Integrative Essay

                The other day I was thinking about the name of the course, Developing a Christian Mind. One of my first thoughts was, haven’t I already developed a Christian mind at school, in my home, in Sunday school and catechism classes? Well, the answer is that yes I had developed a Christian mind in all of those places, but just because I have developed a Christian mind, does not mean that there is no room for further development. Quite the contrary, as there is an infinite body of knowledge to be known about God, so my mind as a follower of Christ must be under a constant state of development. What I learned in my childhood and teenage years at catechism and school were the fundamentals, a foundation on which to firmly place my feet. Now, in my college years my mind will continue to develop, but in a slightly different way. This class, Developing a Christian Mind, helped to expose that to me.

                In many ways, when I was thinking about this concept, I was reminded of Our English Syllabus by C.S. Lewis. In this essay Lewis exhorts students in higher education, such as me, to pursue learning as opposed to education or a specialized vocational training. So, the student becomes educated in a broad spectrum in grade school and high school, and then is equipped for learning. “Here’s your gun, your spade, your fishing tackle; go get yourself dinner. Do not tell me that you would sooner have a nice composite menu of dishes from half the world drawn up for you. You are too old for that. It is time you learned to wrestle with nature yourself.” This same principle ought to be applied to every follower of Christ. We learn the Bible stories as children, we are told to memorize certain verses in the Bible, we are instructed in doctrine; by the time we are seniors in high school we ought to be able to articulate what our world view is and then place our feet firmly on that so that we cannot slip. This is the gun, spade, and fishing tackle Lewis talks about. Now we are equipped to do some exploration, to go see what is out in Creation, to read some literature that is written by someone who might have a false conception about God. But you see, when you build your house upon a rock, though the winds and waves beat against it, it shall not be moved. Our English Syllabus certainly was the reading that had the biggest impact on my own thinking.

                That is not to say, however, that Lewis had written nothing else that is worth reading! I mentioned in my blog at some point that I am engaged to be married next summer, so the essays Have No ‘Right to Happiness’ and on the love Eros out of Lewis’ book The Four Loves were both of particular interest to me. Certainly since my engagement on August 10, 2010 I have been interested in further developing my Christian understanding of the topics concerning sex and the marriage relationship, but even before, that, since the vast world of dating was opened to me in high school, I have been interested in these topics. Lewis further excited that development.

                Have No ‘Right to Happiness’ was a reading that really resonated with me. I advocate the view that divorce is strictly forbidden by the Bible except in the case where one of the two spouses has committed adultery. Even in that case, however, I believe that it would be desirable if the innocent spouse would forgive the sin of the other (unless of course the one spouse will have nothing to do with forgiveness and deserts). In any case, Lewis’ essay resonated with this concept that I believe is truth. In his essay Lewis speaks of the attitude of many that the sexual impulse basically justifies any action taken. So a man and woman may be married for a number of years, and then one of them chooses to desert their spouse because an opportunity to increase sexual happiness (from the purely carnal point of view of the physical aspect) has arisen. To demonstrate this, Lewis invented an imaginary couple called Mr. and Mrs. A, in which Mr. A deserts Mrs. A in the pursuit of sexual happiness. “The real situation is skillfully concealed by saying that the question of Mr. A’s ‘right’ to desert his wife is one of ‘sexual morality’….Mr. A’s action is an offense against good faith (to solemn promises), against gratitude (toward one to whom he was deeply indebted) and against common humanity.” I would go even further and say that it is a direct offense against God’s Word such as the words of Jesus in Matthew 19:9, “Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, comitteth adultery…”

                Lewis also caught my interest in his writing on the love that the Greeks called Eros, which is between lovers (in the bond of marriage). I found Lewis’ description of the beginning of the feeling of Eros to be beautiful as well as inspiring. It is a bit long but I quote it here:

“Very often what comes first is simply a delighted pre-occupation with the Beloved---a general, unspecified pre-occupation with her in her totality. A man in this state hasn’t leisure to think of sex. He is too busy thinking of a person. The fact that she is a woman is far less important than the fact that she is herself. He is full of desire, but the desire may not be sexually toned. If you asked him what he wanted, the true reply would often be, ‘To go on thinking of her.’

This reminded me of my first date with Lisa, in which we spent an hour or two laying on a sled at the bottom of a hill simply staring at each other and talking non-stop. It was cold outside but neither of us noticed because we were so intensely focused on what each other were saying or expressing. When I relate this to developing a Christian mind, I am right away reminded of Christ and His church.

