Kuyperian, Author at Kuyperian Commentary

On December 1, 2014 By Kuyperian In Scribblings Like

Planet Narnia: The Speechless Word

I am currently reading Planet Narnia by Michael Ward. I am only halfway through, so this is not a full review, only some thoughts. I just want to catch you before you appropriate all your Christmas money; this may be a book you want under your tree with your name affixed to it.

The primary reason to read this book is that Lewis was a genius and the Narnia movies are, to put it bluntly, not. If you are watching the movies but not reading the Narniad to your children, then your children are learning lies about Lewis. Although it may be formally true that the films were “based on books written by C. S. Lewis,” it can only be true in the meanest sense. The movies are “action/adventures” for children; the books are the subtlest of fairy tales. The movies are the epitome of unliterary, while the Narniad nears the apex of literary. The Chronicles of Narnia are sublime, and Michael Ward proves it.

Michael Ward is unflinching in his thesis that Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia were shaped by medieval cosmology, which happens also to be a distinctively Christian cosmology. But instead of Lewis using Narnia as a bare metaphor, he wrote the Chronicles “along the light” of medieval astrology instead of looking directly at the light or even at the object on which the light was shining. The seven heavens are the atmosphere in which the stories live, not the focal point of the stories themselves. You are not supposed to read The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe and always be thinking of the planet Jupiter, but without the medieval understanding of Jupiter which Lewis employed as his “atmosphere’ for the tale, the tale would not exist as it does. It is distinctively Jovial, and Ward proves it.

He does the same for the other six books, neatly aligning them with the other six “planets”: Mercury, Venus, Luna, Sol, Mars, and Saturn. The book is incredible—worthy to be read and reread.

I finished the Mercury chapter this morning. As we have just entered the Advent season, the following paragraph stood out to me:

In a sense, ‘the night was over at last’ is a pun, but a pun with a Christological significance, pointing, as it does, not just to the approaach of daylight but also to the effect of Aslan upon Shasta. For that matter, all good puns have Christological significance: first, because Christ himself was a punster; second because there was a divine wit at work (as Augustine recognized) when the Word became speechless (infans) in the infant Jesus; and third because of the essentially polemic import of the God-man. The incarnation of Christ, the enfleshment of the spiritual, is the tap-root of Lewis’s belief in meanings beyond the literal. It is the incarnation which sanctions and underwrites both his use of word-play, one of the lowest forms of wit, and his faith in the highest double meanings of all, which he calls symbols or sacraments. The highest does not stand without the lowest, and Lewis’s understanding of God is that he is both ‘unspeakably immanent’ and ‘unspeakably transcendent.’ To attempt to combine these theological perspectives without cancelling out their polarity was a bold endeavor and full of risk. The Horse and His Boy succeeds as well as it does because a river of Mercury runs through it.

Check out more about Planet Narnia at the website here.<>

On November 26, 2014 By Kuyperian In Scribblings Like

C. S. Lewis: No Ordinary People, No Mere Mortals

“It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deep about that of his neighbor. The load, or weight, or burden of my nieghbour’s glory should be laid on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. 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 other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealing with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And out charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner—no mere tolerance, or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbor, 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.” (emphasis mine)

–C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory” p. 45

Order your own copy here.

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On November 13, 2014 By Kuyperian In Scribblings Like

Naming God’s World

I am currently rereading Nancy Pearcey’s Soul of Science. Here’s a juicy morsel from the conclusion of chapter 7:

“The primeval paradigm of human knowledge is the account of Adam’s naming the animals. Devising a suitable label for each animal required careful observation, analysis, and categorization, based on the way it was created. Adam couldn’t very well call a fish ‘woolly creature with four legs’ or a bird ‘scaled creature with fins.’ He had to reflect the world as God made it.

