshiped in her personal devotions and also at a student praise event most Thursday nights. That must be good as far as it goes, she thought. But she had become very serious about bringing all of her life under the gracious lordship of her Savior, and she could see that she was offering worship strictly on her own terms: the day of her choosing in the form of her choosing and when she chose to give it. Has God commanded something that she is neglecting, however? Is there something he has told his people is pleasing to him and edifying to them?

At the Bible study, she addressed this concern to a friend, Charis, who lived on her hall and whom she knew to be godly. Charis was active in the church she had adopted for her college years, and, from things Wendy had picked up, she knew that Charis had attended church faithfully at home, morning and evening, and had carried that habit with her to college. She would disappear on Sunday mornings to what she called her "church family" and would not show up again until late evening. She seemed to enjoy it, and come back refreshed each Sunday. This girl surely would know something about what God wants in the worship life of his saints.

Charis did not disappoint. She took Wendy straight to Hebrews 10:25, "Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another." She added that, in the Book of Acts, the believers gathered together as a church on Sunday, the first day of the week, the day on which Christ the Savior had risen. And Jesus appeared to them at more than one of those meetings to confirm his approval of that pattern of worshiping together. In this setting, Christians "spur one another on to love and good deeds"--not just college friends, but older saints, and Christians from other walks of life. She also mentioned the blessing that her pastor (who is a wise, older man) sumptuously laid before her each week in his sermons. She was always challenged, always blessed, always grew. She was also grateful for the elders of her church who were wise and took seriously the responsibility Christ had laid on them for the care of his sheep (1 Peter 5:1-5). Charis drew close and looked very intently into Wendy's eyes. She said, "If Christ has given preachers and elders in his church for the blessing of his people, then if I am one of his people I will seek and get that blessing!"

Again the Holy Spirit was pressing these words into her heart, and where the words sank in they seemed to find their natural settings. As usual, where Wendy had previously been quite self-satisfied she now saw a gaping hole that only joyful Christian obedience could fill. Was there anything she was doing on Sunday that was better for her and more delightful than worship with the body of Christ? Was she able to feed and shepherd herself, perhaps with the help of friends, without the contribution of pastor and elders? Apparently, God's answer to both of these questions is, "no."

That Sunday, Wendy went with Charis to church. It required a subway ride and a bit of a walk, but that didn't matter. After a month of this habit, a habit she would never abandon by the way (and she would one day refuse a marriage proposal over it), Wendy marveled at all she had been denying herself by overlooking this dimension of the Christian life. She also reflected on the pattern of church life in which she had been raised. Committed, yet not. Sometimes God, sometimes me, which was essentially always "me." Nonetheless, she thanked God for her parents and for the exposure to Christ and his church they gave her as a girl. But she thanked God all the more for his gracious patience with her meandering, her half-hearted, and distracted pursuit of him. And she thanked him, as she would with her last breath, for Jesus the Good Shepherd who laid down his life for her, and who sought her when she was not seeking him.

Francis Bacon on Climategate

2010-02-26T04:47:00.000-08:00

The recent scandal at the University of East Anglia that blew the lid off of what many thought was the dispassionate objectivity of the science supporting global warming hysteria would come as no surprise to Francis Bacon, arguably the father of what we now call modern science. In the New Organon, his 1620 argument for a new kind of science based on the severe discipline of a patient and rigorous method, he warned against the unreliability of the human mind in investigating nature:

The human understanding is no dry light, but receives an infusion from the will and affections; whence proceed sciences which may be called “sciences as one would.” For what a man had rather were true he more readily believes. Therefore he rejects difficult things from impatience of research; sober things, because they narrow hope; the deeper things of nature, from superstition; the light of experience, from arrogance and pride, lest his mind should seem to be occupied with things mean and transitory; things not commonly believed, out of deference to the opinion of the vulgar. Numberless in short are the ways, and sometimes imperceptible, in which the affections colour and infect the understanding (Book I, aphorism 49).

Read my slightly larger reflection on this controversy at WORLDmag.com in "Political Climate Science."

The Novelty and Genius of Francis Bacon

2010-02-11T14:16:00.000-08:00

The frontispiece to Sprat's History of the Royal Society

(Francis Bacon is on the right)

For over two hundred years, the scientific and philosophic cognoscente lauded Francis Bacon as the father of modern science of of our technological mastery over nature. It was not just Abraham Cowley of the Royal Society who compared Bacon to Moses and his vision of man enthroned over nature to the promised land. Rousseau considered him, along with Descartes, one of the "preceptors of the human race." John Dewey, in Reconstruction in Philosophy (1950), called him "the real founder of modern thought."

It has become common these days to withdraw such credit. Many take the position that Bacon was a mere popularizer of what many true scientists were doing before and during his time. Or they say that his method was insufficiently mathematical or that it simply bears little resemblance to what science has become.

Paolo Rossi, a great scholar of the late Renaissance and early Enlightenment period and of Francis Bacon in particular, offers this well-supported assessment of Bacon's importance as a founder in Philosophy, Technology and the Arts in the Early Modern Era (1962, 1970[tr.]).

The founders of the Royal Society, the authors of the great Enlightenment encyclopedias, and not a few positivist historians and philosophers of the nineteenth century, were fond of the portrait of Bacon as the "father of modern science" because of his discovery of the inductive method. But to consider Bacon still from this point of view would be tantamount, as Benjamin Farrington has trenchantly observed, to placing him on an inappropriate pedestal in an inappropriate part of the gallery.

Nevertheless, the facts remains that when Bacon turned to the mechanical arts, considering them capable of revealing the actual processes of nature, and saw in them that capacity to give rise to inventions and works absent in the traditional knowledge--when polemicising against the logic of the schools, he projected a history of the arts and of technics as an indispensable prerequisite to the reform of learning--he truly became the spokesman for the fundamental demands for the culture of his time. Bacon brought to full awareness some of the thematic ideas that had been making slow headway at the margins of the official science in that world of technicians, engineers, and builders to which men like Biringuccio and Agricola had belonged (pp.117f.).

Many of Bacon's published thoughts on science were not original to him, even some of his more penetrating formulations. But he brought together, perfected, and gave force to what had been developing for a couple of centuries. That goes far beyond being a mere "popularizer."

Rossi documents that many of Bacon's criticisms of the medieval bookish approach to science and his great esteem for the practical over the merely theoretical were circulating among artisans and men of practical inquiry in the generations leading up to his own. Late medieval Europeans were not people of democratic views. There were noble classes and vulgar classes. Accordingly, there were activities suited to the dignity of a gentleman and there were activities as well as objects of study that were beneath him. The mechanical arts were considered base.

The defense of the mechanical arts against the charge of baseness, and the rejection of the notions that culture coincides with the horizon of the liberal arts and that practical operations are tantamount to servile labor, in reality implied the rejection of a certain conception of science, namely, of science as a disinterested contemplation of the truth... (p.x).

Whereas as early as 1603 Bacon called people to put their hope in a new "commerce between the mind and things," Bernard Palissy, a distinguished French potter (N.B. practical, base), claimed in 1580 that the art of observing nature must be founded on a "cult of things" as opposed to bookish learning and philosophical speculation (p.2). Bacon was not the first to emphasize the importance of closing with things themselves if there was to be any great progress in multiplying inventions. On the other hand, Bacon had far more in mind that Palissy, a potter, ever could.

Robert Norman, an English sailor who manufactured magnetic compasses and wrote on magnetism, was already in 1581 attacking the Western philosophic tradition for it's indifference to the practical fruit of inventions. He condemned the "learned" for "promising much and performing little or nothing at all" (p.5). Bacon despised them as boys, who talk but cannot generate (NO I.lxxi). He took his place among many who expected far more than the ancients and their followers could deliver, but his place was not among equals. The others saw some of the problem, and, accordingly, only some of the solution.

In the writings of various artisans and philosophers between 1530 and 1580, Rossi notices,

(1) the procedures of artisans, engineers, and technicians have a value for the ends of the progress of knowledge; (2) such procedures are recognized as having the dignity of cultural facts; and (3) men of culture must give up their contempt for "operations" or "practice" and discard every conception of knowledge that is merely rhetorical or contemplative to turn to the observation and study of techniques and the arts (pp.10f.).

While this statement makes it seem as though the cultural battle that must precede the wide embrace and successful execution of science was won, it was not so, and Rossi does not mean to suggest it was. Bacon took up that fight to his dying day because it was far from over and it required his genius for victory to fall to scientific civilization. A century and half after Bacon's death, in 1680, Richelet's Dictionnaire Français, in it's article on "Méchanique," says, "This term, speaking of particular arts, signifies that which is the opposite of liberal and honorable; it has the connotation of baseness and of being little worthy of an honest person." Much later still, Rossi tells us, "the French Jesuits were scanalized by what they thought was an excessive number of articles on technical subjects in Diderot's Encyclopédie" (p.12).

The great artists of the Renaissance helped eventually to dignify the practical arts with social respectability. But it took time. Again Rossi:

As Antal reminds us, in the fourteenth century art was still considered a manual skill. The artist was addressed with the familiar "thou" as were domestic servants. ... Almost all artists of the early fifteenth century came out of artisan, peasant, and petty-bourgeois melieus. Andrea del Castagno was the son of a peasant, Paolo Uccello of a barber, Filippo Lippi [1406-1469] of a butcher. ... The goldsmith's art was common to painters and sculptors. Brunelleschi, Donatello, Ghiberti, and Ghirlandaio were all goldsmiths at first (pp. 21f.).

Despite these facts, the Renaissance artist of the fifteenth century was rising socially. As Rossi puts it, "No affluent citizens and nobles would have considered the artist's status humiliating" (p.21). Rossi traces this change in people's estimate of art and artists to "the increasingly profane character of artistic production, to the ever greater weight of the opinion of lay persons, as well as to the social transition of artists from the status of artisans to that of bourgeois. Whereas Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) had been not only a painter and sculptor, but also an engineer, architect, and many other things, by the mid-sixteenth century, "commissions of an artisan character no longer appears in keeping with the dignity of the artists. This was the age when Charles V stopped to pick up the brush dropped by Titian [d. 1576]" (p.22).

We note from this, however, that artisans and engineers remained objects of disdain among the powerful and well born. Bacon labored not simply to defend the benefits and dignity of the mechanical arts. While the mechanic had been able to gain some insight into the workings of nature by his attention to "things" and had produced useful works, this field of activity was not the answer to the miserable condition of mankind.

In the New Organon (I.v), Bacon points us beyond this type of labor. "The study of nature with a view to works is engaged in by the mechanic, the mathematician, the physician, the alchemist, and the magician; but by all (as things now are) with slight endeavor and scanty success." Engineers have done good work with what they know, but a true attention to "things" will produce an understanding of nature's inner workings, formulated into "axioms." "The productions of the mind and hand seem very numerous in books and manufactures. But all this variety lies in an exquisite subtlety and derivations from a few things already known, not in the number of axioms" (NO I.vii). These can be derived only from what he called experiments of light, which are to be preferred over what were overhastily and exclusively pursued as experiments of fruit, and these would have to proceed by the disciplined method of investigation that he was proposing. "For axioms rightly discovered and established supply practice with its instruments, not one by one, but in clusters, and draw after them trains and troops of works" (NO I.lxx).

