The revitalization of modern evangelicalism will not come by a discard of its doctrinal convictions and a movement in the direction of liberalism. – Carl F. H. Henry, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, page 59
Posts Tagged ‘Quote’
In Church For The City
It’s not a matter of choosing between worship or mission; nor are we faced with a false dichotomy of church or world, cathedral or city. To the contrary, we worship for mission; we gather for sending; we center ourselves in the practices of the body of Christ for the sake of the world; we are reformed in the cathedral to undertake our image-bearing commission to reform the city. – James K. A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works, 154
On Lookin’ Good
Carnal motives [to resist sin] have the fear of man more than God: ‘How shall I do this and anger man, displease my master, provoke my parents, and lose the good opinion of my minister?’ It should be ‘How can I do this and sin against God?’… When a Christian sins, he hates it, and not like Esau; he wept because he lost the blessing, not because he sold it. – William Gurnall, The Christian in Complete Armour
Bridge to Nowhere
I shall only add that the sin [Satan] tempts you…is not the thing he aims at; his design lies against your interest in the gospel. He would make [that] sin but a bridge to get over to a better ground [for him] to assault you as to your interest in Christ. He…will say today, “You may venture on sin, because you have an interest in Christ,” [but] will tomorrow tell you…that you have none because you have done so. – John Owen, Overcoming Sin and Temptation, 206
Nondiminisable Good
Those who love God love a supreme and infinite good that cannot be diminished by being shared. Those who place their hopes on the possession of created and limited goods are doomed to conflict with one another and to everlasting fear of losing whatever they have gained. – Thomas Merton, Introduction to St Augustine‘s The City of God
To Be Like Stalks
You remember how one of the Greek Dictators (they called them “tyrants” then) sent an envoy to another Dictator to ask his advice about the principles of government. The second Dictator led the envoy into a field of grain, and there he snicked off with his cane the top of every stalk that rose an inch or so above the general level.
The moral was plain. Allow no preeminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser or better or more famous or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them all down to a level: all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals. Thus Tyrants could practise, in a sense, “democracy.” But now “democracy” can do the same work without any tyranny other than her own. No one need now go through the field with a cane. The little stalks will now of themselves bite the tops off the big ones. The big ones are beginning to bite off their own in their desire to Be Like Stalks.” – C. S. Lewis, “Screwtape Proposes a Toast” (The Screwtape Letters)
Screwtape offers this advice in the advancement of jealousy in order to keep humans from faith or to keep those with faith from productive lives. Earlier, he’d said,
No man who says I’m as good as you believes it. He would not say it if he did. The St. Bernard never says it to the toy dog, nor the scholar to the dunce, nor the employable to the bum, nor the pretty woman to the plain. The claim to equality, outside the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior.
I find Lewis’ discussion on this especially relevant today. The way social issues are framed is in terms of “income inequality” and “marriage inequality.” In other words, what is being appealed to in the way the debate is framed is the very jealousy that Screwtape is desirous of. And, like the tyrant in the story, our political class is wielding it with great skill. Don’t fall for it. Someone else’s success is not your failure and our political elite only care enough to knock them down if it keeps you in line. Real answers are more complex.
Secret Rapture
[S.P.] Tregelles, a member of the [Plymouth] Brethren in those early days [~1830], tells us that the idea of a secret rapture at a secret coming of Christ had its origin in an “utterance” in Edward Irving’s church, and that this was taken to be the voice of the Spirit. Tregelles says, “It was from that supposed revelation that the modern doctrine and the modern phraseology respecting it arose. It came not from Holy Scripture, but from that which falsely pretended to be the Spirit of God.”1S. P. Tregelles, The Hope of Christ’s Second Coming, first published in 1864, and now available at Ambassadors for Christ, Los Angeles, California. This doctrine together with other important modifications of the traditional futuristic view were vigorously promoted by [J.N.] Darby, and they have been popularized by the writings of William Kelly. – George Eldon Ladd, The Blessed Hope, 40-41
Dispensationalism started in the Plymouth Brethern churches in England in the 1800s. One of the most distinctive beliefs of that system is that Jesus will secretly return before The Great Tribulation to remove, or Rapture, his church, i.e. take it out of the world so that God’s wrath can be poured out. Ladd, writing in the 1950s, said that the view was popularized by William Kelly. More recently this view was popularized by Tim LaHaye in his Left Behind series of books.
