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On July 31, 2019 By In Books

Shire Eschatology

Note: If any part of this spoils The Lord of the Rings for you, it’s your own fault.

As I recently finished listening to Rob Inglis’s excellent narration of  J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Return of the King, I was struck, once again, by the profound beauty of the ending.  I must admit, however, that the first time I reached the part of the story where the ring was destroyed, I stopped and quickly counted the pages that were left.  How could Tolkien need this many more pages to wrap up the story? As I read on, I was gratified to read about events that struck the right chord of blessed finality–friends reunited, a coronation, a wedding, and a wedding announcement. Sam Gamgee asked of Gandalf, whom he had previously thought dead, “Is everything sad going to become untrue?” I expected the answer to be a simple “yes,” but I was mistaken.

Here we get to the part of the story that Peter Jackson either did not understand, did not have time for, or did not want to test his audience’s patience with when he adapted The Return of the King for the film (I suspect a mixture of all three).  I’m speaking of the scouring of the Shire.  For those of you who are unfamiliar (probably those of you who, sadly, only watched the movie), the hobbits returned to the Shire to find it languishing under tyranny and befouled by the works of Mordor. “Sharkie,” who was actually a greatly-weakened Saruman, had set up shop in Bag End and brought in “ruffians” to tyrannize the hobbits and tear up the countryside. Saruman was a disgraced and de-staffed wizard, a serpent who, as Gandalf said, had one fang left, which was his voice.  He used his voice to influence others to destroy the peace of the Shire. Under his corrupting influence, the ruffians, and even a few bad hobbits had torn down the party tree and replaced many of the hobbit holes with squalid brick huts. They had taken over the “Shiriffs” and were imprisoning any hobbits who dared to resist their regime. Tolkien described seeing the desolation of Bag End as the saddest part of all of Sam’s journeys, worse than Mordor. But the four returning hobbits, fresh from their victories, had reached the necessary level of maturity that enabled them to fight the evil in their land. They lead a revolt in which they deposed Saruman and threw out the ruffians. They then spent years repairing the damage and building up the Shire to its former glory.

Now, I want to be cautious here. Tolkien was clear that he was not intending anything he wrote to be a spiritual allegory.  Frodo was not the messiah. The ring did not represent “sin” or “evil” or “death.” Saruman did not directly represent a weakened Satan who still had power in his voice.  That was not Tolkien’s point. And yet, to the extent that Tolkien wrote something true (which I believe he did), the parallels are inescapable. The moment the ring fell into Orodruin, Sauron’s kingdom was finished. Just so, the moment Christ rose from the dead, Satan’s kingdom was no more. After such a triumph, it is rather anti-climactic that the world continues to bring forth famine, disease, and death in abundance. We are now, eschatologically, at the part of the redemptive story where the hobbits had to reckon with what’s happened to their beloved Shire. The hobbits seemed to be far away from the King, but they had to announce his kingdom, proclaim his triumph, and deal with those who did not recognize his kingship. Perhaps, if we were writing the redemption story, we would end it with the empty tomb, or the day of Pentecost. That might seem like a better story to the Peter Jacksons among us, but it is not God’s story. That story would leave out the Church. While the bride is still beset, the story is not over. We are the hobbits, seemingly the weakest of all peoples, whose blessed job it is to announce the return of the King.

Rob Noland grew up attending Providence Church in Pensacola, Florida. He received his bachelor’s from New Saint Andrews College and his J.D. from the University of Mississippi School of Law. He and his wife, Amber, attend a PCA church in Atlanta, GA where he works as a lawyer.

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On July 11, 2019 By In Books, Theology

A Response to Michael Heiser: “Yes, the Bible is All About Jesus!”

“Everything in the Bible isn’t about Jesus.” That’s the thesis of Michael Heiser’s piece at Logos Talk. As examples, he argues that the “procedures for diagnosing and treating leprosy” and the laws “forbidding people who’ve had sex or lost blood from entering sacred space” aren’t about Jesus.” He goes so far as to make the bold assertion that “No Israelite would have thought of a messianic deliverer when reading these or many other passages.” Heiser concludes his essay with his central concern that “While the drama of the biblical epic ultimately leads to Jesus, he isn’t the ultimate focal point of every passage.”

