Confessing Evangelical

In York last week, I bought an inordinate quantity of secondhand books, including a copy of Dom Gregory Dix's book, "The Shape of the Liturgy". In the spirit of the "rights of the reader" (specifically, rights #2 and #8; and I expect #3 may soon come into play with this one, too...) - I skipped straight to the famous passage on page 744, beginning:

"Was ever another command so obeyed?..."

(Read the whole thing, here.)

But I was particularly moved by the less-familiar paragraphs that immediately follow Dix's recitation of the ways in which the Sacrament of the Altar has been celebrated "at all times and in all places":

To those who know a little of christian history probably the most moving of all reflections it brings is not the thought of the great events and the well-remembered saints, but of those innumerable millions of entirely obscure faithful men and women, every one with his or her own individual hopes and fears and joys and sorrows and loves - and sins and temptations and prayers - once every whit as vivid and alive as mine are now.

They have left no slightest trace in this world, not even a name, but have passed to God utterly forgotten by men. Yet each of them once believed and prayed as I believe and pray, and found it hard and grew slack and sinned and repented and fell again. Each of them worshipped at the Eucharist, and found their thoughts wandering and tried again, and felt heavy and unresponsive and yet knew - just as really and pathetically as I do these things.

There is a little ill-spelled ill-carved rustic epitaph of the fourth century from Asia Minor:- "Here sleeps the blessed Chione, who has found Jerusalem for she prayed much". Not another word is known of Chione, some peasant woman who lived in that vanished world of Christian Anatolia. But how lovely if all that should survive after sixteen centuries were that one had prayed much, so that the neighbours who saw all one’s life were sure one must have found Jerusalem!

What did the Sunday eucharist in her village church every week for a life-time mean to the blessed Chione - and to the millions like her then, and every year since? The sheer stupendous quantity of the love of God which this ever repeated action has drawn from the obscure Christian multitudes through the centuries is in itself an overwhelming thought.

The ten "rights of the reader", as proposed by Daniel Pennac in his book of the same name:

1. The right not to read.


2. The right to skip.


3. The right not to finish a book.


4. The right to read it again.


5. The right to read anything.


6. The right to mistake a book for real life.


7. The right to read anywhere.


8. The right to dip in.


9. The right to read out loud.


10. The right to be quiet.

And with these ten rights comes one warning: "Don't make fun of people who don't read - or they never will."

This inspiring and liberating manifesto is summarised in a wonderful poster, illustrated by Quentin Blake, and intended for use in schools.

I've just uploaded this morning's sermon from our church, on Mark 10:17-31 - a fitting text for Reformation Sunday, as our pastor points out. Some interesting points as well about the rich young ruler's description of Jesus as "good teacher", and our Lord's apparently-dismissive response: "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone."

Last week's was interesting too, as our pastor tackled the thorny topic of marriage and divorce in Mark 10:1-12 - one of those Sunday's when I dare say many pastors find themselves opening their sermon with the words, "What has our epistle reading to teach us this morning?" ;-).

I still haven't got round to setting these up as streaming audio, so it's plain ol' MP3 downloads at the moment. (Though Mplayer seems to stream them pretty well anyway - or am I missing something here? Pardon my technical ignorance, here...)

Zinedine Zidane, Floyd Landis, and now BeginningWithMoses.org... the curse of Confessing Evangelical strikes again.

The BWM blog announces that:

Due to a technical fault on our part BeginningWithMoses.org will be down for a while. Hopefully you'll find the site fully working and with a fresh update within the first week of November. Until then please bear with us...

Technical fault? What sort of technical fault? Erm, this sort. Oh dear. Those renewal notices are so easy to miss, aren't they?

Well, let's hope they can sort this out quickly. There's a lot of good material on that site, and the sooner it's available again - at whatever website address they end up with - the better. In the meantime, a cached version of the Graham Beynon article I linked in my previous post can be found here.

And if York Minster falls down today - well, you'll know why...

An excellent site that I don't make enough use of is Beginning With Moses, a site devoted to "biblical theology": that is, an approach to the Bible that seeks to put every biblical text in the context of the "big picture" of the Bible. The site takes its name from Luke 24:27, one of the key texts teaching that the whole Bible is about Jesus Christ:

And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.

I've been reading the early chapters of 2 Kings over the past few days, and this led me to recall a very helpful "biblical theology briefing" from BWM on 2 Kings 2:1-25, the account of Elijah's ascension into heaven in a whirlwind.

This includes a helpful diagram showing the parallels between Moses, Elijah and John the Baptist on the one hand, and Joshua, Elisha and Jesus on the other (and it's worth noting how many incidents from Elisha's ministry are paralleled, though surpassed, by that of Jesus: feeding a multitude, raising the dead, etc).

But the point I particularly wanted to highlight in this post concerns Elisha's exclamation in verses 11-12:

As they continued walking and talking, a chariot of fire and horses of fire separated the two of them, and Elijah ascended in a whirlwind into heaven. Elisha kept watching and crying out, ‘Father, father! The chariots of Israel and its horsemen!’ But when he could no longer see him, he grasped his own clothes and tore them in two pieces.

A similar reference is found in 2 Kings 6:15-19, where Elisha's servant is dismayed to find the city in which they are staying surrounded by "an army with horses and chariots" sent by the king of Aram (i.e. Syria):

His servant said, ‘Alas, master! What shall we do?’ He replied, ‘Do not be afraid, for there are more with us than there are with them.’ Then Elisha prayed: ‘O Lord, please open his eyes that he may see.’ So the Lord opened the eyes of the servant, and he saw; the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha. When the Arameans came down against him, Elisha prayed to the Lord, and said, ‘Strike this people, please, with blindness.’ So he struck them with blindness as Elisha had asked.

