Vapour Trails

 The Signs of Christ At Work Amongst Us

Some of our readers will be familiar with Rosaria Butterfield.  In this video she responds to questions put to her by Russell Moore, one of the prominent theologians and teachers in the Southern Baptist Confederation.

To those who have not yet come across Rosaria, her experience of coming out of militant lesbianism to faith in the risen Christ is salutary and of great moment for the modern Church.  There is much to learn.  One of the most salutary and encouraging things is how Butterfield responds to questions about her experiences by placing her life within the context of the fundamentals and depths of the Christian faith.  This is what being saved by Christ “looks” like.  There is also important stuff in this video about what the community of the redeemed must be and become. 

Letter From America (About Facing the Truth)

Doctor’s Conversion From Atheism to Christianity

Inspiration for a Central Character in Major Hollywood Film

TheBlaze

Apr. 3, 2014 11:51am  

Billy Hallowell 

Martin Yip is one of the main characters in “God’s Not Dead,” the Christian movie thatstunned observers with its impressive performance at the box office about a student who debates an atheist professor on the existence of God.  Yip’s character, an atheist who converts to Christianity after meeting protagonist Josh Wheaton on campus, is actually based on a real-life doctor who went through a similar experience decades ago.

Dr. Ming Wang, an eye surgeon in Nashville, Tenn., was studying in the U.S. when he became a follower of Jesus.  His story, captured in the 2013 book “God’s Not Dead” (the book preceded the film), began in China, where he grew up with parents who taught at a medical school, according to the Tennessean.
Watch Wang share his story on TBN below:

Coming from a highly educated family, Wang said academics were always of the utmost importance.
“Everything was about scholarship, learning and science in our family,” he told the Tennessean. “Education was the most important.”  He ended up going to Harvard Medical School, where he graduated with honors and was later one of the first surgeons in the U.S. to perform laser cataract surgery. He also holds a degree from MIT and a doctorate in laser physics.

It was at Harvard, though, that he went through a transformation that transcended academics. Wang began questioning certain structures, wondering how the eye, for instance, could be so complex, yet still the result of random evolution.  And that was only one example of the inquisitiveness that sent him on a spiritual path.

Spurgeon’s Conversion

Look!

How the Snowpocalypse of 1850 Led to Spurgeon’s Conversion 164 Years Ago Today

Justin Taylor
January 06, 2014

164 years ago today—January 6, 1850—15-year-old Charles Spurgeon was trudging up Hythe Hill in Colchester, on his way to church. When the blizzard prevented him from going further, he turned the corner and made his way into a small Primitive Methodist Church on Artillery Street.

He recounted the story hundreds of time, each time a bit differently. But here is one of his most vivid recollections:

I sometimes think I might have been in darkness and despair now, had it not been for the goodness of God in sending a snowstorm one Sunday morning, when I was going to a place of worship.

When I could go no further, I turned down a court and came to a little Primitive Methodist Chapel.

In that chapel there might be a dozen or fifteen people.

The minister did not come that morning: snowed up, I suppose.

A poor man, a shoemaker, a tailor, or something of that sort, went up into the pulpit to preach.

He was obliged to stick to his text, for the simple reason that he had nothing else to say. The text was, ‘Look unto Me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth’ [Isa 45:22].

He did not even pronounce the words rightly, but that did not matter.

There was, I thought, a glimpse of hope for me in the text.

He began thus:

‘My dear friends, this is a very simple text indeed. It says, “Look.”

Now that does not take a deal of effort. It ain’t lifting your foot or your finger; it is just “look.” Well, a man need not go to college to learn to look. You may be the biggest fool, and yet you can look. A man need not be worth a thousand a year to look. Anyone can look; a child can look. But this is what the text says.

Then it says, “Look unto Me.”

‘Ay,’ said he, in broad Essex, ‘many of ye are looking to yourselves. No use looking there. You’ll never find comfort in yourselves.’
Then the good man followed up his text in this way:

‘Look unto Me: I am sweating great drops of blood.

Look unto Me; I am hanging on the Cross.

Look: I am dead and buried.

Look unto Me; I rise again.

Look unto Me; I ascend; I am sitting at the Father’s right hand.

O, look to Me! Look to Me!’

When he had got about that length, and managed to spin out ten minutes, he was at the length of his tether.

