Jesus is the end of Ethnocentrism - John Piper

 

 Jesus is the End of ethnocentrism, now by ethnocentrism I mean, the thought, the conviction or feeling that my ethnic group should be treated as superiors or privileged. 

https://www.desiringgod.org/messages/jesus-is-the-end-of-ethnocentrism

God in the Wasteland - Wells, David

We have thus become pawns of the world we have created, moved about by the forces of modernity, our inventions themselves displacing their inventors in an ironic recapitulation of the first dislocation in which God in which God’s creatures replaced their Creator and exiled him from his own world.

Image and appearance assume the function that character and morality once had.

We have ended up with more, but we ourselves have ended up being much less.

We have become spiritual vagrants in the modern wasteland, wanderers with no home to return to. The inner terrain of our lives — including the soil in which our Christian faith grows — is constantly shifting.

The protestant liberalism represented by these churches unabashedly sought a synthesis between Christian faith and modern culture. The liberals held that culture was flawed but that it was not estranged from the life of God. because God is to be found immanently within all human beings, they said, the meaning a morality by which America should live is to be found in religious consciousness.

The more modern they felt themselves compelled to be, the less Christian they were able to remain. It was a predicament from which they could find no way to extricated themselves.

Without God’s truth, without his Word as its center, a civil religion also forfeits his grace and his judgment — and without these, it has not means to survive in the modern world.

If a convergence ha sin fact taken place between modernity and evangelicalism, it is not because modernity has become more theological but because evangelicalism has become modern.

Modernity has be hard at work reducing evangelical faith to something that is largely private and internal. Belief has shrunk from being a contemporary confession of Gods Truth in the church and beyond to being simply a part of personal identity and psychological makeup. Many evangelicals quietly assume , perhaps even without much thought, that it would be uncouth and uncivil to push this private dimension to noticeably or noisely on others or into the public square.…… Modern culture grants me absolute freedom to believe whatever I want to believe — so long as keep those believes from infringing on the consciousness or behavior of anyone else, especially on points of controversy.

The fundamental problem in the evangelical world today is that God rests to inconsequentially upon the church. His truth is to distant, His grace too ordinary, His judgment is too benign, his gospel is too easy, and his Christ is too common.

Why do people choose the substitute over God himself? Probably the most important reason is that it obviates accountability to God. We can meet idols on our own terms because they are our own creations. They are safe, predictable, and controllable; they are, in Jeremiah’s colorful language, the “scarecrows in a cucumber field” (10.5).

There was a time when individualists lived by the internal gyroscope of character. They thought for themselves, did what they believed to be right even if they received no approbation from others, judging that it was better, as David Heisman put it, to be right than to be president.

We now blithely speak of marketing the gospel like any other commodity, oblivious to the fact that such rhetoric betrays a vast intrusion of worldliness into the church. It was once one of the hallmarks of evangelicalism that it offered a pronounced cultural critique, but now it is attentive as any other aspect of that culture to the pronouncements of the pollster.

It is true that the self has lost its capacity for connectedness in the world outside of itself, but it is also the case that it nevertheless seeks to adapt itself to the multiple shifting worlds of meaning through which it must pass each day and that this has a powerful effect on personal identity.…

Personal identity now is being shaped on the basis of a vision of freedom that amounts to little more than complete randomness.

Families have traditionally served as the chief conduit for the transmission of values from one generation to another, and now this conduit is breaking down.

modernization is progressively erasing geographical distinctions as a means of defining community. The modern individual is almost wholly rootless, bereft of any psychological connections to place. To be sure, the new freedom from various parochialism is in some sense exhilarating, but it does not come without a price

Where the self wanders the earth as a vagrant, belonging nowhere, something that is profoundly intrinsic to being human has been lost

Personal identity became increasingly associated not with the narrative of one’s inner life but with the projection of one’s public image .…In this world self is not something that is; it is something that is constructed.…In the modern world,…we are required to construct multiple selves because we live in so many different “worlds,” play so many different audiences, encounter so many different experiences, and juggle so many different values.

There is a hunger for religious experience bu an aversion to theological definition of that experience. There is a hunger for God but a disenchantment with dogma or doctrine.

When the consumer is sovereign the product (in this case God himself)must be subservient.

Neitzche…He declared that God had died, or more precisely, that he had been murdered.… He was speaking of the passing of a world in which meaning and values had been rooted in the transcendent. Hi saw a world in which human beings were wresting sovereignty for themselves, and hencea world in which there were no longer ultimate values but only present possibilities — possibilities that were fluid, open, and unstructured by the divine or by an absolute moral order.

What may start out as an additional authority alongside the word of God will eventually supplant its authority altogether.

In the marketplace, everything is for us, for our pleasure, for our satisfaction, and we have come to assume that it must be so in the church as well, and so we have transformed the God of mercy into a God who is at our mercy

We imagine that for those who love God and are called according to his purpose, all things work together for their satisfaction and the inner tranquility of their lives.

