Confessing Evangelical

As I keep forgetting to cross-post, I think the time has come to shut things down over here. All content will now appear only on the new site at www.confessingevangelical.com. Please update your bookmarks and RSS feeds accordingly. Thanks!

Labels: on the move, signing off

Cross-posted, with comments enabled, at www.confessingevangelical.com. Please update your bookmarks and RSS feeds.

Our church is, once again, marking Lent by publishing devotions written by members and friends of our congregation.

This year, I've got these onto our church website by setting up a dedicated Wordpress blog. This provides an easy way to enable each day's posts to appear automatically on the site each day (without the painful Drupal hacking that was required last year), and means we can also make an RSS feed available.

Anyroad up, the first devotion, reflecting on what it means to say "I have been crucified with Christ", should now have appeared on the site. If you do follow this year's devotions, you'll find some real gems in there. And on some other days, you will be blessed with a delightful opportunity to practice the Christian virtues of patience and forbearance. Either way, you win. ;-)

Labels: church year, devotion, lent

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Our church service on Sunday was something of a J.M. Neale benefit gig, with the good John Mason providing three of the four hymns. The only other hymnwriter to get a look-in was Joseph A. Robinson, whose Transfiguration-themed hymn "'Tis good, Lord, to be here" includes the marvellous final verse:

'Tis good, Lord, to be here.
Yet we may not remain;
But since Thou bidst us leave the mount,
Come with us to the plain.

Returning to J.M. Neale, the final hymn was his translation of the 11th century Latin hymn, Al­le­lu­ia, dul­ce car­men. The footnote in HS98 describes this hymn as "burying the Alleluia" before the season of Lent, when the church refrains from singing "Alleluia". So it seemed a good item to post the day before Ash Wednesday:Read more »

Labels: church year, hymns, lent

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Speaking of WH Auden, yesterday's Guardian included a Nancy Banks-Smith review of the South Bank Show's celebration of Auden's centenary. This anniversary has not attracted a great deal of attention, Banks-Smith points out:

Even the Royal Mail has refused to commemorate with a stamp Auden's popular poem that begins: "This is the Night Mail crossing the border."

Why is Auden not being celebrated more fully? Well, for starters, there's The War. You know: the one which he spent sitting in one of the dives on Fifty-Second Street:

His unforgiven sin was to skedaddle to America in 1939. Interviewing Auden, Richard Crossman said, as tactfully as possible, that even Crossman's stepchildren, who were evacuated, felt they were missing all the fun and had demanded to come home. Didn't Auden feel he was missing a great experience? No, he didn't. The sense lingers that, just for a handful of silver, he left us.

Though Alan Bennett takes a more sympathetic line, as pointed out by Michael Henderson in the article I linked yesterday:

Alan Bennett was on to something when he said that Auden, having fallen in love with a precocious Jewish teenager, Chester Kallman, and decided to stay in New York, was simply "an early GI bride".

Well, maybe. Returning to Nancy Banks-Smith, Bennett also turned up on the South Bank Show:

After the war, the young Alan Bennett went to hear Auden lecturing at Oxford. He advised would-be writers to study geology, fairy stories and Norse sagas. "My heart sank," said Bennett, who really prefers to listen to old women talking.

But there's another reason why the nation failed to clasp Auden to its bosom: he wasn't very nice:

Bennett said, "He was a bully, Auden, all his life. Not an attractive figure. Not lovable. Not cosy." Not Betjeman, then? "He is very much the notion of what people think of as a poet. He was untidy, smelly, a shambles, and that's what people think a poet should be," Bennett mused on.

That calls to mind my favourite story about Auden. He enjoyed word games - anagrams, palindromes - and apparently used to make great fun of TS Eliot for having a name that was an anagram of "Toilets". He stopped after someone pointed out in return that "Wystan Auden" is an anagram of "A nasty unwed"...

Labels: poetry

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Today is Shrove Tuesday, a.k.a. "Pancake Day" (hooray!). Fr Patrick Reardon provides some interesting background information about the day:

The day before [Ash Wednesday] is called Shrove Tuesday because of the custom of making one's confession of sins before the beginning of the Lenten fast. (To "shrive" means to cleanse.)

Among the less devout, however, Shrove Tuesday became an occasion of feasting sumptuously, partying, and general whoop-di-doo. It is irreverently called "Fat Tuesday", Mardi Gras in French. Numerous individuals that have not the slightest intention of maintaining a Lenten fast nonetheless observe Mardi Gras with a celebration called "carnival", a word derived from the Latin expression carni vale, meaning "goodbye to meat"!

