I am happy to note that a new edition of Nevin's The Mystical Presence is out and available. Check it out here. The Reformed  tradition is wide river, not a babbling brook.

On a completely different note, but just as cool, I just read through the small booklet Cycles -- a primer on astonomy -- and learned some good stuff. Anybody who wants to teach the comings and goings in the sky to their kid (and astronomy was part of the Quadrivium, was it not?) should get this booklet. That, and the iPhone app Star Walk.

The Basket Case Chronicles #76

“But I would have you without carefulness. He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord: But he that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife. There is a difference also between a wife and a virgin. The unmarried woman careth for the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and in spirit: but she that is married careth for the things of the world, how she may please her husband. And this I speak for your own profit; not that I may cast a snare upon you, but for that which is comely, and that you may attend upon the Lord without distraction” (1 Cor. 7:32-35).

We have already pointed out that Paul believed the unmarried state created the possibility of “traveling light” during times of persecution, which Paul knew were on the way. He recommends that state, because of these circumstances, if it is possible. At the same time, Paul is realistic. A person without giftedness in celibacy, who falls periodically into immorality, would be better off with a wife and family during the persecution than with his browser history of porn sites in a time of persecution. Get married rather than sin, Paul teaches. But if you are truly able to stay clean, traveling light during that time of history was truly the way to go.

"We were not sent to preach about the perfections of a perfect by distant star, cool and twinkling against a black, velvet sky. We were not even sent to preach a moon, reflecting derivative light -- we are not servants of the ruler of the evening. We were sent to preach a blazing sun, one that lights and heats every creature, one that dominates all things, and one around which everything must of necessity revolve" (From With Calvin in the Theater of God, pp. 94-95).

One of our great modern diseases is the inability to see the big picture. We specialize in our tasks, which Adam Smith described as the source of our wealth. But we also put our heads down and specialize in our thoughts. And this is how it comes about that we can be easily robbed of our birthright by men that I will, for ease of identification, call "bad men." These are men like Woodrow Wilson, or Immanuel Kant, or John Dewey.

We think because the university we went to has different "departments," where the different "majors" hang out, that these are all different enterprises -- like the manufacture of jet engines differs from training horses for future dressage tournaments. But politics and philosophy and education are all part of the same essential project. We will not successfully deal with any one of them without dealing with them all.

After the Enlightenment, continental philosophy went straight to the dogs, meaning by this that what is now called postmodernism came to the surface pretty quickly. This is what accounts for the irrationalism of Kant and all his heirs and assigns. Some Eurowit once said that America is the only country that had gone from barbarism to decadence without an intervening period of civilization. This is a good example of a problem I will address shortly, but something similar (and more accurately) can be said about European philosophy -- they went straight from sophistry to nihilism without any intervening period of thought.

Michael Horton recently offered up a critique of something he called "muscular Christianity," and because I was (I think) referenced in his article as being among the bad guys, I thought I should say something about it.

My first point has to do with the (I think) in the previous sentence. Throughout the article, Horton makes a number of telling points, depending on who he is talking about, and yet one is never quite sure. There are lots of quotes and "quote marks," but one can only hover on the threshold of knowing who he is talking about, and it appears that he is addressing quite a wide range of addressees. The main named practioners of this muscular Christianity he is fending off were D.L. Moody and Billy Sunday, and they have been dead, lo, this long time.

I think Driscoll was in there somewhere, and John Piper was the one who said that God gave Christianity a "masculine feel," and I only know that because I was there when he said it. I was obliquely referenced in the "'federal husband' syndrome that goes beyond the legitimate spiritual leadership of the heads of households found in Scripture." But actually, the model for federal headship is Christ and His love for the church, and so I am not quite sure how someone might "go beyond" that. Masculinity, as I define it, is the glad assumption of sacrificial responsibility, and I have never in my life met a man who overdid it.

Some of the things said in the citations were pretty bad, but why were there perfectly reasonable points lumped in with them? Maybe the bad quotes are only bad taken out of context, and we are not given a context to look up. Looking things up might ruin the party. Maybe citing your opponents would look too masculine, and Horton didn't want to undercut his central point.

Horton is wearied by "countless exercises in 'applied Christianity' . . . without much 'Christianity' to apply." Oh, I don't know. The apostle Paul tells us that the first three chapters of Ephesians pointed to the heighth, breadth, and depth of the grace of God, and that is plenty of Christianity to apply, at least for me. And then he tells husbands, a page or two later, to love their wives in just that way. Love your wives, as Christ loved the church, and gave Himself up for her. Not much to apply? Golly!

