By Farther Steps

Reformed and Reforming, semper reformanda to Christ's glory.

Beware Modern Media

We should realize that if something untrue or immoral is stated in great art it can be far more destructive and devastating than if it is expressed in poor art or prosaic statement…But the greater the artistic expression, the more important it is to consciously bring it and its world view under the judgment of Christ and the Bible.

The common reaction among many, however, is just the opposite. Ordinarily, many seem to feel that the greater the art, the less we ought to be critical of its world view. This we must reverse. – Francis Schaeffer, Perspectives on Art

The Glories of The Old West

There is a lot that is weird about the West these days. We have a Nobel Peace Prize winning president who is fighting wars on three fronts and Donald Trump looks like his most viable opponent. Pia Toscano was the contestant with the best voice and Casey Abrams was the best entertainer and yet both are voted off American Idol. Certain bird eggs are protected by law but babies in mother’s wombs are not.

But today I saw and heard what I think is the cream of Western culture. Yes, I am speaking of the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton. Start with the architecture. Westminster Abby is stunning. None of the stark utilitarianism of Modernism or the goofy pointlessness of Post-Modern architecture, the abbey represents some of the best of what the West has built. Not that there haven’t been stunning buildings since then but the abbey has that soaring, reaching for heaven look. It isn’t so much focused on us as it draws us to look elsewhere.

What of the ceremony itself? Other cultures have marriage ceremonies but more and more they are including elements of the Western ceremony. The white dress, the bouquet, the kiss. The beauty of our ceremony is being recognized and adopted around the world. Again, not that other cultures’ ceremonies are inferior, but some of the beauty our “fairy tale” weddings is being adopted.

The music in the ceremony was almost other-worldly it was so beautiful. The choral piece written by John Rutter made me remember why God gave humanity voices and why he calls us to use them. The Motet ‘Ubi caritas’ by Paul Mealor was almost as peaceful and wonderful as a summer sunrise over a mountain valley. Western culture produced this and I think this is an example of some of the finest music in the world.

Milton and Chaucer were quoted and sung. They are samples of some of the best of Western literature. Sure, Shakespeare was missing but we’re just getting samples of the finest at the wedding, not a complete index.

The Judeo-Christian tradition has formed us in the West; we are bound to it by ties which may often be invisible, but which are there nevertheless. It has formed the shape of our secularism; it has formed even the shape of modern atheism. – Flannery O’ConnorAnd above all of this was the Christianity the West shaped and was shaped by. I was impressed at how Christian the royal wedding remained. There were prayers offered in the name of Jesus Christ Our Lord, blessings invoked in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit and scripture was read and sung. No matter what the New Atheists say, no matter what modern detractors claim, Christianity brought the West to its pinnacle. It liberated man so that nature could be studied and questioned rather than worshiped and feared. God created the world but he is not part of it. Creation is his handiwork and to study and understand it is to learn more about God. As I said above, God has commanded man to sing and make music. Western music was influenced the belief that God is reasonable and rational and his creation is reasonable and rational and humanity, as the greatest created thing, should create what we may in that same fashion. Likewise, God created humanity as male and female and Jesus said that this arrangement was a marriage. Therefore, since marriage was instituted by God we should honor it and it should reflect the dignity and honor which God intended it to display. As was said in the royal wedding, marriage reflects the relationship between Christ and His Church. It is therefore insoluble. God wrote and God spoke and so these things should be done in a way that honors and reflects him.

But this is a monarchy, isn’t Democracy one of the greatest things Western culture has produced? Had the English monarch not been so heavy handed and greedy there would have been no need for democracy. Democracy is itself a response to abuse of power; it seeks to give authority to many instead of one. Christianity itself is a benevolent monarchy and had the West stuck to that model things might be very different today.

I just hope that this isn’t sort of the West’s swan song. I’m not sure that many of those in attendance or presiding over the service believed any of what was said and sung. They may have just viewed all of this as traditional and meaningless words and songs. I hope not. It would tragic to see the West come so far only to abandon it all and head back into barbarism in the name of “progress.” It was, at least, a wonderful glimpse into what is wonderful about Western Culture.

