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Credo ut Intelligam

~ I believe so that I may understand

Credo ut Intelligam

Monthly Archives: September 2019

Illumination of Glory

30 Monday Sep 2019

Posted by Joshua Steely in Meditations

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God, Illumination, Jesus Christ, Life, Light, Truth

“For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6, NIV).

Wonderful is the mystery of divine illumination, the light of God sent unto our minds and hearts.  Without His light we remain in darkness.  In sin, we have a terrible capacity to suppress the truth, to turn away from the light and cling to the darkness.  Yet God has given us light; He sent His Son into our darkness–Jesus Christ, the light of the world.  Whoever receives Him receives light, and beholds a taste of the glory of God.

God is able to make light shine in the darkness.  He is able to illumine shadowed hearts, to drive ignorance from darkened minds, and to instill the grace of understanding, the grace of faith in the light of the Son.

Lord, give us light ever brighter, ever new, that we may behold your glory.

Ode to the Welsh Brew Tea

26 Thursday Sep 2019

Posted by Joshua Steely in Poetical

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Nonsense, Poem, Tea

Here’s three cheers for the Welsh Brew Tea,

who, summoned under a Summer sun

fulfills his oath faithfully,

putting to rout tension.

 

Faithful, vigilant, Welsh Brew Tea,

Receive my encomium to thee!

 

Here’s three cheers for the Welsh Brew Tea,

who comes in Autumn no laggard,

but stalwart in his steaming station

leaves my brow less haggard.

 

Faithful, vigilant, Welsh Brew Tea,

Receive my encomium to thee!

 

Here’s three cheers for the Welsh Brew Tea,

who, welcomed on a Winter’s day,

slackens not in his sworn duty

to chase the chill away.

 

Faithful, vigilant, Welsh Brew Tea,

Receive my encomium to thee!

 

Here’s three cheers for the Welsh Brew Tea,

who sprightly springs at Spring tea-time

to invigorate the languid day

with essences sublime.

 

Faithful, vigilant, Welsh Brew Tea,

Receive my encomium to thee!

The Children’s Crusade

25 Wednesday Sep 2019

Posted by Joshua Steely in Contra Mundum, Musings

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Activism, Children, Ecology, Education, Family, Media, Truth

I saw a clip of that poor girl at the United Nations.  She said something very true at the beginning: she should have been in school.  The fact that adults have done a singularly bad job at addressing pollution is not a good reason to be putting children in the spotlight as activists.

Children are to be taught, nurtured, loved, protected.  They are not to be killed in abortion clinics, mutilated as experiments in a social agenda, or sent out as soldiers in a culture war.

I do not mean that children shouldn’t learn about civic responsibility and social work.  By all means, take them with you to serve at the local food shelf.  Let them march beside you–let them learn under your wing.  But don’t hold them up with a microphone to spurt angry recriminations at their elders–even if those elders are guilty.  I don’t think it helps your cause; more importantly, I don’t think it does their souls any good.

We have developed an activist culture that thrives on outrage, substitutes sloganeering for critical thought, and is riddled with a self-aggrandizement.  I would like for future generations to be wiser, kinder, more generous, and more socially conscious than generations before; I would like for them to step forward boldly and repair the damage that others who came before them have done.

But I do not think it is likely, not if we continue on this present course.  Sending children out to be young crusaders is no way to teach them how to be good men and women.  Our grandparents knew more about community, charity, generosity, and honor than we do.  If we teach our children to scorn the past, we will not prepare them to make a better future.

I do not blame the young activists.  They are teenagers, moved by that glorious youthful drive to take the world by the horns; it is a beautiful thing.  I do blame the parents, who have not the wisdom to protect their children and guide them into adulthood.

She should have been in school.

A Father for Us

24 Tuesday Sep 2019

Posted by Joshua Steely in Meditations, Musings

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Christianity, Depression, Faith, Father, God, Hope, Life, Media

It is easy to become overwhelmed by the tragedy of life.  Every day the news tells us about losses, griefs, horrors and inhumanities.  We have each our pains, and if our hearts are not hardened we have others’ pains to bear as well.  How can we face this world of sadness and separation?

We need a Father who can make everything all right.  Those who have had good fathers know something of this: he seems able to do anything and knows everything, he can pick you up and make you feel safe, he’s your protector and provider.  Those who have tried to be good fathers know that this is what you give to your children: you make for them a world within the world, a world of love and safety and joy, a world where they are protected and provided for and loved.

