The Reformers' Gospel

The 'gospel', to which everything else we do should point, is easy to misrepresent in summary. It is said that the divine law damns us not for our refusal, but for our inability to obey it, or again that in God's sight the deed is good because of the man and not the man because of the deed. This is in reality the obstinate fact which meets us long before we venture into the realm of theology; the fact that morality or duty (or The Law) never yet made a man happy in himself or dear to others. It is shocking, but it is undeniable. We do not wish either to be, or to live among, people who are clean or honest or kind as a matter of duty: we want to be, and to associate with, people who like being clean and honest and kind. The suspicion that an act of spontaneous friendliness or generosity was really done as a duty can subtly poisons it. In philosophical language, the ethical category is self-destructive; morality is healthy only when it is trying to abolish itself. in theological language, no man can be saved by works. The whole purpose of the gospel is to deliver us from morality. Thus the 'Puritan' of modern imagination—the cold, gloomy heart, doing as duty what happier and richer souls do without thinking of it—is precisely the enemy which historical Protestantism arose and smote. What really matters is not to obey moral rules but to be a creature of a certain kind. The wrong kind of creature is damned (here, as we know; hereafter, as we believe) not for what it does but for what it is. And we cannot change our own nature by any moral efforts.

Another way of putting it would be to say that the Reformers, as regards the natural condition of humanity, are psychological determinists. Action necessarily obeys the strongest impulse—the greatest appetite overcomes the less. That the profit should be located in another world makes, as Tyndale clearly sees, no difference. Whether the man is seeking heaven of a hundred pounds he can still but seek himself. Of freedom in the true sense—of spontaneity or disinterestedness—Nature knows nothing. And yet, by a terrible paradox, such disinterestedness is precisely what the moral law demands. The law requires not only that we should do thus and so but that we should do it with a free, a willing, a lusty, and a loving heart. Its beginning and end is that we should love God and our neighbors. it demands of us not only acts but new motives. This is what merely moral men never understand. The first step is to see the law as it really is, and despair.

After the thunder of the law comes the rain of the gospel. Though Nature knows nothing of disinterestedness, Supernature does. There is one Will in existence which is really good of itself, and that Will can join us to itself so that we share its goodness. The transition comes by the gift of faith which immediately and almost by definition passes into love—by the redemption which God performed to win his enemy, to overcome him with love, that he might see Love and love anew. The essence of the change is that we now have power to love that which before we could not but hate. The fretting voice of the law is not the Will of the Beloved, already in principle (if not at every moment) our own will. Deeds are not the cause of salvation, but they are its inseparable symptom. We are 'loosed from the law'—by fulfilling it. Deeds are the fruits of love and love is the fruit of faith. So we utterly deny the medieval distinction between religion and secular life. God's literal sense is spiritual. Wiping shoes, washing dishes, nay, our humblest natural functions are all equally 'good works', and the ascetic life wins no higher room in heaven than a whore of the stews if she repent. Pain and hardship sent by God or self-inflicted may be needed to tame the flesh. They have no other value.

—C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, summarized from pp 187–191.

Why shephanim?

Why shephanim? The NASB refers to the shaphan or shephanim in Leviticus 11:5, Deuteronomy 14:7, Psalm 104:18, and Proverbs 30:26, directly transliterating the Hebrew word שָּׁפָן. In these references the KJV and NIV use coney and the ESV uses rock badger. In all cases they are talking about the species Procavia capensis, now known as Rock Hyraxes. The Bible describes them as simple yet exceedingly wise, making their houses in the cliffs. They are still common throughout the Holy Land and most of Africa. Unable to dig tunnels with their soft feet, they have to live in abandoned burrows or clefts in the rock. Since they appear to chew the cud, they were unclean under the old covenant. Actually, they have long incisor teeth which they can use to defend themselves. They live for their entire lives (about 10 years) in small herds made up of multiple family units. They probably will still be around when Jesus returns.

I want to be like the shephanim.

The title image is of a Cape Hyrax, species Procavia capensis, taken at Hardap Dam, Namibia. The copyright holder, Hans Hillewaert, releases it under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 license.

O minutes great as years!

O minutes great as years!