These references are, I think, typically taken to be an unveiling of angelic activity, normally unseen, that surrounded the activities of the visible people of God. Now angels undoubtedly do exist and are active on God's behalf, but this interpretation of these passages can encourage a "Frank Peretti" view of angels and their activities. Graham Beynon suggests a different meaning, and one which I personally find highly persuasive: that the "chariots of Israel and its horsemen" refers not to angelic "warriors", but to Elijah himself:

[Elisha's] cry at [in verse 12] is often taken to be [a] reference to the chariot and horses of verse 11. However, this would have the oddity of Elisha pointing out the presence of chariots/horses once Elijah had gone. Also the words used are different - chariot is the same but the second reference is to horsemen, not horses.

The more natural explanation is that this [is] a cry with reference to Elijah himself - he is the father, and he is the chariots and horsemen of Israel. This interpretation is confirmed by 13:14 which uses the same expression of Elisha on his death-bed (with no vision of chariots present). Elisha’s cry is therefore focussing on the loss of Elijah, both personally, and to Israel. He is God’s ‘army’ on behalf of Israel, and his loss now is devastating.

To my mind, the reference to 2 Kings 13:14 is conclusive on this question, but this interpretation also holds for the passage in 2 Kings 6 quoted above. The vision of the "horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha" is not the unveiling of an angelic army assisting Elisha by countering the Syrian army, but instead is the unveiling of Elisha's own role as "the chariots of Israel and its horsemen", in succession to Elijah.

This is confirmed by the fact that the next verses do not describe a battle between angels and Arameans, but instead the prayer of Elisha - that is, the exercise of an aspect of his prophetic ministry - leading to the blinding of the Aramean army.

This interpretation has the benefit of focusing our attention on the word of God and on prayer as the means by which we are to work in the world, rather than becoming obsessed (as some corners of the church have become) with spiritual warfare, "battling the principalities" and so on. The parallels referred to above between Elijah/Moses and Elisha/Jesus also mean we recognise that, for all that we gratefully acknowledge the work of angels, it is Jesus who is truly the "chariots of Israel and its horsemen" for us today.

Went to see Waiting for Godot last night.

How was it?

It passed the time.

Just returned from a very enjoyable weekend in York, home of the largest gothic cathedral in northern Europe, York Minster (right; click image for larger version, click here for full-size, 900 KB version).

My uncle (with whom we were staying) sings in the Minster choir, and I attended evensong on the Saturday and the main Eucharist yesterday morning.

It may sound a little unfortunate putting it like this, but the best part of the Eucharist service at York Minster is always the end of it. The service ends with the blessing; then we sing the final hymn; as the hymn ends, the organ continues ex tempore as the choir begins to process out. And then, as the choir reaches the main part of the nave, the organ falls silent; and then this happens (MP3, 460 KB).

This is the Revd G.S. Talbot's setting of Psalm 150, and the linked version is a 30-second excerpt from the version on the St Paul's Cathedral complete psalms collection (sadly, linking the whole thing would be pushing my luck, copyright-wise). The choir continues to sing the psalm as it processes round into the north aisle and disappears east beyond the screen, with the music fading gradually into the distance. The service ends in the same way every week, it's unique to York Minster, and it's one of the most powerful musical (and spiritual) experiences you'll ever have.

It's also precisely how Psalm 150 should be used in the church's worship. As I've said before, Psalm 150 is not about whipping ourselves up into a fervour; it is about releasing the joy and thankfulness that builds up in our hearts as we recall God's goodness towards us. That is why Psalm 150 comes at the very end the psalter, and that is why it is the perfect conclusion to the Eucharist.

Tonight: three short stories from the free software/culture frontiers.

1. The Iceweasel Cometh

I've been using Firefox contentedly since January 2004, but it now appears I will have to get used to calling it "Iceweasel" instead. This follows a dispute between the Mozilla Corporation and the makers of the version of Linux that runs my home PC, Debian.

To cut a (very, very) long story a little shorter (non-geeks feel free to skip a few paragraphs; I'll tell you when you can start reading again): Debian has a strong (verging on fanatical) commitment to "Free software". That is, software that one is free to use, modify and redistribute ("free as in freedom", rather than price). Most Linux distributions flex these principles a little, but Debian's aim is to ensure that all software forming part of "the Debian system" is free.

While the Firefox program itself is Free software, the Firefox logo is subject to licence terms that restrict people's right to modify it. Hence it is, by Debian's definition, "non-Free". Hence it can't be included in Debian. Hence Debian uses a custom logo that consists of a blue planet with no fox round it.

Mozilla have now stated that if Debian is not prepared to include the official, non-Free branding, then it must also stop using the word "Firefox" for the version included in Debian. As Debian is not willing to back down on its fundamental guiding principles, it now appears almost inevitable that Firefox will be renamed "Iceweasel" (with Thunderbird becoming "Icedove").

This has led to a weeks-long orgy of flaming, trolling and general argy-bargy between the opposing camps, with opinion divided between those who see the Debian developers as inflexible fanatics who can't see the wood for the trees, and those who regard Mozilla as having lost sight of the spirit of Free software, even if Firefox still complies with the letter of the "Free software" concept.

For some clarity and sanity from a Debian developer's perspective, I recommend this post by Firefox co-maintainer Mike Hommey, in which he answers some of the wilder allegations that have been made recently about Debian's behaviour.

(NB: non-geeks, feel free to start reading again)

Now, I had been assuming that most neutral observers would think that Iceweasel was a singularly stupid name - petty geek humour at its worst. But when I mentioned it to my wife (a confirmed non-geek), expecting her to roll her eyes at the sheer stupidity of renaming Firefox to Iceweasel, she immediately pronounced the new name to be "gorgeous", much better than "Firefox", and when could we get it installed on our computer, please?

But this still leaves the question of why anyone would care that much about the Firefox logo, for heaven's sake, being "non-Free". Why does all this "Free software" malarky matter, anyway?

