Paul picks up the promise attached to the commandment to children about honouring their mother and father and applies it, not to the land, but to the whole earth. The land is blessed where there are good families and father son/daughter relationships.
'This is not just another book on the family. Larger issues are at play, and ultimately we are talking about the reformation of a mere Christendom.On the need to become a Christian in order to build a family and to pursue Christ before we pursue family retreats and fatherhood:
A man's wife received far more love when she is number two after God than she would if she were number one. A man's children will be fathered diligently when they are loved in the context of a much greater love.
On the interconnectedness of the generations. He describes us as gathering round periods in time (like the 80s) rather like gathering around ponds and staring into them until it's time we move on:
But scripture teaches us that all our generations are connected to one another - humanity is more like a river than a series of ponds. Of course a river changes course, narrows and widens and bends in ways that make it impossible to see upstream or downstream very far. But it is a river nonetheless, and everything upstream affects us now, just as everything we are doing will affect those downstream from us.
To take a very simple example, why do we have sixty seconds in a minute ad sixty minutes in an hour? Why are there 360 degrees in a circl? The answer is that the ancient Sumarians, the first literate culture that we have artifacts from, had a numerical system that operated on a bse-60 level, unlike ours, which is base-10. That is along way upstream, but every time you look at your watch, you are paying silent homage to some stargazer named Iphur-kishi. Or perhaps it was a bean counter named Zababa-il.
Chapter 3: A Culture of Absenteeism
Father hunger is one of the central illnesses of our time, and when there is widespread hunger like this, it is obviously a manifestation of a shortage.Fatherlessness:
We live in fatherless times. We have the obvious problem of fatherlessness when the fathers are long gone, but we also have the problem of fatherlessness when the fathers are present but not accounted for. If fathers are on the premises but don't know what is expected of them, we have another kind of fatherlessnessIt was prophesied that John would come and turn the hearts of the Fathers to their children and the children to their Fathers. How did he do this?
Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.Repentance for the kingdom involves us living for the king and within the kingdom. Our hearts pursue and worship Love himself and in turn we're able to build the kinds of homes where the children love the fathers and the fathers love the children.
We must seek to be Christians first before we can be parents or brothers or sisters:
A man's wife receives far more love when she is number two after God than she would if she were number one. A man's children will be fathered diligently when they are loved in the context of a much greater love.Fathers leave or Fathers detach.
Seeking first God's kingdom a man receives authority from God. Two kinds of authority:
Institutional/positional/office & spiritual.
The authority of office is like having the right chequebook with you. That is your name in the upper left-hand corner. It is your address, your account number. You are the authorises signatory on the account. The other kind of authority is like having money in the bank.Jesus says to pray that the Father's kingdom would come not 'go'.
We are praying that the Father's will would be done on earth the same way it is done in Heaven.Engine and clutch:
Worship is the engine but sooner or later if we're to move down the road we need to let out the clutch.In other words our worship needs to engage our life.
Fathers are more influential that they realise. On being a father:
The Father stoops an infinite distance and requires us to call ourselves by the same name that he bears in infinite glory.On the honour of sharing that name: It reminds me of the place in the LionW&W when Aslan brings the statues back to life, including a lion, and then later refers to 'us lions':
The most pleased of the lot was the other lion, who kept running about everywhere pretending to be very busy but really in order to say to everyone he met, 'Did you hear what he said? Us Lions. That means him and me. Us lions, That's what I like about Aslan. No side, no stand-off-ishness. Us lions. That meant him and me.' At least he went on saying this till Aslan had loaded him up with three dwarfs, one Dryad, two rabbits, and a hedgehog. That steadied him a bit.God the Father calls us fathers as well, but then he steadies us up a bit with a challenging job, a wife, four kids, a quarter of an acre with some tough spots for mowing and a mortgage.
if a man lives his life without reference to the kingdom of God, regardless of how conservative and traditional his family values might be, he is only breaking eggs and not making omelets.on the importance of getting our 'loves' in the right order:
A man's wife receives far more love when she is number two after God than she would if she were number one. A man's children will be fathered diligently when they are loved in the context of a much greater love.The two kinds of authority:
These are, therefore the two kinds of authority. One is the authority of office, which can be obtained in all sorts of ways. The other kind of authority is the kind that flows to the person who takes responsibility. This is spiritual authority - the kind of authority that flowers when there has been death and resurrection.
