#13 Whose Body?

Despite my affection for the Inklings and their associates, I had not read any Dorothy L Sayers (often, strangely, associated with them), until last year. This was after reading Keller's The Reason for God, wherein he uses Lord Peter Wimsey's world and Harriet Vane as a great illustration of the Incarnation. So off I tootled only to discover they are rare as goldust in second hand bookshops...until discovering one secluded bookshop with lots!

I'm not saying Whose Body? is the best, but that it's the first and so far I have only read the first two books of the series. For all I know the best is yet to come, and so I'd take that volume to my island. But for the moment, I'll settle for book No.1.

One reason I had not read them was the assumption it was a lot of posh people being posh (the price of seeing some episodes of the 1980s BBC series, as a child). Well, there are lots of posh people but I also found that Sayers (and thus Wimsey) has an incredibly self-aware wit, and some sections are laugh-out loud funny. At the same time it's a classic, labyrinthine mystery with an impossible crime that somehow must be solvable, but how? In this case, a body is found in bath - no one knows who he is, and it's impossible that he is even there. But there he is. Into this steps the younger Wimsey brother, so much more intelligent and alive than his heir-to-the-family-seat elder brother. Far too intelligent for the high-tea mincing nobility, and suffering post-traumatic-stress symptoms from the trenches of WWI, Lord Peter doggedly pursues the logic of the case, with his utterly loyal batman at his side, throwing one-liners all over the place. On top of this, he is a total bibliophile, likes reading book-catalogues, and attends book-sales.

We must have been seperated at birth.

Happy brirthday UnChristian

I just realised I missed the 3 year mark for this blog. Thanks Minty! Happy birthday blog!

Ortberg: Big God

I strongly believe that the way we live is a consequence of the size of our God. The problem many of us have is that our God is too small. We are not convinced that we are absolutely safe in the hands of a fully competent, all-knowing, ever-present God.

When we wake up in the morning, what happens if we live with a small God? We live in a constant state of fear and anxiety because everything depends on us. Our mood will be governed by our circumstances. We will live in a universe that leaves us deeply vulnerable.

When we have a chance to share our faith, we shrink back - what if we are rejected or cannot find the right words? It all depends on us.

We cannot be generous because our financial security depends on us.

When we need to give someone strong words of confrontation or challenge, we will be inclined to pull our punches. That is because if we don't live in the security of a big God's acceptance, we become slaves to what others think of us.

If we face the temptation to speak deceitful words to avoid pain, we will probably do it. We may try to get credit for something at work that does not belong to us, because we don't trust in a big God who sees in secret and will one day give reward.

If somebody gets mad at us or disapproves, we will get all twisted up in knots - we will not have the security of knowing that a giant God is watching out for us.

When human beings shrink God, they offer prayer without faith, work without passion, service without joy, suffering without hope. It results in fear, retreat, loss of vision and failure to persevere.

If You Want to Walk on Water.... p192-193.

Calvin on Ambrose on Jesus in prayer

He is our mouth, through which we speak to the Father; he is our eye through which we see the Father; he is our hand through which we offer ourselves to the Father. Unless he intercedes, there is no intercourse with God either for us or for all saints.

Calvin quoting Ambrose (Institutes, 3.20.21, Battles p879)

#14 Guards! Guards!

OK, I'm not making any argument that this is great literature, but it is one of the funniest books I have ever read.

Terry Pratchett is not exactly friendly to Christianity (I'm not sure he's especially unfriendly either though), so it's no good going looking for 'underlying motifs of redemption' etc. But he does write funny books. Well, I think about half of them are - some sequences do get repetitive.

Guards! Guards! stands out for me though as being a great story, with really mad humour, well drawn characters and some really good ideas. Woven through also are a myriad references to police movies from planet earth, but worked out in terms of Discworld. Dirty Harry, but a baby dragon with wind, instead of a gun; endless police show cliches; and, which I remember clearly though I must have read this 15 years ago, the great "million to one shot".

So, if you need something distracting and funny, I recokon you could do worse.

(And the dragon was called Eryl; and for those of you to whom this means something, yes I did read it whilst attending you-know-where)

Calvin: prayer

Words fail to explain how necessary prayer is, and in how many ways the exercise of prayer is profitable. Surely, with good reason, the Heavenly Father affirms that the only stronghold of safety is calling upon His name (cf.Joel 2:32). By so doing we invoke the presence
both of his providence, through which he watches over and guards our affairs,
and of his power, through which he sustains us, weak as we are and well-nigh overcome,
and of his goodness, through which he receives us, miserably burdened with sins, unto grace;
and in short, it is by prayerthat we call him to reveal himself as wholly present to us.

Hence comes an extraordinary peace and repose to our consciences. For having disclosed to the Lord the necessity that was pressing upon us, we even rest fully in the thought that none of our ills is hid from Him who, we are convinced, has both the will and the power to take the best care of us.

Institutes, 3.20.2 (Battles, p851)

The most genteel mid-life crisis continues...