—J.R.R. Tolkien, essay on Smith of Wootton Major, quoting John Keats, Hyperion, line 64: "O aching time! O moments big as years!"

Now someone please tell me what "Welco To þe Wode" means.

A Boy is Born to Us

Rorate coeli desuper!
   Heavens, distil your balmy showers;
For now is risen the bright Daystar,
   From the rose Mary, flower of flowers:
   The clear Son, whom no cloud devours,
Surmounting Phoebus in the East,
   Is coming from His heav’nly towers,
Et nobis puer natus est.

Archangels, angels, and dominations,
   Thrones, potentates, and martyrs here,
And all ye heav'nly operations,
   Star, planet, firmament, and sphere,
   Fire, earth, air, and water clear,
To Him give loving, great and least,
   That comes in such a meek manner;
Et nobis puer natus est.

Sinners be glad, and penance do,
   And thank your Maker heartily;
For He that ye might not come to,
   To you is coming, fully humbly,
   Your souls with His own blood to buy,
And loose you from the fiend’s arrest—
   And only from His own mercy;
Pro nobis puer natus est.

All clergy do to him incline,
   And bow unto that babe benign,
And do your observance divine
   To him that is the King of kings:
   Incense his altar, read and sing
In holy church, with mind digest,
   Him honouring above all things
Qui nobis puer natus est. 

Celestial fowls in the air,
   Sing with your notes upon the height,
In firths and in the forests fair
   Be mirthful now with all your might;
   For passèd is your dully night;
Aurora has the clouds all pierced,
   The Son is risen with gladsome light,
Et nobis puer natus est.

Now spring up flowers from the root,
   Revert you upward naturally,
In honour of the blessed fruit
   That rose up from the rose Mary;
   Lay out your long leaves lustily,
From death take life at His behest
   In worship of that Prince worthy
Qui nobis puer natus est. 

Sing, heaven imperial's greatest height,
   Regions of air make harmony,
All fish in flood and fowl in flight,
   Be mirthful and make melody!
   All Gloria in excelsis cry!
Heaven, earth, sea, man, bird, and beast,—
   He that is crowned above the sky
Pro nobis puer natus est.

—Isaiah 45:8, translated from William Dunbar (Scotland, 1460-1520).

Planes

We have in fact reached the point of intersection of two different planes: of a real and permanent, and an unreal and passing world of values: morals on the one hand, and on the other a code of honour, or a game with rules. The personal code of most people was, and of many still is, like that of Sir Gawain made up of a close blend of the two; and breaches at any point in that personal code have a very similar emotional flavour. Only a crisis, or serious thought without a crisis (which is rare) will serve to disentangle the elements; and the process may be painful, as Gawain discovered.

—J.R.R. Tolkien, Gawain and the Green Knight.

Tips on Avoiding God

The avoiding, in many times and places, has proved so difficult that a very large part of the human race failed to achieve it. But in our own time and place it is extremely easy. Avoid silence, avoid solitude, avoid any train of thought that leads off the beaten track. Concentrate on money, sex, status, health, and (above all) on your own grievances. Keep the radio on. Live in a crowd. Use plenty of sedation. If you must read books, select them very carefully. But you'd be safer to stick to the papers. You'll find the advertisements helpful; especially those with a sexy or a snobbish appeal.

—C.S. Lewis, The Seeing Eye.

But they said, 'We will not walk in it.'

Thus says the LORD,
“Stand by the ways and see and ask for the ancient paths,
Where the good way is, and walk in it;
And you will find rest for your souls.

—Jeremiah 6:16.

Holiness

People do not drift towards holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate towards godliness or prayer, or obedience to scripture, or faith and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and we call it tolerance. We drift toward disobedience and we call it freedom. We drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and we call it relaxation. We slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we've escaped legalism. We slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves that we have been liberated.

—D.A. Carson, quoted by Mark Fodale, 3/17/2013.

