Confessing Evangelical

As Percy Dearmer's corpus passes out of copyright protection (see previous post), here is a sad little tale of how copyright can entangle and hamper hymns (and other resources) that might otherwise have become treasures of the church.

Christopher Idle, in the Real Hymns booklet I referred to before, mentions in passing Canon W H Vanstone's 1976 hymn, Morning glory, starlit sky - "in its revised form which while available in many books may now be illegal to reprint".

Idle expands on this rather puzzling comment in a 1999 article for New Directions. William Vanstone published a book in 1977 called Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense, of which Idle writes:

If the book itself became a landmark for countless studies, seminars, and sermons, the final page was (from a hymn-lover's viewpoint) its crowning glory. Morning glory, in fact; so began the poem which perfectly crystallises the book's pastoral and incarnational theology. What a way to write a hymn! And how satisfying to sing, if we know it was not a commission dashed off in ten minutes, but came to fruition from reflection on long experience.

The poem was then adapted to turn it from a seven-stanza poem into a six-stanza hymn, with the editors (crucially) also changing some of the language, getting rid of Canon Vanstone's "thees" and "thous" and generally modernising the words. It appeared in this form in More Hymns for Today (the second supplement to Hymns Ancient and Modern Revised), and in that form is a beautifully written and challenging hymn.

The full words of the revised, hymn version can be found online here (the original poem is at the bottom of this page). For reasons that are about to become depressingly obvious I am not going to reproduce the full text here, but here are the final two stanzas of the hymn:

Therefore he who shows us God
helpless hangs upon the tree;
and the nails and crown of thorns
tell of what God’s love must be.

Here is God: no monarch he,
throned in easy state to reign;
here is God, whose arms of love
aching, spent, the world sustain.

In an era where it is the theologians of glory who often appear to have all the best tunes, how refreshing to see a hymn from a theologian of the cross. Except that it's highly unlikely you will see it anytime soon, partly because some hymnal editors have found it rather strong meat, but also for reasons explained by Idle:

In March this year, Canon Vanstone died, aged 75. Discerning editors want to include his hymn in future books, but his literary executors are allowing only the original, complete with thee/thou, and minus the other changes which helped to make it a small masterpiece. Result? Although the later text is in wide use, many new books will not carry the words at all. Modern editors may be happy with archaisms from 1777, but not from 1977. They will not choose the superseded text.

I think the "discerning editor" Idle probably has in mind is himself, as he was in the process of editing two hymn books at this time! But how sad that this hymn should find itself stifled in this way.

Labels: christopher idle, copyright, hymns, theologians of the cross

Today is the last day in copyright of one of the most famous hymns of the twentieth century, Percy Dearmer's He who would valiant be. Dearmer died in 1936, and copyright therefore expires at midnight tonight, "the end of the period of 70 years from the end of the calendar year in which the author die[d]" (s.12(1) Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, since you asked).

Dearmer's hymn was, of course, an adaptation of John Bunyan's poem beginning "Who would true valour see" from Pilgrim's Progress. Personally I greatly prefer Bunyan's original, which has itself been adopted as a hymn. However, this adoption of Who would true valour see as a hymn came after, and as a result of, Dearmer's adaptation.

One of the main differences between the two versions (which can be seen together, with a MIDI warning, here) is that Dearmer omits Bunyan's references to "hobgoblins" from the third stanza. Dearmer explained this decision as follows:

"In 1904, we who were working at the English Hymnal felt that some cheerful and manly hymns must be added to the usual repertory [sic]; and this song sprang to mind. It was a daring thing to add [this] song to a hymn book, and it had never been attempted before. To include the hobgoblins would have been to ensure disaster; to ask the congregation of St Ignotius, Erewhon Park, to invite all to come and look at them, if they wished to see true valour, would have been difficult."

This is taken from Christopher Idle's fascinating Grove booklet from 2000, Real Hymns, Real Hymn Books, from which I hope to post some more in due course.

Of course, as Idle points out, the success of both hymns, hobgoblins or no hobgoblins, is "largely thanks to MONK'S GATE and Ralph Vaughan Williams" anyway.