It appears to me that Heiser is particularly concerned about developing a hermeneutic that leaves the interpreter off the hook when it comes to studying the Bible or to make connections to Jesus that simply aren’t there.

I appreciate Heiser’s motivations but believe that his approach is misguided and ultimately can do greater damage to Bible interpreters everywhere. I would begin by stating that Heiser’s approach to the topic is fairly minimalistic. He asserts that unless the New Testament alludes to Old Testament presenting Jesus as the messianic deliver and fulfillment, therefore, Jesus must not be read into such ancient texts. This minimalistic approach actually discourages the reader and forces them to put boundaries in the text that do not exist. But the Holy Spirit is a creative God who moves and lives in the narratives of the Bible and who offers a rich array of harmonious themes throughout. Themes of marriage, war, sea, dry land, and creatures are already presented to us in the early chapters of the Bible to prepare us for all its luxurious repetitions throughout the rest of the Bible. Indeed the Word himself appears in the creation narrative which leads to the question: “How can the One in whom all things cohere not be found in some manner in the stories, laws, and descriptions of the Bible?”

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On March 19, 2019 By In Books, Family and Children

Call me…

“Call me Ishmael.” This opening line, one of the most famous in literature, is actually a rather strange turn of phrase, considering that Ishmael appears to be the narrator’s real name.  In normal speech, we don’t say “Call me ____.” Instead, we say, “My name is ____.” We only ask people to call us a certain way when our given name does not match what we want to be called.  Imagine a college student introducing herself at orientation saying, “My name’s Elizabeth, but call me Liz” when her parents and everyone else who knew her up to that point called her “Beth.” Assuming she’s successful in getting her friends to call her Liz, what has she done? Is it a momentous change, or fairly trivial? What if she chose a completely different name for her new friends to call her, like, “Brittany?”  Is that different? In short, what are we doing when we try to change our names? I submit that we are attempting to play God.

            God is the supreme “namer.”  He named day and night (1:5), Heaven (1:8), Earth and Seas (1:9), and he named Man (1:26).  From the beginning, mankind names creation as an act of dominion and image-bearing.  Adam named the animals that God brought to him, and those were their names. (1:19-20).  In the act of naming the animals God brought to him, Adam became wiser to their nature.  He became aware that there was not a helper fit for him among them.  In Adam’s most significant act of naming, he named the woman that God had formed from his ribs.  In doing so, he also penned the first poem, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” (2:23).

            A careful reading of scripture, especially the book of Genesis, reveals that names are vastly important.  Names reveal covenant significance as well as character.   In some cases, a person arrives on the scene with a name that already says something about their character.  For example, James Jordan has pointed out that Rebecca’s name is a pun with the Hebrew word for “myriads.”  She was providentially named that before any human thought that she would be part of the covenant line.  In other cases, God renames the person.  When God renames the person, it is generally in the context of cutting a covenant.  Whenever God gives a person a new name, God’s renaming is efficacious.  That is their name.  Abraham is Abraham; he is no longer Abram.  Sarah is Sarah; she is not Sarai.

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On October 11, 2018 By In Books, Podcast

Episode 38, KC Podcast, Interview with Dr. Gerald McDermott

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In episode 38, Dustin Messer sits down with Gerald McDermott to discuss his newest book, Everyday Glory: The Revelation of God in All of Reality. Dr. McDermott holds the Anglican Chair of Divinity at Beeson Divinity School and ministers at Christ the King Church in Birmingham, AL. Before going to Beeson, McDermott was the Jordan-Trexler Professor of Religion at Roanoke College. This discussion covers diverse topics from McDermott’s book, namely Jonathan Edwards, sexuality, the #metoo movement, and whether all religions are the same.

 

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On September 22, 2018 By In Art, Books, Culture, Film, Wisdom

We Don’t Need Another Type of Hero, III

Why We Should Jettison the “Strong Female Character,” Part III
guest post by Alastair Roberts 
Click HERE for part 1 of this series, and HERE for part 2.

The recurring characterization problems with such Strong Female Characters arise in no small measure from the struggle to show that men and women are interchangeable and can compete and cooperate with each other on the same terms. As I have already noted, this falsehood serves no one. It sets women up for frustration and failure as they have to justify their agency on men’s terms and it produces an embarrassment about male strengths that should be celebrated rather than stifled. It reflects a drive towards intense gender integration and de-differentiation in the wider world.