Yet Genesis tells us ‘God brought the animals to Adam to see what he would call them.’ God did not prescribe one right name, one correct way to describe an animal. He left room for Adam to be creative, both in the features he chose to focus on and in the terms he selected to describe the animal. In this simple paradigm Genesis gives the Biblical basis for all the arts and sciences. On the one hand, we root our work in the external world God has created, and, on the other hand, we freely exercise the creativity and imagination He has given us.” (page 160)<>биржи текстов отзывы топ ов работы

On November 12, 2014 By Kuyperian In Scribblings Like

C. S. Lewis Doodle: “Religion and Science”

C. S. Lewis Doodle on YouTube. This is the entire essay “Religion and Science” by C. S. Lewis from God in the Dock being drawn as it is being read. It is short (7:11) and made even more accessible through the doodle. Not that Lewis made it hard. It is a simple point with profound implications.

On November 6, 2014 By Kuyperian In Theology Like

The Rights and Wrongs of Private Interpretation

One of the legacies of the Reformation is sometimes called “The Right of Private Interpretation of the Bible”.

Before the Reformation, individual Christians were discouraged or even forbidden from reading and interpreting the Bible for themselves. Instead, they were told, the church tells you what the Bible means, what you ought to believe. This, of course, is what lay behind many of the other doctrinal problems in the medieval Catholic church.

But the Reformers objected to this. All Christians, they said, have the right and the responsibility to read the Bible and to seek to understand their faith for themselves.

Unfortunately, in our day, we sometimes end up misunderstanding the idea of Private Interpretation. We tend to think of it in an individualistic way: Every person has the right to decide for themselves what the Bible means to them; we don’t have to listen to anyone else. We end up as religious anarchists: we don’t need anyone to teach us; we just make up their own mind and follow our own path.

This is emphatically not what the Reformers had in mind. More importantly, it’s a serious distortion of the biblical picture. We need to place the idea of Private Interpretation within its proper ecclesiological context. The reason why we all need to grow in our understanding of our faith is not so we can all plough our own personal religious furrow, but so that we can all help each other.

To put it most bluntly, the person sitting next to you at church this coming Lord’s Day needs you to read your Bible between now and then, so you can help them, correct them, challenge them, teach them, encourage them. We all need each other to comprehend the faith more deeply, so that we all come to know more fully the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.

Guest Post by Rev Dr Steve Jeffery, Minister at Emmanuel Evangelical Church, London, England (Blog, Facebook, Twitter)<>

On October 31, 2014 By Kuyperian In Scribblings Like

Luther on the Glories of Christian Fatherhood

Any consideration of the Protestant Reformation in general–and Martin Luther specifically–would be incomplete without mention of Brother Martin’s views on the Christian family and his affection for children. Consider the following excerpt from Luther’s treatise (published in 1522) entitled The Estate of Marriage:

Now observe that when that clever harlot, our natural reason (which the pagans followed in trying to be most clever), takes a look at married life, she turns up her nose and says, “Alas, must I rock the baby, wash its diapers, make its bed, smell its stench, stay up nights with it, take care of it when it cries, heal its rashes and sores, and on top of that care for my wife, provide for her, labour at my trade, take care of this and take care of that, do this and do that, endure this and endure that, and whatever else of bitterness and drudgery married life involves? What, should I make such a prisoner of myself? O you poor, wretched fellow, have you taken a wife? Fie, fie upon such wretchedness and bitterness! It is better to remain free and lead a peaceful. carefree life; I will become a priest or a nun and compel my children to do likewise.

What then does Christian faith say to this? It opens its eyes, looks upon all these insignificant, distasteful, and despised duties in the Spirit, and is aware that they are all adorned with divine approval as with the costliest gold and jewels. It says, “O God, because I am certain that thou hast created me as a man and hast from my body begotten this child, I also know for a certainty that it meets with thy perfect pleasure. I confess to thee that I am not worthy to rock the little babe or wash its diapers. or to be entrusted with the care of the child and its mother. How is it that I, without any merit, have come to this distinction of being certain that I am serving thy creature and thy most precious will? O how gladly will I do so, though the duties should be even more insignificant and despised. Neither frost nor heat, neither drudgery nor labour, will distress or dissuade me, for I am certain that it is thus pleasing in thy sight.”

