A Meditation with both Palm Sunday and Good Friday in Mind ...

 

"My thesis that the practice of nonviolence requires a belief in divine vengeance will be unpopular with many Christians, especially theologians in the West. To the person who is inclined to dismiss it, I suggest imagining that you are delivering a lecture in a war zone (which is where a paper that underlies this ... was originally delivered). Among your listeners are people whose cities and villages have been first plundered, then burned and leveled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, whose fathers and brothers have had their throats slit. The topic of the lecture: a Christian attitude toward violence. The thesis: we should not retaliate since God is perfect noncoercive love. Soon you would discover that it takes the quiet of a suburban home for the birth of the thesis that human nonviolence corresponds to God’s refusal to judge. In a scorched land, soaked in the blood of the innocent, it will invariably die. And as one watches it die, one will do well to reflect about many other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind."

- Miroslav Volf 

Exclusion and Embrace pgs. 303-304

Phos Hilaron

For our midweek Advent devotionals, we've been looking at several ancient Christian hymns.  The following are the notes I used for my favorite along with two videos.  Enjoy!

John 14…

6Jesus answered, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me. 7If you had known Me, you would know My Father as well. From now on you do know Him and have seen Him.”

8Philip said to Him, “Lord, show us the Father, and that will be enough for us.”

9Jesus replied, “Philip, I have been with you all this time, and still you do not know Me? Anyone who has seen Me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? 10Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in Me? The words I say to you, I do not speak on My own. Instead, it is the Father dwelling in Me, performing His works.

The word of the Lord!

…

This evening, with God’s help, I’d like to spend a few minutes introducing [reviewing] what is the oldest Christian hymn known in history outside the Bible.

There are apparently ancient Christian hymns actually INSIDE the Bible – for instance scholars believe that the passage we heard a few moments ago, John 1 – John's “prologue” … was an example of one.

There are others also. 

What does Baptism Mean?

1 Corinthians 12 talks about the kind of body that the Church is.  And the kind of body that the Church is is the kind of body where the weakest members - the members who are least honorable - are afforded and given more abundant honor.  That's the kind of community the Church is.  And every Christian wants the Church to be that kind of community that honors the weak.  The question is: does our practice of baptism actually express that?  Or does the practice of baptism imply that only the strong need apply?  Does the practice of baptism imply that the weak need to get stronger before they get in?  Or are we saying that the weak in their weakness are incorporated into this body that is the body of Christ?

- Peter Leithart

Epiphany Prayer

Gracious Father,

Your Son is the desire of every nation. To Those who hunger for love, He is the Bridegroom rising like the morning sun;

To those who yearn for economic prosperity, He is the Creator who turns water to an overflow of finest wine;

To those in search of justice and righteousness, He is the King who brings the incomplete cleansing of the Law to its glorious fulfillment in grace;

To those who long for sacred purpose and devotion, He is the God Who calls many and when they have sacrificed all to come, He provides for them lavishly especially in the times when it appears that they have given up so much just to arrive at a dead 

end.

For those who long for social equity, He is the Lord Who blesses rulers and masters by drawing their servants closest to Himself, so that they are the only ones given to 

see His miracle as it is performed.

O Christ, You are the joy of man’s desiring; the One for Whom our hearts always 

hunger.

Even our sinful desires are just twisted impressions of the God-shaped void within us. And our hearts are always restless until they find their rest in You.

So shine the light of Your face upon us and bless us to draw us under the shadow of Your wing.

Set our feet to walk on Your path in Your steps, Lord Jesus, and fill us in our emptiness with your Holy Spirit. 

Amen.

Islam: Mirror of Christendom

An abridged essay by Dr Peter J Leithart; the full essay is available here.

“For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks at his natural face in a mirror; for once he has looked at himself and gone away, he has immediately forgotten what kind of person he was.”

