It’s Getting Personal

Calling Across the Storm Tossed Sea

The Christian believes in infinite cosmic personalism.  As the catechism has it, “God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal and unchangeable in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth.”  All of existence, all life, all experience, all circumstances are Personally motivated and caused by the infinite, eternal, and unchangeable God.  He is in the details.  All of them.  Behind them, in them, and ahead of them are the thoughts, intentions and plans of God for us. 

The modern Unbeliever, however, believes in cosmic impersonalism.  The universe just is.  Behind it and in it there is no plan, no purpose, no goodness, no justice nor truth.  There is just what is. And what “is” remains ultimately random, without any meaning.  

Now the Unbeliever has a problem.  Cosmic impersonalism is hard to live with, to say the least.
  The ancient Greeks believed in blind, impersonal fate–much like modern man in may ways.  Whatever will be, will be.  Yet this bleak world-view was deadly, so higher powers were imagined into existence–the gods.  These were super-humans, with all human foibles and personality traits.  The Greeks tried to personalise the impersonal. 

The Christian is reconciled in advance to all circumstances.  No circumstance is random or ultimately impersonal.  That’s why the formal name given to the entirety of life’s circumstances–whether positive or negative–is Providence.  In everything that happens, God is providing for us, His children.  Even supposedly random events are specified to be God’s personal disposition for each.  (Proverbs 16:33) All of life’s experiences and circumstances represent not the product of impersonal forces, but the infinitely detailed personal plan of God for everyone. 

The Christian knows that this world is fallen.  There is evil abroad.  That, too, is personal.  Evil does not reside in rocks, but in the thoughts and intentions of malicious beings dedicated to the attempted destruction of  God and all His hosts.  But, though many evil things may befall us, we are not undone.  God’s plans for the Devil and his demonic host are ultimately for His glory and our good.  As Luther has it:

A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing;
Our helper He, amid the flood of mortal ills prevailing:
For still our ancient foe doth seek to work us woe;
His craft and power are great, and, armed with cruel hate,
On earth is not his equal.

Did we in our own strength confide, our striving would be losing;
Were not the right Man on our side, the Man of God’s own choosing:
Dost ask who that may be? Christ Jesus, it is He;
Lord Sabaoth, His Name, from age to age the same,
And He must win the battle.

And though this world, with devils filled, should threaten to undo us,
We will not fear, for God hath willed His truth to triumph through us:
The Prince of Darkness grim, we tremble not for him;
His rage we can endure, for lo, his doom is sure,
One little word shall fell him.

That word above all earthly powers, no thanks to them, abideth;
The Spirit and the gifts are ours through Him Who with us sideth:
Let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also;
The body they may kill: God’s truth abideth still,
His kingdom is forever.

Contrast this with the horror of Unbelief.  Since there is no good nor evil, nothing in this life has any actual significance or meaning–there is just an endless succession of circumstances and events. To murder has the same significance and not murdering.  Nada.  No significance at all.  As Jean Paul Sartre expressed it, if you are driving down the street and an old woman is crossing the road, should you brake or accelerate?  Killing her has the same significance as not killing her.  None at all.  The only significance, he asserted, was in deciding to do something.  But in this he was merely engaged in special pleading. 

Of course no man can live in a manner consistent with cosmic impersonalism.  So, like the ancient Greeks, the modern Western mind formally proclaims impersonal random chance as the source of all being, then manufactures all kinds of cosmic personalism in the vain attempt to make sense of the world.  It speaks and acts as if the world were a morally infused existence.  There are things to be hated and loved.  There are values, ethics and morals.  The people who live under the same roof believe they love their spouses, their children, they parents and grand parents.  But every action, thought, and word asserting or implying personhood is a falsehood, a lie which cannot be true.  It is just a fiction, a just-so story to make us feel better about things.  The Unbeliever cannot live his “truth”–he denies the truth of cosmic impersonalism every day in countless ways.

But, whilst in the vortex of the lie–claiming cosmic impersonalism, whilst asserting at the same time an ultimately personal warp and woof of existence–the Unbeliever will not repent and turn to the God Who made him.  Consequently, all Unbelief is a lie, a self-deceit, and a manifestation of sin. 

There are myriads of Unbelievers who intuitively know that this is true.  They are confronted with the cosmic personalism of God at every turn.  They know they are suppressing that One Truth.  They are conscious of casting their lot elsewhere.  They are perpetually disturbed, like the tossing of waves on a windswept sea.  They crave reconciliation to the universe, but resist reconciliation to its Creator. 

