"He is the King of glory"

Handel's Messiah is perhaps the most perfect combination of music and Scripture ever created. From prophesy, to incarnation, to death and resurrection, it magnificently recounts the story of Our Lord. It is traditionally associated with Christmas but is relevant to any point in the Christian year. At this moment I'm listening to Handel's Messiah with The English Concert & Choir directed by Trevor Pinnock. I was inspired to listen again today when I read Justin Taylor's interview with Calvin Stappert, the author of Handel's Messiah: Comfort for God's People.

The librettist for the oratorio was Charles Jennens. Stappert gives a theological context to his choice of texts for Messiah:

Deism was very strong at the time, a serious threat to orthodox Christian faith. Charles Jennens, a devout Anglican, compiled the collection of Scripture texts that make up Messiah in order to combat Deism.

Deism’s “natural theology” had room for a creator-god, but denied miracles and any divine intervention into human affairs. Therefore it denied the fundamental Christian beliefs in the Incarnation and the Resurrection. It also denied their necessity. Humans, they believed, had the resources to solve their own problems; there was no need for a Messiah.

Jennens’s choice of texts had both a polemical purpose—to persuade unbelievers—and a pastoral purpose—to nourish and strengthen the faith of believers. He enlisted Handel (whose music he loved and who undoubtedly shared his convictions) to convey his message through the rhetorical and dramatic power of music.

I am inclined to pay much more attention to music than to words (which is why I am often oblivious to objectionable sentiments in songs I like). I can listen to Messiah as background music but how much better in this case to follow the text.

The Pinnock performance has been my favorite for some time, but at the end of the interview Stappert recommends several others.

Handel’s Messiah: An Interview with Calvin Stappert – Justin Taylor

Andy Hardy all day

Among the advantages of being retired, especially if you live in the upper Midwest and it's a frigid winter's day, is the freedom to stay inside, burrow into a comfortable chair, and enjoy something like TCM's "Andy Hardy Festival" this Thursday, December 16. Totally undemanding entertainment from an era when Hollywood was content simply to entertain.

Wikipedia, describes the films that made Mickey Rooney famous:

The early movies focused on the Hardy family as a whole, but the character Andy soon became the center of the series, and his name was featured in most of the titles. They were a big factor in Rooney's rise to stardom. The first two Hardy films dealt moralistically but fairly frankly with the danger of adultery among the younger generation, but the later ones avoided such controversial themes. While teenager Andy's romantic misadventures were pivotal in most of the films, they were always "wholesome" affairs.

The central relationship in the movies was between Andy and his father. Judge Hardy, played by the grandfatherly-looking Stone, was a man of absolute morality and integrity, but behind his stern demeanor was a gentle humanitarian with a droll sense of humor. A typical plot involved Andy getting into minor trouble with money or girls, usually because of youthful selfishness and a slight willingness to fudge the truth. But after a "man-to-man" talk with his father, Andy would listen to his own better nature and do the right thing, assuring a happy ending.

In three films, Rooney was paired with Judy Garland, beginning with Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938), and continuing with Andy Hardy Meets Debutante (1940) and Life Begins for Andy Hardy (1941). ....

TCM Andy Hardy Festival | The American Culture, Andy Hardy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"The dogma is the drama"

Via Justin Taylor, from Dorothy L. Sayers, the first paragraph and another quotation further in from an essay: "The Greatest Drama Ever Staged":

Official Christianity, of late years, has been having what is known as “a bad press.” We are constantly assured that the churches are empty because preachers insist too much upon doctrine—”dull dogma,” as people call it. The fact is the precise opposite. It is the neglect of dogma that makes for dullness. The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man—and the dogma is the drama....

Now, we may call that doctrine exhilarating or we may call it devastating; we may call it revelation or we may call it rubbish; but if we call it dull, then words have no meaning at all.

Taylor provides a link to the essay online.

Dorothy L. Sayers, "The Greatest Drama Ever Staged is the Official Creed of Christendom," Creed or Chaos?, Harcourt Brace & Co., New York, 1949, pp. 3-7.

