Category: Miscellany

“Seven Stanzas at Easter” (a meditation on 1 Corinthians 15)
John Updike

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

[Written in 1960 for a religious arts festival sponsored by the Clifton Lutheran Church, of Marblehead, Mass.]

Thanks to Gregory Reynolds, OPC pastor in Manchester, New Hampshire for passing this on.

So I receive my daily email from the History News Network which includes a report about a panel at the Organization of American Historians annual meeting on the state of the history of American conservatism.  Research and personal interests, not to mention the entertainment supplied by liberal academics having to talk about conservatives, prompt me to click on the link.  And what do I find?  More links, but not to papers or synopses of papers, but to videos of the panelists. 

Now, I know ingratitude is unbecoming in Christians and annoying in others, but I have to admit that I was not in the best of humor having to watch three roughly 10-minute videos of the presentations.  (The fourth was deleted from Youtube before I could get to it, suggesting authors were not consulted before the videos went on line.)  Sure, it was better than not being there, or having to wait for the papers to show up in print. 

But I’d much rather have had the papers.  I could have skimmed them in about as much time as it took to watch one of the videos, and then filed them away with their footnotes for help at another point.   This offers further evidence that for learning, old technologies are superior to new ones.  I mean, would you rather watch an author read a book or simply read (or skim) it for yourself?

Seeking a Better Country is a readable and lively survey of American Presbyterianism since its founding in 1706. Its aim is not to celebrate but to understand how Presbyterians formed one of the largest and most influential denominations in the United States, and those historical developments that led to their decline.

(From NTJ, 39 Alexander Hall, July 1998)

While the principle is subject to abuse, we would affirm the idea that communities of faith, like individuals, are products of their age. For example, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, founded in 1936, came about immediately following what historian Robert Handy has described as the great religious depression in American history. And in his multivolume twentieth century American religious history, Martin Marty locates the birth of the OPC squarely in the thick of the cacophonous “noise of the conflict.” Without a doubt the context of depression and conflict have markedly shaped the identity of that little denomination in its first sixty years.

This year the Presbyterian Church of America is celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary, and the occasion has prompted reflections on the state of the culture at its birth in 1973. One minister in the church has described that year in this way: “The PCA came into being as a separate entity at a very crucial time in the history of the church and world. The year 1973 was marked by great cultural transition from modernism to post-modernism, from liberalism and a reaction to it, to a younger generation that was searching for truth, to a time when evangelicals were becoming aware once again that the Gospel of Jesus Christ did have social implications and applications.”

Wow! The editors of the NTJ, like many of their contemporaries, may have been guilty of sleep-walking through most of the 1970s. Even so, we were taken aback by those claims. We do not believe that 1973 witnessed the decline of modernism, and we have argued elsewhere that modernism is alive and well and looking an awful lot like evangelicalism. (And please: the language of postmodernism surely did not come into vogue until fully a decade after the PCA’s birth).

Still, 1973 is a watershed year of sorts, as evidenced by these cultural milestones:
1. McDonald’s unveils the Egg McMuffin.
2. The NIV (New Testament) is published.
3. Construction begins on the Alaska pipeline.
4. Nixon fires special prosecutor Archibald Cox in his “Saturday Night Massacre.”
5. Ron Blomberg of the New York Yankees becomes the American League’s first designated hitter.
6. Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
7. Supreme Court hands down its Roe v. Wade decision.
8. The IBM Selectric typewriter becomes “self-correcting.”
9. Death claims Pearl Buck, Pablo Picasso, and Bruce Lee (hmm, perhaps modernism died after all).
10. The world’s first video game, “Pong,” debuts.

We leave for others the task of drawing any conclusions about PCA identity. But lest readers complain that we have unfairly listed the more unsavory aspects of a most forgettable year of a most miserable decade, we remind them that we deliberately excluded any reference to the uniforms of a certain Major League Baseball team from western Pennsylvania, a historic bastion of American Presbyterianism.

Some Reformed will concede agreement with Lutherans on justification.  But they draw the line at sanctification.  Supposedly, the Lutheran doctrine of salvation is so justification-centric that Lutheranism neglects the other benefits of salvation.

A piece by David P. Scaer, professor of systematic theology at Concordia, Ft. Wayne, suggests that Lutherans are closer to Reformed than many think.  He wrote:

Lutherans recognize that Christians as sinners are never immune to the Law’s moral demands and its threats against sin, but in the strictest sense these warnings do not belong to Christian sanctification, the life believers live in Christ and in which Christ lives in them. In Roman Catholic and some Protestant systems, the Gospel brings the good news of salvation in Jesus Christ, but is replaced by the Law which sets down directives for Christian life and warns and threatens the Christian as Christian. Law, and not the Gospel, becomes God’s last and real word for the believer. So Christianity deteriorates into an implicit and eventually coarse legalism and abject moralism. Jesus faced this understanding of an ethically determined concept of sanctification among the Pharisees. Holiness was defined in terms of fulfilling ritual requirements. Sixteen centuries later for similar reasons, Luther raised his protest against medieval Catholicism. At times, the New Testament uses the words sanctify and sanctification of God’s entire activity of God in bringing about man’s salvation. More specifically it refers to the work of the Holy Spirit to bring people to salvation, to keep them in the true faith and finally to raise them from the dead and give them eternal life (Small Catechism). All these works are also performed by the Father and the Son. Since God is not morally neutral and does not choose to be holy, but He is holy, all His works necessarily share in His holiness. The connection between the Holy Spirit and sanctification is seen in the Latin for the Third Person of the Trinity, Spiritus Sanctus. The Spirit who is holy in Himself makes believers holy, sanctifies them, by working faith in Christ in them and He becomes the sources of all their good works.

Sanctification means that the Spirit permeates everything the Christian thinks, says and does. The Christian’s personal holiness is as much a monergistic activity of the Holy Spirit as is his justification and conversion. The Spirit who alone creates faith is no less active after conversion than He was before.

While catching up on the blogosphere last night, I ran across news from two good friends over at Front Porch Republic.  From one friend came word that he is battling the disease of shingles.  The other wrote about his experience with law enforement in Arizona — two speeding tickets thanks to cameras installed on Phoenix’s freeways (I guess they’re not so free). 

After reading these and emailing the one friend to wish him good health, I wondered if I had just experienced what millions do through Facebook, an Internet phenomenon that entirely escapes me.  I don’t know what it does, why it’s useful.  But maybe what I encountered at FPR is exactly what happens on Facebook – going on line to see what friends are doing (or, in this case, is being done to them). 

And then I recovered and realized that on Facebook (it seems) people only tell what they’re doing.  On blogs, at least the better ones, people reflect on what their doing. 

That would appear to make blogging more valuable (he wrote while patting himself on the back).  It may explain the difference between improper and proper personal disclosures.  If it’s done in a way that let’s people know who shouldn’t, then it’s improper.  If it’s done for the purpose of generalizing about the human predicament, then its proper.   (But it better be good.)

Thus ends today’s meditative moment.

The Nicotine Theological Journal is a name that invites either a snicker or a wince. A self-conscious reference to the chief chemical in tobacco surely does not manifest sufficient seriousness about theology — hence the reactions of uncomfortable giggles or tisk-tisks implying we should act our age.

Here a little historical reminder may be in order. The editors grew up in an era of American Protestantism not too distant from the time when Harold John Ockenga, the founding president of Fuller Seminary and the National Association of Evangelicals, was publicly ridiculed for his behavior during a trip in 1947 to Europe. In his new book, The Surprising Work of God, Garth M. Rosell writes:

Throughout the months of autumn, . . . a flurry of letters arrived in Ockenga’s Park Street Church postbox asking if the rumors swirling about him were really true. ‘You are probably aware of the rumors relative to your personal actions while on the European trip this summer,’ wrote one concerned friend. Other letters added the specifics: that Ockenga had insisted on visiting the pope despite the objections of the Protestant clergy in Rome, that he had made ‘obeisance’ to the Pope when the delegation had visited him in the Vatican, that he was seen drinking ‘intoxicating liquor’ at meals and receptions, that he had attended the opera and theater in Paris, and that he had purchased ‘cigarettes in the P.X. and then sold them on the black market.

Continue reading “A Journal By Any Other Name Would Be As Serious” →

Well, technically, it never left.  But De Regno Christi, the blog that sponsored that spirited debate about the Federal Vision, was for several months down for the count.  Now, thank to Bill Chellis, a Reformed Presbyterian (isn’t that redundant?) and New York State conservative (isn’t that an oxymoron), the blog is up and running.  This is the place where the two-kingdoms and the National Covenant enjoy peace and harmony — sort of.

If you had a face as good looking as that, sure you’d use a teleprompter.