Taking every thought captive

Welcome to the new home of Captive Thoughts. I decided it was time for my own domain, so here I am.  Everything has been brought over from the old WordPress site which I will leave frozen at this point.

I’m still in the process of tweaking the new theme to add a few things that I like, but that are missing. It may take a few weeks, but eventually I’ll get there. It’s just like moving into a new house. There’s usually a little bit of decorating and DIY to do.

Andreas Viklund has posted an amusing photograph captioned The door to hell? It’s certainly one worrying door, though the real hell is infintely more terrifying.

I came across these wise words this afternoon:

— Guidelines for worship —
Be thoughtful, be reverent, be friendly,
For we meet together as the house of God.
Before the service speak to the Lord.
During the service let the Lord speak to you.
After the service speak to one another.

They are from the Reformed Baptist Church, Inverness, but they are applicable to every church that gathers together as the house of God.

It came as a great surprise to discover that the soon-to-be President of the United States and I had anything in common beyond our humanity, given my abhorrence of his views on abortion, and his naivete about peace in the current eastern conflicts. But, according to an article in the New York Times, his mother-in-law will be living with him when he moves into number 1600.

Now in my second term (of having a mother-in-law in residence, not presidency) I feel uniquely qualified to give him some advice, should he feel the need. So, Barak, phone me anytime if I can be of help!

Of course, his White House is much bigger than our Whyte House, which may make some difference. He may never suffer from “mother-in-law fatigue”, such as a friend inquired about me a few months into my first term, on a day I must have been somewhat under the weather, from other matters I hasten to add.

Some time ago my first Sunday School teacher remarked how scriptural it was to have one’s mother-in-law living with one, given the experience of my apostolic namesake. I have been given to musing, in mischievous moments, and occasionally out loud, whether our Lord asked Peter if he minded him healing said mother-in-law. Perhaps I might be bold enough to ask in glory, though other more pressing and important questions come immediately to mind. And now more serious reading beckons . . . .

I always enjoyed the Quotable Quotes in Reader’s Digest when I was growing up. My uncle used to deposit old copies with me, so they were not the most recent editions, but I devoured them nonetheless. I still have a few remnants of them. The tear off reply slips from the front and back covers still serve as interesting bookmarks, with tempting offers like the new Janet Frazer catalogue, subscriptions to the Complete Works of Dickens, and emigration to Australia.

Over the years I’ve gathered my own favourite quotes, but never really managed to store them in any successful, systematic and easily accessible way. I could add them in this blog, but unless I can comment on them I’m not inclined to do that, since I don’t see a blog as a collection mechanism for quotations.

I recently stumbled on Quoty (not sure how) and have been entering a few quotations into it. It looks promising, so you may want to check it out, and even peek at my small, but growing collection. It’s online, so easily accessible when I’m not at my own computer, but more importantly it allows you to store a reference with the quotation. Not all the online applications seem to allow that, and one of the disappointments I have with John Blanchard’s otherwise excellent quotation collection, The Complete Gathered Gold, is that it only attributes the quotations to their author, without a reference to enable you to find them and read them in context. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and Proverbs, which I also own, remedies this defect. It’s author index is also a disappointing omission from the Blanchard volume. The Quoty tagging facility beats my cumbersome attempts at an Access database, for frequently a quotation needs to be filed under several subjects. Quotes can be exported in HMTL, PDF and CSV.

I’m planning to give it a go for a few months to see if it suits for longer term.

I stumbled on an article by A. T. Pierson on the unity of Scripture tonight. It was published in Volume 7 of The Fundamentals, an original set of which I was given over a quarter of a century ago by a family friend, now in glory. I wouldn’t be keen on his dispensationalism, but I did find the following paragraph towards the end of the article a rather engaging summary of the New Testament letters:

The Epistles are likewise all necessary to complete the whole and complement each other. There are five writers, each having his own sphere of truth. Paul’s great theme is Faith, and its relations to justification, sanctification, service, joy and glory. James treats of Works, their relation to faith, as its justification before man. He is the counterpart and complement of Paul. Peter deals with Hope, as the inspiration of God’s pilgrim people. John’s theme is Love, and its relation to the light and life of God as manifested in the believer. In his Gospel, he exhibits eternal life in Christ; in his epistles, eternal life as seen in the believer. Jude sounds the trumpet of warning against apostasy, which implies the wreck of faith, the delusion of false hope, love grown cold, and the utter decay of good works. What one of all these writers could we drop from the New Testament?*

There is a good deal more in the NT letters, but this looks like a useful overview.

