July 13, 2023 Show with C. R. Wiley on “The Household & the War for the Cosmos”

Iron Sharpens Iron Radio Introduction and Proverbs 27:17

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C. R. Wiley and the Household as a Microcosm of the Cosmos

Afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth. We're listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Thursday on this 13th day of July, 2023.

I cannot believe it's already been six years since the last time I've had today's guests on the program. It was quite a long time ago, six years, May 29th, 2017, when my guest C .R. Wiley discussed his book, Man of the House, a handbook for building a shelter that will last in a world that is falling apart.

Well, today's discussion is not too far in a field of that topic. Today, we are going to be discussing C .R. Wiley's new book, The Household and the War for the Cosmos. And C .R. Wiley is author and today pastors Westminster Presbyterian Church, which is a congregation in the Presbyterian Church in America, the PCA, of Vancouver, Washington.

And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Pastor C .R. Wiley.

Hey, thanks, Chris. It's great to be with you again. It's hard to believe it's been that long. I agree.

Yeah, and I can even recall when I first met you, which was longer ago than that, probably was the early 90s, I met you when I came out to Connecticut, where you were once pastoring and you were either hosting the conference or you were present at the conference.

And Robert Godfrey was one of the speakers and had a debate. Robert Godfrey had a debate with Peter Lightheart on infant communion. Were you hosting that debate or were you just attending that?

I was just there. I didn't host it yet.

Well, tell us about Westminster Presbyterian Church of Vancouver, Washington.

Well, it's a really marvelous place to serve. We're a growing church. We had 70 visitors last Sunday, which is kind of overwhelming. So we're in a kind of phase of our life where we're growing and building sort of our ability to minister to people, hiring staff and stuff.

But the church is full of just great folks. We've got a number of very large families. So the median age of the church is about 15 years old because of all the little people that we've got. And we are a friendly church, but we're also very liturgically, I guess you'd say, conservative.

We serve communion every week. We, you know, recite the creeds, sing psalms. You know, that's kind of the sort of the nature of our liturgy. And anyway, I'm glad to be there with those folks.

And is that exclusive psalmody or do you just include them with the hymnody?

We include them. It's not exclusive.

Okay. Well, if anybody lives in Vancouver, Washington or nearby or is visiting there or you have friends, family and loved ones that live in or near Vancouver, Washington, you can find out more about this fine church at solochristo .org, S-O-L-O-C-H-R-I-S-T-O .org.

And let me ask you, I have always been curious and I'm not sure anybody has ever told me, what's the difference between solo Christo and solus Christus?

That's a great question. If I was a Latinist, I'd be able to give you a better.

I've heard it's had something to do with the tents or something like that.

But yeah, that sounds right.

But I hope some folks hearing this program today will pop by and pay you a visit. Well, we are living in a day and age that is increasingly frightening. And I know that conservatives and more specifically, Christians have said that probably for millennia, but it seems that the frightening aspect of society and its relationship to the family or the household is just becoming more and more bizarre.

In addition to being frightening, things are developing and being held to as being the orthodoxy of society that even liberals never would have dreamed would be condoned and celebrated as they are today.

What was the driving force behind your writing, The Household and the War for the Cosmos, Recovering a Christian Vision for the Family?

Well, I think you've touched on it. I think the sexual revolution has proceeded and been victorious, largely speaking, with regard to the secular society that we find ourselves in. We're seeing the last vestiges of Christian conviction fall away from sort of the broad sort of ethos of our culture, and it's forcing churches to sort of count the cost when it comes to faithfulness to Scripture and even to sanity.

And so there's a kind of way in which this is playing out, I think, in a disappointing way, even among evangelical Christians. But at the same time, we see kind of wheat and tares growing together. There's a lot of things.

There are a number of things that I'm really very encouraged about. I think faithful churches in many parts of the country are actually growing at a remarkable rate at the moment because of the way things are being kind of sorting out.

And I just noted here the other day that I've never seen a period in my ministry where young men are more open to the gospel and direct, frank conversations about their own lives. So, as you know, the opening, I think of, what was it?

