My incessant gasps were potent portents to my comparative illiteracy. I can’t contain them given the passion I feel for both wisdom and literary dexterity. The setting was my office as I work on a classical education curriculum project. We have covered Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. We considered Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan as well as The Federalist Papers. But now comes the master of the written word, G.K. Chesterton and his master work, Orthodoxy.
It was my habit in working on this project to sometimes dog-ear and sometimes underline key passages I want future students to discuss. With GK Chesterton in general and Orthodoxy in particular there is no point in marking the book up. Opening the book to any page is like opening an oven filled with baking bread. You are stunned by the heat, delighted by the aroma. Which is why I find myself simply reading this passage and that, all while giggling like a schoolgirl, laughing at the glory.
If you are familiar with the book, you know of what I speak. If you are unfamiliar with the book, well, that is something we shall have to remedy. Chesterton writes in a genre all his own, the personal apologetic. He highlights his own journey into embracing “mere” Christianity, framing it as a sailor who journeys to the ends of the earth, only to “discover” that he had never left home. Chesterton, in a manner vastly superior to cold-hearted impossibility-of-the-contrary worldview jockeys, demonstrates that Christianity is not only true, but native to us. It is less that the Christian faith fits the God shaped hole in our souls, more that Christianity makes us fill the us-sized hole in the universe.
Though Orthodoxy is sometimes published as a companion piece to Heretics, Chesterton’s slicing up the modernist worldview like an As Seen on TV kitchen appliance, and was in fact written on purpose as a companion piece, Orthodoxy does still from time to time go on the offensive. In the chapter The Ethics of Elfland, Chesterton performs a veritable apologetical symphony, showing the modernist world for a rickety machine, while at the same time opening our eyes to wonder. It is daunting, dizzying, delightful.
Reading Chesterton is no easy thing. It is, as I like to describe it, like eating a buffet of desserts. Every taste is so rich that you both want more, and can take only so much. He is to be savored. In the end you end up with a fat soul, prosperous and joyful. Orthodoxy is a life-changing, even a life giving book, not because it will change your view on this thing or that, not because it will persuade you of your error in thinking this other thing. Instead reading Orthodoxy is like riding a cyclone, crushing the enemy, and then walking out, for the first time, into a world of color. Get it, read it. Then thank God, and send me a note too.
Safe from what? Those who would take their lives and plunder their goods? Yes. That is precisely the function of government. God has granted the state the power of the sword to punish those who assault life and property by force or fraud. It is not, however, the responsibility of the state to keep people safe from themselves. That is the responsibility of the individual. Once we embrace the seemingly benevolent notion that the state has the responsibility to protect us from ourselves we have opened the door to the worst possible tyranny. Any state that can keep a person from harming themselves has total control over that person.
It is missing the tyranny that invites the tyranny. We have grown accustomed to it. In New York City the mayor some years back tried to make it illegal to sell soft drinks in sizes larger than 16 ounces. Prohibition, of large sodas. Happily, the courts protected the citizens of New York from such overreach. That such legislation passed, however, should concern us. More recently we learned that the Biden administration has allocated $30,000,000 to programs that make smoking crack “safer.” There are three things we must not lose sight of.
First, there has been virtually utter silence from the public over this. I’d seen allusions to it on my twitter feed, but had to look it up to be sure it wasn’t clickbait. What I found is that the story is too blasé to be clickbait. No one cares. There is no sense of shame from those allocating these funds, nor is there outrage from those who might normally be opposed. In short, we’ve already embraced the tyranny.
Second, this program isn’t about helping people from accidentally and unknowingly harming themselves. It’s about helping people to harm themselves by keeping them from harming themselves worse. The whole point of the program is to reduce unintentional overdoses and infections. It reminds me of the insane reasoning that says abortion must be legal lest people get hurt in back-alley abortions. We wouldn’t want people killing their own children to be hurt would we?
Third, we have lost all sense of the numbers. $30,000,000? That’s a drop in the bucket. Only, however, if the bucket is the size of an ocean. Were you an average American wage earner and if you paid a tax rate of 50%, half of every dollar you earned, it would take you more 30 years just to pay for this one program for one year. Not a dime to national defense. Not a penny to fund the judicial system. More than half your working life to pay for one year’s worth of crack smoking safety aids. A grateful nation applauds you.
It was President Ford who said “A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take everything you have.” How much more so a government that thinks it is called to give everyone what it thinks they need?