Labels: christopher idle, copyright, hobgoblins, hymns, john bunyan, percy dearmer

One of the greatest pleasures of 2006 has been discovering probably more new music than in any year since I left university. This is largely (though not entirely) thanks to Emusic. I signed up to this service a few months ago, and after a shaky start (during a couple of months I downloaded nothing at all) I've downloaded around 37 albums, plus various odd tracks here and there (some considerably odder than others...).

Here's a top 12 artists that I've discovered over the past twelve months (in alphabetical order by first word, because I'm too lazy to reorder the listing from my ~/Music directory). In some cases, you have my permission to gape at the fact it took me so long:

• Bruce Cockburn: Stealing Fire, Big Circumstance, Life Short Call Now, Inner City Front, Christmas
  
  
• Joanna Newsom: Ys. Mad-as-a-fish, harp-accompanied twittering has never sounded so good.
  
  
• John Prine: Fair & Square, John Prine
  
  
• Laura Cantrell: Not the Tremblin' Kind, When the Roses Bloom Again, Humming by the Flowered Vine
  
  
• Low: Christmas
  
  
• Martha Wainwright: Martha Wainwright (listening to the wonderful, painful, heartbreaking "BMFA" as I type this. It's about her father, and he deserves it.)
  
  
• Sufjan Stevens: Seven Swans (with Illinoise currently in the post, as not available on Emusic UK for some reason)
  
  
• Tanya Donelly: Whiskey Tango Ghosts (not strictly a new discovery, as I love the early 90s album "Star" by her previous band, Belly. But see my note on John Prine, below.)
  
  
• The Piney Gir Country Roadshow: Hold Yer Horses
  
  
• Tres Chicas: Sweetwater, Bloom, Red and the Ordinary Girl
  
  
• Warren Zevon: The Wind
  
  
• The White Stripes: Elephant
  

As the links make clear, all of these have albums available on Emusic, though not all of these were Emusic discoveries: I found a couple of Bruce Cockburn albums in a charity shop (£2 each!), and my wife bought me John Prine's latest album last Christmas*, to my initial bemusement, but rapid delight. (* OK, so "last Christmas" is not technically in 2006. Sue me.)

Incidentally, should anything on this list make you decide you finally want to join Emusic (what kept you?), then do please drop me a line or leave a comment, and I'll send you an invite, which should mean I get some free downloads myself. Look, I've got 26 albums in my "Save for Later" list, so I need all the help I can get...)

Labels: die-DRM-die, emusic, music

Today was devoted, as is traditional for the feast of St John in this realm of England, to post-Christmas sales shopping, in our case in Leeds.

It was a successful trip, and part of my haul included Eamon Duffy's book Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers, 1240-1570" (which neatly used up the book tokens I'd been given for Christmas). I greatly enjoyed Prof Duffy's classic book on pre-Reformation English Christianity, The Stripping of the Altars (even if I think Duffy's thesis in that book involves a degree of straw-manning in his depiction of the "common-accepted view" of late medieval Christianity), and this looks like being another treat.

It's a gorgeous book, full of reproductions of beautiful medieval Books of Hours. However, Prof Duffy's subject in this book is not a conventional study of Books of Hours. Rather, his focus is on the handwritten amendments made to these books by their medieval owners, and by later protestant censors (and just plain vandals - one Book of Hours that Duffy came across in his research had been signed in biro!). As Prof Duffy writes in his preface:

[T]he additions were very varied: portraits of the owners, or customised prayers into which their names had been inserted: extra prayers in Latin, French or English...: detailed information about times of birth for use in the casting of horoscopes: charms and cures and recipes: notes on financial transactions...

Here was an extraordinary archive, a series of unexpected windows into the hearts and souls of the men and women who long ago had used these books to pray.

Prof Duffy goes on to point out that the history of prayer "is as difficult to write as the history of sex, and for some of the same reasons":

Both activities are intensely personal and in the nature of things not readily accessible to objective analysis. As a consequence, the history of prayer, like that of sex, is prone to elicit from historians a good deal of slack thought and overheated comment.

Hence Prof Duffy's concentration on "a very concrete body of evidence", the marginalia of Books of Hours, "beyond all question the most intimate and important book of the late Middle Ages".

