Merry Christmas!

"For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes lying in a manger.' And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, 'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men."

~Luke 2: 12-14

Gloria in excelsis Deo.

The Jaguar-Skeptics

Let us face the obvious fact that most Christians don't like to be noticed for what they really are. In private and among friends we love to expound upon those things that we (very sincerely) believe to be true, but when it comes to those people you work with, or that friend you don't want to offend, or such-and-such group, which may very well be composed of Christians like you, that is generally engaging in talking behind someone's back, or laughing at a joke that is not quite right, our resolve often thins a little. I have laughed along too from time to time.

But this view is downright madness. Its source is common human cowardice, nothing less: the old fear of man. This may be made plainer when we understand what a Christian witness is really like.

Suppose a big group of people was trying to convince itself that jaguars (or lions or tigers or bears or what have you) do not exist. They went to the length or writing books and making vociferous speeches on the subject. Not only this, but they took it upon themselves to fume and take great offense at those stone-age nicompoops who had the cheek to embrace the delirious fancy that wild beasts actually exist. Men may strike lecterns and swear by the existence of Phoenixes, unicorns, gryphons, dragons, and every other invention of the human imagination, but wild-beast-ites are nothing but fundamentalist prudes (since they also embrace those insufferable notions of making preparations against attack and not letting their children run around in the jungle at night), who are actually dragging down society, because they are trying to convince people not to do such liberating things as pull down their walls and use their arrows for firewood.

Now, if you stumbled upon an outlandish group like this, your first reaction would probably be laughter. Your second, after realizing that they were truly serious, would be (since you are but a man) probably disdain. Then one would hope you would feel pity and a sense of urgency for these poor, illusionary souls, cheating themselves with chimerae while danger loomed in the form of those very beasts the belief in which they scoffed at. Certainly you would never feel in the least ashamed at affirming the reality of jaguars in their presence. You would, in fact, cite that fact repeatedly, perhaps thumbing through a biological textbook or the photographs of a naturalist for extra proof. Better yet, you would show them the practical evidence of jaguars: spoor, tracks, recent kills, legends among other peoples, scratch marks on trees, dens, and the like.

I challenge anyone to tell me how our manner in spreading the Christian faith should be significantly different. The main differentiation is that Christianity is so much more important that the threat of death or pain, which might shut us up about jaguars--at least until they started to attack--ought never to stop us from affirming the divinity of Christ or the reality of substitutionary atonement. Certainly public ridicule should not stop us. The souls of men are at stake, not our self-image. The jaguar-believers might have mud slung at them in the street, even be exiled like gypsies, but they would certainly maintain a staunch attitude about their belief and never have the least thought of conformity. If they did, the jaguar-skeptics would crow over their victory, for no one looks more ridiculous than a man who proposes something so stupendously dramatic and life-changing as Christianity by his hearth, and then actually doesn't let it show by the hearth of someone else. Our families already know. It's the other people who had better be able to tell the difference.

~The Musing Protestant

National Symbols

And here I am, back again. Greetings.

It is my intention to muse here, as I ought to do, given my blog's title. I do not intend to take a particular side in this issue at the present moment. I cannot even guarantee the integrity of my postal infrastructure--I may ramble. Bear with me.

The topic of this post was incited by something brought up in the Tabletalk family devotional booklet my family uses in the evenings. Having had several theological or philosophical ideas float through my head that I never quite ended up posting here, I decided that enough is enough and that I should post this here. I want this blog to be much more active.

I said I might ramble. On to what the writer of Tabletalk actually said. He was discussing the phrase "give us day by day our daily bread" from Luke 11: 3. He mentioned that bread, as the staple of the Judean diet in a time when food had to be freshly prepared every day (on account of a paucity of preservation methods), was a nationally-recognized symbol of Life.

This got me thinking about America. We have not only advanced food-preservation techniques but also a ubiquity of food. From tofu to trout, from burgers to bagels, and from chicken to chai tea, we are exposed to a variety of food never shared by another culture until the present day. It is fashionable for any major city to feature restaurants of at least Mexican, Italian, and Asian food. German, French, Arabic, Texan, and so on are also available if one looks in the right places. What this means is that America does not really have a particular staple that symbolizes anything. Followers of the Atkins diet may not find much meaning in "I am the bread of life," and objectors to dairy or sugar products may be little moved by "a land flowing with milk and honey."

