Paltering with Synergism

Isn’t this so true of the struggle to release our grip on self-righteousness, self-respect, self-affirmation? From P. T. Forsyth’s book The Cruciality of the Cross [page 47]:

“A man needs something to make him confident that his past sin, and the sin he is yet sure to commit, are all taken up into God’s redemption, and the great transaction of his moral life is done. … It is not easy.

Theological belief may not be so hard. But for a man to make Christ’s atonement the sole centre of his moral life, or of his hope for the race, is not easy. Nothing is so resented by the natural self as the hearty admission of man’s native lostness and helplessness, especially when he thinks of all the heroisms, integrities, and charities which ennoble the race.

It is not always pride, it is often a mere natural self-affirmation. It is a native self-respect, which makes him shrink from submitting himself absolutely to the judgment of another. Even in his repentance he does not want to lose all self-respect. He feels he cannot amend the life of conscience, and repair the old faults, without, some remnant of self-respect to work from.

His new shoots must come from the old stump, which must not be rooted out. He is fighting for the one remnant of a moral nature which if he lost he fears he would be less than a man. He does not easily realise what a poor thing his self-justification must be compared with his justification by God, his self-repair beside God’s new creation. He does not feel how sterile the stump is, how poorly his moral remnant would serve him for his moral need, how that recuperative vitality is the one thing he lacks, how absolute God’s grace is, and how complete is the moral re-creation in Christ. He palters with a synergism which is always trying to do the best for human nature in a bargain with God.”

Upcoming Bavinck Conference

Announced:

New College [University of Edinburgh] and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam invite you to a two-day symposium on the Dutch Neo-Calvinist theologian Herman Bavinck (1854-1921).

Following the pattern of Bavinck’s work, the conference will first explore issues related to Bavinck’s theology before examining wider cultural and ethical applications of this doctrine.

The Conference will take place in New College 1-2nd September 2010.

More info here. Download the PDF flier here. The conference organizers welcome proposals for papers from graduate students.

You are not your gift

I don’t invest much time reading magazines, certainly not as much time as I should. But I have read Marvin Olasky’s interview with singer, songwriter, and author Michael Card. I’ve read the interview at least three times because there is one segment of the interview that haunts me, warns me, and motivates me as a father.

At one point in the interview Card is asked about his song, “Underneath the Door.” I was not familiar with the song so I went online and found this video:

In the interview Olasky asks Card about this song:

Marvin Olasky: You mentioned somewhere that as a small boy you saw very little of your father. He came home from practice, closed himself in his study, and you would push drawings and other things under his door to try to get his attention. Did it work?

Michael Card: No, it didn’t, actually. I wrote a song called ‘Underneath the Door.’ I grew up eating supper at 8 o’clock because my mom would wait for my dad. In those days when the father would come home the kids would come to the door and greet him. My kids don’t do that with me; they just sort of look up from their video games and say, ‘Oh, you’re home.’

MO: You were the designated dad-bringer.

MC: My family would always send me to go get my dad, and I had to get his attention somehow, because he was locked away in his study. But he was a phenomenal person, my father. The older I get the more I appreciate him. He was a good man.

MO: That sounds frustrating.

MC: It was frustrating. One of my major themes is that you are not your gift, and my father thought he was his gift. He thought that medicine was all he was, so when he was forced to retire he died a few months later. He could not imagine living without being a doctor.

Card’s song and this interview haunt me as a father. They cause me to rethink my own parenting. I don’t have an office door, but are there ways in which my children are locked out of my life? Am I accessible to them? Do I assume that my gifts and calling are more important than the time I spend with my children? In the time I spend with my kids, am I focused on them, am I listening, am I entering their world or do I require them to enter into my world? Do my children get my attention easily? Do they get my full attention? Can I unhitch my mind from all my other duties when I am with them? Do I think of myself as a child of God ultimately or do I think of my value in terms of my gifts and calling and output? All important questions that this interview raises in my own mind.

For my Logos peeps

If you use Logos Bible Software here are three notes from the week:

• I’m told that work to finish Herman Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics (4 vols) has been slower than expected. The work is now set to be released in 6 to 8 weeks (mid April / early May). This is bad news for those who ordered early. But it’s good news for slackers because you can still get in on the pre-pub price of $99.95 (the price will jump to $150 once it’s released).

• This week The Works of John Newton (6 vols) was offered as a pre-pub ($99.95). This is a set to seriously consider. See here for details.

• Also this week, The Whole Works of John Flavel (6 vols) was offered as a pre-pub (also for $99.95). This is another set worth a look. See here for details.

Literature is Life

One of the best little summaries of the value of literature in the Christian life comes from Leland Ryken’s book Windows To the World: Literature in Christian Perspective (Wipf and Stock, 2000). Here’s what Ryken writes on page 34:

“Literature is life. If you want to know what, deep down, people feel and experience, you can do no better than read the stories and poems of the human race. Writers of literature have the gift of observing and then expressing in words the essential experiences of people.

The rewards of reading literature are significant. Literature helps to humanize us. It expands our range of experiences. It fosters awareness of ourselves and the world. It enlarges our compassion for people. It awakens our imaginations. It expresses our feelings and insights about God, nature, and life. It enlivens our sense of beauty. And it is a constructive form of entertainment.

Christians should neither undervalue nor overvalue literature. It is not the ultimate source of truth. But it clarifies the human situation to which the Christian faith speaks. It does not replace the need for the facts that science and economics and history give us. But it gives us an experiential knowledge of life that we need just as much as those facts.

Literature does not always lead us to the City of God. But it makes our sojourn on earth much more a thing of beauty and joy and insight and humanity.”