The New Testament never promises anyone a life of psychological wholeness or offers a guarantee of the consumers satisfaction with Christ. To the contrary, it offers the prospect of indignities, loss, damage, disease, and pain. The faithfully Scripture were scorned, beaten, imprisoned, shipwrecked, and executed.

[In dealing with the worship of the “virgin” Mary] It was assumed that when Mary approached Christ, her Son, she could expect a far more gracious reception than common sinners, and Christ, in turn, could approach the yet more distant father on their behalf.

The people of Our Time are strongly inclined to trace all internal confusion, pain, disappointment or lost advantage back to someone else’s door.

Our experience of the modern world produces the sense that there is no sure and steady purpose pervading life, that purpose, like life itself, has broken apart into small, unrelated fragments, that our daily routine is severed from the meaning that God once provide to it.

There is no way, he said, that we can extrapolate from the world’s pain and disorder, or even from what is good in the world, to what the designs of God might be. We cannot have any hope of success if we begin below… Those who begin with the human perspective inevitably end with the human perspective. We must begin with God, for only in this way will we end with the divine perspective.

Modernity has gone a long way toward robbing us of our faith convictions. While we may believe in God’s existence and his goodness, we find ourselves psychologically disabled in our attempts to bring this belief into incisive relation with the stuff of daily experience, unable to frame effectively our daily routine within the context of ultimatum.

There is some artificiality involved in slicing the work of God too finely, for his purposes were conceived in eternity and are worked out in history as an interconnected whole. What God did in bringing the world into being cannot be separated from his ongoing work of sustaining it, nor can his purposes in creating human life be separated from his purposes of redemption and judgement(John 17.24: 1Peter1:17-20). The beginning must be read in the light of the end, because the end was present in the mind of God in the beginning and hence all that comes to pass has been in the mind of God from the beginning(Isaiah 14.24,27; 22.11; 40.10)

Efforts to build character have been replaced by efforts to manage the impression we make on others. behind this constant game of charades, this shifting of cultural guises, is a personality that is typically shallow, self-absorbed, elusive, leery of commitments, unattached to people or place, dedicated to keeping all options open, and frequently incapable of either loyalty or gratitude.… On the other hand, this kind of person often proves unwilling to accept the limitations of life and hence is inclined to believe in what is deeply irrational. Thus primitive myths and superstitions are now making their appearance side by side with computer wizardry and rampant secularization.

in the post-literate and post-rational world we are entering, the truth of Christian faith may no longer travel on the wings of logical argument as it has in the past, but it will be compelling nonetheless as churches reform their inner lives to embody a fitting counter cultural spirituality centered in a serious, worshipful recognition of the presence of God, an obedient submission to his Word, and a compassionate outworking of His grace in loving service of the stricken of this world.

God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in A World of Fading Dreams

Wm. B Eerdmans Publishing Co. Grand Rapids , USA and Intervarsity Press, Leicester, UK

On aliens, rasial abuse and space CS lewis

This is a warning to what we may expect if we ever do discover animal life (vegetable does not matter) on another planet. Each new discovery, even every new theory, is held at first to have the most wide-reaching theological and philosophical consequences. It is seized by unbelievers as the basis for a new attack on Christianity; it is often, and more embarrassingly, seized by injudicious believers as the basis for a new defense.

But usually, when the popular hubbub has subsided and the novelty has been chewed over by real theologians, real scientists and real philosophers, both sides find themselves pretty much where they were before. So it was with Copernican astronomy, with Darwinism, with Biblical Criticism, with the new psychology. So, I cannot help expecting, it will be with the discovery of 'life on other planets' if that discovery is ever made.

The supposed threat is clearly directed against the doctrine of the Incarnation, the belief that God of God "for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven and was . . . made man." Why for us men more than for others? If we find ourselves to be but one among a million races, scattered through a million spheres, how can we, without absurd arrogance, believe ourselves to have been uniquely favored? I admit that the question could become formidable. In fact, it will become formidable when, if ever, we know the answer to five other questions.

1. Are there animals anywhere except on earth? We do not know. We do not know whether we ever shall know.

2. Supposing there were, have any of these animals what we call "rational souls"? By this I include not merely the faculty to abstract and calculate, but the apprehension of values, the power to mean by "good" something more than "good for me" or even "good for my species'. If instead of asking, "Have they rational souls?" you prefer to ask, "Are they spiritual animals?" I think we shall both mean pretty much the same. If the answer to either question should be No, then of course it would not be at all strange that our species should be treated differently from theirs.
There would be no sense in offering to a creature, however clever or amiable, a gift which that creature was by its nature incapable either of desiring or of receiving. We teach our sons to read but not our dogs. The dogs prefer bones. And of course, since we do not yet know whether there are extra-terrestrial animals at all, we are a long way from knowing that they are rational (or "spiritual").

