The Discarded Image

Theology Is About…More Than Theology

admin — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 04:03:12 +0000

One purpose of this blog is to engage in detail primary sources of Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, and Reformation history from a classical Protestant perspective in order to foster the re-growth and spread of the original, warm, world-embracing humanism of the Reformers themselves.

In a more humane and civilized age than ours, Theology was considered “the queen of the sciences,” and other disciplines, including history, were thought to be extremely useful “handmaidens” to theology (ancillae theologiae). Theology, because its focus was on the God who created all things, was thought to be able to unify all the other disciplines, and all the other disciplines, studying various aspects of God’s world, could shed very useful rays of light on Theology.

I believe that in our age, which has deparated from the beaten path of our fathers (not just our fathers in the Faith, but our fathers in the human race generally considered), we need to take care in asserting the primacy of “Theology.” To assert such a thing today would be to use the same words as were used in the past while imbuing those words with a drastically different meaning. For in our Modern context, where vast sectors of intellectual life are ruled by institutionalized unbelief, Theology has been downgraded from “Queen of the Sciences” to “No Science At All” (many today speak of Mathematics as the real Queen). In reaction to this assault, Modern Protestants have not merely re-coronated Theology, but have become desperately and disproportionately focused upon Theology as the only reliable source of Truth. Theology for many Modern Protestants is not considered just the Queen of the Sciences, but rather the Only Science. Thus, in our Modern Protestant context I would not want to call history a mere ancilla theologiae, for in our Modern Protestant context “theology” is usually defined extremely narrowly as a preoccupation with the details of the doctrines of salvation, with the nuances of how individual souls can commune with God and go to heaven when their basically useless bodies die.

As Modern Protestants, we tend to devalue history – we’re much more interested in Systematic Theology and Biblical Exegesis conceived of as the coldly rational, purely abstract activities of brains – brains that think of the past as useful only in relation to whatever “Truth” we are vigorously fighting for right now. We tend to downplay, if not entirely ignore, how history has shaped us, how it has taught us to think about God, the world, the Bible, ourselves, and other people. This is not how the Bible itself wants us to think – something like two-thirds of it is history, after all!

As Modern Protestants we also tend to accept the idea that the fundamental truth of Protestantism is deliberate separation from what came before followed by a “reboot” of Truth from scratch. This is not how the Bible itself wants us to think – throughout the Old Testament God repeatedly calls His people to remember the past, and the New Testament tells us that the past was written for our instruction (Rom. 15:4; 1 Cor. 10:6).

Lest someone object to my overall thesis in this post, the Bible is not just telling us to remember the biblical past, to focus on history as it is recorded in the Bible. It is intriguing that in the great hall of faith in Hebrews 11, there are references to people and events that do not seem to be recorded in the Scriptures (who in the Old Testament was “sawed in two”?). 2 Chronicles 20 and 27 imply that the reader should consult more information found in other books about the kings – but these have subsequently been lost to us. Jude 1:14-15 directly cites the apocyrphal Book of Enoch, which shows that Jude not only had read the book but that he approved of that part of its contents.

Returning to our practices as Protestants, an odd feature of some very influential sectors of the Reformed world in particular is a marked disdain for pagan antiquity and the Middle Ages – eras (falsely) thought by such men to be largely devoid of God’s Truth, and useful to us only as examples of how foolish sinful men can be when they “don’t take the Bible seriously enough.” Thankfully, say such men, we take the Bible seriously enough, and that is why we disdain the study of the classical and Medieval worlds and instead fixate our minds inside the cracks of our “Reformed Theology” and “Reformed Apologetics” books, there never to be troubled by the silly, self-defeating buzzing of “unbiblical” and “autonomous” thought.

Against this extreme and distortive tendency, it is noteworthy that the Reformers themselves were very conscious of the labors of Christians – and non-Christians! – who had come before their own time, and although they often criticized many of these people they nevertheless demonstrated thorough acquaintance with their works. Not merely Luther and Calvin, but their heirs over the next few generations deliberately studied the classical past and interacted with it very substantively, believing not just that Protestants had nothing to fear from extra-biblical studies but that extra-biblical studies did, in fact, make the Protestant case far stronger.