—The Epistle of James, 1:23-24

Deep in the pit of hell, the pilgrim Dante came across Mohammed, walking with his torso split open from chin to groin.  The surprise in this scene is not the gruesomeness of Mohammed’s punishment, but the place where this scene occurs: the ninth Bolgia of Malebolgia, in the subcircle of hell reserved for schismatics. Mohammed is not among the idolaters or the pagans, but among sinners being punished for breaking off from the Christian Church, all of whom, appropriately enough, have their bodies rent as retribution for rending the body of Christ.

In treating Mohammed as a Christian schismatic, Dante was not inventing a new perspective (he rarely did), but presenting views widespread in his time. Many in the Western medieval world believed that Mohammed himself had apostatized from Christianity.  Centuries before Dante, John of Damascus (675-749) treated Islam in the final section of his treatise de Haeresibus, calling it the “heresy of the Ishmaelites.”

Christmas Hymn

Advent Hymnody #1 - O Savior, Rend the Heavens Wide

... Another beautiful Advent hymn we hear very little of.  It is German from the early 1600's.  And in case you're thinking it is too difficult to learn, here are a bunch of kindergartners who have mastered it.  Enjoy!

Book List

You are what your mind eats …

Book List

You are what your mind eats …

The Redemption of Bernard Nathanson

Few people, if any, did more than Bernard Nathanson to undermine the right to life of unborn children by turning abortion from an unspeakable crime into a constitutionally protected liberty. [And] someday, when our law is reformed to honor the dignity and protect the right to life of every member of the human family, including children in the womb, historians will observe that few people did more than Bernard Nathanson to achieve that reversal.

Dr. Nathanson, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology, had his first involvement with abortion arranging an illegal abortion for his girlfriend. Many years later, he [called it] his “introductory excursion into the satanic world of abortion.”

Nathanson became a nearly monomaniacal crusader for abortion. As Director of the Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health, he presided over more than 60,000 abortions and performed 5,000 himself [one of which included his own son or daughter inconveniently conceived out of wedlock]. 

Zeitgeist as Fog not Wind

"We live in an age that keeps authoritative institutions, philosophies, and religions at arm's length, mixing and matching and analyzing them with a market-place mentality.

There is a fear of change, but who wouldn't be afraid of change?  St Augustine in The Confessions is a freshman in college and reads this book by Cicero that is a call to pursue wisdom for its own sake, so he says it changes his life and he goes after wisdom, but at the moment of his conversion, he looks back on the previous ten or twelve years and, although he set off to pursue wisdom, he realized that nothing really changed, because he didn't really want to be different.

It's scary.  Our habits whisper in our ear and tell us that without them we wouldn't be who we really are.  And Augustine says that in the end that's right.  We wouldn't be who we are.  Part of the genius of The Confessions is to affirm that the journey of faith really is a death to self; it is a really disjunctive and wrenching kind of transformation.  Who wouldn't be frightful in the face of that?"

R.R. Reno, author of "In the Ruins of the Church: Sustaining Faith in an Age of Diminishing Christianity"

Exodus & Wilderness

"In the end, it was a lot easier for God to get Israel out of Egypt than it was to get Egypt out of Israel.
The Passover and Exodus was about getting God's people out of Egypt.  The 40 years in the desert was about getting Egypt out of God's people."

- Pastor Alan Burrow

For All Thy Saints in Warfare: An All Saints' Day Hymn

We don't generally pay much attention to All Saints' Day in the contemporary Protestant Church.  But that wasn't always the case.  Here is a great hymn for that occasion from the Glory to God: Presbyterian Hymnal written by Anglican hymn writer Horatio Bolton Nelson in 1864.  It is set to Vaughan Williams' beautiful King's Lynn.


1 For all Thy Saints in warfare,
for all your saints at rest,
Your holy name, O Jesus,
forevermore be blessed!
For those passed on before us,
we sing our praise anew
and, walking in their footsteps,
would live our lives for You.

2 We praise you for the Baptist,
forerunner of the Word,
our true Elijah, making
a highway for the Lord.
The last and greatest prophet,
he saw the dawning ray
of light that grows in splendor
until the perfect day.

