Confessing Evangelical

Speaking of the resurrection, this is one of those times when the following words of our Lord are particularly important:

"I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die."

Credit where it's due: I don't always see eye-to-eye with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, but his article in last Saturday's Telegraph, "Easter - the awkward time of year", was great stuff.

Dr Williams opens by asking why it is that people are so much more ignorant of the story of Good Friday and Easter than that of Christmas (following a poll - of a type now as traditional at Easter as chocolate eggs - suggesting that only 48% of Britons know why Christians celebrate Easter). He writes:

The truth is that Easter is awkward. The stories themselves are angular and strange - a tormented saga about a judicial murder and a horrific public execution is followed by a series of events that challenge not only our assumptions about how the natural world works, but also our desire to read a story with a good strong ending. Jesus returns from death, but he is not a ghost or a resuscitated corpse - so what is it we are talking about? ...

Hardly surprising that the Easter stories drop readily into the Too Difficult file as far as our society in general is concerned. They seem at first to operate too far outside any frame of reference we can cope with.

This contrasts with the Christmas stories, which have "an accessible, affirming feel to them", and whose "central images are much more universal and manageable - mothers and children, innocence and new life, warmth in midwinter."

But as Dr Williams continues, "perhaps it is just the awkwardness of the stories that ought to persuade us to look again". He points out the way in which the Gospel writers illustrate the events of Jesus' life, and especially His suffering and death, with references to texts from the Old Testament:

Of course, these stories are meant to tell us what happened - but there is a repertoire of images and echoes to draw upon. God’s favoured children are regularly the victims of betrayal and contempt; there is an established way of telling this sort of story.

However, when the writers turn to the Resurrection narratives, "the impression is more fragmented and the time scale not always easy to decipher":

The women flee from the tomb, and then suddenly run into Jesus, according to Matthew. Luke tells us of an odd encounter on the road out of Jerusalem, when two friends of Jesus get into conversation with a stranger and recognise him as Jesus when he breaks bread with them.

John has the poignant story of Mary Magdalene, alone in tears at the deserted grave hearing her name spoken in a voice she knows. People hurry between the tomb and the city and the Galilean mountains, sharing baffling incidents, sometimes interrupted by Jesus inexplicably being there among them. Finally Jesus is seen no more; what is left is the fellowship of disciples trying to put it all into words.

It is both the importance and the strangeness of these events that gives rise to the disjointed nature of the narratives:

When someone stumbles and searches for words, especially someone who is otherwise fluent and coherent, you may well conclude that something has happened for which their experience hasn’t prepared them ...

Even a few decades after the first Easter Sunday, the people in the best position to write about it are still catching up with the experience, not just processing it through a set of conventions.

It's vitally important to realise that Dr Williams is not saying this to put in doubt the historical veracity of the Resurrection; quite the opposite, as he points out in words that had me punching the air in delight at his demolition of one of those oft-trotted-out "sophisticated" explanations of the Resurrection (emphasis added):

Some scholars have cast doubt on the historic value of the stories because of their apparent confusion and unclarity, and have argued that all we have is a symbolic narrative expressing the fact that the disciples felt their faith miraculously renewed after his death. If that were the case, they made a disastrously bad job of it.

The feel of these texts is far more that of people struggling to make sense of something that has happened outside their heads, not inside, wrestling with an intractable set of experiences and meetings, not finding a helpful metaphor for their emotions.

Dr Williams concludes that "the untidy character of the stories leaves the reader or listener with work to do":

The resurrection isn’t a happy ending to a sad story. It is the beginning of a new story, a new phase in the life of the disciples - potentially a new phase for the reader too.

That seems to be what the abrupt end of Mark’s gospel suggests. The women ran away in terror, and... "Well?" we ask impatiently. And the writer lifts his head and says, "Why do you think I’m writing this? And what are you going to do about it? Because nothing is the same now" ...

So it is natural enough that the Easter stories don’t settle as comfortably in the mind and imagination as the Christmas ones. But when someone moistens their lips and looks at us awkwardly and says, "I don’t quite know how to tell you this", we are right to suspect that what’s coming is not just an interesting bit of information or a mere historical anecdote. And we listen that bit harder.

If Easter is awkward, it is because it is always a shock to be told who we really are and what we really might be.

Some of the most surprising people turn out to have been (and maybe even still to be) fans of The Smiths. Pastors of northern Lutheran congregations, for example.

If. like me, you're one of this happy band of pilgrims, then you may be interested in a symposium that the BBC reports is to be held in Manchester next month, entitled "Why Pamper Life's Complexities?", at which the assembled academics will be considering the social, cultural, political and musical impact of The Smiths, including topics such as "gender and sexuality, race and nationality, a sense of place, the imagination of class, the significance of Manchester in popular music, the aesthetics of the band, fan cultures and musical innovation".

Then again, you may not. But I just thought I'd mention it. ;-)

In my blogroll update I mentioned "one other Lutheran addition on which I will go into more detail later". This is the Lutheran Angles blog (britishlutherans.blogspot.com), which is intended to be a group blog for members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of England, where we can discuss how the ELCE should maintain and develop its ministry as it moves into its second fifty years of existence.

I'm in the process of sorting out invitations for various potential participants, and non-ELCE members are very welcome to leave comments. Indeed, we positively encourage this, as the insights and opinions of Lutherans outside the UK will be very valuable to us.

I've put two posts up so far. The first, "What does this (blog) mean?" summarises the intended purpose of the blog. I've also taken the opportunity to explain what I think are the benefits of a blog format as opposed to a discussion board or email list, and in particular the parallels between blogging and open-source software, both of which operate on a "bazaar" rather than a "cathedral" model of development.

At its best, blogging enables people to get their thoughts out into the public domain rapidly (rather than having to spend ages writing perfectly-crafted essays) and then to benefit from feedback from a wide range of other people, many of whom have knowledge or experience that directly relates to the issue under discussion. The hope is that this can allow for constructive and enriching discussion that proves beneficial as the ELCE considers its future direction. And, as I say at the end of that post, "even if we cannot achieve anything quite so ambitious, at the very least we will, hopefully, have some good and useful discussions, and help strengthen the bonds of friendship between our various churches within the ELCE.