The traditional world of women—typically a different existential and intersubjective mapping of spaces that were shared with men—has been reduced through the migration of work away from the home, the expanding social role of the state and its agencies, the shrinking and contracting of families, the thinning out of neighborhoods, and the removal of much of the burden of domestic labour through technology. One’s value in society has also become increasingly contingent upon advanced educational attainment, career, wealth, and consumption. Within this new situation, women have had to forge new identities within worlds created by men and which play to male strengths. Shrunk to a sentimental reservation of domesticity, there is relatively little dignity to be found in what remains of traditional female worlds in most Western societies.

Often natural differences in tendencies and aptitudes between the sexes (as groups, there is plenty of individual variation and departure from the norm) replicate themselves in the wider economic world. Women are frustrated as their desire to have children and raise families prevents them from earning as much as their male counterparts, or enjoying the same social prominence. Women’s greater natural orientation towards relational and caring activities leads to their underrepresentation within the more lucrative and powerful professions. Women are drawn to subjects and occupations that are more personal, artistic, and relational, while men to those that are more realistic, investigative, and thing-based. Despite the expense of considerable money and effort to change male and female preferences, they are surprisingly resistant to change in many respects.

On men’s part, male dominance in realms of high achievement is frequently and often instinctively characterized as pathological. There is a zero-sum social game being played between the sexes and male privilege is a sign of a great injustice, something about which men should feel guilty. The possibility that men dominate because the realms in which they dominate play to their various strengths as a group or involve areas where they produce the most exceptional performers is not an idea that can be entertained in many quarters.

The push for ‘diversification’ and ‘inclusion’ can be a threat to many male groups because their natural rougher socializing tendencies are stigmatized, they are no longer permitted to play to their strengths, and their shared cultures and cultural products are jeopardized by a sort of gender gentrification imposed upon them. The existence of extreme misogyny in many of their reactions to such developments should not be allowed to disguise the presence of understandable concerns (and definitely vice versa too), even where the appropriate response to these concerns may not be that of wholly rejecting the diversification.

We have moved from a situation with distinct worlds of gendered activity—albeit typically deeply interwoven and involving extensively overlapping spaces—to one in which men and women are being pressed into a single intersubjective and existential world, one that was traditionally male. The result is a stifling of men, as manliness becomes a social threat and male strength a problem to be solved. Male strengths have to be discouraged to give women more scope for expression and achievement. Women, on the other hand, are caught in a world that seems rigged against them. The Strong Female Character is one way in which the anxieties, insecurities, resentments, and embarrassments produced by such a situation register in our imaginary worlds.

It is also a revelation of a failure of imagination. Fictional worlds are places in which we can explore possibilities for identity and agency. The fact that women’s stature as full agents is so consistently treated as contingent upon such things as their physical strength and combat skills, or upon the exaggerated weakness or their one-upping of the men that surround them, is a sign that, even though men may be increasingly stifled within it, women are operating in a realm that plays by men’s rules. The possibility of a world in which women are the weaker sex, yet can still attain to the stature and dignity of full agents and persons—the true counterparts and equals of men—seems to be, for the most part, beyond people’s imaginative grasp. This is a limitation of imagination with painful consequences for the real world, and is one of the causes of the high degree of ressentiment within the feminist movement.

Heroic Women and Good Story Telling

The Bechdel Test originally appeared within the comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For. It is an informal test to determine whether or not a film passes the lowest bars for the portrayal of women: 1. Does it have at least two women in it? 2. Do the women talk to each other? 3. Do they talk about something other than a man? It is a helpful heuristic tool for alerting people to the degree to which women and their intersubjective worlds fail to appear within the frame of so many movies and works of fiction. It is far from scientific, nor is it an accurate tool for determining the existence of stunted portrayal of women more generally, but it does often provide an initial indication of limitations or problems.