Today’s Jesus Changes Everything Podcast
It is one of the many moments where CS Lewis presents a simple turn of a phrase, in the midst of a story, and it stops you dead in your tracks. “Safe, safe? Who said anything about safe? He’s not a tame lion” from Mr. Beaver is one of them. Another is, after they’d been apart for some time, how Aslan corrects Lucy’s mistake:
“Aslan” said Lucy “you’re bigger.”
“That is because you are older, little one” answered he.
“Not because you are?”
“I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger.”
It is vital for us to never lose sight of how far we have to go in becoming what we will be. Our glorification is like arriving at a distant galaxy. Our sanctification along the way is like riding the elevator to get on the spaceship. Pride has no place in us as even our best works are tinged with what we once were.
On the other hand, it is likewise vital for us to never lose sight that we are in fact becoming more like what we will be. We mustn’t diminish the good work of the Holy Spirit in us. It’s easy to miss, in large part because of the opposite side of Aslan’s coin. That is, every year we grow better we will find ourselves smaller. Growing in grace means, in part, increasing our understanding of the scope of our sin. The better we get the more clearly we learn how awful we are.
Our Redeemer, however, has not left us orphans. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of power, supernatural power. We are in fact growing into what we will be. Which is reason to celebrate and to give thanks. It is not boastful to affirm that we see better now than we once did the glory of Jesus. It is not arrogant to praise Him for setting us free from this besetting sin or that. And it is not humble to grumble that our progress is going too slowly.
Are we almost there? Not on, or in, your life. Jesus remains busy washing His bride with the water of the Word. Each of us is being scrubbed and molded and shaped. Through the preaching of the Word. Through our prayers and the prayers of others for us. Through the encouragement of the saints. Through the purging fires of hardship. Even through our failures that He stewards so well. The ashes that He trades for beauty are often the remains of what we burned in our folly.
He has promised us that the good work He has begun in us He will complete. Part of the process is not just believing He will do it, but believing He is doing it. Aslan is not getting any bigger. He is, however, opening our eyes more fully that we might behold His glory. And we know that as we see Him as He is, we become like Him.
We are all by nature Pelagians. Like the heretical monk Pelagius, we like to think in our hearts, even should our lips profess otherwise, that we are basically good. Help in fighting this temptation is one of the great blessings that comes from embracing that biblical system of thought known as Reformed theology. Now we understand not only that we are in ourselves only evil, but that God is sovereign over all things.
However, this shift in our thinking, in itself another gift from God, doesn’t send the devil scurrying for cover. Embracing Reformed theology doesn’t make one immune to sin. Indeed, when we embrace sound, biblical thinking with respect to God’s sovereignty, we find ourselves walking a peculiar tightrope. On the one hand, it is rather a short, but dangerous step from, “God ordained whatsoever comes to pass” to “I know why God did this.” I once read a sermon from a Puritan that was a classic example of this error. It seems that the parson came into the meeting house one day and found there in the corner the tattered remains of the Book of Common Prayer, the very symbol of the Romish tendencies the Puritans wanted to purify out of the church. It seems a mouse had gotten to the book, and he chewed it to pieces. The pastor, rightly, expounded at great length on how God’s sovereignty descends down to such details. God, from all eternity, determined that that mouse would find that book on that day, and that the mouse would tear it to shreds. So far so good. Then the pastor went on to explain that God brought this to pass to show us how evil the Book of Common Prayer is. Had I been there that Sunday I would have loved to ask the pastor: “Isn’t it possible, pastor, that God had this happen so we might learn that even the mice are sensible enough to feed upon the wisdom in the Book of Common Prayer?” We need, when trying to interpret history, to remember the wisdom of Calvin who said, “When the Almighty has determined to close his holy lips, I will desist from inquiry.”
There is, however, an equal and opposite temptation. We rightly affirm that God not only controls all things, but that He planned whatsoever comes to pass from before the beginning of time. God’s celestial plan, down to the color of my socks, was down in stone before God even said, “Let there be light.” Again, so far so good. The error is when we take one small step from affirming that it’s all decided to affirming, at least in our hearts, if not with our lips, that God doesn’t act in history. Too many Reformed people are practical deists. We rightly believe that God is the ultimate cause of all things, and then wrongly believe that He is the proximate cause of no things. God did indeed write the grand screenplay that is history. But He likewise wrote a rather large role therein for Himself.
