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.

“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.

He explains this from both the vantage of the man and the woman. An unmarried man can focus on spiritual things entirely, the things of the Lord (v. 32). This shows that Paul is talking about someone dedicated to celibacy for spiritual reasons, not someone addicted to singleness, for selfish reasons. The married man has earthly responsibilities (which Paul elsewhere requires him to pick up), and those responsibilities involve pleasing his wife. He says this is “of the world,” not in the sense of “worldly,” but rather in the sense of earthly. The same thing is true of the married woman. She cares for the things “of the world” too, how she might please her husband (v. 34). Her responsibilities are earthly, not worldly.

He says that the unmarried virgin is holy (set apart) in both body and spirit, in a way that enables her to care for the things of the Lord. Married believers are also holy, also consecrated, but the dedication is routed differently. Virginity is not exalted as a timeless principle of worth, but there are times when it makes perfect sense. Paul is not trying to trip anybody up (v. 35), but rather wants to profit them in a tough time.

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.

Now relativism is implicit in every form of modernism, but philosophers in the English-speaking world kept a brave front up for a bit longer. Analytic philosophers really do reject relativism, but have no Archimedean place to stand in order to wield their magnificent lever. And they cannot find any fulcrum either, but the lever itself is great, and they wave it around like a barge pole. They persist in the valiant enterprise of trying to talk sense. I would want to argue that one of the reasons why philosophy in the English-speaking world didn't go around the relativistic bend like the continental philosophers did is because the Church was much stronger here, much more present in the English-speaking world.

The same thing was true in our political life -- Wilson and FDR and that ilk were fascists at heart, and they got some traction, but not like in Europe. Whenever our various crises got over, things kept righting themselves, and people wanted to go back to normal, as defined by a basically Christian reality.

But back in Europe, because the post-Kantian cluster had abandoned the wisdom of trying to see things as they are, the only thing left for them was the grasp for power. This is why they, almost to a man, were men of the Left, hungry for power, and eager to run the lives of others. Because power was everything to them, this is what they attribute to everyone else -- everything must be a power grab. Well, it is for them, and I say this as a man who, in a year or two, is going to have to obtain the light bulbs I want up on the Indian reservation, in the booth next to the fireworks. Their spirit is tyrannical, through and through.

In the meantime, ordinary Christians have kept their heads down, and worked hard at the manufacture of pins, or whatever it was that Adam Smith used in his illustration. They work faithfully at their jobs, trusting their future leaders to get the appropriate academic credentials in a way that will enable us to maintain the faith "once delivered" without having to be fundamentalist rednecks. They trust that we evangelicals can get themselves a little of that gen-ewww-ine higher ed without going native. But alas . . . more and more of our scholars are showing up at academicesque and evangelically gigs with bones through their noses. The giveaway is when you start to hear that they have delivered an important paper citing Kant, or Nietzsche, or Heidegger, or Marcuse, or Derrida, or Foucault, and they did it without spitting into a little dentist sink afterwards.

I may appear to be changing the subject, but I am not. Bear with me for a moment. Aristocracy is inescapable, and don't be put off by the word aristocracy. Cream rises, and if a man excels in his work, he will stand before kings. But a pagan and unbelieving aristocracy is characterized by contempt for the people, and pours buckets of scorn over their every attempt to better themselves. Down below the ruling class, they are the booboise, they are at best the middlebrows, they are the suburbanites, who shop in big box stores and listen to music by Carrie Underwood. This contempt that the elite, leftist, power-monkeys consistently feel for anything mass-produced is a contempt born from fear. And this describes the European intellectual attitude toward Americans almost exactly.

A Christian aristocracy sees problems when there are problems, sure enough, but does so with affection mixed with love, and love mixed with understanding. One of the things understood is that you can be pleased without being satisfied. A Christian elite wants to be trained in order to govern; a pagan elite wants power in order to be able to rule. And if you are put off with words like elite and aristocracy, you are falling for one of the basic tricks that the pagan elite are fond of using. It is not whether, but which.

And this relates to the point of education. Education is all about the instruction in the light of ultimate meaning, and if there isn't any, what are you going to do? Well, one of the options is to major in groupthink, get your graduate degree in hivebuzz, do some postdoc work at the Sorbonne, and learn how to stroke your chin while lamenting the lack of universal health care in America.

It is all connected. More to come.

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!

So here is my first critique. Tell us who you are talking about so we can tell if you are representing them fairly or accurately. There is a lot of territory between Billy Sunday and John Piper, and so if your combine is covering that wide a swath then maybe you are getting into half of your neighbor's crop.

My second problem is that the whole critique appears to rest on a confusion about the role of "gender stereotypes from our culture." He tells us that "a lot of gender differences are cultural." Okay. Of course they are. This particular zombie appears in every last one of our discussions of this topic, and it always wants to eat our brains. Let us arise therefore, with the machete of truth, and decapitate this one for good and all.

So here it is. There are certain creational differences between the sexes, which God intended to be operative from the begining of the world to the end of it. Women bearing and nurturing children would be something in that category. Men protecting and providing for their families would be another one. But these creational differences have a deep need to find, discover, and apply a wider vocabulary. They want to express themselves further. That is why there are other differences that do not fall into this category of creational difference, but which are roles assigned to the two sexes by societal expectation. And (cue the zombie) it is facilely assumed in discussions like this one that if it is not a creational given, scripturally assigned, with black ink on white paper, we need not pay any attention to it. It is only "a gender stereotype," and what a relief to us all!

