Making progress…

• Received a yellow fever vaccination on Tuesday. It wasn’t until Friday when I started feeling normal again.
• Continued progress on the curriculum. I take my working definition of ethics from John Frame’s Doctrine of the Christian Life: [Christian] ethics is theology, viewed as a means of determining which persons, acts, and attitudes receive God’s blessing and which do not.
• Had a good chat with my mentor Mark Henry yesterday. Mark is a pastor and missionary based out of California.
• Ministry update letters are in the mail! View it here.

Gaba Bible Institute

This week starts the beginning of my final full court press to prepare for the trip. Most of my work so far has been preparing my curriculum and trying to understand the history and context of Uganda. Also, I got my passport in the mail a couple days ago!

Here is a great video introducing the school in which we will be teaching and living. Thank you to everyone who has been praying for me thus far – your continued support is appreciated.

Goin’ to Uganda

Hello all, for those of you that I haven’t already told I have been accepted as a student teacher with an organization called Training Leaders International. Lord willing on June 10th I will embark on a 15 day trip to teach a class at Gaba Bible Institute in Uganda on Christian Ethics. This opportunity came suddenly about a month and a half ago when TLI president Darren Carlson came to RTS and hosted a lunch meeting introducing the organization and ways to get involved. As I sat there listening to his presentation and reading over the outline my heart “burned within” (Luke 24:32) in response to the call to serve others with my passions and talents. In a nutshell, TLI’s purpose is to help “meet the needs of theological  training overseas” by recruiting theology students to take part in short term trips to share their gifts and resources with church leaders in parts of the world where theological training is either lacking or does not exist. Take a minute and check out the TLI blog, especially the post from April 15th about Gaba Bible Institute.

Over these remaining weeks also make sure to check back for occasional updates on my planning and preparation. I’ve never traveled this far and so I’m getting a crash course in international travel (yes, a poor choice of words). To make this trip a reality several pieces need to come together: immunization shots, passport, plane tickets, writing a curriculum (!) and general funding (about $3,600) just to name a few. Fire away any questions or helpful tips you’ve picked up along the way. I look forward to hearing from you!

Clay

A Quote on the Dynamics of Daily Faith

“Few know enough to start each day with a thoroughgoing stand upon Luther’s platform: you are accepted, looking outward in faith and claiming the wholly alien righteousness of Christ as the only ground for acceptance, relaxing in that quality of trust which will produce increasing sanctification as faith is active in love and gratitude.”

Lovelace, Dynamics of Spiritual Life, p. 101

Augustine on finding strength for enjoying God

This quote has quickly become one of my favorite explanations of the impact that Jesus’ life has on the life of a believer. In book 7 of Augustine’s Confessions he talks about his battle with belief. In a climax of internal realizations he says, “And I marveled to find that at last I loved You [God] and not some phantom instead of you; yet I did not stably enjoy my God, but was ravished to You by Your beauty, yet soon was torn away from You again by my own weight, and fell again with torment to lower things. Carnal habit was that weight.” Where do you find strength to enjoy God, to embrace his beauty, without falling from the weight of our sinful nature? At this point it is worth quoting Augustine at length.

So I set about finding a way to gain the strength that was necessary for enjoying You. And I could not find it until I embraced the Mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus, who is over all things, God blessed forever, who was calling unto me and saying: I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; and who brought into union with our nature that Food which I lacked the strength to take; for the Word was made flesh that Your Wisdom, by which You created all things, might give suck to our souls’ infancy. For I was not yet lowly enough to hold the lowly Jesus as my God, nor did I know what lesson His embracing of our weakness was to teach. For Your Word, the eternal Truth, towering above the highest parts of Your creation, lifts up to Himself those that were cast down. He built for Himself here below a lowly house of our clay, that by it He might bring down from themselves and bring up to Himself those who were to be made subject, healing the swollenness of their pride and fostering their love: so that their self-confidence might grow no further but rather diminish, seeing the deity at their feet, humbled by the assumption of our coat of human nature: to the end that weary at last they might cast themselves down upon His humanity and rise again in its rising.

Where do we find the strength to enjoy God and embrace him continually? By embracing God the mediator. Christ confronts the fallen state of the world and offers not only an example but rebirth. Christ doesn’t just make us aware of our idols he helps us to let them go by giving us himself to embrace.

