Confessing Evangelical

We're off on our hols for a week, staying in a village on the south coast of England called Winchelsea. Two of its major claims to fame are:

• John Wesley preached his last open-air sermon there in 1790; and
  


• Spike Milligan is buried in the churchyard.

My parents and sister are coming down from Yorkshire and we'll all be sharing a (good-sized!) cottage. In other words, free baby-sitters!!! Now that's what I call a holiday.

See y'all in a week or so.

... or "abortion on demand", as we say in English. This is the official Episcopal News Service story on the March for Babies' Deaths Women's Lives (see my earlier post linking to Bunnie Diehl's blog). Perhaps its time for ENS to adopt a new slogan: how about, "Fair and Balanced"?

Update: To be fair (and balanced!), it's not only liberal Episcopalians (I refuse to dignify them with the honoured name of "Anglican") who have some evil and whacked out ideas on abortion. From the comments on Midwest Conservative Journal comes this link to some "Catholic" "liturgies for responsible reproduction". Bleh.

Still on Owen Chadwick (see previous post), a lovely detail from Chadwick's assessment of the effects of Reformation and Counter-Reformation on the church's ministry and worship, in this case one practical outcome of the growing emphasis on preaching:

The churches of the sixteenth century acquired a new article of furniture, the hour-glass by the pulpit ... Many sensible men regarded an hour as the limit which their congregation should be asked to bear, though on special occasions like Lutheran funerals sermons of three hours were not unknown ... Most church orders demanded the full hour, at least on Sundays. But printed sermons prove that there were many shorter. The humane Melanchthon thought that half an hour was enough, as the ear is the first of the senses to tire. Half-hour glasses are known; and the makers, not always accurate, sometimes erred in favour of the congregation. There is a surviving hour-glass which unwaveringly completes its hour in forty-eight minutes. (p.420)

I'm nearly at the end of Owen Chadwick's The Reformation. It is highly recommended: fascinating, very readable, and (unlike many accounts of that time) not bigoted against either Protestantism in particular or Christianity in general. One of Chadwick's greatest gifts is his ability with pen-portraits of key figures, such as this description of Luther:

At the time of the Ninety-Five Theses Luther was nearly thirty-four years old. He was a tough, four-square man of peasant stock, with deep-set disturbing eyes and a character as open as the daylight. His mind was active and vigorous, but he was no gymnast of the intellect, a man earnest and persevering rather than subtle and delicate in discrimination. His friends always respected him with an affectionate and sometimes rueful regard, knowing that he held nothing back from them, erected no screen, allowed them to touch his real inwardness. He never ceased to be a peasant, and was proud of his peasant blood. He could be rough in language, vulgar, crude, coarse. He had humour and loud laughter, but not wit. (pp.43,44)

This contrasts with the equally vivid, but less appealing, description of Calvin:

He was not popular. He was the kind of man who has only disciples or opponents; it was impossible to be neutral about him. ... He was a man of the intellect, a man of doctrine. Not even his intimates could penetrate to his soul, as any reader of Table Talk can penetrate Luther. There was something aloof, secret, reserved. He was a man of books, texts, authorities; he lacked a feeling for natural beauty. If he had other feelings they were usually concealed. It is a surprise to see his tenderness of spirit when his wife died. (pp.89,90)

It takes a real skill to evoke an entire character and career in five words, but Chadwick achieves this on numerous occasions, such as this description of the Pope from whom Henry VIII wished to secure permission to marry Anne Boleyn (p.99, emphasis added):

Pope Clement VII, a diligent and unsuccessful politician, was too weak or too prudent to refuse outright.

"A diligent and unsuccessful politician". Ouch.

Josh has an interesting item on the Lord's Supper. The Reformed doctrine of the Lord's Supper seems to have quite a short half-life, decaying quickly, in practice, into a form of Zwinglianism. This is the case not only in church history but also on the level of individual experience, at least in my own case - as I've said before, I tended to find that the Reformed doctrine (the clearest expression of which can probably be found in the Heidelberg Catechism, qq75-79) sorta made sense whenever I read it, but then faded away the moment I looked away, so that the Lord's Supper became a constant struggle to try to "really 'get' the significance of 'it', this time". I think Josh hits the nail on the head as to why this was the case:

Hence my criticism of the Reformed doctrine is not so much that it devalues the Supper or rob it of its efficacy, it is that it completely dispenses with the theological and exegetical reason for the value and efficacy. In other words, they believe in the effects of the Real Presence, but not the Presence itself, and further confuse the Presence with its effects. This is why unless the Reformed recover the orthodox doctrine of the consecrated bread and wine, they're doomed to repeat history: the entire reason that Calvin's doctrine of the Supper had no staying power in Protestantism is that when one is unable to confess "This is the true body of Christ," one no longer has any convincing reason to believe that eating this bread and drinking this cup have any more effect than to call forth Christ's sacrifice to the mind and produce some kind of solidarity based on the shared memory.

For another - complementary rather than alternative - explanation for the instability of Calvin's doctrine of the Lord's Supper, see my earlier post on God's Sovereignty and God's Sacraments, especially the article on Revd McCain's blog which I link from that post.

I love church architecture, and am never happier than when poking around in a medieval parish church somewhere in the English countryside. The constant refrain one hears on the subject of the English parish church is what a tragedy the Reformation was, how much we lost thanks to these Bible-bashing Protestant fanatics, etc, etc. All rather dull, though from a Lutheran point of view I now have more sympathy for the view that much was destroyed in the name of "smashing idols" that could, and should, have been preserved; and it is always magical to discover a medieval painting or carving that somehow escaped the travails of Reformation, Civil War and Commonwealth.

But I was fascinated to read, in Owen Chadwick's book The Reformation, the suggestion that the Reformation - in being universally blamed for all destruction of medieval church art - may have been the victim of a miscarriage of justice:

It is an extraordinary fact that we find more of medieval art and architecture in countries which became Protestant than in countries which remained Catholic at the Reformation ... [I]n general it is the hand, not of the looter, but of the restorer which is chiefly responsible for pulling down. The baroque movement swept southern Europe in the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries, transforming the medieval churches. The baroque movement came likewise, though more slowly, through the countries of the north, creating the great churches, from St Paul's Cathedral downwards, and incidentally destroying more traces of the medieval art and architecture than the Protestant Reformation had attempted.

The least conservative of congregations are those which have most money, the most conservative are those which have least money. In the southern baroque countries, the Church still possessed much land and endowments, and its ecclesiastics could afford to build with magnificence. In many Protestant countries the comparative loosening of old endowments in the Reformation, partly through the action of the governments and partly through the inflation of the sixteenth century, meant that most Protestant congregations had enough to do to keep in repair the old churches which they inherited. They preserved the ancient jewels, not because they loved them, but because they could not buy new and could but keep the old. (p.389, emphasis added)

The italicised words are, of course, capable of much application in today's church environment, but this is, as they say, left as an exercise for the reader. As for Chadwick's central point, that's certainly backed up by the evidence in England. There's nothing more depressing than walking into a parish church in a town that "got rich" during the Victorian era, only to find that it was, as John Betjeman puts it:

Restored (with a vengeance) circa 1883

with all the medieval character and charm ruthlessly smothered and suppressed in fresh, pristine 19th Century stonework, dark carved wood and slightly stomach-turning stained glass. Give me a whitewashed, but otherwise intact, ancient church any day.

Anyway, tomorrow's my last day blogging before I go on holiday for a week, and the one book I must remember to take with me - um, apart from the Bible of course, he added hastily :-) - is Simon Jenkins' Thousand Best Parish Churches in England. Bliss.

I've just added Bunnie Diehl to the blogroll (link now fixed). I'm sure most of you have been doing so already, but do check out her series of recent posts and photographs from the March for Babies' Deaths, or whatever it was called. But try to resist the urge to throw your PC out of the window in sheer rage at what you see depicted there. Lord, have mercy.

This Guardian article from a couple of years back includes the mottos of various "special forces" from around the world, such as:

* the SAS: "Who dares wins"

* Delta Force: "Nightstalkers don't quit"

All very macho and impressive. And then there's the German KSK, which - rising to the challenge - has the following as its motto:

"No one sees them coming, no one knows that they're there. And when their mission is completed they leave no proof that they were ever there!"

Ah well, perhaps it works better in German...

One of the most interesting points made by Peter Jensen in his book, The Revelation of God (see previous post), comes when he looks at the challenge to the Gospel of postmodern ideas about "the death of the author", reader-response etc. He completely turns this on its head, so that rather than mistrust of language being a challenge to the Gospel, the Gospel is instead the vindication of human language.

