Tag Archives: church

Church?

03 Monday Aug 2020

Posted by in Catholic Tradition, Faith, Heresies

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Our long-time commentator, Jock, recently wrote “as far as ‘church’ goes – it is the police (gestapo) aspect that concerns me most of all.” That is to be read in the context of a long dialogie about “church” and what it means. Here, some words of Michael Ramsey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, and one of my favourite theologians, might be called in aid. Commenting that when “we say we believe in the church, we do so only and always in terms of our belief in the God who judges and raises up.” He then goes on to add:

The mistake of ecclesiasticism through the ages has been to believe in the church as a kind of thing-in-itself. The apostles never regardfed the church as a thing-in-itself. Their faith was in God, who had raised Jesus from the dead, and they knew the power of the Resurrection to be at work in them and in their fellow believers despite the unworthiness of them all. That is always the true nature of belief in the church. It is a laying-hold on the power of the Ressurection. And because it is that, it is always on the converse side death: death to self; death to worldly hopes; death to self-sufficiency; death to any security for the church or for Christianity, other than the security of God and the Resurrection. [The Gospel and the Catholic Church].

It is a reminder to us all of what can be so off-putting about the Church – and by that I mean any Church, not simply my own.

In my own Church, as in others, the pejorative description is “clericalism,” which in practice is often no more than the sort of professional camderarderie which can, and therefore does, grow up in any organisation. It is when it gets out of hand, when it appears that what matters is the church itself, not in terms of our belief in God, that things can go badly wrong: it is at the root of all the clerical abuse scandals. It is easy enough to understand how a cleric’s reaction to child abuse, or other sorts of abuse, could be to seek to temper the damage done to the church by “moving on” the suspect, but what is less easily understood, except in terms of clerical group-think is how anyone could have imagined that the longer-term damage would not be more severe; what is impossible to understand is why the first thought of any cleric was not for the victim of the abuse. But, it might be protested, organisations often behave in this self-protective way, to which the answer in the case of the church would be to quote Archbishop Ramsey. Belief in the church as a “thing-in-itself” is ultimately self-defeating.

If the church, any church, seems centred in its own concerns, the chances are that it has lost touch with what, or rather Who, it is there for. Decades of well-meant ecumenism have shown that at national and local level “churches together” can act as one, and the communities where that happens benefit from it. During the current crisis many churches have worked together to help those in need locally. We hear little about that, and much about the supposed failure of Bishops to challenge the Government’s regulations from well-meaning critics who argue one side of a case as though it were the whole picture.

Our faith is in God, and for all the failures of the men who lead it and have led it, the Church is the repository of the dogma and doctrine that has been received from the Apostles. One is at liberty to doubt that, and given the number of churches, it is natural that it should be so. But absent that belief, what have we but a free for all where one person says “x” and another “y” and there is no way of deciding, for example, between the statement that Jesus is the Son of God who died for our sins, rose again on the third day and ascended into Heave, and that He will come again in glory to judge the living and dead, and statement that he was a very good man who went about doing good deeds and died a cruel, but ultimately pointless death? That was not how the Apostles and their their successors proceeded; it cannot be how we proceed.

If we remember and heed Archbishop Ramsey’s advice, we shall at least not swerve far from where we should be. As Jock, like so many, have discovered, the gap between the rhetoric and the reality can be one down which so many people fall. There have been many during the crisis who have claimed that “church” is more than the building, a response to an allegation no one has ever made, though if someone can supply a source for someone saying “the church is just a building” it would be interesting. We might, however, all with profit ponder on Ransey’s words: “we say we believe in the church, we do so only and always in terms of our belief in the God who judges and raises up.”

 

Ideal and reality

10 Friday Jul 2020

Posted by in Early Church, Faith

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There is a paradox at the heart of our Christian lives. We see it portrayed in the Old Testament. Israel is God’s Chosen People. Yet its people are often disobedient, unfaithful and they provoke God’s wrath. It is likewise with the Church. Membership of the Church is no guarantee of salvation, or indeed, even of good behaviour. It is hard to read very far in Catholic social media without coming across expressions of asperity about the Pope, the Bishops, the liturgy and, indeed, the Church itself. This is excused, as all who resort to such criticisms in whatever area of life excuse it, by concern for right-thinking and right practice, or, in Christian terms orthodoxy and orthopraxis. That the ideal exists only on paper, or in the imagination of the critics, or (which is the same thing) in an idealised version of some past “golden age”, is no bar to the critic. It reminds me of the old excuse for corporal punishment – it is necessary to inflict pain in order to stop the person being punished doing something worse. It seems as insufficient an instrument for Christian discourse as our fallen nature could contrive – hence no doubt its prevelance. The irony, in a Culture Wars context is indeed black. Where, I sometimes wonder, do its Christian critics think the idea of “cancelling” someone for their unorthodox views came from? Naturally, when ideas one holds oneself become targets for “cancellation,” one protests. For those doing the cancelling, nothing short of recantation and orthodxy and orthopraxis will do.