I hadn't realised that's where the word "carnival" came from. Fascinating.

Of course, this is a great illustration of the contrast between the English and those of more, ah, southern European temperament. In countries with a more Latin spirit, this is a day for flamboyant partying, parades, music and general uproar. In England, it's a day for eating pancakes, and (crucially) for being really excited about doing so...

Labels: church year, englishness, it's a fascinating fact

Cross-posted (and indeed only comprehensible), with comments enabled, at www.confessingevangelical.com. Please update your bookmarks and RSS feeds.

Well, the autumn scene was pleasant, but a bit impersonal and, as my wife put it, "Christian calendar-ish". So in its place we have this panorama of Malham Cove, from my home county of Yorkshire.

So, it's from my home county and it looks nice. OK, that's the unpretentious reasons done with. The other reason is that it's inspired by WH Auden's poem, "In Praise of Limestone". Michael Henderson quoted this poem at the end of a fascinating piece in Saturday's Telegraph on Auden, "The clearest voice of the twentieth century".

Opinion is divided as to whether the poem refers to the Italian landscape, or the Pennine landscape of Auden's boyhood. I suspect there's a bit of both in there - perhaps the sight of the Italian landscape (which seems to fit the middle section of the poem better, with its references to gods who can be "pacified by a clever line/Or a good lay", operatic tenors etc.) called to mind the Yorkshire landscapes "that we, the inconstant ones, are consistently homesick for".

The poem closes with the following lines, which (among other, more elevating effects, honest) immediately made me go out looking for panorama shots I could put on the top of this page:

The blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from,
      Having nothing to hide. Dear, I know nothing of
Either, but when I try to imagine a faultless love
      Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur
Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.

As for the photograph itself, this is courtesy of Flickr user Peter Theakston, who has very graciously released his photos under a Creative Commons "Attribution" licence. As J Random Hermeneut put it recently, "See how easy blogging can be when we all learn to share?"

[Note: the linked version of the Auden poem contains a disastrous typo in the fourth line from the end of the second stanza. This should read, "So, when one of them goes to the bad, the way his mind works/Remains comprehensible". Not "incomprehensible". I mean...]

Cross-posted, with comments enabled, at www.confessingevangelical.com. Please update your bookmarks and RSS feeds.

In my previous post, I looked at the loosely-drawn parallels that can be made between different religious groups - for example, Shia Muslims and various disparate groups within the church - whose outlook is dominated by a belief in the rapid betrayal of an earlier "golden age".

As I observed in that post, this can often lead to an idealistic and activist approach. After all, if a golden age existed once, then who's to say we can't make it exist again? However, these dreams of a newly-forged age of gold almost inevitably end in failure and disillusionment. This leads to another parallel, as the frustrations of those who look back to the "golden age" are sublimated into a forward-looking longing for a "messiah" who will come and set things straight.

Hence the (mainstream) Shia look for the return of the twelfth Imam. Similarly, while virtually all Christians confess, in theory, that Jesus will "come to judge the living and the dead", I'm sure there is a strong correlation between having a worldview in which the decay of church and society from an earlier state of purity is a key theme, and having the return of Christ as a vivid, central part of daily Christian experience ("Perhaps Today!"). It shouldn't be that way, but it frequently is.

This may go some way to explaining the observation made by a certain "Pirate" on the BHT the other day, concerning Southern Baptists:

I oddly admire certain things about Baptists. I admire their crazy eschatology for the simple reason that at the heart of it is a belief that Jesus really could return at any minute. Honestly, if Jesus actually did return today, 95% [of] the Lutherans, Presbyterians, Catholics, Orthodox, and Anglicans in the world would be completely dumbfounded, despite being orders of magnitude more orthodox in our abstract formulations of eschatology. An actual return in our lifetimes just doesn’t fit into our outlook. Heck, there’s a whole system of theology out there explaining why it won’t be now or any time in the near future. But the Baptists would be saying “I knew you were coming soon!” That’s gotta be worth something.

I think Pirate is absolutely spot-on here. We have friends from independent evangelical churches who amended the standard marriage vows to read, "Till death us do part, or the Lord returns", and if some of us think that sounds strange or "hyper-spiritual", then I suggest we're the ones with some rethinking to do about how seriously we believe in the return of Christ.

Labels: eschatology

I've just finished reading Barnaby Rogerson's book The Heirs of the Prophet Muhammad, the sequel to The Prophet Muhammad, which I have mentioned in passing before.

