Moral Order and Wisdom

The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, Saint John declared in the opening of his Gospel. So far so good, but have you ever wondered if the Word could have become a donkey and dwelt among us? Or could the Word have been incarnate as a man and as a donkey at the same time?

This question is not as far-fetched as it sounds. In Stanley Grenz’s book The Named God and the Question of Being: A Trinitarian Theo-ontology, Grenz tells how the philosopher William of Ockham (1288-1347) declared that God might have come to earth as an ox or donkey. Other medieval philosophers disagreed with Ockham, and the matter became one of intense dispute. According to accounts left to us by Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536), by the fifteenth-century, scholastic theologians had moved on to trying to work out more subtle details such as whether God could have been nailed on the cross and sacrificed for our sins if he had been incarnated as a donkey.

This wasn’t just an abstract question for medieval philosophers with too much time on their hands. Rather, it was a question that penetrated to the heart of an entire way of understanding the world and God’s relation to it. For William of Ockham, it was important to emphasize that God has no attributes apart from His freedom to be free from all attributes. Concerned—not without some warrant—that the dominant scholasticism of his day was domesticating God, turning Him into a civilized Aristotelian, Ockham asserted that God’s saving will-acts must be unconditioned by any factors outside the Divine fiat, including the past history of God’s works. Indeed, Ockham insisted that God could even produce in human beings knowledge of a non-existent past if He wanted to, although he never went as far as some of his contemporaries (particularly John of Mirecourt, Gregory of Rimini, and Pierre d’Ailly) in suggesting that God could actually undo the past.

Ockham hoped to combat stagnant views of God’s freedom, yet as Timothy Nonne pointed out in his article on Ockham in A Companion to Philosophy in the Middle Ages, “in several texts in his Sentences commentaries, Ockham allows that God could command the opposite of practically any act currently contained under his ordered power. Ockham’s reasoning on such occasions is that God cannot be disallowed from doing what seems to involve no contradiction.”

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Lowering God-Given Bariers

Women sometimes defend wearing skimpy swimwear on the grounds that there is nothing sexual to it. If true, this only shows how desexualized our society has become. If a woman can strip down to a bikini in the presence of men without having any thought of the sexual overtones, then this only shows that she has let her body become demystified, that her God-given barriers have been lowered, and that her bare flesh has been evacuated of its inherent eroticism. And that, incidentally, is exactly what the early pioneers of the sexual revolution (and early advocates of nudism) hoped would happen.

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Is Watchman Nee Also Among the Gnostics?

Have you ever been told by a well-meaning evangelical that the way to achieve a victorious Christian life is to “Let go and let God” or “stop trying and start trusting”?

As a teenager, I remember being given this advice by people who were eager to help me achieve Christian victory over sin. “Stop struggling against your flesh”, they would say. “Whenever you’re struggling, that simply proves you’re trying to overcome sin in your own strength rather than in God’s strength. Sanctification has got to be a God-thing, not a man-thing.”

But I could never understand the actual mechanics of how to overcome sin without trying to overcome sin. In fact, I didn’t even know how to get up from a chair—let alone keep to a routine of Bible reading—without using some degree of will-power. Yet I kept being told that will-power was displeasing to God. One person told me that my problem was that I was trying to stop trying to stop trying, which showed that I didn’t really get it.

Watchman Nee

In my early twenties I turned to the writings of Watchman Nee (1903–1972), since I had been told that he had written the best explanation of the “let go and let God” process. In Nee’s book The Normal Christian Life, he argues that God can only get the glory for a person’s sanctification when no human effort is involved. Though Nee denies it, the human agent becomes essentially passive in the work of sanctification since will-power and struggle play no part in the normal Christian life. Nee believed that phrases such as “human effort”, “willpower” and “trying hard” were words of the devil.

When I turned to Nee’s book Release of the Spirit, I began to understand that these ideas arose out of a Platonic-like anthropology. In this book, Nee makes clear that we need to not only escape from the will, but also from the body, the mind or the soul—in other words, everything that makes us human! That’s when I saw that the life Nee was describing was not the normal Christian life at all, but a very abnormal Gnostic one. The problem with Nee’s anthropology was aptly summarized by Ranald Macaulay and Jerram Barrs in their excellent book Being Human: The Nature of Spiritual Experience.

