Real Age

Another of those quizzes. This one asks you to answer a series of questions about your life and health and then tells you your "real" age, as opposed to your biological age, and your life expectancy. It could be valid. It is interesting.

My results:

Biological age:	61
Real age:	53.3
Average life expectancy:	79
Your [my] life expectancy:	86.7

realage.swf

Mark Driscoll

A fascinating description of Mark Driscoll's ministry in Seattle from Christianity Today.

....If he hasn't offended you, you've never read his books or listened to his sermons. On any given Sunday at Mars Hill, it's possible that a visiting fire marshal will get saved. But it's just as likely that a guest will flip him off before walking out.

The spectrum of response speaks to his sharp tongue—his greatest strength and his glaring weakness. But Driscoll also disturbs many fellow evangelicals because he straddles the borders that divide us. His unflinching Reformed theology grates on the church-growth crowd. His plan to grow a large church strikes postmoderns as arrogant. His roots in the emerging church worry Calvinists. No one group can claim him. Maybe that's why they all turn their guns on him. [more]

Some time ago I posted this video from Driscoll about church planting.

Pastor Provocateur | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction

Great Lake

I'm back and paying attention to the blog again after several extremely pleasant days on the western shore of Lake Michigan. My brother and I are both single and retired and thus free to take off somewhere when the weather is good and an opportunity beckons. Both conditions obtained this week. It was a good time. Fortunately, we enjoy many of the same things.

The picture on the left was taken an hour or so after sunrise this morning. The one below yesterday afternoon. I was re-reading one of Dick Francis's early thrillers, Bonecrack. Almost all of his mysteries are set in the context of horse racing in England, and I enjoy his early ones the most. Enough time had passed since I last read it that I remembered very little of the plot. The sun was warm, but there were too many annoying flies - repellent goes in the bag next time.

When not reading, we were walking or eating and drinking. Our favorite restaurant in Sheboygan is a place called Rupp's, which probably hasn't changed very much since the middle of the last century. We stayed at a place called Blue Harbor, quite new and right on the lake. School has started and we were there on weekdays, so it was very quiet [and significantly less expensive than usual]. The place has a water park and caters to families with children but there were few about. It was peaceful and very relaxing.

"Don't know much about history..."

The teaching of US History and civics is failing. High schools do it poorly [classes in politics and government are seldom required], and colleges do nothing to rectify the ignorance. From USA Today:

Students don't know much about history, and colleges aren't adding enough to their civic literacy, says a report out today.

The study from the non-profit Intercollegiate Studies Institute shows that less than half of college seniors knew that Yorktown was the battle that ended the American Revolution or that NATO was formed to resist Soviet expansion. Overall, freshmen averaged 50.4% on a wide-ranging civic literacy test; seniors averaged 54.2%, both failing scores if translated to grades.

Some selected specifics:

• Harvard seniors had the highest average at 69.6%, 5.97 points higher than its freshmen but still a D+. A Harvard senior posted the only perfect score.
• ....Yale, with the highest-scoring freshmen (68.94%), along with Princeton, Duke and Cornell, were among eight schools with freshmen outscoring seniors.
• "Several of the colleges at the lower end of our survey are some of the most prestigious in the country, with average tuition, room and board somewhere north of $40,000 a year," ....

One of the responses is to indict high schools:

Still, "in many cases, these students are coming from high schools where the subject matter has already been covered," notes Tony Pals of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. "It would be a waste of their tuition dollars to sit through the courses again."

...William Galston, Brookings Institution senior fellow of governance studies....: "Less is being expected of secondary and post-secondary education in the way of civic education, and because less is expected, less is achieved," he says.

You can take the test here. As a former history and politics teacher I ought to have done well, and I did - my score was 93.33%, A- on the scale I used to use. I missed four questions - three of them having to do with economics: Questions #39, #53, #58 and #60. Missing even those is embarrassing.

College students struggle on history test - USATODAY.com

Heaven and Hell

Via Challies.com, sermon series by Edward Donnelly about Heaven [from 1999] and Hell [from 1997]. Challies reviewed the book that came of these sermons, Biblical Teaching on the Doctrines of Heaven and Hell, here.

