The Unseen World of Devilish Mischief |
Popular
culture pictures angels and devils perched on our opposing shoulders,
duking it out in a battle of whispered temptations and pious reprimands.
The Bible, of course, has a much richer understanding.
For
the November issue of CT, I asked Graham Cole, professor of biblical
and systematic theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and
author of Against the Darkness: The Doctrine of Angels, Satan, and Demons, to pick five books that can help us get a handle on the supernatural beings operating behind the scenes.
Here’s what Cole has to say about Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices, a book written by 17th-century Puritan pastor Thomas Brooks:
“[Brooks]
writes out of a deep understanding of Scripture and Christian
experience, taking the unseen world of devilish mischief with utmost
seriousness. His focus is on believers (‘saints’) and Satan’s strategies
to trip them up. In chapter after eminently practical chapter, he
describes the devil’s malevolent devices and the remedies to counter
them.”
|
Matt Reynolds
Associate Editor, Books |
Does Socialism Have to Be ‘Godless’? |
The word socialism
has a frustrating habit of slipping the bonds of its textbook
definition and taking on a life of its own. Very few people who
advertise themselves as socialists these days mean to endorse anything
quite as comprehensive as the state owning the means of production or
the abolition of private property. For some, socialism looks like a
Scandinavian welfare state or the policy platform of Bernie Sanders. For
others, it’s nothing more controversial than an ethic of sharing your
toys with all the other kids in the sandbox. In our current political
conversation, of course, “socialist” often appears as a slur against
anyone with left-of-center economic ideas.
Certain
Christians have spied an approximation of socialism in the second
chapter of Acts, when the earliest believers “had everything in common”
and “sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need” (v.
45–46). This gets us a good deal closer to the ideals animating the cast
of characters featured in Vaneesa Cook’s Spiritual Socialists: Religion and the American Left, which recalls an earlier strain of faith-based political thought with few parallels today. Historian Heath Carter reviewed book for CT.
He
writes, “The heart of [Cook’s] story lies in the half-century between
World War I and the Civil Rights movement, a time when ‘spiritual
socialists,’ as she calls them, stretched the boundaries of Christian
social and political imagination, even as they helped reorient the
American Left away from doctrinaire Marxism. As that latter point
suggests, for Cook, as for her characters, socialism is a far more fluid
category than the oft-cartoonish representations of it might suggest.
Consistent with countless readers of magazines like Christianity Today, ‘spiritual socialists turned to the Bible rather than The Communist Manifesto
for answers and inspiration.’ It was their faith that led them to
reject the American Dream. They felt a call, deep in their hearts, to
seek first, instead, the kingdom of God.
“Spiritual
socialists did not agree on every detail of how the kingdom would come,
but nearly to a person they believed that it was not through the state.
As Cook observes, ‘Rather than encouraging centralized power politics,
they promoted small-scale, local organization from the bottom up.’
Dorothy Day offers one case in point. During the international economic
crisis of the 1930s, which prompted countless Americans to put their
trust in an expanding national government, she poured her energies
instead into the fledgling Catholic Worker movement. She put little
stock in the New Deal’s alphabet soup of lumbering federal
bureaucracies; but unlike its conservative critics, she also had no
faith in the free market.”
|
No comments:
Post a Comment