What Is Gluttony?
All sins are deadly: participating in the realm of death and leading to the place of death. What, then, is the healing medicine for gluttons by nature like you and me? It is not found in a new list of rules and restrictions, which “are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh” (Col. 2:23). Rather, it is to seek the fullness of life in the only place it resides: the fullness and super-abundance of Christ Jesus (Col. 2:9–10).
“Curiouser and curiouser” (from Alice in Wonderland) seems an apropos response to our culture’s relationship to food. At one polar end, there are eating competitions to assess who can down the most hot dogs or slices of pizza. At the other, there is a growing movement of the practice of intermittent and prolonged fasting, apart from the Christian practice of prayer and fasting.
In between overeating and not eating at all, there is evidence of moral weight assigned to dietary choices. Recipes are commended as “virtuous and simple,” and invitations are made to cook and consume foods in line with “nature’s self-organizing perfection.” Ethical vocabulary may be noticeably absent from other spheres, but not so in the context of our eateries. A pilgrim following in Apostolic footsteps may well conclude after watching all the cooking shows and reading the gastronomical magazines: “Modern Western denizens: I perceive you are very religious!”
Gluttony, biblically speaking, can be summed up as laboring “for the food that perishes” (John 6:27). It is not only found in over-consumption, but an idolatrous expectation that looks to eating and drinking to provide sating and fullness for the soul (the inner person). To be gluttonous, then, is to carry “broken cisterns that can hold no water” (Jer. 2:13). After all, food as a created reality is a gift, but not to be regarded as having the character or potency of the Creator and Giver (cf. James 1:17).
To be sure, gluttony is to be distinguished from proper feasting. The calendar of the old covenant church was punctuated by days of worship and feasting: “Keep your feasts, O Judah; fulfill your vows” (Nah. 1:15). The communion of saints following the day of Pentecost included “receiv[ing] their food with glad and generous hearts” (Acts 2:46). A Christian abiding in Christ, who has the Spirit-given fruit of self-control, thus should be able to enjoy daily bread and feast in the presence of God. But believers must also be on guard, lest anxiety over what to eat or laying hold of edible goods as holding supernatural power enter into the equation of their lives (see Luke 12:22; 1 Cor. 8:8).
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No Mere Exemplar: Christ as the Object of Christian Faith in Chapter 5 of Christianity and Liberalism (Part 1)
The true joy of embracing the truth far exceeds the comfort derived from the accolades of men, both in this age and in the age to come. It is for this reason that Machen spoke, taught, and wrote with such clarity in defense of orthodoxy for the love and glory of Jesus, the only legitimate object of saving faith. Like Machen in the twentieth century and like Peter in the first century, may Christians today confess with sincere faith that “Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matt 16:16) contending earnestly for “the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3).
In Matthew 16:13–17 Jesus asked his closest followers two questions of enduring significance. (1) “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” (v. 13) and (2) “Who do you say that I am?” (v. 15). The first of these questions was answered with a variety of opinions from mistaken but admiring crowds. “Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others say Jeremiah or one of the prophets” (v. 14). Of course, there were others answering the question in Jesus’s own day who were not so admiring. Many accused him of blasphemy (Matt. 9:3), demon possession (John 7:20), and even of occultic demon manipulation (Matt. 12:24). Whether generally friendly or openly hostile, the variety of public opinions about Jesus of Nazareth all fell woefully short of the truth. Each opinion was the product of the reasoning faculties of Jesus’s contemporaries aided by the faulty presuppositions of their experience and worldview and not the result of divine revelation. When the Lord Jesus himself pressed the question personally to the disciples, it was Peter who spoke the truth about Jesus: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (v. 16). This answer, the true confession, was not the result of Peter’s reasoning faculties nor the natural outworking of his presuppositions. The truth of this conclusion was grounded in the fact that it was divinely revealed: “Blessed are you, Simon bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood did not reveal this to you but my Father who is in heaven” (v. 17).
In his enduringly relevant classic, Christianity and Liberalism, J. Gresham Machen argues convincingly that the theological commitments of liberalism amount to a fundamentally different religion than Christianity.[1] Nowhere is this fact more clearly illustrated than in the comparison between liberalism’s doctrine of the person of Jesus Christ as compared to that of orthodox Christianity. As the Enlightenment ran its course in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, some philosophers and biblical scholars had taken an openly hostile view of Jesus, regarding him as a false prophet with a deluded mind or an egotistical agenda (e. g., H. S. Reimarus and L. Feuerbach).
Others, however, though fully committed to enlightenment methods and ideas, attempted to maintain a reverent view of Jesus. Friedrich Schleiermacher, for example, had argued that Jesus was the chief exemplar of a pure and unfettered God-consciousness, the experiential feeling of absolute dependence.[2] For American liberal theologian Walter Rauschenbusch, Jesus was both the greatest preacher and the most prolific actor with respect to radical social action, ushering in the kingdom of God by breaking the chains of systemic social sins and liberating those oppressed by the systems.[3] This was the species of enlightenment ideology embraced by the liberalism of Machen’s day.