“According to Nee, the person is composed of three parts: the inner man (the spirit), the outer man (the soul) and the outermost man (the body). Because they belong to the outer man, neither the emotions nor the mental thoughts have the same nature as God. Only the spirit relates to God. …He seems to be rejecting not merely the sinful nature but the self, for is not the self constituted by the emotions, the mind, the will—Nee’s ‘outer man’? Consequently he devalues the human. He says that natural compassion and tenderness are still sinful because they are only human. These too must be broken to allow the Spirit to do his work.”

The antithesis that Nee and some of the Keswick teachers have posited between the “natural” and the “spiritual” often arises out of a deep discomfort acknowledging that God works through natural processes and means. According to this line of thought, if God is to get all the credit, then man’s will cannot be involved, not even as an instrument used by the Holy Spirit. If God is to get all the glory, then the involvement of man’s will must be reduced to nil, or at least consigned merely to “choosing to believe” or “choosing to trust.” The idea is that it is somehow more spiritual for God to work when we are passive than when we are actively struggling.

Behind these notions of monergistic sanctification is the same assumption which animated much of ancient Gnosticism, namely that the divine and human are quantitatively rather than qualitatively distinguished, so that they must be negotiated or rationed between God and human persons. If that is your starting point, then of course we want God to swallow up the human, and for God to be glorified by us losing our identity. Gnosticism took this to the extreme of teaching that we had to shake off the shackles of the physical body, whereas teachers associated with the Keswick tradition merely teach that we must shake off the shackles of the will to become passive instruments of the divine. Both ideas are essentially Gnostic.

By contrast, when we understand that God works through means, then it is non-problematic to assert that one of the means or instruments He uses for our sanctification is human will-power, just as one of the instruments He uses for our justification is human faith. (I say “one of the means” because will-power is not the most important aspect of sanctification. But it does play a crucial part.)

This isn’t about trying to earn favour with God through “works righteousness”—heaven forbid! Indeed, God is the one that makes it possible for us to exercise will-power in the first place, just as He is the one who makes it possible for us to exercise faith (Philippians 2:13). Remember that we’re talking here about children of God who already have faith, already love God and who are therefore already filled with the Spirit in some sense.

The point is that in both sanctification and justification, God’s sovereign work occurs through the vehicles by which He sovereignly chooses to work. The believer works because God works. It’s not a question of either/or but both/and, as the human and the divine co-operate synergistically.

The Bible is full of this synergistic both/and approach to sanctification. As I pointed out in my earlier article 'Is Will-Power Good or Bad?', the apostles constantly taught that one of the ways you surrender yourself completely to Christ is precisely through God-directed will-power and human struggle. Indeed, throughout the New Testament the apostles frequently speak of human struggle as a good thing. See Rom 7:14–25; 1 Cor 9:24; Gal 5:17; Eph. 6:18; Col. 4:2; 1 Tim, 4:7-8; 1 Tim. 6:11–12; Heb 12:1–3; 2 Pet 1:5–7, for just a few of the numerous references. Moreover, we know from the gospel narratives that Christ’s time on earth was full of struggles, especially towards the end when He wrestled with the Father’s will in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Further Reading

• Is Will-Power Good or Bad?
• Are Calvinists Also Among the Gnostics?
  
• Is Charles Hodge Also Among the Gnostics?
  
• Is Jonathan Edwards also among the Gnostics?
• Resources for Understanding Gnosticism

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Read my writings at Alfred the Great Society

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Sir Clement Attlee: Wolf in Sheep's Clothing

If my book Saints and Scoundrels sells enough copies, I will be approaching my publisher about doing a squeal. Once again, I will hope to focus on both well-known heroes and villains, as well as lesser known figures. One of the lesser known figures I hope to cover is Sir Clement Attlee. On the Christian Voice website I have told his story in an article that, God-willing, will comprise a chapter in Saints and Scoundrel's Volume 2. Click on the link below to read about the life and legacy of Mr Attlee:

Sir Clement Attlee: a Wolf in Sheep's Clothing

February's Publications

As promised a few days ago, here is my rundown of this month's publications, with a few other articles I wish to feature.