Good illustration on the two authorities:
The authority of office is like having the right chequebook with you. That is your name in the upper left-hand corner. It is your address, your account number. You are the authorised signatory on the account. The other kind of authority is like having money in the bank.On the belief and role of men in the home:
In their families, men are much more important, crucial and influential than they believe themselves to be. It is the easiest thing in the world for a man to grow up, get married, have kids and still think of himself the way he did when he was a boy... He believes that he is just one more person living in this household - just one more of the roommates.On the title of 'father' for us men:
The Father stoops an infinite distance and requires us to call ourselves by the same name the he bears in infinite glory.The Lord's prayer and Fathers:
Words of reassurance, offered or withheld, are monumental in a child's growth. Words of encouragement, or exhortation, or patient teaching, are the same. When a child has grown up under the devastation of unremitting harshness, or the devastation of neglect, the one thing a father may not say is that it 'was not that big a deal.' Of course it was a big deal. The child is (hopefully) going to the praying the Lord's Prayer for the rest of his life. What will naturally, readily, come to mind whenever he starts, whenever he says 'Our Father...'? What does that mean to him in his bones, and who taught it to him?Fathers whether they recognise it or not are behaving in a way that will shape their children's understanding of what it means to be a father, and that understanding will occupy a central place in their lives.
Are you their protector, or the principal thing they need protection from? Are you the provider or the main impediment to provision? Are you the driving engine of joy in your household? Or the central reason for depression and sorrow? 'But the main threat against which a man must protect his wife is his own sin.' The same thing goes for everyone else living in that home. He must protect them all, not only from outside threats, but also from a delinquent protector - himself.'How can I be a model [father] when I have had no model?'
Chapter on masculinity false and true:
Spiritual realities start in the heart but if they never make it out, then they are still born.Honour needs to be expressed otherwise it is dishonour.
Theology comes out your fingertips and whatever it is that comes out your finger tips is your theology.Feminism and modern liberation ideas have poured scorn in recent years on male chivalry. Why shouldn't a woman pay for her own meal? they ask, or they say 'I can open my own door, thank you.' Doug Wilson comments on this. When men 'get the door' they're doing much more than helping a woman out. It is in fact about honour, men honouring that woman in particular and women everywhere in general:
His central role is the liturgical act of saying that women everywhere should be held in honour by men, and that he adds his amen to this, as everyone in the parking lot at Costco can now see.Gilder says:
Masculinity is treated like sex in Victorian England: a fact of life that society largely condemns and tries to suppress and that intellectuals deny.What masculinity isn't:
Masculinity does not mean talking out the side of your mouth. It doesn't mean swagger, or machismo, or a swaggering machismo. It does not mean bluster or bravado, or wearing wife-beaters. It does not mean brittle egos or cinder blocks for brains... On the opposite side, neither does it mean getting in touch with your inner little girl. It does not simper and lisp. Masculinity is not metrosexual.God as masculine but not male:
God the Father is Spirit and one of the characteristics of spirits is that they don't have biological anything, and this would mean (it would seem to follow) that they don't have biological sex. This means that his [Gods] masculinity is not a function of him being male. God the Father is not male but he is still ultimately masculine.C.S. Lewis on why it is that we should address God in the male pronouns he's given us:
Since God is in fact not a biological being and has no sex, what can it matter whether we say He or She, Father or Mother, Son or Daughter? But Christians think that God himself has taught us how to speak of himself.In Eph. 3:15 '...every family' is literally 'pasa patria' patria being 'fatherhood'. Families are really 'fatherhoods'.
