I have several of Thomas Howard's books on my shelves, each of them worth re-reading. I don't have Chance or the Dance?
[originally An Antique Drum, a title I like]. I will soon. The excerpt provided by Insight Scoop persuaded me. From Thomas Howard's Chance or the Dance?, the first three paragraphs:
There were some ages in Western history that have occasionally been called Dark. They were dark, it is said, because in them learning declined, and progress paused, and men labored under the pall of belief. A cause-effect relationship is frequently felt to exist between the pause and the belief. Men believed in things like the Last Judgment and fiery torment. They believed that demented people had devils in them, and that disease was a plague from heaven. They believed that they had souls, and that what they did in this life had some bearing on the way in which they would finally experience reality. They believed in portents and charms and talismans. And they believed that God was in heaven and Beelzebub in hell and that the Holy Ghost had impregnated the Virgin Mary and that the earth and sky were full of angelic and demonic conflict. Altogether, life was very weighty, and there was no telling what might lie behind things. The ages were, as I say, dark. Then the light came. It was the light that has lighted us men into a new age. Charms, angels, devils, plagues, and parthenogenesis have fled from the glare into the crannies of memory. In their place have come coal mining and E = mc2 and plastic and group dynamics and napalm and urban renewal and rapid transit. Men were freed from the fear of the Last Judgment; it was felt to be more bracing to face Nothing than to face the Tribunal. They were freed from worry about getting their souls into God's heaven by the discovery that they had no souls and that God had no heaven. They were freed from the terror of devils and plagues by the knowledge that the thing that was making them, scream and foam was not an imp but only their own inability to cope, and that the thing that was clawing out their entrails was not divine wrath but only cancer. Altogether, life became much more livable since it was clear that in fact nothing lay behind things. The age was called enlightened. The myth sovereign in the old age was that everything means everything. The myth sovereign in the new is that nothing means anything. .... [more from the first chapter]The Old Age and the New | Thomas Howard | From "Chance or the Dance?" | Ignatius Insight
.... Congregational singing. One of evangelicalism’s great legacies, thanks to Isaac Watts, the Wesleys and some great music in the midst of the not-so-great flood of music out of revivalism, the Jesus movement, CCM, etc....[B]e filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart.... (Eph 5:18-19).
Not somebody or a group singing to the audience….uh…congregation, but congregational singing. Worship by singing. Proclamation by singing. ....
Congregational singing is nothing less than congregational preaching and proclamation. It’s that important and should be viewed that way. What is sung will have enormous influence on those who sing.
Singing is an activity that engages mind, heart and body. It’s contribution to worship is in allowing a worshiper to raise his/her voice in praise and proclamation with fellow Christians and with the larger Christian tradition across time and culture.
A singing congregation is a great witness, much greater than a kickin’ band. The band is fine as an expression of creativity and even leadership, but the Wesleys and Lutherans and revivalists all knew that a singing congregation was a congregation open to the Spirit and engaged in the praise of God. ....
Many of us will find ourselves at churches that are poor singing churches. Sing anyway. If you have a voice, sing. Sing out. If a guitar makes singing better, then use it. If drums help, use them. Simply make it the goal to sing the best lyrics, the most anointed and spiritually influential songs and to sing with all the skill a congregation can be taught to utilize. [more]
Best of all were those winter evenings when I crawled into bed and grinned a big grin as I picked up our lovely hardcover edition of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, with illustrations by Michael Hague. Before I cracked it open I knew I would like it, but I really never expected to be transported, as, evening by evening, I was. After the first night (I read only one chapter at a stretch), I wanted the experience to last as long as I could possibly drag it out. It was with a sigh compounded of pleasure and regret and satisfaction in Toad’s successful homecoming that I closed the book. I knew I would read The Wind in the Willows many times, but I could never again read it for the first time. ....There is a good deal more.
.... If we must claim that The Wind in the Willows is about something, I would say that it’s mostly about the inter-animating powers of friendship and place. Ratty loves the river, but he loves it more when he can show it to Mole. Ratty has known all along that “there is nothing—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats,” but he chants this well-worn fact over and over, dreamily, because in sharing the experience with the novice Mole he finds it coming fully alive to himself once more. Badger’s home is all the more delightful as a refuge from the cold because it is Badger’s home, not just some generic warm spot. Badger’s gruff hospitality allows all sorts of creatures to come and go as they will. And Toad Hall becomes more wonderful than ever when it has been saved from the stoats and weasels, and saved by Toad’s faithful friends. Friends give meaning to a place, and the traits of certain places encourage and strengthen the blessings of friendship. These are great lessons for anyone to learn, or to remember, at any age. And no book shows us these relations so beautifully as The Wind in the Willows. ....
