Good Work
Intro
I'm excited to announce the first issue of a new publication featuring work by Lindsey Tollefson, Rich Lusk, Brittany Petruzzi, James Leithart, Aaron Belz, Brendan O'Donnell, and Samuel Dickison. Good Work is a print-only magazine of Reformed Trinitarian theology, published four times a year. Our first issue is available on our website in PDF form, but if you want to see subsequent issues, hot off the press, you'll have to sign up for our mailing list. You can do so on the site, or email garbler@goodworkmag.com. (Why garbler?)
Good Work
For decades, our culture has been the domain of God-hating secularism. After the Sexual Revolution, the Culture Wars began, and Christians have lost every fight since then. Only recently have we made progress, thanks to the Dobbs ruling on abortion, but all other areas of culture are slowly, but inexorably being covered by the dark cloud of paganism.
At least, that’s how the story goes. In Good Work, we'd like to present an alternative.
When King Hezekiah began to restore the worship of the true God during his reign, he faced a similar situation: A once-faithful nation that had given itself up to idolatry. But the problem was not that the false gods had taken over the culture. The problem was that God’s people had abandoned the culture they had been given. The temple was there in Jerusalem. They just ignored it. They had books of law and wisdom, including the Psalms of David, but no one read, sang, or taught them. The harvest was waiting, but the people did not gather it in.
A culture is not a battleground. It is the inevitable outgrowth of belief. It is not the root, but the branches. Worship the God of life and you will have a culture of life. Worship anything else, and your culture will collapse like cardboard in the rain. Secularism—the worship of man in his own image—isn’t so much a culture as an anti-culture, eating itself away from the inside, actively destroying everything good and beautiful. This anti-culture is not worth fighting over. It needs to be thrown away to make room for the true culture of the Church.
What is the Church’s culture? What kind of branches grow from that root? Jesus tells us that He has received all authority in heaven and earth (Matthew 28:18), and so, quite simply, everything in the world belongs to him. This not only includes the souls and bodies of men and women, but oak trees, flamingoes, the Pacific Ocean, debate clubs, steak knives, clouds, fireworks, jet engines, lawn mowers, garage door openers, golf clubs, unpronounceable last names, Saturday mornings, and pancakes. Abraham Kuyper put it well: “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, ‘Mine!’” The world and everything in it is bright with the blood of Jesus. He bought it, and then He gave it to us. All of it. The Church is the caretaker of the whole world. We are responsible for pushing the love of Christ into every corner of the universe.
In other words, Christian culture includes everything. Movies are ours. Science is ours. Education is ours. Government is ours. Social justice is ours. We don’t have to retake anything. We have to take care of what has been entrusted to us.
This should encourage us. The roofer doesn’t have to attach a cross to every roof he repairs. It already belongs to God. The curious naturalist doesn’t have to justify rambling through the woods. Every creature that brings him delight brought delight first to its Creator. The politician does not have to reconcile faith and public service. His public service is his duty to God.
We must repent, of course, as Judah did in the days of Hezekiah. A hard heart cannot learn new songs. Unless, by the grace of God, we turn back to his Word, all the political theory in the world can’t save us. Without repentance, good food turns to ashes in our mouths. Science becomes madness. Politics becomes murder. Culture becomes a seething mass of sharp-toothed envy. Without Jesus, there is nothing. But if we follow Him, we will find every good thing there, too.
Links
Create a website using the Notes app on your phone. I've started doing this for links and quotations from books.
Andrew Case is against copyright laws for ministry-related resources, including the fantastic Hebrew lessons he does with his wife Bethany.
I've recently been entertained by the poems of Robert Francis, especially his "Silent Poem."
Up To
Reading: I set one reading goal at the beginning of the year: to read a biography. On Saturday, I finished Humphrey Carpenter's excellent book on J. R. R. Tolkien. There is much to say and write about Tolkien and I look forward to hearing and reading it. I will only add that this passage from Carpenter's bio captures much of what was special about the creator of Middle Earth:
It was the ordinary unremarkable life led by countless other scholars; a life of academic brilliance, certainly, but only in a very narrow professional field that is really of little interest to laymen. And that would be that — apart from the strange fact that during these years when "nothing happened" he wrote two books which have become world best-sellers, books that have captured the imagination and influenced the thinking of several million readers. It is a strange paradox, the fact that The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are the work of an obscure Oxford professor whose specialisation was the West Midland dialect of Middle English, and who lived an ordinary suburban life bringing up his children and tending his garden.
Or is it? Is not the opposite precisely true? Should we not wonder instead at the fact that a mind of such brilliance and imagination should be happy to be contained in the petty routine of academic and domestic life; that a man whose soul longed for the sound of the waves breaking against the Cornish coast should be content to talk to old ladies in the lounge of a hotel at a middle-class watering-place; that a poet in whom joy leapt up at the sight and smell of logs crackling in the grate of a country inn should be willing to sit in front of his own hearth warmed by an electric fire with simulated glowing coal? What do we make of that?
Watching: For my birthday, I received another subscription to the Criterion Collection's streaming service. One recent treat was Sullivan's Travels, which is deft and hilarious. Just watch the opening scene.
Listening: Messiah, a few movements at a time, following this short guide by Cindy Rollins & co.
Thursday Question
Rather than answer a question, why don't you subscribe to the hottest new zine of 2023?
About
I'm Christian Leithart, a writer and teacher who lives in Birmingham, Alabama. You can subscribe or read previous issues of Time's Corner online. To add extra balderdash to this baloney sandwich, visit my blog.