Wilhelmus à Brakel

[Archiving a comment I wrote to Paul...]

Psalm 141:3 is a good prayer for your effort.

I've been discovering even more clearly how Wilhelmus à Brakel's Christian's Reasonable Service is a unique work for a Work Christian. He doesn't get into Work ideas and practices, but he DOES get into practical matters of being on the Way. And it is all striking to a degree that I couldn't communicate fully here.

Look at the insight on contentment he has that I posted on my Fourth Way blog. That's one example, but it is a massive four volume work and a treasure of similar insight.

He speaks from understanding regarding being in conflict with the world. He has a chapter on prudence that speaks to much that we converse about regarding Work efforts yet from many different angles.

Worth looking into.

If you acquire it used, single volume by single volume, I would acquire volumes 3 and 4 first, speaking from a Work perspective (volume 4 having the most material on practical matters you don't find in systematic theologies, but volume 3 too, it's just that 3 is mostly taken up with a discourse on the ten commandments, but it then goes into the practical chapters like contentment). The first two volumes are worth having, but they cover what most good systematic theologies give you.

On Christian contentment, from Wilhelmus a Brakel

This is a strikingly insightful passage from Wilhelmus a Brakel's Christian's Reasonable Service:

"Contentment is a Christian virtue consisting in a correspondence between the desire of God's children and their present condition... The unconverted are to all good works reprobate and are not acquainted with the nature of this virtue. When they perceive it in God's children, they despise it as a low level of intelligence, day-dreaming, stoic insensitivity, and deem them unfit for loftier matters..."

He also notes that in this state:

"...they rest with delight [in God's will and sovereign determination], in quiet confidence, joyfully, and with gratitude, trusting that the Lord will cause the present and the future to turn out to their advantage. This causes them to utilize their present conditions to the advancement of their spiritual life and to the glory of God." Chp. 64 of Vol. 3 - The Christian's Reasonable Service, Wilhelmus a Brakel

Yes, I've received the insinuation of "low level of intelligence" and also "day-dreaming" and probably also something akin to "stoic insensitivity." I know I look strange to the world. Kind of like a living suicide. And there is really no way to explain it without sounding more strange to them. It's actually decisions I've made to not go in the direction of what I deeemed to be a living death. But the world hardly is looking for understanding anyway, it wants to tempt you or to kill you or imprison you at least. You have protection if you walk the high road, so the stand-off exists...

Speaking of ways to read the Bible...

Speaking of ways to read the Bible (Paul discussing it on his blog, and me talking about it here and there recently) I just re-read this post from my '+' blog.

It has the virtues of being concrete, doable, and thorough. Not to mention historic.

One could substitute another doctrinal work for the Decades, if need be. Even Berkhof's Manual of Christian Doctrine would work. There's something about the older, massive, historic work that seems to fit the project better though. Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion would work too.

Must...finish.....

There's still something to be said for having the handful of truly great novels under your belt, so to speak. They are potent little cosmoses that you can get into total understanding. I mean, you may not be able to have total understanding of them in your youth or pre-Work development and all that, but once you are able they exist to be acquired in that sense. Of course, epic poems are the same and pretty much all other categories of literature, yet still a great novel will have a higher content of human nature and 'ways of the world' in it. In the worldly sense. Maybe not a profound language like a Homer, or deep patterns of anything like a Thucydides, but something more 'fully orbed' in the human nature, societal dynamics realm.

I write the above to inspire me to finish Tom Jones. I'm still in the 400s...

J. A. Wylie - History of Protestantism

J. A. Wylie's History of Protestantism is an esoteric document for this reason: he treats Protestantism as it were a 'school' which alights here, now there, stronger in one era than in another, but everywhere it appears, the school that is, its effect is all out of scale with its numbers or seeming worldly influence.

Protestant is a term that means 'one who confesses and bears witness to the Word of God.' In this inherent meaning of the term you can see that Protestants existed from the beginning of the Christian era.

Wylie's History of Protestantism is also unique for its style. It would probably be called romantic in style by a critic, but it's really more unique than that. It is full of metaphor and bracing scenery and heroism, yes, but it is a style completely free from constraints of the world or the devil. The substance in this sense is the style as well. Wylie sees clearly (faith hath a piercing eye) and describes things with no thought of being artificially 'unbiased' or anything similar. He's writing like a man who doesn't care what any critics will think. He knows God's own, with the Holy Spirit, will see and understand what he is presenting.

It's a unique book also because it is a complete history of Christianity (up through the Reformation) while focusing, as mentioned before, on Protestantism. I.e. focusing on the Word of God and the 'school' that it is and creates wherever it appears and focusing on the individuals and cultures it quickens wherever it appears.

Did I mention it's 2,112 pages? And that would be large pages. Yet on a scale of one to ten of page-turning readability it is a ten. This is a two thousand page book one can actually read complete, with the necessary dedication of time and effort of course, but it's not trudging type reading. The ISBN is: 0-923309-80-2. The latest published edition is by Hartland Publications and is in 4 vols.

It fills the spot of a universal, on-the-mark, inspired history of Christianity, just as Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion fills the spot of inspired, on-the-mark work of theology, and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress fills the spot of universal, inspired work of imaginative Christian literature; and then of course the Word of God itself, the pure and whole traditional text Authorized, King James, Version being the obvious fourth work, the foundation, to give one a rather complete, four-work Christian library. I'd add the Fourth Way by Ouspensky, and Thomas Boston's Human Nature in its Fourfold State, and Petrus Dathenus' Pearl of Christian Comfort, and Herman Witsius' Economy of the Covenants Between God and Man, and Meredith G. Kline's God, Heaven and Har Magedon, and Louis Berkhof's Manual of Christian Doctrine to make a basic ten.

I can't praise this Wylie book enough. Just start on page one and see how it gives you the history of this age that has been successfully buried by all worldly forces and motivations. It's an unveiling type history, written by a historian both mainstream and competent, yet also inspired and of real faith and understanding.