Afflicted in Body, Mind, and Soul

 

James, the fifth chapter: The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed earnestly that it might not rain: and it rained not on the earth for the space of three years and six months. And he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain, and the earth brought forth her fruit.

Lord, there are many afflicted here, in body, mind, and soul. You command them to pray, and so we come before your throne with our petitions. Those hurt in body are the easiest to spot and the easiest to remember before You. We pray for Whitney and Karen, as they deal with bodies under our weary curse. We pray for those dealing with long-suffering, such as the Berglunds and Snells,

Daniels and Stutzmans, Vanderploegs and many others. Raise up all the sick and save them from their sins and temptations.

We pray for those wounded in mind, and those who faithfully care for them morning and night. It is an often thankless and fearful task, but you see all. Give them your comfort, and help us to give them ours.

And we pray for those with wounded souls, an invisible crowd without number. Be with those who desire to be married; they walk a lonely path. Be with Pastor Wilson and the brothers in Brazil as they minister to the hungry there, and grant them your protection. Be with the presidents and headmasters of all the schools in our area, as they mold—knowingly or unknowingly—immortal souls and their desires. We particularly ask for your wisdom for President Merkle as he decides how to deal with our petty city officials. And we pray that the Christ Church Hall would be finished soon, so that our community may grow and take root and flourish and testify. For he who converts a sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death, and hide a multitude of sins. So we ask all this and more, most boldly.

Amen

Petitions, King's Cross, Sept. 22, A.D. 2024

Book of the Month August 2024: An Experiment in Criticism

 

“This laborious sort of misreading is perhaps especially prevalent in our own age. One sad result of making English literature a ‘subject’ at schools and universities is that the reading of great authors is, from early years, stamped upon the minds of conscientious and submissive young people as something meritorious. When the young person in question is an agnostic whose ancestors were Puritans, you get a very regrettable state of mind. The Puritan conscience works on without the Puritan theology—like millstones grinding nothing; like digestive juices working on an empty stomach and producing ulcers. The unhappy youth applies to literature all the scruples, the rigorism, the self-examination, the distrust of pleasure, which his forbears applied to the spiritual life; and perhaps soon all the intolerance and self-righteousness.” 

 I have been reading books for literal decades at this point of my life. Compared to many others, I read easily, well, and very fast. So it is always a really fun moment when I discover someone who can tell me some new things about how to read, and how to think about reading. This book is one of those. 

Get it. Read it.

 

 

Commonplaces: August 2024

 

“The man who does not rein in his will to power and is at the same time very active according to the natural law is in a fair way to become an efficient megalomaniac.”—Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism, in Antigone Journal “Humanities Without Humanism”

“The sentimentalist, who would subject man to the rule of impulse and passion; the pragmatic naturalist, who would treat man as a mere edified ape; the leveling enthusiast, who would reduce human differences to a collective mediocrity—these are the enemies of true human nature.”—Russel Kirk, Introduction, Literature and the American College

“Colleges had been founded for the study of abstractions, not as schools to supply entertainment and job-certification for boys and girls.”

“It is not always easy, of course, in the ebullitions of a new movement, to distinguish the man who has received the living word from the man whose access of energy is the result of being relieved of the necessity of thinking for himself. Men who have stopped thinking make a powerful force.”

“At best, what the typical college has offered its undergraduates, in recent decades, has been defecated rationality: that is, a narrow rationalism or Benthamite logical ism, purged of theology, moral philosophy, and the wisdom of our ancestors. This defecated rationality exalts private judgment and gratification of the senses at the expense of the inner order of the soul and the outer order of the republic. On many a campus, this defecated and desiccated logicalism is the best that is offered to the more intelligent students; as alternatives, they could pursue a program of fun and games, or else a program of social commitment of a baneful or silly character, wondrously unintellectual."

