Mirrors for the divine light

The following passage comes from the final chapter of C.S. Lewis' The Four Loves, entitled "Charity" (Glasgow: Fount, 1979), pp 119-120:

All those expressions of unworthiness which Christian practice puts into the believer's mouth seem to the outer world like the degraded and insincere grovellings of a sycophant before a tyrant, or at best a façon de parler like the self-depreciation of a Chinese gentleman when he calls himself "this course and illiterate person". In reality, however, they express the continually renewed, because continually necessary, attempt to negate that misconception of ourselves and of our relation to God which nature, even while we pray, is always recommending to us. No sooner do we believe that God loves us than there is an impulse to believe that He does so, not because He is Love, but because we are intrinsically lovable. The Pagans obeyed this impulse unabashed; a good man was "dear to the gods" because he was good. We, being better taught, resort to subterfuge. Far be it from us to think that we have virtues for which God could love us. But then, how magnificantly we have repented! As Bunyan says, describing his first and illusory conversion, "I thought there was no man in England that pleased God better than I." Beaten out of this, we next offer our own humility to God's admiration. Surely He'll like that? Or if not that, our clear-sighted and humble recognition that we still lack humility. Thus, depth beneath depth and subtlety within subtlety, there remains some lingering idea of our own, our very own, attractiveness. It is easy to acknowledge, but almost impossible to realise for long, that we are mirrors whose brightness, if we are bright, is wholly derived from the sun that shines upon us. Surely we must have a little—however little—native luminosity? Surely we can't be quite creatures?

I hardly think this point can be stressed enough. The temptation to spiritual pride is always there, and unbelievers are right to condemn the sin when we act upon this temptation. N.B. in the above, where Lewis speaks of "nature", he means sarx, generally translated as "the sinful nature" or, in older Bibles, "the flesh". It's what we are without God's grace.

News on the campaign against abortion in the UK

I received the following e-mail this morning from The Alive & Kicking Campaign:

Dear [mattghg],

The first abortion vote in Parliament since 1990 is now just ten days away (20 May) and the time is very short. The media debate is understandably intensifying.

You recently very kindly signed the Alive and Kicking petition on abortion which now has over 25,000 signatures and will be formally presented to Parliament very shortly.

Would you be willing to take two minutes to sign a new petition to lower the upper limit for abortion for normal babies from 24 weeks to 20 weeks or below?

Petition

If you can spare a bit more time you could also

1. Watch the launch of the 20 weeks campaign (5 minutes)
2. Send an e-postcard to your MP or a friend (2 minutes)
3. Order free postcards to distribute to friends (3 minutes)
4. Get up to date with the 20 weeks campaign (as long as you like)

Please forward this to others

Many thanks for your time

Alive and Kicking

If (you're a British citizen and) you agree with the above, then please take some time to look into this and sign one or both of the petitions.

Some reflexions on the elections

In 2000, Ken Livingstone (left) was expelled from the Labour Party for running against party candidate Frank Dobson in the London mayoral election — which he won, running as an independent. He was readmitted to the party in 2004 when it couldn't face the prospect of losing a second election in a row to an outcast. How ironic that he should now be booted out of office at least in part as a result of the general malaise affecting Labour. That's not to minimise the effect of his accusing a Jewish journalist of acting like a Nazi, or of the stench of corruption coming from the London Development Agency, or of simple public boredom with the incumbent. But I do wonder who would be mayor today if Livingtone had remained independent — although, to his credit, he apparently doesn't.

I don't share the gloomy expectations of some regarding what Boris Johnson (right, with David Cameron) will do to the capital: he decided a couple of years ago to stop being a journalist and start being a politician. Not that I'm overjoyed at his being mayor, either. But politics is always a choice between the lesser of various evils. On that score, I'm rather sickened that the BNP now has a seat on the London Assembly.