Syria

Building on my earlier article about how the West is helping to destroy Christianity in Syria, I have returned to the situation in Syria this month with the following two updates:

• Senator McCain Defends Syrian Rebels in Unprecedented Temper Tantrum
• Syrian Rebels Kidnap Nuns and Orphans

Gnosticism

In 2013 I continued with my ongoing series on evangelicalism and Gnosticism with two more contributions. These articles explore some of the ways that Gnostic-type ideas have infected Christian thinking about work.

• Your Day Job is Your Ministry (Gnosticism and Evangelicalism 5)
• Gnosticism in the Work Place (Gnosticism and Evangelicalism 6)

Clement Attlee

If my book Saints and Scoundrels sells enough copies, I will be approaching my publisher about doing a sequel. Once again, I will hope to focus on both well-known heroes and villains, as well as lesser known figures. One of the lesser known figures I hope to cover is Sir Clement Attlee - surely a first-order villain if ever there was one. In this Christian Voice article I explain about his life and legacy.

• Remembering Clement Attlee: a Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

Creation and Evolution

Having stayed out of the creation/evolution debate for my entire career, I finally couldn't resist getting involved after I watched the Ham/Nye debate. I wrote a three-part study guide for small groups watching the debate. Here are the first two articles in this series. The third one will be published by the Colson Center next Monday.

• Ham/Nye Debate on Creation vs. Evolution: A guide for discussion (part 1)
• Ham/Nye Debate on Creation vs. Evolution: A guide for discussion (part 2)
• Ham/Nye Debate on Creation vs. Evolution: A guide for discussion (part 3) 

Islam 

Finally, this month I have finished my ongoing series on the Islamization of Britain.

• The Islamisation of Britain (Part 1): a crisis in demographics
• The Islamisation of Britain (Part 2): retention and conversion
• The Islamisation of Britain (Part 3): Censorship and ‘Islamophobia’
• The Islamisation of Britain (Part 4): 2013 in Review 
  

Changes to This Blog

I am increasingly thankful for the myriad opportunities to serve God and provide for my family through my writing ministry. I would also covet your prayers that as more people are reading my articles that God would enable me to write with Biblical wisdom and not simply out of my own opinions.

My writing opportunities (both secular and Christian) have recently expanded to a point where it is almost impossible for me to keep up with everything, let alone post links to all the articles on this blog as they become available. In fact, I've even been having to turn down writing opportunities because I am not able to keep up with everything.

Because of this, I will be making some changes to this blog. Originally this blog was a place where I would post reflections about the things I was reading - hence the title of the blog. However, as more writing opportunities became available, this blog began to have less original content and instead turned into a place to link out to other websites where my work appeared. Thus, every time an article was published, I would put a summary of it on this blog and then schedule a future post linking to the article. Having done this, I currently have posts scheduled to be published through to the end of the year.
 
In order to have more time to focus on writing, all new articles will not be featured on this blog at all except in a list of links at the end of the month. When posting the list of links, I may say a few words about each article or I may simply give a list of links, depending on how much time I have.

This change will not be noticeable until 2015 since I already have posts scheduled through the end of the year, although you will begin to see is a post at the end of every month giving links to my various publications.

Jesus of Testimony

by Terrell Clemmons, guest blogger

Greg Spencer

Greg Spencer of Roseburg, OR, was a police officer in narcotics enforcement in the 1990s. His work kept him immersed in a world of violence, death, and depravity on a regular basis. In addition he was a deputy medical examiner, which meant he had to view autopsies, often on bodies whose life had ended in a horrible death. He was dedicated to his work, but it turned him into a hardened and calloused man, and his first marriage ended because of it.

He left the police force after fifteen years of service and became a cross-country truck driver, but about six months into that, macular degeneration in both eyes rendered him effectively blind. He went on disability, and, with the expectation of being blind and disabled for the rest of his life, got help through the Oregon Commission of the Blind in functional blind living, including white cane and guide dog training.

During this time, he met Wendy - his face softens into a smile when he mentions Wendy - a “born again, on fire believer in Jesus Christ,” who “drug me with her to church.” He met Jesus Christ there. And he married Wendy.

