Like a Solid Thing

Here’s another favorite passage from That Hideous Strength.  A few good characters are searching for the historical Merlin, come back from the dead.  One of them, Dimble, a scholar, is more aware of their danger than the others, and is reflecting on the significance of the person they are about to meet.  Its a great description of the medieval world:

Out here, with only the changing red light ahead and the black all round, one really began to accept as fact this tryst with something dead and yet not dead, something dug up, exhumed, from that dark pit of history which lies between the ancient Romans and the beginning of the English. “The Dark Ages” thought Dimble; how lightly one had read and written those words. But now they were going to step right into that Darkness. It was an age, not a man, that awaited them in the horrible little dingle.

And suddenly all that Britain which had been so long familiar to him as a scholar rose up like a solid thing. He could see it all. Little dwindling cities where the light of Rome still rested – little Christian sites, Camalodunum, Kaerleon, Glastonbury – a church, a villa or two, a huddle of houses, an earthwork. And then, beginning scarcely a stone’s-throw beyond the gates, the wet tangled, endless woods, silted with the accumulated decay of autumns that had been dropping leaves since before Britain was an island; wolves slinking, beavers building, wide shallow marshes, dim horns and drummings, eyes in the thickets, eyes of men not only Pre-Roman but Pre-British, ancient creatures, unhappy and dispossessed, who became the elves and ogres and wood-wooses of the later tradition. But worse than the forests, the clearings. Little strongholds with unheard-of kings. Little colleges and covines of Druids. Houses whose mortar had been ritually mixed with babies’ blood. They had tried to do that to Merlin. And now all that age, horribly dislocated, wrenched out of its place in the time series and forced to come back and go through all its motions yet again with doubled monstrosity, was flowing towards them and would, in a few minutes, receive them into itself.

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Almost Anything Might Be True

I keep listening to That Hideous Strength on my ipod shuffle when I go hiking with Sophia.  Its one of my favorite books.  This is a great passage in which Jane’s skepticism about God and Christianity begins to be undermined as she considers death:

It was likely, then, that this – this stumbling walk on a wet night across a ploughed field-meant death. Death – the thing one had always heard of (like love), the thing the poets had written about. So this was how it was going to be. But that was not the main point. Jane was trying to see death in the new light of all she had heard since she left Edgestow. She had long ceased to feel any resentment at the Director’s tendency, as it were, to dispose of her – to give her, at one time or in one sense, to Mark, and in another to Maleldil; never, in any sense, to keep her for himself. She accepted that. And of Mark she did not think much, because to think of him increasingly aroused feelings of pity and guilt. But Maleldil. Up till now she had not thought of Maleldil either. She did not doubt that the eldils existed; nor did she doubt the existence of this stronger and more obscure being whom they obeyed . . . whom the Director obeyed, and through him the whole household, even MacPhee. If it had ever occurred to her to question whether all these things might be the reality behind what she had been taught at school as “religion,” she had put the thought aside. The distance between these alarming and operative realities and the memory, say, of fat Mrs. Dimble saying her prayers, was too wide. The things belonged, for her, to different worlds. On the one hand, terror of dreams, rapture of obedience, the tingling light and sound from under the Director’s door, and the great struggle against an imminent danger; on the other, the smell of pews, horrible lithographs of the Saviour (apparently seven feet high, with the face of a consumptive girl), the embarrassment of confirmation classes, the nervous affability of clergymen. But this time, if it was really to be death, the thought would not be put aside. Because, really, it now appeared that almost anything might be true. The world had already turned out to be so very unlike what she had expected. The old ring-fence had been smashed completely. One might be in for anything. Maleldil might be, quite simply and crudely, God. There might be a life after death: a Heaven: a Hell. The thought glowed in her mind for a second like a spark that has fallen on shavings, and then a second later, like those shavings, her whole mind was in a blaze – or with just enough left outside the blaze to utter some kind of protest. “But . . . this is unbearable. I ought to have been told.” It did not, at that moment, occur to her even to doubt that if such things existed they would be totally and unchangeably adverse to her.

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When its not fun, check your motives

Something I’m learning lately is that when ministry ceases to be fun, we should check our motives.  Sometimes ministry isn’t fun because we live in a fallen world, or because we are facing extraordinary challenges, or because its just plain tough.  But sometimes its not fun because we’re serving with mixed motives – wanting to please people, wanting to be perceived positively by others, wanting to stay within comfort zones.  When I stop and take time to re-align my motives around the gospel – joy stemming from my reconciliation with a Holy God, love for others in light of how much I’ve been loved, hope oriented around the promises of God and His ultimate triumph – the “fun” comes back in.  New strength is found in remembering what it is that we’re fighting for, and burdens feel lighter when our hearts are full of love for Jesus.  Its almost impossible not to have fun when we remember just Who it is that we are serving.

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Samuel Rutherford on suffering

The book I find most spiritually nourishing after the Bible is Samuel Rutherford’s The Loveliness of Christ, which consists of extracts from his letters.  I keep the copy my parents got me when I graduated from seminary near my computer in my office so that I can glance through it from time to time.  Every time I pick it up it drives me to Christ.  Here are some great quotes about suffering I have been thinking about lately as I’ve been looking over it:

“You will not get to steal quietly to heaven, in Christ’s company, without a conflict and a cross.”

“You must learn to make evils your great good, and to spin out comforts, peace, joy, communion with Christ, out of your troubles, which are Christ’s wooers to speak for you to himself.”

“My Lord Jesus has fully recompensed my sadness with his joys, my losses with his own presence.  I find it a sweet and rich thing to exchange my sorrows with Christ’s joys, my afflictions with that sweet peace I have with himself.”

