Christocentric

The Start of Abolition

2012-01-27T17:54:00.001-06:00

The abolition of slavery as an institution didn't begin with William Wilberforce in the early 19th century, but with Gregory of Nyssa's Easter sermon in 379:

If man is in the likeness of God, and rules the whole earth, and
has been granted authority over everything on earth from God,
who is his buyer, tell me? Who is his seller? To God alone belongs
this power; or rather, not even to God himself. For his gracious
gifts, it says, are irrevocable (Romans 11:29). God would not therefore
reduce the human race to slavery, since he himself, when we
had been enslaved to sin, spontaneously recalled us to freedom.
But if God does not enslave what is free, who is he that sets his
own power above God’s?

Historians have searched in vain for a predecessor to Gregory, so I guess we will have to take Gregory's word for it. He must have gotten this from the Bible.

The Sucking Canvass of Nothingness

2012-01-27T14:10:00.000-06:00

I heard a portion of an interview with Woody Allen on NPR on my way to teach class. Allen confessed that it is hard to find any pleasure in life because of the human predicament hanging over every happy moment.

This means, for Allen, that every enjoyment is not pointing beyond itself to the Joy of joys but is, in his words, "ephemeral." Allen has made atheism the canvass of his life. Whatever pleasing strokes he brushes on are immediately absorbed by the sucking canvass of nothingness.

This has reminded me that life without God is painfully subjective. But life with God guarantees an objective reality that our senses were created to know, and Scripture declares that God has personally entered that reality and we are part of his business of redemption. Let's join the family business!

A Reformation Day Sermon

2012-01-21T10:55:00.000-06:00

I preached this sermon on Reformation Sunday at New Life Presbyterian Church in Muncie, IN.

http://www.newlife-pc.org/media/20111030-WorshipService-1.mp3

Reason and the Logic of Revelation

2012-01-17T20:43:00.001-06:00

Thomas Aquinas believed that reason can prove what faith accepts when the books of nature and Scripture overlap. When special revelation stands alone however, reason receives it and may serve to show its logic.

The Queen of the Sciences

2012-01-17T20:40:00.001-06:00

"Everyone [in the Middle Ages] agreed that theology was by far the most important and highly skilled profession of all. Only the most rigorously trained individuals could practice it. It took seven years to qualify as a theologian, and that was after spending at least four years working on a first degree.... If a philosopher did want to tackle matters of faith, then he was perfectly entitled to join the theology faculty and train as a theologian" (Hannam, The Genesis of Science).

We Are Lovers, This Is True

2012-01-13T18:48:00.001-06:00

We are basically lovers. "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and all your strength," says Jesus. I'm one who tends to lead with my mind, which isn't necessarily bad. But when I reduce man to mind that's bad. Especially when I look down on my less cerebral brothers and sisters.

So I need to remember that the life of the mind is important to an abundant Christian life but not the be all end all. In other words, we all have our primary, secondary, and tertiary love languages when it comes to loving God. We must proactively promote the love languages of our brothers, especially when they are different than ours.

Language and its Detractors

2012-01-11T14:31:00.000-06:00

We tend to forget that the postmodern skepticism about language is communicated through language.

Why Religion Gets to the Heart of Things

2012-01-11T14:06:00.000-06:00

Ken Myers has a good quote on why theology is still the queen of the sciences. Whether it is acknowledged or not, it is the science behind all the sciences:

"Virtually all the major disagreements between rival theories in the sciences and in philosophy can ultimately be traced back to the differences between the religious beliefs that guide them" (Roy Clouser, The Myth of Religious Neutrality: An Essay on the Hidden Role of Religious Belief in Theories, Revised edition, University of Notre Dame Press, 2005.

The Western Classics Are Still Doing Their Job

2011-12-30T12:17:00.000-06:00

I recently watched an interview with David Denby, author of The Great Books. Denby is a journalist and film critic and not conservative or religious. He talks about the multiculturalist and feminist attack on the Western classics as "a white oppressive Euro-centric tradition." He said that when you got to the reasons behind their attack, it all has to do with failure to do failures to do justice as with racism and slavery.

Thus it was a failure of equal rights. Denby points out however, that these notions of equal rights come from the West. They are grounded in the belief that each of us has a soul worth developing and saving and representational government for all. He says, "They criticized the courses [in classical literature] in terms they got from the courses or from the culture itself." He adds, ironically, that this shows the books have done their job.

What's Wrong with Only Doing Evangelism and not Politics?

2011-12-30T12:11:00.000-06:00

In his Politics According to the Bible: A Comprehensive Resource for Understanding Modern Political Issues in Light of Scripture, Wayne Grudem has a nice summary of Alvin Schmidt's work on Christian influence on the state. He also does a nice job critiquing the "do evangelism not politics" view represented by John MacArthur:

Historian Alvin Schmidt points out how the spread of Christianity and Christian influence on government was primarily responsible for outlawing infanticide, child abandonment, and abortion in the Roman Empire (in AD 374); outlawing the brutal battles-to-the-death in which thousands of gladiators had died (in 404); outlawing the cruel punishment of branding the faces of criminals (in 315); instituting prison reforms such as the segregating of male and female prisoners (by 361); stopping the practice of human sacrifice among the Irish, the Prussians, and the Lithuanians as well as among other nations; outlawing pedophilia; granting of property rights and other protection to women; banning polygamy (which is still practiced in some Muslim nations today); prohibiting the burning alive of widows in India (in 1829); outlawing the painful and crippling practice of binding young women's feet in China (in 1912); persuading government officials to begin a system of public [Christian] schools in Germany (in the sixteenth century); and advancing the idea of compulsory education of all children in a number of European countries.

During the history of the church, Christians have had a decisive influence in opposing and often abolishing slavery in the Roman Empire, in Ireland, and in most of Europe (though Schmidt frankly notes that a minority of "erring" Christian teachers have supported slavery in various centuries). In England, William Wilberforce, a devout Christian, led the successful effort to abolish the slave trade and then slavery itself throughout the British Empire by 1840.

In the United States, though there were vocal defenders of slavery among Christians in the South, they were vastly outnumbered by the many Christians who were ardent abolitionists, speaking, writing, and agitating constantly for the abolition of slavery in the United States. Schmidt notes note that two-thirds of the American abolitionists in the mid-1830s were Christian clergymen, and he gives numerous examples of the strong Christian commitment of several of the most influential of the antislavery crusaders .... The American civil rights movement that resulted in the outlawing of the racial segregation and discrimination was led by Martin Luther King Jr., a Christian pastor, and supported by many Christian churches and groups.

There was also strong influence from Christian ideas and influential Christians in the formulation of the Magna Carta in England (1215) and the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the Constitution (1787) in the United States. These are three of the most significant documents in the history of governments on the earth, and all three show the marks of significant Christian influence in the foundational ideas of how governments should function. These foundations for British and American government did not come about as a result of the "do evangelism, not politics" view.

Schmidt also argues that several specific components of modern views of government also had strong Christian influence in their origin and influence, such as individual human rights, individual freedom the equality of individuals before the law, freedom of religion, and separation of church and state....

Therefore I cannot agree with John MacArthur when he says, "God does not call the church to influence the culture by promoting legislation and court rulings that advance a scriptural point of view." When I look over that list of changes in governments and laws that Christians incited, I think God did call the church and thousands of Christians within the church to work to bring about these momentous improvements in human society throughout the world. Or should we say that Christians who brought about these changes were not doing so out of obedience to God? That these changes made no difference to God? This cannot be true.

MacArthur says, "Using temporal methods to promote legislative and judicial change ... is not our calling--and has no eternal value." I disagree. I believe those changes listed above were important to the God who declares, "Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream" (amos 5:24). God cares how people treat one another here on earth, and these changes in government listed above do have eternal value in God's sight.

If the Christian church had adopted the "do evangelism, not politics" view throughout its history, it would never have brought about these immeasurably valuable changes among the nations of the world. But these changes did happen, because Christians realized that if they could influence laws and governments for good, they would be obeying the command of their Lord, "Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them" (Eph. 2:10) (Politics - According to the Bible: A Comprehensive Resource for Understanding Modern Political Issues in Light of Scripture, Zondervan, 2010, 39-51).

Leithart's Defending Constantine points out that Constantine was the first Greco-Roman ruler to recognize the church as its own distinct polis, as Augustine would later distinguish the city of God and the city of Man. This distinction was completely lost on pagans who had worshipped their emperor as a god and assumed that Rome was sacked in 410 because the gods were angry that they weren't getting their sacrifices.

Prior to the Christianization of the empire, there was no distinction much less separation of state and religion. Leithart shows that the pagan Roman Empire was drenched in sacrifice to the Roman gods from top to bottom. Today, modern pagans want to use this Christian distinction between church and state to silence the church in the world at large. Shouldn't this get us talking politics again?

Chesterton on Beckett

2011-12-29T12:55:00.001-06:00

Priceless Chesterton:

WHEN four knights scattered the blood and brains of St. Thomas of Canterbury it was not only a sign of anger but a sort of black admiration. They wished for his blood, but they wished even more for his brains. Such a blow will remain for ever unintelligible unless we realize what the brains of St. Thomas were thinking about just before they were distributed over the floor. They were thinking about the great medieval conception that the Church is the judge of the world. Becket objected to a priest being tried even by the Lord Chief Justice. And his reason was simple: because the Lord Chief Justice was being tried by the priest. The judiciary was itself 'sub judice'. The kings were themselves in the dock. The idea was to create an invisible kingdom without armies or prisons, but with complete freedom to condemn publicly all the kingdoms of the earth. ~GKC: What's Wrong with the World.

Stark Reality

2011-12-29T12:40:00.002-06:00

The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal, Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force .... by Rodney Stark
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Stark brings the eye of a sociologist to the secondary literature on early Christianity. His chapter on life in ancient Antioch is eye opening in terms of realism and Christian transformation of the Greco-Roman world.

Stark was confessedly a cultural Christian at the time, and is now calling himself an independent Christian. As such, he gets some things wrong but is on the right track. The work is invaluable, if for no other reason than it infuriates secularists, who think that human rights came from evolution and are sustainable apart from their real basis.

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A Tribute to C. S. Lewis or Jack's Hagiography

2011-12-29T12:33:00.000-06:00

Jack's Life: The Life Story of C.S. Lewis by Douglas H. Gresham
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Not as good as Gresham's autobiography Lenten Lands, which has much more about Gresham's relationship with C. S. Lewis, his stepfather. In this work, Jack is the hero and Mrs. Moore the villain, but Gresham tries to be understanding of the villain. Mrs. Moore is Jack's adopted mother who he cares for because of a promise he made to her son Paddy during WWI. Warnie, Jack's brother, plays the main supporting role and Gresham and his mother Joy Davidman are a part of the latter years of joy, pain, and struggle, but also victory in Christ.

The biography is a tribute to Jack, who, Gresham says, lived out his Christianity better than anyone he's ever known. The one inconsistency with this is that Jack seems almost incapable of tough love. I got the overwhelming impression that the demanding, self-pitying Mrs. Moore needed some gentle rebuking and firm resistance. But the only person who ever properly stood up to her, in Gresham's pages, was her daughter Maureen. After Maureen married and left the Kilns, she reappears once to tell her mom to back off and give Jack a rest, as he was convalescing in the hospital from exhaustion. Warnie and Jack's friends couldn't understand why Jack always gave in to her incessant pettiness. Whenever pressed, Jack told Warnie to "mind his own business." This also sounds like a failure to make oneself accountable. Warnie was a struggling alcoholic and, rather than intervene, Jack seems to have minded his own business.

That said, Jack does press on patiently and admirably. His sense of duty inspires. One also gets the sense that if it weren't for the inklings and his students Jack would've crumbled. Friendship is a powerful means of grace in Jack's Life, but there is little here about those relationships. This is not as surprising however, as how little there is about Jack's relationship with Gresham's mother and with Gresham himself. Mrs. Moore and Warnie have the most ink next to Lewis himself. I couldn't help feeling cheated.

I've read numerous biographies of Lewis and the Inklings, and this is perhaps the best on Jack's life in the trenches of WWI and his trials with Mrs. Moore. It is wonderfully accessible as it is written on about a fifth grade level and is usually brief, plain, and to the point. Gresham has many wonderful insights into things like Jack's nightmares and Lewis's love and care for his property-the kilns. This is a good place to start with understanding Lewis, but I recommend moving on to Gresham's Lenten Lands, George Sayer's Jack, Humphrey Carpenter's The Inklings, and Diana Pavlac Glyer's The Company They Keep.

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The Problem with the Sovereign Self

2011-12-17T11:34:00.003-06:00

Sometimes post modernity is an amplification of modernity. For instance, both take for granted the sovereignty of the self. In modernity the self could know all. In post modernity, the self has to be more modest. Reality is too slippery, so let it go slip-slidin'-away. It's a beautiful destination right?

Right, except there are no standards for beauty except what the individual likes. So this leads me to the sovereign self of post modernity. The self is sovereign not because it can fit the universe into its brain but because it can remake the universe in its own image. That is as long as it doesn't run roughshod over someone else's sovereign self. So we live for pleasure in splendid isolation. Not too comforting is it?

Christianity has a unique opportunity to say to the modernist that we can reliably but not exhaustively know the world, and, to the post-modernist, that skepticism is not the final answer. This is because we are created by the Logos, in the image of the Logos, and thus our reason and senses were made to know the world. So we can say yes to certainty AND humility. Reason is made to know the world of God's natural and special revelation through the senses. Thus, the self is not sovereign but is its true self under God in Christ.

Lust for Power Becomes a Powerful Lust

2011-11-29T22:59:00.001-06:00

When the self and the state supplant Christ as moral authority, the law becomes "do whatever you like as long as you don't put your neighbor in physical danger." As Anothony Esolen says, this means we will be ruled by our appetites (Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civ.).

Why the Modern State is Jealous of the Ancient Church

2011-11-25T17:12:00.001-06:00

Charles Matthews, on the latest Mars Hill Audio Journal, points out that the modern nation state has made the church an offer. It offers the church "freedom" if it would understand itself as a denomination within the overarching category of the nation state. Christians needs to politely say, "No deal!" And consequences be damned. This is because the Bible calls the church "a holy nation" and anything less is bowing to Nebuchadnezzar and no true freedom (2 Peter 2:9).

The state makes this offer because it feels threatened by the absolute loyalty Christians are called to give to Christ. It is also jealous of the church's God-given role in the world. In other words, the state wants absolute loyalty and to do everything Christ has called the church to do, like mercy ministry, which it calls welfare. The modern nation state wants us to believe that there's a political remedy to our every ill and has gotten the church to abdicate its vocation to heal these diseases.

Douglas Wilson has pointed out that, in a sense, every state is a theocracy. The state either points the way to the true God, false gods, or puts itself forward as god. I would argue that the modern nation state of America has done the latter. The neutral secular state is a myth. Cavanaugh in his Migrations of the Holy has pointed out that the we have assembled the largest military in the history of the world in order to propagate our homemade religion here and abroad.

We must love our nation enough to want it to be just.

Writing for the Word

2011-11-18T12:37:00.000-06:00

Wordsmithy | Why Christians must write, and what they must write about | Doug Wilson from Daniel Foucachon on Vimeo.

Christian Comedy

2011-11-07T21:16:00.000-06:00

The ancient pagan worldview said, "Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die." Jesus said, "Be of good cheer, for I have overcome the world." Anthony Esolen points out that the pagan worldview is tragic, but the Christian worldview is a comic (Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization, 95-96).

Not Caring What Anybody Thinks

2011-11-07T20:09:00.001-06:00

I preached on Reformation Sunday in Muncie, IN and in chapel at Heritage Classical on Reformation Day. I came to the conclusion, based on Romans 1:16-17, that once you know you have God's righteousness you don't care what anybody thinks. That's what gave Luther courage to defy the two super powers of his day:

[Since you desire a plain answer I will give it] Unless I can be instructed and convinced with evidence from the Holy Scriptures or by evident reason, I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. Here I stand, I can do no other God help me. Amen.

Then I ran across this on Blog and Mablog:

Courage . . . is the indispensable requisite of any true ministry . . . If you are afraid of men and a slave to their opinions, go and do something else. Go and make shoes to fit them" (Phillips Brooks, as quoted in Stott, Between Two Worlds, p. 300).

Annus Significans

2011-11-05T13:11:00.001-05:00

1831: Year of Eclipse by Louis P. Masur
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Start with a solar eclipse, add Nat Turner's slave Rebellion, Charles Finney's revivals, de Tocqueville's travels, the Trail of Tears, nullification debates with John C. Calhoun, Andrew Jackson, and the octogenarian John Madison, Audobon's birds, a cholera epidemic, a pinch of Transcendentalism, then shake violently and you have the most important year in ante-bellum America.

Masur brings in Frances Trollop, Beaumont, Tocqueville, the British Hamilton, and a host of others to show us as a nation living numerous contradictions, such as liberty and slavery, law and Indian removal, the rise of the Democratic Party led by King Andrew I, and the celebration of nature and industrial revolution. Tocqueville shows us to be a nation of conquerers who thrive on instability and are driven by the profit motive. Individualism, rugged and revivalistic, was running rampant and would eventually redefine democracy as the pursuit of personal preference.

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Constantine vs. Constantinianism

2011-10-25T19:09:00.000-05:00

Constantine is usually accused of mixing church and state, as if the Roman world prior to him were a secular state. But Roman emperors before to Constantine claimed to be part of the Pantheon of gods to whom the Romans were to sacrifice.

When Constantine broke with the Roman sacrificial system, he sided with Christianity, but far from mixing church and state, he distinguished them for the first time. He did this by recognizing the church as a distinct polis with its own authority structure and by tolerating paganism. Constantine was only an interested observer at the council of Nicea and not the final judge, and he allowed pagans to continue to serve as government officials.