A wife too should regard her duties in the same light, as she suckles the child, rocks and bathes it, and cares for it in other ways; and as she busies herself with other duties and renders help and obedience to her husband. These are truly golden and noble works. This is also how to comfort and encourage a woman in the pangs of childbirth, not by repeating St Margaret legends and other silly old wives’ tales but by speaking thus, “Dear Grete, remember that you are a woman, and that this work of God in you is pleasing to him. Trust joyfully in his will, and let him have his way with you. Work with all your might to bring forth the child. Should it mean your death, then depart happily, for you will die in a noble deed and in subservience to God. If you were not a woman you should now wish to be one for the sake of this very work alone, that you might thus gloriously suffer and even die in the performance of God’s work and will. For here you have the word of God, who so created you and implanted within you this extremity.” Tell me, is not this indeed (as Solomon says [Prov. 18:22]) “to obtain favour from the Lord,” even in the midst of such extremity?

Now you tell me, when a father goes ahead and washes diapers or performs some other mean task for his child, and someone ridicules him as an effeminate fool, though that father is acting in the spirit just described and in Christian faith, my dear fellow you tell me, which of the two is most keenly ridiculing the other? God, with all his angels and creatures, is smiling, not because that father is washing diapers, but because he is doing so in Christian faith. Those who sneer at him and see only the task but not the faith are ridiculing God with all his creatures, as the biggest fool on earth. Indeed, they are only ridiculing themselves; with all their cleverness they are nothing but devil’s fools.

Notice that Luther’s vision of the Christian family does not presuppose an absentee father who sees the care of infants as “women’s work” that is somehow beneath him. Rather, Luther’s assumption is that the man who is following hard after Christ will take pleasure and gain sanctification as he rocks his newborn, washes it’s diapers, loses sleep giving baby comfort, and cares for baby’s mother in all tenderness. Luther also assumes that the man who does these things will inevitably face some scorn from what he calls “devil’s fools.”

As we pray for God to grant further reformation to the church in our day, we should pray that one of the evidences of that reformation would be men that mimic Luther’s views on tender caring toward their wives, their newborn children, and overall servant leadership in their households.

—-

Derek Hale has lived all of his life in Wichita, Kansas and isn’t a bit ashamed about that fact. He and his wife Nicole have only six children–four daughters and two young sons of thunder. Derek is a ruling elder, chief musician, and performs pastoral duties at Trinity Covenant Church (CREC). Derek manages a firmware lab for NetApp and enjoys reading, computers, exercising, craft beer, and playing and listening to music. But not all at the same time. He blogs occasionally at youdidntblogthat.tumblr.com.<>mobile rpg games кейсы продвижение ов

On October 31, 2014 By Kuyperian In Culture Like

A Ballad of the German Reformation

For your 2014 Reformation Day listening and viewing pleasure: The Ballad of Martin Luther.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eglz9Yhqflo<>site продвижение web ов

On October 21, 2014 By Kuyperian In Theology Like

Mental Disorders and Ecclesial Hospitality

Why should churches seek to integrate people with mental disorders into the body-life of the church? To begin with, all of us, in our own ways, are thoroughly disordered. Jesus is the only person post-Fall who has been perfectly ordered in psyche, personality, and affections. So integrating individuals with disorders into the life of the church is not optional, and it begins with our own disordered selves. Secondly, though all of us are cracked, we’re still mirrors, reflecting the God of the universe. As C.S. Lewis points out, a “mere mortal” has never walked in our midst. Even the person on the furthest end of the “cracked spectrum” is still a reflection of God, retaining immeasurable worth and beauty.

