my burg

"As political philosophy derives its sanction from ethics, and ethics from the truth of religion, it is only by returning to the eternal source of truth that we can hope for any social organization which will not, to its ultimate destruction, ignore some essential aspect of reality. The term 'democracy,' as I have said again and again, does not contain enough positive content to stand alone against the forces that you dislike—it can easily be transformed by them. If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God) you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin." ~ T. S. Eliot, "The Idea of a Christian Society" in Christianity & Culture

What do Christians -- or the church as a collective -- have in common with secularists working on the problems of the world today?  How is our agenda different, or the same?  What common ground does a secular social justice have with a biblical social justice?  Is better technology or political / social structures (what Eliot calls "machinery") the answer to "setting the world right"?  What solutions should the Church be expected to bring to societal problems? Following are some excerpts from a radio broadcast talk by T. S. Eliot, given in February, 1937, which forms an Appendix to "The Idea of a Christian Society" in Christianity and Culture .  He writes,   "I want to suggest that a task for the Church in our age is a more profound scrutiny of our society, which shall start from the question: to what depth is the foundation of our society not merely neutral but positively anti-Christian?  "It ought not to be necessary for me to insist t...

According to a TIME magazine article in 2015 , "The average attention span for the notoriously ill-focused goldfish is nine seconds, but according  to a new study from Microsoft Corp., people now generally lose concentration after eight seconds, highlighting the affects of an increasingly  digitalized lifestyle on the brain."  The article goes on to cite a dubious upside to this: "On the positive side, the report says our ability to  multitask has drastically improved in the mobile age."   I fear, for myself and for others, that this also affects our study of God's word.  A brief passage, or a devotional moment (aka a "devo"), cannot replace more  prolonged meditation and application of God's word.  Psalm 1 tells us that the way to flourish and bear fruit in the Lord is to meditate on his Law "day and night", and to be rooted in the Scriptures like a tree near a life-giving stream of water. To do otherwise is to let our lives beco...

Above, No Compromise was the second album by Christian singer/song-writer Keith Green, released in 1978. WHY STUDY CHURCH HISTORY? "For the past two-thousand years of our history, Christians have wrestled with Scripture. They have preached sermons, written commentaries,  defended orthodoxy (right belief) against heresy (false teaching), and articulated biblically faithful statements of doctrine in form of the historic  confessions of the faith.  If we disregard all this, choosing instead to remain ignorant of this treasure-trove of spiritual wisdom, is that not arrogant  of us?"   REDISCOVERING FORGOTTEN CLASSICS Here's a treasure trove of lesser known works that you may want to investigate. PASTORAL CONCERN ABOUT EVANGELICAL PROPHECY "The belief that God continues to grant special revelation through personal experience fosters unhealthy experientialism." THOMAS MORE'S ANTIDOTE TO MODERN IDEOLOGIES "By now, the recipe is sadly famil...

I'm currently reading two books on Christian engagement, Rod Dreher's The Benedict Option , and Russell Moore's Onward .  There's much to think about in both, but I'm attracted to Moore's prophetic-minority engagement model.   Here are a few early highlights...  I don’t accept the narrative of progressive secularization, that religion itself will inevitably decline as humanity evolves toward more and more consistent forms of rationalism. As a matter of fact, I think the future of the church is incandescently bright. That’s not because of promises made at Independence Hall, but a promise made at Caesarea Philippi—“I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18). I believe that promise because I believe the One who spoke those words is alive, and moving history toward his reign. That is not to say that the church’s witness in the next generation will be the same. The secularizing forces mentioned before are real—obviou...

Over twenty-five years ago, Carl Henry gave a lecture, first to the Baptist Union of Romania (September, 1990), and later to the Tyndale Seminary faculty (the Netherlands) and at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, entitled "Christianity and Resurgent Paganism".  As with all of his writings I am continually amazed at Henry's prescient insight into Western culture and its trajectory.  Where Henry refers to "modernism" we can easily substitute the term "post-modernism." This is the second post with a few quotes from this talk.   "Modernity, therefore, needs to be liberated not only from the shackles of unbelief, but also from its bondage to wrong beliefs.  Prominent among these beliefs is the notion that science, as mathematical physicists ideally pursue it, is the only reliable method of knowing.  Modern empiricists sponsor an ideological totalism of their own when they confer explanatory crown rights on a theory of truth that cannot decide the ...

Over twenty-five years ago, Carl Henry gave a lecture, first to the Baptist Union of Romania (September, 1990), and later to the Tyndale Seminary faculty (the Netherlands) and at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, entitled "Christianity and Resurgent Paganism".  As with all of his writings I am continually amazed at Henry's prescient insight into Western culture and its trajectory.  In this post and the next I will highlight some quotes from this talk. "The unraveling strands of Western civilization are everywhere.  Not  simply at the future end of history, nor even only at the looming end of  this second Christian millennium, but already in the immediate present,  modernity is being weighed in the balances.  Dismay and distress follow  in the wake of the rebellious despiritualization of our once vibrant  civilization.  Secular hedonism has nurtured the disintegration of the  family and the desanctification of human existence. ...