But to get to this point, people's approach to the world, one another, and all things had to be democratized. Bacon had to undermine and bury all notions of noble and base. We see that in New Organon Book I, aphorisms 119-121, where he calls serious searchers into the secrets of nature and all those who are ambitious to bring her under human dominion to overcome their indisposition to investigate things that are common, mean, or subtle.

And for things that are mean or even filthy — things which (as Pliny says) must be introduced with an apology — such things, no less than the most splendid and costly, must be admitted into natural history. Nor is natural history polluted thereby, for the sun enters the sewer no less than the palace, yet takes no pollution. And for myself, I am not raising a capitol or pyramid to the pride of man, but laying a foundation in the human understanding for a holy temple after the model of the world. That model therefore I follow. For whatever deserves to exist deserves also to be known, for knowledge is the image of existence; and things mean and splendid exist alike. Moreover, as from certain putrid substances — musk, for instance, and civet — the sweetest odors are sometimes generated, so, too, from mean and sordid instances there sometimes emanates excellent light and information (NO I.cxx).

Think of the many and various breathless investigations that had to be undertaken before we could come to the understanding that there was much useful information hidden within stool samples. The humor in the Scrubs number, "Check the Poo," is premised on the still common notion that looking into these things is beneath human dignity. But a scientist sets aside all such notions of dignity and nobility. Or at least he does today. Bacon had to argue for an attitudinal reorientation to get us here. Thus he entitled one of his major works defending his new science, Of the DIGNITY and Advancement of Learning. Learning had always been considered dignified...but not the sort of learning that Bacon argued was necessary to raise the dignity of the human race in power and comfort.

Howard White, in his seminal work Peace Among the Willows (1968), calls this new moral understanding that Bacon not only presents in argument but also insinuates with rhetoric his provisional morality. We see it largely in the Essays. "One has to see what kind of men are to take us from the world where politics controls science to the world where science is to control politics..." (p.43). The men of the future in whom Bacon's provisional morality has taken hold will be "the kind of men who are intended to take the voyage to the New Atlantis..." (p.32; also p.16). But once we all land on the shores of that blessed future and the regime of science takes charge, Bacon expects that we will transition to what White calls the "definitive morality" that Bacon pictures, albeit subtly in New Atlantis. The provisional is what we would call democratic, though not immediately and obviously, but the definitive is far more regimented than the mess that is individual liberty.

But I digress.

While many of these ideas were in the air that Bacon was breathing, and quite self-consciously, Bacon went far beyond them. Rossi points beyond these ideas to Bacon's novelty.

The appeal to "nature" and "experience" so widespread in the culture of the Renaissance (what type of knowledge and what culture, after all, do not appeal to a certain "nature and to a certain "experience"), the rejection of authority (Aristotle, Galen, Ptolemy), the "disputation" with the "ancients," and insistence upon the necessity of observation as such do not themselves imply acceptance of this ideal view of science.

This ideal has a public, democratic, and collaborative character, composed of individual contributions organized in the form of a scientific discourse and offered with the view of achieving a general success which becomes the patrimony of mankind. This conception of science, which found its first expression on a "philosophical" plane in the work of Francis Bacon, played a crucial role in the formation of the idea of progress...(p.64).

Tomasso Campanella, in his utopian work The City of the Sun (1602; published in Latin, 1623), expressed the hope people had in this notion of progress, linked as it was to the conquest of nature through an explosion of inventions, and that was buzzing among those who were at the forefront of learning. "Oh, if you knew what our astrologers say of the coming age, and of our age, that it has in it more history within a hundred years than all the world had in four thousand years before, of the wonderful invention of printing and guns and the use of the magnet..." (Rossi p.65). But he really had no way of getting there. It took Bacon to provide the instrument, the reliably effective organon.

Conviction of Sin

2010-01-24T11:09:00.000-08:00

The Christian life begins with what the Bible calls "conviction of sin," the sense that one is indeed a sinner in God's sight, deserving of condemnation, and in need of being saved from a miserable condition and a justly deserved eternal fate.

We see this portrayed in the New Testament most dramatically in Jesus' account of the Pharisee and the tax collector: "the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, 'God, be merciful to me, a sinner!'" Explaining this, Jesus said, "I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other (the self-righteous Pharisee). For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted."

Ray Ortlund beautifully expresses the biblical teaching on conviction of sin in this passage.

What is conviction of sin? It is not an oppressive spirit of uncertainty or paralyzing guilt feelings.

Conviction of sin is the lance of the divine Surgeon piercing the infected soul, releasing the pressure, letting the infection pour out.

Conviction of sin is a health-giving injury.

Conviction of sin is the Holy Spirit being kind to us by confronting us with the light we don't want to see and the truth we're afraid to admit and the guilt we prefer to ignore.

Conviction of sin is the severe love of God over-ruling our compulsive dishonesty, our willful blindness, our favorite excuses.

Conviction of sin is the violent sweetness of God opposing the sins lying comfortably undisturbed in our lives.

Conviction of sin is the merciful God declaring war on the false peace we settle for.

Conviction of sin is our escape from malaise to joy, from attending church to worship, from faking it to authenticity.

Conviction of sin is, with the forgiveness of Jesus pouring over our wounds, is life.

I'm looking for the source of this passage in Ortlund's works.

Our Modern Dance with Technology

2010-01-11T08:14:00.000-08:00

As I re-immerse myself in the thought of Francis Bacon, the problem of technology, and the crisis of modernity, I expect to be posting frequently on the subject.

In my last post, I made reference to Louis c.k., one of the most prominent popular thinkers of our day on the problem of technology (you must understand I have a dry sense of humor...but at least I have a complete name). He appeared to be suitably impressed by the advances of the last hundred years (flight, high speed internet access, and even the latter while flying) while at the same time understandably disturbed by what those amazing developments do to our hearts, becoming numbingly unamazing to us.

King's student, John, cited Wendell Berry as one who rebels against the computer and it's soul disfiguring effects by continuing to use a typewriter. ("Why I am not going to buy a computer," Harpers, 1987; reprinted in What Are People For?.) I responded that the use of that technology is now the privilege of the well to do because ribbons are rare and expensive if they are obtainable at all. A reader named Phillip corrected me, adding that they are now easy available on via the Internet (a word that MS Word insists that I capitalize). I added this:

Ahh! Though it would be Baconian but not wise to look to technology to solve all our problems, even the problems that technology itself introduces, it is interesting that whereas an advance in technology (and the economics of the marketplace) made typewriter ribbons difficult to obtain, a further advance in technology--the Internet--again along with the economics of the marketplace, has made them easily available once again and at what Phillip tells us is an easily affordable price, even for my old Underwood. Oh brave new world that has such wonders in it!

(Yes, I know that I slightly misquoted Shakespeare. I'm allowed to do that.)

We see this ongoing dance with technology in something I read recently in Superfreakonomics by Leavitt and Dubner, a Christmas present (thanks, Steve!). Greenies, and perhaps people like Wendell Berry, look back wistfully on the days of the horse and buggy, the days of environmentally friendly transportation when the only emissions from our vehicles could be plowed back into the earth and enrich it for organic food production.

"New York City: Horse overcome by heat." Circa 1910.

George Grantham Bain Collection.

But the economist and the journalist tell us this:

The horse, a versatile and powerful helpmate since the days of antiquity, was put to work in many ways as modern cities expanded: pulling streetcars and private coaches, hauling construction materials, unloading freight from ships and trains, even powering the machines that churned out furniture, rope, beer, and clothing. If your young daughter took gravely ill, the doctor rushed to your home on horseback. When a fire broke out, a team of horses charged through the streets with a pumping truck. At the turn of the twentieth century, some 200,000 horses lived and worked in New York City, or 1 for every 17 people.

But oh, the troubles they caused!

Horse drawn wagons clogged the streets terribly, and when a horse broke down, it was often put to death on the spot. This caused further delays. Many stable owners held life-insurance policies that, to guard against fraud, stipulated that an animal be euthanized by a third party. This meant waiting for the police, a veterinarian, or the ASPCA to arrive. Even death didn't end the gridlock. "Dead horses were extremely unwieldy," writes the transportation scholar Eric Morris. "As a result, street cleaners often waited for the corpses to putrefy so they could more easily be sawed into pieces and carted off."

The noise from iron wagon wheels and horseshoes was so disturbing--it purportedly caused widespread nervous disorders--that some cities banned horse traffic on the streets around hospitals and other sensitive areas. ... (I'm skipping the interesting paragraph on traffic fatalities. I want to get right to the dung.)

Worst of all was the dung. The average horse produced about 24 pounds of manure a day. With 200,000 horses, that's nearly 5 million pounds of horse manure. A day. Where did it all go?

Decades earlier, when horses were less plentiful in cities, there was a smooth functioning market for manure, with farmers [people, no doubt, like Wendell Berry--DCI] buying it to truck off (via horse, of course) to their fields. But as the urban equine population exploded, there was a massive glut. In vacant lots, manure was piled as high as sixty feet. It lined city streets like banks of snow. In the summertime, it stank to the heavens; when the rains came, a soupy stream of horse manure flooded the crosswalks and seeped into people's basements (pp. 8-10).

They then describes some other unhappy consequences: flies, diseases, rats, and worst of all...methane! Lots and lots of methane, "a powerful greenhouse gas." Urban planners were gravely concerned about this health crisis (even without the climate issue), but totally stumped as to what to do about it.

But the problem suddenly disappeared, and it was neither government regulation nor a political-cultural rebellion of people in large numbers returning to a simpler, rural, agrarian life out of disgust for what had become of cities.

The problem was solved by technological innovation. No, not the invention of a dung-less animal. The horse was kicked to the curb by the electric streetcar and the automobile, both of which were extravagantly cleaner and far more efficient. The automobile, cheaper to own and operate than the horse-drawn vehicle, was proclaimed "an environmental savior."

Of course, the dance continues. But my point is that it's a dance, though a dance between two who are inextricably locked in embrace and in what will always be, on account of sin and until the Lord's return, a love-hate relationship. Our goal should be, wise in the study of these things, to "spread the love."

P.S. -- My 10 year old daughter, seeing the picture of the exhausted horse, invited me to explain it, so I told her all about New York's horse problems in that day. She immediately suggested that we could have horses today because we have better means of hauling away the waste and the carcasses. Great idea, I thought, and a good application of technology to incorporate the best of yesteryear into modern life. We have bicycle lanes. Why not horse lanes? Cars have to drive around pedicabs. Why not make way for horse drawn buggies? Indeed, New York does have a few of these around Central Park. We could license them so that the numbers do not become unmanageable. I doubt, however, that there will be sufficient real estate in Manhattan that people can affordably devote to stabling a great number of horses. Just a thought.

Progress and Its Discontents

2010-01-09T06:29:00.000-08:00

This semester, beginning next week, I am leading six exceptional students at The King's College in a seminar on Francis Bacon's Invention of Modern Politics. We will be exploring Lord Verulam's plan to conquer nature for the relief of our estate, the benefits that have come of it, as well as the problems inherent in it. We will look closely and critically at Bacon's writings--The Great Instuaration, New Organon, New Atlantis, Essays--and then students will research the benefits and moral complications of subsequent technological developments.

Robert Faulkner, in his penetrating work on Bacon's artful and revolutionary project to reshape and redirect Western civilization, Francis Bacon and the Project of Progress, expresses this sober assessment nicely: "Now it seems that a thoughtful citizen of a modern country must be prepared to defend the benefits of progress, or at least to reconsider them while being aware of the defects as well as the advantages" (p.3).

