Last night I attended a study group started by some friends who are members of a local Christian Reformed Church (Ebenezer Christian Reformed Church). Atty. Jerry Basiao was the study group leader. They were studying John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. I thought to myself, “Isn’t this something? Who would have thought that in such a small country as the Philippines, and in a relatively small city like Bacolod City, there would be a study group on John Calvin’s Institutes!” Someone stepped to the front and began reading a portion of ch. 1 of the Institutes on the knowledge of God and the knowledge of self. Then Atty. Basiao took over, explained a bit, and began addressing questions to the other members. Then came the fun part: We began sharing inputs, asking questions, offering our interpretations of what Calvin probably meant – it was fun! There were serious moments too, as when Elder Godfrey Serfino (an elder of Ebenezer) asked the group, How do we apply the things we’ve learned to the life of the church? (We were a mixed group actually: some Reformed, some Baptist; we even had a walk-in visitor from Pontevedra whose denominational affiliation we knew nothing about). The session lasted around 2 hours, after which we closed in prayer. Atty. Basiao encouraged each one of us to get our own copy of the Institutes. A couple of members began inspecting the books of John Calvin which the group reader (Bryan I think his name was) brought with him. We all had an enjoyable time. What a way to spend Phlippine Independence Day!
Tag Archives: Books
The Intellectual Life
I’m presently reading A.D. Sertillanges’ The Intellectual Life. I first came to know about this book while reading James Sire’s Habits of the Mind. Yesterday I found a secondhand copy of this book at a local secondhand bookstore. I was so happy with my discovery I felt like kissing the book! I’ve just finished the first chapter – ”The Intellectual Vocation” – and I found it really inspiring. Here are a few quotes I liked:
If you are designated as a light bearer, do not go hide under the bushel the gleam or the flame expected from you in the house of the Father of all. Love truth and its fruits of life, for yourself and for others; devote to study and to the profitable use of study the best part of your time and heart.
Do not prove faithless to God, to your brethren and to yourself by rejecting a sacred call.
Every truth is practical; the most apparently abstract, the loftiest, is also the most practical. Every truth is life, direction, a way leading to the end of man.
Work always then with the idea of some utilization… Listen to the murmur of the human race all about you; pick out certain individuals of certain groups whose need you know, find out what may bring them out of their night and ennoble them; what in any measure may save them.
Willing to Believe
I’ve just finished R.C. Sproul’s Willing to Believe: The Controversy over Free Will, a clear and balanced presentation of the different views that Christians hold on Free Will. Sproul, of course, prefers the Reformed view, and at a number of places he tries to answer the objections posed by other views. But his critique of other views is I think fair and courteous. A good and enlightening book, whichever side of the divide you belong. Here’s his conclusion:
How we view our fallen condition, then, has radical implications for how we understand both the nature and necessity of regeneration as it relates to faith. This in turn greatly influences how we understand the biblical doctrine of election… [Those] who believe that the fallen sinner retains the capacity to choose what he desires but is enslaved by these desires, rest their confidence in the knowledge that salvation is of the Lord and those whom the Son makes free are free indeed.
Culture: Its Theological Justification
Colin Gunton in The One, the Three and the Many offers this theological justification for culture:
The distinctive feature of created persons is their mediating function in the achievement of perfection by the rest of creation. They are called to the forms of action, in science, ethics and art – in a word, to culture – which enable to take place the sacrifice of praise, which is the free offering of all things, perfected, to their creator. Theologically put: the created world becomes truly itself – moves towards its completion – when through Christ, and the Spirit, it is presented perfect before the throne of the Father. The sacrifice of praise which is the due human response to both creation and redemption that takes the form of that culture which enables both personal and non-personal worlds to realize their true being.
To my mind, the foregoing is at the end of the day simply an exposition – albeit a brilliant one – of Ephesians 2:10:
For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.
Built to Last
I’m almost halfway into Collins and Porras’ business book: Built to Last. I like their idea about the “Genius of the AND,” as opposed to the “Tyranny of the Or.” So, for example, in the matter of profits – profit is not everything, but “a reasonable profit is right, but not too much.” So a visionary company is one which can embrace both idealogy AND profit.
Profit is not the proper end and aim of management – it is what makes all of the proper ends and aims possible.
