This is my Father's cosmos

From Writers to Read. In the final chapter Douglas Wilson discusses the work of his son, N D Wilson. 

In Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl the fatherhood of God lies behind everything. This apparent chaotic world is not chaotic at all; if we step back and take it all in with the right perspective, we see that it is an intricately designed carnival ride. There is a fatherly purpose in it: it turns out that we thought we were being born into a world full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, but what was happening is that our Father was taking us to a particularly spectacular fair with some really gnarly rides.

In Death by Living Nate spends a great deal of time honouring his two grandfathers, in turn, my wife's father, Larry Greensides, now with the Lord, and my own father, Jim Wilson. And, as Paul mentions in Ephesians (3: 14-15), behind all such admirable fathers is the Father. All fatherhood derives its name from the Father of all things. The heart of wisdom is to learn to see the Father in earthly fathers and not be distracted by their sins and failings. The Father is much more like they are than they are themselves (Heb. 12:11). The window might be dirty because of sin, but we all still need to see through it.

Behind and through all of this is a robust understanding of fatherhood at the source of everything. If we lived in a fatherless cosmos, then little outbreaks of fatherhood here and there would simply be small insanities. In a random universe, everything is random. Fatherhood here and/or there would be just another random event. Fatherhood would be just as random as fatherlessness. But if we live in a world where the Father is behind and beneath everything, then every true adventure has to consist of finding our way back to the place, overcoming the obstacles that came about as a result of estrangement from the Father. Those obstacles are placed by sin and rebellion, and so finding the Father is the archetypal adventure. This is the central reason why Nate's books work as effectively as they do.

Over the power of death

The power to discern God’s presence in common life is imparted when one becomes a Christian, an event in which the power of the Word of God in one’s own personal history is manifest over and over against the power of death. Then and thereafter the Christian lives in any and all events in reliance upon the presence of the Word of God. Then and thereafter the Christian lives to confront others, whatever their afflictions, with the news of God’s care for the world. Then and thereafter the threat of our own eventual historic death holds no fear for us, for there is nothing which we will on that day experience which we have not already foretasted in the event of becoming a Christian, in the event of our surrender to the power of death and of our being saved from that power by the presence of God. Then and thereafter we are free from the most elementary and universal bondage of humanity: the struggle to maintain and preserve, whatever the cost, our own existence against that of all others. Then and thereafter are we free to give our present life away, since our life is secure in the life of God.

William Stringfellow: A Private and Public Faith, pg 66, quoted in The Slavery of Death by Richard Beck.

Reality never repeats

I know that the thing I want is exactly the thing I can never get. The old life, the jokes, the drinks, the arguments, the lovemaking, the tiny, heartbreaking commonplace. On any view whatever, to say, ‘H. is dead,’ is to say, ‘All that is gone.’ It is a part of the past. And the past is the past and that is what time means, and time itself is one more name for death, and Heaven itself is a state where ‘the former things have passed away.’ 

Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand. 

Unless, of course, you can literally believe all that stuff about family reunions ‘on the further shore,’ pictured in entirely earthly terms. But that is all unscriptural, all out of bad hymns and lithographs. There’s not a word of it in the Bible. And it rings false. We know it couldn’t be like that. Reality never repeats. The exact same thing is never taken away and given back. How well the spiritualists bait their hook! ‘Things on this side are not so different after all.’ There are cigars in Heaven. For that is what we should all like. The happy past restored. 

And that, just that, is what I cry out for, with mad, midnight endearments and entreaties spoken into the empty air. 

From A Grief Observed by C S Lewis

If God had willed it....

If God had willed it, each of us might have entered heaven at the moment of conversion. It was not absolutely necessary for our preparation for immortality that we should tarry here. It is possible for a man to be taken to heaven, and to be found meet to be a partaker of the inheritance of the saints in light, though he has but just believed in Jesus.

It is true that our sanctification is a long and continued process, and we shall not be perfected till we lay aside our bodies and enter within the veil; but nevertheless, had the Lord so willed it, he might have changed us from imperfection to perfection, and have taken us to heaven at once. Why then are we here? Would God keep his children out of paradise a single moment longer than was necessary? Why is the army of the living God still on the battle-field when one charge might give them the victory? Why are his children still wandering hither and thither through a maze, when a solitary word from his lips would bring them into the centre of their hopes in heaven?