Well, to get some idea of this, let's move to the opposite end of the software freedom spectrum, as we enter...

2. The Twilight Zone of Vista licensing

The GNU General Public License (GPL), legal foundation of much of the Free software world, observes in its preamble that, in contrast to the GPL, "the licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it" - and, one might add, even your freedom to install and use it.

Microsoft's new edition of Windows, Windows Vista, is due to ship in January 2007 (a mere four years late, with many planned features still unimplemented, but let's let that pass). Now, Microsoft's licences for Windows have always been rather restrictive, but the new Vista licence contains a couple of humdingers.

First, if you buy a retail version of Vista, you will only be able to transfer it to another computer once. If you are unfortunate enough to have two computers in succession malfunction, then you'll just have to buy a new Vista licence for the third machine. In contrast, the current Windows licence - which is bad enough in its own way - allows unlimited transfers, provided you fully uninstall from the previous machine each time.

Second, you will only be able to transfer your Vista licence to one other person, once. They will not have a right to transfer the licence on to somebody else. What this means is that if you buy a secondhand computer with Vista preinstalled, you will not be able to sell or give it to somebody else without buying a new licence.

The sad thing is, these absurd restrictions are highly unlikely to inhibit people from buying Vista, or PCs with Vista preinstalled. However, sooner or later people are going to find their PCs are getting locked down by Microsoft's licensing validation software, and it'll be interesting to see what happens at that point.

But this is a vivid illustration of the gulf in philosophy between Free software and the proprietary model: "Iceweasel" may seem like a silly overreaction to a marginal problem, but in the end the alternative is a situation in which perfectly reasonable behaviour (such as passing on a used PC to somebody else without needing to pay a licence fee) is prohibited.

This brings us to the third, and final, of our moral fables for the day.

3. Reading the future

Earlier today, Craig posted a short but seemingly-enthusiastic notice for the Sony Reader, saying:

This device will do to the paperback what the iPod did to the walkman.

As I said in the comments to Craig's post:

I assume you meant by your statement, "This device will lock increasing numbers of people into DRMed, platform-specific means of reading, and make it next-to impossible - indeed, illegal - to share, donate or re-sell books". No?

I then recommended Richard Stallman's short essay, The Right to Read, in which RMS speculates on a future world in which all books are supplied in electronic, digitally locked-down form, with unlicensed reading of somebody else's books a criminal offence.

While RMS has no doubt exaggerated his vision of the future a little, the basic principle remains that a system in which physical books are replaced by proprietary, electronic formats will be one in which the freedom to read and share ideas is seriously constrained. If you don't believe me, then I suggest you try giving away half your iTunes collection to the poor.

RMS also makes a sharp point about the cultural and psychological attitudes that are inculcated in us concerning copyright issues, and how this might apply to digital books:

Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught since elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrong - something that only pirates would do.

And the lesson is...?

...having to put up with Firefox turning into "Iceweasel" is a small price to pay, compared with the world of digital control that Microsoft and Sony would love to create, a world in which those controls extend to every aspect of our culture from software to music to reading.

The other lesson is: if you want to upgrade your operating system without incurring the hardware costs that will be demanded by Vista or the onerous legal terms under which it will be licensed - and if you fancy giving "Iceweasel" a spin - then why not give Ubuntu a try? Ubuntu is based on Debian, but is generally regarded as more user-friendly. It is probably the most popular version of Linux for desktop PCs at the moment. If you don't have a broadband connection, they'll post an installation disk to you for nothing.

Or if you don't fancy that: just go and buy yourself a secondhand paperback, read it and pass it on to a friend. While you still can.

A few weeks ago, Michael Spencer posted an essay entitled "Reduced to Jesus", in which he argued for the priority of the gospels over the rest of the New Testament.

Now, Michael was spot-on in arguing that we should read the rest of Scripture, Old and New Testament, in the light of Christ. However, given that the whole of the Bible is the word of, and about, Christ, we have to be careful not to fall into the old liberal error of pitting Christ against Scripture. (And I should stress that Michael has made it clear he is not falling into that error himself.)

This can be a difficult balance to maintain in terms of theoretical principle and argument ("All Scriptures are equal, but some are more equal than others"?). The relationship between Christ and Scripture, and between the gospels and the rest of the Bible, is best expressed liturgically and devotionally.

Liturgically, the priority of the gospels is expressed by having the gospel reading as the last of the three Scripture readings at the Divine Service, by the congregation standing during the gospel, and by ensuring that the sermon generally takes the gospel reading as its text. In this way, the church week by week lives out the balance between the priority of the gospels and the continuing value and importance of the rest of Scripture, rather than merely arguing for it in ways that can be misunderstood.

In our own personal devotional lives, the priority of the gospels is best expressed by ensuring they have a high place in our own devotional life, particularly our personal reading of Scripture. I admit this is an area where I have tended to fall down, with months on end passing in which my reading takes me nowhere near the four gospels.

But I've been reinspired to ensure that the gospels form part of my daily diet by the following words from the Roman Catholic writer, Michel Quoist. These are taken from the chapter entitled "The Encounter with Jesus Christ", from Fr Quoist's book The Christian Response. In this chapter, Fr Quoist describes the value and purpose of regular reading of the gospels as follows:

Precisely because you read your favourite newspaper with regularity you begin to adopt its ideas and attitudes as your own. Precisely because you admire a man, you soon begin to react and to think as he does. Precisely because you like a friend, you begin to act like him and imitate him. If you make the gospels a regular reading companion, slowly you will begin to think, to feel, to judge as Christ does. In becoming familiar with the gospels you must of necessity begin to resemble Jesus Christ.

Fr Quoist also counsels against expecting instant results from our reading of the gospels:

The more you meditate on the gospel message, the more Christlike, the more apostolic you will become. You don't say: I've just eaten and yet I don't feel any stronger. Then don't say to yourself: I've been reading the gospels each day for the last week and nothing is changed in my life.