What Constantine actually did was allow the church to reform the state without making the church an arm of the state. The church introduced equal rights for all and charity toward the poor, but wasn't yet used to oppress pagans. Constantine recognized the need for church unity within the empire and called the council of Nicea, but his Christian successors thought the empire needed to be uniformly Christian and called for the removal of paganism. As a result, some began to condone force and the empire became less and less Christian.

Debating Instead of Demonizing

2011-10-08T15:12:00.003-05:00

Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation by Joseph J. Ellis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Founding Brothers by Joseph Ellis is lively, well-written book, which argues that the founders succeeded not because they liked each other or got along, most of the time they didn't, but because they resolved their differences by doing politics face to face.

Ellis writes in vivid images and analogies but is sometimes too wordy for his own good. For instance, Ellis demonstrates that Adams wanted, in modern terms, to "deconstruct" all romanticized accounts of the founding. But this is because Adams thought the historians of his day didn't do justice to the greatness of his own contribution. Ellis writes: "At its nub, his [Adam's] critique of the historical fictions circulating as seductive truths was much like a campaign to smash all the statures, because the sculptor had failed to render a satisfactory likeness of yours truly" (217). What a vivid and memorable sentence, but could've been more effective if shortened into a punch.

Ellis goes on to show just how much the ambitious Adams wanted to be the central figure of the American pantheon of heroes. When Adams was hidden between the lines given to Washington and Jefferson, he wanted to grab the pages of history and start shredding. Privately he mocked Washington for his lack of classical education and once referred to him (though not cited in Ellis) as "old mutton head." Ellis says Washington read mostly newspapers.

Adams was almost post modern in wanting to show that reality defies neat dissection into good guys sporting white hats and bad guys in black hats. He especially wanted to expose Jefferson's betrayals of the Adam's administration. He also wanted to vindicate himself to his critics showing, among other things, that he was responsible for averting war with France in 1800 and not interested in creating an Adam's dynasty by passing on the presidency to John Quincy.

Ellis shows that Adams was jealous of Jefferson because the July 4th Declaration of Independence came to be seen as the defining moment of the new nation. Instead, Adams pointed to the debates in Congress that made that declaration possible. It turns out that Jefferson hadn't participate in those debates, shy as he was, but Adams held forth there and won the day when, on MAY 15, 1776, "Congress passed a resolution calling for new constitutions in each of the states" (242-43).

This was definitive, Adams thought, because the states were creating "separate and independent American governments" and thus breaking with their British Charters. This was the true and original declaration of independence. He looked back on Jefferson's writing of the Declaration as a historical accident that occurred because Adams himself deferred to his junior partner in order to give him something to do. Why couldn't people like his historian friend Mercy Otis Watson see John Adams as the ultimate American hero that he was?

Ellis also argues that historians do their best work when they realize that history doesn't look inevitable at the moment when it was happening. Historians must give uncertainty back to the actors in the historical moment, while also considering the outcomes from the modern vantage point. He writes: "We need a historical perspective that frames the issues with one eye on the precarious contingencies felt at the time, while the other eye looks forward to the more expansive consequences perceived dimly, if at all, by those trapped in the moment. We need, in effect, to be nearsighted and farsighted at the same time" (6-7). Ellis is the master of using alliteration like "contingencies" and "consequences," which stick in the mind. He is the truly rare combination of a competent historian and clear writer. He proves his thesis in spades showing how the founding fathers were indeed brothers who succeeded not because they didn't clash, but because they looked at each other across the table of creative compromise.

Unfortunately, many of the compromises, like the three-fifths compromise, just prolonged the debate until the slave question erupted into civil war. The founding fathers also feuded over whether federal or state power had ultimate sovereignty. This too was finally settled by civil war, and yet the debate goes on in the fallout over how much federal power should be wielded over states, private individuals, and corporations.

In terms of feuding fathers, one squabble went out with a bang, but Ellis argues that the Burr-Hamilton duel was an anomaly. Most quarrels were settled like the Hamilton-Madison argument over whether the federal government should shoulder the burden of state debts after the Revolution. Hamilton, the federalist of federalists, wanted the government to assume this responsibility for the states it was going to rule. Madison feared this would make the states dependent upon and thus subservient to federal power. Jefferson invited the two disputants to dinner, where Madison promised not to make it a hill to die on as long as the future capitol would reside in Virginia. Jefferson and Adams feuded over Jefferson's role in paying a newspaper to print libels against Adams when they were serving together as President and Vice President. Adams had some newspaper men thrown in prison under his controversial "Alien and Sedition Acts" and probably wished he could do the same to his VP. But even this row resolved itself as the two "explained" themselves to each other through statesman like correspondence in their twilight years.

It was the Founders way to feud, and then work it out after "looking each other in the eye." The founders successfully created a new nation because they talked, broke bread together, and lived cooperatively. They would probably be amazed that their union is still together and using their legacy to debate the same issues. But today's political wars tend to be fought on the impersonal battle fields of cyber space and the air waves. Could we accomplish more by settling our differences in community, instead of demonizing each other to our constituents in the partisan media outlets or over twitter or facebook? I think Ellis's Founding Brothers suggests we could.

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Did Everything Good in the State Come From the Church?

2011-10-04T22:41:00.000-05:00

Defending Constantine by Peter J. Leithart
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Americans tend to assume that we cannot have religious freedom without a separation of church and state. But Leithart shows that Constantine created true religious freedom almost a millennium and a half before the US Constitution and within a Christian empire. How did he do this?

First of all he didn't try to turn the church into an arm of the state. Constantine tried to reform his empire with the gospel of Christ, but he did not try to control the church. He respected the church as a distinct polis with its own sphere of authority. For instance, he called the council of Nicea but didn't attempt to determine its outcome. He tolerated paganism in the civil realm, but let the church carry on its own culture war with the empire's pagan past. Compare this to conservatives turning the Christian Coalition of the 1990s into a religious arm for the Republican party (See Stephan Carter's God's Name in Vain).

Now we might consider Constantine's Christian reforms of the Roman state dangerous, but without them, Leithart points out, the state would have continued to allow men to abandon their wives through divorce, treat their unwanted infants as disposable property, sell their children into slavery, and enjoy murder in the gladiatorial arenas as entertainment. Before Constantine, equality could not be assumed. That came from the Christian doctrine of creation, which taught that all people are made in the image of God.

Leithart shows that sacrifice to the Roman gods and the deified emperor was the central religious act in a very religious empire. Constantine broke with the pagan Roman past by not offering the customary sacrifices after his triumph at the Milvian Bridge in 312. He turned the back the demise of the empire by looking out for the disadvantaged. He gave tax breaks to poor parents who couldn't afford to raise their children. Constantine reformed the corrupt judicial system of Rome by turning justice for the those who couldn't afford representation over to ecclesiastical courts.

Constantine had his faults but he knew that the state needed the moral authority of the church in order to defend women, children, and the poor. We are now losing the ground he gained by promoting a secular understanding of the separation of church from the state. Without a transcendent basis for our laws everyone does what is right in their own eyes. There are no absolutes in Israel, and we are re-paganizing at an alarming rate with abortion, no-fault divorce, and commercial combinations that widen the gap between rich and poor.

Would to God that more Christians would, like Leithart, defend Constantine instead of Congress.

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Loving God in Each Other

2011-09-25T22:58:00.000-05:00

Loving the Unseen God

Text: 1 John 4: 7-21

I. Intro.
A. (Att. Getter) It’s easy to love a god you cannot see. This is because we can imagine an unseen God to be however we like.
B. (Textual) John says that we must love God not according to our own imagination. We must love God according to who he really is. And how do we know who he really is? John says that we know who he is because he has revealed himself in Christ’s love and he has revealed himself in each other.
C. (Transition) Let’s take a look at how God has revealed himself so that we can truly love him for who he is.
II. The first way God has revealed himself is in sending his Son to die for our sins.
A. It’s easy to love a God we cannot see, but can we love a God who “sent his son to be a propitiation for our sins?”
B. To love God we must accept the fact that we are in such a bad condition that it required God to become a man and die in order to save us. Steve Brown has said God’s grace is a radical grace, but to receive it we must accept that we are radical sinners.
C. We are sinners who cannot save ourselves. We deserved God’s wrath and couldn’t do anything to satisfy his wrath.
D. (Ill) Sometimes we say to our spouse in exasperation, “What do you want from me.” In other words, “What can I do to make you happy.” What if our spouse said, “Nothing.” That would be a terrible, helpless feeling. But what if our spouse said, “The only way that I can love you is by giving my life for yours. Then and only then can you become a person I can love.” That is actually true. We could never love each other unless we sacrificed ourselves to our spouse. When we make sacrifices for our spouse it makes the other person lovable. “If we don’t sacrifice ourselves we end up sacrificing each other” (Glenn Kaiser). God paid the ultimate sacrifice for us so that he could make us the object of his love and save us. Therein we see his love.
E. This means that we should love each other by laying down our lives for each other. Love begets love. If you want something to be lovable start loving it. Love makes things lovely. Love has a redeeming power that transforms whatever it loves.
F. This is why Paul says, “Without love, I am a resounding gong or clanging symbol.”
G. C. S. Lewis wrote, “The husband is the head of the wife just in so far as he is to her what Christ is to the Church. He is to love her as Christ loved the church – read on – and gave his life for her (Eph. V, 25). This headship, then, is most fully embodied not in the husband we should all wish to be but in him whose marriage is most like a crucifixion; whose wife receives most and gives least, is most unworthy of him, is – in her own mere nature – least lovable. For the church has no beauty but what the Bride-groom gives her; he does not find, but makes her, lovely. (the Four Loves 105-06).
H. We must make each other lovely to ourselves.
I. Someone once told me that they found it very hard to love someone. I said, “Love him and you will find him lovable.” This is divine, agape love. There is nothing lovely about us to the holy God, but he lays down his life in an act of love to make us lovely.
J. In this way, as Lewis points out, husbands are responsible for the loveliness of their wives.
K. John says in v. 17, “we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world.” If we want assurance of salvation we must love others as Christ loved us with sacrificial love.
L. This is not impossible. Jesus is our source, “We love because he first loved us” (v. 17).

III. The second way God has revealed himself is in each other.
A. v. 12, “No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.” What is John talking about?
B. God is invisible but he is made visible in each other. When we love one another sacrificially his sacrificial love is perfected in us.
C. When we go beyond just saying we love one another and actually start loving each other then we find his love in us.
D. v. 20, “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.”
E. The invisible God is made visible in each other. If we cannot love God as he is seen in each other, we cannot claim to love him as he is unseen.
F. It’s easy to love a God we cannot see. It’s another thing to love the God we see in Christ and the cross and each other.
G. But this is who God truly is. We see his sacrificial love in Christ and we see his diversity in each other.
H. Why can’t we love one another when God is in each other? We come to think that God is like us and those who are different are ungodly or unchristian.
I. But God says we cannot claim to love him as he is invisible if we don’t love him where he is visible.
J. (Ill) Gr. Charlie, the church split, and the man he wouldn’t let hate him.
K. This is why marriage is so important. It teaches us to love someone quite different from ourselves.
L. (Ill) there are two kinds of marriages: birds of a feather flock together and opposites attract. The research says that the more successful marriages are birds of a feather flock together. But I know of more marriages where opposites attract. God loves bringing people together who are quite different from each other. Their marriages might not be as successful but maybe they can be better and broader people. I wonder if birds of a feather might not get along better but become more lopsided as people. We are exposed to more through people who are different in temperament, personality, and taste.
IV. Conclusion:
A. God reveals himself in two ways: in his son’s sacrificial love on the cross and in each other.
B. The first transforms us and we see the evidence of that transformation in how we love or do not love people different from us.
C. It’s easy to love a God we cannot see, but loving the God we see in Christ and in each other is more rewarding.

Quicksand for a Foundation

2011-09-21T22:56:00.000-05:00

One of the most prevalent myths of modern times is that the Enlightenment produced science and technology. It was in fact the Christian West that produced the scientific method and modern science.

Other civilizations had no rationale for pursuing science. Platonism did not teach, as Christianity does, that the universe was created ex nihilo (out of nothing) and thus good and knowable by mind. It was the Christian doctrine of creation that gave medieval philosophers a basis for pursuing science. The fact that God created the material world good and us in his image provided a basis for doing science. It meant that our senses were reliable, our reason could be trusted for processing our observations, and systematic knowledge could be built and passed on to other minds.

Simply put, God made our senses to know the world and our mind to develop its potential. This is gave us our "proper confidence." The Enlightenment borrowed that confidence in sense perception and reason but removed their basis in God. As a result, we are now smacked down by the post-modern backlash against Enlightenment confidence in reason, sense impressions, and thus science. See Thomas Kuhn's 1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions if you doubt. The growing consensus is that we are trapped in our own subjectivity.

As Christians we should be poised and ready to restore our "proper confidence" in our ability to observe, report, test, and draw conclusions. There is a basis for science that is rooted in the Christian doctrine of creation. Otherwise we're left with Einstein's conclusion that "What can't be proven scientifically is the scientific nature of science itself." To build science on science is to use quicksand for a foundation. Science must be based on faith in the God of creation and redemption.

Colson on Classical

2011-09-04T15:36:00.001-05:00

Will Anyone Go To Hell?

2011-08-11T14:56:00.000-05:00

Robert Peterson was my mentor at Covenant Theological Seminary, and he has ably responded to Rob Bell's book Love Wins. Dr. Peterson has published several excellent books on eternal destinies and the Bible's teaching on salvation.

Like Dr. Peterson, we need to let God speak for himself through Scripture in dealing with questions of heaven and hell, especially at a time when our culture has no stomach for hard truth and real grace.

Big-leaguers, the Ball, and the Cross

2011-07-29T21:50:00.003-05:00

My son gave me an article to read out of his Sports Illustrated called "Loving Baseball: What Keeps the Grand Game Great? Everything Old Is New Again." It's thesis is that baseball is timeless, at least compared to other modern sports. This is because it's about history as much as the current happenings. What other sport gives you as much opportunity to relish the present in light of the past?

Baseball is a game out of time.... Think about this for a moment: What else but baseball connects us to America of, say, 1891? What else has burned so long in our consciousness? The American population in 1891 was less than about one quarter of what it is now. That was before movies, before television, before radio before Hershey bars, before Wrigley gum, before even Brett Favre. America the Beautiful had not been written. Dracula did not exist [yes he means the novel by Bram Stoker], no Roosevelt had yet been president.... The Olympics, more than 1,500 years since their last staging, would not resume for another five years.

The author, Joe Posnanski, points out that baseball is also played without a clock, and for this it is ridiculed by its critics:

The people who do not love baseball feel its timelessness too. They lampoon a game that feels ... so ... yesterday. They mock baseball ... for its interminable pauses, for sparking so little violence and motion for struggling to adapt (No replay? Really?), for being measured by numbers well to the right of decimal points. "You made me love baseball," Lisa told Bart on The Simpsons. "Not as a collection of numbers, but as an unpredictable, passionate game beaten in excitement only by every other sport."

Baseball falls on hard times in a culture where happiness is equated with excitement instead of patient obedience. You must wait for the drama. It will reward, you just don't know when. But to be there in the moment it happens is bliss. Those interminable pauses are really opportunities for historical repartee. Remember when Bruce Sutter lept into Daryl Porter's arms? Remember, "Go crazy folks! Go crazy!" Remember Adam Wainwright striking out Brandon Inge to win the 2006 World Series? Remember Brummer stealing home? That's Whitey Ball! Would you rather have Willie McGee or Jim Edmonds on your dream team? (I'm obviously a Cardinals fan). Thus the present is always drenched in the past. This makes baseball fans more than history buffs. The liturgies of baseball turns us into a historical community.

But football is different. Football is about looking ahead, betting on the future. Football is about recruiting and the draft and three-team parlays on Sunday. Sure football celebrates its history, but only as history, like a married couple that every now and then looks at the wedding album. In baseball, history is a living and breathing character. When Mark McGwire hit 70 home runs and then Barry Bonds hit 73 and 762 and both, one publicly, the other tacitly, later acknowledged having used steroids--well, that wasn't just an unhappy incident for many baseball fans. It was a crack in baseball's timeline. It broke up baseball's one hallowed connection to Hank Aaron and Roger Maris and Babe Ruth and the past. If football's history was wiped blank tomorrow the game would go on, as popular as ever. Not so baseball.

Baseball, in this way, illustrates something true about the church:

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God (Heb. 12:1-2).

Each time we celebrate the Lord's Supper or hear the preacher proclaim the gospel or sing an ancient hymn "everything old is new again." Covenants are ancient but they are always being renewed. Christ is present in the Supper and "we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses." "Therefore ... let us also lay aside every weight ... and let us run with endurance the race." History is alive in the here and now, defining the true from the false, the orthodox from the heretical, and the living from the dead. We don't have to be slaves of the culture, bound to its fads by the shackles of cool. Just like baseball can keep Pete Rose out of the Hall, instant replay out of the calls, and put real grass back into stadiums, the church has its own culture that defines it in every age and keep it in fellowship with every Christian down through the ages.

Baseball's biggest problems, like those of us with thinning hair, seem to happen whenever it tries to act young. The All-Star Game in Phoenix feels to me like a three-day comb-over. Look, the All-Star Game will never be what it was.... Progress leaves behind casualties. The efforts to keep the All-Star game vibrant and cool--such as the interminable Home Run Derby, the baffling player-selection process and giving home field advanage in the World Series to the winning league--make baseball look as if it's wearing black socks with sandals and saying "dude" a lot. Many of the game's most popular players, including Jeter himself, were not at the game this year. And fewer people watch it on television than ever before.

