Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life:
Such a Way, as gives us breath:
Such a Truth, as ends all strife:
Such a Life, as killeth death.
Come, my Light, my Feast, my Strength:
Such a Light, as shows a feast:
Such a Feast, as mends in length:
Such a Strength, as makes his guest.
Come, my Joy, my Love, my Heart:
Such a Joy, as none can move:
Such a Love, as none can part:
Such a Heart, as joyes in love.
Earlier this month, Matt Chandler, head pastor at The Village Church in Dallas, Texas, was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. Surgery was performed, but the doctor was unable to remove the entire tumor. He started chemo and radiation treatments yesterday. Sunday, John Piper preached a very timely message on suffering at The Village Church . You can find the audio for the sermon here. Also check out the sermon audio archive from The Village Church to hear some of Matt’s preaching. I recommend the Ecclesiastes series from ‘06.
There is also one more resource. Last year, at the Desiring God Conference, John Piper interviewed Matt Chandler on his life and ministery. Find it below:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
The Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University has made a sermon index for Jonathan Edwards’ sermons available. One of the first places I go when I am preparing a sermon is to the Yale University Press volumes of Edwards’ sermons, the Miscellanies, and Notes on Scripture. The indices in the Yale publications are invaluable sources for Edwards research. Below is the list of sermons in canonical order (Many of the sermons are also available there):
I saw Avatar this past weekend and thought that it was pretty awesome. This morning I read a New York Times article that speaks of the pantheism that is throughout the movie. I think that they get it exactly right:
It’s fitting that James Cameron’s “Avatar” arrived in theaters at Christmastime. Like the holiday season itself, the science fiction epic is a crass embodiment of capitalistic excess wrapped around a deeply felt religious message. It’s at once the blockbuster to end all blockbusters, and the Gospel According to James.
But not the Christian Gospel. Instead, “Avatar” is Cameron’s long apologia for pantheism — a faith that equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world.
In Cameron’s sci-fi universe, this communion is embodied by the blue-skinned, enviably slender Na’Vi, an alien race whose idyllic existence on the planet Pandora is threatened by rapacious human invaders. The Na’Vi are saved by the movie’s hero, a turncoat Marine, but they’re also saved by their faith in Eywa, the “All Mother,” described variously as a network of energy and the sum total of every living thing.
If this narrative arc sounds familiar, that’s because pantheism has been Hollywood’s religion of choice for a generation now. It’s the truth that Kevin Costner discovered when he went dancing with wolves. It’s the metaphysic woven through Disney cartoons like “The Lion King” and “Pocahontas.” And it’s the dogma of George Lucas’s Jedi, whose mystical Force “surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.”
Hollywood keeps returning to these themes because millions of Americans respond favorably to them. From Deepak Chopra to Eckhart Tolle, the “religion and inspiration” section in your local bookstore is crowded with titles pushing a pantheistic message. A recent Pew Forum report on how Americans mix and match theology found that many self-professed Christians hold beliefs about the “spiritual energy” of trees and mountains that would fit right in among the indigo-tinted Na’Vi.
As usual, Alexis de Tocqueville saw it coming. The American belief in the essential unity of all mankind, Tocqueville wrote in the 1830s, leads us to collapse distinctions at every level of creation. “Not content with the discovery that there is nothing in the world but a creation and a Creator,” he suggested, democratic man “seeks to expand and simplify his conception by including God and the universe in one great whole.”
Today there are other forces that expand pantheism’s American appeal. We pine for what we’ve left behind, and divinizing the natural world is an obvious way to express unease about our hyper-technological society. The threat of global warming, meanwhile, has lent the cult of Nature qualities that every successful religion needs — a crusading spirit, a rigorous set of ‘thou shalt nots,” and a piping-hot apocalypse.