As with its predecessor, The Heirs of the Prophet Muhammad is a great work of storytelling, a highly readable introduction to a fascinating (and critically important) period of history. Rogerson is not a Muslim, but a very sympathetic observer of Islam. At times this goes too far: Rogerson bemoans the takeover of the nascent Islamic state by the "tough-minded generals [and] scheming politicians", even while his books make clear that the careers of Muhammad and the four "Rightly Guided Caliphs" who followed him had no shortage of war and politics. However, the transition described (and deplored) by Rogerson is still real enough.

Rogerson's greatest ability, however, and the reason why I wholeheartedly recommend both his books, is to help the western reader understand and to some extent inhabit the historical mindset of early Islam. While a more sober history will give you the facts about the early decades of Islam, Rogerson makes you feel the tragedy of them, a tragedy which (he argues) still lies at the heart of the Islamic identity today.

It is impossible not to be moved by Rogerson's presentation of figures such as Ali or his brutally-slain son, Husayn. Ali - son-in-law of the Prophet, hailed by all Muslims as one of the great spiritual figures of early Islam, but regarded by Shias as having been cheated of his inheritance before Muhammad's body had even grown cold - eventually became the fourth Caliph, but was murdered at the end of years of civil war within the Islamic state. His son, the Imam Husayn, then died with his family and was beheaded after making his desperate, doomed last stand at Kerbala in AD 680. He had been summoned to rescue true Islam from the politicians and dynastic monarchs who had now taken it over, only to be abandoned by those who had called him to the fight.

The book is subtitled, "And the Roots of the Sunni-Shia Schism", and looks at the fifty years following Muhammad's death. The split between Sunni and Shia has its origins in those years - indeed, its origins go back to the hours immediately following the death of Muhammad. And Ali, "the linchpin of the whole tale of the Heirs of the Prophet", is a key figure in this split between Sunni and Shia.

As Rogerson writes towards the end of the book:

All Muslims revere Ali as the most enlightened spiritual figure after the Prophet Muhammad. All acknowledge him as a Caliph. All Muslims agree that with the assassination of Ali in 661, the era of holiness within the Islamic community is over.

This is the tragedy of the first half-century of Islam:

[J]ust a generation after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632, the rule of the enlightened Heirs of the Prophet is finished. So after just thirty years, the tough-minded generals, the scheming politicians, the police chiefs and the old clan chiefs are once again back in power. By 661 men of the ilk of Muawiya, Amr and Mughira have triumphed over the Muslim Empire of the Arabs. No one doubts this, whether they are Sunni Muslims or Shia Muslims.

The difference between the two groups lies in the question, not of whether the example of Muhammad was betrayed by his successors, but how quickly:

For the Shia the betrayal of the inheritance of the Prophet begins within a few hours of Muhammad's death, while the Sunni consider that despite the slow creeping decay in spiritual values, this first generation of the Heirs of the Prophet set an example that can usefully be studied by mankind.

Hence the collective example of the first four Caliphs - Abu Bakr, Omar, Uthman and Ali - are taken by Sunnis as a "heroic role model" for the Muslim community.

By contrast:

The Shia concentrate their spiritual energy on a sense of immediate loss, of a divine vision so quickly betrayed by mankind. They argue that only Ali was qualified to uphold the spiritual values that underpinned the whole essence of Islam. This is a melancholic vision, though on another level it allows the Shia to aspire to create a holy state such as Ali might have instituted on this earth.

As such, the Sunni/Shia split seems to follow a pattern and dichotomy found quite often in human affairs, one from which the church itself is far from immune.

It is interesting how the myth of a golden age lost and betrayed can be a spur to activism, of the desire to recreate that age of purity in the world today. This is presumably because, if you believe perfection was possible once, then it follows it is possible again. On the other hand, if you believe that even the so-called "golden age" was itself complex and ambiguous, then this can lead to a greater acceptance of the limitations of human endeavour, a greater realism - but it can also lead to a complacent acceptance of the second-rate and unjust.

To that extent, Shia Muslims find their counterparts in some strange places: in a certain type of "confessional" Christian, calling the church back to a repristinated age of orthodoxy; or, at the other end of the scale, in the type of liberal Christian who weeps tears of frustration at how the pure, simple vision of Jesus the Galilean teacher of righteousness was usurped and betrayed by Paul.

Cross-posted at www.confessingevangelical.com. Please see the post on that site for any comments.