Even if we met them we might not find it so easy to decide. It seems to me possible to suppose creatures so clever that they could talk, though they were, from the theological point of view, really only animals, capable of pursuing or enjoying only natural ends. One meets humans the machine-minded and materialistic urban type who look as if they were just that. As Christians we must believe the appearance to be false; somewhere under that glib surface there lurks, however atrophied, a human soul. But in other worlds there might be things that really are what these seem to be. Conversely, there might be creatures genuinely spiritual, whose powers of manufacture and abstract thought were so humble that we should mistake them for mere animals. God shield them from us!

3. If there are species, and rational species, other than man, are any or all of them, like us, fallen? This is the point non-Christians always seem to forget. They seem to think that the Incarnation implies some particular merit or excellence in humanity. But of course it implies just the reverse: a particular demerit and depravity. No creature that deserved Redemption would need to be redeemed. They that are whole need not the physician. Christ died for men precisely because men are not worth dying for; to make them worth it. Notice what waves of utterly unwarranted hypothesis these critics of Christianity want us to swim through. We are now supposing the fall of hypothetically rational creatures whose mere existence is hypothetical.

4. If all of them (and surely all is a long shot) or any of them have fallen have they been denied Redemption by the Incarnation and Passion of Christ? For of course it is no very new idea that the eternal Son may, for all we know, have been incarnate in other worlds than earth and so saved other races than ours. As Alice Meynell wrote in "Christ in the Universe":
. . . in the eternities
Doubtless we shall compare together, hear
A million alien Gospels, in what guise
He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.

I wouldn't go as far as "doubtless" myself. Perhaps of all races we only fell. Perhaps Man is the only lost sheep; the one, therefore, whom the Shepherd came to seek. Or perhaps but this brings us to the next wave of assumption. It is the biggest yet and will knock us head over heels, but I am fond of a tumble in the surf.

5. If we knew (which we don't) the answers to 1, 2, and 3 and, further, if we knew that Redemption by an Incarnation and Passion had been denied to creatures in need of it is it certain that this is the only mode of Redemption that is possible? Here of course we ask for what is not merely unknown but, unless God should reveal it, wholly unknowable. It may be that the further we were permitted to see into His councils, the more clearly we should understand that thus and not otherwise by the birth at Bethlehem, the cross on Calvary and the empty tomb a fallen race could be rescued. There may be a necessity for this, insurmountable, rooted in the very nature of God and the very nature of sin. But we don't know. At any rate, I don't know. Spiritual as well as physical conditions might differ widely in different worlds. There might be different sorts and different degrees of fallenness. We must surely believe that the divine charity is as fertile in resource as it is measureless in condescension. To different diseases, or even to different patients sick with the same disease, the great Physician may have applied different remedies; remedies which we should probably not recognize as such even if we ever heard of them.

It might turn out that the redemption of other species differed from ours by working through ours. There is a hint of something like this in St. Paul (Romans 8:19-23) when he says that the whole creation is longing and waiting to be delivered from some kind of slavery, and that the deliverance will occur only when we, we Christians, fully enter upon our sonship to God and exercise our 'glorious liberty'.

On the conscious level I believe that he was thinking only of our own Earth: of animal, and probably vegetable, life on Earth being "renewed" or glorified at the glorification of man in Christ. But it is perhaps possible it is not necessary to give his words a cosmic meaning. It may be that Redemption, starting with us, is to work from us and through us.

This would no doubt give man a pivotal position. But such a position need not imply any superiority in us or any favouritism in God. The general, deciding where to begin his attack, does not select the prettiest landscape or the most fertile field or the most attractive village. Christ was not born in a stable because a stable is, in itself, the most convenient or distinguished place for a maternity.

Only if we had some such function would a contact between us and such unknown races be other than a calamity. If indeed we were unfallen, it would be another matter.
It sets one dreaming to interchange thoughts with beings whose thinking had an organic background wholly different from ours (other senses, other appetites), to be unenviously humbled by intellects possibly superior to our own yet able for that very reason to descend to our level, to descend lovingly ourselves if we met innocent and childlike creatures who could never be as strong or as clever as we, to exchange with the inhabitants of other worlds that especially keen and rich affection which exists between unlikes; it is a glorious dream. But make no mistake. It is a dream. We are fallen.

We know what our race does to strangers. Man destroys or enslaves every species he can. Civilized man murders, enslaves, cheats, and corrupts savage man. Even inanimate nature he turns into dust bowls and slag-heaps. There are individuals who don't. But they are not the sort who are likely to be our pioneers in space. Our ambassador to new worlds will be the needy and greedy adventurer or the ruthless technical expert. They will do as their kind has always done. What that will be if they meet things weaker than themselves, the black man and the red man can tell. If they meet things stronger, they will be, very properly, destroyed.