In light of this Imago Dei reality, integrating someone with O.C.D. into a small group shouldn’t be viewed as an inconvenience or a bother, but as a privilege, a way to make the group more functional. By incorporating the mentally disordered person into your group, you’re implicitly acknowledging that the person has something to offer. You’re admitting the deficiency of your church, indeed of yourself, and asking the O.C.D. person to bring their portion to the communal feast, that everyone’s meal might be better because of their contribution. Mysteriously, God is in the business of bringing order from disorder and dignity from depravity.

While we may cognitively recognize the necessity of integrating the differently-disordered into the body-life of our church, we often lack the motivation to do so. An evening Bible study with close friends feels much more comfortable than opening our home to a manic-depressive woman who needs space to process. Joining a softball league sounds like more fun than taking meals to the families of those in long-term psychiatric treatment centers. What should be our motivation for putting ourselves in situations so rife with conflict and pain? The answer, in a word, is love.

On the surface, comfort feels more loving than conflict. Yet, the Bible shows us that to avoid conflict is to miss out on love. After they sin, Adam and Eve avoid conflict, they hide. The first pair would have happily stayed in isolation, avoiding the pain of conflict with God, but God was not content to leave them in there hidden, isolated state. Instead, He approaches them. He kills an animal with which he covers there nakedness and shame. He enters into the brokenness of his creatures, pursuing love at the expense of comfort and ease. Independence, isolation, and privacy are all tertiary to love in God’s economy.

Being in a church is a daily decision to sacrifice comfort for love. On Sunday mornings, our alarm goes off and we choose the conflict of the cold wood floors and bright light over the comfort of our blankets and cozy darkness. We then choose the conflict of awkward greetings and conversations over the peace of isolation. We choose the conflict of confessing our sins to one another over the peace of privacy and anonymity.

If we as a church were called to comfort, to toleration, our job would be easy! To tolerate the A.D.H.D. teen in our church consists of giving a friendly smile, wishing him well from a distance, maybe contributing a few bucks for him to go to camp. But to love him involves the conflict of awkward, lengthy conversations in the church lobby when you want to be on our way to lunch. The inconvenience of making sure he has a ride to Sunday school because you genuinely care not only for his social network, but for his spiritual growth and maturity. In other words, we are not a “Babel” people, scattered and left to our own selves and languages. No, we are a “Pentecost” people, given the Spirit of understanding and unity, the Spirit that pushes us toward the uncomfortable, toward the different, toward the other.

Why should we seek to make our church more hospitable to people differently-disordered? We do so because we’re a people shaped by the word which brings order and comfort to the lost and confused. We’re a people fed by the bread and wine meant only for the hungry. We integrate the differently-disordered into our churches because we are followers of the Savior who left the comfort of heaven to endure the conflict of His Father’s wrath, dying as a substitute for His disordered people. We follow Him down the road of the awkward, the uncomfortable, the confrontational, because it is the narrow road of love. Few will take the journey. Each are given a cross to carry. But all who make the hard choice of walking down this uneasy road will find beauty in the brokenness and peace in the pain.

Dustin Messer is a graduate of Boyce College, Covenant Theological Seminary, and is currently pursuing his M.Th. in Historical Theology from University of Glasgow. Dustin and his wife Whitney live in the Dallas area and worship at Christ Church-Carrollton, TX.<>

On October 15, 2014 By Kuyperian In Books 2

Morning Devotions: The Screwtape Letters, Chapter 6

In Chapter 6 of C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, Uncle Screwtape exhorts Wormwood to “direct the malice of his patient to his immediate neighbor whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary.” Screwtape references the English people as “creatures of that miserable sort who loudly proclaim that torture is too good for their enemies and then give tea and cigarettes to the first wounded German pilot who turns up at the back door.”

Recalling that this book was written in 1942, the English people would certainly have been loving their enemies by caring for wounded German pilots. These Luftwaffe pilots had fallen from the sky, just two years earlier, while attempting to destroy London during their Blitz—37 consecutive weeks of bombing raids, resulting in the destruction of over one million English homes and deaths of over 40,000 civilians. Screwtape’s Enemy (God) told His people to love their enemies, and the English people were actually doing it.

