Full Contact Christianity

…can be found on Bobby’s blog here, in the comments thread. This is easily the best Bobby and I have ever done at communicating with each other, and I’m thoroughly enjoying it.

This from C.S. Lewis, Oxford History of English Literature: The Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama pp. 32-34

We want, above all, to know what it felt like to be an early Protestant.   One thing is certain. It felt very unlike being a ‘puritan’ such as we meet in nineteenth-century fiction. Dickens’s Mrs. Clennam, trying to expiate her early sin by a long life of voluntary gloom, was doing exactly what the first Protestants would have forbidden her to do. They would have thought her whole conception of expiation papistical. On the Protestant view one could not, and by God’s mercy need not, expiate one’s sins.

Theologically, Protestantism was either a recovery, or a development, or an exaggeration (it is not for the literary historian to say which) of Pauline theology. Hence in Buchanan’s Franciscanus ad Fratres the Friars’ prophylactic against it is to keep clear of the ‘old man from Tarsus’ (Tarsensis fuge scripta senis).

In the mind of a Tyndale or Luther, as in the mind of St. Paul himself, this theology was by no means an intellectual construction made in the interests of speculative thought. It springs directly out of a highly specialized religious experience; and all its affirmations, when separated from that context, become meaningless or else mean the opposite of what was intended.

Propositions originally framed with the sole purpose of praising the Divine compassion as boundless, hardly credible, and utterly gratuitous, build up, when extrapolated and systematized, into something that sounds not unlike devil-worship. The experience is that of catastrophic conversion. The man who has passed through it feels like one who has waked from nightmare into ecstasy. Like an accepted lover, he feels that he has done nothing, and never could have done anything, to deserve such astonishing happiness. Never again can he ‘crow from the dunghill of desert*. All the initiative has been on God’s side; all has been free, unbounded grace. And all will continue to be free, unbounded grace. His own puny and ridiculous efforts would be as helpless to retain the joy as they would have been to achieve it in the first place. Fortunately they need not. Bliss is not for sale, cannot be earned. ‘Works’ have no ‘merit’, though of course faith, inevitably, even unconsciously, flows out into works of love at once. He is not saved because he does works of love: he does works of love because he is saved. It is faith alone that has saved him: faith bestowed by sheer gift. From this buoyant humility, this farewell to the self with all its good resolutions, anxiety, scruples, and motive-scratchings, all the Protestant doctrines originally sprang.

For it must be clearly understood that they were at first doctrines not of terror but of joy and hope: indeed, more than hope, fruition, for as Tyndale says, the converted man is already tasting eternal life. The doctrine of predestination, says the XVIIth Article, is ‘full of sweet, pleasant and unspeakable comfort to godly persons’. But what of ungodly persons? Inside the original experience no such question arises. There are no generalizations. We are not building a system. When we begin to do so, very troublesome problems and very dark solutions will appear. But these horrors, so familiar to the modern reader (and especially to the modern reader of fiction), are only by-products of the new theology. They are astonishingly absent from the thought of the first Protestants. Relief and buoyancy are the characteristic notes. In a single sentence of the Tischreden Luther tosses the question aside for ever. Do you doubt whether you are elected to salvation? Then say your prayers, man, and you may conclude that you are. It is as easy as that.

Jim Reitman is a good friend and ally, and the author of the Gospel in 3D series.  He took a bad fall in a cycling accident a couple of days ago, and is in the hospital with multiple fractures — ribs, clavicle, like that.  Please pray for him and his wife Peggy.

I’ve had some complaints that my recording of my plenary session at GES this year suffered from such poor audio quality that it was hard to understand.  Part of that is my recording setup, and I can’t fix that part.  Part of it was the mp3 conversion software I was using, and that I can fix, and I think I have.  I have taken down the old one and put up the new on GES 2010 page.

