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A portion of a prayer from one who influenced me deeply:

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)

Coleridge’s problems did not only come from his laudanum addiction. Look at one of the poems we most obviously identify with the ill-understood effects of withdrawal, and see if you cannot see here in the beginning the reason Coleridge woke from sleep with terrors–or, rather, as those pangs were probably drug-related, why his reaction was a poem which ended with the plaintive “But wherefore, wherefore fall on me? / To be beloved is all I need, / And whom I love, I love indeed.”

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”? Read the rest of this entry »

Some years before he was my professor for Writers & Fundamentalisms and The Bible and Literary Theory, Dr. David Lyle Jeffrey warned us all:

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.”

In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.
Jesus, John 16:33

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face–for ever.
(spoken by O’Brien; Orwell, 1984)