The Calling

"It is the mark of a good story, of the higher or more complete kind, that however . .. terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the 'turn' comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears".

J R R Tolkein

In art and life, noted C S Lewis, we are always trying to glean from successive moments something beyond those moments. Children who relish the opportunity to hear a story over and over again understand this, that it is the 'quality' of something unexpected, not the fact of it, which truly delights us. Like Tom hearing the clock strike thirteen (Tom's midnight garden), we know that such a point opens a window to something astonishing, something which deeply resonates with our 'sense of wonder' and meaning with regards to existence.

This week saw the release of some research into our reality that takes us 'beyond the moment'.

Andrew Sibley at the Uncommon Descent blog reports:

Researchers from Oxford’s Centre for Anthropology and Mind have found evidence that children are predisposed to believe in God or a supreme being. This is because of a natural assumption that everything in the world exists for a purpose and was therefore created.

Dr Justin Barrett was reported in the UKs Daily Telegraph as saying that young children appear to have an inherent faith even when it has not been taught to them by family or school. Even children raised on a desert island without any external influence would start out with a belief in God.

Commenting on the BBC Radio 4’s Today programme he said

“The preponderance of scientific evidence for the past 10 years or so has shown that a lot more seems to be built into the natural development of children’s minds than we once thought, including a predisposition to see the natural world as designed and purposeful and that some kind of intelligent being is behind that purpose…if we threw a handful on an island and they raised themselves I think they would believe in God.”

We have lived through a time when there has indeed been much "surprise" - where the developing image of our universe is not of a place which chaos and chance have thrown together to remain remote and transient, where life is a mere spark that will simply die. Life, in all it's balance and complexity, is here by design - and it is the quality of this truth which urges us to return to the true source of life and wisdom, the one Paul describes as 'made plain' by what we know and understand (Romans 1).

Christmas is a time which invites us, like the children in a nativity play, to learn still more about the 'quality' of such a surprise - that the very wisdom and nature of God is not merely something remotely observed in our studies via microscope or telescope, or even something we all deeply recognize for our earliest days - it is a reality that was 'made flesh' amongst us in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ.

The great 'story' that we are all a part of, is imbued with a marvelous reality - there is a conclusion to this saga that brings eternal purpose, if we but open our eyes and like a child, step into a deeper world.

POISON!

"The body was created as an inseparable part of what makes us human...
We don't just have a body - we are bodily....
The good news is that, in spite of death, the body will be re-united in all its goodness and splendor one day...
Sexual organs, which God created and clearly included in His pronouncement "Good", we now refer to as 'naughty' (or worse)".

Michael Horton.

Sometimes, you read something, like the above, which makes you want to shout "YES!" with your whole being, and sometimes, you read something which hits you right between the eyes, and makes you realize just how impoverished we can make ourselves when we miss 'joining the dots' to unpack the true ramifications of our redemption. Today was certainly a latter encounter.

For several years, I've been receiving and on occasion writing for the excellent Fig Leaf Forum - a regular newsletter for Christian Naturist's. Now I know that the practice itself raises eyebrows amongst many (those who want to know more as to why it shouldn't , please get in touch), but the inherent and underlying supposition of the practice regarding the nature of the body is something ALL Christians need to understand, which brings me back to today.

This month's forum contained an article on the issue of the nature of shame, especially body shame, and how we as believers can so easily miss the necessary understanding of this and end up in a cul-de-sac of mistaken identity - where we have ill-defined what modesty and piety are and thereby totally missed the inherent nature of godliness.

The piece makes you look forward - to the bodily life that is coming - so that we can properly evaluate where we are right now, and what actually occurred in the fall. It's when we make this study that we are so pointedly reminded that shame (something we've all known) is a consequence of sin (severance from the genuine reality of Creation, both in the Beginning and in the coming renewal).
Now, it's imperative we understand this, because it's so easy to confuse shame with modesty, and then become a casualty of a mis-placed 'holiness' - outward dos and don'ts we believe are correct, but are seriously flawed.

When we look at the Biblical perspective, we see that humanity, male and female, naked and unashamed, is the definition of what is 'very good', but, we continue, those days are gone, so we reason, fallen beings that we are, clothing has become a kind of moral duty - a 'protection' against giving way to evil.
Whilst a considered reading of Genesis 3 itself should give us serious doubts about that understanding (and raise other questions - what 'nakedness' is in focus here?), this really doesn't sit too well with how the body is understood in the New Testament itself, or the nature of the resurrection hope which Paul unpacks in Romans and Corinthians (another great area to study).

