Category Archives: books

Review: A Country of Vast Designs

A Country of Vast Designs
A Country of Vast Designs by Robert Merry
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I started this book assuming I would find confirmation of my dislike of James Polk for “getting us into” war with Mexico. It had the opposite effect. While I differ with Polk on what would have been a vision for the American people, and the reasons one should go to war, it is pretty obvious that Polk was in office precisely because the American people wanted that vision. Polk’s faults seem to lie in the faults of the American people of the time.

Polk promised to serve only one term and he kept his promise willingly. He accomplished all his objectives (amazingly) and got very little to no appreciation for doing so. And he got to see how his vision was going to be pulled apart by the slavery/anti-slavery divide.

He ended well. His term in office seems to have killed him and he died very soon after leaving office. But Polk did have time to decide to follow Christ, get baptized, and “die in the Lord.” Look forward to meeting him.

By the way, if you have some vision of America once being led by “statemen” instead of politicians, that vision will die in this book.

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Tolkien and the Moderns

It seems hard to remember now that there was a time when the American counterculture embraced J.R.R. Tolkien and his masterpiece. Groovy dudes in pipe-weed jerkins yelling “Go Go Gandalf,” walls covered with graffiti proclaiming “Frodo Lives!”, and election-year “Gandalf for President” buttons were all popular sights on college campuses from Harvard to Berkeley.

Read the rest: Big Hollywood » Blog Archive » Bored with the Good: The Ennobling Fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien Part 4.

I had mentioned this series earlier before Part 4 was posted. I’ll need time to read it more carefully. I frankly think of Howard as more of an anti-Tolkien than not. But it has been awhile since I read him.

Also, I’m not sure I would be quite as negative about Tolkien’s appeal to “hippies.”

Still, it is a post well worth reading and thinking about.

Review: The Mystical Presence: A Vindication of the Reformed or Calvinistic Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist

The Mystical Presence: A Vindication of the Reformed or Calvinistic Doctrine of the Holy EucharistThe Mystical Presence: A Vindication of the Reformed or Calvinistic Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist by John Williamson Nevin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Here’s the myth: Roman Catholicism invents the idea that the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper actually conveys grace. This eventually becomes the superstition of Transubstantiation. Then Luther and Calvin rise up and liberate the masses from such belief in magic. Luther never quite liberates himself, but Calvin gives us Luther’s justification by faith undergirded by nothing more than hard-core predestinarianism. The sacraments are simply symbols, pictures, and/or dramatizations of a spiritual truth designed to bring it into the participant’s remembrance.

Nevin’s The Mystical Presence: A Vindication of the Reformed or Calvinistic Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist was a reality check for American Evangelicalism. He demonstrated that the assumption of American "puritans" that their heritage came from sixteenth-century Geneva was a delusion. Calvin believed and taught repeatedly and emphatically that believers truly partook of Christ’s flesh and blood in the Lord’s Supper. The idea that the Eucharist was a "naked" symbol was a complete abomination in Calvin’s eyes.

Nevin’s makes his case masterfully. He quotes copiously from Calvin to show that His view of the real presence of Christ in the rite was not an obscure part of his teaching but an essential component of his theology. He also explains how Calvin’s view of the Eucharist was essential to his soteriology. For Calvin, a person is not saved from the wrath of God simply because God imputes "in a merely outward way" Christ’s righteousness to him. A person is saved because he is incorporated into Christ’s human body so that he is more intimately bound to Christ than a branch to a tree, a member of a body to his head, or a human to Adam. Only those united to Christ in this way by the power of the Holy Spirit can benefit from Christ’s righteousness, having it imputed to them as His glorified human life is imparted to them. This is the same once-and-for-all forensic declaration, but it is not baseless, in Nevin’s view. Those who belong to Jesus have his righteousness. Calvin was not unambiguous on this point.

The Lord’s Supper, says Nevin, according to Calvin and the other sixteenth-century Reformers, renews and strengthens this union. We are truly given Christ’s human body by the Holy Spirit when we partake of the Sacrament. Anything less would not be sufficient for our salvation and sanctification.

Nevin carefully distinguishes Calvin’s view not only from the socinians and other rationalists, but from that of traditional Lutherans and Roman Catholics. Regarding the former, Nevin must have made his contemporary Evangelical readers wince when he pointed out that their view was identical to that of Unitarians and other liberals of the day. On the other hand, unlike tran- and consubstantiation, Calvin’s view did not allow for actual material particles to be locally present in the elements or to pass into the bodies of partakers.

Probably one of the most difficult aspects of Calvin’s view was his insistence on a real participation in Christ’s flesh and blood without any matter being transported into the participant. Thus, Nevin’s attempt to formulate and improve on Calvin’s explanation is perhaps one of the most valuable aspects of the book. Nevin make the rather obvious but head-aching comment that a physical organism does not consist in particular physical particles! Living human beings pass out and ingest new particles all the time. Our human body is actually a "law" or "force" which must have matter to exist but is not identical with it. An acorn is considered identical to the oak tree which grows from it, but the oak tree is exponentially more massive and probably does not possess one material particle in common with the acorn from which it originated. By these analogies Nevin clears away the conceptual difficulties which make Calvin’s view hard to believe. It would do no good if mere dead particles from Christ’s flesh were transported into us. What we need is Christ’s life. By the power of the Holy Spirit, Christ’s resurrected, glorified, human life is given to us so that we become sharers in it.

