I found this over at the Levi Girl’s blog (Meghan Smith).  Check it out you won’t be sorry:

The Wilderness Downtown

Read this in the NYT today (hat tip Danny, thanks).  Fascinating article that reasonated with me.  It touches on questions that I’ve been asking about St. Andrew’s: what we’re doing, why we’re doing it.  In fact, the launch of City Church was partially driven my my revulsion of the mega-church mentality with its attendant mega-budget, mega-buildings and the escapist mentality they promote amongst Christians (we really need Christian gymnasiums, food courts, sports leagues?  Please).  I had wanted to post this link to my Facebook account rather than enter it as a separate blog posting however, the NYT wanted me to grant access to the following in order for me to promote their material on my page (apparently the link was not adequate):

“Access my basic information, send me emails, post to my Facebook wall, access posts in my news feed, access my data at anytime, access my friends lists, access my profile information, access my contact information.”

Truly.

Sorry, NYT, just a bit ridiculous.  And, hopefully, to my Facebook friends’ appreciation, I did my bit to protect their privacy.  But, the article is good.  So, here’s snip and I’ll link to the rest:

Maybe the first decade of the 21st century will come to be known as the great age of headroom. During those years, new houses had great rooms with 20-foot ceilings and entire new art forms had to be invented to fill the acres of empty overhead wall space . . . People bought bulbous vehicles like Hummers and Suburbans. The rule was, The Smaller the Woman, the Bigger the Car — so you would see a 90-pound lady in tennis whites driving a 4-ton truck with enough headroom to allow her to drive with her doubles partner perched atop her shoulders . . . But that economy went poof, and social norms have since changed. The oversized now looks slightly ridiculous. Values have changed as well . . . Americans have built themselves multimillion-dollar worship palaces, he argues. These have become like corporations, competing for market share by offering social centers, child-care programs, first-class entertainment and comfortable, consumer Christianity . . . Jesus, Platt notes, made it hard on his followers. He created a minichurch, not a mega one. Today, however, building budgets dwarf charitable budgets, and Jesus is portrayed as a genial suburban dude. “When we gather in our church building to sing and lift up our hands in worship, we may not actually be worshipping the Jesus of the Bible. Instead, we may be worshipping ourselves.”

Read the rest.

Ran across this great quote in the midst of sermon prep last week:

“If our joy is going to reflect the glory of God, then it must flow from true knowledge of how God is glorious.  If we are going to enjoy God duly, we must know him truly.  How can our joy reflect the worth of God if it is not rooted in truth about God? If you say, “My joy is in the journey toward knowing, not the arrival,” you make an idol out of the journey and you turn heaven into a disappointment. Jesus is not honored most by the exploration of various Christologies, any more than your wife would be honored by your indecision concerning her character.  Jesus is honored by our knowing and treasuring him for who he really is.

He is a real person.  A fact.  A fixed, unchanging reality in the universe, independent of our feelings.  Our feelings about him do not make him what he is.  Our feelings about him reflect the value of what we think he has. And if our knowledge of him is wrong, to that degree our enjoyment of him will be no honor to the real Jesus.  Our joy displays his glory when it’s a reflex of seeing him for who he really is.”

~ John Piper, “The Supremacy of Christ and Joy in a Postmodern World”

Nice:

It begins . . .

Insolence Upbraided
While looking up something totally unrelated, I came across an intriguing bit of correspondence published in Jill Morgan’s biography of her father-in-law, A Man of the Word: Life of G. Campbell Morgan. It’s a fine example of how to respond to supercilious criticism.

Living Without Physical Intimacy
From the blog, Radical Womanhood: I believe that one day, I will look at my life and say with confidence that the single greatest blessing I have experienced of singleness has been pain of learning to live without physical intimacy.

What’s Next for Francis Chan
Mark Driscoll and Joshua Harris sat down with Francis Chan and asked why he resigned as senior pastor of Cornerstone Church in Simi Valley, California, and what he plans to do next. Brushing aside the planned discussion topic, Driscoll took charge of the conversation and says to Chan, “Everybody thinks you’re cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. You’ve got a good church going on and you hit the eject button and now you’re an international man of Fu Manchu mystery. What is going on? What are you thinking? And what’s going to happen to your church?” See how Chan responds . . .

Don’t Forget the Toilet Paper: A Memoir
Nerves got the better of me, so I squirmed down the hall to check out my new bathroom.  The stalls featured graffiti of years past, images and words faint from attempts to scrub the art away.  I scanned the walls for potentially useful advice or mind altering wisdom.  As I read the stall walls, I realized something was missing.  There was no toilet paper in the dormitory stalls!  Not even dispensers.  College student fail, and I hadn’t even made it to the lobby yet.  I was doomed.