God has taught us that fathers and husbands are reflectors, in some way, of his masculinity. Men are not the source of this, but they are to be specified carriers of it...
Our response to this should be that our males down here are only a dim, flickering image of what true masculinity is.So what IS masculinity?
Simply put masculinity is the glad assumption of sacrificial responsibility. A man who assumes responsibility is learning masculinity, and a culture that encourages men to take responsibility is a culture that is a friend of masculinity.On headship. Wilson points out that when Paul says 'the head of Christ is God' he is not saying 'God is male and Christ female', or when he says 'the head of the husband is Christ' he is not saying that husbands are female in Christ's eyes. Thus doing away with the notion that headship is to do with gender. Men are not the head of women. Husbands are, however, the head of wife but not (as we have seen) on the basis of their gender:
These categories of headship and submission do show up in the relations between husbands and wives, but they are clearly not bounded by or defined by sex...
...Headship is tied to masculinity but not automatically to maleness. When a meal is a husband or father, he is summoned to the masculine role, and he has been equipped for it.On the notion of sacrificial responsibility:
Biblical authority knows how to bleed for others.Boys and men need to be taught what true masculinity is. It is not something that they can learn simply by looking in at themselves since all men look for their status and identity in something that is outside of themselves. This is different from most women whose bodies and frame and mind seem much more equipped at teaching them about what femininity is. They are, after all, life carriers which gives them a rather big clue to what it means to be truly feminine:
Masculinity is not something a man can discover by looking at his own physiology, or at his yearning desire for sex and supper, most preferably for free... masculinity has to do with performance, whether on the mountain peaks, on battlefields, or as a lover, which explains a lot of male anxieties.Chapter on atheism: 'Atheism starts at home' (which is a great title in itself)
Atheism and the changing image of God presented in the history of the west. How we got to where we are with militant atheism or antitheism as some call it:
So first there was the Father of Jesus Christ, Giver of the Holy Spirit. Then there was the Unitarian clockmaker God, who still watches his clock, and who was willing to do repairs from time to time. Then there was the god of the Deists, one who initially made the clock, wound it up, and then left, leaving no forwarding address. After he had been hone awhile it was decided by general (very scientific) consensus that clocks can assemble themselves, and who needed a clockmaker anyway? This was the advent of modern atheism, a 'scientific' and 'rational' atheism. But after a few generations of that, we are now teetering on the edge of postmodern atheism - one that denies any ultimate clockmaker the right to manufacture any meta-narrative whatsoever... in other words, we drifted away from God. Each stage of that drift was marked by a distortion of what he had revealed about himself.The famous Nietzsche quote in full is well worth reading it seems. It says a lot more than the pithy line that's quoted most often:
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonements, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?A multifaceted atheism:
There are two tenets of modern atheism. The first is that the atheist says there is no God, and the second is that the atheist hates him.He also records C.S. Lewis' description of his own atheism prior to conversion:
I was at this time living, like so many Atheists or Antitheists, in a whirl of contradictions. I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was equally angry with him for creating a world.He also points out, quite brilliantly I think that all this reason rise of popular atheism 'is not a realisation of reasons; it is simply rebellion.'
Fathers as a theology lesson:
A two-year-old boy shaking the crib at 3:30am is studying what fatherhood is like.
Fathers are speaking about God constantly, they do not have the option of shutting up. I loved this quote:
A father who just sits and stares, a father who is down at the office all the time, a father who deserts the family, a father who just donated sperm at the sperm bank - all of them are speaking. Every one of them is saying something all the time. A father who teaches his son to swing a bat, a father who listens to his daughter explain why Peter Rabbit shouldn't have disobeyed, a father who kisses their mum on the lips, a father who reads for hours to the family in the evening - all of them are speaking too.A father teaching his son about God and confronting the atheism is his own son's heart caused by the fall. An atheists vision of God is conditioned by their own anti-theism against God:
We pray, 'Dear heavenly Father...' But the atheist replies that all totalitarian states do the 'Dear Leader' thing. We say that God provides for us. The atheist comes back with the observation that this is just what the overweening state does - cradle-to-grave-security. We say that God hears all our prayers, even the faintest whisper. The atheists answers that Big Brother had a pretty effective surveillance system too. The only thing our religion doesn't share with totalitarianism would be the goose-stepping and the big missile parades.Other one liners:
Gratitude declares the meaning of fatherhood like little else.
