Meander - Volume 15, Issue 3

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Dead and Deep

Douglas Wilson

I recently finished reading Beyond Good and Evil by our old friend Nietzsche. He is a wonderful writer with some great lines. But from beginning to end, the book is filled with a profound self-loathing, a loathing which, I suspect, was caused by the cowardice he displayed in refusing to follow his argument into the Abyss. Arch contempt, and timidity from stem to stern.

Parents should use prayer as an investigative tool. Suppose the parents suspect that one of the children has lied about something to them, but they cannot prove it. It is important that parents not discipline blindly because the Bible teaches that every fact has to be established in the mouth of two or three witnesses. But God knows the truth about the matter, and the parents should pray, asking God to provide them with all they need to know in order to be godly parents. If there is a hidden lie that needs to be brought into the light and dealt with, the parents should ask God to do it. And of course, such a prayer offered in all honesty is a prayer that is offered up in the will of God. How would our loving Father not answer such a prayer? But too often the reason we don't ask is that we don't really want to know. We belong to that shortsighted school of car maintenance and repair—don't lift the hood if you don't want to know.

Keb Mo is a really good blues guy, but watch out for the songs he writes himself. The lyrics aren't that good, but his picking and the distinctive texture of his voice are really something. If you want lyrics that say something interesting, try to follow what Mark Knopfler does. A recent CD called The Ragpicker has a great song about daytime television freak shows.

We have recently fought a war, and we have a twofold duty as we seek to understand it. The first is to reject all forms of earthly partisanship in our thinking. We have an ultimate loyalty to the Lord Jesus, and not to America. But the second duty consists in remembering that political responsibilities and connections are not detached from the rule and realm of Jesus Christ. The gospel does have political ramifications, some of them direct. We must be like the men of Issachar, who understood the times and knew what Israel should do.

We are on the threshold of the establishment of an unbelieving American empire. This by itself does not exclude our involvement in it—think of Daniel, Joseph, the faithful centurion, and Erastus. The problem is caused by the fact that it is a militantly secularist and pragmatic empire and, as such, the pressure is already being applied to the Christian church to abandon its exclusivist claims concerning the Faith. The logic of such empires always insists upon joint worship of various gods in the pantheon. This, above all else, places us at odds with the current religious climate.

So from this point out, every Lord's Day, as you worship the Triune God only, remind yourself, remind your family, that we worship as exclusivist Trinitarians. We pledge allegiance to one nation under Christ. We pledge allegiance to nothing under any idol, or under any generic and undefined deity.

Web loggers, or bloggers as they are called, set up nifty web sites, with cool graphics and interactive gee-whizzery, all of it calculated to . . . let us read their diaries. This is occasionally interesting when an interesting or challenging person does it—but in many cases the only people who want to read the diaries are those who want to have their own diaries read. This is the same reason why Hollywood actors or Nashville recording artists, when talking about one another, always use the word "genius." What goes around comes around. Asinus asinum fricat. So chalk up another one to technological capacity driving what we do before we understand it.

Over the course of the last year or so, I have begun the very pleasant task of re-reading a number of C. S. Lewis' books, books I read the first time twenty or thirty years ago. One thing I have found striking is the sensation of "so that's where I learned that!"

Q. What happened to the girl who ate the curtains?
A. She got sick.