For example, consider email. Most of us depend on it because we find it useful, and so we use it all the time. But we also sense a downside. What is that disturbing impulse we feel to be constantly checking our inboxes. That's not good. John Freeman explores the complexity of the technology in his book, The Tyranny of E-Mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox. "E-mail might be cheaper, faster and more convenient, but its virtues also make us lazier, lonelier and less articulate."

Also have a look at "Louis c.k." claiming that Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy. Warning, this is very funny, and you may see yourself in one of the "spoiled idiots" he describes.

He's entertained by the fact that conservatives and Christians find his routine resonates with what they believe. What they like is clearly the call to moderation and contentment. Louis just despises them, but that's a sign that he doesn't understand either what he's saying or the conservatives and Christians. He himself is incoherent. He meant to condemn capitalism in this routine. He explains this to Opie and Anthony. (The second clip is better than the first, but blasphemous at points.) Yet capitalism is the economic system on which he depends for his lucrative career and high flying lifestyle. He also explains that he is not against technology. He just thinks we should chasten our expectations for it and have a little more peace while using it. This thought has clearly hit a nerve with people given the video's "viral" popularity. People are uncomfortably aware that while technology is good, it affects the way we see the world in ways that are morally unhealthy. And that is a subject worthy of study.

Francis Bacon's Very Political Life

2010-01-09T06:26:00.000-08:00

As I expect to be posting more regularly on Francis Bacon in his relation to Christianity and modernity, I am reposting this reflection on Perez Zagorin's account of his life in chapter two of his 1998 book, Francis Bacon, the chapter entitled, "Bacon's Two Lives."

Lytton Strachey's question, "Who has ever explained Francis Bacon?," still hangs over Bacon scholarship (Elizabeth and Essex, A Tragic History. Butler Press, 2007; p.9). Perez Zagorin identified the puzzle at the very outset of his book, a study of Bacon's life and thought entitled simply Francis Bacon (Princeton, 1998) :

Francis Bacon lived two separate but interconnected lives. One was the meditative, reserved life of a philosopher, scientific inquirer, and writer of genius, a thinker of soaring ambition and vast range whose project for the reconstruction of philosophy contained a new vision of science and its place in society. The other was the troubled insecure life of a courtier, professional lawyer, politician, royal servant, adviser, and minister to two sovereigns, Elizabeth I and James I, who from early youth to old age never ceased his quest for high position and the favor of the great (p.3).

He could have practiced law, a profession for which he trained at Gray's Inn. Indeed, many suggested that he solve his financial difficulties by pursuing that option, but he simply refused. He could have sought an academic position, but that would not have satisfied him. He desired political office. Though he combined both scientist and politician in his soul, he was fundamentally a man of politics.

On the political side of Bacon's life and character, the puzzle has two aspects. On the one hand, Zagorin tells us that Bacon's political ambitions,

...absorbed a large part of his time and energy, pitting himself against rivals in a continual competition for office and power, diverting him from pursuing some of his most cherished intellectual goals, and forcing him to leave his main philosophical enterprise fragmentary and unfinished (ibid.).

This unceasing quest for ever higher political office raises the question, why would someone so committed to the benefit of the human race through a radical reorientation of the intellect, as Bacon was, concern himself so obsessively with political climbing for the whole of his adult life? While public service is honorable and requires people of ability and integrity for it to be done well, there were many others who were highly qualified to take up that task, whereas Bacon alone had the insight and learning to carry on what he called "the great instauration of man over the universe."

In Of The Interpretation of Nature Proemium, Bacon justifies his tireless pursuit of political power by the ability it would give him to support co-ordinated, publicly useful scientific inquiry with the requisite human and financial resources. He had in mind something like the National Science Foundation, or, better yet, Salomon's House as he describes it in New Atlantis. Thus, Bacon reconciles his two seemly incompatible and personally consuming goals, the scientific and the political, by interpreting the political enterprise in terms of the scientific one. Zagorin, by accepting this explanation, comes across like a woman who believes the sweetly spoken but not entirely plausible stories of her cheating husband (or vice versa; pp. 57f.). He produces no evidence that Bacon actually used what power he had at any given point to give significant support to the work of science as he was planning it out.

Bacon's explanation is unconvincing especially coming from a man who calculated his actions as carefully as he did. It was surely true that he could use the power of his political office to support his scientific project, but the effort that such a plan required was disproportionate to anything he could reasonably hope to obtain. The likelihood of his success not only in achieving a sufficiently powerful position in government, but also in holding that position long enough to accomplish his goals, and then also in actually using it to advance his grand project by arranging the cooperation of whoever else was necessary was uncertain at best, and unpromising at worst. As it turned out, he did not become Lord Chancellor until 1618 at the age of sixty, just eight years before his death, a position he held for only three years before his scandalous downfall. As a plan, it's comparable to betting your nest egg at the dog track. It is an unbaconian reliance on fortune.

Given his extraordinary learning and eloquence, it would have been a more efficient use of Bacon's time with a more promising outcome if he had pursued his projects from a position of academic and literary prominence, and used his powerful persuasive abilities to enlist the great in his cause. But Bacon had no interest in a life so far removed from the direct exercise of political power and its attendant honors. Zagorin himself notes that, "Bacon was irresistibly attracted to politics and would never willingly retire into a private existence" (p.4). Indeed, he never did. Even after he was deposed from power as a result of the bribery scandal, instead of turning his full attention to writing and publishing for a more lasting legacy, he continued to beg and claw for power, even if only the right to take his seat in the House of Lords.

(Bacon himself gives us reason not to take him at his word on this public spirited justification for his political ambition. Bacon scholars are remarkably credulous when it comes to Bacon's public affirmations of traditional morality and notions of virtue. But that is another investigation.)

The second aspect of the puzzle of Bacon's politics is the great difficulty he had in accomplishing his goals. He was frequently passed over, and accomplished what ranks he did only by constantly "asserviling" himself, as he lamented near the end of his life. His difficulties were not for lack of talent and intelligence, however. Zagorin's judgment is that people generally saw through his deceits and were repelled by them, earning him distrust rather than influence. Bacon was a great admirer of Machiavelli, but seemed to lack the virtu to be a successful Machiavellian. He was a notorious dissembler and manager of his own image for political purposes. "I had rather know than be known" (Promus of Formularies and Elegancies in Works XIV:13). Zagorin is also very clear on this point.

The subjects of secrecy, esoteric communication, and the techniques of managing people also came into his works. In his personal relationships with the great and powerful whose favor he desired, his preferred methods were dissimulation, subservience, and flattery... (p.14).

Like an orphan who is radically alone and vulnerable in a hostile world, Bacon saw only rivals (like Coke) and instruments (like Essex, the queen herself, and later the king). Zagorin sees this. Bacon, he says, "...regarded other persons purely as means he could exploit to attain his own ends. His object was to aggrandize himself by craft, flattery, and displaying himself in the best possible light" (p.20). One suspects that those who were neither obstacles nor of any use him politically, he used in some other way.

Zagorin identifies Bacon's two contradictory lives, but in fact he had three lives. Whereas his political life compromised his philosophic life, his sexual life compromised his political one. Zagorin spends more than two pages of his short biographical chapter exploring this issue. If Bacon wanted the safest path to high office, then--like Elizabeth, his queen--it would have been prudent of him to commit himself to chastity. He did not.

These contradictions are puzzling only if one accepts Bacon as a genuine philosophical philanthropist with an inscrutable political fixation. On the contrary, it is more reasonable to interpret his scientific project in light of his political ambitions. By this I mean not his politics narrowly conceived (Solomon, Martin, Leary?), but his highest political ambition. He did after all express his philosophic project in strikingly and consistently political language.

Zagorin sets aside his knowledge of Bacon's political obsessions, however, when he turns to consider him as a philosopher. "It is evident that in Bacon's mind the project of developing a philosophy capable of multiplying knowledge and discovery by a true interpretation of nature was his highest, most cherished aim and that to this enterprise other intellectual pursuits were secondary" (p.27). This does not account for his distracting political ambitions, however. If the philosopher is, as Plato says, the one who leaves the cave to pursue the truth, and who would rather remain above, disengaged from the city's concerns, especially the daily concerns, to pursue an understanding of the truth without distraction, then Bacon was no philosopher. He was obsessed with the cave, in particular with it's honors and privileges. He could not even enjoy a graceful retirement in quiet writing and study.

Bacon is tragic figure. He was a man of soaring personal ambition of the sort that would naturally benefit the human race, and indeed has. But he allowed himself to be distracted from his highest goals and most lasting glories by lesser and incompatible accomplishments and pleasures.

Evangelizing the Televangelized

2009-09-20T11:20:00.001-07:00

Consider this. These Australians are mocking what they think is Christianity.

Can we all agree that what Kenneth Copeland, Benny Hinn and their like give us is not any form of Christianity? Yet unlike your local pastor and mine, these clowns are on television for everyone to see. Sadly, they are perhaps the only people claiming to speak for Christ who penetrate the secular worlds of people like these Australian television entertainers.

There is nothing that anyone can do to eliminate the supply of this nonsense. The right of free speech extends also to snake oil merchandising. But surely we can work on the demand side. Who are these people who are watching, and attending, and (most importantly) funding this stuff? Where are the missionaries to the televangelist audiences?

But I'll end on a light note. If you watch carefully at the end of the video, you can see one of the Aussie "faith healers" flip an old man in a wheelchair. (Let me add that ordinarily that would not be funny.) The tall guy at the very end turns and whacks someone. I didn't catch it until the third viewing.

Billy Graham's Long Shadow

2009-09-12T16:36:00.003-07:00

When a friend recently told me that Woody Allen once interviewed Billy Graham, I thought he was joking. It seemed comparable to Groucho Marx interviewing Cornelius Van Til.

But here it is on YouTube. Billy actually does a great job turning Woody's irreverent jabs into gospel opportunities, and often topping the great comedian with fast and funny come-backs.

I do not know exactly when this interview took place, but my guess is the mid to late 1960s.

For the fun and sheer wonder of it, here is Billy Graham in 1949..

...and 1957...

...and 1971...

After sitting under the sound, Reformed, Evangelical ministry of Dr. Glyn Own at Knox Presbyterian Church in Toronto for 16 months, I came to saving knowledge of God after Billy Graham preached a New years Eve service at the IVCF 1984 Urbana Mission Conference.

We had been blessed for several days with the expository teaching of Rev. Eric Alexander from Glasgow. Through that I came to under stand the connection between the cross and my sin, between Christ's death and my life. That is the heart of the gospel.

Billy Graham closed our several days together--19,000 young people gathered at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champagne--with a New Year's Eve worship service. During that time, he told us to bow our heads and close out eyes. He asked us, If God were to call you to the mission field, would you go?" Anyone who would was to stand up. My friends, one on each side of me, stood up. They were missionary kids themselves. I did not stand because I had no desire to go off to the far reaches of the world, even despite what I had learned that week about the centrality of missionary work in the life of the church.

