 |   | In this week’s briefing: Learn to live in the moment while looking for home, get to know one of the most mysterious men of Scripture, and reacquaint yourself with the book that launched C. S. Lewis’s career as an apologist. |   | | | | Where do you feel most at home? Where do you feel secure? Pick any time from your past or present. Who’s in this place with you? Consider your senses. What do you smell? What do you hear? I like to ask these questions to really get to know someone. Not many have ever pondered this question before. But so far everyone knows where to go in their minds once I offer the prompt. This week I’m back in Chicago to speak for a couple different groups and visit my undergraduate alma mater for a basketball game. I regret that security no longer allows me to pop in at Northwestern on Harris Hall and the room where I learned Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, and the history of the Holocaust. (In that same room I remember storming out of a heretical lecture with my now-wife!) Just across Rock Plaza is University Hall, where as a freshman I studied Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and as a senior learned about the Second World War in Europe. These classrooms still feel like my intellectual home. On this trip to Chicago I also resumed conversations with a group looking to improve seminary education in the city. Last year I checked in for the last time on my graduate alma mater. While I lectured, faculty learned they would have one more year before Trinity Evangelical Divinity School closed its campus north of Chicago and relocated some operations to Vancouver, Canada. Even then the campus felt hollowed, no longer the vibrant home where my friends and I learned cultural hermeneutics from Kevin Vanhoozer, the Pauline epistles from Don Carson, and church history from John Woodbridge, Doug Sweeney, and Scott Manetsch. (My final paper for Vanhoozer was a biblical theology of place.) I can remember early morning studying for Hebrew quizzes while bacon sizzled in the dining hall next door. But the place no longer feels like home. I wrote last fall in Unseen Things about the last harvest on my family farm in South Dakota. I’m far from alone in this experience of leaving home, as my brother shared this week from an article in The Wall Street Journal. There’s no good way to shut down a family farm. Memories stir up regret. Nostalgia stings. I didn’t understand at the time, but we really lost the farm when my grandmother died in 2023. We lost the woman who connected the generations, who kept the stories. Once I knew every family for miles around. We worshiped together. We worked together. We played baseball and football and basketball together—first our grandparents, then our parents, then us. The grandparents have died. The parents have retired. My generation has mostly scattered, chosen careers less tied to the land, in places that can never feel quite like home. Not long before she died I learned from my grandmother how to see this loss differently. She didn’t seem as disappointed as I expected her to be after three grandsons all turned down the invitation to succeed her father-in-law, husband, son, and son-in-law. Home isn’t always a place you can still visit. Home is also the person that place made you to be, she told me. Home is the values and convictions you carry from stop to stop on life’s twisting journey. We can’t live in the past. However hard we try, we can’t stop the march of time. Change intrudes on the best laid plans of preservation. Since tomorrow isn’t promised to any of us (Luke 12:25), we’re left to live in the present. Now I see home less like a place I’ve already lost and more like the learning and lessons I’m passing on to others. Home is less like the family farm and more like my undergraduate education. It’s nice to visit for homecoming. It would be odd to still live on campus like a student almost 25 years after graduation. Maturity requires leaving home. I wish my seminary hadn’t relocated to the edge of North America. I wish I could have taken over the family farm and passed it along to my own children and grandchildren. But I dare not despise what the Lord has given instead. Home is where the Lord has placed me, until he calls me to our permanent rest: “For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come” (Heb. 13:14). | | COLLIN HANSEN | | Editor in Chief | | |  |  | | Exploring Psalm 110 and Melchizedek | | During family devotions every evening I’m reading through the book of Hebrews with my kids. That means they’re getting to know Melchizedek, that mysterious man of Genesis without genealogy. For years Carson a few signature courses, rites of passage for MDiv and PhD students at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. They included Biblical Theology, New Testament Use of the Old Testament, and Hebrews—all of which touched on the curious case of Melchizedek. So it’s no surprise that during TGC’s 2011 national conference in Chicago, focused on preaching Jesus and the gospel from the Old Testament, Carson elected to speak on Psalm 110 and Melchizedek, “one of the most instructive figures in