1.31.2014 THE LORD LOVES THE GATES OF ZION - psalm 87.2

was struck by the word 'gates' this a.m.
and was going to write down yet another futile note to myself
to do a word study on 'gate' in the bible.
futile because i am so busy i never get back to it.
let me define 'busy'.
i am busy reading books...
and yet the Lord, as usual, is speaking so gently...but yet persistently
'give up books, steve.
give yourself over to the bible.
give yourself over to being reflectively in the word
...for all that time currently devoted to books.
rats!!!
don't get me wrong.
God has progressively drawn me to His word.
i have been much blessed and am being changed a bit..i think.
(but evidently i have a greater desire for enjoyment
that is in a moment gone into the thin air of nonentity,
than i have to spend my few remaining moments here in beholding God's ineffable
(incapable of being described) beauty in His Word
and be moved to imitate Him...
to never-ending, eternally satisfying reward,
but far better to the increase of His eternal glory.
the bible is a life changing book.
(maybe subconsciously i am afraid of losing all control.
the old self nature wants what it wants
and screams bloody murder whenever it even senses
that something else may replace it as 'control center'...
and it would no longer be in charge.

john wesley, i think, talked about being
the man of one book.
my spirit desires but the flesh is so weak.
it's sick!...
how i feed and give into my own desires
which continually make tons of trouble, temporal and eternal,
in exchange for tiny glimmers of fools gold
and tantalizingly tiny morsels of fleshly pleasure.
why do i do it?
the only thing i see that makes sense of this to me
is found in ecclesiastes 9.3,
'this is an evil in all that is done under the sun,
that there is one fate for all men .
furthermore, the hearts of the sons of men are full of evil
and INSANITY IS IN THEIR HEARTS
throughout their lives.
afterwards they go to the dead'.
insanity comes from a deep subconscious anger and enragement
at the idea i should live for another and die to myself.

may God give me the grace to plead with and agonize for Him
to change this wicked selfish heart
...until He affects the change.

back to the one book idea.
it seems that the idea of spending time in the morning
reflectively reading, thinking and praying over
what just has happened
over what is just ahead.
listening for His guidance (many times discovered right in the day's scripture read)
is being expanded with a growing desire to
spend the evening hours before bed to become given over to intercession
and to do deeper study of scripture that God seems to especially be highlighting.
...all this to the goal of living unto Him
going about doing Good in some similar manner to which He did when here.

enough musing and back to the verse highlighted this morning
..actually, the word, 'gates'.
from the 'quiet' journal,
'could gates signify, by metonymy
(a figure of speech consisting of the use of the name of one thing (here, 'gates')
by that of another (here, the people who use the gates to go into and out from the city)
of which it is associated (as in lands belonging to the KING) )
if this is correct, could 'gates' here, by metonymy, signify those who go thru the gates of Zion?
when v2 says 'the Lord loves the gates of Zion' is this saying
'the Lord loves those who go in the gates to worship Him (at the temple)
as well as loving those who go out of the gates to
1. SHOW FORTH HIS PRAISE AND HIS GOODNESS TO OTHERS throughout the world
WHEREVER and however and whenever THEY MAY BE ENCOUNTERED? or to...
2. DO WAR
(middle english 'werre' from old north french , which is from old high german 'werra;
latin 'verrere' -sweep (away);(deadly) conflict)
meaning confusion and strife)
ON THOSE WHO ACTIVELY HATE AND WILL NOT OBEY
THEIR CREATOR/REDEEMER

(through losing their lives in praying for and actively loving all men
by obedience to God's word ...even to the death.)


2.

1.30.2014 'TIS SO SWEET TO TRUST IN JESUS

1. 'TIS SO SWEET TO TRUST IN JESUS'
JUST TO TAKE HIM AT HIS WORD,
JUST TO REST UPON HIS PROMISE,
JUST TO KNOW THUS SAITH THE LORD.

CHORUS: JESUS JESUS, HOW I TRUST HIM!
HOW I'VE PROVED HIM O'ER AND O'ER!
JESUS, JESUS, PRECIOUS JESUS!
O FOR GRACE TO TRUST HIM MORE!

2. O HOW SWEET TO TRUST IN JESUS,
JUST TO TRUST HIS CLEANSING BLOOD,
JUST IN SIMPLE FAITH TO PLUNGE ME
'NEATH THE HEALING, CLEANSING FLOOD!

3. YES, 'TIS SWEET TO TRUST IN JESUS,
JUST FROM SIN AND SELF TO CEASE,
JUST FROM JESUS SIMPLY TAKING
LIFE AND REST AND JOY AND PEACE.

4. I'M SO GLAD I LEARNED TO TRUST THEE,
PRECIOUS JESUS, SAVIOR, FRIEND;
AND I KNOW THAT THOU ART WITH ME,
WILT BE WITH ME TO THE END.

1.27.2014 APOLOGETICS - americanvision.org

I peter 3.15 says 'sanctify the Lord God in your hearts
and be ready always to give an answer to
every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear...
today EVIDENTIAL APOLOGETICS are prevalent...
THE EVIDENCE produced FOR A GOD (!)...NOT CHRIST.. is from outside of the Bible.

this type of apologetics makes the hearer the judge.

man is not the judge of truth, nor the judge of God.

God has revealed Himself in several ways:
1. His creation...
'the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth His handiwork.
day unto day uttereth speech and night unto night showeth knowledge.
there is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard.
their line is gone out through all the earth
and their words to the end of the world.  psalm 19.1-3
2. His word, the bible...
'...from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures,
which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.
all scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable
for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness:
that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.  II timothy 3.15-7
3. His Son, Jesus Christ...
'God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets,
hath in these last days spoken unto us by His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things...Hebrews 1. 1-2

the only way to know truth is through God.
without Him there is no truth.
all men are born alienated from God and destined for hell,
because they have rejected God,
the one who created them
and gave His life on the cross of calvary to save them from their sin.
'for God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son
that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.

man rejects God because He does not see his need of God
nor does he want to obey God.
'for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men,
who hold the truth in unrighteousness;
because that which may be known of God is manifest in them;
for God hath shown it unto them
for the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world
are clearly seen,
being understood by the things that are made,
even His eternal power and Godhead:
SO THAT THEY ARE WITHOUT EXCUSE. Romans 1. 16-20

today i viewed a video from The American Vision which is founded on the above verses.
it presents a way for interaction with people who do not want the God of the bible.
it is based on a PRESUPPOSITIONAL APOLOGETIC.
(a defense that takes for granted as fact that no truth can contradict the bible).
or to say it another way,
one can only know the way to heaven by submitting themselves to the God of the bible.
Jesus said, I am the way, the truth and the life. no man cometh unto (God) the Father but by Me'.

many present evidence to man with the idea that this will enable man to decide for or against God...
ie. man can be the judge over God.
the bible presents God, the One who on the day of judgment will appoint all men to their eternal place,
to man...as One who died to take away away the penalty for his sin.
'for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God'. romans 3.23
'for the wages of sin is death (eternal separation from God),
but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. romans 6.23

most people today state that there is no set truth...
while (implicitly) positing truth of the above statement!
this approach focuses on not allowing this inconsistency.
and...if possible...helping the person to see this and to see that the bible posits, correctly and unashamedly,
that it alone is the source, the foundation of, truth.

a few statements repeated throughout the dvd of live interactions...
*what is truth in your view?
*the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
*you cannot know anything unless you start with God.
*don't conclude with God, start with Him
*when you don't start with God you have given up knowledge
*where do you get truth about God?
*response to 'truth' statements made which are contradictory to the Bible,
'THAT'S NOT WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS..."

1.24.2014 THE LIFE OF SAINT ANTONY by athanasius

this is a part of the Ancient Christian Writers series...the works of the (church) fathers in translation.
this is translated into english by robert t. meyer, ph. D. quoted here is the introduction.

'the present volume contains the most important document of early monasticism,
'the Life of St. Antony', whose author is no less a man than the great st. athanasius himself.

antony, generally considered the father of christian monachism or monasticism,
was born about the year 250 of well to do parents in middle egypt.
if sozomen's information is not confused, his home town was coma.
his parents were christians.
Ath stresses that the boy was attached to them and to home life,
finding school and companionship with other children distasteful.

he was 18 or 20 years of age when his parents died,
leaving him guardian of his younger and only sister.
one day, about six months later, he happened to enter the church
when he was struck by the reading of the gospel in which the Lord speaks to the rich young man:
'if thou wilt be perfect, GO SELL ALL  that thou hast and GIVE it TO THE POOR;
and COME, FOLLOW ME
and THOU SHALT HAVE TREASURE IN HEAVEN.
applying this to himself, he went home and distributed his land
-a fertile farm of more than 200 acres-
among the townspeople.
he sold all his other belongings.
he did not wish the goods of the world to hamper himself or his sister,
and so he also disposed of the money received, giving it to the poor.
only a small sum was retained for his sister.

but once again as he went to church, he was moved by a lesson of the gospel:
BE NOT *SOLICITOUS FOR THE MORROW.
(*anxious, concerned about)
taking this as another gesture from on high,
he distributed the remaining fund to the poor.
placing his sister in the care of a community of pious women,
he began to practice the ascetic life near his old home.
at this time such life was not yet practiced in common,
but one who desired to lead the perfect life went apart from the rest
and apart from any organization practiced it by himself.
near An's native village there lived an old man who had given himself to a life of asceticism from his youth.
drawn by his EXAMPLE, An left his home surroundings
and observed carefully the ascetic practices of this SOLITARY and of other men like him.
he endeavored to IMITATE the special VIRTUE of each,
not in a spirit of pride or contention,
but with purpose of becoming a model ASCETIC in the eyes of God.
PRAYER was combined with FASTING and MANUAL LABOR,
for his teachers in the ascetic life agreed with the apostle who said that
he that is lazy, neither let him eat. (II thessalonians 3.10)

later he departed to some tombs that lay at a considerable distance from the village.
and obliging friend locked him in an empty vault and brought him bread from time to time.
Ath reports (10) that An remained here until he was approximately 35 years of age,
in his solitude fighting off the temptations of the flesh and the attacks of demons.
because of his constancy the Lord promised him in a vision that he would be ever at his side in time of trial
and make him renowned throughout the world.
he left this retreat to move to the right side of the nile to the outer mountain at pospir,
where he occupied a deserted fort.

after living in his new solitude for a long time-st. ath states (14) that this period lasted 20 years
-he was visited by friends who wished to copy his holy life.
they broke down the door of his retreat
and An emerged, fresh and unchanged and performing miracles and preaching the love of Christ.
many gathered around him to follow the ascetic life.
he became their leader, teaching them constantly by word and example,
fostering their zeal, and attracting still others to the ascetic life.
from this period we have a long discourse (16-43) delivered by An on the vocation of the monk,
the temptations of satan and his powerlessness in the presence of recourse to prayer against him,
and the gift, coming from the Holy Spirit, of discerning good and evil spirits.