I can't remember the name of the book, Great Expectations, perhaps, at the best of times. The worst of times is kind of what we find ourselves in.

Was that the Tale of Two Cities?

That's it, Tale of Two Cities. That's right.

And where do you trace, how far back do you trace the problem? I know that some folks who talk about the erosion of the family when they're coming from a conservative and Christian viewpoint, they trace it back to Thomas E. Dewey and the Marxist ideology that he introduced into the public school system.

But where do you trace the issue back?

Well, he's certainly part of the story, but I wouldn't say he's the point of origin at all. I think you can kind of look at it in two ways. As believers, we know that the household has always been in the target sites of Satan, and so we can trace it all the way back to the garden.

But if we're looking at something more recent, I think, you know, in the 19th century was particularly awful in this respect. There was something that developed in sort of the aftermath of the Enlightenment, where it became evident to many people that you couldn't justify the authority of reason or even its capacity to know the truth without God.

So, rather than, you know, sort of be with the sort of the revelation that precipitated a recovery of the Christian faith as a cultural force, people just took that and went further than any of the sort of the Enlightenment philosophes would have anticipated.

So, people like Nietzsche, Darwin, obviously Marx, they developed what they referred, what has been referred to as the hermeneutic of suspicion, which is essentially a, we've lost faith in the power of reason, and we've retreated into this objective into sort of the sophistry that we saw addressed by Plato in Athens, where, you know, might makes right, man is the measure of all things, all that kind of stuff.

And the way things get sorted out in a world like that is just who's got the power. So, it all becomes power dynamics, and we even lose faith in the capacity of language to convey the truth. Now, language is simply a tool that you use to get your way.

So, that's why, you know, we have this sort of proliferation of interest groups who suspect that when we speak to them and say that what they're doing is wrong, that we're just simply guilty of hate speech, and that we're just trying to kill them.

You know, that's what they, that's how they interpret it, rather than, you know, speaking the truth in love and trying to demonstrate our desire to help them leave a destructive way of living. So, anyway, that's, I think, the 19th century is particularly bad, but you can see, you know, even the roots of this going back into the Enlightenment, you know, people like Voltaire and so forth.

But it's a long story, and I think we're coming to the end of a particular episode or phase of it, and what is emerging or opening up before us is really, I think, what we've kind of been describing as sort of a parting of the ways, and we're going to see how things play out.

And I'm actually very hopeful for the Church. I think that if we recover our apostolic confidence and proclaim the Gospel, and understand that the law of God is something that is intended to be, you know, sort of a framework within which we build a healthy society, then, you know, the future is bright for the Church.

But there's going to be a long period of sorting out, and there's going to be a lot of misery and suffering and just insanity like we're seeing all around us at the same time.

The War for the Cosmos and the Meaning of World

What exactly did you mean in your title, or what did you intend by in your title, The War for the Cosmos?

Yeah, well, the word cosmos is, in our contemporary use, a word that we use for outer space. So, when we think about the cosmos, we're thinking about stars and galaxies and so forth. But it's actually the word in the New Testament, the Greek word, that's translated into the word world very often.

And when we think of a world, we think of just a place. You know, like I live on planet Earth, or the environment in which I live. But in the first century, the word conveyed a bigger meaning, and that was the order of things at the largest level.

So, the cosmos was an order. And so, when, you know, the Apostle Paul spoke of the world, he was talking about the world that God made, the order that God made, or the mess that's been made of it. So, there's a sense in which the word is, depending on the context, either has a positive or a negative connotation.

So, like when we say, for God so loved the world, it would set us with that way it reads is, for God so loved the cosmos that he gave his only begotten son. Well, that's the world that God made. God is the order that God made.

But when we're told that we shouldn't love the world or anything in the world, that's the mess we've made of it. So, that's like the order that we can say is the kingdom of darkness.

Well, as your subtitle describes the book, Recovering a Christian Vision for the Family, what is, in summary, your Christian vision for the family?

