Baptists

As I followed links looking for something I eventually didn't find, I happened upon "Why I Am a Baptist" by Albert Mohler. Mohler is a Southern Baptist; in fact, the president of their largest seminary, but I found his description of what makes Baptists distinct completely unobjectionable (however argumentative we Baptists may be). Some excerpts from a much longer, but very readable article:

Every great movement probably begins in an argument of some sort, and the Baptists emerged in the context of an argument that was intense, significant, and sometimes deadly. Luther had started it. The Calvinists believed he had not taken it far enough. The English Puritans likewise became convinced that the moderately reforming Church of England was not taking the argument far enough. The Separatists (who would include Congregationalists and Presbyterians) believed that the Puritans who remained in the Church of England were not taking it far enough. The Baptists then separated from the Separatists because they were not taking it far enough. Since then, Baptists have not stopped arguing. They often argue among themselves, but more urgently, they argue for the necessity of conversion, for the believers’ church, for the baptism of believers alone, and for liberty of conscience.

The Baptists did not claim to have reestablished Christ’s church, but instead saw themselves as continuing the process of reforming the church through the establishment of true and godly congregations of visible saints—each entering into the covenant fellowship of the congregation by personal testimony of faith in Jesus Christ as Savior and personal commitment to obey Christ in baptism and faithful discipleship. ....

In 1646, Baptist churches in London defined saving faith in these terms:

Faith is the gift of God, wrought in the hearts of the elect by the Spirit of God; by which faith they come to know and believe the truth of the Scriptures, and the excellency of them above all other writings, and all things in the world, as they hold forth the glory of God in his attributes, the excellency of Christ in his nature and offices, and of the power and fulness of the Spirit in his workings and operations; and so are enabled to cast their souls upon this truth thus believed.

Such saving faith, the Baptists continued, “is ordinarily begotten by the preaching of the gospel, or word of Christ.” When you find real Baptists, you will find the preaching of the gospel—the declaration of the great good news that salvation and the forgiveness of sins are bestowed upon all who hear the word of Christ and believe, who rest from their labors to make themselves worthy of salvation and by grace through faith receive the mercy of God, by the merits of Christ alone. ....

The definition of Christ’s church as wholly regenerate is perhaps the most radical of all Baptist doctrines. The necessity of conversion leads to the affirmation of the church as the body of those who are converted, who have heard the gospel and been saved. Others among the Puritans and Separatists approached this affirmation, but the Baptists plowed right through the arguments, insisting there could be no other notion of Christ’s church than that it comprises the twice-born, regenerate believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, who have individually professed their belief in Christ and demonstrated their regeneration through obedience to Christ and his commands. ....

The rightly ordered church is a body of regenerate believers, gathered by common faith and common confession and a church covenant that defines the commitments of church membership. This rightly ordered church appoints the elders and pastors needed for its ministry and organizes its work on its own authority.

One of the most venerable of our Baptist church covenants explains:

As we trust we have been brought by divine grace to embrace the Lord Jesus Christ, and by the influence of his Spirit to give ourselves up to him, so we do now solemnly covenant with each other, that, God enabling us: we will walk together in brotherly love; that we will exercise a Christian care and watchfulness over each other, and faithfully warn, rebuke, and admonish one another, as the case shall require; that we will not forsake the assembling of ourselves together, nor omit the great duty of prayer, both for ourselves and for others; that we will participate in each other’s joys, and endeavor, with tenderness and sympathy, to bear each other’s burdens and sorrows; that we will earnestly endeavor to bring up such as may be under our care in the nurture and admonition of the Lord; that we will seek divine aid to enable us to walk circumspectly and watchfully in the world; denying ungodliness and every worldly lust; that we will strive together for the support of a faithful evangelical ministry among us; that we will endeavor by example and effort to win souls to Christ; and, through life, amidst evil report and good report seek to live to the glory of Him who hath called us out of darkness into his marvellous light.

As others have noted, the Baptists have not been ardent ecumenists. But they have always recognized that there are true Christians in other churches and communions. ....The practice of baptizing only those persons who personally profess faith in Christ became the defining issue for Baptists. Reading the New Testament, they concluded that infant baptism was no real baptism and that baptism, like the Lord’s Supper, was not a sacrament but an ordinance—an act commanded by Christ. The new believer, having given evidence of saving faith and a commitment to follow Christ, is baptized into the fellowship of the church, with the waters of baptism the context for the believer’s profession of faith. Baptism is also the ordinance of entry into the membership and fellowship of the congregation. .... (more)

R. Albert Mohler Jr., "Why I Am a Baptist," First Things, August 1, 2020.

"Quiet time"?

From several years ago, excerpts from "Is It Time to Quit ‘Quiet Time’?" (likely behind a paywall). The problem isn't actually quiet, solitary Bible study and meditation on the Scriptures, but how it is approached.

Every semester, devout Christian students would report to me that they read their Bibles every day. They could even recite key verses from memory. They were fluent in Christian theological clichés. Yet despite their constant engagement with the Bible, they were shocked by what we found in Genesis....

I began to realize that their poor grasp of Scripture wasn’t necessarily due to a lack of reading, although that’s also a large problem in the US. ....

