Talk at the Grace Agenda 2024 Pre-conference
The Principles of War by Jim Wilson
My father was a graduate of the Naval Academy, and studied at the Naval War College. After he got out of the Navy, in the 1960’s, he wrote a series of articles applying the classic principles of war, as outlined by the likes of Sun Tzu and Clausewitz, to the realities of spiritual war. Principles would be things like mobility, surprise, or concentration. Methods would be things like arrows, rockets, aircraft carriers, or triremes. Pedestrian thinkers operate solely in terms of method. Strategic thinkers understand the value of principles.
Principles transfer from one setting to another, and from one generation to another. Methods do not. Men who have learned how to think and operate in terms of principles are men who are much more capable of adjusting or adapting to new circumstances. But if you are trained in one method, and you only have one script, and someone successfully gets you off that script, you do not know what to do.
For one telling example, he discusses the idea of the decisive point in any conflict. That decisive point needs to be simultaneously strategic and feasible. When it comes to all of our culture wars, New York City is strategic, but not feasible. If we took New York for Jesus, it would be all over. But that is not likely. But Bovill, Idaho—a bend in the road to the east here, that would be feasible. We could do it in a couple of weekends, however long it took to unload the moving vans. We could do that, but it would not matter to the big picture if we did. My father decided many decades ago that in the North American context, the decisive points to target were small towns that contained major universities. The university made it important and the small town made it feasible. And then, when he found out that Pullman, Washington and Moscow, Idaho were two small towns, eight miles apart, with a university in each one, he moved here. The name of the game is disproportionate impact. Everything that is now coming out of the Palouse is downstream from that strategic calculation. Everything.
Incidentally, this is not to write off New York. If you are ministering there, you need to ask yourself, “What are the decisive points in this city?” My father had zoomed out and was looking at North America.
I have no idea how many times I have read this little book, and its impact on my thinking has been seminal.
The Discarded Image by C.S. Lewis
One of the great problems with modern Christians, living downstream from the Enlightenment as they do, is that they have overwhelmingly adopted the general cosmology of the atheists, with a few carve-outs or exceptions to the general scheme. In other words, they still have God up at the top, along with some angels, and down here with us, we each of us have a human soul tucked away in our heart somewhere. But everything in between is just what Voltaire or Christopher Hitchens would say—flaming nebulae, empty space, and black asteroids. Just an endless concourse of atoms banging around.
One of C.S. Lewis’s objectives in his fiction (meaning the Ransom trilogy and the Narniad) was to reawaken the Christian’s sense of wonder with regard to the nature of the cosmos around us. He does this by taking us back to a description of the ancient/medieval cosmology. He acknowledges at the conclusion of this book that the cosmology had one fatal flaw, which was that it “wasn’t true.” He grants this, but I think his generosity was only partial. I think this was his head fake.
For example, in Out of the Silent Planet, and Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength, he preserves the essential elements of the medieval scheme, while dispensing with some extraneous things. For example, each of the planets is overseen by an Oyarsa, an intelligent being responsible for that world. But the space craft that first travels to Mars does not clonk into the crystalline sphere that was supposed to be there. So then, some elements are just gone while others are very much alive and well.
For example, in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, we have this exchange between Eustace and Ramandu.
“In our world, a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.” Ramandu replies: “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.”
The Discarded Image is a scholarly and in-depth treatment of the cosmology that held sway over our civilization for much of its history. It is a dense book, but well worth the effort to get through it. If you want the broad outlines of Lewis’s thinking, but don’t have the time to handle such a book, there is an essay I can refer you to. In his Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, there is an essay called “Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages.” That is a chapter length treatment of the same subject matter that is found in The Discarded Image.
Planet Narnia by Michael Ward
The last Narnia book, The Last Battle, was released in 1956. My father started reading the Narnia series to us when I was five-years-old, in 1958. I think it is safe to say that I got into Narnia on the ground floor in two different ways. First, I was very young myself, and wet-clay susceptible, and secondly, the books were new to the entire world as well. I have joked before that I grew up in Narnia, and do not quite understand why they have not issued me the Narnian equivalent of a green card. Over the years, my father would read and reread the stories to us and, as I was the oldest of the four, he would read us the first chapter and I would then take the book and finish it that night. When the next reading time came around, I would be wondering why we couldn’t move on to the next book.
I say this in order to set up an expectation for you. When I first came to read Planet Narnia in 2008, I was flabbergasted. That was over half a century after I had been introduced to Narnia. It was like growing up in a house that I knew inside and out, loving all of its nooks and crannies, only to have some visitor come over one day and ask about a light switch that I had never noticed (inside a cupboard door or something). When I flipped it to find out, a staircase unfolded from the ceiling to reveal another floor I had never known about, one which contained a fully stocked library, with mahogany shelves, and numerous literary treasures. It was like that.