This paradox has been with the Church from its founding by Christ. The man to whom He entrusted His sheep loved them, as he loved Jesus, but that did not stop him being a deeply fallible human being, any more than it stopped him from bringing souls to Christ for salvation. St Paul was clearly a man who aroused strong opinions, and to judge from the tenor of his letters, he was hardly the easiest person to get on with. None of that stopped him being the most effective missionary in Christian history. His letters were kept and copied and circulated because they touched the early Church in so many of its concerns, practical as well as theological.

Perhaps we might learn something from St Paul here? We can see from his letters to the Corinthians that, to put it frankly, he considered some of them to be sinful and wayward and in danger of straying from the Way. But not once, in all his criticisms, does St Paul tell them that they do not belong to the real Church, composed of the faithful. They are, as he makes clear, desperately unworthy, and yet they are the ‘elect’ and they are ‘saints’ and members of the body of Christ.

St Paul looks forward, as does the whole Body of Christ, to the age to come, but he lived, as we live and as the whole Body of Christ lives, in a present where things are far from perfect – and chief among those things is us. The Church is one, even as we are sanctified by baptism, but that is in an echatalogical context; in this fallen world it is hard to see that in the divisions we have caused. Not all who are in the Church will be saved; not all who seem to be outside it will be lost. God alone is the Judge.

We have to live, as Paul’s Corinthians did, with the knowledge we fall short. But we know that what matters is not the falling, but the getting up again. Sometimes all I can say is “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.” Sometimes I think it is all I need to say. Knowing you are actually the tax collector in the Synagogue has only one advantage, it stops you thanking God you are not like yourself, which may be the beginning of wisdom, in learning how to be more like Him.

What is the Church for?

04 Saturday Jul 2020

Posted by in Catholic Tradition, Early Church, Faith

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The question of how we communicate Christianity is tied up with the question of what we think the Church is for. Too often discussions of this concentrate on what needs to be done to revive the Church (that is, what actions we need to take) rather than on what the Church is for (that is what God meant in founding it). Here I want to begin with some wise words from +Rowan Williams:

the Church is because God is and acts, not because of what we do or think. We did not invent the Church. The Church, the body of Christ, is given to us as the means of our particpation in an eternal reality .

He goes on to write: “to engage in mission is not to engage in a recruitment or publicity campaign. It is to seek day after day to extend the invitation built into God’s very being, the invitation to share God’s very life”. (God’s Church in the World, chapter 1).

Do we do this? To what extent does the prevelance of what one might call “management speak” in talking about the Church and its leadership get in the way of a theologically-informed approach to Ministry? As Professor Martyn Percy wrote in 2016 about the reform programme brought in by ++ Welby: “If the changes he is augmenting don’t have a theological root and depth, then the risk is that the change is one of mere pragmatism and expedient managerialism.”

It is sometimes said that whilst history does not repeat itself, historians do; the same thing might be said of large organisations. As anyone who has endured “Management training days” in any organisation will know to their cost, large organisations tend to buy into management-speak, with its “key performance indicators” (KPIs) and “performance targets,” often with the zeal of the neophypte convert. That said, it would be foolish to ignore gems of wisdom embedded in such programmes, though when examined they do seem to have a tendency to be statements of the blindingly obvious heavily disguised by jargon to make them sound more profound. When it comes to the Church, no doubt secular strategic theory has its place, but if it is not informed by faith, then it’s hard to see how the Church distinguishes itself from other organisations. If that is thought desirable, fair enough, but if it is an unintended by-product, that is a different matter.

Martyn Percy’s words here ring true four years after they were written:

Our calling is not to heroically rescue the church, or to save the world. God, in Christ, has already done both of these. It is this God we need to hear more about – and less about how people currently claim to be operating in his name.

Theology is not a detached exercise of the Christian intellect – or at least it ought not to be for a Christian – it is the life of the Body of Christ. As Rowan Williams has commented: “the Church cannot be reformed by human effort and ingenuity, any more than sin can be eradicated by good will.” (Gill & Kendall, Michael Ramsey as theologian, 1995, p. 12). If you define the Church as a human society for promoting certain kinds of behaviour or codes of practice as specified by an elite governing class, or if, in practice, that is what a Church becomes, and if your theology becomes, in effect an exercise in submission to one supreme legitimate source for imperatives in faith and morals, then that runs several sorts of risk – as history shows.

A Church which amounts to a supreme authority to which its members must unquestioningly submit runs the risks inherent in any organisation staffed by human beings. When Lord Acton commented that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely,” he was writing about the history of the Inquisition. As he told the then Bishop of London, Mandell Creighton:

There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. That is the point at which the negation of Catholicism and the negation of Liberalism meet and keep high festival, and the end learns to justify the means. 

Three phenomena tend to accompany such a vision of what Church is: outward conformity out of fear or self interest; conformity because of agreement; nonconformity and schism. The fruits of the former are inward corruption in a whited sepulcre; the fruits of the second are intellectual stagnation and want of lively minds; and the latter, well it usually ends up with the leaders of any particular sect doing precisely what they began by condemning the leaders of their old church for doing: rinse and repeat.