Labels: history, islam

I should add that the migration to the new site would not have been possible without Ady's New Blogger Import script. Thanks, Ady, for preparing this plug-in - and for patiently bearing with the clamouring hordes who kept pestering you with feature requests and other queries as you worked on it!

Labels: gratitude, housekeeping

Well, it's coming up to almost three years since I started this blog, though slightly over three years since I started blogging. I moved around a bit for a few weeks, being as much a bloghosting serial monogamist as a theological one.

Me and Blogger have been going steady since then, but I've now decided to try something new. This is partly motivated by the hassles of the transfer to New Blogger, but in reality it's just my Inner Geek grabbing hold of the steering wheel while muttering something about "root access". So, it's goodbye confessingevangelical.blogspot.com, and hello to the bright, shiny, new, Wordpress-and-Debian-Etch powered www.confessingevangelical.com.

The new site is still a work in progress - in particular, the autumnal theme is subject to change without notice, and I'll need to sort the sidebar out - and I'll continue to cross-post at the old address for a few weeks (or until I get bored of doing so), but please update your sidebar entries, RSS feeds and so on to the new address.

I'm disabling comments on the old blog - at least once I can get access to Haloscan; dang public library web-filtering software - but for the moment I can't guarantee I'll be able to transfer them to the new site: the posts themselves transferred over fine (except for images), but the Haloscan import fell over with a resounding thud.

See you on the new site! :-)

Labels: housekeeping, on the move

Vladimir Putin joins the Guardian commentariat to tell the world, with an admirably straight face, that the US must stop acting unilaterally outside its territory and instead behave according to the "uncontested" political principles of "openness, transparency and predictability".

As one commenter puts it on the Guardian website:

Anna Politkovskaya, Igor Domnikov, Sergey Novikov, Iskandar Khatloni, Sergey Ivanov, Adam Tepsurgayev, Eduard Markevich, Natalya Skryl, Valery Ivanov, Dmitry Shvets, Paul Klebnikov, Magomedzagid Varisov, and Alexander Litvinenko could not be reached for comment.

Labels: guardian, politics, pots and kettles, putin

Richard Dawkins continues to provoke debate, with a recent article in the Times by Alister McGrath provoking a firmly-expressed response from Dawkins himself, with a further letter defending McGrath today.

Well, all this is simply splendid fun, of course, but I think the last word on Richard Dawkins ought to go (but won't, not even on this blog - sorry) to the following letter in the 30 December 2006 issue of the Spectator, from John Barrett of Sandgate, Kent:

Sir: The most cogent comment that I have read about Richard Dawkins’s beliefs was on an internet forum: ‘Richard Dawkins gets to marry Lalla Ward and he still doesn’t believe there’s a God?’

Labels: dawkins, doctor's assistant, spectator

Apparently, Sting decided to re-form The Police in a sudden "light-bulb" moment of inspiration. I'd like to think this was prompted by reading "his" op-ed piece in the Onion: You Know, I Used To Be Kind Of Cool Once:

It hit me the other day, and it was like, "Whoa—that's so bizarre." I was sitting at one of my pianos, working out some chords for my forthcoming album The Tepid Heart, when the wife asked me to pick up some diet soda. Since the staff was off (it was a Sunday), and the kids were due home from football practice soon, I said sure and drove down to the cornershop...

At first, I thought, "Wait... Is this just my memory playing tricks on me? I mean, I recorded the love theme from The Three Musketeers with Bryan Adams and Rod Stewart, for goodness' sake. How cool could I possibly be?" But then I dusted off a bunch of the old LPs and, boy, was I amazed ... I was like, "Did I write this stuff? No way!"

Labels: sting, the onion

Our pastor's sermon this week (delivered by one of the elders, as our pastor is on holiday) was based on 1 Corinthians 13:1-7. As with Dick Lucas' definitive sermon on 1 Corinthians 13, our pastor was keen to stress that this is not a cuddly "hymn to love", but was instead aimed directly at the Corinthians' chief failings as expanded on elsewhere in the letter. As Lucas puts it:

No girl in Corinth wrote to the apostle with the request that he speak at her wedding when next he came by, on the grounds that he wrote so marvellously about ‘love’; if she wrote at all it would be to warn Paul about the angry and resentful reception he might expect from the elders as a result of his plain speaking.

For example, in verse 1, Paul compares speaking in tongues - very popular among the Corinthians - with the "clanging cymbals" used in pagan worship. In other words, as our pastor put it:

Paul takes [the Corinthians] back to their days of pagan idolatry to show them that speaking in tongues without the love of Christ behind it is as useless as pagans worshipping idols. Ouch.