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On August 25, 2018 By In Art, Books, Culture, Scribblings

The Stone Upon the Well

A short story by Remy Wilkins

Sunday morning found me kneeling at the foot of my bed, trembling, pebbles of sweat leaping off the edge of my brow and nose, and hitting the floor in front of me, but not from piety was I procumbent; though as a minister for over a decade, I had made threadbare the knees of my pants from petitionings. No, I was crouched and quivering, begging in half-measures, because of a shooting pain in my side, caused by kidney stones. Doc Thomas said my trouble breathing was purely in my head, but he had given me ample painkillers to make it through the weekend. The new church building was being dedicated today and he’d midwife my suffering on Monday.

I swallowed my medication. The pill a seed from which, I pray, nothing will grow. I dressed and walked across the expanse of grass, spendthrifting the morning glories, to stand beneath the shade of the pecan tree. The white of the slat wood chapel bounced the brightness of dawn to high heaven and the heat was rising, so I staggered back to my study in the little manse across the field.

My study was inviolable, a sanctuary, and only one person was allowed to ascend the mount to meet with me. My father-in-law, my ex-father-in-law, practically my father, an elder, the elder, my only elder in the church, Doc Thomas would knock on the door fifteen minutes before the service and we would pray together; for the church, for the city, for the sick by name, for the lost by the inward groaning of the spirit, for all the burdens of his heart and mine that we dare mention aloud.

After the loss of our building fund, he came through, funded the rest of it from his own pocket. Having given so much, I was ashamed to take more, prodigal of his gifts, but he felt the betrayal in our marriage more intently than I did, for I knew my faults and knew what I deserved far better than he. She left me and I could hardly blame her. She had so much to give and I was fearful of how much I wanted. I took too little, too little notice, too little care, belittling and of little faith.

There was a soft knock and Thomas entered. I was crouched over in my chair, sweat crowning my forehead. “Good morning, Doc,” I said softly. He thought I was weeping.

He was silent as he took a seat at my side, his hand resting on my shoulder, and then prayed. I had not realized until then that it was the anniversary of her leaving. Doc Thomas was aware and his words invoked an unspoken sorrow, a burden I had not been aware of until now. I remembered the last time I saw her.

When I found them I was too stunned to talk. Joe stood up, as guilty as Adam and as nude, and told me he was invited. My wife was too shocked to speak. Joe wrapped himself in a linen sheet and left. I followed him, wanting to ask a question, but all I could think to ask was how soon would the roof would be finished.

I stood at the front door and watched him walk across the field. I could think of only one thing to say, so finally I called, “That’s mine!”

He thought I was talking about his makeshift loincloth and he paused. Then he let fall the linen sheet and ran away naked. His truck was parked at the far end of the construction site, and as the great vehicle revved and wheeled about, my wife pushed past me with a suitcase and an abrupt goodbye. He waited for her and then they were gone. Over the next several weeks, I let the rain ruin the unshingled roof. The tarps were windtorn and rot set in. Plywood had to be replaced and a new crew had to be found to shingle it. And then the money was gone.

I could’ve tracked down Joe and gotten the rest of it back, but forgiveness is more needful than money and I owed my wife a great debt in that department. But I couldn’t bring myself to speak to her.

I amen’d at the end of Thomas’s prayer. We shook hands, then we hugged, and he said something about it being a happy day for the church. We walked over and I was feeling better. The stitch in my side and the thunder and lightning of pain was gone.

The congregation was gathering on the grass. I offered a prayer, a ribbon was snipped, and we trickled inside to the cool of the sanctuary. Pews were selected. A row of children jumped in place until they got their chance to pull the bell’s fat rope. Every soul got its ring. Miss Mattie could not play the piano loud enough, our voices outdid her hands for once. She was glad to be back at the upright, hammering away like a smith at his anvil.

I read the text and prayed to the Spirit for illumination. The passage was the woman at the well. She’d had five husbands when Jesus found her there.

When I looked up, I saw her. Maggie still talked to her father once a week. She knew what today was. She’d think I did it on purpose, dedicate a church on the anniversary of the dissolution of my marriage. I was of a mind to believe it myself. I’m that sort of fool. Married to the church, she’d say with vinegar under her tongue. She knew I measured poorly as a bridegroom. She’d slipped in for the sermon and stood in the back.

And Jesus said, “And the one you are with is not your husband.” Jesus said it, but I could not. I felt her eyes on me. The woman at the well switched topics to the question of where to worship and I did the same.

“‘Our fathers worshipped on this mount, but ye say in Jerusalem,’ the woman said.” I told them how Christ replied, and I told them about mountains, and about the faith that could move mountains.

