Writing Retreat 2

For the next four days I will have the joy of spending some time with my wife and kids in Cape Cod, the place where New England flexes its arm to the heavens, or salutes England. Whatever it represents, we are balanced on the top of the shoulder. For all my years of being a Boston Red Sox fan (over 15), this is the first time stepping foot in the wonderful state of Massachusetts, just in time for their elimination from the playoffs, which makes this trip something like a surprise homecoming that bursts triumphantly into an empty house. But it was still quite a lot of fun throwing a ball of leather and yarn along the seaweed-strewn shoreline with my son and shagging poor tosses from the saltwater bath. We closed the evening by filling ourselves with lobster. Not a bad start to our trip.

This trip will double as an educational trip for the kids (the greatly anticipated Great Awakening trip being postponed until at least November—greatly anticipated by me, mostly). But this trip to the cape will focus on the Pilgrims, Plymouth plantation, etc. While driving up today we listened to the first 5 hours of the audio book version of my favorite Pilgrim book, and one of my top-10 favorite historical books, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War by Nathaniel Philbrick. It’s a brilliant book and a fair and honest treatment of the Pilgrim’s story, their motives, aspirations, and the means they used to survive.

But this trip is not all games, lobster, and history. This time away will triple as my second writing/editing retreat and it will afford me the time to read carefully through my entire book manuscript. The due date is fast approaching and much work is undone. However, the project is progressing nicely and recent feedback on the manuscript has been encouraging. Yet it sits there on the table next to me, a 218-page manuscript and 3 red pens. I do hope I brought enough ink.

Church/Politics: Weekend Reading

This week I have been reading quite a lot on the Church/politics topic. For anyone interested, here are four thoughtful quotes I come across in my reading:

Michael J. Gerson and Peter Wehner, City of Man: Religion and Politics in a New Era (Moody, 2010; pre-press edition), pp. 35-36:

Individual Christians and the corporate body of Christ are not synonymous. To act otherwise is to get both into trouble. Moreover, to recognize the distinction between the responsibilities proper to the church and proper to the individual is to dignify the role of the layperson and ennoble the call of the citizen. How so? Individual Christian layperson may well possess special competence in a policy area—like health care or welfare, national security affairs or overseas development, legal philosophy or immigration policy—that the church simply doesn’t possess and shouldn’t be expected to possess. In this context, the role of the church, at least as we interpret it, is to provide individual Christians with a moral framework through which they can work out their duties as citizens and engage the world in a thoughtful way, even as it resists the temptation to instruct them on how to do their job or on which specific public policies they ought to embrace.

David VanDrunen, Living in God’s Two Kingdoms: A Biblical Vision for Christianity and Culture (Crossway, 2010; pre-press edition), p. 163:

I hope that readers will find the conclusions of this chapter (and the book as a whole) to be both liberating and weighty. The conclusions are liberating, I believe, because they claim that Christians’ consciences cannot be bound by the extrabiblical demands of fellow believers who seek to impose the “Christian” way of teaching mathematics to our children, running our businesses, or supporting political candidates. The conclusions are also weighty, however, because this Christian liberty, which unshackles our consciences from other people’s nonbiblical demands, puts the responsibility back upon ourselves. Our pastors and elders have not been called to micromanage our cultural activities, though sometimes we might wish that we could shift to somebody else the responsibility of deciding how to educate our children, whether to fire a difficult employee, or whether to support a candidate’s political campaign. In the end these are decisions that we must make as individuals and as families with the wisdom God gives us as we live out our Christian faith in our own particular life circumstances.