But if we define the Church as a Divine Epiphany, that is a showing of God’s love for us as revealed in Incarnation and Resurrection, and a revelation to us, albeit through a glass darkly, of what can be known about the Infinite by the finite, then we build on rock. We are Christians, that is we are “in Christ.” We can abandon the limitations imposed by our nature which makes us see the Church as a project begun by Christ through His Apostles, struggling against the forces of darkness in this world, and which needs the application of human wisdom through (take your pick) the Inquisition, the Reformation, schemes of Church planting, better management structures or the like, to survive; it already exists in its fullness which is the Eucharist. The real unity of the Church is a sharing of that sacrifice offered once and for all.

Theology and history point, perhaps, in this direction. In the recent post on Junia, the question was asked “what did St Paul mean by ‘Apostle?'” The Bishop or priest presides at the celebration of the Eucharist in order to let the Messiah act through him (or, in the Anglican understanding, her). The first Apostles were not there by some decree of Canon Law, or because of some semi-occult belief that they had special powers denied to others, but because they represented Christ. It is in that showing that the Church exists in its fullness.

In its language and actions the Church is an assembly which draws us towards a fuller, deeper understanding that through the Incarnation and Resurrection, God’s love is poured out for us, not was poured out, but is poured out. It is because of this, because the Eucharist is the essence of the Church that we have missed it so much.

 

Across the Divide: Education and Faith

05 Tuesday Feb 2019

Posted by in Catholic Tradition, Education

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It is some time since I published here, but seeing that the site is well used by others, I have kept it up and kept an eye on it. I’d like to thank Nicholas in particular for his interesting contributions.

I have had three main reasons for not writing: the first is that any controversy would be unhelpful to the greater cause I serve; the second is time; and the third is that there are enough people offering views on what is happening in the Roman Catholic Church without my adding my mite.

Though I blog pseudonymously, my identity is easily guessed. Indeed, the very week I arrived where I now work, the subject of an unflattering blog piece from me wrote to me here to protest. As I am not in the business of giving egotists attention, I filed the letter in the cylindrical receptacle in my office and decided then and there to avoid any chance of a repeat. In the interim I have been able to help my current University to improve its position in the academic world, which is a much better use of my energies and time. But the question which accompanied me here is now, perhaps because of that, more clamant. What is the place of the Church in education?

In England the Church has been involved in education for far longer than the state. About a third of the schools are Faith Schools, and whether secularists like it or not, the Churches have been, remain, and will continue to be, involved in education. Most Church schools have long waiting lists, and parents will go to great lengths to get their children into one. They must be doing something right.

At tertiary level it is a different matter. It was the need for a Faith-based University to begin to rival the performance at secondary level, which took me to where I am now. But why is the thing worth doing at all? Isn’t Faith a private matter which should be left at the door of any educational institution?

No. The idea that it should be so it, itself, a partisan position. The Churches have huge assets invested in education, and the idea that they should simply be put at the service of those who would like to use them to drive their own agenda has about it a sense of chutzpah which is almost endearing in its bare-faced cheek.

We have passed through an era when education and vocational training became synonymous; it is now widely recognised that what makes people employable are so-called soft skills – the ability to think critically, to solve complex problems, to be creative and to be able to manage people. Lest it be thought that this is special pleading on my part, this list comes from the World Trade Organization, not me. A faith-based education offers a holistic, values-based experience to its students. Anyone who wonders why that might matter to, say, a Banker, might care to ponder the root causes of the crash of 2008. The word “Credit” is from the Latin “Credo,” meaning “I believe.” But if there are no agreed and shared values, if all is relative, how can anyone’s word be their bond? It is every person for themself and the devil take the hindmost. No system of finance or, for that matter, governance, can work on that basis. The best place to lay the right foundations is in schools.

I do not say only Faith-based institutions can offer this, but I do want to suggest that they offer an explicit rationale for the values they espouse, values which still, just, lie at the heart of our civilisation

Of course, any fool can point out that religion has been a divisive force, which is why so many do, but that ignores Original Sin. There is nothing good which fallen mankind cannot put to  a bad use; that does not make it bad.

Viewed aright, the Christian ethic is one of love, and anyone who thinks that is a soft and soppy idea needs to re-read what St Paul says about love. Anyone who has seriously tried to practice that sort of love knows how very hard it is for us. But it is good for us. we are not called simply to tolerate others (a hard enough task for many nowadays) we are called to exercise self-restrain and to love them. A Society as riven and divided as the one in which we live has need of that quality. If it is not inculcated via a Faith-based route, it is unclear who else will provide it.

Our society pays a good deal of attention to physical well-being, and also increasingly to mental well-being. But if we are not careful – and we have not been as a society – these lead down a material route: if I have a healthy body and lots of “stuff” then I am fine. Yet the evidence suggests that our young people are suffering from a crisis of mental health. 

Humankind has always needed more than the material if it is to be healthy; but our impoverished materialism is what is offered, and so when our young want bread, we offer them stones. Again, those educated in a Faith-based system have other indicators of what is an is not the “good life.” Man does not live by bread alone.

The Churches in this country are sitting on a great asset, if one wants to put it bluntly, and if one does, one might add the question of what they are doing to ensure it is well-used? If the Churches do not use that asset properly, then they are poor stewards of a precious inheritance. One of the privileges of my current position is to see the ways in which the Churches are using those assets to make a difference. One might want more, one always will, but the part played by the Churches in the world of education is, on the whole, a noble one.

If Christ will not help us heal, then who else can?

We might reflect on why we have so often given the secularists so much ammunition to show that religion is a divisive affair? It is sin which divides us. If we can follow Him in questioning the lazy assumptions of the comfortable, and in helping those who most need it, then we do His work.

Across the UK the Churches can work together more closely to ensure that there is real diversity in our society – a diversity which includes respect for the part the Churches play in that society. We are not rooted in the shallow soil of Enlightenment assumptions about the perfectibility of humankind, but rather in the insight St Paul offers in Romans 7, which tells us that each of us is the problem. However hard we will the good, we do the bad. Our Faith grounds us in the humility that comes from that, and the fact that the only answer to our fallen nature is Christ.

In a world where “leaders” are expected to be those who always succeed, our Faith reminds us that failure is inevitable, and that what matters is how we use that experience and to whom we dedicate it. The divide in our society, and within us, is to be bridged only by that insight.

 

Something in the Air

13 Friday Apr 2018

Posted by in Catholic Tradition, Church/State, Education, Faith

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Several things caught my eye in Philip’s excellent article the other day. I hate writing posts in commboxes (although I do it far too often), so I thought I would discuss it here.

The first comes from the Catholic Herald, always a good source of information.

[O]n 8 April, I made the 2.5-hour drive to the National Shrine of Divine Mercy Shrine in Stockbridge, Massachusetts for Divine Mercy Sunday. And how could I not? Judging by the licence plates in the parking lots, pilgrims travelled from every corner of the United States. According to the programme, many more flew over from Europe. I practically live down the street.

It was a deeply moving occasion, despite Mother Nature’s lack of cooperation: it was finger-numbingly cold, with snow flurries dropping in and out. Yet 15,000 pilgrims descended on the little mountain town, bundled in parkas and blankets. Some charitable souls drifted through the crowd passing out hand warmers.

Aside from the official proceedings, what struck me most was the demographic make-up. There were Hispanics, Filipinos, Africans, and Chinese – but hardly a Caucasian in sight. That’s grossly unrepresentative of the national Catholic population: 59 per cent are white, 34 percent are Hispanic, 3 per cent are Asian, and 3 per cent are black.

Of course, this has nothing to do with race and everything to do with trends in migration. Immigrants, whatever their faith tradition, tend to be more devout than their native-born counterparts. This is true even in countries like Sweden, where predominantly-white immigrants from Poland are contributing to a boom in the Catholic population.

But are these new Catholics a permanent feature of American and Western European countries? That seems doubtful. A new Gallup polldemonstrates that the rate at which Catholics attend Mass continues to fall since 1955, from 75 per cent to 39 per cent. This, despite the fact that the nominal Catholic population has grown considerably thanks to mass immigration from South America. Meanwhile, attendance at Protestant services has remained fairly stable.

The lack of Protestant immigration actually gives them an advantage with this metric. The children or grandchildren of immigrants who stop practising the faith are more likely to identify – if only nominally – with their family’s religion. Because Catholic immigration is so high, there are many “cultural” or “lapsed” Catholics: those who identify with the Faith, but don’t attend Mass. Meanwhile, Protestants who have “un-churched” are more likely to identify as irreligious.

True enough, out here the Catholic Church is made up of probably close to a majority of Hispanics, of all ages, and who are treated quite badly by the established Anglo congregations, to the point of nearly two churches in one building. A good many of the Anglos strike me as mostly CINO’s (Catholics in name only). Given it is Hispanic immigration, I don’t see it as much in the Protestant churches but suspect it is mostly a lack of Hispanics not a difference in attitude.

The funny part is, Islam also has this problem, they too are losing the immigrants’ children.

Here, again, Pew’s study of Islam in America is enlightening. Nine per cent of ex-Muslims converted to a different faith, and one per cent said they were actively searching for a spiritual path. That means only 10 per cent remain open to engaging with organised religion. The other 90 effectively become secular or “spiritual-not-religious”, which usually amounts to the same thing.

Apparently, it is something in the air in America. part of it, of course, is the churches themselves, I’m not a particularly regular attendee myself. My local church is good on liberal platitudes, on real (what some call, muscular) Christianity, not so much. Other choices such as LCMS are quite inconvenient for me, perhaps it will solve itself, or God will show me a way, but for now, that’s how it is.

In a Federalist article, Mathew Cochrane notes that one of the weaknesses of our churches is that we are driving away men. He quotes Ross Douthat’s “God and Men and Jordan Peterson” New York Times column to good effect.

The men fled; the women stayed.

That’s the story of Easter weekend in the New Testament. Most of Jesus’ male disciples vanished when the trouble started, leaving his mother and Mary Magdalene and other women to watch by the cross, prepare his body for his burial, and then (with the men still basically in hiding) find the empty tomb.

Male absence and female energy has also been the story, albeit less starkly and dramatically, of Christian practice in many times and places since.

Except that is not true, all concerned missed the real story, didn’t they? How many times had Jesus told them he would rise from the dead? None of them, not a single one, believed Him – they went to the tomb to properly prepare his corpse and were gently chided by the Angel:

“Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified and on the third day rise” (Luke 24:5-7).

There is also this,

As one blogger quickly pointed out, two key issues with Douthat’s presentation of the story highlight a disregard for men. First is the enormous factual error: Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, both men, were actually the ones to prepare and bury Jesus’ body (John 19:38-42) while the women watched (Luke 23:55-56) and returned with additional spices several days later. Unlike Douthat, Mark the Evangelist is quite right to observe that Joseph “took courage” before going to the guy who just had Jesus executed and asking him for the corpse (Mark 15:43).

Yep, that’s how you are going to attract men, NOT.

He is Risen

01 Sunday Apr 2018

Posted by in Easter, Faith, St Luke's Gospel, St Mark's Gospel, St Peter

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Well after Nicholas’s kind words yesterday, maybe I should share this. This is my traditional Easter Sunday post, although I edited it for today, it remains very much as it was.

That’s the importance of the day. Jesus the Christ is risen from the dead. This is the most important day for Christians.

Let’s speak a bit on the history. You may know that Easter is an Anglophone term for what nearly everybody else calls some form of Pasch. There’s a myth about that, which The Clerk of Oxford does a fine job of debunking.

How was Easter celebrated in Anglo-Saxon England? There’s a popular answer to that question, which goes like this: ‘the Anglo-Saxons worshipped a goddess called Eostre, who was associated with spring and fertility, and whose symbols were eggs and hares. Around this time of year they had a festival in her honour, which the Christians came over and stole to use for their own feast, and that’s why we now have Easter’.

Yeah, not so much, Eostre was mentioned in two sentences by St Bede, the rest is mostly 19th-century fabrication.

The women and the angel at the tomb, from the Benedictional of St Æthelwold
(BL Additional 49598, f. 51v)

The reenactment of this scene – the women and the angel at the empty tomb – forms one of the best-known elements of the early medieval Easter liturgy, famous because it is often said to be one of the oldest examples of liturgical drama. To quote from Regularis Concordia, as translated in this excellent blogpost at For the Wynn:

When the third reading [of Nocturns] is being read, let four brothers clothe themselves, one of whom, clothed in white and as if about to do something else, should go in and secretly be at the burial place, with his hand holding a palm, and let him sit quietly.  And while the third responsory is being sung, let the remaining three follow: all clothed with cloaks, carrying censers with incense in their hands, and with footsteps in the likeness of someone seeking something, let them come before the burial place. And let these things be done in imitation of the angel sitting on the tomb and of the women coming with spices, so that they might anoint the body of Jesus.

And when the one remaining has seen the three, wandering and seeking something, approach him, let him begin, with a moderate voice, to sing sweetly: ‘Whom are you seeking?’ When this has been sung to the end, let the three respond with one voice: ‘Jesus of Nazareth’. To whom he should say: ‘He is not here.  He has risen, as he said before.  Go, announce it, because he has risen from the dead.’ With this command, let those three turn around to the choir, saying, “Alleluia, the Lord has risen.’ When this has been said, let the one sitting turned back, as if calling them back, say this antiphon: ‘Come and see the place’.

Saying these things, let him rise and lift up the veil and show them the place devoid of the cross, but with the linens placed there which with the cross had been wrapped. When they have seen this, let them set down the censers which they were carrying in the same tomb, and let them take the linen and spread it out in front of the clergy, and, as if showing that the Lord has risen and is not wrapped in it, let them sing this antiphon, ‘The Lord has risen from the tomb’, and let them lay the linen upon the altar.

This is a dramatic replaying of the crucial moment in the Easter story, bringing it to life through the voices and bodies of the monks. Although presumably the primary audience for this liturgical play was the monastic community itself, it may also have been witnessed by lay people. That appears to be the implication of a miracle-story told by Eadmer, describing something which he saw take place as the ritual was being performed in Canterbury Cathedral in c.1066:

There is quite a lot more at her post which is linked above and recommended highly.

We have often spoken about Jesus the leader, and his unflinching dedication to the death to his mission. On Easter, this mission is revealed. It finally becomes obvious that His mission (at this time, anyway) is not of the Earth and it’s princelings. It is instead a Kingdom of souls.

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son,

that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

And so we come to the crux of the matter. The triumph over original sin and death itself. For if you believe in the Christ and his message you will have eternal life. This is what sets Christianity apart, the doctrine of grace. For if you truly repent of your sins, and attempt to live properly, you will be saved. Not by your works, especially not by your wars and killing on behalf of your faith, valid  and just though they may be,  but by your faith and your faith alone. For you serve the King of Kings.