“Every valley shall be exalted,” I said. “And every mountain laid low, saith the prophet Isaiah. Jesus quotes this too and I’ve always found it a curious thing.”

I was off script and wandering in the wilderness of the Word of the Lord. “We hear about the faith that can casts mountains into the sea and we think that means faith can be strong. And maybe that’s true.”

I felt a gonging in my stomach. The pain returning. And I felt bad, nobody likes to hear about a faith that might not be strong, but I pressed on. “Why would mountains need to be moved? Or really, the question is what are mountains for and why would we not need them in the new covenant?”

Maggie started to walk to the exit and pain whited out my sight. I clung to the pulpit to steady myself. “We have to understand, in the old covenant, mountains were meeting places, ladders to heaven. You could think of mountains as full sized altars.”

I was losing my breath. All other faces grew cloudy, a cloud of witnesses.

“The reason why mountains will be laid low or cast into the sea is because,” I nodded at Miss Mattie so she could get to the piano. She liked to play through the final prayer, which would have to come soon. I gripped my side. “Now, we no longer need to ascend the mountain to meet with the Lord. Where two or three are gathered together in his name—”

A man entered, I couldn’t see who, and he whispered something into the ear of someone in the back row. I tried to continue, but there was a ripple of talk and Doc Thomas stood, raising his hand. I ceded the service to him.

Doc had a voice I envied. A tremulous tone with a lilt that could break anger like a dry twig. “Brothers and sisters,” he said and all heads rotated his direction. “The house across the street, the Peterson house, is on fire.”

The commotion was instant. A pastor has never seen such a response to his own words. Every man stood and rushed out the door, the children followed with their mothers in tow.

I slowly made my way to the door, a hand to every pew, and looked across the street as the flames broke through the roof of the Peterson’s. The fire formed a steeple and a siren sounded far off. The Petersons weren’t members and weren’t home. I tried to pray, but the roar of pain inside me swallowed it. I think I saw my wife, my ex-wife, my sister-in-law and once bride, she hugged her father. He knelt before her and clung to her waist, laying his head against her stomach.

The engine arrived and two men jumped out, one of them slung some extra gear at the foot of Paul Milligan, our deacon, who was a volunteer. He had already stripped off his tie and shoes and went about frantically stuffing himself into the flame retardant pants, boots, and jacket.

The hose was hooked up to the hydrant at the corner and water was shot into the fire. A long black pillar rose into the sky. Another couple of volunteers showed up later, but the fire was too far gone. They only sought to control the burn and save the houses on either side.

The Petersons came back and their son sobbed while the mother and father took turns swearing into the cell-phones or under their breath. The crowd had thinned out and as the fire worked its way to the ground, the sun did the same.

In the dark, I had only made it to the pecan tree before I was stricken with a pain too great to move. Leaning against its the scaley bark, I could feel a ring where a sap-sucker had drilled holes. I labored to breathe.

Heat rose up in me and I unbuttoned my shirt. I’d not worn an undershirt and smelled. My cell buzzed in my pants pocket. I fished it out, hunching and resting my head against the tree. “Hello?”

“Mark,” she said and my face screwed up in sadness.

“Forgive me,” I stuttered.

“Was that sermon for me?”

“No,” I gasped. I felt a pressure in my bladder. I grit my teeth and cinched tight my eyes. “It was the doing of the lectionary. I would’ve avoided it if I could.”

I heard her breath crackle in the receiver. I couldn’t tell if it was scoff or sigh. If a scoff, it echoed the scoffing of my heart. If a sigh, it was the breath of my own soul.

“I’m staying at dad’s.” She said softly. “For now.”

“Yes.”

There was a pause. “The sermon—”

“Yes.”

“You never finished. What were you about to say?”

I wanted to scream: “I am the woman at the well, I am the unfaithful bride, I am the faithless husbands.” I felt nauseated and I badly needed to urinate. “I am the mountain that must be cast into the sea.” But I did not say this. I was too weak.

“What was I saying? I don’t remember.”

“Where two or three are gathered…”

“Yes, yes,” I said and the conclusion to my sermon came to me unbidden and full. “But then we shall see face to face.”