After the service, we went directly to out buses to take us wherever on the continent we were going. In the darkness of that bus on my way back to Toronto, I thought about what I had done--or rather not done--that night. By the grace of God I confronted myself, asking, "David! The Lord has given his Son to die for the payment of your sins, and if he tells you to go to Nepal or Brazil you're going to refuse him? You're going to withhold from the One who did not withhold his only Son, his beloved Son for you?" It made no sense at all. So I committed my self to serve him in any way he would direct me to serve him. I count my conversion from that point. I had received Christ as both Lord and Savior (his inseparable offices).

There are things with which I have disagreed in Billy Graham's ministry. The altar call is one of them. But that night--December 31, 1984--God used Billy Graham to bring me into his kingdom, perfecting the labors of others before him. I thank the Lord for Billy Graham.

Thoughts on Paedo-Communion

2009-09-06T15:02:00.000-07:00

Calvin serving the Lord's Supper in Geneva

In his communion address this morning, my pastor compared the Lord's Supper to a family meal. As no passage came immediately to mind in support of this image, his remark distracted me as I pondered in what sense this might be true. Yes, the redeemed in Christ are adopted into the family of God. We are born again as brothers and sisters in Christ. And the Lord's Supper is certainly just that: a supper, and thus a meal.

But I quickly thought of what any paedo-communionists in the congregation would do with his image. "Yes," the would say. "Our children are not little pagans. They are part of the covenant family, as their baptism testifies. [True.] So why are they barred from the family meal?" This imaginary objection was troubling to me. So as I am entirely certain that serving communion to unconverted, unregenerate covenant children (paedo-communion) is an erroneous application of covenant theology, I was ready to jettison the family meal image as unhelpful, and confront the pastor at the door.

Then it occurred to me that the problem lay in a misunderstanding of the nature of the Christian spiritual family in contradistinction to the merely natural family. In the natural family, you come to life, then you live life, and then you die. In the spiritual family that is ours in Christ, however, you start out dead, then you come to life, and then you live life forevermore. Paedo-communionists miss this difference, and that is the root of their well-intentioned confusion. I would no sooner administer the communion elements to my infant children than I would to my deceased saintly grandfather (if I had one). Both of them are in my family. Both of them are included in the New Covenant. But both of them are dead, so to administer the bread and the wine to either one of them would be inappropriate at this time.

Finding Grace in the Sinner's Place

2009-08-29T07:45:00.000-07:00

Stanley Voke was a pastor in England in the years following World War II. I once heard him quoted in a sermon as having said: “There is in all of us a struggle to get and keep our own righteousness, which is why it is so hard to come to the sinner’s place.” It stuck with me because it goes powerfully to the very heart of the gospel.

Today, I found a longer statement from Mr. Voke on the subject. It is said to be taken from the second chapter of his book, Reality: The Way of Personal Revival. I found this wonderful exhortation on the Peacemaker website.

The Sinner's Place

BY STANLEY VOKE

"Nothing in my hand I bring, Simply to Thy Cross I cling."

The hardest thing for anyone is to take the sinner's place. So hard in fact that many never take it at all, while others, having once been brought there, do not care to come there again. None are by nature fond of the sinner's place. Yet if we do not come there, we cannot really know Christ or taste the sweetness of God's forgiving grace. If we avoid it, we might as well say "we have no sin" and so deceive ourselves.

TAKING THE SINNER'S PLACE

The sinner's place is where we accept without excuse that we are sinners. We may admit only one sin such as jealousy or pride; we may be convicted of something that seems small, but in so doing we have come again to the sinner's place-though we may have been Christians for many years. Behind each sin God may show us things more serious until not one but many things are admitted and we are brought to admit the whole radical evil of our nature. A man once confessed he had stolen a rope. He brought it back. The next day he returned, this time bringing a cow he had been unwilling to admit was on the end of the rope! When we take the sinner's place, we admit the truth about ourselves-the whole truth.

The sinner's place is where we take blame. We stop excusing ourselves and saying, "I was not really myself when I did that." Instead we bow our head saying, "Yes, Lord, that was me; that is what I am really like." We no longer blame our nerves, our circumstances, or other people. Should someone point out some fault or criticize us, even unkindly, we do not argue and justify ourselves or try to explain things away. We even admit to the critic that if he knew us as we really are he would find much else to criticize. We save endless time and breath when we come quickly to the sinner's place. Indeed things would be different in many a church if the members met regularly there at the sinner's place.

This is the place David took as, when Nathan challenged him, he bowed his head saying, "I have sinned." Here Job stood and cried, "Behold, I am vile," and Isaiah said, "Woe is me! For I am undone." Here the publican prayed, "God be merciful to me a sinner"; here Peter fell at the feet of Jesus saying, "Depart from me; for I am a sinful man." In this place, the prodigal son confessed "Father, I have sinned and am no more worthy." Paul often knelt in the sinner's place and many a saint has watered it with his tears. If we have not come here, we have not yet begun with God (2Sa 12:13, Ps 51:4, Job 40:4, Isa 6:5, Lk 18:13, Lk 5:8, Lk 15:18).

We do not like the sinner's place for we are afraid it will hurt our pride. So we fight, argue, put others in the wrong, excuse ourselves, and in fact do anything rather than take the sinner's place where God awaits to forgive and set us free.

AVOIDING THE SINNER'S PLACE

Often, we avoid this place because we will not call sin, sin. We talk of shortcomings, failures, weaknesses, frailties, faults, disabilities, propensities; anything but sin. A rose by any other name is just as sweet, and sin by any other name is just as evil-to God. The trouble is we make our own definitions instead of accepting God's. In the Scripture, sin is anything short of the glory of God, anything that misses the mark of moral perfection or crosses the line of God's will, anything that is twisted from the plumbline of Divine righteousness whether it be in motive, desire, intention, instinct, thought, habit, look, word, deed, reaction or relationship. If done heedlessly or in ignorance, it is still sin and to call it something else needing neither repentance nor forgiveness is to avoid the sinner's place.

We can refuse to see sin as sin. Maybe we are active people who have no time to bother with such trivialities. We have our positions and programs to maintain. Like Naaman, we are busy winning our laurels while we cover our leprosy. We address meetings, chair committees, take on jobs, give money to this and that-in fact do anything-except confess ourselves spiritual lepers who need to wash and be clean. We are as those in Jeremiah's day who rushed like horses into battle but never stopped to repent or say, "What have I done?" We are so very busy-too busy ever to stand in the sinner's place (Jer 8:6).

We may avoid this place by assuming the role of correctors. With our doctrines neatly tied up, we are evangelical experts with a keen sense of theological smell. We love to correct but not to be corrected. Like the Pharisees of old we keep ourselves out of the sinner's place by putting others in. We are so full of knowledge that we have no room for a broken and contrite heart. Yet even Henry Martyn, great saint as he was, recorded in his diary, "I have resolved never to reprove another except I experience at the same time a peculiar contrition of heart!" He found he needed to live in the sinner's place.

We may avoid this place by making our security in Christ a pretext for non-repentance. We are assured of our salvation, yet somehow we are no longer convicted of sin. We are like the small boy who, when sent from the table to wash his hands, returned with a big smile and the astonishing remark, "Well, they've had such a wash this time they'll never need to be washed again."

We are by faith sons of God and citizens of heaven. But we are still sinners as well. We still need to wash at "the fountain opened for sin and for uncleanness " (Zec 13:1). Grace will never lead us into sin, but it will ever convict us of it, and sin thus revealed will always lead us back to grace. It is possible to avoid the sinner's place by misapplying the blood of Christ, speaking of it as "covering" or "protecting" as did the blood of the Passover lamb. The sacrifice of Christ on Calvary, however, was for sin.

It is an atoning, not simply a protecting agent. If therefore we need it, we do so as sinners coming for cleansing, not as sinless ones needing only to be secured from evil outside ourselves. When we speak only of the blood protecting us, we are avoiding the sinner's place. A student of Spurgeon (a well known English preacher) once preached before him on "The Whole Armor of God." A conceited young man, he dramatized his message, putting on the armor piece by piece, until, having fortified the whole, he waved the sword of the Spirit and cried triumphantly, "And where is the devil now?" Mr. Spurgeon leaned forward and said, "Young man, he's inside that armor!"

We must watch that we do not let Satan in by forsaking the sinner's place. Our hearts are deceitful above all things and, like the mythological Proteus, will adopt any guise to hide their true nature. Beneath our spiritual phraseology and church reputation we are but poor sinners, who need to be cleansed every day in the blood of Jesus.

FINDING GRACE IN THE SINNER'S PLACE

Is it not strange that the place we sinners avoid is the very one the sinless Savior took? Surely if He were the Son of God He would have come down from the Cross! Miracles, mighty sermons, even resurrection itself we could expect of such a One, but not a baptism in Jordan with publicans and harlots, or a criminal execution with murderers and thieves! Yet this is where He came, for His face was set towards this place from all eternity.

There on the same level a sinner met Him that day. Unlike his comrade who died blaming others and cursing God, this dying thief admitted guilt and found forgiveness. Peace and paradise came to him as he took the sinner's place and found Jesus there. This is the paradox of grace. He who insists he is right will be pronounced wrong, while he who admits he is wrong will be declared right. The righteousness of God is only given to those who stand in the sinner's place.Here and here alone is the place of true peace, for here we cease our strivings and find our God. Here is rest of heart and heaven's door. Here we cast away our pretense, and admit what we really are. Here we come to Jesus to be cleansed by His precious blood. Here the Holy Spirit fills and holiness is found. Here are the springs of revival. This is where the whole church needs to come again and again. It is the place of truth and grace and freedom-the sinner's place. When were you last there? In fact, are you there now?

Kids Don't Need You To Be Cool

2009-07-09T16:37:00.000-07:00

This is hilarious. How much does your church's youth ministry resemble this?

In your church's youth ministry, what is the role of, or attitude toward:

1. the Scriptures?

2. prayer?

3. pop culture?

4. prudence?

First of all, your church's youth pastors should be...the parents! Your church's youth ministry should be one that equips parents to disciple their own children, i.e. to be godly parents.

But if you must have a youth pastor, remember that kids don't need someone just like themselves except older, nor do they want that. They need godly maturity in someone who loves them, but who loves God even more.

The church I first attended and where I first heard the gospel was Knox Presbyterian Church in Toronto. They had a youth pastor, but he was not young. He was once young. He was a soccer star in Ireland in the 1950s who came out to Canada at the invitation of Rev. William Fitch. I can't comment on the state of his ministry in the 1950s, but when he retired in the early 1980s, he was loved and admired by all the young people in the church and neighborhood. At that point, he certainly wasn't cool, but he was everything those kids needed and he led great numbers of them to Christ, and to ever greater maturity in Christ.

Gospel, Church, and Culture

2009-07-09T16:22:00.000-07:00

I think this is from Mark Driscoll, the Mars Hill Church pastor in Seattle.

Diagrams and models like this can be very helpful. For example, I think it was a church-growth PCA guy (Scotty Smith?) who described the work of the church as "upreach, inreach, and outreach." It's a poetic way of saying, "You have to be all of these because they're related, and your church life is incomplete without any one of these activities."

I think that this broad distribution of emphasis (I'm avoiding the word "balance") is related to what I was getting at in my Multi-polar Christian Piety post a while ago.