Book Reivew: The Gift

The Gift is the second book in Chiveis Trilogy. Crossway sent me a prepublication copy to review. It may be helpful to take a look at my review of The Sword, the first book in the trilogy. In this review, I’ll try to avoid any spoilers.

By way of introduction, Bryan Litfin teaches theology at Moody Bible Institute. This trilogy is his first foray into writing fiction. This trilogy has romance, action and Christian theology nicely put together in the story.

In The Gift I found that Litfin has gotten better at this type of writing. There were a few places in The Sword where I cringed a bit. There was none of that in The Gift. What I hope he grows in in the third installment is in character construction. Though Ana and Teo are no longer in their home kingdom, some of the characters were familiar. Teo’s mentor in The Gift felt very much like his mentor in The Sword. Ana’s flighty girlfriend is very like her flighty girlfriend in the first installment. Their malevolent foe in Ulmbartia seems a lot like the one they left behind in Chiveis. This didn’t ruin the story but it did give it a somewhat familiar feel. Also, as happened in The Sword, strangers trust our hero and heroine too quickly and easily.

None of this is to say that the story was a repeat. It certainly wasn’t. Often the second book in a trilogy can be a bit flat as it is bridging the beginning of the story with its resolution. Litfin never let The Gift fall into that trap. The story moves along briskly and always had me wanting to find out what happens next. Pacing has proven to be something Litfin understands. Just when I was beginning to getting tried of the right person showing up just in the nick of time, Litfin changed it up. He fought against making The Gift predictable and mostly succeeded. He also showed finesse in the way he rehashed the first book for those who didn’t read it. He carefully retold the story in a manner that felt like it belonged. I don’t think anyone would be lost reading The Gift if they didn’t read The Sword.

What I found somewhat brave about The Gift was how Litfin introduced evangelical hot button issues: sex, homosexuality, alcohol, nudity. Litfin didn’t omit the ugly side of a kingdom that has forgotten Christianity. Had he chosen to make the Ulbartian culture “acceptably depraved” by avoiding those issues, it could have made the story “safe for the whole family” and at the same time made it lifeless and boring. Litfin includes these things and he doesn’t do it in a tawdry or approving fashion. He simply presents them as what they are. Wisely, he leaves us to recognize them as wrong. We don’t have a character acting as Litfin’s moral mouthpiece. To my mind, that’s good writing; it invites us into the story not to passively consume but to feel and react.

In the end, I found The Gift an improvement on The Sword in most respects. It will prove to be fun summer reading and could provide some interesting points of discussion on how the world would look after a plague and small scale nuclear war but also on engaging theological questions as well. Crossway even included study questions at the end to facilitate it.

These Two Paragraphs Have Nothing To Do With Each Other

Another entry in our infrequent series. And don’t let the fact that both articles are from The Christian Post confused you.

Atheist Newdow Says Legal Fight against ‘Under God’ is ‘Over’ Turns out that that one little phrase was all it took to convert Newdow from an atheist to an evangelical Christian! No, not really. He just came to realize that he doesn’t have the goods to prove his case. Personally, I don’t care if the phrase is there or not. We don’t much act like a nation under God very often. Maybe Newdow can go on to fight for something important like prison reform or ending abortion or something. You know, help America behave more like a nation really under God.

Former Dawkins Atheist Richard Morgan Continues to Praise God What we believe really matters. We may fail to live up to our beliefs but we won’t live above them. This poor fellow expected the atheist community to engage in civil, philosophical discussions about his new found atheism. First mistake, he expected civil discourse on the Internet. Second mistake, he expected civil discourse at Richard Dawkins’ website. What he witnessed was atheists behaving according to their beliefs:  survival of the fittest. Truth didn’t really matter that much in those settings.