 The members of the church look at Christ with an intense thirst for knowledge about Him. All of the suffering that we experience in the world is inconsequential, our afflictions do not really even matter that much in fact we hardly even notice them because we are so “pre-occupied” by our Beloved. But, we do still have a flesh that needs mortification. In our regenerated heart, the heart which Christ has poured His Spirit into, we want nothing but Him. When we are made new by the resurrection, no longer bearing our sinful flesh which wants to sin, then our whole being will sing aloud with joy and reach up to the Saviour. But in this present life we still have flesh, and so God uses pain as a means to mortify that flesh, making us holy. Lewis describes the will of the flesh in his book The Problem of Pain, “Our will, when we are happy, is carried away in the happiness as a ship racing down a swift stream.” So our flesh delights in the things of the world, which makes us forget about our Lord, and shuts up our heart that thirsts for knowledge of Him. But we have a gracious Lord who “shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

We are constantly learning, developing our Christian mind. Our hearts, being filled with the Holy Ghost, are pure and long for our Lord. But we live in a world in which we experience pain. Christ works through that pain, sanctifying us so that we long for Him even more. In spite of the swirls of darkness in this present life we have the reassuring words of the Heidelberg Catechism in answer to the question “What is the only comfort in life and death?”

That I with body and soul, both in life and death, am not my own, but belong unto my faithful Savior Jesus Christ; who, with His precious blood, hath fully satisfied for all my sins, and delivered me from all the power of the devil; and so preserves me that without the will of my heavenly Father, not a hair can fall from my head; yea, that all things must be subservient to my salvation, and therefore, by His Holy Spirit, He also assures me of eternal life, and makes me sincerely willing and ready, henceforth, to live unto Him.”

When we understand the reality of this confession, we have a sense of shalom in our life. We place our hope in Christ, who gives us peace. Shalom is beautifully described by Cornelius Plantinga in his book Engaging God’s World: “Shalom means universal flourishing, wholeness, and delight---a rich state of affairs in which natural needs are satisfied and natural gifts fruitfully employed, all under the arch of God’s love.”

                So, the development of the Christian mind is an ongoing process, but with it come blessings that cannot be found otherwise. When our feet are firmly placed on the rock of Jesus Christ, then as the Apostle Paul describes it in Romans 8:31, “If God be for us, who can be against us?”  We simply must develop our minds to be like the mind of Christ, in all issues that we face. When we are facing a new challenge or a new phase in our life, we turn to the Bible for guidance. When we experience pain and affliction, we cast our cares upon our Lord. In this we receive “flourishing, wholeness, and delight” deep within our soul.

Works Cited:

Holy Bible: King James Version. Indianapolis: B.B. Kirkbride Bible Co., Inc., n.d. Print.

Lewis, Clive S. Have No “Right to Happiness”. Print.

Lewis, Clive S. Our English Syllabus. Print.

Lewis, Clive S. The Four Loves. Orlando: Harcourt Books, 1988. Print.

Lewis, Clive S. The Problem of Pain. Print.

Plantinga, Cornelius Jr. Engaging God’s World: A Reformed Vision of Faith, Learning,
and Living. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002.

The Confessions and the Church Order of the Protestant Reformed Churches. Grandeville, MI: Protestant Reformed Churches in America, 2005. 83-84. Print.

The Problem of Pain

"For all things are for your sakes, that the abundant grace might through the thanksgiving of many redound to the glory of God. For which cause we faint not; but through our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding weight of glory; While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal." ~II Corinthians 4:15-18

How often do we feel pain? I would suggest that pain is felt every day in some form or another. We stub our toes, give ourselves paper-cuts, run into things; sometimes it is serious like a car accident in which we break some bones or perhaps we slip and fall off a ledge. We can get sick with the flu, a cold, pneumonia. And then there is the whole branch of pain caused by human relationships: my girlfriend dumped me or my best friend is upset at something I did, so and so does not like me for whatever reason. The list goes on and on.

So, it is obvious that we feel pain regularly. Now the greater question, how often do we curse God, whether out loud with some spoken profane word, or in our hearts by a thought of discontent for what God has done. This happens with even the slightest of things like the stubbing of the toe.  Immediately following the brief moment of pain comes the "Oh ____!!"

In contrast to this reaction we have C.S. Lewis' book The Problem of Pain. In the chapter on human pain, Lewis explains that God sends us pain because we are "rebels who must lay down our arms." We hate God in our flesh, that is by our original nature, and so God sends us trials and afflictions to mortify that flesh. This is one of the ways in which we are sanctified. According to Lewis, God "shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world." Our flesh has a powerful influence on us yet, but in His love God sends us pain so that we turn to Him.

There will come a day when we no longer need the mortification of the flesh, because our flesh will be made new. By the grace of God in that day we will perfectly do what Lewis describes this way: "...wherever the will conferred by the Creator is thus perfectly offered back in delighted and delighting obedience by the creature, there, most undoubtedly, is Heaven, and there the Holy Ghost proceeds. When we feel the base urge to curse God when we experience pain, we have only to remember the words of the Apostle, "For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding weight of glory...."

