Evolutionism

The Suicide of Thought

G. K. Chesterton

Evolution is a good example of that modern intelligence which, if it destroys anything, destroys itself.  Evolution is either an innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things came about; or, if it is anything more than this, is an attack upon thought itself.  If evolution destroys anything, it does not destroy religion but rationalism. . . . It means there is no such thing as a thing.  At best, there is only one thing, and that is a flux of everything and anything.  This is an attack not upon faith, but upon the mind; you cannot think if there are no things to think about.  You cannot think is you are not separate from the subject of thought.

Descartes said, “I think; therefore I am.”  The philosophic evolutionist reverses and negatives the epigram.  He says, “I am not; therefore I cannot think.”  [G. K. Chesterton, Collected Works. Volume I: Heretics, Orthodoxy, The Blatchford Controversies.  (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), p. 239f.]

Thanksgiving

G.K. Chesterton on Thanksgiving

Justin Taylor
November 28, 2013

“I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”—G. K. Chesterton

“The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.”—G. K. Chesterton

“When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.”—G. K. Chesterton

“You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.”—G. K. Chesterton

“When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?”—G. K. Chesterton

Chrestomathy

Capturing the Imagination

So the arrival of mere Christendom will therefore be convulsive — but it won’t be a legal revolution. It will be a great reformation and revival — it will happen the same way the early Christians conquered Rome. Their program of conquest consisted largely of two elements — gospel preaching and being eaten by lions — a strategy that has not yet captured the imagination of the the contemporary church.
Douglas Wilson

Chrestomathy

Like a Mighty Flood

Not a little confusion exists today over the work of the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament dispensation, contrasted with the New.  Below is B. B. Warfield’s excellent summary of the matter:

The old dispensation was a preparatory one and must be strictly conceived as such.  what spiritual blessings came to it were by was of prelibation.  They were many and various.  The Spirited worked in providence no less universally then than now.  He abode in the Church not less really then than now.  He wrought in the hearts of God’s people not less prevalently than now.

All the good that was in the world was then as now due to him.  All the hope of God’s Church then as now depended on him.  Every grace of the godly life then as now was a fruit of his working.  But the object of the whole dispensation was only to prepare for the outpouring of the Spirit upon all flesh.  He kept the remnant safe and pure, but it was in order that the seed might be preserved. This was the end of his activity then.

The dispensation of the Spirit, properly so called, did not dawn, however, until the period of preparation was over and the day of outpouring had come.
  The mustard seed had been preserved through all the ages only by the Spirit’s brooding care.  Now it is planted, and it is by his operation that it is growing up into a great tree which shades the whole earth, and to the branches of which all the fowls of heaven come for shelter.

It is not that the work is more real in the new dispensation than in the old.  It is not merely that it is more universal.  It is that it is directed to a different end–that it is no longer for the mere preserving of the seed unto the day of planting, but for the perfecting of the fruitage and the gathering of the harvest.

The Church, to use a figure of Isaiah’s, was then like a pent-in stream; it is now like that pent-in stream with barriers broken down and the Spirit of the Lord driving it.  It was he who preserved it in being when it was pent-in.  It is he who is now driving on its gathered floods till it shall cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.  In one word, that was a day in which the Spirit restrained his power.  Not the great day of the Spirit has come.  

B. B. Warfield, “The Spirit of God in the Old Testament,”  Selected Shorter Writings, edited by John E Meeter (Nutley, New Jersey: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1973) 2: 716f.

Secular Rationalizing No Foundation for Rights

The Christian Foundation of Human Rights

Thomas Jefferson wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  This is the kind of thinking I would like to recommend.

We don’t know the nature of Jefferson’s religious beliefs or doubts, or disbeliefs  He seems to have been as original in this respect as in many others. But we do know he had recourse to the language and assumptions of Judeo-Christianity to articulate a vision of human nature.  Each person is divinely created and given rights as a gift from God.  And since these rights are given to him by God, he can never be deprived of them without defying some divine intent. Jefferson has used Scripture to assert a particular form of human exceptionalism, one that anchors our nature, that is to say our dignity, in a reality outside the world of circumstance.  . . .

What would a secular paraphrase of this sentence look like?
  In what nonreligious terms is human equality self-evident?  As animals, some of us are smarter or stronger than others, as Jefferson was certainly in a position to know.  What would be the nonreligious equivalent for the assertion that individual rights are sacrosanct in every case?  Every civilization, including this one, has always been able to reason its way to ignoring or denying the most minimal claims to justice in any form that deserves the name.  The temptation is always present and powerful because the rationalizations are always ready to hand.  One group is congenitally inferior, another is alien or shiftless, or they are enemies of the people or of the state.  Yet others are carriers of intellectual or spiritual contagion.