See also CS Lewis's comment about fellow-pupils often being more helpful to one another than their schoolmaster, on which I blogged a few months ago.

The second post, "What is the ELCE for?" then sets out my own personal view of what the strategic priorities for the ELCE should be, namely:

1. Spreading the Gospel in our communities.
   


2. Serving the "Lutheran diaspora" within the UK.
   


3. Promoting Lutheran teachings within the wider UK church.
   


4. Celebrating (in both senses of the word) the Divine Service, and showing that the historic worship of the church need not be incompatible with living, breathing, attractive Christianity.
   

It remains to be seen whether this idea is going to fly, but I certainly hope it can make a contribution. Do please pay the site a visit from time to time and leave comments, as the blog is certainly not intended just to be an exercise in navel-gazing, but hopefully to be a valuable addition to the wider Lutheran Blogosphere™. Those of you using Bloglines can subscribe to Lutheran Angles by clicking this link.

A few changes to the blogroll - Twylah has dismantled her tipi; Wild Boar's unspellable-Latin-name-goes-here blog has been added, as has Rick Ritchie's Daylight blog at Old Solar (PS: Rick, one word - RSS); the Anglicans have been forced into a shotgun marriage with the "other" blogs. My pseudonymous friend DS Ketelby is another retiree, though I am currently trying to persuade him not to delete his blog altogether (why do people insist on doing that?). One other Lutheran addition on which I will go into more detail later.

Modern Reformation has been dropped with regret, because the latest issue arrived at the weekend, and it would appear that its transformation into a purely Reformed journal is now complete. (For some reason I keep thinking of Emperor Palpatine in Return of the Jedi - "The alliance... will die. As will your friends. Good, I can feel your anger. I am unarmed. Take your weapon. Strike Mike Horton down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete".) No Lutheran contributions at all, unless you count Harold Senkbeil's response to two letters that thought he was being Arminian for saying that Jesus Christ died for the sins of all. Though there is an interesting looking interview with the splendid Rico Tice about using St Mark's Gospel for personal evangelism, so MR may yet get reinstated.

This is great fun: Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie sing, "Every OS Sucks" (4.5 Mb MP3, legal download; streaming versions available here):

Every OS wastes your time
From the desktop to the lap
Everything since the abacus, just a bunch of crap.
From microsoft and macintosh,
To lihn-line-lihn-line-ux,
Every computer crashes, cause every OS sucks

The verse on Linux is particularly good. My wife laughed long and hard - a little too much so, if you ask me ;-) - at this bit:

"It's free," they say -
If you can get it to run.
The geeks say "Hey, thats half the fun!"
Yeah, but I've got a girlfriend and things to get done
The Linux OS sucks
I'm sorry to say it but it does.

Not that I'm saying I agree with it, mind ;-)

The latest in Pr Joel Humann's wonderful Holy Week series of insubstantial parts of Luther's Holy Week sermons for 1529 is essential reading: The Heart of a Thief, in which Luther holds up the Penitent Thief as a model of true sainthood.

Reading this called to mind a CD I was listening to yesterday afternoon: a recording of John Stainer's oratorio, The Crucifixion. The Crucifixion - subtitled "Meditation on the Sacred Passion of the Holy Redeemer" - is one of the highlights of Victorian church music. With its mixture of Gospel narrative, meditative arias, choruses and congregational hymns, it is clearly influenced by JS Bach's Passions (which had been popularised in 19th Century England by Felix Mendelssohn).

But there is another way in which the influence of Bach is felt in the piece, one which only became apparent when I put on the next CD in the pile, Charles Wood's St Mark Passion. This has its moments - particularly the opening chorus of "Sing My Tongue, The Glorious Battle" - but somehow I always find it rather unaffecting. (And it has to be said that if your depiction of the Passion of our Lord is leaving your audience a bit cold, then you're failing on a pretty fundamental level).

Listening to the two in succession, the big difference is that Stainer's work has much more of what Martin Luther called the "for-usness" of the Gospel than does Wood's. This "for-usness" - a quality that Bach's Passions also have, of course - is thanks both to the Revd J. Sparrow-Simpson's libretto and Stainer's rich musical setting. Herman Klein said, after hearing the first performance, "such music enters into the hearts of the people and lives there" - which would explain the enduring popularity of the work. (The fact that it is well within the ability of any competent parish church choir is another reason for its popularity: back when I was a treble in my local church choir, we once performed the whole piece, and frequently sang the chorus "God so loved the world" as an anthem.)

Where all this ties in with Pr Joel's post is that listening to the CD yesterday, I was struck by how the climax of the whole piece comes with the exchange between Jesus and the penitent thief:

And one of the malefactors which were hanged
railed on Him saying:
"If Thou be the Christ,
save Thyself and us."

But the other answering, rebuked him, saying,
"Dost not thou fear God
seeing thou art in the same condemnation?
And we indeed justly;
for we receive the due reward of our deeds:
but this man hath done nothing amiss."

And he said unto Jesus:
"Lord, remember me
when Thou comest into Thy Kingdom."

And Jesus said unto him,
"Verily I say to thee,
today shalt thou be with Me in Paradise."

What you miss reading the words here is the musical setting of those last two lines, sung by the tenors and basses of the choir, and easily the most beautiful and moving phrases in the whole work. Enough to reduce a grown man to tears.

The Crucifixion was premiered in 1887, the height of Victorian England - a time when people were very much more conscious of death than today. The promise of eternal life with Jesus in "paradise" would have carried even greater resonance and power for the original listeners - for whom that time could easily be little further off than it was for the thief - than it does for us today. Hence, no doubt, the emphasis placed on it by Stainer. Just one of many examples of the "for-usness" of Stainer's (and Sparrow-Simpson's) work.

My perception that the work was, in that respect, very "Lutheran", was only reinforced by the final hymn, "All For Jesus", which contains the following lines:

All for Jesus – at Thine altar
Thou wilt give us sweet content;
There, dear Lord, we shall receive Thee
In the solemn Sacrament.

Again, here is a reminder that the "for-usness" of the Gospel - that which connects us to the historical events of Good Friday and Easter Sunday - is not something merely abstract, but takes concrete, physical form in the waters of Baptism, the preaching of the Gospel, and above all in the true body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ in the Sacrament of the Altar.