at about this time we also find An at the head of a group of monks
going to alexandria during the persecution of maximin daja.
his purpose was to offer himself for MARTYRDOM, if the lord willed it.
he spent his time 'ministering to the confessors in the mines and in the prisons'.
but to his grief it did not please God that he should die a martyr
and when the persecution had ended, he returned to his cell,
to be a daily martyr to his conscience, ever fighting the battles of the faith'. (47)

while An was the recognized superior of the monks who had subjected themselves to him,
he remained ever true to his eremitic vocation.
he needed to be alone;
and to be alone, he left pispir and travelled for some days through the desert towards the red sea.
when he had found a spring and some date palms,
he settled there at the foot of a mountain.
this was the 'inner mountain', still known as der mar antonios,
where he cultivated a small garden and spent his time in prayer and meditation.
charles kingsley has this to say of An's new retreat:
'the eastward view from An's old home must be one of the most glorious in the world,
save for the want of verdure and of life.
for An, as he looked across the gulf of akaba, across which, far above,
the israilites had passed in old times, could see the sacred peaks of sinai,
flaming against the blue sky with that intensity of hue which is scarcely exaggerated, it is said,
by the bright scarlet color in which sinai is always painted in medieval illuminations.

from this retreat he was to make quite regular trips to visit and counsel his spiritual subjects.

and other recorded facts, too, show that An must not be thought of
as one who immersed himself in his ascetic practices and the eremitical life to the exclusion of all else.
Ath pictures him as going to alexandria and publicly denouncing the arian heretics and 'Christ-fighters' (60-78
he did not refuse to enter discussion with the 'greeks', the followers of neo platonic thought ( 72-80).
the world beat a path to his cell in the heart of the desert, seeking cures of body and mind and soul;
and, as they had done at pispir, monks came to him for his sympathy and practical advice.

when he felt his end approaching, he wished to die alone on his mountain
-the 'Inner Mountain'-where he had spent so many decades of 'daily martyrdom'.
 after a brief farewell to the brethren on the 'outer mountain',
he went back to his retreat in the company of two monks, macarius and amatas,
who lived with him because of his advanced age.
he then made his last will and testament:
his place of burial was never to be revealed by the two monks;
further, to bishop Ath he left a sheepskin and a cloak, gifts which he had once received from him;
bishop serapion was to receive his other sheepskin,
but they were to keep the hair shirt for themselves (91).
witgh a final blessing for them, he gave up his spirit.

when An died in the year 356 at the age of 105 years,
he was recognized founder and father of monasticism.
his original settlement at pispir of monks who looked to him as their superior,

1.23.2014 MARTYN LLOYD-JONES: a glimpse

27....the state of INDEPENDENT evangelicalism since 1966 has not been
all that he encouraged and urged it to be.
...some subconsciously expected great blessing to crown their secession or separatist stance
and were a little aggrieved when others seemed to see more growth and spiritual prosperity.
the separatist camp often looked uninviting to any would be seceder.

this situation did not remain static.
some went on, as entrenched as ever in their denominations;
others became ever more committed to no compromise separation.
some in the inclusive denominations, however, came to see that triumphalism is one thing,
the triumph of truth quite another.
a more biblical realism emerged.
they became more aware of who and were their true friends were.
at the same time some outside such bodies came to see that
a church which is uncompromised doctrinally can be compromised
just as seriously in other ways;
and that cold or dead orthodoxy is of little use to God or man.
they came to see that blessing cannot be
channelled according to paper lists of ecclesiastical association,
but runs much more along the lines of a people's working relationship with
God, His truth and other Gospel churches.

43...yet deep level isolation from most of his ecclesiastical peers
was a permanent part of the Doctor's experience
and this, i think, gave him a special sense of affinity with the puritans,
who were the odd men out in relation to the anglican establishment
in the century after the reformation.
...he viewed them as classic instances of christian determination to stop at nothing
and to refuse no form of unpopularity and rejection,
in order to get God's church into fully scriptural shape;
...natural as well as spiritual....was powerfully reinforced by the puritan example.

the final point needing to be noted ..is that he was a dyed in the wool reformed churchman
...one who saw that in scripture the church is central to
both the fulfilling of God's purposes and the furthering of His praise
and one for whom therefore THE STATE OF THE CHURCH was always a matter of prime concern.
overall, it is not too much to say that his preaching, ..
started from, revolved round and homed upon just tow areas:
one, the state of the church, for which his final remedy was Holy Ghost revival through a return to the old paths of fatih and practice;
the other, THE STATE OF THE WORLD, for which his final remedy was
the biblical gospel or the three Rs
-ruin, redemption, regeneration- set forth in the Holy Spirits's power.
he described himself as primarily an evangelist,
but in fact the condition of the church weighed upon him as heavily as did that to the lost.
...his ECCESIOLOGY had developed over the years:
ordained a presbyterian and officially one to his dying day,
he became in polity 'A CONVINCED INDEPENDENT'..
and ceased to baptize covenant children,
though retaining affusion as his mode of baptizing adults.
this combination of tenets and procedures was unsual if not unique.
but he WOULD NEVER MAKE POLITY AN ISSUR;
he urged...that evangelical churches should accept without question
each other's varieties of organization and usage
provided these did not directly contradict scripture
and concentrate together on the common quest for
doctrinal purity, spiritual profundity and missionary vitality,
under the guidance and authority of God's written word.
it was thus, to his mind, that true christian unity would be shown
and the church's real health promoted.

at first..he left on one side the question of denominations.
but over the years he came to think that since there was little hope
of the main protestant churches in england and wales accepting biblical reform of faith and life
and seeking spiritual revival together,
since too their links with the world council of churches were compromising their future
(for the Doctor never doubted that a single super church based on doctrinal horse trading
lay at the end of the WCC road)
,the wisest course was for evangelical ministers and congregations to withdraw from these bodies
and form a new 'non denominational' association of the old fashioned Independent type.
he once told me that he had privately believed that something of this kind
would have to happen ever since j. gresham machen
was put out of the ministry of the presbyterian church of the USA in 1936
and thus became a living proof of how resistant to biblical authority and reform
mainline churches can be.
in the 1960s, following the commemoration of the 1662 ejectment of 2000 puritan clergy,
the Doctor began to publicize his view...
his gestures evoked strong feelings both ways.

...how did the Doctor put his case?
essentially, his argument was three pronged:
that separation was prudent in the light of the unattractive ecumenical rapprochements
into which mainline denominations were being drawn;
that separation was an effective and glorious, even necessary, way of manifesting evangelical unity...
that separation was a present duty, since evangelicals wwere guilty by association
of all the evils currently found in their own denominations.

46...in the addresses, 'puritanism and its origins' and 'john knox-the founder of pritanism',
...he rejects what he calls 'the anglican view' of puritanism' as 'essentially pastoral theology'
...and of the puritans as clergy who whild pursuing this interest
stayed in the church of england
even though reforms they sought were not forthcoming.
he rightly observes that this view deals only with how the word 'puritan' was used historically,
not with the human relity to which it was applied.
with m.m. knappen he sees PURITANISM
as a mentality that first appeared as early as william tyndale,
one that starts with INDEPENDENT BIBLE STUDY
and insists on APPLYING THE FRUITS OF THAT STUDY TO THE REORDERING OF
CHURCH LIFE;
a spirit that demands 'REFORMATION WITHOUT TARRYING',
and that will CHALLENGE THE MAGISTRATE'S CONTROL OF THE CHURCH
and BREAK WITH the ECCLESIASTICAL ESTABLISHMENT
WHENEVER NECESSARY...TO SECURE THAT REFORMATION.
APPLICATION OF BIBLICAL TRUTH was and always will be central in puritanism:
'there is no such thing, it seems to me, as a theoretical or academic puritan.
there are people who are interested in puritanism as an idea;
but they are traitors to puritanism unless they apply its teachings;
for application is always the characteristic of the true puritan'.
and the church as such was and remains the prime object of this application;p
the puritan study of piety and pastoral care was, as a matter of history,
'subsidiary to the desire for true reform of the church.
indeed, the underlying argument is that only a truly reformed church...
guarantees the possibility of that full flowering...

52...the Doctor conceived christian experience in puritan terms.
his understanding hinged on two principles;
first, the primacy of the mind in man, as quide to his will and judge of his feelings;
second, the indirectness of the work of the HOLY SPIRT, who teaches and moves us
by FIRST MAKING US ACTIVELY LEARN
and THEN ROUSING US TO MOVE OURSELVES.
when the Spirit is at work, illuminating and imparting,
He stirs mind and feelings together to an affective awareness of divine realities;
God, Christ, grace, pardon, adoption, new creation and the rest;
christianity is therefore 'EXPERIMENTAL' (we would say EXPERIENCIAL)
in its very essence and the idea that the best christianity is that into which least emotion enters
is..shallow and absurd..

53...in teaching holiness, the life of obedience to Christ wherby one abides in Him,
...(he) saw QUIETIST passivity
(a form of religious mysticism taught by Molinos, a spanish priest, in the latter part of the 17th cent.'
requiring extinction of the will, withdrawal from worldly interests and passive meditation on God...)
as a kind of modern demon possessing evangelical minds and needing explicit exorcism.
slogans like 'LET GO AND LET GOD', 'STOP TRYING AND START TRUSTING',
seemed to him from this standpoint so misleading as to be scandalous.
the FORMULAE OF HOLINESS are 'DO THIS', 'DON'T DO THAT AGAIN',
'PRAY FIRST AND THEN ACT' and
WISDOM IS TO GUIDE ALWAYS IN THE APPLICATION OF BIBLICAL PRINCIPLES.
DETERMINATION and EFFORT are needed for the practice of holy living,
since opposition from indwelling sin is multiform and constant, as galatians 5.16-7 shows.
(the flesh sets its desire against the Spirit and the Spirit against the flesh....)


...SPIRITUAL DEPRESSION,
a condition distinct from though often linked with the clinical depression
...has at its heart unbelief of God's gracious promises.
the remedy for it is to learn to fight the feelings that unbelief begets
by keeping one's spiritual eyes on god's faithfulness to His promises
as He disciplines His children
and by talking to oneself in the style of psalm 42 about the certainty that some day
one will be praising God for turning one's sorrow into joy.

54...ASSURANCE OF GOD'S EVERLASTING LOVE and of heaven to come
was to him the supreme blessing in his life
and the supreme form of assurance, which all christians should seek,
was the direct witness of God's Spirit with our spirit that we are children and heirs of God.
equating this witness of which romans 8.15-7 speaks,
with the seal of the Spirit (ephesians 1.13; 4.30 cf. II corinthians 1.22)
with baptism with the Spirit (john 1.33)
and with receiving the Spirit in some passages of acts,
...commending the puritan doctrine of direct assurance as a neglected truth that we need..to recover..

finally, the puritans, with christians of every age till this (19th) century,
viewed DYING WELL as the crown upon a godly life.

78...the PRIMARY WORK OF CHRIST in His earthly ministry he points out was not
physical healing or social relief or political reform.
the physical healins were 'signs' that pointed to profounder needs and possibilities.
the great thing was, SEEK YOU FIRST THE KINGDOM OF GOD + HIS RIGHTEOUSNESS
in comparison with that, all material, physical and social needs took second place...