Jefferson makes the human person sacred, once by creation and again by endowment, and thereby sets individual rights outside the reach of rationalization.  [Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012), p. 162f.]

The Glory of the Incarnation

Songs

Every sabbath, and every Christmas season in particular, songs ring out around the world.  A King was born, the divine being, taking on human nature, human flesh.  The world would never be the same.  Do you hear the people sing, singing the songs, not of angry men, but of humble, pure joy?  We do.  We hear them singing both modern hymns of praise and ancient ones. 

What gives them their power?  They tell us that there is a great love that has intervened in history, making itself known in terms that are startlingly, and inexhaustible, palpable to us as human beings.  They are tales of love, lovingly enacted once, and afterward cherished and retold–by the grace of God, certainly, because they are, after all, the narrative of an obscure life in a minor province.  Caesar Augustus was also said to be divine, and there aren’t any songs about him. [Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012), p. 127.]

Growing Up–Or Not

“Youth Culture” is an Oxymoron

For my generation, peer anxiety was experienced only physically.  If a group were gathered in the hallway, on the playground, or on the bus ride home, we did not wish to be excluded from it.  But adolescents today are wired to one another “twenty-four seven” as they say.  Adolescents today can be excluded (or feel they are excluded, which is as bad) not only from physical gatherings, but also from electronic gatherings  They can be left out of IM, text messages, MYSpace, Facebook, cell calls, YouTube videos, and so forth.  They never really leave their adolescent friends or adolescent gossip to meet adults; they are imprisoned in an electronic society of adolescents, condemned and consigned to the social equivalent of Lord of the Flies.  As Mark Bauerlein puts it [in his book, The Dumbest Generation]:

Instead of opening young American minds to the stores of civilization and science and politics, technology has contracted their horizon to themselves, to the social scene around them.  Young people have never been so intensely mindful of and present to one another, so enabled in adolescent contact.  Teen images and songs, hot gossip and games, and youth-to-youth communications no longer limited by time or speace wrap them up in a generational cocoon reaching all the way into their bedrooms.

Biblically, the goal of youth is to leave it as rapidly as possible.  The goal of the young , biblically, is to be mature.  “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.  When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.”  (I Corinthians 13: 11)  Biblical wisdom literature encourages the young to respect and emulate their seniors, not rebel against them.

My generation tragically rejected such wisdom, and appears incapable of perceiving or repenting of its own unbiblical paedocentrism.  We think, perhaps sincerely (though dull-wittedly), that we are “concerned for youth”, when we are actually concerned to preserve the cultural abnormality of youth culture . . . . and erroneously believe that we cannot minister to the one without embracing, condoning, or promoting the other.

. . . . To “reach” the young by propagating youth culture would be analogous to Jesus’ “reaching” the rich young man by giving him money.  Money was part of that particular sinner’s problem, part of the reason he needed to be reached.  Extended adolescence is part of what our youth need to be delivered from. [T. David Gordon, Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns: How Pop Culture Rewrote the Hymnal (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2010), pp. 160-162.]

Regime of Small Kindnesses

Sacramental Home Life

Marilynne Robinson reflects upon society, homes and housekeeping:

. . . . I must say too how beautiful human society seems to me, especially in those attenuated forms so characteristic of the West–isolated towns and single houses which sometimes offer only the merest, barest amenities: light, warmth, supper, familiarity.  We have colonized a hostile planet, and we must stanch every opening where cold and dark might pour through and destroy the false climates we make, the tiny simulations of forgotten seasons beside the Euphrates or Eden.

At a certain level housekeeping is a regime of small kindnesses, which taken together, make the world salubrious, savory and warm.  I think of the acts of comfort offered and received within a household as precisely sacramental.  It is the sad tendency of domesticity–as of piety–to contract and of grace to decay into rigor and peace into tedium.  [Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012), p. 93.]

Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

The Glory of the Human Being and His Soul

Marilynne Robinson’s meditation on the power and glory of the human soul is worth reading and re-reading.  The wonder, the glory and the majesty of it all has been lost as modern culture has become imprisoned in its materialist caverns.

Modern discourse is not really comfortable with the word “soul,” and in my opinion the loss of the word has been disabling, not only to religion but to literature and political thought and to every humane pursuit.  In contemporary religious circles, souls, if they are mentioned at all, tend to be spoken of as saved or lost, having answered some set of divine expectations or failed to answer them, having arrived at some crucial realization or failed to arrive at it.

So the soul, the masterpiece of creation, is more or less reduced to a token signifying cosmic acceptance or rejection, having little or nothing to do with that miraculous thing, the felt experience of life, except insofar as life offers distractions or temptations.

