True Spiritual Faith

There is no faith that does not come from the word of God. Put positively: all faith must come from the word of God to be true faith. The holy Scriptures are the word kept by the Church, and the Church is the context of the word.

There is little nowadays distinguishing between what often passes for faith and putting God to the test by jumping off a cliff and thinking, On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone (Mt 4.5–7). That is, much of the time what we call faith may be merely sinfully putting God to the test, and our Lord himself suffered this temptation but rejected it.

For more, I point you to someone else’s blog.

Christian Hip

Several months late: the Christian hipster list.

Does this make me a Christian hipster? No, I’m a premodern dinosaur like C.S. Lewis.

Proof? I’m serious about William Byrd and J.S. Bach and G.F. Handel and all those guys being different, musically and lyrically (as applicable), from what passes for a holistic picture of God in the song selections (as if those ought to be at the mercy of personal choice!) in most evangelical churches. I support incense in worship at least some of the time because it’s biblical, not because it’s cool and off the beaten track. And, perhaps most tellingly, I talk and write for meaningful discourse, not to express myself – whatever this modern idolatrous invention means. I’ve breathed American evangelicalism and found it wanting.

Ironically, I’m been mostly talking about myself. But apparently, people these days are too cool for exegesis or extended discourse. Just a change of tone here.

Ad Hominem Argument about Contraception and Abortion

Matthew Yglesias may be right about the opposition of Roman Catholic bishops and the Southern Baptist Convention to federal funding (not the legality, mind you) for contraception (his words here):

Their revealed behavior indicates that they don’t actually find abortion especially problematic, but just place it on a spectrum containing a general aversion to women controlling their own sexuality.

Nevertheless, his remarks form an implicit ad hominem argument against the position that ‘abortion’ (better known, in my judgement, as prenatal infanticide) is murder. [Note: Ad hominem argument is claiming that an argument’s wrong because the person arguing it is a bad person. One example is to argue that something is wrong because Hitler thought it. The problem with this is that not everything Hitler ever thought was wrong: I’m positive he would have agreed that he had ten fingers.]

For his point, that seeking common ground with opponents of ‘abortion’ merely exposes an extreme view but does not proceed beyond that policy-wise, this may be relevant. If, however, Mr Iglesias is using this to cast doubt on the integrity of the very proposition that premeditated induced ‘abortion’ is murder, this logical fallacy ought to be exposed.

I do wonder, though: does a postmodernist epistemology, which assumes that a truth claim is a power claim, lend itself to ad hominem style of argumentation?

Guns in Church?

The New York Times tells me a pastor in Louisville is inviting his congregation to carry firearms into the sanctuary ‘celebrate [their] rights as Americans’. My take’s conservative: I oppose this.

What’s holy is set apart for specifically the Lord’s worship (since everything’s for him, we need not talk about that). If possible, what’s dedicated to God in this way should not be given to any other uses. This means, if possible, Sunday school and movie nights and games and all other such things should be elsewhere, perhaps in the parish hall.

Taking arms into a house of God’s worship is bordering on sacrilege – and I ain’t a pacifist. I’d even prefer that we take off our shoes before entering the house of the Lord, not to speak of the sword.

A church for God’s worship is for declaring and renewing faith, i.e. trust and allegiance, to Christ the King, not to the American state. To this end I think even the American flag is too much, and that includes the Glorious Fourth of July.

So, no guns any farther in than the narthex (at the most!), with the buckets of umbrellas and the restrooms.

Differing with Confessional Standards

In an online debate with John Frame about the Regulative Principle of Worship, D.G. Hart wrote about ordained ministers differing with the confessional standards to which they vowed subscription:

But what happens if my study of the Bible, the counsel of friends, a particularly good sermon, or even a ruling of the Supreme Court persuades me that the Standards are wrong? Do we have any means to revise the Confession and catechisms? The answer is of course. But the way to revise is not simply in my own mind, or in consultation with my editor, or by testing my views in the publishing market. The way to revise creeds is through the church, specifically through the Presbyterian system of graded courts. So first I tell my session (as an elder) or my presbytery (as a minister) of my new views. If they conclude that my views are outside the bounds of the Standards, then either I resign my office, or I write an overture to call for a revision of the Standards. And then I try to persuade the church. Should I fail in my effort I can either resign or force the church to try me for teaching views contrary to the Standards.

For non-denominational churches with a fairly short official confession for membership and another document outlining the teaching position of the church, I suppose the same would apply. If I’ve signed (i.e. sworn) to something like this, the above is what I do.

