Our first Christmas tree

Esther and I have spent the evening setting it up.  The challenge is always getting the lights evenly stationed around the tree (not too hidden, not too obvious) and then run out just in time as you get to the top (which is always difficult because it gets narrow more quickly than you realize).  Usually I have to snake it back down, but this year was a complete success on the first try.

I love Christmas.  My favorite holiday by far.  Its fun to be in our new home and getting set up!

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The Trinity and Arbitrariness

I used to struggle with the doctrine of the Trinity because of a feeling of arbitrariness – why 3?  If God has existed from eternity past in a plurality of persons, why not 30 persons in the Godhead, or 300?  How can what is most basic and before all else be one thing and not another?

But recently it popped into my head: why 1, either?  I had been thinking of a uni-personal God as the “normal” way for God to be, and a tri-personal God as an aberration from that.  But why is 1 more “normal” than 3 in 1?  Why is strict unity more basic than complex unity?  Why should infinite things be like we expect them, when all we have ever known are finite things?  Why should I have any notion of what God should be like to begin with?

It is infinitely comforting that God is different from what I ever could have guessed.  If He were never difficult or surprising, He would not be God.

“The incarnation is so unique that (contrary to someone like Kierkegaard) it cannot even be explained as an absurdity, for that would imply not only that the limits of our minds can circumscribe God’s rationality, but also that we are in a position to know in advance what is possible or impossible with God.”  -George Hunsinger, summarizing Barth’s theology in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, 131.

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Machen on the Virgin Birth

I got a bunch of new books tonight in the mail tonight, mostly commentaries and other books I’ll be using for my ministry here.  One that I threw in out of interest was Gresham Machen’s The Virgin Birth of Christ, which I’ve been spending the evening reading.  I can already begin to see why its a classic.  Machen is such a greater writer – constantly quotable.  In the book he shows how organically connected the doctrine of the virgin birth is to the whole Christian gospel, and how important it is as an expression of its supernatural character.  Though the bulk of the book is devoted to a defense of this doctrine, he does address its significance for the Christian in the conclusion, showing that it highlights the supernatural character of the gospel, reveals one’s view toward the authority of Scripture, clarifies the nature of the incarnation, and points to Jesus’ sinless exclusion from Adam’s corporate guilt.  Interestingly, in this section he makes a similar kind of argument about the virgin birth that N.T. Wright has made more recently about the resurrection, namely, that its truth is the best explanation for the way and the time in which it came to believed by so many.

Here is a favorite quote:

“Our knowledge of the virgin birth, therefore, is important because it fixes for us the time of the incarnation. And what comfort that gives to our souls! Marcion, the second-century dualist, was very severe upon those who thought that the Son of God was born as a man; he poured out the vials of his scorn upon those who brought Christ into connection with the birth-pangs and the nine months’ time. But we, unlike Marcion and his modern disciples, glory just in the story of those things. The eternal Son of God, He through whom the universe was made, did not despise the virgin’s womb! What a wonder is there! It is not strange that it has always given offence to the natural man. But in that wonder we find God’s redeeming love, and in that babe who lay in Mary’s womb we find our Saviour who thus became man to die for our sins, and bring us into peace with God” (394).

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Boethius (2): Love, Reason, and God

I’ve been thinking lately about the difference between a Christian view of love and reason and a naturalistic view of love and reason.  In a Christian worldview, the fundamental reality is the triune God.  Within the being of this one God, love and reason have been going on forever among the three persons of the Godhead, the Father, Son, and Spirit.  Many theologians have even correlated God the Son to the thought or speech (i.e., reason) of God the Father, and God the Spirit to the love that exists between God the Father and God the Son.  This means that love and reason are objectively real and good, and that they predate the universe – that they are, in fact, more basic to reality than even time and space.  For the Christian, therefore, as we love and reason, we are moving closer in to the very core of reality – into that which was before the world, into that which governs the world, into that which will outlast the world.

In the naturalistic worldview, in which matter is all there is, there is no connection between human activities like love and reason and anything ultimate – they have arisen, like all other aspects of our existence, as a result of their ability to help our ancestors survive.  When we experience love and reason, we are moving further away from the core of the reality, into something new and foreign and eccentric.  They are tiny dots amidst an ocean of impersonal chance, the accidental byproducst of meaningless clashings and struggles, ultimately reducible to chemical events in our brains.  They did not predate humanity and they will not postdate it.  Reality will one day swallow them up forever, like a computer eventually overcoming a glitch or virus.

As I’ve been reading in Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy, the poem concluding Book II highlights this connection between the human experience of love and what ultimately stands behind the universe.  This is a worldview that not only has explanatory power, but is beautiful:

What governs earth and sea and sky

is nothing less than love

whose tight rein if it ever slackened

would leave creation in chaos

of civil war’s utter ruin.