But for my students, many of whom read the Bible daily and have chosen to attend a Christian college, their poor grasp on and application of Scripture seems to be due to the way they engage with it. It is a way many American Christians have been reading the Bible for decades: through “daily devotions” or “quiet time.” ....

“As a whole,” Ed Stetzer wrote in 2017, “Americans, including many Christians, hold unbiblical views on hell, sin, salvation, Jesus, humanity, and the Bible itself.” Like many American Christians, my students didn’t seem to understand details required to grasp the whole sweep of Scripture. ....

...[M]y students who do not practice more robust forms of traditional Bible engagement—such as inductive Bible study, yearly Bible reading plans, the lectionary, or lectio divina—have few tools to help situate a daily meditation on a verse such as “What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Rom. 8:31). Such microdosing of Scripture without a grasp of the whole can easily distort our interpretations. Time-tested traditions of long-form Scripture engagement expose us to and familiarize us with the contents of Scripture. .... When my freshmen described their daily quiet times, I began to understand some of the disconnect. They lacked extended communal readings of Scripture where it was safe to interrogate the text and puzzle over its meaning.

For them, Scripture reading was an individual’s responsibility with a necessary outcome: God showing the reader something from the passage that is immediately relevant to his or her life. Many were playing Bible roulette every morning, letting the Scriptures open to any page and asking God to show them what they should learn from the verses. Some of them would read just one verse a day. Others read a passage, or maybe a chapter. ....

Daily devotions have been characteristically solitary and have not usually involved rigorous study of Scripture. Instead, readers often focus on one chapter or even a few verses per session, from which they may expect to receive God’s guidance for their personal life in that moment. Daily devotions typically include a period of prayerful “listening” for God’s voice, which is believed to manifest either in the verses read that session or via direct communication to the mind of the listener.

Though this listening may be expectant, it is essentially passive. It’s often guided by a tacit belief that God’s Word speaks and transforms through sudden insights directed at individual readers, rather than through sustained study and active questioning in community. ....

If Bible literacy is declining, even for those who read devotionally every day, then what is the way forward? Most of the parachurch ministries we talked to reported that they have been considering methods that provide a wider perspective of Scripture. These include ancient Scripture reading rituals that many evangelical churches have rarely practiced (such as lectio divina, the Daily Office from The Book of Common Prayer, and so on). But the practice most mentioned by ministry leaders was the public, or communal, reading of Scripture. .... (more, but likely behind a paywall)

My most recent practice most mornings is reading The Daily Liturgy newsletter provided by Mere Orthodoxy. It includes readings from the Psalms, Old Testament, and New Testament, as well as prayers and meditations on the Scriptures, and it is orthodox in doctrine (i.e., "adhering to the traditional and established Christian faith").

Dru Johnson & Celina Durgin, "Is It Time to Quit ‘Quiet Time’?," Christianity Today, April 2023.

May I be ardent to obey

I have subscribed to The Daily Liturgy offered by Mere Orthodoxy. It is available as a morning newsletter, online, or as a podcast and can be subscribed here. It is free. I get the newsletter. One subscriber says he listens to it as he drives to work every day. I like it. It includes an Old Testament passage, one from the New Testament, a Psalm, and prayers. Today this was the "Prayer of Confession":

Merciful Father, although you have promised me everlasting joy, I am often lazy, apathetic, and hard-hearted. Deliver me, O God, from a slothful mind, from all lukewarmness, and all dejection of spirit. I know these cannot but deaden my love to you; mercifully free my heart from them, and give me a lively, zealous, active, and cheerful spirit; that I may vigorously perform whatever you command, thankfully suffer whatever you choose for me, and be ardent to obey your holy love in all things.

The Daily Liturgy at Mere Orthodoxy,

What about evolution?

A recent article at Mere Orthodoxy describes the results of a "Pew Religious Landscape Survey" on American beliefs about evolution. The choices offered were:

1. Humans have evolved over time due to processes such as natural selection; God or a higher power had no role in this process. (“pure evolution”).
2. Humans have evolved over time due to processes that were guided or allowed by God or a higher power. (“intelligent design”).
3. Humans have existed in their present form since the beginning of time. (“creationist view”).

Breaking it down:

The article, "What to Learn from the Decline of Young Earth Creationism" intends to be read as analysis rather than advocacy. But it does advocate tolerance among Christians of varying views:

It seems that a central argument of some young-earth creationists is this: “If you deviate from the panoply of interpretations we offer on Genesis 1-11, it is because you are succumbing to secularism and downgrading the authority of the Bible.” But, as soon as you find Christians who deviate from their interpretation, but have demonstrably not been animated by secular science nor have abandoned their high view of Scripture’s authority or the historicity of the miraculous…then the argument starts to fall apart. If young-earth creationists want to regain ground on this issue with the wider culture, it might, paradoxically, come from being more open-minded towards other Christians who disagree with them.

When Copernicus and Galileo strove to demonstrate that the earth revolved around the sun, not the other way around, the church was able to provide sophisticated (if not convoluted) Biblical and naturalistic arguments to refute the claim. But they were wrong. And, in time, the Church realized this and adopted heliocentrism. This wasn’t a concession that science had more authority than God's Word, but an admission that they had simply interpreted the Bible incorrectly.