The Wind in the Willows is surely the most beautifully written of all children’s books—it offers to the willing learner a deep course in the making of sentences—and its finest prose may be found in the famous chapter 7: “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.” This is when Rat and Mole, searching the river for a lost baby otter named Portly, find themselves drawn by a distant haunting melody to a small island:
Perhaps he would never have dared to raise his eyes, but that, though the piping was now hushed, the call and the summons seemed still dominant and imperious. He might not refuse, were Death himself waiting to strike him instantly, once he had looked with mortal eye on things rightly kept hidden. Trembling he obeyed, and raised his humble head; and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fullness of incredible color, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humorously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward; saw, last of all, nestling between his very hooves, sleeping soundly in entire peace and contentment, the little, round, podgy, childish form of the baby otter. All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.
“Rat!” he found breath to whisper, shaking. “Are you afraid?”
“Afraid?” murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. “Afraid! Of him? O, never, never! And yet—and yet—O, Mole, I am afraid!”The language here goes right to the brink of over-sweetness—but that is precisely what it must do, as it strives to describe experiences so good, so powerful, that they overtax the human imagination. ....
....The reader does not expect to discover, in the midst of this paean to friendship and domesticity, a glimpse of something far greater than friendship or domesticity—something good beyond Badger’s goodness and yet infinitely more frightening—something numinous. ....
And now, for me, it’s back to a reading of the story that I wish I had known in my childhood. (And yet would I have loved it then?) The river holds more than enough excitement, after all, and so does The Wind in the Willows. When Mole asks Ratty about the Wild Wood, he receives just a few broken, reluctant, uninformative sentences. And when he asks about what might be found on the other side of the Wild Wood, he gets only this quite proper rebuke: “‘Beyond the Wild Wood comes the Wide World,’ said the Rat. ‘And that’s something that doesn’t matter, either to you or me. I’ve never been there, and I’m never going, nor you either, if you’ve got any sense at all. Don’t ever refer to it again, please.’”
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Legal path clear for Hobbit movieThey sued New Line Cinema for a reported $220m (£133m) in compensation, based on breach of contract and fraud.
The suit claimed the US company failed to pay royalties due after the success of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Its settlement, for an undisclosed sum, paves the way for director Guillermo del Toro's two films based on the book.
New Line plans to release The Hobbit in 2011, followed by another movie drawing from other Tolkien works. ....
Published in 1937, The Hobbit follows the treasure-seeking adventure of Bilbo Baggins who obtains the ring that was the focus for the Lord of the Rings. ....
The Tolkien Trust, a British charity which supports causes across the world, will be one of the main beneficiaries of the legal settlement. ....
"The trustees acknowledge that New Line may now proceed with its proposed films of The Hobbit."
.... In many evangelical churches, particularly those of a more contemporary flavor, public reading of the Bible is avoided. Scripture will be scattered across a few song lyrics and inserted as point prompts or proof texts in the sermon. There will be no scripture lessons, no reading of scripture outside of the use of scripture in some function of the service and no sense that extended scripture reading is a high and worthy use of time in worship.The Evangelical Liturgy 8: The Public Reading of Scripture | internetmonk.com
Ironically, it will be the liturgical church and its scripture saturated service that will be called “liberal” by the Bible-waving, but not Bible reading evangelical church. Declarations of confidence in the Bible as the inerrant Word of God will dwell in puzzling juxtaposition with worship services where the most scripture encountered is in popcorned bits projected between film clips and other visuals.
All this against the backdrop of multiple commands and examples in both Testaments leading any reasonably bright fifth grader to the conclusion that the public reading of scripture is an essential component of worship. As Paul says in I Timothy 4:13 Until I get there, focus on reading the Scriptures to the church, encouraging the believers, and teaching them.
It’s here that the logic of the church growth/seeker sensitive approach to worship runs into a wall. Reading scripture publicly is boring, it takes work and it takes time. It requires explanation and if your mantra has been “we aren’t like your old boring church,” you could get sued.
Churches that undertake the reading of scripture lessons as a discipline give this a high and prominent place in worship. Readers should be trained. Attention should be paid to diction and the proper rubrics. Names, places and other obstacles should be anticipated. ....
Pray for a reformation of the public reading of scripture among evangelicals. What a shame that among those who claim so much love for the Bible, one hears so little of the Bible. .... [more]
My notion of effective translation of the Bible involves a high degree of literalism—within the limits of reasonably acceptable literary English—both in regard to representing the word choice and the word order of the Hebrew. . . . [T]he precedent of the King James Version has played a decisive and constructive role in directing readers of English to a rather literal experience of the Bible, and . . . this precedence can be ignored only at considerable cost, as nearly all the English versions of the Bible done in recent decades show.Between Two Worlds: Alter on LIteralism and Effective Bible Translation
.... Maybe you don’t have adults in your life who give you the support that you need. Maybe someone in your family has lost their job, and there’s not enough money to go around. Maybe you live in a neighborhood where you don’t feel safe, or have friends who are pressuring you to do things you know aren’t right.Update: A good, balanced evaluation of the controversy surrounding the President's speech by Albert Mohler. Mohler:
But at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life – what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you’ve got going on at home – that’s no excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude. That’s no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school. That’s no excuse for not trying.
Where you are right now doesn’t have to determine where you’ll end up. No one’s written your destiny for you. Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future. ....
I know that sometimes, you get the sense from TV that you can be rich and successful without any hard work — that your ticket to success is through rapping or basketball or being a reality TV star, when chances are, you’re not going to be any of those things.
But the truth is, being successful is hard. You won’t love every subject you study. You won’t click with every teacher. Not every homework assignment will seem completely relevant to your life right this minute. And you won’t necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try. ....
No one’s born being good at things, you become good at things through hard work. You’re not a varsity athlete the first time you play a new sport. You don’t hit every note the first time you sing a song. You’ve got to practice. It’s the same with your schoolwork. You might have to do a math problem a few times before you get it right, or read something a few times before you understand it, or do a few drafts of a paper before it’s good enough to hand in. ....
And even when you’re struggling, even when you’re discouraged, and you feel like other people have given up on you – don’t ever give up on yourself. Because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country.
The story of America isn’t about people who quit when things got tough. It’s about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best.
It’s the story of students who sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and found this nation. Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war; who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google, Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other.
So today, I want to ask you, what’s your contribution going to be? What problems are you going to solve? What discoveries will you make? What will a president who comes here in twenty or fifty or one hundred years say about what all of you did for this country? .... [more]
.... The nation — and the Obama Administration — should learn from this controversy and be determined not to repeat this fracas. The White House should shut down the cult of personality, and the nation's conservatives should discipline themselves to discern the real issues from the conspiracy myths. There is plenty to deal with on the plane of reality.Update 9/8: When George W. Bush gave a speech to public school students, the partisan reaction was just as unreasonable - Byron York.
Barack Obama is President of the United States. Christians must be the first to pray for this president and to model respect for the presidency, even when we must disagree with the President's policies and proposals. Given what this president intends to say tomorrow to America's students, count me as one who hopes many are listening. If even a few young hearts are encouraged, those moments will be worth all the controversy.
I have been making my way through John Owen’s 1667 treatise, A Brief Instruction in the Worship of God and Discipline of the Churches of the New Testament....John Owen on Delighting in Worship | Meet The PuritansIn one of the more beautiful and practical sections of this treatise, Owen spoke of our delighting in the divine service. ...[W]e read Owen saying that when we gather for the divine service there are four “chief things that we ought to aim at in our observation” .... :
...[W]hat precisely does it mean to “delight” in worship?
- To sanctify the name of God.
- To own and avow our professed subjection to Christ.
- To build up ourselves in our most holy faith.
- To testify and confirm our mutual love. [....]
First, Owen says what it does not mean. Our delighting in the service does not mean what he called a “carnal self-pleasing, or satisfaction in the outward modes or manner of the performance of divine worship.” .... In a word, worship is not about you! Further, he was saying this against those in his time who sought for delight in the outward form and beauty of the liturgy itself. Here Owen sought to cut off any idea that worship was for our pleasure, whether in serving our emotions or even serving our eyes, such as in the Mass or the English Prayer Book with its pomp and ceremony in the days of Archbishop Laud’s high church experimentation. So our delighting in the divine service is not about “what we get out of it,” to use an evangelical phrase. ....