Across and above the storm tossed waves comes the cry of the One Who is their only hope: “Come to Me, all <sup class="footnote" value="[a]”>who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28)   To which Christians add their cry:  “Lord, have mercy, we beseech Thee.”

Calvin’s Daily Devotional

Daily Devotional

November 22

Thine Is My Heart: Devotional Readings from the Writings of John Calvin

by John Calvin (compiled by John H. Kromminga)
Reproduced from the OPC website

Bible Text:
Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day; Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday. —Psalm 91:5, 6

Devotional:
Wherever you turn, all the objects around you are not only unworthy of your confidence, but almost openly menace you, and seem to threaten immediate death. Embark in a ship; there is but a single step between you and death. Mount a horse; the slipping of one foot endangers your life. Walk through the streets of a city; you are liable to as many dangers as there are tiles on the roofs.

If there be a sharp weapon in your hand, or that of your friend, the mischief is manifest. All the ferocious animals you see are armed for your destruction. If you try to shut yourself in a garden surrounded with a good fence and exhibiting nothing but what is delightful, even there sometimes lurks a serpent. Your house, perpetually liable to fire, menaces you by day with poverty and by night with falling on your head….

On the contrary, when this light of Divine providence has once shined upon a pious man, he is relieved and delivered not only from the extreme anxiety and dread with which he was previously oppressed, but also from all care.

For, as he justly dreads fortune, so he ventures securely to commit himself to God. This, I say, is his consolation, to apprehend that his heavenly Father restrains all things by his power, governs all things by his will, and regulates all things by his wisdom, in such a manner that nothing can happen but by his appointment; moreover, that God has taken him under his protection, and committed him to the care of angels, so that he can sustain no injury from water, or fire, or sword, any further than the Divine Governor may be pleased to merit. —lnstitutes, I, xvii, x and xi

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John Calvin was the premier theologian of the Reformation, but also a pious and godly Christian pastor who endeavored throughout his life to point men and women to Christ. We are grateful to Reformation Heritage Books for permission to use John Calvin’s Thine Is My Heart as our daily devotional for 2013 on the OPC Web site. You can currently obtain a printed copy of that book from Reformation Heritage Books.

John Milton, Standing, Waiting, and Serving

The Greatest Sonnet in the English Language

 

Justin Taylor

 

Leland Ryken writes that John Milton’s “When I Consider How My Light Is Spent” is to him “the greatest sonnet in the English language.” During the middle phase of Milton’s life (1640-1660) he focused on supporting the Puritan cause and largely set aside his poetic vocation. By 1654, at the age of 55, he had gone completely blind, and probably composed this sonnet around this time.

When I Consider How My Light Is Spent

by John Milton

When I consider how my light is spent,

Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide

Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present

My true account, lest He returning chide;
“Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?”

I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need

Either man’s work or His own gifts. Who best
Bear His mild yoke, they serve Him best. His state

Is kingly: thousands at His bidding speed,

And post o’er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.”

[Grand encouragement for those whose afflictions appear to render them useless to God, in God’s Kingdom. Ed]

Ineffable Glories

Beyond Fear and Wonder

We have a hard time conceptualising the smallness of atoms and, therefore, the number of them.  The Guardian, in a piece entitled 20 Amazing Facts About the Human Body contained the following factoid:

It is hard to grasp just how small the atoms that make up your body are until you take a look at the sheer number of them. An adult is made up of around  7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (7 octillion) atoms.

The number of atoms in the material universe is finite but uncountable.  The number of atoms in just one human body is hard enough to reckon with.  But it gets even more difficult.  Particle physicists–both of the theoretical and experimental kind–tell us that that the standard model of the atom now consists of a dozen or so particles and four forces.  This would suggest that one human body is made up of far more than 84 octillion atomic particles (since there are multiple sub-atomic particles of the same type in each atom). 

All of these particles are behaving in exactly the way they are commanded to behave.  There are two ways to think about these commands.  The first is the dominant view of our time.
  Unbelief postulates the commands that keep all of these atomic and sub-atomic particles in place doing what they should do are impersonal causes that just are.  It is the ultimate “just so” story.  The Bible, however, reveals that the commands are personal: they come from God Himself.  His speaking and commanding keep every atom and every sub-atomic particle, and every force in existence and in place–all the time. 