80...'every preacher should be, as it were, at least three types or kinds of PREACHER.
thereis the preaching which is primarily EVANGELISTIC.
..there is the preaching which is instructional but mainly EXPERIMENTAL.
...there is more purely INSTRUCTIONAL type of preaching...
...'i am not and have never been, a typical welsh preacher.

83...i felt that in preaching the first thing that you had to do was to
demonstrate to the people that what you were going to do was demonstrate to people
that what you were going to do was very rfelevant and urgently important.
the welsh style of preaching started with a verse
and the preacher then told you the connection and analysed the words,
but the man of the world did not know what he was talking about and was not interested.
i started with the man whom i wanted to listen-
the patient,
a person in trouble,
an ignorant man who has been to the quacks
and so i deal with all that in the introduction.
i wanted to get the listener and THEN come to my exposition.
they started with their exposition and ended with a bit of application....

the rev. leigh powell of canada...recalls taking to westminster chapel a friend,
'an unemotional mathematician',
who st stirred to the depths as the Doctor
'ascended the ladder of pau's logic in romans'.
(he) writes..'as he was preaching he told me,
'i said "ah, yes, but"-and then he answered the but, until i had no buts left'..

86...'lloyd jones was a great logician and clear thinker, but as he himself said,
"no one has ever been 'reasoned' into the kingdom of God".
he preached with zeal and passion, but still many are proof against emotion, however sincere.
the Doctor himself comes to the heart of the matter when he writes,
"true preaching after all is God acting.
it is not just a man uttering words;
it is God using him.
he is being used of God".
this is the unique factor in effective preaching. I corinthians 2.3-5

...consequently the one thing he prayed for,
the one thing he relied on,
the one thing he waited for
and the one thing above all else and beyond most other preachers of his generation
which thousands felt under his preaching
was the unction or anointing  of the Holy Spirit:
that scarcely definable accompaniment of solemn, sacred, searching truth as proceeding from
the eternal presence of God....

113...Lloyd-jones became involved with the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students,  IFES

...all member movements of the IFES had to be unreservedly committed to
the supreme authority of the holy scriptures.
sound doctrine, combined with Spirit generated warmth, must charaterise each national affiliate.
but in adition conscious as (lloyd-jones) was of
the possible domination of powerful countries over the weaker ones,
the Doctor guided the general committee to accept the need for an 'open' fellowship.
each (national?) movement must be encouraged to develop its own style of leadership,
suited to its cultural ethos;
no group should impose on another its pattern of work.
so the basic quality of indegeneity was affirmed at the very outset of this organization.
the fact that L-J was welsh helped considerably.
some delegates were amused when he insisted
that he would not allow the english or the church of england to formulate
his christian perception of truth!

114...as chairman, LJ guided his committees with wisdom.
he refused to allow his members to sidetrack on to trivia or petty issues.
he worked at biblical, rather than pragmatic, solutions to the major issues.
yet in spite of his spiritual stature the Doctor was never a dictator.
he listened to debates with sensitivityu and great patience.
he encouraged all members to participate actively in the discussion.
he would sometimes remind those who were articulate in english to consider their brothers
whose mother tongues were different: they had their distinctive contributions to make.

when i speak to those who served on the executive comjmittee under the Doctor's leadership,
they invariably refer to the evening discussions.
these were always introduced by the Doctor himself.
no business items were permitted.
the members were to tackle contemporary issues.
sometimes these might include a critique on the unification of the church as advocated by ecumenicals.
inevitably there would be a stimulating discussion of the presuppositions
adopted by different ecclesiastical camps.
'what then is the biblical view?', he would pertinently challenge his fellow committee members.
on other evenings they might explore current trends in theology, ethics and society.
the Doctor never allowed these topics to remain in the realm of the academic.
the principles deduced and agreed in their debates were applied to student work or to the church at large. ..

117...the delegates who were at the general committee heard him expound I samuel 4.
his message was on THE ABSENCE OF GOD.
it was possible for christians to be so preoccupied with themselves and their activities
-even christian ones-
that they left God out of their reckoning.
that message was used by God's Spirit to convict many of us of sin and insensitivity to His glory.
it resulted in confession and repentance and a new sense of joy.

118..large crowds of students-both british and those from overseas-
flocked to hear the Doctor (at westminster chapel.)
we would furiously scribble notes.
sometimes, indeed, we were admonished not to concentrate on note taking
lest we fail to meet the Lord Himself.
LJ's  preaching always brought us face to face with the triune God.
it also taught us to think biblically.
those of us from overseas found this discipline invaluable when we returned to our home countries.
faced with ethical compromise and with the current fads and fashions of materialistic societies,
how thankful we were to test every thing from scripture....

...'did you know, my friend, the Doctor asked us, that in east africa, when you gave aTESTIMONY
you did not stop at why and how you became a christian?
you carried on right up to today-this is TRUE christianity, my friend.

...but without a doubt, the greatest thing the Doctor has ever said, as far as i am concerned,
was not found in a sermon.
it was in his long prayer one sunday morning, and i have never forgotten it.
whenever i am in a corner, spiritually, and i remember that one sentence,
God's sovereignty just floods my heart and i am released.
many, many people the world over who have heard the Doctor PRAY can say the same....

..he taught themn to recognise the enemy
and the sins that could easily affect and divide the evangelical 'soldiers'.

124...the way in which he presided over committee meetings enabled future generations of IFES leaders
to major on the issues that really matter.
the fundamentals of the faith have alwys been in the forefront of the IFES.
secondary matters have obviously their importance and place.
but these were never overstressed by leaders in a way
that would lead to unnecessary schism and division.
the Doctor taught us the crucial need to be united in the Lord and in His word.

and finally, his availabilityu as a counsellow and friend meant a lot to younger leaders.
those of us who are in this position require encouragement from time to time
-and sometimes rebuke-
from an older saint who cares for us.
the Doctor's availability to leaders of student movements, and his godly counsel, sustained many of us
and we thank God for his life and ministry.

...friday night discussions which filled the institute hall..to hear him make the audience work out
THE CHRISTIAN ATTITUDE TO THE QUESTIONS they had  RAISED.
he knew how to teach not only so that you did not forget,
but so that in future you knew how to begin on any problems which came up.
it was always scripturally based.
'you think that paul may have said something about it?
paul wrote a number of letters, which one was it in? ephesians?
very well, there are six chapters in ephesians, which chapter?
and so on, until the exact quotation was found
and then put in its context,
and then compared with other parts of the bible on the same subject,
until finally we were all quite clear what the bible was saying,
not because HE had told us, bu7t because he had made us work it through for ourselves.

then we had to apply it-and here he would try to make us separate our well worn prejudices
from the balance of biblical teaching.
'yes indeed, i understand that point of view, mr. catherwood
-and holding that, as you do, you would also logically hold the following, would you not?
you would cautiously assent.
'and that being so...'
and as he took you another step down your road of error you would begin to see where you were going and would hesitate.
'come, come, mr. catherwood, you do agree that that is the logic of your position, do you not?'
and having seen at last were your logic took you, you would be forced back to the beginning
and, having recanted in full public view, would never make that mistake again!
he once apologized for pressing me so hard.
he said, 'you can take it, but there are others who hold the views you are putting who could not take it
and i'm really teaching them through you'.

as i learnt myself later on, discussions are not easy to lead.
in a talk or sermon, YOU map out your own logical route
and you don't have to prepare for all the objections and diversions.
but in leading a discussion anything may arise,
and if you've not got the whole framework within which your doctrinal theme sits,
then you're lost.
if the line of thought is irrelevant, you have to persuade the contributor, very gently,
that it really is another subject.
if it is relevant, you have to know where and how if fits, so that the contributor can be led to the connection
and that facet of the truth can be properly illuminated.
but that requires a wide knowledge of the subject and of all the arguments
and that needs not only a well stocked mind, but the ability to assess
arguments against the framework of doctrine
and the spiritual sensitivity to detect in those arguments a tendency to truth or to error.

the Doctor's vast reading not only gave him a knowledge of the arguments,
but his supreme medical skill as a diagnostician gave him a superbly analytical and logical mind.
you could see him separating out the strands in the argument,
dividing the false from the true, showing why certain strands were dangerous and would not hold,
which strands were true and could be relied on
and where they needed strengthening with others before they could be put to the test.

he showed our generation clearly that the strand of pietistic evangelicalism,
the muscular christianity of the varsity and public school camps,
the devotional piety of the brethren,
the emotional dedication of the great conventions (ie. keswick)
the revivalism of the big interdenominational missions (ie billy graham crusades)
was not enough.
he, almost alone, stopped the retreat in face of the liberal humanism
which the church had not dared to meet head on.
he led the evangelical wing of the church back into the center of theological argument,
not by conceding a thing, but by going back to its foundation in the reformation.
he, almost alone to begin with, wove in again the strong central strand of reformed theology
to evangelical teaching
-a strand which had almost snapped off in the late 19th century,
when spurgeon seemed to lose to the rising tide of liberalism in the 'downgrade' controversy.
that reformed theology which illuminated the immense logical sweep of the christian gospel,
like the great mutually supporting arches of a majestic cathedral,
came as a revelation to those of us brought up on a diet of blessed thoughts and texts for the day.

and having read through calvin and the westminster confession,
through hodge and berkhof,
having seen that the reformed doctrine of the sovereignty of God the creator
transformed the natural sciences and indeed the whole of society,
having seen evolution as no more than speculative metaphysics
and liberalism and higher criticism for old fashioned heresies,
we tended to forget that the majestic fashioned rood of christian doctine was to cove and protect
the human relationships of a LIVING CHURCH.
bu LJ did not.
all the doctrine was dead without the strand of love,
a passionate love for God
-a love which God would return,
flooding us with an overwhelming sense of his presence
and a love for each other,
by which all men would know that we were God's children.

130..there was the nurse in bed at her parents' house, being looked after by a fellow nurse.
she had a soaring temperature which came down to normal every evening by the time the GP called round.
no one could make sense of the symptoms.
LJ got everyone out of the sick room and asked the nurse, 'why did the hospital dismiss you?
she hadn't dared to tell her parents
and had come home with a feigned illness
and with the other partner in collusion to report the high temperature and maintain their desperate cover.
LJ looked at the patient, not at the temperature chart and knew she wasn't ill.
my recollection is that he prescribed a speedy recovery followed by a dose of moral courage.

...what interested him in politics was, i think, the clash of personality.
for him politics was people.
he did not believe that there was a particularly christian view of politics.
it was more a matter of the capacity to make the right judgments.
..what Doctor did object to was the hypocrisy of a politician disregarding his marriage vows
and then taking a high moral tone about the sanctity of contracts.

139...we have a photo graph of LJ in the family (daughter speaking)
-it is my favourite of all the photographs..one of him in profile, reading.
and that is exactly how i think of him.
this oasis of peace in the middle of all the life that was going on around us,
this peaceful man sitting there with a book on his knee,
enjoying it and wanting us to enjoy it as well..

