Peter Leithart writes about faith:

Ruth begins with death - the death of the land in famine, the death of exile, the death of Elimelech, the death of Naomi’s sons, the death of Naomi’s future. Naomi goes out full, and comes back empty. Ruth 1 is a perfect tragic story, a story of endings and emptyings.

But it is chapter 1, and the author wants us to realize that this series of deaths is not an end. The end of chapter 1 is a beginning, as Naomi and Ruth return to Bethlehem “at the beginning of the barley harvest” (v. 22). The author makes his point with a touch so light as to be nearly imperceptible, but the import of that “beginning” is as weighty as anything in Scripture.

“In the beginning” and “once upon a time” make rational sense as the beginning of a story. But recognizing a beginning on the other side of an end is an act of faith.

Mark Dever makes a similar point in his treatment of Ruth. To human eyes, all is despair at the beginning of this book. But the writer of Ruth gives us a glimpse of what a sovereign and good God is planning and working behind the scenes. You can listen to Dever preach on the whole book of Ruth, and also on Ruth chapter 1 specifically.

See also William Cowper’s hymn, God Moves in a Mysterious Way.

Tags: death, faith, goodness-of-God, hope, life, Mark Dever, Peter-Leithart, quotation, Ruth, sovereignty, trust

Peter Leithart writes of hospitality:

Feasting and care for the poor have been polarized in contemporary culture. If you’re a “conservative,” you’re in favor of free trade, consumption without guilt, festivity without concern for those who can’t join you, who probably deserve their poverty anyway. If you’re a “liberal,” you renounce festivity because other people are hungry and how dare you eat when someone else isn’t.

The Biblical prophets combine a promise of festivity with severe denunciation of greed, luxury, and oppression. But they combine the two seamlessly by emphasizing hospitality. The promise is a feast like the feasts of the Pentateuch, where the widow, stranger, and Levite are not forgotten but included as welcome guests.

Against both “conservative” indifference and liberal asceticism, the Bible presents the ideal of the hospitable society.

Tags: application, Christ, Christian, Christian-living, Christianity, comfort, commands, culture, ethics, faith, feasting, gospel, gospel-centrality, grace, gratitude, hospitality, incarnation, joy, life, love, new-creation, Peter-Leithart, quotation, thankfulness

“God has better plans for you than an easy life and victories to follow victories.” — Daniel Baker

Tags: affliction, belief, calling, Christian, Christian-living, Christianity, contentment, cost, Daniel-Baker, faith, holiness, humiliation, humility, joy, lordship, pride, quotation, sacrifice, sanctification, self-denial, sin, thankfulness, unbelief, vocation

Everything worth keeping, it comes through dying.

– Caedmon’s Call, “Ten Thousand Angels,” Overdressed (Limited Edition)

The one thing that is “not good” in the original creation is Adam’s loneliness. And how does God go about addressing that imperfection? He puts Adam into deep sleep, tears out a rib from his side, closes up the flesh, and builds a woman from the rib. The solution to what is “not good” is something like death, and something like resurrection.

That’s always the solution. When God sees that something is “not good” in us, in our life situation, He tends not to ease us into a new stage. He kills us, in order to raise us up again. That has to happen, because it is a universal truth that “unless the seed go into the ground and die, it cannot bear fruit.”

– Peter Leithart, “Radical Solution”

Tags: affliction, Caedmons-Call, Christ, Christian, Christian-living, Christianity, cross, death, fruit, life, Peter-Leithart, quotation, sanctification, seed

Gene Veith quotes Luther on the Christian’s view of parenting. Reproducing it in full, including Veith’s parenthetical remarks:

In working on an article about vocation, I was looking for the source of Luther’s famous saying about the holiness of changing diapers. I found his sermon “The Estate of Marriage” (1522) posted online here. A priceless excerpt:

Now observe that when that clever harlot, our natural reason (which the pagans followed in trying to be most clever), takes a look at married life, she turns up her nose and says, “Alas, must I rock the baby, wash its diapers, make its bed, smell its stench, stay up nights with it, take care of it when it cries, heal its rashes and sores, and on top of that care for my wife, provide for her, labour at my trade, take care of this and take care of that, do this and do that, endure this and endure that, and whatever else of bitterness and drudgery married life involves? What, should I make such a prisoner of myself? O you poor, wretched fellow, have you taken a wife? Fie, fie upon such wretchedness and bitterness! It is better to remain free and lead a peaceful. carefree life; I will become a priest or a nun and compel my children to do likewise.”

