Beware you do not fall into the second sort of enthusiasm — fancying you have those gifts from God which you have not. Trust not in visions or dreams; in sudden impressions, or strong impulses of any kind. Remember, it is not by these you are to know what is the will of God on any particular occasion, but by applying the plain Scripture rule, with the help of experience and reason, and the ordinary assistance of the Spirit of God.
— John Wesley, Sermon 37 – The Nature of Enthusiasm
Isaiah 9:6 (CEB)
A child is born to us, a son is given to us,
and authority will be on his shoulders.
He will be named
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.
Christmas from the Back Side, p.23
We humans have always dreamed of a world of such perfection. In truth, it’s the kind of dream that keeps our political systems going. Those of us in democracies keep thinking we’ll get it in the next election. In other political systems, there’s always a ferment, even if deeply submerged, of hopes for some sort of revolution, some overturning of the old order that will make a new world possible. Plato envisioned it in his Republic, the English nobles with their Magna Carta, the Pilgrims with their dream of a city set upon a hill. Every political convention, however flawed it may be, is still informed by something of this wondrous dream of a better political establishment, and, from it, a better world. But of course all these dreams are flawed, because those of us who implement them are sinners. We need the One described in Isaiah’s vision.
—J. Ellsworth Kalas, Christmas from the Backside
Top Ten Books Every Pastor Should Read [ERB Playlist #3].
These are titles I definitely want to visit in the future. Hey! What’s this web site for if it doesn’t chronicle things I’m interested in? I refer back to this site regularly to get the lists of books I want to read in the future. So there.
Amazon.com: C. S. Lewis: Books, Biography, Blog, Audiobooks, Kindle.
I love reading C.S. Lewis. Sometimes it’s difficult, sometimes it’s straightforward and easily understandable. Wendy is the only reason I ever started reading C.S. Lewis and I’m eternally indebted to her for that. Lewis’ apologetics have helped me find my way closer to God and understand the Bible is not a rule book, it’s an instruction book for true happiness and joy.
It’s strange how Christians support institutions which are explicitly anti-Christian. Are we, then, properly practicing Christianity? Or, are we being bad Christians?
“We all know that benevolence, or Christian charity, as we see it in its manifold and beautiful forms, is the result of the presence and influence of Christ in the heart and in the world. We fail to see such things in the heathen world. Charity belongs to Christianity. It is the work of Christ. Now, when a man gives, and fails to acknowledge Christ in the gift, he has robbed the Son of God of his peculiar glory.”
“Let me illustrate: In a certain distant city there exists a newspaper that is anti-Christ, anti-religion anti-everything that is holy. Whenever a case of public suffering comes up this newspaper opens its columns for contributions, and the contributions flow in. Two-thirds of the donors are Christian men and women inspired by the love of Christ; but mark you, a Christless newspaper gets the glory, and not the Saviour.”
Excerpt From: Rev. Mr. Beverly Carradine. “Secret Societies.” iBooks.
Yesterday I read the book The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism by Timothy Keller and I enjoyed it so much that I rank it #2 behind Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. The idea to read the book came from Rob Renfroe during the Quest Men’s Fellowship Series on Mistaken Identity. Below are some of the excerpts I saves while reading the book (emphasis added by me):
- There is a great gulf today between what is popularly known as liberalism and conservatism. Each side demands that you not only disagree with but disdain the other as (at best) crazy or (at worst) evil. This is particularly true when religion is the point at issue. Progressives cry out that fundamentalism is growing rapidly and nonbelief is stigmatized. They point out that politics has turned toward the right, supported by mega-churches and mobilized orthodox believers. Conservatives endlessly denounce what they see as an increasingly skeptical and relativistic society. Major universities, media companies, and elite institutions are heavily secular, they say, and they control the culture.
- A faith without some doubts is like a human body without any antibodies in it. People who blithely go through life too busy or indifferent to ask hard questions about why they believe as they do will find themselves defenseless against either the experience of tragedy or the probing questions of a smart skeptic. A person’s faith can collapse almost overnight if she has failed over the years to listen patiently to her own doubts, which should only be discarded after long reflection.
- We have come to a cultural moment in which both skeptics and believers feel their existence is threatened because both secular skepticism and religious faith are on the rise in significant, powerful ways. We have neither the Western Christendom of the past nor the secular, religionless society that was predicted for the future. We have something else entirely.