This did cause some confusion among the librarians who assisted Prof Duffy in his research, however. One librarian emailed Prof Duffy to say that:

...she felt sure some mistake had been made. The order I had placed for photographs ... listed pages on which the pictures had unfortunately been scraped or blotted or cut out completely, and some had no pictures at all, only ugly scribblings. So she wondered if I had inadvertently written down the wrong folio numbers, and suggested that I might prefer pictures of some of the more handsome adjacent pages.

Another librarian's reaction to being told of Books of Hours being defaced by Tudor protestants was to exclaim, "Well, I only hope they were they own, and not borrowed from a library!"

So I'm now looking forward to embarking with Prof Duffy on what he describes as:

...a journey through the odd but revealing things that people write in, on or outsider their books, hoping, in the process, to catch a glimpse of the inner lives of people who lived in an even more turbulent age than our own.

But I'll try to resist the temptation to add bizarre and inconsequential notes in the margin for the purpose of confusing future historians...

Labels: book of hours, devotion, eamon duffy, history, liturgy

...for the foreseeable future. I updated my Blogger template and Haloscan comments have broken. It seems Haloscan have been advertising a fix "within the next few days" for some weeks. I've spent the last hour and a half trying to sort this out (using the instructions here) and I've lost the will to live. :-(

Update: I've rolled the template back to the "old" style, so comments are back.

Labels: breakages, premature despair

O admirable exchange,
the Creator of the human race,
taking upon himself a body and a soul,
has vouchsafed to be born of a Virgin,
and, appearing here below as man,
has made us partakers of his Divinity.

For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.

- 2 Corinthians 8:9

Labels: christmas, o-antiphons, turvey abbey

The seven "O"s, in reverse order (as can be seen from my previous posts here), make up the words ERO CRAS:

• O Emmanuel


• O Rex Gentium


• O Oriens


• O Clavis David


• O Radix Jesse


• O Adonai


• O Sapientia

"Ero cras" loosely translates as "I shall be there tomorrow" - highly appropriate for the whole season of Advent, and especially so for Christmas Eve.

Labels: advent, christmas, o-antiphons, turvey abbey

Does your granny always tell ya' that the old songs are the best?
Then she's up and rock 'n' rollin' with the rest...

So here it is (nearly) Merry Christmas, and I hope everybody's having too much fun to read blog posts. But hey, I'm not going to let that stop me, whatever Umberto Eco might say. So here's some very non-Slade-esque Christmas music to pass the time.

Now, I may not get the opportunity to follow Thomas' fervent recommendations and watch A Charlie Brown Christmas this year, but I managed the next-best thing: reading The Gospel According To Peanuts while listening to one of my latest eMusic downloads: Vince Guaraldi's 1965 soundtrack album to the film. I'm not normally a jazz fan at all, but I love it.

Other eMusic Christmas downloads (I had a productive morning yesterday):

• Bruce Cockburn's Christmas. Bruce Cockburn is one of my big personal discoveries in 2006 (a good year for finding "new to me" music), after serendipitously chancing upon a couple of his CDs in a charity shop a couple of months ago. His Christmas album is superb, with highlights including the upbeat "Early on one Christmas morn" and gorgeous settings of "O Little Town of Bethlehem" and It Came Upon the Midnight Clear. If you download only one album this Christmas, etc, etc.


• "Slowcore" band Low's festive album, also (imaginatively) called Christmas. Check out the opening track, Just Like Christmas, and also the only original song off the album, If You Were Born Today.

So that should keep me busy for the next few days. But I'm sure I won't be able to resist the occasional blast of Noddy & Co...

Labels: bruce cockburn, christmas, emusic, music, peanuts

O Emmanuel, our king and our lawgiver,
the hope of the nations and their Saviour:
Come and save us, O Lord our God.

cf. Isaiah 7:14

O come, O come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appear.

Rejoice! Rejoice!
Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.

Labels: advent, o-antiphons, turvey abbey

In case you haven't been following, Thomas really doesn't think very much of It's a Wonderful Life. Or A Christmas Carol.

