Catholicity, Orthodoxy, and Lordship
The inimitable Doug Wilson writes:
Look. Christians who believe the Bible invented free societies. Secularists who worry about fundamentalist Christians sneaking in to spy out their liberties are like a prodigal son, buying drinks for the house, secretly worrying that his father will break into his room that night in order to steal all his money.
Douglas Wilson interacted with Christopher Hitches on a number of occasion leading ultimately to this documentary. Over at this blog in 2009 he spent some time adding to his interactions. Here is an example:
Christopher said somewhere that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. This is quite true, but Christopher misses the point of it. He thinks the resurrection is the extraordinary claim, when actually it is the extraordinary proof. You should not listen to a man who claims to be God (the extraordinary claim) unless He does something like come back from the dead. The resurrection is God’s declaration that Jesus is the Son of God (Rom. 1:4), and when we preach the resurrection, as we are charged to do, we are preaching the proof, not something that needs to be proven. God adds to the proof by anointing all such faithful preaching with His power, testifying to the testimony. It is the power of the Spirit that will convert the world by this means.
Greg Strawbridge interviews Douglas Wilson on several pertinent matters concerning classical education. In this interview they discuss how the resurgence of the Christian Classical Education Movement can avoid the syncretism of past classical educational models. Wilson argues that the response to syncretism in classical education is a commitment to the Scriptures in all areas of life. This is a fine interview and I encourage all of you interested in Christian classical education to listen to it.
My friend Rob Hadding found this gem from Doug:
How are we to understand the “conversion” of our children to God? We know they are, like us, descendants of Adam and therefore by nature under the wrath of God. Yet under the grace of God, they were born into covenant homes and are being raised in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. By nature they are from Adam, by grace they are from the second Adam.
Parents need to guard against two errors here, the first of which is very common in evangelical homes. That error places the burden of proof on the child who has to show that he is “really in.” The other error presumptively maintains that any baptized child is “really in,” regardless of flaming evidence to the contrary. As children grow up in Christian homes, they are to be taught faith, not presumption. They are to be taught faith, not doubts. And the only way this balance can be maintained is through…faith.
The duty of Christian parents is to bring their children up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. This means, at the fundamental level, a central duty of parents is to teach their children to believe God. Unfortunately, many parents in the name of “higher spiritual standards” wind up teaching their children to doubt instead.
Let’s say a small child comes up to his father or mother and says something along the lines of “I love Jesus.” If the response is anything like, “Child, do you know what you are saying?” or “You’re too young to know what you are saying,” the child goes away having learned to doubt. “I thought I loved Jesus, but apparently I don’t. I must learn to be more suspicious of myself.” It doesn’t take too much of this before a child might be chased away from faith altogether.
– Douglas Wilson, My Life for Yours, p. 115-116
Doug Wilson’s article on the Washington Post is terrificly rich and risky. Read it.
The Incarnation of the Word, and the resurrection of that Word from the dead, has entirely remade the world. We fail to recognize this because we don’t understand history—and the way the world actually was before Christ came into it. But humanity lived through a long night indeed, and when Christ came, the sun rose. Men still sin, but the sun is up. We can still have cloudy days, and even storms, but the sun is up—and cannot be made to ever go down.–Douglas Wilson
… in order to reject these unacceptable dualisms, we must insist upon a biblical and absolutely necessary dualism — the antithesis between faith and unbelief, the antithesis between the heart that has been born again and the heart that has not been. This is because unbelief is the font of all the other problems. To therefore blur the distinction between the unconverted heart (whether within the covenant or outside it) is necessarily to enshrine a host of other hopeless dualism in the practice of the Church. It is to put death in the pot.
So this is why we have unbelieving dualisms streaming from today’s pulpits. This is why we have dualism in our baptismal practices. This is why dualism and confusion abound in wedding ceremonies. This is why we cannot be brought to admit that Jesus Christ is Lord over all pluralist societies. This is why we think the Old Testament and New Testament are strangers to one another.
So get this straight — the children of light should be overflowing with thanksgiving because the wrath of God is coming…Read the Rest