We don't know what the future holds, but we do know who holds the future.
In order to guard our children from the unbelief of atheism, we need to be fathers who overflow with gratitude.And a great section on what God wants from us in these difficult times: #suffering
What does God want from us in the evil day? What does God want from us when the culture i disintegrating around us? He doesn't want us coping with cocaine, Central American herbs, prescription pick me up, or the soporific of an endless chain of stupid movies. Neither Huxley's soma nor feelies will do for us.Chapter 6: The education axle
No, the days are evil, so what must we do? We must be filled with the Spirit, and we must sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs because out hearts are full of music. We must render thanks to God the Father in the name of Jesus Christ.
Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. -- Ephesians 6:4Those words 'discipline and instruction' was, for the ancients, an all-encompassing process designed to accomplish the successful enculturation of future citizens. It's a word more like 'democracy' than 'chair' in its broad and loaded implications. It covers a lot of ground in just that one word and our word 'education' is too narrow in understanding it.
If 'paideia' (the word translated above as discipline and instruction) involves a broad enculturation. Then a paideia of the Lord requires a Christian enculturation.
The four spokes of the worldview wheel: or how we enculturate our kids
Taking the image of Christ as the axle, imagine for a moment that a worldview has four spokes - a worldview wheel. Two of the spokes are propositional, and two of them are enacted. All of them must be attached to the axle, who is Christ. The two propositional spokes are catechesis and narrative and the two enacted spokes are lifestyle and symbolism/ritual.So 2 categories each with 2 approaches:
1) Propositional (instructional)
Catechesis (lessons). This has to do with how you teach your children to answer the question 'what do you believe?' The (propositional) response to that question is to say 'I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, and in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord...'
Narrative (stories). This answers the questions, 'who are your people and how did you get here? Where are you going?' Narrative creates a timeline for the students, with an X on the timeline that says, 'You are here.' This is where we came from, this is where we are, and here is the direction we are going.2) Enacted
Lifestyle has to do with your day-to-day customs - how and why you brush your teeth, what your dietary practises are, how you dress, whether or not you are a big techie, and so on. Included here would also be the virtues engednered by the Holy Spirit, directing how you do all these things. Are these things done with love, joy, peace, patience and the remaining fruit of the Spirit?
Symbolism/ritual is a nonverbal way of communicating some of the content of your worldview and your identification with it. Examples of this kind of thing would be crosses on the top of steeples, school uniforms, wedding rings, standing when a woman enters the room, and partaking of bread and wine in a worship service.In the secular world at the moment:
We can see how the secularist has all four elements functioning in his worldview. this is the way all worldviews function. He tells us that he believes in evolution and natural selection (catechesis). He tells us that our people used to live in medieval superstition until the Enlightenment showed us the way out of that darkness (narrative). He insists that men should be allowed to marry men (lifestyle). And he fights like the dickens to keep a Christmas creche from being set up at the country courthouse (symbolism).
Chapter 8: Escaping the pointy-haired boss
Luther: God himself milks the cows through the vocation of the milkmaid.
Chapter 14: Our Father
Theology undergirds everything. How we think of God the Father will drive how we think of all fathers.What is the Father for? Because we don't know what the Father is for we don't know what any father is for.
The Father works and also works as an example for his Son. The Father trusts his Son and turns tasks over to him. The Father seeks honour for his son. The Father ties his reputation together with the reputation of his Son.
This is a mine full of diamonds and it is hard to know how to carry them all out.
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