02 Saturday Jun 2012
Posted in Autos
This is a shocking, beautiful car. The Gullwing Mercedes was one of the most successful race cars of all time. Picasso had one, even though he didn’t have a license, because it was so beautiful. Sir Stirling Moss made one of the greatest drives in history at the 1955 Mille Miglia in an open-topped version of this car. The man in this video cherishes his Mercedes, and I can see why. I loved these as a child just like he did. Maybe he’ll pass his along to me.
God in heaven, listen to that engine.
17 Thursday May 2012
Tags
charity, christian politics, christian thought, left and right, ministries of mercy, timothy keller
Tim Keller’s thoughts on Christians and the parties.
The ideology of the Left believes big government and social reform will solve social ills, while the Right believes big business and economic growth will do it. The Left expects a citizen to be held legally accountable for the use of his wealth, but totally autonomous in other areas, such as sexual morality. The Right expects a citizen to be held legally accountable in areas of personal morality, but totally autonomous in the use of wealth. The North American “idol” – radical individualism – lies beneath both ideologies. A Christian sees either “solution” as fundamentally humanistic and simplistic.
The causes of our worsening social problems are far more complex than either the secularists of the Right or Left understand. We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but with powers and principalities! We have seen there is great social injustice – racial prejudice, greed, avarice – by those with the greatest wealth in the country (and sadly, within the evangelical church itself.) At the same time, there is a general breakdown of order – of the family and the morals of the nation. There is more premarital sex (and thus, there are more unwed mothers), more divorce, child neglect and abuse, and crime. Neither a simple redistribution of wealth nor simple economic growth and prosperity can mend broken families; nor can they turn low-skilled mothers into engineers and technicians.
Only the church can minister to the whole person. Only the gospel understands that sin has ruined us both individually and socially. We cannot be viewed individualistically (as the capitalists do) or collectivistically (as the Communists do) but related to God. Only Christians, armed with the Word and Spirit, planning and working to spread the kingdom and righteousness of Christ, can transform a nation as well as a neighborhood as well as a broken heart.
Ministries of Mercy, Timothy J. Keller, P&R Publishing, 1997, pg. 26. (via Tried with Fire)
24 Tuesday Apr 2012
Posted in Men in Church, Theology
Pastor Doug Wilson is a great and good man, and that doesn’t prevent him from hitting the wrong tone on important issues. In this post, he properly diagnoses a problem in the church: effeminate services with weak men, wretched music, led behind the scenes by women who are strong in the wrong way. He’s getting this from a book that I’ve looked into and found to be quite solid, Leon Podles’ The Church Impotent. Thank you, Pastor, and amen.
However, the original post made me a little queasy. Reading it again, I see it’s meant to me humorous, but people didn’t take it that way. Frankly, that’s because it wasn’t particularly funny. It was pretty dark satire. Here’s an excerpt:
Your worship service and church community might be effeminate if . . .
….
2. Your music minister is more concerned that the choir trills their r’s correctly than that they fill the sanctuary with loud sounds of battle;
3. One of the ministerial staff has taken to wearing a clerical collar and a powder pink shirt, and no one on the session has the courage to tell him that he looks like a thirteen-year-old boy with rosy cheeks, as painted by Norman Rockwell;
4. The worship team gravitates toward “Jesus is my girlfriend” songs, and their facial expressions while up front are those of guys in the backseats of their cars, having just gotten to second base with their actual girlfriends[.]
Pastor Wilson is talking about a real problem, to an audience that includes people who are propagating the problem in a tone that seems calculated merely to raise their ire, not bring them to repentance. I think satire was the wrong approach. These are lazy generalizations about the Church at large, not actual practices, such as female elders, etc.
There were some concerned and angry responses from respectable men in the Christian community, and now Pastor Wilson has come up with this post, which is better in every way and sheds light on the parts masculinity and femininity play in the Church.
First, effeminacy and femininity are not synonyms. When I say that worship services have become effeminate, I am not saying that that they have become feminine. They have actually ceased being feminine (but more on this later). Feminine characteristics are God-given, and in their assigned place, they are a great glory, as terrible as an army with banners. But when feminine characteristics are falsely adopted by someone who has no claim or title to them, then that is effeminate.
The same principle runs the other way. When a woman adopts certain masculine prerogatives, putting on the gear of a warrior, let us say (Dt. 22:5), then this is grotesque. But to say it is grotesque is not to say that the same thing applies when a man who puts on the gear of a warrior. It would be grotesque for him not to.