Sexting, Bodies and Personhood

In a Christian Voice article last month on sexting, I drew attention to the fact that women are sexting more than men. On one level this is surprising, since sexting makes women more vulnerable. After all, a man who has no scruples when it comes to receiving or asking for explicit pictures is probably going to have no scruples when it comes to forwarding those pictures to his mates. A woman who engages in sexting thus sets herself up for the worst sort of public exploitation and is forever under the power of the man she trusted.

But in another sense, sexting makes women less vulnerable, because a girl can experience the excitement of giving her body to a man without ever having to do business with him as an embodied person, without having to approach him in all her vulnerability, fragility and humanness. For many women, this is precisely the appeal of sexting. Sexting is thus seen as liberating sex from the problem that has dogged it from the beginning, namely having to deal with real people. An article in Sans Magazine was exuberant about sexting’s potential to free sexual relationships from the constraints that come with physical presence:

No longer do we actually have to commit to a single task of actually physically undressing, warming up our partner and then engaging in the carnal act of intercourse…. Plus, we don’t ever have to actually see the person.

This quote demonstrates how sexting is the culmination of the dehumanizing principles behind the sexual revolution. The promise of the sexual revolution was that intimacy could be fulfilling outside the obligations of marriage, a promise that researchers have now discovered to be false. The lie of the 21st century is that sex can be fulfilling without actual intimacy. This too will be found to be a lie. In the meantime, the problem is that by coupling sexual pathologies with extremely addictive digital technologies, that brain is being rewired to think differently about sex, relationships and what it means to be human.

Read more here.

Syria articles

I recently published two articles on the Syria situation on the Christian Voice website. See the links below:

• Senator McCain Defends Syrian Rebels in Unprecedented Temper Tantrum
  
• Syrian Rebels Kidnap Nuns and Orphans
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Maintaining Conjugal Love

Taking as my starting point the combined wisdom of Richard Baxter and the Holy Scriptures, I have written three week-long Bible studies on maintaining conjugal love. These studies would be great for husbands and wives to go through together, especially if they are having marital difficulties.

If you don't have time to commit to the three week-long Bible studies, at least check out the wonderful quotations from Richard Baxter at the beginning of each week (although the quotation for part 3 is the same as the one for part 2).

• Maintaining Conjugal Love Part 1
• Maintaining Conjugal Love Part 2
• Maintaining Conjugal Love Part 3

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Read my writings at Alfred the Great Society

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Fiction and Christian Sanctification

Growing up it was sometimes interesting to hear people object to my father’s ministry writing Christian novels. “Why not just tell the truth plainly, instead of putting it into stories?” I would sometimes hear people say. Other times I would sometime people say something like this: “If I wanted to learn more about the Lord, a novel would be the last book I would pick up. Why not go straight to the Bible or to works of theology?”

Charles Finney

In its more extreme manifestation, this prejudice against fiction expresses itself in the idea that works of fantasy are little more than clever lying. The Christian evangelist Charles Finney seemed to hold this idea because he once dismissed both Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott as nothing more than “a host of triflers and blasphemers of God.” 

The same idea was expressed by someone interacting with the ministry of Zondervan publishing. “Fiction is wrong because it’s not true” the person said. “As Christians we should hold fast to the truth and not saturate our minds with falsehoods regardless of what ‘good’ they seem to bring about.”

There are many things we could say in response to this prejudice against fiction. We could point to the example of our blessed Lord, who constantly told stories to illustrate important spiritual truths. Or we might draw attention to the fact that the Bible’s definition of truth is far larger than mere factual accuracy, and so a novel can convey truth even if it deals with characters and situations that are purely imaginary. We might also point out that this prejudice against the novel often arises as a symptom of an unbiblical rationalism—a rationalism that fails to come to terms with the importance scripture attaches to the imagination.

 

While all the above points are crucial for developing a Biblical defense of fiction, in my Colson Center article on fiction I have shared a more subtle and often overlooked reason why fiction is important, even crucial, for our sanctification as men and women of God. I argue that fiction (whether in books or films) allows us to grow in sanctification by simulating the type of experiences that God designed should lead to sanctification. To read my article, click on the following link:

Fiction and the Christian Faith

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Sex on the Screen

Would it be wrong to sneak into the bedroom of a husband and wife you know and watch them having sex, or even to watch them undress as they get ready to have sex?