Similarly the church's biggest problems happen when it tries to be relevant. This is not because it is trying to be something it isn't. It's because the church is already more relevant than any of us can tell right now. Look how it has outlasted every ruler and philosopher that declared it dead from Nero to Mohammed, from Voltaire to Kant, from Nietzsche to Sartre, and it will certainly be here when Ditchkins is gone. C. S. Lewis once quipped, "All that is not eternal is eternally out of date" ("Charity," in The Four Loves). G. K. Chesterton wrote, ‎"The church always seems to be behind the times, when it is really beyond the times" (The Ball and the Cross). If we, the church, would stop trying to be cool, and just be our God-given selves, we might realize how eschatologically cool we are! I see more baseball and Bible in the future.

Gospel Hinges

2011-07-24T15:09:00.001-05:00

Deuteronomy 6:6, 9:

These words that I command you today ... You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

The door is the gateway to the outside world and back into the home. It needs to turn on gospel hinges. It is the entry way to both realms because it must govern our interactions in both places. In My Life for Yours: A Walk Through the Christian Home, Douglas Wilson points out that the door is also a protection from the outside world. Sometimes the door needs to be firmly shut.

Comforting Sovereignty

2011-07-24T14:51:00.000-05:00

Got this from a friend on FB:

Indeed the great point for our comfort in life, is to have a well grounded persuasion that we are where, all things considered, we ought to be. It is no great matter whether we are in public or private life, in a city or a village, in a palace or a cottage. The promise, My grace is sufficient, is necessary to support us in the smoothest scenes, and is equally able to support us in the most difficult. (John Newton)

God's sovereignty always has us where his grace is sufficient.

Curiosity and Kids

2011-07-16T23:37:00.002-05:00

Deuteronomy 6:20-25:

When your son asks you in time to come, 'What is the meaning of the testimonies and the statutes and the rules that the LORD our God has commanded you?' then you shall say to your son, 'We were Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt. And the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand. And the LORD showed signs and wonders, great and grievous, against Egypt and against Pharaoh and all his household, before our eyes. And he brought us out from there, that he might bring us in and give us the land that he swore to give to our fathers. And the LORD commanded us to do all these statutes, to fear the LORD our God, for our good always, that he might preserve us alive, as we are this day. And it will be righteousness for us, if we are careful to do all this commandment before the LORD our God, as he has commanded us.'

God's covenant culture was a culture of question asking. In other words, there should be in our homes an inculcation of curiosity. Not everything is taught. Some things are taught and other things are left for Q and A. This also means that we as parents need to be ready to take advantage of teachable moments.

Evolution Is So Impossible it Happened a Lot!

2011-07-08T23:36:00.001-05:00

Here's a great interview with John C. Collins, my former professor at Covenant Seminary, about the controversy recently generated by geneticists concerning whether we are descended from an original couple (Genesis) or from a pool of separately evolving humans (polygenesis).

Sometimes it takes good science a long time to catch up to the Bible. How much "change over time" is necessary before we realize our ancestors were Adam and Eve and not the Adam's Family?

Is Worldview More Caught than Taught?

2011-07-08T15:03:00.000-05:00

Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation by James K.A. Smith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

James K. A. Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom lays siege to the church’s current approach to worldview training. He says our current fascination with worldview is dominated by a philosophical emphasis that tends to overlook the body and the imagination. Man is treated like “a brain in a vat” rather than as the embodied lover God made him. This leads to an impoverishment of the church and the Christian life and surrender to the world, the flesh, and the devil. Smith seeks to redirect his readers into culture building through the church’s ancient liturgy. He argues that the liturgical practices of the church are full-bodied culture builders that can direct our desires, order our loves, and train our habits for fuller expressions of the kingdom. I think there is much to praise here but also some cautions that Smith shouldn’t have “thrown to the wind.” More about that below. One caution: I found Smith’s book is so provocative and challenging, I couldn’t help writing a longer review essay than a mere review of his ideas.

Smith specifically takes aim at his own reformed tradition which tends to be idea driven instead of practice driven. The reformed tradition tends to view the person as a container of ideas that issue forth in actions, rather than a passionate person formed by practices first and that issue in propositions later. Smith even sees in the reformed emphasis on “basic beliefs” that undergird ideas something more akin to propositions than passions. He fears that this approach, advocated by the highly respected Plantinga, Wolterstorff, and Dooyeweerd also reduces Christianity to a “belief system.” This reduction tends to ignore our the role of the body and makes the faith something that can be mediated outside the church (45). Smith argues that love is the basic human orientation to the world. Man is primarily a lover and secondarily a thinker or believer. Affections are more basic than thoughts, ideas, and propositions.

This is provocative for someone like me who was raised in a rebellion against liturgy. In my circles tradition was out and being "led by the Spirit" was in. This implied, of course, that either our forebears weren't led by the Spirit or the Holy Spirit was doing a new thing or both. I suspect it was both. I later moved toward the intellectual approach which could also denigrate the liturgical as a mindless “going through the motions.” I have since come to appreciate the benefit of time tested liturgy. Smith goes one further by arguing that all of life is liturgical. It is liturgical in that it consists of practices both thick and thin that train our desires. Thick ones are like the Lord's Supper, and thin ones are like brushing your teeth or checking for ticks. These direct our loves, and thus form us as people. The thick practices obviously have a greater impact on who we are. Smith argues that all of life is sacramental but the sacraments themselves are a God ordained intensification of the sacramental order into an act of special grace.

Smith convincingly reveals the liturgies of the mall, media, and market for what they are: training grounds for a kingdom other than the Kingdom of God. Far from innocent, they are "secular liturgies," fine tuned and field tested by media elites and advertisers. They are designed to make us want to dispose of what we have in discontent and purchase the new and the novel. These liturgies tend to express our fallenness and often participate in the demonic. For instance, it is not so subtly suggested to young men that if they mist some axe body spray over themselves beautiful young girls will throw themselves at them. Not only must we be aware of our culture if we don't want to be manipulated by it, but we must also reform it so that we will be reformed in turn. It turns out that, according to Smith, the evangelical and Reformed churches haven’t been as effective as the consumer culture at speaking to the heart and shaping desire.

As mentioned, Smith targets the current evangelical approach to worldview education, because it treats man like a brain walking around in an earth-suit. Smith says our approach to Christian worldview development is overly intellectual and cognitive. Smith's critique is based upon his argument that man is primarily a lover and secondarily a philosopher. We feel, sense, and "love before we know" (70). We imagine before we theorize (66, 134). One might say that worldview is "more caught than taught." Smith says worldview is visceral, running off of sense impressions from the body that fuel the imagination. Only a small percentage of worldview is usually processed by reason. It is also the case that while Christian truth forms Christian practice, our rational understanding and articulation of that truth comes later. Smith does not denigrate the cognitive mind. After all his book is an intellectual tour-de-force which aims to make us better appreciate what is going on in secular and sacred liturgies. His argument is that the teachings of the Christian faith are embedded in the practices and this is gradually discovered intellectually as reason matures. Thus God-ordained worship is the font of personal worldview (136). Visions of the kingdom are implicit in the liturgies (121). He argues that the proper use of the intellect is to deepen our understanding of the liturgical. We can reflect on and reform the liturgy as Smith encourages us to do. For instance, Smith asks us to consider what is going on when we go to the mall.

A walk through the mall presents one with sights, sounds, and smells. It also sends messages and puts us through motions that appeal to the whole person. The mall says fix it not through "confession but in consumption." Smith comments, "implicit in those visual icons of success, happiness, pleasure, and fulfillment is a stabbing albeit unarticulated recognition that that's not me" (96). But it can be me, if I proceed to the altar to complete my worship experience with transaction overseen by a high priest of consumerism professionally trained to pull it off with a smile and a tease for next time.

Smith argues that thick cultural practices, like going to the mall, train our hearts through casting a spell over our imaginations. The body is not unconnected to what we think, contra Kant and the Enlightenment. Smith asserts, and I think rightly, that bodily practices activate and animate our imagination. The heart is trained by the disciplines of the body. Meanwhile, Smith points out, the church tries to extinguish the lust consuming our hearts by pouring water on our heads. He says that we need to develop habits of daily worship in private, in our churches, schools, and families (211). Smith is giving us what he calls a "methodological jolt" by switching us from worldview beliefs to worldview practices and thus liturgies (93). He actually prefers the term "social imaginary" to worldview, but I'm afraid its not nearly as catchy.

Smith emphasizes, a la St. Augustine, that man is a lover and his loves need to be ordered. Smith understands liturgies as rituals that form and direct our loves. His recipe for reordered love through liturgical practices travels through three institutions: the church, the school, and the family. He points to the church as the cultural center of the kingdom that orders our loves under God. Quoting Witvliet, Smith refers to the Bible and worship as "God's language school" that "challenges us to practice forms of faithful speech to God that we are not likely to try on our own. Authentic worship, like toddler talk, expresses who we are and forms what we are becoming" (172). Smith is saying that if we want to love God with all our heart, soul, and strength we must do liturgy. We must kneel, fold our hands, confess, pray, stand, lift our arms, sing, dance, hear, see water trickle over an infant’s head, take, eat, touch, smell, drink, open, read, write, reason, praise, smile, shake hands, hug, and give thanks.

With respect to education, Smith quotes Stanley Hauerwas who said that “every education is a moral formation.” This means that the idea of a secular education that conveys information without formation is a myth. Smith calls for the Christian university to be the ecclesial university. Medieval universities were founded by the church and served as extensions of the church into the world. Today's secular university is, quoting Hauerwas, "the great institution of legitimation in modernity whose task is to convince us that the way thing are is the way things have to be" (221). Smith is refreshing in calling for a radical reformation of Christian universities. “The Christian university should not only be born but also nourished ex corde ecclesiae, ‘from the heart of the church’.” This would include “baptismal renunciations of what the surrounding culture might consider 'excellence’ ” (221). This means the "ecclesial university curriculum" will not look like that of the secular state university "plus Jesus" (220-222). In fact, it might not even ensure its students' success in a world formed by secular liturgies. Smith wants us to consider whether we are willing to pay the price for a truly Christian education.

Smith cites David McCarthy who refers to the family the “domestic church” (212, n. 129). The church is the “first family” that defines our homes and opens them to those to whom Christ ministered. In most Christian traditions, as soon as a child is born into a Christian family, he is baptized by the church. Smith calls baptism a subversive sacrament that, in the words of McCarthy, "establishes a communion that qualifies our relationships of birth" (186). This flies in the face of the modern idols of choice and democracy. Smith points out that since the Enlightenment freedom has been increasingly defined in terms of the mere act of choosing. Historically and biblically freedom has more to do with the ability to choose the good. Modernity has reduced freedom to the mere exercise of the will, because moral authorities, like the church, which define the good have been pushed to the margins of society. The problem with the modern definition is that it ironically leaves us with much less freedom. Smith cites research indicating "that only about 5 percent of our daily activity is the product of conscious, intentional actions that we 'choose'" (81). We simply find ourselves immersed in a life already given to us. Most of us do not choose to live the life of a commuter. We simply accept that lifestyle as a fact of our modern existence. To choose otherwise requires a deliberate countercultural move. Similarly Baptism is an act of grace that says you have begun your formation as a child of God, and it puts the baptized in an antithetical relationship to the world. It shows us that we don't choose the church, but it chooses us as part of the saving arm of God. We can choose otherwise, but only after the fact.

Desiring the Kingdom is a rich mine of truth, but even the richest mines yield some dross when refined by the word of God. Smith seems to be drinking from the font of secular liturgy by using "she" instead of "he" when it could be either sex. Smith thus breaks with Scripture's practice of assuming that a female is not necessarily negated by the masculine pronoun but protected under male headship. So it is no surprise when he also refers to ordained ministers as "she" breaking with the Bible's prohibition of women exercising that office of authority over men. For all the honor Smith pays to Scripture, he doesn't permeate his own words with the Word like one might expect. While he does use the Bible he doesn’t avail himself of the abundance of biblical texts about culture building. The "Shema" of Deuteronomy 6:4-9 would make his point in spades, but Smith doesn't turn his points on that sturdy hinge. Smith is more of a philosopher, but if Scripture is supposed to be the standard, as he says, it ought to be raised a bit more and its habits of speech imitated.

Smith is clearly for more liturgy in worship not less. He shows us that we shouldn’t be afraid of this since life is inescapably liturgical. He also encourages us to embrace the imagination since the liturgical works on the imagination first and most. But he goes on to say that this happens “without having to kick into a mode of cerebral reflection” (167). He recognizes that some people may be scandalized by the implication that liturgies work “ex opere operato” or “by the mere performance of ritual.” He admits that he thinks this is true though not ideal. Indeed, I know of many liturgical churches whose membership tends to have little passion for knowing and applying Scripture to their personal lives. They seem to assume that the liturgy takes care of all their spiritual needs, and their lives tend to resemble the world around them. I also know churches who aren’t known for being liturgical, and yet they have created a vibrant biblical culture where members personally apply the Bible to their lives and the world around them. Smith talks about those who wander into the world but are awakened by a liturgical memory and return to the church. Praise the Lord this happens, but nominal Christianity that issues in backsliding until the eleventh hour is FAR from ideal.

The goal of the Christian life is increasing levels of spiritual maturity as we mature physically and mentally. This means that as our rational capacities develop, rational understanding of what we love and believe should grow. Smith fails to emphasize that the intellectual appropriation of the liturgy represents a primary goal of Christian maturity. He also fails to use the intellectual appropriation of the liturgy as a safeguard against the nominal and passive Christianity that often attends highly liturgical churches. I agree that we need more liturgy, but we need to avoid the opposite error of being merely liturgical. The church must be vigilant in teaching the meaning of liturgy and that it must be personally received by a proactive, reasoning faith “until we all reach unity … in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ” (Ephesians 4:13).

All things considered, Smith's scholarship is good and his call for Christian scholarship to "emerge from the matrix of worship" is much needed. We do need to return to the liturgical without becoming passive. We must use it to invigorate our imaginations and develop our reason. He promises to take the conversation further in future works, and I must say that I'm looking forward to them with my heart, soul, mind, and strength.

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Knowing the World through the Word

2011-06-29T10:04:00.000-05:00

Wow! It's been a long time since I've blogged. It's good to be back. Here's a sermon I preached last Sunday. Blessings to all my readers out there. I always covet your comments, questions, and most of all challengeez! ;-D

Knowing the World Through the Word or How to Introduce Covenant Culture into Your Home
M. Heckel, 6-24-11

I. Read Deuteronomy 6:4-9 & Ephesians 6:1-4.

II. Intro: We’ve had Mother’s Day and Father’s Day was last week. Well today I’ll be preaching on children and the family, so we might call this family day. The Bible has a lot to say about families and raising children.
I am far from an expert on these things. I am very much a father in training. I’m very glad we have God’s word, because I could not teach about this subject on my own expertise. So Let’s take a look at what God is saying to his people in our passage.

III. Historical Context:
A. Israel is about to enter the promised land. Moses has led God’s people out of Egypt, through the Red Sea, entered into covenant with them on Mt. Sinai, given them the Ten Commandments, and they have just wandered in the dessert for forty years. They wandered in the dessert because of their disbelief. They did not believe that they could destroy the inhabitants of the land, even though God was sending Israel as his instrument of judgment. God had given them into Israel’s hand, but ten out of the twelve spies said “There are giants in the land.” They rejected the Word of God and so God rejected that generation. They all died in the dessert except the two believing spies, Joshua and Caleb, and their families.
B. Now they are on the border of the promised land again, and God is about to renew the covenant with his people.
C. After the fall of Adam, God reestablishes relationship with his people through a covenant. In a covenant God makes promises to Israel and calls his people to obey. In this section, God is calling his people to keep the covenant.
D. (Application) Like Israel, we too are God’s people. The church is God’s New Covenant people. So God is addressing us in this passage as well.

IV. God is One, 6:4
A. In verse 4 God solemnly calls his people to attention. Whatever follows is of the utmost importance. The Jews understood this, and made it their great confession of faith that they recite every morning and evening.
B. The Lord, who is Israel’s God is one God. This is know as monotheism and it made Israel unique. All other ancient religions worshipped many gods and were thus polytheistic. The oneness of God also means that his people can trust him. A polytheistic god cannot be trusted because the gods are in conflict.
C. (Application) But this means that we can trust God today no matter what the gods of the market and media do. The market may plummet but God is still on his throne. Brittany may have lost custody, but the Lord never loses custody of us.

V. Loving God, 6:5
A. Israel is told, “You shall love Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.”
B. This shows us that we are to love God with our whole being. He isn’t just part of our lives, he must be our lives.
C. This shows us that love can be commanded. Love is a feeling but it is also a commitment. God commands us to love him. Loving God is a commitment. I’m sure that Israel didn’t always feel like obeying God, but she was commanded to love him.
D. (App) Similarly, we don’t always feel like loving our spouses. We don’t feel in love. But if we love our spouse in spite of our selfish feelings the deepest feelings will eventually spring from our hearts. C. S. Lewis in The Four Loves says that we expect being in love to be like falling in love. But falling in love is only the incentive. It is like the dive into the pool. But once we are in the pool, swimming, not diving, is the thing.
E. Loving God also makes Israel unique. All other ancient religions related to their gods primarily through fear. You did not love Zeus. You might have feared him, but you did not have a personal relationship with him. You sacrificed to him so that he would not be angry; so that you would stay off of his radar. But Israel is unique. Listen to these verses:
i. Gen. 15:6, Abraham “believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness.” We have a right relationship with God based on faith not works.
ii. Genesis 6:8, “Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.” God’s grace is the basis of our relationship with him.