As Jensen points out, the current mistrust of language has some unfortunate consequences, particularly in the area of human relationships:

In our culture we are making heavy weather of the business of reading. There is a distrust of words and of our capacity to relate through words ... [B]ut our unwillingness to accept the authority of the human author ... leads to the corruption of relationships at all levels. Cynicism and love cannot co-exist. Where words fail, love fails too.

But the Gospel consists of promises that establish a relationship, and promises can only be conveyed in verbal, propositional terms*. This has important consequences for human language generally:

If God is able to use words that we may trust, and to develop a deep relationship through words, there is hope for human language. We may not be able to do all that he does, but he points to the possibility that there is such a thing as truthful speech, which may be trusted, and through which genuine human relationships may come.

In the search for such speech it may be that the form of the promise can provide the basis for the rehabilitation of language. Promises demand an assessment of truth; they serve to relate persons; they initiate a narrative of hope and fulfilment; they evoke commentary, discussion, literature and poetry. When our culture abandoned the Bible as its standard of life it may have done far more damage to its roots than it could have imagined. The way back will be through a commitment to the widespread knowledge of God in his word.

The sentence I've put in italics is key to understanding why the Bible takes the form it does, with such a varied range of content - because, as Jensen argues, that is the effect that promises have, and the Bible is fundamentally a covenantal book, the book of God's promises to His people.

[* you may say to that, "What about the Sacraments? Don't they convey God's promises in physical, i.e. non-verbal form?" The answer to that is that the Sacraments are physical elements combined with God's Word, and indeed always used in conjunction with God's Word ("I baptise you in the name of the Father, etc.", "This is my body").]

The problem with reading the Bible as an individual is that that may well be what you end up doing: reading the Bible as an individual, rather than as a member of the Church, to whom the Bible is addressed.

As the Archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen, puts it in his book The Revelation of God (p.223, emphasis added):

Since the advent of printing and literacy it has become common for the Bible to be read by individuals. This obscures the corporate significance of Scripture as the instrument by which Christ rules his church. The narrative element of Scripture, indeed, the narrative line, is of fundamental significance in revealing not merely the person of God, but the identity and nature of the church.

A little later (p.226) Jensen provides further confirmation of the point made in my previous post:

At the very centre of the Bible's authority and unity is Jesus Christ ... the fact that "Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners" (1 Tim 1:15) is the central message of the Christian Bible, and the interpretative key for the whole. The entire context enables us to comprehend the meaning of Jesus Christ's entry into the world; Jesus Christ's great work provides our access to understanding the Scriptures. Indeed, when we fail to realize the centrality of Christ in his work of saving sinners, the Bible becomes a mysterious and fissiparous book. The importance that the study of hermeneutics has assumed in modern Scripture debate partly results from an unwillingness to recognize the gospel-centredness of Scripture. Other messages must then be found to explain the importance of the Bible for the church.

As I hope those quotes demonstrate, Jensen's book is well worth reading. In tackling the theme of revelation, rather than following the "traditional" approach of starting with general considerations of what revelation is, the different types of revelation (general vs special etc), he chooses instead to start with the gospel. The gospel, Jensen argues, is not only the most important revelation of all, but provides the model for how God reveals Himself. To deny that God reveals Himself "propositionally" is to deny that He reveals Himself by way of promises, which in turn is to deny the validity of the gospel, which is entirely dependent on promises stated in verbal, propositional terms. Stimulating stuff.

In my earlier post on study Bibles, I mentioned in passing that I thought that the failure of Christians to read the Bible was related to the current status within evangelicalism of justification, "the first and chief article".

What I meant by the "current status within evangelicalism of justification" was this: not the outright denial of justification by faith, but the failure to recognise justification by faith as the "first and chief article" of the Christian faith - and of our lives as Christians. Justification may not be denied (though sometimes it is) - but it is marginalised, taken for granted, largely ignored, and certainly not seen as the "engine-room" for the Christian life. Compared with earlier generations of Christians, we no longer feel such a pressing, urgent need for our sins to be forgiven: what matters now is not so much receiving forgiveness for our sins, but how we live as Christians.

We can see a number of symptoms of this. Here are just a few that spring to mind:

• In our corporate worship, where the focus in many churches has moved away from what God does for us in proclaiming forgiveness to us through the Word of Absolution, the preaching of the Gospel, and the Sacraments, to what we do in our "praise worship & prayer!!" (to quote the sign I mentioned in my previous post).
  


• In an increased focus on the present work of the Holy Spirit in us, rather than the completed work of Christ for us.
  


• In the enduring fashion for wearing "WWJD" bracelets, rather than (say) "WHJD" ("What Has Jesus Done?") bracelets. Jesus our Example, rather than our crucified and risen Saviour.
  


• In the way we find it increasingly difficult to see why the doctrine of justification should divide Christians, and increasingly easy to agree on ambiguous forms of wording that allow us, with a great sigh of relief, to announce that the "problem" of justification has been "solved", and that we are now all agreed on the question.
  

In that context, it is easy to see why people view the Bible as a source of "timeless principles" for telling us how to live - "life's instruction manual" - and are then frustrated when it apparently fails to deliver what they expect.

The problem with viewing the Bible in this way is that you don't actually need 1,000+ pages of narratives, songs, prophecies, letters etc to tell you how to live. As Luther points out in the Large Catechism, if we just sought to live out the Ten Commandments (which represent around 0.05% of the total content of Scripture) then that would be more than enough to keep our hands full for the rest of our lives.

However, you do need the whole Bible to show you the full, broad sweep of God's purposes, which our Lord summarised as follows:

"Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem." (Luke 24:46,47)

The biggest incentive for us to read the Bible is when we truly feel and recognise that what we need above all else is forgiveness for our sins; that forgiveness of sins can be found only in Jesus Christ; and that Christ can only be found as He is proclaimed in the Word of God (the Word written, the Word preached and the Word visible in the Sacraments). In other words, when we recognise justification by faith as the "first and chief article" of the Christian faith.

In the next day or so, I'll be looking in more detail at what it means in practice to read the Bible as a book about Christ rather than as a set of timeless principles. But I hope this post goes some way to explaining what I meant by linking Bible reading (or the lack thereof) with the "first and chief article".

I saw the following sign in the window of a church I passed this morning on the way to work:

CHRIST CHURCH

Sunday Services
10.30 and 6.30

PRAISE WORSHIP
      & PRAYER!!

There's something missing, there. Can't quite put my finger on it... (and no, I'm not talking about the comma between "praise" and "worship").

(This entry rushed through before Twylah's Papal Bull, Contra Ironicii - attacking the wild boar of sarcasm loose in the Lord's vineyard of Lutheran blogdom - comes into force on 1st May).

You are now leaving the Internet. Have a nice day!

Chris Halverson passes on the following pointless but diverting activity:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.
And here it is

"The provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976 apply to works made or published after 1 January 1978 and provide for a term of copyright protection, in general, of the author's life and 50 years after his/her death, and, in respect of anonymous works and 'works made for hire', of 75 years from the year of first publication or 100 years from the year of creation, whichever expires first." - The Encyclopaedia of Forms and Precedents, Vol 15(1), "Entertainment and Media".

Knew I shouldn't have attempted this while at work...

Update: Repeating the exercise just now, p.23 s.5 for the Kolb edition of the Book of Concord reads: "There will be no end to his kingdom." (from the Nicene Creed). That's more like it!

There's been some discussion over at Twylah's blog on the subject of asceticism. Now, I'd make a very bad ascetic - I can identify completely with UK comedian Bill Bailey, who described himself as "a materialistic hippy - basically, I like stuff". But unless by "asceticism" one means simply "refraining from the wilder excesses of consumerism", I'm not convinced asceticism is a particularly great idea anyway (St Paul's argument in Colossians 2:6-23 is worth reading on this subject, though no doubt it could be argued the Apostle is attacking pagan/judaizing versions of asceticism).

GK Chesterton (c'mon, it must be at least a fortnight since I last quoted him!) comments as follows on the subject:

According to [Lowes Dickinson], the ideal of Christianity was the ideal of asceticism. When I say that I think this idea wholly wrong as a matter of philosophy and history, I am not talking for the moment about any ideal Christianity of my own, or even of any primitive Christianity undefiled by after events. I am not, like so many modern Christian idealists, basing my case upon certain things which Christ said. Neither am I, like so many other Christian idealists, basing my case upon certain things that Christ forgot to say.