- Three generations ago, most people inherited rather than chose their religious faith. The great majority of people belonged to one of the historic, mainline Protestant churches or the Roman Catholic Church. Today, however, the now-dubbed “old-line” Protestant churches of cultural, inherited faith are aging and losing members rapidly. People are opting instead for a nonreligious life, for a non-institutional, personally constructed spirituality, or for orthodox, high-commitment religious groups that expect members to have a conversion experience. Therefore the population is paradoxically growing both more religious and less religious at once.
- But even as believers should learn to look for reasons behind their faith, skeptics must learn to look for a type of faith hidden within their reasoning. All doubts, however skeptical and cynical they may seem, are really a set of alternate beliefs. You cannot doubt Belief A except from a position of faith in Belief B. For example, if you doubt Christianity because “There can’t be just one true religion,” you must recognize that this statement is itself an act of faith. No one can prove it empirically, and it is not a universal truth that everyone accepts. If you went to the Middle East and said, “There can’t be just one true religion,” nearly everyone would say, “Why not?” The reason you doubt Christianity’s Belief A is because you hold unprovable Belief B. Every doubt, therefore, is based on a leap of faith.
- Some people say, “I don’t believe in Christianity because I can’t accept the existence of moral absolutes. Everyone should determine moral truth for him-or herself.” Is that a statement they can prove to someone who doesn’t share it? No, it is a leap of faith, a deep belief that individual rights operate not only in the political sphere but also in the moral. There is no empirical proof for such a position. So the doubt (of moral absolutes) is a leap.
- Some will respond to all this, “My doubts are not based on a leap of faith. I have no beliefs about God one way or another. I simply feel no need for God and I am not interested in thinking about it.” But hidden beneath this feeling is the very modern American belief that the existence of God is a matter of indifference unless it intersects with my emotional needs. The speaker is betting his or her life that no God exists who would hold you accountable for your beliefs and behavior if you didn’t feel the need for him. That may be true or it may not be true, but, again, it is quite a leap of faith.
- …younger Christians are the vanguard of some major new religious, social, and political arrangements that could make the older form of culture wars obsolete. After they wrestle with doubts and objections to Christianity many come out on the other side with an orthodox faith that doesn’t fit the current categories of liberal Democrat or conservative Republican. Many see both sides in the “culture war” making individual freedom and personal happiness the ultimate value rather than God and the common good. Liberals’ individualism comes out in their views of abortion, sex, and marriage. Conservatives’ individualism comes out in their deep distrust of the public sector and in their understanding of poverty as simply a failure of personal responsibility. The new, fast-spreading multiethnic orthodox Christianity in the cities is much more concerned about the poor and social justice than Republicans have been, and at the same time much more concerned about upholding classic Christian moral and sexual ethics than Democrats have been.
- Reinhold Niebuhr has pointed out that irony, amusement at seeing human beings try but fail to be Godlike, is a very Christian way of looking at things.
- Some years ago a man from a southern U.S. state visited Redeemer. He had heard that though we held to orthodox Christian doctrine, we had grown large in the midst of a skeptical, secular city. He expected to find that we were attracting people with avant-garde music, video monitors and clips, dramatic sketches, exceptionally hip settings, and other kinds of eye-catching spectacle. To his surprise he found a simple and traditional service that, on the surface, seemed identical to those in his more conservative part of the world. Yet he could also see that the audience contained many people who wouldn’t have ever attended the churches he knew. After the service he met me and then said, “This is a complete mystery to me. Where are the dancing bears? Where are the gimmicks? Why are these people here?” I directed him to some “downtown art-types” who had been coming to Redeemer for some time. They suggested that he look beneath the surface. One person said that the difference between Redeemer [Keller’s church] and other churches was profound, and lay in “irony, charity, and humility.” They said Redeemer lacked the pompous and highly sentimental language they found emotionally manipulative in other churches. Instead, Redeemer people addressed others with gentle, self-deprecating irony. Not only that, but beliefs were held here in charity and with humility, making Manhattanites feel included and welcomed, even if they disagreed with some of Redeemer’s beliefs. Most of all, they said, teaching and communication at Redeemer was intelligent and nuanced, showing sensitivity where they were sensitive.