3 All praise, O Lord, for Andrew,
the first to welcome You,
whose witness to his brother
named you Messiah true.
May we, with hearts kept open
to You throughout the year
proclaim to friend and neighbor
your advent ever near.

4 For Magdalene we praise you,
steadfast at cross and tomb.
Your “Mary!” in the garden
dispelled her tears and gloom.
Apostle to the apostles,
she ran to spread the word.
Send us to shout the good news
that we have seen the Lord!

5 We pray for saints we know not,
for saints still yet to be,
for grace to bear true witness
and serve You faithfully,
till all the ransomed number
who stand before the throne
ascribe all power and glory
and praise to God alone.

The Scope of Reformational Thinking

"We need to find 21st Century answers to 1st century questions, not 19th century answers to 16th century questions."

N.T. Wright

As we Protestants anticipate Reformation Sunday next week, this is a very helpful caution.  

Please don't think I [or Wright] am discounting Church history or historical theology or the Protestant Reformation.  Most definitely not!  This is simply a pointed exhortation addressing a very specific tendency among tidy-minded Reformed types in the Church today.  This is our temptation.

Why did the Reformers do what they did?  
Because they were like the men of Issachar who understood their times and what Israel should do.  
They went back to Scripture alone and held loosely to historical precedence where they felt the two clashed.  

Today, our temptation is to regard Reformational Confessions as semi-inerrant.
We are in danger of quoting the Reformers instead of following their example; to honor the letter and disregard the spirit of the Reformation.

But rather, we ought always to go and learn what these words mean:  Semper Reformanda.

Dante's Moral Imagination

"Dante does something very, very interesting and - to the limit of my ability to judge such things - something deeply true and wise in his characterization of the deepest level of Hell.
I have in my day seen three different discotheques named "Dante's Inferno".  To name a discotheque "Dante's Inferno" you are, I presume, counting on the notion of heat; transgressive sexuality; wild, hot stuff.  There is a kind of glamour in evil: "bad boys"  I've heard it said that the world of men is divided into husbands and lovers.  The husbands are dull and good, and the lovers are bad and sexy.  Rock stars for my entire lifetime have been cashing in on this motif.
Dante is having none of it.  For him, evil is not glamorous.  If I may be permitted such an observation, Milton gets into a fair amount of interpretative trouble because his Satan is so glamorous.  No one ever said that Dante's Satan is the real hero of The Comedia.  And there's good reason for that.  We only see him in one canto and he can't talk.  He is however very good at drooling.
This is de-glamorizing evil.  And evil is de-glamorized in another way, because the deepest level of Dante's Hell is not fire.  It's ice; cold, motionless, dark, near-absolute zero, frigidity; nothingness.  There's nothing cool - nothing cool - about Dante's Satan...
[Just as at Babel] what thwarts human presumption is a kind of anti-intellect, anti-intelligibility.  So what stands at the center of Hell is gigantic idiocy; literally gigantic, drooling idiocy.  And the punishment here is cold and ice."

- Dr Timothy Schutt, Dante Scholar  

Book List [What I've been reading lately...]

You are what your mind eats ...

Transformed by the Renewing of Your Minds

As much as pragmatic Americans might wish it to be otherwise, the Bible is not an answer-book.  It includes advice, and laws, and rules, but a lot of it consists of puzzling prophecy, ancient history, obscure parables and apparently abstract theology.  What are we supposed to get from that?  We ask for an answer key, and God gives us poetry.  Can’t we just skip the story and get to the moral? 

No we can’t.  

God gave us the Bible to guide us, but also – more fundamentally – to form us.  By studying the Bible, hearing it, reading it, learning from it, we are being remade.

One of the ways the Bible remakes us is by giving us clues about God’s character and work.  Parables aren’t moralistic tales.  They’re allegories of God’s work in the world, the mysteries of His kingdom.  By learning the parables, we learn to anticipate God’s next move. 