"Naïve people lacking certified professional instruction"

I remember being told once that unless I was a musician I couldn't properly enjoy music. A writer at the New Republic is worried that, without scholarly guidance "Oprah’s readers [will] have been left in the dark" as they attempt to puzzle out two books by Dickens: Great Expectations and Tale of Two Cities. Alan Jacobs responds:

.... Kelly’s core concern is summed up here: “the sad truth is that, with no real guidance, readers cannot grow into lovers of the canon.” Cannot? Actually, that isn't a sad truth — it’s not a truth at all — though it is quite sad that someone thinks the world’s greatest works of art are so powerless to reach an audience without academic assistance. As a corrective to such dark thoughts she should read another Dickens novel, David Copperfield, especially this passage:

My father had left a small collection of books in a little room upstairs, to which I had access (for it adjoined my own) and which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe, came out, a glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time, — they, and the Arabian Nights, and the Tales of the Genii, — and did me no harm; for whatever harm was in some of them was not there for me; I knew nothing of it. . . . It is curious to me how I could ever have consoled myself under my small troubles (which were great troubles to me), by impersonating my favourite characters in them — as I did — and by putting Mr. and Miss Murdstone into all the bad ones — which I did too. I have been Tom Jones (a child's Tom Jones, a harmless creature) for a week together. I have sustained my own idea of Roderick Random for a month at a stretch, I verily believe.

“This was my only and my constant comfort,” David concludes. “When I think of it, the picture always rises in my mind, of a summer evening, the boys at play in the churchyard, and I sitting on my bed, reading as if for life.”

Reading as if for life. And with no teachers in sight. A miracle indeed; but one repeated every day. Oprah is giving many, many people an incentive to have experiences like David Copperfield’s, and by my lights that’s not a bad thing.

Text Patterns: Oprah's Dickens

Wordled

J. Mark Bertrand, writer, novelist, and connoisseur of the printed and bound Bible, points us toward someone who has Wordled all of the books of the Bible:

Brad Thomas plugged the text of the NIV into Wordle.net to study word frequency in the various books of the Bible. The more common the word, the larger it appears in the resulting word cloud. And in addition to being informative, these clouds have an aesthetic quality to them, so he decided to make them available in both book and poster form. There's also a video showing each of the 66 word clouds making up the Bible:

For more info about the project, including how to order books and posters, check out Sixty-Six Clouds: Visualizing Word Frequency in the Bible.

Now, if he'd only do it using the ESV...

Bible Design and Binding

Christianity and Constantine

Matthew Lee Anderson recommends Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom, a book about the first Roman emperor who was sympathetic to Christianity:

Defending Constantine cuts through the historical and theological haze with a clarity that is devastating to the popular caricature of the man. Leithart’s historical treatment is extensive–he sets up the context for Constantine’s reign by detailing the brutality of the Roman persecutions, such that Eusebius’s over-the-top affirmation of Constantine begin to make sense. He shifts as the book progresses toward the theology of Constantine, carefully critiquing John Howard Yoder’s anti-Constantinianism theology.

Unlike his critics, Leithart takes seriously Constantine’s Christianity arguing that while an imperfect ruler, Constantine’s writings and policies reveal “a seriously Christian ruler.” Leithart suggests that Constantine’s own writings indicate that his central conviction was that “the Christian God was the heavenly Judge who, in history, opposes those who oppose him.”

In one of Leithart’s most compelling sections, he points out that Constantine not only stopped the slaughter of Christians–he stopped the slaughter of animals, ending the sacrifical system that was at the heart of the Roman political theology. As Leithart writes, “When Constantine began to end sacrifice, he began to end Rome as he knew it, for he initiated the end of Rome’s sacrificial lifeblood and established that Rome’s life now depended on its adherence to another civic center, the church.” .... [more]

Defending Constantine: A(nother) Giveaway | Mere Orthodoxy

A writer of kids' books

Responding to some embarrassingly clueless reactions to Sarah Palin's comment that she turns to C.S. Lewis for spiritual inspiration, Scott Johnson reminds those who need reminding that Lewis was rather more than a children's author:

Almost everyone knows that C.S. Lewis, known to his friends and family as Jack, was a remarkable man of letters. For a serious writer of quality, he was incredibly prolific and incredibly popular. Almost everything he wrote is still in print, and almost everything he wrote is worth reading. Amazon lists 157 or 160 titles under his name. I mention here only a few items of interest.

Every high school senior should read The Abolition of Man [Note: available online]. In it Lewis makes a powerful case for a version of natural law that belies the relativism in which students are inculcated in one way or another in school, especially in college. The problem is not strictly American or of recent vintage. Lewis was prompted to write the lectures that make up the book by a British high school English textbook. The Abolition of Man was published in 1943. ....

It would only be a slight exaggeration to say that every educated person is familiar in one way or another with Lewis's Christian apologetics. He told the story of his own journey back to Christianity from atheism in Surprised By Joy. Lewis's defense and elucidation of Christian faith took form in books too numerous to mention here. Among the most prominent are Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, and Miracles. Closely related are The Four Loves and A Grief Observed, the book Lewis wrote following his wife's death from cancer.