Then he looked at me under the gallery, and I daresay, with so few present, he knew me to be a stranger.

He then said, ‘Young man, you look very miserable.’

Well, I did; but I had not been accustomed to have remarks made on my personal appearance from the pulpit before. However, it was a good blow struck.

He continued: ‘And you will always be miserable—miserable in life and miserable in death—if you do not obey my text. But if you obey now, this moment, you will be saved.’

Then he shouted, as only a Primitive Methodist can, ‘Young man, look to Jesus Christ.’

There and then the cloud was gone, the darkness had rolled away, and that moment I saw the sun; and I could have risen that moment and sung with the most enthusiastic of them of the Precious Blood of Christ.”

Amazing Grace

Breaking the Cycle of Curse

Modern secular society has a fetish over youth.  Which is a way of saying that the preceding generation has lost self-respect.  There are few things more shameful than witnessing disrespect for elders.  One of them is elders taken in self-loathing who attempt to cope by falling into an egregious adulation of youth.  “We, in our generation, have failed miserably.  We have been terrible.  But the youth of today–well, to them belongs the future.  They are wonderful.”  The adulation of youth serves as a pathetic attempt at atonement for the guilt of a generation which rebelled against God, but discovered when it was all too late that things had not worked out so well.

Jonah Goldberg describes it this way:

For generations now, but particularly since the rise of the baby boomers, we have institutionalized  the idea that young people are simply fantastic for no other reason than that they are young.  It has become part of our formal educational philosophy to tell kids they are awesome for no apparent reason.  [Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (New York: Sentinel/Penguin, 2012), p. 223.]

The end result?  A generation of self-absorbed narcissists, unable to get jobs, embittered that the adulation enjoyed as a young person has not continued into adult life.  The upshot: a persistent conviction that society owes them something.  But recall that it all begins with the generation that went before, which has gnawed at its own bones with self-doubt and self-hatred.  

The Christian world-view commands respect for one’s elders (Exodus 20:12), particularly our fathers and mothers.  It warns against the lusts and follies of youth.  It requires that young people be willing to learn the wisdom which the aged offer.

But all of this breaks down when the aged are actually fools, living a life of stubborn rebellion against God.  Sins pass down through generations, as well as righteousness.  Evil patterns reproduce in the lives of those who come after.  Sins, we are told, come down to the third and the fourth generation–a divine pattern which can be broken only by the mercy of God Himself.

This implies that by the third and the fourth generations, things have become so dysfunctional that kids suffering under the ravages of living in alcoholic, drug infused, violent “homes” reach the point where they begin to think there has to be a better way to live.  Sin and its promises become loathsome.  At that point their ears can become open to hear–and take seriously–the offer of new beginnings, of new life in Christ.  When such are converted they usually reject outright the only way of life they have known–along with its all-too-familiar devastations and degradations.

It is at this point that the designation of the Church as a family (brothers, sisters, elders, mothers, fathers) becomes one of the most blessed realities of the new life, created by God’s Spirit within.  Overnight they become adopted into a new family with an older generation which manifests the sanctification and graces of true wisdom and understanding.  As they start to build new lives, the cyclical curse of elders passing on a  life of sinfulness, self-loathing, and restless anger to those coming after is broken.  It is removed. Amazing Grace ceases to be “just a hymn”; it becomes an actual experience.

Only the Christ is big enough and powerful enough to do this.  When He does, it is one of the most beautiful things to behold, far beyond any passing glories of this world. 

Letter From America (About a Christian Exodus)

The mass exodus of Christians from the Muslim world

By Raymond Ibrahim

Published May 07, 2013

FoxNews.com

A mass exodus of Christians is currently underway.  Millions of Christians are being displaced from one end of the Islamic world to the other.   We are reliving the true history of how the Islamic world, much of which prior to the Islamic conquests was almost entirely Christian, came into being.

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom recently said: “The flight of Christians out of the region is unprecedented and it’s increasing year by year.”
  In our lifetime alone “Christians might disappear altogether from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Egypt.”  Ongoing reports from the Islamic world certainly support this conclusion:  Iraq was the earliest indicator of the fate awaiting Christians once Islamic forces are liberated from the grip of dictators. 

In 2003, Iraq’s Christian population was at least one million. Today fewer than 400,000 remain—the result of an anti-Christian campaign that began with the U.S. occupation of Iraq, when countless Christian churches were bombed and countless Christians killed, including by crucifixion and beheading.  The 2010 Baghdad church attack, which saw nearly 60 Christian worshippers slaughtered, is the tip of a decade-long iceberg.