It is interesting to wonder how things would go if they met an unfallen race. At first, to be sure, they'd have a grand time jeering at, duping, and exploiting its innocence; but I doubt if our half-animal cunning would long be a match for godlike wisdom, selfless valour, and perfect unanimity.

I therefore fear the practical, not the theoretical, problems which will arise if ever we meet rational creatures which are not human. Against them we shall, if we can, commit all the crimes we have already committed against creatures certainly human but differing from us in features and pigmentation; and the starry heavens will become an object to which good men can look up only with feelings of intolerable guilt, agonized pity, and burning shame.

Of course after the first debauch of exploitation we shall make some belated attempt to do better. We shall perhaps send missionaries. But can even missionaries be trusted? "Gun and gospel" have been horribly combined in the past. The missionary's holy desire to save souls has not always been kept quite distinct from the arrogant desire, the busybody's itch, to (as he calls it) "civilize" the (as he calls
them) "natives." Would all our missionaries recognize an unfallen race if they met it? Could they? Would they continue to press upon creatures that did not need to be saved that plan of Salvation which God has appointed for Man? Would they denounce as sins mere differences of behaviour which the spiritual and biological history of these strange creatures fully justified and which God Himself had blessed? Would they try to teach those from whom they had better learn? I do not know. What I do know is that here and now, as our only possible practical preparation for such a meeting, you and I should resolve to stand firm against all exploitation and all theological imperialism. It will not be fun. We shall be called traitors to our own species. We shall be hated of almost all men; even of some religious men. And we must not give back one single inch. We shall probably fail, but let us go down fighting for the right side. Our loyalty is due not to our species but to God. Those who are, or can become, His sons, are our real brothers even if they have shells or tusks. It is spiritual, not biological, kinship that counts. 

But let us thank God that we are still very far from travel to other worlds.

I have wondered before now whether the vast astronomical distances may not be God's quarantine precautions. They prevent the spiritual infection of a fallen species from spreading. And of course we are also very far from the supposed theological problem which contact with other rational species might raise. Such species may not exist. There is not at present a shred of empirical evidence that they do. There is nothing but what the logicians would call arguments from "a priori probability" arguments that begin "It is only natural to suppose," or "All analogy suggests," or "Is it not the height of arrogance to rule out ?" They make very good reading. But who except a born gambler ever risks five dollars on such grounds in ordinary life? And, as we have seen, the mere existence of these creatures would not raise a problem. After that, we still need to know that they are fallen; then, that they have not been, or will not be, redeemed in the mode we know; and then, that no other mode is possible. I think a Christian is sitting pretty if his faith never encounters more formidable difficulties than these conjectural phantoms.

If I remember rightly, St. Augustine raised a question about the theological position of satyrs, monopods, and other semi-human creatures. He decided it could wait till we knew there were any. So can this.

"But supposing" you say. "Supposing all these embarrassing suppositions turned out to be true?" I can only record a conviction that they won't; a conviction which has for me become in the course of years irresistible. Christians and their opponents again and again expect that some new discovery will either turn matters of faith into matters of knowledge or else reduce them to patent absurdities. But it has never happened.

What we believe always remains intellectually possible; it never becomes intellectually compulsive. I have an idea that when this ceases to be so, the world will be ending. We have been warned that all but conclusive evidence against Christianity, evidence that would deceive (if it were possible) the very elect, will appear with the Antichrist.

And after that there will be wholly conclusive evidence on the other side.

But not, I fancy, till then on either side.

"Religion and Rocketry" from The Worlds Last Night by C.S. Lewis.

THE TRAVAIL OF BIBLICAL LANGUAGE - Gilkey

 And for all of us, a contemporary understanding of ancient Scriptures depends as much on a careful analysis of our present presuppositions as it does on being learned in the religion and faith of the past.

COSMOLOGY, ONTOLOGY, AND THE TRAVAIL OF BIBLICAL LANGUAGE Langdon B. Gilkey 

From Owen Thomas, ed. God’s Activity in the World: The Contemporary Problem AAR Studies in Religion 31. Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1981.

God doing the Impossible Armin Gesswein

 

“When God is about to do something great, he starts with a difficulty. When he is about to do something magnificent, he starts with an impossibility.”

Armin Gesswein

Belovedness 2 - Sarah Kroger

  Negative self-talk has probably plagued humanity since the beginning. If a friend said some of the things to us that we say to ourselves, they would no longer be our friend. And yet we allow our internal chatterbox to persist, often without even realizing it.

I hope this song wakes people up to the truth that they are beloved. This is who we are, and it’s literally an instruction: be loved. There is nothing we’ve done, no mistake we’ve made, nothing that’s been done to us that can take away the fact that we are beloved. We own the negative things about ourselves far too quickly and we allow those thoughts to control our actions and our beliefs about ourselves. It’s time to silence the chatterbox and allow the truth to grow. It’s time to own our belovedness. 

Whether you’re eight or 80 years old, this song is for you. 