“Check-in Apps”: The Future or an Invasion of Privacy?
These apps enable any business (or any person) to know just where you are at any time. While your location is only available to your friends, anyone with Internet access can potentially figure out your username and see the places of which you are mayor. So they can easily know those places where you visit the most, and can potentially figure out the times when you visit those places. For example, a bar is most likely visited in the evenings, or a coffee shop in the morning. Any stalker with a little bit of web-savvy can easily figure out where a person is at any given time of day.

Deep-Fried Beer
No Kidding.  Bottoms up!

From Tom Jensen at Public Policy Polling on Tuesday: “We’ll start rolling out our Ohio poll results tomorrow but there’s one finding on the poll that pretty much sums it up: by a 50-42 margin voters there say they’d rather have George W. Bush in the White House right now than Barack Obama.”

What happened?

Read the rest.

If we wanted to lay all our stress on the arguments, and concern ourselves only with reasons and counter-reasons, we could easily lose sight altogether of the history of Christ, to which Christian faith owes its existence, and of our own personal history with this faith.

~Jurgen Moltmann, Experiences of God

I read this wonderful paper by Rob Study over at his blog, Awakening Grace.  I appreciate Rob’s fine mind and abilitities of expression.  Particularly, I enjoyed his mining of our Anglcian heritage and his application of ancient truth to present challenges.  The article is long but you’ll be rewarded for working your way through it:

For several centuries now the philosophical worldview of the Enlightenment has been the dominant defining and structuring element in the West.  At its core, it can be described as essentially secular or rigidly materialistic.  Here secular, or rigidly materialistic, means “nature is all there is and all basic truths are truths of nature.”[1]Thus the secular worldview dictates that the deepest experiences of being a human such as embodied life, self-expression, sexuality, aesthetic experience, human political community, etc., are natural phenomenon and can only be explained naturally.  It has been noted, however, that explaining such complex phenomenon purely in materialistic terms devalues and delegitimizes the phenomenon themselves.  As Douglas Wilson, in a recent debate with Christopher Hitchens, noted, if love, hate, the yearning for justice, equality etc. are purely natural phenomenon, they have no more legitimacy than a chemical reaction in a can of Coca-Cola.[2] Milbank, Ward and Pickstock argue in their introduction to Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology that it is this devaluing of complex phenomena that has created the “soulless, aggressive, nonchalant, and nihilistic” materialism of contemporary society.[3]

In an attempt to reinvest the material world with some legitimacy and meaning, theologians in the Anglo-Catholic stream of the Church of England have put forward the theological framework of participation, which essentially posits that a phenomenon has ultimate meaning to the extent that it shares some of its traits and derives them, albeit imperfectly, from God.  And though the proponents of Radical Orthodoxy argue that only transcendence expressed through participation can uphold these complex phenomenon “against the void,”[4] Radical Orthodoxy nevertheless fails on a number of points to safeguard the concreteness of such things as embodied life, gender, temporality, etc., thus leading those who share the concerns of Radical Orthodoxy to seek an alternative solution.

One alternative to Radical Orthodoxy within the Anglican Tradition can be found in the Reformed doctrine of the extra-Calvinisticum, which gives expression to Thomas Cranmer’s sacramental theology.  Cranmer’s sacramental theology is similar to Radical Orthodoxy’s doctrine of participation on a number of points; nevertheless, there is at least one significant point of departure.  That point of departure is theextra-Calvinisticum, a Christological doctrine often narrowly associated with its namesake, John Calvin.  Briefly put, the extra-Calvinisticum is the theological conviction “ that the immutable God became man without diminution or loss as regards any of his attributes” joined with the conviction that the “existence of the second person of the Trinity et extra carnem.” [5] To put it more simply, the extraholds to the ubiquity of the divine Word, the local presence of the physical body of Jesus contained in heaven, while emphasizing the unity of the two in the person of Christ.[6] This paper will argue that Cranmer’s extra-Calvinisticum gives shape to his sacramental theology in such a way that it succeeds in safeguarding the very interests of Radical Orthodoxy.  This will be demonstrated by a critique of the shortcomings of Graham Ward’s essay “Bodies,” followed up by an analysis of Thomas Cranmer’s Answer to Stephen Gardiner Concerning the Sacraments.  If Cranmer’s sacramental theology can be shown to succeed where Radical Orthodoxy has failed, the usefulness of a long dead and oft neglected theologian can be revived to engage postmodern nihilism at its most critical shortcomings.

continue reading "Cranmer’s Sacramental Theology and Engaging Postmodern Nihilism"