A nice article offering “7 Lessons We Should Learn from the German Liberal Theologians and Higher Critics” – if we don’t learn from such people, we may find ourselves blundering into their errors.

Dead Germans.

They are the subject of a lecture I give every spring in my church history classes: a brief overview of German theologians from the 19th and early-20th centuries.

It’s kind of a depressing lecture to deliver — the sad tale of skepticism intersecting with scholarship; a dismal depiction of the disaster unleashed by unrestrained doubt and disbelief.

Despite standing in the shadow of the Reformation, many German Protestant theologians abandoned the historic truth claims of biblical Christianity due to the mounting popularity of Enlightenment rationalism. In so doing, they shipwrecked their own souls while simultaneously devastating the faith of millions of others.

Higher critics, such as Johann Eichhorn and David Strauss, denied the inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible. Moses didn’t write the Pentateuch, they claimed; nor did Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John write the four gospels. To make matters worse, they suggested that the Jesus of the Bible is not the same as the real Jesus of history. In their “quest to find the historical Jesus,” the critics created a “Jesus” of their own imaginations — essentially reducing him to a nice guy who couldn’t do any miracles, never claimed to be God, and was largely misunderstood by first-century Judaism.

Liberal theologians, from Friedrich Schleiermacher to Albrecht Ritschl, similarly disavowed the truth claims of the Bible. They looked instead for a new foundation on which to base their contrived version of Christianity. Some found it in the personal experience of romanticism; others in the moral ethics of the social gospel. But by denying core Christian doctrines (like the substitutionary death of Christ and His bodily resurrection), liberalism denied the very essence of the gospel message (cf. 1 Cor. 15:3-4). As Richard Niebuhr explained — summing up the bankruptcy of liberal theology — liberalism asserted that a “God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross” (The Kingdom of God in America, 193).

As you might imagine, the material in this lecture unfolds like a catastrophic train wreck … as we watch theologian after theologian jump the rails by abandoning the most-basic fundamentals of biblical Christianity.

But, in the midst of the chaos and carnage, are there lessons that we can learn from the German liberal theologians and higher critics, even if it is almost entirely from theirnegative example? I think so.

Here are seven such lessons, arranged in no particular order.

Read it all.

Quite a thought provoking article about image, beauty and the idolatry of both in our age.

A cover photo for Intelligent Life magazine caused a small stir recently because it dared the unthinkable: show a celebrity’s actual face. Cate Blanchett, 42, appears on the cover in little makeup, her smile lines and wrinkles un-retouched. She looks less like an Hollywood star and more like a dignified human being, like someone you might see drinking tea at a neighborhood Starbucks.

Compared to this photo, other images of Blanchett look plastic. The April cover ofHarper’s Bazaar also features her, but it shows her with perfectly smooth porcelain skin and smoky eyes. Her neck looks carved out of stone, her appearance as timeless as Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings, an unnatural immortality brought about through the magic of Photoshop.

She isn’t the first to go enhancement-free in a photo. I remember Jamie Lee Curtis doing something similar a few years back with a bit more fanfare, featuring a photo spread that showed every step of enhancement along the way in a normal shoot. The makers of Dove beauty products have been pushing the “Campaign for Real Beauty,” a series of promotions celebrating beauty that doesn’t fit the stereotypical mold for cover models. But these efforts, like the Intelligent Life cover, are significant only for their rarity. Photoshop is the norm, whether you’re shooting family photos, senior portraits, or billboards.

It’s become so normal that we hardly even notice it anymore, and that’s what makes it all the more insidious. Behind the wrinkle-removing, curve-enhancing, waist slimming work is a satanic ideology of youth and beauty.

Read it all.