Extrapolating this principle a little, I seem to find that America's two most defining traits are these: liberty, and its cousin diversity. Neither of these (I speak of liberty as commonly and I believe wrongly interpreted as the right to do whatever you want) are condusive wires for national symbols. In their cultivation of the common conception of freedom, Americans seem to have lost national symbols, perhaps even national identity, as the bitterly factional elections of the last decade or so have suggested. As I think this through I believe that I am coming down more on one side than another, for it seems to me that America, in its frenetic stranglehold on the concept of diversity, has actually produced division. By constructing artifical barriers between government and religion, between race and race, between crippled and whole, and so on, America has created a nation that is beginning to lose a national identity.

Is this a bad thing? Maybe. I don't know for sure. I do know that what is a powerful symbol for me may not mean much to an African-American slum dweller in Los Angeles or a deconstructionist literary professor in Massachusetts. I'm not saying that we should all be forced to some lowest common denominator of shared standards. But maybe if America started to have more of a sense of itself, we wouldn't have a problem in this department. It took the minds of geniuses to unite us for revolution in 1776, but they did it by appealing to common values. I wonder if even Ben Franklin could do that now.

Thoughts?

Keeping Things in Perspective

Imagine that you live in a broad valley. It is fertile and rich, full of rivers and crops and fruit-trees. There is every imaginable type of land and every imaginable type of person, such that there would be no need to move outside this valley (remember, it is very broad) in order to find a new adventure or a different type of landscape. Above all, this valley is ruled by a perfect King.

This valley has no walls, and there are paths leading out of it. Along the way are warnings, posted at regular intervals. They are varied, and there are hundreds of them, reading like this: "Warning! Pitfalls ahead." "Danger--man-traps." "Wild beasts ahead; turn back." "You are entering inhospitable lands." These become louder and more urgent the more one progresses.

If a man reaches the plateau above, he will find just what these signs predict. If he continues walking he will be harried, bruised, and cut. More warnings signs will appear. If he walks far enough, then of course he has proven he was never a citizen of the valley at all, but this post does not discuss those sort of people.

It probably does not take much mental gymnastics to see that I am making an extended metaphor of temporary wandering in the Christian walk. My point is more than simply illustrative, however, because every Christians knows that he, along with his brothers and sisters in Christ, all wander at times.

There was a guest pastor at our church today, filling in for our regular pastor, who is on vacation/business elsewhere, and this guest pastor's sermon gave me some food for thought. He talked about the parable of the Prodigal Son, but about half his sermon was on the "good son" who never left his father. He made the interesting point that this son is just as estranged from his father as the prodigal son, and--most interesting of all--that the good son obeyed his father in order to keep his father "out of his life." That is, he obeyed his father not out of love for him, but out of a desire to keep his father at a distance.

In the same way, this guest pastor argued, we sometimes obey God in order to keep Him (so we think) out of our affairs. That is, if we are faithful husbands or faithful wives, raise good children, work at successful jobs and never murder, cheat, or steal, God might not really feel the need to impose all those other rules on us like loving our neighbor (as long as help the old lady with her garbage), and so on.

Some of the points he made in this sermon occasioned in me the thought that in this area we have entirely the wrong perspective. Apparently one of the largest effects of our latent sin nature is keeping the wrong mental perspective on information that we know to be true. I know it is wrong to be proud; I know it is wrong to think uncharitable things about an undeserving acquaintance. Yet I have committed both these sins, and sometimes, at least on the surface, I somehow think my life might not be as "fun" if I completely repudiated them. I know, intellectually, better than that. But my perspective is off.

It is alluring to climb to the top of a valley and see what is there, but there are some places we were not meant to go. When sin draws us, it can mask itself under the pretense of a man with keys, releasing us from some kind of internment, as though the Christian life is a series of bars. But the Christian life places no different kind of restraint on a man than my mother put on me in my youth when I tried to cross the road in front of a car I did not notice. It is time that we move from the intellectual knowledge that the Christian life, life in the valley, is superior, into the practical application. Next time sin comes knocking, think about this. There are two kinds of restraint in the spiritual world: Satan's gaol and God's mansion. There is no such thing as completely independent freedom, as though we move through this world without the guiding hand of any external force. Humans are created to worship and serve. It is time we stop thinking of God's laws as some kind of Divine grounding, keeping us at home when we could be having fun with our friends. They are the bonds of love.

~Connor, the Musing Protestant

Training Through Prayer

I may complete the post below some time, but for now, the sermon today inspired me to write about another subject.

Let me begin with an analogy. What is it that makes a warrior successful and feared? Strength, dexterity, reflexes, and wisdom are all necessary components. But these will not be honed to perfection without the one constant necessicity of every pursuit: training. A warrior will submit to discipline. He will discuss with his trainers and with himself, receiving their instruction and exchanging information and ideas. But above all, he will practice motions, strength-building exercises, and practical scenarios again, and again, and again. He will devote himself to his labor, however tedious. And then his enemies will run (and he will catch them, for he has run more diligently than they) and his friends will doff their caps or bow in respect, because he has been steadfast in the application of his discipline.