Well, we're not stopping with songs, as you can see from minternational's first post. Now we're on to what we will refer to as 'literature' (ie not theology or non-fiction). We felt we ought to make that clear to our legions of fans, who now number several more than zero.

I've applied my usual aesthetic criterion: if I was stuck on a desert island/in a cave/in an attic avoiding relatives, which books would I want with me? So in countdown fashion, here's the first of my 15:

#15 Foundation by Isaac Asimov

This is pure SF, as opposed to just flying around in spaceships shooting things, and was some of the first real SF I read. I think it has been justly called the ultimate SF series (it really is a series, but me and minty didn't discuss the validity of series, so I'm plumping for volume1).

The central hypothesis is brilliant and simple, the more so for being invented way before modern statistical analysis. Hari Seldon discovers that given a big enough clump of humanity, one can actually predict what the future will be. This doesn't work with smaller numbers, but with a quadrillion people in the galaxy it can be done with startling accuracy.

Through this he discovers that the Galactic Empire will collapse and a dark age of 30,000 years will follow (his description of the beginning of the crumbling of empire has always stuck with me: no big wars or the like, just...grass growing through cracks in sidewalks and no one removes it; systems break down and no one fixes them... and in our day and age, when essential services are being withdrawn...hmmmmm).

But what if it could be stopped? Using this science, he develops a way in which the dark age can reduced to 1000 years and creates Foundation to do it. Outwardly it is a repository for all knowledge (50 years before wikipedia), which will be preserved for through the dark age; but unwittingly it is part of Seldon's brilliant plan to insert other dynamics into history in order to proactively limit the darkness...

Against this massive background characters play out stories, and plots unfold. Foundation's Edge is my favourite, but it is an epic sequence of books all round (I think there is one I have not read: to be honest I think Asimov went a bit funny in some ways towards the end of his career and I was starting to get a bit uncomfortable with some of his later stuff).

So there you go!

Calvin: treasure in heaven

I love the way he puts this:

We ought then to imitate what people do who determine to migrate to another place, where they have chosen a lasting abode. They send before them all their resources and do not grieve over lacking them for a time, for they deem themselves the happier the more goods they have where they will be for a long time. But if we believe heaven is our country, it is better to transmit our possessions thither than to keep them here where upon our sudden migration they would be lost to us. But how shall we transmit them? Surely by providing for the needs of the poor; whatever is paid out to them, the Lord reckons as given to Himself (MT.25:40). From this comes that notable promise: "He who gives to the poor lends to the Lord" (PROV.19:17). Likewise, "He who sows bountifully shall reap bountifully" (2COR.9:6). For what is devoted to our brothers out of the duty of love is deposited in the Lord's hand. He, as He is a faithful custodian, will one day repay it with plentiful interest. Are our duties, then, of such importance in God's sight that they are like riches hidden for us in God's hand? And who would shrink from saying this, when Scripture so often and openly attests it?

Institutes, 3.18.9 (Battles p.827)

Ortberg: Fear

Fear has created more practising heretics than bad theology ever has, for it makes us live as though we serve a limited, finite, partially present, semi-competent God.

John Ortberg, If You Want to Walk on Water..., p131

Robinson on Calvin

From a Christianity Today, including thoughts from Marilynne Robinson, interview:

Though it seems arcane to many today, Calvin's theology is not so unusual, Robinson maintains. Indeed, it brings comfort to the Christian soul.

"For Calvinism, we are all absolutely, that is equally, unworthy of, and dependent upon, the free intervention of grace," Robinson writes. "This is a harsh doctrine, but no harsher than others, since Christian tradition has always assumed that rather few would be saved, and has differed only in describing the form election would take. It might be said in defense of Christianity that it is unusual in a religion to agonize much over these issues of ultimate justice, though in one form or another every religion seems to have an elect. The Calvinist model at least allows for the mysteriousness of life. . . . The belief that we are all sinners gives us excellent grounds for forgiveness and self-forgiveness, and is kindlier than any expectation that we might be saints, even while it affirms the standards all of us fail to attain."

Ortberg: Sin

The problem with what might be called the "victorious Christian living" mindset is not that it takes sin too seriously. The problem is it inevitably becomes selective about which sins God hates the most, and they always end up being somebody else's sins. It misses the deeper layers of sin: sin not just as concrete acts of lying or cheating, but the sin of narcissism that infects my preaching and image-management that corrupts my conversations; the sin in my motives and emotions that is real but that I cannot simply turn off...

...

Frank Laubach preached the gospel to a tribe that had a long history of violence. The chief was so moved by Laubach's presentation that he accepted Christ on the spot. He then turned to Laubach in gratitude and said, "This is wonderful. Who do you want me to kill for you?"

That's his starting point.

I was raised in a church where the Scriptures were taught, given parents who loved me and each other, in a city where being a Protestant Christian was considered normal. So if I think I am superior to the chief because I'm less likely to kill somebody, I'm sadly deluded.

Leadership June 09