Fire and the Fading Year

"...I will send a fire on the wall of Gaza..." Amos 1:7

There is an old spiritual centered on the promise that the world will nevermore be destroyed by water. The assurance to Noah does not mean all judgment will be averted. Hence the song includes the words: "...the fire next time." War recurs in the Mid-East by reason of wounds of long bleeding. The conflict is protracted. The conflict was predicted. The conflict will not abate until the coming of the Son of Man. Our former UN Ambassador mentioned the likelihood of an Israeli strike on Iran between the election and the inauguration. The idea is that Iran's nuclear program must be stopped. If Israel attacks during the transition between two Administrations, immediate American pressure to desist is less likely. In an article in the London Times Britain's former Foreign Minister (David Owen) urged Israel to resist any inclination to attack. At this moment the fire is falling on Gaza not Iran. One day it will fall over the entire earth. I once heard Eric Alexander say that one who refuses the salvation offered in Christ Jesus has no shelter from the wrath of God. It is a truth seldom emphasized in our day. It was the special province of a prophet to warn. But pity the poor pastor who makes his congregation uncomfortable today. When we insist that sermons merely palliate and congratulate (a famous West Coast Pastor just demoted his own son for deviating from that path) we divest our pulpits of the prophetic. It is a trend much to be lamented. While Gazans flee the fire this time we note that there will be a fire next time.
If we have shelter well and good.
Let us press the urgency of shelter upon those who don't. Leisure is ill-suited to this task.
The number of allotted years is fixed and finite.
And the year we're in is fading.

Merry Christmas from our family to yours
Photo taken in Memphis Tennessee December 24th 2008

The Festival of the Born King

“Where is He who is born King of the Jews?” Matthew 2:2

Alec Motyer, the Anglican Old Testament scholar, called Isaiah 9:6 the prophecy of ‘God come to be born.’ The notion that God could be born was an idea without precedent. Just so, babies are not kings at the moment of their birth.

Edward VII (d. 1910) was not king when he was born; his mother Queen Victoria was on the throne. She was still on the throne when her grandson George V (d. 1936) was born. It was the same with Edward VIII and George VI. Babies wait their turn. They wait on their own maturity as well as the death of the previous monarch.

The exception of course was Bethlehem. Jesus did not ascend to the throne—He descended. He came from the higher heavenly place to the earthly. He came not to be an earthly king but the earthly king. The star proclaimed it. Magi believed it. Christians celebrate it.

So come, let us adore Him, born the King of Angels.

Hymn to the Christ Child

We greet Thee Lowly Babe
Near Bethlehem we heard your fame
Now draw we near to learn your Name
Sent to live with sinful men
Sent to be the Shepherds’ Friend

We sought Thee Lovely Babe
By Eastern Star we saw your sign
So rushed to make our treasure Thine
Brought gifts of myrrh and gifts of gold
Though great the distance, great the cold

We hail Thee Lordly Babe
From Heaven’s gate we hastened down
To share the joy the earth has found
To show the slaves, to tell the free
That angel hosts still worship Thee

Merry Christmas from Ronnie and Jane

Jonathan Edwards and What Isaiah Said About Christmas

For unto us a Child is born; unto us, a Son is given; and the government shall be upon His shoulder. And His name shall be called: Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. Isaiah 9:6

Some (including Yale Professor Perry Miller) have insisted that Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) was the greatest philosophical reasoner born in North America . He was the first President of Princeton. Tragically he was also one of the first to die of small-pox vaccination. Just as tragically he was the first Pastor to be fired from the church his grandfather founded. Genius doesn’t always find a smooth path .