What this really shows is that the Fall has entirely broken what was meant (and will be) our natural relationship to the created order, to one another and to the physical body, but that this is what has been redeemed and will be made evident in the approaching 'glorifying' (re-instating of proper significance) of God's handiwork. It also shows us that we can allow badly informed piety to become our schoolmaster with regards to our bodies, fueling a distaste for God's gifts which mars and demeans what we should truly honor.

What struck me was just how crucial such insights have to be when we begin to look at the practical aspects of Christian living. Paul speaks of us giving our bodies as a 'living sacrifice to God' - you actually cannot do that if you hate the physical, the sexual, the natural part of what you are. God is calling for us to show Christ through these very means - in the manner in which we share God's life and love to the world around us. "Denying ourselves" in the sense of cutting ourselves off from the life we are rooted in removes the very means whereby God wants this current world to be 'savored' with the richness of Christ and His redeeming work.

There's a great deal to unpack here, and all I've done so far on this is really get my toes wet.

What comes to mind when you begin to consider how we may have mis-placed godliness?

Savoring the world

"Medieval Europe not only created the experimental science of optics and initiated surprisingly modern-sounding discussions about cosmology, but began the systematic teaching of astronomy to university undergraduates.... All this was done with the full encouragement of Christianity - for without that, there would never have been the physical resources nor the intellectual initiative to follow this path...
The disciplined search for truth which we call science, therefore, is not the natural foe of such faith, and to see it as such is to commit a serious injury to those historical forces which have produced Western civilization". Dr Allan Chapman.

Something is finally dawning in some quarters of our culture regarding the bareness of atheistic secularism, particularly with regard to its caricature of the significance of Christianity.
Today, a review was published in a popular paper here of a new television drama, some seven years in the making, to be aired this week, which seeks to challenge our incorrect assumptions on the Purtian period in England, which actually marked the beginnings of enriching society in ways we would all value as good.

"The Puritan conviction", writes Lucy Powell, "was that beauty was God-given, not man made. This meant that women could loosen the punishing pinch of fashionable, tight-wasted bodices, ditch the cumbersome hoops and bustles in their skirts, and forgo the established practice of dropping arsenic into their eyes to make them wide. They also stopped dousing their faces with acid to make them white and wrinkle-free... the period saw a radical shift in the idea of what the role of a woman would be".

The first real 'sexual revolution' occurred at this time. Puritan Men and women were able to 'socialize' in a manner which shocked at the time, and within marriage, the Puritans also encouraged sexual pleasure and satisfaction for both men and women as an inherent part of love making. Far from being the dismal characters we think them to be, they merely sought to show that all of life is best within its proper context, and key to this was an understanding of the relationship of the created order to its Creator.

Modern history is replete with examples of this 'savoring' of our world by Christianity. From the abolition of slavery, to the beginning of trade unions and social welfare, from the rich development of our language, to the origins of the first modern schools of learning for science and the arts, all stems from this same weaving of life and faith.
Is it then, perhaps any wonder, that in a time when there has been very active attempts to dis-engage such association and dismiss these connections that our culture has become more fractured and dis-membered and life has become more demeaned?

Jesus told His disciples that they would become 'salt and light' in this world, and history shows us the reality of what transpires when His body enriches the days and times around them.
Rather than becoming removed from these days, let's seek to do our best to value and season the lives of people and the opportunities we are given with the meaning of all those good things which come down to us from our Father, through His redemption, made ours in Christ.

The continuing collision

"Western Civilisation had an innate dynamic drive whose deepest source was its sense of direction and purpose - a confidence in its destiny. This came from Christianity".

Historian John Roberts.

"And I will bring division between you - between your offspring and hers". Genesis 3:15


I was fascinated to read these remarks this week by Dave Scott on the Uncommon Descent website:

"Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for (the modern world). Why do I say it’s a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.

Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday—these are deeply held (mythic) structures. They are profoundly conservative belief".

We live an in a day which seeks to define itself as inherently pluralistic, where 'spirituality' is either deemed as inherently viewed as an evolutionary miss-demeanor, or essentially practiced as nothing beyond a dualistic 'merging', amidst the illusion of the material, into the ultimate state of non-existence. Within such a context, it is fascinating to see what Mr Scott has touched upon, that the almost gravity-like pull of the Biblical message of Creation, Fall and Redemption cannot actually be exorcised from our lives - it has to be re-defined, made manageable and, of greatest import, achievable by the 'natural' human community - able, it is said, to achieve this goal through its own common will.