Sarah Kroger

http://www.sarahkroger.com/blog/2020/8/21/belovedness

Bible Study is... Letter from Logos.com

The Bible isn’t a collection of inspirational thoughts like pearls on a string. The human authors present logical positions and arguments. One of the most important aspects of Bible study is understanding an author’s line of thinking.

Faithlife Aug 2 2020

When I saw him he was my brother - African Proverb

 

African proverb: 

"When I saw him from afar, I thought he was a monster.

When he got closer, I thought he was an animal.

When he got closer, I recognized that he was a human.

When we were face to face, I realized that he was my brother."

Not of Christ - Boston history from Christian History Institute

A SOUR GREETING FOR TWO QUAKER WOMEN

[19th century Quaker woman—Charles Frederick Holder, Quakers in Great Britain and America (New York: Neuner 1913)]

TWO QUAKER MISSIONARIES, Ann Austin and Mary Fisher, arrived in Boston harbor on this day, 11 July 1656, the first of their sect to reach New England. They were greeted with cruelty. The Puritans who ruled Massachusetts regulated religious teachings and behavior. News from England had prejudiced them against Quakers, whom they classed with heretics.

Deputy Governor Richard Bellingham boarded the ship Swallow, ordered the women to remain aboard until further notice, searched their belongings, and confiscated about one hundred books they had brought with them. According to Boston authorities, these “contained most corrupt, heretical, and blasphemous doctrines, contrary to the truth of the gospel here professed amongst us.”

The Boston council met at once. Deploring the women’s “dangerous, heretical, and blasphemous opinions” which “they came here purposely to propagate,” the council ordered their books burned, the women imprisoned with no opportunity to speak to anyone, and the Swallow’s owner, Simon Kempthorn, to give security that he would transport the women back to Barbadoes, or cause them to be transported.

The authorities then forced Austin and Fisher to strip and examined them closely for signs of witchcraft. Austin claimed that one of the searchers was “a man in womens apparel.” To prevent anyone seeing or speaking to them, the window of their cell was boarded up. No arrangement was made to provide them with food.

Nicholas Upsall, an innkeeper with a Christian heart, offered to pay the women’s fines if he could speak with them. His request was denied. Indeed, Bostonians were warned that anyone attempting to speak with the heretics would be fined five pounds. Upsall then bribed the jailer five shillings a week to take food to the prisoners, who otherwise might have died of starvation. 

Boston held the women five weeks, until another ship owner, William Chicester, agreed to take them back to Barbadoes. During those five weeks, the pair were permitted neither candle nor writing material in their darkened cell. When they left, the jailor kept their Bible and bedding as his payment.

Shortly afterward, Upsall, an elderly man, was banished from Massachusetts for protesting the treatment of a second group of Quakers. Although Upsall was a blameless Puritan and a faithful churchgoer, the authorities showed him no leniency. He found shelter with an Indian chief in the area now known as Rhode Island.

https://christianhistoryinstitute.org/it-happened-today

The Scariest Verse of the Bible Matt 7.21

Matt. 7.21   “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ 23 And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’

Clearly Jesus is here saying people might think that they know what they are doing, serving the king, they are not just pew warmers but active in the church, believing all the while they are serving the king of kings and yet when they stand before the king it is evident that they never knew Him. Some people think the solution is to follow the commandments apparently, but God wants a relationship, not obedience.

Call to Discipleship - Juan Carlos Ortiz

Call to Discipleship 

From Milk to Meat

Why did Jesus put ministers in the Church?

And He gave some apostles: and some prophets: and some Evangelists: and some pastors and teachers; For perfecting maturing of the saints , for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ(Eph 4:11-12)

Herein lies part of the answer. the purpose of the preaching oand teaching in the church is to perfect (bring to maturity) the saints for the work of the ministry. The one learning today is to become a teach tomorrow. The pastors are not to entertain or maintain the believers, but to mature them. In other words, shepherds are not placed in the flock to give milk to the sheep. God provides milk to every mother to give her child. Ministers must take the sheep into maturity. 

God gave the church ministers to equip and perfect the saints. Yet most of the activities we have in the church are to maintain the saints rather than equip them. 

. . . 

Our Ministry is to equip them, to perfect them, to make out of them teachers that they may teach others. That meant I as a pastor needed to have a clear vision of the objective of my existence. What does God wish me to make of the believers? Each pastor must ask himself, " why did God put me in the ministry? what is my work? To what should I dedicate myself?" The answer to this question is always, To perfect the saints for the work of the ministry, that Christians might be properly equipped for their service" (Phillips).

. . . 

Paul tells the Hebrews they should already have been teachers, which means that the Christian is really progressing when he can teach and guide someone else to be a Christian. "For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again" (Heb. 5:12 RSV). Phillips, translating the same passage, says, "At a time when you should be teaching others, you need teachers yourselves to repeat to you the ABCs of God's revelation to men." This means we should graduate sometime, for if we do not advance we are slipping back.  We should pass from the first grade of the rudiments to the second grade of the pure milk, and on to the third grade of solid food.