Turn the Page

In our first grade we were—at different times—almost every creature imaginable, learning of them and how they fitted into the world and how they touched onto our segment of the world, until we saw fellow creatures wherever we looked. We were birds! We fluttered and sang and flitted from chair to chair all around the room. We prinked and preened and smoothed our heads along the brightness of feathers and learned in those moments the fierce throbbing restlessness of birds, the feathery hushing quietness of sleeping wings. And Mary beat endlessly at the closed windows, scattering feathers, shaking the glass, straining for the open sky. But Zach set himself against the lessons and ground his heel viciously down on the iridescence of a green June-bug that blundered into our room one afternoon. The rest of us looked at our teacher, hoping in our horror for some sort of cosmic blast from her. Her eyes were big and knowing—and a little sad. We turned back to our work, tasting for the first time a little of the sorrow for those who stubbornly shut their eyes against the sun and still curse the darkness.

And soon the stories started. Other children heard about Red Riding Hood and the Wolf and maybe played the parts, but we took turns at being Red Riding Hood and the Wolf. Individually we tasted the terror of the pursued—the sometimes delightfully delicious terror of the pursued—and we knew the blood lust and endless drive of the pursuer—the hot pulses leaping in our veins, the irresistible compulsion of hunger-never-satiated that pulled us along the shadowy forest trails.

And when we were Red Riding Hood, we knew under our terror and despair that help would come—had to come when we turned the page, because it was written that way. If we were the Wolf, we knew that death waited at the end of our hunger; we leaped as compulsively to that death as we did to our feeding. As the mother and grandmother, we knew the sorrow of letting our children go, and the helpless waiting for them to find the dangers and die of them or live through them, but always, always, whether we were the pursuer or the pursued, the waiter or the active one, we knew we had only to turn the page and discover who lived happily ever after, because it was written that way! And we found out that after you have once been the pursuer, the pursued, and the watcher, you can never again be only the pursuer or the pursued or the watcher. Ever after you are a little of each of them.

As Cinderella, we labored in the ashes of the fireplace and of lonely isolation and of labor without love. We wept tears of hopeless longing as we watched the semblance of joy and happiness leave us behind, weeping for it even though we knew too well the ugliness straining under it —the sharp bones of hatefulness jabbing at scarlet satin and misty tulle. Cinderella's miracle came to us and we made our loveliness from commonplace things, and learned that happiness often has a midnight chiming, so that it won't leak bleakly into a watery dawn; and finally, that no matter how fast we run, we must leave a part of us behind, and by that part of us, joy comes when we turn the page and finally live happily ever after, because it is written that way.

With Chicken Little, we cowered under the falling of our sky. We believed implicitly in our own little eye and our own little ear and the aching of our own little tail where the sky had bruised us. Not content with panicking ourselves with the small falling, we told the whole world repeatedly and at great length that the sky was falling for everyone because it fell for us. And because the Fox promised help and hope and strength, we followed him and let our bones be splintered in the noisome darkness of fear and ignorance. And, as the Fox, we crunched with unholy glee the bones of little fools who shut themselves in their own tiny prisons and followed fear into death rather than take a larger look at the sky. And we found them delicious and insidious.

And Jackie started having nightmares—he just wouldn't come out of the Fox's den even after his bones were scrunched to powder. He was afraid of a wide sky and always would be. So the next day we all went into the darkness of caves and were little blind fish. We were bats that used their ears for eyes. We were small shining things that seemed to have no life, but which grew into beauty, and had the wisdom to stop when they reached the angles of perfection. So Jackie chose to be one of those and didn't learn with us any more, but grew to limited perfection in his darkness.

And Steve longed to follow the Fox forever. Every day his eyes would hesitate on our teacher's face, but every day the quietness of her mouth told him that the Fox should not come back into our learning. And his eyes would drop and his fingers would pluck anxiously at one another.

The school year went on and we were princesses leaning from towers drawing love to us on shining extensions of ourselves, feeling the weight and pain of love along with its shiningness as the prince climbed Rapunzel's golden hair. We, as Rapunzel, betrayed ourselves to evil. We were cast into the wilderness, and we bought our way back into happiness by our tears of mingled joy and sorrow. And—as the witch—we were evil, hoarding treasures to ourselves, trying to hold unchanged things that had to change. We were the one who destroyed loveliness when it had to be shared, who blinded maliciously, only to find that all loveliness, all delight, went with the sight we destroyed.

