Soul – Page 3 – AD CAELOS

What is the Gospel?

Understanding the Gospel starts by understanding that God is, by his very nature, both perfectly loving and perfectly just. Both.

If you want the real God, you can’t have just one or the other. It’s a package deal.

Here are the opening lines of perhaps the greatest poem ever written, Milton’s epic “Paradise Lost”:

Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful
Seat

In these thirty-eight words, Milton has summarized all of history: We were originally given everything we needed in order to live joyfully, in wholeness and love. We traded our happy condition for a lie, with tragic, cosmic implications. We have since lived a broken existence in a broken land east of Eden.

Justice could not let our act of disobedience stand. Someone had to pay. And someone did.

Enter love, which led God to take on human flesh in the form of “one greater Man,” who lived the perfect life we should have lived, and then died the death we deserve.

Justice served. Love wins. In Christ, we are restored, regaining “the blissful Seat.”

That’s good news.

Photo credit: Ben Swayze, 2013

Dostoyevsky’s Response to the Problem of Evil

From the literary classic Brothers Karamazov:

I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, of the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood that they’ve shed; and it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify what has happened.

Beautiful words, aren’t they?

Watch this.

No, this is not a “hold my beer” moment.

Anyone who knows me well is more than aware that I love Tim Keller, the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City. The guy is just so humble, learned, and wise. No one currently living — and I mean no one — has more significantly impacted my faith and my understanding of what life is all about.

If I could force everyone I know to watch the following, I would. Alas, I can’t. Will you please watch? You’ll be very glad you did.

A Lord’s Prayer

Our Father in heaven, holy is Your name. May we utter it only in reverence

Continue to bring to earth the Kingdom You initiated that Easter morning so many years ago

May Your will be done here, as it is now and has ever been done in Heaven

Holy Spirit, this day, guide our steps that we may do the Father’s will

Give us that which will sustain our bodies, enough for today

We humbly ask that You forgive the evil we have done, just as we forgive all wrongs that have been done to us. No man, woman, or child owes us anything — we hereby release any and all such debts

Forbid that we should yield to temptation

And deliver us from the schemes of the evil one

It is in Jesus’ name that we pray

Amen.

An Invitation to The Inklings

We are a free online apologetics discussion group for Christians interested in deepening the imaginative and philosophical grounds for our faith. Our focus is primarily, though not exclusively, on the literary and philosophical works of C.S. Lewis, arguably the 20th century’s greatest defender of the Christian faith.

There are no prerequisites other than a love of reading and thinking.

We are set to begin our first session of 2020.

Here’s how it works:

Sign up in the comments section below, making sure to enter your name and email address. (You may also contact me via Facebook)
On Sunday, April 12th, 2020 (and going forward every Sunday), I will send out info on the week’s subject material — as well as a link to a video lecture
Starting on Wednesday, April 15th (and going forward on every Wednesday evening), we will gather from 7-8pm for group discussion via web conference
The plan right now is to continue meeting through early June, 2020

Week One will consist of a general overview. And Week Two will be on how we as humans create meaning from information. Both are setup material for C.S. Lewis’s treatment of love in his The Four Loves and Till We Have Faces.

If you want to get ahead of the reading, we will be starting in Week Three on The Four Loves. You might want to go ahead and purchase both books now, if you don’t already own them.

-Jim Swayze

Why would I even want to believe?

This is about hypotheticals. And this is about God.

Before you get too up-in-arms, I’m not going to even try to offer up earth-shattering proof — as if that were even possible — for the existence of a deity who, by definition, is outside the natural world and therefore not knowable by the senses. (Though at least some of my fellow Christian thinkers would disagree, I just don’t think proof is possible, for or against).

I’d just like here to take a few moments to address those of you who might answer the question of desire posed by the title of this post some way like this:

“Even if God were real, which I’m fairly certain isn’t the case, I wouldn’t want to believe in a Divine-Being-in-the Sky, forever ready and willing to smite the unfaithful. I have no desire for some exclusive, unjust, narrow, regressive Somebody who would allow all the pain and suffering that occurs in this world — or who was so weak they could not prevent it.”

My friend, I get it. I don’t want that God either.

Let me ask you this: Have you ever had the experience of having a pretty firm idea about something — only to find out later that reality’s actually not much like what you had in your head? I don’t know, maybe you didn’t like superhero movies or coconut cream pie or early morning runs by the lake. But then you actually let go and watch the film, eat the pie, go for the run. And you think, if only for a moment, “Hey, maybe there is something to this.”

I’d humbly suggest that God is real, that the mass of humanity hasn’t been involved in some sort of monumental misunderstanding, and that if you desire to know more about Him, it’s there for the asking. And that, maybe just maybe, those who would answer the question of belief in the negative don’t really know the value of Whom it is they are rejecting.

This blog, Ad Caelos, is dedicated to that possibility. I hope you’ll read on.