A Meditation with both Palm Sunday and Good Friday in Mind ...

 

"My thesis that the practice of nonviolence requires a belief in divine vengeance will be unpopular with many Christians, especially theologians in the West. To the person who is inclined to dismiss it, I suggest imagining that you are delivering a lecture in a war zone (which is where a paper that underlies this ... was originally delivered). Among your listeners are people whose cities and villages have been first plundered, then burned and leveled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, whose fathers and brothers have had their throats slit. The topic of the lecture: a Christian attitude toward violence. The thesis: we should not retaliate since God is perfect noncoercive love. Soon you would discover that it takes the quiet of a suburban home for the birth of the thesis that human nonviolence corresponds to God’s refusal to judge. In a scorched land, soaked in the blood of the innocent, it will invariably die. And as one watches it die, one will do well to reflect about many other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind."

- Miroslav Volf 

Exclusion and Embrace pgs. 303-304

Autoculturalism

"The identities we are chattering about today tend to impose a kind of imperative to restlessly reinvent oneself; to construct - what I call - a culture of one.  We are less threatened by multiculturalism than by autoculturalism."

- Ken Myers, Mars Hill Audio Journal

The Main Problem with the Media ... [might not be what you think]

"I think that the main problem with the press is not bias.  The complaint of those on the left and conservatives is that it is.  I think the main problem with the press, rather, is superficiality.  Their inability to go beyond the narrative structure of antagonist and protagonist; who's up and who's down; their inability to understand, frame, and report on issues that are not simply political.  The tendency is to force these kinds of cultural issues onto a political frame of reference; to see them only as struggles of power."

James Davison Hunter
in a Mars Hill Audio Journal interview with Ken Myers [ from 1994!]

... don't you want to keep reading???? [below]

Francis Schaeffer on Punk Rock

"Why does human life have any value at all?  Not only are you going to die individually, but the whole human race is going to die.  Someday the world will grow too hot or cold and all you people will not only be individually dead, but the whole conscious life on this world will be dead and nobody will see the birds fly.  As you know, I don't speak academically, shut off in a scholastic cubicle.  I have lots of young people come to us from the end of the earth.  And they have gone to the end of this logically.  They realize what the situation is.  They can't find any meaning to life.  It's the meaning of the words "punk rock".  I must say that on the basis of what they're being taught in schools, that the final reality is only this material thing - they're not wrong; they're right."

- Francis Schaeffer

Cultures cultivate. A culture is more like an ecosystem than like a supermarket. And human persons, as encultured creatures, are generally less like independent rationally choosing shoppers than like organisms whose environment predisposes a certain set of attitudes and actions.

Cultures cultivate. Not that our activities are absolutely determined by cultural influences. We are rational beings, not just instinctual beings. We can make choices that go against the conventions sustained around us. We can lean into the prevailing winds, but only if we know how to stand somewhere solid. Only if we are not being carried by the wind. We need to be able to imagine alternative ways of perceiving reality.

Cultures cultivate, so if we want to offset the influence of cultural systems that distort or misrepresent reality, we need more than good arguments that analyze the distortions. We need cultural alternatives that provide opportunities for participating in a different way of telling the story of human experience.

For example, counteracting the materialistic reductionism of our time requires practices that convey to our imaginations the coherent unity of matter and spirit. Challenging the assumptions that human beings are best understood and best treated by social structures as autonomous choosers whose choices provide meaning in an otherwise meaningless universe requires settings in which submission and obedience to some order of things that precedes our willing is known as a delight and a blessing.

Distorted institutions and practices can’t be confronted only by arguments. They require well-ordered practices and institutions. Resisting cultural confusion is more than a matter of thinkingoutside the box. We need to be able to intuit outside the box. And to encourage well-ordered intuitions to those under our care, especially our children — because cultures cultivate.

As the Angels in Heaven: A Theological Reflection on the Plight of Bruce Jenner

Long after his sordid story broke, we are still talking about Bruce Jenner.  His sad state fascinates us and brings many of our societal failures and follies to the surface.  Chief among them is our destructive devotion to the ultimacy of personal choice.  Devotion that borders on idolatry.

In this man's fractured life, we see the folly of making the subjective will ultimate. 

When a full-grown man says something like, "as far back as i can remember, i have felt like and identified as a woman," and we are unable to respond with anything but, "well, then you must really be a woman," we are in deep trouble.