. My favorite Edwards' quote comes in his sermon on Revelation 5:5-6. While enlarging upon the possibility that a lion could be regarded as a lamb he remarked upon the “admirable conjunction of diverse excellencies “ which we find in Christ Jesus. A lamb may have peculiar qualities (meekness, humility, innocence) . But those qualities are necessarily remote from the qualities of the lion (majesty, courage, tenacity). Not simply different but practically opposite. How can we imagine the combination of such opposites? That’s just it; we can’t IMAGINE . But God has manifested just such a thing.
We see the same unlikely combinations in the Christmas prophecy of Isaiah 9.One who is born is yet eternal. A child is able to hold the government upon his shoulder. A Son is also somehow called Father. Impossible? Of course--- but the thing happened. It happened in the broader context of that other impossibility: God became Man.
There are roughly 30 million gods in the Hindu pantheon.
In Hindu iconography there is an attempt to amalgamate the incompatible. One figure not an elephant has the trunk of an elephant.The image is grotesque. But when we come to know Jesus we behold previously unassimilated attributes in harmony. CS Lewis asked how anyone could entertain “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life” and “I am meek and humble…” claims from the same person without protest. We would protest unless we witness some unanticipated consistency in the claimant which renders those opposites congruent.
In Jesus the confluence is not grotesque but rather seamless, convincing, satisfying and real.
Beholding the Infant Deity in Bethlehem we note another set of blended opposites. Something new is paired with something original. Did Matthew and Luke connive at the unscrupulously dishonest and the spiritually magnificent in the same fabrication? That would be yet another impossible combination.
The Incarnation is too sublime, too beyond the range of human imagining, to be invented.
By man He is uncontrived. As God He is uncreated.
We celebrate the historical event at Christmas. The Word of the Father is now in flesh appearing.
O come let us adore Him.
For He is the admirable conjunction of diverse excellencies.

Bach - Magnificat - 01 - Magnificat

Christmas Music as an Apologetic.

National Public Radio consistently projects what we may fairly call a secular point of view. There’s nothing which feels quite so secular as listening to NPR on a Sunday morning. All Things Considered, the long running evening news magazine is a liberal broadcast which few conservatives can resist. Years ago near Christmas I was listening to ATC when a woman commentator shared the challenge of being Jewish in America at Christmas. I wish I could remember her name. What she said was cordial and insightful. As she wrapped it up she conceded wistfully that Christmas had quite simply inspired the greatest music in the history of the world. That admission contained a sigh and a signal.
Even Richard Dawkins (who succeeded Bertrand Russell and Madalyn Murray O’Hair as the world’s most famous atheist) has admitted to being a "cultural Christian." The foundation for so startling a confession.? He found the singing of English Christmas carols to be irresistible. There is a truth and power in music whose source is not yet fully comprehended. Music is the registry of an unarticulated native reality. The power of music offered in praise suggests that though God’s truth can be denied the beauty which radiates from that truth cannot go unadmired. Music which praises God’s majesty reflects God's majesty. The music of Christmas, like the message of Christmas resonates with something deeper than the mere recognition of excellence.
As thinkers like H R Rookmaaker, Calvin Seerveld and Jeremy Begbie have taken pains to point out there is an undeniable conncection between aesthetics and apologetics. By apologetics we mean the effort to substantiate the truth claims of Christianity by the marshalling of evidence. That effort necessarily involves the refutation of error.
Where are the hymns of the cults?
If they exist I’m sure they are not worth singing. That the world is fallen means that much which is unspeakable proceeds apparently unabated. But God has drawn a line in some places. Let’s face it ,the world has produced powerful and appealing music which may be sensual, romantic, patriotic, or whimsical. But God’s sovereign providence has not allowed a corresponding volume of appealing music to be produced in the service of false worship.
Nowhere does the superiority of Christian music show itself more dramatically than in the music of Christmas. The season does not adorn the theology. The theology adorns the season. The traditions are invested with beauty and wonder by the augmentation of historical reality.
Christmas happened in Bethlehem .
Angels announced it.
Shepherds found it.
Magi searched for it.
Herod feared it.
The facts sound prosaic enough but when we respond to the facts reverently the music and poetry begin to flow. The thing becomes first luminous, then overwhelming.
We offer a bit of the Bach 'Magnificat' as Exhibit A.
After which I rest my case.
When we hear this news can anyone keep from singing?
Richard Dawkins could not.

Nor can I.

