The next eight installments (beginning with today’s) will all be from the next sermon, as found here, titled “The New Name”
(14) Truth is Truth
Truth is truth, whether from the lips of Jesus or Balaam.
The above was all Lewis chose to include in this shortest yet of abridged thoughts from MacDonald. I can’t help but note what a modernist character this particular selection (especially the isolated character of the selection) shows of Lewis’ thought. Penner and Kierkegaard before him would not lack for words to describe the spirit of modernism shining through this particular focus, and having absorbed Penner’s work, it is now shown in glaring relief to me too. So I will dare to include a bit more with it below (still an extreme isolation from the rest of MacDonald’s surrounding thoughts - which were here centered on the mysticism of St. John in both his gospel as well as in his Revelation). But I trust that my slightly wider inclusion at least gives some answer to Penner’s charge and shows rather more of MacDonald’s thoughts with which Penner would (or perhaps did) find much more resonance.
Truth is truth, whether from the lips of Jesus or Balaam. But, in its deepest sense, the truth is a condition of heart, soul, mind, and strength towards God and towards our fellow–not an utterance, not even a right form of words; and therefore such truth coming forth in words is, in a sense, the person that speaks.
I don’t think “Truth is truth” intrinsically denotes the depth of said truth, does it?
There is a deeper truth, namely the condition of God’s relationship to the person and its strength, not just the individual’s towards God. They are not one and the same because he is constant and faithful when we are not, speaking as one demonstrably flawed person.
I’m not sure I understand what you’re getting at above. It sounds like you agree with MacDonald that truth is much more than just propositional. In which case - Amen!
Here is a long one for today … (and I will follow Lewis in leaving this one at least partially abridged as he did.)
(15) The White Stone (Revelation 2:17)
…the giving of the white stone with the new name is the communication of what God thinks about the man to the man. It is the divine judgment, the solemn holy doom of the righteous man, the “Come, thou blessed,” spoken to the individual.
…
The true name is one which expresses the character, the nature, the being, the meaning of the person who bears it. It is the man’s own symbol,–his soul’s picture, in a word,–the sign which belongs to him and to no one else. Who can give a man this, his own name? God alone. For no one but God sees what the man is, … or even, seeing what he is, could express in a name-word the sum and harmony of what he sees. To whom is this name given? To him that overcometh. When is it given? When he has overcome. Does God then not know what a man is going to become? As surely as he sees the oak which he put there lying in the heart of the acorn. Why then does he wait till the man has become by overcoming ere he settles what his name shall be? He does not wait; he knows his name from the first. But as–although repentance comes because God pardons–yet the man becomes aware of the pardon only in the repentance; so it is only when the man has become his name that God gives him the stone with the name upon it, for then first can he understand what his name signifies. It is the blossom, the perfection, the completion, that determines the name; and God foresees that from the first, because he made it so; but the tree of the soul, before its blossom comes, cannot understand what blossom it is to bear, and could not know what the word meant, which, in representing its own unarrived completeness, named itself. Such a name cannot be given until the man is the name.
God’s name for a man must then be the expression in a mystical word–a word of that language which all who have overcome understand–of his own idea of the man, that being whom he had in his thought when he began to make the child, and whom he kept in his thought through the long process of creation that went to realize the idea. To tell the name is to seal the success–to say, “In thee also I am well pleased.”
Not only then has each man his individual relation to God, but each man has his peculiar relation to God. He is to God a peculiar being, made after his own fashion, and that of no one else; for when he is perfected he shall receive the new name which no one else can understand. Hence he can worship God as no man else can worship him,-- can understand God as no man else can understand him. This or that man may understand God more, may understand God better than he, but no other man can understand God as he understands him. God give me grace to be humble before thee, my brother, that I drag not my simulacrum of thee before the judgment-seat of the unjust judge, but look up to thyself for what revelation of God thou and no one else canst give. As the fir-tree lifts up itself with a far different need from the need of the palm-tree, so does each man stand before God, and lift up a different humanity to the common Father. And for each God has a different response. With every man he has a secret–the secret of the new name. In every man there is a loneliness, an inner chamber of peculiar life into which God only can enter. I say not it is the innermost chamber --but a chamber into which no brother, nay, no sister can come.
an image or representation of someone or something.
an unsatisfactory imitation or substitute.
“a bland simulacrum of American soul music”
Anabaptists are big on the community nature of the Kingdom of God (even - or especially in the salvific sense), and we’ll often contrast that with how individualistic the focus of modern Christianity has become. So this from MacDonald was a good reminder to me again of the importance of each of our individual natures in how we relate to God … uniquely as it were. In a sense, this may even be hyper-individualistic in the sense of going far beyond what modern Christendom has come to emphasize: that while we as individuals have a very personal need to be saved, nonetheless, our salvation is also supposed to fit a universally formulaic pattern that can thus be used as a ratification of our tribal memberships. Or at least, that might be my simulacrum of modern institutional Christendom. I see MacDonald’s observation here as taking individualism to a higher level.