- Freedom cannot be defined in strictly negative terms, as the absence of confinement and constraint. In fact, in many cases, confinement and constraint is actually a means to liberation.
- If you have musical aptitude, you may give yourself to practice, practice, practice the piano for years. This is a restriction, a limit on your freedom. There are many other things you won’t be able to do with the time you invest in practicing. If you have the talent, however, the discipline and limitation will unleash your ability that would otherwise go untapped. What have you done? You’ve deliberately lost your freedom to engage in some things in order to release yourself to a richer kind of freedom to accomplish other things.
- This does not mean that restriction, discipline, and constraint are intrinsically, automatically liberating. For example, a five-foot-four, 125-pound young adult male should not set his heart on becoming an NFL lineman. All the discipline and effort in the world will only frustrate and crush him (literally). He is banging his head against a physical reality—he simply does not have the potential. In our society many people have worked extremely hard to pursue careers that pay well rather than fit their talents and interests. Such careers are straitjackets that in the long run stifle and dehumanize us.
- Disciplines and constraints, then, liberate us only when they fit with the reality of our nature and capacities. A fish, because it absorbs oxygen from water rather than air, is only free if it is restricted and limited to water. If we put it out on the grass, its freedom to move and even live is not enhanced, but destroyed. The fish dies if we do not honor the reality of its nature.
- What then is the moral-spiritual reality we must acknowledge to thrive? What is the environment that liberates us if we confine ourselves to it, like water liberates the fish? Love. Love is the most liberating freedom-loss of all.
- “Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others…but you are still distinct from it. You may even criticize it in yourself and wish you could stop it. But there may come a day when you can no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticize the mood or even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself, going on forever like a machine. It is not a question of God “sending us” to hell. In each of us there is something growing, which will BE Hell unless it is nipped in the bud.” — C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
- Despite all the books calling Christians to provide proofs for their beliefs, you won’t see philosophers doing so, not even the most atheistic. The great majority think that strong rationalism is nearly impossible to defend. To begin with, it can’t live up to its own standards. How could you empirically prove that no one should believe something without empirical proof? You can’t, and that reveals it to be, ultimately, a belief. Strong rationalism also assumes that it is possible to achieve “the view from nowhere,” a position of almost complete objectivity, but virtually all philosophers today agree that is impossible. We come to every individual evaluation with all sorts of experiences and background beliefs that strongly influence our thinking and the way our reason works. It is not fair, then, to demand an argument that all rational people would have to bow to.
- If you don’t trust the Bible enough to let it challenge and correct your thinking, how could you ever have a personal relationship with God? In any truly personal relationship, the other person has to be able to contradict you. … [W]hat happens if you eliminate anything from the Bible that offends your sensibility and crosses your will? If you pick and choose what you want to believe and reject the rest, how will you ever have a God who can contradict you? You won’t! You’ll have a Stepford God! A God, essentially, of your own making, and not a God with whom you can have a relationship and genuine interaction. Only if your God can say things that outrage you and make you struggle (as in a real friendship or marriage!) will you know that you have gotten hold of a real God and not a figment of your imagination. So an authoritative Bible is not the enemy of a personal relationship with God. It is the precondition for it.
- The Clue of Beauty: Arthur C. Danto, the art critic at The Nation, once described a work of art that gave him a sense of “obscure but inescapable meaning.”12 In other words, while great art does not “hit you over the head” with a simple message, it always gives you a sense that life is not a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” It fills you with hope and gives you the strength to carry on, though you cannot define what it is that moves you.
- In The Nature of True Virtue, one of the most profound treatises on social ethics ever written, Jonathan Edwards lays out how sin destroys the social fabric. He argues that human society is deeply fragmented when anything but God is our highest love. If our highest goal in life is the good of our family, then, says Edwards, we will tend to care less for other families. If our highest goal is the good of our nation, tribe, or race, then we will tend to be racist or nationalistic. If our ultimate goal in life is our own individual happiness, then we will put our own economic and power interests ahead of those of others. Edwards concludes that only if God is our summum bonum, our ultimate good and life center, will we find our heart drawn out not only to people of all families, races, and classes, but to the whole world in general.