Instead of this, Owen said that our delighting in the divine service was rooted in “contemplation on the will, wisdom, grace, and condescension of God.” Our God has drawn near to us! And he has done so, as Owen wrote, “of his own sovereign mere will and grace.” Why? Owen gave five beautiful reasons:When we gather for the Divine service (meaning, God’s service to us in Word and sacrament and our service to him in prayer), we are to find our delight in our covenant God himself, not in anything else, whether within us or whether external to us that we have contrived. It is our communion with God that brings us delight and the means of grace serve to bring us closer to him that we might glorify him and delight in him. .... [more]
- “so to manifest himself unto such poor sinful creatures as we are”
- “so to condescend unto our weakness”
- “so to communicate himself unto us”
- “so to excite and draw forth our souls unto himself”
- “and to give us such pledges of his gracious intercourse with us by Jesus Christ”
A good friend calls my attention to Robert Pinsky on George Herbert (1593–1633) and sends along a selection of Herbert poems including this paraphrase:.... A professor pointed out that in order to appreciate almost any book — certainly any challenging one — a person has to sit down with it for an hour or more, has to get "settled in" with it, has to soak up the world that it evokes. It takes time! But what 18-year-old has time — or the habit of taking time, or the patience to take time, or the motivation to take time — to read?Think I'll go outside and read for a couple of hours.
One of the nice things about being a historian is that you get to play God. You know what the future holds, while the people you are studying don’t.
...I found that The Shack wasn’t nearly as good as some had said, and it wasn’t nearly as bad as others had charged. It has everything positive about contemporary evangelicalism, and yet it has all the drawbacks of current evangelical expression too.
Some good things:And some bad:
- The story doesn’t sugarcoat evil. It takes sin and suffering seriously.
- The book focuses upon God meeting us in our suffering. God is not absent in our pain. When someone is in the deepest of grief and despair, God often makes himself most present.
- The book shows the need for a personal encounter with God. Christianity is about communion with a personal, relational God.
My biggest problem with The Shack is its portrayal of God. I understand that the book is a work of fiction, not a theological treatise, and therefore should be treated as fiction. But the main characters are the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. These are actual Persons. To portray God in a manner inconsistent with his revelation to us in Scripture (and primarily in Jesus) is to misrepresent living Persons.He also finds that the book takes a low view of both the Bible and the Church.
When people put down The Shack, they will not have a better understanding of the Trinity (despite the glowing blurbs on the back cover). They will probably have a more distorted view of God in three Persons. ....
There is absolutely no sense of transcendence and holiness. It is the “God is my buddy” perspective on steroids. Compare (better yet, contrast!) Mack’s encounter with God to the final chapters of Job or the stunning vision of God that Isaiah witnesses in the temple. One can hardly imagine Young’s “Papa” eliciting the same kind of response. The God of the Bible cares deeply how he is portrayed. To tamper with the way God has revealed himself is to put forth a false picture of God.
Some Thoughts on “The Shack” : Kingdom People
- Missing fathers. So many people have grown up with absent daddies or abusive father figures. For many, the mother is the rock of the home. To portray God the Father as a matriarch is bound to resonate with a good number of people.
- The anti-authoritarian tendency of our culture. At one point in the book, God speaks of there being no roles of hierarchy in the Trinity. God even submits to humans. This resonates with a culture that already eschews traditional understandings of role and authority. (I can picture my Romanian friends rolling their eyes at The Shack and saying, “That’s so American!”)
- The immanence of God. Evangelicals too often bring God down to the level of understanding, faithful friend. Ultimately, this view of God is shrunken and reductionist. Just like it is misrepresenting God to make him so other that he is virtually unknowable, it is misrepresenting him to make him so close and human that his God-ness is absent.
C. S. Lewis Blog: Jack the Blogger?.... [W]e are led to believe that Jack is fussily anachronistic in themes; his metaphors hopelessly daunting, and dated when they’re not; his supernaturalist faith a stern impediment for the un- or de-churched; his vocabulary well beyond the reach of the unschooled; or, paradoxically, embarrassingly concrete and un-theoretical for the academician.
As it happens, none of these deficits turn out to register as flaws among Jack’s actual readers....
Jack’s anachronism is not a pose but a principle; since “all things not eternal” are “eternally out of date,” and the surest way to avoid irrelevance is not to be avant-garde, ahead of the trends, but not to worry about it one way or another, and to take the calendar and the polls out of the equation right from the start.
The questions that arise when confronting the central point of one of Jack’s essays or novels or sermons is never, “Is this old?” but always, “Is it so?” Of course, the truths he foregrounds are neither old nor new; they’re timeless. For Jack’s words are predicated upon the notion that while our through a glass darkly understandings may grow or wane within a particular generation or civilization, human nature—our tendencies and propensities for good or evil, our predicaments and aspirations—are well documented, and transcend the particular eras in which we find ourselves situated. ....
The important thing for him to convey was not that certain ideas were “his” in some ego-driven possessive campaign for attention, but that the ideas he articulated and promoted belonged to everyone for all time, and were in danger of being drowned out “by the microphone of his age.”