I take historic Christianity with all its sins upon its head; I take it, as I would take Jacobinism, or Mormonism, or any other mixed or unpleasing human product, and I say that the meaning of its action was not to be found in asceticism. I say that its point of departure from Paganism was not asceticism. I say that its point of difference with the modern world was not asceticism. I say that St. Simeon Stylites had not his main inspiration in asceticism. I say that the main Christian impulse cannot be described as asceticism, even in the ascetics.

- GK Chesterton, Heretics

And then, of course, there is Luther in the Small Catechism:

He also gives me clothing and shoes, food and drink, house and home, wife and children, land, animals, and all I have. He richly and daily provides me with all that I need to support this body and life. (The Creed, First Article).

God certainly gives daily bread to everyone without our prayers, even to all evil people, but we pray in this petition that God would lead us to realize this and to receive our daily bread with thanksgiving ... Daily bread includes everything that has to do with the support and needs of the body, such as food, drink, clothing, shoes, house, home, land, animals, money, goods, a devout husband or wife, devout children, devout workers, devout and faithful rulers, good government, good weather, peace, health, self control, good reputation, good friends, faithful neighbors, and the like. (The Lord's Prayer, Fourth Petition).

Interesting that the list of our "needs" goes well beyond basic subsistence, to a warm and wholesome vision of "the good life" (good food, good drink, good health, good company).

In short, Christianity is not religion of asceticism, but of thankfulness which bears fruit in generosity to others.

While we're on the subject of Bible editions (see previous post), Australian publication The Briefing has a fascinating critique of "red-letter Bibles" (i.e., where the words of Christ are printed in red). I've never liked red-letter Bibles - mainly because I dislike the implication that the rest of the Bible is not as much Christ's Word to us as the direct quotations from His earthly ministry - but what is really striking about this article is the statistics on comprehension levels.

The article quotes a study which shows that black text on a white background has an 89% comprehension level (that is, 89% of people in the study read such text with a fair or good level of comprehension). White text on a black background, by contrast, had a mere 12% comprehension level. And red text on a white background carries only a 19% comprehension level (the relevant table in the article mislabels this information, but the accompanying text makes the position clear). As the article concludes:

According to Wheldon's study, to print the words of Christ in red is to ensure that they will be poorly comprehended by 81% of readers! It is difficult indeed to see how this does him honour. To be sure, it makes his words stand out - it's just that it's almost impossible to read and remember them. I trust that little further needs to be said. Out of reverence for the Lord Jesus, we must put a stop to red-letter Bibles. They are rendering his words largely unreadable, thus affecting the spiritual well-being of who knows how many unsuspecting Bible readers. In the interests of Christ's words being read, we must ensure they cease being red.

Update: the original study, which is referenced in the Briefing article, can be found here: "Communicating? Or just making pretty shapes?" (PDF).

A friend of ours (our former (Baptist) pastor, in fact) wrote to UK evangelical publication Evangelicals Now a few years ago complaining about the multitude of Bible versions now available, and in particular the market segmentation practised by publishers. You know the sort of thing: "The Spirit-Filled Life Bible", "The Student's Life Application Bible", "The Word Extreme Teen Bible", "The Women's Devotional Bible" etc. Our pastor commented that what he would like to see - what people really needed - was "The Sinner's Bible", but he didn't think this would find many buyers in the current market...

Brian Lee wrote a piece a couple of years ago in Modern Reformation on this same topic of "Study Bible Madness". His article lists some of the more egregious examples (the funniest being the "Woman, Thou Art Loosed! Edition"), but also goes on to identify the underlying problem:

[U]ltimate responsibility does not reside with the marketplace. It meets a demand which is symptomatic of a greater ailment, namely, Christian guilt for not reading their Bibles. When they do pick them up, they don't understand them, they're bored, the text doesn't make sense, it's irrelevant. The introduction to the Life Application study Bible sums it up: "Many Christians do not read the Bible regularly. Why? Because in the pressures of daily living they cannot find a connection between the timeless principles of Scripture and the ever-present problems of day-by-day living."

The Bible is viewed as a book of moral instruction -- "timeless principles" -- which is meant to solve problems in our everyday life. It is, in short, a manual, not essentially differing from the booklet that tells me how to program my VCR. No surprise that both gather dust and the four zeros are still flashing.

Thinking about it, I think the problem goes deeper than this - or rather the problem identified by Brian Lee is a reflection of an even deeper underlying problem - namely the current status within evangelicalism of the "first and chief article", justification. But my thoughts on that will have to wait for the moment.

Have done some minor updates on my blogroll:

• My "longer posts" blog has been added: so far this only contains my Theology of Glory vs Theology of the Cross table (see my earlier post on this blog for more details).
  


• Ruminating Lutheran appears to be inactive and broken at the moment, so has been temporarily yanked off the list till Pennsy sorts out the technical problems.
  


• I've added Revd Joel Brondos' excellent Collarbones blog.
  


• My old "Confessing Anglican" blog finally expired (sniff!) so has been removed.

Also, don't miss the "What is Lutheranism?" links also listed on the right. This consists of a number of basic Lutheran resources that I have found particularly helpful in my explorations of Lutheranism over the past few months. If you're not a Lutheran, here are some good places to find out what Lutheranism is all about. If you are a Lutheran, there may be some interesting stuff there for you anyway.

Update: I've also just added Al to the list of "others".

Great quote from JI Packer. I can identify with much of what he says here:

Those whom I call restless experientialists are a familiar breed, so much so that observers are sometimes tempted to define evangelicalism in terms of them. Their outlook is one of casual haphazardness and fretful impatience, of grasping after novelties, entertainments, and 'highs', and of valuing strong feelings over deep thoughts ... Through their influence the spontaneous jollity of the simple extrovert comes to be equated with healthy Christian living, while saints of less sanguine and more complex temperament get driven almost to distraction because they cannot bubble over in the prescribed manner.

While I think he's a little unfair on extroverts here, he's right to criticise the tendency to exalt bubbly, outgoing, cheerful spontaneity as the ideal for Christian living. The tragic results of this tendency are seen when people trained to think the Christian life is all about joy and happiness - and, in particular, that maintaining a cheerful, "But now I'm happy all the day" air is essential to one's "personal witness" - are left utterly destitute when affliction strikes them.

Couple of good articles this month on the For the Life of the World site.

Firstly, a piece by Gene Veith on The Family: A Place of Refuge. Some good stuff on vocation in there (I have blogged Veith articles on this subject before).

Secondly, Revd Dr. Carl C. Fickenscher II writes on The Family: A Place for Catechism, including suggestions as to how to use the Small Catechism as part of family devotions. As Dr Fickenscher points out, the catechism was aimed not at church confirmation classes, but for families (setting out the chief Christian doctrines "As the Head of the Family Should Teach Them in a Simple Way to His Household"):

...Luther meant that this little book he was composing would have an honored and useful place in the Christian family. It was intended to be devotional, meaty but digestible, expressed in language that wasn't just for trained theologians but for fathers, mothers, and kids.

In an earlier article, The Cute, The Cool, and the Catechized, Gene Veith also wrote about the value of catechesis as a means of uniting the generations within the church and ensuring that each member may "grow up from Baptism on into the full, shared life of a spiritual community, in which a wide diversity of ages and sensibilities come together in the Body of Christ."

Finally, no post on the value of the catechism would be complete without a link to Peter Bender's classic MR article, Continually Learning the Meaning of our Baptism - the article which first introduced me to Luther's Small Catechism.

(PS - I hear dark rumours that, for many "cradle Lutherans", the Small Catechism is a blue book up on a shelf, that they last looked at the day before their confirmation. If that's true - and I suppose that, particularly in these circumstances, I should discount such slanders and instead "explain everything in the kindest possible way" :-) - then all I can say is you're mad, the lot of you. The Small Catechism is one of Lutheranism's most precious treasures and greatest gifts to the church. It's spiritual dynamite, and I fell in love with it long before I started heading towards Lutheranism. If it's more than three weeks since you last read it, then my only suggestion is: Tolle, lege.)

Some rich pickings today from the search engines. I think blogs exist partly to confuse search engines, because most blogs feature quite an eclectic range of content and thus hoover up some rather random search queries, such as:

* bridge simon garfunkel

* "man comes around" theology

* "holy water" "bottled tap water"

* "Christopher Hitchens" "opium of the masses"

* Bible anti-swearing quotes

I'm not even going to pretend that these earnest seekers will have found what they were looking for here. My sincere apologies to you all :-)

A columnist in this week's Spectator passes on a joke told by Roman Catholic novelist Alice Thomas Ellis, which seems particularly appropriate in the light of the recent discussion on Twylah's blog about wearing crosses and crucifixes:

A man walks into a jeweller, asks: "Have you got any crosses?" Jeweller: "Sure. How about this one?" Man: "Nah. Nah. That's not quite right. Got any others?" Jeweller obliges. Man hums and haws. Jeweller tries again. "Nah. Sorry. Not quite my style, know what I mean?", the man concludes. "Haven't you got one of them ones with, y'know, a little bloke stuck to it?"

