A thought-provoking post from Matthew Jepsen. (Reproduced here with permission).

Below, Lewis articulates a contemporary rendition of Augustine’s “God-shaped hole”:

Most people, if they have really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise. The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or first think of some foreign country, or first take up some subject that excites us, are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning, can really satisfy. I am not now speaking of what would be ordinarily called unsuccessful marriages, or holidays, or learned careers. I am speaking of the best possible ones. There was something we have grasped at, in that first moment of longing, which just fades away in the reality. I think everyone knows what I mean. The wife may be a good wife, and the hotels and scenery may have been excellent, and chemistry may be a very interesting job: but something has evaded us.

- C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Ch.3

I’m tracking with him here for sure, but I’ve met quite a few Christian (with whom this also resonates) that are mystified at how few people around them seem to find this sort of thing compelling. Michael Spencer discussed the same thing about six years ago in light of a London Times study on religion and youth. The relevant summary goes like this:

“Nevertheless, young people do not feel disenchanted, lost or alienated in a meaningless world. “Instead, the data indicated that they found meaning and significance in the reality of everyday life, which the popular arts helped them to understand and imbibe.” Their creed could be defined as: “This world, and all life in it, is meaningful as it is”, translated as: “There is no need to posit ultimate significance elsewhere beyond the immediate experience of everyday life.” The goal in life of young people was happiness achieved primarily through the family… The researchers were also shocked to discover little sense of sin or fear of death. Nor did they find any Freudian guilt as a result of private sensual desires. The young people were, however, afraid of growing old.”

Capon though, (to string some metaphors together), gets closer to the bone, closer to the bare metal, closer to the raw psychology behind this and in the process borrows a page out of Girard’s book (whether he knows it or not).

The untamability of romance, the endlessness of the vision of the beloved, threaten constantly to send us off in successive limitless expeditions after something that grows successively harder to define. The movie star on her fifth marriage seems always to be less clear about what she wants and less free to make her wanting serve her well. For under it all lies the endlessly expansive pride of a being who cannot add a cubit to her stature or a minute to her life. That is our dilemma: desire is endless; we are not.

-Robert Capon, Bed and Board, p.56

Romance is never ultimately satisfying, not necessarily because we have this longing for God that is mistakenly misdirected at the nearest lover (thought that can be an accurate way to describe it at times), but because our desire is alive and regenerated and unlimited. Ambition for power and success can never be satisfied because our capacity to envy will always exceed the magnitude of our own frame.

A man who drinks gets thirsty again, but Christ explicitly(!) describes what He gives as a “spring of living water welling inside” (John 7). Oughourlian argues convincingly in his Genesis of Desire that this thirst is most certainly from God, not the product of our corruption or of the devil. Adam was thirsty in Eden, and then he was satisfied by drinking water. So are we. But we cannot add one cubit to our stature. We steadily covet more than our humble (but beautiful) selves can ever contain. To be satisfied in God and to find rest in him implies, chiefly, that we no longer need what our neighbor has, or what only our creator has. In due time He wills to give us all in an ongoing and eternal fashion.

The Mosaic dietary laws were temporary. Just as a Nazirite made a temporary vow for the purpose of sanctification for holy war, so Israel’s purpose as a nation of holy warriors included certain abstinences prescribed by God. Once the war was over, the prohibitions were removed. “Bridal food” (the Feast of Tabernacles) was back on the menu in the first century.

The Nazirite vow was a symbolic form of death and resurrection, of the bridegroom going into the grave (short hair), slaying the serpents, and emerging from the chamber with His bride (long hair), whom He then presented to the Father. [1] The prohibition on the Tree of Knowledge was a temporary one. It began Adam’s holy war, but he broke the vow, failed to rescue the bride and was expelled from the Lord’s table. [2]

Jesus Himself said He would not drink wine until He drank it in the kingdom, after His holy battle. Although there were personal prefigurements of it (the vinegar, and most likely meals with the disciples after His resurrection included wine), that second “bridal” drinking is history, the wedding supper of the Lamb in AD70.

Christians, as holy warriors, abstain from things for the purpose of intercession — holy war — and then return to the “kingdom blessings.” We fast for others, and we fast for the purpose of holy war against our own members, bodily discipline. [3] But the death is always for the purpose of resurrection. God is a phenomenal foodie. As Robert Farrar Capon wrote, God made onions because He likes them.

So, the claim that a Mosaic diet is healthier has no basis in the Bible. In fact, such a view is the result of imposing the modern worldview upon Scripture, a worldview which denies that every part of Creation has a message for us. James Jordan writes:

…the Old Testament laws are being misused by persons who, with the best of intentions, want to find health hints in the Bible. My hope is that these studies will help redirect the focus of this concern and put matters back into perspective. The food law of the New Covenant is the Lord’s Supper, and sickness and health are indeed tied to its faithful observance (1Cor. 11:30). Sickness and health were related to the dietary laws of Moses for the same reason, but that reason is the Spiritual efficacy of the sacrament, not the biological mechanics of the human body.

The hygienic misuse of these laws arises, as do other misinterpretations, because of the pervasive influence of non-Christian philosophical viewpoints in our culture. It is clear that the laws of clean and unclean in the Bible are symbolic in nature. Peter’s vision in Acts 10 establishes a symbolic connection between the unclean animals and the Gentile nations, an association already set forth in Leviticus 20:22-26. No one denies this, but modern Christians are not accustomed to Biblical symbolism, with the result that full justice is not done to the laws of uncleanness.

