Population fell in S.F., other parts of Bay Area: “Stymied by a slowly rebounding economy and saddled with a low birthrate, San Francisco lost 10,301 people “
The Culture of Death begins to work its magic. Gay marriage cannot solve this problem. We need many families with three children, normal families who want children, to get out of the coming demographic mess that sexual liberation and feminism has handed us. Our great-grandparents and grandparents were right.
Christians Reach Out To Muslims: “Aziz Mekouar, Morocco’s ambassador to the United States, welcomes the group’s effort:
‘My point of view is, there are lots of misperceptions on both sides, and I think it’s good that people get together,’ he said. ‘Here in the U.S., people have absolutely not the slightest idea what Islam is. It’s coming from the same revelation, the same scriptures, and they don’t know that. . . . On the other side, people didn’t know what evangelicals are, and they saw a bunch of nice people wanting to do good.’ “
Seemingly clueless evangelical leaders no one has heard of head off to do harm to the cause of Christ. (We can only hope the press has misunderstood the mission. See the recent LA Times blog.)
Note the Islamic leader keeps his eye on the ball. He claims Islam and Christianity have the “same revelation.” If the “evangelical leaders” agree to that, then they are not evangelical. If they don’t agree, then they will be viewed as hating Islam in the end. Here is my idea for Islamic relations: let’s send them lots of missionaries before they end up where Dante put Mohammad.
Phil Johnson is the source of some of the best reading recommendations I have ever received. He taught me Trollope. And now he has had me read Mark Twain’s masterpiece, Joan of Arc. I am fairly immune to Twain’s normal charms. He is fun in small doses, but his best notes, irony and skepticism, wear after one hundred pages or so. Joan was his favorite work and it is easy to see why. It is bright, where Twain is usually grey. It is chock full of faith, hope, and charity, whereas Twain is usually just full of himself and his cleverness. There is some of his notable humor in the book, but not too much of it. There is not a slow page.
I am working on a longer piece dealing with the book, but this thought for tonight: why isn’t this book taught? Twain is most often feted as skeptic and religion basher, google his web followers if you don’t believe me. This is not the Twain of Joan of Arc. He believes in Joan and her miracles. He accepts her historicity. The American curmudgeon was a final conquest of the Maid of Orleans. It revolutionizes the way I view Twain. It doesn’t fit the “story” the liberal/secular educational establishment loves to tell. . . so it is overlooked.
(I think Trollope superior to Dickens. . . and overlooked for the same general reasons.)
emergingchurch.info > reflection > jonny baker: “There may just be a culture of permission, creativity, and an embrace of diverse expressions of church that change the face of the Anglican church as we know it in Britain. I think Rowan is right - it is a watershed moment. “
Wow! The Archbishop of Canterbury is “Rowan” in this chatty article. We also discover there is a culture of “permission” in the Church of England! Wow! Who would have guessed?
For those not keeping up: there is a new group of Christians who think:
1. we are in a post-modern age. They cannot and do not define this.
2. that foundationalism is dead in philosophy. This is false, but most emerging Christians confuse this with the death of doctrine. This is akin to confusing The Theory of Relativity with relativism.
3. Dallas Willard is a theologian. I love Dallas Willard (who is a philosopher not a theologian), but he is being used by muddle headed people to create a new millenial hippy movement.
4. they have gone beyond liberal and conservative. This means they are liberal. They priest women, deny the Bible is without error, and fall into muddles and heresy at every turn. This is proof, they argue, of life, but it may also be proof of the senile state of post-modern Christendom.
But back to this priceless gem of an article:
I suppose the fifty years of experimenting in just this manner was just a prelude to the “emerging church.” That will solve everything! All that other indentical language used by other naive folk in previous decades was just wrong, because they were not part of the “emerging church.”
Wow!
calendarlive.com - Times Movie News: “In a Year of Passion, an Added Sheen for Easter
By Larry B. Stammer
BELIEFS: Interest in Jesus’ story, fueled in part by Mel Gibson’s hit film, is expected to draw unusually large crowds to Sunday services”
Are reporters well educated? Do they have a clue about the things on which they write? Or do they have pre-written stories? If you are in doubt whether at the LA Time facts checking is a lost art, read this witless story.
Larry Stammer has discovered that a great many people are Christians. In trying to make sense of the whole thing, he is artless about the religious world. So he presses his macro key, provided by the LA Times, and writes the standard hog wash about religion. He manages to have a totally tin ear. To cite one example, he describes my institution Biola University as a “fundamentalist” school. This will come as a shock to the fundamentalists who denounce Biola as apostate having sold out for the “lure” of being, well, a University. (Google it for yourself!) I supposed we sold out so that folk like Larry Stammer would not confuse us with fundamentalists. (Ah, so often we are like Esau, only we never get the pottage!) There are many fine fundamentalist institutions, Biola is just not one of them. Now this seems like a small point to an outsider, but it is as offensive and ignorant as confusing Orthodox and Reformed Jewish communities. Of course, no one would doubt the LA Times is capable of that as well. Just don’t trust the paper.