What response do you expect from your show of love other than to be loved in return? The gifts will come in due time. Don't always be trying to get something out of everything you do. Meditate on the gospels in a spirit of generosity; simply try to be faithful to God's revelation of his love for you.

In the same way, our aim in reading the gospels should not be to find points of immediate application and relevance for our life that day:

If you try to "apply" the gospel message to your life in some artificial way, it will not be the gospel which inspires your life but some merely human conception of it. Let the Holy Spirit breathe where he will, and in his own good time.

The highlighted sentence there is of critical importance. Is it really the word of God that is guiding our lives, or is it our interpretation and understanding of that word, the framework we erect around it? That is certainly a challenge for me.

These principles also extend to our reading of the rest of Scripture. The main purpose of reading the Bible for ourselves is not to get daily moral guidance (do we really need a daily Bible reading to tell us how to live decent lives?), but to be shaped by Scripture over time, in ways we can hardly detect ourselves.

And, as Fr Quoist demonstrates, this is especially true of the four gospels, where we see and hear Christ directly, rather than veiled in Old Testament promise and apostolic proclamation.

I was reading 1 Kings 18 this morning, the confrontation between Elijah and Baal on Mount Carmel. This led me to recall a helpful point made about this passage by Dick Lucas, in particular concerning verses 36 & 37.

Elijah has just set up his altar, and has poured water over it repeatedly, "so that the water ran all round the altar, and filled the trench also with water" (v.35). He then prays as follows:

"O Lord, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known this day that you are God in Israel, that I am your servant, and that I have done all these things at your bidding. Answer me, O Lord, answer me, so that this people may know that you, O Lord, are God, and that you have turned their hearts back."

We are told that, in response to this prayer, "the fire of the Lord fell and consumed the burnt-offering, the wood, the stones, and the dust, and even licked up the water that was in the trench" (v.38), leading the previously-unimpressed Israelites to fall on their faces crying, "The Lord indeed is God; the Lord indeed is God!" (v.39).

The point Dick Lucas made was as follows. This text is often taken as an example of heroic prayer - "Elijah the Prayer-Warrior". Pouring water over the altar was Elijah's way of demonstrating his faith in God to be able to overcome even the most unpropitious of circumstances in response to our prayers. In the same way, we are to pray fervently and with faith, and not to be dismayed by the apparently impossible odds we may face. Indeed, we should avoid making human efforts to "help God along", because such efforts are a sign that we lack Elijah's faith in God to act against all adverse circumstances.

But Lucas then drew our attention to one little line from verse 36:

"O Lord, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known this day that you are God in Israel, that I am your servant, and that I have done all these things at your bidding.

Elijah wasn't "stepping out in faith" with a cunning plan of his own devising, and seeking to get God "on side" by demonstrating his own personal fervour. God had told him to do all this: from the challenge to the prophets of Baal to the pouring of water over the altar, everything Elijah had done in this chapter was at God's specific direction and bidding.

This puts a new perspective on our understanding of Elijah as an example for our own prayers (which he certainly is, as St James points out). But he is an example, not of someone boldly striking out on his own in his prayers and hoping that God will support him if he shows enough "faith", but instead of someone founding his prayers on the revelation of God.

Indeed, when we understand the story in this way, it reminds us what true faith is, and what it means to pray "in faith". The "prayer warrior" approach can encourage an equation of "faith" with personal fervency: so that to "have faith" is to have a certain inner mental/emotional state of certainty and confidence. However, true faith is simply believing and trusting what God has told us.

God said to Elijah, "Go to Carmel and challenge the prophets of Baal in the following way". This is what Elijah did; hence he was acting "in faith". Had it just been some idea Elijah had - an exercise in "holy risk-taking" - that would not have been acting in faith in quite the same way.

Similarly, for us to pray "in faith" is, first and foremost, to pray on the basis of what God has told us about himself and about his will and purpose for us. The Small Catechism's section on the Lord's Prayer is a good demonstration of this: for each petition, we are reminded that it is already God's purpose for his name to be hallowed, his kingdom to come, to give daily bread "to everyone without our prayers, even to all evil people", etc.

The point of this approach is not to say that our prayers don't matter, or that the only effect of prayer is to change our own perception of events and circumstances ("Prayer doesn't change God; it changes me"), but rather to spur us on to pray for these things with greater confidence; in other words, truly to pray like Elijah, confident that God will do what he has promised.

Further to my previous post, Laura Cantrell's website includes a page with over an hour's worth of MP3 downloads, including album tracks, live recordings and Peel sessions. Makes a nice introductory CD (though you'll want to check the "normalize" option before burning it, as the recording levels are a bit variable).

Why are you still here?

Thursday 12 October was John Peel Day and, to mark this, eMusic's latest "eMusic Dozen" features twelve John Peel Favorites.

Now, to be honest, I didn't listen to John Peel all that much while he was alive. He was notorious for playing very left-field music, and typically you'd turn on his show to find yourself in the middle of a twenty-five minute slab of Polish industrial techno. But, as people used to say about Panorama, while I may not have listened to his show, it was good to know it was there.

Peel's favourite band was The Fall, and I already knew I liked them, so I wasn't expecting any major revelations through looking at this list of twelve tracks. But one that caught my eye was an album called "Not the Tremblin' Kind" by someone I'd never heard of called Laura Cantrell. The description began:

Like Peel, New Yorker Cantrell is a DJ too — having hosted the terrific "Radio Thrift Shop" on East Orange, NJ, listener-supported standby WFMU, one of the closest things in the States to a station promulgating Peel-ish eclecticism.

So I thought, OK, she's a New York DJ, so it's probably going to be some unlistenable dance cacophony. But hey, she looks quite presentable (never forget this: I am very shallow) and it's a cracking title, so let's have a listen.