VI. God’s Word, 6:6-7
A. God’s word is to be on our hearts.
B. We are to teach it diligently to our children.
C. How do we do this you ask? We are to “talk” the word of God:
i. “when you sit in your house, and when you walk along the way.” This covers the private and the public realms. This means we are to discuss the word of God everywhere we go.
ii. “and when you lie down, and when you rise.” This is a common Hebrew way of saying “all day.” We are to discuss the word of God at all times.
iii. We get the word of God into our hearts and into the hearts of our children by discussing all of life in relation to the word of God. This is the divine curriculum.
D. (App) Even 2 + 2 = 4 needs to be discussed in relation to God. This reflects the nature of an orderly and logical God who made a creation that can be described mathematically. We can penetrate the mathematical nature of the world because we are made in God’s image. Though they like four bones better than two, dogs don’t understand that 2 + 2 = 4. Now think about discussing politics, philosophy, history, literature, economics, business, art, sports, and relationships in relation to the word of God! That’s a marvelous thing, but it’s only possible if we know the word of God.
E. Before the time of print culture, the people of god would have heard and memorized God’s word in worship and in the family. Today each of us can afford a Bible of our own. We can sit down, open it up, smooth out the pages and read what God has said about these things.
F. (App) A few years ago I realized that my Bible knowledge was slipping. I noticed that worldly influences we’re creeping in upon me. I had three degrees in divinity, and I had begun to take the Bible for granted. I had quite reading. I was reading plenty of other theology, but there is no substitute for the word of God. I had to get back into it, so I started by reading a Proverb a day. There are thirty-one chapters, one for each day of the month. I must have read through Proverbs five times, stopping, restarting, and faltering many times until I reformed the habit. Then I started reading Acts and then the Psalms at the same time. I started reading the books I was reading to my family after supper and then the kids started reading them. We’ve still have a long way to go but we’re going.
G. (App) Douglass Wilson says that there are three kinds of culture we can have in the home. We can leave a cultural void that the media is only too happy to fill with television, internet, materialism, and consumerism. Or we can create a culture of rebellion when we preach on thing but live another in front of our family. Or we can build a Christ centered culture with the word of God (Standing on the Promises).

VII. Experiencing God’s World through God’s Word, 6:8-9
A. “You shall bind them as a sign on your hand.” We touch the world with our hands and we are to touch the world with God’s word. This brings healing to a sick world. It mends the brokenness.
B. “They shall be as frontlets between your eyes.” We see the world through our eyes. We are to see the world through God’s word like a pair of glasses if you will. In order to see the world the way God does, he needs to adjust our prescription.
C. “On the doorposts of your house.” Even the rooms in our house are to reflect the gospel. Do our rooms glory God? Do they point us to family time, play time, feasting, festivity, celebration, orderliness, rest, and quiet time in his word? Or are our rooms permeated with worldliness and distraction?
D. “On your gates.” The gate is the way to the outside world and the way back in to the home. This gate is to be guarded by the word of God. In all our comings and goings we are to experience the world through God’s word.

VIII. Conclusion: People of God, we must remember that our God is one, he’s consistent, and can be trusted. We are to love him with our whole being, committed to him no matter what. His word is to be on our hearts and taught diligently into the hearts of our children all the time, everywhere we go, and thus in relation to all of life. We are to experience God’s world through his Word. So let’s open the word, smooth out the pages, read, and let God write it on our hearts. Let’s be transformed by the word and let the word transform the world around us. It won’t be easy. There will be set backs, but God can build a Christ centered culture around us. For nothing is impossible with our God.

Eastern Orthodoxy Rebuking the PCUSA

2011-05-22T21:20:00.000-05:00

Saving the World According to the Word

2011-05-11T06:54:00.001-05:00

Stanley Fish's Save the World on your Own Time is a call to secular compartmentalization. Teaching is teaching and that's all. Saving the world doesn't belong. You can aspire to teaching for teaching's sake, but don't aim higher unless you are off the clock.

What?

It's true that the academy can't save the world, but the world is the Lord's and the fullness thereof. Christians should laugh at Fish's paltry view of life and heed Christ's call to be "fishers of men."

Being Right for the Wrong Reason

2011-04-10T22:39:00.000-05:00

In the parable known as the prodigal son, we celebrate with the younger brother and rightly so. He who was lost is now found! We don't want to be like the older brother who rejected the mercy of the father.

But we may forget that the older brother didn't sin in staying with his father. Unlike his younger brother, he had been faithful to their father. He did right, but he did it for the wrong reason. This was exposed when his younger brother came home:

Look! All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!

His sin lay in his not having his father's heart for the lost. By choice he stayed outside the party his father was throwing for his brother's homecoming. The older brother's self-righteousness consoled him. That good-for-nothing brother was back and was given a heroes' welcome. What's wrong with the world! Am I the only one who sees this injustice?!

Would we rather feel superior or feel forgiveness? The parable makes us count the cost of the gospel. We should want to be faithful, but in being faithful their is a temptation to be prideful. Let's be faithful but love mercy, because we all need both.

Does Freedom of Religion Require the Separation of Church and State?

2011-03-29T16:32:00.002-05:00

We assume that the only way to have religious freedom is to separate church and state, but we've had very mixed results. See a recent example here in St. Louis.

Peter Leithart, in his Defending Constantine, argues that Constantine achieved true religious freedom for pagans and Christians. He did this while cooperating with the Christian church to produce a Roman republic with ethical standards and moral development.

Constantine outlawed an ancient version of "no fault divorce," which led to the abandonment of women, gladiatorial games, which littered arenas with bodies, and the exposure of children, which usually resulted in infanticide. He also passed laws that would provide welfare for poor people who couldn't afford to raise a new baby. He reformed the justice system by eliminating they buying and selling of judgeships, and allowed those who couldn't afford an attorney to appeal to an ecclesiastical court.

It appears that the true pax Romana did not occur under Caesar Augustus but under Constantine, and that we often look positively barbaric next to the first Christian Emperor.

No Purpose for Plato's World

2011-03-26T11:25:00.000-05:00

One of my students recently pointed out that the debate between Plato and Aristotle was over whether reality is essentially one or many. Plato argued that it is essentially one because all of the particulars of the created world come from the One and the Forms in His mind. Thus reality exists ante rem or before the things of the created realm. Aristotle argued that reality exists in re or in the things of the created realm. Thus ultimate reality isn't one thing but has many expressions in the things of the physical world. In other words, "treeness" doesn't exist before the oak, ash, and elm, as in Plato's understanding, but in them. In fact, according to Aristotle, the Form or ultimate reality is the cause of the particulars of this realm. It is what makes an oak a tree, an ash a tree, and an elm a tree.

Aristotle pointed out that there is no cause and effect relationship between Plato's concept of God, the One, and the created world (Metaphysics, 1.988.a-b; 1.991a-b). He overlooked Plato's Demiurge from the Timaeus who fashions the created particulars based on the Forms in the mind of the One. But Aristotle points out a problem with Plato's thought nonetheless.

The Demiurge is an independent contractor. Plato invented him for his "likely story" in order to keep the One from getting his hands dirty with physical matter. For Plato, the material realm is the lowest order of reality and unworthy of the pure spirit of the One.

The problem with this, from a Christian perspective, is that there is no purposeful link between this world and the One. People may correspond to the Form of the Human, but this is a far cry from being created by God, in his image, in order "to glorify him by enjoying him forever," to use John Piper's phrase.

Charles Murray in his Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950, points out that in the ancient world, only Christianity gave people a divine purpose for their lives. The image of God lends dignity and his will gives purpose. But the One in Plato's philosophy lends no purpose to mankind except to give him something to contemplate, and only the philosophers were capable of doing this in a purpose driven way. Murray argues that it was Christianity that inspired the Western world with a sense of purpose that led to experimentation with the God given creation and the development of science and critical thinking.

Praying and Paying

2011-03-25T22:22:00.000-05:00

The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression by Amity Shlaes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Shlaes uses William Graham Sumner's "forgotten man" to expose the problems with FDR's New Deal. To paraphrase Sumner, A sees the plight of X and says to B, "Let's pass some legislation to help X," and C gets the bill. Sumner wrote about C: "He works, he votes, generally he prays - but he always pays - yes, above all, he pays." The identity of A is the progressives and B is Congress. It is laudable that A wants to help X but tinkering with the economy at the expense of C only exacerbates the problem. Shlaes is not a shrill conservative on the rampage but a classic liberal.

Shlaes argues that FDR's intervention in the private sphere made the Depression worse, encouraged the government to bully and harass its citizens (see the Schecter case!), and introduced special interest politics. This messianic view of government is still with us and has come home to roost with Obama.

Ancient peoples established governments to stop people from taking too much land and gobbling up resources at the expense of others. Regulation is one thing, intervention is another, and the private sphere has got to be put into the hands of as many private citizens as possible, if we are going to be great again.

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Kurt Cameron's Mouth

2011-03-23T11:13:00.001-05:00

As one who agrees with most of Lutheran theology, I simply adore this:

Did Peace in 1919 Lead to War in 1939?

2011-03-20T20:37:00.000-05:00

Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World by Margaret MacMillan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Good read about the wrap up of WWI. MacMillan tries to revise the accepted wisdom that the Allies botched the peace, which lead directly to the second world war. It's true that Hitler would play to the German people's wounded pride and resentment after the war. It came to be known as the "Dictat" or "dictated peace." The Germans especially hated the "war guilt clause" of article 231, which laid all responsibility for the war at the doorstep of German "aggression." Ulrich Brockdorff-Rantzau blew up and refused to sign the Treaty of Versailles. When the allies rearmed, the Germans sent two representatives to pen their names to the treaty. Did this lead directly to WWII? MacMillan says this is too simplistic.

MacMillian argues that the Germans deceived themselves into thinking that they hadn't lost the war. MacMillan points out that it wasn't a mere armistice or cease fire. The Germans gave up all occupied lands and surrendered their navy. The Germans also allowed themselves to believe that Woodrow Wilson could deliver a non-punitive peace. Germany had taken Wilson's advice and become a republic. But Wilson was one of four on the supreme council, and he had to compromise to get anywhere. David Lloyd George, prime-minister of England, and Georges Clemanceau, prime-minister of France, were out for reparations, revenge, and security. Their people had lost more than America, and they stood to lose more in future elections. They convinced Wilson to shrink Germany and give the rhineland to France as a neutral zone. Wilson would compromise as long as he could get the League of Nations. Meanwhile the league was loosing ground in the US, and Wilson's own country would never join.

Lloyd George did change his mind about some of the reparations. "Treat them like the enemy and they won't disappoint." But Wilson had already reached his compromise limit. The treaty would have to stand as is. John Maynard Keynes famously said, "It was harder to de-bamboozle this old Presbyterian than it had been to bamboozle him.” Keynes wanted to rehabilitate Germany economically. A prosperous Germany would be a peaceful Germany.

The big four were more realistic than they've been given credit for. Lloyd George said: "The English public like the French public, thinks the Germans must above all acknowledge their obligation to compensate us for all the consequences of their aggression. When this is done we come to the question of Germany's capacity to pay; we all think she will be unable to pay more than this document requires of her."

MacMillan argues that the German sense of betrayal cannot account for the rise of Nazi Germany. Prior to the Great Depression, the German people wouldn't give the Hitler the time of day. He was too radical. Once they hit rock bottom, radical solutions were given a hearing and Hitler got his chance. MacMillan can write well and she shows how so much of modern history, including the formation of Iraq, goes back to Paris 1919.

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The Demise of Community, the Demise of Character

2011-03-10T20:02:00.001-06:00

I recently listened again to a Mars Hill Audio interview with James Davison Hunter on his book The Death of Character: On the Moral Education of America's Children. He argues that the demise of character stems from the demise of moral communities like church and family. This has proceeded on the modern assumption that we are inherently good from childhood and Christianity is bad because it has taught us that we are sinners in need of redemption.

All we really need, it's dogmatically asserted, it a good self-esteem and an opportunity to define ourselves as children, teenagers, or adults. The rest will take care of itself. All parents and teachers need to do is facilitate this moral revelation by calling it out with psychological techniques like values clarification. We think we can develop moral character in the young without wielding moral authority. We are reaping the whirlwind and shrugging our shoulders, "What can you do?"

On the adult level, radical individualism continues to sever ties between people and their God given authorities.

"Hey teacher! Leave us kids alone!"

"Tell my mother, tell my father; I've done the best I can; to make them realize, this is my life; I'm not angry, I'm just saying; Sometimes goodbye is a second chance."

It's true that some communities abuse their moral authority or exercise it hypocritically and ties must be cut. But this has become an excuse to define the self apart from Christ's moral order. Like Joshua, we must be "strong and courageous" again and again and again (Joshua 1). Children do not respect what they can kick around, even if we think we're being their friend. Parents are called to teach the word of God diligently to their children:

These words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise (Deuteronomy 6:6-7).

This is part of loving God and loving our children and our neighbor as ourselves. Rule apart from relationship will breed hatred. Relationship without any rules will breed disrespect. Rules revealed by God and applied in a loving relationship will bring order. Love covers a multitude of sins.

Sophocles Rex

2011-03-09T22:48:00.002-06:00

The Three Theban Plays: Antigone; Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Oedipus Rex is both the best and the worst tragedy ever told. The plot and its execution show a master at work. It's also the worst in that it's the most tragic tragedy of all. But don't stop there. Read Oedipus at Colonus. Just when you thought it was impossible to help Oedipus, he has a redemption of sorts. You haven't understood Sophocles if you stop at Oedipus Rex. Antigone is not to be missed either. She is pro-family at a time when her uncle was trying to replace family and religion with the state. Sophocles is more relevant than ever.

Fagles translation is both accessible to the modern reader and compelling, which is no small feat. Bernard Knox's introduction to Oedipus Rex is worth the price of the book. Here's my take: The older generation represented by Herodotus still believed in the gods and prophecy, while the younger generation represented by Thucydides and Euripedes mocked it. Jocasta tells Oedipus that we make our own way in a world of chance. The chorus says: "If the prophecies don't come to pass ... the gods, the gods go down." No more trips to Delphi. We'll go back to homo mensura (man is the measure of all things) and Protagoras. Well, guess whose side Sophocles is on? He gives the ancient secularists what they want: a play where the gods do not make an appearance. And yet he frustrates them by vindicating prophecy. Who needs the Deus ex machina? Man knows the god who is there whether he's willing to admit it or not.

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Bottum's Up or the Forgotten Reformation

2011-03-03T22:34:00.000-06:00

Joseph Bottum has reviewed Pascal Bruckner's Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy in the recent Books and Culture (March/April 2011). Here's Bruckner:

From existentialism to deconstructionsim, all of modern thought can be reduced to a mechanical denunciation of the West, emphasizing the latter's hypcrysy, violence, and abomination.... The whole world hates us and we deserve it. That is what most Europeans think.

Bottum comments:

Much of Europe--much of America, as well--has simply lost its nerve, unable to maintain the delicate balance of self-critique and self-confidence that was the gift of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment.

The Middle Ages was not perfect and it knew it. The medievals knew enough however to accept the claims of Christ that all things hold together in him. The Renaissance was diverse, but every humanist agreed on going ad fontes (to the sources). The Enlightenment agreed on one thing--the church was out. They chanted aude sapere (dare to know) to each other, but it was Eden all over again: "Hath God said ... ? ... He knows that in the day that you eat, you will be like him knowing both good and evil."

Dare to know the difference between good and evil for yourself. Protagorus returned with a vengeance. The familiar homo mensura (man the measure) was shouted from the rooftops. Man is the measure of all things "visible and invisible." Dare to be your own god. That's confidence, but terribly misplaced. Where's the self-critique? What about semper reformanda (always reforming)? Who came up with that? Oh ya! That pesky little movement called the Reformation. Self confidence? Who spoke truth to power? Wasn't it Luther who told Charles V and the papal nuncio:

Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. May God help me. Amen

Always reforming? Why not? The Word of God must have its say no matter how imperfectly we read it. How could Bottum have forgotten that? The Enlightenment idols of Darwinism and rationalism die hard and slow, but they are dying.

Bruckner's Perpetual Euphoria takes a shot at our happiness entitlement program. He thinks it's about the right to pursue happiness rather than demanding to have it. That's not bad, and we should even give two cheers for Mr. Bottum. But there's so much more offered by the one who came so that we might have life, and "have it more abundantly" (John 10:10).

Trends Change, Truth Changes

2011-02-27T21:48:00.000-06:00

Kenda Creasy Dean, author of Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church, recently appeared on Mars Hill Audio Journal and gave a great insight into our culture. I paraphrase:

Our consumer culture breeds attitudes of low commitment. This is because the consumer fix is a quick fix. When it runs out we go get something else.

Could this be why so many of our churches are revolving doors? What's even more alarming is when the gospel is packaged in the cheap gleam of top-ten lists, movie clips, trendy beats, and lousy drama. Whatever happened to the "permanent things:" preaching, sacraments, confessions, creeds, psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs? David Wells once quipped, "What you win them with, is what you win them to." Trends change but truth changes.

Thinking About Our Thoughts: The Mind-Brain Distinction

2011-02-26T15:46:00.000-06:00

I've lately been reading James LeFanu's Why Us? How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves. LeFanu is a British medical doctor and science journalist who doesn't buy the materialist line that we are merely biological machines programmed by our genes and running on chemical reactions in the brain. My college philosophy professor argued that the mind is an allusion. The brain is all. Thought is nothing more than biochemical reactions in the brain. He pointed out that scientists can see the brain lighting up as they process information from the sense. I was stumped or should I say my chemical reactions were curbed.

LeFanu points our that we don't experience the world like a machine, but as a self. We don't just process sense impressions, but we tell ourselves what to think and how to think. This is how we "take every thought captive" (2 Cor, 10:5) and overcome disorders like OCD. The brain doesn't work like a computer storing information and pulling it up out of digital files.

The brain constructs the world we experience from neurons bombarding our senses. That world of color, sound, smell, taste, and touch comes from the impact of colorless, mute, odorless, tasteless, and intangible neurons. Our brains translate the interaction into a lively world for the self to navigate. The self presides over all this by giving attention to certain impressions, thinking about them, and then "presumably" storing those thoughts somewhere in the brain.

Using brain scans, cognitive scientists have show that the brain memorizes in one part but recalls that memory from another part. So where was the memory stored and how can it be conjured up decades later from a part of the brain that was not lighting up during the act of memory creation? This has baffled researchers.