Explaining Francis Bacon

2009-07-03T13:13:00.001-07:00

Lytton Strachey's question, "Who has ever explained Francis Bacon?," still hangs over Bacon scholarship (Elizabeth and Essex, A Tragic History. Butler Press, 2007; p.9). Perez Zagorin identified the puzzle at the very outset of his book, a study of Bacon's life and thought entitled simply Francis Bacon (Princeton, 1998) :

Francis Bacon lived two separate but interconnected lives. One was the meditative, reserved life of a philosopher, scientific inquirer, and writer of genius, a thinker of soaring ambition and vast range whose project for the reconstruction of philosophy contained a new vision of science and its place in society. The other was the troubled insecure life of a courtier, professional lawyer, politician, royal servant, adviser, and minister to two sovereigns, Elizabeth I and James I, who from early youth to old age never ceased his quest for high position and the favor of the great (p.3).

...absorbed a large part of his time and energy, pitting himself against rivals in a continual competition for office and power, diverting him from pursuing some of his most cherished intellectual goals, and forcing him to leave his main philosophical enterprise fragmentary and unfinished (ibid.).

The subjects of secrecy, esoteric communication, and the techniques of managing people also came into his works. In his personal relationships with the great and powerful whose favor he desired, his preferred methods were dissimulation, subservience, and flattery... (p.14).

Who But God...?

2009-05-14T17:48:00.000-07:00

For several years, there has been an email circulating with pictures of a rare flower from Thailand called the Parrot Flower. It is a form of Internet apologetics that asks, "Who but God could do this?"

Just as there are people who fabricate things like this--I assume to make Christians look gullible--so too there are people who call anything of this sort a hoax because it makes the Christian's point a little too nicely.

But Hoax-Slayers tells us that this is indeed the rare Impatiens psittacina that grows in Thailand, Myanmar and portions of east India. Psittacina means "parrot-like."

"[I]nformation about the plant was first published in 1901 in the Curtis Botanical Journal Magazine by the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker. And the now famous photographs included above were taken by a Thai grower of the plant in 2001."

For the full story on these remarkable creatures, go to The Exotic Rainforest and for more pictures, consult the same folks here.

It is marvelous that God would limit such a glorious work to so small a region, the way he places beautiful, colorful fish in the deep depths of the ocean where no one can see them.

The Devil Is In The Antitheses

2009-05-13T17:40:00.000-07:00

Donald A. Carson, Prof. of New Testament
Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

On the Emerging Church movement:

So which shall we choose?

Experience or truth? The left wing of an airplane, or the right? Love or integrity? Study or service? Evangelism or discipleship? The front wheels of a car, or the rear? Subjective knowledge or objective knowledge? Faith or obedience?

Damn all false antithesis to hell, for they generate false gods, they perpetuate idols, they twist and distort our souls, they launch the church into violent pendulum swings whose oscillations succeed only in dividing brothers and sisters in Christ.

Donald Carson, Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church, p. 234.

You can hear D. A. Carson's sermons at SermonAudio.com.

His Sheep Follow Him

2009-04-17T18:34:00.000-07:00

If the elders in Christ's church were like these sheep dogs, and if we were to obey them the way these sheep obey these sheep dogs, the church would be more beautiful and glorious in its life on earth as what you will see in this amazing display of synchronized shepherding.

We continue to unfold glories from God's creation, and parables of his kingdom.

The great chapter in which Jesus describes himself as the Good Shepherd is chapter 10 of The Gospel According to John.

"He who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep. To him the gatekeeper opens. The sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice" (vv. 2-4 ESV).

"My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand" (vv. 27-28).

The Sportsman and the Well Lived Life

2009-04-14T11:54:00.000-07:00

These displays of upper body strength are a wonder to behold.

Amazing as they as, however, I wonder how important it is that they do not actually accomplish anything. The Guinness Book of World Records contains accounts of many things that in themselves are impressive but that more broadly considered are utterly pointless. Sitting on a pole for a very long time comes to mind. After initially admiring the record holder's stamina, or whatever, one cannot help but ask if this is the best use of the fellow's time.

Much of what passes for sports strikes me the same way. Much of modern athletic competition combines the awesome and the trivial--rare human ability combined with fruitless endeavor. But it has not always been so. Many athletic competitions have their origins in agriculture and warfare. Consider the Scottish highland games. Large men throwing things and pulling ropes are practicing competitively what they ordinarily they do on their farms. Consider also the Olympic Games. Traditionally, what do you see? Running. Throwing the javelin. Wrestling. Riding. Shooting. Each of these games, in its original conception, was a display of strength and skills in public competition that were useful in vitally important enterprises. The athletic achievement was not ultimately for its own sake but had reference to these larger, life-sustaining activities.

Those activities--subduing the earth by one's labor and subduing one's enemies in battle--face daunting challenges and so require awesome human accomplishments when done well. We celebrate those accomplishments, and thus also encourage them, by these competitions.

Athletics are healthy both physically and psychologically. I knew a man for whom golf was an antidote to depression. It keeps my parents young and limber. Athletics are also good for the character of the young, when done properly. Wrestling in high school impressed good habits of discipline in me. It is said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. Athletics can be serious business.

But athletics becomes trivial when it becomes merely entertainment, amusement, diversion. Though baseball played at its best involves amazing feats of skill and strength, it is of no consequence whether the Yankees or the Red Sox wins the World Series. (Put aside your partisan passions and admit it.) The same is true of the the feats of upper body strength in this video. Yes, they are astounding, but to what end? It is true that they are beautiful, and that is good in itself. It brings out more fully the glory of God's creation. That's wonderful, but God calls us to put his marvelous creation to godly use.

Why do we celebrate these isolated acts of strength and skills without context? Perhaps we no longer believe in ends, but we still can't help be impressed by the means by which we once pursued those ends.

Athletics of this sort remind me of what has become of art. We have removed it from the churches and great houses because so many of us no longer believe in church and great families. So too, now that agriculture and war are mechanized, we can appreciate the yeoman and the warrior in isolation of what called forth the heights of their achievements. We can appreciate their virtuosity without their virtue.

Art has become abstract not only in its form, but also in its placement (if that's right way to put it). We deprive it of any meaningful setting. It goes straight from studio to gallery, unless one turns a living room into a gallery. Art used to serve a function. It used to communicate a story or remember a relative or a person of great accomplishment. It helped us see the special beauty of a landscape or even of a beggar child. What I'm questioning is the value of athletics when it becomes so self-referential, so self-sufficient that it becomes comparable to art-divorced-from-life.

Am I being overly pragmatic in all of this? Disgracefully utilitarian? What about beauty for its own sake? It is possible, however, to appreciate the aesthetic aspect of a beautiful act or artifact and still set it to work in something that has a larger meaning. It's not so much utility that I have in mind, as it is some larger meaning or narrative, or the affirmation of an important truth, as art does when it is done well.

Slow Down and Behold the Glory of God

2009-04-10T13:55:00.000-07:00

"Densmore Shute Bends the Shaft, 1938"
Dr. Harold Edgerton,
the M.I.T. professor who pioneered the art of high-speed photography

Advances in technology have allowed us to observe a level of glorious detail in God's creation that has been previously hidden from us. Dr. Harold Edgerton at M.I.T. pioneered the art of high speed photography, allowing us to see the remarkable movements of the hummingbird, the golfer's swing, and a bullet's path of destruction through an apple.

Here is a marvelous video various slow motions we have the privilege of seeing, now even from the convenience of a home computer.

To top it off, you now have the privilege of doing the high speed photography easily with your own camera, as David Pogue of the New York Times demonstrates.

Now he tells us that Casio has reproduced the capability of that $1000 SLR camera in a pocket sized $350 camera ("Cameras With Time-Machine Powers").

It's not technology that's amazing, nor even we technologists, but God who made this wonderful world, the fullness of whose wonders we are far from exhausting.

O Lord my God, When I in awesome wonder,
Consider all the worlds Thy Hands have made;
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,
Thy power throughout the universe displayed.

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!

When through the woods, and forest glades I wander,
And hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees.
When I look down, from lofty mountain grandeur
And see the brook, and feel the gentle breeze.

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!

And when I think, that God, His Son not sparing;
Sent Him to die, I scarce can take it in;
That on the Cross, my burden gladly bearing,
He bled and died to take away my sin.

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!

When Christ shall come, with shout of acclamation,
And take me home, what joy shall fill my heart.
Then I shall bow, in humble adoration,
And then proclaim: "My God, how great Thou art!"

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!

"O Store Gud," written by Swedish pastor, Carl Gustaf Boberg (1859-1940) in 1891. Translated into English in 1949 by Stuart Hine, a missionary to Russia where he encountered the hymn.

God's Glory in Craig Smith's Praise

2009-02-22T12:45:00.000-08:00

Back in the old days when I listened to the radio and "taped" songs on "cassettes," one night I chanced upon a startlingly beautiful and, it seemed to me, suitably worshipful song of praise from a fellow named Craig Smith. Years later I looked for the singer and the song, but without finding a trace of them. Then came iTunes...still nothing.

Then today, looking for suitable YouTube videos for a Sabbath afternoon, I thought to look up this Craig Smith tune for which I had no title.

Here it is! "We come to thee, O Lord, and bow before the God of Israel." It is very reverent, as songs of God's praise ought to be. I have always found that it communicates "lost in wonder, love, and praise" very effectively, especially in the crescendo at the end. (Don't the download buttons for iTunes etc. get your hopes up.)

Jehovah - Craig Smith

Here is another rediscovered from long ago: "Your heart is what the Father desires...Fashion in me a heart that's thirsting for you." That's what it's all about, folks.

Pure Heart - Craig Smith

One last song. This one is very John Michael Talbotesque.

Lord of all the Earth - Craig Smith

If you know anything about this album or this artist, or even the woman who sings on the "Jehovah" track, please let me know. He has a website for his music, and he appears to be a pastor in Arkansas. I would buy the album if I only could. And, as I am a Scotsman, that's saying a lot.

Multi-polar Christian Piety

2009-02-15T13:15:00.000-08:00

In Streams of Living Water, Richard Foster presents a thought provoking thesis: Among the various Christian traditions, there are several “streams” of piety, features of a healthy well-rounded Christian life, both personal and corporate, that do not converge in any one tradition, but each of which is characteristic of one or another tradition. The streams he identifies are prayer, personal holiness, charismatic gifts, compassion, Word-centeredness, sacraments, and he offers historical, biblical and contemporary examples from various traditions—evangelical, contemplative, social justice, etc. Well, there are problems with his list of streams. Most fundamentally, if you are not word-centered, what exactly is the character of your sacraments (are they man made?), the expression of your compassion (is it just secular ideology?), the form of your personal morality (is it legalism?), and your ecstatic experiences (are they even real?)?

But I found the general concept quite thought provoking. It gave form to something I had been stewing over for some years. I would put it this way. There are indeed, as I said, various features of a healthy, well-rounded Christian life, both personal and corporate. I would identify, perhaps not exhaustively, word-centeredness, theological orthodoxy, reverence, joy, community-love, mercy-love, and mission-love. Devotion to God under the authority of his word has to be fundamental. That is not always accompanied by theological orthodoxy, and vice versa, but the former should develop into the latter, and orthodoxy should found itself on the Word. Love is the mark of a Christian, but this takes various forms. There is the love that a body of believers has for one another as a community, a love they have for the helpless and suffering (who may or may not be among them), and a love they have for the lost, both near and far.