This might be a good opportunity for you to have a listen too.

And by crikey, it's absolutely gorgeous. Modern country/folk, reminiscent of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, or Tres Chicas (another eMusic discovery). I immediately downloaded it and have spent the rest of the day listening to it (alternating with my other download of the day, from The Piney Gir Country Roadshow, also worth a listen).

John Peel described Laura Cantrell's album as:

"My favourite record of the last ten years and possibly my life."

Which is somewhat unexpected given the type of music with which he was generally associated. But then, life is full of pleasant surprises (a number of which have, for me, been coming via eMusic over the past few months).

This morning's Guardian headline was what Bill Deedes would call "a bit of a marmalade-dropper":

One in 40 Iraqis 'killed since invasion'
US and Britain reject journal's finding that death toll has topped 650,000.

650,000 dead since the invasion? Say it ain't so!

And of course, there has been no shortage of people who are more than willing to say precisely that, including the Guardian's own Michael White. But before dismissing this study too hastily, it is worth reading the statistical analysis by Daniel Davies, also on the Guardian website, who argues that The numbers do add up.

First up, the headline figure of 650,000. Davies expresses some regret that this "point estimate of the number of excess Iraqi deaths" has been given so much prominence:

Point estimates are almost never the important results of statistical studies and I wish the statistics profession would stop printing them as headlines.

Such estimates "are only interesting in so far as they demonstrate or dramatise the answer" to the real question posed by the survey, namely:

As a result of the invasion, have things got better or worse in Iraq? And if they have got worse, have they got a little bit worse or a lot worse?

Despite attempts to disparage the survey as only examining "small samples extrapolated to the whole country", the sample was in fact a large one: "12,801 individuals in 1,849 households, in 47 geographical locations". This is comparable with political polls, which typically survey 2,000 people and achieve a margin of error of +/- 3%.

But even if we just look at that sample and make no attempt to extrapolate, the results are still "shocking":

In the 18 months before the invasion, the sample reported 82 deaths, two of them from violence. In the 39 months since the invasion, the sample households had seen 547 deaths, 300 of them from violence. The death rate expressed as deaths per 1,000 per year had gone up from 5.5 to 13.3.

It's worth reading over that a couple of times - and perhaps imagining those figures as applied to the 2,000 households in the part of town where you live; imagining a situation in which the overall death rate in your town has more than doubled, with the death rate from violence increasing seventy-fold.

(Incidentally, some might wonder if Iraqis hostile to the invasion might be "lying and systematically exaggerating the number of deaths". But Davies points out in a footnote that "death certificates were checked and found in 92% of cases".)

As Davies concludes, the answer to the qualitative question posed by the survey is clear: "things have got worse, and they have got a lot worse, not a little bit worse". Even if one's hunch - or hope - remains that 650,000 is an overestimate, it is clear that the official figure of 60,000 is almost certainly an even wilder underestimate:

If you go out and ask 12,000 people whether a family member has died and get reports of 300 deaths from violence, then that is not consistent with there being only 60,000 deaths from violence in a country of 26 million. It is not even nearly consistent.

One of the most illuminating points made by Davies is one of general application to any discussion of statistics:

How Would One Get This Sample, If The Facts Were Not This Way?

And in this case, only one answer is really possible: that the study was fraudulent:

If a Mori poll puts the Labour party on 40% support, then we know that there is some inaccuracy in the poll, but we also know that there is basically zero chance that the true level of support is 2% or 96%, and for the Lancet survey to have delivered the results it did if the true body count is 60,000 would be about as improbable as this.

As Davies concludes:

Anyone who wants to dispute the important conclusion of the study has to be prepared to accuse the authors of fraud, and presumably to accept the legal consequences of doing so.

Of course, the study's authors have, alas, saved their critics the trouble of doing this, by offering the easy target of "650,000 dead", allowing people to attack that attention-grabbing headline while ignoring the human catastrophe that is still revealed by these figures.

Me and m'main man Hugo are like that, but it turns out that everybody's favourite democratically-elected Bolivarian strongman is not a man to be trusted when it comes to reading recommendations.

"It reads easily, it is a very good book", Chavez told the UN concerning Noam Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival. A few days later, the Guardian reported that Chavez's recommendation had caused sales of Chomsky's book to rise sharply.

Unfortunately this news item coincided with a delay in a delivery I was expecting from Amazon, so finding myself short of reading matter, at a loose end in Ottakars, and with the money obviously burning a hole in my pocket, I picked up a copy of Chomsky's book.

All I can say is that if Our Hugo thought it "reads easily", then the Spanish translation must be masterful. The English version, by contrast, is an unreadable, hectoring rant from beginning to - well, I'd say "end", but I've only managed to grind my way about 2/5ths of the way through it so far.

What's particularly frustrating is that somewhere lurking inside this book there may be a good and persuasive book struggling to get out. US foreign policy since the second world war does have some pretty ugly aspects to it, not least in Latin America (which probably explains Chavez's enjoyment of the book). This is a point recognised even by many neo-cons, whose "draining the swamp" strategy - whatever history's verdict upon it might be - was partly motivated by an acknowledgement of the failure of the "but he's our son of a bitch" approach.

And, talking of "our sons of bitches", Chomsky makes some telling points about the way in which the US has subsequently claimed the credit for the overthrow of dictators that it had either supported almost to the bitter end (Ceausescu, Marcos, "Baby Doc" Duvalier) or whose worst crimes had been committed while still enjoying US support (Noriega, Saddam).

However, what this subject needs is something more along the lines of Elizabeth Kolbert's book on climate change: a sober, calm, relentless litany of attested facts. Chomsky's rhetoric, by contrast, is so overheated and extreme that one ends up feeling quite sympathetic towards the Reagan administration. Sifting the truth from the flailing, spittle-soaked invective is almost impossible. (Chomsky's suggestion that the US enjoyed a unipolar hegemony even during the Cold War is a particular low.)