I nearly cried out in pain as some dagger of starlight danced upon my kidney. I felt severed. She thanked me, said goodnight, and hung up, instinctively closing with “I love you,” like children ending prayers with “Jesus name amen.” A thoughtless utterance that held all truth and anchored us to the world.

I could no longer wait and fumbled at my belt and let my trousers fall. In the dark, in the dark of the tree, on the tree, I passed the stone. I left a curse on my tongue and let a blessing well up inside me and flow free.

Remy Wilkins teaches at Geneva Academy in Monroe, Louisiana and the author of two middle grade novels, Strays (Canon Press, 2017) and Hush-Hush (forthcoming).

This post appeared originally at Theopolis blog and is reposted here by permission

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On August 18, 2018 By In Books, Culture, Family and Children, Interviews, Men, Podcast, Politics, Scribblings

The Importance of Earnest Being

A guest post by G. Shane Morris

The digital ink spilled over Canadian clinical psychologist and author Jordan Peterson by now could fill a metaphorical ocean, but I want to venture what I think may be an unexplored cause of his popularity: his lack of guile or pretense.

Anyone who has spent any time in comment box debates or hasn’t been living in an undersea cave since the 2016 presidential election knows the tone of news commentary, opinion writing, and even journalism has taken a nasty turn. Of course, if you had asked someone following the 2012 election whether the partisan rancor in America could get any worse, he might have shrugged and said, “I don’t see how.” That person is probably hiding in a dark place right now, embarrassed by his lack of imagination.

Image result for jordan peterson beard

It’s not enough to disagree with someone, anymore. If a person favors a different policy, has come to a different quotient after dividing the benefits of his or her political party by its drawbacks, or even fails to subscribe to an ascendant gender theory of more recent provenance than my five-year-old daughter, such a person is not merely wrong. He or she is too stupid to be classified as a vertebrate (in which case we mock), or else irredeemably wicked (in which case we call him or her a Nazi or a Cultural Marxist). These mutually exclusive attacks are alternated from day to day, often against the same people.

But what if not just merely wrong, but pitiably wrong–even deceived–were still serviceable categories? What if instead of automatically sorting ourselves into warring ideological or partisan factions hurling insults and abuse at one another, we called a ceasefire, met on neutral ground, and admitted, “Hey, I am just playing the part I thought I was supposed to play, but I don’t really think you are a venomous arthropod. Let’s calm down and figure this out.”?

That’s where Jordan Peterson seems to be coming from. (more…)

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On April 14, 2018 By In Books, Culture

Gaining Death: A Review of ‘Paul, Apostle of Christ’

We in the West must constantly seek out reminders of what real hardship looks like. Last week I was given a screener for “Paul, Apostle of Christ,” starring Jim Caviezel, who played Jesus in “The Passion of the Christ,” as well as James Faulkner from “Downton Abbey.” This biblical movie was just such a reminder, not only of what it’s like to endure persecution for the name of Christ, but of the fact that the Apostles and early Christians were real people who didn’t know they would become living legends–or even that anyone would remember their stories. (more…)

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On March 5, 2018 By In Books, Culture, Politics

Book Review: Health Care Sharing Ministries by Stephen R. Turley

I am not part of any health care sharing ministries but in January I had the opportunity to go to a presentation by Samaritan Ministries. The presenter caught my attention when he opened with the question: “What is the Worldview of your Health Insurance Company?” I realized that I had not considered that question for myself. What does my health insurance company think about various moral issues? It is not like the medical field is an amoral field. In fact, in the scientific and technological landscape in which we live, we need to be asking about morals more often than we do. I tell my students all the time that in our age of technology we don’t need to ask “can we do this”, but rather “should we do this”. And that question is becoming more fundamental in a world where Elon Musk has launched his Tesla Roadster into space.

In this way, Turley’s book is important in pushing the conversation about health care further.

In this book, Turley gives a helpful overview of what health sharing ministries are and why they are significant. Here is a brief explanation for those who are new to the idea. A health sharing ministry is one that works as a networking system for Christians to connect with other Christians so that when a medical need arises the need can be met by Christians sending money directly to the person in need. The organization, like Samaritan Ministries, co-ordinates the exchange and directs the payer where to send his check each month. There are a few organizations on the market and each does things a little differently so it would be helpful to look into them all: Samaritan Ministries, Medi-Share, Christian Health Care Ministries, and Liberty HealthShare.  Turley has a list of resources in the back of his book on these ministries and on other medical resources.