But our pastor is never happier than when he is disturbing the comfortable and comforting the disturbed, and he obviously felt the need of the former at this point in the sermon:

We must be careful here, because I think we can often come down too heavily on the Corinthians. Speaking in tongues is not an issue among us. But perhaps a bit of modern updating for Lutherans might do the trick.

He then goes on to offer the following rewrite of verses 1 to 3 for contemporary Lutherans (I've adapted this slightly to fit in more closely with the ESV text):

If I preach, teach and confess the true, unadulterated Word of God as expounded by the 1580 Book of Concord, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have The Lutheran Hymnal and, understand the proper distinction of Law and Gospel, and if I know that I am justified by grace alone, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give £x a week to the church, and occasionally show up to services, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Spot on. As our pastor went on to say:

Often, Lutherans take pride in their wonderful heritage and begin to sound a bit like the Corinthians with their tongue-speaking. That, I think, is a pretty close equivalent to what Paul was saying to the Corinthians.

He stressed that this is not to say that the Bible, the Lutheran Confessions, the liturgy, Law and Gospel etc are not "vitally important", any more than Paul was devaluing spiritual gifts:

[H]e just wanted [the Corinthians] to use them correctly: in love. So it is with us. We use the Bibles, the Confessions, the liturgy, our stewardship in love to God and in service to one another.

To listen to the sermon, click here, or click here to download it (MP3). As mentioned before, it is not our pastor you will here, as he is on holiday. But that's quite authentic in itself: after all, Paul's letter would have been read out to the Corinthians by somebody else!

Labels: 1 corinthians 13, love, lutheran, sermons

Great article by Jon Ronson in yesterday's Guardian Weekend magazine, in which Ronson seeks to find out who are the most favoured targets for junk mailers.

He does this by creating a number of personas - Happy Ronson the ultra-ethical green consumer, Paul Ronson the suave millionaire, George Ronson the elderly Daily Express reader and Titch Ronson the unemployed, single 38-year old who spends far beyond his limited means on pornography, gambling, martial arts magazines and Nazi memorabilia - and signs each one up to a representative sample of services and products, "forgetting" in each case to tick the marketing opt-out box. He then waits to see who gets the most junk mail.

Depressingly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, it is Titch Ronson who proves the most alluring magnet to direct marketers, especially those selling financial services:

Titch has so far been offered loans by Ocean Finance, Shakespeare Finance, e-loanshop.com, TML Mortgage Solutions, loans.co.uk, Blair Endersby, easyloans.co.uk, an MBNA Platinum card and an American Express Red card.

What is it that makes Titch such a catch? Ronson eventually catches up with the company that sold Titch's details on to these finance companies (most of whom are in what you might call the "Bad credit? Good credit!" sector), a free online lottery called Loopy Lotto. Loopy Lotto's director, Dan Bannister, has a clear-eyed view of his subscriber base:

"People who are looking for something for nothing and are into instant gratification ... It's not a massively upmarket list."

Ronson explains his experiment, and in particular how Titch Ronson found himself bombarded by junk mail from companies that had bought his details from Loopy Lotto. Be warned - Dan's reply is about to take us to the dark underbelly of the direct marketing world:

Dan nods, pleased and unsurprised. He explains that Titch sounds classically, enticingly, "sub-prime". "Sub-prime is the golden egg," Dan says. "If, as a direct marketer, you can identify sub-prime characteristics, you can do very well."

Dan goes on to explain that "the vast majority of junk mail - be it loans or otherwise - is directed at the sub-prime market":

"The best thing you can tell a client is that you can accurately identify sub-prime individuals. Which is why, when people are asked to fill in lifestyle surveys, they'll often see questions like, 'Have you ever experienced difficulty getting credit?' or, 'Have you ever missed a mortgage payment?' Those are the sorts of triggers that will identify you as potentially sub-prime."

As Ronson observes:

It is slightly chilling to realise there are rational, functional people up there employed to spot, nurture and exploit those down here among us who are irrational and can barely cope. If you want to know how stupid you're perceived to be by the people up there, count the unsolicited junk mail you receive. If you get a lot, you're perceived to be alluringly stupid.

This unpleasant truth is confirmed when Ronson visits Stuart Dagg of the company Sonar, which produces computer software used by "list brokers". Initially, Stuart follows the party line as he explains the company's activities:

We continue silently to watch the PowerPoint presentation until we get to the part where the postcodes of every British household are divided into four social types: "Wealthy", "Comfortable", "Less Comfortable", and "Struggling".