Lewis's faith also found expression in fictional form. Who doesn't know The Screwtape Letters? It has become a modern classic. Educated readers should also be familiar with The Great Divorce. .... (more, including a pretty good list of recommended CSL books)

Power Line - He doesn't know Jack

Advent III: Found faithful

O LORD Jesus Christ, who at Thy first coming didst send Thy messenger to prepare Thy way before Thee; Grant that the ministers and stewards of Thy mysteries may likewise so prepare and make ready Thy way, by turning the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, that at Thy second coming to judge the world we may be found an acceptable people in Thy sight, who livest and reignest with the Father and the Holy Spirit ever, one God, world without end. Amen. [BOCP]

LET a man so account of us, as of the ministers of Christ, and stewards of the mysteries of God. Moreover it is required in stewards, that a man be found faithful. But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged of you, or of man's judgment: yea, I judge not mine own self. For I know nothing against myself; yet am I not hereby justified: but he that judgeth me is the Lord. Therefore judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come, who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts: and then shall every man have praise of God. [I Corinthians 4]

When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide,
Lodg'd with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, least he returning chide,
Doth God exact day-labour, light deny'd?,
I fondly ask; But patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts, who best
Bear his milde yoak, they serve him best, his State
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o'er Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and waite.
[John Milton, 1673]

Faithful to Lewis?

John Nolte at Big Hollywood interviews Walden Media President Michael Flaherty about, among other things, whether the integrity of Christian themes in Voyage of the Dawn Treader remain in the film. It is obvious that Flaherty, at least, is familiar with C.S. Lewis's work far beyond Narnia. His answers are encouraging and, starting this weekend, we can judge for ourselves. Flaherty:

.... While Lewis would argue that Narnia is not an allegory, rather a “supposal”, there are strong Christian themes in the book that were influenced by Lewis’ worldview. Further, Lewis’ main focus in writing Dawn Treader was “the spiritual life.” While every book encounters some changes from the page to the screen, we wanted to make sure that the themes that were important to Lewis – redemption, temptation, grace, and our yearning for our true home – were not only preserved, but amplified through the changes that we made with the script. There were a number of lines from the book that were important to preserve verbatim as well. Most important are Aslan’s lines at the end when he tells Lucy “In your world I have a different name. You must learn to know me by it. That is the whole reason you came to Narnia. By knowing me better here you would know me better there.”

We felt a sacred trust with this scene not only to be faithful to the book, but to be faithful to all of Lewis’ writing. The topic of longing was a theme in so much of what Lewis wrote. My favorite passage in all of Lewis’ writing comes from Mere Christianity, where he delivers the famous insight that “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” In The Problem of Pain Lewis writes about desiring “something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside.”

Reepicheep is the very embodiment of this longing. At the beginning of the film, we hear Reep reciting his lullaby. He then talks to Lucy about his hope and desire to make it to Aslan’s country. When he finally arrives there at the end, the scenery is breathtaking. Reep delivers an incredibly moving speech to Aslan about his longing and desire for his country. I won’t ruin it for you, but it draws heavily upon the passage in The Problem of Pain where Lewis writes about something we “were born desiring,” and that even our greatest moments have been but “tantalizing glimpses” of it. When Reep abandons his sword and bravely sets sail in his little coracle, it will send shivers down the spines of all friends of Narnia.

Finally, there is the critical scene of Eustace’s undragoning. We had a nice workshop during the script development about grace being something that cannot be earned – it can only be given. So we wanted to make sure that this critical concept was conveyed with the undragoning, but we added a battle between Eustace the dragon and the sea serpent.

Here is the way it plays out: Reepicheep encourages a very reluctant Eustace to do battle with the Sea Serpent. Reep makes it clear in a way that only he can – that there must not be any retreat or any surrender. To do so would spell certain death for everybody aboard the Dawn Treader. Yet after some initial fighting, Eustace retreats to protect himself, despite Lucy pleading to him to come back to help them and despite his knowledge that he is most certainly leaving them to die.

He makes his way back to the safety of an Island, defeated and ashamed. He tries desperately to rip off his dragon skin, but he realizes that he cannot do it himself. That is when Aslan approaches Eustace to rip off his dragon skin for him. It is clear in the film that this in not being done in return for anything that Eustace has done – but in spite of it. At a time when Eustace feels more friendless than ever, he realizes that Aslan is the one person who will never abandon him. It is a great illustration of grace..... (more of a very informative interview)

Flaherty also says that whether Silver Chair will be filmed depends entirely on the success of Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Assuming it is made, the next would be The Magician's Nephew.