The Unbelieving materialist–that is, vast majority of human beings upon the planet in our day–have a strange binary view of the situation.  For some bizarre reason they argue that if there is a natural cause of particular matter or a material phenomenon it serves to disprove the existence of God.  Natural causation, therefore, means no divine causation–a remarkably banal idea.  All this does is beg another question which runs something like this: since both Unbelievers and Christians alike acknowledge the existence of natural causes as self-evident, the real point of division between Belief and Unbelief must lie elsewhere.  And it does.  The real point is to explain why natural causation exists at all. 

Christians talk about primary and secondary causes.  We can illustrate as follows.  A man lifts a billiard cue and strikes a billiard ball, sending it careering into another, which then shoots off in a tangential direction. The primary cause (in this illustration) of the balls’ movement is the billiard player; a secondary cause is Newton’s laws of motion.  The Bible reveals that the Living God has created and providentially maintains all things.  He is the primary cause of all things; He also has established and maintains all secondary causes.  The existence of secondary causes is due to the grace and goodness of God.  That is the Christian’s explanation as to why natural causation exists.  Unbelief has no rational explanation.  It’s only recourse is to resort to chance. 

Atoms and sub-atomic particles and the forces which keep them together and control their movements exist, and exist in perfect harmony, because God unceasingly speaks these things into existence.  But there’s more.  Particle physicists tell us that

. . . electrons are confined to specific orbits–as if they run on rails.  They can’t exist anywhere between these orbits but have to make a “quantum leap” from one to another.  

But within those rails the precise orbit or position of each electron appears to be random: influenced and controlled by no secondary cause whatsoever.  This is what led Einstein to grumble about God “playing dice with the universe.”   If this is correct–future experimentation may be able to make predictive sense about the precise path and location of each electron in an atom–it implies that the precise positioning of electrons is subject to no secondary causes whatsoever, but the direct, fiat command of God as the alone cause.  God, of course, does not play dice with the universe. Einstein simply was blind to the One True God who has revealed Himself as the all conditioning Conditioner.   The precise location and path of each electron in the human body, and of all electrons existing in the universe is commanded and known by God at all times.

God is infinite, eternal, and unchangeable.  His greatness and majesty and power is on display without ceasing.  When the Psalmist declared, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made” he was speaking the truth.  But we, in our days, are privileged to apprehend the truth of that statement in ways that the Psalmist could never imagine. 

 

The "Invisible Hand" At Work

 Vlad the Impaler Whacks France

Providence has a way of trammelling the avarice and humbling the hubris of  the New Model Man.  Believing he answers to no-one but himself, the Great Humanist Man steps forth to create, as if ex-nihilo, the perfected human society.  His key tool is law–the laws of command and control. 

At that point, all of creation seems to conspire against our pathetic Hero, making nugatory his grand designs and utopian schemes.  We call this the work of Providence–or what Adam Smith termed the Invisible Hand.  Christians know and believe it to be the Hand of the Living God, governing the world to secure His purposes, not those of our pathetic Hero.

Taxing the rich more has become fashionable again in the envy-dripping drawing rooms of our modern Don Quixotes.
  Let’s extract more money off the rich so that we can fund our utopian plans. From Obama to David Cameron to Francois Hollande–glistening avatars all of the New Model Man–the envy wealth tax has been applied.  But a counter conspiracy begins, as if by magic.  The rich move.  They decamp to more clement places. 

The latest example is French actor, Gerard Depardieu who has decamped to live in Belgium, and, in one of the most delicious ironies of the year, has been granted Russian citizenship by Vlad the Impaler.  This from Stuff:

Depardieu has waged a battle against a proposed super tax on millionaires in his native country. French President Francois Hollande plans to raise the tax on earned income above €1 million (NZ$1.58 million) to 75 percent from the current 41 percent, while Russia has a flat 13-percent tax rate. . . . As Depardieu’s criticism of the proposed tax roiled his country, French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault called him “pathetic.”Depardieu responded angrily in an open letter. “I have never killed anyone, I don’t think I’ve been unworthy, I’ve paid €145 million in taxes over 45 years,” the 64-year-old actor wrote. “I will neither complain nor brag, but I refuse to be called ‘pathetic’.”

Depardieu said in the letter that he would surrender his passport and French social security card. In October, the mayor of a small Belgian border town announced that Depardieu had bought a house and set up legal residence there, a move that was slammed by Hollande’s newly-elected Socialist government.