In this book, Turley argues that we are in the age of a health care revolution and that the old insurance model is outdated and on its way out. He unpacks some of the biblical impetus behind these new sharing models. He also tells of his own experience and stories from being part of Samaritan Ministries. In this way, he shows how the system works from the inside. He also spends a chapter on the importance of the self-paying patient.

Here are some of the key elements of the book that I appreciated.

First, Christians have always been on the forefront of medical care reform and innovation. From hospitals and health care in the ancient world to adoption practices to medical research today, Christians are the movers and shakers in this field. And this is true in the area of health insurance.

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On January 9, 2018 By In Books, Theology

Contours of the Kuyperian Tradition

In March 2017, IVP Academic published Craig G. Bartholomew’s systematic introduction to the Neo-Calvinist school of thought entitled, Contours of the Kuyperian Tradition.

Kuyper scholars like James D. Bratt, author of the 2013 Kuyper biography Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat, have recommended Bartholomew’s book. “Agree with Kuyper or not, this is the place to go to learn, in brief, what he said, did, and wrought,” said Bratt.

Over at the Jesus Creed blog on Patheos, The Rev. Canon Dr. Scot Mcknight has two posts on the book. On December 22, McKnight overviews his familiarity with Kuyper’s work and poses the usual objection to Kuyperian thinking: the how. In the Reformed world, we have seen a variety of Neo-Calvinist interpretations from Rushdoony’s Reconstructionism to James K.A. Smith’s efforts to revive Augustine’s “permixtum of the saeculum.”

McKnight is likely familiar with this variety (and history) of its applications and expresses his nervousness at Bartholomew’s paragraph: “Mission is easily reduced to evangelism and church activities, and indispensable as these indeed are, mission is much broader. As David Bosch points out, “Mission is more than and different from recruitment to our brand of religion; it is alerting people to the universal reign of God.”

McKnight and I belong to the same Anglican Diocese, where he is Canon Theologian. While McKnight doesn’t embrace the term Kuyperian – I do and here’s one reason why. McKnight returned to Contours on December 28, 2017 and pulls up to Kuyper’s conversion story. Interestingly, this is a place where McKnight’s Anglican tradition and Kuyper can actually touch historically. Kuyper’s conversation happens while reading a popular novel: The Heir of Redclyffe by Charlotte M. Yonge – a disciple of Father John Keble, who closely supervised the writing of the book.

McKnight and Bartholomew point to Kuyper’s quote:

“I read that Philip knelt, and before I knew it, I was kneeling in front of my chair with folded hands. Oh, what my soul experienced at that moment I fully understood only later. Yet, from that moment on I despised what I used to admire and sought what I had dared to despise.”

It is not clear in his blog if McKnight has made (or would agree with) this connection, but I would posit that it is no coincidence that Kuyper’s conversion and ecclesiology are born out of a Yonge novel. McKnight is likely familiar with the “Tractarian/Puseyite” traditionalism (or Oxford Movement) that Yonge hopes to romantically entangle the reader with. Her inclusion of high-church, sacramental Anglo-Catholicism is essential to the historic import of the book. In Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader, Bratt notes how Kuyper made the connections himself, “the hero’s funeral rite in the Church of England conveyed the comforts available from a pure ‘mother-church’ that was there to guide each step of the pilgrim’s way.”

McKnight goes on to connect Kuyper’s critique of modernity with his emphasis of separation and the sphere-sovereignty of the church. While Kuyperianism is often maligned as a political theology, McKnight, Bratt, and Bartholomew all point to his bold emphasis on the importance of the Church.

Perhaps, I am putting too much weight on Kuyper’s conversion story and its connection to the Tractarians, but they both spring from the same revolt against modernity. Both Neo-Calvinism and Anglican Traditionalism are born to combat the tides of what they saw as liberalism. It is impossible to understand the Anglo-Catholics as a liturgical movement alone, they also represented an anti-modernist political philosophy for the Church against the encroachments of “whiggery.” In a similar way, Kuyper would develop a political theology as a result of his high view of the church, as a defence against modernism, not as a tool for power or mere social engagement.

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