At the same time, pantheism opens a path to numinous experience for people uncomfortable with the literal-mindedness of the monotheistic religions — with their miracle-working deities and holy books, their virgin births and resurrected bodies. As the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski noted, attributing divinity to the natural world helps “bring God closer to human experience,” while “depriving him of recognizable personal traits.” For anyone who pines for transcendence but recoils at the idea of a demanding Almighty who interferes in human affairs, this is an ideal combination.
Indeed, it represents a form of religion that even atheists can support. Richard Dawkins has called pantheism “a sexed-up atheism.” (He means that as a compliment.) Sam Harris concluded his polemic “The End of Faith” by rhapsodizing about the mystical experiences available from immersion in “the roiling mystery of the world.” Citing Albert Einstein’s expression of religious awe at the “beauty and sublimity” of the universe, Dawkins allows, “In this sense I too am religious.”
The question is whether Nature actually deserves a religious response. Traditional theism has to wrestle with the problem of evil: if God is good, why does he allow suffering and death? But Nature is suffering and death. Its harmonies require violence. Its “circle of life” is really a cycle of mortality. And the human societies that hew closest to the natural order aren’t the shining Edens of James Cameron’s fond imaginings. They’re places where existence tends to be nasty, brutish and short.
Religion exists, in part, precisely because humans aren’t at home amid these cruel rhythms. We stand half inside the natural world and half outside it. We’re beasts with self-consciousness, predators with ethics, mortal creatures who yearn for immortality.
This is an agonized position, and if there’s no escape upward — or no God to take on flesh and come among us, as the Christmas story has it — a deeply tragic one.
Pantheism offers a different sort of solution: a downward exit, an abandonment of our tragic self-consciousness, a re-merger with the natural world our ancestors half-escaped millennia ago.
But except as dust and ashes, Nature cannot take us back.
From Anselm (1033-1109): Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Man)
Boso. Infidels ridiculing our simplicity charge upon us that we do injustice and dishonor to God when we affirm that he descended into the womb of a virgin, that he was born of woman, that he grew on the nourishment of milk and the food of men; and, passing over many other things which seem incompatible with Deity, that he endured fatigue, hunger, thirst, stripes and crucifixion among thieves.
Anselm.. We do no injustice or dishonor to God, but give him thanks with all the heart, praising and proclaiming the ineffable height of his compassion. For the more astonishing a thing it is and beyond expectation, that he has restored us from so great and deserved ills in which we were, to so great and unmerited blessings which we had forfeited; by so much the more has he shown his more exceeding love and tenderness towards us. For did they but carefully consider bow fitly in this way human redemption is secured, they would not ridicule our simplicity, but would rather join with us in praising the wise beneficence of God. For, as death came upon the human race by the disobedience of man, it was fitting that by man’s obedience life should be restored. And, as sin, the cause of our condemnation, had its origin from a woman, so ought the author of our righteousness and salvation to be born of a woman. And so also was it proper that the devil, who, being man’s tempter, had conquered him in eating of the tree, should be vanquished by man in the suffering of the tree which man bore. Many other things also, if we carefully examine them, give a certain indescribable beauty to our redemption as thus procured.
Let all mortal flesh keep silence,
And with fear and trembling stand;
Ponder nothing earthly minded,
For with blessing in His hand,
Christ our God to earth descendeth,
Our full homage to demand.
King of kings, yet born of Mary,
As of old on earth He stood,
Lord of lords, in human vesture,
In the body and the blood;
He will give to all the faithful
His own self for heavenly food.
Rank on rank the host of heaven
Spreads its vanguard on the way,
As the Light of light descendeth
From the realms of endless day,
That the powers of hell may vanish
As the darkness clears away.
At His feet the six winged seraph,
Cherubim with sleepless eye,
Veil their faces to the presence,
As with ceaseless voice they cry:
Alleluia, Alleluia
Alleluia, Lord Most High!
“Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence” is an ancient chant of Eucharistic devotion based on the verses taken from Habakkuk 2:20.
From R.C. Sproul
The simple answer to your question is that the X in Christmas is used like the R in R.C. My given name at birth was Robert Charles, although before I was even taken home from the hospital my parents called me by my initials, R.C., and nobody seems to be too scandalized by that.
X can mean so many things. For example, when we want to denote an unknown quantity, we use the symbol X. It can refer to an obscene level of films, something that is X-rated. People seem to express chagrin about seeing Christ’s name dropped and replaced by this symbol for an unknown quantity X. Every year you see the signs and the bumper stickers saying, “Put Christ back into Christmas” as a response to this substitution of the letter X for the name of Christ.
First of all, you have to understand that it is not the letter X that is put into Christmas. We see the English letter X there, but actually what it involves is the first letter of the Greek name for Christ. Christos is the New Testament Greek for Christ. The first letter of the Greek word Christos is transliterated into our alphabet as an X. That X has come through church history to be a shorthand symbol for the name of Christ.
We don’t see people protesting the use of the Greek letter theta, which is an O with a line across the middle. We use that as a shorthand abbreviation for God because it is the first letter of the word Theos, the Greek word for God.
The idea of X as an abbreviation for the name of Christ came into use in our culture with no intent to show any disrespect for Jesus. The church has used the symbol of the fish historically because it is an acronym. Fish in Greek (ichthus) involved the use of the first letters for the Greek phrase “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.” So the early Christians would take the first letter of those words and put those letters together to spell the Greek word for fish. That’s how the symbol of the fish became the universal symbol of Christendom. There’s a long and sacred history of the use of X to symbolize the name of Christ, and from its origin, it has meant no disrespect.
Taken from Now, That’s a Good Question!
From his poem Hosea and Gomer:
Think not, my son, that God’s great river
Of love flows simply to the sea,
He aims not straight, but to deliver
The wayward soul like you and me.
Follow the current where it goes,
With love and grace it ever flows.
“Who could do this unless the Son of God should also become the Son of man, and so receive what is ours as to transfer to us what is his, making that which is his by nature to become ours by grace?” (Inst. 2.12.2)
Every year John Piper writes a poem for each Sunday of Advent . He does this as a Christmas gift for his congregation. The following is an excerpt from one of these poems. The name of the poem is “Glorified,” and this portion takes place immediatly following Jesus’ return to the earth in judgement.
And then the Lord
Wiped every tear away and turned
To see his bride. Her heart had yearned
Four thousand years for this: His face
Shone like the sun, and every trace
Of wrath was gone. And in her bliss
She heard the Master say, “Watch this:
Come forth all goodness from the ground,
Come forth and let the earth redound
With joy.” And as he spoke, the throne
Of God came down to earth and shone
Like golden crystal full of light,
And banished once for all the night.
And from the throne a stream began
To flow and laugh, and as it ran,
It made a river and a lake,
And everywhere it flowed a wake
Of grass broke on the banks and spread
Like resurrection from the dead.
And in the twinkling of an eye
The saints descended from the sky.
And as I knelt beside the brook
To drink eternal life, I took
A glance across the golden grass,
And saw my dog, old Blackie, fast
As she could come. She leaped the stream—
Almost—and what a happy gleam
Was in her eye.
I knelt to drink,
And knew that I was on the brink
Of endless joy. And everywhere
I turned I saw a wonder there.
A big man running on the lawn:
That’s old John Younge with both legs on.
The blind can see a bird on wing,
The dumb can lift his voice and sing.
The diabetic eats at will,
The coronary runs uphill.
The lame can walk, the deaf can hear,
The cancer-ridden bone is clear.
Arthritic joints are lithe and free,
And every pain has ceased to be.
And every sorrow deep within,
And every trace of lingering sin
Is gone. And all that’s left is joy,
And endless ages to employ
The mind and heart to understand
And love the sovereign Lord who planned
That it should take eternity
To lavish all his grace on me.
O God of wonder, God of might,
Grant us some elevated sight,
Of endless days. And let us see
The joy of what is yet to be.
And may your future make us free.
You can listen to John Piper read the poem here.
From Amy Adair guess posting at Think Christian:
“How much did she cost?” the cashier at the grocery store asked, pointing to my daughter.
I nervously shifted Evie, on my hip and swiped my credit card. My husband and I had just gotten home from Beijing, China, with our new daughter and I wasn’t prepared for prying questions from strangers.
“How much did you pay for your car?” I shot back.
She wrinkled her forehead, frowned, and was obviously offended by my question.
“I’d just heard that it was $100,000 to adopt from a China,” she hissed.
“It’s not $100,000,” I sighed. “She didn’t cost a penny. We did, however, pay a social worker and an agency to help facilitate the adoption.”
As I headed back to my car, I had a sinking feeling that more people would ask the same question. I was right. The first week Evie was home, my dentist, a neighbor, and a stranger at the park all wanted to know: How much?
It is true, adoption isn’t cheap. There are a lot of fees that add up quickly. We paid for a home study, visas, passports, immigration papers, plane tickets, and hotels. Quite honestly, it is a financial sacrifice. But so are other things that people don’t question, like sending your child to college. People find a way to do it. Much like financing a college education, there are grants, loans, and federal tax credits available to adoptive parents.
I wonder, though, what’s the cost of not adopting? It was never God’s intention for children to grow up in an orphanage without the love of a mother or father. Clearly God weeps for those who suffer, especially the fatherless. In fact, in Matthew 19:14, Jesus berates his disciples for turning children away from him. Jesus invites the children to stay and declares that the kingdom of Heaven belongs not to the grown-ups but to the kids. It is one of the many beautiful pictures in the Bible that illustrates God as our Abba or Father.
It is also a call to action. Just as Jesus welcomed the children, he asks us to reach out to the neediest to the least of these.
Imagine what would happen if every Christian world-wide cared for orphans? I know not every Christian is called to parent an orphaned child. But I do believe that Christ calls every Christian to care for and support the fatherless. That could be praying for an adoptive family, supporting an adoption cause, or sponsoring a waiting child.
Financing an adoption isn’t the price tag that should shock people. It’s the cost of standing by and doing nothing that should leave Christ-followers speechless.
(Amy has written children’s books, a teen magazine column, interviews, and adoption applications. She is the proud mother to two boys who are 7 and 4. Her latest adventure led her to Beijing, China, with her husband Jonathan where they met their newest addition to the family, a two year old little girl. You can read about her life, faith, and the ups, downs, and joys of motherhood at www.1001tears.blogspot.com.)
From the December ‘09 edition of byFaith Magazine :
Richard Doster, December 2009
Ask your neighbors for an off-the-cuff reaction to the words “Christian literature” and you’re likely to hear them stumble through a list of belittling adjectives. Despite the swelling ranks of able Christian writers, the reaction demonstrates that we—heirs to the tradition of Chaucer, Milton, and Donne; successors to Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Chekov; the literary descendants of G.K. Chesterton and Dorothy Sayers, and of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, and of Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy—are now viewed as an inconsequential presence in the world of literature. We have, volitionally, banished ourselves to the “inspiration” section at the back of Barnes & Noble. And by doing so, we may have abandoned our neighbors and left literature in the hands of writers who’d leave them hopeless.
All the names just mentioned were, of course, great writers because of their Christian faith, not in spite of it. They appreciated the inherent goodness of God’s creation; they knew the pervasive consequences of mankind’s Fall; they relished the hope of Christ’s resurrection, and anticipated the day of His cosmic-wide redemption. They combined talent with an irresistible urge to tell stories, and then—armed with this gripping a worldview—they made sense of a seemingly pointless world. Their books and poems provided eternal significance to the mundane; they held out hope while never flinching from the cold, hard truth of life in a sin-afflicted world. As a result, their works are appreciated today across the entire breadth of our literary culture.