Call to discipleship

Juan Carlos Ortiz

Logos International, Plainfield, New Jersey

1975

- Christian Growth, Maturity

Scripture Purpose - Alan Richardson

God's Word, though addressed to us here and now, was given through the mouths of men who lived centuries before our time. Accordingly, two tasks are imposed upon the commentator. First, he must show, with the aid of every resource of biblical scholarship, how the divine message was received and understood by the original hearers long ago: and therefore we have tried to sum up as concisely as possible just so much of the critical, historical and literary discoveries of modern Old Testament research as is essential for a truly historical understanding of Genesis[Bible] And secondly, he must show how the ancient truth of Genesis is to be received to-day in an age which, not surprisingly, tends to look to modern science for an account of the world and of man, their beginning and their possibilities: and therefore we have tried in the Introduction to describe the nature of religious truth, such as is given to us in the parable of Genesis, and to show how it differs from and does not conflict with scientific truth. In this way, it is hoped that the difficulties and misconceptions which arise for the ordinary reader when he turns to the opening pages of the Bible Will be removed. 

Preface to  Genesis 1-11 The Creations Stores and the Modern World View 

Torch Bible Paperbacks London 1969

- Scripture,

Eros vs friendship CS Lewis

“Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend. The rest of us know that though we can have erotic love and friendship for the same person yet in some ways nothing is less like a Friendship than a love-affair. Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest. Above all, Eros (while it lasts) is necessarily between two only. But two, far from being the necessary number for Friendship, is not even the best. And the reason for this is important.

... In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets... Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, 'Here comes one who will augment our loves.' For in this love 'to divide is not to take away.”

― C.S. Lewis, 

The Four Loves

- Eros, Friends, Love, Interpretation

Tom Holland: Why I was wrong about Christianity

Tom Holland

Tom Holland: Why I was wrong about Christianity

“We preach Christ crucified,” St Paul declared, “unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness.” He was right. Nothing could have run more counter to the most profoundly held assumptions of Paul’s contemporaries – Jews, or Greeks, or Romans. The notion that a god might have suffered torture and death on a cross was so shocking as to appear repulsive. Familiarity with the biblical narrative of the Crucifixion has dulled our sense of just how completely novel a deity Christ was. In the ancient world, it was the role of gods who laid claim to ruling the universe to uphold its order by inflicting punishment – not to suffer it themselves.

Today, even as belief in God fades across the West, the countries that were once collectively known as Christendom continue to bear the stamp of the two-millennia-old revolution that Christianity represents. It is the principal reason why, by and large, most of us who live in post-Christian societies still take for granted that it is nobler to suffer than to inflict suffering. It is why we generally assume that every human life is of equal value. In my morals and ethics, I have learned to accept that I am not Greek or Roman at all, but thoroughly and proudly Christian.

Tom Holland

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/religion/2016/09/tom-holland-why-i-was-wrong-about-christianity

- Tom Holland, Christianity, Atheism 

The mystery of godliness... Ian thomas

The Mystery of Godliness - W. Ian Thomas

"The moment you come to realize that only God can make a man godly, you are left with no option but to find God, and to know God, and to let God be God in you and through you, whoever He may be--and this will leave you with no margin for picking and choosing--for there is only one God and He is absolute, and He made you expressly for Himself!

Beware lest even as a Christian, you fall into Satan's trap! You may have found and come to know God in the Lord Jesus Christ, receiving Him sincerely as your Redeemer, yet if you do not enter in the mystery of godliness and allow God to be in you the origin of His own image, you will seek to be godly by submitting yourself to external rules and regulations, and by conformity to behavior patterns imposed upon you by the particular Christian society which you have chosen, and in which you hope to be found 'acceptable.' You will in this way perpetuate the pagan habit of practicing religion in the energy of the 'flesh,' and in the very pursuit of righteousness commit idolatry in honoring 'Christianity' more than Christ!"