Now, as the U.S. supports the jihad on Syria’s secular president Assad, the same pattern has come to Syria: entire regions and towns where Christians lived for centuries before Islam came into being have now been emptied, as the opposition targets Christians for kidnapping, plundering, and beheadings, all in compliance with mosque calls telling the populace that it’s a “sacred duty” to drive Christians away.

In October 2012 the last Christian in the city of Homs—which had a Christian population of some 80,000 before jihadis came—was murdered.  One teenage Syrian girl said: “We left because they were trying to kill us… because we were Christians….  Those who were our neighbors turned against us. At the end, when we ran away, we went through balconies. We did not even dare go out on the street in front of our house.”

In Egypt, some 100,000 Christian Copts have fled their homeland soon after the “Arab Spring.”  In September 2012, the Sinai’s small Christian community was attacked and evicted by Al Qaeda linked Muslims, Reuters reported. But even before that, the Coptic Orthodox Church lamented the “repeated incidents of displacement of Copts from their homes, whether by force or threat.  Displacements began in Ameriya [62 Christian families evicted], then they stretched to Dahshur [120 Christian families evicted], and today terror and threats have reached the hearts and souls of our Coptic children in Sinai.”

Iraq, Syria, and Egypt are part of the Arab world.  But even in “black” African and “white” European nations with Muslim majorities, Christians are fleeing.  In Mali, after a 2012 Islamic coup, as many as 200,000 Christians fled.  According to reports, “the church in Mali faces being eradicated,” especially in the north “where rebels want to establish an independent Islamist state and drive Christians out… there have been house to house searches for Christians who might be in hiding, churches and other Christian property have been looted or destroyed, and people tortured into revealing any Christian relatives.” At least one pastor was beheaded.

Even in European Bosnia, Christians are leaving en mass “amid mounting discrimination and Islamization.”  Only 440,000 Catholics remain in the Balkan nation, half the prewar figure.  Problems cited are typical:  “while dozens of mosques were built in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, no building permissions [permits] were given for Christian churches.” “Time is running out as there is a worrisome rise in radicalism,” said one authority, who further added that the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina were “persecuted for centuries” after European powers “failed to support them in their struggle against the Ottoman Empire.”

And so history repeats itself.

One can go on and on:

• In Ethiopia, after a Christian was accused of desecrating a Koran, thousands of Christians were forced to flee their homes when “Muslim extremists set fire to roughly 50 churches and dozens of Christian homes.” 
• In the Ivory Coast—where Christians have literally been crucified—Islamic rebels “massacred hundreds and displaced tens of thousands” of Christians.
• In Libya, Islamic rebels forced several Christian religious orders, serving the sick and needy in the country since 1921, to flee.

To anyone following the plight of Christians under Islamic persecution, none of this is surprising.  As I document in my new book, “Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians,” all around the Islamic world—in nations that do not share the same race, language, culture, or economics, in nations that share only Islam—Christians are being persecuted into extinction. Such is the true face of extremist Islamic resurgence.

Raymond Ibrahim is author of the new book “Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians” (Regnery Publishing 2013). A Middle East and Islam specialist, he is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an associate fellow at the Middle East Forum.

[Editor’s note: we in New Zealand have experienced part of this exodus.  Christian Iraqi refugees have resettled in New Zealand.  They are gradually assimilating into NZ churches and finding Christian fellowship and support.  This is a very small part of a global story. 

 

At one level it is yet one more demonstration of how intrinsically weak and insipid Islamic doctrine and historical teaching is.  Islam cannot survive without the sword.  It repeatedly demonstrates it cannot win a religious battle for hearts, minds and souls for it is spiritually impotent.  It has to force its doctrines and life by the sword upon subjugated peoples.  And when it has “cleansed” itself of Christians, Islamic societies turn upon one another.  There are no wars of religious more vicious than the wars between Shi’ites and Sunnis–an enmity that stretches back one and a half millennia.  Shi’ites cannot persuade Sunnis, and vice versa, for both are spiritually impotent.  They can only progress their cause by means of violence, intimidation, standover tactics, and bloodshed.  Islam is a religion of gangsters.