the entire Bible for helping us put our Bibles together,” he told us. This week I got to go back and listen to this message that remains one of our most memorable in TGC history. My family discussed the significance of his name, “king of righteousness,” and his designation as “king of Salem” (peace, shalom, associated with Jerusalem). We explored the potential Eucharistic symbolism of the bread and wine and considered whether this is a preincarnate visitation of Jesus. (Carson rejects both common interpretations.) Carson opts instead to see the mysterious Melchizedek through the broader category of Old Testaments allusions, specifically typology: That is, where there is a pattern, an institution, or a person, place, or thing that gets repeated and repeated and ratcheted up and repeated and ratcheted up and repeated and ratcheted up until you’re taught to expect that there is something bigger that brings it to a climax. Then the fulfillment of that typology is the antitype, and it always ends up with Christ, in one fashion or another, related to him. As a type of Christ, then, Melchizedek helps us to see Jesus as both king and priest, the man whose genealogy is God. He is our judge, but he is also our mediator. He is the lion of the tribe of Judah. And he is also the lamb who is slain as sacrifice for our sins. What a Savior! | | | | |  |  | | The Problem of Pain C. S. Lewis | | Before this week I last read through The Problem of Pain around 20 years ago with a small group with my church. I’ll never forget one of our members confessing, “I’ll tell you my real problem of pain: reading this book.” I understand the sentiment! This isn’t the easiest book to read. Written in 1940 at the outset of the Second World War, it’s lacking the pathos of his A Grief Observed, published in 1961 after his wife’s death. The Problem of Pain began with an invitation from Centenary Press founder Ashley Sampson, whose “Christian Challenge” series aimed for apologetic reach to the British public that no longer shared Christian beliefs. Lewis had published The Pilgrim’s Regress in 1933 and Out of the Silent Planet in 1938 around the Munich crisis. Still, it was hardly obvious from those works that Lewis would be suited to write an accessible apologetic on the problem of evil for a skeptical public. Lewis asked if he could write anonymously, but Sampson declined. Lewis was neither an ordained clergyman nor a trained theologian. His scholarly credentials didn’t suggest popular instincts. Lewis had a more important qualification that few of those other leaders could match, however. He had been a convinced atheist, and not that long ago in his adult life. The best Christian apologists can make the best case against Christianity. And that’s how Lewis began, with ample evidence supplied by the war: In the most complex of all the creatures, Man, yet another quality appears, which we call reason, whereby he is enabled to foresee his own pain which henceforth is preceded with acute mental suffering, and to foresee his own death while keenly desiring permanence. It also enables men by a hundred ingenious contrivances to inflict a great deal more pain than they otherwise could have done on one another and on the irrational creatures. This power they have exploited to the full. Their history is largely a record of crime, war, disease, and terror, with just sufficient happiness interposed to give them, while it lasts, an agonized apprehension of losing it, and, when it is lost, the poignant misery of remembering. While we’re made in the image of God, Lewis answered himself in echo of Dostoevsky, we can’t impose our limited understanding on God’s self-definition. That’s the Creator’s privilege: “The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word ‘love’, and look on things as if man were the centre of them. Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man.” Fulfilling Sampson’s hopes, The Problem of Pain was a triumph. Writing for The Guardian a month after the book released, philosopher W. G. de Burgh of the University of Reeding raved: “This is a strong book: strong in its background of sound scholarship, never obtruded on the reader, but evident to the discerning eye, strong in its frank admission of mysteries and unpalatable facts, strong above all in its uncompromising affirmation of the Christian revelation.” Lewis, de Burgh observed, knows that “much of what he writes will be antipathetic to the temper of the present age. . . . But experience seems to show that the rising generation whose needs Mr. Lewis has primarily in view, are by no means averse to hard and unpalatable teaching, provided that what is taught is true. If this be so, there should be no lack of readers for this book.” The book hardly lacks readers still today, despite its philosophical complexity and intellectual detachment. The book still rings true to the world with God at its center. Next week on Unseen Things: Bob Thune explains why freedom from is a bad substitute for freedom for, renowned Lincoln biographer at Oxford looks at religious nationalism in the American Civil War. | | | |  | |
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