In Reading, where I live, the council slipped out of Labour's control (to NOC) for the first time in eleven years. It's been one of those elections. If you want to know how I feel about that, well, it's a secret ballot :)

Praying for revival

Do you think that the Church of England, or, more broadly, the church in England, is in a bad state at the moment? Not nearly as bad as it was in the early eighteenth century, ‘a period of place-seeking, money-grabbing and moral irrelevance’, according to William Hague’s biography of William Wilberforce, The Life of The Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner (London: Harper Collins, 2007), pp 9-11:

Many observers considered that Christianity was largely absent from much of the Church’s preaching. The renowned lawyer Sir William Blackstone did the rounds of the best preachers in London before declaring that ‘Not one of the sermons contained more Christianity than the writings of Cicero’. The vicar Henry Venn considered, after listening to sermons in York, that ‘excepting a single phrase of two, they might be preached in a synagogue or mosque without offence’. It was common for apathetic clergy simply to buy sermons from each other [...] This was not surprising in an age when many of the clergy ceased to perform religious duties at all. Having been appointed to a lucrative parish, it was common practice for clergymen to become absentees, keeping the living obtained from the parish and delegating curates to carry out their duties at a much lower rate of pay. [...] Hard drinking was common, Wesley writing from St. Ives in 1747 that two clergymen were led home at one or two in the morning in such a condition as I care not to describe’.

Above all, it was the ruthless competition for the most lucrative parishes and dioceses that made the eighteenth-century Church a place of touting and toadying ambition [...] With such rewards available, the Church was converted into a branch of the aristocracy. To cap it all, political patronage was decisive in most of the senior appointments. [...] By 1750 Manchester had a population of twenty thousand, but only one parish church.

And yet, from such an inauspicious situation there arose a great revival. Jonathan Fletcher over at Reform has used this information as part of his case for British Evangelical Anglicans to stay within the CoE (HT: Anglican Mainstream). I plan to refrain from posting on that question until we’ve had the full post-Lambeth shakedown. But what I will say is that reading these words of Hague’s has served to remind me, amid all I hear about the ‘decline of Christianity in the West’, of just how timeless the call to ‘Save yourselves from this corrupt generation’ (Acts 2:40) is. And prevailing reactions to this call remain the same, too. Jürgen Spieß has said as much regarding the comparison between the responses he gets to his talks and those the Apostle Paul got to his speech at the Areopagus; and Hague also cites (p16) these words of the Duchess of Buckingham:

It is monstrous to be told that you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl on the earth. This is highly offensive and insulting and at variance with high rank and good breeding.

Quite so. The gospel is offensive. I well remember being offended by it. But it’s true. Of course, the danger with taking this tone is that we become judgemental of the surrounding culture without actually trying to help, or even acknowledging that, but for the grace of God, we would be under the same judgement. Adam Groza has recently made this point well while expounding Chesterton: the Christian believes

Not that sin is a problem in general, but that my sin causes pain and suffering in the world [my emphasis, heh]

But that said, we shouldn’t accept spiritual stagnation or backsliding in ourselves, individually, and we shouldn’t accept it on a social level, either. Time to pray – and work, under God – for revival.

Irreverent stats

I love statistics. Torture numbers and they will confess to anything.

- 'Galapagos Finch'

See also:
You're having a graph!
b3ta.com challenge: graphs

Some wisdom from the world of hip-hop

Life is fragile, we take it for granted,
I’m thankful for the life I was handed.
Christ stretched out his arms on the cross,
Offered me freedom at a tremendous cost.
I can’t accept the gift without repentance.
I talked to God with expectancy,
He said: “Ask for anything in the name of my Son,
If it’s my will then it will be done”.
I’m not praying for material possessions,
Being close to God is the greatest blessing.

- Braille, ‘Blessed Man’, The IV Edition (Syntax, 2008)

Dembski on sin and redemption

From William Dembski's Christian Theodicy in the Light of Genesis and Modern Science:

It is vital here to have a correct picture of Christ’s redemption and our role in it. In allowing evil and then redeeming us from it, God is not an arsonist who starts a fire, let’s things heat up for us, and then, at the last moment, steps in so that he can be the big hero. Nor is God a casual bystander, who sees a fire start spontaneously and then lets it get out of control so that he can be the big hero to rescue us. We are the arsonists. We started the fire. God wants to rescue us not only from the fire we started but also, and more importantly, from our disposition to start fires, that is, from our life of arson. [...]