Overnight, the French government’s tax base shrinks.  Put taxes up upon the wealthy and less wealthy people pay in tax.  Funny that.  The law of opposite unintended consequences at work.  The New Model Man is consigned to shouting insults and shaking clenched fists.  And for Depardieu, to be aided and abetted by Vlad the Impaler adds bitter insult to cruel injury.

The Kremlin statement gave no information on why Putin made the citizenship grant, but the Russian president had expressed sympathy with the actor in December, days after Depardieu reportedly said he was considering Russian citizenship. “As we say, artists are easily offended and therefore I understand the feelings of Mr. Depardieu,” Putin said.

Who would have thought that Vlad was such a tender hearted, sensitive guy?

But this is not just a French phenomenon.  In Maryland, US the state government deliberately targeted the wealthy in an envy tax to plug its deficit hole as its reckless spending on creating the New Model Man and the perfected human society yawned into a chasm.  The results were perfectly predictable:

A new study finds Maryland’s attempt to raise tax revenue by hiking taxes on “the rich” has backfired, as the state’s wealthy job creators simply packed up and moved.

“The study, by the anti-tax group Change Maryland, says that a net 31,000 residents left the state between 2007 and 2010, the tenure of a ‘millionaire’s tax’ pushed through by Gov. Martin O’Malley,” CNBC reports. “The Change Maryland study found that the tax cost Maryland $1.7 billion in lost tax revenues. A county-by-county analysis by Change Maryland also found that the state’s wealthiest counties also had some of the largest population outflows.  “In total, Maryland has added 24 new taxes or fees in recent years, Change Maryland says. Florida, which has no income-tax, has been a large recipient of Maryland’s exiled wealthy.”

Maryland is worse off than ever before.  Its utopian pretensions are crumbling into dystopian folly.   They have just been whacked by the Invisible Hand of the Lord.  And it’s not just Maryland:

Maryland isn’t alone.  As California raises taxes on that state’s productive citizens, many have fled to Nevada and Texas in record numbers.

All in all, states with lower taxes, especially lower taxes on the rich, are finding job growth grow at twice the national rate.

The Great Humanist Man steps forth proudly to cast off the shackles of the Son of Man.  He, Who sits enthroned in the heavens, laughs at their folly.  His providential law of opposite unintended consequences once again smacks down the arrogant and the proud. 

This, of course, is not to say the rich are righteous.  Far from it in many, many cases.  The difficulty of a rich man entering the Kingdom of Heaven remains a timeless reality, as does the extreme difficulty of a camel passing through the eye of a needle.  But it is to say the confabulations and conspiracies of  the New Model Man to create the perfect world are as condemned as any secular Unbelieving rich person’s arrogance.  That the two should work against each other, frustrating their respective dreams and pretensions, is as ironic as Vlad extending the sensitive hand of compassion to a wealthy man.  Usually he imprisons plutocrats, then steals all their property.  For the good of Russia, naturally. 

Letter From America (About the Pencil)

It Takes a Thousand People to Create a Pencil 

Justin Taylor|

Milton Friedman used to give an example of “The Power of the Pencil” as an illustration of the wonder of the free market—namely, that one person alone could not create the pencils we have, but a thousand people labor and cooperate together to produce a pencil that we can purchase for a a trifling sum. The video below tells the story well. For those who have eyes to see, it’s also an amazing testimony, I think, to divine providence and as our work as image bearers in reflecting his creativity (even if unwittingly) and having appropriate dominion over creation.

Creation By Divine Command

The Regular is the Miracle

Christians believe in the God Who is the Cause of all causes.  Here is an excerpt from one of the most comprehensive confessions ever made by the Church, written about four hundred years ago:

God from all eternity did, by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass: yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures, nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established. (“Of God’s Eternal Decree”, Westminster Confession of Faith 3:1)

Natural causation exists only because God has ordained and commanded all.  But this confession, this aspect of the undoubted Christian faith, has never been understood by materialists and Unbelievers in general.
  To them god can ever only be nothing more than a warranting concept, a bucket if you will, to hold all that we don’t know and understand about natural causes.  As scientific knowledge increases, and our understanding of natural causation grows, the “bucket”, and therefore god, shrinks.   This is known as the “God of the gaps” theory. 

Materialists cling to it like petulant children because the identification of god with all that we are agnostic about is already required by their materialist pseudo-religion. It is the only god their religion allows them to acknowledge.  For them it is always “matter versus God”.  For the Christian it is always “only matter and natural causes because of God”.  Thus, the dichotomy of matter versus God has only and always been a straw man.  When materialists talk of god they always are making reference to an idol–to a god as they have conceived it to be, not to God as He has revealed Himself to be.