Second, there is a difference between corporate piety and individual piety. In the first paragraph of my original post, I recommended the book The Church Impotent by Leon Podles. This particular point is a central theme of his book. The Church is the bride of Christ (Eph. 5:23), and is in the process of adorning herself, as a bride does for her husband (Rev. 21:2). Podles points out that a fatal step was taken (by Bernard of Clairvaux) when expressions of corporate piety became normative for expressions of individual piety. The Church can and must adorn herself as a bride. Our corporate identity is feminine. But if an individual man attempts to replicate that identity in his personal devotions, two bad things can happen. The first is that he finds he can step right into such role, no prob, and presto, we have ourselves a new worship leader. The second problem is that the cultivation of this demeanor is so alien to how God made him that he concludes that the Christian faith must not be for him. This is all the result of a fundamental confusion about the relationship of corporate identity to individual identity.
I had never really considered this before. Together, we are the bride. We are feminine, and we submit to our husband the Lifegiver. But individually, we are men, and we approach God as…sons? I’m assuming so, since that is our relationship to God the Father. So, Wilson’s beef with high-voiced worship leaders is one part ad hominem and two parts substantive criticism: they think effeminacy, not femininity, is called for in worship, and in private life, instead of masculinity.
I come from a church that is wildly different from the make-believe effeminate congregation Wilson satirizes, but it still falls into the ditch he describes. I think that’s why his post rubbed me the wrong way: yes, this problem exists, and heck no, that is NOT how it manifests itself in the real world. What use is it to diagnose a cancer if you think it takes the form of purple spots on the elbow?
Ultimately, Wilson’s second post filleth up and runneth over with wisdom, which balances the rather arid nature of his previous screed. Doesn’t that tell us something about Christian give-and-take, about the Blogosphere? It’s so easy to write quickly and hit ‘Publish’ before we ought, and to attract a swarm of infuriated bloggers with the same problem. It’s not easy to make peace with the hornets after taking a swing at their nest (and calling them bees, to boot), but that’s what Wilson does. Christians should learn from him.
We should also learn from him that we are feminine together, because we serve the ultimate masculine God, and that we as men are masculine, and our sisters are feminine individually because we are sons and daughters of the High King, the Holy One of Israel. He has given us sex and sexual identity to image His eternal, ever-forgiving marriage to us, and His everlasting adoption covenant with us. Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel!
13 Friday Apr 2012
Beautiful cars, soundtrack by Radiohead. Amen.
11 Wednesday Apr 2012
Posted in Marriage
My theology teacher once told us that sex is more amazing for Christians than for anyone else. The reason is that Christians sacrifice themselves for each other. We put ourselves last. In love, we should seek our spouses’ happiness. In sex, we should seek our spouse’s pleasure above our own. Two people who are giving of themselves and devoting themselves wholeheartedly to each other will have more, fuller, truer intimacy than a man and a woman who seek brute physical gratification as quickly as possible. These words from Remy Wilkins on this awesome blog should encourage those of us who are still single and painfully abstinent to press on: the final goal could not be more worthwhile. Marriage is the best picture we have of the relationship that defines the world, that of Christ and His church. (Post title via Toby Sumpter).
We have bought into certain lies that are flimsy as our pick-up lines. One of the most absurd is thinking that the more women you sleep with means more sexual skills, that more women equals more experience. Nothing could be further from the truth. Consider the man who declares his love of cities, all cities and talks about his vast knowledge of cities. He spends the night in a different city one day after the next. He gets off the bus, buys a t-shirt, notches his belt and hops back on the bus. He is suppose to be a grand lover of cities? Rather his is the most worthless of tourists, he’s the doofus in the fannypack mugging in front of every giftshop across the nation. He knows nothing of the city, does not love any city at all, but rather he loves to see his greasy unshaven mug in different settings each night. The man that says he knows New York City because he was once laid-over there one rainy insignificant night is a great fool.
So too the lothario, who beds women with tricks and well worn moves. He’s never had to please a woman night after night. He can only pick up women at the watering hole looking to be watered, the lowhanging fruit. A real man knows how to please the woman who’s dealt with screaming kids all day, who went through the day with peanutbutter in her hair, wearing sweatpants and grannypanties because the laundry is stacked to highheaven. A real man can’t rely on a couple of cheap sex tricks to please a woman, running the same two plays on an unsuspecting defense, a real man has to play the same team night after night and the things that worked last night aren’t good enough for today. Real men bed the same woman every night keeping it new and fresh and exciting. Lotharios, in the extremity of their lameness, have so little game they have to move from woman to woman with their smoke, mirrors and hand dancing.
