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Re: Over-The-Rhine Digest V3 #51



Me:
 >I have ASM  but haven't read it yet.It is on my *to read* list.Didn't know
 >about UtM. I don't remember where I picked up the phrase. Perhaps 
 >Schaeffer?
 
 Hi, Kevin.
 
      Francis Schaeffer has been a great influence on my ideas.  It
 is fun to see his name on the list.  I saw his television series
 _How Should We Then Live?_ on PBS before I was fully a Christian.

**Hey Rick;
wowie zowie! and I thought PBS banned anything with a Christian world view 
;-) Glad to hear that PBS played it. I didn't know that. According to Franky 
in *A Time For Anger* the other Schaeffer series was turned down time and 
time again for its Pro-life message. But Franky has been known to be a little 
creatively overzealous in his writing to make a point.

 I was most influenced by his saying that in the course of history
 if people do not have an absolute reference point, God, then they
 drift in relativism.  After a while in a world without God there
 is very little reason to be nice to each other or to do a good days
 work.  Many of the great scientific thinkers who broke away from
 the church in past centuries became very sad.

**Yea, that was a big influence on my thought too. I started to read 
Schaeffer while still an inquiring skeptic. Also a big influence from him in 
my thinking was the need for a unity of nature and grace - 
universals/particulars or the spirit world and the physical world. And, that 
everything finds its purpose/meaning in the Holy Trinity wasa good chunk of 
the *evidence* that turned me. That even love itself,  finally makes sense/ 
becomes eternal when we understand that love, needing an object, finds 
exactly that in the Christian understanding of the Trinity. Always Three. And 
therin also lies the answer to unity IN diversity.
   His 4 steps to understanding art helped me out too, although I still don't 
think you can *totally* seperate content from form which IIRC he did. There 
is a beauty in some art with a bad message beyond just the basic form. It is 
wrapped up in the greater whole of the piece. Are the colors vibrant. There 
is true truth in the color itself. Are the words composed beautifully. Then 
there is true truth behind the meaning of the words themselves in the way 
they have been laid together.
     
 I do not read enough to recognize the other names that you
 mentioned.  I will make a point of looking them up.

**CS Lewis, (Narnia Tales/Screwtape Letters/Mere Christianity) JRR Tolkien 
(The Hobbit/ Lord of the Rings) and Charles Williams. All friends and 
prolific writers. They (among others) used to meet every thursday in a pub 
called  *Eagle and Child* or in Lewis' room at Magdallen college and share 
thier writings calling themselves *the Inklings* LotR is perhaps the greatest 
fantasy ever written. Chronicles of Narnia  perhaps the greatest childrens 
tale ever told.
 
Pax Christi,
Kevin
 
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