And as we know, the Christ is still leading the mission to save the souls of all God‘s children. It is up to us to follow the greatest leader in history or not as we choose. We would do well to remember that our God is a fearsome God but, he is also a just God. We shall be judged entirely on our merits as earthly things fall away from us. But our God is also a merciful God. So be of good cheer for the Father never burdens his people with burdens they cannot, with his help, bear.

As we celebrate the first sunrise after the defeat of darkness, Hail the King Triumphant for this is the day of His victory.

 

He is Risen indeed!

And hath appeared unto Simon!

Even Simon, the coward disciple who denied him thrice

“Christ is risen indeed, and hath appeared to Simon!”

to Simon Peter the favoured Apostle, on whom the Church is built

Crossposted from Nebraska Energy Observer.

Viva el Cristo rey!

22 Tuesday Nov 2016

Posted by in Catholic Tradition, Faith, Salvation, St Luke's Gospel

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christ-as-kingThis was the cry of many Hispanic martyrs put before firing squads by socialist dictators.

“Long live Christ the King!“

I thoroughly agree with all that Chalcedon said in his reflections Sunday. While he writes from his Catholic perspective, I find them valid for us all. Is there any amongst us whose church doesn’t have similar problems?

But for us, as for the Catholics, last Sunday was Christ the King, and it is perhaps happenstance that we have been speaking recently of the two kingdoms, or perhaps it is not. One thing we do know is who reigns and rules in both Kingdoms. The reading Sunday was Luke 23:33-43, and I want to emphasize a bit of it.

39 And one of the malefactors which were hanged railed on him, saying, If thou be Christ, save thyself and us.

40 But the other answering rebuked him, saying, Dost not thou fear God, seeing thou art in the same condemnation?

41 And we indeed justly; for we receive the due reward of our deeds: but this man hath done nothing amiss.

42 And he said unto Jesus, Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom.

43 And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.

If you can’t see yourself in the first thief, well I surely can in my mirror.

Dr. Gene Veith who is currently in Australia posted a bit from a bulletin note on Christ’s kingship from Pilgrim Lutheran Church there. I’d like to share it with you as well.

On this Last Sunday of the Church Year, the Day of Fulfillment, the focus of our readings is “Christ the King.” In Jeremiah 23 God denounced the kings of Judah as “shepherds” who had scattered God’s sheep.  But God also promised to “raise up for David a righteous Branch,” who “shall reign as king and deal wisely.”

In Luke 23 we see how this King would be revealed to the world:  dying on the cross for the sins of the world.  How hidden from the world is the wisdom of God!  It is seen only by faith.  The hostile religious leaders sneered and scoffed:  “A Messiah (the long-promised King) who can’t save himself!”  The pagan soldiers mockingly challenged him to save himself.  Pontius Pilate wrote a contemptuous yet official (and profoundly true!) superscription, “This is the King of the Jews.”  One of the criminals derisively called for proof of his messiahship.  But the other thief, admitting his guilt, looked to the tortured, dying Jesus and by faith saw Him for who He was:  the King who could save him.  And Jesus promised that he would be with Him in paradise today.  Jesus is the the merciful King who forgives even those killing Him and grants eternal life to a repentant sinner.

Still Christ our King comes among us, bringing the reign of God into our ordinary lives; not in dazzling spectacle but in the ordinary things He has commanded and in which He promised to be present to forgive, save, and give life:  water, word, bread, and wine.

One day, at Jesus’ second appearing, the veil will be lifted and Christ the King’s reign will no longer be hidden to human eyes, and every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord (Phil 2:10-11).  But for the time being the same Lord Jesus Christ brings the reign of God to us in humble ways, and looking to Christ Crucified we can joyfully say:  “This is my King.”

Reflections on hell

23 Wednesday Dec 2015

Posted by in Bible, End times, Faith, Reading the BIble, Salvation

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gehenna1We have been discussing hell a lot here, and I have been doing a bit of reading on the subject. Dave Smith and I (and Ginny) have had something of a back and forth on this (300 comments and rising!) and rather than leave everything in the comboxes, I thought I’d share some thoughts. Right up front, let me say I am not denying the reality of hell, but what I am doing is interrogating the view that it is a place where souls, or souls and bodies, burn for eternity.

So, let us have a little look at that four-letter word – hell. It is not used in the Greek or the Septuagint – so we do not find it anywhere in the original Bible. What do we find? We get four words (the links are to Strong’s concordance so you can check I am not making this up as I go along):

  1. Sheol (Hebrew)
  2. Hades (Greek)
  3. Tartarus (Greek)
  4. Gehenna (Greek)

It depends, of course, on which English translation you use. The most common one, the King James Version, has the most uses of the word ‘hell’ – some 54 occurrences – you can see from the link that others have far fewer. To put it into perspective, the Bible uses the word ‘heaven’ 664 times – in whatever version you choose. It may mean nothing that in most versions heaven is mentioned more times, but in most modern versions ‘hell’ gets 14 mentions, and the original word is one of those used above. So where does this get us?