There is much else of value in Nevin’s work, more than I can recite from memory as I punch out this brief review. Perhaps the most questionable portion of Nevin’s work is his exegesis.
The texts he uses are very similar to those used by Richard Gaffin in Resurrection & Redemption: A Study in Pauline Soteriology. In other words, Nevin was a century ahead of the cutting edge of conservative Reformed scholarship.

Anyone claiming to be Evangelical and/or Reformed needs to read this book. There is simply nothing else like it. You will never be the same again.

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A lesson from Tolkien’s life: You do not want God’s job

J. R. R. TolkienIn order to fully understand what I’m about to write, you will need to see the book for more details. More than simply the facts of John Ronald Reuel’s life (and deaths), I found some material about artistic accomplishment and loss in childhood that applies quite specifically to Tolkien.

Let me make the point by outlining a possible time travel story (one of the literary ambitions of Tolkien, by the way, that never materialized: he was to do time travel while Lewis was to do space travel).

Say you are, against your will for reasons you don’t understand, thrown back in time and space to South Africa in 1896 with some brief medical training and supplies. There you meet a man named Arthur, who–you were told–is likely to get rheumatic fever.  You stay with him and manage to prevent this from happening.

Then you are whirled forward a few years in time and a few thousand miles in space to an English home. Arthur is there and tells you he decided to return to make his fortune in England since his wife so prefers it. Their two boys also love the English countryside (perhaps the older one does so especially in contrast to early, vague memories of the South African wilderness). They are a faithful Anglican family, attending a rather middle-church parish. You recognize your next and final assignment in the wife, Mabel. You explain what insulin can do for diabetes and leave her with the training, equipment, and supplies she needs to remain healthy for years (extracting a promise never to reveal her anachonistic technology).

And then you return home and find you cannot recognize the scifi section of your local bookstore. It is all spaceships and ray guns.

The Lord of the Rings was never written.

Now there are jillions of things wrong with this scenario. We could assume the rules of LOST and say that time always tries to spring back into its original shape so that, once you prevent a death, another death comes about soon after, so that Arthur and Mabel still die early.  If Arthur had decided to stay in South Africa (as he seemed to want to do, despite Mabel’s misgivings) then the whole family would have been present for the Boer War. No one knows what might have happened then.

Also, maybe some other great author would have invented fantasy.

On the other hand, I might be under-stating the impact. Perhaps C. S. Lewis would never have been converted. Then there would be no apologetics and no children’s fantasy either.

But getting back to the impact on fantasy literature: frankly, I don’t think we would have Star Wars, Dune, or Harry Potter or many other works. No Ranger’s Apprentice series not least because the term “Ranger” would be restricted to cowboys rather than medieval war scouts.

It is pretty clear that noteworthy, creative people are disproportionately likely to have suffered the loss of one or both parents in childhood. While he could have wandered in many ways (and almost did many times), Tolkien was following a rather well-trod path going from bereavement to fame as an author. (The loss he suffered in the slaughters of World War I probably also count in this regard.)

I argue for all this in the book, I won’t say more here.

But I will ask you this. What if we replay the scenario except you recognize who Arthur is and realize that when you go back, if you save him, it will be a world with a much happier Tolkien and no trilogy.

Do you save him?

You don’t want God’s job.

Thus spake Severian of the Seekers for Truth and Penitence

We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges. When soldiers take their oath they are given a coin, an asimi stamped with the profile of the Autarch. Their acceptance of that coin is their acceptance of the special duties and burdens of military life–they are soldiers from that moment, though they may know nothing of the management of arms. I did not know that then, but it is a profound mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by them, and in fact to believe so is to believe in the most debased and superstitious kind of magic. The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all.

The Shadow of the Torturer, Gene Wolfe

via Lupine Nuncio – Gene Wolfe News and Rumors.

Why a quotation from a Gene Wolfe novel? Because every blogg.er should do so on a regular basis, that’s why

Repost: we are God’s outreach

In Gene Wolfe’s excellent tetrology, The Book of the Long Sun, Patera Silk receives a vision from the Outsider that his predecessor’s prayers for help have been answered. He is the help. But this means he must not expect help. The help is him.

This seems symmetrical with what we need to realize about reaching modern culture. God reached modern culture by calling us. If we need to reach modern culture that defeats the entire point.

N. T. Wright’s After You Believe

After You Believe: Why Christian Character MattersAfter You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters by N.T. Wright

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is an extremely helpful, understandable, and practical book on the Christian life. Wright wants readers to understand that God wants Christians to be changed in their very character and that this change, while a gift, is not effortless. This had a powerful impact on me especially because I listened to Proverbs several times while reading it and that book amplified Wright’s message.

If you were to only read one book by N. T. Wright I think it should be this one. I love some of his other works, but this addresses a central issue to every Christian and I’ve never found a book like it.

Full disclosure: I received a review copy of this book many months ago.

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Not all who wander are lost

It is the glory of God to conceal things,
but the glory of kings is to search things out.

via Passage: Proverbs 25:2 (ESV Bible Online).

I’ve been prone to consider this Proverb as aimed at exegesis of Scripture. Early in chapter 1 we are told Proverbs will contain the riddles of the wise, so there is some basis for this.

But nothing at all indicates this Proverb is meant to be so limited in scope.

Does your life make no sense?

Maybe your life is a riddle and you are royalty. Maybe you wish it were otherwise, but God is honoring you with glory.

Of course, the only way to “search things out” in such a case is to continue to live your life and not give up hope.

All that is gold does not glitter, and not all glory appears glorious at first. Proverbs is about dealing with trials and gaining from them. If you knew the time limit or the answer that would appear, then it wouldn’t really be a riddle and you would not be the king God is crowning.