"The formula is very simple," he tells me. "A company like MBNA will market to these people." He points at the word "Wealthy". "But they won't market to these." He points at the word "Struggling".

"Why not?" I ask.

"Because the last thing a credit card company wants is to have customers default on their loans," Stuart explains.

All well and good, but what about Titch Ronson? Titch, who earns less than £10,000 per year but spends between £10,000 and £24,000 on his credit card (according to the lifestyle survey completed in his name)? How come he gets bombarded by credit offers while affluent Paul Ronson gets nothing?

"OK," Stuart says, cutting me off. I look at his finger. It's hovering over the word "Wealthy". "I suppose," he says, "this is a bit more real world..."

His finger begins to move southwards down the list, past "Comfortable", and comes to rest somewhere between "Less Comfortable" and "Struggling".

"Yes," he says, almost as if he's admitting it to himself for the first time. "This is a more, uh, real-world example of who will be marketed to."

UK readers will probably want to click here, next...

Labels: direct marketing, exploitation, guardian, isaiah 3:15

I'm nearing the end of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Discipleship (for previous posts, see here). The closing section of his penultimate chapter ("The Saints") is another critical passage, I think, for understanding Bonhoeffer's argument in the book as a whole. Overall, it demonstrates that Bonhoeffer really is saying nothing that cannot be found in the Lutheran confessions (see my post on Love and the fulfilling of the law) or, more importantly, in the New Testament.

Like Melanchthon, Bonhoeffer gives short shrift to the idea that faith and good works are mutually exclusive:

We shall be judged according to our works - this is why we are exhorted to do good works. The Bible assuredly knows nothing of those qualms about good works, by which we only try to excuse ourselves and justify our evil works. The Bible never draws the antithesis between faith and good works so sharply as to maintain that good works undermine faith. No, it is evil works rather than good works which hinder and destroy faith.

As he continues, "the law of God is still in force, and still demands fulfilment (Romans 3:31). And the only way to fulfil the law is by doing good works".

However, critically, for the Christian the doing of good works is not a matter of law, but of gospel. It is not that God commands that the believer must do good works; rather, God promises that we will do good works:

We cling in faith to Christ and his works alone. For we have the promise that those who are in Christ Jesus will be enabled to do good works.

See Ephesians 2:10, cited by Bonhoeffer in an earlier paragraph.

As a result, what Bonhoeffer is advocating is emphatically not an inward-looking obsession with how "sanctified" we are, or even a self-willed effort to become more "sanctified" by our own endeavours. On the contrary:

From this it follows that we can never be conscious of our good works. Our sanctification is veiled from our eyes until the last day, when all secrets will be disclosed.

If we want to see some results here and assess our own spiritual state, we have our reward. The moment we begin to feel satisfied that we are making some progress along the road of sanctification, it is all the more necessary to repent and confess that all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags.

Bonhoeffer continues:

Yet the Christian life is not one of gloom, but of ever increasing joy in the Lord. God alone knows our good works, all we know is his good work. We can do no more than hearken to his commandments, carry on and rely on his grace, walk in his commandments, and - sin.

We ourselves will have no idea of the good works that God has done in and through us until the last day:

All the time our new righteousness, our sanctification, the light which is meant to shine, are veiled from our eyes. The left hand knows not what the right hand does. But we believe, and are well assured, "that he which began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Jesus Christ" (Philippians 1:6).

In that day Christ will show us the works of which we were unaware. While we knew it not, we gave him food, drink and clothing and visited him, and while we knew it not we rejected him. Great will be our astonishment in that day, and we shall then realise that it is not our works which remain, but the work which God has wrought through us in his good time without any effort of will and intention on our part (Matthew 25:31ff.).

So we are not to be cast into despair by our apparent lack of good works, our continuing sinfulness. Rather, we are "to look away from ourselves to him who has himself accomplished all things for us and to follow him".

The good works will come, not because we roll up our sleeves and make a tremendous effort of the will (unlike those half-hearted Christians, over there), but because God has promised that they will happen. And we won't even realise it has happened until we stand before him.

Labels: bonhoeffer, discipleship, sanctification

A few months ago, I came across a secondhand copy of a book by the late Alistair Cooke entitled "The Americans", a collection of fifty of Cooke's "Letters from America" from between 1969 and 1979. I enjoyed listening to Alistair Cooke in his later years, and it has been a delight to read these letters from his golden age.