09 Monday Apr 2012
Posted in Architecture
Tags
Chapel at Rio Roca Ranch // Maurice Jennings + Walter Jennings Architects // Texas
08 Sunday Apr 2012
Posted in Poetry, Sacraments, Theology
You know, if Christ really rose, and if He really made the world better, then this Easter is the best day anyone has yet seen. And tomorrow will be better, and the next day, and so on until the end of time. –Z.A.W.
Easter is the greatest day of the year, because it is a swell in the kingdomtide.
We use a long word for this ultimate optimism: postmillennialism. We believe that Christ came, that He died, that He rose again—so do all Christians. But what did the Rising mean? We think He began something in Bethlehem, completed it at Pentecost, and two thousand years later we live in a better world–in the best world that has yet been.
But, you say, we sinned. The world is full of the weeping of the broken—I weep, I am broken. But the Father, the Son, and the Spirit have encompassed our suffering. The suffering of Jesus on the cross is big and broad enough to take all ours away. It is great enough to draw all who are willing to the unfathomed love and unutterable mercy of our God.
Dostoevsky:
I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, for all the blood that they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.
Jesus shouted to the world: IF ANYONE IS THIRSTY, LET HIM COME TO ME AND DRINK. And they will come, and they will drink, and they have been for a thousand generations, and they will until the Son comes and balms all wounds and wipes all tears away. The sower in the field will be overtaken by the reaper, so quick and fertile will be the soil. And because this is happening every day, in every moment, whether we see it or not, the world is being annexed by the King more every day.
It is Eastertide. We have filled our bellies and our hearts brim full with the Gospel light on this Day of Days. Now we must go out and make the world shake with the name of its ruler. We must preach Christ, crucified and risen, to the nations. We must be washed clean to do this. We must drink the water, the blood, and eat the bread of the Lamb.
We had brunch amid the tombs today, and talked about the Coming. We joked how the prideful in their mausoleums would rattle the chains until an angel led them sheepishly out, and how the humble beneath simple stones will rise, freed from dust, into glory. Once, I thought graveyards were landfills. Now I know they are gardens.
Garden-Gospel – m. m. b.
This is the Garden-Gospel
And we serve a Green-Thumbed God.
We have been planted like lilies,
And we will wear white vestments
as they.
We will reach with stamen and steeple
Unto Him, Unto the Lifegiver.
He is water and bread for our roots
Wine for our fruits
And sun and shade for seasons.
We are His, we blooms.
We will dry.
Germination is a long time coming.
We will shoot up once again.
Green tendrils, bleary heads
ensorcelled, once again
by light. Entrapped,
Once more, by sunsoilearthwind Holy God Holy Son Holy Ghost -
amen.
07 Saturday Apr 2012
Tags
Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh; ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart
That-pierced-died, withered, paused, and then regathered
Out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
Time will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.
And if we have an angel at the tomb,
Make it a real angel,
Weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
The dawn light, robed in real linen
Spun on a definite loom.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
By the miracle,
And crushed by remonstrance.
(via Justin Taylor)
07 Saturday Apr 2012
Posted in Manifestos
Pastor Toby Sumpter of Trinity Reformed Church on the reasons for repentance: love and fear. Pastor Sumpter is a great and good man and his sermons have helped me break down the walls of sin in my life and conquer the strongholds of worldliness that keep me from serving God. Only through Christ, only through love can we come to true repentance. The goodness of God brings us to repentance. The goodness of God brings us to the goodness of God. Please, read the whole thing. If you are a true man or woman, put away fear and throw yourself upon the freely offered love. It will be the most painful and the most glorious thing you will ever do. Read the whole thing HERE.
But why do we repent? Why do we ask for forgiveness? Why do we apologize? Why do we want to go make it right?
There are ultimately only two possible answers to that question. In this world, there are really only two motivators, only two engines that drive every human soul. There is the way of fear and the way of love. The engine of fear drives people to try to obey, to try to do what’s right because they are afraid of the consequences, afraid of what people might think, afraid of pain, afraid of shame, afraid of embarrassment, afraid of being rejected, afraid of losing friends or loved ones, afraid of being alone, afraid of sickness, afraid of disease, and ultimately this is because people are afraid of death (Heb. 2:15). But this kind of fear is ultimately selfish and self-serving, and so it must collapse back onto itself. This kind of fear operates in order to protect self, in order to protect yourself from those fears. But selfishness is always self-defeating. Jesus says that those who try to save their lives will lose them. Those who try to protect themselves will be destroyed. This is because selfishness is actually a thick blindness, and this means that for all the thrashing about, you’re still on a hook that’s drawing you to your death. You’re a lousy protector, a lousy god, and you’re still going to die. And thus, fear begets more fear.
