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.
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Sunday, November 23, 2008
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.
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.
Saturday, November 22, 2008
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.
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.
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.
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.
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