The depressing thing is that the level of ignorance about the Christian faith is so total here in the UK - "a darkness that could be felt" - that I can't be 100% certain whether this actually is a joke, or whether it's taken from a gritty fly-on-the-wall documentary...

One of the major factors that first got me interested in Lutheran teachings - in fact, probably the number one factor above all others - was discovering Luther's distinction between the Theology of Glory and the Theology of the Cross.

It was probably via Modern Reformation's issue devoted to the subject that I first encountered this teaching, and it completely blew my mind. As Mike Horton says in the introduction for that issue:

On rare occasions, one stumbles on a topic that is not only a fascinating subject of theology, but a completely new way of seeing theology. For me, justification and election not only added to my beliefs, but rearranged all the furniture. A similar epiphany occurred concerning the theology of the cross.

I can identify with Horton's experience 100% here. As Horton goes on to say:

Once we see what this contrast means, suddenly the biblical plot is illuminated in some surprising ways. In the theology of the cross, both Christ's cross and our participation in that cross throughout our lives, find a bond. It helps us understand the link between theology and life, between Christ's redemptive work and our suffering. It doesn't need to be made practical; it is practical from start to finish.

To help me get my head round the concept, around this time last year I put together a table summarising the main points from a number of different articles and other sources which I'd found on the subject.

I've now converted this to an HTML format and have posted it on my companion blog for longer posts (NB - link now fixed). While it's quite a sketchy outline, I hope you will find it helpful in exploring "Luther's theological breakthrough" (as Alister McGrath has termed it).

Revd Joel A. Brondos has posted an item refuting at some length the idea that Lutherans teach "consubstantiation". He comments that "Lutherans are often thought to hold the view of consubstantiation regarding the Lord's Supper".

At least coming from a Reformed/Evangelical perspective, "often" seems an understatement there. Until I started reading Lutheran teachings at first hand, I had never come across the slightest suggestion that Lutherans taught anything other than consubstantiation.

Even after I discovered that Lutherans did not use the term to describe the Lutheran position, I assumed at first that this was due to a reluctance to use philosophical expressions to "explain" words that should instead simply be believed, rather than an outright rejection of the concept. It therefore came as something of a surprise when I read the following in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of England's statement of beliefs (emphasis added):

...the Lutheran belief, call the 'Real Presence', does not imply, either by transubstantiation or consubstantiation, any kind of change in the visible elements...

This fits with Josh's helpful recent post in which he quoted at length from the Formula of Concord and concluded (in his own, erm, inimitable style):

Most of the c**p you hear about the Lutheran doctrine, we reject. Confessionally, we've got an article rejecting just about every kind of BS we've ever been accused of. That's pretty nice, isn't it? So if you're Reformed, and you've heard some ridiculous thing about what we believe, we don't believe it. That's what the Confessions say. "If someone attributes something moronic to us, we reject it. Leave us the c**p alone."

As Principal Skinner once put it to Groundskeeper Willy, "Wise counsel, William. But the potty talk adds nothing." (but let's not get started on that subject again!).

I'm sure this is nothing new for most of you, but I was looking for an explanation of the symbolism of Martin Luther's seal (as depicted above), and thought I might as well post what I found.

The LCMS site has a quotation from Luther explaining the seal. The "schools" section of the site then includes a brief summary as follows:

• In the center is a black cross indicative of Christ's dreadful sacrifice on the cross for every sinner who ever lived.
  


• The cross is in the center of a red heart, to show that faith causes love, joy and peace to grow in the human heart.
  


• The red heart is on a white rose (Luther's favorite flower) because white is the color of angels and blessed spirits.
  


• The white rose is against a blue-sky background to symbolize the Christian's hope for the coming joys of heaven.
  


• The seal is enclosed in a gold ring, showing that the bliss of heaven is unending.

Luther personally oversaw the creation of this symbol, and described it as his compendium theoligae (summary of theology).

Interesting item on the Pontifications blog, reporting on an address by Anglican theologian, Dr George Sumner. In this address:

Sumner zeroes in on one of the symptoms of our problem - the adoption of open communion by virtually all Episcopal parishes. I do not believe that ECUSA has officially adopted a totally open communion - the last time I checked we still require a visitor to be a communicant in good standing in their own congregation - but the fact remains that parish rectors have embraced the rule that the Table is open to all the baptized. In fact, there are those who are pushing for the deletion of the baptism requirement, opening up the communion to the heathen world. Sumner comments:

We fancy ourselves a catholic tradition, replete with Eucharists, we seek to rediscover baptism in its fullest sense, and at the first opportunity we reach for a novelty that flies in the face of consensus catholic practice, contradicts a robust Eucharistic theology, and undercuts the seriousness of baptismal discipline we have claimed to want to reclaim. How does one explain this, beyond its immediate marketing use? If we cast for a moment an anthropologist’s eye toward this proposal, we see that it offers a ritual consonant with the kind of community we actually think ourselves to be, highly porous, virtually boundary-less, and doctrinally under-determined. Open communion is indeed the liturgical outworking of a pneumatic and pluralist comprehensiveness.

Pontificator concludes:

Dr. Sumner is absolutely correct. The abandonment of Eucharistic and baptismal discipline reveals that we have become a community that has given up on being a counter-cultural force within the wider culture; we have become a community that is identical to the culture (or at least identical to a sub-culture within the culture). We have confused the gospel of death and resurrection and replaced it with the ideology of inclusiveness. The latter is but a poor counterfeit of the message of Christ, who summoned his disciples to radical discipleship.

He then goes on to consider the pros and cons of open vs closed communion. While I disagree with aspects of his conclusion (basically, that closed communion is only justifiable if you're the Roman Catholic or Orthodox Church and thus claim to be the one true visible church on earth), I still found it interesting to have this perspective on the consequences of (and underlying reasons for) practising open communion.

Just found an interesting exchange of emails buried away in my "Personal Correspondence" email archive folder. This time last year, I was just beginning to look into Lutheran teachings, and had printed out a copy of the Small Catechism to read while on holiday at the end of April. It appears my response was the usual one for evangelicals discovering Lutheran teachings at first-hand: "They believe what about baptism???"

I emailed the LCMS's Church Information Center with the following query. This email will give a pretty clear indication of "where I was at" at that stage:

From: [John H]
Sent: Sunday, May 04, 2003 8:38 AM
To: infocenter@lcms.org
Subject: Baptismal regeneration query

I'm having some difficulty understanding the Lutheran view on baptismal regeneration. My parents, being nominally Christian, had me baptised as a baby. My main contact with the church was then several years as a choirboy but I never really encountered or understood the biblical gospel.

For most of my teens I was an out-and-out atheist. However, during my last year at university I became a Christian.

While I wouldn't want to identify one particular moment when this happened, at the start of 1994 I was certainly giving every indication of being dead in my sins, without hope and without God in this world, but by the end of 1994 I was a new creation in Christ. Within a Reformed perspective, this seems to make sense -- I rejoice in God's promise to me in my baptism as an infant (and find Luther's description of baptism as water combined with the Word of the gospel extremely helpful), but I did not actually appropriate this promise until my regeneration 21 years later.

However, I do not understand how my experience (not an uncommon one) would be expressed within a Lutheran framework. To be frank, the concept of infant faith being imparted by baptism seems to me to verge on the nonsensical. As I do not believe Lutherans are given to believing nonsense, I would appreciate further explanation on this point.

Yours in Christ,

John H

A couple of days later, I received the following reply:

From: Otto C Hintze
Sent: 05 May 2003 21:03
To: infocenter@lcms.org
Cc: H, John
Subject: Re: FW: Baptismal regeneration query

Dear John,

Your concern has been referred to me for response.

Yes, your experience is more common that we like to think. It happened to me also, although in a different context. The Scriptural (Lutheran) explanation of that goes as follows:

As an infant we were made a disciple of Christ by being baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Matthew 28:19-20.

We were not baptized into a church denomination, but into the death and resurrection of Christ, which can only be appropriated through faith, which in turn was given you through the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Romans 6:1-10.

Faith was GIVEN us; we did nothing to become God's own child, a member of His Kingdom. Faith is a gift of the Holy Spirit by God's grace alone. Ephesians 2:8-9 Faith comes by hearing the message, and the message is heard through the Word of Christ. Romans 10:17

We were born again by water and the Spirit. John 3:5 - regenerated Titus 3:4-5, "saved by the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit".