Certain fundamental things precede memory.  Certain truths are objectively true about us - whether we prefer and identify with them or not.  Several of these objective truths of reality come by way of the body we're given. We receive our bodies, and therefore our genders, long before we possess anything like memory or feeling or a sense of identity or even any self awareness at all.
You show up at conception and there it is - already right there in your DNA from the first second of your life.  And centuries after you die, if archaeologists happen to dig up your bones, one of the first things they will determine by the most basic testing is whether you were male or female.

When we hear ourselves asking questions like - "Can you imagine being trapped in a body you don't belong in?" ... as if you could be switched at birth into a foreign body by accident or trickery... as if - because of its gender - your body were something you could be "trapped inside of" like an elevator in a blackout.

Psalm 23 a Modern Secularized Version

We will have no shepherd, and yet we shall not want …

By getting a competitive and marketable degree I have postured myself to lie down in the green pastures.

By attaining a certain socio-economic status I am able to reside beside the still waters,

I maintaining a generally law-abiding lifestyle I walk on the paths of practicing random acts of kindness from time to time for the sake of a tolerant coexistence,

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death with the help of my therapist I will fear no evil; my expansive healthcare benefits and the technical advances of medical researchers comfort me.

Thanks to modern biology, nutritional science, and economics – I have prepared a table for myself and my elected officials wield our military might to keep our enemies as far away as possible.

I’m able to take advantage of the convergence of Madison Avenue and Wallstreet so that my head is anointed with this season’s latest fashionable accessories, and inasmuch as I’m able to be savvy and tap into their lifegiving streams - my cup runneth over.

Surely material abundance and the right to make my own personal choices about truth and reality shall follow me all the days of my life and then afterward I will dwell in the house of bliss forever according to the details of my own preferred religion’s happy ending – unless of course there is no life after death in which case, I won’t.

Zeitgeist as Fog not Wind

"We live in an age that keeps authoritative institutions, philosophies, and religions at arm's length, mixing and matching and analyzing them with a market-place mentality.

There is a fear of change, but who wouldn't be afraid of change?  St Augustine in The Confessions is a freshman in college and reads this book by Cicero that is a call to pursue wisdom for its own sake, so he says it changes his life and he goes after wisdom, but at the moment of his conversion, he looks back on the previous ten or twelve years and, although he set off to pursue wisdom, he realized that nothing really changed, because he didn't really want to be different.

It's scary.  Our habits whisper in our ear and tell us that without them we wouldn't be who we really are.  And Augustine says that in the end that's right.  We wouldn't be who we are.  Part of the genius of The Confessions is to affirm that the journey of faith really is a death to self; it is a really disjunctive and wrenching kind of transformation.  Who wouldn't be frightful in the face of that?"

R.R. Reno, author of "In the Ruins of the Church: Sustaining Faith in an Age of Diminishing Christianity"

Art, Music, Creation, Difference, Violence, Harmony, and the Trinity

"Creation is the work of a dynamic, three-personed God and the members of the Trinity enjoy an eternal giving and receiving among one another. The doctrine of the Trinity informs us of both the personality and the dynamism of God - qualities that are suggested in the ancient term applied to the Trinity - perichoresis. It refers to the mutual indwelling of the persons of the Trinity by extension perichoresis can be used to refer to God's relationship to the world whereby all things exist in him and through him; in him we live and move and have our being... why move?  Are we dancing when we have our being?
All of creation is somehow engaged in the life of the trinity is well.  John 17 in particular comes to mind where we read that in our growth in Christ God indwells us and we indwell Him.  So Father Son and Holy Spirit are dancing around each other and the Christian life is our entry into that dance.
Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart notes that while God was under no necessity to create, the act of creation flows out of the infinite love that's experienced by the members of the Trinity.  Hart writes:
"God's gracious action in creation belongs from the first to that delight, pleasure, and regard that the Trinity enjoys from eternity as an outward and unnecessary expression of that love.  Thus creation must be received before all else as a gift and beauty."

What is Worldliness?

“Modernity presents an interlocking system of values that has invaded and settled within the psyche of every person. Modernity is simply unprecedented in its power to remake human appetites, think processes, and values. It is, to put it in biblical terms, the worldliness of Our Time. For worldliness is that system of values and beliefs, behaviors and expectations, in any given culture that have at their center the fallen human being and that relegate to their periphery any thought about God.