143..again he felt very strongly that you should never read just to get ideas which you then regurgitated.
he said, 'we are not meant to be gramophone records or tape recording machines'.
i remember sometimes his expressing some anxiety about various speakers who,
because of their love for the writers of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries,
would produce the thoughts of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries,
often in the language of the 17th, 18th and 19th century.
he used to worry sometimes about a person.
...he said, 'in a sense one should not go to books for ideas;
the business of BOOKs IS TO MAKE ONE THINK...
the function of reading is to stimulate us in general,
to stimulate us to think, to think for ourselves.
'take all you read'  he said and masticate it thoroughly'.
it is rather like bacon, isn't it?
you know how he said that some books are meant to be tasted, others to be swallowed
-and some..are to chewed and digested.
that was the reading that my father approved of.
you chewed and you digested your books,
so that they became part of you.
you were then stimulated.
you though and what came out was, as it were, your quintessence of all the reading,
but it was yours. (note: you not only spoke better, as LJ's daughter goes on to say, but you lived differently..)

148...also...'he said, 'what then is the main purpose and function of reading?
it is to provide information.
he read widely for information.

..our younger son, as many teenagers do, at one point flirted dangerously with
transcendental meditation.
he was talking endlessly about it, of course, discussing it with everybody
and saying he had been reading these marvelous books that would set the world right,
and it was all great...
so my father said, 'well, now what are these books?'
this is the great thing about grandparents, isn't it, they have time to talk.
and so jonathan produced a book by a man called lobsang rampa
and my father said, 'i'll take that book and read it'.
so he took the book..and he read it from cover to cover.
he did say that he had a slightly uncomfortable feeling while doing so.
it was a little paperback, with a picture of a sort of chinese face on the cover.
the book was called The Third Eye and in the chinese face there was an eye in the middle of the forehead
-a most bizarre looking cover, hideous with this eye glaring out.
..he took notes on it and when he came back he went through it with jonathan.

in other words, our tendency so often with young ones is to say,
'for goodness' sake, that's all rubbish, you'll forget about that.
that's nothing, you'll grow out of it'
this was not at all true of my father.
he wanted to know just exactly what it was that was getting hold of this boy
and so he went through the book.
he said where the points were good
and pointed out where they were dangerous.
and because he had read it, he knew the book far better than jonathan.
and as a result, the information that he had acquired made him able to deal with this kind of situation.

153..now , on the whole, if people do a lot of reading they are told,
'when you get tired go out and have a walk, play a game of tennis or watch TV or something'.
not my father.
he has a sentence which i think is very revealing.
he says, 'the mind must be given relief and rested.
but to relieve your mind does not mean that you stop reading;
read something different'...LJ would read medical journals...

...when LJ read..'he always wanted to know the other man's point of view better than he knew it himself.
and because he read these writers so thoroughly he always advised us...
to BE QUITE CERTAIN WHAT A MAN DIDN'T SAY AS MUCH AS WHAT HE DID.
you know, one would read and get taken over by, a certain writer.
'my goodness, we would comment, he says ABCDE'
'yes, my father would reply, but he doesn't say FGHIJ'.
so he would read these philosophical books and he would read all the journals;
theological journals of every shade and colour would arrive in the house.
he would read them and reading the reviews, he would have ideas for his own reading.
not only that.
he felt that it was IMPORTANT FOR US ALL as christians
TO KNOW WHAT (IS) GOING ON IN THE WORLD around us.

155...'i was reading english at oxford at the time and i remember quite well getting myself into terrible trouble
by attacking chaucer for writing some story that i felt he shouldn't have written
and more or less calling him a dirty old man.
i didn't quite, but i very nearly did.
and..the wrath of the tutor came upon my head
and i remember telling my father this, rather thinking that i had been suffering as a christian, as it were.
'not at all', he said, 'you are not handling your literature properly'.
he believed in this balance;
you looked at literature as literature ...
to see what the style did,
what the content was,
what the purpose of the man was in writing it.
...he was ..good at giving the right book to the right person.
...in Preaching and Preachers...he says that if somebody is introspective and slightly given to depression,
you do not give him a book that is
thundering out the message of conviction of sin and the total depravity of man and so on:
..he says, you may well drive him mad.

170...'the christian's supreme desire should be not simply to be forgiven and to be blessed
but to know and rejoice in God Himself.
LJ writes..'there are many examples of this in the bible.
psalm 42.1,2 expresses it perfectly,
'as the harrt panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after Thee, O God'.
that man is crying out for this direct knowledge of God,
this immediate experience3 of God.
his soul 'panteth', he is 'thirsting' for Him, the living God.
not God as an idea, not god as a source and fount of blessing,
but the living Person Himself.
do we know this?
do we hunger for Him and thirst for Him?
are our souls panting after Him?
this is a very profound matter and the terrible thing is
that it is possible to go through life praying  day by day
and yet never realizing that the supreme point in christian experience is to come face to face with God,
to worship Him in the Spirit
and in a spiritual manner
...is the greatest desire of our hearts and our highest ambition,
beyond all other blessings and experiences,
just to know that we are there before Him and that we know Him and are enjoying Him?

...174..the Doctor was undeviating in his insistence on the doctrine of the new testament
as the sole standard for christian truth,
the absolute authenticity of which flows from this fact,
that the truth the apostles communicate to us in its pges is precisely the truth
they themselves received from the Lord, who is Himself the Truth.
'the test of truth is its apostolicity, he declared.
'the gospel of Jesus Christ as announced and taught in the new testament, he added,
claims nothing less than that it comes with the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ Himself
who gave it to these menh who, in turn, preached it and caused it to be written.
here is the only standard.
it is still the only standard.
...'it was his first principle' that 'every teaching is to be tested by the teaching of the new testament,
not by feelings, not by experience, not by results, not by what other people are saying and doing'.

wrong doctrine, he asserted, was generally attributable either to a diminishment or to an expansion of apostolic truth
and was recognizable by the insistent emphasis it placed on one particular idea or practice.
(ie. *adult baptism by immersion is essential to salvation...
*the absolute necessity of speaking with tongues if you are to be sure that you have received the Holy Spirt
*sometimes in connection with physical healing in the teaching that no christian should ever be ill...
*the cult of mary and the saints...etc)

259...*'augustine was greater than calvin.
calvin is the more complete; no thanks to him for that, for calvin was standing on augustine's shoulders,
augustine on his own feet'.
*'hyper calvinism is all house and no door.
arminianism is all door and no house!'
*God will neither take the blame of sin, nor alienate or split the praise of grace'.
*'i preach a free gospel to every man or i don't preach the gospel at all,
but i know that its acceptance without the help of the Spirit is an impossiblity...
calvinism is not inconsistent with a free gospel'.
...from william knight's Colloquia Peripatetica.

1.19.2014 MARTYN LLOYD-JONES, the pastor's pastor

taken from martyn lloyd-jones: chosen by God, which has different long time acquaintances sharing
different aspects of his character and life. the one quoted form here is 'the pastor's pastor by rev. hywel jones,
principal of the london theological seminary, a training institute for preachers with the Doctor (lloyd-jones)
was instrumental in establishing. in the retrospective hywel jones is recounting the westminster fellowship,
a closed weekly meeting led by lloyd-jones that ended being a help to many men in the pastorate.

p214  ...the fact that the meeting was a private one was not allowed to breed exclusiveness in our thinking.
we were jolted out of our complacency on many occasions by questions which erupted or flashed,
such as 'what difference did being at the Westminster Fellowship make to us in our ministering
-that is, our preaching, our conduct of public worship and the prayer meeting
and in our dealing with people?
what difference did it make to us in our personal communion with God
-praying secretly for oneself and others and not publicly as a church official,
and reading the holy scriptures for food for our own souls and not for sermons for others?
further, were we aware of the need of the age,
the darkness of the hour which had deepened since we last met?
were we crying to God and urging our people to do so,
as well as calling on men and women to repent?
were we serious?
were we in earnest?

such questions were presented and re presented,
applied and re applied,
and many a time we were brought to lament our own condition, our prayerlessness and consequent powerlessness with God and men.
but never were we went away in despair.
while others were invited to open the sessions in prayer,
the Doctor always closed them and the Lord was always there in the closing prayer in the afternoon.
he drew near and was invoked not just as our Lord,
but as the Lord of our brothers, many of whom were in need;
the lord of our wives and children;
the Lord of our churches, their officers and members, at home and worldwide;
and the Lord of our nation and even the world,
who could again arise, shake terribly the great ones of the earth and revive His people.

the pattern usually followed in the meetings was quite open.
any member could raise a question for discussion
and it was the practice for a theological subject to be taken up in the morning
and a pastoral one in the afternoon.
such an arrangement had many benefits.
first, the need for ministers to be continuing students of theology was underlined,
yet the need to be truly pastoral was not minimised.
in addition, discussion imposed upon us the necessity
to do some work ourselves rather than just have information, as it were, doled out to us.
in this way we had to speak to each other,
listen to each other,
correct and be corrected by each other.
he made us learn how to cope with each other's adjustments to or even disagreements with our positions
without our feeling personally attacked.
he inspired us to submit our views to the scrutiny of the meeting and did this himself too..
the meeting was bigger than any of us.
we were there to confer.
he made many of us 'men'.

the chief benefit of such a pattern to the meeting, however, lay in having the Doctor's responses to the matters raised.
these would be given at the beginning, in the course of and at the end of the discussion.
they would vary in length according to their position and , of course,
in content in accord with the subject under discussion.
the Doctor's approach was, in its basic features, both scientific and spiritual.
the uniqueness of his methodology lay in the combination of these factors.
there was something of his mentor, the great jonathan edwards, about him.

there are people who, claiming to be scientific, are consequently at best agnostic about the spiritual world.
on the other hand there are those who feel that to be spiritual means of necessity they must be anti-scientific.
such a divide is but another indication of how far our nation has departed from God and his world.
who believes any longer that theology is the queen of the sciences?
the Doctor did and he taught us to do so too.
as he refused to believe in a necessary conflict between the two,
he refused to sacrifice either on the altar of the other.
to crown theology was to give science its proper place as well as theology.

therefore the spiritual was not to be discarded merely because it was denounced by someone
in the name of science.
an attempt had to be made to discover whether it was real science, ie. theory without facts.
similarly a false spirituality which consisted of an other worldliness coupled with asceticism
was to be opposed because it lacked the support of scripture.
the doctor, not only as the physio but also the theologian,
believed in the sanctity of facts and would not knowingly deny ONE for the sake of any theory.
all facts, whether in the world of in the Word, were true.
thy, therefor, stood in harmonious relationship with each other
because they all stemmed from the God who cannot lie.

it is impossible to convey what relief this brought to many a mind troubled
by theories and conclusions ranged against scripture teaching,
and how it nerved the spirit for one's work of studying and preaching.
we had nothing to fear, quite literally.
as ALL truth was on God's side, our side,
we did not need to fear truth.
why then should we need to fear error, ignorance, scepticism and unbelief?
how foolish we had been!
 to demonstrate how foolish and arrogant scientists can sometimes be,
he quoted to us some words of j.s. haldane who in 1931 wrote in his book Philosophy of a Biologist,
'it is inconceivable that there should be a chemical compound with the properties of DNA.