This is the first time that I’ve heard that the teaching of a secret Rapture came from a supposed prophetic utterance. Keep in mind, this is one citation of one man. According to Ladd, Tregelles was a Brethren scholar respected for his work on the Greek New Testament. The “Edward Irving” mentioned was a man who spoke eloquently and widely on the imminence of Jesus’ return but in 1830 he published a tract that asserted that Jesus had a fallen human nature. Tregelles also said that the same “spirit” which gave the utterance was “not owning the true doctrine of our Lord’s incarnation in the same flesh and blood as His brethren, but without taint of sin.” That is, Irwin’s error and it sounds like Tregelles is claiming that the “spirit” that announced a secret return of Jesus also revealed Jesus’ supposed fallen human nature.
If accurate, this does not cast a good light on the origins of Dispensationalism.
| ↩1 | S. P. Tregelles, The Hope of Christ’s Second Coming, first published in 1864, and now available at Ambassadors for Christ, Los Angeles, California. |
|---|
A Borrowed Optimism
Offered as a follow on to my previous post.
None of these ideas–the goodness of the material [world], the progress of history, the dignity of individuals, the significance of choices, and the value of emotions–made any sense in an impersonal universe and therefore they had never arisen. Nietzsche’s great critique of modern secular humanism strikes at the irony of this point: Though none of these (basically Christian) moral ideas rationally follows from an impersonal universe, late modernity has inherited them, intensified and absolutized them, and cut them completely loose from any transcendent grounding fruit of Christian ideas and severed the root. Now all these ideas must be held in the face of what is thought to be a completely impersonal universe, even more impersonal than the ones believed in by ancient societies because it has no supernatural or spiritual aspect to it at all. – Tim Keller, Preaching: Communicating Faith in an Age of Skepticism, 129.
Late modernism borrows heavily from Christianity and absolutely refuses to acknowledge it. If the universe is impersonal, as science claims it must be, and history is pointless, then why get up in the morning? There’s no benefit to dragging a comb across the crown of your head because in 10,000 year, a blink of an eye to the impersonal universe around you, you won’t exist nor be remembered. Your contributions and efforts will have affected nothing. Late modernism borrows Christianity’s optimism and then criticizes us for the reasons for our hope.
Aimed at Heaven
Hope is one of the Theological virtues. This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. The Apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade, all left their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither. It seems a strange rule, but something like it can be seen at work in other matters. Health is a great blessing, but the moment you make health one of your main, direct objects you start becoming a crank and imagining there is something wrong with you. You are only likely to get health provided you want other things more—food, games, work, fun, open air. In the same way, we shall never save civilisation as long as civilisation is our main object. We must learn to want something else more. – C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
The Impossibility of No Sabbath
The Sabbath was a holy sign of the covenant bond between God and His people. It was as much a part of the order of creation as was creative labor, and in being obedience in the work and rest, Israel would demonstrate its total allegiance to God.
As the Sabbath (like work and marriage) is rooted in the nature of creation, it is certain that the Sabbath (like work and marriage) was part of the cultural expression of Eden. While we have no explicit mention of human observance of the Sabbath in the first chapters of Genesis, the arguments made in passages such as Exodus 31 about the nature of the Sabbath indicate that God’s sanctifying of it (Genesis 2:2ff.) was from then on part of how creation functioned. The intimate fellowship between God and man in the Garden presupposes that man would honor what God had established as holy. Since the Fall is the first occurrence of human disobedience to the divine order established in creation, it is impossible that man would not have observed the Sabbath in the original culture of Eden. – Ken Myers, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes