REflections

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Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.
— Wendell Berry

In C. S. Lewis’ “Chronicles of Narnia,” Aslan, the Great Lion, serving in the typology of Jesus Christ, mentions often the “Deep magic before the dawn of time.” If we humans think of creation at all, we seldom put it into the context of the truly unknowable. Even more to point, we never think in such terms about our world today. We are the masters of our own destiny, creators of our own world, and just because we still have a few evolutionary kinks to work out, without any help from some mythical figure, we will eventually get it right.

However, if we were not so self-righteously arrogant and presumptuous, we should be readily able to discern, that Aslan’s deep magic did not end with the creation of the world, but still is the force that maintains the world in such order that life on earth continues to be possible. Natural law, ordering the physical known and unknowns such as dark matter, flows like a river, towards an eternal ocean, where this magical unknown will become part of our understanding of reality.

If this is true, in times like this, perhaps wisdom begins with the reality that we should pray more, boast and pontificate less. Texas Governor Rick Perry has gotten all sort of secular distain for proposing, something quite similar to this, as the beginning of the transcendent solution to what ails the nation, and also our world.

Watching the Internet traffic to the Wonder Springs Chronicle you can see a definite drop off in site visitors when some part of an article focuses on some spiritual attribute such as God’s grace or faith as a means to bring clarity to our current problems.

With that in mind I figured I might as well get the God stuff out front at the beginning, because this week that is pretty much the context. When you look at the world, in the light of faith in God and the justification provided by the grace of God alone, you see that it is not Lewis’ Mere Christianity, but the Christian religion that is not that much different than Al Gore’s quest to save the world from global warming. It is all about keeping the law, our efforts to become gods, and really nothing about God becoming human flesh and by grace alone, becoming the propitiatory sacrifice of all human sin.

We are not going to save ourselves eternally, and our simple minded solutions to this current mess are just going to continue to provide more unintended consequences to our bimodal solutions; we are not going to fix this predicament without realizing, that, just as Wendell Berry says, “Nature (natural law) is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.”

Tags: C. S. Lewis, Natural Law, Sin Cosmos, juggernaut, Laffer Curve, wealth, dry bones valley