but though urged to unbounded confidence in the veracity of the holy scriptures
and to the unreserved application of our minds to their study,
we were also repeatedly warned against the subtle danger of trusting our own reason and its ability.
the long history of the church of Jesus Christ, beginning in the new testament and continuing to our own day,
was too full of examples of believers, preachers and theologians (particularly the latter)
misinterpreting the Word, teaching error and leading others astray
for us to think of ourselves but with all our resources more highly than we ought to think.

when a question was raised, the Doctor would first of all set about opening it up for consideration.
this he used to do in one of two ways.
sometimes he would ask the questioner to say a little about the matter which he had raised,
for example, how he had met with it or why had he raised it.
by this means, some aspects of the subject might appear and some stimulus to discuss it might be provided.
on other occasions, he would himself take up the question and rephrase it
and in so doing broaden what otherwise
could never have provided sufficient basis for a morning's discussion.
it was not unknown for him to do more than rephrase the question;
he would on occasion provide us with one of his own about something which was pressing upon him.

both these approaches were instructive.
the first impressed on us the need to discover as much as we could about a subject
before proceeding to form views about it by analysis, and then conclusions.
the doctor would invite others to add information to this stage of the discussion
and try to keep suggestions as to how to respond to it out of the picture.
this was truly the scientific method
-observation and the gathering of data came first in the consideration of any question
and no fact which seemed to complicate was to be excluded.
how often we felt reproved at the slender and partial basis on which we made our judgments!

the second approach taught us the importance of the indirect method.
we were repeatedly reminded of the need to be general in one's approach to a subject
before concentrating more narrowly upon it.
the method followed in discovering what elements were present in a chemical was urged upon us,
\namely, one began with tests to discover which large category it fell into
before using more specific tests to determine its precise nature.
to rush at a problem and face it directly was dangerous folly.
this was (and is) particularly the case in the area of exegesis of biblical texts
where often they became pretexts for some hobby-horse
because they were not seen in their contexts.
similarly, areas of theology or eras of history with their predominating features,
were of immense importance in dealing with subjects.
it was also the case that one needed to bear in mind certain generalities
 regarding nature and humanness, male and female,
before concentrating on more narrow details.
in this way, what was complex and difficult in scripture, history and contemporary life
was almost half resolved.
perspective was crucial, but it had to be valid, ie. supported by data, to be truly helpful.

of special relevance in this whole area was the treatment of biblical texts.
the Doctor not only taught us the importance of being accurate in exegesis of words and terms,
but of discovering the PRINCIPLES of truth contained in them.
we were not to make connections between texts in terms of words used, concordance wise,
but in terms of those principles of truth which were enshrined and expressed in them.
this instruction was massive gain,
for one was taught to think doctrinally and biblically at one and the same time.
one's doctrines were not to be culled from a tome on dogmatics,
but were to arise from the words of scripture.
in this way the danger of being theoretical in one's doctrine was guarded against\
and also the danger of being inaccurate and contradictory in one's teaching from scripture.

the Doctor was not more concerned for principles than for people.
his sensitivity to them and their conditions was as keen as his perception of principles.
while ti is true that he refused to let personalities cloud his thinking,
whoever they were, he insisted on considering people, whoever they were,
in his expression of those principles.
in him there was but a single step between being a scientist and a theologian
and also between being a preacher and a pastor.
he grasped truth; declared it; but also sought us with it.

what we looked forward to was his summing up.
on so many occasions he would have the conclusion in mind before the discussion had really started
and he would be guiding it accordingly.
he would in concluding always have something to say which was both clarifying
after our meanderings and stimulating for further thought.
one occasion stands out clearly in my memory.
the question raised that morning was whether evangelicals could be fairly charged with being adolescent.
in the lively discussion which followed it was obvious that the Doctor saw substance in the charge.
the time came for him to sum up.
he did so by specifying the symptoms of adolescence which he saw around him.
these were that the 'evangelical adolescent'
1. does not think he needs to grow
2. tends to be easily impressed and credulous
3. confuses excitement with spiritual life
4. is prone to be unstable and go off at tangents
5. lays great value on the gregarious element
are not these worth pondering still?

so many subjects were raised at meetings at the fellowship.
they included;
apostasy and backsliding,
missionary societies and the church, 
the missionary and the church,
counselling,
visiting,
demon possession,
the supernatural,
mental illness,
healing,
acupuncture,
abortion,
euthanasia,
homosexuality,
cremation and burial,
marriage,
music,
tongues,
prophecy,
laying on of hands,
apostles,
the prayer of faith,
law and love,
tithing,
should an evangelical only be positive and not vegetative,
bible translation,
evangelism,
prayer, worldliness,
church discipline and
politics.

though the meetings covered a wide range of topics
-and the Doctor with his voluminous reading always had something to say on each
-he had certain major concerns to which he frequently returned.
he knew that ministers.
time was often threatened (he urged us to keep the mornings free, even on holidays if we could)
and that the pressures of modern life coupled with the perplexities
of the ecclesiastical and social scene could have a diverting as well as a disturbing effect.
he therefore repeatedly gave us our bearings and kept us to the main things
with regard to the work of the christian ministry.
we often left the Fellowship being able to say to ourselves with regard to some development
which was making us uneasy that we were right after all.
it was also often the case that we were, if only in our minds,
brought back on course again.

what were these emphases?
first and foremost was the importance of SPIRITUAL LIFE.
this was asserted in relation to the individual christian, the minister and the church.
the essential place of truth, ie. the truth of the written word of God,
 in spiritual life has already been stressed but to the Doctor life included more than truth.
meetings were given over to a consideration of the question
'what is wrong with us today?'
or, 'why is there a lack of life in our churches?'
the short and most serious answer which the Doctor urged on us
was our lack of realisation that God was a LIVING GOD.
this showed itself in our preoccupation with what he called 'our greatest enemy', namely religion
and our being immersed in our own plans and actions
which we then presumed to baptize by special prayer.
we praised the gospel instead of proclaiming it,
defended it by apologetics instead of declaring it by assertions
and we had become exhibitionist theologians instead of ambassadors with a message from the King.
we were more concerned with a horizontal plane, ie. man to man, us to people, the church to society,
than with the vertical dimension, ie. us and all and each one to God.
though repudiating and ridiculing the 'God is dead' theology,
evangelicals knew and spoke very little about the living God 'who deals familiarly with men'.
the Doctor said on this score, 'brethren, we are mad, mad!

the reality of the LIVING God, the Doctorf maintained,
was the centre and circumference of the bible.
God was living and revealed Himself.
He did so irrespective of the circumstances of time and place in the bible.
he could intervene and not be kept out;
He could overturn and set to rights again individuals and nations,
and do so by His own sovereignly chosen means or without any.
it was in relation to the greatness of the variety of his activity, but also its necessity, that the Doctor said:
'the study of the scriptures alone would have finished the church long ago'.

so, when this element of spiritual life which was the result of the working of the Holy Spirit
was under consideration,
the Doctor could become a critic of orthodoxy, even reformed orthodoxy.
he did so not only because of the heady effect which the (re)discovery of reformed theology was having,
but also because some exponents of that theology
were overlooking or excluding the immediate works of the Spirit in addition to regeneration,
viz. the baptism of the Spirit, the bestowal of spiritual gifts and revival.
he pointed out repeatedly that charles hodge omitted
any reference to revival in his three volumned  Systematic Theology
and the b.b.warfield regarded the gifts referred to in i corinthians 12-4
as having ceased with the age of the apostles.
this the Doctor described as 'a new form of dispensationalism'.
for him, jonathan edwards was right when he distinguished between excesses and the spiritual,
though the latter would have varying, even striking, physical phenomena.
he declared:'we must learn to draw the line between the essential and the indifferent on the one hand
and on the other between the indifferent and the wrong'.

the Doctor was interested in anything which appeared to display signs of spiritual vitality,
wanting all the information about it and urging us to have the same interest.
in the fellowship he would ring details of incidents which he had heard about
and members would raise matters related to house church groups
and the charismatic movement in their areas.
we discussed tongues, prophecy, miracles, healing, music and dancing
and the use of the body in worship.
in all these, the Doctor was most careful.
he would not dismiss all such phenomena as psychological or demonic
as some would have preferred.
but he did not hesitate to say that those elements could be present.
on the other hand, he would not and did not endorse the charismatic movement.
he urged careful observation and evaluation in the light of
what the bible taught of the spiritual effects on an experience of God
-awe and reverence, a sense of personal sin and unworthiness, love to the saviour and the brethren ,
concern for the perishing and a spirit of prayer.
his most emphatic charge directed against us was,
'why do we not have problems associated with spiritual life?'
the answer was obvious.

he did not urge us to adopt the practices of the charismatics.
rather he called on us to seek the lord
without setting limits to what he might do
or what we would allow Him to do,
asking Him to turn to us and visit us in gracious revival.
meanwhile, we were not to follow any human methods
for obtaining the Spirit because none were laid down in scripture.
God gives the Spirit in the name of Jesus Christ to those who ask him.

the second feature is the primacy and importance of preaching.
his views on this have rightly been published and need not be repeated,
but two or three things can be said.
the first is that the Doctor's own story is one of a commitment to preaching.
what could he have become in the medical world?
in aberavon he could have become involved in politics, locally and from there even on the national level.
he could have become a theological teacher in the calvinistic methodist church
-the church which he loved for all the right reasons.
if howel harris, daniel rowland and william williams could, as some said,
have ruled a kingdom between them, what might have been the upper limit of the doctor's abilities?
but having been called to be a preacher of the glorious gospel of the ever blessed God,
he would not stoop to be a king.

by what he did as well as what he said he underlined to us
the importance of the calling which he and we shared.
to continue to give ourselves to the work of preaching in an age of
counsellors, mass evangelists, guitarists, song leaders, film operators, overhead projectionists
and story tellers was not easy.
he provided us with the support we needed.
h would come to preach for us and refer to us as his friend.
at times he would come to listen to us, concealing himself if he could in the back row
and would go away happy if he had been given a sense of God.

he was apprehensive about the effect which the various gifts practised by charismatics would have upon preachers and preaching.
while urging the restoration of meetings like the society meeting of the 18th century,
he contended for the retention of public worship in the nonconformist pattern,
led from the front by the minister in a raised pulpit who integrated the service.
he did not regard this as either grieving or quenching the Spirit.
he gave himself to the preaching of the word,
'the highest and the greatest and the most glorious calling to which anyone can ever be called',
and God exalted preaching through him.