Ward’s thesis, which he demonstrates conclusively, is that the seven Narnia books are written in a way that maps onto the seven heavenly spheres. Dawn Treader is the sun, The Horse and His Boy is Mercury, The Magician’s Nephew is Venus, The Silver Chair the moon, Prince Caspian is Mars, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is Jupiter, and The Last Battle is Saturn. With this as a backdrop, numerous aspects of the books take on a new shape.
Tolkien had not liked the books because they seemed to him to be a hodge-podge. Think about all the disparate elements that seem just jumbled into together—who manufactured Mother Beaver’s sewing machine? Where did she buy it? And what is Father Christmas doing in Narnia anyhow? Greek fauns caper by us, and centaurs stand in the background, looking grim and stately. But what Tolkien assumed was the junk drawer of Lewis’s mind actually had a deep and unifying structure, one that tied everything together in a most satisfying way. The result is what Ward calls donnegality, a word he reapplied from a comment that Lewis had made about County Donnegal in Ireland.
Mars is the god of war, and Prince Caspian is the most military of all the books. He is also the god of forests and glades, and it is striking what role is played by the trees in it. In The Silver Chair, the moon oversees things like moonstruck lunacy, and Rilian is under a heavy enchantment, out of his right mind for 23 hours a day. The color silver plays a role, as does wetness and wateriness, classically connected to the moon. In the Dawn Treader, the sun is almost a main character. And this explains how it is that Father Christmas does too fit in Wardrobe. Jupiter is the god of joviality, and “by Jove” is a common expression in the book, and who is more jovial than Father Christmas? This is the book that actually put Ward onto the case—a line in Lewis’s poem The Planets says “winter passed and sin forgiven,” and that about sums the book up.
There is another book written by Michael Ward, entitled The Narnia Code, which is a more popular treatment of the same material. I read that in 2013, and it was also stupendous. Let me skootch that in as another recommended book.
Idols for Destruction by Herbert Schlossberg
I first read this book in 1983, and it was like swallowing an edifying cinder block. Schlossberg analyzes our contemporary world, and begins by citing Hosea 8:4—“they made idols for their own destruction.” I have recommended the book to others ever since, and someone I recently recommended it to commented to me on how prescient it all was.
Schlossberg identifies (and dissects) six major idols. They are the idols of history, humanity, mammon, nature, power, and religion. He concludes with some commentary on what we should do about it all. In short, he covers the waterfront.
“In a society in which idolatry runs rampant, a church that is not iconoclastic is a travesty. If it is not against the idols it is with them.”
“Big business often is said to be the enemy of government, but that is highly misleading. The robber barons were robbers because they bought off legislatures in order to further their economic interests at the expense of competitors and customers.”
“The Bible can be interpreted as a string of God’s triumphs disguised as disasters”
“Humanitarianism thus changes victimhood from accident to essence. It expands the category of victim until it swallows the entire person. It takes away the poor person’s humanity and gives him in its place the ontological status of victim. The sheltering arms of humanist sentimentality shower altruism on the poor person and refuse to allow any criticism to fall on his behavior. Blame instead falls on circumstance. The universe is said to have arrayed its forces implacably against the victim, who understandably feels resentment and self-pity because of the fate that circumstance has arranged for him. He was born out of circumstance, molded by circumstance, determined by circumstance. That hard taskmaster will never release its hold on him, will always keep him in the thrall of ontological victimhood.”
“The paternal state not only feeds its children, but nurtures, educates, comforts, and disciplines them, providing all they need for their security. This appears to be a mildly insulting way to treat adults, but it is really a great crime because it transforms the state from being a gift of God, given to protect us against violence, into an idol. It supplies us with all blessings, and we look to it for all our needs. Once we sink to that level, as [C.S.] Lewis says, there is no point in telling state officials to mind their own business. ‘Our whole lives are their business.’”
I See Satan Fall Like Lightning by Rene Girard
One of the standard responses in our family, whenever we see some form of mimetic rivalry erupt, is to say “it’s all in Girard, man.” I want to give a caution at the front end, however. Girard is one of the most insightful observers of human action and interaction that I know of, but he also exhibits the wisdom of the adage that when you buy a new hammer, everything you see looks like a nail. He takes his insight out to the utter frozen limit, which means he ends in pacifism and a denial of the doctrine of the substitutionary atonement.
The problem arises in Girard’s tendency to erase the need for the sacrifice of Christ on the cross to be a true propitiation. This means that at the end of the day, Girard believes that the crucifixion undoes the human tendency toward mimetic violence by Abelardian means, instead of Anselmian means.
Girard himself was aware of this tendency, and he (somewhat jokingly) tried to resist it in a presentation he once gave on the thought of Nietzsche, and resisted the tendency unsuccessfully. But at least on that topic, he was correct.
There are two kinds of desires. One is creational, like the itch between your shoulder blades, or thirst, or hunger. Any of these things could happen to you on a desert island, apart from all others. But there is another class of desires that come to life because we are wired to everybody else. These are mimetic desires, imitative desires. We want as reflective and copying individuals, and because we lie to ourselves about what we are doing, we get ourselves into the most frightful snarls. Girard is great in his ability to enable you to see this kind of thing happening. And, once you see it, you will start to see it everywhere.
Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt
As the proverb puts it, the road to Hell really is paved with good intentions. Nowhere is this more evidently the case than when it comes to economics and economic proposals. There is a certain mentality afoot that measures every good deed in terms of what the expressed motives were, instead of evaluating each “good” deed in terms of what the actual consequences actually were.
This slender book by Hazlitt walks us through any number of practical economic proposals, from tariffs, to minimum wage laws, to full employment, to public works, to rent control, and so on, down the block and around the corner. He plainly and cogently shows why the “solution” to some public ill is frequently a solution that is going to be crying out for another solution later on.
This is crucial in our time because numerous Christians want to apply the parable of the Good Samaritan to public policy, not realizing that competence on an individual level does not automatically translate to a society with millions of people in it. Suppose the Lord had told the parable about a Samaritan who did not know how to move someone who was badly injured, and consequently made everything a lot worse.
Institutes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin
Many moons ago, before I was a Calvinist, I could feel the gravitational pull. I remember telling a friend, a Nazarene pastor, that if the Arminians were a grove of trees over here, and the Calvinists a grove of trees over there, I would be a solitary tree over near the Calvinist grove. Unfortunately, theology doesn’t work like that, and neither do systems of thought. But I still knew I wanted to be “nearer” the Calvinists.
Once I was on the road, speaking in the Seattle area, and on the way home, I stopped in a Christian bookstore in Wenatchee, Washington, and asked if they had a copy of Calvin’s Institutes. The friendly lady behind the counter said, “Oh, is that a new title?”
Later on, I successfully obtained a set and began working my way through it. It was slow but rewarding going. After I had become a Calvinist I read the Institutes again. I am not accustomed to quoting Karl Barth with appreciation, but I will here.
“Calvin is a cataract, a primeval forest, a demonic power, something directly down from Himalaya, absolutely Chinese, strange, mythological; I lack completely the means, the suction cups, even to assimilate this phenomenon, not to speak of presenting it adequately. What I receive is only a thin little stream and what I can then give out again is only a yet thinner extract of this little stream.”
That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis
I am smuggling two books into one review here. This book should be read alongside The Abolition of Man. They were written at the same time, and in the Preface, Lewis says this: “This is a ‘tall story’ about devilry, though it has behind it a serious ‘point’ which I have tried to make in my Abolition of Man.”
I have read this book at least 16 times that I know of. It is not only the kind of book that I know I could read again, it is the kind of book that after a certain period of time has elapsed, I know I will have to read again.
Mark and Jane Studdock are unhappy in their marriage, and this is because neither one has been willing to accept the station in life to which God has assigned them. Their respective sins in this regard drive much of the action in the book. Mark Studdock has been driven for much of his life by a lust to belong, and this makes him vulnerable to the lure of the complex systems driven by the “inner ring,” first at Bracton College, and then at Belbury. This whole theme is developed by Lewis at length in an essay entitled “The Inner Ring” and which can be found in his collection of essays called The Weight of Glory. Mark Studdock is the walking personification of this lust.
Jane Studdock has the opposite problem. While Mark desperately wants to belong to the important set, Jane is fiercely opposed to “belonging.” She does not want to belong to her husband, which causes friction between them, and when she is forced to take refuge at St. Anne’s, she is very resistant to the idea of submitting herself to that particular society. She wants independence, he wants to belong, and they both just irritate one another. Ransom tells Jane that her problem with her marriage is not what she supposes. “You do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience” (p. 147).
Her conversion occurs when she finally, wonderfully, submits. Mark’s conversion occurs when he finally, wonderfully, rebels.
