Fall History & Heritage — #4 (week of October 3)

Comments and questions this week come from George Grant’s Almanac sketches, Bill
Bennett’s America, vol.1, and the daily Bible studies in Tabletalk as indicated.

September 22 — Oxford
A vignette on perhaps the greatest university city in the world, “crowded with incident
and achievement,” Oxford, England. The astronomer Edmund Halley, architect
Christopher Wren, moral philosopher (and economist) Adam Smith, historian Edward
Gibbon, and playwright Oscar Wilde were among many, many notable figures to have
studied and labored there. It was the inspired milieu of Oxford where J.R.R. Tolkien
crafted his inventive fantasy of Middle Earth: The Hobbit (1937) and its sequel The Lord
of the Rings (1954-55). C.S. Lewis said of Tolkien and his work, “such a tale, told by
such an imaginative mind, could only have been spawned in such a place as Oxford.”

September 27 — The “acknowledged dean” of American Evangelicalism
The man described here is colonial New England’s Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758),
first-rate theologian and philosopher, Congregational pastor in Northampton, MA, and
frontier missionary to the Indians in Stockbridge, MA. For the record, the author of
“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” spoke as much or more about the heavenliness
of heaven as he did the hellishness of hell. The emphasis of our text was on Edwards’
unwillingness to compromise the Word of God, to dilute either theological or ethical
standards, for the sake of either influential critics or the will of the masses. He suffered
loss of status and standing on account of this (being dismissed from the congregation
he served for over 25 years), but his role in the Great Awakening and the profundity of
his writings have secured his reputation for all time among the learned and the pious.

September 29 — Kipling Meets Twain
An entertaining account of an 1889 meeting between English poet and novelist Rudyard
Kipling (d. 1939) and an American writer he deeply admired, Mark Twain (d. 1910).
Kipling was fairly young (in his 20s) and still working his way up the literary ladder at the
time, while Twain was enjoying immense popularity and the financial rewards that
usually accompany it. “Reading his books,” Kipling revealed, “I had striven to get an
idea of his personality, and all my preconceived notions were wrong and beneath the
reality. Blessed is the man who finds no disillusion when he is brought face to face with
a revered writer. That was a moment to be remembered; the landing of a twelve-pound
salmon was nothing to it. I had hooked Mark Twain, and he was treating me as though
under certain circumstances I might be an equal.”
Now if we could cultivate something of the depth of feeling for a favored author that
Kipling had for Twain, we might be teachable yet.

The World, the Flesh, and the Devil — (Tabletalk, Sept. 26-28)
Biblical theologians through the ages have identified generally these three entities as
the chief enemies of Christians in their quest for spiritual growth? The first foe listed
represents that persistent pattern of life in society that deviates from the standards of
God, while the second calls attention to the wayward impulses that remain in the hearts
even of true Christians. The third, foremost of all, is the supernatural origin of evil itself
specializing in accusing the saints of (and inciting them to) sin.

Out of Africa: White Men and Black Slaves — (Bennett’s America 1, pp. 2-3)
Today’s critics of the West (Western Civilization) often give the impression that white
European Christians introduced slavery to an otherwise peaceful and prosperous
African continent. Did they? Hardly. What they did do, however, was purchase legions
already enslaved by fellow Africans and Arabs and remove them to their own lands and
overseas possessions. Sometimes the slaves were treated well and their lives were
improved, but more often than not they were simply exploited and abused.

Bennett writes: “Slavery was an inescapable part of African life. Mansa Musa, a devout
Muslim, was the king of Mali (currently part of Niger). He sold fourteen thousand female
slaves to finance his journey to Cairo in 1324. The Arabs were always .seizing our
people as merchandise,’ complained the black king of Bornu (in present-day Nigeria) to
the sultan of Egypt in the 1390s. With the extension of Islam into West Africa’s .Gold
Coast’ came an increasingly vigorous trade in black slaves. The Christian Portuguese
emulated this practice. Three hundred years before adoption of the U.S. Constitution,
decisions made in Europe and Africa would have great and terrible consequences for a
nation as yet unimagined and a people still unnamed.”