Herman Bavinck, “Christian Principles and Social Relationships” in Essays on Religion, Science, and Society (Baker Academic, 2008), p. 143:

So that everything may revive and may become again what it ought to be and can be, the Gospel tests all things–all circumstances and relationships–against the will of God, just as in the days of Moses and the prophets, of Christ and the apostles. It considers everything from a moral point of view, from the angle in which all those circumstances and relationships are connected with moral principles that God has instituted for all of life. Precisely because the Gospel only opposes sin, it opposes it only and everywhere in the heart and in the head, in the eye and in the hand, in family and in society, in science and art, in government and subjects, in rich and poor, for all sin is unrighteousness, trespassing of God’s law, and corruption of nature. But by liberating all social circumstances and relationships from sin, the Gospel tries to restore them all according to the will of God and make them fulfill their own nature.

Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics (Baker Academic, 2008), 4:437:

The relationship that has to exist between the church and the world is in the first place organic, moral, and spiritual in character. Christ—even now—is prophet, priest, and king; and by his Word and Spirit he persuasively impacts the entire world. Because of him there radiates from everyone who believes in him a renewing and sanctifying influence upon the family, society, state, occupation, business, art, science, and so forth. The spiritual life is meant to refashion the natural and moral life in its full depth and scope according to the laws of God. Along this organic path Christian truth and the Christian life are introduced into all the circles of the natural life, so that life in the household and the extended family is restored to honor, the wife (woman) is again viewed as the equal of the husband (man), the sciences and arts are Christianized, the level of the moral life is elevated, society and state are reformed, laws and institutions, morals and customs are made Christian.

Theological Reflections On Sigur Rós

By request.

From James Davidson Hunter, To Change the World, pages 231–232:

Even in the context of late modernity, suffused as it is by failed ideologies, false idolatries, and distorted ideas of community, joy, and love, one can still find much good. Life still has significance and worth. What is more, people of every creed and no creed have talents and abilities, possess knowledge, wisdom, and inventiveness, and hold standards of goodness, truth, justice, morality, and beauty that are, in relative degree, in harmony with God’s will and purposes. These are all gifts of grace that are lavished on people whether Christian or not. To be sure, there is a paradox here that perplexes many Christians. On the one hand, nonbelievers oftentimes possess more of these gifts than believers. On the other hand, because of the universality of the fall, believers often prove to be unwise, unloving, ungracious, ignorant, foolish, and craven. Indeed, more than any Christian would like to admit, believers themselves are often found indifferent to and even derisive of expressions of truth, demonstrations of justice, acts of nobility, and manifestations of beauty outside of the church. Thus, even where wisdom and morality, justice and beauty exist in fragments or in corrupted form, the believer should recognize these as qualities that, in Christ, find their complete and perfect expression. The qualities nonbelievers possess as well as the accomplishments they achieve may not be righteous in an eschatological sense, but they should be celebrated all the same because they are gifts of God’s grace.

Hobbit Day

Hobbit Day was a success.

We started with breakfast, then enjoyed a second breakfast, and then I received a surprise in my office when my four favorite hobbits brought elevensies, a snack that included a basket of grapes, cheeses, and sliced sausages. Later I arrived home with the delicious coney stew on the stove filling the air with the aroma of Hobbiton. The coney stew included rabbit, pearl onions, carrots, ‘taters,’ turnips, leeks, button mushrooms, bacon, and red wine.

It was delicious. After the stew I read from LOTR about Frodo and Bilbo’s birthday in the Shire and we enjoyed Tolkien’s rich images in the fireworks and the deep humor of Bilbo’s speech (“I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”). By this point the three smallest hobbits were all in costume.

Then, as is the case whenever a Hobbit celebrates a birthday, we distributed trinket gifts. Then after we cleaned up the kitchen we gathered around the screen and enjoyed a delightful look at what Mordor must now look like (Iceland), filled with peace and song and kites and fellowship. So we watched the Sigur Rós Heima documentary. The film was a most perfect conclusion to a delightful (and filling) Hobbit Day.

