Practical Christianity: Rational Affection

One thing that struck me while reading William Wilberforce’s A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Higher and Middle Classes was how logical, almost scientific, his language and arguments were. He uses a lot of logical analogies to illustrate his points. He points to astronomy and the natural world, and even mentions Isaac Newton at one point. He also references historical, political, and international events to trace a pattern of human nature and behavior, thus laying a groundwork for his theses. 

He uses a phrase that I thought was interesting “rational affection.” We don’t often think of affection—an emotion—as “rational.” We don’t expect to be able to logically figure out who we’ll fall in love with, or to explain with a pros-con spreadsheet why you are friends with a specific person. Yet when it comes to our love of God, Wilberforce treats it as a rational act. Our loving God is not on our own initiative—we’re not doing Him any favors. Rather, our loving God is a natural, logical reaction of gratitude for Christ’s salvation, of appreciation of all the blessings He gives us, of acknowledging who God is, and of awe in how great and truly different He is from us. 

Practical Christianity: The Trap of Good Deeds

In his essay, A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Higher and Middle Classes, William Wilberforce explains that one trap for “nominal Christians” (and even those believers that are otherwise strong in their faith) is the problem of works. True righteousness has nothing to do with what we have done, and everything to do with what Christ has already done. “But they rather conceive of Christianity as opening the door of mercy,” but once a Christian has stepped through that door the rest is “up to them.” 

Practical Christianity: The Purpose of Imagination

The things we care about are often the things in the closest proximity. William Wilberforce uses the example of feeling more keenly the tragedy of an accident on the street just outside, than the tragedy of thousands of people being slaughtered on the other side of the world.

And the things that are in closest proximity to us do not even have to be real. Our imaginations allow us to feel more emotion for the characters in the book we’re reading than for real incidents going on farther away. In fact, because these characters in a sense live inside us, they are in the closest proximity anything could be…and therefore might be more powerful than things going on in our own homes. 

Practical Christianity: Ignorance Is No Excuse

William Wilberforce’s 1797 essay, A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Higher and Middle Classes, confronts the lukewarm attitudes of religion in his culture. It really resonated with me, more than two hundred years later, because there are so many parallels or foreshadowings of present-day culture.

One thing that is constant throughout history—thus putting my life on an equal footing with Wilberforce’s—is the presence of sin. Sin is often simply defined as “evil” or “wickedness” or “doing bad things,” but I would argue that sin’s scope is a little wider than your stereotypical “bad” things like criminal acts, but extends to anything that is against God.

Practical Christianity: William Wilberforce’s Thesis

In the upcoming entries I plan to discuss some of these “nuggets of wisdom” I found in William Wilberforce’s A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Higher and Middle Classes.  But first it might be helpful to know the purpose of this essay.

“The main object which he has in view is, not to convince the Sceptic, or to answer the arguments of persons who avowedly oppose the fundamental doctrines of our Religion; but to point out he scanty and erroneous system of the bulk of those who belong to the class of orthodox Christians, and to contrast their defective scheme with a representation of what the author apprehends to be real Christianity.”

The point of this book was for Wilberforce to expose the shallow religious façade that had become so prevalent in Britain at the time. Times have changed drastically since then, and while I can’t speak to the state of British religious views personally, from my observations in America we’ve drifted even farther from Christianity in its truest sense. 

Practical Christianity: Introduction

Awhile back I slogged through a very long and very dense essay titled A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Higher and Middle Classes. For brevity’s sake (and to belay carpal tunnel syndrome) I will nickname it Practical Christianity. Published in 1797, this essay was written by William Wilberforce, whom I had best known beforehand as being an instrumental player in abolishing the slave trade in Britain.

This work is in public domain and so I downloaded a free version on my Kindle. I read it during my breaks at work, which hindered me from reading it very fast, and in the end I think that was a good thing because this is one book that one cannot simply breeze through.