The remarkable WF Deedes - if Dan Rather was a "veteran journalist", then what word do you use to describe someone whose first major assignment was to report on the invasion of Abyssinia in 1936, and who is still writing regular reports and columns today? - had an interesting perspective on Good Friday in his column yesterday, in which he recalled the "solemnity" of Good Friday in his youth, and went on to say:

I still accept the solemnity of the day and the beliefs that go with it, but, in more recent times, I regret to say, I have tended to view the events surrounding the Crucifixion through a journalist's eye and to regret how shamefully my copy would have fallen short of the accounts we are offered in the Gospels.

From the trial under Pilate onwards, what a story it was to write. Even a rogue newspaper reporter, inventing news (such as America has experienced) could not have made it up; a thought that, through my worm's eye way of viewing it all, helps to fortify belief.

A similar thought certainly struck me during yesterday's Good Friday service at our church: how remarkable it is that people should be gathering together to mark such an event (and in such good numbers, too - easily equivalent to the attendance on a well-attended Sunday morning).

In all the religions of the world, is there anything to compare with the narrative of Holy Week, and Good Friday in particular? It's one thing for a religion to mark the death of its founder: quite another to treat it as the pivotal event of history, the hinge around which our whole faith pivots. To call this Friday "good".

In almost every other religion, the founder had a career lasting a number of decades, and lived to a good age. He had plenty of time to amass followers and build a legacy. Our Lord died at around the age of 33; His public career lasted barely three years; by that time He had attracted maybe 500 followers, most of whom deserted Him as His enemies closed in. And He didn't just die, He died a shameful and disgraceful death that marked Him out in the eyes of the world as a fraud, cursed by God.

Contrast that with Muhammad, who started his public preaching in AD 615, and who by AD 622 had fled for his life from Mecca (and it was only his privileged family background that had protected him until then). Following his exile to Medina, Muhammad lived another ten years, in which he amassed many followers, and won over cities and tribes by a combination of his teachings and his wars of conquest (the founder of the "religion of peace" personally led 27 military campaigns, and delegated a further 38 to his junior commanders, and even his highly-sympathetic biographer Barnaby Rogerson concedes that Muhammad "was the aggressor in this conflict").

By the time of his death, Muhammad was held in honour by tens of thousands of followers spread across the entire Arabian peninsula, who were determined to carry forward his legacy. The future of Islam was assured. Whereas it is inconceivable that Islam would have survived Muhammad's death had he lost his life in AD 618, as the leader of a small Meccan sect.

Similar comparisons can also be made with other significant religious figures (eg Buddha), and these comparisons are instructive because they remind us just how remarkable, indeed how odd, in human terms the emergence of Christianity was. It's so easy for us to take the Gospel narratives for granted. Easy also for us to read texts that speak of the future worldwide spread of the Gospel and to miss how completely astounding it is that such promises should actually have come to pass in human history.

So here's one crucial lesson of Good Friday, a lesson that (as Deedes puts it) "helps to fortify belief": Christianity just isn't normal.

From Couldn't Help Noticing comes this list of winners from Christian Retailing magazine's 2004 Retailers Choice Awards. The list of categories reminds me of the old comment about how "statistics are like bikinis - what they reveal is interesting, but what they conceal is vital":

Health/Fitness: 10 Essentials of Highly Healthy People (Zondervan), Walt Larimore, M.D.

Evangelism: What's So Amazing About Grace? (Zondervan), Philip Yancey

Series: "Women of Faith Study Guide Series" (Thomas Nelson)

Wall Décor: Names of Jesus cross (Inspirio)

Devotionals: His Passion (Integrity Publishers)

Nonfiction: The Faith of George W. Bush (Charisma House), Stephen Mansfield

Relationships: The Power of a Positive Wife (Howard Publishing), Karol Ladd

General Gifts: You Are Loved voice message photo frame (Lighthouse Christian Co.)

Bibles: Revolve (Thomas Nelson)

Music: Adoration (Sparrow), Newsboys

Gift Books: Daily Inspiration for the Purpose-Driven Life (Inspirio), Rick Warren

Charismatic: Knowing God Intimately (Warner Faith), Joyce Meyer

Christian Living: Next Door Savior (W Publishing), Max Lucado

Decorative Accessories: Family silver flip photo frame (Lighthouse Christian Co.)

Spiritual Growth: Experiencing the Heart of Jesus (Thomas Nelson), Max Lucado

Spanish: Una vida con propósito (Vida Publishers), Rick Warren

Jewelry: Fashion Jewelry Collection (Bob Siemon Designs)

Self-Improvement: Everybody’s Normal Till You Get to Know Them (Zondervan), John Ortberg

Children: 20 Bible Verses Every Child Should Know (Standard Publishing)

Fiction: And the Shofar Blew (Tyndale House), Francine Rivers

That's right - awards for "wall decor" and "decorative accessories", nothing for "doctrine" or "theology". Just doesn't sell, y'see.

More seriously, some of these categories and winners seem to reflect a medieval Catholic approach to the Christian life, in which the promises of the Gospel are obscured by a plethora of artifacts that are invested with a quasi-sacramental ability to bring us closer to God: the "You Are Loved voice message photo frame", for example. And quite what "self-improvement" is doing as a category in "Christian" awards is anyone's guess.

But that's what happens when we lose sight of the central importance of doctrine. The Gospel is doctrine, cannot be anything else by its very nature: it consists of certain promises, statements, declarations, teachings that need to be heard and believed (see my recent post on this subject). While Christians are not all called to be doctrinal theologians in an academic sense, when we throw doctrine out altogether we end up throwing the Gospel out with it.

What are we then left with? Watered-down Law in the form of self-help manuals and step-by-step guides - because God will surely not deny His grace to those who do what lies within their power - and trinkets to help us feel closer to God (since the promises of the Gospel, as held out to us in Word and Sacrament, are no longer sufficient to achieve this). The Retailers Choice Awards category list, in other words.

This is the attempt I made last year to set out the readings for Holy Week in chronological order - matching the readings to the day on which the events actually happened, so far as possible. I'm posting it now in case people find this a helpful resource for their Holy Week devotions. Any suggested corrections are welcome in the comments.

SUNDAY

• Matthew 21:1-17


• Mark 11:1-11


• Luke 19:28-46


• John 12:12-50

MONDAY

• Matthew 21:18-22:14


• Mark 11:12-12:12


• Luke 19:47,48


• John - N/A

TUESDAY

• Matthew 22:15-25:46


• Mark 12:13-13:36


• Luke 20:1-21:38


• John - N/A

WEDNESDAY

• Matthew 26:1-14


• Mark 14:1-11


• Luke 22:1-6


• John - N/A

THURSDAY

• Matthew 26:15-75


• Mark 14:12-72


• Luke 22:7-65


• John 13:1-18:27

FRIDAY

• Matthew 27:1-61


• Mark 15:1-47


• Luke 22:66-23:56a


• John 18:28-19:42

SATURDAY

• Matthew 27:62-66


• Mark - N/A


• Luke 23:56b


• John - N/A

The Easter Day readings should then be straightforward!

Laughing Len's finest hour:

Hallelujah
by Leonard Cohen

Now I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord.
But you don't really care for music, do you?
It goes like this
The fourth, the fifth,
The minor fall, the major lift,
The battle king composing Hallelujah:

Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Your faith was strong but you needed proof,
You saw her bathing on the roof:
Her beauty, and the moonlight, overthrew you.
She tied you
To a kitchen chair,
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair,
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah:

Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

You say I took the name in vain -
I don't even know the name,
But if I did, well really, what's it to you?
There's a blaze of light
In every word,
It doesn't matter which are heard,
The holy, or the broken, Hallelujah:

Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

I did my best, it wasn't much,
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch.
I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you.
And even though
It all went wrong
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah:

Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah

Genius. Apparently, it took him ten years to write this song - and it was time well spent. Don't let the ghastly version used in Shrek put you off - listen to the original, from Cohen's classic album Various Positions.

My wife originally introduced me to Cohen's music, and it was listening to her copy of Cohen Live last night that prompted this post. One of E's favourite Cohen songs, also from Various Positions, and also on the live album, is If it be Your Will:

If It Be Your Will

If it be your will
That I speak no more
And my voice be still
As it was before
I will speak no more
I shall abide until
I am spoken for
If it be your will

If it be your will
That a voice be true
From this broken hill
I will sing to you
From this broken hill
All your praises they shall ring
If it be your will
To let me sing

If it be your will
If there is a choice
Let the rivers fill
Let the hills rejoice
Let your mercy spill
On all these burning hearts in hell
If it be your will
To make us well

And draw us near
And bind us tight
All your children here
In their rags of light
In our rags of light
All dressed to kill
And end this night
If it be your will

If it be your will.

Cohen is not and, as far as I know, never has been a Christian. But it's difficult not to feel a sense of sad frustration at how close he seems to have got in some of these songs.

Keen students of what Chris Johnson calls "the Current Unpleasantness" within Anglicanism will be aware of the "chicken dinners" myth: the slanderous (not to mention racist and patronising) allegation put about by certain "liberal" bishops after the 1998 Lambeth Conference that African bishops' opposition to the homosexual agenda was the result of their having been bankrolled by wealthy Western evangelicals.

It was apparently Barbara Harris, Suffragan Bishop of Massachusetts who first suggested they had been "bought with chicken dinners". (+Harris was also reported as saying, at the same conference, "If assholes could fly, this place would be an airport" - how charming, Your Grace).

It turns out, however, that such allegations have a long pedigree. The latest piece on Old Solar is a piece by Sean Mellott on the various runners and riders for the Papal succession. At the start of the article, Mellott describes how Rodrigo Borgia came to be elected Pope Alexander VI:

One account has it that Borgia placed the bribes in the electing Cardinals’ evening meal of roast chicken.

:-)

Nice post from Erica about the hymn "Abide With Me".

It is indeed a great hymn. Erica suggests it would be good for funerals, and certainly it used to be very popular at funerals in the UK, along with Psalm 23 sung to "Crimond". Both have now been largely supplanted by Frank Sinatra ("My Way"), Celine Dion ("My Heart Will Go On") and Robbie Williams ("Angels"). *sigh*. Oh, and "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" - a fun enough song, but heartbreaking as a feeble shake of the fist at the "last enemy".

"Abide with Me" is probably best known in this country as "the Wembley Anthem", the hymn sung before the FA Cup Final and other major cup finals at Wembley Stadium. Certainly the most moving time I've ever sung it was the only time I've been to Wembley, for the Rugby League Challenge Cup Final in 1999 - traditionally Rugby League's "big day out", when the finalists' towns or cities are emptied as fans travel from the north of England (RL's heartland) to the Final.

To my surprise, it wasn't just the first verse that was sung, but the whole hymn. And regardless of how many people were thinking about or really believing what they were singing, the sound of 73,242 people bellowing out words like:

Where is death's sting? Where, grave, thy victory?
I triumph still if thou abide with me!

is one that brings a lump to my throat thinking about it even now. An unforgettable experience. Plus, Leeds Rhinos stuffed London Broncos 52-16 (including Martin "Chariots" Offiah running the length of the pitch to score Leeds's first try), the widest winning margin in the history of the competition. So it was a pretty good day all round. :-)

It's doubly moving when you think about how this tradition may have arisen in the first place. The first FA Cup Final at Wembley Stadium was in 1922, only a few years after the slaughter of the First World War, and "Abide With Me" was sung there for the first time in 1927.

It's easy to see how the words of this hymn would have gripped what was at that time still a largely Christian nation, as it struggled to come to terms with the greatest disaster in European history since the Black Death. (Indeed, my understanding is that the overall casualty figures from the War had only become available in around 1923, turning a vague continent-wide sense of trauma into horror at the scale of what had happened).

Let's hope the tradition continues when the new Wembley Stadium is opened in a few years' time.

Bunnie draws attention to CPH's edition of Martin Luther's sermon, How to Meditate on Christ's Passion. "At $4.99," she writes, "it's more costly *not* to buy it".

Aah, there speaks someone who's never had the dubious pleasure of asking CPH to quote for international shipping (I learnt to ask before ordering after I paid $13 shipping on a $3.75 pack of Small Catechism booklets...).