The Mystery of Godliness
by W. Ian Thomas

Knowledge... Holmes

When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Sherlock Holmes

- empiricism, Sherlock Holmes, Truth, knowledge,

Pursuit of God preface Tozer

Though right tempers cannot subsist without right opinions, yet right opinions may subsist without right tempers. There may be a right opinion of God without either love or one right temper toward Him. Satan is a proof of this." Thanks to our splendid Bible societies and to other effective agencies for the dissemination of the Word, there are today many millions of people who hold "right opinions," probably more than ever before in the history of the Church. Yet I wonder if there was ever a time when true spiritual worship was at a lower ebb. To great sections of the Church the art of worship has been lost entirely, and in its place has come that strange and foreign thing called the "program." This word has been borrowed from the stage and applied with sad wisdom to the type of public service which now passes for worship among us. Sound Bible exposition is an imperative must in the Church of the Living God. Without it, no church can be a New Testament church in any strict meaning of that term. But exposition may be carried on in such way, as to leave the hearers devoid of any true spiritual nourishment whatever. For it is not mere words that nourish the soul, but God Himself, and unless and until the hearers find God in personal experience they are not the better for having heard the truth.
The Bible is not an end in itself, but a means to bring men to an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God, that they may enter into Him, that they may delight in His Presence, and taste and know the inner sweetness of the very God Himself in the core and center of their hearts. This book is a modest attempt to aid God's hungry children so to find Him. Nothing here is new except in the sense that it is a discovery which my own heart has made of spiritual realities most delightful and wonderful to me. Others before me have gone much farther into these holy mysteries than I have done, but if my fire is not large it is yet real, and there may be those who can light their candle at its Harne. 

A. W. Tozer Chicago, Ill. June 16, 1948

Issogesis - Walter C. Kaiser

Biblical Integrity in an Age of Theological Pluralism
In my judgment, the most dramatic moment in the entire twentieth century came in 1946 when W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley published their article “The Intentional Fallacy” in the Swanee Review. This shot would eventually be heard throughout the century and around the literary world. Most of the careful distinctions this duo made have now been lost in the popular versions of their work, which are now understood to advocate something like this: Whatever an author may have meant or intended to say by his or her written words is now irrelevant to the meanings we have come to assign as the meaning we see in that author’s text! On this basis, the reader is the one who sets the meaning for a text.
This astounding thesis changed all the rules of communication and interpretation. It gave the course for postmodernism, with its attendant methodologies, an enormous boost by setting a literary work free from its author’s affirmations and thought and substituting instead a multiplicity of meanings that were imputed to the work by each and every individual reader! This has become the heart of the integrity issue as the twenty-first century now struggles to see if the word integrity has any meaning left for our day!

Preaching and Teaching from the Old Testament
A Guide for the Church
Walter C. Kaiser

It could be summed up in the famous words of Richard of Chichester's prayer - to enable men and women 'to know Jesus Christ more clearly, to love him more dearly, and to follow him more nearly'.
William Barclay
General Introduction to the 1975 Edition

Your God is too Small - JB Phillips

Your God is to Small JB Philips Pg 36 - 38

There is a conception of God which seems at first sight, to be very lofty in splendid, but which proves paradoxically enough on examination to be yet another of the 'too small' ideas. It is to think that the guy who is responsible for the ferret terrifying vastness of the universe cannot be possibly interested in the lives of than minute specs of the consciousness which exists on an insignificant planet.
To have even the beginning of the in appreciation of the greatness of the Power controlling the incredible system that science is beginning to reveal to us is a staggering but salutatory experience. We may feel the sense God is so huge in our whole sphere (let alone an individual man) is so minut by comparison, that we cannot conceive his taking the detailed interest in a single human life at the protagonist of the Christian religion affirm. To those oh, and they are not a few, who are secretly wishing for a release from moral responsibility ( and is every argument about religion is colored by the desire),be a great relief --  sort of relief of a Schoolboy might find in realizing that in a school of a thousand Corey's his peccadilloes are very unlikely to be noticed by the Headmaster. To others the thought of their insignificance may be desolating -- they feel not so much set free as cast adrift.
But whatever a man's reaction may be to the idea of the terrific 'size' of God, the point to note is that his comment is this: 'I cannot imagine such a tremendous God being interested in me' and so on.  He 'cannot imagine': which means simply that his mind is incapable of retaining the ideas of terrifying vastness and of minute attention to microscopic detail at the same time. But it is in no way proves that God is incapable of fulfilling both ideas (and a great many more).
Behind this inability to conceive such a god there probably lies the unconscious, but very common, cause of "inadequate gods' -- the tendency to build up a mental picture of God from our knowledge and experience of man. We know, for instance, that if a man is in charge of fifty other men he can fairly easily make himself familiar with the history, character, abilities, and peculiarities, of each man. If he is in charge of five hundred he may still take a personal interest in each one, but it is almost impossible for him to know and retain in his memory personal details of the individual If he is in charge of five thousand men he may in general be wise and benevolent; but he cannot, indeed he does not attempt to know his men as individuals. the higher he is, the fewer his individual contacts. Because in our modern world we are tending more and more  to see men amassed in large numbers, for various purposes, we are forced to realize that the individual care of the ' one in charge' Maestro left a mess this realization has permeated our unconscious minds, and we find it inevitably suggested to us that the Highest of All must have the  que es contacts with the individual. Indeed if He is Infinitely High the idea of contact with the infinitesimal small individual becomes laughable.
But only if we are  modeling God upon what we know of men. That is why it is contended here that what we at first sight appears to be almost super adequate idea of God is, in reality, inadequate -- it is based on two tiny a foundation. Man may be made in the image of God;  but it is not sufficient to conceive God as nothing more than an infinitely magnified man.
You do know I'm still there who do the lines to you can just fill in that I thought you drew it in if I thought you drew the tracks