Marilynne Robinson reflects on this circumstance.

For almost as long as their has been science in the West there has been a significant strain in scientific thought which assumed that the physical and material preclude the spiritual. The assumption persists amongst us still, vigorous as ever, that if a thing can be “explained,” associated with a physical process, it has been excluded from the category of the spiritual.  But the “physical” in this sense is only a disappearingly thin slice of being, selected, for our purposes, out of the totality of being by the fact that we perceive it as solid, substantial. We all know that if we were the size of atoms, chairs and tables would appear to us as loose clouds of energy. [Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), p. 9f]

Robinson, of course, is making reference to the astounding discoveries over the last century in particle physics.  It turns out that matter is not “hard” at all.  It is all loose pulsating clouds of energy.  We are all loose pulsating clouds of energy.  Robinson continues:

It seems to me very amazing that the arbitrarily selected “physical” world we inhabit is coherent and lawful.  An older vocabulary would offer the world “miraculous.”  Knowing what we know now, an earlier generation might see divine providence in the fact of a world coherent enough to be experienced by us as complete in itself, and as a basis upon which all claims to reality can be tested.  A truly theological age would see in this divine Providence intent on making human habitation within the wild roar of the cosmos. 

But almost everyone, for generations now, has insisted on a sharp distinction between the physical and the spiritual.  So we have had theologies that really proposed a “God of the gaps” as if God were not manifest in the creation, as the Bible is so inclined to insist, but instead survives in those dark places, those black boxes, where the light of science has not yet shone.  And we have atheisms and agnosticisms that make precisely the same argument, only assuming that at some time the light of science will indeed dispel the last shadow in which the holy might have been thought to linger.  [Ibid.]

Given what we now are learning about the cosmos and the natural order, the old dualism between matter and spirit is exploding to pieces.  This is not to say that men will cease clinging to it with stubborn ferocity.  It is to say, however, that their intractable stubbornness will be increasingly plain.  The material realm’s testimony to the God who created all things is getting louder and more scintillating as our understanding of the material grows.  The chaotic, wild roar of the cosmos makes the plain, the hard, the ordinary, the predictable, and the regular character of the creation appear comprehensively and utterly miraculous. 

Mysterious Ways

The Church is Always Maturing

Divine providence is a mysterious, yet wonderful business.  As the hymn writer put it, God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform.  One of the great benefits of a close scrutiny of the history of the church is, in retrospect, to see God’s hand at work.

In the midst of the tumult or the vicissitudes it is usually very hard to discern what is going on.  Three hundred years later its possible to discern what the Lord was building.

Ageless Wisdom

God Feeding Babies

Luther’s understanding of calling and vocation is startling and radical to modern ears, influenced by secularism.  But it is true to Scripture itself.  Consider the following account from Gustaf Wingren on Luther’s understanding of divine providence and the multiple offices of every human in carrying out His providence:

God creates the babes in the mother’s body–man being only an instrument in God’s hand–and then he sustains them with his gifts, brought to the children through the labors of  father and mother in their parental office.  “Even though a father is an instrument of procreation, God himself is the source and author of life.”

God himself will milk the cows through him whose vocation that is.  He who engages in the lowliness of his work performs God’s work, be he lad or king.  To give one’s office proper care is not selfishness.  Devotion to office is devotion to love, because it is by God’s own ordering that the work of the office is always dedicated to the well-being of one’s neighbour.  Care for one’s office is, in its very frame of reference on earth, participation in God’s own care for human beings. [Gustaf Wingren, Luther on Vocation, trans. by Carl C. Rasmussen (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 1957), p.9.] 

From this flow some scintillating truths.  Firstly, human work, agency, and labour is not co-labouring with God in the sense that we do something and God does something, each contributing to the whole.  Rather, God is the entire complete and whole actor; we are His servants, God working in and through us.  

Secondly, because when a mother feeds her child, God is feeding the child, and because when the soldier defends his neighbours, God is defending the neighbours, likewise all work, all human agency must be regarded as God providing and God working.  All of life, then, is holy.  All lawful work, and offices, and responsibilities are holy.  The distinction between sacred and secular evaporates. 

On Holy Ground

Sacred World; Sacred History

Materialists like to portray Christians as living in an unreal, make believe world.  It’s a small step from there to paint Christians as ignorant simpletons.  Uneducated rubes. 