Worldliness is what makes sin look normal in any age and righteousness seem odd. Modernity is worldliness, and it has concealed its values so adroitly in the abundance, the comfort, and the wizardry of our age that even those who call themselves the people of God seldom recognize them for what they are.”

–David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 29.

10 More from RC Jr - Non-Fiction for Teens

What are ten books your teenagers read as part of their homeschool education?

• April 15, 2014

• By: Dr. R.C. Sproul, Jr.
• Fiction & Literature, Homeschooling

One of the weaknesses of the school model of education is that it squeezes out great books that don’t fit neatly into one or another of those artificial divisions of learning we call “subjects.” We don’t start with, “What books have had a deep impact in shaping what I am?” But with “What subjects am I supposed to be teaching, and which books will help me teach them?” I don’t teach my children subjects—I seek to instill in them wisdom. Which means I have them read the books that gave me wisdom.

All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes: The Christian and Pop Culture by Ken Myers. This book was a genuine wake up call to me, alerting me to the more subtle ways the broader culture has influenced not just what I think, but how I think. It was for me the beginning of seeking to live a more deliberate life.

The Abolition of Man by CS Lewis.  A thoughtful yet accessible prophetic exposition of the then coming post-modernism.

The Holiness of God. We often, as parents, struggle with fear that our children are more eager to please us than their heavenly Father, that they see their faith as a familial thing, but that they don’t quite own it personally. This classic exploration of the character of God is deeply helpful. It reminds my children that God is for real, and that they must deal with Him, one at a time.

Monsters from the Id by E. Michael Jones. Jones, editor of Culture Warsmagazine, traces the history of horror fiction from Mary Shelley’sFrankenstein to Aliens. Why would I want my teens to read that? Because Jones, as is his habit, masterfully weaves the private lives of the creators of these stories with their ideologies and the stories themselves. Reading Jones is like reading Romans 1 unfold before your very eyes as you watch minds given over to depravity bear bitter fruit.

Jesus, Himself, led our small-group Bible study, and yet He was not known to us until the Breaking of Bread ...

Thank you to Uri Brito for posting this on his blog.  It is a collection of quotes from Albert Mohler's interview with theologian Stanley Hauerwas.  It fits perfectly into yesterday's sermon/Gospel passage - Lk 24: Returning to the Church and finding Christ in the breaking of bread.  [*Please note: the transcripts widely available online INCORRECTLY quote Hauerwas in the section below.  I've reviewed the audio and transcribed them accurately.*] Enjoy!

Mohler: When you look at American Christianity in general, and American Evangelicalism in particular, you appear to see a church that is looking less and less like the church.

Hauerwas: That’s true. I have great admiration for evangelicals for no other reason than they just bring such great energy to the faith and I admire that. But one of the great problems of Evangelical life in America is evangelicals think they have a relationship with God that they go to church to have expressed but church is a secondary phenomenon to their personal relationship and I think that’s to get it exactly backwards: that the Christian faith is a mediated faith. It only comes through the witness of others as embodied in the church. So I should never trust my presumption that I know what my relationship with God is separate from how that is expressed through words and sacrament in the church. So evangelicals, I’m afraid, often times, with what appears to be very conservative religious convictions, make the church a secondary phenomenon to their assumed faith and I think that’s making it very hard to maintain disciplined congregations.

Apologetics in Light of the Resurrection

"[Like Thomas], those who live in the world of the enlightenment will naturally ask, ‘but did it happen … and how do you know?’ And they must be encouraged to come with their questions.  The prim and proper Bartian would no doubt prefer it if Jesus had said to Thomas, ‘Go away and come back when you’ve got a better epistemology!’  But interestingly the story works the other way round.  Good historical answers are available just as Jesus could in fact be touched…

This is because the resurrection, if it means what the NT says it means, is not a creatio ex nihilo but a creatio ex vetere.  As in Romans 8 – just as the old ontology is swallowed up in the new: what is mortal being swallowed up,  not replaced with life but swallowed up in it -  so the old epistemology, quite properly, is transcended and therefore included in the new.  There is no complete disjunction.

The resurrection itself is not the abandoning of the old body and the emergence of a new one, but the raising to new life of the old one itself.