“I have no quarrels at his cross.  He and his cross are two good guests, and worth the lodging.”

“Christ and his cross together are sweet company, and a blessed couple.  My poison in my palace, my losses are rich losses, my pain easy pain, my heavy days are holy and happy days.  I may tell a new tale of Christ to my friends.”

“I have many a grieved heart daily in my calling.  I would be undone, if I had not access to the King’s chamber of presence, to show him all the business.”

“They are blessed who suffer and sin not, for suffering is the badge that Christ has put upon his followers: take what way we can to heaven, the way is edged up with crosses.”

“His cross is the sweet burden that ever I bare: it is such a burden as wings are to a bird, and sails are to a ship, to carry me forward to my harbour.”

My takeaway: a great part of intimacy with Christ is finding Him to be sweet right in the midst of a bitter cross.  Coming to Him during suffering and allowing Him to give us strength, endurance, and even joy, right in the midst of that place.  Jesus does not get the praise He deserves when we only worship Him out of abundance and ease.  He is glorified and seen for His true worth when we find Him enough for us in our lowest moment – enough to forgive our deepest sin, enough to heal our deepest shame, enough to give us contentedness and strength and joy in our deepest struggle.

What if we really believed that the deeper the suffering, the more real and gracious we will find Christ to be in the midst of it?  What if we so loved and valued Christ that suffering in His service was an honor greater than any earthly praise, and therefore a joy greater than any earthly comfort?  We would be able to face suffering without fear, and with true joy.  Jesus, give me a heart that loves you so much that it yearns with blazing longing to be spent, and to suffer, for you.

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Barth on Anselm (2)

Some reasons why Barth’s Anselm book interests me as a book to focus on this year:

1) Barth sees Anselm as an especially important and relevant theologian.  He calls him “one of those phenomena which simply must be known and respected” (8) and says, “I find more of value and significance in this theologian than in others” (7).  Given Barth’s broad acquaintance with historical theology, I think its worth investigating what it was that made Anselm particularly stand out to him.

2) Barth represents a break from traditional interpretation of Anselm (both liberal Protestant and Roman Catholic).  He says that Kant and Aquinas were at one in their mistaken rejection of Anselm’s argument (8) and sets out to “deal with Anselm quite differently from hitherto” (7).  I think its worth exploring what Barth saw in Anselm that he thought others had missed.

3) Barth’s study on Anselm is important for his own theological development.  Even if we reject von Balthasar’s 3-stage paradigm of Barth’s development (with the shift from dialectical to analogical thought coinciding with the Anselm project) in favor of Bruce McCormack’s 2-stage thesis of post-1915 continuity, there can still be no question of a more general importance to Barth’s 1930-1 Anselm project.  It is, by his own testimony, an integral piece of the puzzle of how his thought continued to unfold throughout his career.  As he puts it: “my interest in Anselm was never a side-issue for me….  In this book on Anselm I am working with a vital key, if not the key, to an understanding of that whole process of thought that has impressed me more and more in my Church Dogmatics as the only one proper to theology.”  Or as he puts it in the Church Dogmatics, II.1: “I learned the fundamental attitude to the problem of the knowledge and existence of God at the feet of Anselm of Canterbury, and in particular from his proofs of God set out in Proslogion 2-4.”  In other words, this little book is not only an important part of the conversation among Anselm scholarship, but a window into Barth’s development.

4) Finally, it deals with some basic issues that have always interested me, like theological epistemology and the ontological argument and the doctrine of God.

I also got Jasper Hopkins’ 1972 book on Anselm, which I’ll read after Barth.  Between these two books, and Ian Logan’s recent book on Proslogion, I think I’ll get pretty well exposed to Anselm scholarship.  Its fun to have a little project to be chipping away at.  A few other isolated books I am hoping to read in 2011:

-Paul Johnson’s biography of Winston Churchill

-Dallimore’s shorter biography of Whitefield

-Metaxas’ biography on Bonhoeffer

-Copleston’s book on Aquinas

-Kostenberger and Swain’s book on Trinitarianism in John in the NSBT series

-The Lord of the Rings (maybe I’ll finally finish it!)

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Righteousness, Strength, and Joy

I heard someone summarize the gospel recently with three short statements: “Jesus is all my righteousness.  Jesus is all my strength.  Jesus is all my joy.”  I found it so helpful this afternoon to reflect on this way of summarizing the gospel, and in particular the last statement, that Jesus is all our joy.  I’ve been learning a lot lately about how we find strength to follow Christ each day in the same way we initially receive salvation – in a posture of naked faith, trusting in and receiving what God alone can do.  But today I needed to be reminded that even this is not complete.  Jesus is not merely my defense against a guilty conscience and my power amidst weakness.  He is also my joy, my reward, my treasure, my portion, my fulfillment.  He is not only hope for judgment day and my strength to follow him today, but also the point behind each – the goal of my entire salvation, from first to last.

I find this convicting because it exposes my heart’s temptations towards bad motivations and other sources of joy that compete with Jesus.  How often I turn to something other than Jesus for joy?  How often can simple things like food, or a day off, or a ministry success give me more comfort and joy on a day by day basis than Jesus does!  Ouch!  Time to repent.  But I also find it hopeful because it reminds me that there is so more to Christ than I have yet experienced.  Jesus has so much more joy to give than any earthly thing.  He has the joy that I was made for.  I want to go deeper in my worship of Him and find Him more and more to be my all – all my righteousness, all my strength, and all my joy.

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Grateful for 2010

Esther and I spent some time last night thinking together and listing all the ways God has cared and provided for us in 2010, and filled up several pages with notes of gratitude.  We’re especially grateful for his provision of my ministry position here in Sierra Madre, our wonderful home and new little dog, and our new friends here.

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