As most of you know, I’ve been grappling with all things having to do with worship over the last few years.  So it was a particular delight to drop in on an old friend’s blog and find her writing on some related things.  Here’s a quote:

But as I think of worship – even beyond the musical element of it – I am intrigued by the use of the word ‘worship’ as found in the book of Exodus. When God appointed Moses to lead the Israelites out of Egypt He said a certain phrase over and over and over again, “Let my people go, so that they may worship me.” I’ve read through the journey of the Israelites’ mass exodus out of Egypt countless times, but never remember seeing the so-that part. God delivering His people from Egypt was all about worship. We might expect something more along the lines of “Let my people go, so that they can tithe more, or keep the rules more comprehensively, or go to church every Sunday, or feed the poor, or subscribe to Christian magazines… I don’t know, you can fill in the blank, but you get the point. God could have made freedom about anything, but He made it about worship.

You can read the rest of the entry here.  It’s worth your time.

Many thanks to some good friends, I had the opportunity to go to Israel in the first half of November with HaDavar Ministries. Bob Morris of HaDavar was our tour host, and Hela Crown-Tamir of Israel, the Holyland Way was our guide (shameless commercial plug: buy her very useful book).  Both were outstanding.

The opportunity arose suddenly, and as Kimberly and I were discussing whether or not I should take it, she asked me to keep a journal* of the trip for her.  I did, and to my surprise nearly filled the thing.  Below is an excerpt:

Today we also went to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.  Both Hela and Bob are saying, 100%, This Is Where It Happened.  Haven’t heard the reasons yet.  Took a series of pictures of the icons, including a nice set of the four evangelists.  The church has all manner of chapels, corridors, passageways &c.  After coming out — 10 min. before the rendezvous time — I saw a little side door, just off to the right of the main doors as you face the church.  I stuck my head in out of curiosity, and saw it was a little chapel.  One cleric was sitting in the shadows in the corner, droning his prayers; it was otherwise deserted. I sat down.  As I had in a quiet(er) corner of the church above, I said the Creed quietly.  Here I added the Lord’s Prayer and some other things as well, thinking of the centuries of brothers and sisters who said these same words here.

I believe in the communion of saints.

Then a door at the head of the chapel banged open, disgorging a flood of pilgrims noisily clambering down the stairs below the door, noisily traversing the length of the chapel and exiting by the door where I’d entered, their chatter disrupting my prayers.  I liked communing with the silent and long-departed dead saints a lot better than the raucous fellowship of the living ones.

Oh, well.  God isn’t finished with me yet.  Grow in grace, Tim.  Grow in grace.

*(By the way, Cavallini & Co. makes a really nice leatherbound journal for Barnes & Noble.  The Israel Journal was my second, and I highly recommend them.)

“Inferior people discuss people; mediocre people discuss events; great people discuss ideas.”

I came upon that notion somewhere in my travels as a head-in-the-clouds youngster and thought it was brilliant.

Not least because it meant I was superior to my peers.

Incarnated, this is the notion that two philosophers discussing the nature of metaphor in a cafe somewhere are vastly superior to two parents discussing whether to let Johnny sleep over at his friend Richard’s house this Friday night.

The philosophers are so learned, so interesting, and the parents are just so…common.  Boring.  Joe and Mary Sixpack with their mundane problems.  Who cares?

God does.  Truth is, Mom and Dad deciding who Johnny gets to spend time with will impart more wisdom than all the philosophy departments in all the universities in all the land.

Now before I get an endless stream of angry comments, let me hasten to say that gossip is a sin, and ideas are important.  But the notion that ideas are the only subject really worth talking about is just so much Hellenistic piffle; the ideas only matter when a person incarnates them.    The weightiest idea you can think of wouldn’t crush a gnat if it landed right on top of him.

Johnny has crushed lots of gnats.  Johnny matters.  Whether Mom and Dad let him spend the night at Richard’s, and how they handle the situation, shapes his character.  If they do their job well, then by the time the philosophy professor gets hold of him, he already knows which ideas he ought to incarnate, and which ones he’d better not.