From my bookshelf I picked up again the classic little work, The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think (SPCK, 1963; Servant Books, 1978), by Harry Blamires.  This author was encouraged to write by none other than C. S. Lewis, his tutor at Oxford.  Writing from mid-twentieth century Britain, Blamires examines our wholesale surrender to secularism and how to recover a uniquely Christian approach to thinking and dialogue.   "We twentieth-century Christians have chosen the way of compromise. We withdraw our Christian consciousness from the fields of public, commercial, and social life.  When we enter these fields we are compelled to accept for purposes of discussion the secular frame of reference established there.  We have no alternative -- except that of silence.  We have to use the only language spoken in these areas." (p. 27) "We have stepped mentally into secularism.  We have trained, even disciplined ourselves, to think secularly about s...

C. S. Lewis wrote, "All that is not eternal is eternally out of date" ( The Four Loves ). J osh Moody and Robin Weekes, authors of Burning Hearts: Preaching to the Affections , would agree, and maintain that -- despite all our scientific and technological advances -- this age is pretty much like the ages before.  Therefore, "relevant" preaching will preach to those unchanging issues of greatest importance...   "What is the same about our age? Everything of greatest importance. People are still made in the image of God. People are still fallen and depraved. The world and the whole universe is still created by God and sustained by the word of His power. All of reality still throbs to the beating heart of the living God. Jesus is still Lord. The cross is the centre of the universe and of all time and space. The Holy Spirit is the power for ministry, life, change and Christlikeness... Ecclesiastes is right when it says that ‘there is nothing new under the sun’ (E...

Carl Henry observed that contemporary culture considers itself to be "culture-transcending."  That is, people who approach uncomfortable content in the Bible will dismiss it as being culturally-conditioned, while assuming their own viewpoint as being above or transcending cultures.   He warns that evangelical scholars particularly -- what he calls "evangelical mediating scholars" -- are being tempted to divide certain apostolic statements, for example, as coming from "Rabbinic Paul" versus "Christian Paul."   He writes,    "The notion that the Apostle Paul compromises New Testament christology under the influence of the rabbinic ethos is often advanced by critical theologians in connection with various biblical emphases that they find personally distasteful.  If what Paul teaches about evangelical women or about Christians and divorce, or about homosexuals, is to be comprehended by dismissing the authority of the biblical teaching, the ax...

"Even avowed atheists, at the end of the day, still have to come up with some sort of placeholder for the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus Christ in order to explain how the universe got here. For instance, what is Richard Dawkins’s reverential treatment of Darwinian natural selection if not an attempt to suggest that something other than the God of the Bible—in this case, the laws of biology—is absolutely necessary to explain the origin, diversity, and beauty we find on planet earth and in the cosmos? Throughout the course of human civilization, what has been seen as ultimate has been worshipped. And that which is worshipped always makes demands upon its followers. In that sense then, everyone is religious. Dawkins’s god may not be personal, but his worldview bears the marks of religious fervor. He has a list of orthodoxies and is quick to cast out heretics from his midst. Despite earnest attempts to do away with religion in modern times, it cannot and will not go away. Fa...

"Acedia" n. "spiritual or mental sloth; apathy." From Gr. "listlessness; without care." (From The New Oxford American Dictionary )  "As acedia, boredom is one of the Seven Deadly Sins. It deserves the honor. You can be bored by virtually anything if you put your mind to it, or choose not to. You can yawn your way through Don Giovanni or a trip to the Grand Canyon or an afternoon with your dearest friend or a sunset. There are doubtless those who nodded off at the coronation of Napoleon or the trial of Joan of Arc or when Shakespeare appeared at the Globe in Hamlet or Lincoln delivered himself of a few remarks at Gettysburg. The odds are that the Sermon on the Mount had more than a few of the congregation twitchy and glassy-eyed. To be bored is to turn down cold whatever life happens to be offering you at the moment. It is to cast a jaundiced eye at life in general including most of all your own life. You feel nothing is worth getting excite...

"He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end."  (Ecclesiastes 3:11 ESV) "If the ills of humanity were caused by culture, they could certainly be cured in no other way than by culture.   But the ills are native to the human heart, which always remain the same, and culture only brings these out.   With all its wealth and power, it only shows that the human heart, in which God has put eternity, is so huge that all the world is too small to satisfy it.   Human beings are in search of another and better redemption than culture can give them.   They are looking for lasting happiness, an enduring eternal good.   They are thirsting for a redemption that saves them physically as well as spiritually, for time but also for eternity."     (Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, III:326-327)

Here's a very good interview with Francis Schaeffer Institute Director Mark Ryan, entitled “Finding Common Ground in a Divisive World” (Covenant Seminary, August 27, 2013)  There are some excellent real-life examples. Here are a few highlights... When looking to engage others honestly with the gospel, we must not let ourselves validate the common stereotypes. There are enough other barriers to the gospel already; we don’t need to add to them by behaving in ways that play into the negative or restrictive images many people have of what they think Christians are like. Also, we have to learn to approach people not as evangelistic projects, but as fellow human beings—made in the image of God even though fallen and imperfect—and so give to them the same consideration and attention that we would like and expect for ourselves... My emphasis is to help people reframe apologetics and get them to see that it’s not so much a discipline to be mastered as it is an orientation of the he...