So, that answers my question a few months back – at least for me – about confessional dissonance.

An Answer to Pietism Regarding Unity

From an explanation of the Anglican Prayer Book:

What do people often say respecting the importance of unity among Christians?

That outward and organic unity is of little consequence so long as we have unity of spirit. [Note: What happens when word doesn’t become flesh? Self-delusion on a base of Deism.]

What reply do you make to this?

There can be no true unity of spirit where there is outward disunity. If we have unity of spirit, outward unity will follow as naturally as the blossom follows the bud. The one is the natural and necessary consequence of the other.

What else do people often say?

That ‘when we get to heaven it will make no difference what Church we belong to,’ or that ‘if we love the Lord Jesus Christ sincerely, nothing else is required.’ [Note: I get so annoyed by such sentiments, because it belittles both doctrine and unity.]

What reply do you make to this?

We say that love to Christ is undoubtedly the foundation of all true Christian character; but if we love Christ sincerely we shall be very careful to keep His commandments and to live in unity with His Church.

Does not our Lord sanction the division of Christians into separate and independent bodies or congregations, when He says, ‘Where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them’?

No; these words emphasize the importance of cooperation and unity among His followers in contrast to individualism and disunity.

What else is often said to show that God approves of divisions among Christian people?

‘See how much good they do, and how they flourish. If it were wrong to separate from the Church, would God bless them as He evidently does?’ [Note: Is it not possible for God to work in spite of your damnèd good intentions? Consider also whether the fruit is actually good, or whether it merely appears so, good for food, and a delight to the eyes, and to be desired to make one wise.]

What do we reply to this?

God blesses everyone who has zeal and piety and devotion, but the fact that God commends and rewards our character and life in general does not release us from the obligation to carry his will in corporate life work.

How do we know that Christian unity will ever come?

Because Christ Himself prayed for it, and Christian people everywhere are beginning to desire it.

Tahoe and an Ethos of Worship

Having climbed up a way through the trees, I sit between two falls. The craggy edges of the rocks meet ever-pounding waters in a ceaseless pile of tumbling water. Aspen leaves tinkle like little bells in the breeze, the trunks growing white and slender, like lithe nymphs, out of the rocks strewn on the banks; the fathers of bonsai twist out of the bright bank on the other side. Cone-bearing trees tower silent and stately over the rocks and the falls, smaller trees waving paper leaves in their shadow. I lift my eyes to the mountains and the swirling skies: rocky faces with woody stubble stare down at me, and clouds float unaware of my existence.

Be still.

Low Church and Asian Idolatries

Thoughts on my quick impression of some comments I skimmed on a Next Gener.Asian Church blog post:

I think low-church expressions of faith among Asians often represent an attempt on some level to assimilate to Western individualistic culture in the choice of what to emphasize when we articulate the faith. At the same time, and ironically, this choice also allows certain aspects of traditional Asian culture to remain uncritiqued by the gospel, particularly some idolatries of power structure that may be deconstructed by the rival reality and authority of the Church. I’ll talk about mostly Chinese people, with whom I’ve interacted the most, since I myself am Chinese and speak Chinese.

Among these is the place of shame and public repentance (which, in some places, may be none): the advantage of a low-church way of doing things is that pushing everything into the individual conscience keeps things looking clean at the same time that people can reserve public shame for drastic measures. Take a second look at ‘Asian values’ in the political sphere and you may see a connexion.

I think there is a historical tendency supporting this as well. Low-church faith is especially easy structurally for Chinese culture because the bulk of religious-looking activity has long been a matter of buffet-style pluralism (viz. the way people visit temples), while the complex of the more official, public rites for heaven and grain and ancestors remains attached to whatever the people view as the civil government. In mainland China, under the communist régime, this can clearly take the form of the insistence that the gospel has no political meaning whatsoever, despite its inherent exposé of the idolatries attached to any Caesar on earth.

Obviously, this thought is still very little developed, but it may represent yet another reason for me to advocate a coherently high-church Protestant piety.

Procedural Normative Theory Applied to Political Power

If the procedural theory of normative economics is applied to political power, mass chaos (or efficiency accrued to great evil) ensues. To keep the procedural theory and an anti-Hitler normative theory of political power, I see only two options:

1. Economic power is more sacred, more morally inviolable, than political power.
2. The rights of political power are less transferable (or exchangeable) than the economic power manifested in economic assets. You can sell almost any of your possessions, but you cannot sell your vote, for example.