Kant philosophizes that philosophy is unknowable

Have you heard the one about the jelly jars and the mysterious cylindrical jelly? This has is one of my favorite parables so far in my class (History of Philosophy and Christian Thought, John Frame, RTS.) A group of philosophical minded jelly jars get together to find out why jelly takes a cylindrical shape when put inside them. They do scientific tests on the jelly but come up stumped. One day however the smartest jelly jar of them all postulates that it is not anything in the jelly itself that makes it cylindrical when put inside them, it is a quality they have as jelly jars – the jelly is conforming to them. As it turns out, this is a comparable illustration of Kant’s view of the world. All the universals that Plato wanted to say were the reality, of which our world is a mere shadow, Kant claims the mind itself creates and imposes on the world – substance, unity, plurality, causality, cylindricity are all made up so we don’t go crazy. The jelly of experience enters our mind and it conforms to the shape of our intuition to become objects in space and time. These qualities may really exist but we cannot say for certain. All we know is they exist in the noumenal realm, the counterpart of the now famous distinction from the phenomenal world. The noumenal realm is like the junk drawer of the universe. All metaphysical truth is relegated to this realm because its truth is unknowable. Included in that group is God, time, space, and basically anything Kant couldn’t figure out.

Among the many amazing aspects of his philosophy is the idea that metaphysical truths which suspend in the unknowable category play a dominant role in the rest of his system. Specifically, he recognizes that living as if God exists has benefits for life. Indeed, he brings Christ into his system as an icon of human morality. Dr. Frame’s response is simple but powerful. He asks if we should live as if God exists (for moral benefit, mental stability, etc.) should we not also believe he exists? In other words, by introducing the helpfulness of the God category we are also in a way admitting the need for a real God. This can be a backdoor approach to the moral argument for the existence of God.

Today’s secular philosophers have rationalizations for morality that, unlike Kant, don’t include God. Dr. Richard Dawkins, though he presents himself as more of a scientist than philosopher, wants to argue the exact opposite, that the God category (or religion) is responsible for more blood shed than any other category of thought. You see, Dawkins is a modern-day representative of the reaction people had to Kant’s noumenal realm – if it is unknowable then it is disposable, all we have is the world as our mind experiences it. For Dawkins then, the God experience is one of delusion. Nonetheless, this illustrates the important role that philosophy has for our understanding of God. If we set as our goal to believe as the Bible teaches us, we must be able to formulate that in a philosophically and theologically correct way, which is that biblical revelation is authoritative over human reason. Kant is an amazing synthesis thinker and master visionary. From the standpoint of faith, one wishes he could have used that amazing ability to expound a knowable God.

In His Hand – A Confession

Helmut Thielicke

After such a long time since my last posting, I thought I’d share a quote that expresses a theme our household has been wrestling with and also serves as an explanation for why I have not posted recently. I am greatly indebted to my pastor, Larry Kirk, for introducing me to the German pastor, theologian, and intellectual Helmut Thielicke. A cursory read proves his work to be a well of insight which I know from experience has been a source for Larry’s heart and teaching, both of which he holds close together.

In his work The Freedom of the Christian Man, Thielicke quotes John 6:26 where Christ says, “You seek me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves”. Thielicke then explains it this way,

“What he was saying was: You are not seeking me; you are seeking your own satisfaction. You are not seeking the gift that reveals the Giver; you are seking the gift as an end in itself. You are not seeking the Savior, but only salvation. You are not seeking my hand, but only the pennies in my hand–like one who flings a prayer to heaven when the bombs come screaming down and the next moment forgets it, because what he wanted was preservation and not the presence of the Preserver.”

He goes on to makes this glaring observation:

The eyes that leer and lust for bread can never wait. Only he who looks at the hand that gives the bread can say, “The eyes of all look to thee, and thou givest them thier food in due season” (ps. 145:15), which means at a time which is “in his hand” (ps. 31:15). He who sees the bread and not the hand loses the sense of the “due time”. He wrenches everything out of its due season and wants it this moment.