A La Carte (9/18) :: Challies Dot Com SideBlog

Young evangelicals adrift

Ignorance of important theological distinctions, denominational origins, and the Modernist/Fundamentalist dispute seems prevalent among young Evangelicals, says Dean Curry of Messiah College. He is concerned.

We are all always subject to being "...tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine..." We are also all influenced by the spirit of the age - and tolerance for other opinions, often meaning not caring - is very much a part of that spirit in our age. It is, in fact, vitally important to understand how doctrine came to be, and why the lines were drawn where they were. There may well be disputes that no longer matter - but it is impossible to know unless the reasons those disputes occurred are also known. As the founder of Faber College wisely observed, "Knowledge is Good."

In the October First Things, in an article titled "Evangelical Amnesia," [not online] Curry writes:

.... Without theological moorings, young evangelicals are without a spiritual rudder and thus at the mercy of the prevailing winds of personal feeling and the cultural zeitgeist. Indeed, as young evangelicals have drifted from denominational and theological moorings, it is no wonder that many have found haven in postmodern categories of the "emerging church" movement that, in the words of one of its enthusiasts, encourages "a new way of doing church and being the church, one that resonates not only with ... the first fully postmodern generation."

This new way of doing church finds its focus in the postmodern holy grails of tolerance, diversity, generosity, openness, inclusion, antidogmatism, and subjectivity. Traditionally understood, Christian theology is about drawing lines between truth and error. Postmodern Christian theology, however, is suspicious of line-drawing, emphasizing instead epistemological skepticism and relational integrity.

To be sure, the mosaic of contemporary American evangelicalism defies easy generalization. The research of Smith and others suggests that American young people remain religious and that predictions of the total secularization of American youth culture are premature. Nevertheless, the fading light of theological literacy among younger American evangelicals raises questions about American evangelicalism's century-long role as the bearer of Christian orthodoxy among American Protestants. Without a clear Christology and understanding of the Church, biblical authority, common grace, and soteriology, it is no wonder that young evangelicals are increasingly unable to articulate and defend the historic Christian worldview and are drawn instead to postmodern ways of thinking.

The damage done here is not only to theological fidelity but also to Christian apologetics. To a generation for whom being tolerant and tolerable is the sine qua non of social etiquette, there is little motivation to defend robustly a distinctive Christian theology. Pressing, as it does, absolute truth claims, traditional Christian apologetics is bound to offend the embracing postmodern sensibilities of open-ended theological hospitality.

It should not be surprising that the faith commitment of these young evangelicals is so shallow. ....

First Things, October, 2007, pp. 15-17

C.S. Lewis on Tyranny

More C.S. Lewis. The Acton Institute quotes him:

Here’s justly famous quote from C. S. Lewis on why the danger posed by a nanny government can be much more oppressive than that posed by the consolidation of economic power:

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

They also provide a link to the excellent essay from which the quotation was taken: "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment," an essay I regularly used in my high school political science classes when we were discussing the legal system and theories of punishment for criminals.

Lewis on Moral Tyranny - Acton Institute PowerBlog

THE WAR

PBS provides an extended preview of The War, Ken Burns new series about World War II and how it was experienced by Americans. The series begins on PBS one week from today, September 23. Ken Burns says his intention is to tell people what war is like, through the direct experiences of those who were in it. Burns:

The War is a kind of bottom-up, experiential look at the Second World War told not from the familiar perspectives of celebrity generals or politicians or an overweening interest in strategy or tactics or the distraction of weaponry and guns but from so-called ordinary people. There are no experts in the film. If you weren't in the war or waiting anxiously for someone to come back, you're not in our film. ....

We're losing 1,000 [World War II] veterans a day in this country, our kids think we fought with the Germans against the Russians, it's horrible, and I couldn't abide. I'm in the memory business, and each time a person dies, it's a whole library of memories that leave. ....

PBS.org: The War, US News: The War

Screwtape

Last January Dr. Bruce Edwards answered thirteen questions about C.S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters for a documentary on the subject. Lewis wrote that imagining himself into the way a devil might think was a very unpleasant ordeal. Edwards explains what he wanted to achieve by doing so:

Lewis’s main intention is to illuminate the psychology of temptation for believers—but also to illustrate the severe limitations and outright ignorance that the underworld has of God’s purposes. Screwtape never understands why the Enemy loves the patient, even to the point of giving up his life for another.