There is a qualitative difference between computation and consciousness. Ever increasing levels of programming and computation by ludicrous speed computers will only ever be able to simulate consciousness.

The optic nerve doesn't simply photograph an image from the outside world but creates the images of world outside. Lefanu says, "The brain perceives the world 'out there' by fragmenting the visual image into thirty separate specialized 'maps' scattered throughout the visual cortex ... arranged in a hierarchy of fourteen different levels" (202-03). One map might clarify what it is, say a cat, by noting its color, shape, and size. Another map might tell where it is located, say in a tree. If the cat is moving, say from the limb above to the earth below, the brain has to repeat this process moment by moment. Since the cat is never the same as it twists through the air in order to land on its feet, the brain must continually be able to categorize it as a cat.

"Attributes such as form, colour, and movement" are "handled by separate structures of the brain" but how is it all assembled into the same image and categorized by the brain? One scientist says, "It obviously must be assembled, but where and how, we have no idea" (206). It must also associate the images of the cat with mewing or in this case screeching received by the auditory nerve. It seems the brain is hardwired to know the world. It must "be born with an innate knowledge of how the world works." It seems that Descartes was correct about us being born with innate ideas. The linguist Noam Chomsky asserted that children must be born with a "'language acquisition device', ... by which they could make sense of the babble of sounds around them" (189).

It turns out that the brain has billions of neurons and creates trillions of synapses and can do upwards of a quadrillion computations per second. We don't just have the equivalent of one supercomputer in our heads that will soon be surpassed in our cyborg future. Charles Jonscher, a computer scientist from Harvard says, "The true comparison would be a figure more like twenty billion computers" (187). Daniel Levitin, the author of This Is Your Brain on Music, has speculated that there are more states of mind possible than there are atoms in the known universe.

All this begs the question of how we know that the rich experience of the outside world of cats and trees and mountains and oceans is true. If it is subjectively created by the brain from interactions with subatomic particles, then how do we know it is a reliable representation of the objective world outside ourselves. How can we trust our senses? How can we believe our eyes and ears?

Lefanu doesn't go there, but the only basis for confidence in the senses is the Christian doctrine of creation. Our senses can reliably know the world we experience, if and only if they were created to know that world by a loving creator who made both to correspond. I suppose that one could say that we know it is true because it is successful. But that begs the question of why we would find success between two separately evolving systems? G. K. Chesterton wrote:

Reason itself is a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a skeptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, "Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?" The young skeptic says, "I have a right to think for myself." But the old skeptic, the complete skeptic, says, "I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all." There is a thought that stops thought (Orthodoxy, Chap. 3).

Materialism is self-defeating and cannot explain something as basic as self consciousness. The mind cannot be reduced to the brain without calling self consciousness an illusion. A brain thinks but the mind tells it how. With all of our intelligent design capabilities we can only mimic the self with our "artificial" intelligences. Even if we could create self-conscious beings like ourselves would it disprove intelligent design? Not unless we are sub-intelligent.

How the Pioneers Felt

2011-02-02T21:49:00.000-06:00

My wife found one of the funniest things I've heard in awhile on Facebook. It was the status of one of friends Ruth Akers.

My cable is out so I can't watch TV on the big screen and I'm forced to use my iPhone as a tether to watch Netflix on my iPad.

Now I know how the pioneers felt.

This strikes us as funny because we think we have it hard sometimes. But when we compare our place in history to any other place in history, we realize that we have comforts and capabilities that nobody could've imagined fifty years ago. I only pray that we will use them wisely, even when the cable goes out.

Plot and Character

2011-02-02T20:29:00.001-06:00

Poetics by Aristotle
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Aristotle says that the exercise of any capacity brings pleasure. He defines poetry as language made pleasurable in verse form. Aristotle distinguishes the poetic genres of epic poetry (like Homer's Illiad and Odyssey) and tragedy (like the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles) and comedy (like the plays of Aristophanes). Aristotle only mentions lyric poetry, which is what we normally think of as poetry (like a sonnet). When Aristotle is talking about poetics, we should think of stories in verse form like Shakespeare's plays.

Aristotle explains that we enjoy poetics because of their imitation (mimesis) of reality. Thus Aristotle doesn't believe that our enjoyment of good poetry is purely subjective or only a matter of taste. The better the imitation of reality and the more pleasurable the language, the more our enjoyment will increase. I suppose that the subjective element is our own version of reality, which dictates whether we agree with the author's vision of reality. While Aristotle might have conceded this, he focuses on standards for imitation and pleasurable language.

Comedy is "an imitation of inferior people.... The laughable is an error or disgrace that does not involve pain or destruction" (3.4). When we laugh we recognize something ridiculous in others. Hopefully we can do this when we recognize our own silliness, but Aristotle doesn't "go there." Epic poetry, on the other hand, "is an imitation in verse of admirable people," like the hero Odysseus. "Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is admirable, complete and possesses magnitude ... effecting through pity and fear the purification (katharsis) of such emotion" (4.1). Thus we come to one of the main differences between Aristotle and Plato.

Plato criticized the poets in Book Ten of Republic, because he considered their work a mere representation of reality, which also stirred up the emotions. Plato considered reason the highest human faculty, whose job it was to tame the passions of the heart and discipline the appetites of the body. Thus poets were guilty of creating escapist fiction. Conversely, in his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle wrote:

For example, fear, confidence, desire, anger, pity and in general pleasure and distress can be experienced in greater or lesser degree, and in both cases wrongly. To feel them at the right time, in response to the right things, with regard to the right people, for the right reason and in the right way--that is the mean and optimum, which is the characteristic of virtue (1106b.18-23; cited in Introduction xxxviii).

According to Aristotle, the emotions weren't necessarily inferior to reason. They merely needed to be exercised and trained, just like reason. This happened during katharsis or "purification" by experiencing emotion through tragic stories. Thus if tragedies could release and train the emotions in a positive way, we need quality stories with good plots. A good plot imitates reality accurately and presents characters that we can recognize.

A defective plot was one in which "the sequence of episodes is neither necessary nor probable.... they draw out the plot beyond its potential" (5.6). We tend not to love books or movies whose plots or actions are not believable or inaccurate. But we must also take into account the genre of the story. We wouldn't expect the driver in "Driving Miss Daisy" to suddenly put on a wizard's hat and wave a staff to avoid a car accident, but such actions in a fantasy story would not be unrealistic.

Good plots, for Aristotle, create astonishment through reversal, recognition, and suffering. Aristotle cites Sophocles' "Oedipus Rex," as an example. At the end of the play, when understanding dawns and the great king falls, the reader is amazed. A modern example would be the movie "The Sixth Sense," in which a reversal occurs at the end of the action. We then “recognize” what’s really going on and are surprised to find that we have been watching the movie the wrong way from the beginning.

The goal of character is goodness, appropriateness, likeness, and consistency. This means that characters, once established, must not act out of character. Concerning goodness, Aristotle says, "The character is good if the choice is good" (8.1). In the movie “Shadowlands,” the following words are put into the mouth of C. S. Lewis: "Aristotle’s solution was simple and radical, plot is character. Forget psychology; forget the insides of men’s heads. Judge them by their actions." This insight into Aristotle is in sharp contrast to our post-modern movies, which often try to reconstruct villains by creating sympathy for them.

From a Christian point of view, sympathy for a bad character is sinister, unless it creates a desire to redeem the bad character. This happens in Lord of the Rings with Gollum, when we are given a peek into his background. As Frodo begins the "taming of Smeagol [Gollum]," we begin to feel pity for him Gollum and hope that he can change. There are examples in the Bible like Jacob's brothers, but the norm in Scripture is bad guys are bad guys, and they will be judged by their actions. God will call us all to account, and good plots do the same, rather than making excuses for badness or trying to create sympathy toward sin.

Also contrary to Hollywood is Aristotle's dictum "no unnecessary badness" (8.1). The gratuitous, the explicit, and the shocking pass for realism today instead of the true, the good, and the beautiful. There are endless examples of this in recent movies and books. Aristotle provides some from the ancient world, and they are quite tame in comparison to our own. An example of a terrible villain who isn't “unnecessarily badæ is Kevin Bacon's character in "The River Wild." I think he says about two cuss words in the whole movie and there is little to no sexual innuendo. Oh, to read and watch without feeling the need afterwards to take a bath!

Aristotle also discusses poetic style:

The most important quality in diction is clarity, provided there is no loss of dignity. The clearest diction is that based on current words; but that lacks dignity. By contrast, diction is distinguished and out of the ordinary when it makes use of exotic expressions -- by which I mean non-standard words, metaphors, lengthening, and anything contrary to current usage.... So what is needed is some kind of mixture of these two things: one of them will make the diction out of the ordinary and avoid a loss of dignity ... while current usage will contribute clarity (9.4).

Aristotle gives plenty of examples to illustrate his points and Homer is praised beyond the rest as "he excels everyone in diction and reasoning" (10.2). Constructing quality plots is not easy but Aristotle advises: "nature itself teaches people to choose what is appropriate to it" (10.3). Nature, not artifice, is the standard for Aristotle.

Aristotle also addressed strict imitation vs. poetic license: "Impossibilities should be referred to poetic effect, or idealization of the truth, or opinion. With regard to poetic effect, a plausible impossibility is preferable to what is implausible but possible.... It is probable that improbable things will happen" (11.3). When we think of or experience an improbability, we might have the basis for an interesting plot. I'm afraid that many moviemakers today start with special effects they want to create, and a screenplay is concocted artificially to present it. A return to Aristotle would mean a much needed return to plot and character.

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What We Should Already Know

2011-02-01T12:05:00.000-06:00

G. K. Chesterton wrote:

The cinema boasts of being a substitute for the tavern, but I think it a very bad substitute. I think so quite apart from the question of fermented liquor. Nobody enjoys cinema more than I, but to enjoy them a man has only to look and not even to listen and in a tavern he has to talk. Occasionally, I admit, he has to fight; but he never need move at the movies (What I Saw in America, 102).

Current research supports the common sense notion that reading, learning languages, and social interaction improves memory function and prevents cognitive decline. It also shows that watching TV reduces memory function and contributes to decline in both the young and old ("Maintaing Your Mental Edge," Lecture 29 in "Lifelong Health: Achieving Optimum Well-Being at Any Age," The Great Courses [The Teaching Company, 2010]).

Why don't we make common sense a little more common? Then perhaps we won't spend millions funding research to demonstrate what we should already know. We can knock off early and go to the tavern. Maybe instead of a fist fight, a verbal brawl, in Christian love of course, might do us some good. Even taking in the occasional movie might prove a good field for battle.

Economics to the Glory of God Pt. 2

2011-01-26T11:24:00.001-06:00

Proverbs 28:8

Whoever multiples his wealth by

interest and profit

gathers it for him who is

generous to the poor.

According to God's economy tithes, offerings, and giving to the poor is simply the best investment. Savings is second and Wall Street is much further down the list. This shows just how screwed up we've become.

Proverbs 28: 19-22, 26-27

Whoever works his land will have plenty of bread,

but he who follows worthless pursuits will have plenty of poverty.

A faithful man will abound with blessings,

but whoever hastens to be rich will not go unpunished.

To show partiality is not good,

but for a piece of bread a man will do wrong.

A stingy man hastens after wealth

and does not know that poverty will come upon him....

Whoever trusts in his own mind is a fool,

but he who walks in wisdom will be delivered.

Whoever gives to the poor will not want,

but he who hides his eyes will get many a curse.

Are we working our land and giving to the poor? That is a perennial question in Scripture. Whether we are diversified is also important, but doesn't receive the same emphasis.

Nominal Nominations

2011-01-23T21:30:00.000-06:00

After seeing "The King's Speech" last night I would like to go ahead with my Oscar nominations:

Movie of the Year:

"The Kings Speech" (compelling)
"Nanny McPhee Returns" (Inspirational)
"True Grit" (Grisled Realism, except the rattle snakes)
"Despicable Me" (Redemptive)
"Inception" (Dreamy)

Best Actor:

The young girl in "True Grit"
Colin Firth "The Kings Speech"

Best Supporting Actor:

Geoffrey Rush "The Kings Speech"
Jeff Bridges "True Grit"

Special Effects:

"Inception"
"Voyage of the Dawn Treader"
"Tron Legacy"

Screen Play:

"Inception"
"The Kings Speech"

Worst Hack Job:

"Gulliver's Travels"
"The Actual Nominations of the Academy"

Economics to the Glory of God

2011-01-22T14:07:00.000-06:00

Proverbs 22:16

Whoever oppresses the poor to

increase his own wealth,

or gives to the rich, will only

come to poverty.

We have had our share of economic woes lately in America. Could they be related to the truth of that verse? The rich have been getting richer and the poor poorer for a long time. In the 1970's a CEO was paid twenty times more than the lowest paid worker. Today he's paid over 300 times more (Goodzward, Hope in Troubled Times)!

The Mondragon Corporation in Spain is based on Distributist principles so that the highest paid is remunerated at only six times more than the lowest paid worker. It is a billion dollar company (William Cavanaugh, Being Consumed).

When will we learn to love our neighbor as ourselves?

Republic of Thought

2011-01-19T19:44:00.001-06:00

Plato: Republic by Robin Waterfield
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was my second dip, and this time I swam from one end to the other and read almost all of Waterfield's notes. There are things to be said about Plato and about Waterfield as a translator and commentator. Plato first.

The republic is an empire of thought. Plato knows that it is a mere thought experiment and that it will never take. That said "Ideas have consequences" and Plato certainly tries to make his mark on political, philosophical, and theological policy. What is refreshing about this ancient air that blows off every page is that Plato's goal is to convince that in order to have an orderly civil order laws and behavior must be grounded in the absolute or what he calls "the Form of the Good." In the argument between the Christian and the secularist Plato is firmly in the camp of the Christian. He knows that a robust morality cannot be brewed from the grounds of "enlightened self-interest." Enlightened self-interest is like the shifting shadows on the "cave" wall - just "shadows of morality" (517.d). There must be an absolute standard to even distinguish good and evil, much less be able to legislate it for a community. Today we expect morality to spontaneously generate apart from moral authority. Plato argued that the Form of the Good not only casts light for the mind's eye to see all of reality but it was the source of all reality and thus everything good. It is even the source of 2 + 2 = 4, so that it would actually be immoral to teach that 2 + 2 = 5. We can't have morality on any other terms but a knowledge of God, whom he called the One, and his true Ideas. Plato wrote:

"It isn't only the known-ness of the things we know which is conferred upon them by goodness, but also their reaity and their being .... It's my opinion that the last thing to be seen -- and it isn't easy to see either--in the realm of knowledge is goodness; and the sight of the character of goodness leads one to deduce that it is responsible for everything that is right and fine, whatever the circumstances, and that in the visible realm it is the progenitor of light and of the source of light, and in the intelligible realm it is the source and provider of truth and knowledge. And I also think that the sight of it is a prerequisite for intelligent conduct either of one's own private affairs or of public business" (509b, 517c).

It's true that Plato was an elitist, dividing society into the castes of guardians, who are philosopher kings, auxiliaries, who oversee the military, and workers who farm, build, buy, and sell. He believed that the guardians must be given an education in what T. S. Eliot called the "permanent things:

"Imagine someone who really lacks the ability to recognize any and every real thing and has no paradigm to shed light for the mind's eye. He has nothing absolutely authentic to contemplate ... and use as a reference-point whenever he needs to, and gain a completely accurate picture of, before establishing human norms of right, morality, and goodness (if establishing is what is required), and before guarding and protecting the norms that have already been established."

This means that those who govern need an absolute standard or transcendent basis for law. Laws must transcend individuals if they are to bind all individuals and thus whole communities. Are we the first civilization, where most of the elites think we can dispence with the transcendent and still have a moral order? Every time someone declares someone else in the wrong he assumes something binds them both. Where does he get this moral authority over other people?

Plato has his problems as well. He would like for the government of the philosopher kings to take over the role of the family and all children to call older men father so that the family fades into the larger community. The Philosophers are to arrange marriages of the best and brightest of both classes in order to improve the race and men are to share the women and have multiple marriages. The Philosophers are to tell everyone the noble lie that some are made of gold and meant to govern, while others are silver, and the rest are copper and iron and meant for manual labor. But all are rational enough to accept this as corresponding to their nature and thus good for them. Plato would abolish private property and personal possessions among the guardians in order to get rid of envy and ambition. The workers are allowed to own and possess and thus they might not be jealous of the guardians unless they were rational and wanted to rule for the right reasons. These could be recognized and moved up to the philosopher class and others could be demoted if they weren't interested in philosophy.

From a Christian point of view Plato is still playing with the "shadows of morality" since he doesn't know God's special revelation, but he does better than most with general revelation. It's not until we read the best of the ancient world that we realize what an effect Christianity has had on the West and just how much of our morality that we take for granted as rational, such as marital fidelity and equality of women and children, was actually revealed by the God of the Bible.

Now on to our translator Robin Waterfield. Waterfield doesn't go with the traditional translation of "eidos" as "form" but uses "type" instead. For some reason modern translators can't leave well enough alone and go for worse. The type of the good doesn't have the same force as the "form" of the good. On top of this Waterfield is a materialist who can't understand Plato at points.

Plato apparantly stands out in Greece for believing in the minds immortality. He argues that a things disease always destroys it like when rust reduces metal to dust. The mind must be immortal however because its disease, which is immorality, doesn't destroy it. In fact most, like an early character named Thrasymachus, become clever and vivacious in their promotion of immorality. Waterfield calls Plato's argument circular and here's why:

"There is no reason to suppose that physical death and psychic death are not identical, or that what destroys bodies does not also destroy minds, unless one already believes that the mind is different in substance from the body."

If the mind is reducible to the brain, which is grey matter and chemicals, then explain self-consciousness. Computers aren't self-conscious. If all we have is nerves and synapsis then how are we able to tell ourselves how and what to think? Explain the longing for transcendent meaning in this bag of chemicals that we call man. There's no reason to suppose that our minds die when our brain function stops unless one already "believes" that the mind is reducible to the brain.

