Bully's Blog

A passage from Why Johnny Can’t Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers, by T. David Gordon:

“All of their sermons are about Christian truth or theology in general, and the particular text they read ahead of time merely prompts their memory or calls their attention to one of Christianity’s important realities (insofar as they perceive it). Their reading does not stimulate them to rethink anything, and since the text doesn’t stimulate them particularly (but serves merely as a reminder of what they already know), their sermon is not particularly stimulating to their hearers.

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or Silencing the Higher Critics

Yet more on literary analysis of the Bible as a ‘terrible marvel‘; a review of two books. As Warren Gage has commented, we are on the verge of a tremendously creative time in Biblical theology. But this to me seems also to be an element of scholarship returning home, older and wiser, from a wilderness of unbelief.

Genesis: The Story We Haven’t Heard
by Paul Borgman. Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2001. 252 pages.

The Literary Structure of the Old Testament: A Commentary on Genesis-Malachi
by David A. Dorsey. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1999. 330 pages.

Reviewed by Timothy Paul Erdel, Ph.D., Archivist and Assistant Professor of Religion and Philosophy, Bethel College, Mishawaka, IN.

“I have been fascinated by the primal power of Old Testament stories for as long as I can remember. From my perspective, there is no clearer window on human character, no greater storehouse of hard and holy truths. Yet some tales are deeply disturbing. Phyllis Trible calls them ‘texts of terror.’ Even the most familiar passages may seem strangely distant. So I relish each time a preacher or teacher sheds new light on these ancient Hebrew narratives.

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The LORD called out to the man and asked, “Where are you?”  Genesis 3:9

For those who wonder why God doesn’t fix all the wrong in the world right now, C. S. Lewis wrote that when the Author walks onto the stage, the play is over. That is true, but narrow…

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The quiet, daily betrayals are just as capable of turning an ardent Christian into a confirmed, if uncomfortable pagan. C. S. Lewis believed that the ‘softly, softly’ approach is one of the key tactics of the Devil. To paraphrase Screwtape, he aims to introduce into every life that revolves around God a slight change in orbit that will ever-so-slowly send them spinning into outer darkness.

Read Mark Hadley’s review of the film, Good.

In C. S. Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, we are given a good example of a boy who was brought up poorly. Eustace Scrubb had stumbled into a dragon’s lair, but he did not know what kind of place it was. “Most of us know what we should expect to find in a dragon’s lair, but, as I said before, Eustace had read only the wrong books. They had a lot to say about exports and imports and governments and drains, but they were weak on dragons.”

It is a standing rebuke for us that there are many Christians who have an open sympathy for the “true” books which Eustace read — full of true facts about governments and drains and exports — and who are suspicious of great works of imagination, like the Narnia stories, or The Lord of the Rings, or Treasure Island, because they are “fictional” and therefore suspected of lying. The Bible tells us to be truthful above all things, they tell us, and so we should not tell our sons about dragon-fighting. Our sons need to be strong on drains and weak on dragons. The irony here is that the Bible, the source of all truth, says a lot about dragons and giants, and very little about drains and exports.

–Doug Wilson, Future Men, p. 101.

“The apocalyptic beliefs of the first Christians have been proved to be false. It is clear from the New Testament that they all expected the Second Coming in their own lifetime. And, worse still, they had a reason, and one which you will find very embarrassing. Their Master had told them so. He shared, and indeed created, their delusion. He said in so many words, ‘this generation shall not pass till all these things be done.’ And he was wrong. He clearly knew no more about the end of the world than anyone else. This is certainly the most embarrassing verse in the Bible.”

(From C. S. Lewis, “The World’s Last Night” (1960), found in The Essential C.S. Lewis, p. 385)

Either C. S. Lewis was right, or Jesus was. The choice is obvious. All those things came to pass.

“We must not suppose that if we succeeded in making everyone nice we should have saved their souls. A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world.”

—C.S. Lewis

Douglas Wilson on preaching to the whole man

In his great book The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis prophetically wrote of what has become one of the defining sins of our age. We veer erratically between two extremes — rationalism is arid and dry, and ultimately unsatisfying, and this provokes a reaction into swamp-like mysticism and emotionalism. Neo-classicism begets the rebellious child romanticism, and romanticism begets the rebellious child of a can-do technopoly. As we swing from one extreme to another, we miss the point of balance, which is that of having our affections under the authority of the God who made the world the way He did.

Lewis’ words are both blunt and revealing. He says we laugh at honor but then are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful. The end result is what Lewis called “men without chests.” This has come about because an arrogant rationalism has dismissed all notions of sentiment, loyalty, and affection as “nothing but” mere sensation, without any objective connection to the outside world. This in turn provokes a revolt of the emotions, a revolt that wallows in those sensations, but does so in a way as to prove the point of the rationalists.

One of the chief culprits in allowing this state of affairs to develop has been the delinquency of the pulpit. Continue reading

“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.

All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal…

Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour, he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat – the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.”

C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory: And Other Addresses