Cultivation, Not Castration, of Masculinity

C. S. Lewis has a fascinating little essay in God in the Dock called 'Priestesses in the Church.'

In it he's addressing a 1950s Anglican/Episcopal issue, but the relevance to today's church scene is striking. Lewis argues that the office of priest should be open to men only.

At one point he says:

It is painful, being a man, to have to assert the privilege, or the burden, which Christianity places upon my own sex. I am crushingly aware how inadequate most of us are . . . to fill the place prepared for us. But it is an old saying in the army that you salute the uniform not the wearer. . . .

We men often make very bad priests. That is because we are insufficiently masculine. It is no cure to call in those who are not masculine at all. A given man may make a very bad husband; you cannot mend matters by trying to reverse the roles. He may make a bad male partner in a dance. The cure for that is that men should more diligently attend dancing classes; not that the ballroom should henceforward ignore distinctions of sex and treat all dancers as neuter. (238-39)

Thankfulness

"We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you . . ."
(Col 1:3)

Paul starts with thankfulness. Why?

Every one of us has a bunch of blessings and a bunch of adversities in life. Good and bad. Joys and sorrows. And every one of us at any given moment in the day is focusing on one or the other of these clumps of realities. We can be aware of both, but we can't simultaneously focus on both. One must always be in the mental foreground and one in the background. Ten seconds' notice of someone's countenance can usually tell you which is foregrounded for them at the moment.

Thankfulness is not false, painted smiles. It is not hollow words. It is not Pollyanna religion, pretending everything is better than it is. It is the gritty determination to focus on the blessings and not the adversities, even when, by the world's scale, the adversities far outweigh the blessings.

For those of us in Christ, it could be that just about every earthly reason to be thankful has been stripped away. But we are still in Christ. We still have the supreme blessing without which every earthly blessing is irrelevant and in comparison with which every earthly adversity pales.

Which is where Paul was at, most of the time. Destitute, beaten, forsaken, opposed. But he starts out Colossians, and most of his letters, thankful. Why? Because he had that one all-determinative thing, that one Friend. So he starts his letters thankful, before saying anything else. This is the tone-setter.

An Eternal Welcome

Bishop Handley Moule's commentary on Romans from a century ago, though a bit overly Keswick-ish at times, might be the most beautifully written commentary I have ever come across, on any book.

Here's a snippet from his comment on Romans 3:23-24:

In the discovery of your necessity, and of Christ as the all-in-all to meet it, you see with little need of exposition the place and power of faith. It means, you see it now, simply your reception of Christ. It is your contact with Him, your embrace of Him. It is not virtue; it is absolutely remote from merit. But it is necessary; as necessary as the hand that takes the alms, or as the mouth that eats the unbought meal.

The meaning of justification is now to you no riddle of the schools. Like all the great words of scriptural theology it carries with it in divine things the meaning it bears in common things, only for a new and noble application; you see this with joy, by the insight of awakened conscience. He who "justifies" you does exactly what the word always imports. He does not educate you, or inspire you, up to acceptability. He pronounces you acceptable, satisfactory, at peace with Law.

And this He does for Another's sake; on account of the Merit of Another, who has so done and suffered as to win an eternal welcome for Himself and everything that is His, and therefore for all who are found in Him, and therefore for you who have fled into Him, believing.

So you receive with joy and wonder "the righteousness of God," His way to bid you, so deeply guilty in yourself, welcome without fear to your Judge. . . .

The harlot, the liar, the murderer, are short of the glory of God; but so are you. Perhaps they stand at the bottom of a mine, and you on the crest of an Alp; but you are as little able to touch the stars as they. So you thankfully give yourself up, side by side with them, if they will come too, to be carried to the height of divine acceptance, by the gift of God, "justified gift-wise by His grace."

--H. C. G. Moule, The Epistle to the Romans (London: Pickering & Inglis, 1902), 96-97

Who knew one was allowed to write commentaries like that!

Only One of These Can Be True

1. Isaiah 53:

". . . he had no form or majesty that we should look at him,

and no beauty that we should desire him."

2. Hollywood:

We Belong Elsewhere

From a short essay by Lewis called 'On Living in an Atomic Age,' expressing a key theme of Lewis' engagement with Naturalism/Atheism/Evolutionism:

Really, the naturalistic conclusion is unbelievable.

For one thing, it is only through trusting our own minds that we have come to know Nature herself. If Nature when fully known seems to teach us (that is, if the sciences teach us) that our own minds are chance arrangements of atoms, then there must have been some mistake; for if that were so, then the sciences themselves would be chance arrangements of atoms and we should have no reason for believing in them.

There is only one way to avoid this deadlock. We must go back to a much earlier view. We must simply accept it that we are spirits, free and rational beings, at present inhabiting an irrational universe, and must draw the conclusion that we are not derived from it. We are strangers here. We come from somewhere else. Nature is not the only thing that exists. There is 'another world,' and that is where we come from.

And that explains why we do not feel at home here. A fish feels at home in the water. If we 'belonged here' we should feel at home here. All that we say about 'Nature red in tooth and claw,' about death and time and mutability, all our half-amused, half-bashful attitude to our own bodies, is quite inexplicable on the theory that we are simply natural creatures. If this world is the only world, how did we come to find its laws either so dreadful or so comic?

If there is no straight line elsewhere, how did we discover that Nature’s line is crooked?

--C. S. Lewis, 'On Living in an Atomic Age,' in Present Concerns (London: Fount, 1986), 78-79 (italics original)

Love

Paul Miller on "A Loving Life" from Crossway on Vimeo.

Our Words, Our Identity

In rereading James recently I wondered if our speech is the integrating theme of really everything James says, even though he seems to hop from one topic haphazardly to the next. Throughout, James gives the impression: what we say isn't an aspect of what defines us and what kind of religion we have, but comprehends the whole.

So as I am now in Luke I was struck by the way Jesus concludes his teaching on a tree being known by its fruit in Luke 6. I have always read this tree/fruit thing to be a statement about our deeds, practically speaking. Just as a healthy tree produces healthy fruit, a healthy heart produces healthy deeds.

But notice what Jesus actually says: "The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks" (Luke 6:45). 

We are defined by our words. Our words are who we are. I don't mean identity-definition in a gospel sense, our identity as sons and daughters of God, in defiance of our word-failings. A less ultimate but no less comprehensive identity: what I say is who I am. I simply have nothing else. Maybe that's why James says that whoever can tame the tongue is perfect, complete (James 3:2).

Mark 10:45

The Army Grows

Things have been quiet around here as my wife Stacey and I have welcomed our fourth Ortlund offspring into the world, our first daughter, Chloe. Here she is with her brothers. She will be available for dating at age 30, upon screening of suitors.

Interpreting the New Testament