Taking every thought captive

Some gleanings from the past month:

• Are we heading for ecological disaster? Or is it all hype? Or perhaps there is a hidden agenda. It’s not often that dissenting voices are reported, and usually they’re written off as crackpots. That might be a little hard when they come with environmentalist pedigrees like Bjørn Lomborg and Indur M. Goklany. The Kairos Journal article “Is Economic Progress Killing Our Planet?” makes interesting reading. I’ve had a growing suspicion of the popular view for some time. It looks like there might be hard evidence to back up scepticism. Lombord has his own Web site at http://www.lomborg.com/.
• Justin Taylor posted ‘On the Distinction between Christ’s “Passive” and “Active” Obedience‘ (Between Two Worlds, 15 May 2009). Very helpful in making the distinction clear.
• The Soul in Cyberspace: An Interview with Gouglas Groothuis (Tim Challies, 6 May 2009) was an interesting piece that got me thinking again about the effects of technology. The quote that struck Tim forecefully, “Chistians are specially equipped to think rightly about technology,” also struck me.

I got a copy of Fear Not! by Ligon Duncan yesterday and have started reading it. My interest was piqued by a recent blog post of the closing paragraph.

I hesitate to go as far as Jonathan Edwards in the opening quotation in chapter 1:

Resolved, to think much, on all occasions of my own dying, and of the common circumstances which attend death.

But I do think about it more frequently than I used to. It is much nearer than ever before, unless Christ return before it happen to me. Perhaps I miss the hymns that I sang in earlier years, that spoke realistically and comfortingly about it. And yet I think Christians are more touched by death than others, for several reasons.

Our circle of friends in our church fellowships typically has a wider age than that of our increasingly self- , peer- and close-family-centred pagan neighbours. We will know more older people more intimately and thus experience death at much closer quarters than others.

But at a deeper level, since Christian faith is in a Saviour who died and rose again, our faith sprang to life because of a death. And at that time we will have faced the wages of our sin — our death. And then, on a continuing basis, as we participate in the Lord’s Supper we are regularly (weekly as a baptist) confronted with the reality of a death we dared not die and a death that was not deserved, but for which we are immensely grateful as we will eternally be.

Despite such intimate acquaintance with death, Fear Not! promises to be a practical help for those times when death comes close, a touches family and friends. I trust it will be a preparation for personal authentic Christian grief and compassionate Christian comfort in the presence of death.

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Ligon Duncan, with J. Nicholas Reid, Fear Not! Death and the Afterlife from a Christian perspective. Fearn, Ross-shire: Christian Focus, 2008.