A faithful Christian who eagerly seeks the kingdom of God, who seeks to know Christ and the power of his resurrection, will try to understand all of these features and realize them in practice. But when he does he finds them frustratingly elusive...especially if he tries to realize them all together at once...and even more so if he tries to get there in community with other similarly zealous Christians. It is one of the “tensions” of the Christian life.

A tension is a situation in which you are drawn equally between two incompatible options. They are both good, perhaps even necessary. As such, they both beckon you. But as soon as you attempt to embrace one, you lose the other. What makes it a tension is that you cannot simply opt for one of the poles. By the very nature of things, to do so would bring great unhappiness of some sort. This is a particularly complex tension because it is multi-polar. As a result of the fall, we can never grasp all of these characteristics at once. When you try to grab onto one that you are missing, you lose at least one of those you had. The key to living with this problem is understanding that there are these multiple poles and that they are elusive this side of the Lord’s Second Coming.

This multi-polar model for understanding the complexity and difficulty of the fullness of Christian piety strikes me as useful for understanding the degree of dissatisfaction that many thoughtful and spiritually growing Christians feel toward their churches or church traditions, as well as the frustration we experience when we try to bring ourselves and our churches into greater conformity with biblical holiness.

The awareness of the multi-polar nature of a complete, biblical picture of the church and of the Christian life engenders greater humility in us when we assess other traditions, and honesty in our appreciation their strengths. It also encourages cautious and chastened expectations in one’s own pursuit of this multi-polar centering, and the understanding that the pursuit of that centering is indeed just that: a centering, as opposed to a linear rush forward from one spiritual objective to the next.

For example, Eastern Orthodoxy excels in reverence, but that comes with iconographic idolatry, Marianic mediation, and the subordination of Scripture to a tradition. Contemporary American Evangelicals have a joy that is alien to other traditions, but they are impoverished by theological indifference, individual self-absorption, and historical solipsism. Historically Reformed churches preserve theological orthodoxy with great precision, but they tend to be emotionally reserved, formalistic, and socially inward looking. The parish church offers community, but typically nothing else.

Clearly the poles are not simply equal in importance. Given the nature of the Christian religion as a faith because it is a gracious gift from God rather than a spiritual labor by men, a minimal theological orthodoxy is a sine qua non. There must also be love. “Without love you are nothing.” But love is the fruit and indication of salvation, not the means of appropriating it as a properly informed faith is. The same is true of joy and reverence.

The image of multi-polar centeredness appears to suggest the need for “balance” in the Christian life, but that is misleading. It is not as though one needs to compromise a truth over here or a virtue over there or a relationship in another direction in order to become a well-centered, biblical Christian, i.e., godly. Otherwise, loving people with God’s perfect love or embracing God’s revealed truth accurately in every point of blessed detail would be “going to an extreme” and would preclude living a godly Christian life. But how can perfectly godly love make one ungodly? How can believing the entire Bible make someone unbiblical in any way? There is a sense in which one cannot truly embrace any of the poles except in the center. Joyless orthodoxy is, in a way, a betrayal of orthodoxy.

The trickiness of living life centered between the poles is not a problem inherent in the poles. In themselves, they are perfectly in harmony with one another. In fact, they harmonized perfectly in the sinless life of Christ, who is the very image of God and the Word of truth. He understood, affirmed, and lived out the poles to their fullest. The problem is in us, living as we do in this "Already and Not Yet" condition this side of the parousia. So even a church that intellectually affirms all the poles and understands them biblically will nonetheless find them maddeningly and even divisively elusive in practice.

So with all this unsatisfying and dogged imperfection, what’s a poor pilgrim to do? Knowing the multi-polar ideal, a Christian must settle himself in a church that he conscientiously judges to be the best centered among these elusive poles. The centering Christian must then—grace permitting—hold to what is good, and then humbly, cautiously cultivate what is missing.

Christianity is Comedy, not Tragedy

2008-12-20T18:18:00.000-08:00

cartoon by John Guido

What makes this funny? (If you don't think it's funny, just pretend.) A chastened spirit is the last thing you expect from a Viking. Yet Haldor, who is clearly just coming off a rampage or an outburst of Nordic wrath, is looking all sheepish and so-very-sorry. My eleventh grade teacher told us that humor is the juxtaposition of the incongruous. Think of Monty Python's Flying Circus and Airplane.

But for that reason, Haldor illustrates the gospel. That transformation, that new nature, that unnatural kindness and, on the other hand, that brokenness over the evil that lurks within and bursts forth, is what Jesus does with sinners.

Christianity, in that respect, is comedy, not tragedy. My wife, a Grove City College educated English teacher, tells me that comedies and tragedies are distinguished by how they end. Comedies end in weddings, whereas tragedies end in funerals. Consider Shakespeare. Much Ado About Nothing ends in a wedding; Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet end in funerals. The Bible ends with the hope and promise of a wedding. "The Spirit and the bride say, 'Come!'" Christ, the bridegroom, responds, "Yes, I am coming soon" (Revelation 22:17, 20).

I recall Patrick Downey (assoc. prof. of philosophy, St Mary's College, CA) saying something like that when I knew him at Boston College fifteen years ago. You will find something of interest along those lines in his book, Serious Comedy: The Philosophical and Theological Significance of Tragic and Comic Writing in the Western Tradition (Lexington, 2001).

Back to humor--cartoon humor in particular--if you are interested in this subject, you need to read The Naked Cartoonist by Robert Mankoff, the cartoon editor for The New Yorker. He knows what's funny, and he explains why what works works and why what doesn't doesn't. On pp. 21-22 his advice is "just a little more inking--and a lot more thinking." He shows the magic of layering an idea over what otherwise is an ordinary picture, perhaps just by a caption. I always found that this is what separated Bizzaro from The Far Side (aside from off-putting pointy characters versus attractive round ones).

You can read this 2006 HuffPost interview with him.

For example, "If you're watching America's Funniest Home Videos you never say, "I don't get it." You're not saying, "Ok, a guy fell off a chair. Can someone explain that to me again?" But if you're looking at a Danny Shanahan cartoon in which there's two praying mantises -one male and one female and the male is missing his head and the female is saying "You slept with her, didn't you?" There's something to piece together. There's a slight delay where these different sort of competing ideas come together - mesh and produce laughter."

***********
Postscript:

Gregory Wolfe in his wonderful essay, "The Tragic Sense of Life" (Image, Spring 2009), firmly rejects this association of the gospel with comedy, and he cites Hans Urs von Balthasar in support of his position:

The notion that Christianity is somehow alien to tragedy—that it is simply and straightforwardly “comic” because the resurrection makes for a happy ending—could not be more radically wrong. In his essay “Tragedy and Christian Faith,” Hans Urs von Balthasar singles out three essential elements of tragedy: that the good things of the world cannot sustain themselves and are lost; that this places us in a position of contradiction or alienation; and that this condition is bound up with an “opaque guilt,” in which individual moral responsibility cannot account for all suffering, leaving us subject to a mysterious “inherited curse.”
According to von Balthasar, Christ does not banish tragedy but carries it into the heart of God. Christ “fulfills the contradiction of existence...not by dissolving the contradiction but by bearing that affirmation of the human condition as it is through still deeper darknesses in finem, ‘to the end,’ as love....”

David Bentley Hart appears to disagree in The Beauty of the Infinite, pp.374ff.

The Trinity and Harmony

2008-12-13T13:38:00.000-08:00

Trinitarian teaching is usually presented as a bare but inscrutable fact one must simply accept. “We can’t understand it, but we must accept it because the Bible teaches it.” Or it is defended on consequentialist grounds. If God is not Trinitarian, and thus if Jesus is not God, then Christ’s sacrifice for sin was ineffective, and there is no salvation from sin.

But while it is true that the Trinity is ultimately incomprehensible, it is equally true that the world makes no sense without it. The deepest desires of the human heart make no sense without it. Or at least the Trinitarian nature of the Creator makes sense of those fundamental human longings in a way that no other religion or cosmology of any sort does.

When you reflect upon life, you can’t help but notice that there is conflict everywhere -- in marriage, between siblings, at work, on the road in government, between nations...even within oneself. It is inescapable. So how do you deal with that?

1. You can force everyone else to submit to your will. This is tyranny, and we have seen it in men like Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and more recently in Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. But people who deal with conflict this way end up entirely miserable.

2. Another way to deal with conflict is to preclude it by isolating yourself from everyone else. But this ends up in loneliness and self-absorption of a different sort. It is dehumanizing, and thus leads also to misery.

3. The third way, the one for which we were created, is to seek harmony through love. Because we were made in the image of the Trinitarian God, we were made for loving harmony, not for self-centered isolation, nor for self-centered domination. Father, Son and Holy Spirit exist in perfect agreement without any one of them oppressing the others and without each one walling himself off from the others. They exist in eternal, loving harmony.

Handel's Messiah

We can understand harmony between one another by the example God the Creator has given in music. Each note is different; it has a place in the musical order that God has created. That order is fixed. Not even Congress can change the notes, not even if they appropriated $700 billion to do it. Notes are notes. Each note, considered on its own, is beautiful and glorifying to God. But it does not fulfill its purpose until it’s arranged with other notes, e.g. in a melody. Still more glorifying to God, however, is the arrangement of notes in harmony with one another. In a harmony, a number of notes form one sound. That is most glorifying to God because it most resembles the Trinity itself. In a chord of three notes, the three are clearly discernable within one sound.

Accordingly, when we, who were made in his image, live in harmony with one another, we glorify him. We live in harmony when we live as God created us and gifted us to be. Sour notes produce cacophony, not harmony. Sin is a spiritually sour note. That harmonious living involves respecting what God created and gifted others to be. I Corinthians 12 pictures the church this way--as the body of Christ with many parts, each doing its part and respecting all the others for their contributions. This requires knowing godliness in general, and your own gifts and calling in particular. It also requires knowing the other gifts and callings, and respecting what God does with them.

Thus, in Christ, people, like different notes, can come together—regardless of race, class, occupation—and, without surrendering their differences, can find beautiful, God-glorifying unity of purpose. This is not the moralistic, relativistic celebration of difference we hear trumpeted as gospel these days. Nor is it a libertarianism that stands formalistically aloof from distinctions between good and evil. Rather, it is the harmony-shalom-unity that does not deny difference, but honors it's glorious divine purpose.

***
What others are saying:

David Bentley Hart in The Beauty of the Infinite (p.276)

“The image of cosmic music is an especially happy way of describing the analogy of creation to the trinitarian life. Creation is not, that is, a music that explicates some prior and undifferentiated content within the divine, nor the composite order that is, of necessity, imposed upon some intractable substrate so as to bring it into imperfect conformity with an ideal harmony; it is simply another expression or inflection of the music that eternally belongs to God, to the dance and difference, address and response, of the Trinity.”

Robert Letham in The Holy Trinity: In Scripture, History, Theology, and Worship (pp. 438f.)

“The whole idea of developing a theme, of moving progressively and purposefully to a goal, of returning after a myriad of complex modulations to a resolution, of a variety of instruments playing different notes that are all part of a single score, is based on the matrix of realities found in the created order, which the Holy Trinity put there in the work of creation itself, and which reflects who he is.”