Big Hollywood » Blog Archive » Exclusive Interview: Walden Media President Michael Flaherty on ‘Dawn Treader,’ the Liam Neeson Controversy, and the Franchise’s Future

Essential reading for any parent

I am not a parent and will never be one. But I was once a child and I spent my career among young people. I think Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child by Anthony Esolen may be a very good book for parents of young children and for those who will be.

From the Amazon description:

Play dates, “helicopter parenting,” No Child Left Behind, video games, political correctness: these and other insidious trends in child rearing and education are now the hallmarks of childhood. As author Anthony Esolen demonstrates in this elegantly written, often wickedly funny new book, almost everything we are doing to children now constricts their imaginations, usually to serve the ulterior motives of the constrictors. ....

Much like The Wonder of Boys and The Wonder of Girls, and The Dangerous Book for Boys and The Daring Book for Girls, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child confronts contemporary trends in parenting and schooling by reclaiming lost traditions. This practical, insightful book is essential reading for any parent who cares about the paltry thing that childhood has become.

The National Review Book Service provides chapter titles:

• Method 1: Keep Your Children Indoors as Much as Possible (or They Used to Call It "Air")
• Method 2: Never Leave Children to Themselves (or If Only We Had a Committee)
• Method 3: Keep Children Away from Machines and Machinists (or All Unauthorized Personnel Prohibited)
• Method 4: Replace the Fairy Tale with Political Clichés and Fads (or Vote Early and Often)
• Method 5: Cast Aspersions upon the Heroic and Patriotic (or We Are All Traitors Now)
• Method 6: Cut All Heroes Down to Size (or Pottering with the Puny)
• Method 7: Reduce All Talk of Love to Narcissism and Sex (or Insert Tab A into Slot B)
• Method 8: Level Distinctions between Man and Woman (or Spay and Geld)
• Method 9: Distract the Child with the Shallow and Unreal (or The Kingdom of Noise)
• Method 10: Deny the Transcendent (or Fix Above the Heads of Men the Lowest Ceiling of All)

Amazon.com: TEN WAYS TO DESTROY THE IMAGINATION OF YOUR CHILD (9781935191889): Anthony Esolen: Books, National Review Book Service: Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child by Anthony Esolen

Faith for a Lenten age

This original sin, infecting the paradox in which man asserts his freedom against his finiteness, and complicating with a fatality of evil a destiny which man senses to be divine, is the tissue of history. It explains why man's history, even at its highest moments, is not a success story. It yawns, like a bottomless crater, across the broad and easy avenue of optimism. It would be intolerable without faith, without hope, without love. [Whittaker Chambers on Reinhold Niebuhr, 1948]

The post a couple of days ago that quoted from Whittaker Chambers's Witness inspired me to look for other Chambers material online. "Big Sister Is Watching You," his famous [infamous?] review of Atlas Shrugged for National Review has been published at NRO. It successfully inoculated me against Rand even though I had read and enjoyed Anthem.

During the 1940s and '50s, up until the Hiss case, Chambers was a senior editor at Time magazine where he authored a number articles that are available online. One of them, "The Dictatorship of the Animals," is a 1946 review of Orwell's Animal Farm. Another, "Don v. Devil", is the cover article about C.S. Lewis that I have posted about before. One of his last efforts for Time, published in March, 1948, was also a cover article, this one about Reinhold Niebuhr, "Faith for a Lenten Age."

.... To the mass of untheological Christians, God has become, at best, a rather unfairly furtive presence, a lurking luminosity, a cozy thought. At worst, He is conversationally embarrassing. There is scarcely any danger that a member of the neighborhood church will, like Job, hear God speak out of the whirlwind (whirlwinds are dangerous), or that he will be moved to dash down the center aisle, crying, like Isaiah: "Howl, ye ships of Tarshish!"

Under the bland influence of the idea of progress, man, supposing himself more & more to be the measure of all things, achieved a singularly easy conscience and an almost hermetically smug optimism. The idea that man is sinful and needs redemption was subtly changed into the idea that man is by nature good and hence capable of indefinite perfectibility. This perfectibility is being achieved through technology, science, politics, social reform, education. Man is essentially good, says 20th Century liberalism, because he is rational, and his rationality is (if the speaker happens to be a liberal Protestant) divine, or (if he happens to be religiously unattached) at least benign. Thus the reason-defying paradoxes of Christian faith are happily bypassed.