That Song I Like

There’s no accounting for taste.
I tilt toward the traditional in the worship wars. But must we war? And must we take sides?
Once in Memphis I waxed rhapsodic about Graham Kendrick’s “Knowing You Jesus”, at that time my favorite contemporary Christian song. A friend whose tastes are a bit more traditional than my own challenged me on the line in that song which says: “You’re the best...” . What could I say? She was right. The sentiment is true but trite and excessively casual. I suppose it’s there because it rhymes with the line before. But the song moves me nonetheless.
I know little about any genre of music but I am especially ignorant of Contemporary Christian Music. In November ,2007, I joined some YWAMERs (Youth With A Mission) for a week of study in Budapest . During their worship segment they sang a song I had never heard. I liked it so much I asked them if they would come to our church that Sunday and teach it to us. They were bound for places like Romania , Armenia and Egypt but they made time on the Sunday to drop in. It wasn’t a new song. Lots of people had heard it but somehow it had passed me by. Neither was it a song which had generated a lot of excitement. Nor can I say that the words are anything special. I found myself wanting to rewrite in parts. But the combination of the words and the music got to me all the same and made me want to worship. The words are an invocation –what some would call a bidding prayer. The YWAM team showed up and did as I asked, but I don’t think anyone was impressed like I was.
The next day I flew to the Mid-East.The plane landed at 4 in the morning. I was met by my driver, a National with a big moustache and a small gun. Then there was an American colleague who lives in country part of the year. We had a three hour drive ahead of us. The two of them discussed the advisability of leaving while it was dark. They thought it best to visit the restaurant and wait out the dawn. Finding the restaurant closed they shrugged, and we set out. No one asked me. I won’t say I was scared ,but if I had been offered an escort by The Light Brigade I would not have turned them down.
Our driver pushed in a cassette (remember those) and guess what?
I think it was the third song.
It was as if the Lord was saying “Did you forget that I’m sovereign over this space as well?”
I know I haven’t told you the name of song.
But if you click on below you can listen.
And , if you don’t like, it well…
There’s no accounting for taste.

Meet With Me Ten Shekel Shirt Worship Video

Milton on His 400th

In the third year of our marriage Jane and I walked into an Antique Shop in Goldsboro North Carolina . We walked out with a portrait of Milton and his three daughters. That picture has hung in every place we’ve ever stayed. We didn’t know the artist was Hungarian (Michael Munkacsy-a reproduction of course), still less did we know we would one day live in Hungary where Jane would lecture on Art.
While I was a student I learned that Milton is the second greatest poet in English behind-who else-Will Shakespeare. For the record Geoffrey Chaucer ran a strong third. I do not know who makes these determinations or how authoritative they are but that one sounds reasonable. Paradise Lost is always dreaded (by all but the most literary) and often encountered by students of every generation. A classic has been defined as a masterpiece we want not to read but to have read. Paradise Lost is nothing if not a classic.
It is not only a poem but a theodicy. That is it is an effort (as the poet plainly admits) to justify the ways of God to man. These apologetic aims were subverted by the reality that Milton did not always deploy biblical arguments. Though his Christianity was highly publicized he was in fact heretical on the doctrine of Christ’s Person. The more serious drawback though (and it’s a shocker) is the charge that Milton made Satan the hero of Paradise Lost. If that were true (my knowledge of the poem is too superficial to weigh in on this one) it would obviously spoil the thing for the likes of simple Christians like myself.
I encountered the “Satan as hero” thesis quite by accident just today while reading an interview with the Roman Catholic apologist Dinesh D’Souza, a powerful ally in our conflict with the New Atheists. You may consult Dinesh’s analysis for yourself at

http://www.salvomag.com/new/articles/salvo7/7segelstein.php

My own favorite Milton quotes range beyond Paradise Lost:
In his essay against censorship called ‘Areopagitica’ Milton contends that truth or virtue is only praiseworthy if it has been tested. And tests only come by battles with antagonistic points of view. Nothing, he maintained, should be banned from the field by decree but rather vanquished in the field by debate.
His arguments, though always appealing and sometimes noble, are not always biblical or wise. But his phraseology is irresistible. About these untested convictions he wrote:
“I cannot praise a fugitive or a cloistered virtue.”
He meant he couldn’t admire a virtue which runs away or a truth which hides. Stirring stuff that.
In ‘Lycidas’ he wrote the words:
“ To scorn delights and live laborious days”
This is an ideal I’ve always admired but seldom applied. Milton well articulates an approach to work I would aspire to. He writes a similar thing when he characterizes his personal view of his own calling and the legacy he hopes to leave.
“By labor and intense study (which I take to be my portion in this life) joined with the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to after-times, as they should not willingly let it die." (Reason of Church Government)
I’d say he succeeded.
Happy Birthday John Milton. We have few poets today and we are the poorer for it.
And we have none like you.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING

Pity the poor atheist who feels grateful but finds no one to thank.