Man or Rabbit?

"One of the things that distinguishes man from the other animals is that he wants to know things, wants to find out what reality is like, simply for the sake of knowing."

"Morality is a mountain which we cannot climb by our own efforts; and if we could we should only perish in the ice and unbreathable air of the summit, lacking those wings with which the rest of the journey has to be accomplished. For it is from there that the real ascent begins. The ropes and axes are 'done away' and the rest is a matter of flying." ~ C.S. Lewis

I found this reading to be a bit more difficult to interpret. I think that in this essay, more so than the others we have read, the Anglican background of C.S. Lewis is manifested. Anglican theology holds that works are a necessary ingredient of justification. For example, Lewis says the following about three men who were unbelievers, Socrates, Confucius and J.S. Mill: "...these men were in a state of honest ignorance or honest error. If their intentions were as good as I suppose them to have been (for of course I can't read their secret hearts) I hope and believe that the skill and mercy of God will remedy the evils which their ignorance, left to itself, would naturally produce both for them and for those whom they influenced." I think that the implication in this is that a man who outwardly does the work of the law even if he does not know Christ, will be forgiven that lack of knowledge. Reformed theology holds that man is justified by grace, and that works will necessarily follow "for it is impossible that those who are implanted into Christ by a true faith should not bring forth fruits of thankfulness (Heidelberg Catechism A. 64)." Notice that fruits of thankfulness only come from those implanted into Christ. God does not justify those who do not know Christ.

The error of Lewis concerning the relationship of justification and works made this reading difficult for me, but I did my best to not write off the whole reading because of its presence. I found the end of the essay to be quite rewarding. "All the rabbit in us is to disappear -- the worried, conscientious, ethical rabbit as well as the cowardly and sensual rabbit. We shall bleed and squeal as the handfuls of fur come out; and then, surprisingly, we shall find underneath it all a thing we have never imagined: a real Man, and ageless god, a son of God, strong, radiant, wise, beautiful, and drenched in joy." I believe that I think differently about this than Lewis did. I think that Lewis is referring to the resurrection only. I think, though, that we can look at this quote in the light of regeneration and the resurrection. In a sense, when we were regenerated we were given a "real Man" that is hidden in the body of the "rabbit." The rabbit representing our old flesh and our old nature. But I like the imagery given by Lewis, that we will "bleed and squeal," because having a new heart is not something that we want, but something that God makes us want and gives to us freely. And then this imagery fits with the final resurrection as well, because we will shed our old flesh when we die, but then we will be made anew. God has done this for us! How amazing!

So as those who are regenerated and look forward to our resurrection, we do not have to decide if we are a man or a rabbit. God pulls off our fur in spite of the fact that we don't want him to, and He makes us Men (and Women). In this knowledge we fly from the summit by the wings of His grace!

Vocation

"But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass: For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was. But whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed." ~James 1:22-25

Those who believe in Jesus Christ have a calling in this life. God has formed each one of them, from birth onward, before and after regeneration, to further His great purpose in manifesting His Son Jesus Christ as glorious. And this forming goes past death and into eternity! So what is our calling? Our calling is to seek the glory of God in all things that we do.

Before we are regenerated we hate the purpose of God, we want nothing more than the humiliation of the Lamb. But after regeneration, we have a new heart that loves that Lamb and wants this purpose of God to be realized, but we still have a sinful flesh which does its best to put down the righteous thoughts of the regenerated heart of the believer. This is why it is so important to go to church where we hear the Word, which James says is like looking in the mirror and seeing how wicked we are in our flesh. The danger is that when we see how wicked our flesh is, we ignore it. James says that instead of seeing our wickedness and then forgetting, we must see what it is that is good in the sight of God, see how we do not match up, and then strive to do what is good. In this way we are sanctified.

Having said all of this, I believe that the church must be at the very core of the Christian calling. The Christian man and woman ought to center their life around the church, because this is where they can look into the "perfect law of liberty." We ought to work to bring up our families in the fear of the Lord, which cannot be done without hearing the preaching weekly. We ought to deliver finances to support the gospel and take care of the poor in the church. Cornelius Plantinga acknowledges the importance of the church in the fifth chapter of his book Engaging God's World. "Of all the ways that we can express our citizenship in the kingdom of God, none is more obvious than becoming an active member in our local church." When we center our calling around the church, we are centering our calling around the preaching, which is Christ speaking to His people!

All this being said, it is obvious that we cannot spend our whole life sitting under a perpetual sermon, and that would be an anti-biblical approach to life. Our life ought to be rooted in the church, but we must also branch out into the world. God put us here for a reason, and that reason is so that we, as children of light, shine out in the darkness. Plantinga says we "need to avoid the despairing tendency to write the world off, to abandon it as a lost cause, and to remove ourselves to an island of like-minded Christians." It would be easy to think this way when one compares the corruption of the world to the blessings found in the church, but we must shine as the people of God! So, since our life must be rooted in the church, when we go out and live in the world, we must be a witness to the blessings that we find in that church! It would be selfish to not want to demonstrate the spiritual blessings we receive through the preaching and fellowship with believers!

