Saint Athanasius' Boyhood Games

Saint Athanasius

It was the year 313, and the bishop of Alexandria stood at his window and looked out upon the city he was responsible for.

Beyond the line of houses, Bishop Alexander could see the city’s port bustling with the activity that had made Egypt such a rich trading centre during the height of the Roman Empire. Beyond that, stretching as far into the distance as the eye could see, the bishop looked upon the waters of the Mediterranean.

Just as Bishop Alexander was about to turn away from the window and prepare for some guests he was expecting for Sunday dinner, his gaze caught something he hadn’t seen before. On the shore of the harbor a group of boys were playing.

In itself this was nothing unusual; what was unusually is what the boys were playing. They seemed to be reenacting a baptism service. One of the boys was actually baptizing the other boys.

Concerned that the boys were making light of weighty matters, the Bishop sent his servant to break up the mock service and bring the boys to himself.

When the boys arrived at his house, the bishop began by asking the boys what they had been playing.

“It wasn’t our fault,” put in one of the company. “It was the bishop’s fault.” As he said this, the boy pointed towards a tall slim lad with ruddy hair, the one whom Alexander had seen baptizing the other boys.

“What is your name?” he asked.

“My name is Athanasius,” the young boy replied, a little nervous to find the bishop taking such an interest in him. “We were just playing,” the boy continued. “I was pretending to be the bishop and these [pointing to his companions] are my catechumens who have been awaiting baptism.”

As Bishop Alexander continued to question the boy, his response turned from one of censure to wonder. It turned out that the child had performed the baptismal rites on his companions with remarkable accuracy, perfectly reciting in Greek the liturgical formula used in the baptism of catechumens.

“Are you a Christian?” Alexander asked.

“Yes.”

Bishop Alexander continued his inquiries. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“I want to be a priest.”

The bishop stood silent for a moment eying the boy. “It is not an easy life,” he said softly, recalling the Diocletian persecution which had only just come to an end and in which many of his friends had been martyred for the faith. “Also, a priest must have learning.”

“I love to learn,” said the boy, “And I am not afraid of anything!”

Impressed by the boy’s enthusiasm, the bishop made inquiries into the names and whereabouts of his parents. Later that week Alexander paid Athanasius’ parents a visit and asked for permission to bring the boy up in order to train and educate him for the ministry. Athanasius’ parents, who always knew there was something special about their boy, gladly accepted the bishop’s offer.

Athanasius quickly grew to love the gentle bishop as a father. But Athanasius was not the only one blessed by the relationship. The busy bishop found his generosity to the boy repaid a hundredfold, as the lad became a most useful assistant. Together the two of them travelled around the vast diocese, strengthening local church leaders and ministering to the needs of the saints.

Six years later, when Athanasius was 23 years old, he was ordained as a deacon and continued to work closely with the aging Patriarch.

Keep reading...

On Culture and Genuises

"Geniuses do not arise out of a vacuum. They are the product of years—often centuries—of collective input from dozens of individuals. Most of these individuals will probably be unaware of the heritage they are contributing to, yet their collective efforts help to foster and sustain a culture in which greatness can thrive." Saints and Scoundrels, page 142

____________

Read my columns at the Charles Colson Center

Read my writings at Alfred the Great Society

To join my mailing list, send a blank email to robin (at sign) atgsociety.com with “Blog Me” in the subject heading.

Click Here to friend-request me on Facebook and get news feeds every time new articles are added to this blog.

Plato, Aristotle and Pop Music

Carson Holloway has some excellent resources at the Witherspoon Institute channeling Plato and Aristotle's understanding of music to contemporary debates. This helpfully moves beyond a lot of the moralizing that often occurs in debates about contemporary music to look at the real ontological, aesthetic, ethical and political issues at stake. They can be read at the following links:

• The Pop Culture Wars
• What’s Really the Matter with Pop Music

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.”

Keep reading...

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.

Keep reading...

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

____________

Read my columns at the Charles Colson Center

Read my writings at Alfred the Great Society

To join my mailing list, send a blank email to robin (at sign) atgsociety.com with “Blog Me” in the subject heading.

Click Here to friend-request me on Facebook and get news feeds every time new articles are added to this blog.

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
  |
  
  

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

____________

Read my columns at the Charles Colson Center

Read my writings at Alfred the Great Society

To join my mailing list, send a blank email to robin (at sign) atgsociety.com with “Blog Me” in the subject heading.

Click Here to friend-request me on Facebook and get news feeds every time new articles are added to this blog.

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

____________

Read my columns at the Charles Colson Center

Read my writings at Alfred the Great Society

To join my mailing list, send a blank email to robin (at sign) atgsociety.com with “Blog Me” in the subject heading.

Click Here to friend-request me on Facebook and get news feeds every time new articles are added to this blog.