But we outgrow our fathers, even the best of fathers.  We discover the world outside the world they made for us, and we make our way in that world and come to know its darkness and danger and despair.  We come to see that our fathers were pointing us towards someone bigger than themselves, that fatherhood is a picture of the ultimate human need, natural for creatures and tragic because of sin.

We need a King who can put things right.  We need a Savior who can forgive us.  We need a Father, who can enfold us in His embrace and wipe the tears from our eyes, who can make things okay.

We need God.

And God has reached down to us.  “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (Jn. 3:16, NIV).

There is a King; He has come, and He is coming again.  His kingdom is among us, and it will be complete.  He is going to fix things.  “‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes.  There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away” (Rev. 21:4).

There is a Father for us.

Lord of Light

23 Monday Sep 2019

Posted by Joshua Steely in Poetical

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Eternity, God, Light, Poem, Truth

Lord of light, invincible,

the light by which we see,

the light beyond that lights our eyes

and lights the way to thee,

Lord of light, unfading,

enlighten us to see

only in your consuming radiance

burns bliss eternally.

Wrong Tree

20 Friday Sep 2019

Posted by Joshua Steely in Contra Mundum, Pro Ecclesia, Theology

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Christianity, God, Gospel, Idolatry, Liberalism, Nature, Nonsense, Panentheism, Theism, Theology, Truth, Union Theological Seminary, World

Union Theological Seminary is back in the news, with another display of the theological deterioration that liberalism brings.

I trace the progression something like this: the failure to hold to the truth about God as revealed in Scripture leads to an over-emphasis on the immanent, on the matters of this world; accordingly, the Divine transcendence collapses into immanence–aided by the feminist impulse, which takes umbrage at the masculine personalism of God in the Bible, and pushes either in the direction of goddess-worship or a loss of God’s personalism (or, paradoxically, both); the result is a slide from theism into panentheism, the conflation of Creator with creation.  I’ve read that Paul Tillich, possibly the most renowned 20th-century American liberal theologian, came to the point where he couldn’t really pray, but only meditate in or upon nature; God had ceased to be personal in his conception.

What I’m saying is that when your gospel becomes too this-worldly, so does your picture of God.

I am not saying that Union has arrived at panentheism yet, only that they are perhaps on the road there.  They have certainly arrived upon a place of absurdity; what else can you call a worship service involving confession to plants of mankind’s sin against creation?

To quote Union’s widely-circulated tweet:

Today in chapel, we confessed to plants. Together, we held our grief, joy, regret, hope, guilt and sorrow in prayer; offering them to the beings who sustain us but whose gift we too often fail to honor.

What do you confess to the plants in your life?

It is not entirely clear whether they prayed to plants (i.e., regarded them as divine) or simply whether they prayed about their misdeeds towards plants or prayed with plants to God, so I give them the benefit of the doubt that they didn’t actually worship the plants.  But they did confess to them, regarding them as “beings who sustain us.”

It is one thing to poetically address plants as a sort of metaphor, or to speak about how they reveal God, as in Psalm 19 or my own poor poem from yesterday.  It is quite another to confess our sins to plants, as though they were personal beings and as though it were them, not their Creator, who we have offended by our wasteful destruction of the environment.  It insinuates devotion to Gaia, rather than to God.

Faced with criticism over this debacle, Union has defended their decision by pointing out that they weren’t exactly committed to wholehearted devotion to the one true God anyway.  As their statement is reported in the Washington Examiner article linked above, in their chapels:

“One day, you may come in to find a traditional Anglican communion, another day you may enter into a service of Buddhist meditation or Muslim prayer,” the spokesperson continued. “Another, you may find a Pentecostal praise service or a silent Quaker meeting. We create a home where people can worship side by side, in traditions similar to and very different to their own. Through this process, we learn from our neighbors and discern our own faith more deeply.”

That does fill in the picture, but its hardly comforting for anyone concerned about the students’ souls.

There is a God, a righteous and holy God, a jealous God–the God who says, “I am the LORD; that is my name!  I will not yield my glory to another or my praise to idols” (Isa. 42:8, NIV).

You must know Him; that is the single most important thing in this life.