I have not been following this thread regularly but I recently came across a quote from Lewis that I like and wonder if I could ask here if anyone know the source?
“Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future… The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.”
Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future. Happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment “as to the Lord.” It is only our daily bread that we are encouraged to ask for. The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.
Makes me wonder what we non-anabaptists think those verses mean about being the Body of Christ made up of all those different parts with different abilities and functions. We have no justification for the type of individualism we practice in the church or for the kind of spiritual refugees we create because of our disobedience.
We occasionally recite something about the universal church. Are we (Protestants) just so obsessed, when we get to the word “catholic,” in making sure our brains comprehend that we’re NOT meaning RC that we completely bypass what the word DOES mean? Are we able to recognize that the Kingdom of God extends beyond “my pew” “my Bible study” “my local church” “my denomination” “my national church (dis)organization” “my generation” “my comfort zone(s)”?
Let me repeat MacDonald again:
We (individualists) need to look to MacDonald’s prayer for wisdom in asking for the help we need to live like we must, if we are going to live as the Body of Christ.
We cannot value or rely on other members of this Body that we see as simulacra. We simply cannot function properly, if we see every difference among us as a threat worthy of God’s judgement, rather than a further revelation of God.
While I do like nicely elucidated doctrinal statements, and am a naturally careful person who values “guardrails,” I undertand that they all miss important things, that I don’t see on my own.
Thanks for this, Mark.
I seem to be an oddity among my bretheren, in that I have read little of Lewis. Just haven’t gotten to him; “the weight of reading” (just what’s around my house and on my ereaders alone!). Overwhelming to think of.
I will never, ever be bored.
That rather puts the lie to the idea that Christianity is merely the signing on to this creed or the other. I wonder if it doesn’t also address what some (or all) ‘ex-Christians’ think Christianity is, and many or most nons.
Spurgeon would certainly sign on to that bit of MacDonald at least.
Not articulated exactly but I hope implicit is that the relationship is not merely a conceptual and academic understanding but an ‘experimental’ one – to again use his nineteenth century term for ‘experiential’, an experiential one, and requisitely so.
This text follows directly on the heels of and is continuous with the last posting.
(18) The Secrets in God
From this it follows that there is a chamber also–(O God, humble and accept my speech)–a chamber in God himself, into which none can enter but the one, the individual, the peculiar man,–out of which chamber that man has to bring revelation and strength for his brethren. This is that for which he was made–to reveal the secret things of the Father.
From the above it naturally follows (and indeed MacDonald does very much follow it there as I recall) that any single person’s knowledge of God must be hopelessly and always incomplete. The tiny fraction of all people that we intersect with in our own individual lives, much less have access to avail ourselves of what they might teach us, is an extremely small portion of all humanity.
Yet another humility for us, in the extreme. And yet - also an extreme personalized call on the importance of each of us. We each are given something of God to share that nobody else apart from us had access to! Try imagining the implications of that, as we variously embrace some or dismiss other crazies around us in life or in this very forum! We obviously don’t just take everything everybody says as of equal value - that would be impossible; but somehow we are called to acknowledge a Divine dignity in every person, perhaps deeply buried I suppose, but there nonetheless.
Yeah, Merv. All of that. When do Christians widely start taking the Body of Christ seriously and valuing it and their participation in it? I dunno; maybe it’s an American thing to take each other for granted and try to strip down the membership rolls of the Kingdom.
1 Corinthians 12:12–27
English Standard Version
For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit.
For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body.
The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable we bestow the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.
Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.
And
Ephesians 4:1-7
I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the #unity# of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call— one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift.
How can we reveal the secret things of the Father to each other, when we focus our energies on disunity, dissociation, discord within the Body of Christ? What sort of anti-apologetic do we practice by living this way?
Two: The book that won’t leave me alone, The End of Apologetics
If the modern epistemological paradigm is focused on the question, “Is it (belief about the world/reality) true and justified?” the hermeneutical paradigm I want to replace it with puts at the center of its inquiry the question, “Is it intelligible and meaningful?” The pressing issue is not solving an abstract set of theoretical problems but interpreting the symbols and texts of a received tradition in order to understand their meaning and significance in relation to a concrete set of problems and exigencies that we encounter. A hermeneutical approach is better construed in terms of the metaphors of conversation and dialogue, as opposed to the epistemological model of trial and debate. By definition, dialogue is bidirectional and other-centered; dominance and control are not compatible with it. To be sure, there will be arguments, logic, evidence, and so on that are crucial parts of the process of arriving at conclusions within interpretive traditions, but these are invitations for response from differing points of view rather than an attempt to foreclose on them. These alternate points of view that emerge through dialogue are not barriers to understanding but enable us to gain greater insight into the text (as well as ourselves, our world, and others) as we submit our interpretations to critical tests that are free and open to critique and response. The End of Apologetics by Myron B. Penner, pp. 68-69.
What have I not gained from listening to thoughtful people, who think differently from me, to whom God has made clear different things from me?
Well, certainly I have not gained more certainty. That seems like a small price in comparison to benefits of improved understanding and even friendship.