This certainly cuts to the core of an anxious heart. I spoke this last week on God’s motives–the mind behind God’s actions. One of my main points was that God’s mindset from all eternity has been one of  self-sacrifice. Even in the face of the cross it is still difficult to allow this truth to be a controlling reality in our core. What Thielicke’s quote shows is that God’s nature is the same no matter what our motives, his nature remains constant, everyone is watching for his provision and he give’s it in due season. Sadly, instead of his self-sacrificing nature leading us to embrace him, we “leer and lust” after his provision. Nevertheless, the hope is in the admonition. He does extend to us something more than bread. He does hear our prayer when the bombs are dropping. He does set himself before us. In Christ we are in his hand.

Resurrection and Nature

In 1 Corinthians 15 Paul exercises his great theological reasoning power in an interesting discussion about resurrection. After making his case for half a chapter, he picks up in verse 35, “But someone will ask, ‘How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?’ You foolish person!” Calvin says that Paul is making use of an anthypophora, a Greek term meaning to bring something forward by way of an objection. In this case, Paul brings forth an objection to resurrection through the mouth of someone he considers a fool. Why does he consider them as such? I want to point out here that this is not the rant of a self-righteous Christian, the impression of which is all too familiar in today’s culture. The argument that he is making here is not against this hypothetical person’s materialist and depraved disbelief of all things spiritual, though that is a related issue. More specifically though he is making a case against their lack of right interpretation of natural phenomena. What!?

If we look at the text he is not directly critical of their lack of faith and does not go into an argument about it, rather he launches into farming imagery, wildlife imagery, space imagery, and eventually an appeal to Adam and Christ. Now, wouldn’t it follow that a discussion about resurrection would include a discussion on faith? Is this not how we believe in resurrection, through faith? What Paul is doing is remarkable. He uses a natural phenomenon to illustrate spiritual resurrection. As in the sowing of a seed, so it is with man; life emerges out of death. He is not calling the Corinthian Christians, or us, to believe in spite of what we see in the natural world, but rather to believe in resurrection in accordance with what we see in the natural world. This is a very important distinction for today as we are constantly asked to divide our lives into sacred and secular compartments. I remember reading a quote my Martin Luther once along these similar lines, where he said something like ‘I am convinced of the grace of God causing spiritual renewal everytime I see the barren tree of winter sprout new buds in the spring.’

If we follow Paul’s argument to the end of verse 49, we can see why natural phenomena illustrates the spiritual reality of resurrection. The entirety of Paul’s argument for resurrection is dependent not only on the view that God created this physical reality, but that the physical reality, including ourselves, needs resurrection from the dead, and that resurrection is possible only through the redemptive work of Christ, the Adam who conquered where the first failed. In Christ we are given the light of God to perceive the testimony of nature. We do believe in Christ through faith, but this not against our perception of nature, which declares both God’s glory and man’s need for renewal.

Resources by Doug Moo

I recently saw this on a post by Matt Harmon on his blog Biblical Theology. Apparently Doug Moo has recently added a bunch of his theological articles and resources to his website that was originally intended to sell his photography. I checked it out and there is a lot of great material there, most of which is in a handy pdf format. You also should check it out if you get a chance. This is a great wealth of information from one of the top Bible scholars around. Visit Doug’s site here: http://www.djmoophoto.com/index.html

Lewis and the Divine Life

Here is a quote by C.S. Lewis that I recently cited in a class I taught. The class was called Knowing Christ: Paul’s Conversion from Religion. I used this quote to illustrate that not only do our religious gains count as loss when it comes to our salvation, but they the real problem is that they don’t help us to gain Christ. Lewis says this in an essay titled Man or Rabbit? :

“The people who keep on asking if they can’t lead a descent life without Christ, don’t know what life is about; if they did they would know that ‘a descent life’ is mere machinery compared with the thing we men are really made for. Morality is indispensable; but the Divine Life, which gives itself to us and which calls us to be gods, intends for us something in which morality will be swallowed up. We are to be re-made. All the rabbit in us is to disappear–the worried, conscientious, ethical rabbit as well as the cowardly and sensual rabbit. We shall bleed and squeal as the handfuls of fur come out; and then, surprisingly, we shall find underneath it all a thing we have never yet imagined: a real Man, and ageless god, a son of God, strong, radiant, wise, beautiful, and drenched in joy.”