A number of the letters, unsurprisingly, cover the Watergate affair. Dramatic irony has not been kind to the first of these, from September 1972, in which Cooke takes a lofty view towards "the Watergate caper", before predicting that the American people would quickly become bored with the whole business ("Do I sense the first polite suppression of a yawn?").

Well, as you may recall, things didn't quite work out that way, and the later letters are a fascinating record of how the whole "caper" unravelled. They end with a gripping account of the final days of the Nixon presidency, when "suddenly ... the missing link fell into place as audibly as the lock clanking on a prison door" with the discovery of "incontrovertible proof" that the President had lied.

The letter was broadcast the day after Nixon's resignation, and in the final paragraph of his letter, Cooke summarises the options with which Nixon had been faced following the Judiciary Committee's vote to impeach him:

So now. He could resign and assure himself of $156,000 a year in pension and allowances. Or he could be impeached, convicted and have $18,000 pension as an old Congressman and an old sailor. He could still face criminal prosecution, once he was restored to ordinary citizenship. He might bargain for immunity, as Vice President Agnew had successfully done. He might beg for a pardon from the incoming President. He might go on believing against all the omens that he would somehow salvage one-third of the Senate. These were the alternatives he faced, as three or four of the leading conservatives in the Senate were meeting to decide whether to tell him he had to go. The rest you know.

Great stuff, but 110 pages later my enjoyment of Cooke's prose turned into slack-jawed admiration as he described (in a letter from a quiet news week in 1978) something of the logistics of producing his letters: "the taping, the air-mailing of the tape, the passage through customs three thousand miles away, the first transmission...", all the time with the risk that "something cataclysmic" had happened in the intervening period of some days between recording and broadcast.

This had been particularly pertinent in the "days and nights" of Watergate, when "cataclysms were routine":

I remember having to re-do my talk several times so that some listeners around the globe wouldn't think I'd been asleep during the previous twenty-four hours.

Even then, Mr Nixon's final decision to abdicate came about thirty-six hours after my deadline for recording the talk. As I sat before the microphone, people were either saying, "He's bound to go" or "Of course, he'll brazen it out." I therefore had to contrive a final sentence which, if you will allow me, I now believe to have been the cagiest sentence I ever spoke into a microphone.

Faced with the on again-off again desperation of the man in the White House, all I could do was report as dispassionately as possible the known events of the week up to the moment the mike was turned on. At the end of this recital, I said - with cryptic solemnity - "The rest you know". By the time you heard it, in London or Melbourne, you did.

"The cagiest sentence I ever spoke"? Oh, come now, Alistair, you're too modest. That wasn't "caginess": that was genius.

Not that he got any credit for it at the time:

No critic, no listener, no official of the BBC, apparently paused to figure out the impossibility of my recording those words four full days before the roof fell in. The most sceptical, the most sophisticated listener believes without a second thought that what is being said is being said at the moment he hears it.

The closing section of Cooke's Watergate letter can be heard here (in - meh - Real Audio; for this I pay my licence fee?). There is some difference between this and the text version: "The rest you know" is not the final sentence, as the last two paragraphs are transposed. I don't think that diminishes Cooke's achievement in how he handled this broadcasting conundrum.

Labels: alistair cooke, genius, letters from america, watergate

The Boar's Head Tavern is five years old today. As a former BHT fellow, I've already stuck my oar in as part of the celebrations.

The BHT is a unique site, and a great place to lurk. As I say in my post over there, it is a great example of the "friendship of the baptised*" (* and/or the "splashed as infants in a shocking absence of Scriptural warrant"/"immersed as adults in a blasphemous repudiation of their previous baptism"/etc. - ironic that the BHT's friendship of the baptised is frequently expressed in long, rolling, infuriating arguments about baptism), and it is also the only place where we can still have the pleasure of reading blog posts by a certain Lutheran "Pirate"...

Labels: boars head tavern, friendship of the baptised

Charlie Brooker nails the "PC vs Mac" ads:

[W]hen you see the ads, you think, "PCs are a bit rubbish yet ultimately lovable, whereas Macs are just smug, preening tossers." In other words, it is a devastatingly accurate campaign.

The first comment, from Brooker himself, is fun, too.

As for the campaign itself, I only have one thing to add, a brief message to Apple: PC != Windows. All the problems you describe as affecting "PCs" are actually problems with Windows. Other PC Operating Systems Are Also Available...

Labels: apple, live to geek, the penguin in the room

I've been trying to keep a safe distance from the recent discussions on "sanctification" on various Lutheran blogs (my recent posts on Bonhoeffer are only indirectly connected to these wider discussions). However, one thing for which I'm grateful is that this discussion has sent me back to a part of the Lutheran confessions that I have not read for a couple of years, but that made a big impact on me at the time: the Apology to the Augsburg Confession, and in particular the section on "Love and the Fulfilling of the Law".