Catastrophic Paradoxes. And yet, as 20th Century civilization reaches a climax, its own paradoxes grow catastrophic. The incomparable technological achievement is more & more dedicated to the task of destruction. Man's marvelous conquest of space has made total war a household experience and, over vast reaches of the world, the commonest of childhood memories. The more abundance increases, the more resentment becomes the characteristic new look on 20th Century faces. The more production multiplies, the more scarcities become endemic. The faster science gains on disease (which, ultimately, seems always to elude it), the more the human race dies at the hands of living men. Men have never been so educated, but wisdom, even as an idea, has conspicuously vanished from the world. ....

At the open end of that impasse stood a forbidding and impressive figure. To Protestantism's easy conscience and easy optimism that figure was saying, with every muscle of its being: No.

His name was Reinhold Niebuhr. He was an Evangelical-pastor, a professor of applied Christianity at Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary, an editor of Christianity and Crisis, Christianity and Society, contributing editor of the Nation, and an ex-Socialist who was still unflaggingly active in non-Communist leftist movements. He was also the author of countless magazine articles and eleven books on theology. His magnum opus, the two-volume Nature and Destiny of Man, was the most complete statement of his position.

Against the easy conscience, Dr. Niebuhr asserted: man is by the nature of his creation sinful; at the height of man's perfection there is always the possibility of evil. Against easy optimism, he asserted that life is inevitably tragic. Says Niebuhr: "Mankind is living in a Lenten age." .... (more)

Religion: Faith for a Lenten Age - TIME

When the universe created itself

Joe Carter notices that "there is one unfortunate group—the children of atheistic materialists—that has no creation myth to call its own" and sets forth to fill the gap:

In the beginning was Nothing, and Nothing created Everything. When Nothing decided to create Everything, she filled a tiny dot with Time, Chance, and Everything and had it expand. The expansion spread Everything into Everywhere carrying Time and Chance with it to keep it company. The three stretched out together leaving bits of themselves wherever they went. One of those places was the planet Earth.

For no particular Reason—for Reason is rarely particular—Time and Chance took a liking to this little, wet, blue rock and decided to stick around to see what adventures they might have. .... [much more

When Nothing Created Everything | First Things

Clueless in Hollywood

From The Hollywood Reporter:

Liam Neeson...told the Telegraph in London that his character doesn't necessarily represent Christ. That might be news to Lewis, though, who wrote the opposite before he died in 1963.

"Aslan symbolizes a Christlike figure, but he also symbolizes for me Mohammed, Buddha and all the great spiritual leaders and prophets over the centuries," Neeson said. ....

"The whole Narnian story is about Christ," Lewis once wrote. He said he "pictured him becoming a lion" because it's the king of beasts and because Christ is called "The Lion of Judah" in the Bible.

Aslan, wrote Lewis, "is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question: 'What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia?' "

But Dawn Treader producer Mark Johnson agrees with the, shall we say, more inclusive analysis from Neeson, telling The Hollywood Reporter that "resurrection exists in so many different religions in one form or another, so it's hardly exclusively Christian."

"We don't want to favor one group over another ... whether these books are Christian, I don't know," Johnson added. ....

The Christian imagery in Dawn Treader must have been too subtle:

John 1:29

The next day John seeth Jesus coming unto him, and saith, Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.

John 21:9-14

As soon then as they were come to land, they saw a fire of coals there, and fish laid thereon, and bread. .... Jesus saith unto them, Come and dine. And none of the disciples durst ask him, Who art thou? knowing that it was the Lord. Jesus then cometh, and taketh bread, and giveth them, and fish likewise. This is now the third time that Jesus shewed himself to his disciples, after that he was risen from the dead.

'Dawn Treader' Studios Reach Out to Influential Christians With 'NarniaFaith' Website, Screenings - The Hollywood Reporter

"I think relevance is a crock"

A post at internetmonk.com led me to this good interview with Eugene Peterson from 2005. The answers below that I selected deal primarily with worship:

What if we were to frame this not in terms of needs but relevance? Many Christians hope to speak to generation X or Y or postmoderns, or some subgroup, like cowboys or bikers—people for whom the typical church seems irrelevant.

When you start tailoring the gospel to the culture, whether it's a youth culture, a generation culture or any other kind of culture, you have taken the guts out of the gospel. The gospel of Jesus Christ is not the kingdom of this world. It's a different kingdom.

My son Eric organized a new church six years ago. The Presbyterians have kind of a boot camp for new church pastors where you learn what you're supposed to do. So Eric went. One of the teachers there said he shouldn't put on a robe and a stole: "You get out there and you meet this generation where they are."

