In terror or in peace?

Bob, at In the Clearing, writes about Christians and death in "Death, where is thy sting?" There are those who seem to believe that it is unfair and unjust of God whenever bad things happen to Christians - or, on the other hand, that those bad things must be the work of the devil. The real question isn't why bad things happen, but why not?

I don't want to break anyone's heart, but I hope you all know you're probably going to die someday.

I recently heard a Christian friend of mine say, "I just don't understand how God can allow so-and-so to get cancer." I wanted to say, do you really think certain people should be immune from the normal frailties of the flesh? Or that being a believer should mean not getting cancer, heart disease, MS, etc.? The real question is, why shouldn't he or she get cancer? Or you? Or me? Or anyone else? ....

One of the darkest regions of our interior continent is that place where we harbor our thoughts about death. Our selfish feeling that death is just not fair, and our childish fear of it, which only reveals the shallowness of our faith. .... See, the wages of sin is death, but when Christ took care of sin on the cross, he took care of death. The crosswork of Christ took care of both sin and death.

I know a fellow whose ministry it is to "walk with the dying." He befriends and advocates for dying people, and he's often at their side when they pass from this world. He told me once, "Bob, there's no way to predict how someone is going to die. I've seen atheists die peacefully in their beds and lifelong Christians die in abject terror. You can never tell."

I am not foolish enough to claim to know in what way I will face my end, whether in terror or in peace. But I know how God would have me go. Giving him the glory right to the end! .... [more]

In the Clearing: Death, where is thy sting?

Doug Sanford, RIP

Yesterday afternoon a good man died. Doug Sanford was a member of the Madison Seventh Day Baptist Church where I am also a member. He was more than just a member. He was the first there every Sabbath to open the building, set up the chairs, heat water for the coffee, and make us all welcome as we arrived. He was also one of our worship leaders and very well prepared and thoughtful in both the preparation and conduct of the service. He loved to be provocative and thoroughly enjoyed a good joke or a bad pun. Our small congregation will miss him very much. I will miss him very much.

Doug was a convinced and committed Christian. His faith and courage over the months of his illness have been an extraordinary witness to me and to all of us. He loved hymns and those by Fanny Crosby were particular favorites. I am reminded today of these words:

I know I shall see in His beauty
The King in whose law I delight;
Who lovingly guardeth my footsteps,
And giveth me songs in the night.

Redeemed, redeemed, Redeemed by the blood of the Lamb;
Redeemed, redeemed, His child, and forever, I am.

I've known Doug since he moved to Milton, Wisconsin, as a teenager. When he became active in the Madison church, I got to know him a lot better. He was a generous and genuinely caring person more likely to do something than to engage in sentimentality. He was not the sort of person who wanted to burden others with his troubles and so we only gradually became fully aware of the seriousness of his illness, although it has been apparent for some time now. He moved from his home into a hospice on Sabbath and died on Sunday.

Doug leaves behind his wife, Renee, his daughters, Tina and Kathleen, and a son, Caleb. He is also survived by his father, a brother and three sisters, and many friends.

Jesus said “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live...."
(Jn 11:25, ESV)

Science and moral impotence

Steven Lenzner, at The Weekly Standard, reviews Yuval Levin's Imagining the Future: Science and American Democracy. The cental thesis seems to be that modern science is not, as many would claim, neutral, but utopian and dismissive of moral objections. Because health and long life are the highest values — and science promises to deliver them — anything that seems to stand in the way gets shoved aside.

It is necessary to remind ourselves that, although health and long life are very good things — and medical progress has contributed enormously to both — death still comes, and that this temporal life has a context that demands much more of us than mere extended existence. "Health and wealth" have become ultimate values for many inside the Church — people who should have been taught to know better.

From the review:

Ancient science was contemplative: It sought to understand nature, but was content to let it run its course. The scientific project founded by Bacon and Descartes saw nature as hostile to human prosperity, as penurious and arbitrary. Far from being a source of guidance on how to live, nature was something to be overcome or conquered. Science was, in Bacon's famous phrase, to be put in the service of "the relief of man's estate." A new order was to emerge in which science would progressively conquer poverty and disease and hold out the prospect of the indefinite extension of human life. Empirical science was to be the means of political reformation. Levin nicely sums up the less sober aspirations born of the modern scientific project in this way.

