More gems from Augustine’s City of God:
“…each man, like a letter in a word, is an integral part of a city or of a kingdom, however extensive.”
“In the absence of justice, what is sovereignty but organized brigandage?”
From Book IV, Chapters 3 and 4.
It’s been a long time since I read any of St. Augustine’s monumental City of God. I recently decided to pick it up again. What incredible brilliance! It’s hard to believe that something written in the Fifth Century can remain so erudite and fresh. Of course, most modern readers won’t always agree with Augustine, but many of his arguments apply as well today as they did 1500 years ago. There really is nothing new under the Sun. As I read through the City of God, I’ll post about the gems I find there. So here is the first one:
I’m working on a new song inspired in part by C.S. Lewis’ book “The Great Divorce.” It’s called Shadowlands. The song title is a link to the MP3 file, which is a very, very rough demo with just some acoustic guitar and guide vocal. I still need at least one more verse. Here are the lyrics so far:
I walked the dusty streets
Of this Shadowland
I held these broken stones
In my own two hands
It seemed so real to me
When I made my stand
In this Shadowland
The houses on the hill
are dark today
the famous and the strong
the cowards and the brave
they found their way out here
and passed away
In this Shadowland
[chorus]In the Shadowland
They don’t remember what you’ve done
In the Shadowland
It doesn’t matter where you’re from
Everybody ends up here
In this Shadowland
Last night my wife and I actually got to see a first-run movie! Hee-hah! We decided to see the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line. I love musician biopics. They give musicians like me hope that someone might remember our music, even if us wannabes don’t have the talent to create anything that will really last.
If you aren’t familiar with Cash’s genious for songwriting, Walk the Line will provide a taste of why he is such an icon. You can’t beat lyrics like this, from Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues”:
When I was just a baby,
My Mama told me, “Son,
Always be a good boy,
Don’t ever play with guns,”
But I shot a man in Reno,
Just to watch him die,
When I hear that whistle blowin’,
I hang my head and cry.
Add Cash’s rumbling bass voice and some slapback Telecaster guitar to the mix, and you have a song that that speaks to people’s souls. “Walk the Line” brilliantly shows how Cash the songwriter and performer, along with his eventual wife June Carter, bottled this sort of magic.
The film doesn’t shy away from Cash’s struggles with drug addiction or his infedility to his first wife, nor does it glamorize them. It’s refreshing to see a film acknowledge that drug and alcohol abuse, and sexual infidelity, have life-destroying consquences.
In real life, Cash never fully overcame these demons, but he did find redemption through his faith in Christ (see this CT article for more on Cash’s faith). And this is where the film is most disappointing. In typical Hollywood fashion, the Cash we see on screen finds redemption through “believing in himself” and through romantic love.
For example, the film portrays Cash’s audition for Sun Records owner Sam Phillips, which Cash began by singing gospel tunes. Phillips wasn’t interested in the gospel tunes, which were derivative and commercially unappealing, but Cash persisted, pulled out “Folsom Prison Blues,” and Phillips perceived the spark of genious. This is a true story, but in the film it’s embellished with a contemporary pop psychology platitude uttered by Phillips: “it’s not about believing in God,” he tells Cash, after rejecting the gospel tunes, “it’s about believing in yourself.” I doubt the real Johnny Cash would agree. I think the real Johnny Cash would be the first to say that his ability to accept himself, and to truly love, followed the redemption he found in Christ.
The film’s other great cliche is that romantic love conquers all, and justifies everything. Cash was married with four children when he fell for June Carter, and Carter was married with children as well. To the film’s credit, it shows Carter resisting Cash’s advances early on their relationship. It seems that, in real life, Cash and Carter eventually developed a solid marriage. Yet, the film seems a bit too dismissive of Cash’s first wife, as though the love Cash and Carter eventually come to share washes away the sins of infidelity and divorce. Again, I think the real Johnny Cash would be the first to say that his earlier conduct was not made acceptable by the love he eventually found with Carter.
“Walk the Line,” then, is fascinating for its moments of stark honesty, its window on an important time in contemporary music history, and its grafting of our cultural worldview’s mixture of self-reliance and romantic love onto a story of true redemption.
I heard a challenging sermon this weekend on the Christian’s relationship to “the world.” It was on the whole a well-balanced sermon, but it was particularly challenging to me because of the baggage I brought to it. I grew up, until my teen years, in a German Bretheren church that emphasized a retreat from “worldliness.” My emotional baggage about what constitutes “the world” is therefore heavy.
Ecclesiastes 7:2 tells us
It is better to go to a house of mourning
than to go to a house of feasting,
for death is the destiny of every man;
the living should take this to heart.