We are not all physical warriors, nor is it necessary to be so. But we Christians are all spiritual warriors. It is not an army to which one simply volunteers. And the battles will be fought. Nonetheless, though everyone is a soldier, not everyone is really ready to fight. God will protect His elect from falling away (to continue the physical analogy, that would be like either dying or being captured), but many can hardly strike one successful blow offensively.

Physical warfare requires physical training. It so follows that spiritual warfare requires spiritual training. One aspect--very important and also very neglected--of this training is prayer. Prayer is the discussion, or rather the communion, with our Commander, God. It is where we bring before him our needs--areas in our spiritual warfare where our skill is woefully lacking, or combat zones beyond our control to deal with. God will reward this kind of communion with training and discipline, via the Scriptures and the Holy Spirit.

The Scriptures and the Holy Spirit are the tools by which we are strengthened, but prayer has a strengthening aspect too, and it is also the means by which we derive the most benefit from those tools. Searching the Scriptures without prayer is like walking into a training field with an instructor, and thinking one knows how to use the equipment. The result will probably be wrongful application that may take considerable un-learning to rectify.

Pray without ceasing, and God will mold you into a fearsome warrior from whom the servants of Satan flee.

~Connor

God's Sovereignty in Election: The Logical Argument

You all thought I would never update this, did you not? To be sure, I have been sadly tardy. I have thought of writing posts on here often, but schoolwork and novel-writing always conspired to intervene. Let us hope this post makes up for lost time, at least in some small way.

As I said, I am going to post about the question of God's sovereignty. Far be it from me to claim that I have sounded this topic to its depths (no one can), or even to the depths so far reached by human endeavors. But I shall do my best. If I say anything spurious, please correct me.

So far as I can see, there are two primary camps on this subject. The first is the Total Sovereignty view, i.e., that God elected some (not all) to salvation, based on no merit or potential of their own, entirely in His own foreknowledge. The rest He condemns to Hell for their transgressions.

The second camp or position says that the above view actually portrays an unloving God--and since an absence of love is contrary to God's character, this state of affairs cannot be the case. The most common argument for this position is that God--pardon me for using an old and tired phrase--'looked through the corridors of time' to see who would choose Him, and, based on that choice, then saved them.

My allegiance is with the first camp, and the purpose of this post is to answer, as best as God may enable me, the objections of the second camp.

This can further be divided into two categories, however: an argument from logic and an argument from Scripture. I'll tackle the logical argument in this post, and the Scriptural one in the next, though of course there will be overlap between both.

So first, I think it is safe to assume that those in the Corridors of Time camp believe all things came from God. Those who do not need more than a post from me on God's sovereignty. Assuming that, then, an inevitable problem of causality arises. They say that God looked and saw who would choose him. But for moral choices to be made, they need a causer. The immediate causer of that moral choice is the soul. But the creator of our souls is God. Souls are things; all things come from God; therefore God created the soul. And so the ability to choose God must have from from Him.

Some may object to this as mere hair-splitting, but it is not. Simply trumpeting effects without establishing a cause is no argument at all. I believe that, at rock bottom, a so-called "circular" argument is necessary--i.e., God exists because He says he does--but then I also believe that God is above logic and that circularity is no longer a problem at that point. But more on that, perhaps, in another post.

On this level, as I said, trumpeting effects without establishing a cause is no argument at all. It would be like this. Suppose you have a son with blue eyes. You and your wife both have brown eyes. A neighbor notices this and says, "Oh, John has blue eyes, and neither of you do--it must be a recessive gene, huh?"

"No," you reply. "There is no history of blue eyes in our family. He chose them at birth."

That would be, of course, absurd. Infants--or anyone, for that matter--cannot choose their eye color. To say that young John could do as much would be ascribing to him a power he does not possess.

And, if the implications are faced squarely, that is the same thing the Corridor of Time campers are, no doubt mostly unconsciously, doing. To say that God saw who would choose Him, i.e., independently, is ascribing some power to mankind which the Bible (see, told you these would overlap) gives no room for. We have no more power to choose salvation than we have to choose our own eye color.

Again, their purpose is not usually to undermine the notion of God's power. There are many sincere Christians in that camp; in fact they are trying to "protect" God from what they see as an attack on His loving character. But they can only do that by ignoring the cause and concentrating only on the effects. And, as I hope I can show in some way in Part II, this "protection" is not needed at all.

~Connor, the Musing Protestant :-)