The problem is that the Bible tells us that we need to honor the standards assigned by our culture in situations just like this one. There is no other way to show honor to our neighbor individually than by knowing and honoring the standards established by our neighbor collectively.

"Thou shalt rise up before the hoary head, and honour the face of the old man, and fear thy God: I am the Lord"(Lev. 19:32). But who in their right mind would suppose that our cultural vocabulary for honoring the elderly is identical with that shown 3,500 years ago? But we still have to do it, right? And when we do it, it should be with our vocabulary, not theirs, even though our vocabulary is not in the Bible. Honor all men (1 Pet. 2:17). But how? I don't know how to do this without resorting to all these darn cultural stereotypes. Only language I know, more's the pity, and wouldn't it be nice if we could just honor all men in a more pristine location, like Platoburg? And husbands are called to honor their wives as the weaker vessel (1 Pet. 3:17), but if we listen to Horton and set aside our knowledge of gender roles as culturally assigned, the dutiful husband would then be left with donning grease paint on his face, and doing a little mime in the evenings. If she doesn't get it, maybe its because she's the weaker vessel. Or the smarter vessel. Or something.

Suppose you overheard one of the kids from your church telling one of the sweet little church ladies to "eff off." Suppose you confronted him about it, and he defended himself by saying that the meaning assigned to those particular sounds were assigned by our culture, and not by the Holy Spirit speaking in Scripture. Suppose further that he scoffs and says that the whole thing is "linguistically arbitrary." And, you know, he's right, and I suppose you also know that he is entirely and completely in the wrong. It is linguistically arbitrary, and he still doesn't get to speak that way.

The Bible never tells us that men should take out the garbage, or that a gentleman holds a seat for the lady, or that opening a car door for your wife is a class act, and so on. Never. But that is irrelevant. Our culture gives us the vocabulary of honor, but the Bible tells us how we must do something with that vocabulary.

When I am told in the Scriptures to love my wife, I am told nothing about what I must do on our anniversary. But the anniversary gives me an opportunity to do what the Holy Spirit commanded me to do. And recovering male sinners should never waste such opportunities. I am told that I must do something, and a great deal of the raw material for obeying Scripture is given to me by my culture. That's the way it is supposed to work.

And last, Horton makes the standard mistake of confusing an attack on effeminacy (inappropriate softness) with an attack on femininity (glorified responsiveness). When a man acts girly, to object to this is not to attack the girls. "But you used the word 'girly' in that previous sentence, did you not? Why would you use the word girly in a pejorative way if you didn't have a deep misogynistic streak, a thing about girls, hmmm?" The answer is that words derive their meaning and intent from an old-fashioned thing that our ancestors used to call "context." If you tell your teen-aged son, who is driving you all to church, that you "need a little less Dale Earnhardt Jr., son," this is not a slam on NASCAR. Dale Jr. is just fine in his place, in context. Just not turning down Maple Ave. Sunday morning on two wheels.

Horton assumes that if we object to feminine traits in the wrong place, then we must somehow be bothered with then in the right place too. "Are we really ready to identify shallow sentimentalism with 'feminization' of the church? Do godly women want this any more than men?" I quite agree. Of course they don't. Godly women don't want girly preachers any more than the men do. Godly women don't like femmy worship any more than the men do. Godly women don't want the worship of the evangelical and Reformed church to get any gayer. I mean to say . . .

I know this because I write as a man surrounded by really competent women with high views of the feminine calling. They know their stuff, and they embrace their calling. They have razor sharp minds, and know how to dissect the pretensions of the theological bloviators, whose tribe appears to be in the ascendant. They don't do these dissections in public because they don't think it would be fitting, and prefer that the menfolk do that stuff. But it is not a matter of ability. I mean, you ought to hear them go. In our extended clan, the men are the diplomats. So whenever I take on effeminacy in public Christian life, do the girls think I am criticizing them? Are you kidding? I think sometimes they suspect I am going liberal.

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.

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.

The great king, the king of Assyria, was about to encounter an epic disaster, and that would be crowned with the indignity of being murdered by his own son. This, in contrast with the great king of Heaven and earth, who gave up His Son, who willingly laid down His life for us, that we might have the food and drink of everlasting life. And here it is now, the bread and wine of true grace.

Come, and welcome, to Jesus Christ.

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).

The sinfulness of sin is not found in an abstraction, or in the breaking of some moralistic rule, but is rather a direct function of having a bad attitude about being with God, learning to be like Him. If we want to be with Him, involved in what He is doing, the way He is doing it, then we are in fellowship with Him. If we want to avoid Him, hiding our sin away in our little dramas, our fits of temper, our petulance, or our self-pity, then we are out of fellowship with Him.

If such is the case, we have come now to our time of corporate confession. Here is the perfect opportunity to put it right. What better time? When you get on your knees, just place that little self-idol, whatever it is, on the floor in front of you. As you pray, let go of it, surrender it, and just leave it there when you get back up. It was kind of ugly anyway.

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?