In the 15th century, prior to any contact with the West, the Incan king, Pachacuti, builder of the famous city of Machu Picchu, renounced his culture's worship of the sun god, Inti, and for good reason. He understood that the sun was merely part of the physical order, which like himself, was bound to the realities of that realm. In a hymn composed by the king, he renews the almost extinct memory of Viracocha, the omnipotent creator of all things. "He is ancient, remote, supreme and uncreated", noted the king, "He manifests Himself as a trinity when He so wishes. He created all the peoples of the world by His word. He alone is our origin, ordaining our years and causing us to be sustained and grow through the gifts of His creation.He has pity upon our wretchedness and alone judges and absolves us. He should be revered with awe and humility".

We recognize our need for the very 'pattern' which scripture conveys, but like the fallen of Eden, we quickly seek to re-define such matters via the fig-leaves of our terms, our misguided understanding. Only those, like Pachacuti, who stand before the naked truth of our reality can hope to gain true wealth and wisdom - we are either made by one who has marked us with destiny, or we and all we inhabit are inherently irrelevant. These are essentially the only two players in the room. The age-long truth, so mirrored in the aspiration of eternity in our hearts, is that there is indeed one in whom we live and move and have our being, and though He is far above and beyond our most determined means to ignorantly define, He has made Himself known through the coming of the Word.

The Necessity

“For nearly half a century, the church was split into two or three obediences that ex-communicated one another, so that every catholic lived under ex-communication by one pope or another and in the last analysis, no one could say with certainty which one had right on his side. The church no longer offered certainty of salvation. She had become questionable in her whole objective form. The true church, the true pledge of salvation HAD TO BE SOUGHT OUTSIDE the institution.

It is against this back-drop of a profoundly shaken ecclesiastical consciousness that we are to understand that Luther, in the conflict between his search for salvation and the tradition of the church ultimately came to experience the church not as the guarantor but as the adversary of salvation”.

Historical assessment of the reason for the reformation by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger
(now Pope Benedict XVI).

It's something the media age has made us live with - national and international convulsions of crisis and upheaval which seem immediate, if mostly conveyed in a detached, almost remote fashion, where we can sit and watch but feel disconnected. It can even occur regarding things that are literally happening under our noses.

Yesterday, I watched with disbelief as a small town around an hour's drive from my home was bombarded with a month's rain in under two hours, a foot of hail and ice, and lightning that sheeted the night sky so long that people there thought the end of the world had arrived... Meanwhile, most of us in the same county slept quietly in our beds, unaware of what had occurred in our backyard until the news reports the next morning.

It is the strangest thing to visit a place where some great event has occurred. In the last decade, I recall walking through a forest the morning after a great storm - the strongest of its kind, they believe, in over a thousand years. Great old trees had been uprooted and tossed around like kindling, famous landscape markers had vanished overnight and the whole place smelt of the sap of a broken, torn place.

There are moments when such a conflagration is not only necessary, but demanded amongst the Christian church; a 'breaking' of bones in order that they may be re-set and bound to heal and grow well. The events in medieval Europe, from the preaching and ministry of John Wycliffe and the Lollards, through the sacrifice of Jon Hus, to the protest against indulgences by the Augustinian, Martin Luther, were the birth bangs of the long and hard work of seeking to bruise in order to mend, that those of us living may genuinely be exposed to the radiance of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and be made free by this alone.

The struggle has not changed. The church still creaks and teeters, as it so often seems overloaded by those who teach another Jesus, another 'gospel', but some 500 years on from that morning in Wittenburg, when Luther took the bold step of expressing concerns due to his conviction that Apostolic truth was at stake, there are still voices who wish to affirm the message of the New Testament - the just shall live by faith alone - that we may truly do each other good.

On this day, when our world dallies with fear, superstition and the eve of another year, let us look towards a greater truth, a greater day, when the healing of Christ through the good news heralds the renewal of the Lord's good handiwork....

From earth's wide bounds,

from oceans farthest coast, through gates of pearl stream in the countless host,

singing to Father, Son and Holy Ghost, Alleluia, Alleluia.

Hymn: For All the Saints by Vaughn Williams.

