4.5 Gallons of Apple Juice or Cider - you determine your level of involvement here, but remember sugar turns to alcohol, and the better juice you get the better cider you'll have

4 or 5 cans of juice concentrate - the frozen kind, and I like to make one or two of them cherry or raspberry or something just to make it more interesting

The next time you move a batch of beer from the primary fermenter to the secondary fermenter, leave the yeast cake at the bottom of the bucket and make cider right away, like THUS:

Boil the juice for twenty minutes. Cool. (I've never done this, but decided from now on I'm going to boil.)

Pour the cooled "wort" into the fermenter right on top of the yeast cake. Yes, you are reusing yeast. This is okay to do! Add your concentrates (that is, if you didn't boil them). Ferment as you would beer. Pay close attention though, because this will be a pretty strong cider, so you want to make sure you get all that sugar fermented.

Bottle as usual. Remember, though, most commercial ciders are easy on the carbonation, so you may want to scale back your sugar to decrease carbonation. I have occasionally used a can of raspberry concentrate as my priming sugar. This works pretty well, but is less predictable. Also, I like to bottle half my batch and then add a cup of Splenda (won't ferment) to the second half for a slightly sweetened cider.

It's no Woodchuck. But it's fun, it's cheap, it's easy, and it's yours. Cheers!

Credits go to some Internet discussion forum that was roughly this recipe.

Two new biographies, Cornelius Van Til: Reformed Apologist and Churchman and Francis Schaeffer: An Authentic Life, reminded me again of the importance of eschatology. Van Til (1895-1987), who was professor of apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary for 43 years, had strong disagreements with J. Oliver Buswell (1895-1977) and Allan MacRae (1902-1997) over apologetic methodology. In addition to apologetics, Buswell and MacRae opposed the anti-premillennial view of Westminster Seminary. In terms of cultural application of the gospel, however, there wasn't much difference between Van Til's amillennialism and Buswell's and MacRae's premillennialism.

Early in his theological training, Schaeffer's eschatology was shaped by the Scofield Reference Bible.¹ Os Guinness writes that "dispensational premillennialism . . . has had unfortunate consequences on the Christian mind," including reinforcing an already developing "anti-intellectualism" and a "general indifference to serious engagement with culture."² While this description cannot be applied to Schaeffer, there is an underlying premillennial pessimistic stream that cuts through Schaeffer's worldview.

William Edgar, a professor of apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary, recounts the time in the 1960s he spent studying in L'Abri, Switzerland, under the tutelage of Schaeffer (1912-1984):

I can remember coming down the mountain from L'Abri and expecting the stock market to cave in, a priestly elite to take over American government, and enemies to poison the drinking water. I was almost disappointed when these things did not happen.³

Edgar speculates, with good reason, that it was Schaeffer's "premillenarian eschatology" that negatively affected the way he saw and interpreted world events. One of Schaeffer's last books, A Christian Manifesto, did not call for cultural transformation but civil disobedience as a stopgap measure to postpone an inevitable societal decline. "The fact remains that Dr. Schaeffer's manifesto offers no prescriptions for a Christian society. . . . The same comment applies to all of Dr. Schaeffer's writings: he does not spell out the Christian alternative. He knows that you 'can't fight something with nothing,' but as a premillennialist, he does not expect to win the fight prior to the visible, bodily return of Jesus Christ to earth to establish His millennial kingdom."⁴

Tom Sine offers a startling example of the effect "prophetic inevitability" can have on some people:

"Do you realize if we start feeding hungry people things won't get worse, and if things don't get worse, Jesus won't come?" interrupted a coed during a Futures Inter-term I recently conducted at a northwest Christian college. Her tone of voice and her serious expression revealed she was utterly sincere. And unfortunately I have discovered the coed's question doesn't reflect an isolated viewpoint. Rather, it betrays a widespread misunderstanding of biblical eschatology . . . that seems to permeate much contemporary Christian consciousness. I believe this misunderstanding of God's intentions for the human future is seriously undermining the effectiveness of the people of God in carrying out his mission in a world of need. . . . The response of the (student) . . . reflects what I call the Great Escape View of the future. So much of the popular prophetic literature has focused our attention morbidly on the dire, the dreadful, and the destruction of all that is.⁵