This realization did not diminish what God’s Word told us about the rising and setting of the sun or the foundations upon which the earth rested, but it moved us closer to seeing what the author originally intended when he used those word pictures. Similarly, if we approach Genesis 1 assuming that its primary function is to refute figures like Darwin, we will miss the meat and marrow of what the Divine Author intended for us to receive from His Word and therefore may fundamentally misunderstand His world. (more)

Marc Sims, "What to Learn from the Decline of Young Earth Creationism," Mere Orthodoxy, March 6, 2026.

Josephus and Jesus

I've been reading history for a very long time. I love this sort of thing. On an ancient Jewish historian and what he may have written about Jesus:

.... Josephus is our most important historical source for the Roman East—Syria, Galilee, and Judea—offering priceless insights into politics, warfare, religion, and daily life we’d otherwise never know.

I’ve taught about Josephus’s life and works for more than 20 years—first in secular settings like Macquarie University and the University of Sydney, and now at Wheaton College. But Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ by T.C. Schmidt, associate professor of religious studies at Fairfield University, has forced me to rewrite my lectures—and it might just have changed my mind. It seems that a controversial passage about Jesus’s resurrection might be original after all.

Of everything Josephus wrote, a single paragraph has been analyzed and debated more than all the rest. Those 90 words are even given their own name in scholarship: the Testimonium Flavianum—the testimony of Flavius Josephus about Jesus.

It appears in Book 18 of Jewish Antiquities. Here’s the standard translation from the Loeb Classical Library, with brackets around the words I’ve described for decades as “dodgy.” (Not exactly a technical term, but I always thought it apt.)

About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, [if indeed one ought to call him a man]. For he was one who wrought surprising feats and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. [He was the Messiah.] When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing among us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come to love him did not give up their affection for him. [For he appeared to them alive again on the third day, the divine prophets having foretold these and countless other marvellous things about him.] And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.

Since a famous 1987 article by Géza Vermes (professor of Jewish studies at Oxford University), the scholarly consensus about this paragraph has been that Josephus himself wrote a brief, neutral—or perhaps negative—remark about Jesus, which was later “improved” by a Christian scribe copying out Josephus’s works in the fourth, fifth, or sixth century. ....

Schmidt does a terrific job in the early chapters of his book chasing down all the manuscripts that contain the Testimonium Flavianum. Josephus wrote in Greek, but his work—at least parts of it—was quickly translated into Latin, as well as Syriac, Armenian, and Arabic. Unlike most classical and New Testament scholars, Schmidt seems comfortable swimming in all these linguistic oceans.

The upshot of his analysis is that we may have to rethink a key line. ....

I’ve spent my career trying to ensure my teaching about the historical Jesus stays within the bounds of mainstream (secular) scholarship, and Schmidt’s book is a major, serious challenge to the consensus on the Testimonium Flavianum. It won’t completely convince everyone, but if I’m any indication, it could partly convince many. I might owe my former students an apology. (more, summarizing the argument made in the book)

This appears at the end of the review: "Editors’ note: A generous donor has made Josephus and Jesus freely available in PDF format."

John Dickson, "I Might Owe My Students an Apology About Josephus," TGC, Jan. 19, 2026.

Blessed are the dead...

When my father died, I asked the pastor to use scriptures that remind us of the hope we have. They are scriptures used for the funeral of a believer in the Book of Common Prayer.

I AM the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die.

I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: and though this body be destroyed, yet shall I see God: whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not as a stranger.

We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.

The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom then shall I fear? the Lord is the strength of my life; of whom then shall I be afraid?

One thing have I desired of the Lord, which I will require; even that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the fair beauty of the Lord, and to visit his temple.

Now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept. For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.

Jesus said, Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.

I heard a voice from heaven, saying unto me, Write, From henceforth blessed are the dead who die in the Lord: even so saith the Spirit; for they rest from their labours.

"Like a tree planted by the water-side"

From a 1971 W.H. Auden letter critical of liturgical reform:

As for the Psalms, they are poems, and to 'get' poetry, it should, of course, be read in the language in which it was written. I myself, alas, know no Hebrew. All I know is that Coverdale reads like poetry, and the modern versions don't.

Coverdale's version of the Psalms is the version used in the Book of Common Prayer.

Coverdale's Psalm 1:

1. BLESSED is the man that hath not walked in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stood in the way of sinners : and hath not sat in the seat of the scornful.
2. But his delight is in the law of the Lord : and in his law will he exercise himself day and night.
3. And he shall be like a tree planted by the water-side : that will bring forth his fruit in due season.
4. His leaf also shall not wither : and look, whatsoever he doeth, it shall prosper.
5. As for the ungodly, it is not so with them : but they are like the chaff, which the wind scattereth away from the face of the earth.
6. Therefore the ungodly shall not be able to stand in the judgement : neither the sinners in the congregation of the righteous.
7. But the Lord knoweth the way of the righteous : and the way of the ungodly shall perish.

liturgical reform – Snakes and Ladders

From agnosticism to belief

From Barton Swaim's review of Charles Murray’s Taking Religion Seriously:

.... A Christian friend, asked by Mr. Murray how he had come to faith, named C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity (1952). Lewis’s argument that Jesus couldn’t have been a “great moral teacher” if he wasn’t the Son of God, as he claimed to be, grabbed Mr. Murray’s attention. The usual response—that the Gospels don’t record what Jesus said and did, and that belief in his divinity was a much later invention—led Mr. Murray to read an array of books on the four Gospels’ origins. (In a series of vignettes, Taking Religion Seriously lists all the books the author read in his journey from agnosticism to belief.)