Catching up on all of the Anglican news I missed being out of the country these past two weeks led me to this quote by Bishop Michael Nazir Ali regarding the failure of the Anglican Communion Covenant to pass in the Church of England:

“I am disappointed that the Anglican Communion Covenant, even in its watered down version,has failed to gain the support of the Church of England. This now means that the Jerusalem Statement (2008) is now ‘The only game in town.’” (Anglican Mainstream)

Personally, I am quite pleased that the Covenant has failed.  I hope, now, that it fails globally.  Why?  Because as +Nazir Ali notes, the Covenant is a weak, watered down, document – a minimalist and sad attempt to find some common framework to preserve a crumbling Communion.  Global rejection of the Covenant may just open the door for the robust and clear Jerusalem Statement (2008) to take center stage as the doctrinal/confessional center of Anglicanism.  Secondly, failure of the liberal western Anglican leadership (specifically, the Archbishop of Canterbury who bet the farm on the Covenant’s passage) signaled by the rejection of the Covenant may allow for the emergence of GAFCON/FCA as the organizational center of Anglicanism.

The following extract, The Jerusalem Declaration, is from the larger document, The Jerusalem Statement:

The Jerusalem Declaration

In the name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit:

We, the participants in the Global Anglican Future Conference, have met in the land of Jesus’ birth. We express our loyalty as disciples to the King of kings, the Lord Jesus. We joyfully embrace his command to proclaim the reality of his kingdom which he first announced in this land. The gospel of the kingdom is the good news of salvation, liberation and transformation for all. In light of the above, we agree to chart a way forward together that promotes and protects the biblical gospel and mission to the world, solemnly declaring the following tenets of orthodoxy which underpin our Anglican identity.

    1. We rejoice in the gospel of God through which we have been saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. Because God first loved us, we love him and as believers bring forth fruits of love, ongoing repentance, lively hope and thanksgiving to God in all things.

    2. We believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God written and to contain all things necessary for salvation. The Bible is to be translated, read, preached, taught and obeyed in its plain and canonical sense, respectful of the church’s historic and consensual reading.

    3. We uphold the four Ecumenical Councils and the three historic Creeds as expressing the rule of faith of the one holy catholic and apostolic Church.

    4. We uphold the Thirty-nine Articles as containing the true doctrine of the Church agreeing with God’s Word and as authoritative for Anglicans today.

    5. We gladly proclaim and submit to the unique and universal Lordship of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, humanity’s only Saviour from sin, judgement and hell, who lived the life we could not live and died the death that we deserve. By his atoning death and glorious resurrection, he secured the redemption of all who come to him in repentance and faith.

    6. We rejoice in our Anglican sacramental and liturgical heritage as an expression of the gospel, and we uphold the 1662 Book of Common Prayer as a true and authoritative standard of worship and prayer, to be translated and locally adapted for each culture.

    7. We recognise that God has called and gifted bishops, priests and deacons in historic succession to equip all the people of God for their ministry in the world. We uphold the classic Anglican Ordinal as an authoritative standard of clerical orders.

    8. We acknowledge God’s creation of humankind as male and female and the unchangeable standard of Christian marriage between one man and one woman as the proper place for sexual intimacy and the basis of the family. We repent of our failures to maintain this standard and call for a renewed commitment to lifelong fidelity in marriage and abstinence for those who are not married.

    9. We gladly accept the Great Commission of the risen Lord to make disciples of all nations, to seek those who do not know Christ and to baptise, teach and bring new believers to maturity.

    10. We are mindful of our responsibility to be good stewards of God’s creation, to uphold and advocate justice in society, and to seek relief and empowerment of the poor and needy.

    11. We are committed to the unity of all those who know and love Christ and to building authentic ecumenical relationships. We recognise the orders and jurisdiction of those Anglicans who uphold orthodox faith and practice, and we encourage them to join us in this declaration.

    12. We celebrate the God-given diversity among us which enriches our global fellowship, and we acknowledge freedom in secondary matters. We pledge to work together to seek the mind of Christ on issues that divide us.

    13. We reject the authority of those churches and leaders who have denied the orthodox faith in word or deed. We pray for them and call on them to repent and return to the Lord.

    14. We rejoice at the prospect of Jesus’ coming again in glory, and while we await this final event of history, we praise him for the way he builds up his church through his Spirit by miraculously changing lives.