We were saved by baptism. Titus 3:5; 1 Peter 3:21

When baptized as an infant we were given all the benefits and blessings of baptism.

However, we fell away and lost those benefits, although God still pursued us and brought us to saving faith in Jesus again through the Gospel by the power of the Holy Spirit at a later point in our lives. We believe that we can fall from grace and faith. Galatians 5:4; Jude 24 And that we do ourselves, and is our own grievous fault. If we had died in that fallen state, we would have gone to hell, baptism or not. Falling from grace is falling from our baptismal salvation. Now we have been regenerated through the Gospel by the power of the Holy Spirit and are saved. Thus, the way of the Scriptures.

Hope I have helped.

In His service, Rev. Otto C. Hintze ThD, LCMS
International Center Chaplain

"Hope I have helped": more, as it turns out, than you could have imagined, Revd Hintze. I know many of you (eg Josh) have a very negative view of the LCMS denominational infrastructure, quite probably 100% justified for all I know. But to get a response like that from a denominational information office is pretty impressive. I dread to think how the Church of England would have responded to a similar enquiry.

Just been reading Garrison Keillor's book, Me!, which is the purported autobiography of Jimmy "Big Boy" Valente, a pro-wrestler who becomes governor of Minnesota (as Keillor puts it in the introduction, "This work ... should not be construed in any way as an autobiography of an actual governor of Minnesota, God bless him.") Not the profoundest novel ever written in the English language, but entertaining enough.

Reading Lake Wobegon Days a year or so ago probably played a small but significant role in setting me on the path to Lutheranism, if only be putting Lutheranism into my mental landscape. While Lutheranism is less central in Me!, there are the occasional references, particularly the following entertaining quote (where Jimmy "Big Boy" is describing how he fell out with Arnold Schwarzeneggar):

"You wouldn't want me on your jury, Arnold," I said. "I was brought up by Lutheran people and taught to be charitable, as Luther says in his Small Catechism, to speak well of your neighbour and explain his actions in the kindest possible way, but Luther didn't know anyone in Hollywood. If Luther'd known movie people, he would've put more emphasis on eternal damnation."

But the bit I really wanted to quote is from the opening chapter, where Jimmy "Big Boy" is explaining that his reasons for wanting to give his side of the story on a number of issues, including the following. This appealed to me because the licensing of trade marks and other IPRs forms a significant part of my own work, so I can appreciate the real importance of the distinction Jimmy makes (emphasis original):

I do not earn $100,000 a year from the sale of Jimmy (Big Boy) Beer. The money I earn is not from the sale of the beer but from the licensing of my name to American Beer Corp, which manufactures the beer. Furthermore, I have a licensing agreement for Governor Jimmy- and Love the Gov-brand action toys, board games, children's clothing, animated feature films, and a planned theme park south of Minneapolis, for which I will be paid a sum in the mid seven-figures plus royalties. There is nothing in the constitution that prohibits a governor from licensing his name and likeness. If people don't like it, they can go get their own licensing agreements.

"Well, there’s good news and bad news. The bad news is Neil will be taking over both branches and some of you will lose your jobs. Those of you who are kept on will have to relocate to Swindon, if you wanna stay. I know, gutting. On a more positive note, the good news is I’ve been promoted. So ... every cloud ...... you’re still thinking about the bad news aren’t you?"

- David Brent, The Office

In honour of Dan's URL and blogroll; and without a trace of bitterness over the fact that the beer quiz he linked to declared me to be a non beer-drinking nun: from the classic Simpsons episode, Burns Verkaufen der Kraftwerk, when one of the German purchasers of the power plant turns down the offer of a free drink from Homer:

"Oh, thank you. My English is not good, but I have to tell you, your beer is like swill to us. Do I have that right? I am saying that only a swine would drink this beer."

(To be fair on Dan, he does at least have the good taste to regard American beer with the contempt it so richly deserves...)

From the same episode, I also love the announcement by the new bosses following their initial review of the plant:

We regret to announce the following lay-offs, which I will announce in alphabetical order. Simpson, Homer. That is all.

Not to mention Mr Burns's reflections on the limitations of wealth:

What good is money if you can't inspire terror in your fellow man?

Wise words.

Josh has now trained his guns on the Roman Catholic Church, in particular the issue of whether Rome can truly claim an infallible teaching authority.

On the subject of the "Magisterium", Douglas Wilson of Credenda Agenda wrote an interesting piece a couple of years back in which he spoke about the "doctrine of the Table of Contents", in which he observed that:

The problem with contemporary Protestants is that they have no doctrine of the Table of Contents. With the approach that is popular in conservative evangelical circles, one simply comes to the Bible by means of an epistemological lurch. The Bible “just is,” and any questions about how it got here are dismissed as a nuisance. But time passes, the questions remain unanswered, the silence becomes awkward, and conversions of thoughtful evangelicals to Rome proceed apace.

But he goes on to point out that swimming the Tiber is actually no solution to this:

[T]he point of this article is not to lament current evangelical inconsistencies, but rather to point out that the Roman Catholic Church shares those inconsistencies in remarkably similar ways ... When men go over to Rome, they believe they have answered these great historical questions; but what has actually happened is they have joined a communion which is old enough for them to assume that the answers have to be around here somewhere. But if we investigate, we soon discover the same embarrassed silence so characteristic of evangelicalism.

[In relation to the Roman magisterium,] the question is this: where is the Table of Contents? Put another way, what are the precise boundaries of the magisterium? Conservative evangelicals know what they are submitting to, but they do not know why. Roman Catholics know why they are submitting, but they do not know what they are submitting to. Evangelicals should be asked, regarding the Bible, “Why is your Table of Contents?” Roman Catholics should be asked, regarding the magisterium, “Where is your Table of Contents?” Why has the Church not performed for the magisterium the same service she performed when testifying to the canon of Scripture? Does the magisterium have canonical boundaries, and if so, what are they?

Oh, and if you want to know what the Lutheran doctrine of the canon of Scripture is, then the answer is: I don't know (yet). I do have an outline knowledge of the history of how the canon was arrived at, enough to have satisfied my own mind on the question some years ago (before anyone accuses me of making the "epistemological lurch" to which Doug Wilson refers). There is a page on the WELS Q&A which deals with this very briefly but with references to other reading, here. If anyone can give any further information on the precise Lutheran position, I'd appreciate it.

Update: Pr David Jay Webber's Lutheran Theology site has an extract from Francis Pieper, entitled The Witness of History for Scripture (Homologoumena and Antilegomena). I've had a glance through it and - while my head feels like it's about to split (in whatever sense of that word you care to choose) - it looks like it probably gives a fairly definitive picture. But what would I know? ;-)

A reasonably eventful weekend, in terms of my journey into Wittenberg:

1. It was the "liturgical tenth anniversary" of my "becoming a Christian" back in 1994 (see this recent LQ discussion, which concluded here, for details of why the phrase "becoming a Christian" is in quote marks!). The "real" anniversary was on 10th April, but it slipped my mind at the time. However, 10th April 1994 was the First Sunday after Easter, and since my return to faith was very much tied in both with the truth of the Resurrection in general and Easter 1994 in particular, it seems more appropriate to count it in "church years".
   
   
2. We spoke to the pastor at our church, and he will be coming round to our house this Wednesday to start classes with a view to our joining the church in a few weeks. It's normally a 10-12 week course, but given that the first few weeks are given to topics like, "Who is Jesus?", he felt that in our case he could safely skip straight to the specifically Lutheran bits! So assuming all goes to plan, and we still want to sign up after undergoing the instruction (!), we could be admitted to the Lord's Table by the beginning of June - probably around the same time we have our younger son baptized.
   
   
3. I played the organ at our old Anglican church - we left around three years ago, but I remained on the evening organ rota - and plucked up the courage not to take Communion. I'd realised only on Friday, to my dismay, that this Sunday would be Communion in the evening. I knew two things: (i) I could not, in conscience, take Communion there any more (last time, the bread and wine turned to ashes in my mouth); and (ii) the vicar, George, would go absolutely ballistic if I told him that.
   
   In the end, though, it turned out George was off-duty (being at home but on holiday, if you follow) and the assistant minister - having less sharply-tuned spiritual antennae than George - accepted without question my suggestion that I simply play the organ during the distribution. I'd've been happy to go into the details with him if he'd asked, but given this was only ten minutes before the service began, I was quite relieved not to have to go through a long, strained conversation on the subject of closed communion.
   