So Eric, being a good student and wanting to please his peers, didn't wear a robe. His church started meeting in a high-school auditorium. He started out by wearing a business suit every Sunday. But when the first Sunday of Advent rolled around, and they were going to have Communion, he told me, "Dad, I just couldn't do it. So I put my robe on."

Their neighbors, Joel and his wife, attended his church. Joel was the stereotype of the person the new church development was designed for—suburban, middle management, never been to church, totally secular. Eric figured he was coming because they were neighbors, or because he liked him. After that Advent service, he asked Joel what he thought of his wearing a robe.

He said, "It made an impression. My wife and I talked about it. I think what we're really looking for is sacred space. We both think we found it."

I think relevance is a crock. I don't think people care a whole lot about what kind of music you have or how you shape the service. They want a place where God is taken seriously, where they're taken seriously, where there is no manipulation of their emotions or their consumer needs.

Why did we get captured by this advertising, publicity mindset? I think it's destroying our church.

But someone else might walk into Eric's church, see him with his robe, and walk out, thinking the whole place was too religious, too churchy.

So why are they going if it's not going to be religious? What do they go to church for?

Of course, there's another aspect to this. If you're going to a church where everybody's playing a religious role, that's going to be off putting. But that performance mentality, role mentality can be seen in the cowboy church or whatever—everybody is performing a role there, too.

But we're involved with something that has a huge mystery to it. Are we going to wipe out all the mystery so we can be in control of it? Isn't reverence at the very heart of the worship of God?

And if we present a rendition of the faith in which all the mystery is removed, and there's no reverence, how are people ever going to know there's something more than just their own emotions, their own needs? There's something a lot bigger than my needs that's going on. How do I ever get to that if the church service and worship program is all centered on my needs? .... [more] [emphasis added]

Spirituality for All the Wrong Reasons | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction

E pluribus unum

Roger Scruton believes that "multiculturism" in Europe is in retreat: The American Spectator: "Multiculturalism, RIP." From the essay:

....[C]ulture and race have nothing to do with each other. There is no contradiction in the idea that Felix Mendelssohn was Jewish by race and German by culture — or indeed that he was the most public-spirited representative of German culture in his day. Nor is there any contradiction in saying that a single person belongs to two cultures. Felix's grandfather Moses was a great Rabbi, upstanding representative of the Jewish cultural inheritance, and also founding father of the German Enlightenment. ....

Once we distinguish race and culture, the way is open to acknowledge that not all cultures are equally admirable, and that not all cultures can exist comfortably side-by-side. To deny this is to forgo the very possibility of moral judgment, and therefore to deny the fundamental experience of community. It is precisely this that has caused the multiculturalists to hesitate. Rightly enjoying the polytheistic festivals of the Hindus, the Carnivals of Caribbean blacks, and the celebrations of the Chinese New Year, they have led us to believe that cultural difference is always an addition to social life, and never a threat to it. Anyone who discriminates between cultures, therefore, really must have something more dangerous at the back of his mind — a desire to exclude on grounds of strangeness, which is the first step towards the racist mindset.

But experience has finally prevailed over wishful thinking. It is culture, not nature, that tells a family that their daughter who has fallen in love outside the permitted circle must be killed, that girls must undergo genital mutilation if they are to be respectable, that the infidel must be destroyed when Allah commands it. You can read about those things and think that they belong to the pre-history of our world. But when suddenly they are happening in your midst, you are apt to wake up to the truth about the culture that advocates them. You are apt to say, that is not our culture, and it has no business here. That is what Europeans are now saying — not just a few crazies, but everyone. And the multiculturalists are reluctantly compelled to agree with them. ....

....We don't require everyone to have the same faith, to lead the same kind of family life, or to participate in the same festivals. But we have a shared moral and legal inheritance, a shared language, and a shared public sphere. Our societies are built upon the Judeo-Christian ideal of neighbor-love, according to which strangers and intimates deserve equal concern. They require each of us to respect the freedom and sovereignty of every other, and to acknowledge the threshold of privacy beyond which it is a trespass to go unless invited. Our societies depend upon a culture of law-abidingness and open contracts, and they reinforce these things through the educational traditions that have shaped our common curriculum. It is not an arbitrary cultural imperialism that leads us to value Greek philosophy and literature, the Hebrew Bible, Roman law, and the medieval epics and romances, and to teach these things in our schools. They are ours, in just the way that the legal order and the political institutions are ours: they form part of what made us, and convey the message that it is right to be what we are. ....