Let’s deal with ‘Tartarus’ first and its one mention in 2 Peter 2:4. This, we are told, is a holding place for fallen angels before they are judged – so I think we can say with some confidence it isn’t any place anyone is going to spend eternity. That leaves us with the other three words which the older English translations call ‘hell’.

In the Old Testament, every translation is from the Hebrew ‘Sheol’. It means the abode of the dead. I cannot trace any mention in the Jewish sources to which I have access of anyone burning there for eternity. In English, ‘Sheol’ is translated variously as ‘hell’, ‘the pit’ and ‘the grave’ – and it is a place people can go into when they are alive, but in which they then perish. It is a place of the dead – there is no mention of anyone in it having any consciousness – or of them burning. Hades is mentioned 11 times in the NT, mostly as hell, but once as grave. But what sort of place is it? If we look at Acts we see a place which looks like Sheol – a place where the dead go and their bodies rot.

The only word used in the NT which has any connotation of burning is Gehenna. It is used 12 times in the NASB: Matthew 5:22; Matthew 5:29; Matthew 5:30; Matthew 10:28; Matthew 18:9; Matthew 23:15; Matthew 23:33; Mark 9:43; Mark 9:45; Mark 9:47; Luke 12:5; James 3:6. Gehenna was a real place – it is the Hinnom valley just outside Jerusalem. It was the place where the Pagan Jews erected their altar to Moloch. As a result, later generations used it as a rubbish pit into which all the refuse of the city was thrown, and where the bodies of those crucified were also thrown – and fires would burn perpetually to burn the remains and stop germs spreading. So, when Jesus refers to it in Mark 9 as the place where the worm does not die and the fire is not quenched he is speaking literally – those hearing him knew the place. There is no reference here to it being a place where any conscious being would dwell in eternal torment. Of course, for a Jew, the defilement of the corpse in such a place was a dreadful thing, and Christ is saying that even that would be better than sinning – but the idea that he is saying that those who sin are going to spend eternity suffering there is not in the text. If we look at the Lukan reference, where Jesus talks about ‘Him’ who destroys the body and soul in Gehenna, then that is a reference to God destroying us – not letting us live forever in torment.

Paul tells us the wages of sin is death, which he contrasts with the eternal life to those who believe. He does not say ‘the wages of sin is to burn in hell forever. Paul was steeped in Jewish teaching, and what he inherited was the idea of Sheol as a place of death and extinction. Psalm 1:6 told Paul and his fellow Jews that the Lord would know the righteous, but the ungodly would perish; it did not say they would burn in Gehenna. Psalm 37:20 made the same point – the wicked would perish, they would vanish away, and Psalm 69:28 underlines that – they will be ‘blotted out’ – not burnt in any lake of fire. They will be (Psalm 92:7) ‘destroyed forever’. This was standard Jewish teaching as we see not only from the Psalmists, but from Isaiah too. Malachai certainly mentions fire, but does so to say that the wicked will be burnt up and no trace of them will be left.

This was what the Jews believed, so if Jesus was telling them something new, one might expect much to have been made of this by Paul and the others – after all, if, as disobedience to God actually means spending eternity in a lake of fire, then that’s a message to get out there urgently, not least to the People of the Covenant who had no such concept. Yet we find St John, who certainly combatted heretical ideas in his Gospel and letters, telling us that those who do not believe in Jesus will perish, whilst those who do will have everlasting life; he does not say those who do not believe will burn in Gehenna. Paul makes the same point to the Philippians that the evil will be destroyed. The same message was sent to the Thessalonians (unless one takes the view that everlasting destruction does not mean that you are destroyed for evermore, but are subject to being destroyed for ever, and I can’t see why Paul would have meant that when there was no Jewish teaching to that effect) the Corinthians and, as I have already mentioned, to the Romans.

Paul seems to have known nothing of this Gehenna where the wicked would burn eternally, and neither he, nor James nor Jude nor Peter mention it. It would have been a big departure from what they had been taught, and one might reasonably have expected it to be emphasised. Instead there is a continuity with the Jewish teaching on Sheol. We shall be raised at the last and judged, and then, death and hell (Sheol) are cast into the lake of fire. They cease to exist, that is the second death.

How we read Revelation is always a moot point, and is one of the reasons the early Church fathers hesitated before accepting it into the Canon. ‘As late as 633, the Spanish Council of Toledo remarked how many people still opposed the use of John’s Revelation, and commanded that it must be read in church liturgies, under heavy penalty’, whilst to this day the Greeks do not use it in their liturgical worship. But it is there (although Luther had his doubts) and it tells us that hell and death are to be cast into the lake, as are those whose name is not written in the book of life, but only ‘the devil’ ‘the Beast’ and the ‘false prophet’ are condemned to eternal torment. One could certainly insist that everyone else in the lake would also suffer, but that would be a lot of weight to place on a notoriously difficult text.