One of those books on the Gospels’ formation is perhaps the greatest of them all: Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (2006), a densely researched and dispassionate argument that the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) are more or less what they present themselves to be: accounts of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, compiled from the testimonies of eyewitnesses. Mr. Murray also read prominent critical accounts of the Gospels—books by Bart Ehrman, among others, that reject all supernatural claims—and wasn’t so impressed.

These latter accounts, Mr. Murray concludes, falter under the weight of unanswered questions. Among those questions: If the idea of Jesus’ divinity was so late an invention, as all critical biblical scholarship must assume, how is it that not a single New Testament book so much as alludes to the most cataclysmic event of ancient Judaism, the destruction of the Second Temple in A.D. 70? Jesus foretells its destruction in the Gospels, and this has been interpreted as a later insertion to make him sound prophetic, but are we to believe that any mention of the temple’s actual destruction never found its way into any New Testament book?

And why does the Acts of the Apostles end with the reader wondering what became of its two most important characters, when we know they were martyred? “If people kept augmenting and altering the books of the New Testament as the revisionists insist,” Mr. Murray wonders, “why wouldn’t someone have added a few lines at the ending of the Acts mentioning the deaths of Paul and Peter?” The most plausible answer, of course, is that Luke’s account was finished before their deaths and no one in subsequent decades felt sufficiently bold to tamper with it. And most puzzling of all: Why did Jesus’ disciples go to their deaths insisting he had been raised from the dead when they had neither hoped for nor expected such a thing in the first place, if they knew it never happened? .... (more)

Barton Swaim, "Taking Religion Seriously Review: Faith Makes a Comeback," Oct. 17, 2025.

Deliverance

Robinson Crusoe is, of course, a classic work of fiction. Few, I suspect, think of it as a work of Christian fiction. The illustration is by N.C. Wyeth, followed by a commentary on quotations from the book.

Three times a verse of Scripture comes to Robinson Crusoe in an hour of special need.

The first came in a spell of sickness. Recalling that the Brazilians used tobacco as a medicine, he searched in one of the chests for a roll of tobacco — and found a Bible. This he opened casually, and the first words that came to him were, "Call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me." (Psalm 50:15).

"The words," he wrote in his diary, "were very apt to my case, and made some impression on my thoughts at the time…though not so much as they did afterwards. .... Before I lay down I did what I had never done in all my life: I kneeled down and prayed to God to fulfil the promise to me."

The second occasion was during a sense of sin. Recovered from his sickness, he began reading in the New Testament with the not uncommon result that he had found himself more deeply and sincerely affected with the wickedness of his past life. "Now," he records, "I began to construe the words mentioned above, 'Call upon me, and I will deliver thee,' in a different sense from what I had ever done before; for then I had no notion of anything being called deliverance, but my being delivered from the captivity I was in…the island was certainly a prison to me…but now I learned to take it in another sense.

Now I looked back upon my past life with such horror, and my sins appeared so dreadful, that my soul sought nothing of God but deliverance from the load of guilt that bore down all my comfort…. And I add this part here, to hint to whoever shall read it, that whenever they come to a true sense of things, they will find deliverance from sin a much greater blessing than deliverance from affliction." .... (more)

"Robinson Crusoe and the Bible"

"All-or-nothing"

Michael at Shadow to Light usually takes on the arguments of atheists. This time, he posts on a subject that will annoy some Christians: "The First Chapters of Genesis":

There are many Christians who argue that the first chapters of Genesis must be read as literal history. What’s more, if you refuse to embrace such an interpretation, you are rejecting the Bible, therefore rejecting Christianity. I don’t agree. In fact, when I read the first chapters of Genesis, it’s seems clear (to me) that we are dealing with a significant amount of symbolism. In other words, Genesis reads more like symbolic history, an allegory that is conveying deeper truths about our past and who we are. The literalists would disagree, arguing that unless Genesis is literal history, describing things as they happened, it’s nothing more than a fantasy. And of course, atheists everywhere are happy to weigh in and agree with this all-or-nothing thinking. ....

He intends to do a series on the subject: "First, I want to lay out some of reasons I think Genesis is meant to be interpreted as symbolic history. Second, consider some of the truths that Genesis is conveying. Finally, consider what would be the historical truths."

Michael, "The First Chapters of Genesis," Shadow to Light, April 6, 2025.

Norman Vincent Peale

The incoming President's favorite pastor was Norman Vincent Peale, the author of The Power of Positive Thinking (1952, but still in print). Today Jake Meador writes about "The Perils of Positive Thinking":

[F]or Peale the Christian message isn’t a message about the nature of reality, the reasons that mankind suffers and does evil, or the way that we might be saved from those things by something that exists outside of ourselves. It is not a story of God taking on flesh and entering the world as a rescuer, and the renewer of all things. Rather, Christianity—and really it’s just Christian words for Peale—is a technique for people in advanced industrial societies to achieve their dreams. It represents a kind of baptism of egocentrism for the wealthy and the powerful. Indeed, virtually every personal anecdote Peale shares involves well-to-do people. You will find many business owners, civic leaders, and men about town in The Power of Positive Thinking. What you won’t find are janitors or plumbers.

