Chapter 3. Te Deum: Remembering the Most High
The medieval conception of God was reverent and humble before His incomprehensible majesty. By contrast, moderns are irreverent, crass materialists. Doug Wilson looks at how Beowulf speaks of the Most High. Pagan converts to Christ had (have?) a greater reverence than secular converts, who have little prior conception of deity. At least the pagans had an unfocused reverence in place already. Most of us lack this, and need to learn reverence from the ground up. How do you reverence God in your family? How do you speak of the Lord of life? What names do you use for the King of glory?
Chapter 4: The Emerging Divide: Losing the Serpent... and the Greeks
Modern Christians are embarrassed about some Scriptural truths ("excommunication, the death penalty, patriarchalism, slavery, a young earth, and monarchy..."). Medievals weren't embarrassed to grapple with the best human wisdom and toss it if it was inconsistent with Scripture. The best example is philosophy. Medievals engaged with it. They appear to us to have compromised with it, but how often do we compromise with contemporary thought? As often, they expunged the worst of the Greeks from the worldview they were constructing. Don't follow modern scientific findings blindly. It can be a long, complicated process to find the divide, the antithesis, to discern between good and evil in a given cultural phenomenon. Sometimes we draw the line in the wrong place (all movies or alcohol are sin), sometimes we draw a line when there doesn't need to be one (one nursing method as God's way?), sometimes we don't draw a line when there should be one (David with Absalom). In your family do you need to draw, erase, or move the line in any area of life, to follow God's Word more faithfully?
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