Wolf and Ignoble Savages

If you’ve looked at the 2019 LCMS Convention Workbook you’ll note that there are plenty of overtures regarding the Doctrine of Creation, calling on the Synod to confess what is plainly revealed in the Bible: that the True and Living God created all things at the beginning in six, twenty-four hour days.

I always found great pleasure when Aaron Wolf (if you have not yet given in his memory to his family, please do so here) would take whatever Synodical controversy was cooking at the moment and weave it into his writings. It was like he was hiding Easter Eggs for his Missourian friends to find and for them to put to use his sound words. Aaron certainly did this with his three part essay “Ignoble Savages” which Chronicles has made available online. Below is a taste of Aaron’s work. Read the whole thing, links are below.

The Darwinist, writes Richard Weaver, “assumes that evolution is a fact and then uses it as both cause and effect in describing the phenomena of nature.” This is pure question-begging, no matter how much data detailing what is is amassed and labeled “evidence.” Christians desperate to make peace with such “evidence,” which was gathered to bolster a vision of man that is fundamentally opposed to virtue and good order, ought to consider that C.S. Lewis called this the “idolatry of artefacts.”

We speak a lot about culture and its restoration. Culture means the institutional and traditional cultivation of a people’s norms, which themselves are rooted in that people’s ideal of man. Man made in the image of God and conforming to the image of Christ served as the basis for Western Christian Civilization for centuries. But the false image of uncreated man, up from apery, cannot drive us to look upward to the God Who is there, nor back to the wisdom of the past, but only “forward,” to whatever our darkened imaginations may imagine.

Part One is here.

Part Two is here

Part Three is here

The image is Paradise by Lucas Cranach, the Elder. 1536.