In another place Plato says, "It's goodness which gives the things we know their truth and makes it possible for people to have knowledge." Waterfield says, "what is the meaning of the assertion that goodness is responsible for truth and knowledge? (Truth means little ore than just knowability here) .... It cannot be merely that to know a thing is to know in what way it is good, because Plato envisages knowable types of immorality and evil." Why can't Plato be saying that knowledge of the good is the source of our knowledge of all things and even our knowledge of bad things because the bad things are a perversion of the formerly good thing. Knowledge of the good means we know 2 + 2 = 4, and we know that it would actually be immoral to teach that 2 + 2 = 5.

That said Waterman's translation is a good read and his notes are certainly more than worthwhile.

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Luxury Folly

2011-01-13T23:26:00.000-06:00

I just re-listened to a Mars Hill Audio interview with Robert Frank about his 1999 book Luxury Fever: Money and Happiness in an Era Excess. It has been republished in 2010 by Princeton Univ. Press, because it is probably more relevant than ever.

Frank argues that we buy possessions that don't make us happy, because the incentives are wrong. Our consumer culture sends us the message that to be successful we must look the part. This means conspicuous consumption like the Lexus, the sprawling estate, and the flashy wardrobe with all the accessories. Inconspicuous consumption like vacation, family time, and relaxation, which we know are more fulfilling, are not incentivized by our consumer economy.

Thus Frank proposes a economic model that sounds more like what my grandparents knew. I've always wondered why during WWII the war effort at home was always about sacrifice and doing without. Today we're told that if we want to help, we need to get out and spend. We chart consumer confidence as a mark of a healthy economy. It's spending not savings, stupid!

Frank says not so fast. If we know what's good for us we need to change the game. Why not incentivize savings. Do away with income tax and set up a progressive consumption tax. Say a family pulls in $1,000,000, and they save $300,000. This means that they spent $700,000 on consumables, and this is their taxable income. The tax is graduated so that low and middle income families aren't made any poorer, and also have an incentive to save. This sounds like a distributism of savings.

Despite the poor economy, we've seen another decade of little to no savings among the majority of Americans. When you think about it, we must be out of our minds.

Many reviewers complain that Frank's vision doesn't take cultural realities into account. Just because we know that intangibles are better for us doesn't mean that we can quite worshipping the invisible hand of Adam Smith. Smith told us that the sum of individuals seeking their own interest adds up to the common good for all. This is the invisible hand of the self-regulating market, but it has infected us with luxury fever. Didn't Jesus say, "Do not store up treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy and thieves break in and steal, but store up treasures in heaven where moth and rust do not destroy and thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is there your heart will be also." More intangibles please!

A former student of mine described our consumer economy as a once flowing river that has all but dried up. In order to keep it flowing the government has gone into debt buying two parts hydrogen for every one part oxygen and flooding the basin of consumerism. This is an artificial stimulant that gets us spending again. But it leaves us with the hangover of buyer's regret, and a government that's going to take us down the drain with it. I pray that this doesn't have to happen in order for us learn wisdom and change our incentives. "Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people" (Proverbs 14:34).

Blue Empires

2010-12-18T14:40:00.000-06:00

I've been grading a lot of papers recently about the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and it seems to me that the empire was not on the brink of social, moral, or spiritual collapse. Edward Gibbon had argued that Christianity had contributed to an otherworldliness that made the Romans militarily and economically absentminded.

The Christian Emperor Constantine however had been a life long soldier and was anything but lax militarily. He brought in a pax Romana of prosperity that rivaled that of Caesar Augustus. Peter Heather points out that the Eastern side was even more permeated with Christianity, and Constantinople thrived until the Ottoman conquest in 1453. If anything, Christianity prolonged the existence of the Western empire and then resurrected it in 800 under Charlemagne. Blood-sports did continue despite Constantine's ban. But at least such spectacle was disapproved of by the leader and the growing Christian population, who made up only about 10% of the empire at the beginning of Constantine's reign in 406.

Rome and the Western Empire fell for a myriad of reasons, which all led to a weakening of the military in the face of ever more powerful barbarian tribes who had Attila the Hun breathing down their necks. While Christianity counter-acted social factors the damage had been done and the Barbarians would not be stopped.

Romans had become self-absorbed and were no longer replacing themselves with children. Rodney Stark, in The Rise of Christianity and The Victory of Reason, documents how large families came to be seen as too costly to people's careers of political advancement and self-indulgent lifestyles (See also Peter Leithart's Defending Constantine). This despite Caesar Augustus giving tax breaks to those who made the sacrifice of bringing more than two natural born Roman citizens into the world.

Depopulation, while again counter-acted by large Christian families, left a void that the Barbarians began to fill in the fourth century, when they were hired to fight in the Roman military. This created a conflict of interest however, because barbarians sometimes found themselves fighting against their own tribes who were trying to migrate into Roman territory. Heather says that the Romans created their own conquerors by enriching them through trade and equipping them with military knowledge. It doesn't take long for the enemy to notice the hand your playing and learn to play at the same game. The weakened Romans didn't know how to counter their own military strategies and weapons when used against them.

Rome had expanded through a plunder economy which eventually ran out once the empire was so bloated it was about to pop. When they needed more money they started minting more coins. When the gold and silver started running out, they coated cheaper metals which led to hyper-inflation. The now near-sighted Romans, instead of investing in finding more mines, started hyper-taxing the provinces. When the provincials couldn't pay, the empire forced the wealthy provincials to make up the short-fall.

All this led to disgruntled population defended by an under-funded military trying to protect an over-expanded empire. Once the contractions started, the barbarians gained momentum and the rest is history: Alaric in 410, Vandals in 455, and the Foederati in 476. By the end, there was no more Western empire to occupy, and so the new barbarian ruler was given a title under the Eastern Emperor in Constantinople.

Makes one wonder what will happen to the American Empire? At least the blue sections.

Mosaic

2010-12-17T13:18:00.000-06:00

I've been grading a lot of position papers recently on the authorship of the Pentateuch (first five books of the Old Testament). It seems that the argument for Mosaic authorship runs thus:

The "giving" of the contents of the Pentateuch is associated with Moses, who is also described as writing specific sections. It seems likely that he would have written all of it given his education in Egypt, previous access to ancient sources, his being an eye-witness of most of the events, and a prophet who received special revelation from God. This is supported by testimony from the rest of the Old Testament and New Testament that attributes "the law," the traditional way of referring to the Pentateuch, to Moses.

Perilous Navigation

2010-12-16T21:47:00.000-06:00

David McCullough:

History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.

All I Want For Xmas Is These Books

2010-12-15T13:24:00.001-06:00

Just in case you were racking your brain about what to get your favorite blogger of Christmas, here's my wish list:

Why Mutants Will Never Change by Gene Poole (co-written by the Swirling Eddies)

How to Grow a Brain by Sarah Bellum (Preface by Garrison Keillor)

Don't Eat Yellow Snow by I. P. Freely (now in its 50th printing)

Under the Bleachers by Seymour Butts (now in 100 the anniversary edition)

Writing a Bestseller without Selling Out by Page Turner (Epilogue by Garrison Keillor)

Who Goosed the Moose by Antler's in the Treetops (a true classic)

Hollywood Meets Holy Wood

2010-12-08T21:23:00.001-06:00

There's a great article by Steven Boyer called "Narnia Invaded" over at Touchstone on the problem with the first two Narnia movies. Find it here.

Here are a few comments of my own. In Hollywood and the culture at large there can be no such thing as what Anthony Esolen calls "blessed hierarchies." When Hollywood tries to translate C. S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia it significantly warps the message and changes the characters. Instead a young man ready to lead, Peter is little better than Edmund at the beginning of the cinematic version of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe.

If you didn't know the book, I think the movie might lead you to believe that Edmund was first a victim of Peter and then the witch, instead of a kid who needed a new heart. The Peter of the movies is more conflicted than noble, and is a far cry from the chivalric knight of Lewis' imagination.

Boyer points out that the movies have so far perverted Lewis' message to modernity into the message of modernity. Instead of the ennobling effects of duty to God-given authority, we have Edmund learning to not "do as he was told" and saving the day at the end of The Lion. Instead of his reign in Narnia teaching him to be a better leader in this world, Peter picks fights at the beginning of Prince Caspian and even with Prince Caspian, once he gets back to Narnia. The High King is anything but noble through most of the movies, because, as we post moderns know, kings by definition are self-centered tyrants. So Peter must learn to not be so kingly in the movies.

Aslan also becomes more like the god of Deism than the untame Lion who ruled at the top of the "blessed hierarchy." Mr. Beaver says, "Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you." When will we learn that we need royal priests and servant kings who know how to take orders from the King of Kings in the government, church, and families?

I'm still hoping against all odds for better from Friday's release of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. When Hollywood meets Holy Wood the result usually leaves a lot to be desired. We shall see....

States' Wrongs

2010-12-04T20:39:00.000-06:00

The 150th anniversary of secession is coming up (Dec. 20), and there's a good New York Times article here about the festivities being planned. The following excerpt sums up my view of the cause of war and why, I think, the anniversary should not be celebrated:

Most historians say it is impossible to carve out slavery from the context of the war. As James W. Loewen, a liberal sociologist and author of “Lies My Teacher Told Me,” put it: “The North did not go to war to end slavery, it went to war to hold the country together and only gradually did it become anti-slavery — but slavery is why the South seceded.”

Playing Marco Polo in the Shallow End

2010-11-26T12:36:00.000-06:00

A recent article in Christianity Today called "The Leavers: Young Doubters Exit the Church" by Drew Dyck stirred up some reflection on the state of American teenagers and another group called "emerging adults." Dyck cited the work of Christian Smith who wrote Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. Smith documents the shallowness of the Christianity we have passed on to teens.

He characterizes the worldview of American teens as "Moralistic, therapeutic, Deism." Most teens believe that the purpose of life is to be "nice." Nice people go to heaven and "not nice" people don't. So it's moral. God created us, but he doesn't get in the way. He's there if you need him, like a therapist. Other than that, he doesn't interfere. So it's deistic.

Smith found that even kids from conservative Bible-believing churches were practically deists. I would add that if we don't show our kids the difference between Christianity and other worldviews, and why it matters, we leave them in the shallows. When deep problems begin to sink their faith, it's no wonder that they climb into someone else's boat. Dyck's article cites statistics that this is happening right now in an unprecedented way.

Smith's other work Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults documents a prolonged adolescence, where young people continue to experiment morally and vocationally into their late twenties. God may be there at the end of life, but if not, at least one has made a lot of money and been successful.

For most emerging adults, life is about having a good time and settling down "someday" with a beautiful spouse, having a couple of kids, and parties surrounded by lots of toys and friends. There's anxiety about navigating all the transitions and not messing up the future. They don't put down roots in traditional communities because they are constantly adjusting to changes.

Smith's research found that most emerging adults who attend church have no idea what their church teaches or that there's supposed to be some sort of commitment to Christ. Many go to mega-churches where nobody knows them. According to this group, dubbed "selective adherents" by Smith, church is a good thing to do on a Sunday morning as long as you don't have other plans.

Smith shows that emerging adults have little conviction about anything, even politics, because they confess to being trapped in their own subjectivity. Post modernism has made them aware that the outside world is socially constructed by the individual in his own time and place. People believe what they believe because that is how they were raised. Belief makes it true for the person, and there is no objective, shared reality to test truth claims. Live and let live for pleasure.

As a church, we've got to be more deliberate about worldview teaching and living. Christian redemption of the individual and the world for God's glory is the driving force of the Bible and redemptive history. We can know this because God has revealed it objectively and created us to know it subjectively. Our senses and our souls can reliably know the world because God made them for that purpose. Either we get into that epistemological stream or we're still playing "Marco Polo" in the shallow end.

Dyck appears to be critical of "seeker sensitive" services and "low commitment Bible Studies," of evangelical mega-churches. But in the end he says that there's nothing wrong with them as long as we also teach the faithful with more depth. I would suggest that Dyck has fallen prey to the post modern here, because everything he cited in his article militates against the low commitment approach with non-believers. This doesn't seem to jive with Jesus, who made his listeners count the cost up front. David Wells has pointed out, "What you win them with is what you win them to."

Now enter "When Scripture Becomes An A-La-Carte Menu" by James Tonkowich in By Faith. Tonkowich summarizes Smith's six categories of emerging adults:

Committed Traditionalists represent approximately 15 percent of emerging adults. They “embrace a strong religious faith, whose beliefs they can reasonably well articulate and which they actively practice.”
Selective Adherents (30%) believe and perform certain aspects of their religious tradition, but neglect or ignore others.” The attitude of so-called “cafeteria Catholics” is now widespread across evangelical and Reformed churches.
The Spiritually Open (15%) while not committed to any specific religious faith “are nevertheless receptive to or at least mildly interested in some spiritual or religious matters.”
The Religiously Indifferent (25%) don’t oppose religion, but don’t have any interest either.
The Religiously Disconnected (5%) admitted to no opinions about religion because they know nothing about, and are not connected in any way, with religious bodies or friends.
The Irreligious (10%) are openly hostile to all religion.

Tonkowich proceeds to a discussion of how to reach "emerging adults" who have been catechized by the culture into moral relativism. The moral relativism can be seen in the following examples cited by Tonkowich:

A man who attends a mega-church with his live-in fiancé explained to Smith why he felt comfortable ignoring his church’s teaching about pre-marital sex: “I think in my head it’s all personal opinion, whether you’re going to believe it or choose to like it and listen to it.”

“There is [a] self indulgent attitude,” ... “that says, ‘My life is difficult. I have lots of brokenness. I know it’s not right, but … .’”

Ruling Elder Bob Baldwin at GraceDC commented that when it comes to biblical sexuality, “If the rules don’t fit their cultural expectations, they mentally find a way around them, ignoring what they know to be true scripturally. What surprises me most is how carefully they have thought through their work-arounds.”

Smith documents the same pattern with the story of a young woman he interviewed: “In the middle of explaining that for religious reasons she does not believe in cohabitation before marriage, a young evangelical woman, who is devoted to gospel missionary work overseas, interrupted herself with this observation, ‘I don’t know. I think everyone is different so I don’t think [cohabitation before marriage] would work for me, but it could work for someone else.’”

Tonkowich's argues that we must reach emerging adults, especially those afflicted with moral relativism, through relationships. Tonkowich writes:

One pastor has noticed, “There are feelings of guilt, insecurity, and shame—especially shame. The problem for them is that they don’t know why these feelings exist.” In fact, these feelings hint at an authority beyond the self.

Romans 1:18-32 teaches that there are truths about life and God that we cannot not know (to use author J. Budziszewski’s phrase). We may pretend we don’t know them. We may suppress them. We may bury them under layers of carefully constructed philosophical skepticism, but all to no avail. From time to time these truths bubble uncomfortably to the surface.

Ministry to emerging adults should create opportunities founded on strong, honest relationships to explore the truths that will not be ignored, truths that explain the guilt and shame that will not go away. Apologetics begins not with correcting bad thinking, but with listening and helping to dig up the uncomfortable facts of life that, by the grace of God, will not go away.

Tonkowich collects much anecdotal evidence that opening up about struggles invites people to share honestly. Emerging adults have been programmed to "never let them see you sweat" and always exude competence. But when they see us modeling repentance then perhaps the deep end won't seem so scary.

I would add that when it comes to raising and educating children and young adults it begins with correcting sinful ways and thinking with Bible, Bible, Bible, coupled with love deeds and modeling repentance. Constant excursions to the deep end with plenty of swimming, diving, splash fights, dunking, and laughter will build a strong Christian culture in the home that will serve them well into the future. As one pastor has noted, they will be able to "do more harm to the world than the world will be able to do to them."

Fore Golfers

2010-11-17T15:57:00.002-06:00

A Little More Nonsense Now and Again

2010-11-17T15:46:00.002-06:00

A Little Nonsense Now and Then

2010-11-17T15:43:00.000-06:00

"The Gods of the Copy Book Headings"

2010-11-17T15:19:00.002-06:00

A friend recently shared a great piece of verse with me. Rudyard Kipling, the author of Jungle Book and "Riki Tiki Tavi," wrote the marvelous poem below.

All you need to know is that copybooks were handwriting manuals for elementary school children to hone their penmanship (a lost art). At the top were short morals and Bible verses for them to copy in their own handwriting. To understand the rest all you need is ears to hear and eyes to see.

The Gods of the Copy Book Headings:

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place;
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four —
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man —
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began: —
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

Laughter is Warfare

2010-11-17T14:58:00.000-06:00

One time G.K. Chesterton, the rolypologist, was patted on the stomach by his adversary, George Bernard Shaw, a beanpole of an infidel, and was asked what they were going to name the baby. Chesterton replied immediately that if it was a boy, John, if a girl, then Mary. But if it turned out to only be gas, they were going to name it George Bernard Shaw.

I got this gem from Blog and Mablog.

Survival of the Flimsiest

2010-11-13T22:28:00.001-06:00

I recently re-watched Collision with a fellow teacher and his class. Collision is a documentary of a series of debates between Atheist Christopher Hitchens and Christian Apologist Douglas Wilson. Hitchens repeatedly challenges Wilson to name a good action that a Christian could do that an atheist couldn't. This receives a good but only a partial answer from Wilson.

Wilson is right when he points out that the question is not whether there are some good actions which only a Christian can do, but whether an atheist has any basis for distinguishing between good and evil in the first place.

Whenever Hitchens criticizes anyone, which he loves to do, he assumes a norm that binds us all. But if Darwinism is true, then morality is subjective and evolving too. Hitchens claims that morality comes to us through the trial and error of evolution. This manifests in our innate sense of right and wrong and our consensus with fellow humans as to what constitutes an orderly civilization. But our innate subjective feelings are not very binding nor is an appeal to consensus. That we, as a species, agree to make laws in order to survive doesn't really mean anything to a Hitler. Hitchens says that referring morality upward doesn't help. But without God, how could you challenge the authority of a totalitarian state like Hitler's?