We anticipate that when wheat is sown, weeds will be sown as well.  We anticipate that we’ll have to wait for harvest for everything to be sorted out.  We learn that the tree that counts doesn’t even look like a tree, but more like a bush, or a cross.  We learn that God’s kingdom moves ahead through agents that we recoil from – prostitutes, tax-gatherers, sinners – as God sanctifies the world using the unclean.

But by learning the parables, living in the parables, and living out the parables, we come to know the ways of God.  God is the choreographer and lead partner of our history and of our lives, and by learning the rhythm of the parables, we learn to keep in step with our dance partner.

- Peter Leithart

A Japanese Bach Collegium? But Why?

"The God in whose service Bach labored and the God I worship today are one and the same. In the sight of the God of Abraham, I believe that the two hundred years separating the time of Bach from my own day can be of little account. This conviction has brought the great composer very much closer to me. We are fellows in faith, and equally foreign in our parentage to the people of Israel, God’s people of Biblical times. Who can be said to approach more nearly the spirit of Bach: a European who does not attend church and carries his Christian cultural heritage mostly on the subconscious level, or an Asian who is active in his faith although the influence of Christianity on his national culture is small?”

- Masaaki Suzuki, 
on the strangeness of his life's labors to establish a Japanese Bach Collegium 

Pentecost Prayer 2014

All praise to You, our Heavenly Father, on this Pentecost Day!

At Babel, we said, 'Let us make burnt clay bricks,

and build a towering temple city to reach the Heavens

and thus make a name for ourselves.'

But you were displeased by our sinful pride and cursed our tongues saying:

“Let us go down and confuse their speech,

Lest nothing be impossible for them.”

But we were foolish to even attempt these things,

For Christ is the only One Who can ascend to the Heavens

And He has.  And now HIS name is above every other name.

And the temple city of God does not reach up to the sky,

but comes down from Heaven,

Just as You and the Son sent down the Spirit in tongues of fire,

And overcame the confusion of our speech

So that any tongue might call upon Jesus’ name for salvation.

By Your fiery Spirit, You’ve made us the burnt bricks, living stones, and pillars in Your holy Temple,

And You’ve given us new names by writing upon us Your name in baptism

And the name of Your City, which comes down from Heaven.

So we praise You this Pentecost morning, and thank You Father for the gift of the Son, and thank You Son for the gift of the Spirit, and thank You Spirit for the gift of the Church.

Amen.

10 More from RC Jr - Non-Fiction for Teens

What are ten books your teenagers read as part of their homeschool education?

• April 15, 2014

• By: Dr. R.C. Sproul, Jr.
• Fiction & Literature, Homeschooling

One of the weaknesses of the school model of education is that it squeezes out great books that don’t fit neatly into one or another of those artificial divisions of learning we call “subjects.” We don’t start with, “What books have had a deep impact in shaping what I am?” But with “What subjects am I supposed to be teaching, and which books will help me teach them?” I don’t teach my children subjects—I seek to instill in them wisdom. Which means I have them read the books that gave me wisdom.

All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes: The Christian and Pop Culture by Ken Myers. This book was a genuine wake up call to me, alerting me to the more subtle ways the broader culture has influenced not just what I think, but how I think. It was for me the beginning of seeking to live a more deliberate life.

The Abolition of Man by CS Lewis.  A thoughtful yet accessible prophetic exposition of the then coming post-modernism.

The Holiness of God. We often, as parents, struggle with fear that our children are more eager to please us than their heavenly Father, that they see their faith as a familial thing, but that they don’t quite own it personally. This classic exploration of the character of God is deeply helpful. It reminds my children that God is for real, and that they must deal with Him, one at a time.

Monsters from the Id by E. Michael Jones. Jones, editor of Culture Warsmagazine, traces the history of horror fiction from Mary Shelley’sFrankenstein to Aliens. Why would I want my teens to read that? Because Jones, as is his habit, masterfully weaves the private lives of the creators of these stories with their ideologies and the stories themselves. Reading Jones is like reading Romans 1 unfold before your very eyes as you watch minds given over to depravity bear bitter fruit.