Dorothy Sayers took the lightly regarded “detective novel” and transformed it … to illustrate the conflict between sin and Christian virtue.
Beowulf, for example, after 1,300 years, is still required reading on college campuses, and still deemed essential to the education of well-rounded students. Writer and teacher Donald Williams, in his essay Christian Poetics, Past and Present, explains how the poet wrestled with the tension between his Christian faith and Teutonic heritage. He made this grand synthesis, Williams says, “in which the heroic ideal was enlisted in a cosmic war of good and evil.” Williams also reminds us that Dante, in the Divine Comedy, “created concrete images that allegorically incarnated Christian doctrines ….” And that Chaucer gave us a “humane and sympathetic portrait of God’s plenty.”
Transforming the Detective Story
Dorothy Sayers’ work is more recent, and much more accessible. Between 1923 and 1935 Sayers wrote 11 Peter Wimsey detective stories. A savvy and gifted believer, Sayers elevated the genre. She took the lightly regarded “detective novel” and transformed it, employing who-done-it plots and a recurring cast of characters to illustrate the conflict between sin and Christian virtue, and to show readers how, at least from man’s perspective, evil might be restrained but never ended.
Sayers wrote the most popular sort of fiction. Believers and non-believers anticipated each new installment, and her stories today, some 70 years after they were written, are still available at Barnes & Noble. And they still depict, as author Joyce Brown, puts it, “… the horror and irrevocability of evil and the power of virtue, which relentlessly battles against it.”
Perceiving Life Through the Central Christian Mystery
Twenty years later Flannery O’Connor, with the wit she was known for, addressed the tension that confronts contemporary Christian writers. There was an assumption, O’Connor noted, that Christians should write for only one reason: “… to prove the truth of the Faith.” When pressured to tame her “grotesque” characters and to sanitize her Southern, gothic fiction, O’Connor balked. She’d seen the sentimental drift in Christian writing; it was, she said, “… a distortion that overemphasized innocence.” And innocence, when exaggerated in a fallen world, not only mocked the true state of man and society, but the price that was paid for their redemption.
Writers must learn, “to be humble in the face of what-is,” O’Connor argued. They must understand that concrete reality—the things we see, hear, taste, smell, and touch—are the only clay a novelist can mold. They aren’t to persuade with argument or develop abstract theories or disguise essays in the garb of story. Rather, they’re to create characters, invent action and dialog, and concoct settings that look a lot like the places we know. If the novelist’s work is to ever transcend the here-and-now, O’Connor said, it must be firmly rooted in it.
O’Connor griped that Christian writers tended to be concerned with “unfleshed ideas and emotions.” They’re reformers, she complained, who “… are possessed not by a story but by the bare bones of some abstract notion. They are conscious of problems, not of people, of questions and issues, not of the texture of existence, …of everything that has a sociological smack, instead of with all those concrete details of life that make actual the mystery of our position on earth.”
That mystery, underscored for her by life in the “Christ-haunted South,” was the theme she couldn’t escape. The Christian writer, O’Connor explained, perceives life from the “standpoint of the central Christian mystery: that is has, for all its horror, been found by God to be worth dying for.” This, she knew—when understood and applied—expanded the writer’s vision. It inspired investigation. It meant that nothing is off limits. And that everything—regardless of how common—matters.
O’Connor—because she was a Christian, because she was concerned about her vocation, and because she knew the world and the Church looked on warily—cared about quality. A Christian’s novel, she said, must be “complete and self-sufficient and impregnable in [its] own right.” When told that good Catholics, because they were responsible for proclaiming the gospel, couldn’t also be good artists, she replied “ruefully” that, “because I am a Catholic, I cannot afford to be less than an artist.”