What are we to learn from this? We have enemies that we need to love, and these enemies will probably fall into at least two distinct categories: the ideological sort—liberal judges, corrupt politicians, misguided mega-church pastors, etc., or of the personal sort –failed friendships, obnoxious neighbors and coworkers, or strained family relationships. Relationships so strained that particular people have become our real enemies, but not the type of enemies sneaking in at night to murder us while we sleep. Our enemies are of a different sort than England’s enemies of the 1940’s.

Lewis’ call to love our enemies, however, is of the same sort. While our hatred of the judges and politicians may be real enough, causing much angst and even the occasional expletive, those people are not in close enough proximity to feel either our hatred or our love. They cannot feel our steely glares through their teleprompter. While they are vying for our vote, not our affection, we are called to love them as we love ourselves. We would want someone to pray for us, not gripe about us behind our backs. We would want someone to think the best of us and our intentions, not demonize every word we say. Thinking the worst of our enemies does nothing but bring us down. Lewis elaborates on this point in Mere Christianity:

“Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, `Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally, we shall insist on seeing everything – God and our friends and ourselves included – as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.”

Concerning the personal enemies that we see every day, the Samaritan is always in the ditch. These are the ones that Lewis is calling us to love through our actions, for they are ever present. Screwtape would want us to feel good enough about loving our faraway enemies that we would consider our job well done and thereby cease loving the enemies next door. If we view loving our neighbor as a checklist—something we could quantify and complete in a given time period—then we are more susceptible to fall into Screwtape’s trap.

Lewis’ idea of loving those who are far away to the neglect of loving those who are near applies to more than just our enemies. We can send money to help Compassion International kids around the globe to the neglect of loving the poor around us. (I say this as a financial supporter of Compassion, not a foe.) We can love the missionaries who have travelled far to the neglect of supporting local charities or even neglecting to personally testify of the mercy of God to our neighbors.

One final thought is that we can fall prey to loving our virtual neighbors while neglecting to love those neighbors that God has placed within our own household. “Just one more email, darling, and I’ll be done for the evening.” “Hold on, honey, I’ve just got to post this to Facebook and I’ll read to you.” “Junior, play my iPad while I finish this article.” None of this should be taken as some sort of guilt trip about using global technology for the benefit of those that afar off, but are we loving God’s people around the globe to the neglect of those flesh-and-blood heirs of Christ’s Kingdom placed under our direct care? If we are, then both Screwtape and Wormwood are about to get a promotion.<>

On October 12, 2014 By Kuyperian In Scribblings Like

Anti-ethnocentric Ethnocentrism

“Only in the Western nations, i.e., those influenced by Greek philosophy, is there some willingness to doubt the identification of the good with one’s own way. One should conclude from the study of non-Western cultures that not only to prefer one’s own way but to believe it best, superior to all others, is primary and even natural—exactly the opposite of what is intended by requiring students to study these cultures. What we are doing is applying a Western prejudice—which we covertly take to indicate the superiority of our culture—and deforming the evidence of those other cultures to attest to its validity. The scientific study of other cultures is almost exclusively a Western phenomenon, and in its origin was obviously a search for new and better ways, or at least for the validation of the hope that our own culture really is the better way, a validation for which there is no felt need in other cultures. If we are to learn from those cultures, we must wonder whether such scientific study is such a good idea. Consistency would seem to require professors of openness to respect the ethnocentrism or closedness they find everywhere else. However, in attacking ethnocentrism, what they actually do is assert unawares the superiority of their scientific understanding and the inferiority of the other cultures which do not recognize it at the same time they reject all such claims to superiority. They both affirm and deny the goodness of their science.”

–Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, p.36

Perhaps we could summarize it this way —

Anti-ethnocentric Ethnocentrism: The belief that our way of thinking, which states that no one’s way of thinking is better than anyone else’s, is better than anyone else’s way of thinking, which states that their way of thinking is better than ours.

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