Well, the way that I approach the matter in my book is what I think is actually implied in Scripture throughout Scripture, and that is the household is a microcosm. So, when you hear the term microcosm, you do hear the word cosmos.

Cosm is cosmos. So, it's an order. It's a small order that reflects the larger order. So, the larger order, as Christians understand, is Christ is the head and the church is the body, and that we are on our way to a beautiful future kind of the cosmos 2 .0 in which the church, as the bride of Christ, enjoys all of the glory and blessings that have been secured for her because of the victory of Christ.

That's, of course, the great wedding feast of the Lamb. And, you know, we see the happy ending in the book of Revelation where this all comes to pass. So, in the meantime, the church is united to Christ, and Christ is the head, the husband.

The church is the bride, the body, and that, we see the apostle Paul says, is the model for a household order. So, a husband is to love his wife as Christ loves the church. A wife is to respect her husband and submit to him like the church submits to Christ.

So, the microcosm reflects the macrocosm. And when a household is ordered well, it's a little bit of heaven on earth. Obviously, we're sinners. Obviously, we fall short. But when it's done right, it's a beautiful picture of the end of the world.

The Church's Failure to Maintain Households

And what do you see in your experience, not only just as an American citizen, now who has lived on both coasts, first the East and now the West, what do you see as not only an average citizen and a Christian, but as a pastor, are things that you believe are areas where the church has failed in regard to the maintenance of households?

And how much of the world's ideology, philosophies, and worldview have many Christian families perhaps unconsciously adopted, in your opinion?

Oh yeah, that's a very significant matter. I think that we've more or less conformed to a fallen understanding of the way marriage is to be understood. For unbelievers, if they even entertain marriage, they do so as a kind of lifestyle choice that maybe they have a preference for.

And that lifestyle choice is supposed to be fulfilling at a personal level. But the marriage itself doesn't speak to any larger concern than the interest of the two people who get married. So that's why with no-fault divorce, for example, if you're not happy anymore in your marriage, then its purpose is no longer being served because it's all about the couple, and it's all about their felt needs and their self-understanding of what makes them happy at any given time.

We know though, of course, that in any relationship, there are going to be good times and bad times. And there are going to be times where we feel unhappy with the way things are. But if we have a sense that the institution that we belong to has a larger purpose, we can kind of steel ourselves and press through the difficulty.

So for example, let's say you're in the army and you're fighting a just war. There are going to be lots of periods in the course of that conflict where you're just not very happy. But you do what you need to do in order to serve the interests that are being served by that institution, the military.

And so you do what you need to do to soldier on, so to speak. And I think that's the side of things that we just have lost largely in the culture that we find ourselves in. But it's worked itself into the church.

And generally speaking, when pastors talk about marriage, most of them want marriages to succeed, of course. And most of them want people to stick together. But they conceive of the institution in the very way that is helping to sort of undermine it.

You know, because of the secular and the larger sort of social assumptions that prevail in our society. People just don't get it, even in the church anymore, you know, when it comes to what is this supposed to be about?

Counseling Children, Education, and the Recovery of Piety

Well, we are going to our first commercial break. If you have a question for C .R. Wiley on his book, Household and the War for the Cosmos, Recovering a Christian Vision for the Family, send it to ChrisArnzen at gmail .com.

ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. That's C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA.

Please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter, a matter involving your own family, a matter involving families within the congregation where you're a member, or your pastor's family, or whatever the case may be where you would be compelled to remain anonymous.

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That's royaldiadem .com. Mention Chris Arnz of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. We are now back with our discussion with C .R. Wiley, and C .R. Wiley has written a new book, The Household and the Cosmos, or I'm sorry, The Household and the War for the Cosmos, and the subtitle is Recovering a Christian Vision for the Family.

I want to read an excerpt from Nancy Piercy's foreword to this book. Today, the true revolutionaries are not feminists, homosexual activists or other progressives, but those who are seeking to halt any further erosion of the family and even reverse the process.

Families who are intentionally working to restore at least some of the traditional functions of the household. And we have, Brother Wiley, we have a question from an anonymous listener that has come in.

And the anonymous listener says, as a pastor and as the author of this book, what counsel do you have for families who, on one hand, are attempting to shelter their children and protect their children from outside influences that have a design and an intention to capture their imaginations and minds and pollute them with false anti-Christian worldviews, without at the same time keeping them so isolated and protected that they become incapable of having a conversation as they grow older with those who are in the outside world, making their efforts to evangelizing and discuss their faith almost impossible because they can't even understand what those who are protesting against their faith are saying.

Well, that's a great question. And there are a couple of thoughts that come to mind for me on that. So I've got three grown children, and they are all married and doing well. So they're believers and have children of their own.

And I'm pleased, of course, that God has blessed me this way and blessed them. But in terms of my own experience with them, one of the things that I did throughout the course of their childhoods is engage with them in pretty serious conversations about what's going on in the world in an age-appropriate way at the right time.

But it required of me a pretty, I think, a good education and some real personal experience that I could draw on to help them understand what was going on. And then the other side of it, of course, is to present to them in the very way the family is ordered and is working.

And in other ways, through literature or obviously worship at church and scripture, a beautiful vision that just very strikingly contrasts with what they see going on all around them in the world. I think there's a kind of naivete that is unavoidable when you're talking to, say, second and third generation Christians, because they don't have direct experience with the things that they're told are evil.

But those of us who witness those things firsthand, experience those things firsthand, we do the best we can to warn them. But we have to kind of reconcile ourselves to the fact that you can't inherit your parents' experiences.

So there has to be at least a measure of freedom that the children have to think and to ask questions and to even challenge parents when they get a little older and get good answers. And there are going to be periods of time, of course, where the child is thoughtful and maybe wondering and questioning what he or she's been told.

But I think, by and large, when things are done well, most of the time, a child comes out on the other side of that in a really good spot. And I'm pleased to say that's been the case with my children, and I've seen that in many other families as well.

So the point of the question is a great question, and it's something that I take very seriously, but that's been my approach.

Well, thank you, Anonymous. And if you email me your full name and mailing address, you will win, you will receive absolutely free of charge a copy of The Household and the War for the Cosmos, Recovering a Christian Vision for the Family by our guest C .R. Wiley.

And that will be compliments of the publisher, Canon Press, and also compliments of Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, CVBBS .com, who will be shipping that book out to you at no charge to you or to Iron Shepard's Iron Radio.

And if you are a first-time questioner, please identify yourself that way, because on top of that, you will also receive a free New American Standard Bible. So please let us know about that. We also have Arnie in Perry County, Pennsylvania, who says, after exploring your book on the internet, I have discovered that it is published by Canon Press, and I was wondering if you share the passion for classical Christian education that seems to be championed by the ministries affiliated with that publisher.

Well, I am on the board of New St. Andrews College. I'm also on the board of the Academy of Philosophy and Letters, which isn't explicitly committed to classical education, but is very sympathetic to it.

So yes, I do believe that a good education includes a good and thorough introduction to the Western tradition. If I were in a different part of the world, maybe I would include other works as well, but that doesn't mean that we put those things on the level of scripture or on the teachings that we've received from sound teachers over the centuries.

It just means that there are things that even pagan people know that are worth knowing, and their insights aren't complete, but they're still useful to a degree. So, for example, when we think about, say, the Apostle Paul, the Apostle Paul was thoroughly acquainted with Stoicism.

We know that that's the case because he could quote Stoics off the top of his head. He did so when he was in Athens. We see it in Acts chapter 17. So he engages in an apologetic with Epicurean and Stoic philosophers, knowing very well that they reject any possibility of an afterlife, and he looks for points of contact in his conversation with them, things that he could agree with them about, but he doesn't hold back at the end.

He tells them that the Lord Jesus had been raised from the dead, and that was an indication that he was going to judge the world, and that they needed to get on good terms with him. And that's the point at which they were offended.