An Imagination Sent Soaring by the Gospel
C.S. Lewis, a contemporary of O’Connor’s, was as a gritty a realist as she was. And yet our neighbors—practically all of them, regardless of their religious beliefs or affiliation—love his fantasy. The genre might have been his natural, literary inclination. George Sayer, in his biography Jack: A Life of C.S. Lewis, notes that Lewis’s most “precious moments” were when he was aware of the supernatural’s intrusion into the workaday world. “His success in translating these moments into his fairy stories gives [The Chronicles of Narnia] a haunting appeal,” Sayer wrote, providing readers with “a taste of the other.” Read the rest of this entry »
Kim Riddlebarger of White Horse Inn fame wrote an article discussing the first question of the Heidelberg Catechism for the Ligonier Ministries blog. I have posted it below:
Of all the Reformation-era catechisms, perhaps none is as well-loved as the Heidelberg Catechism. In the opening question and answer, the personal and distinctive tone of the catechism becomes evident. “What is your only comfort in life and in death?” This is not a theoretical question — “What would be necessary if God were to comfort sinners?” Rather, this is a very practical question — “How do I have comfort as long as I live and then when I die?”
The key word in the opening question is comfort (German, trost). The word refers to our assurance and confidence in the finished work of Christ. This comfort extends to all of life and even to the hour of death. As one of the authors of the catechism (Zacharius Ursinus) puts it in his commentary on the catechism, this comfort entails “the assurance of the free remission of sin, and of reconciliation with God by and on account of Christ, and a certain expectation of eternal life; impressed upon the heart by the Holy Spirit through the gospel, so that we have no doubt but that we are saved forever, according to the declaration of the apostle Paul: Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” Note that the catechism speaks of our “only” comfort. There is no other such comfort and assurance to be found apart from Christ.
In answering the opening question, the catechism asserts that “I, with body and soul, both in life and in death,” will have this comfort. A paraphrase of Romans 14:7,8 here, we are reminded that God’s care extends to us throughout the course of our lives. Christ has removed the curse; there is assurance of salvation in this life and the resurrection of our bodies at the end of the age (see Q & A 57–58). This knowledge comforts us now and prepares us for whatever lies ahead.
Our comfort derives from the fact that “I am not my own.” These words are taken from 1 Corinthians 6:19,20: “You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.” We are Christ’s, and He will do with us as He wills. This comfort is based on the fact that God is sovereign and has the power to do as He has promised.
This wonderful fact is further spelled out in the next part of the answer. “But [I] belong to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.” The catechism directs us away from our faith (the subjective) to Christ’s obedience — my “faithful” Savior (the objective). Christ fulfilled all righteousness and died for our sin upon the cross for me. The specifics of Christ’s obedience are spelled out in more detail in the next part of the answer: “who with His precious blood.” These words come from 1 Peter 1:18,19: “…knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot.” The death of Christ is the only means by which the guilt of human sin can be removed (expiation) and the wrath of God turned aside (propitiation). The catechism reminds us that the ground of our salvation is the work of Christ for us, not our faith or our own good works.
Next, the first answer of the catechism tells us that the death of Jesus lies at the heart of this promised salvation because He “has fully satisfied for all my sins.” Christ’s death alone satisfies the justice of the holy God (Rom. 3:21–26). No human work or religious ceremony can do this. Not only that, but His death has “redeemed me from all the power of the devil.” This is an echo from 1 John 3:8: “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil.” Satan has been cast out of heaven so that he can no longer accuse us before the heavenly court. Christ’s victory over him is evident at the cross (Col. 2:13–15).
The catechism then states the precious truth that our assurance of salvation and our perseverance in faith are also the work of Christ. “[Christ] so preserves me that without the will of my Father in heaven not a hair can fall from my head.” This is taken from Matthew 10:29,30: “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered.” To possess the comfort promised in the Gospel, I need to know that God’s sovereign care extends to all aspects of my life. Nothing happens to me apart from the will of God. In fact, “all things must work together for my salvation” (see Rom. 8:28). God has ordained all things. He redeems us from sin. And in the end, God will turn it to my good.