Well, I think It's a Wonderful Life is probably an American thing. I saw it a few years back and found it neither particularly inspirational, nor quite as obnoxious as Thomas finds it (though I take his point). It's something that's on at Christmas over here, but it's not something that symbolises what Christmas is for us. (That would be this instead. Or maybe this.)

But anyway, if nothing else, Thomas' series of posts has made me want to check out the Charlie Brown Christmas Special again. Except they're not showing it on any channel in the UK this year, so I guess I won't. Still, at least that'll avoid this type of incident.

Labels: christmas

O King of the nations, and their desire,
the cornerstone making both one:
Come and save the human race,
which you fashioned from clay.

- cf. Isaiah 28.16; Ephesians 2.14

O come, Desire of nations, bind
In one the hearts of all mankind;
Bid Thou our sad divisions cease,
And be Thyself our King of Peace.

Rejoice! Rejoice!
Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.

Labels: advent, o-antiphons, turvey abbey

O Morning Star,
splendour of light eternal and sun of righteousness:
Come and enlighten those who dwell in darkness
and the shadow of death.

- cf. Malachi 4.2

O come, Thou Day-spring, come and cheer
Our spirits by Thine advent here;
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night,
And death’s dark shadows put to flight.

Rejoice! Rejoice!
Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.

Labels: advent, o-antiphons, turvey abbey

O Key of David and sceptre of the House of Israel;
you open and no one can shut;
you shut and no one can open:
Come and lead the prisoners from the prison house,
those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.

- cf. Isaiah 22.22, 42.7

O come, Thou Key of David, come,
And open wide our heavenly home;
Make safe the way that leads on high,
And close the path to misery.

Rejoice! Rejoice!
Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.

Labels: advent, o-antiphons, turvey abbey

O Root of Jesse, standing as a sign among the peoples;
before you kings will shut their mouths,
to you the nations will make their prayer:
Come and deliver us, and delay no longer.

- cf. Isaiah 11.10, 45.14, 52.15; Romans 15.12

O come, Thou Rod of Jesse, free
Thine own from Satan’s tyranny;
From depths of hell Thy people save,
And give them victory over the grave.

Rejoice! Rejoice!
Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.

Labels: advent, o-antiphons, turvey abbey

Here's a phrase to conjure with: Lord Goldsmith's "explanation" of the decision to halt the anti-corruption investigation into BAE in response to an ultimatum from the Saudi government:

"It has been necessary to balance the need to maintain the rule of law against the wider public interest."

Just let that one roll around inside your brain for a few moments. I've been brooding over that sentence for the past few days, and it doesn't get any less depressing with time.

As a letter to the Guardian pointed out, "the rule of law should not be 'balanced' against 'the wider public interest': the rule of law is the public interest". But Tony Blair - ever the constitutional innovator - clearly regards the rule of law as equivalent to the ministerial code of conduct: useful up to a point, but not something that should be allowed to stand in the way of a busy prime minister with things to get done.

The alternative explanation - trying, like a good Lutheran, to follow the eighth commandment and explain everything in the kindest possible way - is that Lord Goldsmith was not offering an explanation, but making a cry for help; that he was sending out a subtext that he realised how iniquitous this decision was, and was alerting people to the threat it represented to the rule of law. Well, er, maybe.

Setting such speculations aside, I was trying to find a suitable comparison that didn't involve breaking Godwin's Law. It was my wife who nailed it: "It sounds like the sort of thing Robert Mugabe would say".

Update: An excellent suggestion from Daniel S. Ketelby in the comments, who suggests that "it's a Capricorn One statement - an apparently innocuous mistake or mis-statement used in hostage situations to signal to loved ones that all is not well."

Labels: appeasement, merchants of death, politics

My "O Sapientia" posts now feature images taken from these gorgeous banners produced by Turvey Abbey. I love Turvey Abbey's posters/banners, and I hope they can forgive the flagrant infringement of copyright on the grounds that it's also giving them some free advertising...

Labels: advent, pleas for mercy, turvey abbey

O Adonai, and leader of the House of Israel,
who appeared to Moses in the fire of the burning bush
and gave him the law on Sinai:
Come and redeem us with an outstretched arm.

- cf. Exodus 3.2, 24.12

O come, O come, great Lord of might,
Who to Thy tribes on Sinai's height
In ancient times did'st give the law
In cloud and majesty and awe.

