The Story of Our Lives

“God has a plan—that is, a story—for each of His children. Strictly speaking, we do not shape the facts of our lives into stories; we try to discern the pattern of the story that God is telling with our lives.”
—Peter Leithart

The Glory of the Psalms

Of how many heroic characters have these old temple songs been the inspiration! Jewish saints and patriots chanted them in the synagogue and on the battlefield; apostles and evangelists sung them among perils of the wilderness, as they traversed the rugged paths of Syria and Galatia, and Macedonia; martyrs in Rome softly hummed them when the lions near at hand were crouching for their prey; in German forests, in Highland Glen, Lutherans and Covenanters breathed their lives out through their cadences; in every land penitent souls have found in them words to tell the story of their sorrow, and victorious souls the voices of their triumph; mothers watching their babes by night have cheered the vigil by singing them, mourners walking in lonely ways have been lighted by the great hopes that shine through them; and pilgrims going down into the valley of the shadow of death have found in their firm assurances a strong staff to lean upon.
—H.T. Hanna

Dangers of Originality in Art

Craftsmanship, and not originality, was the emphasis in the arts prior to Romanticism and the Enlightenment. Certainly an artist was praised for imaginative ideas, but the value of those ideas rested in how the artist treated and developed those ideas and crafted them into something profound. The quality of the idea was dependent on its suitability for development.

An artist striving to be original by necessity ignores or rebels against the history and development of their art. This denial flies in the face of the Biblical ideas of learning from the past, passing along wisdom, and respecting the clouds of witnesses who have gone before.

An artist motivated to be original, by definition, is more interested in personal glory than the glory of God. The impulse to be different for the sake of being different has little or no place in a Biblical concept of the arts.

Scripture does not deny the opportunity to be creative, but the emphasis and purpose is far different than our concept of originality. Craftsmanship, as an artistic trait, is much more in line with the Biblical notion of the arts—and a far more difficult endeavor requiring the exercising of wisdom and ability. The idea of taking various materials, gathering them, remolding and blending them, and ultimately enlarging them is the bringing of order inherent in craftsmanship—an opportunity to act as a sub-creator.

One need only to evaluate the twentieth century art that used originality as its basis to see how far originality takes true art away from a Biblical standard and winds up destroying itself in the process.

Creed and Education

Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot be separated from education. It IS education. A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching. There are no uneducated people; only most people are educated wrong. The true task of culture today is not a task of expansion, but of selection-and rejection. The educationist must find a creed and teach it.
--G.K. Chesterton

Review on Reformation21

My review of The Incarnation in the Gospels is now available on the Reformation21 website.

More Luther Quotes

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.

For where God built a church, there the Devil would also build a chapel.

I am afraid that the schools will prove the very gates of hell, unless they diligently labor in explaining the Holy Scriptures and engraving them in the heart of the youth.

Music is the art of the prophets and the gift of God.

Peace if possible, truth at all costs.

To gather with God's people in united adoration of the Father is as necessary to the Christian life as prayer.

If I knew that tomorrow was the end of the world, I would plant an apple tree today! (Possibly not Luther, but too good not to include)

Modern v. Trinitarian Beauty

Beauty: In Modernity, beauty is at most an accident of power. It derives from survival by power or mutation, and it is an unnatural presence in Modernity’s cosmos, because it doesn’t reflect the conformity and power at the center of that world. But beauty is not efficient; it is superfluous, unnecessary, an overflow, a natural expression of the Trinity’s life. Beauty doesn’t operate by force or power or necessity but by holy seduction, like the Trinity.
—Doug Jones