as the Spirit gave birth to the church by means of the word
and by the same instrument sustained, protected and promoted its life,
the Doctor saw the preaching of the word as crucial to the church's wellbeing.
nothing was more important than that the Lord would call men to preach and equip them for that ministry.
this was why he took the lead in the formation of the london theological seminary and became the first chairman of the board.
while not denying that prediction may still occur,
he regarded the prophecy referred to in I corinthians 14
as the kind of thing which can happen in preaching when new thoughts and unprepared words are given from above.
he urged us always to be open to that dimension in preaching
and never to adhere to our prepared sermons so rigidly as to refuse to follow such leading.

the third feature was his concern for the church.
while thankful for the good work which had been done by organizations, societies and movements,
it was the church which had been done by organisations, societies and movement,
 it was the church which he found to be at the centre of the outworking of the purposes of God
and His chosen instrument for the furtherance of the gospel.
it was the Doctor's complaint that prior to 1966 he had found great difficulty in getting evangelicals to discuss the doctrine of the church.
further, at a time when non-evangelicals
were eager to take a fresh look at the church and the churches,
evangelicals were to be found defending their denominations with the same fervour as they engaged in evangelistic work.
this saddened him because he believed that, of all people,
evangelicals should be ready to examine everything in the light of scripture
and that included the church.
but he saw more than this.
he saw that:
1. whatever creed or confession the had on paper,
they were fostering a denial of the gospel and evangelicals
were unconcerned about their church involvement in such sin.
2. evangelicals were guilty of the sin of schism
because they were joined to people on matters of secondary importance
and separated church wise from people who believed the same gospel as they did.
he maintained that non christians could not actually be guilty of schism
though they spoke much and lamented greatly that the church was in schism.
TO BE GUILTY OF SCHISM PEOPLE HAD TO BE IN CHRIST.
(note: ie. as true christian should never separate from another true christian even though they have differences on doctrines that are outside doctrines concerning the person of Christ.)

in the national assembly of evangelicals in 1966 all this came to the fore in the Doctor's address
and he called on evangelicals to leave their denominations
and form a loose fellowship of evangelical churches for the defence and confirmation of the gospel.
the rightness of this call was confirmed by subsequent events
in anglicanism and baptist nonconformity.
the keele congress and the publication of Growing into Union showed that
evangelicals to be in the church and accepting the role assigned to them of being a wing in it.
at the baptist union assembly the same position was in fact taken
by not disciplining the rev michael taylor who denied the deity of the Lord.
the Doctor knew that the situation was such that heretics could not be disciplined
and for evangelicals to say they would leave only when excommunicated
was to stipulate an impossibility, so alien is it to the spirit of the time.

after the westminster fellowship was re formed,
we were often required by the Doctor to do two things.
the first was to look at the situation to see if there was any material change in it.
nothing was further removed from the truth than the claim that
having retreated into  am isolationist ghetto,
continuing to persuade ourselves that we needed to stay there to give credibility,
in one's own eyes at least,
to the step already taken.
frequently we looked around and not only saw no reason to change our mind or repent of the act,
but were confirmed in the step, the costly, agonizing step, many others had taken
-and the Doctor in particular.

but the issues of principle remained.
the questions 'what is a christian?
what is the church?'
were still not being answered univocally in the churches and by their leaders.

the second requirement presented to us was to look at ourselves and to face the question,
'were we closer-and closer to each other as churches?'
was there a church fellowship in existence outside the church groupings to which we belonged?
were we committed to the british evangelical council?
SECESSION WAS THE ROAD TO UNITY, the Doctor taught us,
AND NOT THE PATH TO ISOLATIONISM AND EXCLUSIVISM.
we saw that we could not go back without denying principles of truth
which could not be more closely bound up with the gospel,
but i wonder whether we saw as clearly that we must go on.
the Doctor impressed on us that we had been brought out in order to be brought in.
unless we went on to show the glory of the gospel in the churches, how could we expect any to join us?

...the Westminster Fellowship..was FELLOWSHIP between him and us and we felt the bond.
the same relationship existed even over the telephone and better still in our homes.
he listened to us and soon one knew one was talking to
a valued, trusted and beloved friend.
now that is over-for a little while....

1.18.2014 'THE WORLD THE MISSIONARIES MADE' by andrea palpant dilley

found in christianity today, 2.2014; about the research by robert woodberry

...the lecture was by kenneth a. bollen, and UNC-chapel hill professor and one of the leading experts
on measuring and tracking the spread of global democracy.
bollen remarked  that he kept finding a signficant statistical link between democracy and protestantism.
someone needed to study the reason for the link, he said.
woodberry sat forward in his seat and thougt, THAT'S ME. I'M THE ONE.

...in search of answers, W traveled to west africa in 2001.
setting out one morning on a dust road in lome, the capital of togo,
W headed for the university of tog's campus library.
he found it sequestered in a 1960s era building.
the shelves held about half as many books as his personal collection,
the most recent encyclopedia dated from 1977.
down the road, the campus bookstore sold primarily pens and paper, not books.

'where do you buy your books? W stgopped to ask a student.

'oh, we don't buy books, he replied.
'the professors read the texts out loud to us and we transcribe.


across the boarder, at the university of ghana's bookstore, W had seen floor to deiling shelves lined with hundreds of books,
including locally printed texts by local scholars.
why the stark contrast?

the rason was clear:
during the colonia era, british missionaries in ghana had established a wholed system of schools and printing presses.
but france, the colonia power in togo, severly restricted missionaries.
the french authorities took interest in educating only a small intellectual elite.
more than 100 years later, education was still limited in togo.
in ghana, it was flourishing.

...evidence kept coming.
while studying the congop, W made one of his most dramatic early discoveries.
cong's colonial era exploitation was well known:
colonists in both french and belgian congo had forced villagers to extract rubber from the jungle.
as punishment for not complying, they burned down villages, castrated men and cut off children's limbs.
in french congo, the atrocities passed without comment or protest, aside from one report in a marxist newspaper in france.
but in belgian congo, the abuses aroused the largest international protest movement
since the abolition of slavery.
why the difference?

...protestant missionaries, it turned out, were allowed only in the belgian congo.

..to convince skeptics, however, W needed more than case stgudies.
anyone could find the occasional john and alice harris or john mackenzie,
discard the nathan prices and assemble a pleasing mosaic.
but W was equipped to do something no one else had done:
to look at the long term effect of missionaries using the wide angle lens of statistical analysis.

in his fifth year of graduate school, W created a statistical model that could test the connection between missionary work and the health of nations.
he and a few research assistants spent two years coding data and refining their methods.
they hoped to compute the lasting effect of missionaries, on average, worldwide.
'i felt pretty nervous, he says.  i though,
what if i run the analysis and find nothing?
how will i salvage my dissertation?


one morning, in a windowless, dusty computer lab lit by fluorescent bulbs, W ran the first big test.
after he fomosjed [re[[omg tje statostoca; [rpgra, pm jos cpm[iuter. je c;ocled 'emter'
and then leaned foprward to read the results.

'i was shocked, sayd W,
is was like an atomic bomb.
the impackt of missions on global democracy was HUGE.
i kept adding variables to the model
-factors that people had been studying and writing about for the past 40 years
-and they all got wiped out.
it was amazing.
i knew, then, i was on to something really important.

..W could now support a sweeping claim:
area wher protestant missionaries had a significant presence in the past
are on average more economically developed today,
with comparatively better health, lower infant mortality, lower corruption, greater literacy, higher educational attainment (especially for women) and more robust membership in nongovernmental associations.

in short; want a blossoming democracy today?
the solution is simple
-if you have a time machine: send a 19th century missionary
(note: when they went out believing God had called and God would provide,
rather than kicking in the business model of raising and maintaining 'support').

..'we don't have to deny that there were and are racist missionaries..
we don't have to deny thaere were and are missionaries who do self centered things.
but if that were the average effect,k we would expect the places where missionaries had influence to be worse places
than places were missionaries weren't allowed or were restricted in action.
we find exactly the opposite on all kinds of outcomes.
even in places where few people convedrted, (missionaries) had a profound economic and political impact.'

there is one important nuance to all this:
the positive effect of missionaries on democracy applies only to 'conversionary protestantss'.

...independence from state control mad a big difference.
'one of the main stereotypes about missions is that they were closely connected to colonialism...
but protestant missionaries not funded by the state were regularly very critical of colonialism.

..he notes that most missionaries didn't set out to be political activists.
locals associated christianity with their colonial abusers,
so in order to be effective at evangelizing, missionaries destanced themselves from the colonists.
they campaikgned agaisnt abuses for personal, practical reasons as well as humanitarian ones.

...while missionaries came to colonial reform through the backdoor,
mass literacy and mass education weremore deliberate projects
-the consequence of a protestant vision that knocked down old hierarchies in the name of
'the priesthood of all believers'.
if all souls were equal before God, everyone would need to access the bible in their own language. ..

.....if you look worldwide at poverty, literacy is the main thing that helps you rise out of poverty.
unless you have broad based literacy, you can't have democratic movements.

as W observes, although the chinese invented printing 800 years before europeans did,
in china the technology was used mostly for elites.
then protestant missionaries arrived in the 19th century
and began printing tens of thousands of religious texts,
makeing those available to the masses
and teaching women and other marginalized groups how to read.
not until then did asia(s)...start printing more widely.

1.17.2014 THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV by feodor dostoevsky

some remarks on the book made in henry troyat's biography of dostoevsky, 'firebrand'....

..the Karamazov family live in a little provincial town.
K pere, a cynical and lewd old buffoon, has ruined his life with mysterious debauchery.
from his first wife who beat him unmercifully, he had a son Dmitri,
a savage brute with sudden impulses to honest and metaphysical preoccupations.
from his second wife, a peevish and hysterical woman, he had a son Ivan,
an irritable intellectual with a tormented and destructive mind-
a hero and martyr of negation.
but Aliosha, his youngest son, seems to be untouched by the hereditary curse of the Ks.
his disposition is characterized by male kindness,
the opposite of the asexual kindness of the hero of The Idiot.
he is the positive principle of the book, the luminous axis around which
the other characters whirl like black midges.
in addition to the three brothers, there is the infamous Smerdiakov,
a son of old K by a feebleminded deaf mute whom he had raped one night for sheer bravado.
the epileptic bastard serves as a lackey in his father's house.
he is stolid, pretentious, cunning, admires I who is annoyed by him
because in S he recognizes a caricature of himself.

Old K and his 4 sons quarrel with one another about a woman named Grushenka.
Smer, thinking that he is obeying I's secret wish, murders his father.
K is accused of the crime, sentenced to hard labor and leaves for siberia.
this is the story.

the book is dominated by 2 problems
-the problem of seduction and the problem of God.
it is the conflict between the idea of Gru and the idea of Christ.
the other characters are placed between these two poles.
some, like the old K, are symbols of sensuality;
others, like the starets (spiritual counselor in the russian orthodox church) Zosima,
are symbols of religious faith.
between these extremes the souls of the other characters are arranged skillfully in a hierarchical order.
Smer, D, I, and A are, so to speak, progressive embodiments of the same character
-the individual who shakes himself free of the beast
and is realized in the 'new man'.
these 4 brothers are one and the same being;
each represents a different stage of the single personality development.
'the ladder of vice is the same for all, Aliosha says to Dmitri.
'i am on the first rung, you are a little high-at the thirteenth, for instance.
in my opinion, it's absolutely the same thing'.