Book of the Month July 2024: The Total State

 

I am a teacher, and a bookworm, and a nerd (possibly in that order) and so when I want someone to understand something, I will usually hand them a book. You want to understand the Crusades? Book. You can't figure out how to reconcile the one and the many? Book. How should you raise kids? Here's a book. The Bible is one of them, of course, but God has been kind enough to let us copy his method of communication about innumerable things. 

But this leads to a problem: how do you decide which books to read? There are probably now more books about, say, WWII than any one person could, quite literally, read in a lifetime! With all this information wandering about, how do you select and shape your reading?

Commonplaces: June/July 2024

 

“She looking thro’ and thro’ me/Thoroughly to undo me,/Smiling, never speaks:/So innocent-arch, so cunning-simple…”—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Lilian”

“Tota ecclesia instar tonitrui reboat Amen.”—Jerome, 2nd Prologue to his Commentary on Galatians, in Whitaker, Disputations on Holy Scripture

“We must exactly distinguish between man’s duty and God’s purpose, there being no connection between them. The purpose and decree of God is not the rule of our duty; neither is the performance of our duty in doing what we are commanded any declaration of what is God’s purpose to do, or his decree that it should be done. Especially is this to be seen and considered in the duty of the ministers of the gospel, in the dispensing of the word, and exhortations, invitations, precepts, and threatenings, committed unto them; all which are perpetual declaratives of our duty, and do manifest the approbation of the thing exhorted and invited to, with the truth of the connection between one thing and another, but not of the counsel and purpose of God, in respect of individual persons, and the ministry of the word. A minister is not to make inquiry after, nor to trouble himself about, those secrets of the eternal mind of God, namely—whom he purposes to save, and whom he hath sent Christ to die for in particular. It is enough for them to search his revealed will, and thence take their directions, from whence they have their commissions…and when they make proffers and tenders in the name of God to all, they do not say to all, “it is the purpose and intention of God that ye should believe,” (who gave them any such power?) but, that it is his command, which makes it their duty to do what is required of them; and they do not declare his mind, what himself in particular will do.”—John Owen, The Death of Death in the Death of Christ

Book of the Month June 2023: Empires of Light

Great are the powers of electricity....It makes millionaires. It paints devil's tails in the air and floats placidly in the waters of the earth. It hides in the air. It creeps into every living thing....Last night it nestled in the sherry. It lurked in the pale Rhine wine. It hid in the claret and sparkled in the champagne. It trembled in the sorbet electrique....Small wonder that the taste was thrilled and the man who sipped was electrified...energy begets energy. (from the Buffalo Morning Express, January 13th, 1897, after the city had been electrified)

I rather desperately wanted to write this on Joe Rigney's new Emotional Sabotage. But if you're one of the four people who reads my stuff, you've already heard of that one. So I decided to do something a bit more unknown. So our candidate for this month, flouncing into the (electric) spotlight in all her shy glory, is Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World by Jill Jonnes (2004). In this highly readable historical work, we are treated to visions of how a substance that we moderns take for granted--electricity--sparkled and crackled its way into American life at the end of the 19th century.

You Can Only Tell What You Know

 

"...not that I mean to depreciate [the poets]; but everyone can see that they are a tribe of imitators, and will imitate best and most easily the life in which they have been brought up; while that which is beyond the range of a man’s education he finds hard to carry out in action, and still harder adequately to represent in language.”—Plato, Timaeus (Jowett)

It is a common Twitter trope these days to portray our American elites (political or artistic) as a deliberate set of societal saboteurs, scheming in air-conditioned offices about how to take down the whites and the Christians, the "grillers" and the "normies." They lure us with innocent-sounding phrases like justice and neighbor or a wonderful Episode 1 of a streaming series. The mass of middle America joins in, some with caution, more with enthusiasm. And then--bam--in swoops the Wokeness, the lawfare, the main-character-who-surprise-is-actually-gay-but-still-somehow-just-as-awesome. The trap closes, we conservatives lose another political battle or beloved IP, and the process starts all over again.