The answer is--they are here that they may "live unto the Lord," and may bring others to know his love. We remain on earth as sowers to scatter good seed; as ploughmen to break up the fallow ground; as heralds publishing salvation. We are here as the "salt of the earth," to be a blessing to the world. We are here to glorify Christ in our daily life. We are here as workers for him, and as "workers together with him." Let us see that our life answereth its end. Let us live earnest, useful, holy lives, to "the praise of the glory of his grace." Meanwhile we long to be with him, and daily sing--

"My heart is with him on his throne,
And ill can brook delay;
Each moment listening for the voice,
Rise up, and come away.'"

Charles Spurgeon in Morning and Evening, from the June 10th Morning entry

He walks everywhere incognito

From page 293 of The Narnian, by Alan Jacobs: talking about Lewis' reaction to Alec Vidler's radical theology and John Robinson's Honest to God:

But after all he had been through in Joy's illness and death, he better understood their discomfort with traditional doctrine. They were trying to get beyond "religion," and in his misery Lewis had come to understand that impulse - even if he thought they were going about it in absolutely the wrong way. "Religion" is either a set of cultural practices or a set of doctrines, and in either case - though for Lewis the doctrines were always absolutely necessary as maps toward one's true destination - they should never be the goal of the Christian life. (To make such a mistake would be "as if navigation were substituted for arrival, or battle for victory, or wooing for marriage.") 

Beyond all religion lies Something, or rather Someone, that religion can never capture, Who is more real than any practices or doctrines. "We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito. And the incognito is not always hard to penetrate. The real labour is to remember, to attend. In fact, to come awake. Still more, to remain awake." Such attention is difficult; we often fail to achieve it, and when we think we are most awake we are often sound asleep. One wonders how much of Lewis' own writing he believed, there near the end, to have been attentive in this true and full sense. It is perhaps telling that at one point in Letters to Malcolm he recalls what happened to Thomas Aquinas, who, after receiving an overwhelming and indeed disabling vision of God, thought back on his life's work of theological reflection and said, "It reminds me of straw." 

On facing death

Cicero wrote a book called the Tusculan Disputations,  five books on death, pain, depression and related passions, and happiness as a state of mind. In the third book of Robert Harris' trilogy on Cicero, the narrator, 'Dictator', Tiro (Cicero's secretary and right hand man) sums up the last book: 

In the fifth book, Cicero offered his practical prescriptions. A human being can only train for death by leading a life that is morally good; that is - to desire nothing too much; to be content with what one has; to be entirely self-sufficient within oneself, so that whatever one loses, one will still be able to carry on regardless; to do none harm; to realise that it is better to suffer an injury than to inflict one; to accept that life is a loan given by Nature without a due date and that repayment may be demanded at any time; that the most tragic character in the world is a tyrant who has broken all these precepts.

page 249, paperback edition. 

Cicero was declared a righteous pagan by the Early Church, and therefore many of his works were deemed worthy of preservation.

Belief in Hell

Does Anyone Really Believe in Traditional Hell? 

Again, there comes this very serious obstacle to accepting the popular creed. I shall state it thus, either this creed is true or false If false—the question is ended. If true, can this strange fact be explained—that nobody acts as if he believed it? I say this, for any man who so believed, and who possessed but a spark of common humanity—to say nothing of charity—could not rest, day or night, so long as one sinner remained who might be saved. To this all would give place—pleasure, learning, business, art, literature; nay, life itself would be too short for the terrible warnings, the burning entreaties, the earnest pleadings, that would be needed to rouse sinners from their apathy, and to pluck them from endless tortures. 
Ask me what you will, but do not ask me to believe that any human being, who is convinced that perhaps his own child, his wife, his friend, his neighbor, even his enemy, is in danger of endless torment, could, if really persuaded of this, live as men now live, even the best men: who can avoid the inevitable conclusion that its warmest adherents really, though unconsciously, find their dogmas absolutely incredible? In fact these men (and it is the best thing to be said for them) teach their creed without real conviction. Their best eulogy is that they are self-deceivers. 
These remarks also explain an obvious difficulty, viz., it has been shown how the popular creed cuts at the root of all religion, poisoning the very fountains whence we draw our conceptions of love, of righteousness, of truth. But if so, it may be fairly asked, how is it that society subsists, that morality is not extinct? Because, I reply unhesitatingly, because no society, no individual, can possibly act, or has in fact acted, on such a creed, in the real business of life. It is simply impossible: who would dare so much as to smile, if he really believed endless torments were certain to be the portion of some member of his household—it may be of himself? Marriage would be a crime; each birth the occasion of an awful dread. The shadow of a possible hell would darken every home, sadden every family hearth. 
All this becomes evident when we reflect that to perpetuate the race would be to help on the perpetuation of moral evil. For if this creed be true, out of all the yearly births a steady current is flowing on to help to fill the abyss of hell, to make larger and vaster the total of moral evil which is to endure for ever. “The world would be one vast madhouse,” says the American scholar Hallsted, “if a realizing and continued pressure of such a doctrine was present.” 
Remark again how this doctrine breaks down the moment it is really put to the test. Take a common case: a man dies—active, benevolent, useful in life, but not a religious man, not devout. By the popular creed, such a man has gone to hell for ever. But who really believes that? nay, instinctively our words grow softer when we speak of the dead in all cases. Do even the clergy really believe what they profess? I cannot refrain from most serious doubt on this point. If they believe, why are they so often silent? Habitual silence would be impossible to any one believing the traditional creed in earnest. The awful future would dwarf all other topics, would compel incessant appeals. But what do we find? Everything, I reply, that marks a declining faith in endless evil—silence; excuses; modifications; evasions of the true issue.