……
It’s the goodness of God that drives us to repentance. It’s the goodness of God that drives us back to the Father who awaits us with open arms. It’s the insistent, stubborn, relentless goodness of God that teaches us to defy our fears, to defy our circumstances, to defy the lies and lusts that seduce us and imprison us. It’s the goodness of God that wakes us up with stomach full of the pods fed to pigs; it’s the goodness of God that wakes us up and reminds us of the goodness in our Father’s house.
04 Wednesday Apr 2012
Posted in Travel, Uncategorized
Tags
Rod Dreher, one of my favorite bloggers, is leaving for Paris for a few days. He is going with his niece, the daughter of his late sister Ruth. He is writing a book about her life, and his trip to France with Hannah will become the closing chapter. In preparation for this trip, he shared something by Truman Capote, about whom I knew nothing and now want to know something.
In London a young artist said to me, “How wonderful it must be for an American traveling in Europe the first time; you can never be a part of it, so none of the pain is yours, you will never have to endure it — yes, for you there is only the beauty.”
Not understanding what he meant, I resented this; but later, after some months in France and Italy, I saw that he was right: I was not a part of Europe, I never would be. Safe, I could leave when I wanted to, and for me there was only the honeyed, hallowed air of beauty. But it was not so wonderful as the young man had imagined: it was desperate to feel that one could never be a part of moments so moving, that always one would be isolated from this landscape and these people; and then gradually I realized I did not have to be a part of it: rather, it could be a part of me. The sudden garden, opera night, wild children snatching flowers and running up a darkening street, a wreath for the dead and nuns in noon light, music from the piazza, a Paris pianola and fireworks on La Grande Nuit, the heart-shaking surprise of mountain visions and water views (lakes like green wine in the chalice of volcanoes, the Mediterranean flickering at the bottoms of cliffs), forsaken far-off towers falling in twilight and candles igniting the jeweled corpse of St. Zeno of Verona — all a part of me, elements for the making of my own perspective.
It almost always feels prideful to talk about the blessings of foreign travel. It is something that comparatively few people do in my circles; they think it is a luxury. Perhaps it is, but it taught me many lessons. Travel, Twain said, is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness. I remember being teased about going to France; people said things like, “Are they still surrendering over there?” No one visits France for the politics.
Everyone visits France for its great natural beauty, its exceptional food, and, if they go about it rightly, for the reasons Twain mentioned. What better way is there to understand the world wider than the States than experiencing it? I intend to travel as much as I can, because as Capote relates, the whole place is like a treasure box of lessons about the world.
29 Thursday Mar 2012
What should men do on the Internet?
Everyone knows what they actually do, and that we can’t do it. We should forget about porn. It should be boring. Why would brutalized, painted body parts lure us away from the body?
But I digress. What should we as Christian men do on the internet?
We must seek wisdom. If we don’t seek wisdom, we will drown in the sea of foolishness that laps at the shores of connectivity. Culture is religion externalized, and the internet is humanity digitized, magnified, and distorted as if viewed through a pair of heavy glasses. [The internet should be more connected to real human lives: Facebook is the start of a good thing.]
Our lives, our full lives, must be able to transfer to a new medium without losing their focus–that is the only way Christ’s holiness will inform our actions on the internet and it will become more than a tool that leads to sin for me and for many other men. In other words, Christians should seek wisdom on the internet and post wisdom on the internet, the kind of virulent wisdom that drives away foolishness. Maybe, perhaps, if we confront porn addicts on their home turf, if we hack porn sites and insert gospel popups, then we will be stepping in the right direction. I’m not advocating that, but a defensive posture in Internet holiness will only get us so far. The web is not a thing in itself, it is only us, in all our tawdry vainglory.
Let us redeem it. We are men, we are weak, our God is great, He will build us up for this task.
We can start by reading good blogs by good men.
Here are some blogs I frequent. I won’t give you a blurb about each, because I think you should explore them for yourself.
1. The Cedar Room.
2. Blog and Mablog.
3. Rod Dreher.
4. Peter Leithart.
5. Toby Sumpter.
6. Justin Taylor.
26 Monday Mar 2012
Posted in Uncategorized
From one of my favorite books, Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Cons. As a teenager, his book resonated with me as I sought to understand why my life looked so different from other Christian conservatives. This book is pure gold.