Rejoice! Rejoice!
Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.

Labels: advent, o-antiphons, turvey abbey

O Wisdom, coming forth from the mouth of the Most High,
reaching from one end to the other mightily,
and sweetly ordering all things:
Come and teach us the way of prudence.

- cf. Ecclesiasticus 24.3; Wisdom 8.1.

O come, Thou Wisdom from on high,
Who orderest all things mightily;
To us the path of knowledge show,
And teach us in her ways to go.

Rejoice! Rejoice!
Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.

Labels: advent, o-antiphons, turvey abbey

As an Advent special, I'm planning to do brief posts for each of the "O" antiphons between 17 and 23 December (traditionally used as the antiphon for the Magnificat at evening prayer). Each post will consist of the text for the antiphon from Common Worship: Daily Prayer, and the corresponding verse from J.M. Neale's hymn "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel" (MIDI warning). Enjoy!

(And yes, I realise I'm a day late starting this. So you get two days for the price of one today.) ("Tsk! It takes us by surprise every year, doesn't it?")

Labels: advent, o-antiphons

The Lord, your God ... will rejoice over you with gladness,
he will renew you in his love;
he will exult over you with loud singing
as on a day of festival.

- Zephaniah 3:17-18a

Those words from this morning's Old Testament reading brought to mind a passage from Lionel Shriver's novel, We need to talk about Kevin, where the narrator tells her parents-in-law:

"I realise it's commonplace for parents to say to their child sternly, 'I love you, but I don't always like you.' But what kind of love is that? It seems to me that comes down to, 'I'm not oblivious to you - that is, you can still hurt my feelings - but I can't stand having you around.' Who wants to be loved like that? Given a choice, I might skip the deep blood tie and settle for being liked. I wonder if I wouldn't have been more moved if my own mother had taken me in her arms and said, 'I like you.' I wonder if just enjoying your kid's company isn't more important." (p.143)

"Liking" somebody is often regarded as a very poor substitute for loving them. But a moment's self-reflection is enough for us to realise how important it is for our well-being to have people around us who not only love us, but who simply like us; who enjoy our company; who like having us around; who think we're pretty neat.

People can survive without grand romantic passions in their lives, but it's very hard to function for long without knowing there is someone out there who simply likes you.

The importance of being liked as well as loved also applies to our relationship with God. The words, "God loves you", have become so well-worn as to lack almost all force at times. Yes, we may think, God loves us, but that's just the love of the infinitely patient for the infinitely unpleasant. He loves us like a parent changing a filthy nappy on a screaming infant at some unearthly hour of the night: yes, he loves us, but frankly there are things he'd rather be doing.

But those words from Zephaniah bring home a liberating and gloriously enriching truth for us. God doesn't merely tolerate us, he rejoices over us, he exults over us. You get the distinct impression that... he likes us. That he asks us to pray to him and praise him, not because it's good for us, but because he enjoys it.

Think also of those wonderful words from God in Hosea 9:31 (NIV):

When I found Israel,
it was like finding grapes in the desert.

Isn't that wonderful? Such as simple image of joy and delight, almost of relief.

So here's some good news to lift our hearts as we approach Christmas: "Rejoice! God likes you! He enjoys your company! He thinks you're neat!"

TK posted this Christmas questionnaire over at her Katie's Beer blog, and I thought I'd give it a whirl:

1. Egg Nog or Hot Chocolate?

Mulled wine.

2. Does Santa wrap presents or just set them under the tree?

Presents from Father Christmas are wrapped and arrive in a sack in the living room (with small presents in a stocking at the end of the boys' beds). Presents under the tree are from non-magical donors.

3. Colored or white lights on the tree and/or house?

White, for the first year ever. I finally caved in to my wife's preference for white over coloured lights, and I have to admit she was dead right - they look a lot nicer.

4. Do you hang mistletoe?

We don't.

5. When do you put your decorations up?

Today! (I still haven't recovered; the boys got very bouncy...)

6. What is your favorite Christmas dish (excluding dessert)?

A surfeit of roast potatoes.