It’s different with us.
Thank God our Benefactor sought us out.
Thank God we know His Name.

The Hebrew scholar Bruce Waltke taught me the Psalms in the early 70s. Once in class he told how his son Jonathan had often to be interrupted while saying grace. The problem was Jonathan’s endless elaboration of particulars. First he would give thanks for the toast. Then he would offer thanks for the butter on the toast, followed, as night follows day, by the jam. The toast having yielded up its three spheres, he would then turn with relish to the eggs. Those key breakfast crucialities, the salt and pepper, were seldom forgotten.

I know now that the Jonathans of the world should never be reined in. Such men are rare. Let them be unleashed.

I was born in Atlanta and we enjoyed the local rituals. The Georgia-Georgia Tech freshman football game was always played on Thanksgiving Day. Furman Bisher was the Sports Editor of the Atlanta Journal. He was a prose stylist of a high order. As far as I know he never registered any special Christian conviction, though he always ended each column with ‘Selah.’ Every Thanksgiving he wrote a much anticipated piece on what he was thankful for. Furman Bisher had his 90th birthday this month. That column is in the Atlanta paper today.

My favorite all-time quote has to do with Thanksgiving. It comes from John Calvin, the French-Swiss theologian whose 500th we celebrate next year. Calvin wrote, “To be human is to be that part of the cosmos which responds to the goodness of God with gratitude.” One reason I find this exciting is because convincing definitions of the human are elusive. It’s harder than we think to determine just what Man is--especially when we stray outside the biblical framework. The Marxists insisted the key to the definition was economic; the Fascists, racial; the Freudians, psycho-sexual; and so on. They were wrong, of course. But Calvin gets to the heart of it.

Scripture teaches that Man is a fallen image bearer who can only be rescued by a Wounded Healer. I am grateful for that rescue. I wish I were so learned that I could claim to have discovered the Calvin quote in the primary sources. I did not. It was in a book called Philosophers who Believe and the reference was cited by Nicholas Woltersdorf, the retired philosopher at Yale. He insisted that he was writing not as a philosopher and not even as a Christian particularly, but as the father of a son who died. He lost his 25 year old in a mountain climbing accident in Austria. In the teeth of the sorrow he was grappling with the question, “Is God still good, and am I still grateful?” Dostoyevsky called man the “ungrateful biped.” Calvin’s point was that if we sink below gratitude for God’s goodness, we sink below the level of the human. We humans are a product of design, and we were designed to give thanks to God.

Jane and I send Thanksgiving Greetings from the old Hungarian capital.
They don’t mark the date here, but we will have fellowship with those who do.

Jonathan, wherever you are, I hope you’re still at it.
May your tribe increase.

Another Anniversary

November 23rd marks the anniversary of Blaise Pascal’s conversion in 1654.
Though Pascal died short of his 40th birthday his achievement, like his intellect, was towering.
He counted all as nothing in comparison to knowing Christ.
Voltaire, that great cynic of the Enlightenment, loathed Pascal’s theology but declared that Pascal was the greatest man ever to have written in French. He attributed Pascal’s conversion to trauma from a carriage accident which triggered a breakdown leading to religious mania. It is notable that for all his mocking Voltaire cried out to Jesus for mercy on his deathbed. He’d made a famous prediction that 100 years after his death the Bible would be found only in museums.Voltaire’s house is now owned by the Swiss Bible Society. Sweet irony that.
Pascal wrote an account of his conversion and sewed the parchment into his jacket. When he obtained new clothes he would repeat the process. It was found after his death. Evidently he kept it with him to the end of his life .In that testimony one paragraph is headed by the simple word: FIRE
Os Guiness declared that Pascal became a man consumed by divine fire.
In that same record he wrote: “The world forgotten; everything except God…Complete and sweet renunciation.”
He told no one about his conversion. However he did overwhelm everyone with the evidence.
His sister Jacqueline later wrote, “Little by little he changed, so that soon I no longer knew him.”
A Pascal is given to the Church once every century or so.
Let us thank God for his memory.
Let us imitate his fervor.
Let us pray for his successors.