   Perhaps this was a bit cowardly, but then (as I explained in an earlier post) I am a bit of a coward when it comes to this sort of thing. Plus, not actually being a member of Christ Church Lutheran yet put me in a slightly more awkward position - by the time this issue arises again, I should be a member at Christ Church and so I'll be able to say, more straightforwardly, "I'm a Lutheran", rather than going into a fifteen minute explanation of our current situation.
   
   Plus (i) I have now finally crossed the Rubicon and abstained from Communion in a non-Lutheran church, and having "broken my duck" without the sky falling in, it won't be such a wrench in future*; and (ii) I'll now have the opportunity to email George to explain the position and answer his queries/objections, rather than catching him "on the hop"; and also to discuss the position with our new pastor to get his views on what I should be doing. For now, I'm just grateful to God for not breaking the bruised reed or snuffing out the smouldering wick.
   
   (I know some would say I shouldn't be participating at all in a heterodox church's worship, but - and gosh does this sound pathetic when I come to type it out - it's the only opportunity I have to play a proper church organ, and I'd need some serious persuasion to turn my back on half a lifetime of playing, and loving, the "king of instruments". But I am happy to submit to my pastor's guidance and discipline on this issue.)

* OK, that has to break some kind of record for the most clichés squeezed into one sentence, a matter of days after posting Orwell's injunction to "never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print". So sue me ;-)

I need cheering up after that last post (below), so here's a quote I love from a Simpsons episode a few years back, concerning some rather more wholesome social engineering:

Lisa Simpson, looking at the tiny society she created in a margarine tub as part of a science experiment: "Wait, one of them is nailing something to the door of the cathedral. Oh, I've created Lutherans!"

Ladies: planning a trip to the UK in the near future? Watch out when you go to the "bathroom" in any public place: that heavily made-up, rather broad-shouldered woman with big hands and a suspiciously-pronounced Adam's apple - who appears to be using the "facilities" in the neighbouring cubicle while standing up - may well be a man.

But think twice before complaining to the manager: you could find yourself under arrest for breaching a transsexual's rights of confidentiality, thanks to the UK's bright, new, shiny Gender Recognition Act. This allows transsexuals to be registered as the gender of their choice (even if they retain the, um, functioning parts of their birth-gender). Any later revelation of their original birth-gender is then potentially a criminal offence.

This article, from conservative Anglo-Catholic publication New Directions, looks at the implications of this insane law for the church, especially after exemptions that would have protected the church were voted down - thanks only to the votes of Church of England bishops sitting in the House of Lords!

What a great country.

This year is the centenary of the 1904/1905 Welsh Revival, and UK evangelical publication Evangelicals Now marks the occasion by publishing extracts from the diary of a central figure in the Revival, Evan Roberts. In an editorial, E-N's editor says of this diary:

The great themes of the saving ability of the Redeemer and 'that no one is too much of a sinner to be made into a new creature' are there. But the emphasis for Christians, which Evans felt crucial to the outpouring of the Spirit, were these:

1. If there is some sin or sins in the past not confessed, we cannot have the Spirit. Therefore, we must search, and ask the Spirit to search us.

2. If there is something doubtful in our life, it must be removed - that is, something of which we are unsure as to its being wrong or right. The thing must be removed.

3. Total surrender to the Spirit. We must do and say all he asks us.

4. Public confession of Christ.

My heart sank as I read this doleful list of preconditions for God's grace. Call me churlish, but this sounds more like what Martin Luther was doing between 1505 and 1517, as a dutiful but conscience-stricken monk, than a description of truly evangelical theology and practice.

The greatest "revival" (if you want to look at it in those terms) in post-Apostolic history, the Reformation, began precisely when Luther stopped following that sort of approach and discovered "the righteousness that is from faith to faith" - a point made more eloquently and in greater detail in Rick Ritchie's enticingly-titled essay, "Was Martin Luther a Born-Again Christian?".

All this tends to confirm my view that it's not "revival" the church needs - it's Reformation. (The Lutheran Reformation, to be precise).

One of my favourite blogs is Chris Johnson's Midwest Conservative Journal. Chris is a conservative Anglican, and his often-hilarious dissections of the wilder lunacies of the Episcopal Left are always worth reading.

He's just been examining Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold's latest thoughts on the subject of the Blessed Virgin Mary ("Whatever the correct position of Mary in the church ought to be, I think I'm on safe ground when I say that Frank Griswold isn't anywhere near it").

Having picked myself up off the floor, dried my tears and finished clutching my aching sides, I now commend it to your attention. Glorious stuff, especially for those of you who despair at the hierarchy within certain confessional Lutheran denominations I could mention. If you think your leadership's bad, guys, just try Frank Griswold for size.

PS - just to return to the current Topic A in the Lutheran Blogosphere for a moment, Chris Johnson's blog is, in my view, an object lesson in how to conduct Christian polemics.

Which OS are You?

Interesting post on Revd Paul McCain's Cyberbrethren blog a couple of weeks ago, entitled "Knocking Everywhere, But Nowhere in Particular", and looking at Gnostic tendencies in contemporary Christianity. McCain quotes from a book by Philip Lee, Against the Protestant Gnostics, and the bit that really struck me related to the issue of how - given John Calvin's high view of Word, Sacraments and Church - so much of the stream of Christianity flowing out of Geneva could end up, within a few centuries, as an individualistic chasing of one fad after another:

It is difficult to see how American Protestantism, deeply rooted in Calvinistic theology, could have moved in the direction of syncretistic religion. Calvin himself was quite clear about the single focus of faith ... Is it possible that Calvin himself left a loophole for Gnostic misinterpretation and even for Gnostic syncretism?

Even Wendel, the great student and advocate of Calvin's theology, conceded that there was room for ambiguity in Calvin's doctrine of the sacrament. He understood Calvin as believing that "we may attain to it [union with Christ] by other means, such as preaching, reading the Bible, or prayer," that is, by other means than through the sacraments. This open question was to lead North American followers onto a lonely road and, finally, into a Gnostic way far remove from "the ancient paths, where the good way is."

The Puritan followers of Calvin heard their teacher loud and clear on the matter of the sovereignty of God. Because God is sovereign, He has no obligation to use the sacraments. If God wishes to cleanse us by other means than by baptism, He can. If He chooses to nourish us by other means than Holy Communion, He certain can. They began to infer from this premise that God does not choose such means to save us. And because God is not bound to employ the Church itself to do His work, the Church does not occupy an essential role in redemption ...

... Unfortunately the critique of liberalism has come and continues to come chiefly from an evangelicalism which has an equal disdain for anything concrete in the Christian faith. If possible, the evangelicals were more suspicious of the sacraments than were their liberal opponents ... founded on the logic that because God does not require particular objects to effect His salvation, neither do we require them to receive His salvation.

As a "recovering Calvinist", I found this particularly helpful. I've spent years struggling with the "low" view of the Sacraments dominant within evangelicalism today, being convinced (from the Bible, the Anglican Prayer Book and Articles, and from my reading of Reformed writers such as Mike Horton and the Credenda Agenda crowd) that Baptism and the Lord's Supper should be seen as both more central, and more "effectual", than they are in practice by most evangelicals; while at the same time finding that Reformed explanations of the Sacraments sort of made sense when I read them, but then disappeared like the mist the moment I looked away - or compared them with what the Bible said.

That description of a conceptual distinction between the "outward sign" and the "inward grace" leading to a practical separation in which the outward sign can ultimately be discarded as unnecessary, seems a convincing explanation of the problem. Reason says, "God is not tied to the sacraments, so if people no longer find the sacraments 'helpful', then we can safely abandon or downgrade the sacraments in favour of other means."

Of course, reason says exactly the same thing about preaching, and many evangelicals who have used that line of argument consciously or unconsciously to downgrade the sacraments are now (rightly, but inconsistently) indignant with those charismatics who say that preaching is not necessarily the "best" or most "helpful" way of "speaking to people" today: that praise & worship songs, testimonies and "words of knowledge" are more "effective" today than old-fashioned preaching. (A few years ago, I had a long and fruitless argument with a charismatic friend who used precisely this line of argument - though he conceded that preachers could be given 10 to 15 minutes to say a few words; presumably to give us some practical but timeless truths for daily living).

As so often, it is asking the wrong questions that gives you the wrong answers. The proper question for us to ask is not, "Is God tied to the Word and Sacraments?" - in a way, that's not really any of our business - but rather, "Where can we find forgiveness, life and salvation? Where has God promised to give us these things?". And the answer then comes: in the Word, the water, the body and the blood. God may use other means to save people - that's His prerogative, after all - but why would we want anything other than the means God has graciously given us?