 

But we also know that those enslaved under this darkness will one day be released, for Islamic nations will eventually willingly fall under the aegis of the Lord Jesus Christ.  Their coming to Christ will be not by the sword, but by the Spirit, Who will call them irresistibly in the day of His power, “convincing them of their sin and misery, enlightening their minds in the knowledge of Christ and renewing their wills”, He will “both persuade and enable them to embrace Jesus Christ freely offered to them in the Gospel. (Westminster Shorter Catechism)] 

Of Train Wrecks and Car Crashes, Part III

Sins of Identity

At one point in her Augustinianesque “Confessions” about her conversion Rosaria Butterfield has this to say:

Slowly but steadily, my feelings did start to change–feelings about myself as a woman and feelings about what sexuality really is and what it really isn’t.  I–like most everyone who identified as gay or lesbian–felt really comfortable, very at home in my body, in my lesbianism.  One doesn’t repent for a sin of identity in one session.  Sins of identity have multiple dimensions, and throughout this journey, I have come to my pastor and his wife, friends in the Lord, and always to the Lord himself with different facets of sin–how pride, for example, informed my decision-making, or how my unwillingness to forgive others had landlocked my heart in bitterness.  I have walking this journey with help.  There is no other way to do it.  I still walk this journey with help.  [Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor’s Journey into Christian Faith (Pittsburg: Crown and Covenant Publications, 2012), p.23.]

One of the implicit challenges in Butterfield’s book is for the church is to learn to walk with saints converting out of what she calls “sins of identity”.  These are conditions where a sinner has told himself that he is a certain kind of person and has built a lifestyle accordingly.  The sins have become institutionalised within and without.  Sexual sins, when translated into full throated expressions of self-identity, are always like this. Involvement in false religions, when it has touched and conformed the heart and soul of a sinner, is also like this.  

We marvel at the power and grace of God to deliver people from such sins of identity.  There is no power upon earth that can do this.  Only God can so reconstruct such a human being thus wound up in sin and error.  But, and here is the challenge, as Butterfield says, such a person can only walk this journey with help. Are we, as God’s people, willing to do this?  We have to be.  It is our calling.  We dare not be, lest we provoke our great King to anger. 

Of Train Wrecks and Car Crashes, Part II

 Faith and Haste Are Usually Like Oil and Water

Conversion for the Apostle Paul appears to have been like a fatal car crash.  The old was smashed.  But out of the wreckage, something new, something wonderful was born.  The Scriptures do not give many details, but it seems that some time after Paul’s dramatic Damascus road experience, when the shards of his former identity lay scattered on the ground, he retired to obscurity and privacy.  It would appear that he needed time to be reconstructed, rebuilt by the Spirit to equip him for the ministry ahead.

Paul tells us that after his initial conversion, he went away into Arabia (a desolate and relatively uninhabited place); then he returned to Damascus and then after three years he “came out”, going up to Jerusalem to visit with the apostles.  Then, subsequently, he went to Syria and Cilicia  (Galatians 1: 11-24)  All up, it appears that there was a period of about fifteen years between his initial conversion and before his public call to the work of apostleship. 

The breaking of an old identity–particularly one very strongly etched and inscribed–takes time.
  In Rosaria Butterfield’s confessions or “Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert”  there are many passages detailing doubts, questions, struggles, pain, and suffering as she moved from darkness into the light.  The idea, fable really, of people painlessly and without friction instantly transforming from the old man to the new is never real. 

At one point she describes it this way:

Two incommensurable worldviews clashed together: the reality of my lived experience and the truth of the world of God.  In continental philosophy, we talk about the difference between the true and the real.  Had my life become real, but not true?  The Bible told me to repent, but I didn’t feel like repenting.  Do you have to feel like repenting in order to repent?  Was I a sinner, or was I, in my drag queen friend’s words, sick? How do you repent for a sin that doesn’t feel like a sin?  How could the thing that I had studied and become be sinful?  How could I be tenured in a field that is sin?  How could I and everyone that I knew and loved be in sin?

In this crucible of confusion, I learned something important.  I learned this first rule of repentance: that repentance requires greater intimacy with God than with our sin.  How much greater?  About the size of a mustard seed.  Repentance requires that we draw near to Jesus, no matter what.  And sometimes we all have to crawl there on our hands and knees.  Repentance is an intimate affair.  And for many of us, intimacy with anything is a terrifying prospect.  [Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor’s Journey into Christian Faith (Pittsburg: Crown and Covenant Publications, 2012), p.21.]