A Note on the Anniversary: 45 Years On

Every American my age or older knows where he was the day C.S. Lewis died. Most remember unwittingly. The great man died in Oxford around the same hour John Kennedy was shot in Dallas. November 22nd, 1963, leaves us with more than one reason for remembering.

Some Christians progress through a C.S. Lewis phase which leads on later to something else. Call it a fixation, but the phase never left me. I hope it never does. Far from abating, the lucidity of CSL’s logic and the purity of his prose arrests my attention and commands my admiration more and more each passing year.

The individuality of Lewis’ practically articulated theology frustrates many Evangelicals. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, born the year after Lewis, whose brother knew Lewis at Oxford, went so far as to suggest that Lewis’ conversion may have been solely intellectual. I am impressed emphatically to the contrary. While unexposed to many emphases of evangelical conviction, Lewis hammered out a relatively evangelical theology in virtual isolation. He eschewed the label ‘evangelical’ because he eschewed all labels except for ‘Christian.’ He was the quintessential ‘Mere Christian.’ Although Lewis may line up with evangelical theology only 85% of the time, it is more or less universally agreed that he expresses that 85% more elegantly and convincingly than those who agree with us at a rate of 99% plus. As for the other 15% let us regret but let us also remember that Lewis had no truly conservative biblical influences. He had no evangelical mentors or heroes (with the possible exception of Bunyan). His wide learning and his Bible reading alone led him to a conviction of the rightness of orthodox Christian doctrine.

Among those of his friends who took Christianity seriously many were Roman Catholic. These included his physician, R.E. Havard, his favorite pupils, Bede Griffiths and George Sayer, and his closest Oxford faculty colleague, J.R.R. Tolkien. There have been revisionist efforts to claim CSL as a closet Roman Catholic. This point of view is abetted by the Catholic enthusiasms of Walter Hooper, Lewis’ last secretary and literary executor. Lewis’ generosity toward Roman Catholics is better explained by the aforementioned friendships and a determination to distance himself from the anti-Catholic postures associated with the Belfast of his youth. On the Person and Work of Christ and the supremacy of Christian claims over against all other religions Lewis was thoroughly biblical. Evangelicals better trained and more theologically acute have been less effective in wooing 20th century skeptics toward the Savior. Lewis was (sadly) Arminian, but it is a demonstration of sovereignty that God would appoint an Arminian layman devoid of biblical training to be such a powerful force in putting across the Christian message.

Lewis’ personal life, though not without blemish, was admirable on the whole. It is true that he likely only fell in love twice in his life and both times with married women. The record of his dealings with the first (much older) woman was shameful to a high degree. In his defense he was a naïve and atheistic youth at the time the liaison began. One could wish that he had worked harder to save Joy Gresham’s marriage. But, as some who knew them well (including members of her own family who are committed believers) are still alive and able to represent this part of CSL’s life, it is perhaps better to maintain a courteous reticence.

But there is much to be celebrated in his life as well as his writings. He was a wounded war hero. He lived a life of strict frugality so that he could sustain a record of rare generosity in giving away much of the material assets which passed through his hands. He was indefatigable in his labors. The demands of his professional life were such that his enormous contribution to Christian efforts was offered in the context of great personal sacrifice in moments he could eke out after duties to his University and his household were discharged.

We may thank God for such a gift. C.S. Lewis and Winston Churchill were born on successive days (November 29th - 30) in different years (1898, 1874). Churchill and Lewis died in the same 14-month period. Just as we search in vain for Churchill’s successor in the realm of world politics, so we search in vain for Lewis’ successor in the world of apologetics. While we wait, we remember.

And we are grateful.

The Paradox and Proof of Variegated Praise

Long ago in Romania I noted a sure portent of the coming Communist collapse. It was during the rule of the wretch Ceausescu. I was meeting with university students in Bucharest. The young American missionaries who organized the meetings now live in Ukraine, Russia, and Kazakhstan. One has moved back to Colorado with his Romanian wife. The balcony of the flat where they lived faced toward an inner courtyard. Here in Budapest we are fond of calling those monochromatic blocks “Commie Condos.” They litter the Eastern European cityscapes reminding us that Communism was an enemy of aesthetics as well as freedom.