We were the greedy woman. We wanted a house, a castle, a palace—power beyond power, beyond power, until we wanted to meddle with the workings of the universe. And then we had to huddle back on the dilapidated steps of the old shack with nothing again, nothing in our lax hands, because we reached for too much. But then we were her husband, too, who gave in and gave in against his better judgment, against his desires, but always backing away from a no until he sat there, too, with empty hands, staring at the nothing he must share. And he had never had anything at all because he had never asked for it. It was a strange, hard lesson and we studied it again and again until Benny was stranded in greed and Dorcas in apathy.

But childhood can't last. That was our final, and my hardest, bitterest, lesson. One day our teacher wasn't there. She'd gone away, they said. She wouldn't be back. I remember how my heart tightened and burned coldly inside me when I heard. And day followed day and I watched, terrified, the memory of her dying out of the other kids' eyes.



Oh, I know that no one believes in fairy tales any more. They're for children. Well, who better to teach than children the fact that good must ultimately triumph? Fairy tale ending—they lived happily ever after! But when it is written that way! The marriage of bravery and beauty—tasks accomplished, peril surmounted, evil put down, captives freed, enchantments broken, humanity rejecting the pleasures of beasts, giants slain, wrongs righted, joy coming in the morning after the night of weeping. The lessons are all there. They're told over and over and over, but we let them slip, and we sigh for our childhood days, not seeing that we shed the truth as we shed our deciduous teeth.

I never saw our teacher again, but I saw my first grade again, those who survived to our twenty-fifth anniversary. At first I thought I wouldn't go, but most sorrow can be set aside for an evening, even the sorrow attendant on finding how easily happiness is lost when it depends on a single factor. I looked around at those who had come, but I saw in them only the tattered remnants of our teachings.

Here was the girl who so delighted in the terror of being pursued that she still fled along dark paths, though no danger followed. Here was our winged one still beating her wings against the invisible glass. Here was our pursuer, the blood lust in his eyes altered to a lust for power that was just as compulsive, just as inevitably fatal as the old pursuing evil. Here was our terror-stricken Chicken Little, his drawn face, his restless, bitten nails, betraying his eternal running away from the terror he sowed behind himself, looking for the Fox, any Fox, with glib, comforting promises. I looked for Jackie. I asked for Jackie. He was hidden away in some protected place, eternally being his dark shining things, afraid—too afraid—of even shallowness ever to walk in the light again.

There were speeches. There was laughter. There was clowning. But always the underlying strain, the rebellion, the silent crying out, the fear and mistrust. They asked me to speak. I stood, leaning against the teacher's desk, and looked down into the carefully empty faces.

"If you have forgotten," I said, "it's a long time ago. If you remember, it was only yesterday. But even if you have forgotten, I can see that you haven't forgotten the lessons. Only you have remembered the wrong part. You only half-learned the lessons. You've eaten the husks and thrown the grain away. She tried to tell you. She tried to teach you. But you've all forgotten. Not a one of you remembers that if you turn the page you can happily ever after, because it was written that way. You're all stranded in the introduction to the story. You work yourselves all up to the climax of terror or fear or imminent disaster, but you never turn the page. You go back and live it again and again and again.

"Turn the page! Believe again! You have forgotten how to believe in anything beyond your chosen treadmill. You have grown out of the fairy tale age, you say. But what have you grown into? Do you like it?" I leaned forward and tried to catch evasive eyes. "With your hopeless, scalding tears at night and your dry-eyed misery when you waken. Do you like it?

"What would you give to be able to walk once more into a morning that is tiptoe with expectancy, magical with possibilities, bright with a sure delight? Our teacher taught us how. She gave us the promise and hope. She taught us that we can all finally live happily ever after because it is written that way. All we have to do is believe and turn the page. Why don't you?"

—Zenna Henderson, Turn the Page, abridged.

Two-One

Jar one chord, the harp is silent; move one stone, the arch is shattered;
One small clarion-cry of sorrow bids an armed host awake;
One dark cloud can hide the sunlight; loose one string, the pearls are scattered;
Think one thought, a soul may perish; say one word, a heart may break!

Life went on, the two lives running side by side; the outward seeming,
And the truer and diviner hidden in the heart and brain;
Dreams grow holy, put in action; work grows fair through starry dreaming;
But where each flows on unmingling, both are fruitless and in vain.

—Adelaide Anne Procter, Legends and Lyrics II.