Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

The Prophet Sober and the Culture Drunk

Douglas Wilson

Blog&Magblog

March 9, 2015

Well, it is Monday morning, so let me write something outrageous. We can sweep up the pieces later. But also keep in mind the fact that just because something is outrageous, it does not follow that it is untrue or unnecessary. In fact, now that the cultural headquarters of our republic has been transferred to the National Zoo’s central monkey house, every day that goes by makes normality more and more outrageous. So there’s that.

Worldview thinkers know that everything is connected. The world is all of a piece, and in the final analysis, the long war between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent is an interpretive war over the whole. The seed of the woman seek to understand the world as the Creator of it understands it, and the seed of the serpent seek to understand it in evolutionary terms, which is to say, on its own terms.

The cosmos is here because God put it here. Or, taking the other route, the cosmos — in some form — was always here. Either God is eternal, or matter/energy are. In the former scenario, there was nothing material and then bam, there was everything that is. In the latter, you have constant, everlasting, unrelenting change. No hope, but lots of change.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Until Someone Unsettles It

Douglas Wilson

Blog&Mablog

2 February, 2015

The creation account in Genesis is read in different ways. It would be easy therefore, to jump right into the Genesis text and show that I read it in one of those different ways.

I do read it in one of those different ways, and bringing out arguments accordingly would be easy. Before getting to my main set of points, let me give just one example. All sides agree that the Hebrew word for day — yom — admits of different meanings, just as the English word day does. For example, I could say, “Back in my grandfather’s day, he was a champion at picking corn, and, while it was day, could average ten bushels a day.”

Now several things are true about this. One is that my grandfather really was a champion at picking corn, but that is another story for another time. The second thing is that day has three different meanings in the course of just one sentence. Day first means time, “in my grandfather’s time.” Second, it means “while the sun was up,” day as opposed to night. And third, it meant “twenty-hour increments,” Tuesday and then Wednesday, and so on.

But the third thing to note about this is that for native speakers of English, the different uses of day do not throw us in a state of consternation. We pick up on all kinds of contextual clues that enable us to tell what is going on.

Evolution and Cool-Shaming

BioLogos, Respectability, and Classical Christian Education

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

December 15, 2014

As classical Christian education has made it through our first round of trials, which threatened to make us fail through failure, we have now come to the much greater test, one that would make us fail through success. With hard work comes success, and with success comes respectability, and with respectability comes . . . spiritual heat death. As Cotton Mather once put it with regard to physical blessings, faithfulness begets prosperity, and the daughter devours the mother. Or as Moses put it, on the same topic, “Lest when thou hast eaten and art full, and hast built goodly houses, and dwelt therein . . . thou say in thine heart, My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth” (Deut. 8:17). The same principle applies to the intellectual fruit of hard academic labor.

Graduates of classical Christian schools are much sought after. They have been taught well, and it shows, and those of us in the movement have heard story after story of how this graduate got a high flying scholarship, and how that one was recruited for the honors program, and so on. We are proud of our students, and rightfully so. But one of the central tests of how we are teaching our students is going to be seen in how they respond to this praise from the world. With the arrival of this praise comes the temptation to want it in the wrong way. The respectability that got there by not caring at all what they think becomes the kind of respectability that cares very much what they think.

And I am convinced that this is one of the reasons why evolutionary thinking is starting to make a play for our community of schools.