When Peale cites Scripture, it is invariably out of context and applied in ways that would have been quite shocking to the original authors. The point of one of Peale’s favorite texts—if God is for us, who can be against us?—is not that...people should pursue their personal kingdoms with confidence and positivity because God is on their side. It is, if anything, almost the opposite: The quite extensive witness of Scripture is that the sorts of people Peale constantly cites in his book are precisely the people least likely to enter the Kingdom of Heaven unless they repent of the very avarice and self-centered ambition that Peale’s work encourages.

The results of this confusion on Peale’s part in which he seeks to use Christian language to advance wealthy Western individualist goals are sometimes hilarious. In one passage, he explains that one can harness “prayer power” to achieve one’s goals, but only if one understands the rules and formulas required to pray “scientifically.” ....

According to the wisdom of Scripture and mother church, prayer is a way of laying our fears and concerns before God. But it is not a self-help technique or a kind of celestial snack machine we visit whenever we are hungry. Prayer is a way through which human creatures enjoy communion with their creator and through which they are renewed and restored to what they were made to be. .... Often prayers seem to go unanswered, not due to using the improper technique but, as the Scriptures tell us, because God’s ways are inscrutable to us, and the work of prayer is not so much to yield the results we want, but to align our fallen and imperfect will with God’s will so that we might be caught up in closer relationship with him.

All of this complexity, which one must speak Christian to understand, falls away in Peale’s work. It is almost as if he doesn’t even recognize such complexity as being part of the human experience, let alone the Christian experience. Prayer is simply a technique one practices in order to improve one’s daily material life, to help one’s mood, or, quite crassly, to grow one’s bank account. .... (more)

Jake Meador, "The Perils of Positive Thinking," The Dispatch, Jan. 19, 2025.

The miracle at Cana

From "And They Began to Be Merry" by Kevin Williamson:

Jesus’ first miracle isn’t about transmutation of beverages—it is about social anxiety. It is about shame. Some relations have not planned well for their wedding, and they are going to be embarrassed, and probably gossiped about, when they run out of wine to serve their guests. Shame related to such an occasion was a big deal in that world. This is, emphatically, not Jesus’ problem. But Jesus has a mother, and mothers of the kind He had have a good way of making things that aren’t our problem our problem, and so Jesus’ mother gives Him a nudge. Jesus is not obviously ready to be nudged, and replies: “Woman, what concern is this to us?” Mary, deploying a classic passive-aggressive maternal strategy, tells the servants: “Do whatever he tells you.” ....

And so Jesus launches the public part of His career on someone else’s schedule in order to spare some relatives embarrassment. ....

The miracle is that the Ruler of the Universe cared about such a little thing as the social anxieties of a bunch of nobodies in an obscure little corner of the world of no particular importance, and that He loved them the way a father loves his children—and what kind of father offers just enough at a time like that when he has, at his disposal, the very best? The best robe, the gold ring, the fatted calf, the wine that was better than any wine the local whatever-was-Hebrew-for-sommelier had ever tasted? The supernatural stuff is one thing, but consider the magnificence of that gesture, the sheer audacious style of it. I do not care if you are the most cynical atheist walking the Earth—it is impossible not to admire the panache. He bends reality into a new shape, makes the universe follow new rules, to help out a friend, and He does it cool—nobody even knows what happened except for the waiters. .... (more)

Kevin D. Williamson, "And They Began to Be Merry," The Dispatch, Nov. 28, 2024.

Hell

I enjoy browsing through books of quotations, collections from many sources like H.L. Mencken's  A New Dictionary of Quotations (it was new once), but I also have books of quotations from individual authors who have proven to be eminently quotable, for instance, Samuel Johnson, Chesterton, and C.S. Lewis. One of my favorite quotable authors is Dorothy L. Sayers, who never minces words, especially regarding Christian doctrine. Today I was looking through a book of Sayers' quotations, A Matter of Eternity, published by Eerdmans in 1973, and came across this:

...there seems to be a kind of conspiracy, especially among middle-aged writers of vaguely liberal tendency, to forget, or to conceal, where the doctrine of Hell comes from. One finds frequent references to "the cruel and abominable mediaeval doctrine of hell", or "the childish and grotesque mediaeval imagery of physical fire and worms"....

But the case is quite otherwise; let us face the facts. The doctrine of Hell is not "mediaeval": it is Christ's. It is not a device of "mediaeval priestcraft" for frightening people into giving money to the Church: It is Christ's deliberate judgment on sin. The imagery of the undying worm and the unquenchable fire derives, not from "mediaeval superstition", but originally from the Prophet Isaiah, and it was Christ who emphatically used it. If we are Christians, very well; we dare not not take the doctrine of Hell seriously, for we have it from Him whom we acknowledge as God and Truth incarnate. If we say that Christ was a great and good man, and that, ignoring His divine claims, we should yet stick to His teaching very well; that is what Christ taught. It confronts us in the oldest and least "edited" of the Gospels: it is explicit in many of the most familiar parables and implicit in many more: it bulks far larger in the teaching than one realises, until one reads the Evangelists through instead of merely picking out the most comfortable texts: one cannot get rid of it without tearing the New Testament to tatters. We cannot repudiate Hell without altogether repudiating Christ.