He also wanted to show that there was no “romance” in rebellion, and that those who align themselves with hell are not only choosing the losing side, they are choosing the most banal, boring, bloated, uninteresting creatures. Along the way, he uses Screwtape to point out the foibles and stupidities of human life—identifying the pressure points of pride and vanity undergirding so much of our day to day living.

Its brilliance lies in depicting the everyday and showing how from a demonic point of view, the devotion and care Christians show to their fellow men and women, mirrors of the love God has shown to them, is unfathomable to the desperately lost and unreflectively wicked.

Later Dr. Edwards gives what he believes to be the "most important lesson to be learned from The Screwtape Letters."

That satanic lies can be resisted and refuted by steadfastly holding on to the truth of Who God is, and who we are in Him, and by being knowledgeable and vigilant to oppose the devil’s schemes, through prayer, Scripture, worship, and the company we keep.

Those interested in Lewis will also find Edward's blog, Further Up & Further In both interesting and rewarding.

Edwards very much liked The Company They Keep, the book about the Inklings which I noted in an earlier post, and gives a brief review here.

(And no, this is not becoming a blog exclusively about the Inklings and C.S. Lewis. I've just been coming across a lot of good stuff on those subjects recently.)

Further Up & Further In » Screwtape: What’s Going On?

Inklings

The Times Literary Supplement has a review of a new book, The Company They Keep, about the Inklings and the influence they had on one another - and particularly how they influenced one another's work. From the review:

Tolkien and Lewis formed the spine of the Inklings, regularly convening to read and discuss one another’s work in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College. There were nineteen members in all, and Glyer excels at depicting their world, with its petty rivalries, joshing honesty (“he is ugly as a chimpanzee”, wrote Lewis of fellow Inkling Charles Williams), its wit and learning and championship of scholarship for its own sake. The Inklings were often supportive and sympathetic (“the inexhaustible fertility of the man’s imagination amazes me”, wrote Lewis in 1949 on receipt of another installment of The Lord of the Rings), but were capable of ferocious criticism if it was felt that a member had done anything less than his best (“You can do better than that. Better Tolkien, please!”). Tempers must surely have become frayed at times – as Tolkien became unyieldingly critical of Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia (“about as bad as can be”) or as the English don Hugo Dyson met the latest bulletin from Middle Earth by (according to Tolkien’s son Christopher) “lying on the couch, and lolling and shouting and saying, ‘Oh God, no more Elves’”.

Not that all of them were ever present at the Magdalen reading meetings: often no more than six or seven would turn up, while the rest preferred to save themselves for the more raucous social gatherings in the Oxford pub The Eagle and Child.

Inkling James Dundas-Grant recalls a typical scene:

“we sat in a small back room with a fine coal fire in winter . . . . back and forth the conversation would flow. Latin tags flying around. Homer quoted in the original to make a point . . . . Tolkien jumping up and down, declaiming in Anglo-Saxon.”

Endearingly eccentric though this might sound, the group have been accused of cliquey provincialism, of being hermetically sealed in their nook at “The Bird and Baby” from those evolutions which were occurring in the wider world of literature. John Wain, a former pupil of Lewis’s and an occasional Inkling himself, wrote a hostile account of the group in 1962, stating that they were “politically conservative, not to say reactionary; in religion...in art, frankly hostile to any manifestation of the ‘modern’ spirit”. ....

Yet this mistrust of modernity was part of the group’s essential spirit. Most of the Inklings were veterans of the Trenches and had little cause to applaud a world descending once again into conflict. The image that Glyer’s expert account will sometimes conjure up, of ageing scholars swapping tales with a pint of ale in hand, seems tellingly familiar – reminiscent of a convocation of hobbits back from the war and living out their days in comfort in the Shire. .... (more)

[Thanks to Mere Comments for the reference]

Down the pub with Tolkien and Lewis - TLS Highlights - Times Online

The Chasm

Another of C.S. Lewis's lectures found online: De Descriptione Temporum, his inaugural lecture upon appointment as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University in 1954.