– David Packard
Here’s another quote:
Profit maximization does not rule, but the visionary companies pursue their aims profitably. They do both.
Profitability is a necessary condition for existence and a means to more important ends, but it is not the end in itself for many of the visionary companies. Profit is like oxygen, food, water, and blood for the body; they are not the point of life, but without them, there is no life.
This is sound and sane business advice, and not greedy at all.
Click HERE to learn more about the book
New Book on Filipino Thinkers
Comelec Commissioner Rene Sarmiento has come out with a book entitled “Grow in Grace and Govern in Wisdom”, which is a compilation of readings and articles of “great Filipino thinkers” together with classical philosophers, such as Plato. I understand it’s priced at around P500.00.
Click HERE to read about it.
Democracy on Trial
Just a few more pages and I’m through with Bethke Elshtain’s Democracy on Trial. I guess the long and short of what I’ve learned from this books is that -
… human beings will always fall short of an absolute ideal… “the only reasonable hope for salvation from evil and wickedness at which men might arrive even in this world and even by themselves, without any divine assistance,” must be the imperfect workings of government, the flawed actions of citizens among citizens.
Thomas Merton
Thomas Merton’s really something. Yesterday I started reading his The Sign of Jonas and I found gems scattered all round!
I have only one desire and that is the desire for solitude – to disappear into God, to be submerged in His peace, to be lost in the secret of His Face.
Let me keep silence in this world, except in so far as God wills and in the way He wills it. Let me at least disappear into the writing I do.
God’s love takes care of everything I do. He guides me in my work and in my reading…
Reading Merton makes me want to leave the law profession and become a monk! Maybe it’s not too late.
A Father’s Influence
Matthew Henry, the great Bible Commentator, was who he was largely because of the influence of his father, Philip Henry:
Matthew Henry, having such a well educated father as his private tutor, lacked nothing that a more formal theological education might have brought him. Every day his father preached to the household at family prayers, and everyday young Matthew translated for his father a passage from the Scriptures in the original languages. In addition his father guided him through the Latin classics, and Henry’s mastery of this literature is evident throughout his literary legacy…
From earliest childhood Matthew Henry was brought up to live by the Word of God. Reading Henry’s biography of his father, The Life of the Reverend Philip Henry, A.M. it becomes clear that the ministry of the son was but a public manifestation of the piety of the father.
(Source: Historical Handbook of Major Biblical Interpreters, edited by Donald K. McKim, Inter-Varsity Press 1998, pp. 195, 196)
Matthew Henry’s Commentary on the Whole Bible has been a great blessing to pastors the world over, and all because a godly father brought up his child in the way he should go.
God, Man and Morals
Just a couple of chapters more and I’ll be through with Francis Schaeffer’s Trilogy. I’m now in chapter 2 of the 3rd Book in the Trilogy, He is There and He is Not Silent, where Schaeffer describes man’s dilemma: man is noble and he is also cruel. How do you account for both his nobility and cruelty? But before we can answer that we have to reckon with the fact that man is finite and personal; that’s a given. But how did he begin, i.e., how did he come to exist? Well, one answer is he is the product of time plus chance plus energy plus matter, in other words, he had an impersonal beginning. But an impersonal beginning spells the death of morality. As Schaeffer explains:
If we accept the impersonal beginning, finally we will come to the place where man’s finiteness and his cruelty become the same thing… With an impersonal beginning, morals really do not exist as morals. If one starts with an impersonal beginning, the answer to morals eventually turns out to be the assertion that there are no morals… With an impersonal beginning, everything is finally equal in the area of morals.
I think what Schaeffer is saying is that without a personal Creator-God to give us existence we have no foundation for morality, there is no absolute standard by which we can distinguish right from wrong. Right cannot be better than wrong if both are simply the products of impersonal chance. Schaeffer goes on to say:
So we find man cast up with a feeling of moral motions which in reality leads only to a complete cosmic alienation, because if you begin with the impersonal, in the universe as it is, there is no place for morals as morals. There is no standard in the universe which gives final meaning to such words as right and wrong. If you begin with the impersonal, the universe is totally silent concerning any such words.
I am reminded by something Dostoevsky put into the mouth of one of his characters in his novel The Brothers Karamazov (I’m quoting from memory): “Without God everything is permissible.”