Attractive booklet: $4.99. Unattractive shipping costs: I dread to think. A link to a PDF copy of the text on CPH's website: Priceless.

It is a truly great piece of work. Luther starts off by criticising the wrong ways of meditating on Christ's Passion - as a means to stir up hatred against the Jews, as a superstitious way to acquire merit and defend oneself against bodily danger, or for stirring up merely emotional empathy with His sufferings (the last of these certainly being a potential problem with Mel Gibson's film).

(As for the first point, those who think that Luther's attitude towards the Jews began and ended with the ghastly anti-Semitic pamphlets that blight his later reputation may be interested in reading Pr Joel's post on this subject recently, particularly his point about how Luther's earlier teachings abruptly ended the traditional Holy Week pogroms, and led over time to a greater awareness of how it is our own sins that nailed Jesus to the cross, with the individuals who carried out the deed really acting as no more than our agents).

Luther then goes on to consider the right ways of meditating on Christ's Passion. Firstly, Christ's Passion should lead us to realise how serious our sin really is, "that a person so great as Christ went out to meet this fate, suffering and dying for sinners":

If you truly and deeply reflect on the fact that God’s Son, the eternal Wisdom of God, suffers, you will be filled with terror ... You should deeply believe, and never doubt, that in fact you are the one who killed Christ. Your sins did this to Him ... It is as if Jesus is saying, "Learn from my death what you have earned and what you deserve to receive."

Then we should recognise the comfort of Christ's suffering:

Just as our sins flowed out of Christ and we became aware of them, so we should pour them back on Him again and set our conscience free ... Take your sins and throw them on Christ. Believe with a joyful spirit that your sins are His wounds and sufferings. He carries them and makes satisfaction for them...

If we dwell too much on our sins, going over and over them in our conscience, keeping them close to our hearts, soon they become too much for us to manage and will live forever. But when we see our sins laid on Christ, and see Him triumph over them by His resurrection, and fearlessly believe this, our sins are dead and become nothing. Our sins don’t stay on Christ, but are swallowed up by His resurrection...

Therefore, here is what you need to do. First, stop looking at Christ’s sufferings any longer. They have already done their work and have terrified you. Press forward through all difficulties and see His friendly heart. Look how full God’s heart is with love for you. This love moved Him to bear the heavy load of your conscience and sin.

This should also provide support to us in times of trouble or temptation:

When the day comes that sickness and sorrow weigh you down, think how little it matters compared to the thorns and nails of Christ. If you have to do something you don’t want, or can’t do something you want to do, think about how Christ was led about by others, tied up as a prisoner.

Does pride attack you? Look at how your Lord was mocked and disgraced along with murderers. Do sexually impure thoughts and lust come your way, thrusting themselves on you? Think how bitter it was for Christ to have His tender flesh torn, pierced and beaten, again and again.

Luther concludes:

We need to meditate on Christ’s Passion, not with lots of words or with a showy display, but put it to true use in our lives. Paul admonishes us, "Consider Him who endured from sinners such hostility against Himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted" (Hebrews 12:3). Peter says, "Since Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves with the same way of thinking" (1 Peter 4:1).

But this kind of meditation on Christ’s Passion is not used much. It is very rare, although the Epistles of Paul and Peter are filled with it. We have changed the essence of meditation on Christ’s Passion into a show, and simply painted meditation on Christ’s Passion in letters and on walls.

Or DVDs?

On to happier things - the life-giving Word of God, rather than the money-grabbing Word of Bill. If you haven't done so already, I recommend reading Pr Joel's posts quoting Hermann Sasse on the inerrancy of Scripture and his Christological analogy.

On the subject of inerrancy, Dr Sasse points out that:

The doctrine of the inerrancy of the Scripture has traditionally been considered a conclusion drawn from the fact of inspiration and has been maintained as such by the church. The church did not try to cite a proof passage (e.g., Jn 10:35) until most recent times. People drew the conclusion from God's credibility (Wahrhaftigkeit), since he cannot lie, that his Word must be credible (wahr) and cannot deceive us or tell us lies.

It is this principle that is more important than the specific 19th-century term "inerrancy". This is echoed by Anglican evangelicals like John Stott, who has stated his preference for the more positive language of "trustworthiness" rather than "inerrancy".

Dr Sasse continues:

The doctrine of the inerrancy of the Holy Scripture is an article of faith, just as inspiration is an article of faith. It cannot be proven that the Bible is free from what appears to our human reason to be a contradiction or an inaccurate reference or even a "mistake" or "error," which we imagine we are to criticize pedantically with a red pencil or even to harmonize into nonexistence...

It has pleased God the Holy Spirit to give us his Word in the form in which men of an ancient time and of an ancient culture wrote history, giving us several accounts of the same event without bothering about the differences; employing citations which are not word-for-word (würtlich) according to our standards; numbers which do not want to be taken word-for-word in the sense of statistical historiography; events which lie beyond human experience like the protological (primeval, urgeschichtlich) and eschatological (end-time) statements of the Scripture ...

It is only by receiving the Bible from God's hand as his Word, as it is, and not by trying to make it what our reason expects of a divine book that we will be in a position to believe and understand it as the book of eternal truth.

I think I see what Dr Sasse means there, though there is a danger that this line of argument could lead to the neo-orthodox approach against which Francis Schaeffer argued so effectively, that of seeking to protect the Bible by placing it beyond questions of whether these things really happened or not as historical events in space and time.

There is also a parallel with Dietrich Bonhoeffer's striking point (somewhere in his Letters from Prison, I think) that, contrary to what is commonly assumed, it is not that we conclude from Jesus' perfect life that He is truly God. Rather, the fact that He is God means that actions and words that might otherwise be deemed unrighteous - "violently" cleansing the Temple, or condemning His opponents - are in fact seen to be sinless and righteous acts of a holy God. (I'm no doubt misquoting and misrepresenting Bonhoeffer dreadfully here - is some years since I read his letters - may try to dig out the precise quote at some point).

While Sasse and Bonhoeffer's points both make me feel a little uneasy, that's probably a good type of unease to feel. It is so tempting, with both the Word Incarnate and the Word Written, to smooth off the rough edges and make them fit our preconceived categories of what the incarnate God and His Word ought to be like.

I found Pr Joel's footnote to his second post particularly helpful, when he argues that the "conservative" approach to the Bible "as typified by Fundamentalism" is one in which:

...the formal principle of theology is given a higher rank than the material principle. The doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture is the one great fundamental of "Fundamentalism" from which all the rest of the articles of faith must follow.

In other words, the proper approach is to maintain justification by faith (the "material principle") as the "first and chief article". But justification by faith only stands where we have a reliable and trustworthy promise of forgiveness from God in His Word. Thus the reliability of Scripture (the "formal principle") is a consequence of the doctrine of justification, rather than vice versa.

The consequences of inverting this relationship can be seen in the fact that it is now perfectly possible to deny justification by faith and remain an evangelical in good standing, provided you continue to pay lip-service to biblical inerrancy.

If you are wanting an office suite (word processor, spreadsheet etc) but are dismayed by the licence fees charged by Microsoft, you may be interested in trying out OpenOffice.org, the free (as in both "free speech" and "free beer") office suite based on Sun's StarOffice, and available for Windows, Mac and Linux (in order of increasing quality ;-)).

A beta version of OOo 2.0 is now available for download, and it is a big improvement on 1.1. OOo 1.1 couldn't cope very well with outline-numbered documents from MS Word, but 2.0 does much better.

The only major gap I've noticed compared with MS Word is the lack of a simple cross-reference system for inserting references to other paragraphs. You have to set a manual bookmark for each cross-reference, which is a real pain when drafting legal documents with lots of "subject to clause [x]"-type provisions. But it isn't such a pain that I was prepared to spend the THREE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY QUID!!! (i.e. $700) that Microsoft expect me to shell out for the basic, standard, stripped-down home edition of MS Office.

As it happens, I did find someone on eBay offering copies of MS Office Professional for £8.49 plus postage, but (call me a suspicious Aloysius) I decided that he probably wasn't a legitimate supplier. And quite apart from the moral objections to software piracy, I've seen Microsoft in action against unlicensed copies of their software: "that'll be the licence fee you should have paid at the time, plus the licence fee that you'd have to pay to buy the software now, plus a bit more to make it a nice round number. And if you don't like it, sue the person who sold you it - who we've just bankrupted". So I'm not going to stick my head through that particular noose, thank you very much.

What's particularly galling is that - since my decision to stick with OOo has ended up being based on price rather than ethics - I've now sacrificed the moral purity of a principled refusal to reward Microsoft for using their secret proprietary .DOC format as a means of forcing people to buy their software, and I'm still having to insert cross-references by hand. From him who has not, will be taken away even the little that he has. *sigh*

Sorry, just needed to get that off my chest. Thank you for your forbearance ;-). But just to reiterate: if you are thinking of buying a word processor etc, then do "beware of expensive imitations", and give OOo a try first.

Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose. You are a
mystery novel dealing with theology, especially
with catholic vs liberal issues. You search
wisdom and knowledge endlessly, feeling that
learning is essential in life.

Which literature classic are you?
brought to you by Quizilla
Hat-tip to Rick Ritchie.

No, not that kind of dating. I finally got round to doing something I've been meaning to do ever since I set up this blog, but wasn't sure how to do it - adding "AD" to the dates of posts.

Sounds trivial, and I suppose it is trivial in some ways, but the Sydney Anglican magazine The Briefing came out with quite a persuasive argument a few years ago for using "AD" as often as possible. The article in question has now been reprinted on The Briefing's blog, Couldn't Help Noticing. In it, Kel Richards argues that:

Since "AD" stands for Anno Domini ("in the year of Our Lord") every time you use AD you are saying that Jesus Christ is the Lord of history. It’s a small, simple way of confessing to the Lordship of Jesus.

Richards goes on to say that "This may not strike you as important, but the enemies of Jesus know exactly how important it is", as evidenced by attempts to replace BC and AD with BCE and CE ("Before Common Era" and "Common Era").

By using "AD" wherever possible - "on your letters, emails, cheques, in your diary - anywhere and everywhere you use a date that includes the year" - Richards argues that we have an opportunity:

to advertise the fact that we confess Jesus to be the Lord of history, the Lord of time, and (indeed) the Lord of all.

Richards calls on other Christians to follow his example, and if you're on Blogger and want to join his "little campaign" on your own site, here's how you do it.

Click the "Template" tag, locate the following code in your template, and add the bit I've put in bold:

<BlogDateHeader>
<h3><$BlogDateHeaderDate$> AD</h3>
</BlogDateHeader>

Note the space before the letters "AD". Also, the style tag in your template may differ from mine ("<h3>") - this should be left untouched, whatever it is.

Then simply save your changes, and republish your blog. As Kel Richards says at the end of his article, "Let’s start a movement".

Note: Before anyone points this out, I know that the proper way of putting it is "AD 2005" rather than "2005 AD". However, displaying it as "AD 2005" would need Blogger to change their code to allow this as an option. Perhaps this can be the next campaign ;-)

Spent the weekend in Aldeburgh, on the East Anglian coast. E's parents have bought a flat in Aldeburgh and invited us and the boys along so we could see the flat and also go to some of the events taking place as part of the Aldeburgh Literary Weekend.

The first of these was an enthusiastic and informative talk by Dr Sam Newton on Beowulf and the Sutton Hoo ship-burial. The full story of the Sutton Hoo ship-burial and how it came to be discovered can be found on Dr Newton's website, here.

The lecture included slides of many of the artifacts found in the ship burial, which included works of astonishing intricacy, craftsmanship and beauty, made from gold, garnet and glass. For example, these shoulder clasps:


Here's a close-up of one of the clasps, showing the design of two interlocking boars (note the blue-glass tusks):


The combination of garnet and glass is particularly interesting for historians of art, apparently, since this combined a Celtic skill (glass) with an Anglo-Scandinavian skill (garnet). The garnet is believed to have originated in northern India.

Dr Newton demonstrated how, as early as the 7th century, eastern England was part of an international network of Anglo-Saxon/Scandinavian nations, with astonishing achievements of art and craftsmanship, and a trading network sufficiently advanced that they could make use of materials from halfway round the world. Couple that with the literary achievements of Beowulf and other Anglo-Saxon works - he quoted at length from Cynewulf's poem "Christ", which links the ascension to images of seafaring - it all demonstrates how the term "Dark Ages" is based more on prejudice than on a real assessment of the era's merits.