I am very leery of the way the term "post-modern" is used (e.g. the post below), and part of my skepticism derives from my reading of Lewis. Here and elsewhere he does an effective job of making many of the traditional divisions that we learned in history and literature classes seem very artificial.

All lines of demarcation between what we call "periods" should be subject to constant revision. Would that we could dispense with them altogether! As a great Cambridge historian has said: "Unlike dates, periods are not facts. They are retrospective conceptions that we form about past events, useful to focus discussion, but very often leading historical thought astray." ....

In this lecture he identifies himself as a representative — "a specimen" — of Old Western Culture, a culture that has had more continuity than not until quite recently:

... It is by these steps that I have come to regard as the greatest of all divisions in the history of the West that which divides the present from, say, the age of Jane Austen and Scott. The dating of such things must of course be rather hazy and indefinite. No one could point to a year or a decade in which the change indisputably began, and it has probably not yet reached its peak. But somewhere between us and the Waverley Novels, somewhere between us and Persuasion, the chasm runs. ...

Lewis offers four reasons for this argument. First, that politics — how we are governed — has changed:

In all previous ages that I can think of the principal aim of rulers, except at rare and short intervals, was to keep their subjects quiet, to forestall or extinguish widespread excitement and persuade people to attend quietly to their several occupations. And on the whole their subjects agreed with them. They even prayed (in words that sound curiously old-fashioned) to be able to live "a peaceable life in all godliness and honesty" and "pass their time in rest and quietness". But now the organisation of mass excitement seems to be almost the normal organ of political power.

Secondly, in the arts:

I do not think that any previous age produced work which was, in its own time, as shatteringly and bewilderingly new as that of the Cubists, the Dadaists, the Surrealists, and Picasso has been in ours. And I am quite sure that this is true of the art I love best, that is, of poetry. .... In the whole history of the West, from Homer — I might almost say from the Epic of Gilgamesh there has been no bend or break in the development of poetry comparable to this. ....

Third, what he calls the "un-christening" of the West — not a reversion to paganism or mysticism, but to a "post-Christian" society:

A post-Christian man is not a Pagan; you might as well think that a married woman recovers her virginity by divorce. The post-Christian is cut off from the Christian past and therefore doubly from the Pagan past.

Finally, he cites the impact of technology, along with the popular understanding of Darwin — the sense that what is newer is better, of the inevitability of progress and the relative worthlessness of what is old:

From the old push-bike to the motor-bike and thence to the little car; from gramophone to radio and from radio to television; from the range to the stove; these are the very stages of their pilgrimage. But whether from this cause or from some other, assuredly that approach to life which has left these footprints on our language is the thing that separates us most sharply from our ancestors and whose absence would strike us as most alien if we could return to their world. Conversely, our assumption that everything is provisional and soon to be superseded, that the attainment of goods we have never yet had, rather than the defence and conservation of those we have already, is the cardinal business of life, would most shock and bewilder them if they could visit ours.

This division in the history of the West has made much of the past incomprehensible. I'm doubtful that the "post-moderns" will be much help in recovering it, since much of what they dismiss belongs to it.

De Descriptione Temporum

"Take off your shoes..."

A new book by Ben Witherington, Making a Meal of It: Rethinking the Theology of the Lord's Supper, is intended "...to tease your minds into active thought, and challenge some of the basic assumptions that lead to the practice of these things in ways that don't actually comport with what the NT says or suggests...."

Baptists [Witherington is a Methodist] tend to view Baptism and the Lord's Supper as symbols rather than sacraments - with an implicit "only" in front of the word "symbol." But a symbol stands for something, and re-thinking the significance of what these acts represent ought to remove the "only."

Witherington writes about his book at his blog and offers some good reasons for considering seriously whether we should continue doing what we do:

When we approach the sacraments we need to have the approach that Moses had with the burning bush - it is God in Christ we are encountering here, and a high and holy moment is involved. Take off your shoes, and repent of your sins. Secondly, we have entered what is called post-modernism, and in a post-modern age mystery and ritual are already playing a much bigger role in various venues than in the past. There are many young people specifically choosing to go to churches where there is liturgy, drama, mystery, and the very regular practice of the sacraments. When worship, practically speaking, serves as the major calling card and tool of evangelism in our culture, it behooves us to figure out what moves us and leads us into the very presence of the Lord, and seek to better facilitate that.