"Herein is wisdom..."

"But He, in Himself, after a fashion which we can neither describe nor conceive, predestinating all things, formed them as He pleased, bestowing harmony on all things...
in this way, in short, He formed all things that were made by His Word that never wearies".

Irenaeus.

I've carried it around for most of my adult life - a little green card that says I'm disabled. Most of the time, I forget about it, and most of the people I meet everyday probably never see me that way, but in my case it's something that's been true since birth, and there are mornings where I really know it's true.

It's like that in all kinds of ways in life - we suddenly find ourselves facing a trail or a circumstance which leaves us way out of our depth, but what do we do in that moment?

Sometimes, we can see things coming. I can recall my visit to America in 2005, and the friend I was staying with telling me in no uncertain terms that the growing 'sub prime fiasco' was going to wreak havoc on the global economy.
Occasionally, perhaps because of hindsight from another event, we correctly read part of what's shaping up and can thereby anticipate what's required next. A good sailor, I'm told, can tell in many cases what the wind is probably going to do, and what that means for the day at sea.
It's useful to be a good judge of such things, but however good a prospector we may be, life will always have something up ahead that catches us out - because of who and what we are.

The tendency of human nature is to put everything into a box - a scheme entitled 'modernism' or 'secularism' or a plethora of others; whatever 'suit' we think will fit the moment, but at the end of the day, our Politically Correct 'dress codes' will leave us bare before the harsh realities we all face, for they contain no remedy.

Nearly 2,000 years ago, as Christianity wrangled with the belief that the physical was irrelevant, Irenaeus sought to guide our view beyond such trends to a touchstone that will leave us awe-struck when truly realized.
Beyond the meager limitations of our defining, our scheming, our oh so real frustrations, there is the revelation of the Word (John 1:1).
It's really worth doing sometime - sit down with your study guides and begin unpack what this definition of the character and nature of God is seeking to express to us - it's astonishing.
Of course the amazement does not end there - this Word was made flesh, and because of this, the 'stuff' we inhabit and are made of will not be forever bound to futility and frustration, but will be liberated from such misery and decay.

It certainly gets harder to do things as we get older (except have a good moan, perhaps!), but the truly good news is that there is genuine hope for our poor race and this maligned world we inhabit.

It may be hard to start tomorrow, but it may help to see each day as a moment heralding that great redemption - an opportunity for us to truly see, to taste, to know, the glory of the one revealed as the Word.

In proper context

"From the fourth century onwards, there took place what some have termed the paganizing of the church. It adopted beliefs and practices that were wholly alien to the Gospel".

Jacques Ellul

"Be on your guard against the ferment, the teaching, of these men".

Jesus.

Last month, new evidence was released that a certain chemical used in common plastic items, including water bottles, can under certain conditions leach into the contents of the plastic container and end up within our bodies, causing a much higher likelihood of heart problems or cancer.
The very items we use everyday to help us keep healthy could in fact be responsible for major health problems and deaths, all because there is a fault with the container the 'healthy' product is provided in.

The same is so abundantly true regarding the very nature of the Christian church.

Why is it that the essential message of fundamental freedom (the redemption in Christ that once again allows us to love God and each other) is so buried beneath an unbearable weight of provisos and conditions which are strenuously advocated amongst the various 'traditions' (ancient or modern) in the majority of variations in Christendom? Why would an Apostle like Paul once again find himself standing almost alone if here today because of his bold and clear affirmation not only of the Gospel itself, but of the ramifications regarding Christian liberty, now so rigorously deemed 'outside' the remit of 'piety' assumed and shored-up within the niche of most churches?

The answer is because we have so often been told to avoid the plain statements of Christ and His Apostles and to place confidence in the leaching of folly into the instruction of leaders and institutions - poison which makes us numbed and dulled to the real power and nature of the vital Christian life.

Dualistic and Gnostic 'purity' has murdered our faith for centuries, and it must be denounced as the dark mesmerism which defrauds so many into swallowing whole a mime, a hideous and hollow imitation of a faith which wishes to drive deep into our flesh, our deeds, in a fashion that reveals mere external 'display' as a toxic, malevolent mantle.

The requirement of our generation, as we fast approach another anniversary of Luther's issuing of a thesis toward liberty, is to recognize the true responsibility of Christian discipleship, to stand sure in the freedom we have, and to teach and live from within that freedom, never again giving ourselves to the horror of dead religion.