Another (related) slur is that Christians are anti-science because they do not value the world of matter.  They are so “heavenly minded” they are of no worldly good. 

Of course these slurs are just that.  They betray a profound ignorance of that which materialists presume to criticise.
  True Christianity maintains a profound respect for the created world–in both its material and immaterial aspects.  The reason is that we believe it to be God‘s creation.  What God has created let no creature despise.  God is so transcendent, He is immanent in all things He has made.  Matter does not have an eternal existence, but a beginning point–and that at the command of God. 

David Bentley Hart explains:

For the more educated and philosophically inclined, the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, by God’s free action, raised the principle of divine transcendence to an altogether vertiginous height.  It produced a vision of this world as the gratuitous gift of divine love, good in itself: not merely the defective reflection of a higher, truer world, not a necessary emanation of the divine nature or a sacrificial economy upon which the divine in some sense feeds, but an internally coherent reality that by its very autonomy gives eloquent witness to the beauty and power of the God who made it.

And history now acquired not only meaning but an absolute significance, as it was within time that the entire drama of fall, incarnation, and salvation had been and was being worked out.  The absolute partition between temporal and eternal truth had been not only breached but annihilated.  [David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p.199f.]

It’s not only the material world which Christians revere, it’s also human history and the course of mankind on the earth down through the centuries.  For these are swept up in the divine drama of redemption by Christ Himself, the eternal God Who has taken on a perfect and complete human nature.  All men and all nations now belong to Him.  In the end, even the crass materialists will acknowledge it.  

Small "C" Conservatism

Losing Our Soul

We at this blog are “small-c” conservatives.  The past, what we have inherited, represents the sovereign, providential governance of the Living God over His creation as He brings His glorious purposes to pass.  In respecting and studying and analysing our past, we see the glory of God writ large.  We see redemption.  We encounter the grounds of all life and hope.

Hence, we find novelist P D James to be right on the button in this quotation:

We live in an age notable for a kind of fashionable silliness and imbued with a restless desire for change.

It sometimes seems that nothing old, nothing well-established, nothing which has evolved through centuries of experience and loving use escapes our urge to diminish, revise or abolish it.

Above all every organisation has to be relevant—a very fashionable word—to the needs of modern life, as if human beings in the twenty-first century are somehow fundamentally different in their needs and aspirations from all previous generations.

A country which ceases to value and learn from its history, neglects its language and literature, despises its traditions and is unified only by a common frenetic drive for getting and spending and for material wealth, will lose more than its nationhood; it will lose its soul.

Let us cherish and use what we still precariously hold.

Let us strive to ensure that what has been handed down to us is not lost to generations to come.

—P.D. James, “Through All the Changes Scenes of Life: Living with the Prayer Book,” in The Book of Common Prayer: Past, Present and Future: A 350th Anniversary Celebration, ed. Prudence Dailey (Continuum, 2011), p. 51.

Hat Tip: Justin Taylor

Turning From the Sins of our Fathers

Reformation in our Day

The seeds of our current prevailing secular idolatry were sown three hundred years ago by church leaders.  They wanted to assure their world that the Christian faith was grounded, not in God and the work of His Spirit in the hearts of men, but in human reason.  This necessitated making room for reason–giving it a locus of authority independent of God.

The sphere in which human reason was authoritative, and in which it could bring God to the bar, was the study of creation.  Nature was no longer seen first through the pre-interpretive lens of Scripture, but first (and last) through the ratiocinations of man.  These ratiocinations purported to “prove” the existence of the God spoken of in the Bible.  The Bible everywhere, but particularly the Psalms, speak of God’s ceaseless, total and complete involvement in the entire creation.  Even the brute beasts of the forest cry to the Lord for food, and thank Him when He provides it.  Teaching such as this church leaders covered over, then eventually denied.

Reformation, and a return to the cultural dominance of Christendom, will not be possible until the Church recognises these sins and repents of them.  It is critical that the Church rediscovers and re-proclaims that all the created realms came into existence in the first place and continue to exist only because God spoke and continues to speak their existence.  Only by God’s continual speaking do atoms exist and the structures of Nature hold. It is critical that the Church rediscovers this God–the only God–and returns to worship Him for Who is truly is.   

This is, and was, the historical Christian faith.  The last three hundred years have been a departure, a defalcation from orthodoxy at this point.  This is why we charge the modern and post-modern church in general with the sin of idolatry–of worshipping a god of its own devising, not the God revealed in the Scriptures. It is essential that the Church repent of these things and return once again to believe in the God of ex-nihilo creation and exhaustive, total providence.