Well, there it is, ‘heresy corner’ as Chalcedon has called it. I shall don my helmet and retire to my trenches with just one note. I am not denying the resurrection (pace ginny), neither am I saying hell is not real. I am simply trying to see how what the Scriptures say aligns with the Western belief that hell is a place of eternal torment. Yes, I am happier to think that God has so arranged things so that no one suffers for eternity; the faithless go down to the pit and are known no more; the faithful rise to life eternal.

 

 

 

Christianity in the public square

25 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by in Bible, Faith

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One reflection on the fuss over the showing of the advertisement for the Lord’s Prayer in cinemas, would be that it shows up the ambivalence our society has with Christianity and, probably with the idea of religious faith of any variety; I think it does not know what to make of it. My comments apply to the UK, and I’d be interested in what our American readers and commentators have to say about their own situation, but here the only exposure most children get to religion is via school, where, even in Church of England or Catholic schools, teachers bend over backward to be inclusive – which is a euphemism for not teaching much about Christianity. They will get lots of comparative religion, but how much use this is to children who don’t understand what religion is might be a good question to ask. When I was teaching, it was always difficult for Heads to find trained RE teachers and we usually made do with teachers whose expertise was elsewhere; as someone with a doctorate in a religious topic who was also an elder in his local church, I ended up as our ‘lead’ in this area; not ideal, but better than the alternative – which was the PE teacher (who happened to have some spare space in his timetable!). If that was the case in a public school (for our US readers, that means ‘private’ – yes, I know, but the English are odd like that!), then it is even worse in many State schools.

In one sense one might say this has not changed much – there was always a problem filling RE, but back when I started it was easier to do because there were always a number of teachers who, like men played a role in their local churches and could be plugged in to cover the subject when needed. Now that is rarely the case. That reflects the wider aspect of the problem – the gap between wider educated society and religion. So, if our children are not getting much by way of religious education at school, and if the wider society of which they are part is religiously illiterate, it can be said with some confidence that they will not get that sort of education anywhere else.

At my own chapel, we put on a weekly Bible study class, but that is mainly taken by those already members of the fellowship. We started a weekly introductory class back in September, and that has a small membership, but they are all adults, and all came via our street preaching; none of them know much about religion, and we had to start from the most basic of basics. All those in the class had education up to the age of 18, and two of them have degrees, but not one of the eight knew anything much about Christianity except what they’d picked up from the media – and most of that was negative.

After 12 weeks we have made some progress, but when we decided to set up the course, we asked around other churches to see what they did, and found the answer was very little. I’d hoped the C of E, who do something which looks useful, might prove a little more ecumenical than they have, but you can’t always have what you want – or what would make economic sense (they have seven in their class!). But at least we are doing something. Very few others are.

So, I can see where the C of E was coming from with its advertisement – the state of play is dire, and I am not sure how well-equipped we are to deal with a favourable response – but it would be a nice problem to have.

Church and churches

29 Thursday Oct 2015

Posted by in Faith

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thebodyofChrist

That Jesus founded a church no one but a fool could doubt; he said so himself. Indeed, I doubt any fool did doubt until men found it necessary to say to the church of their forefathers that they were no longer part of it. It should be noted that when men did that in history, they did not deny the need for a church, they simply denied that the church from which they had split was the true church; we see such rhetoric even now with regard to what has been happening in the Synod in Rome.

We forget, or at least I think we tend that way, that the church is an organism, not an organisation; it is the body of Christ. When we think of it as an organisation with rules and regulations, we get only part of why it exists; it exists because it was founded by Christ – it has been necessary for Christians in all times and in all places, because we are not simply embodied atomistic souls, we are children of the one God.

It is often noted here, not least by one contributor, that the Church seems full of sinners. He means, of course, the Roman Catholic Church, but he might as well say all of us, because we are the church and we are all sinners; we are not the more Godly because we go to church on a Sunday – though hopefully we are more Godly as a result of that. The Gospel of God is our common heritage: it is not Baptist, nor Roman nor Orthodox nor Anglican, and though all may sometimes have spoken as though it were, and although many will believe in their hearts it is theirs, it is ours.

The fruits of the Spirit are not pride and contention, they are love and understanding. The one Body grows. The Church is not, as some say, invisible, it is visible. But how we might ask, can it be so divided and disordered? What, I say, would you expect from a bunch of fallen sinners? Would you expect perfection? Seek it in the hereafter, and if we look at our own church, whatever it is, we shall see within it dissension and division so that even men who say ‘I am a Catholic’ will look at another and wonder how he can say it – and that is true of us all.

Baptism, the Eucharist and church elders are all parts of what we inherit from the Gospels and the Apostles, they speak to us of God’s redeeming love, and they tell us that human love can be made perfect only by the building up of the one body. We can, each of us, proceed only by the light and Grace gifted to us, but we can all try to discern how love can build us up. Two things alone are needed – love of God and love of neighbour: when we do that perfectly, then we shall see more clearly.