Like those who hailed Jesus as John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, or one of the prophets, liberal preachers and theologians wished to maintain some reverence for Jesus as an exemplary figure, even as the first and quintessential Christian, but their rejection of the authority of divine revelation inevitably resulted in their failure to believe and confess the truth about Jesus as “the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Therefore, just as the religion of liberalism is altogether different than Christianity, so the Jesus revered by liberalism is an altogether different figure than the Jesus of the true Christian faith.
Machen’s treatment of the person of Christ is the subject of Chapter five of Christianity and Liberalism. Before considering the gospel message of salvation in Chapter six, Machen says, “We must consider the Person upon whom the message is based. And in their attitude toward Jesus, liberalism and Christianity are sharply opposed.”[4] Over the course of some thirty pages, Machen states, re-states, and defends the thesis that true Christianity regards Jesus of Nazareth as the object of faith while liberalism can, at best, regard him as the example of faith:
The modern liberal preacher reverences Jesus; he has the name of Jesus forever on his lips; he speaks of Jesus as the supreme revelation of God; he enters, or tries to enter, into the religious life of Jesus. But he does not stand in a religious relation to Jesus. Jesus for him is an example for faith, not the object of faith. The modern liberal tries to have faith in God like the faith which he supposes Jesus had in God; but he does not have faith in Jesus.[5]
In the remainder of Part 1 of this essay, I will summarize Machen’s trenchant critique of the liberal view of the person of Christ in four parts to set his argument forward as an example of the kind of courage, clarity, and winsomeness needed to “contend earnestly for the faith once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3). Part 2 of the essay will offer a summary of a few of the ideological challenges facing orthodox Christology today followed by a reminder from Machen of the unchanging truths of orthodox Christology, which function as the right answer to falsehood in every age.
1. The Jesus of History is the Christ of Faith
Machen’s critique of liberal Christology’s belief in Christ as a mere exemplar of Christian faith can be broken down into four distinct themes. First, liberal Christology is based entirely on a historical-critical methodology that posits a sharp dichotomy between the Christ of orthodox Christian faith and the Jesus of history. This dichotomy is usually traced back to the German scholar H. S. Reimarus, who sought to use the methods of historical-critical research to separate fact from fiction in the accounts of the actions and words of Jesus found in the canonical gospels. This undertaking, eagerly embraced by other enlightenment thinkers, would later come to be called “The Quest of the Historical Jesus.”[6] Fundamental to the quest was the philosophical argument that an ancient historical record cannot be trusted as fact since the truth of what is being claimed cannot be demonstrated in the present. If historical truth itself cannot be demonstrated, then nothing can be demonstrated from historical truths. Nothing universally binding, and certainly nothing supernatural, can be based in the claims of history, however true those claims may be. This idea is what G. E. Lessing called the “ugly broad ditch” that could not be crossed.[7]
Machen rehearses the claim of Lessing’s “ugly broad ditch,” observing that, “for modern liberalism, a supernatural person is never historical.” He notes that, for liberals, “The problem could be solved only by the separation of the natural from the supernatural in the New Testament account of Jesus, in order that what is supernatural might be rejected and what is natural might be retained.”[8]
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The Best Single-Volume Reformed Systematic Theology You’ve Never Heard Of
This devotional aspect is perhaps uncommon in systematic theologies, but it is characteristic of The Wonderful Works of God. Christian families should have some reference work or guide to help make sense of the Bible and theology and to consult when confronted by confusing or difficult matters. Many books provide answers that satisfy the mind; better still is the book that presses those answers into the heart to elicit worship and praise.
Following the watershed publication of his four-volume Reformed Dogmatics in English at the turn of this century, interest in Dutch Reformed theologian Herman Bavinck (1854–1921) has sharply increased. Indeed, it almost seems as though Bavinck’s destiny is to influence the 21st century far more than the 19th century, during which he wrote most of his dogmatic work. A steady stream of new translations and editions of his other works has emerged (e.g., Saved by Grace, Essays on Religion, Science, and Society, The Christian Family, On Preachers and Preaching, Philosophy of Revelation, Reformed Ethics, The Sacrifice of Praise, Christian Worldview).
But there is a book that has almost been forgotten in this flurry of interest and excitement. Translated by Henry Zylstra and originally published by Eerdmans in 1956 under the title Our Reasonable Faith, this single-volume systematic theology represents Bavinck’s own distillation of his four-volume magnum opus. Though available for more than half a century, it has remained fairly obscure outside the walls of Reformed seminaries.
The reasons for this obscurity are mysterious, for the book has a plausible claim of being the best single-volume Reformed systematic theology ever produced. It’s therefore welcome that Westminster Seminary Press has now restored the author’s title (Magnalia Dei, or The Wonderful Works of God), and re-released it in a format worthy of such a book.