There’s no absolution from confessing your sins to a fern.  It can’t forgive you.  It’s not the tree of life.  You have to bring your sins, instead, to Christ who bore them on the cross.  “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness.  By his wounds you have been healed” (1 Pet. 2:24, ESV).

But when you turn away from the cross, you can get so lost you find yourself talking to trees.

 

Unhidden

19 Thursday Sep 2019

Posted by Joshua Steely in Poetical

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Tags

Heaven, Life, Nature, Poem, Revelation, Truth, Wisdom

That bold azure canopy above shows,

rather than hides,

the brilliant gates of heaven to our eyes,

and every blossom that unfolds

unfolds to us.

The twining grapevine molds

a sculpture of suggestive power

as songbirds herald

celestial tidings with each daylit hour.

We search, but cannot find what we

refuse to see–

that every moment apes eternity.

Real Nonconformity

18 Wednesday Sep 2019

Posted by Joshua Steely in Contra Mundum, Meditations

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Celebrities, Christianity, Culture, Happiness, holiness, Life, Media, Righteousness, Society, Subversion, Truth

Nonconformity is all the rage these days.

Except that it isn’t, of course.  It can’t be.  If it becomes popular, it’s no longer nonconformy–it’s just conformity.

So I think it would be more accurate to say that the idea of subversion is very popular, while actual subversion never can be.  This is a point that it would be nice to see impressed, somehow, upon certain populations, such as the literary industry.  If all the cool kids are waving your flag, you might be in rebellion against God, truth, nature, and so on, but you’re not ‘speaking truth to power.’

Real nonconformity is never fashionable.  But it can be righteous.  In Romans 12, the apostle Paul exhorts Christians, “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (v.2, NIV).  There is a godly nonconformity, the transformed living that comes from the Holy Spirit’s sanctifying work.

This nonconformity doesn’t parade its transgressiveness, but quietly displays its virtue.  Its hallmark is virtue, not virtue-signaling.  Its the nonconformity of the man who doesn’t swear and the woman who dresses modestly–the people who get mocked for their respectability, rather than lauded for their scandalousness.  The pattern of this world urges greed, pride, lust, and anger; the Spirit-transformed life displays charity, humility, chastity, and peace.

Clothed in the right amount of virtue-signaling, the pattern of this world may get you headlining music festivals and photographed on magazine covers.

But the transformed life is usually happier now, and eternity awaits.

Rejecting Young Lives

17 Tuesday Sep 2019

Posted by Joshua Steely in Contra Mundum

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Academia, Christianity, LGBTQ+, Secularism, Sexual Revolution, Society, Truth

Famously liberal Religion News Service gave an unintentionally apt title to a recent article: “Duke University’s student government rejects Young Life over LGBTQ policies.”  It would have been even more apt had they not capitalized “Young Life.”

The story is an old one by now: supposedly tolerant university decides that, in the wake of the sexual revolution, the standard Christian morality that has been a cornerstone of two millennia of Western civilization is no longer to be tolerated.

Not surprising, since Duke University is a very prominent academic institution, and therefore expected to yield immediately to inane cultural movements.

Interestingly, Duke’s motto is Eruditio et Religio, “Knowledge/Learning and Faith.”

The eruditio is hard to dispute, but I have a question about the religio–namely, what religion would that be?  Not the Methodism of the school’s history.  Some sort of paganism, apparently.

In their privileging of sexual deviancy above Young Life, Duke’s student government has shown they do not understand what will really nourish the minds and souls of young lives.

One more reminder that secularism is a mask for anti-Christian ideologies, and not the neutral force it pretends to be.

On Silvery Wing of Holiest Song

16 Monday Sep 2019

Posted by Joshua Steely in Poetical, Quotes

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Gospel, Jesus Christ, Poem, Praise

“Hush! while on silvery wing of holiest song

Floats forth the old, dear story of our peace,

His coming, the Desire of Ages long,

To wear our chains and win our glad release.

Our wondering joy, to hear such tidings blest,

Is crowned with ‘Come to Him, and He will give you rest.’

Rest, by His sorrow!  Bruised for our sin,

Behold the Lamb of God!  His death our life.

Now lift your heads, ye gates!  He entereth in,

Christ risen, indeed, and Conqueror in the strife.

Thanks, thanks to Him who won, and Him who gave

Such victory of love, such triumph o’er the grave.”

–from “Threefold Praise,” by Frances Ridley Havergal

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