An Altared Heart
Anxiety, Prayer, Poetry, and Hope During COVID-19
Sarah Crowley Chestnut
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What can be learned about God and self that cannot be learned in any other way but by staying in one place for a long time?
Our friend Sarah Chestnut asks this question in a series of Holy Week reflections on our site and over at The Rabbit Room. Drawing from her own experience of anxiety and the wisdom George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Psalm 23, Sarah helps us understand how God might be molding our hearts individually and corporately in these strange days.
Read "An Altared Heart: Anxiety, Prayer, Poetry, and Hope During COVID-19". You can also listen to Sarah read "CRUCIAL: Poems on Christ's Seven Last Words from the Cross", a series of original poems, over at the Southborough L'Abri podcast.
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"No Wealth but Life"
Moral Reasoning in a Pandemic
Ken Myers reads Brad Littlejohn
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The coronavirus raises a host of questions: "What is this all for? What is the value of human life? Am I willing to sacrifice my freedom to protect my neighbor? Can I sacrifice some comfort to protect life?"
In this remarkable piece, Brad Littlejohn explains how Christians – especially those who claim to be pro-life – are uniquely poised to offer answers to these questions, but that many are currently squandering the opportunity by clinging tightly to illusory freedoms, wealth, and material comfort.
What's behind this? Littlejohn probes the hard questions and their "chorus of objections", brushes away the errors of sentimentalism and utilitarianism, and prepares for a landing like this:
At the root of our protest that “the cure is worse than the disease,” I suspect, is a fear that our own way of life may have to change. Comforts that we once took for granted might turn out to be luxuries. Luxuries that we once aspired to may have to be shelved for another decade or two. Freedoms that we thought were our birthright, we will be forced to realize, were in fact simply the lucky blessing of having been born at the right time.
Once we've turned our back on these fears and false freedoms, we've started on the path of true Christian liberty – the freedom to love our neighbor.
Listen to Ken Myers read "'No Wealth but Life': Moral Reasoning in a Pandemic" over at Mars Hill Audio or via the Mars Hill Audio app. You can also read the original essay and its followup – "Our Lives or Our Freedoms: The Fear of Tyranny in a Time of Pandemic" – over at Mere Orthodoxy.
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Is Covid-19 in the Bible?
Scriptural Reflections from Ephraim Radner and Peter Leithart
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What does the Bible tell us about the current crisis? A perennial impulse, especially in America, is to search out places in Scripture where the present upheaval, whatever it might be, is specifically mentioned in prophetic writings. This often leads to predictions about what's coming next, predictions that often instill fear and tend to be disproved as time goes by.
The Bible does tell us about the future, but this is not its primary purpose. The Scriptures are alive with stories and poetry, laws and patterns through which we can more clearly see our present experience.
Here are two reflections that approach the Bible to find not a roadmap for the future, but a Scriptural lens to help us more wisely apprehend these strange days.
- Ephraim Radner sees this crisis as a Jubilee moment: "No flying about the globe, no boardroom deals, commercialized sociality, mass political campaigns, pushing to get ahead, or making one’s mark. Instead, this is a time for living with the gift of life God has provided. In doing so, God’s own being and grace is unveiled to the otherwise distracted and self-absorbed creature."
- Peter Leithart sees this moment as an apocalypse, which literally means an unveiling. "When God comes near, he strips away the fig leaves, our defenses and delusions, and brings hidden things to light," Leithart writes. "The main thing exposed by any apocalypse is the state of the heart."
Read "The Time of the Virus" and "Apocalypse Now?" over at First Things. More could be said on both counts, but see what happens if you let these Biblical provocations sink into your imagination in the coming days.
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Isolation has given Andy some unexpected time to work on this newsletter including: new plans for challenges, new headers, and a few new sections (scroll down).
Reading: Andy has revisited a much beloved poem, T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets. Here are his hard-won, homemade annotations to this beautiful (but confusing) poem (part 1, part 2) and a lecture to guide you through.
Listening: This playlist has been on repeat for the past few weeks.
Writing: The blog on the conquest of Canaan for the Bible Project was posted recently. You can read the whole series on violence in the Bible on their blog. Part 1 is on the flood. Part 2 is on the sacrifice of Isaac.
He is also doing some writing on life at L'Abri, starting with a short piece on media technology and the Manor House.
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At the beginning of this coronavirus crisis, Phillip realized how every grocery run provided an opportunity to see Edwin Friedman’s five characteristics of an anxious system at play. This resulted in a sermon on non-anxious presence, something all of us could use a bit of right now.
Reading: Come to think of it, he's been reading memoirs by two Christian non-anxious presences: Eugene Peterson’s The Pastor and Andrew Peterson’s Adorning the Dark. Both really good. He's also meandering through Augustine's expositions of the psalms.
Listening: It’s Holy Week, so time for Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, part two of Messiah, and the aforementioned AP’s Resurrection Letters: Prologue. How about you?
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The Mosaic of Atonement
Joshua McNall
Down through the centuries, Christians have argued about what precisely is happening when Jesus dies on the cross. Is he receiving the punishment for our sins, destroying the works of the devil, giving us an example to follow?
Theologians often speak as if only a single answer were true and end up creating a "defensive hierarchy" that prizes one answer over and/or against the others.
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Enter this remarkable book by Joshua McNall who integrates various approaches to the atonement with the image of the body of Christ.
- The Feet: Recapitulation (Christ and Adam)
- The Heart: Penal Substitution (Punishment Resulting in Peace)
- The Head: Christus Victor (Salvation via Triumph)
- The Hands: Moral Influence (the Power of Transforming Love)
Pick up The Mosaic of Atonement for a refreshingly integrated approach to what we're celebrating this Holy Week.
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Three cheers for our new intern, Hunter. He has been running around behind the scenes doing lots of things to make this newsletter better for weeks now. Thanks, Hunter!
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We launched the new Patrons-only newsletter.
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And today you get to read it.
If you want read all the resources we can't fit into the regular issues, become a patron.
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Catch up on the last three issues.
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As part of a future project to turn L'Abri lectures into essays, I am looking for volunteers to transcribe three lectures. If you are interested, email me (Andy), transcribe it, and share the google doc with me once it is done.
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