The late Colin Gunton (1941-2003), in a flurry of productivity just before his untimely death, put out a bunch of books that are remarkable for containing enough ideas that they could each have been expanded into more books. Looking for a half-remembered quotation, I recently skimmed back through my copy of his book The Triune Creator. I never did find the quotation I was after, but I found these four thought-provoking statements about the Christian doctrine of creation:

…the view of creation as deified conflict is perpetually renewed in human culture, most recently perhaps in Hegel and Marx, as well as in many of their disciples. Violations of the peace of creation are an offense against the God of the Bible, in complete contrast and opposition to the fact that they are a rational response to the gods of mythical and philosophical paganism. p. 26

The choice is inescapable: either God or the world itself provides the reason why things are as they are. To ‘personalise’ the universe or parts of it, particularly inert substances like molecules, is to succumb to crude forms of superstition. As we shall see, only a theology which distinguishes God from the world ontologically justifies the practices of science without succumbing to a pantheism or crypto-pantheism which effectively divinises the temporal. p. 39

The incarnation implies a certain freedom in the relations between God and the world, and so is the basis of the doctrine that God creates ‘out of nothing.’ The act of creation is accordingly seen to be grounded in an anterior richness in God. pp. 67-68

We are created not to ascend through the material to the spiritual, but to be perfected in time, through Christ and the Spirit, in and with the created order as a whole. p. 170

If those get your mind going, treat yourself to the whole book some time. It’s a couple hundred pages just like that.

And who wouldn’t like sheep? With a cloud for a body and nub for a tail, this ovine citizen has a distinctive strut. He throws his sloping hooves out in front of him and pulls himself along the green pasture beside the still waters - - his posture suggests he’s walking backwards, but be not deceived, this sheep maketh progress. The still waters are not pictured, and the green pastures are represented by a continuous zig-zag line like a tide chart. The constant diet of grass has lent its color to his green voice (what color is your voice?), which belts out his future plans: “I’M GOING TO EAT SOME GRASS ! ! ! ! !”

Sub conditione Jacobi, lamby, “under the condition laid down by James: “If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that.” For what is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. If the Lord wishes, you will indeed EAT SOME GRASS ! ! ! ! ! !

In 1927, the second Dean of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, John Murdoch MacInnis, wrote a book called Peter the Fisherman Philosopher: A Study in the Higher Fundamentalism, published by Biola Book Room. The alarmed reaction to this book ignited a controversy that led to MacInnis’ resignation, the recall and destruction of the book, and the banning of the book from the Bible Institute’s library collection. What was in that book, and what was at stake in this controversy?

To read the rest of “Biola’s Banned Book: Peter the Fisherman Philosopher,” which I presented on September 25, 2006 at a Banned Book colloquium in Biola’s library heritage room, click for more.

Three fundamental categories for theologizing are nature, grace, and glory. These terms indicate things you’ve already thought about before, but they don’t quite map onto other terms you might already know.

Nature is what a thing is in itself. Human nature is a created good, a thing with its own integrity and a recognizable completeness in itself. You can’t quite call it independent, because every nature you’ve ever encountered is a created nature which owes its being to God. But nature, the realm of created goods, has to have a relative independence from God in that it genuinely has existence as something distinct from the creator. You didn’t have to exist, and it’s worth thanking God for the gratuity and bonus of your sheer existence.
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I have a half-baked theory that evangelicalism was a much greater spiritual force about a hundred years ago. I’m not a historian or sociologist, and I don’t have a lot of interest in figuring out exactly what went wrong between our time and the golden age. It’s enough to know that sometime around the first quarter of the twentieth century, somebody obviously spent the family fortune, and later generations of evangelicals have been born poorer (in terms of spirituality, confidence, historical sense, academic heft, biblical literacy, ecumenical credibility, cultural impact, theological orientation, and clues). There are plenty of fine moments and good books from 20th century evangelicals, but if you just leap over the whole sorry century and land back at the end of the nineteenth, you come into contact with a stream of spiritual power that does not feel familiar - - it feels better. Evangelical theology and spirituality one hundred years ago were palpably better.

Now and then I check my half-baked theory by opening the oven door and sticking a toothpick in it. Minus the tortured culinary metaphor, here’s how I actually do that. I read a few pages from The King’s Business, the monthly magazine that Biola published beginning in 1910. The first decade of the magazine is available online here. Help yourself!