Following my anti-swearing post yesterday, I thought I'd post something more constructive. I've wagged my finger at y'all about how you shouldn't be writing, so here's some more positive guidance on how we all should be writing.

Here are George Orwell's six elementary rules for written prose, from his classic essay "Politics and the English Language":

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
   
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
   
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
   
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
   
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
   
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
   

Please don't start wading through my previous posts (or even this one!) to find examples of my breaking these rules. This is definitely a case where "I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing."

However, Orwell's rules - particularly when read in conjunction with the hilarious, but telling, examples of bad English in his essay - are well worth keeping in mind, especially next time you hear a journalist saying something like, "President Bush will be aiming to resuscitate the road map" (or, as Robin Cook puts it in an article in today's Guardian, "[Bush] has just unplugged the road-map from its life-support apparatus" - an enduring image, if you stop to think about it visually, which Cook obviously didn't).

And Orwell's essay is essential reading if you wish to discover why poor English is not only an aesthetic issue, but a political (and, one might add, a theological) problem: because poor English both reflects and promotes poor thinking.

One particularly enjoyable section involves Orwell's treatment of a well-know verse in Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Orwell translates this into modern English as follows:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Quite.

(I think I will welcome any feedback on how to improve the English in this post, though I can't guarantee I won't ban you in a fit of pique if you point out anything too embarrassing).

I'm pleased to see that someone found my site via the search "Lutheran 'daily lectionary'". I hope this means they had less difficulty finding this online than I had - that's the main reason I posted it in the first place.

Other recent searches: the Zurbaran and Francesca paintings have generated quite a few hits (posting art is obviously a good way to increase traffic); "lutheran implosion" (think you'll be wanting Dan's site rather than mine, squire); "Bach's theology"; "Calvinism's celebrations" (sounds like one of those "world's shortest book" gags, like the Book of Italian War Heros or Great French Military Victories of the Twentieth Century); and (my personal favourite) "Painting of Jesus knocking at the door of the UN". I need to see that picture, now :-)

Jason Dart rightly pointed out in a comment on my "polemics" post, below, that "there is a rather thick line ... between being polemical and being crude and insulting", and that "crude language and insults" may be particularly counterproductive when debating with pietists ("If that's where the Lutheran approach gets you, I'll stick to Rick Warren, thanks all the same").

Now, without wanting to sound too much like a parent here - but I then am a parent, and sounding like this kinda goes with the territory - in the past couple of months I have found myself being slightly taken aback by some of the language one encounters in the Lutheran Blogosphere. I keep biting my tongue, but now I've decided to take the advice of that ol' pietist John Wesley to "cast the fire out of your bosom."

All I want to say is this: Ephesians 4:29, Ephesians 5:4, Colossians 3:8 and James 3:1-12 may be "Law", but "the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good". So it'd be nice if our righteousness could exceed that of the Pharisees, scribes and Pietists on this one.

Lecture over :-)

There's been an interesting discussion in the comments to this post on Josh's blog, which linked the same exchange that I referred to in my earlier post on the "If you died tonight...?" question. The issue is over whether Ron "Terrible Swede" Olson was right to take such an aggressive line towards OleLuth777, or whether he should have aimed for a more conciliatory, persuasive approach.

Personally, I think there's a place for aggressive Christian polemics, though my own personal instincts are towards a more moderate, "why can't we all just get along?" approach; perhaps too much so at times (I did use to be an Anglican, after all). While Ron's reply is different from how I would have responded - we are, after all, different people, plus I don't have such a good editor to assist me - sometimes you do need to give people a serious jolt before they are open to persuasion. Call it "Law and Gospel", if you will.

For some interesting reflections on the proper place of Christian polemics, there's a whole issue of Modern Reformation devoted to the subject: Polemics: A Defense of Defending. Mike Horton provides the lead article, "How To Be Polemical Without Being a Downright Nasty Person!", which I offer without comment to the Lutheran Blogosphere's attention. Y'all seem to manage this pretty well, most of the time (see, there I go again, being Mr Nice Person).

Also recommended: David Mills's classic essay, Recovering the Art of Christian Polemics (thanks to Chris Williams for having drawn this one to my attention a couple of months back).

I dare say this seemed like a good idea at the time...

Interesting item on the Real Presence, from the Anglican "Pontifications" blog: "How can Jesus be in two places at once when he's not any place at all?". Intriguingly - given that this is an Anglican minister writing - the writer comes down squarely on the side of ... the Lutheran doctrine.

Having looked at the Roman Catholic, Reformed and Eastern Orthodox teachings, the writer points out that:

[The] Eastern, nondualistic approach was recovered in the West by, of all people, Martin Luther! ... Luther’s refusal to comprehend heaven as a determinate place meant that he did not need the theories of scholasticism in order to interpret Christ’s bodily presence in the Eucharist. Jesus is risen into the glory of God, and therefore he can be present in his body anywhere he promises to be. “This is my body. This is my blood.”

“The glory of our God,” Luther writes, “is precisely that for our sakes he comes down to the very depths, into human flesh, into the bread, into our mouth, our heart, our bosom.”

Where is the risen Jesus? Right there on the altar, as bread and cup. Jesus is risen into the Holy Eucharist!

All rather a long way from the "Black Rubric" of the 1662 Prayer Book, of course ("the natural Body and Blood of our Saviour Christ are in Heaven, and not here; it being against the truth of Christ's natural Body to be at one time in more places than one"), but then even the most orthodox Anglicans tend to sit a bit loose to their confessions at times.

The writer also links to a longer essay by Alvin Kimel (PDF) on the subject, which I've not yet read so can't comment on one way or the other.

Celebrated the end of my Lent break from buying books, CDs and DVDs yesterday by buying myself Johnny Cash's last "American Recordings" album, The Man Comes Around. It's pretty amazing stuff.

The title track opens the album, and is extraordinary, one of Cash's all-time best. It's about the Second Coming, with lyrics largely drawn from Revelation and other biblical texts (even if, occasionally, apparently taken from the JRCV - John R Cash Version), and astonishing music - the whole album features some of the tightest and most accomplished musical accompaniment I've heard in a long while.

The lyrics to this track can be found here, but probably lose some of their impact without the music. You might even be tempted to think they're a bit Tim LaHaye in places. Yeah, right - Tim LaHaye wishes.

In the liner notes, Cash explains that the song had its origins in a dream he had about meeting the Queen. Well, it would, wouldn't it? Makes perfect sense.

The rest of the album is then one of the most eclectic mixes imaginable: with songs by Nine Inch Nails ("Hurt"), Simon & Garfunkel ("Bridge Over Troubled Water" - sic), Depeche Mode ("Personal Jesus" - as expected, Cash transforms and redeems a previously-blasphemous song, turning it into one of the best songs on the album) and the Beatles ("In My Life"), not to mention "Danny Boy" (!) and "We'll Meet Again (!!! - yes, that "We'll Meet Again", the Dame Vera Lynn one). Almost all of these demonstrate that, if you let Johnny Cash borrow one of your songs, you were unlikely ever to get it back. It's his now.

You'll have guessed I'm fairly positive about this album. I don't plan to make a habit of album reviews on this site, but couldn't resist plugging this one.

I'm trying to order the book I blogged about the other day, About Our Liturgy.

It seems it's only available by mail order from University Lutheran Chapel, Minneapolis ($10 including international shipping), and they can only accept orders by post with money order enclosed, i.e. not by Visa or PayPal (the methods I suggested to them). I can't even begin to imagine how to go about doing that from the UK.

If any of you Lutheran blogosphere regulars have a PayPal account by which you could accept payment of $10 (plus your own postage costs) from me, and then mail a cheque to ULC on my behalf, that would be greatly appreciated. Please email me if you can help.

(I hope this doesn't read too much like one of those Nigerian "419" scams... at least I'm not asking you to place $25,000 in an offshore account to "facilitate" the transaction...)

Update: Problem is now solved. Many thanks to Jason Dart, who offered the services of his PayPal link over at Tentatio.

What's weird about this is that when I did this at home last night, I was only "Accidentally Evil". Doing it again today to get the code so I could post it here (since I only have web-TV at home), I appear to have been upgraded. I must be more evil today than yesterday.

My downfall is that I not only want to be a lawyer, I am a lawyer...

I liked this point from a post on Josh's blog.

When defending theology is defending something other than the Gospel, your theology sucks, and it needs to change. [Equating defending theology with defending the Gospel] only makes sense if you believe in salvation by faith, by "believing what you heard." If it's all about sovereign regeneration experiences and personal relationships with Jesus then yeah, what you believe, teach, and confess is largely irrelevant.