We fear that in our belief in an instant, gratifying creation we expect that conversion will be a relatively quick and instant affair, like Nescafe.  The conversion of Paul fits into this paradigm.  We see him on the road to Damascus.  We see the great light.  We hear the voice of Christ from heaven.  We observe him rising from his blind bed and going straight to the synagogue to confront the Jewish people with Jesus as the Son of God.  That’s the kind of conversion we look for in our Nescafe world.  Right.  Paul is now one of us.  He is arraigned in the ranks.  Let’s go after the next convert.

But it took years to prepare Paul thoroughly for what was ahead of Him.  The Lord is never in a hurry.  His work is most often slow and gradual and far too often Christians and churches don’t have the patience to work with people slowly and gradually.  We think the real and the divine always produces instant and spectacular change: the more spectacular and the more instant the more evidently divine.  In this we are gravely and sadly mistaken.  It ultimately makes us impatient with God and frustrated with the Church and with fellow Christians. 

There are many reasons we don’t have patience, either with God or with man.  One is our own sinful hearts.  Impatience, after all, is a demanding, arrogant attitude towards God and man.  “I want it, and I want it now”, and the reason is I am important in my own eyes.

Rosaria Butterfield talks about learning to obey God one step at a time, slowly, gingerly, painfully.  When she first started attending church she felt awkward and uncomfortable–despite the warmth and welcome of the congregation.  In one sermon she heard of Jesus’ dictum that if men obey Him they would find out soon enough whether His word was from God (John 7:17).  She learned, as she puts it, that obedience comes before understanding.  Then she says:

I started to obey God in my heart one step at a time.  I broke up with my girlfriend.  My heart really wasn’t in the break-up, but I hoped that God would regard my obedience even in its double-mindedness.  I started to go to the [Presbyterian Reformed] church fully, in my heart, for the whole purpose of worshiping God.  I stopped caring if I looked like a freak there.  I started to receive the friendship that the church members offered to me.  I learned that we must obey in faith before we feel better or different.  (Ibid. p.22)

It takes time for the new person to grow out of the fatal car crash of repentance.  And, let us never forget this: in more Christian times, when the truths of the Gospel and the law of God were institutionalised and socialised into the warp and woof of the culture, many folk would become Christians and would end up doing and behaving in their new Christian life as they had been raised.  They, like the Prodigal, would return to the household culture of their youth. This is no longer generally the case.  Sin and its fruits have so perverted the West that the average person is self-identified, socialised and institutionalised  into unbelief and sin.  These generations of unbelief and rebellion has born consistent fruits.  Conversion now requires transformation, not a returning home.  Most people today have never been in the home in the first place.  It is a totally foreign place to them.

Today, as not seen in the generations of our forbears, ministry to the lost and the dying requires much care, much patience, and much faith.  Above all, we must be willing and prepared to work and serve at God’s pace, not our own.  One day with Him is as a thousand years.  This means that the little things of daily life are to be counted as vitally significant and important.  He who believes will not be in haste.  

Great Books

Book of the Month/March 2013 

Engaging the Culture – Book Review
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, 02 March 2013

Gosh, what a book.

I really cannot recommend this book highly enough. This will be a relatively short review — what I want to do is give a brief summary of the set-up, mention three things about it that were simply wonderful, and then conclude with a plea for you to get it and read it.

Rosaria Champagne Butterfield was an English professor at Syracuse, a postmodern specialist in Queer Theory, and a radical lesbian. In this book she describes her “train wreck” conversion to Christ, and how the Lord has since then led her step by excruciating step to her current high calling as a Reformed pastor’s wife, a homeschooling mom, and a foster parent.

Here are the three things I found striking about this book, in no particular order. The first thing is the obvious potency of hospitality and love.
She was brought to Christ by faithful Christians who opened their homes to her, and since coming to Christ she has seen that same potency working outward — by marking what has happened in the lives of others as she has opened her home.

The second thing is how she so ably describes the work of the Spirit and how He leads His people through layers of repentance. Her story is a story of a repentance that didn’t quit at the church door. This is a book about the relationship of authority and repentance.