Thomas Allin: Christ Triumphant: Universalism Asserted as the Hope of the Gospel on the Authority of Reason, the Fathers, and Holy Scripture. Annotated Edition, 2015

The godless and godforsaken

When God becomes man in Jesus of Nazareth, he not only enters into the finitude of man, but in his death on the cross also enters into the situation of man's godforsakenness. In Jesus he does not die the natural death of a finite being, but the violent death of the criminal on the cross, the death of complete abandonment by God. The suffering in the passion of Jesus is abandonment, rejection by God, his Father. God does not become a religion, so that man participates in him by corresponding religious thoughts and feelings. God does not become a law, so that man participates in him through obedience to a law. God does not become an ideal, so that man achieves community with him through constant striving. He humbles himself and takes upon himself the eternal death of the godless and the godforsaken, so that all the godless and the godforsaken can experience communion with him.

Jürgen Moltmann

The Crucified God

The lover of life

The thought of death and life after death is ambivalent. It can deflect us from this life, with its pleasures and pains. It can make life here a transition, a step on the way to another life beyond -- and by doing so it can make this life empty and void. It can draw love from this life and deflect it to a life hereafter, spreading resignation in "this vale of tears." The thought of death and a life after death can lead to fatalism and apathy, so that we only live life here half-heartedly, or just endure it and "get through." The thought of a life after death can cheat us of the happiness and the pain of this life, so that we squander its treasures, selling them off cheap to heaven. In that respect it is better to live every day as if death didn’t exist, better to love life here and now as unreservedly as if death really were "the finish." The notion that this life is no more than a preparation for a life beyond, is the theory of a refusal to live, and a religious fraud. It is inconsistent with the living God, who is "a lover of life." In that sense it is religious atheism.

Jürgen Moltmann

The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology

The true laws of the physical

To see Christ as God and man is probably no more difficult today than it has always been, even if today there seem to be more reasons to doubt. For you it may be a matter of not being able to accept what you call a suspension of the laws of the flesh and the physical, but for my part I think that when I know what the laws of the flesh and the physical really are, then I will know what God is. We know them as we see them, not as God sees them. For me it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical. Death, decay, destruction are the suspension of these laws. I am always astonished at the emphasis the Church puts on the body. It is not the soul she says that will rise but the body, glorified. I have always thought that purity was the most mysterious of the virtues, but it occurs to me that it would never have entered the human consciousness to conceive of purity if we were not to look forward to a resurrection of the body, which will be flesh and spirit united in peace, in the way they were in Christ. The resurrection of Christ seems the high point in the law of nature.

Flannery O’Connor

"Letter to 'A' (Sep. 6, 1955)" in The Habit of Being

Death and Being

Now it is with this intense passion for being, that the idea of death clashes. Let us search why it is we shrink from death. This reason brethren, we shall find, that it presents to us the idea of not being. Talk as we will of immortality, there is an obstinate feeling that we cannot master, that we end in death; and that may be felt together with the firmest belief of a resurrection. Brethren, our faith tells us one thing, and our sensations tell us another. When we die, we are surrendering in truth all that with which we have associated existence. All that we know of life is connected with a shape, a form, a body of materialism; and now that that is palpably melting away into nothingness, the boldest heart may be excused a shudder, when there is forced upon it, in spite of itself, the idea of ceasing forever.

Frederick W Robertson in his sermon on Victory over Death, in Sermons Preached at Brighton, Third Series. 