1. We are conservatives who stand outside the conservative mainstream; therefore, we can see things that matter more clearly.
2. Modern conservatism has become too focused on money, power, and the accumulation of stuff, and insufficiently concerned with the content of our individual and social character.
3. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.
4. Culture is more important than politics and economics.
5. A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship—especially of the natural world—is not fundamentally conservative.
6. Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract.
7. Beauty is more important than efficiency.
8. The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.
9. We share Russell Kirk’s conviction that “the institution most essential to conserve is the family.”
10. Politics and economics won’t save us; if our culture is to be saved at all, it will be by faithfully living by the Permanent Things, conserving these ancient moral truths in the choices we make in our everyday lives.
26 Monday Mar 2012
Posted in Men in Church
Dr. Peter Leithart is one of the wisest men I know.
“We always marry the wrong person.” And if by chance you married the right person, “just give it some time and he or she will change” (Hauerwas).
We search the world for a partner to help us build a little kingdom where all our selfish dreams come to pass. We want someone who will leave just as we are. We want a spouse who adjusts without our having to make any adjustments. We want the benefits of cohabitation while remaining essentially single. We don’t want a husband or wife. We want to sit on the throne, and what we really want is a worshiper.
What we get instead is a spouse who prods and pokes and provokes and won’t let us be our old selves, those selves in whom we take so much delight and pride. God doesn’t let us get away with our idolatry. He didn’t design marriage for self-fulfillment, but to train you, slowly and painfully, to “love and care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married” (Hauerwas).
One way or the other, you are doing to die. You can keep worshiping yourself and demand worship from your husband or wife, and that will be the death of your marriage. Or you can kill your old self in faith that God will raise another self from the grave. Lent is for smashing idols. To ensure a healthy marriage the first idol you have to smash is the one in the mirror.
06 Monday Feb 2012
Posted in Theology
Tags
I’ve recently been researching the history of Gnosticism and I am struck by the number of Gnostic tendencies that the modern church has imbibed without realizing it. (For a good overview of what Gnosticism is, see my article on Irenaeus or my review of Against the Protestant Gnostics.)Following are eight Gnostic myths that much of the contemporary evangelical church has adopted (and obviously I am generalizing, a practice I defend here).Gnostic Myth # 1: Christianity isn’t a Religion, it’s a Relationship
By relocating the nexus of religion in the private experience of each individual and self-consciously downplaying the public and corporate aspects connoted by the word “religion”, much of contemporary evangelicalism has unknowingly drunk deeply from the wells of Gnosticism. In the process, much of the modern church has lost the categories with which to think about Christendom, viewing the faith primarily through an individualistic lens.
Those interested in exploring this aspect further should consult the first essay in Stephen Perks’ Common-Law Wives and Concubines.
Gnostic Myth # 2: Salvation Means Going to Heaven When You DieFor much of the contemporary evangelical community, the doctrine of bodily resurrection of believers has been eclipsed by the innovation that salvation means living in heaven for eternity. It is revealing that many evangelicals find nothing amiss with the idea that the immortality of the soul, not the resurrection of the body, is the goal of personal salvation. Moreover, recent surveys have shown that many Christians no longer believe that their bodies will be resurrected at all.Those interested in exploring this further should continue reading this paper or consult N.T. Wright’s book Surprised by Hope or my blog post “Resurrection or Disembodiment? Gnosticism in Evangelical Theology.“
Gnostic Myth # 3: The Material World isn’t Important
Under the influence of Gnostic myth # 2, as well as various eschatologies which teach a lack of organic continuity between what happens during this age and the future renewal, many Christians have colluded with the Gnostic notion that what happens in this world is unimportant to God.
Those interested in exploring this aspect further would do well to consult Os Guinness’ Fit Bodies Fat Minds or my article “Recovering the Protestant Affirmation of Life.“
Gnostic Myth # 4: Institutional Religion is Bad
Having been suckered into embracing a number of Gnostic dualisms, many modern Christians automatically think that institutional religion is at odds with genuine heart-felt faith, and that whatever we give to the former is less we have for the latter.