I suspect that the Dark Ages are called this for two main reasons. First, because comparatively little has survived (not surprising in the damp climate of northern Europe), it is natural for scholars to concentrate on other eras which have more material to study. Secondly, and more importantly, because it's not that the Dark Ages lacked light, but that the light was in the "wrong" place - the church, rather than the secular academy. As Chesterton writes in Orthodoxy:

I found that Christianity, so far from belonging to the Dark Ages, was the one path across the Dark Ages that was not dark. It was a shining bridge connecting two shining civilizations.

If any one says that the faith arose in ignorance and savagery the answer is simple: it didn't. It arose in the Mediterranean civilization in the full summer of the Roman Empire. The world was swarming with sceptics, and pantheism was as plain as the sun, when Constantine nailed the cross to the mast. It is perfectly true that afterwards the ship sank; but it is far more extraordinary that the ship came up again: repainted and glittering, with the cross still at the top.

The term, "Dark Ages", comes from the same classicist mentality that labelled the finest architecture in Europe as "Gothic" (i.e. "barbarian"). Quite apart from anything else, it's an attitude that leads to people missing out one of the great stories of human history: the strange rebirth of Europe. Chesterton again:

Our civilization ought to have died, by all parallels, by all sociological probability, in the Ragnorak of the end of Rome ... Just as Europe was about to be gathered in silence to Assyria and Babylon, something entered into its body. And Europe has had a strange life - it is not too much to say that it has had the jumps - ever since.

Bunnie Diehl has an interesting post on Benny Hinn and his ("allegedly") fraudulent claims to heal people. There is also follow-up to the expose on the White Horse Inn site, as Mike Horton was apparently one of the contributors to the programme mentioned by Bunnie.

One of my theological heroes, the Anglican conservative evangelical Dick Lucas (see past posts here and here), has a simple answer to the claims of people like Hinn, though Lucas tends to reserve his particular ire for Morris Cerullo, following the latter's high-profile events in London in the early 1990s.

Lucas directs people to Mark 1:29-34:

And immediately he left the synagogue and entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. Now Simon's mother-in-law lay ill with a fever, and immediately they told him about her. And he came and took her by the hand and lifted her up, and the fever left her, and she began to serve them.

That evening at sundown they brought to him all who were sick or oppressed by demons. And the whole city was gathered together at the door. And he healed many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons. And he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him.

As Lucas goes on to point out (I paraphrase): "That's what true healing looks like. Jesus heals Peter's mother, and before you know it the whole town has gathered at the door. Just imagine if these people [like Cerullo] really were healing people. They wouldn't need expensive advertising campaigns. We'd see the same thing happening now as happened with Jesus."

The Internet Monk has an excellent essay on the question of whether evangelicals are guilty of overvaluing marriage. The essay is largely aimed at a recent address by the President of the Southern Baptist Convention, Dr Al Mohler, in which he not only affirmed marriage, but also specifically criticised Christians who delay or avoid marriage:

Singleness is not a sin, but deliberate singleness on the part of those who know they have not been given the gift of celibacy is, at best, a neglect of a Christian responsibility.

The iMonk rightly lays into Dr Mohler over this, and sets out a number of ways in which contemporary evangelicals are guilty of an unbiblical denigration of singleness - leading (among other things) to single people being marginalised and neglected in church life, and teenagers being railroaded prematurely into marriage.

Here are just a few, largely unconnected, thoughts in response to the iMonk's essay:

1. As at least one person has pointed out in the comments to the essay, only a man - and a married man at that - could have come out with what Dr Mohler was saying. The gender imbalance in most churches means that many women who would love to get married simply cannot find a suitable Christian husband (and I'm guessing that Dr Mohler would most certainly not advocate that they look for a non-Christian husband instead).
   
   That's certainly the experience of a number of Christian women that my wife and I know. For people in that position of involuntary celibacy, Dr Mohler's comments are at best insensitive, and at worst a kick in the teeth for people who have struggled for years of single life, often having to resist the temptation to get into an inappropriate relationship - or to pluck up the courage to end one they've got into - or to avoid marrying in despair the first remotely plausible Christian man who crosses their path, regardless of suitability.
   


2. That said, the latter danger - of young people feeling compelled to marry before they are ready for it - is not such an issue here in the UK. Here, the danger is far more of the church unconsciously absorbing the surrounding culture's preference for late marriage and overly long pre-marital relationships.
   
   My wife and I got engaged at the age of 22, before I started my post-graduate studies to become a lawyer. I started at the College of Law a couple of months after our engagement, and joined the Lawyers' Christian Fellowship group at our college. I can still remember how shocked the other members of the group were when they discovered that I was engaged at such a "young" age - and how shocked I was in turn by their reaction.
   
   What struck me was how ludicrous it is for Christians to follow the world's approach to this. Question: why don't non-Christian couples feel compelled to get married until they're the other side of 30 and have been together for ten years? Answer: because they don't feel they need to wait till they're married before they start having sex.
   
   Sorry to be so blunt here, but that's the main reason why people don't rush off and get married before they're 25 these days. For Christians to adopt one half of this pattern - marrying late - while trying to reject the other half - sleeping together anyway in the meantime - would be laughable if it were not so downright foolhardy.
   


3. It's always interesting to contrast St Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 7 with the unconscious attitudes which dominate today's church. When my wife and I got married and joined our first church as a couple, we were both struck by the contrast between how this church welcomed us as a married couple, and how our previous churches had treated us as single people.
   
   As a married couple, you are (perceived as) gold dust for a church: and, fair enough, stable married couples and families are indeed the backbone of most congregations. But single people are perceived as a pastoral problem, with married couples seen as more likely to be "net contributors" to church life. (I've blogged before on how this also impinges on evangelistic strategy and approaches to worship).
   
   In comparison to this sort of attitude, how alien St Paul's words sound today:
   
   

   The unmarried man is anxious about the things of the Lord, how to please the Lord. But the married man is anxious about worldly things, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided. And the unmarried or betrothed woman is anxious about the things of the Lord, how to be holy in body and spirit. But the married woman is anxious about worldly things, how to please her husband.