So what happens when people whose identity is fixed by creed or kinship immigrate into places settled by Western culture? The multiculturalists say that we must make room for them, and that we do this by relinquishing the space in which their culture can flourish. Our political class has at last recognized that this is a recipe for disaster, and that we can welcome immigrants only if we welcome them into our culture, and not beside and against it. But that means telling them to accept rules, customs, and procedures that may be alien to their old way of life. Is this an injustice? Surely not. If immigrants come it is because they gain by doing so. It is therefore reasonable to remind them that there is also a cost. .... [more]

The American Spectator : Multiculturalism, R.I.P.

“Ye shall be as gods”

Via David Limbaugh at Ricochet.com, Whittaker Chambers in Witness on the appeal communism then had; a warning that  applies equally to every utopian cause:

Their power, whose nature baffles the rest of the world, because in a large measure the rest of the world has lost that power, is the power to hold convictions and to act on them. It is the same power that moves mountains; it is also an unfailing power to move men. Communists are that part of mankind which has recovered the power to live or die—to bear witness—for its faith. And it is a simple, rational faith that inspires men to live or die for it.

It is not new. It is, in fact, man’s second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: “Ye shall be as gods.” It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision. Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision: the vision of God and man’s relationship to God. The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God.

It is the vision of man’s mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world. It is the vision of man’s liberated mind, by the sole force of its rational intelligence, redirected men’s destiny and reorganizing man’s life and the world. It is the vision of man, once more the central figure of the Creation, not because God made man in His image, but because man’s mind makes him the most intelligent of the animals. ....

The vision is a challenge and implies a threat. It challenges man to prove by his acts that he is the masterwork of the Creation — by making thought and act one. It challenges him to prove it by using the force of his rational mind to end the bloody meaninglessness of man’s history — by giving it purpose and a plan. It challenges him to prove it by reducing the meaningless chaos of nature, by imposing on it his rational will to order, abundance, security, peace. It is the vision of materialism.

Whittaker Chambers Speaks to Today - Ricochet.com

"There I have another name"

Later this week the third film in the Chronicles of Narnia series will appear in American theaters. This review in World Magazine by Megan Basham is encouraging to those of us somewhat disappointed by the treatment Prince Caspian received and worried that some of C.S. Lewis's quite specifically Christian allusions might have been altered or eliminated for a general audience. On the new film of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader:

For those who know and love the books (and even for those who don't), the first third of the movie is pitch-perfect. Perfect in the way Peter Jackson's rendering of The Shire and Gollum were perfect. It begins with Will Poulter as the smarmy, pestilential cousin of the Pevensies, Eustace.

Poulter owns the character like an old-time stage actor. His body language is starched, his speech affected, and his mannerisms irritating. In short, he is exactly what one would expect from someone named Eustace Clarence Scrubb. Even more impressive is Poulter's portrayal of Eustace's redemption. As believable as he is before the lion, Aslan (Liam Neeson), peels away his dead, gnarled shell, he is equally authentic in his transformation into a new creation with a tender heart. Simon Pegg, voicing the valiant mouse Reepicheep, is another phenomenal addition who is easily on par with all the great character actors peopling Harry Potter's world. ....

...Christian audiences may be stunned and grateful to see how the filmmakers reveal the true nature of the great lion. His direct-from-Lewis explanation that he is in our world too and we must learn to know him by another name will be like a spring in the desert for thoughtful parents whose time is often spent in theaters enduring cheap bathroom jokes and even cheaper believe-in-yourself messages. And it certainly makes Walden worthy of helming Narnia into the future. .... (more)

WORLD Magazine | Dawn Treader | Megan Basham | Dec 18, 10

Advent II: Blessed Hope

Blessed Lord, which hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning; grant us that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them; that by patience and comfort of Thy holy word, we may embrace, and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which Thou hast given us in Our Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. [Thomas Cranmer]

WHATSOEVER things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope. Now the God of patience and consolation grant you to be like-minded one toward another according to Christ Jesus: that ye may with one mind and one mouth glorify God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Wherefore receive ye one another, as Christ also received us to the glory of God. Now I say that Jesus Christ was a minister of the circumcision for the truth of God, to confirm the promises made unto the fathers: and that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy; as it is written, For this cause I will confess to Thee among the Gentiles, and sing unto Thy name. And again He saith, Rejoice, ye Gentiles, with His people. And again, Praise the Lord, all ye Gentiles; and laud Him, all ye people. And again, Esaias saith, There shall be a root of Jesse, and he that shall rise to reign over the Gentiles; in him shall the Gentiles trust. Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope, through the power of the Holy Ghost. [Romans 15]