In summary, this is our vocation: to hear the preaching, and to be a witness by living out of that preaching. Living out of the preaching means that we behave ourselves in accordance with God's word and are in this way sanctified, but it also means that in our daily lives we talk about the blessings we have received through the Word of Jesus Christ, and demonstrate those blessings by giving of one's self in acts of mercy just as the Father gave His Son in the ultimate act of mercy. I could go on this topic for a while, but I think that I have surpassed the 350 word minimum by about double by now, so I will end here.

The Inner Ring

"For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ. For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free; and have been all made to drink into one Spirit. For the body is not one member, but many." ~I Corinthians 12:12-14

I found this reading to be quite interesting. C.S. Lewis deals here with something that I think every student that goes through high school has had no choice but to deal with; the existence of the "inner ring," or perhaps you could describe it as a clique. In the essay, Lewis describes the existence of the inner ring, but then he goes on to show how everyone gets absorbed in being part of the "know" to the point where it can drive a person away from friends they already have. "I believe that in all men's lives at certain periods, and in many men's lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside."  In my group in class we paralleled this with high school as I mentioned above. There are groups such as the popular kids, the jocks, the nerds, etc. Every kid wants to be a part of one of these rings, and if one person has the opportunity to move up to a more respectable or "popular" ring they often ditch their old friends in a heartbeat. Thus the existence of high school drama.

As I was thinking about this I paralleled this idea with the first sin. Satan says to Eve in Genesis 3: 4b,5 "Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." Satan was tempting man with the same sin which he had fallen to, namely, to be a god. In essence, the sin of the Devil and the sin of man was, out of pride, to be equal to God, or perhaps it could be restated as, to be in God's inner ring. This is a great sin, and I think it has been replicated over and over again throughout history by men in competition with other men to be the greatest, to rise up the ranks until you are at the most "inner" of all the rings.

Yet in contrast to this, we have the great Good of our Lord Jesus Christ who did quite the opposite to advancing himself. Rather, we have Him emptying himself, making Himself the most poor of men who ever lived, and this in contrast to the eternal riches He has as God! Lewis says that "the quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it." I think it would be more scriptural as well as more comforting to state it this way: The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts, but Christ has given us a new one that is filled with His Spirit!

So, because of Jesus' sacrifice, we are by His grace in His inner ring, namely, the church. And this inner ring constitutes a multitude of believers who all have the common interest of submitting to and praising our Lord who saved us from the treachery of our own pride!

My Future Bride

This is Lisa and I on our engagement day. July 1 can't come soon enough!

Eros

"And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away." ~Revelation 21:2-4 (KJV)

"Within Eros [sexual desire] is rather about the Beloved. It becomes almost a mode of perception, entirely a mode of expression. It feels objective; something outside us, in the real world. That is why Eros, though the king of pleasures, always (at his height) has the air of regarding pleasure as a by-product.....Anyway, whose pleasure? For one of the first things Eros does is to obliterate the distinction between giving and receiving." ~C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

For the last several years I have been fascinated over the idea of love between a man and a woman. That is because over the last several years I have been seeking the woman who will be my wife. I am thankful to God that He has brought me this woman, and we are engaged to be married on the first of July. My fascination over the topic has a lot to do with my pursuit of marriage, but the more I grew in my knowledge of what marriage is really all about, the more it fascinated me.

You may wonder why I used the quote from Scripture that I did. That is because I have the understanding, as does most of the Christian world I presume, that marriage is a picture of the relationship of the church to Jesus Christ. The church is the bride, who formerly was ugly and rejected, a wretch laying on the side of the street waiting to die, who Christ in His loving mercy reached down and picked her up, made her beautiful and adorned her for a wedding in which He would be the groom. In all of eternity, from the day when the church will be resurrected in the new flesh and the creation redeemed from the clutches of sin, "baptism by fire," the bride and the groom, church and Christ, will have the Eros in which the church praises and submits to her Christ, and Christ glorifies and loves His church.

When I seek marriage, this is what I seek. A relationship in which my Lisa and I will have a foretaste of this everlasting relationship that the church as one organic whole will experience with Christ. My earthly marriage will be brief, ending with the death of one party. But the eternal marriage of ultimate bliss in submission to our Lord will be, as I said, eternal! What a glorious and humbling thought.

By the way, when I described the church as being wretched and filthy and fully miserable before Christ's spirit entered her, I did not mean to suggest that this is paralleled in our earthly marriage. Lisa is a very beautiful young woman to whom I an extremely grateful to be engaged.