Christ has conquered! The voyage to the undiscovered country has been made and one man has returned, Jesus of Nazareth. He is now plainly revealed to be God’s only Son. Trapped in the cave, bound in the chains of our sin, we could not see the light of life. Christ came down from heaven and sat with us. He was free of our original guilt and unchained. He tried to break our shackles, but we mocked Him and allowed the rulers of this world to murder Him. And so evil seemed to triumph, but now unexpected, beyond hope, Jesus has returned! His very blood forever reveals the hollowness of our deception. His passion shows the fraud in our claims of pleasure without Him. Death has been defeated, Satan has no more power. The shadows are blown back in the fierce light of His divine power. The light of Reality is brought from Heaven to us and the flickering images are dispelled.
Jesus Christ will break our chains, if we will but speak the Word. Paradise is possible. The curse of Adam is lifted from our backs. Our sins are forgiven and the purpose of humanity has been fulfilled. Even more He makes all things new. . . helping restore the very Earth to right order and relationship with God. Having united God and man in His incarnation, He now destroys the power of sin by His most precious Blood! No work of our own did this thing. We had rejected Him, but Divine Love could not be defeated. He has returned! He is risen! Hope!
Jesus of Nazareth is revealed to be the Christ, fully God and fully man. He has come in the flesh, bled, was buried, and now lives forever more. Christ has come, Christ has risen, Christ will come again! The tomb is empty and history has a focal point and an End! Glory!
God save the President of the United States.
He is risen!
He is risen indeed!
Alleluia!
St. John Chrysostom: HOMILIES ON THE GOSPEL OF JOHN: “Now nothing is more full of light than a most excellent conversation.”
Amen. And this conversation must center first in the Word of God. Chrysostom shows that knowing the Second Person of the Trinity in a living manner is not opposed to careful, propositional study of Sacred Scripture, but one with it.
The Bible is not merely a story, but living theology, propositional and alive at the same time. To forget either thing is to become lost in ourselves again. Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.
Sacred Space - Saturday 10th April, Holy Saturday: “
I exist in a web of relationships - links to nature, people, God.
I trace out these links, giving thanks for the life that flows through them.
Some links are twisted or broken: I may feel regret, anger, disappointment.
I pray for the gift of acceptance and forgiveness.”
Part of the emerging church prayer for the day. Gone are our sins, miserable offender status, and being the chiefest of sinners. We get some Ignatius quotes. . . without the thundering, “Where is your bishop?” that the old martyr would shout at these self indulgent heretics.
Church of the Apostles - spirituality: “apostles is a spiritual hub, where you can connect to your core nature as a spiritual being. we don’t gather as church to download spirituality into lives that are unspiritual, instead we come together to heighten and reinforce our awareness of our spiritual nature and its importance in our lives. “
You could not make this stuff up if you tried. Good luck finding “connecting to your core nature” in the New Testament. Of course, all that stuff about sin has gone away. All the truth stuff (not rules but following Jesus) you can hear in AWANA. The rest is either neo-Platonic heresies (with icons!) or shift-key broken nonsense.
Of course, no one defines the “post-modern age” or tells us how the computer they are using to blog fits this paradigm. They don’t tell us what happened to Creeds, which just happen to predate their main monster: modernism.
Post-modern Christians aren’t.
emergingchurch.info > stories > christchurch and upton: “headspace has five core principles or values that form the ethos of the community. They are transparency; connections; reflection and dialogue; recreation and love and life.”
Now there is the message of Jeremiah, Amos, and the Gospels. And Jesus said to his disciples, “Let us have some recreation. Let us be transparent with each other.” When the next generation comes along and has a good laugh at all this vocabulary, who will be there to help the emergent church burn-outs? You’ve got it: Saint Michael down the street with the quiet and wise Oxford trained parish priest who has seen it all before from the sixties to now or Grace E.Free next door with the vibrant theologians and real community life. Just like in the days of the Jesus People.
Hidden in all the emergent church agit-prop is this fact: they are small and stay small. They cater to the burned out, upper class, college educated Christian hurt by some form of normative Christianity. Instead of helping them return to the actual Church (where is the BOCP in this Anglican parish?), they are placed in a little hot house where they can be themselves. Normative churches force you to deal with children and old people, plumbers and dons. They have liturgies that change slowly, organically, and spiritual practices that are part of the heritage of the place in which they find themselves.
The emergent church isn’t.
This is the day between. Good Friday with its horror is past, but the joy of Easter is still ahead. Holy Saturday is the time we live in now. Christ has come and Christ will come again. Now we are in Holy Saturday. When I was a child, I thought the day useless. Why keep Jesus in the tomb Saturday? Why not raise Him on the Sabbath? Of course, the answer was in the question. On the Sabbath Christ rested from His labor. He harrowed hell and defeated death, then He paused and rested. Why? Why hasn’t Christ returned? Because it is good for us to wait. Wait for the right time. Because rest is God’s perpetual state, He is always reminding humans of it. He is a God who rests, never in a hurry, always sure of Himself and His timing. Good news indeed for our hurried world. So we wait for Pascha and prepare. And know that this Holy Saturday may be the last, since tomorrow Christ Himself may appear indeed. Pascha to Come is soon, always soon. First Light is coming.