Mark’s transformation is described, in anticipation, as the moment when he would finally begin to be a person (p. 217). That moment happens when he is being prepared by the “objective room,” and is told to show contempt to a crucifix. Lewis is very explicit in describing Mark’s change as one of learning “rebellion” (p. 329). When he is pressed, he finally replies, “It’s all bloody nonsense, and I’m damned if I do any such thing” (p. 337).
For Jane it works the opposite way. She had been in the grip of what Lewis describes as a “prim little grasp on her own destiny.” Ransom tells her she needs to agree with her adversary quickly. She says, “You mean I shall have to become a Christian?” He replies, “It looks like it.” And then, when it happens, Love swallows up her personal identity, but in a way that makes it possible for her to become Jane in truth. “In this height and depth and breadth the little idea of herself which she had hitherto called me dropped down and vanished, unflattering, into bottomless distance, like a bird in a space without air” (pp. 318-319).
This struggle for the salvation of these two individual souls takes place in the foreground, but in the background is the struggle for the salvation of the world. What is the particular nature of this struggle? The way Lewis has set this conflict up, it is a battle between the gnostics and the incarnationalists. On the one hand are those who are hyper-rational, hyper-intellectual, and even hyper-spiritual. They don’t like stuff, particularly living stuff. Their idea of purity is entirely ethereal.
In his book The Abolition of Man, a book that corresponds with his point in this book, Lewis dissects the process of education that produces men like Mark Studdock, men that Lewis describes as “men without chests.” It is ironic, and probably not accidental, that the whole society at Belbury is governed by a bodily Head, but it is a Head that literally has no chest. The process of taking over the small town of Edgestow consists of bulldozing the place, and getting rid of that which grows. The small town of Cure Hardy, which Belbury plans to annihilate, is a representation of gnosticism’s hatred of that which is particular, and homey. St. Anne’s stands for that which is fruitful, that which multiplies. Belbury stands for sanitation, and for making this world much cleaner . . . like the moon.
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
I first read Tolkien when I was in high school, at the urging of my mother. The framework of Middle Earth has accomplished, in my mind, one of the goals that Tolkien had set for it. The Mediterranean world had their mythologies, and the Norse world had theirs. In a strange twist, the English world did not have one, and Tolkien set himself to rectify the problem. It is not a mythology in the classic sense, being handed down over generations, coming to us from the mists of antiquity. It was printed in a published and copyrighted book, written by an Oxford don, a man known to a number of people still alive. At the same time, if I might put it this way, it scratches a very similar itch to the one that mythology scratches.
The Lord of the Rings is not allegory. “Though it [The Hobbit] is not an allegory” (Letters, p. 41). The Narnia stories are not allegory. So what is allegory, and what are these stories then?
First, Tolkien recognizes the problem we face. He said, “I dislike Allegory – the conscious and intentional allegory – yet any attempt to explain the purport of the myth or fairytale must use allegorical language. (And, of course, the more ‘life’ a story has the more readily will it be susceptible of allegorical interpretations: while the better a deliberate allegory is made the more nearly will it be acceptable just as a story.) Anyway, all this stuff is mainly concerned with Fall, Mortality, and the Machine.” (Letters, p. 145).
And elsewhere: “. . . do not let Rayner suspect ‘Allegory.’ There is a ‘moral’, I suppose, in any tale worth telling. But that is not the same thing . . . Of course, Allegory and Story converge, meeting somewhere in Truth. So that the only perfectly consistent allegory is a real life; and the only fully intelligible story is an allegory . . . You can make the Ring into an allegory of our own time, if you like: an allegory of the inevitable fate that waits for all attempts to defeat evil power by power” (Letters, p. 121).
The problem is that we must traffic in definitional subtleties.
Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton
I didn’t start reading Chesterton until after I was out of the Navy. I came here to the University of Idaho, and I had decided to major in philosophy. I did this because my plan was to get my degree and then move to another small college town to man a bookstore after the pattern of my father’s strategy. The plan, in short, was to be an informal bookstore apologist/evangelist. As an apologist I wanted to be thoroughly acquainted with the other worldviews that were out there. I did not want to say to a Buddhist that his perspective was wrong because it began with a B instead of a C like Christianity does. In short, I wanted to understand.
The difficulty was that the study of philosophy meant being pitched headlong into a bunch of questions that I thought ought not to be asked, or, if they should have been asked, were pursued in the most nonsensical way possible. It was then, in my first year of studying philosophy, that I picked up my copy of Orthodoxy from our local Christian bookstore. It was like putting on an oxygen mask at 12,000 feet.
It was life of the mind combined with common sense. Chesterton was bracing, exuberant, funny, insightful, a wordsmith, and funny some more.