Family Bike Ride

Last week, we were able to take our first official family bike ride. Tim's dad (who is with us for just a week) took us to a park he often visits. We rode through some woods, around a lake and right through a vineyard. There is a lot of beautiful French countryside for us to enjoy at just a short distance out of the city.

Book Review: Descartes' Bones

Title: Descartes’ Bones
Author: Russell Shorto
Publisher: DOUBLEDAY
Number of pages: 257




Review: This book, published in October 2008, provides (in the words of its subtitle) “A Skeletal History of the Conflict between Faith and Reason.”

Russell begins with an overview of “The man who Died” (chapter 1). Descartes lived in a an age of many scientific discoveries. However, he perceived them to be without any unifying foundation. The crises he experienced was a loss of meaning, and he began a quest for truth, for something to believe in. He was resolved to slash every idea until he came to a proposition that was impossible to deny. Aristotle, Aquinas, Plato, the Hebrew prophets and the Apostle Paul were all regulated to the same dustbin. Even his own senses could not be trusted since senses can deceive. There might be a tree in front of me, or I might be just dreaming that that is a tree.

“At the end of this remorseless reduction there is only one thing that remains, one proposition that can’t be denied, one sound, as it were, in the universe, like the lonely ticking of a clock. It is the sound of the thinker’s own thoughts. For can I doubt that thoughts are occurring right now, including this one? No: it’s not logically possible.” Hence the conclusion: “Cogito, ergo sum,” or, “Je pense, donc je suis,” or “I think, therefore I am.” This was way more than a slogan. As Shorto explains, it declared that “the mind and its ‘good sense’--that is to say, human reason--are the only basis for judging whether a thing is true…. Human reason supplanted received wisdom. Once Descartes had established the base, he and others could rebuild the edifice of knowledge. But it would be different from what it had been. Everything would be different.”

Following the overview of chapter one, the majority of Shorto’s book is devoted to a description of the peregrinations of the French philosopher’s bones down through the centuries following his death in 1650. The story is fascinating, not only because the skull was separated from the bones sixteen years after Descartes’ death (and followed a completely different trajectory through different countries), but because of the recurring connection that Descartes’ bones had with the developing ideas and events of the “modern” world that Descartes’ philosophy had produced. Thus, in an odd way, Descartes’ skull and the ideas which emerged from it keep intersecting.

This is a fascinating read, because it is on the one hand a non-fiction historical detective story, and on the other hand a philosophical analysis of modernity. Descartes introduced “modernism” which eventually gave way to “postmodernism.” The postmodern world ended, according to Shorto, on September 11, 2001. He borrows from the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas the term postsecular to describe the next stage in the evolution of Western society. This is a stage in which the two radical extremes--radical secularists (such as Christopher Hitchens and other “radical Enlightenment” warriors) and the “theological camp” (people “at the fringes of Western society who [refuse] to go along with the basic ideals inherited from the enlightenment,” who reject homosexuality, etc., and who value supposed divine revelation over human doubt)--are brought into the “moderate Enlightenment camp” in which it is recognized that “scientific and religious worldviews aren’t truly inconsistent but that perceived conflicts have to be sorted out.” (He explains how the American Revolution was the result of “moderate Enlightenment” thinking, and the French Revolution the result of “radical Enlightenment” thinking.)

Our understanding of the relationship of faith to reason and reason to faith have titanic implications to our own personal worldview. Understanding how these two have related throughout western history helps us better relate to the millions around us who, indifferent as they may be to the doubts concerning the authenticity of Descartes’ skull, are nonetheless the products of the doubts that skull produced.

Book Review: The J. I. Packer Collection: Selected & Introduced by Alister McGrath

Author: J. I. Packer edited by Alister McGrath
Publisher: IVP
Number of pages: 284




Review: Alister McGrath (professor of historical theology at Oxford University and author of J.I. Packer: A Biography) has collected 16 separate essays by Packer and arranged them in chronological order, the first dating from 1954 and the last from 1998.

If one were to organize these essays thematically, they would testify to Packer’s statesmanship in three different areas.

1. Statesman for Christian apologetics. Here is where Packer is at his best: defending the historic, evangelical faith. His genius mind is not shrouded, as others are, in verbose terminology and syntax, but exposed in his crisp and elucidating explanations of the doctrine of Scripture (“Revelation and Inspiration,” 1954), the exclusivity of the Gospel (“Christianity and Non-Christian Religions,” 1959; “The Problem of Universalism Today,” 1969; “Is Christianity Credible?,” 1981), the deity of Jesus Christ (“Keep Yourselves from Idols,” 1963; “Jesus Christ the Lord,” 1977; “A Modern View of Jesus,” 1987), penal substitution (“What Did the Cross Achieve?,” 1974) and “the divinely executed retributive process that operates in the world to come,” i.e. “the reality of hell” (“The Problem of Eternal Punishment,” 1990)

Here we find him taking his enemies head on. (Of Dr. Robinson’s book he said, “It is just a plateful of mashed-up Tillich fried in Bultmann and garnished with Bonhoeffer. It bears the marks of unfinished thinking on page after page.”) He stands up even to his friends. (In defending the doctrine of eternal punishment, he specifically mentions John Stott and said that he, among others, “appear[s] to back into [the belief in annihilation or conditional immortality] in horrified recoil from the thought of billions in endless distress, rather than move into it because the obvious meaning of Scripture beckons them.”) One thing is clear: Packer is not the man to mess with!