Advent is a time of waiting. Our whole life, however, is Advent - that is, a time of waiting for the ultimate, for the time when there will be a new heaven and a new earth, when all people are brothers and sisters and one rejoices in the words of the angels: "On earth peace to those on whom God's favor rests." Learn to wait, because he has promised to come. "I stand at the door?" We however call to him: "Yes, come soon, Lord Jesus!" Amen. [Dietrich Bonhoeffer]

"With a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence"

One of the characteristics of the debate about the appropriate relationship between church and state has been the selective use of history in support of one or another interpretation of the beliefs of the Founders. On the one hand there are those who argue that the United States has been a "Christian nation" from the start, and on the other that Deism and skepticism were more typical. Good history can help to sort this out. Thomas Kidd is one of the academic historians who have done that work, particularly in his God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution. In "The Tea Party, Fundamentalism, and the Founding" Kidd responds to a recent book that seems to have brought more heat than light to the discussion:

.... First, I think that Lepore is right that conservatives, especially Christian conservatives, get into dangerous territory when they treat the Founders as saints and its key documents as holy writ. This exaggerated reverence has, at times, shaded into presenting the story of the Founding as one of unvarnished holiness and perfection. For Christians, admiration for the American Founding and devotion to Christ must remain strictly separate, lest we slide into a corrupted kind of civil religion. We might easily note that religious principles undergirded the Revolution (as I do in my book God of Liberty), or that many of the rank-and-file Patriots were serious Christians. But to baptize the Founding as a unique work of God is risky business.

When we simply admire the best qualities of the Founding and do not try to conflate it with the sacred, we can comfortably affirm that the Founders achieved a very high level of political wisdom. They led Americans through a war that would have probably ruined people of lesser courage, and they set up a government that, with all its imperfections, has endured as the longest-standing republic on earth. Surely we can admire these things without bending the knee to worship.

.... Surely we all agree that the leaders of our Revolution were products of a culture that was morally faulty, just as our own society is. But entirely dismissing the wisdom of that age throws out the very principles — especially the notion that "all men are created equal" — that helped us move past the limitations of the Founding. .... [more]

An essay by Patrick Allitt in The Claremont Review of Books — surveying several histories touching on the role of religion during the Revolutionary era — includes this about Kidd's God of Liberty:

.... Agreeing with a wide consensus that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and other central figures were Deists who doubted the inerrancy of scripture and denied the divinity of Jesus, he shows how they nevertheless collaborated with zealous evangelical Christians to defeat Britain and create a republic. What's more, they understood their work as having divine as well as secular significance, and they worked against a backdrop of millennial enthusiasm as end-of-the-world sects sprang up around them.

Despite their many differences, Kidd notes, nearly all the revolutionaries shared five religious principles. First, they believed in a creator God who made all men equal and therefore free, possessing the same basic rights. Second, they agreed that God moved through history and sometimes made nations His providential instruments. Third, they agreed that there is a deep human propensity to sin that must be checked by the right institutions. Fourth, they believed that even with these institutions the republic would only succeed if men conquered the temptation to sin and acted virtuously. Finally, they favored religious liberty. Agreement on these fundamentals enabled them to cooperate despite striking differences on theological questions. "During and after the Revolution," Kidd writes, "many people conflated America's political affairs with divine purposes, which lent an aura of redemptiveness to the war and to the agenda of a fledgling nation." ....

Those five areas of agreement seem to me still a pretty good way to think about religion, the state, and human nature.

Thomas Kidd: The Tea Party, Fundamentalism, and the Founding, The Claremont Institute - Patrick Allitt: God and Country

"When I Was Sinkin' Down..."

David Neff at Christianity Today reviewing a history of the original Fisk Jubilee Singers, "Tell Them We Are Singing for Jesus": The Original Fisk Jubilee Singers and Christian Reconstruction, 1871-1878, explains how spirituals ended up in all the hymnbooks.

.... The story of the Fisk Jubilee Singers is ironic. White Christians aimed to give black Americans Christian civilization, but they received a dose of slave spirituality that shaped Anglo-American Christianity for the better.

The Jubilee Singers embarked on their tours to demonstrate that former slaves could perform the best of the Western musical canon. They soon discovered, however, that the spirituals in their concerts moved their audiences deeply, and they devoted their revised repertoire to slave songs of faith. Their arrangement of "Steal Away," with its dramatic dynamic contrasts, left American and British audiences weeping.

The Jubilee Singers did more than create awareness of an important American folk art. They gave white audiences a striking vision of Christ's liberating power. That vision gave hope that those with other bondages might experience their own exodus. Every Jubilee Singers concert was evangelistic. .... [more]

Singing For Jesus | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction