Diary of the Blue Ridge

“Like a stone on the surface of a still river / driving the ripples on forever, / redemption rips through the surface of time, / in the cry of a tiny babe.” - Bruce Cockburn

It’s winter in the Blue Ridge. The leaves have long since turned color and fallen, blue smoke is funneling out our chimney, and the wood pile is starting to thin. A couple Saturdays ago, on the last really nice day of the year, Ami and I were working outside breaking kindling and splitting wood when the sky was suddenly carpeted with hundreds of hawks heading south.

In many ways, this year has been a season of death and ending for our young family. Symbolically, we’ve died to our old life of singleness as we joined ourselves to each other; literally, our marriage has been colored by an encounter with physical death, as Ami’s brother Doug passed away suddenly this fall, adding to the earlier deaths of both of my maternal grandparents; and vocationally there has been death, as I recently lost my job at The Rutherford Institute due to budget cuts.

Superficially, despite the recent hardness in our lives, there is good reason to keep a stiff upper lip–we are young, bright, and well-educated, most of our lives lay before us, and surely the light years will outnumber the hard when all is said and done. But profoundly, there is reason even to rejoice. For we do not live, like those unfortunate Narnians, in a land where it is always winter and never Christmas. Rather, we, like you, dwell in a reality that was irrevocably changed by the God who, for his glory and our pleasure, put on flesh, proclaimed his kingdom, and kicked down the doors of Hades along the way. For in Christ, there is not winter and there is no death; there is only and always resurrection.

And so we go to Lowe’s and use our wedding gift card to buy a big fat Douglas Fir. We cram it into the Pontiac and take it home and string it with lights and icicles and snowflakes and angels, we make chocolate chip cookies and mail cards to friends and family, we throw another log on the fire–not to put a good face on tragedy and hardness, but rather, to celebrate the deeper and only lasting reality; that is, in December of 2003, the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. So let us rejoice. For Christ’s birth is not the end of the story, but merely the beginning–Israel has found her King, we live in his kingdom, and there are so many chapters still to be written; indeed, it will take all of eternity to tell of the wonders we will see. O Come, O Come, Emmanuel. A very Merry Christmas from Scottsville.

Courtesy of 40 Bicycles--

One of the great triumphs of the film The Lord of the Rings, it seems to me, is that it takes precisely the opposite line [to existentialism], urging us to find our true selves by following and staying loyal to the vocation that we wouldn't have chosen, that comes to us from outside. - N.T. Wright

What Wright names is why the films (and books) are so counter-cultural, and it is also I think why they are so popular. We live in a post-Christian society, but we still long to be redeemed, to know the gracious law of God. We don't know how to be good, but we remember goodness when we see it in Aragorn, Gandalf, Frodo and Sam, because it is beautiful.

Peter Liethart reports on an interesting book which purports that schoolchildren don't play enough (and no, they don't mean video games), arguing that children who learn through play are actually better students than those who are chained to their desks for hours at a time. I'm a big believer in this - my first five or six years of home education consisted of something like, "read a book, do your math workbook, read another book...and play outside." I think there's a great deal of wisdom in this (though it probably could a little more structured than my experience was).

Leithart comments:

No doubt there's some trendy pomo anti-authoritarianism in this, but it also rings true. Yahweh, after all, trained his people not only through instruction in the Torah but also through "playful" rituals and festivals. Sacraments are more than drama and play, but they are that as well.

More spiritual weirdness from our President, though it happened about a year and a half ago. Evidently Bush visited Japan in 2002 and thought it'd be a good idea to be a sensitive multi-cultural president and visit a Shinto shrine to worship the idol of a dead Japanese emperor, where he and Laura supposedly bowed before the idol and "clapped their hands to awaken him." I don't remember any American evangelicals raising a peep about this, but it did get some Korean Christians riled up.

According to the BBC, "in its purist form the Shinto faith reveres nature." Well, isn't that nice and harmless. If I was of the dispensationalist persuasion, given Pres. Bush's seemingly obsessive attempts to pay homage to all religions, I think I might be ready to call him the best current candidate for the anti-Christ. Especially considering the way he has most evangelicals duped. But being a good Reformed Presbyterian, I think George W. Bush, like most of the politicians our country has been cursed with, is afflicted with a desperate fear of man and is consequently constantly mocking the one true God. But God will not be mocked.

Come, Lord Jesus.

It's a bad week to be an Arkansas Pine Bluff basketball fan, after they lost to Oklahoma 94-24 Tuesday night.

ESPN reports that the Golden Lions trailed 48-9 at halftime, and the partisan Oklahoma crowd broke into cheers in the second half when they cracked double digits. That's pretty humiliating. Meanwhile, APB player Chris Parker put up numbers that are reminiscent of my all-too-long high school basketball career: 23 minutes, 0-5 shooting, 8 turnovers. That's what I'm talking about. I always liked practice a lot better than the games.

John Robbins, at the Trinity Foundation has published an interesting essay on Clive Staples "Jack" Lewis' flirtation with bad theology. I don't agree with everything Robbins says, who seems to see a heretic around every corner, but he does make some good points, and seems to have done his research well. Most interesting is a letter Robbins quotes in which Lewis explains his disclaimers for the inerrancy of scripture.

“Whatever view we hold on the divine authority of Scripture must make room for the following facts.

“1. The distinction which St Paul makes in I Cor vii between [“not I, but the Lord”] and [“I speak, not the Lord”].

“2. The apparent inconsistencies between the genealogies in Matt i and Luke iii: with the accounts of the death of Judas in Matt xxvii 5 and Acts i.18-19.

“3. St Luke’s own account of how he obtained his matter (i.1-4).

“4. The universally admitted unhistoricity (I do not say, of course, falsity) of at least some narratives in Scripture (the parables), which may well extend also to Jonah and Job.

“5. If every good and perfect gift comes from the Father of Lights then all true and edifying writings, whether in Scripture or not, must be in some sense inspired.

“6. John xi.49-52. Inspiration may operate in a wicked man without his knowing it, and he can then utter the untruth he intends (propriety of making an innocent man a political scapegoat) as well as the truth he does not intend (the divine sacrifice).”

While I have a hard time believing, as Robbins seems to do, that Lewis is in hell, it does seem that he has some untenable beliefs about Scripture. From reading other parts of the essay, it seems that Lewis placed a great deal of emphasis on Christ being the true "word of God" at the expense of scripture, which led to his disclaimers. What I know of Lewis' writing would seem to bear this argument (about his lack of faith in scripture) out. That is, when Lewis makes a theological argument, he often uses natural law instead of scripture to prove his point; before I thought that this was simply a way in which to convince those who didn't believe in scripture to his own way of thinking, but now I wonder if it's because Lewis didn't completely believe in scripture himself. In any case, I think that Clive Staples will remain one of my favorite writers...but this essay gives some good insights on how he should be read.