L'abri Marginalia (3)

More assorted notes from the L'abri conference:

• Ethos: Sometimes the most powerful thing in a person's words is the character of the speaker you can see behind the words, his or her ethos. The words themselves are the sails and the ethos is the wind which moves the ship. This is something that grows over time and can either make the words themselves much more powerful and beautiful than they would have been otherwise, or it can completely undercut the words and render them irrelevant. Ethos is who the speaker is when he or she is not speaking, not on stage, not being watched. It is how they treat their spouses and children, what happens when they get cut off in traffic, when they are betrayed, when they make a mistake. Ethos is not something that anyone can hide - it shows through. Logos is the content of the message. Pathos is the emotion in it, the heart in it. But of all three ethos is the most powerful. A beautiful life hardly needs to speak at all. When a human being is living as God made humans to live, brimming with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, self-control, and all the rest that kind of life is it's own testimony.
  

• Implications of Common Grace: God has been lavishly generous to the world, and this is known as his common grace. The world is filled with evidences of his grace. It is in everything from the rain that falls and waters crops to the capacity of mankind to reason and think. The Bible tells the story of a world that derives it's every good aspect directly from a loving, kind God who is committed to his creation. If this is true then a few things follow: 1. God calls us to honor people whenever we meet them. God has been extremely gracious to everyone alive, including his enemies. If God gives his gifts with such a broad hand, and extends dignity and honor to everyone, we must also. We must see every new person as a being made in the image of God and for whom God cares and watches closely. That is grounds for much honor on our part. 2. We must receive the gifts unbelievers give us with gladness. Something is not good just because it is Christian. Things are good because they are true and beautiful, and Christianity does not have a monopoly on that. 3. We must be affirmative of human culture. At the end of things all nations will carry their glory into the kingdom of God. 4. We must work happily alongside non-believers in all settings. 5. Christians above all must care for this world because God is in the midst of caring for the world. This is something that non-believers have led the church in. 6. The general response to God's common grace should be praise and adoration to God.

• Repugnant People: If the above is true the question rises: how do you live Christianly with repugnant people and still treat them in the light of the fact that they are image bearers of God? The answer, it seems, is the cross. As Lewis said, "On the cross, justice and mercy kiss." Jesus spent his life mingling with those whose ideas were detestable, and he gave his life to make those very people beautiful. Christians are called to live out God's redemption in the way we too love people. “Our commitment as Christians should be to seek and save those who are lost, that’s why Jesus came. Not to save, nice, decent people. That’s not why he came. We need to think very differently that we are sometimes taught to think. People’s repugnance is not to alienate me from them. It is to draw me towards them in love.” – Jerram Barrs.

• What Can We Know?: "There is mystery in that there is much that we don't know, but there is much also that we can know... No one has a God's eye view, but we can get God's point of view if he tells us. All reality is a mystery. We walk into like a fog, trusting God." -Jock Macgregor

• Cynicism: Cynicism is an over-confidence in suspicion. It is the belief that you can see through people, look at their motives and see their hypocrisy. In our culture there is a delight in cynicism. It is the delight of being in the inner ring which is formed by putting others outside. There is cynicism towards God, the thought that God does not "walk his talk. "God's only excuse is that he does not exist." -Camus. What is needed is for the flow of cynicism to be reversed and to be cynical of cynicism. You need incredible x-ray psychological vision to see inside the inner workings of another's soul. In fact, the only way to justly be cynical is if you have reach the positition of omniscience, and what do we see of the only one who is truly omniscient? God is not cynical at all. He hopes. He acts in faith and trust. Think of the parable of the Prodigal Son. The father has all the reasons in the world to be cynical of his son, but he runs to greet him and it is the father's joy that is the focus of the story, not his suspicion of his son. The limitations of cynicism lead us to humility. We do not even always know what is going on inside our own heads, let alone another's.