History, then, is the stage upon which God has been for millennia telling an incredibly fascinating story about all kinds of different things – among them salvation, but not only salvation. As the old hymn goes, “This world is not our home, we’re passing through,” but as the other old hymn goes, “This is my Father’s world,” and all the seemingly mundane things in it are things He has put here, things to which He expects us to pay attention because they are His. The most fundamental fact of our whole religion – the Incarnation of the Word – is buried deep in history: “In the time of Herod king of Judea…In the days of Caesar Augustus…when Quirinius was governor of Syria…,” and so forth. And as the Creed says, “He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate…” History is not dispensable; it is the warp and woof of our whole Faith.

In sum, then, Protestants have nothing to fear from – and no justifiable reason to avoid – serious, sober-minded, thorough study of history. Indeed, such an activity is an essential part of our identity first as Christians and second as Protestants. I hope you’ll join me in the posts on this website as I seek to do just that: to tread the beaten path of our ancestors, both Christian and non-Christian, in an effort to remember the past and creatively appropriate its lessons for the present.

Groping for God

admin — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 03:55:11 +0000

Romans 1:18-32 starkly says:

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator–who is forever praised. Amen. Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion. Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.

This passage of Scripture often sees action in the attempts of some Christians to say that unregenerate man cannot “truly” understand anything about God, about themselves, or about the world, because in their sin they have “suppressed” the truth, their thinking has become “futile,” and they have been “given over by God” to the results of their sin. Hand-in-hand with verses like “The natural man does not understand the things of God for they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14), and “What fellowship has light with darkness” (2 Cor. 6:14), and “Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things” (Col. 3:2), the Romans passage is used by some to prove that the unregenerate are, almost as it were, an entirely different race of beings from the regenerate. They do not even understand the truth that stares them in the face, let alone accept it.

By contrast, Acts 17:17-33 conveys very clearly the idea that unbelievers can and do know quite a lot about God, themselves, and the world even though their minds are darkened by sin:

While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols. So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there. A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to dispute with him. Some of them asked, “What is this babbler trying to say?” Others remarked, “He seems to be advocating foreign gods.” They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection. Then they took him and brought him to a meeting of the Areopagus, where they said to him, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears, and we want to know what they mean.” (All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.) Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: -to an unknown god. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you. “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’ “Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone–an image made by man’s design and skill. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead.” When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, “We want to hear you again on this subject.”

Notice some important things about the Acts passage relative to the Romans 1. Despite the fact that unbelievers “suppress the truth in unrighteousness,” they do in fact know the truth about God because God has made it plain to them. Note that their suppressive activity is ethical – it results in God judging them by giving them over to a catalogue of grossly evil actions. Romans 1 does not indicate that man’s sin has made him ontologically evil or epistemologically blind. The Acts 17 passage makes it as plain as can be that God has ordered human life in such a way that man can seek him and perhaps “reach out for him and find him.” As another translation puts it, men can “grope for God.” As a general rule, men may try to get far from God, but God is not far from men. If He has arranged things such that men can “grope” for Him, and if, as we know from Hebrews 11, He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him, is it proper to read the Romans passage as an absolute rather than a rhetorical statement?

Welcome

admin — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 18:59:24 +0000

Welcome to the Discarded Image Classical Tutorials.

This is a multi-purpose website which hosts two main activities oriented within a classical Protestant perspective. The first consists of occasional articles of interest about Church history, basic Christian theology, and classical eduction. The second is a Classical Tutorials program aimed at a variety of levels from 9th grade to working adult.

For current and past articles, please continue scrolling down this page.

For the Classical Tutorials program for high schoolers, please click here.

For the Adult Education program, please click here.

Omnibus III Program

admin — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 19:35:23 +0000

Omnibus I Program

admin — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 19:33:37 +0000

Henle Latin Program

admin — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 19:30:17 +0000

Lingua Latina Program

admin — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 19:27:41 +0000

Lingua Latina is a full-immersion program that has been described this way: “Entirely composed in Latin, Part I, Familia Romana, provides an excellent introduction to Latin, including the essentials of Latin grammar and a basic vocabulary of over 1500 words. The thirty-five chapters describe the life of a Roman family in the 2nd century A.D., and culminate in readings from classical poets and Donatus Ars Grammatica, the standard Latin school text for a millennium. Each chapter is divided into two or three lectiones (lessons) of a couple pages each followed by a grammar section, Grammatica Latina, and three exercises or Pensa. Hans Ã˜rbergs impeccable Latinity, humorous stories, and the Peer Lauritzen illustrations make this work a classic. The book includes a table of inflections, a Roman calendar, and a word index, Index vocabulorum.”

At present we offer tutoring in the Pars I level of this program. We plan to expand to Pars II soon.

About the Instructor

admin — Sun, 01 May 2011 03:46:53 +0000

Tim Enloe is a professional educator involved in the classical Christian school movement. He holds a B.A. in Liberal Arts from New St. Andrews College, and an M.A. in Humanities from the University of Dallas. His favorite subjects are History (Classical and Medieval), Rhetoric, and Latin. Among his specific interests are the following research projects:

The philosophical basis and practice of rhetoric, specifically the Socratic impact on rhetoric as a tool for guiding men to the Good
The cultural connections of Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, and Reformation worlds
Classical Greek and Roman political theories

Contact: tgenloe@gmail.com

Books and CDs

admin — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 18:58:15 +0000

The following books and CDs are available for purchase from The Discarded Image Classical Tutorials. To order any item, click on its picture.

	The concept of “subcreation” is a key to understanding what Tolkien was attempting to do in his fantasy works. Subcreation, or the idea that the creatures God makes are themselves able to create within the boundaries that God has set, but not necessarily in the same way He Himself actually did things, puts many of Tolkien’s seeming theological novelties into perspective and helps us to better appreciate his faithful literary artistry. As well, by coming to grips with this concept as it appears in Tolkien’s works, we may be able to find inspiration for our own subcreative works done for the glory of God and the advancement of His kingdom. Paperback (75 pp.) – $8.00 Download: $2.99
	Thanks to a mixed heritage, the catholic Christian tradition has always been pluriform in its notions of authority. During the Western Schism of 1378-1418, conflict between two types of authority, papalist and conciliarist, reached a fever pitch. The battle between these views consumed the 15^th century and provided ecclesiological preparation for the Protestant reformation in the 16^th. Throughout the Reformation and into the 17^th century Protestants invoked conciliarist principles against the papacy’s absolute monarchy. Standing on catholic conciliarism, the Reformers worked for lawful, biblical reform of the Church. Considering this essential backdrop leads us to better appreciate our heritage as Protestants. Paperback (144 pp.) – $9.88 Download: $4.00
	This book is an exploration of the legitimacy and limits of the imagination for Christians. Through an in-depth discussion of the fiction works of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, the author tries to show how a Christian understanding and use of the imagination can proceed into areas often thought to be off-limits, such as mythology, magic, and ways of God’s dealings in creation that are not explicitly spelled out in the Bible. Paperback (180 pp.) – $9.96 Download: $4.00
	This thesis focuses on Edward the Confessor (r. 1042-1066), an Anglo-Saxon “sacral king” who was declared a saint a century after his death. In a century torn by strife between the Church and slowly emerging national powers, King Henry II used the political symbol of King Edward and his real, personal presence in this world as Saint Edward to support a strong royalist view of authority against the clericalist view of the English Church of his day. As both a king and a saint, Edward became a perfect illustration of the fundamental Medieval dilemma of how to reconcile and properly relate the “two orders” of Christian society, the temporal and the spiritual. Hardcover (87 pp.) – $20.00 Download: $7.00

Tuition and Fees

admin — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 20:09:35 +0000

The Discarded Image Classical Tutorials is dedicated to providing a quality program of ongoing education for high-school age students and working adults. At the same time, due to our present economic climate, we are also dedicated to keeping the costs for our courses to a minimum.

Tuition for all offered classes is $150.00 per student.

Please note: For home schools, there is a discount of $25 per course per additional student for multiple students from the same family. For example, using a Track I course:

Cost for one student: $150
Cost for second student from the same family: $125
Cost for third student from the same family: $100

The home school discount applies only to students from the same family. (Home school co-ops are not treated as the same family.)

There are no other fees associated with these tutorials except books. We try to keep the book costs for our tutorials low by selecting versions of the texts which are balanced between quality and cost. Most of these books are available from online booksellers in good used condition, which helps to lower the student’s price more.

The Discarded Image

Theology Is About…More Than Theology

Groping for God

Welcome

Omnibus III Program

Omnibus I Program

Henle Latin Program

Lingua Latina Program

About the Instructor

Books and CDs

Paperback (75 pp.) – $8.00

Download: $2.99

Paperback (144 pp.) – $9.88

Download: $4.00

Paperback (180 pp.) – $9.96

Download: $4.00

Hardcover (87 pp.) – $20.00

Download: $7.00

Tuition and Fees