Part of it @apartofit - Tumblr Blog

Posts

[According to the church fathers,] the heart of the Christian faith is not something simply conceptual; it is a fact, or even better, an action, the movement of the Son sent into the world for our sakes to draw us back to the Father.

Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery

When I was just out of college and working among the poor, a friend, an older and wiser chain-smoking Franciscan friar, commented on the intensity of my life and work at that time and said, “You don’t have the kind of prayer life and rhythms of contemplation to sustain the work you are doing.” He warned that I was going to burn out. I was surrounded by too much suffering to be able to subsist without more rest, more prayer, more quiet days, more solitude, more silence, more listening. He was right. Within a few years, I was spent.

Tish Harrison Warren

#lifeofprayer

Neil Gaiman’s story is the story of many in our disenchanted, disappointed era. In order to address them, we must learn, like Lewis, to speak to the imagination with a word that provokes longing and joy. “A story is a good way of gettin’ someone on your side,” the African deity Anansi (“Mr. Nancy”) says in American Gods. That’s not necessarily true. But a story is a good way to be heard, to speak to the psyche and the conscience, to subliminal hopes and fears. That’s why Lewis resonated with Gaiman—and with me. In the Narnia tales, Lewis had nothing to sell. He simply had a story that was itself embedded in a Story he had the confidence to believe was true. In an era when many suspect that religion—and the Christian religion in particular—is just a vehicle for political or economic power (and when many have, sadly, been given many reasons to think so), this sort of conscience-to-conscience truth-telling is necessary. That’s why the “hidden dragons” had to be sneaked past. In the Christianized West, the gospel story has too often been presented as a means to an end—to moral behavior or to patriotism or to a place among the “normal people” of the culture. That is a Screwtape religion, not a Narnian one. When the gospel message is heard in unexpected places, in unexpected ways, one can hear something that is far from “normal,” far from a means to some earthly end. Gaiman may have resented Lewis’s “hidden agenda” when he discovered it; many do. But how liberating it is to find out that Lewis’s hidden agenda is actually the agenda—there is no agenda behind it. Lewis had found Joy, had found Aslan’s country, and simply said to the reader, “Come and see.” The old gods disappoint, and the new ones do, too. But there’s another Story yet. The work of Neil Gaiman is one more reminder that however transcendence-averse modern cerebra might be, the message has not reached the modern imagination. Even in the sterilized secularity of the West, there are yet signposts in a strange land. There are yet intimations of interest in something, or someone, just out of reach, even when those intimations are safely hidden away in science fiction or fantasy. Christians should take note. Perhaps the way to speak to a transcendence-starved West might include not only a cathedral liturgy or a revival tent, but also, even still, a lion, a witch, and a doorway, just where one least expects it, to Narnia.

Russell Moore, Watchful Dragons

#narnia #fantasy #truemyth #cslewis

At some level, Gaiman wants there to be a plot to the universe, and perhaps to his own life. And at some level, he seems to fear what is left if there is not. “Ask me with a gun to my head if I believe in them, all the gods and myths that I write about, and I’d have to say no. Not literally,” he writes. “Not in the daylight, nor in well-lighted places, with people about” (Cheap Seats, p. 63). Of course, Gaiman will not always be in well-lighted places; none of us will. The question is whether there is something, or Someone, waiting for us in the dark—someone who has placed for us what Lewis and Walker Percy call “signposts” along the way, in our stories, in our histories, in our life-plots.

Russell Moore, Watchful Dragons

[Satan] is superhuman, but not divine; has great power, but is not omnipotent; wields influence on a large but restricted scale, and is destined to be cast into the bottomless pit.

Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology

As for the discord and strife that we say exists between Satan and God, we ought to accept as a fixed certainty the fact that he can do nothing unless God wills and assents to it…Therefore Satan is clearly under God’s power, and is so ruled by his bidding as to be compelled to render him service…By [Satan’s] wickedness he is urged on to attempt courses of action which he believes to be most hostile to God. But because with the bridle of his power God holds him bound and restrained, he carries out only those things which have been divinely permitted to him; and so he obeys his Creator, whether he will or not, because he is compelled to yield him service wherever God impels him.

John Calvin, Institutes of Christian Religion

The Reformation, especially its Calvinistic branch, brought about a significant change in belief in the devil. Going back to Scripture and not going beyond it, confessing the absolute sovereignty of God, it could not view Satan and his angels, however powerful, as anything other than creatures who without God’s will cannot so much as move. The Reformation, let it be said, was not rationalistic. It maintained that there are evil spirits who exert an inward influence on people, especially on their imagination, and can even degrade them into their instruments. The power of Satan over humanity, however, is always subject to God’s providence. It is primarily ethical in character and has its origin in sin. It is, moreover, restricted within narrow bounds. God, not Satan, is the Creator of light and darkness, good and evil. Sickness and death are sent to us by him (Is. 45:7)…Our life, and the end of our life, is not in Satan’s hand but in God’s…moreover, Satan cannot create and produce something out of nothing, nor can he as incubus or succubus bring forth children; he cannot change humans into animals, kill, or bring back to life. He cannot immediately exert influence on the human intellect and will not alter the substance or quality of things, and so on.

Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics

What we see in Satan is the horrible co-existence of a subtle and incessant intellectual activity with an incapacity to understand anything. This doom he has brought upon himself; in order to avoid seeing one thing he has, almost voluntarily, incapacitated himself from seeing at all. And thus, throughout the poem, all his torments come, in a sense, at his own bidding, and the Divine judgement might have been expressed in the words 'thy will be done'. He says 'Evil be thou my good' (which includes 'Nonsense be thou my sense') and his prayer is granted.