They weren't offended by anything he said prior to that, contrary to what maybe people had heard. And the reason I know that is because I'm thoroughly acquainted with Stoicism. I've read the Stoics and have a pretty good sort of understanding of the way they thought.

So I'm reading right now, I'm reading Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, and Aurelius was the emperor, Roman emperor. He learned from actually another Stoic philosopher who was a slave, and that's one of the things, that's one of the marvelous ironies he learned from Epictetus.

But what he was missing was something that we as Christians know, but he didn't know, or if he had heard about it, he didn't believe it, and that is the resurrection. So if you don't factor the resurrection into your thinking when you're trying to understand the world, you're going to get some things wrong.

That's just a given, but that doesn't mean that everything you think is entirely wrong. There are some things that you can see, and we can see the Apostle Paul talking about that in Romans chapter one.

There are some things that you can see that are true, and you can actually think about them in ways that, and write about them in ways that are helpful. So you know Calvin knew this, other great theologians knew this, and that's why they didn't simply, you know, get rid of or burn all of the books that we've received from antiquity.

They read them and tried to get.

What they could out of them. Do you have a personal preference as to a superior model of education for Christian children between classical Christian education in an actual school setting or homeschooling?

Well in my church, we're very committed to.

Homeschooling. Our church families do use classical Christian curriculum, but the children are taught at home. I know many people who have children who were enrolled in classical Christian schools, and they seem to be doing great.

My own kids had a little bit of both. So I'm not an advocate of one over the at the expense of the other, although I do think that it's hard to beat just the sort of the sort of the I think the healthy dynamics that can happen in a well.

Run homeschool environment. Great. Oh by the way Arnie in Perry County, you have also won a free copy of The Household and the War for the Cosmos by our guest C .R. Wiley, and that is compliments of our friends at Kennan Press who have given us a limited number of free copies for listeners who submit questions.

And we also want to thank Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service CVVBS .com will be shipping this book out to you. One of the things that I have a difficulty with, and I'm sure that most Christians do, unless they are far more super sanctified than I am, which I would mean most people, but I get so sickened and outraged when I see things in the media like just yesterday on the news, I believe it was yesterday, a parade of homosexuals chanting, we're here, we're queer, we're coming for your children, and saying that with much exuberant joy and laughter and just vile satanic expressions on their faces.

The situation that makes my reaction to that difficult is trying to curb the hateful anger that boils up in me. I have to forget, I have to remember, I should say, that these people are lost and even as vile and grotesque as their ideology may be, in that parade there may be some of God's elect that have not yet been regenerated and given new hearts.

So how as a pastor do you counsel people to curb the fury that boils up in them when you actually have people publicly chanting that they're coming for your children? And as someone, a conservative commentator recently said while playing that video, they mean what they say, folks.

This is not just a hyperbole. This is not just done for their own entertainment. They actually mean what they say. How do you respond to my question there? Yeah, Chris, I thoroughly.

Understand your perspective and I share it. I lived in Cambridge, for goodness sake, right between Harvard and MIT for about a decade and was actually at Harvard Divinity School for a period of time. I remember during those days when I was at Harvard Divinity School, I remember one semester I was walking down the hall and you know how you always have in different educational institutions in the first few days of school, all the clubs that want to sign you up to get you into their activities.

And there was a, you know, the standard stuff you'd expect at Harvard Divinity. I mean, like, you know, Greenpeace and, you know, typical sort of left-wing causes. There was a table, though, for the Evangelical Fellowship at Harvard Divinity School that had like six names signed up.

And then I got to the LGBTQ, whatever, alphabet soup table and they had three full pages front and back, you know, with signatures, people who had signed up to belong to that club. This was in the mid -1990s.

So this is something that goes back a ways. And so because of those days and my experience in that environment, I know these people pretty well. I've heard everything that they had to say when they attacked the, you know, Christian faith, but also in their own defense.

And I'm not entirely impressed with them intellectually or in any other way, but your point is right on the money. And these are people that we don't know the end of the story when it comes to those people.