Originally from Introductory Papers on Dante, 1953.

Doing the right thing

Russell Moore:

Russian president Vladimir Putin murdered another Christian this week. It was just another day in Putin’s supposed project of protecting “the Christian West” from godlessness. After all, they tell me, one can’t create a Christian nationalist empire without killing some people.

Before the world forgets the corpse of Alexei Navalny in the subzero environs of an Arctic penal colony, we ought to look at him—especially those of us who follow Jesus Christ—to see what moral courage actually is.

Navalny was perhaps the most-recognized anti-Putin dissident in the world, and he is now one of many Putin enemies to end up “suddenly dead.” He survived poisoning in 2020, recuperated in Europe, and ultimately went back to his homeland despite knowing what he would face. Speaking of his dissent and his willingness to bear its consequences, Navalny repeatedly referenced his profession of Christian faith. ....

“The fact is that I am a Christian, which usually sets me up as an example for constant ridicule in the Anti-Corruption Foundation, because mostly our people are atheists, and I was once quite a militant atheist myself,” Navalny said (as rendered by Google Translate). “But now I am a believer, and that helps me a lot in my activities because everything becomes much, much easier.”

“There are fewer dilemmas in my life, because there is a book in which, in general, it is more or less clearly written what action to take in every situation,” he explained. “It’s not always easy to follow this book, of course, but I am actually trying.”

Specifically, Navalny said, he was motivated by the words of Jesus: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied” (Matt. 5:6, NASB).

“I’ve always thought that this particular commandment is more or less an instruction to activity,” Navalny said. “And so, while certainly not really enjoying the place where I am, I have no regrets about coming back or about what I’m doing. It’s fine, because I did the right thing.” .... (more)

Russell Moore, "What a Murdered Russian Dissident Can Teach Us About Moral Courage," Christianity Today, February 21, 2024.

"How rich God is in mercy..."

In 1944 Sheed & Ward, a Catholic house, published The New Testament of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, translated by Ronald Knox. Knox was a very interesting person. He was Catholic chaplain at the University of Oxford in the 1920s and '30s. He was a classical scholar, broadcaster, apologist, and author of several mysteries, a founding member of the Detection Club. C.S. Lewis called him "the wittiest man in Europe." I recently got a copy of his New Testament translation. This is from his version of the second chapter of Ephesians:

HE found you dead men; such were your transgressions, such were the sinful ways you lived in. That was when you followed the fashion of this world, when you owned a prince whose domain is in the lower air, that spirit whose influence is still at work among the unbelievers. We too, all of us, were once of their company; our life was bounded by natural appetites, and we did what corrupt nature or our own calculation would have us do, with God's displeasure for our birthright, like other men. How rich God is in mercy, with what an excess of love he loved us! Our sins had made dead men of us, and he, in giving life to Christ, gave life to us too; it is his grace that has saved you; raised us up too, enthroned us too above the heavens, in Christ Jesus. He would have all future ages see, in that clemency which he shewed us in Christ Jesus, the surpassing richness of his grace. Yes, it was grace that saved you, with faith for its instrument; it did not come from yourselves, it was God's gift, not from any action of yours, or there would be room for pride. No, we are his design; God has created us in Christ Jesus, pledged to such good actions as he has prepared beforehand, to be the employment of our lives.

Ronald Knox, The New Testament of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, Sheed & Ward, 1944.

Sacred names

Michael J. Kruger is a professor of New Testament and Early Christianity. He regularly teaches an elective, “The Origin and Authority of the New Testament Canon.” He writes "I think my students particularly enjoy a sub-module of that course where we study high-resolution photographs of early Christian manuscripts." I found this interesting:

...[W]e spend some time working through images of P66, one of our earliest (nearly complete) copies of John.

There’s lot to say about P66, and early manuscripts in general, but when students see a NT manuscript up close for the first time, they notice something rather peculiar and unexpected. They notice that the Greek words for “God,” “Lord,” Christ,” and “Jesus” are not written out in full. Instead, they are abbreviated.

To abbreviate these words, the scribe would typically take the first and last letter of the word and put a horizontal stroke over the top. As an example, below are two instances of such abbreviations, side by side. The first is the abbreviation for θεοῦ and the second for Ἰησοῦς.

 Scholars refer to this scribal phenomenon as the nomina sacra (“sacred names”). ....

Our earliest New Testament manuscripts, a number of which date from the second century, already utilize this feature as far back as we can see. As a result, the nomina sacra are now regarded by scholars as the primary way that we know a document is Christian. ....

The nomina sacra are designed to show reverence and devotion to the name(s) of God. Contrary to what the term “abbreviation” implies, the nomina sacra were not designed to save space. Instead, they were a way for the scribe (and, later, for the reader) to set apart the divine name. Thus, as strange as it might sound, they were a form of worship.