Grushenka too is on this 'thirteenth rung'.
this prostitute, the mistress of an old merchant who has rescued her from poverty,
is a courtesan (prostitute), says old K,
but probably a 'greater saint' than all the nuns in the convent.
'this woman is a beast', 'this woman is an angel',  retort the other characters.
and D exclaims, 'yes, that's what she is-a tigress.
the queen of immodesty, the completely infernal woman,
the queen of all fiendish women unleashed in the world'.
but what strikes A  is 'the naive and kind expression of her face'.

whom are we to believe?
all of them are right, for Gru has earned all of these opinions.
Gru, the young girl, the slut, the beast, the saint, embodies the multiple contradictions of woman.
she is woman on the model of polina suslova (a woman in Dostoevski's earlier life).
woman is folly become flesh,
women are worn out by waiting
and are disconsolate when their desires are gratified,
they yearn to give themselves and reproach men
for having taken them.
they are cruel for the pleasure of being gentle afterward,
then they are gentle for the pleasure of being cruel afterward.
they are perversely modest and voluptuously innocent.
they lie to God, to men, to themselves.
they are not caught in life, they toy with life, they pose before life as before a mirror.
and they make faces and change their expressions to give themselves the sensation of existing.
while permanence is for men the proud of their reality,
woman asserts her existence through change.
man wants to be one, woman wants to be multiple.
man feels his strength only in the full consciousness of his virtues and defects;
woman feels strong only in total unconsciousness of herself.
man is the organize world, woman the formless universe.
everything is possible with her,
nothing is certain with her.
one must flee from her
or else renounce dominion over her.

Gru's beauty has bewitched old K.
this drunken, stingy, lying and vicious old mans seems to be a
a portrait of Dos's own father, painted with pitch.
'he was sentimental, yes, he was sentimental and wicked'...

in the presence of the beautiful  Gru, old K is nothing but a stammering and slobbering buffoon.
he gives her the portion of his estate that was to be D's inheritance.
every day he hopes that she will visit him
and wanders from room to room befuddled with lust, waiting endlessly;
but Gru does not yield to him, nor to K when he falls in love with her.
she laughs at father and son,
and as the days go by the two men hate each other more and more intensely.
'they scrutinized each other, with their knives ready in the sheaths'.

Raskolnikov
(i think a Dos character in another of his books..any name that is not specifically defined in what comes out of this biography are either book characters or people identified in other parts of this book..)
is obsessed by an idea to such an extent that he loses all freedom;
D and his father are so obsessed by a human being that they have become slaves of their desire.
'beauty is a terrible and horrible thin', says K.
its power over men equals and sometimes exceeds that of ideas.
the erotic madness of the K's is comparable to the political madness of the protagonists of The Possessed.
in both cases, the desire for an earthly gratification reduces man to the status of beast,
and the claim to the right of defying all morel limits leads him to depravity and murder.

'as for D, says his father, I will crush him like a cockroach'.

and D says of his father: 'i don't know-perhaps i will kill him, perhaps i won't.
i fear that i shall be unable to endure his face at such a moment.
i hate his adam's apple, his nose, his eyes, his impudent smile.
he disgusts me.
that is what frightens me'.

nevertheless, he spies upon his father, lest Gru , lured by promises of money,
should yield to the old man.
one night Grigori, the servant, surprises K in the garden.
K strikes him on the head with a pestle and runs away.
he finds Gru at the inn.
'then an orgy began, a mad party', with wine, songs, dancing.
Gru, completely drunk, admits to D that she is in love with him and wants to marry him.
'although you are a savage, she says to him, i know that you are noble.
from now on we must live honestly...let us be good and honest, let us not be like beasts
....take me far away from here...i don't want to stay here, i want to be far, far away'.

it is as though a looming disaster were intensifying the emotions of these sensual characters.
the foreknowledge of a terrible fate drives them to intensify their transient pleasures.
they are cheerful because they feel that they have no right to be cheerful.
and it is a fact that in Dos's characters all joys that are not strictly spiritual ones
seem strangely fragile.
at the very moment when we witness sudden happiness in an individual, we are perturbed,
because we know that he is doomed.
with the refinement of a sadist, Dos nurses the happiness of his hero before punishing him.
he does not strike a tired, sick body;
he gives the blow on a day when the individual is in his prime,
when his hopes are being fulfilled.
D is arrested at the height of amorous intoxication.
he is charged with parricide, (murder of a close relative)
and his protestations of innocence are of no avail;
all the evidence points to him as the criminal.

Smer, the actual murderer of their father,
plays the role of the diabolical double that is so dear to Dos.
what torture for an honest man to meet the embodiment of everything
dirty, unavowed, forgotten, beastly and cowardly that is buried in himself!
you are serene, you accept yourself
-and then suddenly you are confronted with an individual who is offal, the cesspool of yourself,
who is yourself in what is most vicious in yourself.
in his corrupt mouth, your noblest words sound like obvious stupidities;
in his narrow mind, your noblest ideas are turned against you.

thus I D walks his own alter ego like an ape on a leash.
he hates Smer; Smer is gratified by this hatred and commits murder
because he believes that he is thereby obeying a secret order from his master.
what has been only a vague hope in the heart of I K
is suddenly transformed into a monstrous actuality that horrifies him.
because of Smer who realizes the criminal intention of his master,
Ivan is guilty no longer of a dream but of a deed.
Smer stands for the fusion of the idea and the act,
he symbolizes the negation of spiritual irresponsibility, the punishment of the freethinker.

'you yourself, he says to i, have strongly desired your father's death...
you were incapable of killing him yourself,but you hoped that someone else would do it'.

I questions himself, tries to be reasonable, is troubled.
'yes, i have been waiting for this, and if so,  it is true that i wanted to kill him'.
and he asks his conscience, 'did i desire my father's death to this extent?'

I is guilty because of this thought, this intention.

'you have killed him, you are the chief murderer.
i was only your helper, Smer insists.
the lackey proceeds to reveal the origin of his crime to his master.
the truth is that he committed murder because there was nothing to stop him.
thanks to the speeches of i, the intellectual,
Smer understood that 'everything is permissible' in this world.
if there is no God, there is no hell.
'if God does not exist, there is no such thing as being virtuous,
virtue is useless.
that is the way i reasoned'.

having thus negated the rules of common morality, having jumped over the wall,
Smer confuses freedom with license.
he commits murder and his act involves I who declared the
'evedrything is permissible',
and D, who said, 'why does such a man exist?'

I is innocent before human justice, but nothing can justify himself in his own eyes.
because he negates God, he is faced with Smer.
instead of superman, he discovers the ape;
instead of the luminous ladder, he perceives the abyss;
instead of defying superior reason, he is faced with madness.
this intelligent, educated, gifted man begins to suffer from hallucinations;
he undergoes a split of personality, he sees the devil and this devil is himself.
'it is myself, but with a different face...
you express my own thought....
only you have chosen my most foolish thoughts;
you are stupid and trivial'.

Ivan K is Dos, whom 'God has tortured all his life'.
I's blasphemous negations are Dos's own negations in his moments of doubt.
'these fools have not even dreamed of the power of negation that i have overcome', he writes.
and when I K says, 'can one accept universal harmony at the price of the tears of one little martyred child?'
it is Dos himself who speaks. (through I in the story)

I was to Dos what Smer is to I
-the embodiment of all that was odious in himself.
I was that part of the author's soul which he wanted to cast away
and the masterful punishment of his author.

shining above these wretched beings are two luminous figures, Aliosha and the starets Zosima.
the youngest of the brothers K is a novice in a peaceful monastery with big white walls,
but he is not a real mystic.
Dos writes of him, 'A was in no way a fanatic nor even, i think, a mystic.
he was simply a philanthropist ahead of his time'.

this boy is perfectly balance, perfectly adjusted to reality
and he has a serene confidence in God.
to be sure, he believes in miracles but he is not troubled by them;
they are the crowning of his faith, not its foundation.
'for a realist faith is not born of miracles; miracles are born of faith'.

thus A is a 'realist', a complete human being.
unlike Myshkin (the main character in the Idiot), he is of this world,
he is capable of understanding the views of his brothers and father;
he is not a stranger in relation to the sinners around him.
therefore his merit in resisting all temptations is the greater.
the starets Z tells him, 'this is what i think of you:
you will go forth from these walls and live like a monk in the world.
you will have many adversaries, but even your enemies will love you.
life will bring you many misfortunes, but you will find happiness in misfortune;
you will bless life, and you will make others bless it
and this is what matters most'.

A was doubtless modeled on shidlovsky, Dos childhood friend,
and Soloviov, the philosopher with the face of Christ.
as for Z, we have seen that this character was inspired by
Tikhon Zadonsky and Father Ambrosius of the optina pustin monastery.

'the starets, writes Dos, is a man who absorbs your soul and your will in his own'.
he is a powerful confessor who rules the monastery by virtue of his extreme clairvoyance and the serene shrewdness of his advice.
'many say that as a result of receiving,for many years,
all those who came to pour out their hearts to him, eager for advice and consolation,
he finally acquired great perspicacity.
he would cast one glance at a stranger and guess why he had come, what he needed,
and even what tormented his conscience'.

like A, Z was a man before becoming a saint.
he lived among his fellow men and served in the army.
when he decided to become a monk he was motivated
not by despair or intellectual conviction, but by love.
Z's doctrine is a doctrine of love and joy.

the strarets repeats the words of his young brother,
'life is a paradise in which we all dwell, but we refuse to recognize this'.
he says also, 'everyone of us is guilty before all men, for all men, for everything'.

all men are united by universal sympathy and the villainy of any one man
has repercussions on the rest.
evil is not confined to single criminal and his direct victim; it spreads like a grease spot.
those who unconsciously desire evil are affected by it even if they do no evil
and those who have realized such desires in themselves without condemning them also suffer.
even those who know nothing of crime are mysteriously accomplices in it.

we are all responsible, defiled, unhappy.
we have stolen with the burglar whose face we do not know,
we have murdered with the parricide about whom we read in the newspapers,
raped with the lewd,
cursed with the blasphemous.
each of us bends under the sin of the world.
and yet all of us will be saved.
A says, 'man cannot commit a sin that can exhaust God's infinite love.
believe that God loves you more that you can conceive,
that he loves you in your sin and with your sin...
if you love, you belong to God.
love redeems everything, saves everything'.

Z does not summon the believer to embrace rigorous monastic rule,
to practice asceticism, to whimper with contrition.
he asks men only to admit their faults and to love.
what matters is not the result achieved, but the effort to achieve it.
when the proud man bows his head, he is closer to God than a lackey who falls on his knees,
because the proud man has had to struggle with himself in order to offer to God this sign of human modesty,
while the lackey prostrates himself by habit.