Finally, we learn that this comfort becomes mine through the work of the Holy Spirit. “Wherefore, by His Holy Spirit, He also assures me of eternal life.” The Holy Spirit bears witness to the truth of God’s Word and confirms the promise God made to me that He will save all those who trust in Christ. This same indwelling Spirit “makes me heartily willing and ready from now on to live unto Him.” It is God who will see His good work through to the end. That one who justifies me will also sanctify me. He who began a good work in me will see it through to the end.
Knowing these things gives me unspeakable comfort in life and in death.
The guys at the Reformation Theology blog have posted a top 10 list of books that they have read for 2009. In the list is the book featured below, A Treatise on the Law and the Gospel, written by John Colquhoun.
John Colquhoun (1748–1827) was a minister in the Church of Scotland whose sermons and writings reflect those of the Marrow brethren of the Secession church. Colquhoun’s writings are theologically astute and intensely practical. He wrote on the core doctrines of the gospel, particularly on experiential soteriology.
In this book, Colquhoun helps us understand the precise relationship between law and gospel. He also impresses us with the importance of knowing this relationship. Colquhoun especially excels in showing how important the law is as a believer’s rule of life without doing injury to the freeness and fullness of the gospel. By implication, he enables us to draw four practical conclusions: 1) the law shows us how to live, 2) the law as a rule of life combats both antinomianism and legalism, 3) the law shows us how to love, and 4) the law promotes true freedom.
“The law and the gospel are the principal parts of divine revelation; or rather they are the center, sum, and substance of all the other parts of it. Every passage of sacred Scripture is either law or gospel, or is capable of being referred either to the one or to the other . . . If then a man cannot distinguish aright between the law and the gospel, he cannot rightly understand so much as a single article of divine truth. If he does not have spiritual and just apprehensions of the holy law, he cannot have spiritual and transforming discoveries of the glorious gospel; and, on the other hand, if his view of the gospel is erroneous, his notions of the law cannot be right.”
—John Colquhoun
“In this book, Colquhoun helps us understand the precise relationship between law and gospel. He also impresses us with the importance of knowing this relationship. Colquhoun especially excels in showing how important the law is as a believer‘s rule of life without doing injury to the freeness and fullness of the gospel. By implication, he enables us to draw four practical conclusions: 1) the law shows us how to live, 2) the law as a rule of life combats both antinomianism and legalism, 3) the law shows us how to love, and 4) the law promotes true freedom.”
–R. Scott Clark
Contents
1. The Law of God or the Moral Law in General
2. The Law of God as Promulgated to the Israelites from Mount Sinai
3. The Properties of the Moral Law
4. The Rules for Understanding Aright the Ten Commandments
5. The Gospel of Christ
6. The Uses of the Gospel, and of the Law in Subservience to It
7. The Difference between the Law and the Gospel
8. The Agreement between the Law and the Gospel
9. The Establishment of the Law by the Gospel
10. The Believer’s Privilege of Being Dead to the Law as a Covenant of Works
11. The High Obligations under Which Believers Lie
12. The Nature, Necessity, and Desert of Good Works
Douglas Wilson has an ongoing review of the Teenage Vampire series, Twilight, on his blog. He makes some good points in the current installment posted below:
| By Douglas Wilson |
| Wednesday, 09 December 2009 13:01 |
| In my previous post on this, I got a little into the theological weirdness that is pervasive in this Twilight business. This time, I would like to explain why this whole phenomenon gives me the pastoral fantods. I am referring to all the lessons that I don’t want the young ladies in my congregation learning, and which presumably their parents don’t want them learning either. The fact that they are willing to learn this kind of thing from such a book indicates a high level of antecedent neediness — a neediness that was nurtured by fathers, brothers, boyfriends and husbands, and not by Stephenie Meyer. Meyer is just the person who had the presence of mind to make a mint off of it.So let’s talk about how these books train young women to respond to abusive relationships in all the wrong ways. In this chapter, Bella faces up to what she might have to do if Edward Cullen is in fact a vampire.”