His defense of the public square included exorcism of the “chronological snobbery” that prevented earnest seekers from hearing News from Home. Jack believed in what G. K. Chesterton called “the democracy of the dead,” the ability of wise men and women of all periods to speak to the present. .... (more)
Justin Taylor notes a new blog: Meet the Puritans, one of whose contributors, Mark Jones, argues in "But who were the 'Puritans'?" that the term has more to do with a time and place than with Calvinism:.... Puritanism was far too diverse to be of any strict theological use. Certainly the majority was Reformed or Calvinistic, but when Richard Baxter, who defies classification, John Goodwin, an Arminian, John Milton, a possible Arian, John Bunyan, a Baptist, and John Eaton, an Antinomian, are included, there is good reason to be cautious when using the term to describe a theological tradition. ....Meet the Puritans promises to be an interesting site.
Many scholars argue that “Puritans” are those who attempted to reform the Church of England along godly lines. Some were Presbyterians; others were Congregationalists. Some were Reformed; others were Arminian....
...Baxter was very much a moderate Puritan though he was theologically innovative; other moderate Puritan divines were often deeply committed to conserving strict Reformed orthodoxy. Cromwell and Milton had much stronger radical sympathies. When people say that they “love the Puritans”, one always has to ask “which Puritans”? ....
"It's simple," she said. "Abortion is not medical care. Pregnancy is not a disease, and fertility is not a pathological condition. Pregnant women are not carriers of illness but human beings with dignity who deserve optimum care along with their children, born and unborn."Insight Scoop | The Ignatius Press Blog: "It's really not that difficult to understand that killing is not a form of healing."
Christianity Today reports that the Today's New International Version is being discontinued and the NIV will be significantly revised:....Keith Danby said the 2002 revision of the translation, Today's New International Version (TNIV) was a mistake.I used the NIV for many years but never made the shift to the TNIV. I always preferred the language of the Revised Standard Version and was very pleased when the English Standard Version appeared. I paid relatively little attention to the arguments about the quality of the translations although I have an aversion to trendiness and decisions that seem to owe more to political correctness than anything else. I have now settled happily into the ESV.
"Quite frankly, some of the criticism was justified and we need to be brutally honest about the mistakes that were made," Danby said. "We failed to make the case for revisions and we made some important errors in the way we brought the translation to publication. We also underestimated the scale of the public affection for the NIV and failed to communicate the rationale for change in a manner that reflected that affection." ....
Doug Moo, chairman of the the Committee on Bible Translation (which is the body responsible for the translation) said the committee has not yet decided how much the 2011 edition will include the gender-inclusive language that roiled critics of the TNIV. .... [more]
.... For most of our history, Baptists have been more concerned with the externals of the Table—grape juice or real wine, who may preside, who may partake—rather than with the question of what actually goes on at this sacred meal. It is well known that Luther and Zwingli differed strongly, and actually broke fellowship with one another, over the meaning of the words of institution, “This is my body.” Historically, Baptists have belonged more to the Reformed (whether Zwinglian or Calvinist) side of that debate, but it is important to realize that all of the mainline reformers reacted against the displacement of the Lord’s Supper as the central focus of Christian worship in medieval Catholicism. They criticized the fact that the Eucharist had become clericalized (the service in Latin and only bread for the laity), commercialized (votive masses used as a fundraising scheme in much of the church), and scholasticized (the dogma of transubstantiation and the view of the mass as a sacrifice).Dr. Timothy George on The Baptist View of the Lord’s Supper | internetmonk.com
The reformers harked back to the teaching of the New Testament, the practice of the early church, and especially to the theology of St. Augustine. Augustine argued that in the sacrament the sign must be identified as a sign by a word spoken about it, thus making the sacrament itself a “visible word.” In commenting on John 6:50, Augustine wrote: “ ‘He who eats of this bread will not die.’ But that means the one who eats what belongs to the power of the sacrament, not simply to the visible sacrament; the one who eats inwardly, not merely outwardly; the one who eats the sacrament in the heart not just the one who crushes it with his teeth” (In Ev. Joh. Tract. 26.12). While Luther could speak of the manducatio impiorum, “the eating of the ungodly,” the Reformed tradition picked up Augustine’s distinction and emphasized the cruciality of faith for the proper reception of the beneficium of grace in the Supper. This same theology they found echoed in other pre-reformation figures including Ratramnus, Wycliffe, and Hus. What they rejected, in keeping with Luther, was an understanding of the sacrifice of the mass as an expression of works-righteousness, a theology which seemed to them to undermine the all-sufficiency of Jesus’s once-and-for-all death on the cross—where, as Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer put it, he offered “a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world.” [more]