Of course, it should be noted that the earliest Christians didn’t show devotion merely to the words “God” or “Lord,” but also to the names “Jesus,” and “Christ.” Thus, the nomina sacra constitute one of earliest pieces of evidence for the Christian belief in the divinity of Jesus. They demonstrate a remarkably high Christology, at least among these Christian scribes. ....

In sum, this oft-overlooked feature has tremendous significance for our understanding of early Christian culture. Not only did the earliest Christians care about books, and the careful copying of such books, but the nomina sacra demonstrate that they had a rather developed scribal infrastructure to make that happen.

Moreover, the scribes appeared to be fairly theologically astute. Through these abbreviations, they expressed a view that Jesus deserved honor and devotion right alongside God. The bundle of names—God, Lord, Jesus, Christ—showed that Jesus was not considered a new and separate divine being, but (somehow) shared the same divine identity as the God of the Old Testament. (more)

Michael J. Kruger, "One of the Most Remarkable Features of Early Christian Manuscripts," canon fodder, November 27, 2023.

Knowledge is good

E.D. Hirsch Jr. in Cultural Literacy argued that there are things that “every American needs to know." Biblical literacy ought to be among them:

At times, a tiny cultural moment can reflect a titanic sociological shift. Such is the case with a 10-second video clip from Jeopardy! On July 12, 2023, one of the “Double Jeopardy” categories was “Walking and Talking.” The clue: “This Bible book gives us the line ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.’” All three contestants—undoubtedly all highly educated individuals, as Jeopardy! candidates tend to be—stared blankly in silence until the signature buzzer sounded. ....

A single instant on Jeopardy! provokes us to ponder what has been lost. The tragic irony is that the entire story of Western culture is, in a sense, indebted to the Psalms; even if one does not believe in the theology expressed in the biblical book, one cannot understand the history of literature without it. The greatest of English writing—from Shakespeare to the modern novel—provides a window into the interiority of the human psyche. But this was not learned from the works of Homer, or Ovid, or Sophocles. Only in the Bible, and especially in the Psalms, could ancient literature provide such a window on man’s ability and need to look within. It is difficult to believe that the humanist literature of the West would have been possible without David’s inspiration and example. ....

But the Psalms are most essential because of their theology. In an ancient age when the state reigned supreme; when the monarch was worshipped as a god, the Psalms presented us with a king named David who assured his subjects that there was something, Someone, higher than he, to Whom he owed everything, and to Whom even the most powerful of rulers will be called to account. .... (more)

Meir Y. Soloveichik, "Psalms Have They, But They Know Not," Commentary, November, 2023.

Remembrance, humility, and connection

From "Because I Said So":

.... Moses offers three critical ways to address the challenge of trusting in the divine: remembrance, humility, and connection. This nuanced understanding points to critical engagement as the foundation of obedience.

Let’s start with remembrance. Humans tend to have a short memory. We see this powerfully illustrated with the incident of the golden calf. Shortly after God commanded the people not to have other gods and not to make idols, the Israelites did both. So Moses spends a significant chunk of this Torah portion reviewing the miracles and lessons of the past, including the incident of the calf. He begins: “Remember the long way the Lord, your God, led you these 40 years in the desert, in order to afflict you, to test you, to know what is in your heart, whether you would keep God’s commandments or not.” (Deuteronomy 8:2). He wants the Israelites to remember the miraculous way they were cared for by God in the past, but also the mistakes that were made along the way.

Recalling this history might lead the Israelites to take their success for granted and assume that divine favor is assured. This is why Moses cautions the Israelites to practice humility. “Do not say in your heart, ‘Because of my righteousness, the Lord has brought me to possess this land, and because of the wickedness of these nations, the Lord drives them out from before you.’” (Deuteronomy 9:4) Moses here is speaking to the human tendency to attribute success to our own righteousness and to believe there is some deficit in those who do not succeed as we do. A stance of humility, the recognition that there is something beyond our own power, some cosmic alignment responsible for what we achieve (or fail to), is a preventative to succumbing to the arrogance of success.

Finally, we come to the heart of Moses’ teaching, his encouragement of the Israelites to stay close to the source of blessing: “You shall love the Lord, your God, keep His charge, His statutes, His ordinances, and His commandments, all the days.” (Deuteronomy 11:1) This may be the most challenging aspect for us today — to act based on an ongoing personal connection with the divine. To help hone this skill, Moses issues a curious command to “circumcise the foreskin of your heart” (Deuteronomy 10:16). ....

The three levels of trust-building Moses describes bring the Israelites — and us — from “because I said so” to a greater understanding of why we should do so. .... (more)

Rabbi Tiferet Berenbaum, "Because I Said So," My Jewish Learning, August 5, 2023

Yet this I call to mind

"When the Therapeutic God Isn’t Sufficient" considers what we are taught by Lamentations

.... Sometimes Christians will try to use the Bible and pious truisms to avoid an acquaintance with grief. A pastor at my father’s funeral told my mother, “This is a celebration.” No, it’s not. My mother was a widow at the age of 47. Avoiding the grief, passing the mourning, always on a mountaintop with a smile on our face… this is psychologically unhealthy, spiritual malpractice, and not Biblical. Lamentations proves that. ....