7. Favorite Christmas memory as a child.

My favourite Christmas experiences from childhood onwards have been visiting York Minster for their Christmas Eve service. It's a few years since last managed this, though.

8. When and how did you learn the truth about Santa?

I'm sorry, but what are you talking about? Is there something about him I need to know?

9. Do you open a gift on Christmas Eve?

No! Wait till the day itself, I say.

Except (ahem) for this year, where my parents bought us a new flat-screen monitor for our PC. It was sent direct to our house, and I felt I ought to plug it in just to check it worked. The moment it came on, I realised there was no way I could now pack it away till Christmas - it is so much better than the old CRT monitor. Forgive me, Father Christmas, for I have jumped the gun!

And our boys got their main presents from their maternal grandparents today, as we're up with my parents for Christmas itself. For a cute overload, go see these videos of kids on quads (click "more from this user" if you want to see the full set).

10. How do you decorate your Christmas tree?

Change of direction this year as mentioned above. White lights, gold/copper baubles, gold tinsel. Most tasteful tree we've ever had. Previously, our Christmas decorations have made the place look a bit too much like a pub - my fault.

11. Snow! Love it or dread it?

What snow? This is south-east England - snow is something you get half an inch of some time in January, if you're lucky. (And then the entire country grinds to a halt. The traditional greeting in such circumstances is, "Tsk! It takes us by surprise every year, doesn't it?", with a rueful shake of the head.)

12. Can you ice skate?

Yes, after a fashion. We normally make a trip to Leeds in the new year to go ice-skating in Civic Square*. (* Now renamed "Millennium Square". But as for me and my house...)

13. Do you remember your favorite gift?

The one that stays in my mind most is the Action Man tank I got one year.

14. What’s the most important thing about Christmas for you?

Christmas Eve has always been the real centre of things for me - mystery, wonder and anticipation. The fact that the 24th is now also our younger son's birthday only adds to the enjoyment of the day.

15. What is your favorite holiday dessert?

Christmas pudding. Though you can't beat a really good mince pie.

16. What is your favorite Christmas tradition?

Christmas carols.

17. What tops your tree?

This year, an angel and a snowflake. Our older son was bouncing around talking about "the angel and the snowflake", which sounded like a great title for a book about Christmas as a happy blend of religious and secular traditions.

18. Which do you prefer, giving or receiving?

Giving. By other people, to me. ;-)

19. What is your favorite Christmas song?

"The Three Kings", by Peter Cornelius.

20. Candy Canes! Yuck or yum?

No idea what these are, but I'm going to go with "yuck".

I'm relieved to see that this doesn't appear to be one of those "tag" memes, but if you do answer these questions on your own blog then please let me know in the comments.

Labels: christmas, meme

Christopher Howse devotes his weekly Sacred Mysteries column in the Daily Telegraph to the subject of hope, occasioned by the re-publication of an anthology Howse edited that was originally called "Comfort", but has now been renamed "The Assurance of Hope". As Howse points out:

In a way this is a less appealing title, but ... it gives a better indication of the book's scope.

The problem with the original title, Howse suggests, was that people misunderstand the nature of "comfort" (though personally I suspect the publishers were also concerned people would think a book with the title "Comfort" was directed only at the bereaved). People confuse being comforted with being comfy:

There is a fabric conditioner called Comfort, and this suggests that being comfortable is something, like chocolate, that people will pay good money for. But it was hardly what I was getting at.

Indeed, complacent self-cosseting (with which many distance themselves from the harshness of the world) is the least likely option to achieve its aim. It is like falling asleep in the snow.

By contrast, Christian comfort is based on what the writer to the Hebrews calls "the assurance of hope". This, like the associated virtues of faith and love, "cannot just be stoked up in the heart by applied effort": these qualities are a gift from God.

Love for God, for example, is "a participation in the love that God has for us, which he showed us first, before we had an inkling of him and his lovability". In the same way:

Hope would be dubious if it rested on our previous experience. It is not like hoping there is enough petrol in the tank to get you home. This hope is based on God's intervention.

God's love is "utterly dependable", because "God has made promises and he has the power to keep them", and he is not a liar.

"God is the cause of future events, as he was of the past," continues Howse. "The covenant he chose to make is factored in to the plan for billions of personal histories."