Roger Scruton probably nailed it when he said recently that:

Prof. Chomsky is an intelligent man. Not everything he says by way of criticizing his country is wrong. However, he is not valued for his truths but for his rage, which stokes the rage of his admirers. He feeds the self-righteousness of America's enemies, who feed the self-righteousness of Prof. Chomsky. And in the ensuing blaze everything is sacrificed, including the constructive criticism that America so much needs, and that America - unlike its enemies, Prof. Chomsky included - is prepared to listen to.

If anyone can suggest where that "constructive criticism" might be found, I'd be glad to hear it. In the meantime, as I'm sure you needed no telling: don't bother with Chomsky's book.

Still, on the plus side: after a BBC radio report following Chavez's UN speech, at least I now know how to pronounce "hegemony".

Mark Steyn continues his journey through the Great American Songbook with an essay about... well, that would be telling. Steyn begins his article by saying that, back in his disc-jockey days, he liked to stump his listeners by using the following opening verse in "spot the intro" competitions:

This day and age we’re living in
Gives cause for apprehension
With speed and new invention
And things like fourth dimension
Yet we get a trifle weary
With Mr Einstein’s theory
So we must get down to earth at times
Relax, relieve the tension...

As Rolf Harris would say, "D'you know what it is, yet?" (and no points for saying, "Um, a bit lame?").

No? Well let's continue:

No matter what the progress
Or what may yet be proved
The simple facts of life are such
They cannot be removed...

Now that's beginning to ring the very faintest of bells, but nope, still can't put my finger on it. Still, we've reached the chorus now. How does that go, then?

You must remember this...

And, as Steyn puts it, "the minute you hit those first four words you can almost hear the audience sighing in contentment", as they start recalling that a kiss is still a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh, and that the fundamental things apply As Time Goes By.

This reminded me of a point Mark Steyn made recently in his weekly slot with Hugh Hewitt, talking about Frank Sinatra's pianist Bill Miller (starts about halfway down the linked page), when he spoke about the mistake many singers make when singing the "standards":

You know, I love the great American songbook. And the one problem I find [is] you'll just go into a piano bar late at night, and there'll be a talented singer doing the song. And everyone reveres, everyone knows Cole Porter and Rogers and Hart, and all these people, that they're great now. They're regarded as classics. And so, people are over-reverential to them.

One thing they do is they always sing the verses. And often times, the verse to a great song is not terribly good. It was just something they had to have because it was used in a spot in a show or a movie, or whatever.

This is a mistake that Frank Sinatra and Bill Miller didn't make:

[T]hey were very good at deciding we don't need this verse, it's just some boring bit of stuff in the beginning, it's not necessary to the meat of the song, and whatever. They were very...so in that sense, they were sympathetic in what they regarded as great material.

And sometimes, verses are best forgotten for all sorts of other reasons. I still haven't recovered from the shock of discovering the second verse to "The Sun Has Got His Hat On". It's pretty unbelievable. All I can say is: we've come a long way.

Our church website now includes MP3 sermon recordings. So far, only this morning's sermon (MP3, 8.8 MB) is available, but we hope that most weeks' sermons will be added in future. You will quickly discover that pastors in English Lutheran churches don't always sound very English!

This morning's sermon is on Mark 9:30-37, and includes some particularly helpful comments on verse 35 ("If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all") and its connection with the doctrine of vocation.

The audio level is a little wayward for the first 30 seconds, as I was fiddling with the input levels (no time for a soundcheck before the service!).

The Register reports a terrifying threat to the people of Arlesberg in Germany: a giant earwig advancing upon the town, as revealed by Google Maps or Google Earth.

I'd like to remind the earwigs that, as a trusted blogging personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.

The Times's subeditors, previously famed for their skill at crafting boring headlines - "Small earthquake in Chile: not many dead" is the most famous - have come up with something a little naughtier today. Couldn't have happened to a nicer chap...

I was reading Ephesians 6 this morning, and was struck by a couple of thoughts concerning verses 10-17 of that chapter.

Verse 12 is a statement I think we often mentally mislay:

For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.

So often our focus is on (real or perceived) "enemies of blood and flesh", and I'm sure we can make our own list of these. And because we focus our attention on human "enemies", we then forget, or misunderstand, what Paul says about how we are to engage in "our struggle". We turn the struggle into something that is principally concerned with what we do or refrain from doing, whether that is by campaigning, writing blog posts, voting in church meetings (or political elections) and so on. In other words, law.

In contrast, just as Paul shows us our enemy is not who we think it is, so he shows us a different way in which to tackle this enemy:

Therefore take up the whole armour of God, so that you may be able to withstand on that evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm. Stand therefore, and fasten the belt of truth around your waist, and put on the breastplate of righteousness. As shoes for your feet put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace. With all of these, take the shield of faith, with which you will be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

Now, the various parts of the "whole armour of God" (highlighted in bold) can often be seen as separate, and indeed some of them can often be given something of a "law" emphasis: living a righteous life, sharing the gospel, maintaining faith in God.

But it seems to me that these verses should not been understood as law, but as gospel. The whole armour of God is not a ragbag of different tasks assigned to us, but the single gospel of Christ in its different functions: as the "belt of truth", as the gift of righteousness which is our breastplate, as the message whose proclamation overthrows the devil, as the salvation which protects us, and as the sword by which God defeats his (non-"blood and flesh") enemies.

Seeing these verses as being solely concerned with the gospel and its work in and through us also saves us from "over-interpreting" them by minute examination of each metaphor. These verses are best taken as poetry, whose metaphors work upon us in their own right, rather than it being necessary for each image's "objective", didactic meaning to be unpacked before we can "really" understand this passage. I think it was Alan Bennett who said (to paraphrase, poorly) that if we can interpret a poem fully in prose, then it wasn't really poetry to begin with.