Think about this: the mark of the nails on the body of the risen Jesus are thus the sign that validates historical inquiry into the resurrection. The nail thrusts themselves, like the skepticism of the enlightenment, were meant to wound but now remain as evidence.  Go figure…

-Tom Wright

Please Speak Directly Into the Microphone ...

" ... there is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pointless indifference. . . . We are machines for propagating DNA . . . . It is every living object’s sole reason for being.” 

-Richard Dawkins  [compilation by William Lane Craig]

[photo: freerepublic.com - sorry, I couldn't resist posting the picture, especially when the quote was about man's chief end being to propogate his DNA ... ]

Susman and Myers on Personality and Culture

In the 19th century, character was key, but other key words related to the concept of character: citizenship, duty, democracy, work, building, golden deeds, outdoor life, conquest, honor, reputation, morals, manners, integrity, … and above all: manhood, virility.

Early 20th century, accompanying material change, we move from a production-oriented society to a consumption-oriented society, and character disappears and what becomes key is personality: personality used to mean the qualities that were universally shared by all persons – the things we had in common. Personality was then changed to describe the attributes or qualities that make you unique. So the advice is on how to build this sort of personality or image. Here are the new key words from advice manuals: fascinating, stunning, attractive, magnetic, glowing, masterful, creative, dominant, forceful. [these words were almost never used to described character – character is either good or bad, not glowing. The quality of being ‘Somebody’ is emphasized. We live constantly in a crowd [basically strangers who will never have time to know your character], how can we distinguish ourselves from others in the crowd? ‘Crowd’ is the most commonly used word. The new personality literature stressed items that could be best developed in leisure time and that represented in themselves an emphasis on consumption. The social role demanded of all in the new culture of personality was that of a performer. Every American was to become a performing self.

"Personality and the Making of Twentieth-Century Culture."

- Warren Susman

An Age of Disillusionment

“I would go so far as to say that never has there been a greater opportunity for preaching than there is today, because we are living in an age of disillusionment. The Victorian age, last century, was an age of optimism. People were carried away by the theory of evolution and development, and the poets sang about the coming of ‘the parliament of man and the federation of the world’. We would banish war and all would be well, and the world would be one great nation. They really believed that sort of thing. Nobody believes it by now apart from an odd representative here and there of the old ‘social gospel’ of the pre-1914 era. We have lived to see the fallacy of that old optimistic liberalism, and we are living in an age of disillusionment when men are desperate. That is why we are witnessing this student protest and every other kind of protest; that is why people are taking drugs. It is the end of all the optimism of the liberals. It was bound to lead to this because it was wrong in its basic conceptions, its origin, in its very thinking. We are seeing the end of all that. Is not this then the very time when the door is wide open for the preaching of the Gospel?

Choose Subversive Sarcasm

For those of my readers not from Maryland [okay, ... hi mom ... and to my other reader from Lithuania, 'Zdravstvuj, comrade!'], a bit of background is in order.  For the last 2 years, Howard County has launched a public niceness campaign based on the Oprah-endorsed book 'Choose Civility'.  The initiative is based out of their award-winning library branches, where I have to admit I do spend a considerable amount of time.  The whole campaign consists almost entirely of handing out free bumperstickers that say "Choose Civility in Howard County".  But because civility is so dependent upon some ethical framework, I find that daily, as I drive to and from work, a miniature Greg Bahnsen appears [poof] on my shoulder spouting presuppositional jabs each time I see the bumpersticker.  So, not wanting to miss an opportunity to declare the postmodern emporers' new clothes of civility to be, in fact, non-existent, here are some humorous parodies I've come up with.  My good friend and creative genius John Barnes was the original inspiration for most of these and you can find his batch of these with a quick google search. 

To see the rest of the collection, click below ...

Under the Hood of Postmodernism

'From my perspective, "postmodernism" merely names an interesting set of developments in the social order that is based on the presumption that God does not matter.'

- Stanley Hauerwas
in Preaching As Though We Had Enemies

[painting: "Surreal," © 2009 Marcus A. Jansen, MW Gallery Aspen]

Virtue and Its Imposters

VIRTUE AND ITS IMPOSTERS  
by Thabiti Anyabwile

Three things confuse a Christian; Yeah, four confound any man.
Unbelief masquerading as wisdom,
Enthusiasm presenting itself as faith,
Fear pretending to be patience,
and permissiveness claiming to be love.

What I've been Reading Lately [Book List] ...

You are what your mind eats ...