The “Dawn Treader” and the Church

Tolkien himself may object to a blog post about Narnia on such an otherwise perfect Hobbit Day, but since we’re reading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader as a family the book is on the brain and, hence, on the blog. The reading (or re-reading or re-re-reading, depending on who in the family you are talking about) is in anticipation of the 3D movie release in December. The extra time will allow us to slow our pace and to read and study the book carefully and benefit from secondary sources. Over the past few days I have been digging through a few books for background it was while researching that I stumbled upon an interesting point made by Alan Jacobs. He proposes that TVDT is ultimately an allegory of the Church. Here’s the argument in Jacobs makes in The Narnian (HarperOne, 2005), page 209-210:

… The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” … I am tempted to call an allegory of the Church. After all, historically Christians have linked the Church with Noah’s Ark: each boat is, in its time and place, a unique vessel of salvation. As the Church sails toward Heaven, so the Dawn Treader sails toward Aslan’s country at the end of the world.

And on this voyage Eustace’s situation is the most significant one. He finds himself on this ship, knowing no one, comprehending nothing, and staying with the others only because he has no other option, as the slave trader Pug discovered when he “threw him in free with other lots and still no one would take him.” He doesn’t see that the Dawn Treader is his only hope of survival; he doesn’t see that from the other members of that crew he could learn skills and virtues alike. Thanks to his parents and his school, he is a “boy without a chest” and is simply incapable of understanding what motivates the others, the martial Mouse Reepicheep above all.

And the only way for this to be remedied … is for Eustace to undergo a kind of death: to have his very skin stripped away by Aslan, and only by Aslan, and to emerge newly born from the encounter. Moreover, the first part of what he must learn is simply that he is not a very good boy, that he is weak and cowardly—that, to put it bluntly, he is simply inferior to Caspian and Edmund and, yes, Reepicheep. It is noteworthy that after he becomes a boy again he tells Edmund, “You’d think me simply phony if I told you how I felt about my own arms. I know they’ve no muscle and are pretty mouldy compared with Caspian’s, but I was so glad to see them.”

This is the first time that Eustace has considered himself anything but superior to everyone else, and if it seems obvious that Eustace’s musculature would be dwarfed by that of the powerful young king, well, in the matter of self-knowledge everyone has to start somewhere. Only once he has acknowledged the “mouldiness” of his arms and the “beastliness” of his behavior is Eustace ready to begin the process of becoming a real member of the Dawn Treader’s crew.

If Jacobs is right and TVDT is an allegory of the Church, that allegory is ripe with application about what it means to live humbly within the community, to depend upon Christian friends (reminiscent of Bunyan’s allegory), and what it means to welcome and care for ungrateful wretches like Eustace who are yet in need of God’s sovereign and gracious skinning. Needless to say, after reading this excerpt from Jacobs I think I will be reading TVDT with new eyes.

But Narnia will wait until another day because this day is Tolkien’s day. And tomorrow on the blog I hope to have a few pictures of our coney stew feast.

Happy Hobbit Day.

Hobbit Day 2010

“Bilbo and Frodo happened to have the same birthday, September 22nd,” wrote Tolkien. And since 1978, September 22 (Wednesday) has become the annual date that LOTR fans celebrate Hobbit Day by dressing in costume, eating themselves silly, drinking a bit, singing songs, watching the movies, shooting fireworks, and walking barefoot.

This year we will be joining the fellowship of the nerds. This will require a trip to the grocery store and, in our case, since I don’t hunt, I’ll be driving across town for coney. But it’s worth it. After we finish our sixth meal of the day we’ll read some passages from the LOTR trilogy or from The Hobbit.

Stephanie is one blogger who cooked up a Hobbit Day feast back in 2007. Here’s her menu:

• First Breakfast: omelet, mushrooms, bacon (cooked in the fireplace), and coffee
• Second Breakfast: whipped cream and berries, seedcakes
• Elevensies: bread, cheese, fruits. This is when the ale started.
• Luncheon: leek and mushroom-stuffed puff pastry boxes, cold chicken
• Afternoon Tea: seedcakes, banana bread and Keemun tea
• Dinner: coney (rabbit) stew with red wine, onions, garlic, carrots and herbs, cooked in the fireplace for about 6 hours
• Supper: we were going to have a selection green salads, but could only muster up enough hunger for a few sprigs of watercress

Be creative—and enjoy!