Fear of death

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE: 
On how to rehearse for death and how to diminish fear.
17 June 1963

Pain is terrible, but surely you need not have fear as well? Can you not see death as the friend and deliverer? It means stripping off that body which is tormenting you: like taking off a hair- shirt or getting out of a dungeon. What is there to be afraid of? You have long attempted (and none of us does more) a Christian life. Your sins are confessed and absolved. Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave it with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.

Remember, though we struggle against things because we are afraid of them, it is often the other way round—we get afraid be- cause we struggle. Are you struggling, resisting? Don’t you think Our Lord says to you ‘Peace, child, peace. Relax. Let go. Underneath are the everlasting arms. Let go, I will catch you. Do you trust me so little?’

Of course, this may not be the end. Then make it a good rehearsal.

Yours (and like you a tired traveller near the journey’s end) Jack
From The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume III
Compiled in Yours, Jack

Resurrection

In the earliest days of Christianity an ‘apostle’ was first and foremost a man who claimed to be an eyewitness of the Resurrection. Only a few days after the Crucifixion when two candidates were nominated for the vacancy created by the treachery of Judas, their qualification was that they had known Jesus personally both before and after His death and could offer first-hand evidence of the Resurrection in addressing the outer world (Acts1:22). A few days later St Peter, preaching the first Christian sermon, makes the same claim—‘God raised Jesus, of which we all (we Christians) are witnesses’ (Acts 2:32). In the first Letter to the Corinthians, St Paul bases his claim to apostleship on the same ground—‘Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen the Lord Jesus?’ (1:9).

As this qualification suggests, to preach Christianity meant primarily to preach the Resurrection. . . . . The Resurrection is the central theme in every Christian sermon reported in the Acts. The Resurrection, and its consequences, were the ‘gospel’ or good news which the Christians brought: what we call the ‘gospels’, the narratives of Our Lord’s life and death, were composed later for the benefit of those who had already accepted the gospel. They were in no sense the basis of Christianity: they were written for those already converted. The miracle of the Resurrection, and the theology of that miracle, comes first: the biography comes later as a comment on it. . . . . The first fact in the history of Christendom is a number of people who say they have seen the Resurrection. If they had died without making anyone else believe this ‘gospel’ no gospels would ever have been written.

From Miracles by C S Lewis

Overcoming evil

If we take seriously the words and life of the man from Galilee, we are driven to the conclusion that his was a unique solution to evil in the world, a different kind of solution altogether, an unacceptable solution by any political standards: 'Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, pray for those who persecute you.' Jesus spoke without fear against hypocrisy and injustice and corruption into the very teeth of his enemies. His fervour led him to peaks of anger as he physically scattered the men and beasts and goods which were desecrating the temple and the very notion of religion. But this action of his neither purified the temple nor renewed the sense of religion nor did it obliterate evil or bring justice to the world. In the final analysis, the message of the New Testament, the message that passes from Jesus to us, is that the only way to overcome evil is to give into it. Overcome it he did, beginning with death which he turned into resurrection. In his case, he could not have overcome death by violently struggling against it, or by disputing with Pilate or Caiaphas over the injustice of it all, and thus avoiding it altogether. It can be argued that his was a singular case, and a singular solution, and that it is not applicable to others, and to us. Singular it was, but it stands nonetheless as the only solution to evil offered in the New Testament. Even beyond his death, when we think of the other issues that were at stake at the time: the issues of justice and innocence and guilt, the question of the meaning of truth and of earthly and non-earthly kingdoms, the matter of the identity of the Messiah and of the true meaning of religion; we have to ask ourselves: who really triumphed? Jesus or Pilate? Jesus or the High Priest? Jesus or the Roman soldiers? Jesus or the Roman Empire?
There will always be a cross somewhere in the midst of the Christian solution to evil, a cross of pain involved in not returning blow for blow; a cross of the natural, human bitterness felt in the experiencing of hatred and returning love in its place, of receiving evil and doing good; a cross reflected in the near impossibility of counting oneself blessed in the midst of persecution, or of hungering and thirsting for justice, or in being merciful and peacemakers in a world which understands neither. Between us and fulfillment, between us and everlasting justice, between us and salvation of this suffering world, there will always stand the paradox of the cross, a cross not for others, but for us. 'The Jews are looking for miracles, and the pagans for wisdom. And here we are preaching a crucified Christ, to the Jews and obstacle they cannot get over, to the pagans madness.' (1 Cor. 1:22-23)
There is, on one hand, a moral, human, political solution to evil in the world. And there is a Christian solution. The gospel, which contains the latter, will always be compromised by identifying it with the former.