The third thing is that, while the book is relatively short, it is jammed with passing observations that are priceless. She is a wise woman with a good eye. Not only does she have a good eye, she has a trained outsider’s eye. She was converted out of the world, and grafted into Christ. Her description of that is glorious. But she was also converted out of one tribe, and grafted into another tribe, a reality which gave her a good perspective on which aspects of our behavior (in the conservative Reformed world) were about Jesus, and which ones were merely tribal . . . and kind of odd. Consequently, there are observational gems throughout the book, usually just a sentence or two, but which could be developed into chapters or books all on their own. Pay attention to those.

Okay, let me shoehorn in a fourth thing. She really knows how to write.

This is a book that will really bless you. Get it, and read it. Gosh, what a book.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

11 Theses on Believing God 

Theology – Welcome to the Reformed Faith
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, 12 February 2013

1. Born as we are in a fallen race, we need to begin with the recognition that unbelief is our default setting (Matt. 13:58). Unbelief is abnormal, but not really unusual.

2. This means that we are in a state of perpetual tension, because everything in the world around us declares the faithfulness of God (Rom. 1:19), and is declaring it with clarity to hearts that don’’t want to accept it.

3. Because our loss of faith did not cause us to lose our wits, we retain a high level of ability in rationalization (Eph. 4:18). Faith and unbelief therefore traffic in competing narratives.

4. This condition of unbelief is incorrigible, and cannot be undone apart the efficacy of an imperishable seed that comes to us from outside ourselves (1 Pet. 1:23).

5. Faith must therefore be understood as a gift from God. It is not something we autonomously offer to God; it is something He gives to us so that we may render it back to Him in gratitude (Eph. 2:8-9).

6. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God (Rom. 10:17). The imperishable seed that reverses our natural state of unbelief comes to us in the form of propositions. The Word comes to us by means of declarative speech. And this is not sola Scriptura only, but also tota et sola Scriptura.

7. Once genuine faith is quickened in us, it grows as a seed grows into a mature plant. Faith therefore admits of degrees (Matt. 8:26).

8. Once genuine faith is quickened in us, unbelief does not vanish in an instant, but as with every other aspect of how sin is dealt with in our sanctification, it is mortified and weakened continually (Heb. 3:12).

9. Faith is to be understood as a function of relationship, as we considered Him faithful who had made the promise (Heb. 11:11).

10. We are to walk in faith in the same way we began our pilgrimage by faith. Being a Christian is not radically distinct from becoming a Christian (Gal. 3:3).

11. Faith has a punctiliar beginning, but the faith itself is not punctiliar. The just shall live by faith (Hab. 2:4; Rom. 1:17).

Faith, therefore, is a gift of God, and is the natural response to the perceived faithfulness of God.

Sown Seeds

Loathsome Words And Withered Hands

Most of us who are Christians can look back in our lives and discern what we could not at the time–the hand of God Himself.  Things said, books read, people met, or unbidden thoughts that provoked and disturbed.  It is only in hindsight that we can now see the full impact and significant force of these circumstantial events.  We now see that in them God was at work, sowing seeds that one day would spring up to evergreen life. 

Most often these circumstances and events served to disturb, to provoke discomfort.
  Peter Hitchens, raised in a nominally Christian home and sent to a public school, gives us his account of the seeds sown.

There were other things too.  During a short spell at a cathedral choir school . . . I had experienced the intense beauty of the ancient Anglican chants, spiraling up into chilly stone vaults at Evensong.  This sunset ceremony is the very heart of English Christianity.  The prehistoric, mysterious poetry of the Magnificat and the Nunc Dimittis, perhaps a melancholy evening hymn, and the cold, ancient laments and curses of the Psalms, as the unique slow dusk of England gathers outside and inside the echoing, haunted, impossible old building are extraordinarily potent.  If you welcome them, they have an astonishing power to reassure and comfort.  If you suspect or mistrust them, they will alarm and repel you like a strong and unwanted magic, something to flee from before it takes hold. . . .

But above all I had discovered–and strongly feared and disliked–the ancient catechism . . . . (I) was actively angry and resentful at the catechism’s insistence on rules I had no intention of obeying.  By the time I was around twelve, I had a sense, when I encountered this text, of a very old and withered hand reaching out from a dusty tomb-like cavity and seeking to pull me down into its hole forever. 