Ben Witherington: Making a Meal of It-- Rethinking the Theology of the Lord's Supper

Seventh Day Baptists are not the same

The Seventh Day Baptist denomination, to which I belong, is small and, because of its name, often confused with the much larger and better known Seventh-day Adventists. A post at SDB Forums has once again emphasized that error. There are really quite a few differences - one of which is that Adventists are not Baptists. Here is a comparison of the beliefs of Seventh Day Baptists with those of Seventh-day Adventists. For those with sufficient interest: the SDB Statement of Belief and the SDA Fundamental Beliefs. Also a brief history of Seventh Day Baptists.

SDB/SDA Compare

Giving God the first fruits of your time

In the course of an article with good advice for Christian college students, Kevin Offner suggests this:

Take the idea of the Sabbath seriously. Busyness is one of the greatest idols of contemporary America and when we purpose to do no work one day out of seven, this idol loses some of its hold on us. In the Ten Commandments we read, “Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work . . .” (Exodus 20:9-10) The point here is not legalism, but rather that a habit of intentionally refraining from work is a continual reminder to us of our need for God.

Why not keep a day a week (Sunday is a good choice) to worship with others, rest, write snail-mail letters, take long walks, drop in on friends, read fiction or play with children? Spend concentrated time in prayer, reflecting on your last week and preparing for the upcoming week. Keeping a day a week to rest is giving God the first fruits of your time, showing him that you trust him to help you accomplish all he is calling you to do.

Making the most out of college - StudentSoul.org

To believe as He believed

Did Jesus believe in the "verbal, plenary inspiration" of the Scriptures? J.P. Moreland says he did, and makes the case at Scriptorium.

What Did Jesus Believe About Scripture? | Scriptorium Daily

More about Madeleine L’Engle

From GetReligion, a good, informative, entry about Madeleine L'Engle.

Wherever L’Engle went, people kept asking her to explain her beliefs, from heaven to hell, from sex to salvation, from feminism to the arts. The writer did not hide her views, but rarely used the kind of language that so-called “Christian writers” were supposed to use.

Thus, her career was defined by a paradox: Many of her strongest admirers were evangelical Christians, as were most of her fiercest critics. Thus, it’s symbolic that she donated her personal notes and papers to Wheaton College — the Rev. Billy Graham’s alma mater — where they are part of a collection best known for its materials about the life of Christian apologist C.S. Lewis. [more]

Update, 9/14: There is good column in the Wall Street Journal today by Meghan Cox Gurdon about "reading Madeleine L'Engle as a child and as an adult."

A child is inclined to take away very different lessons from a novel than is an adult. For one thing, "A Wrinkle in Time" is infused with Christian faith to such a degree that, were it newly published today, it would probably be relegated to the religious section of the bookstore.

...As a heathen child, I missed entirely the biblical references, the significant mention of Jesus and the way a loving God's sovereignty over the universe is understood even as the characters battle an expanding force of pure evil. Meg's father, at one point, urges her to be courageous in confronting IT. "We were sent here for something," he tells her, echoing Romans 8:28. "And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose."

Clearly, American society wasn't as twitchy about Judeo-Christian content 40-odd years ago. In fact, over the decades "A Wrinkle in Time" has been criticized as insufficiently Christian, a claim that pained its Episcopalian author. [more]

Tesser well, Madeleine L’Engle » GetReligion

Harry Potter and the Christian critics

Mark Shea, in First Things, answers arguments critical of the Harry Potter books of "the sort one only finds in the hothouse of Extremely Earnest Conservative Christianity," and concludes:

One need not find the novels to their taste. One can complain about Rowling's style, etc. But the assertion that the books are spiritually dangerous or anti-Christian is, in my view, unfounded and, indeed, counterfactual.