From Rediscovering Christianity, by Vincent Donovan, pages 168/9

Moving on...

If any of us were to be asked, do you want to stay here on earth, or would you like to move into a bigger, better, brighter world we would probably answer that, even with earthly anxieties and problems, we would rather stay on earth than move into an uncertain future. But, like the child, we have no choice. At a time, not of our choosing, we make the transition from this world into eternity. From our earthly perspective this moment looks like, loss, parting, separation, it looks and feels like death. But the one who has died is encountering the fullness of God’s life and love, and is being offered this life for eternity.

Fr John O'Connor, on his blog Food for Faith

The body

For me it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical. Death, decay, destruction are the suspension of these laws. I am always astonished at the emphasis the Church puts on the body. It is not the soul she says that will rise but the body, glorified.

Flannery O'ConnorThe Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

More of an action

The third of six summings-up that P T Forsyth gives in the sixth chapter of his book, The Work of Christ (page 150)

This reconciling and redeeming work of Christ culminates in his suffering unto death, which is indeed more of an act than an experience.  Here, in the Cross, is the summit of his revelation of grace, of sin, and of humanity.  And the central feature of this threefold revelation in the Cross is the holiness of God's love.  It is this holiness that deepens error into sin, sin into guilt, and guilt into repentance; without which any sense of forgiveness would be but an anodyne and not a grace, a self-flattering unction to the soul and not the peace of God. 

Pleasing to God

Let us then stand in solidarity with the poor and the excluded, remembering that faith's practices are not intended to expand our pleasure or produce novelty. Behavior pleasing to God makes a simple claim: caring for the lonely and the poor and being a people attentive to "the fatherless and widows in their affliction." Let us throw ourselves into humdrum tasks and the ordinary work of mercy and justice.... Let us act boldly against the powers of death that surround us and reclaim from the cult of insipid godliness the courage to offend the pious and the proud. Let gratitude and the humility of participation shape our devotion to life. Let us resolve to make and keep others free, and let us resist the urge to colonize God for our group's needs even as we seek to keep redemptive spaces open. Let us live with passionate worldliness in the brilliant and fleeting time of our mortal life, and let our witness to peace grow out of the convictions of our faith, the audacity of our hope, and the generosity of our love. Let us never forget that the community of Christ exists as a structure with four sides open tot he world.

Charles MarshThe Beloved Community

Charles Marsh is Professor of Religion at the University of Virginia and Director of the Project on Lived Theology. He is the author of Reclaiming Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the award-winning God's Long Summer, and The Last Days. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia

Justice and peace

...it is clear that action for justice and peace in the world is not something which is secondary, marginal to the central task of evangelism.  It belongs to the heart of the matter.  Jesus' action in challenging the powers that ruled the world was not marginal to his ministry; it was central to it.  Without it there would be no gospel.  But Jesus' challenge was not in the name of an alternative way of exercising power.  he did not offer an alternative government.  He did not repeat the story of which history has so many illustrations, the story of the victim of oppression who, in the name of justice, dethrones the oppressor and takes his seat on the same throne with the same instruments of oppression.  The manner of Jesus' challenge, the way that led through his own death to resurrection and the sharing of a new life with the community he formed to go the same way through history to it send, opened up a new route through history along which every human rule would stand under both the judgement and the mercy of God.

Lesslie Newbigin, page 137-8 in The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

Death and the believer

Lots of atheists seem to be certain, recently, that this ought not to be a problem for believers, because – curl of lip – we all believe we’re going to be whisked away to a magic kingdom in the sky instead. Facing the prospect of annihilation squarely is the exclusive achievement of – preen – the brave unbeliever. But I don’t know many actual Christians (as opposed to the conjectural idiots of atheist fantasy) who feel this way, or anything like it. Death’s reality is a given of human experience, for anyone old enough to have shaken off adolescent delusions of immortality. There it is, the black water, not to be cancelled by declarations, by storytelling, of any kind. Whatever sense belief makes of death, it has to incorporate its self-evident reality, not deny it. And again, in my experience, belief makes the problem harder, not easier. Because there death is, real for us as it is for everyone else, and yet (as with every other outrage of the cruel world) we also have to fit it together somehow with the intermittently felt, constantly transmitted assurance that we are loved. I don’t mean to suggest that all believers are in a state of continual anguish about this, but it is a very rare believer who has not had to come to a reckoning with the contradiction involved. On the one hand, the cruel world – the world made cruel by seeing it as created – and on the other one, the sensation of being cherished by its creator.

From Unapologetic, by Francis Spufford.