[One option would be to] tell him to leave me alone — and mean it this time. I was gripped in a sudden agony of despair as I considered that alternative. My mind rejected the pain, quickly skipping on to the next option” (p. 139).Any pain is preferable to the pain of having the destructive male gone. Got that? You can think up a lie to tell the nurses at the ER when you go down there to have that black eye looked at. There has to be another option to quickly skip on to, right?In her dream, when she saw Edward fanged and ready to destroy her, she realized that “even as he called to me with sharp-edged fangs, I feared for him” (p. 139, emphasis in the text).Yeah, what about that? What might happen to the live-in boyfriend thug if somebody found out what he is doing to destroy the girl he is beating up every night? After all, a guy with great abs can probably look pretty good in a wife-beater. The poor buddy needs looking after, he needs someone to fear for him, to cover for him.”And I knew in that I had my answer. I didn’t know if there ever was a choice, really. I was already in too deep” (p. 139). “This decision was ridiculously easy” (p. 140).In too deep is right. Ridiculously easy is right.To pile irony on top of irony, in this chapter Bella is also writing a paper on “whether Shakespeare’s treatment of the female characters [in Macbeth] is misogynistic” (p. 143). This means Meyer knows the word, and presumably what it means. And Meyer acts like Bella knows what it means, even while she walks her step-by-step through what might be called truly “idiot choices for a female.” When she goes to school next time after this “decision,” she is confronted with the fact that Edward is not there, “Desolation hit me with crippling strength” (p. 145). Anything but that. Anything but the absence of the one who wants to hurt me so bad. So sure, foolish parents, encourage your girls to look up to a protagonist like that. What could go wrong? It’s just a fictional book, you stupid Puritan.Before untangling this wicked snarl, let me put a few background observations on the table. In an earlier post, I described this as “cartoon porn for the emotions.” Let me explain what I mean by that. Lust is not a sin that afflicts one half of the human race, leaving the feminine half entirely unaffected. Because men are male and women female, because men are convex and women concave, their desires are correspondingly fitted to their natures. Men want what they want, and women want to be wanted that way. Men desire and women desire to be desired. This is a matter of emphasis, obviously. I am not saying that men don’t have a need to be desired, or that women don’t desire. These desires are both present in both sexes, and they are both weighted differently. And that weight is different enough to drive men and women into very different forms of personal destruction. Men destroy women very differently than women destroy men. But they both do it, and the recipients of these destructive powers are the hormones with feet that are currently frisking around them.
Now Bella is a perfect screen onto which women can project these sorts of desires. She is nondescript; she is klutzy. She is no great beauty; she is ordinary in the extreme. Now take someone like that, someone who does not appear ever to have been desired in any significant way, and put her in a position where she is all of a sudden desired in every significant way. If a woman can be desired in a particular way, Bella is desired in that way. She is desired that way with no practice in handling it, blam, right out of the blue. She is now desired for sex, she is desired for her blood, she is desired as an object to protect, she is desired as an object to destroy, she is desired for her smell, she is desired by multiple predators and buffoons, and on and on it goes. And right at the center of this maelstrom of cosmic lust is a plain Jane high school girl. Now, three guesses why this whole thing is so popular with needy women. Men have to be told, as Proverbs says over and over, that to desire a particular kind of woman is to desire destruction. Women have to be secured against the flip side of this same kind of destructive pattern. To desire to be desired by a certain kind of man is to desire destruction. As wisdom says, all who hate her love death (Prov. 8:36). So gather round, girls, (says Meyer) and let me teach you some stinking lies. Why buy the book? If a man treats you terribly, it is all because he loves you. If a man confesses he might kill you, you should just stay with him forever and a day. If a man abandons you without explanation, it is because he loves you so much. If your lover needs to be changed, it must be possible for you to change him. And anyways, after that doesn’t work out, it would be better to be swallowed up by his problems than to be without him. Anything but going without him. |