INTRODUCTION:
I am fond of saying that grace has a backbone, but I think it is time to explain what I mean by that. The context of these remarks is the general and current ongoing discussion about the worrisome trajectories of all those incipient legalists and antinomians out there. The incipient legalists are the ones the incipient antinomians are worried about, and vice versa.

THE TEXT:
“Wherefore, my beloved, as ye have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure” (Phil. 2:12-13).

SUMMARY OF THE TEXT:
We see that for the apostle Paul, obedience is not a bad word. It does not have negative connotations for him. The Philippians were beloved by him, and he commends them for their obedience (v. 12). This was not just when Paul was present, but also when he was not with them. In particular, he tells them (in his absence) to work out their own salvation with fear and trembling (v. 12). How is it possible for them to do this? God is the one who is at work within them, willing and doing in accordance with His good pleasure (v. 13). This means that the Philippians were to work out what God was working in. The labors of both parties, added up, did not come to 100%. God did everything in them. They did everything that was the result of what God did in them. Salvation is all of grace—even the work.

But what is the relationship of the grace of God to the (seemingly unrelated) world of hard moral effort? If the grace of God is in all and through all, and beneath us all, then why do we still have to sweat bullets? Are those who sweat bullets abandoning the grace of God? Are those who rejoice in free forgiveness forsaking the demands of discipleship? But not all conditions are meritorious.

RECONCILED FRIENDS:
Spurgeon once said, when asked how he reconciled divine sovereignty with human responsibility, that he did not even try—he never sought to reconcile friends. If we think about it rightly, from the vantage of those jealous for moral probity, we will never try to reconcile grace with works—that would be like trying to reconcile an apple tree with its apples. And, if we think about it rightly, from the vantage of those jealous for the wildness of grace, we will never try to reconcile grace with merit, for the two are mortal enemies and cannot be reconciled.

But those who insist that apple trees must always produce apples will make the friends of free grace nervous, not because they have anything against apples, but rather because they know the human propensity for manufacturing shiny plastic apples, with the little hooks that make it easy to hang them, like so many Christmas tree ornaments, on our doctrinal and liturgical bramble bushes. But on the other hand, those who insist that true grace always messes up the categories of the ecclesiastical fussers make the friends of true moral order nervous—because there are, after all, numerous warnings (from people like Jesus and Paul, who should have a place in these particular discussions, after all) about those who “live this way” not inheriting the kingdom. Kind of cold, according to some people, but the wedding banquet is the kind of event you can get thrown out of.

RIGHTLY RELATED:
So what is the relationship of grace to hard, moral effort? Well, hard, moral effort is a grace. It is not every grace, but it is a true grace. It is a gift of God, lest any should boast. We are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, and this is a description of someone being saved by grace through faith, and not by works (Eph. 2:8-10). This is the meaning of our text—“work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.” We are called to work out what God works in, and absolutely nothing else. If we don't work out that salvation (as evidenced by the fruit of it), then that is clear evidence that God is not working anything in.

If we work out some pressboard imitation (a salvation that has the look of real wood!), then that shows that God is not working anything in there either. Moralism is just a three-dollar flashlight to light the pathway to Hell with. And of course, if we are guilty of the opposite error, if our lives are manifesting a lineup of dirty deeds done dirt cheap, the only real sin we are avoiding is that of hypocrisy. Overt immorality is the fifty-dollar flashlight.

ALL GRACE, ALL THE TIME:
This is why we need a little more of “in Him we live and move and have our being.” Actually, we need a lot more of it. The answer to the grace/works dilemma is high octane Calvinism, and by this, I don't mean the formulaic kind. If God is the one Paul preached -- the one of whom it can be said “of him, and through him, and to him, are all things”—then where in the universe are you going to hide your pitiful merit? If He is Almighty God, and He starts to transform your tawdry little life into something resembling Jesus, who are you to tell Him that He is now wavering on the brink of dangerous legalisms?

The bottom line is that we cannot balance our notions of grace with works or our notions of works with grace. We need to get off that particular teeter totter. We have to balance absolutely everything in our lives with God Himself, who is the font of everlasting grace—real grace. Real grace is the context of everything. If we preach the supremacy of God in Christ, and the absolute lordship of that bleeding Christ, and the efficacious work of the Spirit in us who raised Jesus from the dead, then a number of other things will resolve themselves in a multitude of wonderful ways.