'do what you can
(note: 'agonize to enter the narrow door, for many will seek to enter and will not be able. luke 13.24)
and it will be taken into account.
that which seems to you wicked in you is purified by the very fact that you have realized it....
at the moment when you realize with horror that despite your efforts you are not only closer to your goal,
but have moved away from it, at that moment you will achieve your goal and you will behold...
the savior who, without you knowing it, has lovingly guided you'.

Z and A are bathed in the same blessed light.
they love and this is sufficient to gain the sympathy of simple people and children,..

the intellectual attacks this serene philosophy.
I K fights the serene faith of his brother with the diabolical arguments of the Grand Inquisitor.

(note: a man judging God!? how queer! how futile..and fatal!
 'for what if some did not believe?
shall their unbelief make the faith of God without effect?
God forbid.
yea let God be true, but every man a liar;
as it is written, that Thou mightest be justified in Thy sayings
and mightest overcome when Thou art judged'. romans 3.3-4)
the legend that i relates to A is the culmination of The brothers K
and probably the testament of Dos' literary career.
it sums up everything, illumines everything and is truly Dos's last word.

in seville, during the inquisition, Christ appears among the crowd.
He is recognized at once.
people throng around Him and beg Him for miracles.
J performs the miracles asked of Him.
then the Grand Inquisitor, a man of 90 with a dried up face and hollow eyes,
orders the arrest of the savior.
at night, the Grand Inquisitor visits Jesus in the dungeon.
'why have You come to disturb us', he says. For you do disturb us'
the old man proceeds to read a terrible indictment against Jesus.
the Grand Inquisitor does not believe in God or man.
he does not believe in God because he refuses to heed the savior's words,
'you have no right to add one word to what you have said
he does not believe in man because he maintains that the christian doctrine
goes beyond the moral strength of mankind.

he rejects the synthesis of the human and divine priciple in freedom.
'I want to make you free, Jesus had said,
but by proclaiming the freedom of choice between good and evil,
Jesus proclaimed man's responsibility, condemned man to the torments of his conscience
and made him the object of a whole machinery of suffering,
in which remorse, temptation and hope are inextricably mixed.
FREEDOM IS INCONCEIVABLE WITHOUT SUFFERING.
freedom can be bought only at the price of suffering.
and christianity is above all a religion of suffering.

thus man is confronted with a dilemma;
on the one hand, independence with moral torture,
on the other, well being through submission.
what will be his choice?

the Grand Inquisitor chooses for him.
Christ, he maintains, has overestimated the strength of His creatures
in imposing the ordeal of freedom on them.
'have you forgotten that man prefers peace, even death, to the freedom of choosing between good and evil?
man's great goal is happiness, and the task of the church is to organize his happiness on earth.
thus the church loves man better than Christ loves him
since Christ has placed an excessively heavy burden on his shoulders.

'because You placed man too high,
You acted pitilessly toward him,
You demanded too much of him'.
the ideal of Jesus in the form that it assumes in the gospels
can be realized only by a few chosen spirits.
christianity is an aristocratic religion and as such impossible.
religion is intended for the masses
and if must propose a way of life that can be followed by the masses.
it must bring comfort to fools, cowards, perverts and the sick.
it must be accessible to the lowest of mankind;
it must be vulgar.
in the place of freedom, uncertainty and spiritual suffering,
the Grand Inquisitor wants to give man a euclidean

(only one line may be drawn through a given point to a given parallel line...
note: here, the point seems,
the church's approach to God is the one line and Jesus' command the other...
the first possible and bringing good (as viewed by the Self)
and the second bringing continual trouble...ala luke 13.24 AGONIZE to enter the narrow door
for many will seek to enter and will not be able)

organization of the world.
at this point the Grand Inquisitor embraces Shigalev's
(think he was a revolutionary, a nihilist?, in st. petersburg)
doctrine.
he takes care of the crowd and defends the hungry and the weak.
he promises them not heavenly bread but earthly bread.
'You (Jesus) have promised them heavenly bread,
but can it compare with earthly bread, in the eyes of this weak human race,
eternally wicked and eternally ungrateful?...
to us, it is the weak who are precious'.
this religion of earthly bread is identical with the atheist socialism of The Possessed.

the Grand Inquisitor proclaims the ideal of mediocre happiness,
as against great spiritual aspirations:
'we shall give them the quiet happiness of weak creatures, such as they are by nature...
yes, we shall set them to work,
but in their leisure hours we shall organize their life like a child's game,
with childish songs, choruses and innocent dances.
oh, we shall allow them even sin, because they are weak and helpless'.
(note: and liquidate them if their 'sin' hinders our grand vision for mankind?)

it was in the name of man's freedom that Christ in the desert refused to succumb to the first temptation,
that of earthly bread.
according to the Grand Inquisitor, this was his first error.

His second error was His wish to be loved freely.
men cannot believe when guided by their hearts alone.
they need a certainty.
the divine promise is unintelligible to them,
it is enveloped in too much mystery, too much silence, too many allusions.
'You have chosen the strangest, most enigmatic, most indeterminate things
-everything that exceeds man's strength'.
man wants to be terrorized, enslaved,
he wants to be convinced of the inexorable NECESSITY of worshiping.

Christ allowed Himself to be crucified like a thief,
He bled on the cross and His death was witnessed by women in tears.
because He desired that man's love should not be won by miracles,
He moved away from man and lost him.
'You wanted a freely accorded love, not the servile passion of a terrified slave.
here again You overestimated man'.

thus the second temptation, that of authority,
is complemented by the third temptation, that of the miracle.

the Grand Inquisitor accepts these three temptations that Christ rejected.
he corrects the work of Christ by basing it on earthly bread, on authority and on miracles.
'and men rejoiced at being led again in a herd
and delivered from the fatal gift that caused them such torment'.

thus, christianity is no longer the religion of the elite but the religion of all.
the church betrays God out of love for man.
it uses Christ to symbolize not a spiritual but a social order.
it sets up 'christian communism'.
it formulates rigid duties, bourgeois
(concern with property values, respectability...strictly middle class)
theories and gives promises of absolution, pardon and eternal life
to reassure its lamentable flock.
rites, festivals and professions of faith are the official pageantry of the Divine Presence.
supernatural mystery is transformed into fairy tales for young persons
who partake of the sacrament for the first time.
it multiplies bells, incense, pictures and sculptures.
it mobilizes all the arts, all the senses, to dazzle the masses.
it diminishes God, offering him for sale like a commodity.

(note: witness the only instance of GREAT ANGER by Jesus in driving 'sales' our from His Father's house.)

and its triple lie, its triple blasphemy, is so cleverly contrived that no one dreams of denouncing it.
the church disavows Christ while extolling His (note: rabbit foot?) work.
it is the last refuge of atheism.
and men will burn Christ rather than renounce the facile dogmas
that the Grand Inquisitor has forged for them.
'they will cling to us with terror, like a young brood under their mother's wing...'

'if anyone deserves the stake more than all others, it is You', says the Inquisitor to Christ.
'tomorrow i shall order You to be burned'.

Christ approaches the Inquisitor and kisses his bloodless lips.
the old man shivers, opens the door and says,
'go away and don't come back'.

it is noteworthy that I, the atheist, exemplifies the divorce between religion and the church.
he attacks not Christ but the church, he defends not atheism, but unwittingly the true faith.
he, more than anyone else, stresses the supreme moral beauty of Christ,
his wish to be loved for His own sake.

according to Dos, the catholic theocracy alone is guilty of
having stolen the word of Christ for imperialistic purposes.
yet the byzantine orthodoxy can be accused of the same crime;
in fact any ecclesiastical system incurs the reproach of caesarism.
throughout its history the church has fought against the temptation
of denying spiritual freedom.
and yet the true mystery of Christ is the mystery of freedom.
the meaning of calvary is the assertion of man's perfect freedom of choice.
victorious divine truth would have compelled the allegiance of human souls apart from love.
crucified divine truth, truth humiliated, lacerated, covered with spittle and pus,
does not impose itself on man.
man believes not because but notwithstanding.
the act of faith in the presence of this corpse that is like any other corpse is perfectly free.
and Dos invites us to this free faith that is incomprehensible and logically inadmissible.

faced with the problem of God, I K rejects the theological explanation of the world.
he evokes the memory of all human suffering.
in his eyes the expiation of wrongdoers in eternity does not redeem the horrors
for which they were responsible during their earthly existence ;
'what is the use of all the hellish sufferings of the doomed, if a child has been tortured to death?'
moreover, he asks, 'where is harmony, if there is still a hell?
i want to forgive and to reconcile myself.
i do not desire that there should be more suffering'.
the explanation supplied by the church is oversimplified.
something more that the give and take principle is needed.  but what?

'how can i conceive anything about a God who is too high for me? he says.

thus this atheist does not deny God;
he rejects the possibility of conceiving Him.
to want God is not to be an atheist any longer.
to insult God, is to believe in God.
I's passionate negation is directed against the God of the church,
against the administrative, factitious, familiar God of the Grand Inquisitor.
I refuses to admit a God comprehensible to the human mind,
justified by human syllogisms and brought down to earth by humans.
'God is not of this world'.
he can only be a riddle, a hope.
the church spoils this hope by making it specific.

having thus reached the threshold of true faith, I withdraws.
he is filled with admiration because the idea of God could germinate in man's obtuse (not quick
or alert in perception) mind.
did God create man or did man create God?

I does not want to know the answer to this question.
before this world that is a failure,
before this God who does not even illumine His work,
I 'returns his entrance ticket', saying: 'i do not accept it, i refuse to accept it'.
and he renounces God out of love for mankind, as did the Grand Inquisitor in the legend.

having refused God, I becomes satanic.
I K is the devil.
he sees the devil in a delirium and this devil is himself.
the devil knows God, yet rejects Him.
'i was there, he says to I , when the Word expiring on the cross
ascended to heaven taking with Him the soul of the good thief who was crucified...
at that moment i should have liked to join all the choirs and cry hosannah with them....
but in view of my duties...i was compelled to repress a beautiful gesture and remain in my ignominy'.

thanks to the devil, i at last discovers the reasons for his own atheism.;
because of his desire to measure himself against God,
to do without God,
to replace God,
he refuses the faith that PURSUES Him.
here we find the theme of the superman, the concept so dear to Dos:
'the human mind  will grow great,
it will rise as high as satanic pride and
this will be the era of deified mankind'.
but I is not at ease in his atheism.
he hurls a cup of tea at the devil, 'like a woman'.
he drives out the devil, he drives himself out.
for it is difficult to deny a presence that one perceives inwardly to be necessary.
he is one of those who voluntarily take the path to hell.
he is sick with God.
will he die of this sickness?

Aliosha looks upon his brother with horror and pity
and in the end gently disses his mouth, just as Christ kissed the Grand Inquisitor.
such an answer is the only possible answer of a christian to an atheist.
for he can oppose only love to logic.
faith cannot be explained, cannot be imposed at order.
myshkin, the idiot, says to hippolyte, the unbeliever,
'go your way and forgive us our happiness.'.

'God will be victorious, thinks A.
'either Ivan will be resurrected in the light of truth or he will succumb in hatred'.
and he prays for his brother, because there is no other way of saving him.