So which is it, and why?

Headphones and Public Worship

I understand the use of headphones, but I think this trend of privatizing music is worrisome, as the increasingly burdensome privatizing of reading away from almost all orality is worrisome, reinforcing our idolatrous perception of self as truly autonomous monad. We witness here the progressive disintegration of society into a mere shadow of itself. Performance and edification are social things, and I think we must be very careful to prevent them from becoming decontextualized pieces of information.

…lest we think the opera house or concert hall is the only place for music to shape a common consciousness. Perhaps this is a symptom of professional music being readily available to us wherever we are as long as we have those mp3 players (iPods, if you’re an Apple person). Autonomy isn’t everything.

So it is with music in service of the Lord’s Day worship of the Church.

Poverty Relief and Liturgical Splendour as Worship

Matthew 25 says that those who give food to ‘the least of these my brothers’ when they are hungry, drink when they are thirsty, welcome when they are strangers, clothing when they are naked, and visit when they are sick or in prison, these are the ones who so have served and worshipped Christ; on the other hand, worship of Yahweh as described in the Old Testament is full of gold and incense such that we cannot say simply, ‘Christ has fulfilled it, so it is no longer necessary.’

What do we do? Both. Jesus himself implies as much (Mt 23.23).

Typesetting References in the Bible

Whoever makes Bibles, please typeset them like this:

I’ve written before implicitly in favour of deëmphasizing chapter and verse numbers, in addressing issues of external authority in relation to human verse numbers, as have others. The least we can do is to bump the numbers out and have normal paragraphs, unlike most settings of the Authorized (King James) Version. This has been done centuries ago: just see the 1583 Louvain Bible (image) and Baskerville’s 1763 Greek New Testament (image).

We ought to have Bibles that interfere as little as possible with interpretation of the books as given. To that end, verse numbers set into the text visually are a hindrance – and, by the way, this must be significant for the unconscious mind too. If the point of reference numbers is simply to be on the same page, so to speak, and to find things with precision, the way we’re used to can readily be changed. I’m sure we, being the adaptable humans that we are, can adjust reasonably naturally.

Languages and the City of God

What did early churches do in the Roman Empire when they had monolingual speakers of more than one language? Surely in their cultures they had ethnic strife and language shift and all that. If the early Church still had but one liturgy, then we ought to reflect on the reasons.

The tension is ‘meeting people where they are’ and depicting in living form what the Church expects the earth to become in conformity with the living image of Christ as the head of living humanity, the second Adam. Our Lord met people where they were by going out to serve them and inviting them to appear at his feast; he didn’t simple play this contextualization game, because redeemed humanity is a different culture for everyone born after Adam.

Of course redemption is foreign to us all: we’ve all come from the condition of original sin and cultures of idolatry with their own myths and kings and rites. From those elementary principles, as Paul calls them in Galatians, the Holy Spirit works on our hearts through Scripture, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper and the support of the Church working as one Body.

Ah, but it’s hard: first we need to find out what the idolatries are to which the Church stands as a rival polis to this present evil age before we can know how to touch and redeem them with the gospel of Christ. Only then will we know what one Church is in the multilingual context.

Catholicity, Catholicism, and Schism

The Nicene Creed says that we believe εἰς μίαν, Ἁγίαν, Καθολικὴν καὶ Ἀποστολικὴν Ἐκκλησίαν: in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. Those who can read Greek (whether with understanding or not) can see that ‘catholic’ is merely the Greek word Anglicized: in fact, it has nothing directly to do with the Roman Catholic Church. Many Protestant churches, however, attempting to avoid the hint of the appearance of association with the Church of Rome and its bishop, substitute another word for ‘catholic’, usually ‘Christian’ or ‘universal’.

I disagree with this choice, though those who know me know that I am a Protestant and highly value what the Church has learned through the Reformation.

Bible Verse Numbers and Authority

Overreliance on verse fragmentation in the Bible for study: what does it do? I shall pass over the obvious pitfall of coming to use verse numbers as near-canonical aids, since every sound instructor of exegesis, no doubt, points this out: I assume, then, that those who hear this word of caution take it to heart that verse numbers cannot be used for interpretation. But relying too heavily on man-made verse numbers – vastly more than what some fear of systematic theology itself – puts us, the mortals, in the place of judgement over the text, for us to appraise it as we seek to find what we think we need at the time convenient for us.