Reading God in the Whirlwind: How the Holy-love of God Reorients Our World , by David Wells (Crossway, 2014).  Here are some highlights so far... This is the direction in which our culture is pushing us: God does not interfere. He is a God of love and he is not judgmental... We see him as a never-ending fountain of these blessings. He is our Concierge.   We have exited the older moral world in which God was transcendent and holy, and we have entered a new psychological world in which he is only immanent and only loving.   We are now thinking of ourselves in terms, not of human nature, but of the self. And the self is simply an internal core of intuitions. It is the place where our own unique biography, gender, ethnicity, and life-experience all come together in a single center of self-consciousness.  And none of it is framed by absolute moral norms. This is where the overwhelming majority of Americans live.   This is not a generational matter. It was, and is...

Here are two similar views -- related to the issue of women in combat -- from two very dissimilar sources.  First from an evangelical pastor, John Piper, and then from a feminist professor of humanities, Camille Paglia: "So it has been in almost every society that has come under the sway of Christian truth: women of valor, women ready to die in the service of family and fatherland, but not women armed by men for combat. It would have been viewed by most men as cowardly."  (John Piper, The Folly of Men Arming Women for Combat ) "Extravaganzas of gender experimentation sometimes precede cultural collapse, as they certainly did in Wiemar Germany.  Like late Rome, America too is an empire distracted by games and leisure pursuits.  Now as then, there are forces aligning outside the borders, scattered fanatical hordes where the cult of heroic masculinity still has tremendous force.  I close with this question:  is a nation whose elite education...

Bruce Little writes... "The world does not understand the nature of its lost ness . It knows something is wrong, but fails to comprehend the true  nature of that lost ness . Of course, on a personal level, that lost ness is only remedied in Christ, but I use the term  lost ness to speak of the philosophical and moral calamity that has come upon western cultures. "Increasingly we have witnessed the blunting of belief in God.  Even among those who claim to believe that God exists, there  is very little edge to that belief - it is weak and ineffective. This has left people without an external reference for  moral direction and without a metaphysical grounding for morality. Clearly, this is a decisive point of intersection of  theology and culture. "Here the Christian message offers the missing piece deleted by naturalism - the personal, infinite Creator God who stands  above nature and has spoken. This points first, not to a religious truth, but ...

"We were not aware of Pastor Giglio's past comments at the time of his selection, and they don't reflect our desire to celebrate the strength and diversity of our country at this inaugural. Pastor Giglio was asked to deliver the benediction in large part because of his leadership in combating human trafficking around the world. As we now work to select someone to deliver the benediction, we will ensure their beliefs reflect this administration's vision of inclusion and acceptance for all Americans."   (Addie Whisenant, the Presidential Inaugural Committee) "In other words, a Christian pastor has been effectively disinvited from delivering an inaugural prayer because he believes and teaches Christian truth."   (Albert Mohler) Excerpted from "THE GIGLIO IMBROGLIO -- The public inauguration of a new Moral McCarthyism , by  R. Albert Mohler Jr.  

R. C. Sproul writes,  About thirty years ago, I shared a taxi cab in St. Louis with Francis Schaeffer. I had known Dr. Schaeffer for many years, and  he had been instrumental in helping us begin our ministry in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, in 1971. Since our time together in St.  Louis was during the twilight of Schaeffer’s career, I posed this question to him: “Dr. Schaeffer, what is your biggest  concern for the future of the church in America?” Without hesitation, Dr. Schaeffer turned to me and spoke one word:  “Statism.” Schaeffer’s biggest concern at that point in his life was that the citizens of the United States were beginning to  invest their country with supreme authority, such that the free nation of America would become one that would be dominated by  a philosophy of the supremacy of the state. (From "Statism" by R. C. Sproul, 2008) I think Dr. Schaeffer was prescient to see our path to statism.  When truth, and the quest for truth,...

"So much of what draws us to our personal gods has to do with where our needs are, where we hurt, why we hurt, and how we desire that pain to be satiated. It also has to do with our culture and what is promoted to us. In my experience standing in front of the towering stone sphinx, I wasn’t moved to worship, mostly because my Western culture hasn’t sold that to me. I’d be more tempted by a giant ice-cream cone. Preferably one with peanut- butter chunks." --Kelly Minter, in No Other gods: Confronting Our Modern Day Idols. Here's Tim Keller on what's an idol... What is an idol? It is anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give… [T]he human heart takes good things like a successful career, love, material possessions, even family, and turns them into ultimate things. Our hearts deify them as the center of our lives, because, we think, they can gi...