The book of Lamentations is the fruit of finally realizing that they had totally misunderstood God. So, it is useful for us today in which many people who are loud and open about their faith, posting cute, pious thoughts about God on their Facebook pages, regular in church or watching their favorite preacher on YouTube, and yet the god they worship is a lot like the god the people of Jerusalem were counting on to save them from the Babylonians, the god whose protection we can procure with a little religion, who keeps us from being acquainted with grief. When that god fails, you’ll have lamentation. Today, we’ll be told to cheer up, look on the bright side, see the glass half full.

Sometimes you don’t need to cheer up. ....

We’re not in denial. We’re not pretending the diagnosis hasn’t been delivered, that we didn’t put our loved one in the ground, that we’re not unemployed and unsure of where the next check is coming from, that that child who seems to be throwing his or her life away isn’t doing it; we are tasting the wormwood and the gall, the bitter. But...just here after 20 verses of lamenting the catastrophe, when it’s gone from the darkest to pitch black, the only glimmer of hope in all of Lamentations:

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;
His mercies never come to an end;
They are new every morning;
Great is Your faithfulness!

.... Google this verse and you’ll find lots of pictures of the text imposed over a sunrise or flowers, maybe with hearts, full of cheeriness. But that gives the wrong impression. That makes it seem that these words are just another attempt to dodge walking with sorrow. It would be better to see these words superimposed on a smoldering pile of rubble where the Lord’s temple used to be, the burned out houses of the people of Jerusalem, the dead bodies of priests, the living skeletons of starving children; maybe today, see them over the tombstone of your dear mother, on your cancer diagnosis, on the divorce decree a court serves you, on the dead body of your premature daughter with blood everywhere, over that see the words, “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; His mercies never come to an end,” even when it feels like you are about to; “they are new every morning,” even when it feels like you might not make it to the morning. “Great is Your faithfulness!”

Saying (or singing) those words is easy at a glorious sunrise, at the birth of a child, a clean biopsy, a wedding. But that’s not how they were inspired. The prophet recounts the catastrophe; asks God to remember the wormwood and the gall he’s tasted and then, “But I call this to mind,” my confidence. My hope is not perished after all because God’s covenant loyalty, His commitment to be merciful to me, never ends. He is faithful. That is our confidence. .... (more)

May each of us rest in that confidence.

John Carpenter, "When the Therapeutic God Isn’t Sufficient," Mere Orthodoxy, May 22, 2023.

Jefferson's Bible

From "Doubting Thomas: On Peter Manseau’s The Jefferson Bible":

WITH A PENKNIFE in his hand, Thomas Jefferson cut out of the gospels every single interesting thing about Jesus Christ. The virgin birth? Cut. Water into wine? Deleted. The raising of Lazarus? Erased. The demoniac? Exorcised. The temptation in the desert? Removed. The resurrection? Canceled. Writing in 1819, a year before he took on this task, Jefferson expressed his desire to eliminate from the Bible the “immaculate conception of Jesus, his deification, the creation of the world by him, his miraculous powers, his resurrection & visible ascension, his corporeal presence in the Eucharist, the Trinity, original sin, atonement, regeneration, election, orders of hierarchy, Etc.” He ignored that several of those concepts aren’t in the New Testament, or that the immaculate conception refers to the Virgin Mary. Applying cold rigor, Jefferson evaluated the gospels, and found them filled with superstitious dross invented by unscrupulous scribes and affirmed by credulous believers. But underneath all that rubbish, he thought, there was a “system of the most sublime morality which has ever fallen from the lips of man.” ....

In an 1814 correspondence with his frenemy John Adams, he enthuses that one can find Jesus’s authentic morals “as to pick out diamonds from dunghills.” Always sensitive to the accusations (some of them true) that he was a libertine, an atheist, and an adulterer, Jefferson anticipated his defense, writing that “I am a real Christian […] a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus, very different from the Platonists, who call me infidel” — a clever rhetorical maneuver of redefinition. ....

...[H]olding the utmost faith in the operations of his own (superior) mind, Jefferson affirmed that he could cut out those passages “which contradict the laws of nature” ....

This is what’s so unsatisfying about Jefferson’s Bible — he has expunged mystery. And mystery is the gospels’ raison d’être. Jefferson repeatedly claimed that the morality of the New Testament was the most sublime and benevolent — a frequent injunction of liberal mainline Protestantism — but is it true? I’d venture that anything which is demonstrably livable within Christian ethics is anodyne, and that anything which is novel is an impossibility, so that the gospels are only coherent if Christ is God ....

From the Sermon on the Mount come the transgressive promises of the Beatitudes, but also that “if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee,” and “whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.” How much worse are Jefferson’s sins? Christ is just as extreme in describing forgiveness. There is undeniable beauty in trying to “[l]ove your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you,” or in encouraging that “whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also,” but such commandments are impossible. At the very least they’re incredibly hard — fit for mystics and saints — but not the normal congregation. Which is precisely the point — Christ isn’t offering a “benevolent code of morals” — he isn’t suggesting a code of morals at all. Rather, he’s proclaiming our intrinsic fallenness and the necessity for God’s infinite grace. “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect” isn’t a rule — it’s an ideal: one we’re bound to fail. As Jefferson himself did — spectacularly. ....

"Doubting Thomas: On Peter Manseau’s The Jefferson Bible,” Los Angeles Review of Books, Nov. 6, 2022.