Love binds people too,

in matrimony’s sacred bonds

where chaste lovers are met,

and friends cement their trust and friendship.

How happy is mankind

if the love that orders the stars above

rules, too, in your hearts.

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The True Older Brother

We’re going through a series on Sunday mornings based on Tim Keller’s book The Prodigal God.  We’re learning from Jesus’ parable in Luke 15:11-32 that breaking the rules isn’t the only way to be alienated from God, and that all of us stand in desperate need of the grace that God prodigally gives us in the gospel.  This week I wanted to help students see how Jesus is true older brother who spends his inheritance to bring us home after we have squandered ours, so I wrote a different version of the story – not as an improvement on the original, but as a learning device.  Praise God that we who know Jesus have an elder brother like this:

“There was a man who had two sons. The younger one said to his father, ‘Father, give me my share of the estate.’ So he divided his property between them.

Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living. After he had spent everything, there was a severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed pigs. He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything.

Not long after his brother had left, the older brother said to his father, “father, I cannot bear to think of my younger brother suffering in this severe famine.  I will go and find him.”  And his father said to him, “my son, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours.  Take what you need and go and find your brother.”  So the father divided the remainder of his inheritance with his remaining son, and his son set off on a long journey to find his brother.  And when he had found him feeding the pigs, he said to him, “my brother, how many of our father’s hired servants have more than enough bread, and you perish here with hunger!  Come home with me to our father, and he will receive you.

But the younger brother said to his older brother, “I have sinned against heaven and before my Father.  I am no longer worthy to be called his son. I have devoured his property by spending it on prostitutes. How could he receive me?”  And the older brother said to his younger brother, “you have squandered your inheritance, but I will share my inheritance with you to make up for it.  You have disgraced our family name, but I will share my place of honor as first-born with you and never let anyone speak evil of you.  You are here longing to eat the pods you feed to pigs, but my father and I will put the best robe on you, and put a ring on your finger, and shoes on your feet.  We will kill the fattened calf and invite the neighbors and celebrate.  For you were dead, but now you can live; you were lost, but now I have found you.”

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Boethius (1): On the blessings of bad fortune

In my down time these days I am reading and really enjoying Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy as part of my pre-reformation church history reading project.  Boethius (c. 480-524) was a Christian philosopher and statesman who lived in Italy in the early sixth century right as the classical world was dissolving away and the medieval world was beginning to crystallize.  He is often recognized for his role in transmitting Aristotle’s work on logic into the medieval period (his Latin translations and commentaries were the only Aristotle many a medieval monk ever knew), and for the literary influence of The Consolation, which has been absolutely massive.  David Slavitt in the introduction to my copy calls it “one of the most influential and most widely copied, translated, and commented upon works in Western literature” [Harvard University Press, 2008, xix]).  In The Discarded Image, C.S. Lewis’ academic work on medieval and renaissance literature, Lewis said of The Consolation: “until about two hundred years ago it would, I think, have been hard to find an educated man in any European country who did not love it.”

Boethius was executed by the Ostrogoth (and Arian) Theodoric the Great, who suspected him of sympathies to the Byzantine Empire during a time when East-West tensions were very high.  He most likely wrote The Consolation of Philosophy while in prison awaiting execution, which I think gives its overall tone an honesty and an urgency that books written in leisure often lack.  While he is in despair at having lost everything, Lady Philosophy comes to him and reasons with him to think wisely about his misfortune.  The book basically consists of his dialogue with Lady Philosophy, alternating between poetry and prose.  Here is a sample quote, when Lady Philosophy to Boethius is demonstrating how fickle fortune is:

“Ill fortune is better for men than good.  When fortune smiles, she is always false.  But when she is inconstant and whimsical, she shows her true self.  The first aspect of fortune will deceive people, but the second is instructive.  The first blinds while the second opens men’s eyes to how fragile the happiness of mortals really is.  The man who enjoys good fortune is driven frantic, running this way and that and trying to maintain what he has.  The other is steady and, if he learns from his experience, even wise.  Good fortune can lead men astray, deceiving them about what to expect from life and how to think of themselves.  When Fortune is unkind, she draws men back to an understanding of what the world is like, and who their friends are.  Surely, in your time of trouble, you must have learned who were your real friends.  The honest ones have been winnowed out from that crowd of associates and companions, all of whom have deserted you.  What would you have paid them back then to know which were which and whom to trust?  Here you are, complaining of the wealth that you have lost, and you fail to recognize the wealth you have gained – knowledge of your true friends” (pp. 56-57 of Slavitt’s work).

More on Boethius to come, especially his discussion of how divine foreknowledge and human freedom relate, which is what I find most interesting about his thought.

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