Let’s take an example that will show how differently people in the ancient world thought from the way we think today. This story will show us that if we are to understand Biblical symbolism, we shall have to learn to think in Biblical categories, and set aside our modern worldview.

When Jacob returned to the promised land after his sojourn in Mesopotamia, he was met by the Angel of the Lord. God wrestled with him all night, and when the Angel “saw that he had not prevailed against him, he touched the socket of his thigh; so the socket of Jacob’s thigh was dislocated while he wrestled with him” (Gen. 32:25). This dislocation, with Jacob’s subsequent limp, constituted a sign of Jacob’s victory. He had wrestled “with God and with men” and had prevailed (Gen. 32:28). Like a father training his child, so God had wrestled with Jacob for nearly a hundred years, using Esau, Isaac, and Laban as His tools to strengthen His son for service. Now, as a token of His grace, He gave Jacob a limp.

What does this mean? For an explanation we can look to Genesis 3:15, where we are told that the serpent’s head will be crushed, while the heel of the Seed will be bruised. It is possible to trace this imagery through the scripture, and what emerges is that because of sin, all men must suffer some wound. The head wound is for God’s enemies, while a mere foot wound is for His friends. Accordingly, Jacob’s limp was a sign of his victory and salvation, a sign that, with God’s grace, he had crushed the serpents in his life.

Now, would it occur to you or me to draw any culinary conclusions from this episode? Doubtless not. Yet we read in Genesis 32:32, “Therefore, to this day the sons of Israel do not eat the sinew of the hip which is on the socket of the thigh, because He touched the socket of Jacob’s thigh in the sinew of the hip.” Notice what the verse does say:  It does not say that God commanded the Israelites to memorialize this incident by refraining from eating this muscle. Rather, it says that the sons of Israel drew an inference from the event: They inferred that it would be improper to eat this particular muscle.

Does this inference make sense to us?  Does it go along with the way we twentieth-century people think? Clearly not.

My point is that twentieth-century readers are not at home in the worldview of the Bible. We do not understand how people thought and reasoned, because we do not share their presuppositions and outlook. The result is that we are prone to misinterpret the meaning of significant parts of Scripture, and this is particularly true of the Mosaic dietary laws. If we are to understand the real meaning of the Levitical code, we must acquire the mindset of the ancient Israelite, which is the mindset of the Bible. When such passages as Genesis 32:32 begin to make sense to us, we will be in a position to investigate Leviticus 11, but unless we become familiar with the “inner logic” of Genesis 32:32, the other dietary laws in the Bible will continue to be somewhat obscure to us. [4]

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[1] See The Fruitful Field.
[2] See Touch Not, Taste Not, Handle Not and The Greatest Consumer.
[3] I have summarised Arthur Wallis’ book on fasting here [PDF]. See also Fasting as Sacrament.
[4] James B. Jordan, Studies in Food and Faith. Document included in the Complete James Jordan set.

Cooking as Eschatology

But while they still did not believe for joy, and marveled, He said to them, “Have you any food here?” So they gave Him a piece of a broiled fish and some honeycomb. And He took it and ate in their presence.

NOTE: THIS POST HAS BEEN REMIXED AND INCLUDED IN GOD’S KITCHEN.

Thanks to Doug Wilson’s recommendations of it, one of the books I took to hospital was The Supper of the Lamb by Robert Farrar Capon. It is a mouth-watering fusion of cookbook and theology, pushing the idea of multi-disciplinary insights to the outer limit. But then, we moderns don’t have such biblical horizons, do we? We refuse to see the world as the Bible reveals it to us.

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Here’s a charming quote discovered and posted by Doug Wilson over a year ago. Being exactly the opposite of the so-called “party” image portrayed on TV and in glossy mags, it kind of stuck with me. It is not sinful like they are, yet it is so “incorrect” that it must be true.

“I wish you well. May your table be graced with lovely women and good men. May you drink well enough to drown the envy of youth in the satisfactions of maturity. May your men wear their weight with pride, secure in the knowledge that they have at last become considerable. May they rejoice that they will never again be taken for callow, black-haired boys. And your women? Ah! Women are like cheese strudels. When first baked, they are crisp and fresh on the outside, but the filling is unsettled and indigestible; in age, the crust may not be so lovely, but the filling comes at last into its own. May you relish them indeed. May we all sit long enough for reserve to give way to ribaldry and for gallantry to grow upon us. May there be singing at the table before the night is done, and old, broad jokes to fling at the stars and tell them we are men . . . The road to Heaven does not run from the world but through it” (Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb, p. 180).

What a delightful image! This is a kind of glory the Christian west has largely forgotten. This is the kind of parties we want to be throwing.

To coin a phrase by Douglas Adams, I think the real reason many Christian stuffed shirts disapprove of such gatherings is because they don’t “get invited to those sorts of parties.” What winebibbers those Christians are! In one sense, we get our wings the same way The Hungriest Caterpillar did.

Yes, in the bigger picture, there is still a time for fasting. But our New Covenant feasting is just as glorifying to God. In Esther, the fast lasted for one day and it resulted in the permanent Feast of Purim. The sufferings of David lead to the end of Saul and the feasts of Solomon.

As Christians fast, the world consumes the church (in the same way we “eat Jesus”). That was the theme of the Old Covenant. [1] But when victory comes, as it always, inevitably does, we feast. Then the kings of the earth bring their glory into it: the church consumes the world. This is how it will be until both church and world are transfigured figures.

This is the perfect marriage of thrift and largess, and it takes a king’s wisdom to stay balanced on such a muscular steed.

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[1] See Touch Not, Taste Not, Handle Not and Eat Local and Die.