FIRST THINGS: On the Square » Blog Archive » Harry Potter and the Christian Critics

Science and religion

The current issue of First Things includes "God and Evolution" by Avery Cardinal Dulles. [The entire essay is available online.] He is concerned primarily with the Roman Catholic response to the issues raised by Darwinism and identifies three approaches, described briefly, and then summarized:

.... All three of these Christian perspectives on evolution affirm that God plays an essential role in the process, but they conceive of God’s role in different ways. According to theistic Darwinism, God initiates the process by producing from the first instant of creation (the Big Bang) the matter and energies that will gradually develop into vegetable, animal, and eventually human life on this earth and perhaps elsewhere. According to Intelligent Design, the development does not occur without divine intervention at certain stages, producing irreducibly complex organs. According to the teleological view, the forward thrust of evolution and its breakthroughs into higher grades of being depend upon the dynamic presence of God to his creation. Many adherents of this school would say that the transition from physicochemical existence to biological life, and the further transitions to animal and human life, require an additional input of divine creative energy.

Dulles, himself, inclines to the third position. Note that none of these arguments is compatible with the young earth, seven-literal-day, Creationist position.

Inevitably, his discussion of evolution raises the broader question of the relationship between religion and science generally, and the contention by some that science is the exclusive way to know and that religion is simply superstition. Dulles responds in the latter part of the essay:

Some contemporary scientific atheists are so caught up in the methodology of their discipline that they imagine it must be the only method for solving every problem. But other methods are needed for grappling with questions of another order. Science and technology (science’s offspring) are totally inadequate in the field of morality. While science and technology vastly increase human power, power is ambivalent. It can accomplish good or evil; the same inventions can be constructive or destructive.

The tendency of science, when it gains the upper hand, is to do whatever lies within its capacity, without regard for moral constraints. As we have experienced in recent generations, technology uncontrolled by moral standards has visited untold horrors on the world. To distinguish between the right and wrong use of power, and to motivate human beings to do what is right even when it does not suit their convenience, requires recourse to moral and religious norms. The biddings of conscience make it clear that we are inescapably under a higher law that requires us to behave in certain ways and that judges us guilty if we disobey it. We would turn in vain to scientists to inform us about this higher law.

Some evolutionists contend that morality and religion arise, evolve, and persist according to Darwinian principles. Religion, they say, has survival value for individuals and communities. But this alleged survival value, even if it be real, tells us nothing about the truth or falsity of any moral or religious system. Since questions of this higher order cannot be answered by science, philosophy and theology still have an essential role to play.

Justin Barrett, an evolutionary psychologist now at Oxford, is also a practicing Christian. He believes that an all-knowing, all-powerful, and perfectly good God crafted human beings to be in loving relationship with him and with one another. “Why wouldn’t God,” he asks, “design us in such a way as to find belief in divinity quite natural?” Even if these mental phenomena can be explained scientifically, the psychological explanation does not mean that we should stop believing. “Suppose that science produces a convincing account for why I think my wife loves me,” he writes. “Should I then stop believing that she does?”

A metaphysics of knowledge can take us further in the quest for religious truth. It can give reasons for thinking that the natural tendency to believe in God, manifest among all peoples, does not exist in vain. Biology and psychology can examine the phenomena from below. But theology sees them from above, as the work of God calling us to himself in the depths of our being. We are, so to speak, programmed to seek eternal life in union with God, the personal source and goal of everything that is true and good. This natural desire to gaze upon him, while it may be suppressed for a time, cannot be eradicated.

Science can cast a brilliant light on the processes of nature and can vastly increase human power over the environment. Rightly used, it can notably improve the conditions of life here on earth. Future scientific discoveries about evolution will presumably enrich religion and theology, since God reveals himself through the book of nature as well as through redemptive history. Science, however, performs a disservice when it claims to be the only valid form of knowledge, displacing the aesthetic, the interpersonal, the philosophical, and the religious.

The recent outburst of atheistic scientism is an ominous sign. If unchecked, this arrogance could lead to a resumption of the senseless warfare that raged in the nineteenth century, thus undermining the harmony of different levels of knowledge that has been foundational to our Western civilization. By contrast, the kind of dialogue between evolutionary science and theology proposed by John Paul II can overcome the alienation and lead to authentic progress both for science and for religion.