Josh is making a very sharp point here, and it came to mind again when reading 2 Corinthians 9:13 this morning (emphasis added):

By their approval of this service, they will glorify God because of your submission flowing from your confession of the gospel of Christ, and the generosity of your contribution for them and for all others...

It's striking how important one's "confession of the gospel of Christ" is to Paul. None of this nonsense we hear today about how someone "may sit a bit loose to the teachings of the Bible as historically understood, but he's a very holy man" (a sentiment often expressed concerning Rowan Williams). The question is not, "Are you a 'holy person'?" or even, "Are you regenerate?". The question is, "Do you believe and confess the gospel of Christ?"

This also fits with the approach taken by Jonathan Edwards (that well-known Lutheran!) in The Religious Affections. Edwards puts forward the view that if you do not believe the Bible's teachings, if you cannot say the Creed with sincerity, then you are not a professing Christian, period; so the question of whether your profession is genuine does not even arise, regardless of what experiences you claim to have had. This came as quite a jolt when I first read it, having been thoroughly infected with the prevailing view that, "Just because someone doesn't believe the Gospel doesn't mean you can write them off as a Christian."

The article by Dr Joel Okamoto on Speaking the Gospel into Postmodern Ears (see earlier post) goes on to look at the Lutheran - and biblical - alternative to this postmodern "blind doubt", in which

For both the modern and the postmodern mind, the key issue is what I am able to know, what counts is what I am able to know, to grasp, to understand.

Dr Okamoto points out how this is the complete opposite to the position we face with the Gospel:

From our Lutheran Catechism we confess about the Holy Spirit: “I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ, my Lord, or come to him; but the Holy Spirit has called me by the Gospel, enlightened me with his gifts, sanctified and kept me in the true faith. In the same way He calls, gathers, enlightens and sanctifies the whole Christian church on earth, and keeps it with Jesus Christ in the one true faith.”

“I cannot by own reason or strength believe.” That is our situation as sinners; that is the way Lutherans speak about the sinful condition: “I cannot believe.”

Always salutary for us to be reminded of this: as someone whose conversion (back) to Christianity was largely influenced by reading CS Lewis, I have a tendency to think that mere intellectual argument is sufficient to bring someone to faith (even though that is a total misreading of my own experience). To be reminded that people cannot believe is shocking to us, but true (and, one might add, something that needs to be given more than just lip-service in how we go about sharing the Gospel with people).

But given this inability to believe, how are we to set about addressing postmodern non-believers?

What is called for is to put the so-called “free will” to death, and then to bring forth new life. In the language of the Lutheran tradition, preaching the Law is putting the sinner, the rebellious in us, to death. Preaching the Gospel, the good news of forgiveness of sins and eternal life, on the other hand, brings forth faith in Christ the Lord.

Yes, but can you give us some concrete examples of what that means in practice? Dr Okamoto quotes Gerhard Forde, who uses the example of election, in his book Theology is for Proclamation:

Take the doctrine of election: the teaching that God chooses those who are saved. Who is Yahweh but the God of Israel? What is Israel but God’s chosen people? “Jacob I loved; Esau I hated.” Election provides “a crucial test case,” [Forde] says, “because it is such a persistent, intractable, and offensive problem for us.”

So what do we do? How do we set about preaching the message of God's election of sinners? "What word should be proclaimed?". I had a real interest in the answer to this question, having until recently been a Calvinist. While I feel I have some handle on the Lutheran position on election, I was wondering how Lutherans set about addressing the topic in practice, and so I was on the edge of my seat as I read all this.

Forde's answer is striking - almost shocking. But then I keep finding myself being first shocked, then persuaded, and finally thrilled and delighted by Lutheran teachings, and this may be no exception (p.15, emphasis added):

We are not, says Forde, "...to proclaim that God is an electing God; everybody knows that already and is scared to death by it." To proclaim that God elects is a preaching of the Law; this is a word that accuses and terrifies. Where this word has done its accusing work, where it has shown the wrath of God, then the word of the Gospel is to be spoken. What is to be said? In this case, the task is not to explain election. It is to do the electing. As Forde puts it: "One must have the nerve - or better, the Spirit - to do the unheard-of-thing and say to those listening 'You are the elect!' or 'You are the one.' " And out of such preaching God works, God saves.

One of the most refreshing differences between Lutherans and other evangelicals is Lutheranism's willingness to say, outright, "I forgive you your sins in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" - rather than hedging God's forgiveness round with "ifs". In Forde's terms, to elect, rather than merely talking about election.

Interesting article by Dr Joel P. Okamoto on "Lutherans Speaking the Gospel into Postmodern Ears" (PDF), from the Concordia Journal, April 2001 (starts on page 8 of the PDF file).

One thing I found interesting was the explanation (p.12) of how

for Augustine and the early church, and for Anselm and the medieval church, the relationship between faith and knowledge could be summed up in the saying, Credo ut intelligam: I believe in order to know,

but this relationship was then inverted by Descartes, whose principle then became, "I doubt in order to know":

For Descartes, the fact that he was doubting, that his mind was active in doubting, was for him indubitable evidence of his existence. Cogito ergo sum: I think therefore I am. But take note of his way to know. It used to be: I believe in order to know. For Descartes, it became: I doubt in order to know.

Descartes did not take this to its logical conclusion (namely, "the elimination of the possibility of certain knowledge about anything"), but Nietzsche did, and "the relativism and pluralism of the postmodern mind reflect a triumph of the ways of Nietzsche". A particularly good point made by Dr Okamoto is:

For Descartes, doubt was the starting point to certain knowledge, but doubting has turned out to be his legacy, and it is enormous. As Lesslie Newbigin observed: "At the most obvious level, it has created a prejudice in favor of doubt over faith. The phrases 'blind faith' and 'honest doubt' have become the most common of currency. Both faith and doubt can be honest or blind, but one does not hear of 'blind doubt' or of 'honest faith.'&nbsp"

"Blind doubt": brilliant. That's exactly what we see all around us. People who don't actually have the first idea what Christianity is about, but (like a three-year old refusing his dinner), just know they don't like it. And yet who think they are exercising "honest doubt" in place of the poor, deluded "blind faith" of those ignorant, lumpen, bigoted Christians.

There is some more good stuff later in the article, but that's enough for one post. More tomorrow.

"...and God were to ask you, 'Why should I let you into my heaven?', what would you say?"

I've never massively cared for this "evangelistic diagnostic tool". The idea, of course, is that any response beginning "Because I..." ("am a good person", or whatever), rather than "Because Christ...", is a solid-gold indicator of an unconverted state. And perhaps it can have some use in showing people the contrast between works-righteousness and the righteousness that comes through faith on account of Christ. But I've never felt entirely comfortable with it, and never used it myself, mainly because (i) it's not actually in the Bible (I mean, can you imagine St Paul or St Peter using that as their opening gambit with a non-believer?) and (ii) it's a bit of a trick question, and thus seems to verge on using underhand ways and practising cunning.

However, until reading this exchange between the Terrible Swede and "OleLuth777", I'd never been able to put my finger on what the real problem was. But this changed when reading the TS's response when asked that very question by OlePiet777:

I find this question very disturbing on your part. Since when was salvation dictated by what I do?

That's it! That's exactly the problem. It fosters the impression that salvation is won by a test for which we can practise. It replaces outright works-righteousness with a form of response-righteousness. And like all paths to "salvation" based on Law, it has two main effects:

1. In the careless and complacent, it reinforces the impression that the means of salvation lie within their grasp. It may be surprising - even offensive - to them to discover that the test is so very different from what they had expected, but it doesn't challenge the basic sinful paradigm of self-salvation by self-effort.

2. For believers, it can create a sense of insecurity and fear for their salvation. The conscious or unconscious anxiety is, "What if I slipped up and got the answer wrong?" You get hit by a bus, find yourselves at the gates of heaven unexpectedly, St Peter fires the "Why should I let you in?" question at you, and you get tongue-tied and come out with the wrong answer ("Because I'm a Christian!"). It reminds me of the Bridge of Death in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where failure to answer a question correctly results in being catapulted into the Gorge of Eternal Peril: "What is your favourite colour?" "Blue - no! Yellow! Aaaaarrrrrggggh!"

I suppose the reason I hadn't spotted this problem before is that (for obvious reasons) I am "infected with non-Lutheran theology", as the Swede would put it.

So should anyone ever ask me this question - and no-one has so far - I'll now be sorely tempted to respond, "Because I am baptized". Oh, hang on, that answer's one of the classic signs of the "baptized pagan". Oops. Into the Gorge of Eternal Peril I go...