From St. Patrick’s Confession

For there is no other God, nor ever was before, nor shall be hereafter, but God the Father, unbegotten and without beginning, in whom all things began, whose are all things, as we have been taught; and his son Jesus Christ, who manifestly always existed with the Father, before the beginning of time in the spirit with the Father, indescribably begotten before all things, and all things visible and invisible were made by him. He was made man, conquered death and was received into Heaven, to the Father who gave him all power over every name in Heaven and on Earth and in Hell, so that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord and God, in whom we believe. And we look to his imminent coming again, the judge of the living and the dead, who will render to each according to his deeds. And he poured out his Holy Spirit on us in abundance, the gift and pledge of immortality, which makes the believers and the obedient into sons of God and co-heirs of Christ who is revealed, and we worship one God in the Trinity of holy name.

A Gift on a Thread

I want to chase a thread through Luke’s writings. I began to notice it as I’ve been reading Acts but it starts in Luke’s gospel. The thread is the promise of the Father. It starts in Luke 24:49 when Jesus promises to send “the promise of my Father upon you” to the disciples. They are to wait in Jerusalem till this promise is given and then they will be “clothed with power from on high.” What is this promise? At this point it isn’t clear but it sounds pretty good!

The next mention of the promise is in Acts 1:4 where the previous announcement is repeated but we also get more of a clue as to what this promise is. Again, they’re told to stay in Jerusalem and “wait for the promise of the Father.” But this time Jesus goes a bit farther and tells them that they will be “baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.” The promise of the Father is the Holy Spirit.

We have gained a bit of insight into the promise so far. The promise is the coming of the Spirit and when He comes, He will cloth the disciples with power. We don’t know what that will look like yet but again, it sounds pretty good so far.

We know what happens next in Acts. The Spirit comes upon the church, all 120 of them, as they wait in an upper room in Jerusalem and he does come with power! There is the sound of a might wind and tongues of flame land on each of the disciples and they speak might words in other languages (Acts 2:1-4). Is that the arrival of the promise of the Father? That is how Peter explains the events of the day against the theory someone put forward that the disciples are drunk. In Acts 2:33 he says that Jesus ascended to the right hand of the Father, he received the promise of the Holy Spirit and he poured out that promise on the church.

So who is this promise for? Is it just for the Apostles? Peter extends the offer of the promise to others. In Acts 2:39 he says “For the promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off.” But Peter qualifies that list of recipients. He says that the promise is for “everyone whom the Lord God calls to himself.”

At this point a few things happen. First, we’re not sure exactly what Peter means by those “the Lord God calls to himself.” There is a general call of the gospel that goes out to everyone. Does that mean that everyone in the crowd who Peter preached to received this gift? They heard the gospel so in a sense they were called. That doesn’t seem to fit. Later in Acts 2 we get a head count of those who responded to the call it is 3,000; a huge number but probably not the entire crowd. So we are going to keep looking for a way to know who God calls to himself and gives this promise. The other thing that happens is that “the promise of the Father” isn’t used to describe the arrival of the Holy Spirit on people any more in Acts. Now that the Spirit has come Luke just refers to Him but not the promise. We can see this transfer occur in Acts 3:28 & 29. In verse 38 Peter says that if they’ll respond by repenting and being baptized then God will give them the “gift of the Holy Spirit” then he says “For the promise is for you…” So as we continue chasing this thread we need to look for the Spirit and not the word “promise” any more.

Then next stop in this thread is Acts 5:32 where Peter once again explains who God will give the Spirit to. He says that “God has given [the Holy Spirit] to those who obey him.”

So let’s gather all of this up. God the Father promised to give God the Holy Spirit to people. When Jesus rose from the grave and ascended to heaven he received the promise and gave Him to a group of people. The way Peter defines it, these people are those who God calls, who repent, who are baptized, and who obey God. That is who the promise is for. That group could be the crowd in Jerusalem for Pentecost, it could be the Jews in Judea, and it could be people in Corinth and Ephesis and Colossea. The way to tell is to see who responds to the general call of the gospel. The promise they receive is the Holy Spirit. The promise is not for rebellious people, be they Jewish or gentiles.