Algernon Swinburne, the Victorian skeptic and poet, declared that the world had grown grey from the breath of Christ. A pity he died before the advent of the Communist era (and it’s a mercy we’ve lived past the death of the Communist era). Perhaps the visual evidence provided by societies determined to deny Christ would have convinced him of the idiocy of his assertion. God made the sky blue and the leaf green. Spiritually it is the atheist who pollutes and defoliates. It is the secularist who drains the earth of color. It was Jesus who (in the words of Calvin Seerveld) brought rainbows to the fallen world.

The balcony where I stood in Bucharest was on an upper floor. I looked down on an aged Romanian woman lovingly tending the flowers in her window box. Those blossoms were a riot of color, splendid in contrast to the dull greys and browns which dominated the hideous background. She was obviously poor, as was nearly everyone in Romania and certainly everyone in that particular apartment building. But at the impulse of her private, creative reflex she brought forth more loveliness than the regime who rendered her life arduous and her nation ugly. I thought in that moment, “Ceausescu won’t win. God has left a testimony to his beauty in that solitary gardener. She is proof enough that the beauty which endured is the beauty which will prevail.”

I was overwhelmed with a similar impression on my first visit to Eastern Europe in 1987. The indigenous Christian music produced by marginalized Hungarian Christians meeting in secret was surpassingly beautiful. I never thought I would hear its equal.

But I did.

Later that year I met in secret with a few university students in Brno, Czechoslovakia. That group was forced to observe even greater measures to insure secrecy. The Moravian and Slovak Christians who emerged from the blight of Communism began to compose their own extraordinary versions of Christian music in their native idiom. The most impressive songwriter I met during those early days was a young Moravian girl named Lenca. She remains impressive. Last Tuesday evening at a student meeting in Brno I heard Lenca (now a mother of two working with her husband in ministry) playing her guitar and singing Christian songs.. I’ll do what I can to make her music available on this site soon.

Christ is the Savior of the whole world. He is the coming King and His reign is universal. The praise offered His name by Christians in disparate places is strikingly familiar and startlingly different at the same time. It is this paradox which provides another piece of evidence that though we come from radically different origins, through radically different experiences, we arrive at the same radical conclusion:

There is one God who made heaven and earth and Jesus of Nazareth is His Son.

It makes us want to sing.

Why “Jacob’s Limp”?

There is another inhabitant of the blogsphere calling his entries “Jacob’s Limp.” So we are only able to use that designation as a subtitle.

Bible students will instantly recognize the reference to Genesis 32. On his flight to Haran, God sent Jacob a Vision (Gen. 28). This was the famous dream sequence of the ladder. Twenty years later on his way back home God sent Jacob a Visitor. His identity is revealed by degrees. We believe the “man” Jacob wrestled with was none other than the Angel of the Lord, the usual Old Testament designation for the pre-Incarnate Christ.

That struggle is a picture of prevailing prayer. God allows Himself to be persuaded to do something He desired all along. (We see the pattern articulated in Ezekiel 36:37.)

Speed had served Jacob well during his career up to that point. That career was characterized by determination to gain by rascality what God would have granted by grace. Thus he hastened to Isaac’s side when Esau went out to hunt (Gen. 27:18-19). Thus he fled Canaan to escape his offended brother’s wrath (Gen. 28:5). Thus he fled his father-in-law (Gen. 31). Doubtless he planned to rely on speed if evasive measures were necessary during the coming confrontation with Esau, but the Man he grappled with took that option away (Gen. 32:25). When the Man whom Jacob called God took His leave, Jacob limped away from the place he called Peniel.

An encounter with the Living God renews our conviction that reliance upon self is folly. Any resource the self can muster independent of God is a liability. Jacob’s Limp was a consecrated weakness. Jacob’s Limp made it more likely that the patriarch would run with dependence on the strength of God because his own strength had been diminished. The wound accelerated the weaning from self.

Let us thank God for such wounds.
Let us welcome them with gratitude.
Let us regard them as favors.

May we receive from God those blessed weakenings
which make dependence upon Him the more necessary.

Others boast of strength.
Let us rather boast of weakness.
Let others leap for joy.
For us this limp suffices.
And we rejoice the more.