* Arthur T. Pierson, The Testimony of the Organic Unity of the Bible to its Inspiration, in The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, edited by R. A. Torrey (Chicago: Testimony Publishing Company, 1909-15). Vol. 7, Ch. 4, p. 68.

I’ve been reading Nathan Pitchford’s current book, an allegorical fantasy entitled Fair Semblances, for a few months now and thoroughly enjoying it. There are 20 chapters to catch up with, and regular fixes installments every Monday. I’ve been meaning to spread the word for some time now, and have finally got round to it. Some resolutions are best unmade, then they have more chance of being kept! There’s some great theological reflections on the blog as well as a great story. If you enjoy the book, leave Nathan a comment to encourage him.

C. S. Lewis ends the fourth chapter of Book I of Mere Christianity with a note on the supposed middle road between the twin alternatives of a universe viewed from the perspectives of materialism and religion. He dispels the notion that the Life-Force philosophy (a.k.a. Creative Evolution, or Emergent Evolution) is in reality a middle road. If the force is personal, then it is the same thing as religion, and if impersonal, then it is materialism by another name. He describes the pulling power of this view astutely:

One reason why many people find Creative Evolution so attractive is that it gives one much of the emotional comfort of believing in God and none of the less pleasant consequences. (p. 34)

He sees so clearly that the thought of a great Force gives a sense of continuity and is somehow vaguely comforting when life is going well. But,

If, on the other hand, you want to do something rather shabby, the Life-Force, being only a blind force, with no morals and no mind, will never interfere with you like that troublesome God we learned about when we were children. The Life-Force is a sort of tame God. You can switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you. All the thrills of religion and none of the cost. Is the Life-Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen? (p. 34)

The abundance of faiths in the supermarket of religion to which we trundle our spiritual trolleys bears out Lewis’s point well. Even dyed-in-the-wool materialists cannot escape the hope of this wishful thinking, so Dawkins calls himself a “cultural christian”, while all the time denying every doctrine of the Church. Let’s face it, science may have smells, but only liturgical Christianity has the bells and smells.

But it strikes me that such wishful thinking is not only to be found among nostaligic materialists who gravitate to the more liturgy-focussed Christian denominations. Even those of us who worship in more Word-focussed forms of service may be content with just the familiar cadences of the preaching. Once through the doors, we can be adept at turning the volume down, or even off, until next Sunday. It can be hard to tell whether it is a fix or an inoculation. However it is to be viewed, it clearly demonstrates that we have never answered Lewis’s question in another book, “Is he a tame lion?”

Ann Zerkle has written an interesting article “In Defense of Buying Books” (Get Rich Slowly, 30 Dec 2008; HT lifehacker, 3 Jan 2009) that made me feel good about my book buying habits. I do borrow from the University library, but for the really important books, a purchase is definitely a must.

I’ve never really calculated the cost per hour, but I think many of my purchases are definitely less expensive than Zerkle’s. I have a considerable number of technical books on databases, programming languages and Web development. Most of them weigh in about £25-30, and I reckon they would take 25-30 hours of reading, so I think they’re about £1/hour. Set them against a 2 or 4 day course, and they definitely pay for themselves many times over.

Novels at, say, £10, that take, say 15-20 hours enjoyable reading, are even better value at 50-70 pence/hour. But then classic novels will be reread several times, so the cost comes down considerably. The same goes for classic theology books. I’m rereading C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity again (prompted by Tim Challies’s Reading Classics, but way behind schedule at the moment). I reckon this is my third time round, and likely to take about 20 hours. My copy cost the princely sum of 25 pence (back in the mid 70s), so that’s costing me less than a ha’penny per hour!

Of course, the main thing about reading books is not the cost, but the sheer enjoyment of turning the page. A good television dramatisation doesn’t even come close to reading a well written novel up close and personal. I’ve just started 2009 with P. D. James’s latest offering, The Private Patient, to lighten up the week after a daily dose of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. I’ll be reading, but only occasionally blogging it for Calvin’s 500th anniversary.

Now that I’ve salved my conscience on the buying front, it’s time to knuckle down to some serious reading.