movies and growing in grace

I thought I may invite you to undertake a task I set for our church YF recently.

List all the Christian values you can think of in a Bond movie.  Now list all the anti-Christian values.

List all the Christ-like virtues of James Bond.  Can you think of any contrasts?

How consistent is it to admire James Bond on a Saturday night and then worship Jesus Christ on a Sunday morning?

spotting idolatry of self

D A Carson in ‘Scandalous: The Cross and Resurrection of Jesus‘ has a couple of amusing but telling examples of how we betray our idolatry of self.

When we look at a class graduation photo (or for that matter an old school class photo or church group photo) whose face do we look at first, whose image do we linger over?

Or better still, if we have been involved in an argument, a real rooster of a debate, and we go away seething inside, mentally rehearsing all that we said, and especially what we should have said, when we play the revised version over in our heads – who wins?

Carson wryly confesses, ‘I have lost a lot of arguments in my time, but I have never lost a mental rerun.’

Ditto.  Mea culpa.

escape from nihilism

If you have not read it you must read J Budziszeski’s essay, ‘Escape from Nihilism.  It is found here. Below is a sample.

But the main reason I was a nihilist, the reason that tied all these other reasons together, was sheer, mulish pride. I didn’t want God to be God; I wanted J. Budziszewski to be God. I see that now. But I didn’t see that then.

I have already said that everything goes wrong without God. This is true even of the good things He’s given us, such as our minds. One of the good things I’ve been given is a stronger than average mind. I don’t make the observation to boast; human beings are given diverse gifts to serve Him in diverse ways. The problem is that a strong mind that refuses the call to serve God has its own way of going wrong. When some people flee from God they rob and kill. When others flee from God they do a lot of drugs and have a lot of sex. When I fled from God I didn’t do any of those things; my way of fleeing was to get stupid. Though it always comes as a surprise to intellectuals, there are some forms of stupidity that one must be highly intelligent and educated to commit. God keeps them in his arsenal to pull down mulish pride, and I discovered them all. That is how I ended up doing a doctoral dissertation to prove that we make up the difference between good and evil and that we aren’t responsible for what we do. I remember now that I even taught these things to students; now that’s sin.

It was also agony. You cannot imagine what a person has to do to himself–well, if you are like I was, maybe you can–what a person has to do to himself to go on believing such nonsense. St. Paul said that the knowledge of God’s law is “written on our hearts, our consciences also bearing witness.” The way natural law thinkers put this is to say that they constitute the deep structure of our minds. That means that so long as we have minds, we can’t not know them. Well, I was unusually determined not to know them; therefore I had to destroy my mind.