From the very beginning, the modern worldview has given rise to peculiar utopianisms of various stripes, all grounded in the dream of overcoming nature and living, free of necessity and fear, able to meet every one of our needs and our whims, and able, most especially, to live indefinitely in good health. This brand of utopianism generally begins in a benign libertarianism, though at times it has ended in political extremism, if not the guillotine.

We're far from the guillotine, but you only have to think about the relative capacities of smoking, on the one hand, and blasphemy, on the other, to generate indignation and see precisely to what extent this peculiarly modern moralism has taken hold. ....

The problem, as Levin diagnoses it, is that our constitutional order depends upon modern science and its blessings, yet science also works as a subtle moral corrosive that threatens to undermine the moral judgment essential to a healthy liberal democracy:

In our time, we are perhaps less inclined to recognize science as a set of ideas with aspirations to universality precisely because the scientific enterprise has been so successful. But the authority we cede to science, both as the servant of health and as the master of knowledge, weakens our allegiance to those other sources of wisdom so crucial to our self-understanding and self-government. Those other sources serve to ground our moral judgment, while science avoids or flattens moral questions, since it cannot answer them and rarely needs to ask them.... For all its power, science risks leaving us morally impotent.

Put another way, the hidden moral premises of science — especially those concerning health — have so insinuated themselves into our collective consciousness that any attempt to challenge them in the name of other goods is almost invariably a defensive, rearguard action. Such attempts can slow but not stem the tide of "progress," and rollbacks are all but unimaginable. ....

Insofar as "traditional morality" appears to stand in the way of our aspirations for physical well-being and medical progress, it will be under assault. Yet the capacity for unreflective moral intuition (and indignation) is alive and well in certain important realms of American life. Consider higher education. Sad to say, it is precisely in the only institution where untrammeled questioning can do no harm — where it is the indispensable means to its end — that it is least respected. Political correctness employs the means of traditional morality, especially shame, less to silence certain opinions than to make them unthinkable. [more]

PREVIEW: Biomorality

Everyone needs to be converted

Darryl Dash interviewed Tim Keller about "Ministry in a Post-Christian Culture" and asked him, among other things, "You've said that we need to change significantly—beyond ordinary approaches like new programs or staff.... What are some of the deeper issues the Church needs to face?" Part of Keller's answer:

...Lloyd-Jones, of course, believed the need was for spiritual revival. The trouble with naming this is that, unfortunately, in many evangelical circles, especially charismatic ones, "revival" is always said to be the cure-all for our ills. But Lloyd-Jones was thinking of the historic revivals and of a theology of revival of Jonathan Edwards. This means we must, as in all the revivals, recover the gospel of grace.

I agree with Lloyd-Jones on this, but this is a very unpopular view right now in much of the evangelical world. In parts of the Reformed world, Edwards' view of revival is under attack as individualistic and inimical to the importance of the Church. Oddly, in the emerging church Edwards' view of revival is unpopular for the same reasons, because of its emphasis on the "individualistic" views of substitutionary atonement, forensic justification and so on.

I think these attacks on (or indifference to) the importance of revival are very wrong. We live in a society in which revival is necessary. As Peter Berger shows in The Heretical Imperative in contemporary pluralistic societies, everyone who believes a faith has to make an individual choice to believe it. There are no longer inherited, authoritative faith traditions. Whether you raise a child Lutheran, Muslim or Baptist the child at some point will have to choose to make the faith of his parents his or her own. In other words, they will have to have a conversion experience.

When revival breaks out through a recovery of the gospel, three things happen:

1. nominal church members realize they'd never been converted;
2. sleepy, lethargic Christians are energized and renewed;
3. outsider non-Christians are attracted into the beautified worship, community and lives of the converted and renewed church members.

That's how it works. We need it. (more)

Thanks to Justin Taylor for the reference. Ministry in a Post-Christian Culture: An Interview with Tim Keller - Darryl's Blog

Why believe?