In Jesus, we are the new humanity. Is Jesus grace or works? Jesus lives in the garden of God's everlasting favor, and we are in Him. In Christ, there are no prohibited trees. Outside Him, they are all prohibited. That means there is only one real question to answer, and it does not involve any grace/works ratios. The question is more basic than that, and has to do with the new birth.

Note to the reader: If you were having weird little deja vu sensations, that is probably because this sermon outline is a reworked version of an earlier blog post. You are not losing it.

We are the people of God, and so of course He promises to feed us. We are the sheep of His pasture, and He also promises to feed us in the presence of our enemies (Ps. 23:5).

And while we are being fed, our enemies are not silent about it. While we are being fed by the Lord, we hear their commentary about what is going on. They have opinions about our food, just as we are instructed to have opinions about theirs.

While Hezekiah and his people were besieged in Jerusalem, Rabshakeh, their adversary, taunted them about their food. He said that Hezekiah (and by implication, the Lord) would only be able to provide them with the loathsome food and drink of their own bodily waste (Is. 36:16). But if they listened to him, and surrendered, they would be led to a land of “corn and wine, bread and vineyards” (Is. 36:17). He would provide them with a true feast, and there they would be able to serve a “great king, the king of Assyria (Is. 36:4).”

God counters with a promise to Hezekiah (Is. 37:30) that they will be fed, and Sennacherib will come to nothing. There is a two-fold refutation. What they say about our table is false, and will be shown to be false. Secondly, what they claim about their promised food is also false. Why spend money for bread that is not bread (Is. 55:1-2). Come, let your soul delight in fatness.

Grace is free and more than a little wild, and this is why we are given the gift of being the servants or bond-slaves of the Lord. The grace of God is absolutely consistent with God’s holy character, and this is why His well-favored sons and daughters are free, and more than a little wild.

God delights in this kind of paradox. Slavery to righteousness is freedom from sin. Freedom in sin is the worst kind of slavery. You are going to serve someone. May be the devil, or it may be the Lord, as Dylan sang, but it will be someone. As you reflect on these things, don’t kid yourself. The apostle Peter warns us about the devil, and he did not say that the devil is a roaring lion, seeking whom he may bite or nip. He is seeking prey to devour (1 Pet. 5:8).

Let us try to forget the word evangelical as a demographic description. Let us try to forget the word liturgy as a description of the boring church you grew up in. Let us try to forget the word doctrine as it was handled by the 19th century divine, the Rev. Dr. Snodgood, in three volumes.

When the fire falls, all of these things are glorious. When the glory departs, all of them are Ichabodian. It makes no sense to argue for the glory of the house after it has been left to us desolate.

When a certain doctrinal controversy broke a few years ago, it was necessary to take the firehose of grace to the doctrinal gnat-stranglers. But we have to always remember that -- in Scripture -- the firehose of grace sprays in a 360 degree radius, and not just 180, where those other guys are standing. We can get soaked pretty good too, and those standing with and near us the same.

The world is suffused with the glory of God; the world is sacramental. And when our sin causes Jesus to break fellowship with the rebellion, it is a dead sacramental to the rebels. What can we make dead by this means? Actually, what can't we make dead? Doctrine, liturgy, processionals, cantatas, plans of salvation, gospel-as-story, you name it.

If we are to be faithful servants, we must speak the way the Bible speaks. We must attack what the Bible attacks, and defend what the Bible defends. If we do this, we must be prepared to be accused of being "unbalanced" and "unfair." But as Peter Leithart wonderfully began Against Christianity, "I have written an unbalanced book. I have written an unfair book. I have written a fragmented book." Amen, and let us have much more of it. And why?

If we are unbalanced, we might one day fall over into glory. If we are unfair, we might find that we are actually being unfair to all the hidden cheat codes of our unctuous religiosity. Forgiveness, after all, is pretty unfair. If we learn to scatter more fragments of grace, a second glance might reveal them all to have become diamonds the moment they left our hands.

Aslan is not a tame lion. Shift used that truth destructively, and to his own damnation, but it is still a truth for all that. We don't care that God's grace is not domesticated, and cannot be domesticated. We don't care that God is not tame. He's good, I tell you.

Think for a minute. Donne's Holy Sonnet 14 has some wisdom for us. You want your worship and your devotion is spring up like a well? You want to be made new, you say? It cannot happen unless we invite Him to "break, blow, burn." That line ends with "make me new."

Do we mean it?

"What is it that overcomes the world? Is it not our faith (1 John 5:4)? We lament, Why does the world not believe? Well, when was the last time we commanded it to? When was the last time we spoke with authority, and not like the scribes?" (From With Calvin in the Theater of God, p. 94).