Eschatological ideas have consequences, and many Christians are beginning to understand how those ideas have shaped the cultural landscape. A world always on the precipice of some great and inevitable apocalyptic event is not in need of redemption but only of escape. As one end-time speculator put it, "the world is a sinking Titanic ripe for judgment."⁶ Any attempt at reformation would be futile and contrary to God's unavoidable and predestined plan for Armageddon.

Gary DeMar is president of American Vision and has been a regular guest of Postmillennialism.com since 2001. For more information: American Vision P.O. Box 220, Powder Springs, GA 30127, 800-628-9460, www.americanvision.org.

Notes
1. Colin Duriez, Francis Schaeffer: An Authentic Life (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2008), 42.
2. Os Guinness, Fit Bodies, Fat Minds: Why Evangelicals Don't Think and What to do About It (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1994), 63-65.
3. William Edgar, "Francis Schaeffer and the Public Square" in J. Budziszewski, Evangelicals in the Public Square: Four Formative Voices on Political Thought and Action (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006), 174.
4. Gary North and David Chilton, "Apologetics and Strategy," in Tactics of Christian Resistance: A Symposium, ed. Gary North (Tyler Texas: Geneva Divinity School, 1983), 127-128. Emphasis in original.
5. Tom Sine, The Mustard Seed Conspiracy: You Can Make a Difference in Tomorrow's Troubled World (Waco, TX: Word, 1981), 69.
6. Jan Markell, "Kingdom Now: We're Not Returning to Eden" http://www.christianworldviewnetwork.com/article.php/1626/Jan_Markell. For a response, see Gary DeMar, "Is the World a Sinking Titantic?," Biblical Worldview (May 2007), 4-6.

The title for this post sounds like an oxymoron, and, of course, it is. How can one be both an atheist and a Christian? Again, I am wanting to push the understanding of the one-versus-two-storey universe. In the history of religious thought, one of the closest versions to what I am describing as a "two-storey" world-view, is that espoused by classical Deism (the philosophy espoused by a number of the American founding fathers).

They had an almost pure, two-storey worldview. God, "the Deity," had created the universe in the beginning, setting it in motion. He had done so in such a way that the world could be described as directed by His Providence, but not in any sense interfered with after its creation. Thomas Jefferson produced a New Testament, wholly in tune with this philosophy. He expunged all reference to miracle and kept only those things he considered to have a purpose in "moral teaching." The creator had accomplished His work: it was up to us to conform ourselves to His purposes and morality - which were pretty indistinguishable from natural law. If you read the writings of the period it's much more common to read Providence where a Christian might put God. Many modern evangelicals mistakenly read such statements as Christian.

Functionally, other than having some notion of an original Creator, Deists were practical atheists. The God Who created had completed His work. Ethics were as much a matter of scientific discovery as any other principle of physics. They believed in something they called "God" or "Providence" but only in a very divorced sense. It would be hard to distinguish their thought from that of an atheist except that they clung to an idea of God at least as the initiator of all things.

I have here introduced the notion of "practical atheism," meaning by it, that although a person may espouse a belief in God, it is quite possible for that belief to be so removed from everyday life, that God's non-existence would make little difference.

Surprisingly, I would place some forms of Christian fundamentalism within this category (as I have defined it). I recall a group affiliated with some particular Church of Christ, who regularly evangelized our apartment complex when I lived in Columbia, S.C. They were also a constant presence on the campus of the local university. They were absolute inerrantists on the subject of the Holy Scriptures. They were equally adamant that all miracles had ceased with the completion of the canon of the New Testament. Christians today only relate to God through the Bible.