Literary Frivolity

Here is a very helpful and balanced perspective on literature and aesthetics from a paper by C. S. Lewis published the book Christian Reflections (Eerdmans, 1967) page 10:

“The Christian will take literature a little less seriously than the cultured Pagan: he will feel less uneasy with a purely hedonistic standard for at least many kinds of work. The unbeliever is always apt to make a kind of religion of his aesthetic experiences; he feels ethically irresponsible, perhaps, but he braces his strength to receive responsibilities of another kind which seem to the Christian quite illusory. He has to be ‘creative’; he has to obey a mystical amoral law called his artistic conscience; and he commonly wishes to maintain his superiority to the great mass of mankind who turn to books for mere recreation. But the Christian knows from the outset that the salvation of a single soul is more important than the production or preservation of all the epics and tragedies in the world …

It thus may come about that Christian views on literature will strike the world as shallow and flippant; but the world must not misunderstand. When Christian work is done on a serious subject there is no gravity and no sublimity it cannot attain. But they will belong to the theme. That is why they will be real and lasting—mighty nouns with which literature, an adjectival thing, is here united, far over-topping the fussy and ridiculous claims of literature that tries to be important simply as literature.

And a posteriori it is not hard to argue that all the greatest poems have been made by men who valued something else much more than poetry… The real frivolity, the solemn vacuity, is all with those who make literature a self-existent thing to be valued for its own sake.”

Satan’s Tactic

From Puritan Thomas Brooks’ book Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices:

“The first device that Satan has to keep souls in a sad, doubting, and questioning condition, and so making their life a hell, is by causing them to be still poring and musing upon sin, to mind their sins more than their Savior; yes, so to mind their sins as to forget, yes, to neglect their Savior, that, as the Psalmist speaks, ‘The Lord is not in all their thoughts’ (Psalm 10:4). Their eyes are so fixed upon their disease, that they cannot see the remedy, though it be near; and they do so muse upon their debts, that they have neither mind nor heart to think of their Surety. A Christian should wear Christ in his bosom as a flower of delight, for he is a whole paradise of delight. He who minds not Christ more than his sin, can never be thankful and fruitful as he should.”

Librophiliac

is a word that denotes someone who suffers from an inordinate love of libraries. Two librophiliacs (always more dangerous in pairs), after being “shocked into a library induced euphoria” (yikes), assembled a compendium of photographs of some of the world’s most beautiful libraries. See the collection here. Beautiful.

Orthodoxy

Whether you love him or hate him you cannot help but love him. G. K. Chesterton that is.

In the past I’ve featured a series of favorite Chesterton quotes on the blog (which explains the graphic to the right). Many of those quotes I pulled directly from my favorite Chesterton title, Orthodoxy, a book that celebrated its 100th anniversary a few years back. And I must be behind on my blog reading because I just came across a tribute by Ralph Wood. Wood writes:

G.K. Chesterton’s most renowned book is a hundred years old. Orthodoxy was first published in London by John Lane Press in 1908, and it has never gone out of print—with more than two dozen publishers now offering editions of the book. Graham Greene once described it as ‘among the great books of the age.’ Etienne Gilson declared that Chesterton had a philosophical mind of the first rank. Hugh Kenner said that the only twentieth-century author with whom Chesterton could be compared is James Joyce. And Dorothy Day was inspired to return to Christianity mainly by reading Orthodoxy. Indeed, we might say that the last century belongs to Chesterton—for in that now one-hundred-year-old book, Orthodoxy, he remarkably prophesied the ailments of both modernism and postmodernism, while adeptly commending Christianity as their double cure.

Wood’s article is a good read. Chesterton’s book is a fun read (if you can stomach the wrongheaded assumptions about Calvin and Calvin’s theology). And it is a book that has been said to cure insanity. It’s a classic and there are many different versions available online.

Holy Subversion

The Christian life is a journey to the patria, our eternal homeland. It is a journey to a place that will astound us like nothing we have ever seen and it will welcome us like an old familiar home at the end of a long journey.

But we are not home. We are pilgrims hitchhiking across this life, walking by faith and not by sight. And we are seeking to live holy lives, lives that contradict the world’s unholy desires that we have ingested from birth.

This pilgrimage of subversion is the theme of Trevin Wax’s new book Holy Subversion: Allegiance to Christ in an Age of Rivals (Crossway, 2010). It is a book about subverting the worldly temptations in relation to power, sex, leisure, money, success, and even the self. It is a book that challenges assumptions. It is a bold book. It is a prophetic book. It is a call for God’s people to be alert to the spiritual dangers lurking in the commonly approved social priorities of this world and to rejoice in the holy provisions of God. You should check it out.

But you don’t have to take my word for it (LeVar Burton). Here are three endorsements:

Albert Mohler: “Trevin Wax faithfully sounds the call for world-changing, Christ-exalting Christian practice. By unmasking contemporary ‘Caesars,’ he reveals real dangers and points to pitfalls of which many believers are completely unaware. This book serves as a helpful reminder and competent guide to draw out the implications of true allegiance to Jesus Christ.”

J. I. Packer: “How should God’s American people put the lordship of Jesus Christ on display in their lives? Wax’s searching answer is biblical, basic, businesslike, and blunt.”

Russell Moore: “Christianity is all about paradox. We lose our lives to gain them. We find life in crucifixion. We serve in order to reign. In his book, Holy Subversion, Trevin Wax takes up the question of how to be both a rebel—against the false authorities of this time—while simultaneously being submissive—to the divine authority of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. This book is a helpful warning against both nihilism and cynicism.”