The dark purity of the seventeenth-century language was also disturbing.  It was the voice of the dead, speaking as if they were still alive and as if the world had not changed since they died–when I thought I knew that the world was wholly alterable and that the rules changed with the times.  Now I am comforted greatly by this voice, welcoming the intervention of my forebears in our lives and in their insistent reminder that we do not in fact change at all, that as I am now, so once were they, and as they are now, so shall I be. . . . The words I found myself particularly loathing formed part of the answer to the question: “What is thy duty towards God?”  They run: “To submit myself to all my governors, teachers, spiritual pastors and masters: to order myself lowly and reverently to all my betters . . . to do my duty in that state of life, unto which it shall please God to call me.”

This passage well expressed the thing that the confident, ambitious young person dislikes about religion: its call for submission–submission!–to established authority, and its disturbing implication that others can and will decide what I must be and do.  [Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2010), pp 26-28.]

While the specific circumstances may differ we suspect that many, if not most, Christians could give similar accounts of the long and painstaking work of God in their lives preparing them to meet Him against Whom they had long been kicking. 

War of the Worlds

 Recovering Cosmic Christianity

Conversion and baptism were momentous events for early Christians.  Both involved a rejection of one earthly realm and an entering of another earthly realm that was now also a heavenly realm–the power of God and His Christ falling upon the earth, to establish His kingdom here.

Here is David Bentley Hart’s description:

To become a Christian was to renounce a very great deal of what one had known and been to that point, in order to be joined to a new reality, the demands of which were absolute; it was to depart from one world, with an irrevocable finality, and to enter another. . . .

(T)he period of one’s preparation for baptism could not conclude until one had been taught the story of redemption: how once all men and women had labored as slaves in the household of death, prisoners of the devil, sold into bondage to Hades, languishing in ignorance of their true home; and how Christ had come to set the prisoners free and had, by his death and resurrection, invaded the kingdom of our captor and overthrown it, vanquishing the power of sin and death in us, shattering the gates of hell, and plundering the devil of his captives. . . .

We today are probably somewhat prone to forget that, though the early Christians did indeed regard the gods of the pagan order as false gods, they did not necessarily understand this to mean simply that these gods were unreal; they understood it to mean that the gods were deceivers.  Behind the pieties of the pagan world, Christians believed, lurked forces of great cruelty and guile: demons, malign elemental spirits, occult agencies masquerading as divinities, exploiting the human yearning for God, and working to thwart the designs of God, in order to bind humanity in slavery to darkness, ignorance, and death.

And to renounce one’s bonds to these beings was an act of cosmic rebellion, a declaration taht one had been emancipated from (in the language of John’s Gospel) “the prince of this world” or (in the someone more disturbing language of II Corinthians) “the god of this world”.  In its fallen state, the cosmos lies under the reign of evil (I John 5:19), but Christ came to save the world, to lead “captivity captive” (Ephesians 4:8) and to overthrow the empire of those “thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers” (Colossians 1:16, I Corinthians 2:8, Ephesians 1:21, 3:10) and “rulers on high” (Ephesians 6:12) that have imprisoned creation in corruption and evil. . . .

These thrones and powers and principalities and so forth were not merely earthly princes or empires (though princes and empires served their ends); much less were they vague abstractions; they were, according to Jewish Apocalyptic tradition, the angelic governors of the nations, the celestial “archons”, the often mutinous legions of the air, who–thought they might be worshipped as gods, and might in themselves be both mighty and dreadful–were only creatures of the one true God.  It was from the tyranny of these powers on high that Chrsit had come to set creation free.  And so the life of faith was, for the early church, before all else, spiritual warfare, waged between the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of this fallen world, and every Christian on the day o fhis or her baptism had been conscripted into that struggle on the side of Christ.  From that point on, he or she was both a subject and a co-heir to a “kingdom not of this world”, and henceforth no more than a resident alien in the “earthly city”.  [David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies,  (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p.113f.

The fact that so many modern Christians in the West, if they think about such scriptural passages at all, regard them as symbolic or literary images, rather than the literal truth (such things can no longer be believed in a “rationally” scientific materialistic age) tells us just how much ground the ancient demons have regained in the West.

The right response, however, is not fear, but faith.  As Luther put it, “The prince of darkness grim, we tremble not for him.  His rage we can endure, for lo, his doom is sure.  One little word will fell him.”  Churches in the West must also recover the cosmic significance–with all its implications–of conversion and being baptised into the household of faith.