In my previous post, I said I would be looking at the ELCE's position on confirmation and communion. This is set out in a 2002 report by the ELCE's Commission on Theological and Social Concerns, entitled "Confirmation, Catechesis, and First Communion in the Lutheran Church" (PDF).

The report provides a helpful historical overview of the development of confirmation from the early church through to the Reformation and beyond. I don't propose to look at this now, as it covers similar ground to my earlier post. The report is concise and readable, and it is worth reading the whole thing (regardless of whether you're an ELCE member).

One point the report does make in this section, though, is that Luther continued the rite of confirmation only with some reluctance ("it is clear that [his] heart was not in it"), and his strong preference was for lifelong catechesis of young and old, in conjunction with regular private confession and absolution. The report's conclusions recommend a recovery of this emphasis on lifelong catechesis (while remaining tactfully silent on private confession, a practice that is by no means repudiated by the ELCE, if you catch my drift).

The report then draws a number of conclusions concerning the ELCE's current practice. I don't think one has to read too far between the lines to discern the personal position of the report's authors, particularly in the section outlining some of the "dangers" of the current approach. Observing that "confirmation in the ELCE and her sister churches has traditionally taken place at the age of 13-14, or older", the report states as follows:

a. Historically considered, this is extremely late to delay a child's first reception of the Sacrament.

b. Although some arguments may be put forward in favour of such a late age, it was originally due to pietistic, rationalistic, and political reasons, which have nothing to do with the Gospel.

c. There is no scriptural or confessional reason to withhold the Sacrament from a child who is able to be instructed, examined, and absolved.

d. The pre-teen and teenage years can be among the most spiritually difficult times in a person's life, a time when the strength afforded by the Sacrament is most needed.

However, the report's conclusions at first appear to draw back from the obvious implications of these observations:

The ELCE's current practice that a person's first reception of Holy Communion in our church be preceded by intensive catechetical instruction and marked by a public rite of acceptance to the Lord's Supper should be continued as a useful norm. Such a process and rite may or may not be called "confirmation".

This sounds awfully like "business as usual" (especially if we overlook how lukewarm the expression "a useful norm" sounds, like Tony Blair describing Gordon Brown last week as "a remarkable chancellor").

But then the next paragraph continues (I love the delicate irony of the opening words):

Recognising that withholding the Sacrament from younger children may not always be justifiable, pastors and parents should be encouraged to begin the catechetical and examination process at the age that is suitable to each individual child. Holy Scripture places upon parents the primary responsibility to raise their children in the faith, and pastors are called to assist them in this duty.

The last sentence sounds very much as if the primary responsibility for assessing whether a child is ready to receive communion lies with the parents, with the pastor's responsibility being to "assist" them in making this assessment. The paragraph as a whole certainly makes it very difficult to argue that a six- or seven-year old child who is "able to be instructed, examined, and absolved" should be excluded from the Lord's Table. (For the purposes of this discussion, we are setting aside the question of whether that is that is the correct basis of assessment.)

The next conclusion is even more pointed:

In the absence of a specific Word of God on the matter, congregations must learn to be tolerant of a diversity of practice in such matters as the age of "confirmation".

As is the following paragraph, which states that:

Members of the congregation should trust the pastor's judgement in dealing with unusual circumstances.

Now that cuts both ways, of course. It means that parents shouldn't get too uppity if the pastor judges that their child should not be admitted to communion. But the overall dynamic appears to be: parents have the primary responsibility for determining their child's readiness to receive communion; the pastor is to assist them in making this determination; and any members of the congregation who don't like it should (ahem) "trust the pastor's judgement" (which I think translates as, "butt out").

I may be reading too much into this. Certainly I don't believe the report is justifying parental militancy - a particular danger for middle-class parents accustomed to making sure their children get what the parents determine the children need - or attempts to overthrow the pastor's authority.

But the report's final conclusion is unarguably correct. What's more, I believe the process it commends could lead only to one conclusion on this issue (and I suspect the report's authors were well aware of this):

Unity of understanding and practice in this matter would be improved if the pastors and members of the ELCE would carefully review together such basic teachings as the nature and benefits of Holy Baptism and the Lord's Supper, grace and justification, catechesis and confession of faith.

Once we really understand and appreciate what the Lord's Supper is, and the gifts we receive in it; and once we really understand and appreciate that our children's baptism has fully incorporated them into Christ and given them the Spirit, as surely as our own baptism has for us; once we shake off the last influences of pietistic and Reformed thinking concerning the shape of the Christian life; then how can we withhold from our children the gifts we claim for ourselves?

As we've seen in my previous post, Chris Jones shows convincingly that confirmation in the Lutheran church is a humanly-devised ceremony (not that there's anything wrong with that; we're not Presbyterians, after all), leading to the conclusion that we should not:

...set up a humanly-devised ceremony as a barrier to the sacrament by which our Lord delivers the forgiveness of sins and the life of the Kingdom to His people.

Chris then goes on to consider the implications of this for the age at which we admit children to the sacrament of the altar:

The connection between confirmation and first communion was, I think, originally due to the notion that baptism without confirmation was somehow incomplete. If a person has not been fully initiated into the Church (by having received the gift of the Holy Spirit), how can that person receive Holy Communion?

But if, as we have seen, baptism is full initiation into the the faith, bringing both incorporation into Christ and the gift of the Holy Spirit, then "then what more needs to happen to enable a person to receive communion?"

Chris engages with a couple of points I made in the comments to my original post on this topic. As regards my comment that infant communion "represents a major change in the practice of ... at least the western church", Chris points out that the practice of the western church has been broken for at least 1,500 years and it's about time we fixed it (I paraphrase).