What about Peter’s statement that the promise is for “your children”? Some take that to mean that the children of those who believe are part of the New Covenant. But does that fit with the thread we’ve seen? Only if those children repent and obey and are baptized, just like everyone else.

The point of this is that for those who obey, God has promised to give them the Holy Spirit, the third member of the Triune Godhead who will fit them with power that comes from “on high” or from God himself. What a tremendous gift. We can have salvation in Jesus’ name (Acts 4:12) but we also get fitted with divine power to accomplish his purposes in our lives as well.

Call Me Elmer

I don’t want to defend the execution of Servetus. The greatest heroes of the faith are still merely men. Edwards owned a slave, Luther became anti-Semitic, Peter stopped eating with gentiles. I wouldn’t do any of those things today but would I have had I lived at those times? I don’t know. It’s easy to judge the past based on our contemporary sensibilities, it is harder to see our own faults in our own time. I am afraid to ask the Lord to show me mine.

I don’t want to defend the execution of Servetus. The greatest heroes of the faith are still merely men. Edwards owned a slave, Luther became anti-Semitic, Peter stopped eating with gentiles. I wouldn’t do any of those things today but would I have had I lived at those times? I don’t know. It’s easy to judge the past based on our contemporary sensibilities, it is harder to see our own faults in our own time. I am afraid to ask the Lord to show me mine.

Permissible Hypotheses Only

In his speech [at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s conference] and in an interview, Dr. [Jonathan] Haidt argued that social psychologists are a ‘tribal-moral community’ united by ‘sacred values’ that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals. “I consider myself very middle-of-the-road politically: a social liberal but fiscal conservative. Nonetheless, I avoid the topic of politics around work,” one [non-liberal graduate] student wrote. “Given what I’ve read of the literature, I am certain any research I conducted in political psychology would provide contrary findings and, therefore, go unpublished. Although I think I could make a substantial contribution to the knowledge base, and would be excited to do so, I will not.”

The fields of psychology, sociology and anthropology have long attracted liberals, but they became more exclusive after the 1960s, according to Dr. Haidt. “The fight for civil rights and against racism became the sacred cause unifying the left throughout American society, and within the academy,” he said, arguing that this shared morality both “binds and blinds.”

“If a group circles around sacred values, they will evolve into a tribal-moral community,” he said. “They’ll embrace science whenever it supports their sacred values, but they’ll ditch it or distort it as soon as it threatens a sacred value.” It’s easy for social scientists to observe this process in other communities, like the fundamentalist Christians who embrace “intelligent design” while rejecting Darwinism. But academics can be selective, too, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan found in 1965 when he warned about the rise of unmarried parenthood and welfare dependency among blacks — violating the taboo against criticizing victims of racism.

“Moynihan was shunned by many of his colleagues at Harvard as racist,” Dr. Haidt said. “Open-minded inquiry into the problems of the black family was shut down for decades, precisely the decades in which it was most urgently needed. Only in the last few years have liberal sociologists begun to acknowledge that Moynihan was right all along.” – John Tierney, The New York Times, Social Scientist Sees Bias Within, February 7, 2011

Old /= Correct

I’m just going to quote this entire Piper post without further comment:

Beware of imputing advantage to antiquity. Seventy years after the death of Jesus the churches had neither the collected New Testament nor a living apostle. It was a precarious and embattled time.

Neither the experiences nor the teachers of the first 300 years of the church are as reliable as the finished New Testament. The church did not rescue the New Testament from neglect and abuse. The New Testament rescued the early church from instability and error.

We are in a better position today to know Jesus Christ than anyone who lived from AD 100 to 300. They had only parts of the New Testament rather than the collected whole. That’s how valuable the fullness of revelation is in the finished Bible. Beware of idealizing the early church. She did not have your advantages!

Almost no comment.

Amen.