A 2-minute outtake from the DVD COLLISION: Christopher Hitchens vs. Douglas Wilson:
Anxious Impatience
Craig M. Gay, in his book The Way of the (Modern) World: Or, Why It’s Tempting to Live As If God Doesn’t Exist (Eerdmans, 1998), seeks to expose the symptoms of worldliness in the postmodern world. The organization of the book is quite thoughtful and the author builds a new theme off the previously theme, eventually tying all the themes together.
In a very basic form, the book develops around five progressive building blocks:
(a) Control—Man seeks to control his world through technology and rationalism. By this he refers to the impulse in the postmodern heart to control every area of life through technology, not merely to improve certain areas of life.
(b) Secularity—The aspirations of the modern man to this techno-rational control of the world leave little room for any god, save the “self-defining self.” God—if ever referenced at all—becomes a “god of the gaps,” a god whose necessity is limited to the areas of life that are outside of our control. Think “acts of god.”
(c) Individualism—The forces of control and secularity combine to encourage individualization, a fix-it-yourself mentality that breaks apart personal relationships and community.
(d) Anxiety—Man becomes an individualized self. But “the assumption of godlike responsibilities has turned out to be a heavy burden and that we have become increasingly anxious beneath the weight of this burden” (p. 308).
(e) Impatience—Combine control, secularity, individualism, and the anxiety from these godlike responsibilities and you end up with “what is possibly the master theme of modernity, and now of ‘postmodernity’: that of impatience” (p. 308).
This progression is helpful. And when the author begins to weave together the anxious impatience of our world his work really proves practical. Because, as Christians, we are called to cultivate an eschatological worldview and the spiritual disciplines of waiting and watching, distinctives directly undermined by modern forms of worldliness. I will leave the topics of prayer and community is for another post altogether.
I mention the five building blocks of his book because it provides an introduction to an important quote from the conclusion on the topic of “anxious impatience.” Gay writes:
…anxious impatience is evident in virtually all aspects of modern social and cultural existence, and not least in the increasingly frantic pace with which so much of life is carried on today. It is largely by reason of impatient frustration, after all, that we have been persuaded to try to perform the functions of the hidden—and, indeed, seemingly absent—God.
“God is either unwilling or incapable of helping us,” we say in effect, “therefore we have no choice but to help ourselves, to take matters into our own hands, and to try to engineer a habitable environment for ourselves.” Ironically, it is this same anxious impatience that has consequently moved us to surrender ourselves so naively to the dehumanizing techniques of the modern world.
Indeed, it is anxious haste that has incited us to mortgage ourselves to technical rationality for the sake of its promise of control. “After we have taken control of the world,” so we tell ourselves, implying that taking control of the world must somehow enable us to take control of ourselves, “then we will discover how to be human persons again.” But the horizon keeps receding, and we always seem to be waiting for the promised control to be established.
The longer we are forced to wait, however, the more anxious we become; and the more anxious we become, the more prone we are to placing what little hope we have left into the possibility of technical-rational control, and thus to giving ourselves over to dehumanizing modern systems; and so forth. It is an unfortunately vicious cycle.
Modern secular society is thus a culture of anxious impatience, a culture in which so much stress has been placed upon human abilities and human agency that the modern mind has effectively lost the ability to trust anything, or more importantly anyone, else.
—Craig M. Gay, The Way of the (Modern) World: Or, Why It’s Tempting to Live As If God Doesn’t Exist (Eerdmans, 1998), pp. 310–311.
So it’s not difficult to see why our postmodern culture find it difficult to understanding the value of faith, why it finds trusting in God difficult, why it’s unlikely that man waits patiently for God to lead and act, and how the cultural assumptions impinges upon God and distracts the heart by anxious impatience. Even as Christians, we feel the weight of this unbelief, this worldliness.
And so if you are looking for a book to help make sense of the modern world and to expose the subtleties of worldliness (and its costs), this book is an excellent—albeit studious—starting point.
Major Christian Authors
From Gene Veith’s blog:
I mentioned in a post yesterday that I am teaching a course at Patrick Henry College called “Major Christian Authors.” Some of you asked about my reading list. Here it is:
(1) Dante’s Paradiso
(2) Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Book I “Holiness”
(3) George Herbert, The Temple
(4) John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress
(5) Gerard Manley Hopkins, Complete Poems
(6) G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday
(7) T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets and other poems
(8) C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
(9) Charles Williams, The Descent into Hell
(10) Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory
(11) Flannery O’Connor, The Violent Bear It Away
Our students, thanks to our classical liberal arts core curriculum, have already read Dante’s Inferno, and other Lewis books. Likewise, obvious major Christian authors and their works who are missing from this list–such as Augustine’s Confessions, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Pascal’s Pensees, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment–are also in the core.
The Temple of Eden
In his book The Temple and the Church’s Mission (IVP/Apollos, 2004), G. K. Beale argues that the Garden of Eden was the “first archetypal temple.” He provides 14 conceptual and linguistic parallels between Eden and future tabernacle/temple structures. My brief summary:
1. The Garden as the unique place of God’s presence. Eden was the place where God walked back and forth with man, paralleled this with later references to the Tabernacle (Gen. 3:8 with Lev. 26:12, Deut. 23:14; 2 Sam. 7:6–7).
2. The Garden as the place of the first priest. Adam was placed in the garden to “cultivate and keep it” (Gen. 2:15). Taken alone, “cultivation” has obvious agricultural meaning. But this pair of terms (“cultivate/keep” also translated “serve/guard”) is used elsewhere in the OT to describe the work of the priest (Num. 3:7–8; 8:25–26; 18:5–6; 1 Chr. 23:32; Ezek. 44:14). Thus “the task of Adam in Genesis 2:15 included more than mere spadework in the dirt of a garden. It is apparently that priestly obligations in Israel’s later temple included the duty of ‘guarding’ unclean things from entering (cf. Num. 3:6–7, 32, 38; 18:1–7), and this appears to be relevant for Adam, especially in view of the unclean creature lurking on the perimeter of the Garden and who then enters” (p. 69).