- If we get our very identity, our sense of worth, from our political position, then politics is not really about politics, it is about us. Through our cause we are getting a self, our worth. That means we must despise and demonize the opposition. If we get our identity from our ethnicity or socioeconomic status, then we have to feel superior to those of other classes and races. If you are profoundly proud of being an open-minded, tolerant soul, you will be extremely indignant toward people you think are bigots. If you are a very moral person, you will feel very superior to people you think are licentious. And so on.
- The story of the gospel makes sense of moral obligation and our belief in the reality of justice, so Christians do restorative and redistributive justice wherever they can. The story of the gospel makes sense of our indelible religiousness, so Christians do evangelism, pointing the way to forgiveness and reconciliation with God through Jesus. The gospel makes sense of our profoundly relational character, so Christians work sacrificially to strengthen human communities around them as well as the Christian community, the church. The gospel story also makes sense of our delight in the presence of beauty, so Christians become stewards of the material world, from those who cultivate the natural creation through science and gardening to those who give themselves to artistic endeavors, all knowing why these things are necessary for human flourishing. The skies and trees “sing” of the glory of God, and by caring for them and celebrating them we free their voices to praise him and delight us. In short, the Christian life means not only building up the Christian community through encouraging people to faith in Christ, but building up the human community through deeds of justice and service.
Recently I finished listening to an installment of the Quest Men’s Fellowship Series on Mistaken Identity. This episode was titled Vulnerable. I’m not always able to attend Quest because of other Bible Study obligations but I regularly listen to the podcast. This one was really impactful because it validated some of the sources I’ve come across in my search for answers to the hard questions concerning my faith.
I go to great lengths to be diligent in my search for sources of spiritual and intellectual principles. It’s the only method in which I can be confident. I have to put the sources—author’s intentions—into context with the information they put forth. It’s not to pick only sources I agree with, rather it’s to pick quality sources I can trust, even when I disagree. Especially when I disagree.
So, when I saw the “suggested reading” list from this episode, I was extremely excited. It’s a list I would have made. This, to me, is validation for the sources I’ve found and the direction I’m going in my intellectual and spiritual growth. My pastor, whom I respect deeply, suggested readings which I independently found. That statement is not about me, it’s about Providence. Awesome.
Here’s the list:
- Is Christianity intellectually credible? Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis; The Language of God, Francis Collins – head of the Human Genome Project; The Reason for God, Timothy Keller.
- Scientific Questions – The Case for a Creator, Lee Strobel.
- General “Problems” with the Christian faith – The Case for Faith, Lee Strobel.
- Is Jesus the unique Son of God? Basic Christianity, John R. W. Stott
“LIFE QUESTIONS
We humans are (as far as we know) the only creatures on this planet who wonder about themselves. The rabbit doesn’t ask, “Why am I here?” nor does the sycamore tree say, “Am I fulfilling my purpose?” Only we humans stand at a distance from ourselves, in a figurative sense, and ask questions about our existence.
Do we ask these questions because we matter so much? If we do, how did it happen to be so? If not, how did we get such an exalted view of ourselves? How is it that we combine in our nature both baseness and magnificence? What manner of creatures are we? Why are we made as we are?”
Excerpt From: “Christian Believer – Session 8.” iBooks.
7 Reflections on Forty Years of Writing // Asbury Seedbed.
- Let’s take Scripture seriously, unfiltered, without blinders, inductively.
- The church is a spiritual/social organism with its own ecology.
- God is always in the business of radically renewing the church, if we are open to the Spirit and faithful to Scripture.
- God has “a plan for the fullness of time to bring everything in heaven and earth together under one head, even Jesus Christ” (Eph. 1:10).
- Christians are “stewards of God’s grace” (1 Peter 4:10) and stewards of the earth.
- Since God is always at work to renew the church, church history is largely the story of a succession of renewal movements, from the early church right up to today.
- We have unbounded confidence that God will fulfill all his promises.
I’m very weak on this and I empathize with the Jews of the Old Testament:
[The Jews were] chosen in order to be a witness. They [were to] transmit the covenant faith to others, indeed, to the whole world. This understanding was difficult for them to maintain; time and again they slipped into the perception that their chosenness was to their own benefit. We understand this, of course, because throughout church history we Christians have so often succumbed to the same misperception. Not often by doctrinal statement, but by pattern of life and failure of mission.
Quoted from Christian Believer Bible Study, session 7.
