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Enjoying God Blog

Last week I mentioned the release of John Piper’s most recent installment in The Swans are not Silent series of Christian biographies. The three men discussed in the book are George Herbert, George Whitefield, and C. S. Lewis. The book is titled, Seeing Beauty and Saying Beautifully. I thought I’d give you a couple more insightful quotes from the book in hopes that it will stir you to get it and read it in its entirety. Continue reading . . .

Last week I mentioned the release of John Piper’s most recent installment in The Swans are not Silent series of Christian biographies. The three men discussed in the book are George Herbert, George Whitefield, and C. S. Lewis. The book is titled, Seeing Beauty and Saying Beautifully. I thought I’d give you a couple more insightful quotes from the book in hopes that it will stir you to get it and read it in its entirety.

(1) Not many would instinctively connect poetry with predestination! Poets are typically envisioned as tender, deeply emotional and sensitive souls who labor to communicate in ways that people are led to weep or rejoice or meditate quietly on the profundity of life and death. Therefore, that George Herbert was a poet who believed in predestination strikes many as rather odd. Piper finds it perfectly appropriate. You’ll need to read the chapter to see why.

Here I simply want to highlight one comment from Piper’s treatment of Herbert. One of the marks of the Calvinism embraced by George Herbert, notes Piper, “was that God’s sovereign self-exaltation was supremely expressed in preventing man from putting God in the place of a dependent master who needs servants to sustain him. Instead God expresses his sovereignty in putting humble and dependent man finally and permanently where God will serve him with the inexhaustible resources of the riches of his glory” (65).

(2) If the angry atheists of our day (or any day) are right, and nothing exists outside of whatever random configuration of atoms we encounter, is there any reason why their claims for atheism should be taken seriously? No. C. S. Lewis put it this way:

“If I swallow the scientific cosmology as a whole (that excludes a rational, personal God), then not only can I not fit in Christianity, but I cannot even fit in science. If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees. And this is to me the final test” (C. S. Lewis, “Is Theology Poetry?”)

In other words, says Piper, “modern people construct a worldview that treats their thoughts as equivalent to wind in the trees. And then they call these thoughts true. Lewis said that’s a contradiction. Atheistic man uses his mind to create a worldview that nullifies the use of his mind. . . . If there is no God as the foundation of logic (like the law of non-contradiction) and the foundation of value judgments (like justice and beauty), then man is abolished. His mind is no more than the rustling of leaves, and his value judgments are no more than ripples on a pond” (131).

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