Book of the Month May 2024: Ascent to Love

"Here failed the strength of my high fantasy;/Already though my will and my desire/Were, as a balanced wheel is moved, turned by/The love that moves the sun and other stars."

Ascent to Love is a study guide (or perhaps, more accurately, an interpretive overview) of Dante's Divine Comedy. I heard someone say once that Peter Leithart is a better literary critic than a theologian, and based on what I've read of his stuff so far, it seems to check out. This was excellent. He charts a course through the three parts of the Comedy and ties it all together as a pursuit of Love--not the smarmy emotion of so many Hollywood movies, but the burning, bright holiness that makes everything work. Dante begins wandering in a dark wood. He is lost, hunted, and unable to reach his life's goal. But his cries are heard, and he is sent a guide--the great poet Virgil--to show him the way out of his errors. His journey is the wonderful song of the Commedia. 

Commonplaces: May 2024

 

“Nec promiscuam habere ac vulgarem clementiam oportet nec abscisam; nam tam omnibus ignoscere crudelitas quam nulli.” (Neither should we have indiscriminate and general mercy, nor yet preclude it; for it is as much a cruelty to pardon all as to pardon none.)—Seneca, De Clementia I.ii

“Principum saevitia, bellum est.”—Seneca, De Clementia I.v

“The Christian, when fullest of divine communications, is but a glass without a foot; he cannot stand, or hold what he hath received, any longer than God holds him in his strong hand.”—William Gurnall, The Christian in Complete Armour

“Many lose heaven, because they are ashamed to go in a fool’s coat thither.”—Gurnall

“Obedience, being a child of faith, partakes of its parent’s strength or weakness.”—Gurnall

“They say writing is just pushing a feather, but… writing occupies not just the fist or the foot while the rest of the body can be singing or jesting, but the whole man. As for school teaching, it is so strenuous that no one ought to be bound to it for more than ten years.”—Martin Luther, in Roland Bainton’s Here I Stand

Book of the Month April 2024: Common Grace

“We fortify ourselves in opposition to God when we view this world as our sphere and this earth as our domain. God has his heaven, and we have this earth, and a bartering ensues in which, after death, God allocates to us a piece of his heaven--while we, in exchange, give God during our earthly life a piece of this earthly life, as it were. And then, of course, a somewhat businesslike mind-set governs in this sacred realm as well, by which we attempt to purchase as large a piece of heaven as possible by sacrificing as small a piece of this earthly life as possible.”—Abraham Kuyper, Common Grace Vol. II

It is quite common in modern Reformed circles to talk blithely of "Kuyperianism." The term is rarely defined, but seems to mean the opposite of a stark spiritual/material dualism, where heaven is God's pure spiritual domain and the earth belongs to the Devil and his angels (meaning a Christian need not bother himself with it overmuch). We might summarize it as the mindset of "this world is not my home, I'm just a-passin' through" of many old gospel songs. In this view, a Christian is a stranger with his mind on purely spiritual concerns, and what is going on in this realm of sin and trouble need not concern him. But Kuyperians instead claim the Christian does have earthly concerns--usually concentrated in the political and economic realms. While this is a fine definition, there is a lot more to true Kuyperianism than an integrated orthopraxy.

The name is coined from Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920), a Dutch pastor who managed to do more in his eighty-seven years than any one man had a right to do (start a political party, found and edit a major newspaper, manage a nationwide church split, found a university, be elected prime minister, write theological bestsellers...the list could go on). In America, he is best known for his Lectures on Calvinism, originally six talks given as part of Princeton's Stone Lectures in 1898; as well as for his famous quote,

 "Oh, no single piece of our mental world is to be hermetically sealed off from the rest, and there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: 'Mine!'"

Kuyper was one of the leading voices of what is often called Neo-Calvinism, a movement that opposed Modernism--the rationalism and secularism that flowed over Europe in the wake of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic conquests. He saw Calvinism as not simply a particular Reformed response to the papacy or a special emphasis on soteriology, but as a total system or "worldview." This system would allow Christians to oppose the totalizing claims of modern life with an equally totalizing (but far more justly balanced) response.