2. Statesman for theological spirituality. A major emphasis in Packer’s writings comes from a failure that he observed in seminaries to make any real connection between Christian theology and Christian living. He opposes the approach to theology that “separates the questions of truth from those of discipleship; it proceeds as if doctrinal study would only be muddied by introducing devotional concerns; it drives a wedge between theology and doxology, between orthodoxy and orthopraxy, between knowing true notions about God and knowing the true God himself, between one’s thinking and one’s worshipping. Done this way, theology induces spiritual pride and produces spiritual sleep. Thus the noblest study in the word gets cheapened. I cannot applaud this.” The problem, as Packer saw it, was found in the “cultural assumptions, especially within the western academy, which have forced theology to see itself as an academically neutral subject, not involving commitment on the part of its teachers or students, which is primarily concerned with information about abstract ideas.”

In contrast, Packer says we should approach theology “so that our thinking about [God] becomes an exercise of homage of him.” Packer’s goal was to “arrange a marriage” between systematic theology and spirituality. “Properly understood, theology embraces, informs and sustains spirituality.” Out of this flowed, of course, his most famous book, Knowing God (1973). The articles pertaining to the topic of theological spirituality in this collection are “On Knowing God” (1975), “An Introduction to Systematic Spirituality” (1990), and “Evangelical Foundations for Spirituality” (1991).

3. Statesman for ecumenical “great-tradition Christianity.” In later life, Packer saw the difference between Protestant churches and the Church of Rome overshadowed by a new and greater division within Christianity: a division between those who “honour the Christ of the Bible and historic creeds and confessions” on the one hand, and “theological liberals and radicals” on the other. Why should not conservatives form an alliance across the denominations to fight this radicalism? “Domestic differences about salvation and the church should not hinder us from joint action in seeking to re-Chrstianize the North American milieu.” This is what motivated him to sign the document “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” (ECT) in 1994 and to speak at the Aiken Conference, organized by leaders within the Orthodox Church, in 1995. (The essay he gave at that event is published in this book as “On from Orr,” 1996.)

Towards the end of his essay he asks, “Can conservative Protestants, Eastern Orthodox, and Roman Catholics of mainstream type join together in bearing witness to all that I have spoken of? I urge that we can, despite our known and continuing differences about the specifics of the salvation process and the place of the church in that process” (emphasis mine). There was only one hindrance: “To be sure, fundamentalists within our three traditions are unlikely to join us in this, for it is the way of fundamentalists to follow the path of contentious orthodoxism, as if the mercy of God in Christ automatically rests on persons who are notionally correct and is just as automatically withheld from those who fall short of notional correctness on any point of substance. But this concept of, in effect, justification, not by works, but by words--words, that is, of notional soundness and precision--is near to being a cultic heresy in its own right, and need not detain us further now, however much we may regret the fact that some in all our traditions are bogged down in it.”

It is on this point, in my opinion, where the great Packer fails, and does so miserably. I am reminded of Peter in Galatians 2 who began to undermine the Gospel for which he had fought so valiantly to uphold. Packer has fought valiantly to uphold the truth of the Gospel. We should never forget our debt. Sadly, he undermined through his actions much of his life’s labor. We should never forget the danger of doing the same.

Visiting the Cheloudtchenkos

Last Wednesday we took a day trip down to Ustaritz, France, a small village in Basque country right on the border with Spain. The purpose of our going was to visit with fellow missionaries JJ & Valerie Cheloudtchenko, and their two children David and Anna. JJ is presently struggling against cancer, and we wanted to pay them a visit in an effort to encourage them and enjoy fellowship with missionaries who have been in France much longer than we. (JJ is French, and grew up in the very area where he now ministers.)

We had a great time just visiting and chatting with the family. Valerie's aunt, Erika Cropsey, was visiting from Michigan, as she is helping out for about five weeks. Our kids especially had a blast playing together. They played and played and played outside, making "chicken pot pie" in the sand (that was the meal we had brought along), building tents with a tarp, playing ball, and everything else imaginable. Because of JJ's current health situation, the family is somewhat isolated from any sort of regular fellowship with any other believers, and so we determined to try to visit again soon.

On the way back home, we paused to snap a picture off the coastline of Biarritz, an internationally-known vacation spot.

Our container has arrived

We are thankful that the container with our belongings arrived safely on Wednesday. We had a good group of friends come to help us unload. It took us less than 45 minutes. Our stuff is presently stored in the garage here at my parents' home where it will remain until we get a place of our own.