Format
By “format” I mean that the volume itself is beautiful, from its richly textured dust cover, to the cloth cover beneath, to its high-quality Smyth-sewn paper. Annotations will resist bleeding through the paper, and the book will lay open on your desk. The aesthetics are impressive.
Inside one finds an attractive new typesetting for Zylstra’s translation, along with much more. Westminster Seminary professor R. Carlton Wynne helpfully introduces Bavinck and the book’s background, and Nathaniel Gray Sutanto translates for the first time Bavinck’s original foreword, which Zylstra had omitted.
Most helpful of all is a massive subject and Scripture index compiled by Charles Williams, which will enhance the book’s usefulness for students and researchers.
Content
As for the content, it is—as already mentioned—Bavinck’s own distillation of his four-volume Reformed Dogmatics into a single volume. But that is actually misleading: it’s not an abridgment of the four volumes. It is, rather, Bavinck’s fresh restatement of his dogmatic work for a lay audience. In 1910, one reviewer put it this way: “None but a learned man could have written this book, but he has hidden his tools.” Bavinck has put aside the kitchen equipment and delivered the meal.
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Divorce Wrecks Children’s Lives Too
Written by Erika J. Ahern |
Monday, October 31, 2022
We make a promise in marriage that offers unconditional love to one person and the children that come from that union: we say “you can place your happiness in my hands.” In that moment, both you and all your dependents are inextricably linked by your own choice until death. No amount of re-imagining your life will change the fact: you will never be fulfilled personally until you have fulfilled your vow. We don’t understand the vow when we make it, but it hangs in our hearts as an immovable lodestar.Just after Christmas 2021, Honor Jones, a senior editor at the Atlantic, published “How I Demolished My Life: A Home-Improvement Story.” It’s a self-portrait of a mother who, while wrangling with kitchen renovation plans, decides she doesn’t want a new kitchen.
She wants a divorce.
Jones spends the next three thousand perfectly manicured words trying to justify her decision to break up her family. She displays all the self-congratulatory bravado of middle-aged white women who read Henrik Ibsen’s Doll’s House or Oscar Wilde’s A Picture of Dorian Gray for a high school literature class and then imagine themselves forever in the role of Brave Protestor of Victorian Oppression.
Jones describes her marriage, which produced three children who are still young, as her cage. Her imperfect suburban home is, to her, an icon of her imprisonment.
She doesn’t like the “chaos” of her house and, even with the help of sensible Luba, her hired cleaning woman, she finds the lived-in quality of a home with children irksome.
“[T]he crumbs got me down. I sometimes felt that they were a metaphor, that as I got older I was being ground down under the heel of my own life. All I could do was settle into the carpet.”
So she tells her husband she’s divorcing him. She loves him, she really does. He gave her everything she’d asked for. But it wasn’t enough.
“I loved my husband; it’s not that I didn’t. But I felt that he was standing between me and the world, between me and myself.”
She seems to think she has now suddenly come to herself: only by breaking free and feeling “cold wind on my face” will she be herself again.
So they move their three children into a large apartment in New York City (the city is “better for our careers”). She and her husband alternate staying with the kids and camping out in a smaller, one-bedroom apartment that they can afford. She sells their Pennsylvania home, folds her husband’s sport coats for the last time, and ruminates on the deep mysteries of self-actualization.
Jones is a gifted writer. She applies all her considerable talent in the art of rhetoric, but only to showcase her utter failure in the art of self-knowledge.
All in all, she paints a vivid picture of what we might call a “good divorce.” She applies just the right measure of compunction and sincerity, as well as compassion for her children (whom she admits she’s deprived of their family).
The piece struck a nerve. It received pointed censure on the Atlantic’s Twitter feed and comment box, much of it along the lines of “you sad, pathetic, entitled woman” and “what about your children, you selfish pig.”
It’s unlikely a Twitter mob will ever change a heart or mind. And to be fair, we don’t know the real Honor Jones, who may be far more conflicted about her decision than the picture she has put forward. We can’t know what other factors in her life and marriage she has chosen not to share. The fact that such “brave,” “confessional” writing is encouraged, let alone celebrated as heroic and cathartic, tells us more about our society and its appetites than about the writer.
But the public response to the piece does get surprisingly close to the heart of the matter. Marriage was not the prison. Jones was terribly, tragically wrong, because her marriage was in fact her best means to finding herself. By jumping ship on her family, she abandoned the one vessel that could best carry her on her voyage of self-discovery: the life-long, exclusive commitment made in a marriage.
Self-knowledge is the key to the happy life. Greek philosophers inscribed the admonition “know thyself” over the entrance to the oracle at Delphi. Confucian and Daoist philosophers, in their distinct ways, call for self-awareness and self-cultivation.
We are a puzzle to ourselves, as Jones demonstrates. But she has swallowed the lie that only by breaking free of commitments and disappointments and the daily grind of life together will she find out who she really is. That daily grind is called “losing yourself,” and it hurts.
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