The more weighty objection to infant communion is "that children do not have the understanding necessary for the faith to 'discern the body' in the sacrament of the altar", an argument based on 1 Corinthians 11:27-29. Chris responds:

I do not think we want to identify faith with understanding, or worse, to make faith dependent on understanding - Credo ut intelligam and all that. As soon as we do that, we cut the ground out from under infant baptism. Faith is, of course, a gift of grace, through Word and Sacrament - not the product of our intellect and thus dependent on our understanding.

I think that is a good point, and one that needs further consideration. If anyone has a persuasive argument to defend the standard western position on 1 Cor 11:27-29 then please share this in the comments.

But it was Chris's closing sentence that I found most convincing, and that led me to press him to "wump up" his comments into a proper post:

Theologically, we Lutherans are clear on the sufficiency of baptism as the rite of initiation; we ought to be consistent and uphold baptism as the only gateway one must pass on the way to the altar.

He shoots, he scores, and the crowd is going wild.

So where does this leave us? Well, on a personal level, while I find Chris's arguments on infant communion persuasive, I do not yet feel sufficiently strongly on this to start campaigning on this issue in our own congregation. Also, it's such a non-starter at present that it would only undermine arguments for pre-confirmation admission of older children (on which I do feel very strongly).

I raised the question of "primary school-age communion" with our pastor at our elders' meeting last night. It would be unfair on my pastor to share his own views here, but he did direct my attention to the ELCE's official position, which I will look at in my next post on this topic.

Chris Jones supplied some comments to my post on age of admission to Communion, which he has now expanded into that most rare and welcome of treasures (and no, I'm not being sarcastic), a post on his own blog in which he looks at Lutheran theology and practice relating to confirmation and communion. Not that there is a great deal of connection between Lutheran theology and practice on these issues, as Chris persuasively argues.

First, Chris reminds us of the background to the western practice of confirmation. Originally, "baptism, confirmation, and first communion were always done together, in a single rite of Christian initiation", by the bishop for each city. Later, as the church grew, this ministry was delegated to presbyters within each congregation. However, the western and eastern churches followed different approaches to this:

In the East, baptism, confirmation, and the eucharist were all delegated to the presbyter; but in the West, only baptism and the eucharist were delegated, while confirmation continued to be reserved to the bishop.

As Chris continues, "From this decision flowed all of the confusion in the West over confirmation and first communion", as baptism and confirmation came to be regarded as separate practices, not merely practically but theologically. The result of this was that:

[Baptism] then came to be regarded as somehow incomplete, as not fully incorporating a person into the Church. For if there is a later, separate rite bestowing something that a person that he did not receive in baptism, then baptism itself must be somehow lacking.

By the time of the Reformation, "rite of confirmation ... had lost its integral connection with baptism", with confirmation being regarded as the rite by which the gift of the Holy Spirit was bestowed on believers. By contrast, the Reformers - while retaining the practice of confirmation - insisted that baptism effected both incorporation into Christ and the gift of the Holy Spirit:

In our Lutheran theology, baptism is understood as complete initiation into the Church and into Christ, bestowing both union with Christ and the gift of the Holy Spirit.

The only difference between baptism as understood in the Lutheran Church and baptism/confirmation as practiced in the early Church is that we don't have a particular ceremonial expression of the gift of the Holy Spirit. But the theology, the intent, and the effect are the same.

So where does this leave the Lutheran practice of confirmation? Chris's view is that keeping confirmation separate from baptism was "historically and liturgically incorrect", and that "the truly right thing to do would have been to restore the unity of baptism and confirmation as one rite". In any event:

Given this history, and given the Lutheran theology about what happens in baptism, it is clear that whatever confirmation is in the Lutheran Church, it is not the same thing that was called "confirmation" in the early Church. It does not have the same theological basis, the same intent, nor the same sacramental effect. It just happens to have the same name.

As a result, "there is no doubt that 'Lutheran confirmation' is a ceremony of human invention. We have never claimed otherwise."

The application of this to the question of admission to communion is then clear:

So what kind of sense does it make to set up a humanly-devised ceremony as a barrier to the sacrament by which our Lord delivers the forgiveness of sins and the life of the Kingdom to His people?

Which is what I was driving at with my earlier statement that "the Lord's Supper is in the Bible, and confirmation ... ain't".

(Chris, in his comments on my previous post, questioned whether that last statement was strictly correct. I'm unpersuaded, but in any event my statement was more descriptive of what led me personally to start receiving communion before I was confirmed [as an Anglican] following my return to the faith in 1994, rather than a considered theological assertion.)

This brings us on to the question of the appropriate age for admission to the Lord's Table, which I'll look at in my next post.

Josh S finally takes his leave of the Lutheran Blogosphere - which he, to all intents and purposes, founded back in 2002.

Thanks to the wonders of the Internet Archive, Josh's original posts from May 2002 can still be read online. They include praise for a book by Dr Hermann Sasse, a long (but cogent) rant about non-Lutheran views on the Lord's Supper, and a post beginning with the words, "I need to bitch". Sound familiar?

At least Josh learnt about paragraph spacing in the years that followed. ;-)

Oh well. Blogging's loss will be more than one LCMS congregation's gain, God (and his chosen instrument, the Holy Voters' Assembly) willing. I look forward to posting MP3s of Pr Strodtbeck's sermons, some time c.2010.

Until then, things will seem strangely quiet round here - though I'll be keeping my eye out for the appearance, sooner or later, of a pseudonymous Lutheran with an abrasive but intellectually brilliant blog...

Baffled by the Conservatives' new logo (right)?

Officially, it symbolises the Tories' "Vote Blue, Go Green" message under leading video-blogger David "Dave" Cameron, but Steve Bell has an alternative explanation. You'll never look at it in the same way again (particularly the blue bit).

(Oops, I gave the wrong link to the Webcameron site. Should have been this one instead...)