Over at Fors Clavigera, James Smith raised the topic of the practice of leading worship by writing an open letter to praise bands encouraging them to consider, or reconsider, the theology of Christian worship and the practices employed by praise bands.  I found it a thoughtful and helpful article.  Here’s a snip:

My concern is that we, the church, have unwittingly encouraged you to simply import musical practices into Christian worship that–while they might be appropriate elsewhere–are detrimental to congregational worship. More pointedly, using language I first employed in Desiring the Kingdom, I sometimes worry that we’ve unwittingly encouraged you to import certain forms of performance that are, in effect, “secular liturgies” and not just neutral “methods.” Without us realizing it, the dominant practices of performance train us to relate to music (and musicians) in a certain way: as something for our pleasure, as entertainment, as a largely passive experience. The function and goal of music in these “secular liturgies” is quite different from the function and goal of music in Christian worship.

So let me offer just a few brief axioms with the hope of encouraging new reflection on the practice of “leading worship”: (read the rest here)

Thoughts?  Opinions?  Observations?  Do tell….

An impersonal God?  Well and good.

A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness inside our own head?  Better still.

A formless life force surging through everyone – a vast power we can all tap? Best of all.

But a living God – pulling at the other end of the cord approaching at infinite speed, the hunter, the covenant Lord, the husband?  That is quite another matter.

There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion suddenly draw back – supposing you really found Him?  Or, worse still, suppose He found you.  If there is a God you are in a sense alone with Him.  You cannot put him off with speculations about your neighbor’s hypocrisy, or memories of what you have read in books.  What will all that chatter and hearsay count when the anesthetic fog we call the real world fades away and the divine presence in which you have always stood becomes palpable, immediate and unavoidable?

- C.S. Lewis (quoted by Tim Keller)

Ran across this great video clip (h/t: Mez McConnell):

I am enjoying quite a bit the reading I’m doing as preparation for our spring/summer sermon series on the 39 Articles.  Peter Moore dropped off his copy of +John Rodgers’ new book on the Articles.  It’s next on my reading list having finished J.I. Packer’s nice little treatise: The Thirty-Nine Articles: Their Place and Use Today.

In his essay, Packer writes of the dual role the Creeds and Articles play in the development of a coherent, robust and authentic Anglicanism.

The Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds challenge every generation of the world church: do you still stand with us on the Trinity? on the Incarnation? on the second coming of our Lord, and the Christian hope?  If not, why not?  Are not our positions scriptural?  Go to the Bible and see.  And if you find they are, will you not labour to teach and stress and defend these things in your day, as we did in ours?  And the Articles, supplementing the Creeds, ask each generation of Anglicans further questions.  Do you stand where we stand with regard to the sufficiency and supremacy of Scripture? the gravity of sin? justification by faith alone in and through Christ alone? the nature of the sacraments as seals of the gospel promise, means of grace because they are means to faith? loyalty to the gospel in word and sacrament as the sole decisive mark of the church? the dangerous, anti-evangelical tendency of Roman doctrines and practices?  If these things are not at the centre of your faith and testimony, why not?  Test these contentions by Scripture: is it not the case that where we are positive, the Bible was positive before us?  And if we were right then to treat these points as evangelical essentials, ought not you to be seeking ways and means of proclaiming and vindicating them now?

If there is any substance in what we have been saying, it is clear that we many not just casually cast off the Articles because they are old.  Until they are decisively refuted from Scripture (which has not been done yet), we have no warrant for rejecting them, or for relaxing the requirement of clerical subscription.

Catholicity is a matter of belief and of doctrine before it is anything else.

- J.I. Packer, Thirty-Nine Articles, p.32

Joe Carter, an editor at The Gospel Coalition, has this report:

The Story: After the Obama administration’s announced that health insurance coverage would require the inclusion of contraception and abortifacients, several Christian leaders—including Chuck Colson, Richard Land, and Rick Warren—called on Evangelicals to stand with Catholics in civil disobedience to this law.

Read the rest.

Sounds ominous. Yes?

So wrote and warned the editor of “The Christian Index”, Gerald Harris, as he noted the inroads of Reformed teaching into the ranks of various Baptist organizations and institutions.

“It appears that some of our institutions and agencies are giving, at the least, tacit approval to Reformed theology or are, at the most, actively on a path to honor, if not implement Reformed theology and methodology in their institutions,” warned Harris.

Read the rest.

(h/t: Brian)