The Ferry

I kneel and bow and pray you come with me,
And we will dance beneath these scattered lights,
Concealed for days by dawn’s diviner rites,
Until each night unseals our wait and see.
Dance with me as I ask on bended knee:
Awash in ocean’s orchestrated nights,
Afloat in inky blackness that indicts
Another reason, no, another plea.
You must remember, we are parasites
Until we pray or prey, receiving all
We take for given, or mistaken call
Our contributions to these passing sights.
Some thing eternal feeds us, and we thrive,
Rejoicing through this passage none survive.

PGE 6-27-2008

All knowing is adversely affected by the fall, yet people can—under the right conditions—attain reasonable beliefs on the things that matter most.

(Doug Groothuis, “The Christian Worldview in Classical Philosophical Categories“)

True enough. But “the right conditions” remain critical, and open to interpretation in lieu of an eschatological realization: crucial, a crux not merely of interpretation.

OK, so there’s something reflexive about this. At my other blog, I posted for those interested in watching the videos.

This is theory, or something like it.
(more…)

Give us that which, our heavenly Father, Wesley really understood, and Finney, the evangelist that most people know in this country and Whitefield and many of the others. A call for the individual to accept Christ as Savior and come under the shed blood of Christ and pass from death to life. A call for those of us who are Christians, oh God, to bow our hearts more completely and not let other things get in the way — to let the Holy Spirit have His place under the teaching of Scripture and within the circle of the teaching of Scripture, and then, Heavenly Father, to realize that everything belongs to the Lord Jesus. That He died not only to take our souls to heaven — but that our bodies will be raised one day from the dead.

(Francis Schaeffer, A Christian Manifesto)

His problem was hard enough; his efforts to compose himself, however, were seriously defective:

Ere on my bed my limbs I lay,
It hath not been my use to pray
With moving lips or bended knees ;
But silently, by slow degrees,
My spirit I to Love compose,
In humble trust mine eye-lids close,
With reverential resignation,
No wish conceived, no thought exprest,
Only a sense of supplication ;
A sense o’er all my soul imprest
That I am weak, yet not unblest,
Since in me, round me, every where
Eternal Strength and Wisdom are.

(Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Pains of Sleep“)

“My spirit I to Love compose.” The “I” that is mine, the “spirit I” and not the gross one, the one that may be “compose[d]” by the efforts of the Imagination, “composed” by such efforts “to Love” as the concord of Will (which directs the Imagination) and Reason (which Coleridge cannot but identify with the Spirit speaking within “My spirit”) called Faith (conducing always to Love wholly thus defined), a concord identical with the indifference among “in me” and “round me” and “every where” that the “Eternal Strength and Wisdom” perdure in being. . . .

Yet do we not decompose when we see such action to “compose”? (more…)

The seventeenth century–no less than the second century or the twentieth century–abounds in examples of would-be faithful Christians who, lacking the sound hermeneutical basis which comes from apprenticeship to the historic understanding of the faith, combine a very high view of the Bible with extremely naive views of language, text, and (consciously or unconsciously) self-justifying motivations in the individual reader. The results in any time of this kind of epistemological cocktail include a free-wheeling entrepreneurial reading of the Bible–perilous at best, self-serving and, often enough, finally tyrannous at worst. In our own era it has certainly led to widespread confusion of Christianity with “the American way of life.”

Getting the Drift

Today I find my world in banking snow,
Accounting for this winter’s days, the cold
Within my heart, and costs still left untold
Until I settle down with one I owe.
In silent drifts I heap up all I know,
Accumulating here like Fafnir’s gold,
Sole hoard of things I’ve bought that never sold,
Investment in this winter’s window show.
In unrelenting ardor I confess
My love for silver moonlight and the days
Twice brightened, cloud and snowbank, and the haze
That spreads through world and mind at my address
To one who hears these secrets with a smile:
Who longs for spring, yet stays to talk a while.

PGE 2-6-2008