What then does Christian faith say to this? It opens its eyes, looks upon all these insignificant, distasteful, and despised duties in the Spirit, and is aware that they are all adorned with divine approval as with the costliest gold and jewels. It says, “O God, because I am certain that thou hast created me as a man and hast from my body begotten this child, I also know for a certainty that it meets with thy perfect pleasure. I confess to thee that I am not worthy to rock the little babe or wash its diapers. or to be entrusted with the care of the child and its mother. How is it that I, without any merit, have come to this distinction of being certain that I am serving thy creature and thy most precious will? O how gladly will I do so, though the duties should be even more insignificant and despised. Neither frost nor heat, neither drudgery nor labour, will distress or dissuade me, for I am certain that it is thus pleasing in thy sight.”

A wife too should regard her duties in the same light, as she suckles the child, rocks and bathes it, and cares for it in other ways; and as she busies herself with other duties and renders help and obedience to her husband. These are truly golden and noble works. . . .

Now you tell me, when a father goes ahead and washes diapers or performs some other mean task for his child, and someone ridicules him as an effeminate fool, though that father is acting in the spirit just described and in Christian faith, my dear fellow you tell me, which of the two is most keenly ridiculing the other? God, with all his angels and creatures, is smiling, not because that father is washing diapers, but because he is doing so in Christian faith. Those who sneer at him and see only the task but not the faith are ridiculing God with all his creatures, as the biggest fool on earth. Indeed, they are only ridiculing themselves; with all their cleverness they are nothing but devil’s fools.

Notice that in Luther, for all of the late medieval era, it is the FATHER who is dealing with the baby’s diaper.

Tags: baby, calling, Christian, Christian-living, Christianity, contentment, culture, Father, fatherhood, Gene-Veith, gratitude, husband, joy, love, Martin-Luther, mother, motherhood, nobility, parent, parenting, quotation, service, thankfulness, vocation, work, worldview

We’ve been talking about atheism and apologetics and argument. But Alvin Plantinga helpfully reminds us that the Christian’s starting point is faith:

[Christians] don’t postulate the existence of God, as if this were a scientific hypothesis of some kind. They don’t typically propose the existence of God (let alone other characteristic Christian doctrines, such as Trinity, Incarnation, Atonement) as a kind of hypothesis, designed to explain organized complexity or other phenomena. They don’t believe in God because God’s existence and activity is a good hypothesis, a good explanation of organized complexity in the world. When God spoke to Moses from the burning bush, Moses didn’t say, “Hey, look at that weird bush! It’s on fire but isn’t burning up! And listen to those sounds coming out of it! What’s the best explanatory hypothesis I can think of? Perhaps there is an all-knowing, all-powerful wholly good being who created the world, and he is addressing me from that bush. Yes, that must be it, that’s a good explanation of the phenomena.” Christians do not reason as follows: “What is the best explanation for all that organized complexity and the rest of what we see about us? Well, let’s see, perhaps there is an omniscient, omnipotent, wholly good being who created the world. Yes that’s it; and perhaps this being is one of three persons, the other two being his divine son and a third person proceeding from the first two (yet there are not three Gods but one); the second person became incarnate, suffered, was crucified, and died, thus atoning for our sins and making it possible for us to have life and have it more abundantly. Right; that’s got to be it; that’s a dandy explanation of the facts.” What Christian would reason like that?

Hardly any. Rather, the traditional Christian thinks she knows these things by way of faith and its correlate, divine revelation through divinely inspired Scripture and/or the teaching of the church, the body of Christ. She doesn’t, of course, claim that these teachings constitute the best scientific explanation of some phenomena, anymore than we believe that there has been a past because we think this is a good scientific explanation of such present phenomena as wrinkled faces, dusty books, rusted automobiles and crumbling mountains. (Of course once she knows, as she thinks, that God has created the heavens and the earth she can use that fact to explain what might otherwise be inexplicable.)” — Alvin Plantinga

This faith isn’t the blind leap of fideism, but it is a quiet confidence in God’s goodness and faithfulness. We have tasted and seen that the Lord is good!