Also in Letham, p. 446

“Only a God who is triune can be personal. Only a Holy trinity can be love. Human love cannot possibly reflect the nature of God unless God is a Trinity of persons in union and communion. A solitary monad cannot love and, since it cannot love, neither can it be a person. And if God is not personal, neither can we be—and if we are not persons, we cannot love. This marks a vast, immeasurable divide between those cultures that follow a monotheistic, unitary deity and those that are permeated by the Christian teaching on the Trinity. Trinitarian theology asserts that love is ultimate because God is love, because he is three persons in undivided loving communion. By contrast, Islam asserts that Allah is powerful and that his will is ultimate, before which submission (islam) is required.”

Pray For Your Pastor

2008-12-07T17:40:00.001-08:00

The pastoral ministry is an especially difficult calling. A good minister, like the Good Shepherd he serves, spends himself to exhaustion and gives himself sacrificially for the flock under his care. The labor is particularly demanding because not only is a gospel minister the special target of everything in this world, both seen and unseen, that hates Christ and wants to see his Kingdom fall (as if that were possible), but he also suffers from the assaults of the people whom he serves. He's too dull; he's too passionate. He preaches too long; he preaches to lite. Too much doctrine; too many stories. I just don't like him. He's not the man we had before, or the man I heard at the conference.

Bill Shishko, may pastor at Franklin Square Orthodox Presbyterian Church, is a thoroughly sound and remarkably pastoral preacher, and he recently preached on the importance of praying for your pastor (or, if you are a pastor, the importance of resting in prayer for blessing in your ministry).

Having cautioned the Christians in Ephesus to equip themselves spiritually with the full armor of God and to pray at all times for all the brothers and sisters in Christ, Paul adds a special request to pray for him in particular. He says to pray, "also for me, that words may be given to me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains, that I may declare it boldly, as I ought to speak" (6:19f. ESV).

I will not attempt to reproduce the sermon, or even the sermon outline, but only offer some wisdom that I gleaned from the message.

When you pray for your minister, you are praying for yourself. Paul instructed Timothy, "Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for in so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers" (1 Timothy 4:16). Your minister feeds your soul from the word of God. As he thrives, in due course you will thrive.

The minister's vices often become a virus in the church. When he goes astray, he takes a large part of the church with him into destructive error.

Pray for the minister in his preaching, research, devotional reading, broader reading, prayer life, thought life, counseling, local church government, wider denominational responsibilities, private encounters, family life, finances, worries and encouragement. He is not a rock. Christ is the Rock. He is a sinner like you, a broken vessel through whose weakness God manifests his strength and glory.

A minister's family faces special challenges. There are unique strains on his marriage and pressures on his children. Breakdown in his family has a profound effect through him on the church, on visitors to the church, and on those who are watching the church. Pray for them.

The minister feeds his sheep by his preaching; the flock supports the minister by their prayer.

Before you criticize your pastor, pray for him. No, first develop a history of praying for him.

What if God Were NOT a Trinity?

2008-11-30T12:19:00.000-08:00

The trinitarian nature of God has always been a challenge for Christians. It was a challenge for the church to settle on and formulate the doctrine in the fourth century. It has been a challenge for the church to keep a firm grip on this doctrine in each successive age. Most recently, it is the Russellites, the so-called Jehovah's Witnesses, who have embraced the Unitarian heresy. But American Evangelicals, in their theological shallowness and self-centered sentimentality, have a dangerously weak grasp of this essential doctrine.

The doctrine of the Trinity is challenging because though Scripture clearly teaches the doctrine, albeit indirectly, it is a doctrine that is uniquely incomprehensible. In fact, my theology professor in seminary, Wayne Spear, told us, "If you think you understand the Trinity, you're a heretic." Then he would smile mischievously. Some people have tried to explain the Trinity with pictures and diagrams--think of Saint Patrick and his cloverleaf--but ultimately they attempt to simplify what cannot be simplified without being utterly falsified.

This may lead some to wonder if the doctrine is even true? Of course, a re-engagement with the witness of Scripture should be sufficient to draw the doubting soul back to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, saying "Where else will I turn, Lord? You have the words of eternal life." But As Moses was not able to look at God directly, but instead viewed him indirectly, seeing only his hind parts, so too, though the Trinity may be impossible to understand fully when studying it directly, it may be helpful to examine it indirectly by asking, "What if God were not a Trinity, a tri-unity, one God in three persons?"

Consider three doctrines concerning God as he has revealed himself in the Bible. He is trinitarian, i.e., he is one God and yet he exists in three persons. He is self-sufficient, i.e., he does not need us or anything else in his creation. He is love, i.e., he is essentially relational.

If God were unitarian and essentially relational, he would not be self-sufficient. That is to say, he would suffer loneliness apart from his creation. He would need us. But that is absurd. That would not be a God worthy of worship. That would be a God with whom you could negotiate an eternal bargain. Conceivably the human race could form a labor union of sorts and conspire to withhold fellowship from God unless he met our demands. The very thought of it is blasphemous. I once heard a minister tell his congregation that God created us because he was lonely. Of course, because God is indeed trinitarian, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were perfectly content in loving friendship with one another before the creation of the world. Loneliness was impossible. How could any mere creature rival what the three persons of the Trinity had, continue to have, and always will have with one another? Clearly this minister of Christ was not accustomed to thinking about what came out of his mouth when he instructed his people in their faith. But that notion of God's neediness that only we can fill is very attractive to those who are self-centered and sentimental and thus have little concern to be Biblically theological.

Alternatively, if God were unitarian and wholly self-sufficient, then he would not be love. That is, entering lovingly into relationships would not follow from his essence. He could remain cold and aloof from his human creation, issuing only laws and demands while punishing every infraction with a severe hand. Of course this is Allah, the god of Islam, who is nowhere in the Koran identified as "love."

Both of these absurd consequences are grotesquely unchristian. You cannot be a unitarian--i.e. deny the existence of the one, true God as tri-unity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit--and believe coherently in a transcendent God who is nonetheless a loving God.

The Lord Our Righteousness

2008-10-28T18:00:00.000-07:00

I heard of this hymn, "Jehovah Tsidkenu," by Robert Murray M'Cheyne (1813-1843), the young Scottish preacher of few years and great accomplishment, years ago and have searched for it from time to time. But the Internet clears the brush and exposes all sorts of information!

Jehovah is a corruption of Yahweh, the covenant name of God in the Old Testament. Tsidkenu is Hebrew for "our righteousness." The phrase comes from Jeremiah 23:5-6, "Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In his days Judah will be saved, and Israel will dwell securely. And this is the name by which he will be called: 'The LORD is our righteousness.' (ESV)"

I once was a stranger to grace and to God,
I knew not my danger; and felt not my load;
Though friends spoke in rapture of Christ on the tree,
Jehovah Tsidkenu was nothing to me.

I oft read with pleasure, to soothe or engage,
Isaiah’s wild measure and John’s simple page;
But even when they pictured the blood-sprinkled tree,
Jehovah Tsidkenu seemed nothing to me.

Like tears from the daughters of Zion that roll,
I wept when the waters went over His soul,
Yet thought not that my sins had nailed to the tree
Jehovah Tsidkenu — ’twas nothing to me.

When free grace awoke me by light from on high,
Then legal fears shook me, I trembled to die;
No refuge, no safety in self could I see —
Jehovah Tsidkenu my Saviour must be.

My terrors all vanished before the sweet name;
My guilty fear banished, with boldness I came
To drink at the fountain, life-giving and free—
Jehovah Tsidkenu is all things to me.

Jehovah Tsidkenu! My treasure and boast,
Jehovah Tsidkenu! I ne’er can be lost;
In Thee shall I conquer by flood and by field—
My cable, my anchor, my breastplate and shield!

Even treading the valley; the shadow of death,
This “watchword” shall rally my faltering breath;
For while from life’s fever my God sets me free,
Jehovah Tsidkenu my death-song shall be.
The meter is 11.11.11.11, but a suitable tune of that meter is CARITAS ("My Jesus, I Love Thee").

Spared Death and Sparse Thanks

2008-10-13T16:33:00.000-07:00

A car was crushed under a truck. This video bills the driver as having "cheated death."

The Lord's mercies are a wonder to behold. Even more wondrous is how he continues them despite how little thanks he receives.

And of course the media presents these things as though there were no God. On one level, our country is no different from a atheist regime.

Liberals Fear the Godly in All Forms

2008-09-21T18:31:00.000-07:00

The evangelical church is in bad shape. Our worship is shallow, our intellectual life scandalous, and our politics co-opted. But Lauren Sandler is frightened by our emerging power. In Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement (Penguin, 2007), she says there is something “terrifying and alluring” emerging from our ranks. People who should be growing up into enlightened defenders of Western progress are being drawn into what she calls the “Disciple Generation” of a hip, culturally engaged, profoundly irrational and politically dangerous new evangelicalism.

The book is somewhat sensationalist. Sandler, a self-described “unrepentant Jewish atheist,” wants to alert her secular liberal friends to this looming threat, but she also wants to sell books. So instead of providing a truly general survey of evangelical youth, she highlights the Goth church in the Queens bar, heavily tattooed skateboarders, and the power focused Patrick Henry College students.

In her trolling around the edges of evangelicalism looking for controversy, however, she makes an interesting observation. The “disenchantment with the modern experience, that has not fulfilled all that it promised” (p.239) is driving young people to Jesus, to spiritual discipline and to the agape love that is found in Christian community. That love “is the emotion that secularism, enraptured by its logic and empiricism, refuses to engage” (p.10). Addressing her secularist audience, she warns that, “their lives are in fact a criticism of our own.” In response to this, she suggests that enlightened people save this emerging generation from the lure of superstition and right wing nuttery by “the promise of love articulated within a genuine expression of youth culture” (p.33).

But can secular enlightenment top the resurrection? Because they have no risen, glorified, and life giving Savior, they will not have the "secular Great Awakening" that she sees is necessary to cobat what Christianity offers. Where there is no loving heavenly Father, there can be no movement-wide "promise of love," but only abstract causes and cultural power grabs.

A Debtor To Mercy Alone

2008-08-30T07:52:00.000-07:00

I find that Evangelical college students do not know old hymns. Thus they do not sing the praises of the church throughout the ages. Also as a consequence, they miss out on the theological depth and worshipful instruction that is found is many of these hymns.

"A Debtor To Mercy Alone" is one of my favorites.

A debtor to mercy alone, of covenant mercy I sing;
Nor fear, with Thy righteousness on, my person and off’ring to bring.
The terrors of law and of God with me can have nothing to do;
My Savior’s obedience and blood hide all my transgressions from view.

The work which His goodness began, the arm of His strength will complete;
His promise is Yea and Amen, and never was forfeited yet.
Things future, nor things that are now, nor all things below or above,
Can make Him His purpose forgo, or sever my soul from His love.

My name from the palms of His hands eternity will not erase;
Impressed on His heart it remains, in marks of indelible grace.
Yes, I to the end shall endure, as sure as the earnest is giv’n;
More happy, but not more secure, the glorified spirits in Heav’n.

The words are from Augustus Toplady (1740-1788). The Trinity Hymnal sets it to the tune Trewen, a fine Welsh melody by David Emlyn Evans (1843-1913).

The Audacity of Suing God

2008-08-24T12:36:00.000-07:00

"The Parable of the Vineyard" (Matthew 21:33-46)

by John S. C. Abbott & Jacob Abbott, Illustrated New Testament (1878)

A Nebraska state senator is suing God, WORLD Magazine reports.