Here is the orthodox doctrine, now largely lost to the Church, as recapitulated and applied by B. B. Warfield:

It is because we cannot be robbed of God’s providence that we know, amid whatever encircling gloom, that all things shall work together for good to those that love him.  It is because we cannot be robbed of God’s providence that we know that nothing can separate us from the love of Christ–not tribulation, nor anguish, nor persecution, nor famine, nor nakedness, nor peril, nor sword. . . . Were not God’s providence over all, could trouble come without his sending, were Christians the possible prey of this or the other fiendish enemy, when perchance God was musing, or gone aside, or on a journey, nor sleeping, what certainty of hope could be ours?

“Does God send trouble?”  Surely, surely.  He and he only.  To the sinner in punishment, to his children in chastisement.  To suggest that it does not always come from his hand is to take away all our comfort.  [B. B. Warfield, “God’s Providence Over All,”  Selected Shorter Writings of Benjamin B. Warfield, 2 vols., ed. John E. Meeter (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2001), 1: 110.]

Note Warfield’s allusion to Baal, as lampooned by Elijah in I Kings 18.  We either worship the God of all-governing, all-conditioning, all-disposing providence, or we worship is an idol–a creature of human fabrication.

>The Sum Total of Human Misery–Yet

>The Unexpected Good

J R R Tolkien writing to his son, Christopher during the dark days of World War II

I sometimes feel appalled at the thought of the sum total of human misery all over the world at the present moment: the millions parted, fretting, wasting in unprofitable days–quite apart from torture, pain, death, bereavement, injustice.  If anguish were visible, almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a dense dark vapour, shrouded from the amazed vision of the heavens!  And the products of it all will be mainly evil–historically considered.  But the historical version is, of course, not the only one.  All things and deeds have a value in themselves, apart from their “causes” and “effects”.  No man can estimate what is really happening at the present sub specie aeternitatis.  All we do know, and that to a large extent by direct experience, is that evil labours with vast power and perpetual success–in vain, preparing always only the soil for unexpected good to sprout in.  So it is in general, and so it is in our own lives.  (The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, a selection edited by Humphrey Carpenter, with the assistance of Christopher Tolkien.  London: HarperCollins, 1981, p.76)

 How powerfully these themes present themselves in The Lord of the Rings!  What a profound hope and belief in the Providence of King Jesus.

>Meditation on the Text of the Week

>Providence: a Ministry of God’s Love

For I proclaim the name of the Lord;
Ascribe greatness to our God!
The Rock! His work is perfect,
For all His ways are just;
A God of faithfulness and without injustice
Righteous and upright is He.
Deuteronomy 32: 3-4

There is no comfort like the fact of God’s infinite, unchanging and eternal love for us. If we can but get this truth into our individual consciousness, it will sustain us in every trial. All the universe is under His personal sway, and He is our tenderest and dearest Friend carrying each of us close in His heart.

Providence is not merely the outworking of a mechanical system or the beneficent operation of wise and good laws. It is rather the thoughtful, sleepless, loving care of our Father. We put God too far off. There are laws of Nature, but He is the Law-maker, and these laws are but the methods of His kindness. They do not make any gulf between Him and His children. In every well-ordered household there are regulations, rules, habits, laws, but these do not make the home-providence any less due to the love and kindness of the parents. No more do Nature’s established and uniform laws cut us off from the personal care of God.

He comes near to us perpetually in these methods of His providence. His own fingers touch the tints in the flower. With His own hand He feeds the birds, and in all second causes it is still His hand that works. The beautiful things we see are the pictures our Father has hung up in our chamber to give us pleasure. The good things we receive are the ever-fresh tokens of His thoughtful love for us.

And the same is true of the evil and painful things. Our Father sent them. They seem to mean harm. But He loves us with a love deep, tender and eternal. We cannot see how these things consist with love’s plan, but we know that they must; and in this faith we may rest, not understanding, but yet undoubting, unquestioning and unfearing.

If we could push ajar the gates of life,
And stand within and all God’s workings see,
We could interpret all this doubt and strife,
And for each mystery could find a key.

But this we cannot do. Hereafter we shall know. Yet even now, knowing what we do of God’s wise and eternal love for us, we can believe and trust and be at peace. This is the truest comfort. It is the clasp of the tree’s roots upon the immutable rock. It is the soul’s clinging to God in the storm.