HT: Macht at Prosthesis

In last Thursday’s post I described the atheist’s world was a “small little world.” In his book Orthodoxy (read online), G. K. Chesterton brilliantly describes atheism as a sort of painfully ingrown madness that sees all the world through the petty lens of a few mechanical rules, and therefore utterly fails to see the bigness and beauty and life and joy in that world:

The madman’s explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed specially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness. If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours. Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do. Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ’s.

Nevertheless he is wrong. But if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed. Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large. A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world. There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions. Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable MARK of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic’s theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way. I mean that if you or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air, to convince it that there was something cleaner and cooler outside the suffocation of a single argument. . . .

As an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has just the quality of the madman’s argument; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out. Contemplate some able and sincere materialist, . . . and you will have exactly this unique sensation. He understands everything, and everything does not seem worth understanding. His cosmos may be complete in every rivet and cog-wheel, but still his cosmos is smaller than our world. Somehow his scheme, like the lucid scheme of the madman, seems unconscious of the alien energies and the large indifference of the earth; it is not thinking of the real things of the earth, of fighting peoples or proud mothers, or first love or fear upon the sea. The earth is so very large, and the cosmos is so very small. The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.

Earlier Chesterton writes that “the poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.” We need to live as poets, tasting and seeing God’s goodness and grace. And our practice of apologetics ought to point to that goodness and grace and joy in Christ.

An atheist once told me that he had tried his best to prove that God didn’t exist, but failed. The best he could go on was his own intuition, which he was sure was right. I expressed surprise that he had failed in his attempts; given his presuppositions, it seemed to me he could easily prove that God didn’t exist. Here is my proof of the non-existence of God:

1. There exists a god. (assumption)
2. A god is any being which is strictly superior to and has comprehensive authority over all of reality. (definition)
3. Humans exist and are autonomous. (premise)
4. A human possesses the power of self-determination of his thoughts and actions, exercised in exclusion to the god’s power of shaping reality. [from (3)]
5. Human self-determination precludes the god’s strict superiority and comprehensive authority over humans. [from (4)]
6. Therefore, it is false that a god exists. (by contradiction)

The catch, of course, is #3; humans are not autonomous. Particularly in today’s age, where unfettered personal liberty is an unquestioned good, and where the experience of having a true king is so utterly foreign, the idea that we are not autonomous is a very hard pill to swallow. But this also exposes the fact that the real reason the atheist is committed to opposing God is because he cannot bear to think that he is not the captain of his soul. See my comments on this proof for more thoughts.

The Bible also stirs our imagination by explaining our connection to God as his children. Our new standing is legal, but it is also personal and practical. Marriage and adoption both involve legal unions but ones that are intended to create relationships that are far more than legal contracts. Imagine a married couple who only related at a legal level without love. Their marriage would be no different than a business partnership. What if adoptive parents only related to their new child in terms of their legal obligations to feed, clothe, and educate him? The words “I love you” would never be uttered. This would be horrific because the new legal status is intended to be the context in which a deeper, fuller relationship flourishes. Marital and parent-child relationships are not less than legal; they are much more!

In the same way, our reconciliation with God gives us a relationship with him that should alter the way we respond to everything. God is now my Father and I am his child. He looks on me with favor. I am the object of his attention and affection. I have access to his care. He blesses me with his resources. He offers ongoing forgiveness and cleansing as I struggle with sin. He promises never to leave or forsake me. He makes a commitment to finish the work of change he has begun in me.

– Tim Lane and Paul Tripp, Relationships: A Mess Worth Making, p. 159.

Our forgiveness and justification lies at the very heart of our salvation, but our adoption as God’s own children is by far the richest and deepest privilege we enjoy.

When in distress or confusion, literate medieval Christians would sometimes let the Bible drop open, and took guidance and comfort the first passage their eye alighted on.

This could be superstitious, of course. But it could also come from a deeply genuine faith.

Sometimes, we don’t need to hear specific, or even relevant, instructions. Sometimes, in distress, it’s enough if we can hear our Husband’s voice.

– Peter Leithart, His Voice

I often find after reading the Bible that, even if there is no really obvious way I have been directly edified or encouraged, I am still in better spirits. Peter Leithart has articulated one reason why this is true.

Tags: adoration, affection, Bible, Christ, Christian, Christian-living, comfort, faith, husband, instruction, Peter-Leithart, quotation, Scripture, spiritual-disciplines, superstition, voice, Word