Such a group can be called "Biblicists," or something, but, in the terminology I am using here, I would describe them as "practical atheists." Though they had great, even absolutist, faith in the Holy Scriptures, they had no relationship with a God who is living and active and directly involved in their world. Had their notion of a God died, and left somebody else in charge of His heaven, it would not have made much difference so long as the rules did not change.

I realize that this is strong criticism, but it is important for us to understand what is at stake. The more the secular world is exalted as secular, that is, having an existence somehow independent of God, the more we will live as practical atheists - perhaps practical atheists who pray (but for what do we pray?). I would also suggest that the more secular the world becomes for Christians, the more political Christians will become. We will necessarily resort to the same tools and weapons as those who do not believe.

Christianity that has purged the Church of the sacraments, and of the sacramental, have only ideas which can be substituted - the result being the eradication of God from the world in all ways other than theoretical. Of course, since much of modern Christianity functions on this ideological level rather than the level of the God-Who-is among-us, much of Christianity functions in a mode of practical atheism. The more ideological the faith, the more likely its proponents are to expouse what amounts to a practical atheism.

Orthodox Christianity, with its wealth of dogma and Tradition, could easily be translated into this model - and I have encountered it in such a form. But it is a falsification of Orthodoxy. Sacraments must not be quasi-magical moments in which a carefully defined grace is transmitted to us - they must, instead, threaten to swallow up the whole world. The medieval limitation of sacraments to the number 7 comes far too close to removing sacraments from the world itself. Orthodoxy seems to have declared that there are 7 sacraments solely as a response to Western Reform and Catholic arguments. In some sense, everything is a sacrament - the whole world is a sacrament.

However, if we only say that the whole world is a sacrament, soon nothing will be a sacrament. Thus the sacraments recognized as such by the Church, should serve not just for pointing to themselves, but also pointing to God and to everything around us. Holy Baptism should change all water. The Cross should change all trees, etc. But Baptism gives the definition: water does not define Baptism. Neither do trees define the Cross. Nor does man define Christ. Christ defines what it is to be human, etc.

The more truly sacramental becomes the Christian life, the more thoroughly grounded it is in the God-Who-is-among-us. Such a God is indeed, "everywhere present and filling all things." Our options are between such a God - as proclaimed in the New Testament - or a God who need be no God at all for He is removed from us anyway.

At the Divine Liturgy, before approaching the Communion Cup, Orthodox Christians pray together:

I believe, O Lord, and I confess that Thou art truly the Christ the Son of the living God who camest into the world to save sinners, of whom I am first. I believe also that this is truly Thine own most pure Body, and that this is truly Thine own precious Blood. Therefore, I pray Thee: have mercy upon me and forgive my transgressions both voluntary and involuntary, of word and of deed, committed in knowledge or in ignorance. And make me worthy to partake without condemnation of Thy most pure Mysteries, for the remission of my sins, and unto life everlasting. Amen.

There is not a single hint of a distance between us and God. At this point, having prepared for communion, having confessed our sins, we stand at the very center of the universe, before the God Who Is, before the God with Whom Moses conversed on Mt. Sinai, and we receive His true Body and Blood.

Such realism of a first-storey character makes bold claims about the nature of the God whom we worship and how it is that we relate to Him. It's removal from the "end of miracles" deism of some Biblicists could not be more complete.

There is a dialog that may take place between Christians and atheists. But there is, prior to that, an even more important dialog to be had, and that is with the practical atheism of Christians who have exiled God from the world around us. Such practical atheism is a severe distortion of the Christian faith and an extremely poor substitute for the real thing.

Richard John Neuhaus has written frequently of returning the Church to the public square. I think the problem is far deeper. In many cases we have to speak about returning God to the Church. In cases where practical atheism is the faith of a goup of "believers," their presence in the public square makes no difference. Who cares?

But within the Orthodox faith, God cannot be exiled from our world no matter how men try. He has come among us, and not at our invitation. "While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8). He is already in the Public Square as the Crucified God who is reconciling the world to Himself, whether we like it or not. The opposite of practical atheism is to do the only thing the Christianity of the first-storey can do: keep His commandments and fall down and worship - for God is with us.