By the grace of God I am what I am

As quoted in Christian Witness and Church Members Magazine (1858), page 459:

Two or three years before the death of that eminent servant of Christ, John Newton of London, when his sight was become so dim, that he was no longer able to read, an aged friend and brother in the ministry called on him to breakfast. Family prayer followed, and the portion of Scripture for the day was read to him. In it occurred the verse, ‘By the grace of God I am what I am’ [1 Cor 15:10]. It was the pious man’s custom on these occasions to make a short familiar exposition on the passage read. After the reading of this text he paused for some moments, and then uttered this affecting soliloquy:

I am not what I ought to be. Ah, how imperfect and deficient!

I am not what I wish to be. I abhor what is evil, and I would cleave to what is good!

I am not what I hope to be. Soon, soon shall I put off mortality, and with mortality all sin and imperfection.

Yet, though I am not what I ought to be,
nor what I wish to be,
nor what I hope to be,
I can truly say, I am not what I once was;
a slave to sin and Satan;
and I can heartily join with the apostle, and acknowledge,
‘By the grace of God I am what I am.’

Stressful Jobs

This video will help give you a greater appreciation for your own vocation:

HT: 22[+] Words

Unvisited Tombs

George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871): “…for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

The Methods of Grace

John Newton is most famous for his hymns (e.g. Amazing Grace) and for his campaign to abolish the slave trade, but he was also a skilled author of personal letters. Many of those letters survive and have been published over the centuries. It doesn’t take long for the reader to notice his pastoral wisdom. In one letter to a pastor/friend on Nov. 6, 1778, he addressed the dangers that appeared in the writings of “New England divines” by which he means Solomon Stoddard and perhaps Stoddard’s grandson, Jonathan Edwards. The NEDs were not particularly sensitive to the work of God in the life of the sinner and tended to be formulaic, undermining assurance and encouraging doubt in genuine believers, said Newton. Newton saw this tragedy and raised the flag of concern in a letter. Here’s what he wrote in one letter [published in Wise Counsel (BoT, 2009), pages 120–121]:

Most of the New England divines I have met with have in my judgment one common fault: they abound with distinctions and refinements in experimental matters [ie evaluating grace in the life of a person], which are suited to cast down those whom the Lord would have comforted. And in their long account of what they call a preparatory work, they include and thereby depreciate some real and abiding effects of true grace. They require such an absolute submission to the righteousness and sovereignty of God, before they will allow a person to be a believer, as I apprehend is seldom the attainment of a babe in Christ.

I think if Mr Stoddard had been at Philippi, and the jailer had sprung trembling in to him (instead of Paul and Silas) with the same question he would have afforded him but cold comfort, and would have made him wait a few weeks or months to see how the preparatory work went on before he would have encouraged him to believe in Jesus. …

It would be well if both preachers and people would keep more closely to what the scripture teaches of the nature, marks and growth of a work of grace instead of following each other in a track (like sheep) confining the Holy Spirit to a system; imposing at first the experience and sentiments of others as a rule to themselves, and afterward dogmatically laying down the path in which they themselves have been led, as absolutely necessary to be trodden by others. There is a vast variety of the methods by which the Lord brings home souls to himself, in which he considers (though system-preachers do not) the different circumstances, situations, temperament, etc. of different persons. To lay down rules precisely to which all must conform, and to treat all enquiring souls in the same way, is as wrong as it would be in a physician to attempt to cure all his patients who may have the same general disorder (a fever for instance) with one and the same prescription. A skilful man would probably find so many differences in their cases, that he would not treat any two of them exactly alike.

The words of a skilled soul-physician.