3. The Garden as the place of the first guarding cherubim. After sin was introduced into the garden, Adam and Eve are barred from the tree of life by cherubim. This reveals that Adam’s work included more than gardening—he was to protect the garden from evil and uncleanness. (Gen. 3:24 with Ex. 25:18–22; 1 Kgs. 6:29-35, 8:6–7; Ezek. 28:14–16, 41:18).
4. The Garden as the place of the first arboreal lampstand. Likely, the Tree of Life provides the model for the lampstand placed directly outside the holy of holies (Ex. 25:31–36).
5. The Garden as formative for garden imagery in Israel’s temple. Temple references in the OT possess botanical, garden-like features (1 Kgs. 6:18, 29, 32; 7:20–26, 42, 47; Zech. 1:8–11; Ps. 74:3–7; 52:8; 92:13–15; Lam. 2:6; Isa. 60:13, 21).
6. Eden as the first source of water. Like Eden, the eschatological temples feature a source of water (Gen. 2:10 with Ezek. 47:1–12; Rev. 21:1–2).
7. The Garden as the place of precious stones. Note the correlation between precious stones in Eden and the building materials of the later tabernacle and temple (Gen. 2:12 with 1 Kgs. 6:20–22, Ex. 25:7, 11–39; 28:6–27; 1 Chr. 29:2).
8. The Garden as the place of the first mountain. Eden was situated upon a mountain (Ezek. 28:14, 16) just like Mount Zion (Ex. 15:17) and the eschatological temple (Ezek. 40:2; 43:12; Rev. 21:10).
9. The Garden as the first place of wisdom. “The ark in the holy of holies, which contained the Law (that led to wisdom) echoes the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (that also led to wisdom). Both the touching of the ark and the partaking of the tree’s fruit resulted in death” (pp. 73–74).
10. The Garden as the first place with an eastern facing entrance. Like the future tabernacle and temples, Eden was entered from the east (Gen. 3:24 with Ezek. 40:6).
11. The Garden as part of a tripartite sacred structure. Genesis 2:10 reveals that “a river flowed out of Eden to water the garden.” This reference formally distinguishes Eden from the garden. From this Beale builds the case that Eden and its adjoining garden “formed two distinct regions” (p. 74). He sees here tripartite degrees of holiness, similar to the temple complex, comprised of (a) the region outside the garden (the outer court); (b) the garden representing a sacred place (the holy place); and (c) Eden, where God dwells (the holy of holies).
12. Ezekiel’s view of the Garden of Eden as the first sanctuary. In Ezekiel 28:13–18, the prophet draws a number of parallels between Eden and Israel’s tabernacle/temple. Specifically, the prophet references Eden as a sanctuary and pictures Adam dressed as a priest (v. 13). And “Ezekiel 28:18 is probably, therefore, the most explicit place anywhere in canonical literature where the Garden of Eden is called a temple” (pp. 75-76).
13. The Ancient Near Eastern concept of temples in association with garden-like features. “Gardens not untypically were part of temple complexes in the Ancient Near East” (p. 76).
14. Early Judaism’s view of the garden as the first sanctuary. Beale provides evidence from the non-canonical Jewish literature to further prove that “Judaism in various ways also understood the Garden to be the first sanctuary in line with the above Old Testament evidence” (p. 27).
Conclusion: “The cumulative effect of the preceding parallels between the Garden of Genesis 2 and Israel’s tabernacle and temple indicates that Eden was the first archetypal temple, upon which all of Israel’s temples were based” (pp. 79-80).
Read more on these conceptual and linguistic parallels on pages 66–80 of Beale’s The Temple and the Church’s Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God (IVP/Apollos, 2004).
Writing to Learn/Think
From Justin Taylor today:
Calvin, citing Augustine: “I count myself one of the number of those who write as they learn and learn as they write.”
John Piper: “Writing became the lever of my thinking and the outlet of my feelings. If I didn’t pull the lever, the wheel of thinking did not turn. It jerked and squeaked and halted. But once a pen was in hand, or a keyboard, the fog began to clear and the wheel of thought began to spin with clarity and insight.
Arthur Krystal: “Like most writers, I seem to be smarter in print than in person. In fact, I am smarter when I’m writing. I don’t claim this merely because there is usually no one around to observe the false starts and groan-inducing sentences that make a mockery of my presumed intelligence, but because when the work is going well, I’m expressing opinions that I’ve never uttered in conversation and that otherwise might never occur to me. Nor am I the first to have this thought, which, naturally, occurred to me while composing. According to Edgar Allan Poe, writing in Graham’s Magazine, ‘Some Frenchman—possibly Montaigne—says: ‘People talk about thinking, but for my part I never think except when I sit down to write.’ I can’t find these words in my copy of Montaigne, but I agree with the thought, whoever might have formed it. And it’s not because writing helps me to organize my ideas or reveals how I feel about something, but because it actually creates thought or, at least supplies a Petri dish for its genesis.”
2 Random Book Questions
(1) Does anyone own a copy of P.G. Wodehouse’s autobiographical Over Seventy, also published in the compilation Wodehouse on Wodehouse? If you do, and you’re willing to part with it, you will find in me a book trader of astonishing generosity.
(2) Anyone aware of a commendable study of the theology of Fyodor Dostoevsky? Has anyone pulled the theology from his works and organized it into some form of systematic study? Just curious. I do see a journal article of this nature.
Happy Friday!
Tony Reinke 