The history books of the Bible, thankfully, practice exactly the right balance here. God is not passively watching, while man determines the future, as the Pelagians would have us believe. Neither is He providing easy-to-read captions beneath each of His actions so that we might know what it means. And neither still is He passively watching because He did the hard work of setting up the dominoes long ago. God is actively bringing to pass that which He planned from the beginning. Sometimes He tells us how, and sometimes He doesn’t.
Not long ago Tonga was assaulted with a tsunami, something insurance adjusters wisely call “an act of God.” Why there? Why now? That He hasn’t told us. We ought to shy away from speaking for Him. We honor Him better as we confess we simply don’t know. What we know is this. God has three great goals as He acts in history. There are three certainties that have been planned from the beginning. First, He will gather a bride for His Son. There are precious few acts of God in space and time more precious than when He gives life to the living dead, when His Spirit quickens those chosen before all time. Second, He will destroy all His enemies. Psalm 110 tells us that Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father until all His enemies are made a footstool. We serve a God of vengeance and destruction, to the praise of His name. He destroyed the Canaanites, and He still destroys His enemies. And third (of this we can be sure), He is about the business of purifying His bride. He acts in history so that history can reach its end, the marriage feast of the Lamb, when we will appear, without blot or blemish, and we, because we will see Him as He is, will be like Him.
It is a holdover of our modernist past that we tend to see the work of translation as a science more than an art. We think we punch a word in from language a, and out pops the exact same word, except in language b. Not only do different languages not relate in that way, even one language, looked at from two different time periods, will have the same issues. The postmoderns are right also to note that language has a tendency to be used for power, rather than for clarity. On the other hand, words do in fact carry meaning. In the end, language is Trinitarian, a blending together of harmony and complexity.
Consider he. He, fifty years ago, was clearly understood to have two distinct but related meanings. One meaning was this- a male antecedent. That is, when we use the word he, we are referring to a male something that has already been referenced. The second meaning was this- an antecedent of unknown gender. “He just drove through that red light” could either mean, “That man just ran through that red light” or “That person, I don’t know if it was a man or a woman, just ran through that red light.” Over the past few decades women of both sexes have gotten their knickers in a twist over this common convention, a convention that long precedes the English language, and will, despite the efforts of some, outlast it. They seem to believe that the second use of the term is somehow a boon to male-kind, that it provides us with an unfair advantage. The first fruit of this silliness was the banishment of the use of he in the second sense in certain, mostly academic circles. Eventually it led us to the TNIV and other politically correct paraphrases of the Bible.
To be fair, one could argue that older translations which use he in the second sense can be misleading to readers in our day who use he only in the first sense. This position would suggest that because the meaning of he has changed, accuracy of translation, rather than ideological considerations, require the change. This does not, however, get to the heart of the issue, and begs the question of where the English language really is in our day.
First, the use of the singular masculine pronoun for antecedents of unknown gender is not at all unique to the English language. It is found, in fact, in both Greek and Hebrew. (Remember that when we are translating we have to understand both our own language and the language from which we are translating.) To put it more bluntly, God the Holy Spirit uses pronouns this way. We would be wiser to seek to be consistent with God than to be consistent with Gloria Steinem.
Second, every “gender neutral” English translation to date has gone well beyond seeking to avoid the use of he, when we do not know the antecedent’s gender. We have seen real distortions of the plain meaning of the text, driven by egalitarian sensibilities, rather than a passion for translating accuracy. We should not be surprised. The Committee on Bible Translation, the scholars who brought you the TNIV, have as one of their standards this notion, “The patriarchalism (like other social patterns) of the ancient cultures in which the Biblical books were composed is pervasively reflected in forms of expression that appear, in the modern context, to deny the common human dignity of all hearers and readers. For these forms, alternative modes of expression can and may be used, though care must be taken not to distort the intent of the original text.” At the root of this debate is different understandings not only of language and translation, but of Scripture, and inspiration. I strongly discourage folks from using the TNIV, or the current NIV. Even older versions of the NIV, while predating these kinds of gender changes, were put together by the same set of scholars. It is also, in my judgment, too close to a paraphrase.
Issues like this require wisdom. On the one hand, my friends on the other side of the aisle generally don’t see the trajectory of where they are headed. On the other hand, my friends on my side of the aisle tend to think those on the other side have already entered into the fullness of the folly they are flirting with. The former need to wake up and repent. The latter need to boldly confront the error, but accurately, and with neither pride nor hysterics. This is, in the end, scary stuff, grounded in more scary stuff, neo-evangelical feminism. At bottom, I fear it is all driven by a fear of the world. Wisdom, however, calls us to fear God.