Wilson's answer is incomplete in that he fails to concede to Hitchens that morality is innate, but not because of evolution. It is innate in everyone because we are all created in the imago Dei (image of God). Not only is it doubtful that evolution would produce common morality, but, without a transcendent standard based in God, there would be no way to back it up or keep it in place. If Darwinism were true morality would not only be subjective, but it would also be like a passing fad. You could evolve beyond good and evil like the aliens that are abducting us in all those movies. Now back to the point. It is true that atheists can do any good deed that a Christian can, but this is because, as created beings, we all share the moral law written on the heart.

Hitchens points out that some Christians are just as guilty of moral evils as some atheists. This is true, but there is the difference: When a Christian does evil, he is being inconsistent with Christianity. But when an atheist does evil, he's not being inconsistent with atheism.

Wilson gets Hitchens to admit this at one point, and I don't think Hitchens realizes that this is a major weakness. People can be good without God, but they can also use atheism as a premise for changing the game in frightening ways. Exhibit A: Hitler. Exhibit B: Stalin. Exhibit C: Mao. Exhibit D: well, you get the picture. In fact, if survival of the fittest is the mechanism of evolutionary progress, it's hard to justify things like caring for the sick or giving blood. In such an act of charity, we are helping the weak survive and undermining the fitness of the species. It amounts to survival of the flimsiest!

A Superb Discussion on C. S. Lewis

2010-11-10T21:33:00.000-06:00

Alan Jacobs, ND Wilson, and Doug Wilson in conversation | Full Edition from Canon Wired on Vimeo.

Economics as the Possession Not the Pursuit of Happiness

2010-10-23T13:11:00.003-05:00

Being Consumed by William T. Cavanaugh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Cavanaugh argues that globalism is a counterfeit of the church. Consumerism is the worldview that drives the structures of globalism and it is a direct challenge to the Christian faith. Cavanaugh writes:

Consumer culture is one of the most powerful systems of formation in the contemporary world, arguably more powerful than Christianity. While a Christian may spend an hour per week in church, she may spend twenty-five hours per week watching television, to say nothing of the hours spent on the Internet, listening to the radio, shopping, looking at junk mail and other advertisements. Nearly everywhere we lay our eyes -- gas-pump handles, T-shirts, public restroom walls, bank receipts, church bulletins, sports uniforms, and so on -- we are confronted by advertising.

Such a powerful formative system is not morally neutral; it trains us to see the world in certain ways. As all the great faiths of the world have attested, how we relate to the material world is a spiritual discipline. As one corporate manager frankly put it, 'Corporate branding is really about worldwide beliefs management' (47-48).

Consumerism seeks to exploit our restlessness, while Christianity seeks to cure our restlessness. St. Augustine, Cavanaugh's primary discussion partner and guide, once "confessed," "Thou hast made us for thyself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee."

Thus the worldview of consumerism and its quasi church of globalism with its sacraments of technology are idols meant to replace Christ, his universal church, and the sacraments of bread and wine. Cavanaugh shows that as we consume we become more "detached" from the things we consume. Because consumerism is based on desire for desire instead of the object that is desired, we constantly throw away what we consume as we move on to our next purchase.

But in the Eucharist (the Lord's Supper/communion) we become consumed by what we consume. Instead of detachment, we experience greater attachment to Christ and thus satisfaction in Him. Cavanaugh points out that in consumerism possession kills desire, but in the Eucharist possession transforms and satisfies desire. This is because God made us for himself. We were created to know God and enjoy him forever (Westminster Confession of Fatih), but we worship and serve the creation instead of the Creator (Romans 1).

Cavanaugh expertly diagnoses the problem but he also gives solutions, at least on the individual and local level. Cavanaugh is not as ascetic who is trying us feel guilty about consuming materials. He wants to reform our view of what we consume. Every created object contains traces of the Creator. When we use created things we should be enjoying the Creator. Created objects don't satisfy us when they are treated as an end in themselves. The satisfy us when we use them to point us to their source in God. Thus, the things of earth don't go strangely dim, as the misguided hymn says, but they grow, as one of my friends likes to say, "strangely alive."

Cavanaugh brings in Hans Urs von Balthasar for a philosophical discussion of how we see the universal and the particular united in Christ. In globalization we see only particulars unrelated to anything universal or as mere interchangeable stand-ins for the universal (as in the liberal idea that all religions lead to God so it doesn't matter which one). Thus particulars are dispensable. But in the incarnation of Christ, we see the universal Son united with the finite Jesus. By becoming man, God makes room for every particular. Every material object, just like Christ's humanity, can be set apart for God's purpose.

God created us to create under him. Thus we should consume what we produce and produce what we consume. Cavanaugh realizes that we can't produce everything we consume, so he says we should consume locally and get to know our producers in order to make God-glorifying choices.

We don't realize that our clothes, coffee and other consumables are produced by poor people in third world countries who are being exploited by businesses feeding our consumption. Do we know how our God-given cows are being treated? Cavanaugh does. He buys his beef from a local farmer who feeds his herds healthy, naturally produced food instead of drugs meant only to bulk them up. The cows are clean and not penned up in their own muck. Does the meat cost more? Definitely, but a little less beef goes much farther in terms of satisfaction. Adam Smith could not have been more wrong when he said that the market provides all the knowledge necessary for the consumer to make rational choices for the common good.

Cavanaugh argues that Adam Smith's and Milton Friedman's definition of freedom as the absence of coercion, actually leads to a coercive capitalism. He argues for a return to Augustine's definition of freedom as the ability not just to choose but to choose the Good. We must choose the Good as defined by God who created human nature. Without the Christian understanding of the chief end of man, nothing remains but lust for power through profits.

Cavanaugh compares the Mandarin Co. who outsources jobs to El Salvador to the Mondragon Cooperative Corp. in Spain who hires locally. The Mandarin Co. widens the gap between employer and employee by forcing workers to put up with substandard pay and working conditions. If the workers protest, as they have, the company simply threatens to leave El Salvador for cheaper labor elsewhere. The workers aren't coerced. They have a choice, but few options, and they can't afford the consumables they are producing.

A priest founded the Mondragon Co. on Distributist principles, which means that the employees are owners and the highest paid in the co. only makes six times more than the lowest paid. Compare that to the average CEO who makes 300 times more than the lowest paid worker in a modern corporation. Mondragon is a multi-billion dollar company who has created a healthy, educated local community with low crime rates. "Which has promoted human freedom?" asks Cavanaugh. Neither group is coercing its employees to work there, but one of them as enabled human flourishing and the other is oppressive.

What Cavanaugh doesn't address, and this is probably the major weakness of the book, is how to restructure the state, national, and global economy along the lines of Augustine's definition of human freedom and the principles of Distributism. Distributism seeks not to redistribute wealth through taxation but to distribute ownership to as many people as possible. G K. Chesterton did address how to implement this at the national level, and he needs to be heard along with Cavanaugh.

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Pearcy on Secularism (click here)

2010-10-19T21:39:00.000-05:00

Faith, Works, and Scissors

2010-10-14T14:39:00.000-05:00

According to the Bible, works aren't the basis of our relationship with God, but they are a test of whether we believe in that God. If someone said I believe in Christ, but I don't want to be baptized, we would question whether they actually believe. Thus our relationship with God is by faith alone, but if we refuse to do the good works he commands we don't have the faith we think we do. We are Christians by faith but without Christian works we are not Christians.

Thus C. S. Lewis quipped that arguing whether faith or works is more important is like arguing over which blade of the scissors is more important.

Risus bellum!

2010-10-12T17:39:00.000-05:00

Spurgeon wrote:

The man who serves his God with his whole heart is apt to forget his surroundings, and to fling himself so completely into his work that the whole of his nature comes into action, and even his humour, if he be possessed of that faculty, rushes into the battle (Eccentric Preachers, pp. 75-76).

I got this quote from Doug Wilson's blog. Risus bellum (Laughter is warfare).

An Artist with a Prophetic Voice

2010-10-11T20:16:00.000-05:00

Click on the post title to read a letter to North American churches written by Makoto Fujimura. He is an abstract impressionist with a prophetic and learned voice.

What a God, What a Gift!

2010-10-10T21:16:00.000-05:00

When the Greek men thought of an Almighty god, they created a lightening wielding, womanizer whose every seduction resulted in a pregnancy. Zeus fathered at least 100! God equals ultimate virility.

When the Hebrews received revelation from the one true God, he was "holy, holy, holy," and sex was his gift of one-flesh union to married couples. This loving union participated in the creative ability of God's own love. Out of the loving union of the Trinity, flowed creative acts that created people in his image ex nihilo. Out of the loving union of the married couple, flowed a creative act that produced children in the image of God. What a gift, what a God!!

Let's Talk About Conversation

2010-10-07T14:32:00.001-05:00

Conversation: A History of a Declining Art by Stephen Miller
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Miller traces the history of the "conversible world" of friends and acquaintances who discussed the big ideas of their day and how they shaped their world. The ancient world gets short shrift, but the 18th c. British coffee houses get their due. Miller covers the likes of Samuel Johnson and David Hume and their discussion partners and contrasts this golden age of conversation with the lack of meaningful conversation happening today. Miller argues that the conversible world has shrunk. People no longer visit coffee houses for conversation but to use the wifi. We prefer friends at out fingertips rather than face time for important issues. Contrast this with the world of Johnson and Hume who made face time with friends one of the greatest joys of their intellectual lives.

Johnson and Hume work well as about the only value they shared in common was a love of conversation. It would have been quite a spectacle had they ever met for coffee. Hume was the consummate skeptic who despised people who thought they were the most interesting topic of conversation. Miller agrees as he makes Rousseau the villain of this history. Rousseau thought his life worthy of a "Confessions" not written to God, like Augustine's Confessions, but to his fellow man. Rousseau's audience was evidently supposed to think that Rousseau's Confessions were some sort of anti-septic for all his questionable deeds.

Johnson sought out conversation to cure his melancholy. Recent research (not from Miller) has shown that it is a natural drug more helpful than any anti-depressant, though the anti-depressant can help get you out of the pit and back into the coffee house. Johnson and Miller like raillery and badinage instead of preoccupation with the self. Raillery is the jocular intellectual dueling that isn't underhanded but usually so over the top that it's just good clean fun for those who don't take themselves too seriously. Badinage is playful conversation that is usually refined by intellectual and experiential knowledge. It reminds me of GK Chesterton's tremendous trifles.

Miller's book is never dull, despite what other reviewers have said on Goodreads, and is a veritable gold mine of wisdom for learning the ropes of good conversation. If you want a practical guide for avoiding boredom and conversation stoppers and stimulating community then Miller's book is a great place to start. From a worldview perspective, Miller is a secularist who values religion for the issues it raises for rational discussion. He finds his religious friends, even those who accept the authority of the Bible, to be great discussion partners.

Miller however, never addresses the challenge that secularism poses to substantive conversation. Secularism promotes the idea that people must check their ultimate commitments at the door of public debate. This is the real conversation stopper and the greatest weakness of the book. Miller's work does serve as a good reminder that curiosity is born in conversation which demands a conversing community of honest intellectuals. This is a declining ideal.

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Way Beyond the Blues!

2010-10-01T08:26:00.002-05:00

Eat, Drink, and Be Merry, For Tomorrow We Live Forever.

2010-09-30T19:50:00.000-05:00

William Cavanaugh in his Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire argues that Christianity and consumerism are basically at odds. Christianity promises to cure our restlessness but consumerism tries to exploit it. But this doesn't mean that Christianity is totally against consumption. Worldly consumption actually detaches us from the objects we consume. We use something, throw it away, and then go shopping. No big deal. But when we consume our Lord's body and blood, we don't become detached but rather more attached to him.

Cavanaugh also points out that creation contains revelations of its creator. So when we consume it, we should be growing closer to him in our enjoyment of the created objects. They point beyond themselves to him. I remember being struck by how many times God told Israel to feast, and said that he would be with them in the midst of their enjoyment. Let's eat, drink, and be merry, because tomorrow we live forever!!

Infectious Hampsters!

2010-09-24T09:54:00.002-05:00

The Not So Slippery Greece

2010-09-23T14:46:00.000-05:00

Ancient Greece: From Prehistoric to Hellenistic Times by Thomas R. Martin

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Solid overview but with no substantial thesis. Martin focuses on the plight of the common man, women, and slaves whose existence changed little from down through the ages. Martin documents it as "nasty, brutish, and short" no matter the period: prehistoric, classical, or hellenistic.

The prose is accessible though not not especially memorable. Discussions are informative with a few quotes from the primary sources but more would've been welcome. The arts are given a fair shake as well as the philosophers. The dramatic changes in society via Themisticles, Pericles, etc. are understated and it comes across a little lifeless. On the positive side, Martin is clear, generally concise, and great for giving the reader the big picture. It filled in a lot of gaps for me while leaving me disappointed that the glorious moments seemed a little "ho-hum."

My main criticism is that author's personality seems to hide beneath a veneer of objectivity when he could've revealed it by arguing various theses or points of view. This approach usually makes for more interesting reading than the objective approach. I would rather an author take a position and try to be fair to his opponents than be dull and uninteresting by trying to "appear" objective.

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Linkage Here

2010-09-18T16:56:00.002-05:00

My friend Jason Carter has posted a Distributist Biblio on his blog Outlines of Sanity. I highly recommend your taking long draughts from this well!

Coercive Commercialism

2010-09-14T14:40:00.006-05:00

I've just begun William T. Cavanaugh's book Being Consumed. He observes that Milton Friedman's definition of freedom as the absence of coercion has ironically led to coercive commercialism. It doesn't force anyone to buy, but it does surround and manipulate. "Consumers feel besieged by marketing and surveillance" (1).

The free market promises to make the individual his own god, determining good and evil for himself as a consumer. It promises to liberate man from definitions of right and wrong but it enslaves him to his appetites. It is guided by no definition of human nature and thus no position on what is good or bad for humans. Man is left without a telos or goal of human fulfillment to strive for. In this vacuum, man's will is at the mercy of the marketers. It is not even a battle. The will of the consumer helplessly acquiesces to the relentless onslaught of the marketers.

We need a positive definition of freedom. The classical and Christian view is that freedom is the ability to choose the Good. This means we need a definition of the Good to serve as a guide for human consumption. Where are we going to get that if not from Christianity? Don't we need Christianity to be honored again in the public square? To the extent that we still pay lip service to the common good aren't we living off of borrowed capital? The checks are starting to bounce and we are in trouble. We must return to font of living water as individuals, families, and a society. Lord help us!

Darwinists Admit They Have No Morality

2010-09-10T09:20:00.003-05:00

Click on the title of this post to read a review of a new book called Sex at Dawn and some other confessions of what it means to be a consistent Darwinist.

Against Christianity?

2010-09-08T21:10:00.004-05:00

Against Christianity by Peter J. Leithart

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Christianity has become the label for the church marginalized by the modern secular state. So Leithart is against Christianity but not the church. Leithart calls the church to repent of its retreat and reassert its culture, language, and influence in the world at large, which includes the state. The church must return from its state imposed exile.

Haven't we tried this before you ask? What about the evils of medieval Christendom? Leithart convincingly argues that the evils of Christendom were inconsistencies, and not a problem intrinsic to that social order. The church and state may cooperate in ruling under God without coercing its people. The church was never meant to rule Christendom but Christendom was supposed to be ruled by a state with "Christian politics."

Leithart agrees that the church's message to the state is countercultural, but he also maintains that this is compatible with a Christian political realm outside the church. Leithart doesn't talk much about the direction of influence between the state and the church, but seems to assume that both are in need of constant reform and renewal by the dynamic of the gospel.

Leithart does appeal to Augustine's city of God. The church is political because it is a polis and ekklesia which commands loyalty greater than any state. The church is a threat to the usurping state. It is the true United Nations. If the state won't respect the spiritual, moral, and theological authority of the church then all the worse for the state. The church is not a part of the polis, it is its own polis, say Leithart (28).

This rings true. Modern liberalism has "cleansed" the public sphere of religion but this hasn't helped us agree or get along. We are more polarized than ever. What modern liberalism has done is take away the basis of persuasion. The Christian conscience has been erased from the public square. Without the ability to make religious arguments, we are at the mercy of our ruling appetites.

Patrick Henry proposed that a non-sectarian Christianity be declared the state religion of Virginia. Jefferson and Madison opposed Henry and this was never tried. What about Massachusetts Bay Colony? Well, I would point out that that was a coercive Christendom which failed because it was too strong where it needed to be permissive to dissenters.

There is a lot more here than a defense of Constantinianism. There is a robust view of the sacraments as an efficacious union of the symbol with the reality. This also works for Leithart as a spearhead against the secularist divorce of the natural and the supernatural. Leithart also highlights ethical transformation as part of the gospel. The gospel seeks to transform the community. "She withdraws from the world for the sake of the world" (135). He points to the work of Rodney Stark who documents the rise of christianity through social transformation in the cities. This led to Christendom and to use the title of one of Stark's books The Victory of Reason.

Leithart's sword cuts through so many layers of secularist armor that it's shocking and refreshing at the same time. Only God can make obligatory. Otherwise everything is permissible and the state wields brute force while the culture festers. The separation of church and state doesn't promote liberty but only slavery to appetite.

Leithart's prescription for change is worship and liturgy. He calls worship is an historical exercise that reenacts redemptive history through word and sacrament. These center us in redemptive history and teach us to "name the world through the Word" just like Adam (72-73).

The church's mission is not to accommodate her language to the existing language, to disguise herself so as to slip in unnoticed and blend in with the existing culture. Her mission is to confront the language of the existing culture with a language of her own (57).