He concludes:

Therefore the offer of hope is always open. Though we spit out into the dust the good things given to us, and break faith till we can no longer recognise it, hope is still not withdrawn. Hope is not the hand that the drowning man puts up above the waves. It is the hand that reaches down to save him from drowning.

Labels: hope, theology

A month or so ago I posted an item about the excellent Biblical Theology Briefings site at BeginningWithMoses.org. Within hours, the site went down, but I'm now delighted to report that they have retrieved their domain name and the site is now back up again.

Now all they've got to do is fix the weird fault that's currently preventing scrolling the page using Firefox (or rather, Iceweasel)... (Update: Now fixed. Not only great theology, but great customer service too. :-) )

Labels: biblical theology, resurrection

...with the Lutheran Advent Calendar. I want me one of those!

Labels: advent, lutheran

With apologies to anyone for whom this may be old hat, this is great fun: Dasher, a unique keyboard-less text input system.

Instead of typing, you use the mouse to zoom in on letters as they appear on screen. Like a mobile phone's predictive texting system, once Dasher has an idea of what word you may be trying to write, it makes the letters of that word more prominent - allowing the occasional exhilarating experience of writing most of a single word (such as "experience") with a single, bold sweep of the mouse. Experienced users can apparently achieve up to 39 words a minute - far more than with a conventional onscreen keyboard.

If this sounds completely baffling, then I suggest you give it a try, using the Java-based in-browser demonstration. The site includes tips for novices, and a fuller three-page explanation.

What's the point, I hear you ask? Well, partly just the heck of it, but this page suggests some constructive uses: for text input on a PDA; for one-handed or (using an eye-tracker) hands-free typing. It is ideal for many people who have disabilities that prevent them from using a conventional keyboard.

But it could also be useful for password entry on a system where security might be a concern - for example, a shared computer, or your parents' unpatched Windows XP machine that's probably festooned with keyloggers (though I have a better, set-the-controls-for-the-heart-of-the-geek solution to that one, which I may pass on at some point). The password can be entered using Dasher, and then cut-and-pasted into the password entry field.

Or the whole thing could turn out to be just a diverting curiosity - but hey, that's better than nothing, isn't it?

(And no, I didn't type this post using Dasher. Just this parenthesis.)

NASA has announced that it will be reporting a "significant find" on Mars later today. The word on the street is that this will be an announcement that liquid water has been found on the planet's surface. "If confirmed, this would increase the possibility that microbial life could have existed recently or possibly exists now on the Martian surface," suggests Aviation Week.

The NASA news briefing is scheduled for 1 pm EST today.

Update: official confirmation, with photos, now on NASA's website:

NASA photographs have revealed bright new deposits seen in two gullies on Mars that suggest water carried sediment through them sometime during the past seven years.

"These observations give the strongest evidence to date that water still flows occasionally on the surface of Mars," said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program, Washington.

A photograph of the Q&A session from the news briefing is available here.

Thanks to Tom R for drawing my attention, in the comments to my previous post, to remarks made by Tony Payne in the latest issue of The Briefing. Payne writes (emphasis added):

The Reformers themselves famously disagreed about whether Jesus's words 'this is my body' should be taken literally ... Luther could not see any indication in the text itself as to why it should be figurative ... leading to the rather strange Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation in the Lord’s Supper.

Well, I wasn't about to take that lying down, so here is a response that I've sent off this morning (links added for this post):

Dear Briefing,

In his response on the "24x6" Interchange Special, Tony Payne refers in passing to "the rather strange Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation". As both a Lutheran and a long-time subscriber to the Briefing, I have to point out this is both factually inaccurate and a little unfair.

First, the factual inaccuracy: contrary to popular belief, the Lutheran doctrine of the Lord's Supper is not "consubstantiation". Lutherans reject all attempts to explain the Lord's Supper in philosophical terms, whether transubstantiation or consubstantiation. Rather, we take Jesus' words at face value and believe that, by virtue of Jesus' words of institution, the bread is his body and the wine is his blood - a belief often called "the real presence", but perhaps better described as "the real identification".