Once you learn how to learn from these old founders of fundamentalism, almost any page will do. Here’s the trick: You’re not just looking for somebody who was writing in 1910; instead you’re trying to get a sense of the atmosphere they were living in, the things they were reading, and the things they took for granted as belonging to them.
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Words from J.H. Jowett, written in 1910:

It is possible to evade a multitude of sorrows by the cultivation of an insignificant life. Indeed, if it be a man’s ambition to avoid the troubles of life, the recipe is perfectly simple — let him shed his ambitions in every direction, let him cut the wings of every soaring purpose, and let him assiduously cultivate a little life, with the fewest correspondences and relations.

By this means a whole continent of afflictions will be escaped and will remain unknown. Cultivate negations, and large tracts of the universe will cease to exist. For instance, cultivate deafness, and you are saved from the horrors of discords. Cultivate blindness, and you are saved from the assault of the ugly. Stupefy a sense, and you shut out a world. And, therefore, it is literally true that if you want to get through the world with the smallest trouble you must reduce yourself to the smallest compass.
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The turkey on the table is roasted red, and Freddy age six gives a wave so exuberant that it might take as many as six fingers to get the message across.

Happy Thanksgiving from the Middlebrow gang. We’ve been on the road this week at an annual conference and are giving thanks to be back home, ready to get back to blogging.

Brad Stetson gave a lecture at Biola this week on the virtue of tolerance. Stetson, a PhD in social ethics from the University of Southern California, co-authored a widely-praised book on this subject last year. In just about 40 minutes, Stetson can put thoughts in your head that burn away the enveloping fog of confusion on this subject.

The most helpful thing I heard Stetson point out to the Biola undergrads who gathered to hear him was that since tolerance presupposes disagreement, it can only come into play when two parties hold conflicting views of what is true or good. If you subtract the commitment to truth, tolerance evaporates. Since that is the case, isnt’ it odd that people who earnestly believe in something are considered by that very fact to be intolerant. If tolerance is “a policy of patient forbearance in the presence of something which is disliked or disapproved of,” only people with opinions ever get a chance to be tolerate each other. The presence of disagreement is a presupposition of tolerance. The more committed you are to truth, the more times a day you have a chance to put up with people who don’t see it your way.

How, then, can tolerance be employed so often as a virtue which demands the sacrifice of truth commitments? Stetson thinks this abuse of tolerance is (highly successful) move of manipulative deception. It involves a particular sleight-of-hand called “value formalism.” There is a cluster of values which have no content of their own, but are merely the shapes that values can be exercised in: chief among them are change, choice, diversity, and tolerance. Change in itself cannot be a good; it is a form which has to receive its goodness from some material good (”I am healthy, but I will add the virtue of change to that and become sick”). Similarly, the value (moral or otherwise) of a choice is determined not by the act of choosing, but by the moral value of the ends chosen. Diversity is likewise relative (”There’s too much human decency in here, we need the diversity of some real bigots”), and tolerance functions the same way: merely formal in themselves, but tremendous virtues if oriented toward a more solid material good.

I have long thought that tolerance, though a virtue, is not a cardinal or hinge virtue. It just can’t bear the weight of anything else turning on it; it must turn on other virtues. Stetson’s The Truth About Tolerance took that germ of an insight and develops it at worthy length.

In 1872, Adoniram Judson Gordon (1836-1895) managed to spin a book out of two words of Scripture: In Christ . The book is a ten-chapter gem, and as an opening gambit, Gordon freely admitted that the phrase “in Christ” points to a great mystery. Though he had plenty to say in describing the ramifications and effects of being in Christ, Gordon did not attempt to explain the thing itself: how is it that our lives take place in the life of Jesus? How does God implicate us in events that took place so long ago and so far away, “under Pontius Pilate?”

“‘Tis mystery all,” says Gordon:

No words of Scripture, if we except these, ‘God manifest in the flesh,’ hold within themselves a deeper mystery than this simple formula of the Christian life, ‘in Christ.’

Indeed, God’s taking upon himself humanity, and yet remaining God, is hardly more inexplicable to human thought than man’s becoming a “partaker of the divine nature,” and yet remaining man. Both are of those secret things that belong wholly unto God.

Yet, great as is the mystery of these words, they are the key to the whole system of doctrinal mysteries. Like the famous Rosetta stone, itself a partial hieroglyph, and thereby furnishing the long-sought clue to the Egyptian hieroglyphics, these words, by their very mystery, unlock all mysteries of the divine life, letting us into secrets that were “hidden from ages and from generations.”

As the key to the secret things of God, the mystery hid from the foundation of the world but made known to those who are “in Christ,” our inclusion in the messiah is also characterized, partly, by mystery.

File this under “Evangelicalism a little over 100 years ago.” How firm a grasp on the fundamental things!