Having read recently that there are more neurons in the human brain than there are stars in the Milky Way,
and having read any number of times that the human brain is the most complex object known to exist in the universe, and that the mind is not identical with the brain but is more mysterious still, it seems to me this astonishing nexus of the self, so uniquely elegant and capable, merits a name that would indicate a difference in kind from the ontological run of things, and for my purposes “soul” would do nicely.

Perhaps I should pause here to clarify my meaning, since there are those who feel that the spiritual is diminished or denied when it is associated with the physical.  I am not among them.  In his Letter to the Romans, Paul says, “Ever since the creation of the world (God’s) invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.”  If we are to consider the heavens, how much more are we to consider the magnificent energies of consciousness that make whomever we pass on the street a far grander marvel than our galaxy?

At this point of dynamic convergence, call it self or call it soul, questions of right and wrong are weighed, love is felt, guilt and loss are suffered.  And, over time, formation occurs, for weal or woe, governed in large part by that unaccountable capacity for self awareness.

The locus of the human mystery is perception of this world.  From it proceeds every thought, every art.  I like Calvin’s metaphor–nature is a shining garment in which God is revealed and concealed.  As we perceive we interpret, and we make hypotheses.  Something is happening, it has a certain character or meaning which we usually feel we understand at least tentatively, though experience is almost always available to reinterpretations based on subsequent experience or reflection.  Here occurs the weighing of moral and ethical choice.  Behavior proceeds from all this, and is interesting, to my mind, in the degree that it can be understood to proceed from it.  [Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012),  p.8f.] 

You Shall Not Pass!

Only Force Standing in the Gap

Being Christian is one thing. Fighting for a cause is another, and much easier to acknowledge – for in recent times it has grown clear that the Christian religion is threatened with a dangerous defeat by secular forces which have never been so confident.

Why is there such a fury against religion now? Because religion is the one reliable force that stands in the way of the power of the strong over the weak. The one reliable force that forms the foundation of the concept of the rule of law.

The one reliable force that restrains the hand of the man of power. In an age of powerworship, the Christian religion has become the principal obstacle to the desire of earthly utopians for absolute power. [Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith]

It’s A Small Matter–Or So We Are Told

Music And Worship

Music is a contentious issue in the Church.  This is not surprising.  It has been contentious for a long, long time.  One of the issues abroad today is whether church music and song should reflect the currently prevailing musical idioms of our culture. 

On any given Sunday, up and down the country churches listen to (and sing) songs which imitate trite “love songs” playing on just about every radio station, 24/7.  With one difference: the love songs are sung about Jesus.  It is banal and disrespectful.  It breaches the third commandment–being nothing more than the using of God’s holy Name in a vain and empty manner.

T. David Gordon, in his Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns puts the matter in a wider perspective. 

Biblically, then, neither music nor song is merely a matter of entertainment or amusement.  Both are very serious business, both culturally and religiously.  Song is the divinely instituted, divinely commanded, and divinely regulated means of responding to God’s great works of creation, preservation, and deliverance. 

Worship song is both the remarkable privilege and the solemn duty of the redeemed.  Therefore, to suggest that worship song is “merely” or “just” anything, whatever that “anything” is, is to deny the very teaching of Scripture about the importance of worship song in God’s economy–an importance so great that it characterizes the life of the redeemed in the world to come.  Thus, the unfortunately common statements, by both proponents and opponents of contemporary worship music, that this is “merely” a matter of taste or preference are erroneous and must be regarded as unbiblical. 

This . . . posture that worship song is merely a matter of amusement or entertainment . . . . arises from a culture that has come to be characterized, as Neil Postman argued, by amusement.  In such a culture . . . it is not surprising that even Bible-believing people have unwittingly adopted such an anti-biblical stance.  They simply aren’t aware of the conflict between the teaching of the Bible and the values of our culture on this point.  [T. David Gordon, Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns (Phillipsburg: P& R Publishing, 2010), p.31f.]

Letter to Hadrian

The Christians

. . . . The Christians, O King, have found the truth by going and seeking for it. . . . They do not do to others what they would not have done to themselves.  They comfort those who wrong them and make friends of them: they labour to do good to their enemies. . . . He that has gives freely to him who has not.  If they see a stranger, they bring him under their roof and rejoice over him as if over their own brother: they call themselves brethren, not after the flesh but after the Spirit and in God . . . .

Aristides, Apology, 15 (to the Emperor Hadrian, c130AD)

Nietzsche Has Triumphed in the West

The Essence of Modernity

To be entirely modern (which very few of us are) is to believe in nothing.

This is not to say it is to have no beliefs: the truly modern person may believe in almost anything, or even perhaps in everything, so long as all these beliefs rest securely upon a more fundamental and radical faith in nothing–or, better, in nothingness as such.