Sin has rendered us insane. Granted, most of us don’t see it that way and take offense at the very suggestion. But if God is all that Christian theology teaches that he is, then it is nothing short of insanity for us to be constantly constructing idols that divert us from finding ultimate satisfaction in the God who is the source of our being and is willing to give himself so totally to us that he enables us to call his life ours (see Galatians 2:20 and Colossians 3:1–4).

The central ideas of Dembski's theodicy are that evils, both personal and natural, exist because God wants us to learn gravity of sin - "to rescue us from a life of arson requires that we know the seriousness of what arson can do [...] so that we can rightly understand the human condition and come to our senses" - and that their origin is to be traced to the fall.  In response to the question of how natural evils can be due to the fall when they preceded it by a few million years, Dembski answers that while they are indeed chronologically prior to the fall, they are logically and "kairologically" posterior to it (not being phased by Newcomb's paradox).

The theodicy itself is interesting and definitely worthy of discussion, and I will be grateful for comments on it.  To my mind, it has a lot going for it, although it does sound a bit much like backward causation, and backward causation sounds weird.  But this is not the point of the post as such.  What I wanted to do was draw attention to the noetic effects of sin (Romans 1:21; 1 Corinthians 1:20; Ephesians 4:18) and its destructiveness.  Apologies to anyone who saw "Dembski" in the title line and is disappointed to find that this post has nothing to do with ID.

Going deeper

They speak truly but touch on only half the matter: we must go deeper.

- John Calvin

Back at the end of February I and about 80-odd other people went to a conference at the Round Church in Cambridge run by a new organisation called Still Deeper, which, the founder explained, aims to really encourage and enable Evangelical Christians to "go deeper" in our faith in terms of doctrine, Bible exposition and cultural engagement. He was worried by a certain superficiality he sensed in contemporary churches, engendered by exessive activism, pragmatism, specialisation and reliance on techniques. This was the first in a planned series of conferences aimed at biblical engagement with certain issues. The issue here was friendship. Over the course of the lectures we explored together what impact Christ should have on our friendships, even on what we understand by the word, in contrast to the world's view, taking in the opinions of such Christian thinkers of the past as John Chrysostom, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, Søren Kierkegaard and C.S. Lewis. We also examined what it means to be friends with Jesus (John 15:15). Future conferences are planned, the next due to take place on September 27 and dealing with "The dark side of the cross".

The reason I am blogging about this now is that since then a website has been set up with a useful collection of articles and other resources, including film and book reviews, reflexions on the Christian life, philosophy, theology and information on both conferences mentioned above. I recommend it to you, whether or not you live anywhere near enough to Cambridge to actually make it to any of the conferences.

UPDATE (19/04): The next conference will be in London, not Cambridge.

Happy Easter

Christ is risen!

Peter S. Williams has posted a good collection of material on the evidence for the resurrection, to which I'd add the this talk by N.T. Wright at the Faraday Institute at Cambridge Univeristy.

As for what that means - check out this very short outline from Sam Allberry, student worker at the church I was part of as a student.

(A redated and updated post)

The new eugenics, part II: Racial elements

Dear reader, I'm going to assume that you don't hold such explicitly racist opinions as "the fewer black kids out there the better". I'm going to assume that you're not trying to "lower the number of blacks". But if you were, how would you go about doing that? Like this:

Abortion as genocide? Strong words, of course. But consider what this investigation by Lila Rose has revealed: Planned Parenthood will take donations from people who are explicitly giving money for the purposes outlined in the quotations above. They even have specific schemes in place to enable this.

Another point. In my last post on abortion as eugenics, I gave a list of freethinking eugenicists from the prewar period. To that list we can add Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, who bemoaned the "ever increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all" and claimed that "our failure to segregate morons who are increasing and multiplying [...] demonstrate our foolhardy and extravagant sentimentalism".

HT: Evangelical Outpost