Dr J. R. Miller, Pennsylvania, 1897

>Meditation on the Text of the Week

>It’s Always Personal

Are not two sparrows sold for a cent? And yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Therefore, do not fear; you are of more value than many sparrows.
Matthew 10: 29—31

God is the all conditioning Conditioner. He is the totalitarian ruler of all reality. These statements by our Lord underscore this truth in a dramatic way. He states that even the most secular and pedestrian affairs of our existence are totally controlled by God. In the context of the text our Lord is using this truth to comfort and encourage His people in the face of hostility and persecution.

The totalitarian providential control of the Living God over all things is something which is so vast, so complex, and so mysterious that it leads us to the awe of silence. Here is but one perspective. If we consider a world-wide event—maybe an international calamity, such as the planes being flown into the Twin Towers. Most of us can remember when we first heard the news and many circumstances in our lives at the time. Or maybe an event with a global impact such as the credit collapse of the last two years.

Here is one calamity brought upon the world by the Lord. The effects are corporate yet also extremely granular. The one event transmits effects right down to the most random of circumstances in individual lives. After 9-11 months and months later somewhere in the world a traveler is held up amidst long lines caused by increased airport security and misses an appointment. Yet that granular circumstance bringing frustration and great irritation to that one individual person has been designed and ordained by God for that individual on that day from the beginning of time.

The effects and consequences flowing across the globe from 9-11 to millions and millions of people are those which have been precisely and perfectly and completely and exhaustively ordained by God. The circumstances in each individual life have been so superintended and commanded by God that the direct and indirect impact of 9-11 in each individual life comes with the precise nuance of cause and effect that the Lord has ordained for each and every person on each and every day.

Or again, we realise that it is not only nations and businesses which have been affected by the global credit crunch. Thousands upon thousands, if not millions, have lost jobs, changed jobs, gone back to school, lost their homes, made new plans, given up old plans and for each individual and family the precise affect of the nuanced cause and effect has been exactly as the Lord commanded and provisioned. Day by succeeding day; moment by succeeding moment.

This is what we are taught by the Lord’s statement that even the hairs on our head are numbered and that every sparrow which falls does so at the precise will and exhaustingly particular command of the infinite and eternal God.

This means, of course, that the world and all the circumstances of our lives are neither random nor impersonal. Rather, even the most apparently inconsequential and random particulars are personally designed by the Lord for us. When Unbelievers hear this, particularly in the “entitlementistic” West, they cry out that God must be evil and wicked for so many bad things happen which are both unpleasant and unwanted.

But the truth could not be more contrary. It is man who is evil and wicked and the bad things which happen to individuals are a personal warning and reminder that whereas God has given many good gifts to every person, and has sent the sun to shine upon all mankind, many have used His generous gifts and provision to stimulate yet further unbelief and superstition toward God, and neglect and dismissiveness of Him. Every hard and difficult providence comes as a sober warning to all who live in rebellion against the Lord. The oft-repeated personal message is: repent and turn to me before it is too late. Your life is a vapour. It is soon over. The things you consider so stable and strong, O man, are dust and ashes. The Lord sends thousands upon thousands of warnings daily to all who continue to resist Him—each perfectly designed and crafted, nuanced and particular, personal and intimate. For one it is the sudden realisation of middle age. For another it is a sudden shooting pain which portends infirmity or disease. For another, it is the collapse of financial markets wiping out stored wealth. For another, it is the loss of a loved one.

In the latter half of the previous century some nuclear physicists postulated that the core of matter, sub-atomic structures are random. They should have been more precise: they meant that the core of matter is so complex and various that it can only be seen by man as random. Yet to God, in His mind and commands, every apparent random particulate is decreed, commanded and ordained at every instant and for all time.

The same truth and reality applies to God’s exhaustive providential control over all the circumstances and experiences of all human souls. To us, the implicit complexity is so vast that it appears random. On one ordinary day an anonymous person left for work, as they have done these past twenty years, at the same hour, walking to the same bus stop. But on one particular day a “random” car lost control and crashed into the footpath, hitting and subsequently paralyzing the person, changing his life forever.

That one apparently random circumstance was perfectly designed and nuanced not only for that anonymous victim but for all who came to know of it and be affected by it: his family, his colleagues, the ambulance staff, the driver of the uncontrolled car, the police. The effects of pain, anger, sadness, grief, guilt, and confusion each had their place, their personal divine intent and message for all.

In our world, even the ordinary and the profane is holy and fearful and wondrous because of Who God is.