Modernity’s highest ideal–its special understanding of personal autonomy–requires us to place our trust in the original absence underlying all of reality, a fertile void in which all things are possible, from which arises no impediment to our wills, and before which we may consequently choose to make of ourselves whatever we choose.  We trust, that is to say, that there is no substantial criterion by which to judge our choices that stands higher than the unquestioned good of free choice itself, and that therefore all judgment, divine no less than human, is in some sense and infringement upon our freedom.

This is our primal ideology.  In the most unadorned terms possible, the ethos of modernity is–to be perfectly precise–nihilism. 

 David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 21

The Fear of God

Paths to Christian Belief

. . . . Very rarely, no never, does it happen that someone comes to us with the wish to become a Christian who has not be struck by some fear of God.

Augustine, On Catechizing the Uninstructed, 5.9 (400 AD)

Compulsion

Not a ‘Well Turned Phrase’

. . . . I do not care whether you expect some well-turned phrases today.  It is my duty to give you due warning by citing the Scriptures.  “Do not be slow to turn to the Lord, nor delay from one day to the next, for His anger shall come when you know not.” . . . I cannot be silent: I am forced to preach upon it.  Filled with fear myself, I fill you with fear.

Augustine, Sermon in Miscellanea Agostiniana, 1 (1930) 199.

Power of God Unto Salvation

Raphael,_St_Paul_Preaching_in_Athens_(1515)

Do Preachers Expect a Response to the Preaching of the Gospel?

St Paul expected his hearers to be moved. He so believed in his preaching that he knew that it was “the power of God unto salvation” [Rom. 1:16]. This expectation is a very real part of the presentation of the Gospel. It is a form of faith. A mere preaching which is not accompanied by the expectation of faith, is not a true preaching of the Gospel, because faith is a part of the Gospel. Simply to scatter the seed, with a sort of vague hope that some of it may come up somewhere, is not preaching the gospel. It is indeed a misrepresentation of the gospel. To preach the Gospel requires that the preacher should believe that he is sent to those whom he is addressing at the moment, because God has among them those whom He is at the moment calling: it requires that the speaker should expect a response. —Roland Allen, Missionary Methods—St. Paul’s or Ours? (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1962), p. 74.

Hat Tip: Justin Taylor

The Coming of the Kingdom

Like a Mustard Seed

“My chief ambition in writing is to call attention to the peculiar and radical nature of the new faith in that setting (of the culture of late antiquity): how enormous a transformation of thought, sensibility, culture, morality and spiritual imagination Christianity constituted in the age of pagan Rome; the liberation it offered from fatalism, cosmic despair, and the terror of occult agencies; the immense dignity it conferred on the human person; its subversion of the cruelest aspects of pagan society; its (alas, only partial) demystification of political power; its ability to create moral community when none had existed before; and its elevation of active charity above all other virtues.

“. . . . (T)here has been only one–the triumph of Christianity–that can be called in the fullest sense a “revolution”: a truly massive and epochal revision of humanity’s prevailing vision of reality, so pervasive in its influence and so vast in its consequences as actually to have created a new conception of the world, of history, of human nature, of time, and of the moral good.  To my mind, I should add, it was an event immeasurably more impressive in its cultural creativity and more ennobling in its moral power than any other movement of spirit, will, imagination, aspiration, or accomplishment in the history of the West.  And I am convinced that, given how radically at variance Christianity was with the culture it slowly and relentlessly displaced, its eventual victory was an event of such improbability as to strain the limits of our understanding of historical causality.”

David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p.xi

Chrestomathy

Damn All False Antitheses to Hell

D.A. Carson:

So which shall we choose?
Experience or truth?
The left wing of the airplane, or the right?
Love or integrity?
Study or service?
Evangelism or discipleship?
The front wheels of a car, or the rear?
Subjective knowledge or objective knowledge?
Faith or obedience?
Damn all false antithesis to hell, for they generate false gods, they perpetuate idols, they twist and distort our souls, they launch the church into violent pendulum swings whose oscillations succeed only in dividing brothers and sisters in Christ.

—D.A. Carson, Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church: Understanding a Movement and Its Implications (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005), 234.

False antitheses are found everywhere amongst Christians as they seek to exercise an ungodly dominance over the Scriptures and reduce God’s revelation and the Christian faith to something they can control.

Hat Tip: Justin Taylor

Chrestomathy

Atheism As Failure to Grasp the Implications

Devil in a Blue Dress
Written by Douglas Wilson
Friday, October 28, 2011 7:37 am

“If the two of us [an atheist and Christian] were looking at a new report of the latest atrocity, I would say that at some point in the future, in some fundamental way, that will be put right. You want to say, as an atheist, that it will not ever be put right. But you refuse, for some reason, to tak the next logical step and admit that there is therefore nothing wrong with it now” (Letter From a Christian Citizen, p. 54).

Courage and Christian Ministry

Go Make Shoes

“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).