He is particularly well-known today for his response to the exaltation of the principle of popular sovereignty. Europe had rallied to the idea that the voice of the people, not the monarch, holds ultimate sway in any government system. Whatever the people decide goes. Hegel divinized that process as the dialectical "voice of history" and it is, of course, a key component of political battles in our day. Therefore, if what ever the people says goes, and the voice of the people is the government, then there is no appeal beyond government fiat. Kuyper refused to accept this view of the state's all-encompassing authority. Instead, he divided various governments into "spheres"--primarily civil, ecclesiastical, and family. Each sphere has unique authorities and penalties, and were separated and founded by God; but they overlap in practical ways in day-to-day life. Dividing them is where it gets tricky, because every individual belongs to different spheres.

So how do we know what to do? One of the common answers has been the classical concept of "natural law." However, with the rise of Darwinian evolution and materialism, this term often got freighted with the idea that the rules for life somehow existed outside of God, or at least of any Christian revelation. Kuyper, leaning on the traditional Reformed view of covenant, instead formulated the concept of "common grace." Grace here might be best defined as "God's unmerited favor." While particular grace saved the individual, and covenantal grace saved the elect, common grace saved all of mankind after the sin of Adam, when it rightly should have died in his transgression. Without this general or "common" grace, the last two would have no opportunity to work.

Here, then, are three touchstones of grace. One is entirely personal, a white stone, engraved with a name known only to God and to you. This is wholly particular grace. The second one is the touchstone of the covenant grace, a blessed gift you enjoy in common with all God's children. The third is the touchstone of a general human grace, coming to you because you are among the children of humanity, yours together with not only all God's children but in common with all the children of humanity. (Common Grace, Vol. I, pg. 5, italics original)

It is important to note that Kuyper saw common grace as in no way salvific, as he was occasionally accused of doing (and went to particular pains to refute). He saw it instead as a way to distinguish God's forbearance against sin:

The notion of "general" grace is so easily misused, as if by it were meant saving grace, and that is absolutely not the case. The only grace that is saving in the absolute sense is particular, personal grace, and even covenant grace receives this title of honor only with certain qualifications. Nevertheless, even though covenant grace in certain instances is saving in terms of its nature when significance, this may never be ascribed to general grace.... In itself general grace carries no saving seed within itself and is therefore of an entirely different nature from particular grace or covenant grace. Since this is often lost from view when speaking about general grace, to prevent misunderstanding and confusion it seemed more judicious to revive in our title the otherwise somewhat antiquated expression, and to render the phrase communis gratia, used formerly by Latin-speaking theologians, as "common grace." (Vol. I, pg. 6) 

He treated the subject at length in articles in the newspaper he founded and ran, De Heraut. The finished articles were then organized and collected into three volumes: Volume I covered the biblical theology of the doctrine, what Kuyper called its "origin and operation;" (Vol. I preface, xxxviii) Volume II offered a doctrinal, systematic presentation; Volume III gave practical out workings of the doctrine in everyday Dutch life (from cowpox vaccines to education to Sabbath laws). The entire set was published in book form in 1902. It has been freshly translated into English in a fine set available from Lexham Press.

In our day of debates over general equity theonomy, Christian nationalism, or the effectiveness of the Constitution, the most valuable and easily accessible volume will be the third on practical concerns. In spite of the intervening time and ocean, most of his topics remain highly relevant to American Christians today. I mused while reading it that the history of America might have looked quite different if this work had been translated when it came out, instead of a hundred and ten years later--we might have been far more skeptical of government education, for one. But it is never too late to do the reading! Kuyper is brilliant, and even when you disagree with him, he forces you to think through an issue.

Thanks to the Abraham Kuyper Translation Society, there is much more of Kuyper available in our day than the Lectures on Calvinism. If you've got the time and the inclination, I highly recommend you dive deeper into the work and life of this irrepressible Dutchman.