Those interested in exploring this aspect further should consult DeYoung and Kluck’s Why We Love the Church: In Praise of Institutions and Organized Religion and my article ‘Institutional Religion.‘
Gnostic Myth # 5: It isn’t Going to Last Forever
Agreeing with the Gnostics that the physical world is destined for the cosmic rubbish heap, many evangelicals have assumed that the only work which lasts forever is the work of saving souls. Raising families, building cathedrals, reading novels and trimming hedges are only of temporal importance. This is often motivated by an unconscious dualism between creation and redemption, as if God’s purposes for the latter had nothing to do with His original intensions in the former.
Those interested in exploring this further should consult David Hegeman’s Ploughing in Hope as well as David Field’s excellent online source ‘Not the Least Lash Lost‘ and my article ‘Recovering The Protestant Affirmation of Life.’
Gnostic Myth # 6: Jesus’ Kingdom is not of this World
Having misinterpreted the Greek of Jesus’ words in John 18:36, many evangelicals have been given the perfect excuse for rushing like lemmings off the cliff of Orthodoxy into the swirling currents of Gnosticism, where they have been drowned in the idea that God’s Kingdom is anything but the rule of Christ on the earth.
Those interested in exploring this further should consult Peter Leithart’s Against Christianity as well as THIS list of resources.
Gnostic Myth # 7: Knowledge saves
An assumption among much popular Protestantism (although it is not to be found in the Protestant creeds) is that in order to be saved by the gospel one must understand the gospel. The idea that genuine faith must be self-conscious faith has unconsciously oriented many evangelicals to locate the soteriological nexus in a cognitive state, whether faith, doctrinal exactitude or personal assurance. John Wesley, for example, came close to suggesting that salvation was impossible outside the cognitive state of ‘assurance.’ “I never yet knew,” he told an enquirer in 1740, “one soul thus saved, without what you call ‘the faith of assurance’: I mean a sure confidence, that by the merits of Christ he was reconciled to the favour of God.” The Journal of the Rev. John Wesley, A.M. , ed. N. Curnock, Vol. 2 (London, 1911), pp. 333 f.
Equally one finds that the ability to articulate justification in broadly sola fide categories becomes the litmus test for whether a person is truly saved. Ironically these external tokens of salvation are often held up as the alternative to the legalistic superstition that is allegedly operative whenever external rituals like circumcision, baptism or works are viewed as proof of salvation. (I have discussed this further in Step 3 of my article, ‘Sola Fide: The Great Ecumenical Doctrine.‘)
Those interested in exploring this further should read my article ‘From Eucharist to Pulpit.‘Gnostic Myth # 8: God Doesn’t Work Through MeansEchoing the anti-creational orientation of classical Gnosticism, much of the modern evangelical community is uncomfortable acknowledging that God’s grace can be mediated through physical means and instruments. The sacraments are thus reduced to mere symbols for the much more important work which is invisible and non-physical.This mentality has led some evangelicals to making anti-sacramentalism a central pillar in defining their movement For example, the ministers of the London Baptist Association defined Evangelicalism as being “in opposition to Sacramentarianism; the simplicity of the communion of the Lord’s Supper, in opposition to the doctrine of the Real Presence” From The Christian, 5 October 1888, p. 5, cited by by D.W. Bebbington in Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s , Unwin Hyman Ltd, 1989, p. 4.Those interested in understanding some of the historical factors that has led to this situation (at least as far as American Christianity is concerned), should check out the following resources:
- The Problem of Mediation in the First Great Awakening
- American P.I.E.
- A Critical Absence of the Divine: How a ‘Zero-Sum’ Theology Destroys Sacred Space
- The Mercersburg Theology and the Quest for Reformed Catholicity
These and other Gnostic tendencies within Protestantism may well be one of the reasons so many evangelicals have been turning to Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy for spiritual consolation, although it is certain that both these traditions are not without their own unique manifestations of crypto Gnosticism.Further Reading
- A Critical Absence of the Divine: How a ‘Zero-Sum’ Theology Destroys Sacred Space
- Are Calvinists Also Among the Gnostics?
- Was Jonathan Edwards a Gnostic?
- The Strange Outbreak of Canadian Gnosticism
- Dorothy Sayers Against the Gnostics
- Review of Against the Protestant Gnostics
- Resurrection or Disembodiment?
- The Glory of Institutional Religion
- Tom Wright on Gnosticism
- All Blog Posts on Gnosticism
- Recovering The Protestant Affirmation of Life
11 Wednesday Jan 2012
Posted in Books
Here’s what I think. I think everyone should buy a tree-based book, and it should come with a free electronic copy. But until that happens I’m sticking with regular books, mostly because I don’t want 21st-century technology to take over yet another area of my life.