As the recent discussions have shown, it is exceedingly difficult to strike the correct balance between emphasising that, on the one hand, justification is by faith entirely without works, and on the other, that good works are nevertheless an essential component of the Christian life. However, in this section of the Apology, Philip Melanchthon expresses this balance supremely well.

While consistently emphasising that our good works as Christians cannot and do not contribute in the slightest to our justification, Melanchthon explains how good works are a necessary consequence of justifying faith. Conversely, justifying faith is a necessary condition for good works.

One reason why good works necessarily follow upon faith is that faith brings the Holy Spirit and new life into our hearts, enabling us truly to fear and love God for the first time:

Because faith truly brings the Holy Spirit and produces a new life in our hearts, it must also produce spiritual impulses in our hearts. The prophet shows what those impulses are when he says [Jer. 31:33], “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts.” Therefore, after we have been justified and reborn by faith, we begin to fear and love God, to pray for and expect help from him, to thank and praise him, and to obey him in our afflictions. We also begin to love our neighbor because our hearts have spiritual and holy impulses. (p.140)

(Note: page references are to the Kolb/Wengert edition of the Book of Concord, from which the quoted text is taken.)

Indeed, "these things cannot happen until after we have by faith been justified, reborn, and received the Holy Spirit", because we cannot keep the law without Christ and the Holy Spirit (p.140). In addition, the human heart cannot love God "as long as it believes that he is terribly angry and that he is oppressing us with temporal and eternal calamities":

Therefore God is not loved until after we grasp his mercy by faith. Not until then does he become someone who can be loved. (p.140)

Melanchthon goes on to make a striking statement that would no doubt bring condemnation down upon his head in some Lutheran circles:

We openly confess, therefore, that the keeping of the law must begin in us and then increase more and more. And we include both simultaneously, namely, the inner spiritual impulses and the outward good works. Therefore the opponents’ claims are false when they charge that our people do not teach about good works since our people not only require them but also show how they can be done. (p.142)

Hence love for God is an essential part of the Christian life and is an inseparable from faith:

It is clear, then, that our teachers require good works. In fact, we add that it is impossible to separate love for God (however meager it may be) from faith. For through Christ we have access to the Father, and, having received the forgiveness of sins, we now truly realize that we have a God (that is, a God who cares for us), we call upon him, give thanks to him, and fear and love him. Thus John teaches in his first epistle [4:19]: “We love him because he first loved us”... (p.142)

It is important to note, however, that our fulfilling of the law as regenerate believers in Christ is never perfect in this life, and "we dare not hold that we are regarded as righteous before God on account of our observance of the law":

Instead, it must be realized that we are regarded as righteous or accepted on account of Christ, not on account of the law or our works, and that this incipient observing of the law pleases God because we are in Christ. Likewise, that on account of faith in Christ what is lacking in fulfilling the law is not reckoned to us. (p.146)

It will be noted, however, that this is a long way from saying that good works and "observing of the law" are an optional extra in the Christian life. In the end, this is a question of the proper distinction of law and gospel:

We must see what Scripture attributes to the law and what it attributes to the promises. For it praises and teaches good works in such a way as not to abolish the free promise and not to eliminate Christ. For good works are to be done because God requires them.

Therefore they are the results of regeneration, just as Paul teaches in Ephesians 2[:10]. “For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.” (p.150)

(That verse from Ephesians could profitably replace every word that has been written on this subject over the past few weeks. Not that I'm letting that stop me...)

In summary, we can express the position as follows:

• Good works can only be done by righteous people, but we only become righteous before God by faith in Christ, not by our works.
  
  
• Good works spring from a regenerate heart that has the Holy Spirit, but we receive the Holy Spirit only by faith in Christ, not by our works.
  
  
• Good works are motivated by love for God and neighbour (not by a self-interested pursuit of personal salvation, among other possible motives). But we can only truly love God when we are assured that he is no longer angry towards us; that is, when we have peace with him through faith in Christ, not by our works.

The application of this in the Christian life is then a matter of pastoral practice, "taught ... by the Holy Spirit in the school of experience" (as Walther puts it). But what Melanchthon is saying here is far closer to the teaching (and the general atmosphere) of the New Testament than slogans such as "Sanctification is simply learning to realise you've been justified!"

Labels: book of concord, discipleship, sanctification