The Sojourn

Author: Burrows

  • What Matters Supremely

    What matters supremely, therefore, is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it—the fact that he knows me. I am graven on the palms of his hands. I am never out of his mind. All my knowledge of him depends on his sustained initiative in knowing me. I know him, because he first knew me, and continues to know me. He knows me as a friend, one who loves me; and there is no moment when his eye is off me, or his attention is distracted from me, and no moment, therefore, when his care falters.

    J.I Packer, Knowing God, 41.

  • C.S. Lewis’s Biggest Mistake

    C.S. Lewis’s Biggest Mistake

    …was apparently being indifferent about the order in which the Chronicles of Narnia should be read.

    I was shocked to discover, on the first page of Walter Hooper’s preface in Lewis’s collection of essays On Other Worlds (1975), that he mentioned how Lewis recommended the Chronicles be read in chronological order, starting with The Magician’s Nephew.

    Now, The Magician’s Nephew is a fine book as origin stories goes, but there’s no way it should be read as the first book in the series. Turns out, I am not alone in this opinion. In fact, the official website of C.S. Lewis includes an article about the suggested order for the books:

    Lewis scholars almost universally agree that we should disagree with what Lewis said about the order of publication. C. S. Lewis was not the kind of person to focus on himself, and though he remembered everything he ever read almost word for word, he lacked such perfect memory toward anything he actually wrote. He was truly selfless not only in his actions towards others, but in his constant practice of ignoring himself in order to make God, not Lewis the center of his life. I’m not convinced Lewis was thinking about his books and their content when he gave thought to the best order in which to read them. He was probably thinking about what might be easiest for children to understand. And while he “preferred” chronological order (Collected Letters III, 847n.), he also said, “perhaps it does not matter very much in which order anyone reads them” (Collected Letters III, 848).

    Perhaps, once having read all seven books, Lewis might be correct in this. However, when reading them for the first time, the best place to start is, without a doubt, a little girl and a big wardrobe.

  • France is Hexagonal

    France is Hexagonal

    One of the objections against the accuracy, or the historicity, but really, the truthfulness of Scripture is that it contains certains points of information which are scientifically inaccurate, and therefore proof that the Bible is riddled with errors.

    But one of the first rules of hermeneutics (or the interpretation of a text) is to understand the context, and one of the most overlooked points of context is the genre of the text itself. Consider the following quote from Stanley Fish:

    In his great book How to Do Things with Words (1962), J.L. Austin considers the apparently simple sentence “France is Hexagonal.” He asks if this is true or false, a question that makes perfect sense if the job of a sentence is to be faithful to the world.

    His answer is that it depends.

    If you are a general contemplating a coming battle, saying that France is hexagonal might help you assess various military options of defense and attack; it would be a good sentence. But if you are a geographer charged with the task of mapping France’s contours, saying that France is hexagonal might cost you your union card; a greater degree of detail and fineness of scale is required of mapmakers. “France is hexagonal,” Austin explains, is true “for certain intents and purposes” and false or inadequate or even nonsensical for other. It is, he says, a matter of the “dimension of assessment”—that is, a matter of what is the “right or proper thing to say as opposed to a wrong thing in these circumstances, to this audience, for the purposes and with these intentions.”

    Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence (2011), 38–39.

    This same principle applies to the interpretation of a biblical text. If the genre of Genesis was scientific textbook, or the genre of Exodus statistical analyses, then we might have legitimate qualms about the way certain pieces of history are communicated. But the fact that these are historical narratives, and theological epics, allows for a certain elasticity to the language.

    This kind of genre contextualization may not solve all our interpretive difficulties, but it does give us a framework for understanding why an event might be communicated one way and not another.

  • Have We Been Transformed?

    Alister McGrath

    The ultimate test of whether we have grasped theological truth is thus not so much whether we have comprehended it rationally, but whether it has transformed us experientially. In an important sense, we are not called on to master theology, but to allow it to master us.

    Alister McGrath, J.I. Packer: His Life and Thought, 84.

  • On Patrol

    On Patrol

  • Annotations — June 4, 2021

    A Victory Already Won

    One practical application that comes from understanding the gospel as, fundamentally, the proclamation of good news.

    God’s Hand of Blessing

    The story of a young woman in West Timor (in Indonesia) who takes up the task of Bible translation. An encouraging example of how God uses small people to accomplish big things.

    Pornography and Resisting the Power of Temptation

    John Piper gives a very helpful word picture that helps to clarify the language we use in the fight against sexual temptation.

    Some Lengthy Thoughts on Women Leadership

    A long post by Alastair Roberts about women leaders in the Bible. The most fascinating part of the discussion is about the nature of the priests and the priesthood.

    Lean Toward the Radical

    Part of our own family’s mission is “Risk for his cause”, and so this post resonated strongly with me. How a husband balances the tensions of family and mission in his own heart.