FOXNews.com - Politics - White House Releases PDB
We now know that the White House was not asleep at the switch. Bush was finding out what the problems were and starting to deal with them. He requested a frank appraisal of the world’s risks and got it. Sadly, there was too little time to deal with all the risks.
The important thing to remember is this fact which must be burned into all our minds: Bin Laden WAS NOT and IS NOT the only threat to American security. The madman in South Korea is one. The fanatics of Iran are another. We used to have to fear the Butcher of Baghdad who had already tried to kill a president. After eight years of security neglect by the Arkansas Alcibiades, one threat got through. To focus only on that threat while eliminating it would be suicide. We are in a world war.
George Bush knows it. John Kerry does not.
How can we glory in the Cross? How can a gospel that is so violent be beautiful? These are questions that oddly occur only to us the church submerged in the pursuit of peace and personal spiritual well being of those who view pain through the lens of being stuck in a freeway. The flogged God seems self-destructive. Why would God do that to Himself to satisfy Himself? The blood of Good Friday makes us sick. Couldn’t God have so loved the world that he gave us therapy? Why the cross?
It is hard to see in an age when every emotion, every desire is justified. Having come to the end of myself, I know there is no joy in the indulgence of my pleasure. What I want is most often destructive to myself and to others. How I look back with horror on my indulgence of my own desires in my youth. How I wish that I could undo pain caused, words carelessly spoken, and evils committed. The further from self-indulgence I move the worse it looks to me. More and more the sweet joy of denying self and taking up my own cross becomes obvious. The pain of saying “no” to self is possible, because the true sting of it was taken by God on Himself. God became man and suffered at the hands of men so that I can become free of the problems of men. Love faced hatred and allowed all of men’s wicked passions full reign so that we can say “no” to our wicked desires. Wicked desires. We really do have them. It is remembering that fact that makes the Cross so necessary and so glorious. The Cross is the answer to evil, but we had forgotten evil.
It is no surprise that we are struggling to find the courage for the War on Terror. It is not neat. Problems cannot be solved according to script or in well lit, air conditioned rooms, using calm voices. There are no reports to be filed in the city of Baghdad, just brave deeds to be done. In that world of pain and misery, brought on by the arrogance of one man, Sadaam, who looted a nation’s soul, sin makes sense. Men turn for answers to people they hope are holy and these men betray them. Other men go to porn movies misusing their newly found liberty by becoming uworthy of it. Still others wait and wait for the Americans to solve all their problems, their resolve sapped by the tyrant’s decades of rule.
American blood will liberate Iraq. In the end, we will give our lives and our treasure that another nation may be free. We will do this despite the fact that this liberty may allow them ingratitude. Without the shedding of blood, few if any nations have achieved liberty. Almost no great action has been taken without awful sacrifice.
We are slowly waking up from our indulgence, from our reduction of religion to our fads and tastes, and our refusal to allow Christ to dominate us. We don’t want our religion coercive, but Jesus is Lord and sits His apostles on thrones. We proclaim the Kingdom of God, but act like democrats. We excuse the sins of others hoping that God’s love will be soft and easy, like an over indulgent parent. But the Cross makes all our believes a lie. God demanded of Himself the Cross. The Second person of the Holy Trinity came and suffered. He judges our sins and we have but one hopeful response. Two men betrayed him: Judas refused to repent, killed himself and was damned while Peter repented with bitter tears, was forgiven, and became prince of the apostles. Two thieves were hanging with Christ on the cross: one continued to justify himself and died in his bitterness while the other acknowledged the justice of his sentence and entered with Christ into paradise. There is power in the blood, spilled blood.
How we sang and sang this as a child. “Would you be free from the power of sin, there is power in the blood!” Liberal critics sniffed at our “slaughter house” religion. And now the children of the great evangelical revivals are too gnostic, too smart, too internet savvy, to sing of the blood. They do not embrace a religion of denial and pain. They do not like to think of the awesome power in the Blood. It is too central, too demanding. It cannot be marketed.
There is a wonderful image in Mel Gibson’s passion where the soldier Longinus pierced Jesus side with the Holy Lance and then was bathed in the water and blood that flowed from the Christ’s side. “Disgusting” a secularist may say. “Cleansing” a believer replies. All the foul sin of Auschwitz, of the torture rooms of Baghdad, of the House of Special Purpose in the Soviet Union, and of my own dark heart demand this price. The world is real, badly broken, and in need of healing. It requires a divine sacrifice and an incredible passion. It requires that the Virgin’s heart be broken and that His disciples be scattered and torn. It rends the veil of the Temple in two and restores access to all to the hidden Mercy Seat of God. It is Real, the Blood of Christ. It is the basis of our redemption and the drink and life of the Kingdom of God. There is no Kingdom without a proclamation of that Blood.
“Sin stains are washed in its life giving flow.” I am a sinner, chief of sinners. Wash me like Longinus in your blood. Like Peter may I confess that I have denied you. Like the thief on the cross may I see you in Paradise.