Second hand Gun
A skillful writer can make us feel that we have entered the very hearts and lives of these,  and many other, people. Almost without question, we had what we have read or seeing to the sum total of what we call 'experience'. The process is almost entirely automatic, and probably most of us would be greatly shocked if it could suddenly be revealed to us how small a proportion of our accumulated 'knowledge of the world' is due to our first-hand observation and experience.
The significance of the second-hand knowledge of life to the subject we are considering is this: the conception of the Character of God which slowly forms in our minds is largely made by the conclusions we draw from the 'providences' and 'judgements' of life. We envisage 'God' very largely from the way in which he appears to deal with (or not to deal with) His creatures. If, therefore, our knowledge of life is (unknown to us in all probability) faulty or biased or sentimental, we are quite likely to find ourselves a second-hand god who is quite different from the real one.  pg 39-40



False Galilean
If they were completely honest, many people would have to admit that God is to them an almost entirely negative force in their lives. It is not merely that He provides that 'gentle voice we hear . . .  which checks each fault', but that His whole Nature seems to deny, to cramp, and inhibit their own. Though such people whole never admit it, they are living endorsement of Swinburne's bitter lines:

Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean,
The world has grown grey from their breath.

Compared with their non=Christian contemporaries their lives seem to have less life and colour, less spontaneity and less confidence. Their god surrounds them with prohibitions but he does not supply them with vitality and courage. They may live under the shadow of his hand but it makes them stunted, pale and weak. Although the thought would appear blasphemous to his devotees, such a god is quite literally a blight upon human life, and no one can be surprised that he fails to attract the loyalty of those with spirit, independence, and a keen enjoyment of the colour and richness of life.
The words written above are a plain exposure of a false god, but of course, the unhappy worshippers never see their bondage as clearly as that or they would break away. They are bound to their negative god by the manipulation of isolated text of scripture or by a morbid conscience. At last, they actually feel that it is wrong to be themselves, wrong to be free, wrong to enjoy Beauty, Ron to expand and develop. Unless they have their gods permission they can do nothing. Disaster will infallibly bring them to heel, sooner or later, should they Venture beyond the confines of 'his planned for them'.
Such people, naturally enough, can only by strenuous efforts maintain their narrow loyalty. They do not get the chance to admire and love and worship and wordless longing one who is overwhelmingly Splendid and beautiful and lovable. At best they can only love and worship because their God is a jealous God, and it is his will and Commandment that they should. Their lives are cramped and narrow and joyless, because their God is the same. There must be compensations in the worship of such a God, and they usually are these.

1. The belief that the joy and freedom of those who do not subscribe to the worship. Of the negative God is just an illusion. Negative God worshippers often sustain themselves by imagining and elaborating upon the inner strange and conflicts of those who do not know their God. In fact, the strange and conflicts of ordinary  life are quite rightly felt by sensible people to be preferable to the Intolerable and never-ending strain of worshiping a God who drains the life of all its vitality in colour

2. There is a certain spiritual masochistic joy and being crushed by the Juggernaut of a negative God this is perfectly brought out in him which is still song in certain circles:

Oh to be nothing, nothing,
Only to lie at His feet,
A broken and empty vessel
For the Masters use made meet.

The sense of humor is, of course, suspended by the negative God, or his devotees would be bound to see the absurdity of anyone's ambition being to be ' nothing', a 'broken' and, not unnaturally, ' emptied' vessel line at gods feet! Better still, the New Testament ( a book full of freedom and joy, courage and vitality) might be a searched in vain to supply any endorsement whatsoever of the above truly Dreadful verse and the conception of God it typifies. if ever a book taught man to be 'something, something', to stand and do battle, to be far more full of joy and daring and life than they ever were without God --  that book is the New Testament!

3. The comforting idea of being ' something' special. Worshipers of the negative god often Comfort themselves by feeling that what is good enough for 'the world' is not good enough for them:  the chosen, the unique. Even though this means a life denuded of the beauties of art, abnormal pleasures, and Recreation, alive cramped in normal means of expression--that is a small price to paying the separate,. unique
This pathetic idea of being '' something special, is clung to with desperation so that we find worshippers of the negative God who knows in their secret hearts that their lives cannot really exhibit any Superior qualities to those of their ' worldly' or 'worldly Christian' friends, clean tightly to the rules of '  separateness-- so that they may at least feel  that they are marked out as a special favorites of their God!
All this is very unattractive men in Pleasant oh, but it is quite common among religious people the question for them is: dare they defy and break away from this imaginary god with a Perpetual frown and find the one who is the great Positive, who gives life, courage enjoy, and  wants His  Suns and daughters to stand on their own feet? 

- Jesus, Humanity, Satan, God,