   Now isn't the time to go into all the questions about St Paul's argument in 1 Corinthians 7, and particularly how we should distinguish in that chapter between general principles and points that relate specifically to the crisis ("this present distress", v.25) that seems to have been afflicting Corinth at that time.
   
   But it is clear that St Paul regarded singleness as providing opportunities for serving the Lord - for being a "net contributor" - that were not available to married people, who face the distraction of having a spouse and family to worry about. Any Christian married couple will have some idea of what the Apostle was driving at here.
   


4. It also has to be said that Dr Mohler has a point when he talks about Christian men who refuse to "grow up" and who display "simple sloth, personal immaturity [or] a fear of commitment". For single Christian men - particularly in larger churches with a youthful congregation - the church can be something of a "buyer's market", and this can lead to serious problems.
   
   Some men in this position - by no means all, before anyone reading this takes offence - do not seem to understand the pressures that single Christian women are under, and in some cases this leads to some pretty shoddy treatment. The couple start dating; they seem to be growing closer; maybe they even start kissing; and then, just as the woman is thinking this might finally be "it", all of a sudden Blokey decides that "the Lord is not leading me into marriage at present", and drops her. And then does the same thing again, and again, and again, leaving a trail of emotional and spiritual wreckage in his wake.
   
   I know of one evangelical/charismatic Anglican church with a large number of young, single professionals in its congregation, where the vicar felt compelled to preach a sermon on the issue, basically reading the riot act to the single men, telling them to get their act together and stop treating their sisters in Christ so shabbily. And, back at university - where I was an atheist until my final term, he added hurriedly - the pattern of "serial monogamy" among certain members of my college's Christian Union was something of an open scandal, as my friends and I laughed about how the main benefit in becoming a Christian was clearly the opportunities it provided to "pull".
   

So, in conclusion, at what point should we say that marriage has been over-valued? Well, Dr Mohler certainly seems to have passed that point when he says that marriage is the "ultimate priority God has called us to". But we don't need to go as far as that to fall into the error the iMonk is describing. The real problem is when affirming marriage (a good and necessary task for the church) shades over into denigrating singleness, in a manner that St Paul - and Christians throughout the ages - would find incomprehensible.

Chris Johnson's post about the "atmosphere of rancour and mutual hostility" that seems to have characterised the recent Anglican Primates' Meeting suggests that Private Eye has, if anything, been a little too kind to the Anglican Communion in its latest issue:

THE ALTERNATIVE ROCKY HORROR SERVICE BOOK

No.94: A Service for the Fudging of the Schism

President: Dearly beloved, we are gathered here in a very real sense to say as little as possible about sincerely held differences of opinion that exist between members of our Anglican community over a matter that we do not wish to talk about.

(Here he may call upon representatives of the two parties to come forward.)

President: Do you, Bishop Onanugu, from the Church of the Holy Exorcist in Lagos, agree to be quiet for the next three years in the hope that the whole thing will blow over?

Bishop Onanugu: I don't.

President: And do you, Bishop Marvyn de Lumberjack from the Church of the Village People in Moosejam, also agree to be quiet for the next three years?

Bishop de Lumberjack: I don't.

President: And will you further agree to love, honour and respect one another and your differing traditions for as long as you both shall live?

Both: No, we won't.

President: We will now give each other a sign of peace.

(The Bishops then exchange solemn blows in the sight of the congregation.)

President: We will now sing the Hymn of Thanksgiving for our deliverance from schism.

(All sing Hymn no.94)

HYMN
"Fight the good fight,
We both think we're right."

DISMISSAL

The Archbishop of Canterbury (for it is he): I think that all went rather well.

Bishops: Get lost, beardie!

© Nothing in Common Worship, 2005

Update: Also deserving mention from this week's Private Eye - the following mock headline:

POPE 'IN GOOD HEALTH - BUT DEAD'
Vatican Latest

Interesting post a couple of weeks ago from Rob arguing that "the devaluation of the sacraments will always push the church away from being a people, and toward being only a place".

"How long can a group of regularly gathered Christians consider themselves a church if they continue to marginalize Word and Sacrament?", asks Rob: a question that has come up on this blog, too.

Rob's right: it is by the preaching of the Gospel and the administration of the Sacraments that we are constituted as the church of God; not by being a group of like-minded individuals, assembled in a particular building, singing songs and being nice to one another.

But, paradoxically, Lutherans (and other catholic Christians) nevertheless often have a higher regard for the church building than do non-sacramental (or "sacrament-lite") Christians. This is illustrated by the use of the phrase, "the house of God".

Before becoming a Lutheran, I'd spent ten years having it drummed into me - and, indeed, happily doing some equivalent drumming myself - that the church building is not to be referred to, under any circumstances, as the "house of God". The church building is not like the Old Testament temple: a mystical, special place, the particular dwelling-place of God. It is simply a convenient (or, quite often, inconvenient) place in which to meet together without getting rained on.

No need for especially "reverent" behaviour - talking softly, walking slowly - in a church building, any more than there is in a supermarket. Indeed, the old expectation that people should behave reverently "in church" was denigrated as being alienating, particularly for children and "seekers".

But surely it is in fact appropriate to think of our church building as "God's house". Yes, God is present everywhere; yes, we as Christians and as the church are now truly described as the temple, the place where God's Spirit dwells. But our church buildings are still a very precious resource: the place at which God makes Himself present in Word and Sacrament for the salvation of His people.

Our church had its AGM recently, and one of the reports came from the Property Committee. This committee is chaired by the previous pastor, who took the job upon his retirement from the pastorate ten years or so ago, and I found the closing paragraph of his report rather moving:

We need the help and cooperation of everyone to keep our church premises clean and tidy - to keep it always looking attractive and inviting - a place we are proud to call "GOD'S HOUSE"! More volunteers would be much appreciated, to help with this very important and rewarding work of the care and maintenance of GOD'S HOUSE.

Our sentiment is well expressed by the Psalmist: "How lovely is Your Dwelling Place, O Lord! Lord, I love Your House, the place where Your honour dwells!"