Last week my friend Jeff at The Dawn Treader posted the horrible news that a friend of his — Clete, a sixteen-year-old young man, the son of his former pastor — was killed by a drunk driver. Today Jeff posts about Clete’s funeral. I encourage you to visit that house of mourning. You’ll see there the story of someone in whom the love of Christ overflowed, in simple things like bear hugs. You’ll see what really matters most in life.
I didn’t know Clete or his family at all, and I know Jeff only from our blogging interactions and a few emails and Skype calls. But I’m profoundly grateful today for Jeff’s generosity in sharing Clete’s story. My heart is broken for the tragedy that has visited Clete’s family and friends, my brothers and sisters in Christ, but my faith and sense of purpose have been refreshed by the story of this yound man’s life. May my epitath be as profound.
Rich Garnett at Mirror of Justice raises an interesting question about whether the Church should adopt the principles of the free software movement. Rick’s entry refers to an article suggesting that the ideals of the free software movement are consistent with Catholic social teaching regarding the dissemination of information, and that the Church should publish its electronic materials in non-proprietary formats.
This morning I punished my 7-year-old son for something. The punishment was that after school he was to go to bed until dinner time. My wife later called me at work after she and the kids had finished dinner. It seems my son had done homework downstairs before dinner, and is now claiming that he is no longer punished because the punishment specified confinement “before dinner” and it is now “after dinner.” Ok, he didn’t say the “specified confinement part,” but it was a pretty good lawyerly agrument nonetheless.
My friend Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost raises some interesting questions about whether Christians, Jews and Muslims worship the same God. Joe’s answer, in short, is that we do not worship the same God because of Christianity’s triune understanding of God and specifically because of our belief in the divinity of Christ. I’ve heard this argument periodically bandied about in Evangelical circles.
I don’t buy this line of argument. I think it mixes who God actually is (ontology) with what we know and believe about Him (epistemology) and what sort of belief in Him results in salvation (soteriology).
God is no less God, as an ontological being, if our understanding and knowledge of Him is imperfect. If we follow this line of reasoning all the way, no one would truly be worshipping God unless the worshipper has a perfect knowledge of God. Since no one can claim a perfect knowledge of God, we’d all be excluded as worshipers.
We certainly can cite many passages in the New Testament that speak of salvation being made available only in Christ. Clearly, the New Testament scripture teaches that saving faith is only faith in Christ; no one is saved apart from Christ; no one who rejects the divinity of Christ can claim to have saving faith.
This soteriological question, however, is a different question, than the whether Muslims and Jews have at least some degree of knowledge of and faith in the same God, as an ontological being, that we Christians worship. Scripture reveals God’s nature progressively. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob clearly is presented in scripture as the same God we Christians worship. We Christians believe we understand more of His triune nature than Abraham, Isaac or Jacob did because of God’s progressive revelation of Himself in scripture and in the person of Christ. The epistle to the Hebrews certainly confirms the continuity between genuine faith under the Old and New Covenants. God has not changed, but we now know more about Him through Christ and are offered a new covenant based on that deeper knowledge.
So, I think it is more accurate to make a distinctions based on progressive revelation and what constitutes saving faith under the new covenant rather than to define a non-triune understanding of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as constituting a “different” ontological being than the God Christians worship.
This distinction between ontology, epistemology, and soteriology gives us Christians common ground with Muslims and Jews on many basic things relating to the nature of man, morality, and natural law, while leaving us free to differ on matters specific to soteriology without resorting to universalism.
Two articles in today’s Wall Street Journal caught my eye. (Unfortunately I can’t link to either article because WSJ’s website is subscription only.)
The first article discusses changes in the “Ferberizing” and William Sears’ attachment method. Ferberizing involves letting a baby cry, without any comforting, so long as the baby is dry and fed. The attachment method involves always responding instantly to the baby’s cries, even if that means never getting any sleep. The big surprise: advocates of both methods now acknowledge that a balanced approach is better than either extreme. Yes, the common sense of the gazillions of moms and dads who came and went long before Ferber and Sears prevails. Duh.
The second “duh” article involved how to determine whether an online purchase will be subject to state sales tax. The writer suggests first Googling the selling company to determine whether they have offices in your state that might subject them to local sales tax. After that, the article says, try a “purchase run-through” by hitting the “checkout” button. Again, duh! Why bother with all that Googling, which is likely to get you mired in links about arcane state tax law issues. Go right to the “checkout” button. If you see sales tax listed, you’re paying it, and if you don’t want to pay, don’t confirm the purchase. Unless you find state tax law inherently interesting, in which case you probably need to take an Ambien and get a good night’s sleep.