This belief in the "real identification" of bread and body, wine and blood, is what Christians have believed from the earliest times. What Lutherans firmly reject is the medieval innovation of "transubstantiation" as a purported explanation for this identification, and (even more strongly) any suggestion that the Lord's Supper is a sacrifice offered up by us to God. Rather, eating and drinking the Lord's body and blood in the Supper is a means by which, through faith, we appropriate the benefits won for us in the single sacrifice of Jesus on the cross: "forgiveness, life and salvation", as Luther summarises them.

Next, the unfairness, particularly Payne's description of the Lutheran doctrine as "strange". This doctrine may indeed sound "strange" to non-Lutheran evangelical ears. But, when placed in the historical context of how most Christians have understood Jesus' words at most times, it is less strange than Zwingli's doctrine. If Zwingli couldn't understand "how Luther could miss the metaphorical nature of Jesus' words", that's probably because this "metaphorical" understanding had eluded the entire church for the preceding 1,500 years. (Indeed, it appears to have eluded the apostle Paul, if 1 Corinthians 10:16 is anything to go by.)

Zwingli's doctrinal innovation was not only rejected by Luther, but also (though less vehemently) by Calvin and the Anglican Reformers. It was only with the coming of 18th-century rationalism that Zwinglianism began to sweep all before it among non-Lutheran evangelicals.

Indeed, even Zwingli might recoil from some statements made about the Lord's Supper by Sydney Anglicans, such as the assertion in the "Christian Worship" module of the Moore College Correspondence Course that "too much significance has been given to this rite" by Christians, or Dr John Woodhouse's bizarre suggestion in a Briefing article a few years ago that Jesus did not intend to institute a continuing rite at the Last Supper.

I'll let you know if it gets published (or perhaps Tom R could point it out to me, if I've once again failed to attend adequately to my own copy ...)

Regarding that last reference to Dr John Woodhouse - a former principal of Moore Theological College - the article to which I was referring can be found here (you'll need to scroll down a bit). Sample quote:

If, in Mark’s day, there was a sacramental meal which was understood to have been instituted by Jesus, it is remarkable that he chose to give no indication that, at the Last Supper, Jesus instituted a practice that was to be repeated.

The fact that the narrative is repeated by three of the four gospels - suggesting that it was seen as having at least some degree of continuing significance for the evangelists and their audience - and that the earliest account is found in a passage that is specifically concerned with the "repeated practice" of the Lord's Supper in Corinth, seems to carry little weight for Dr Woodhouse. A "strange doctrine" indeed.

"It's the most wonderful ti-i-i-i-me of the year!..."

I love Advent. It's easily my favourite time of the church year, with its air of mystery and expectation. (And a blessed relief after all those weeks of unremitting green...)

The mood of the season is perfectly captured in the hymn, O Come, O Come, Emmanuel. Is there a more atmospheric hymn? You can almost see the clouds swirling around your feet as we sing:

O come, O come, great Lord of might,
who to thy tribes on Sinai's height
in ancient times did'st give the law
in cloud and majesty and awe.
Rejoice! Rejoice!
Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.

Reminiscent of the opening words of the epistle to the Hebrews in the Authorised Version. I understand it's not the most accurate translation of these verses (contrast the ESV), but there are times when accuracy has to yield to theophany:

GOD, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son...

A good season for collects, too. Lutheran Worship's collect for Advent Sunday is:

Stir up, we implore you, your power, O Lord, and come
that by your protection we may be rescued
from the threatening perils of our sins
and be saved by your mighty deliverance;
for you live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and forever.
Amen.

Good stuff, and I do like the way the Lutheran collects for Advent all begin with those words, "Stir up...". Those words open the Book of Common Prayer's collect for the last Sunday before Advent, "Stir-up Sunday" - traditionally a reminder to make your Christmas pudding later that day!

And it's the Book of Common Prayer that wins the Advent collects contest, with this collect (which is then repeated throughout Advent, along with the collect for each week):

Almighty God,
give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness,
and put upon us the armour of light,
now in the time of this mortal life
in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility;
that in the last day,
when he shall come again in his glorious majesty
to judge both the quick and the dead,
we may rise to the life immortal;
through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.

That's what Advent's all about. I'll almost be sorry to get to Christmas. ;-)