Nebraska state Sen. Ernie Chambers, 38, has filed suit against God for causing "widespread death, destruction and terrorization of millions upon millions of the Earth's inhabitants." He claims the litigation is meant to make a serious point about equal access to the court system. But the senator's past criticism of Christians and regular habit of skipping morning prayers during the legislative session suggest that other forces are at work.
The court has threatened to dismiss the lawsuit due to its inability to serve God with notice. But Chambers argues that courts routinely acknowledge God's omniscience and omnipresence while swearing in witnesses and therefore should recognize that God is already aware of the proceedings and will be present for all hearings. ("God on Trial," Aug. 23, 2008; p.14)

This is ironic in the extreme. Imagine a domestic servant who steals from the employer, breaks his stuff, curses him continually, abuses the other servants, acts like he owns the place, never does his job except by accident when it happens to coincide with the servant's own plans, and finally humiliates and even kills the employer's son--his only son, whom he loves. Then when the employer brings consequences to bear upon the servant, not so much in punishment (that is held over until later, if necessary) as in chastisement, the servant sues the employer for unsafe living conditions.

The completely self-serving servant refuses to recognize the food, clothing, shelter, protections and steady flow of comfortable amenities that the employer continues graciously to supply. Moreover, the employer even offers peace and amnesty by transferring the servant's debt of punishment to employer's own son.

And, of course, these chastisements are nothing compared to what the servant deserves: expulsion into the cruel outdoors.

In short, it is we who stand condemned before God--in all his goodness.

Do you suppose, O man—you who judge those who practice such things and yet do them yourself—that you will escape the judgment of God? Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God's kindness is meant to lead you to repentance? But because of your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God's righteous judgment will be revealed. (Romans 2:3-5 ESV)

But, in contrast to sinful human beings, there is mercy and grace before God's righteous seat of judgment...and it centers entirely in the person of Jesus Christ the Savior.

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.

And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God. (John 3:16-21 ESV)

That is news you won't find in the mainstream media.

Community and the Longing Soul

2008-08-21T05:43:00.000-07:00

In a sermon at Franklin Square Orthodox Presbyterian Church on Long Island, New York, Pastor Benjamin Miller said,

We long for a bond of human community that nothing can break (no one moves away, grows cold toward us, dies), in which each is eagerly pursuing the good of everyone with an infinite and gracious love. But that is found only in God the Father through Jesus Christ.

This brings to mind Augustine's prayer from the Confessions, "Father, you made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you." Aristotle's observation is true: we are "political animals." We were made for community. "No man is an island, sufficient unto himself," said Donne. But though made for community, we were not made for this world. What we long for in relationships, we cannot find in earthly, natural relationships.

The human bonds that sweeten our lives are blessings from God, but like all of his blessings they point beyond themselves to the One who alone truly satisfies. It is the failure to see this that in the modern world has led to utopian ideology and thence to monstrous tyranny. Mistaking the sign for the signified, seeking in this world what can be found fully only in the next, or in what transcends this world, is idolatry and leads necessarily to disappointment, misery and destruction.

With that in mind, the wisdom of the American system of government can be seen in its moderation. It secures for each citizen the freedom to pursue happiness, but does not guarantee that happiness. That is only God's to give.

Indeed, God has promised us that happiness. He has promised you that happiness. He gives you himself, and does so only in the Lord Jesus Christ, the Savior of sinners and the Mediator of the New Covenant.

To Israel he said, "I will satisfy the weary soul, and every languishing soul I will replenish" (Jeremiah 31:25 ESV).

He fulfilled this promise in Jesus the Messiah, the hope of all nations: "I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst" (John 6:35).

Vos on the Kingdom of God

2008-08-17T19:26:00.000-07:00

Geerhardus Vos has a fine statement on the kingdom of God in his introduction to The Teaching of Jesus Concerning the Kingdom of God and the Church (Presbyterian and Reformed, n.d.).

He first draws attention to Luke 4:43 where Jesus says, "I must preach the good news of the kingdom of God to the other towns as well; for I was sent for this purpose" (ESV). He adds that the importance of this concept of the kingdom of God "will best be felt by considering that the coming of the kingdom is the great event which Jesus connects with his appearance and activity...(p.9)."

Having made a brief case for the centrality of this idea in the Bible and in the teachings of our Lord, he then cautions the reader against interpretive excess.

While thus recognizing that the kingdom of God has an importance in our Lord's teaching second to that of no other subject, we should not go to the extreme into which some writers have fallen, in finding in it the only theme on which Jesus actually taught, which would imply that all other topics dealt with in his discourses were to his mind so many corollaries or subdivisions of this one great truth. The modern attempts to make the kingdom of God the organizing center of a theological system have here exerted a misleading influence upon the interpretation of Jesus' teaching. From the fact that the proximate object of his saving work was the realization of the kingdom, the wrong inference has been drawn, that this must have been also the highest category under which he viewed the truth. It is plain that the one does not follow from the other. Salvation with all it contains flows from the nature and subserves the glory of God, and we can clearly perceive that Jesus was accustomed consciously to refer it to this divine source and to subordinate it to this God-centered purpose, cf. John 17:4. He usually spoke not of "the kingdom" absolutely, but of "the kingdom of God" and "the kingdom of heaven," and these names themselves indicate that the place of God in the order of things which they describe is the all-important thing to his mind.

It is only with great artificiality that the various component elements of our Lord's teaching can be subsumed under the one head of the kingdom. If any deduction and systematizing are to be attempted, logic and the indications which we have of our Lord's habit of thought on this point alike require, that not his teaching on the kingdom but that on God shall be given the highest place. The relation observable in the discourses of the Fourth Gospel between the person of Christ and salvation, is also the relation which we may conceive to exist between God and the kingdom. Because god is what he is, the kingdom bears the character and embodies the principles which as a matter of fact belong to it. Even so, however, we should avoid the modern mistake of endeavoring to derive the idea of the kingdom from the conception of the divine fatherhood alone. This derivation expresses an important truth recognized by Jesus himself, when he calls the kingdom a fatherly gift to the disciples, Lk 12:32. But it represents only one side of the truth, for in the kingdom other attributes of God besides his fatherhood find expression. The doctrine of God in its entire fulness alone is capable of furnishing that broader basis on which the structure of his teaching on the kingdom can be built in agreement with Jesus' own mind.

It is worth noting that the Great Commission speaks of authority and obedience, but makes no explicit reference to the kingdom of God. Jesus' restatement of it before his ascension in Acts 1 is similarly silent. Vos is saying that not the kingdom but God himself is the comprehensive theme in the Bible and thus in Jesus' teaching, more specifically the glory that he is due and that sinful man, made in his image, has denied him, but which will be his in the end, in heaven, on earth, and under the earth.

But the kingdom is the most prominent expression of that. When the angel announces the Messiah's birth to Mary, he uses kingdom terminology: "...the Lord will give him the throne of his father David. And he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end" (Lk 1:32-33 NKJV). As this gospel is heading for the ends of the earth, Luke tells us in the very last verse of the Book of Acts, "[Paul] lives two whole years at his own expense, and welcomed all who came to him, proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance" (Acts 28:30-31 ESV). The Apostle Luke equates the kingdom of God with the gospel.

Having adequately prepared the reader, Vos then states the unparalleled importance of this kingdom theme.

On the other hand, it cannot be denied that in many respects the idea of the kingdom acted in our Lord's thought and teachings as a crystallizing point around which several other elements of truth naturally gathered and grouped themselves in harmonious combination. That is the idea of the church, where it emerges in his teaching, is a direct outgrowth of the development of his doctrine of the kingdom, will appear in the sequel. But not only this, also the consummation of the world and the final state of glory were evidently viewed by him in no other light than as the crowning fulfilment of the kingdom-idea. Still further, what he taught about righteousness was most closely interlinked in his mind with the truth about the nature of the kingdom. The same may safely be affirmed with reference to the love and grace of God. The great categories of subjective religion, faith and repentance and regeneration, obviously had their place in his thought as answering to certain aspects of the kingdom. Even a subject apparently so remote from the kingdom-idea, in our usual understanding of it as that of miracles in reality derived for Jesus from the latter the larger part of its meaning. Finally, the kingdom stood in our Lord's mind for a very definite conception concerning the historical relation of his own work and the new order of things introduced by it to the Old testament. All this can here be stated in general only; our task in the sequel, will be to work it out in detail. But what has been said is sufficient to show that there is scarcely an important subject i9n the rich repertoire of our Lord's teaching with which our study of his disclosures concerning the kingdom of God will not bring us into contact.

You can find the book online here.

You can buy the Westminster Discount Books reprint of the book from the Westminster Seminary Bookstore here.

The Unity of Religions

2008-08-15T09:11:00.000-07:00

Envir Hoxha (pronounced hoja) smashed the majority Muslim religion in Albania and reduced the faithful of all Illyria's religions to mere co-religionists. The result? Though Albania is 70% Muslim and almost all the rest are either Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholic, it is all quite nominal. In a seminar on the value of religion for democracy, both a "Muslim" and a "Christian" gave an account of the essential unity of all religions, at least the monotheistic ones, and thus the basis on which we can all finally get along in this necessarily shared life. Secularists who remain sentimentally attached to their religious heritage are fond of viewing religion this way.

But is it possible that what is most important in religion--what is most profoundly significant--is not what they share in common but what distinguishes them, i.e. what is unique to each one? That, after all, is how the religious themselves view their own religions. It is only those who are more concerned about peace among men than about peace with God that view it otherwise.

And isn't it always the unique and distinguishing that is of greatest importance? What is common merely directs us to it. If we were to recognize only what is common to all human beings, friendship--that which sweetens life and affirms our humanity--would become impossible, and it is only in friendship--that attachment of one's own particular soul to another particular soul in all its particularity--that humanity is most profoundly understood and cherished. A tyrant has no friends.

Medicine, for example, is premised on an understanding of what is common to all human bodies--the circulation of blood, the respiratory system, the arrangement of organs--and yet without recognizing and taking seriously the distinguishing characteristics of particular bodies, the diagnosis and cure of illness are impossible.

So too with religion. If we recognize only what religions share in common and if we refuse to take seriously what distinguishes them, it is impossible to understand any particular religion or even religion itself.

God became man to remedy sin. But he became a particular man at a particular time to redeem particular men and particular women. If you suppress that distinguishing feature of Christianity, then the religion that you claim teaches essentially the same thing as Islam is not in fact Christianity.

The Innes Theological Blog

2008-08-14T19:21:00.000-07:00

Frontispiece to Francis Bacon's Great Instauration

Why another Innes blog? Well, it is not because I just don't have enough to do. But from time to time I have a strictly theological post that I want to put out there.

My original blog, Principalities and Powers, is for Christian and theoretical reflection on political life. I have avoided posting anything that gets too far off the political and cultural path. This blog allows me that freedom to roam.

I call it Piety and Humanity after Francis Bacon's use of the phrase in New Atlantis, his literary envisioning of the scientific society for which he was laying the practical and theoretical foundation. "Besides, we are come here among a Christian people, full of piety and humanity." It was Bacon's intention to replace piety with the modern virtue of humanity, and retrofit the Christian faith for service to the new science and the brave new world for which it would provide a foundation and establish a horizon.

This blog is in part simple theological reflection, but in part--and unavoidably--a conversation with that world...our world.