FIRST THINGS: God and Evolution

Luther, Calvin and Predestination

Internet Monk questions a Lutheran, Josh Strodtbeck, about God's sovereignty and the differences between the Calvinist and Lutheran approaches to the doctrine. In his answer to what appears to be the beginning of a series of questions and responses, Strodtbeck notes that:

...for Lutherans, divine sovereignty isn’t a significant driving force in theology. As we see it, God’s attributes are in some sense inscrutable. Theology begins and lives where God is known, which is in Christ given to us in the Word and the Sacraments, not in abstract formulations of attributes or rigorous, logically consistent assertions about the nature of divine decrees.

The Internet Monk also links to a description of Luther's position on predestination compared to Calvin's. In that comparison, after a description of the Calvinist position and responses to it, Don Matzat quotes Luther:

A dispute about predestination should be avoided entirely... I forget everything about Christ and God when I come upon these thoughts and actually get to the point to imagining that God is a rogue. We must stay in the word, in which God is revealed to us and salvation is offered, if we believe him. But in thinking about predestination, we forget God . . However, in Christ are hid all the treasures (Col. 2:3); outside him all are locked up. Therefore, we should simply refuse to argue about election.

Such a disputation is so very displeasing to God that he has instituted Baptism, the spoken Word, and the Lord’s Supper to counteract the temptation to engage in it. In these, let us persist and constantly say, I am baptized I believe in Jesus. I care nothing about the disputation concerning predestination.

Martin Luther did not know of the confusion and contentions that would later exist among Christians and the major heresies such as Universalism and the rebirth of Pelagianism that would arise as the result of the debates over the doctrine of predestination. If he had known, he most certainly would have reminded us of his words: "For this you should know: All such suggestions and disputes about predestination are surely of the devil."

Internet Monk: God's Sovereignty in Lutheranism, Martin Luther and the Doctrine of Predestination by Don Matzat

Intellectual heresy

In the issue of Time dated September 8, 1947, almost exactly sixty years ago, the cover article was "Don v. Devil," and the picture on the cover, as you can see, was identified as "Oxford's C.S. Lewis, His Heresy: Christianity." The article begins:

The lecturer, a short, thickset man with a ruddy face and a big voice, was coming to the end of his talk. Gathering up his notes and books, he tucked his horn rimmed spectacles into the pocket of his tweed jacket and picked up his mortarboard. Still talking — to the accompaniment of occasional appreciative laughs and squeals from his audience — he leaned over to return the watch he bad borrowed from a student in the front row. As he ended his final sentence, he stepped off the platform.

The maneuver gained him a head start on the rush of students down the center aisle. Once in the street, he strode rapidly — his black gown billowing behind his grey flannel trousers — to the nearest pub for a pint of ale.

Clive Staples Lewis was engaged in his full-time and favorite job — the job of being an Oxford don in the Honour School of English Language & Literature, a Fellow and tutor of Magdalen College and the most popular lecturer in the University. To watch him downing his pint at the Eastgate (his favorite pub), or striding, pipe in mouth, across the deer park, a stranger would not be likely to guess that C.S. Lewis is also a best-selling author and one of the most influential spokesmen for Christianity in the English-speaking world. (read the article)

Many of Lewis's best known books had not yet been written in 1947, although The Screwtape Letters, portions of Mere Christianity, and the space trilogy were in print. Miracles was about to be published. The article provides a reasonable introduction to his ideas, and a favorable one.

At the time there were a number of well-known authors and poets who were identified with orthodox Christianity — among them Auden, T.S. Eliot, and Dorothy L. Sayers. It had become intellectually respectable to be a Christian. At the end of the Time article Lewis is quoted as warning that this was a fashion — and fashions change:

Recently in Oxford's lively undergraduate magazine, Cherwell, he wrote: "Perhaps no one would deny that Christianity is now 'on the map' among the younger intelligentsia, as it was not, say, in 1920. Only freshmen now talk as if the anti-Christian position were self-evident.... [Yet] we must remember that widespread and lively interest in the subject is precisely what we call a fashion.... Whatever...mere fashion has given us, mere fashion will presently withdraw. The real conversions will remain, but nothing else will. In that sense we may be on the brink of a real, permanent Christian revival: but it will work slowly and obscurely in small groups. The present sunshine...is certainly temporary. The grain must be got into the barn before the wet weather comes."

Don v. Devil -- TIME