Metábasis eis állo génos (24)
You should consider following Roger Scruton Quotes and the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation. These introduced me to his lovely 2001 article “Becoming a Family.” Some choice quotes:
Sometimes we [Roger and his wife Sophie] embark on a quarrel, but there is neither winner nor loser, because we are one thing, not two, and any attack on the other becomes an attack on oneself. All the matters over which people like us are supposed to argue—money, freedom, visits, friends, hobbies, tastes, habits—become occasions for a deeper cooperation. What we have discovered through marriage is not the first love that induced it but the second love that follows, as the vow weaves life and life together. Western romanticism has fostered the illusion that first love is the truest love, and what need has first love of marriage? But an older and wiser tradition recognizes that the best of love comes after marriage, not before. . . .
The new curriculum, which has both the aim and the effect of cutting off children from their parents, making them unlovable to adults and the exclusive property of the state, springs from the minds of people who are themselves, for the most part, childless. It would be better, it seemed to us, for Sam [their son] to be sent down a coal mine, there to encounter the real world of adults, than to go through the complete course in demoralization that our rulers require. Even the private schools must follow the National Curriculum, which has been carefully devised to remove all the knowledge that Sophie and I value and to substitute the “life skills” needed in an urban slum. . . .
The experts who greeted our educational plans with such outrage were, after all, the voice of our modern culture—the very same culture that has shaped the educational system and set up the state in opposition to the family. It is only since becoming part of a family that I have fully gauged the depth and seriousness of this opposition. The family has become a subversive institution—almost an underground conspiracy—at war with the state and the state-sponsored culture. . . .
Because there is no going back to Jane Austen’s world, we take refuge in the belief that every aspect of it reflects some arbitrary cultural imperative, with nothing due to permanent human nature. By extending cultural relativism even into those spheres where it is not culture but nature that determines what we do, we deceive ourselves into accepting—but with anxiety—a situation so novel that our ancestors never even thought to guard against it: the situation in which men and women are exchangeable in all their social roles and all their spheres of action.
Lots of reflection this week on the understandably complex relationship between China and the US. I appreciate the reporting of Jack Posobiec and the reflections of Michael Foster and Jamie Soles.
I think we are to see a hint of David’s census in Luke 2: the days of Jerusalem and Rome are numbered from this point.
I’ve been reflecting on why so many cosmopolitan Christians are so compliant with our current tyrannies. A lot has to do with public education (c.f., Scruton), but there is a theological angle as well. Sinclair Ferguson makes the striking point in his book The Whole Christ that the legalist and the antinomian share the same world view at root. It is right to repudiate legalism and preach God’s free grace, but Ferguson shows us that we can preach grace in such a way that we are not actually set into humanity’s maturity, into the freedom of the glory of the sons of God.
I am not saying that we become consciously antinomian, but we are functionally so. And of course this is a tendency rather than an outright error. One way the tendency expresses itself is to consider that we are somehow principally saved by merit, even the merit of Jesus. Or we may consider that it is the Son who saves us from the Father’s wrath, rather than the Trinity saving us from the wrath of the Trinity. Another way the tendency expresses itself is to consider that justification is merely forensic, without being caught up in a wholly covenantal context. Or we may resonate deeply with Luther’s statement that the Christian is a “perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject of all, subject to all,” yet find it hard to believe that we are also a “perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.”
The outcome of this is that we come to believe that God is, in the words of the wicked servant of Luke 19, severe, taking what he does not deposit and reaping what he does not sow. Even though in his great love and mercy he has saved us from his severity, we believe that severity is still a primary feature of his character and of the nature of the world, somehow counterbalanced or overruled by his love and mercy; rather than severity’s being a conditional expression of covenantal lovingkindness, covenantal blessing and curse.
The result is that the functional antinomian can feel quite comfortable with legalism, conformity, or even tyranny in certain areas of life.
I asked Lisa what she would write if she had time to blog. She has read a number of Christian biographies recently and wishes to urge others to do so as well. Some good examples are God’s Smuggler, Evidence Not Seen, and The Hiding Place. From books like these, she has been greatly encouraged in boldness and resistance to tyranny. One thing that struck her is that these great heroes of the faith disobeyed in both big and little things. Another thing that struck her is how precious and important worship is to God’s people, and what great lengths people went to in order to participate in worship.
I’m so grateful for all of the Psalms we have learned, many from Jamie Soles. I have been singing this one off and on this week:
Gods you may be, but just sentences do you speak?
Uprightly do you judge, O sons of Adam?
No, in heart injustices you devise;
On the earth the violence of your hands you weigh out.Estranged are the wicked from the womb;
They go astray from the belly, speaking lies.
They have venom like venom of a serpent.Like a deaf cobra that stops up its ear,
So that it does not hear the voice of charmers,
However skillful the enchanter may be.O God, shatter their teeth in their mouth;
The fangs of the young lions tear out, Yahweh!
Let them vanish like waters that flow away of themselves!When he aims his arrows, let them be circumcised,
Like a slug, melting away as he moves,
Like a woman’s miscarriage that never sees the sun.Before your pots can feel the thorn,
Whether green or dry, He will whirl him away.
Glad will be the righteous when he sees the vengeance;
His feet he will bathe in the blood of the wicked.
And men will say, “Surely there is a reward for the righteous;
Surely there is a God who judges on earth!” (Psalm 58, James Jordan)
Asher and I are listening to Perelandra. This is my third time through, and the first time I caught that McPhee makes a brief appearance in chapter 3! Speaking of the trilogy, it seems that the macrobes may be at work.
Some quotes:
“I’ll tell you how I look at it. Haven’t you noticed how in our own little war here on earth, there are different phases, and while any one phase is going on people get into the habit of thinking and behaving as if it was going to be permanent? But really the thing is changing under your hands all the time, and neither your assets nor your dangers this year are the same as the year before.” (Lewis, Perelandra, chapter 2, p. 24)
“Do you feel quite happy about it?” said I, for a sort of horror was beginning once more to creep over me.
“If you mean, Does my reason accept the view that he will (accidents apart) deliver me safe on the surface of Perelandra?—the answer is Yes,” said Ransom. “If you mean, Do my nerves and my imagination respond to this view?—I’m afraid the answer is No. One can believe in anaesthetics and yet feel in a panic when they actually put the mask over your face. I think I feel as a man who believes in the future life feels when he is taken out to face a firing party. Perhaps it’s good practice.” (Lewis, Perelandra, chapter 2, p. 27)
You need to get yourself something from the Walking Crab. Amen!
Scott: The weird thing about The Snowman movie is . . .
Lisa: The boy doesn’t put on any underpants.
Scott: Oh, I was thinking that some of the architecture looked too Russian for an English setting.
I gotta have my orange juice. 
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