Of course that would be wrong.

Now let’s modify the question a little. If a couple you know gave you permission to come into their house and watch them have sex, or even to watch lesser forms of erotic contact, would it still be wrong for you to view it?

Again, I am assuming that most Christians would agree with me that this too would be wrong. (If you don’t think this would be wrong, then you need to review some of the Scriptures I brought up in part 1 of this series.)

Now let’s modify the question still further. If the same couple made a video of themselves having sex, or even just undressing each other, and then sent you the video, would it be wrong for you to watch either all or some of it? Again, I am assuming that most Christians would have no hesitation saying that the only acceptable thing to do would be to throw the video in the trash.

You can probably guess where I’m heading with this thought experiment, which has one further modification. Suppose the same couple were videoed having sex or being naked in an erotic context, but it occurred within a movie? Would that be wrong to watch?

I would argue that this too would be wrong for the same reasons, but suddenly I find myself in a minority, because millions of American Christians are completely comfortable viewing such content, for they do it all the time when they sit down to watch television and movies. Indeed, the only difference between the sexual content that is routine in movies, on the one hand, and the final stage of my thought experiment, on the other, is that the actors are not married and we do not know them. But if anything, the fact that they are not married merely adds another layer of wrongness to the activity.

In short, if it’s wrong to watch people having sexual contact in the real world, then it is equally wrong to watch the same actions on television or in a movie.

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Gender Discrimination is Sometimes Good

Things like racism, agism and sexism all hinge on the axiom that it is wrong to discriminate. However, Anthony Browne has written an interesting little book about political correctness in which he argues that discrimination is sometimes not only necessary but positively good. The book is titled The Retreat of Reason and is reviewed by me here. Browne showed that gender discrimination is not only accepted in many instances, but many times is necessary, laudable and defensible. Gender discrimination simply means treating a person differently than you would if that person were a different sex. For example, when a man dates a woman he is, in a sense, ‘discriminating’ since he would not offer the same treatment to members of his own gender category, assuming he is a heterosexual. In short, there are many cases where men and women are unequal, and these are diversities to be celebrated rather than inequalities to be lamented. The real question, therefore, is not whether something is a case of sex discrimination, but whether it is a case of justifiable sex discrimination. Browne writes:

“Young men pay higher rates for car insurance than young women and older men, because young men are, on average, more dangerous drivers than young women and older men. A young man who is a safe driver is thus discriminated against because of the characteristics of other people in his age and sex group….Anti-discrimination campaigners may publicly declare that all discrimination on the grounds of sex should be outlawed, but they are unlikely to agree that all men should have the right to use women’s toilets, that men should be allowed to go to women’s gyms, or to demand overturning the right of women’s clothes shops to refuse to employ men….Men pay smaller pension contributions than women for a given level of private pension, for the simple reason that, on average, they have shorter lives and so on average claim less….The various forms of rational discrimination that are widely accepted are not often called discrimination – although that is clearly what they are – because accepting that some discrimination is actually essential to the working of a society would undermine the public acceptance of a ‘zero tolerance of all forms of discrimination’. The war on discrimination would become meaningless if there were general public awareness that actually some forms of discrimination are needed.”

How Good Manners Help to Preserve Civilization

The second installment in my series on manners is now available online at the Colson Center.

In my earlier article on manners, I shared how one of Edmund Burke’s critiques of the French Revolution was that it was the fruit of a society that had lost its manners. Surveying the events that led to the revolution, Burke argued that chivalry, refined sentiment and good manners were crucial in preserving our humanity and keeping us from lapsing into a purely functional barbarism.

My latest installment in this series seeks to unpack some of Burke reasons for suggesting that good manners help to fortify civilization from decay and collapse. Manners help to preserve civilization by keeping us from collapsing into a purely functional barbarism. Moreover, manners enable a society to collectively navigate between the extremes of chaos and totalitarian control. To find out how click on the link below:

Edmund Burke and the Necessity of Good Manners (part 2)