He says that worship is a language course and liturgy is the teacher. Excuse me, I think its time for class.

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Compassion and Conviction

2010-09-07T23:19:00.000-05:00

Compassion without conviction breeds license.

The Way We Were

2010-09-02T22:10:00.002-05:00

Our seminary curricula are largely identical to what they were around the First World War, but the entering seminarian is a profoundly different person than was the seminarian of the early twentieth century. Then, the individual was well-read in poetry, and had studied nearly a decade of classical language (Latin, Greek, or both), learning by reading poetry and ancient languages to read texts carefully. He had written compositions almost weekly in many of his academic classes, and often wrote letters to friends and family. In contrast, the entering seminarian today has the faculties of a sixth- to eighth grader sixty years ago, and the seminary curriculum cannot make this seminarian an adult by the time he graduates (Gordon, Why Johnny Can't Preach, p. 68).

I got this off of Doug Wilson's blog. This was certainly true of me.

The Frontline Against Secularism

2010-09-02T15:04:00.004-05:00

In anticipation of Peter Leithart's Defending Constantine, due out in November, I am reading Against Christianity, and it has helped crystalize something for me.

The church's liturgy revels in the union of the natural with the supernatural. It revels in the wedding of word, water, bread, and wine with grace, forgiveness, cleansing, and strengthening.

This is the frontline in the battle against secularism, which marginalizes the supernatural to the private sphere of personal belief. It divorces grace from the natural order of everyday life. It tries to make the things of God off limits to public discussion (90-91).

Does Nature Have Meaning?

2010-08-30T07:50:00.005-05:00

Does creation reveal its meaning to us or do we confer meaning onto it?

This is an important question. If we believe that creation is given to us by God and reveals its God-given meaning to our senses and intellect, then we will be more likely to respect it. But if we believe that nature isn't created by God, then it has no God-given quality that we are bound to respect. It is reduced to raw materials that we may manipulate. We can give it any meaning we want.

Now which worldview is more likely to take better care of the earth and use biotechnology for human good?

Grace Before, Mercy After

2010-08-29T22:30:00.000-05:00

Before the fall God gave Adam more than he deserved. After the fall he gave him the opposite of what he deserved. Before the fall there was grace, after the fall grace took the form of mercy.

Why Richard Dawkins Needs to Get His Science from iCarly

2010-08-26T09:01:00.003-05:00

I was recently watching a rerun of the preteen television show iCarly with my children, and lo and behold Albert Einstein was quoted by Spencer:

The thing that can't be proved is the scientific nature of science itself.

I couldn't believe my ears, and I thought I would have to wander through the rest of my life wondering if I had really heard Einstein quoted on a preteen pop-culture tv show. Then I remembered we had just acquired the modern technological marvel called DVR. So I grabbed the remote from my kids and re-round iCarly. They thought I was going to change the channel. So when my seven year old daughter's cries of protest changed to surprise: "What are you doing dad?" I realized that I actually had heard Spenser quote Einstein.

This just goes to show you the relevance of pop culture to those still stuck in modernity.

I say this because Richard Dawkins, whose stuck in the Enlightenment, obviously needs to get his science from iCarly. This is because he and his friends, like Christopher Hitchens, seem to assume that science does not involve faith. But it is really an act of faith to rely on our sense perceptions.

The scientific method proceeds by observations from our senses, and these are interpreted by our minds. To accept that these are reliable impressions of reality and that our mind interprets them accurately is to assume a lot. It is again an act of faith. This faith is justified, I would argue, if and only if our sense perceptions were designed to interpret reality. Otherwise faith in our sense impressions and our interpretations of them is unfounded. Thus, Dawkin's position is not only based on faith, but on an unfounded faith.

So what if Richard Dawkins was made to sit down and watch a kids show, and all of a sudden he thought he heard Einstein being quoted. Could he "believe" his ears? Yes, but only if they were designed to pick up sound waves, and if his brain was designed to interpret the meaning intended by the source of those sound waves. But this kind of confidence in science would lead to the God of Christianity, and that would be unbelievable, wouldn't it?

A Child's Education

2010-08-09T14:28:00.005-05:00

Why is a child's education so important?

Augustine writes:

Virgil certainly is held to be a great poet; in fact he is regarded as the best and the most renowned of all poets, and for that reason he is read by children at an early age--they take great draughts of his poetry into their unformed minds, so that they may not easily forget him, for, as Horace remarks,

New vessels will for long retain the taste
Of what is first poured into them (City of God I.3).

What I Have Written, I Have Written

2010-08-09T08:59:00.000-05:00

Quod scripsi, scripsi.

Order in this Order

2010-08-09T08:47:00.001-05:00

We know things left to themselves tend toward disorder. So who put the order in this natural order?

Augustine, Distributism, & Empire

2010-08-08T17:04:00.005-05:00

In preparing to teach on on Augustine's City of God I ran across the following passage:

Let them see the possibility that good men really shouldn’t rejoice at the expanding of the empire.[1] … ; and human affairs being thus more happy, all kingdoms would have been small, rejoicing in neighborly concord; and thus there would have been very many kingdoms of nations in the world, as there are very many houses of citizens in a city. Therefore, to carry on war and extend a kingdom over wholly subdued nations seems to bad men to be felicity, to good men necessity…. [Victory] would have surely been the case if, instead of a stone on the capitol,[2] the true King of kings and the Lord of lords would have dwelled there and been known.[3]

Augustine believed that the city of God was the last best hope for the city of man. The Roman Empire was too big for its own good and had gotten to where it was by being bad. Rome did not conquer because it had to wage just wars, but because it worshipped Jupiter. It hurled its lightening bolts around the Mediterranean until they began to short circuit.

The Barbarians had been biding their time and now, a la St. Jerome, the city of man that had taken the world was about to be really taken. Too bad they hadn't worshipped the true king of heaven (at least until lately and even then half-heartedly). Maybe then they would have stayed small and neighborly. Trying to do too much as an individual or a nation only diminishes you. Stay small and beautiful. Empires are for chumps.

__________________

[1] Trans. mine: Videant ergo ne forte non pertineat ad uiros bonos gaudere de regni latitudine. The rest is Dod's trans. unless noted otherwise.

[2] Statue to Zeus/Jupiter.

[3] Trans. mine: Quod profecto haberetur, si non lapis in Capitolio, sed uerus rex regum et dominus dominantium cognosceretur atque coleretur.

The Individual Good vs. the Common Good

2010-08-02T22:45:00.000-05:00

Someone has said that after all other motives for art have been discarded, the only one left was self-expression. The Greeks were motivated by the idea of beauty as perfection. The Romans were into gritty realism. The glory of God motivated Christendom art. In fact, most medieval artists didn't even sign their art. The Renaissance recovered the Graeco-Roman portrayal of man but, in the light of Christendom, saw him as made in the image of God. The Romanticists were motivated by nature as the ideal place for man.

Things start to fragment from there. After Christendom the center doesn't hold. Without a conception of the glory of God and man as made and then remade in God's image, man is set adrift. When there is no king in Israel, everyone does what is right in his own eyes. Man's view of himself and the world begins to depreciate until the only thing left is money and experimentation.

Patrick Deneen the author of Democratic Faith (click on the blog title) said in a Mars Hill Audio interview (volume 91) that when he asks his students to define democracy the most common set of answers has to do with the freedom of the individual to pursue his preferences. This is democracy as self-expression.

Deneen points out that this is much different than what Aristotle meant when he defined democracy as "rule and being ruled in turn." Everybody took a turn, even the poor, in Athenian democracy. Today, with the church relegated to the margins of society, it's up to the individual to find or make his own meaning.

The church has been told that it can make no claim on any world except its own. The individual is left to himself. He wanders with no commonly held view of human nature. There is nothing intrinsically bad or good for him. There is only what he wants. In this way, there is no common good there is only the individual good.

Instead of democracy preserving the common good, it is reduced to protecting our individual conceptions of the good. This means the individual can do anything he wants as long as he doesn't physically harm is fellow man. The liberty to swing my fist ends at my neighbors nose. This impoverishes democracy by handing it over to our appetites for sex, money, and power. "It's just business" is really insidious when you think about it.

Gravitas

2010-08-01T15:01:00.002-05:00

I lifted this quote from Doug Wilson's blog:

The old seminary professors used to speak about a necessary trait for pastoral ministry called gravitas. It refers to a soul that has developed enough spiritual mass to be attractive, like gravity. It makes the soul appear old, but gravitas has nothing to do with age. It has everything to do with wounds that have healed well, failures that have been redeemed, sins that have been forgiven, and thorns that have settled into the flesh. These severe experiences with life expand the soul until it appears larger than the body that contains it (Barnes, The Pastor As Minor Poet, p. 49).

The Way We Live

2010-07-26T15:59:00.003-05:00

The way we live is only self-evident to us. Ask our pilgrim fathers or just about anyone else before the 19th century if it is in the best interest of freedom to separate church and state, and they will probably look at you as if you just arrived from a distant star. Christopher Dawson pointed out, in the mid 20th century, that "it is no exaggeration to say that all civilizations have always been religious."

Putting on "Intellectual Muscle"

2010-07-13T09:39:00.009-05:00

Steven Loomis and Paul Spears recently did an interview on Mars Hill Audio Journal about their new book Education for Human Flourishing (click on the title). I have listened to it now many times and am resonating with great resounding echoes!!

Spears makes the point that failure plays a major role in any intellectual pursuit. We cringe at that because we are quantifiers. We know that if we quantify trial and error after error in a culture where we've programmed students not to fail it will create anxiety. We've created a culture where self esteem is the ultimate good.

Spears also points out that the Socratic method is all about failure, and to the extent that we incorporate it we usually teach kids to do faux dialogue. This means that students will tend to only ask questions that they know the answer to and proceed to show off their knowledge in conversation with the teacher. This way they get some cache in front of their classmates. This also explains why students are usually reticent to answer our questions. What if their wrong in front of their classmates?

This is the opposite of what Socrates was up to. His dialogue partners went away hanging their heads but at least they knew themselves better. Socrates motto was "know thyself" and his second one was like it: "The unexamined life is not worth living." This means that Socrates was a successful teacher and his students were learning whether they realized it or not. It seems to me that Jesus taught a lot like this too as well as his followers.

Spears says that until we find out how little we know, how much we need to learn, and just our uninformed our assumptions are, we are not really on the path of learning. Doug Wilson commented that our motto is: "Thou Shalt Feel Good About Thyself."

I didn't really experience this kind of learning until my master's work and it wasn't full on until my doctoral program. I remember walking away from class day after day thinking, "Matt, you are such an idiot." Well I'm sure I still am, but hopefully I'm a little wiser. Now listen to the way C. S. Lewis describes the manner of his education from about age eleven with his tutor Kirkpatrick:

I soon came to know the differing values of his three openings. The loud cry of "Stop!" was flung in to arrest a torrent of verbiage which could not be endured a momnet longer; not because it fretted his patience (he never thought of that) but because it wasted his time, darkening counsel. The hastier and quiter "Excuse!" (i.e. excuse me) ushered in a correction or distinction merely parenthetical and betokened that, thus set right, your remark might still, without absurdity, be allowed to reach completion. The most encouraging of all was, "I hear you." This meant that your remark was significant and only required refutation; it had risen to the dignity of error. Refutation (when we got so far) always followed the same lines. Had I read this? Had I studied that? Had I any statistical evidence? Had I any evidence in my own experience? And so to the almost inevitable conclusion, Do You not see the that you had no right, etc.

Some boys would not have liked it; to me it was red beef and strong beer.... Kirk excited and satisfied one side of me. Here was talk that was really about something. Here was a man who thought not about you but about what you said. No doubt I snorted and bridled a little at some of my tossings; but, taking it all in all, I loved the treatment. After being knocked down suffiently often I began to know a few guards and blows, and to put on intellectual muscle. In the end, unless I flatter myself, I became a not contemptible sparring partner. It was a great day when the man who had so long been engaged in exposing my vagueness at last cautioned me against the dangers of excessive subtlety (Surprised by Joy).

It's no wonder that Lewis nicknamed him "The Great Knock." Now what if Kirk had been quantifying young Jack's performance and mailing report cards to his father and building up a transcript to send to Oxford? What if the educational establishment kept asking Kirk about the level of assessment that his student was on and to please hurry and send those standardized test scores.

When we combine our approach with our equally disconcerting message that students go to school in order to get a good job. it's no wonder they get disillusioned. Spears documents that by California social science standards, students are to thinking about their "human capital" in third grade! He explains that this is an economic term which is intended to get kids to think about what they will contribute to the "economic flourishing."

This is disillusioning because students get the message that humans go to school not because they are rational souls who need to develop into their true selves, but they go to school because humans need money and society needs them to make money. (Where is it that we are warned about the love of money?) Don't we need to return to education for "human flourishing" as defined by the Word so as not to be "conformed by the pattern of this world" (click on the title).

Distributing Ownership Instead of Money

2010-06-12T10:42:00.005-05:00

Anthony Esolen in his Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization points out three factors that contribute to lower birth rates:

High taxes
Scarcity of land for private property and agrarian lifestyles
Poor living conditions

The Wall Street Journal just published the following on the increased cost of child-rearing:

A child born in 2009 will cost nearly a quarter of a million dollars, or about $222,360, to raise to maturity, up a little less than 1% from 2008, the Agriculture Department said Wednesday in its annual report on the average cost of raising a child. (The department runs the survey to help courts and state governments set child-support guidelines.) Expenses for child care, education and health care rose the most compared with 2008, while the cost of transportation for a child actually fell, the department said. Annual child-rearing expenses for the average middle-income, two-parent family range from $11,650 to $13,530, depending on the age of the child, the department says.

Child care accounts for 17% of the total spending, and education for 16% of the total. The cost of housing makes up nearly one-third of the total; this is gauged by the average cost of an additional bedroom. But the tally excludes any spending on kids over age 17, so it doesn't include one of the biggest and fastest-growing single financial outlays many parents make: the cost of sending your child through college. Higher-education costs aren't included, the department says.

Families in the Northeast have the highest costs, followed by cities in the West, then cities in the Midwest. Families in rural areas and in Southern cities have the lowest child-rearing costs.
For families with many kids, however, there is some good news: The more children you have, the less it costs to raise each one. These economics of scale deliver 22% savings per child for families with three or more children. That is because kids can share a bedroom, hand down clothing and toys to each other, and consume food purchased in bulk quantities, reducing costs. Also, private schools and child-care centers may offer sibling discounts. The data is compiled based on spending by 11,800 two-parent families and 3,350 single parents with at least one child under 18 living at home.

What if we started distributing land instead of money? What if we created tax laws in favor of small business, family farms, and distribution of ownership to employees instead of corporate combinations owned exclusively by big businessmen?

In such a new climate, would we find our work more fulfilling and quit working for a paycheck? Could we start finding fulfillment in our families instead of individual consumption?

Might I propose that God made us to flourish in families, living in gardens, working with our own tools, and not on assembly lines, working with other people's machines, and looking forward to the weekend and our next spending spree.

Do We Share 99% of Our Genes with the Town Mouse or the Country Mouse?

2010-06-10T20:58:00.006-05:00

I asked a friend last night how long naturalism will be able to hold up against the onslaught of Stephan Meyer's argument in his Signature in the Cell. Meyer's basic thesis is that evolution by natural selection and random genetic mutation cannot explain the diversity of life much less the origin of life. The main problem here is that it can only select from what's there or change what's there. They cannot supply what's there. These mechanisms cannot produce genetic information, which is akin to digital code.

This would be like saying that the consumer market and viruses can account for all computer hardware and software. The consumer market selects particular computer hardware and software for survival, and virus and spyware can damage it, but neither of these impersonal agents can produce it. How do you go from computers the size of houses to iPads through consumer choices and hackers? Without intelligent computer programmers we would not only never have a computer but the iPad would never assault us with its sexy sleekness.

Now check this from James Le Fanu, a guest blogger at the Discovery Institute, who writes on " The Last Days of the Façade of Knowing":

Interchangeability across species reaches its apotheosis with the finding that we share 99% of our genes with a mouse. How so trivial a genetic difference can generate such diversity of form defies all explanation, other than to suppose it must be ‘something to do’ with gene regulation, ‘the turning on and off of genes at different times and places in the course of development’.

The implications are clear enough. Biologists could in theory sequence every living creature on the face of the planet, but this would only confirm they all share the same core set of genes that account for the nuts and bolts of the proteins and enzymes of the cell of which all living things are made. But beyond that the really interesting question — that of ‘form’ — what it is that so readily distinguishes the elephant from the octopus, fireflies from foxes would remain as elusive as ever.

The genetic instructions must be there of course because otherwise the tens of millions of our fellow species would not replicate themselves with such fidelity from generation to generation. But we are compelled in the light of these extraordinary findings of the recent past that we have no conception of why we should become so different from a worm or fly.

And the same applies though more significantly still to Darwin’s proposed mechanism of evolutionary transformation. There is, to be sure, persuasive evidence of a shared or common ancestry in the interchangeability of, for example, our genome with that of a mouse and our primate cousin — but beyond that the myriad of random genetic mutations that would provide a basis for the transformation of one form of life into another are nowhere to be found. “We cannot see in this why we are so different from chimpanzees”, observed Svante Paabo Chairman of the Chimpanzee Genome Project on its publication in 2005 — “part of the secret is hidden in there, but we don’t understand it”. Nothing has subsequently emerged to challenge that conclusion.

The standard scientific response to these anomalies and perplexities is to concede that ‘it’ has turned out to be much more complex than originally contemplated — which is certainly true. But nonetheless, the argument goes, the accumulation of yet more biological data, the sequencing of yet more genomes must eventually, like a bulldozer, drive a causeway through current perplexities. Perhaps, but more certainly, the reverse for the more that science progresses, the more genomes that are sequenced, the more striking the irresoluble discrepancy between the similarity of the genetic instructions and the diversity of the living world (click on post title to read the whole).