A group called I Believe Too is raising money to counter the American Humanist Association's atheist poster campaign on Washington, D.C. buses with the this message [click on the image to enlarge it]. At their site they describe the intention of the campaign:

Our goal is to counteract the AHA with a positive, upbeat ad of our own that identifies God as our true and loving creator.

They are also selling a bumper sticker with the same message here.

I Believe Too - Home

"God is my Führer"

TIME, December 23, 1940:

"Not you, Herr Hitler, but God is my Führer." These defiant words of Pastor Martin Niemoller were echoed by millions of Germans. And Hitler raged: "It is Niemoller or I."

So this second Christmas of Hitler's war finds Niemoller and upwards of 200,000 other Christians (some estimates run as high as 800,000) behind the barbed wire of the frozen Nazi concentration camps. Here men bear mute witness that the Christ—whose birth the outside world celebrates unthinkingly at Christmas—can still inspire a living faith for which men and women even now endure imprisonment, torture and death as bravely as in centuries past.

More than 80% of the prisoners in the concentration camps are not Jews but Christians, and the best tribute to the spirit of Germany's Christians comes from a Jew and agnostic (TIME, Sept. 23) — the world's most famous scientist, Albert Einstein. Says he:

"Being a lover of freedom, when the revolution came in Germany, I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but, no, the universities immediately were silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love of freedom; but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks....

"Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly." [....]

Taking a leaf from the Nazi-verboten Old Testament, where King David got rid of Bathsheba's husband by having him set "in the forefront of the hottest battle . . . that he may be smitten and die." the Nazis mobilized over 55% of Germany's Protestant pastors for Army service, most of them as privates. They singled out Confessional pastors especially. In some districts 75% of the recalcitrant Confessional pastors were drafted for front-line service. [more]

Thanks to Tom Gilson at Thinking Christian for the reference.

German Martyrs - TIME

A pagan feast?

In 2003 Touchstone published "Calculating Christmas", by William Tighe. Since, every now and then, people appear in our churches who fall into the category he defines as "the fringes of American Evangelicalism" and vehemently oppose Christmas or some aspect of its traditional observance, and since atheists are also apt to charge that the day is really a pagan celebration of the Winter Solstice, the article may be helpful in setting the record straight. Read it all.

Many Christians think that Christians celebrate Christ’s birth on December 25th because the church fathers appropriated the date of a pagan festival. Almost no one minds, except for a few groups on the fringes of American Evangelicalism, who seem to think that this makes Christmas itself a pagan festival. But it is perhaps interesting to know that the choice of December 25th is the result of attempts among the earliest Christians to figure out the date of Jesus’ birth based on calendrical calculations that had nothing to do with pagan festivals.

Rather, the pagan festival of the “Birth of the Unconquered Son” instituted by the Roman Emperor Aurelian on 25 December 274, was almost certainly an attempt to create a pagan alternative to a date that was already of some significance to Roman Christians. Thus the “pagan origins of Christmas” is a myth without historical substance.

The idea that the date was taken from the pagans goes back to two scholars from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Paul Ernst Jablonski, a German Protestant, wished to show that the celebration of Christ’s birth on December 25th was one of the many “paganizations” of Christianity that the Church of the fourth century embraced, as one of many “degenerations” that transformed pure apostolic Christianity into Catholicism. Dom Jean Hardouin, a Benedictine monk, tried to show that the Catholic Church adopted pagan festivals for Christian purposes without paganizing the gospel.

In the Julian calendar, created in 45 B.C. under Julius Caesar, the winter solstice fell on December 25th, and it therefore seemed obvious to Jablonski and Hardouin that the day must have had a pagan significance before it had a Christian one. But in fact, the date had no religious significance in the Roman pagan festal calendar before Aurelian’s time, nor did the cult of the sun play a prominent role in Rome before him.

There were two temples of the sun in Rome, one of which (maintained by the clan into which Aurelian was born or adopted) celebrated its dedication festival on August 9th, the other of which celebrated its dedication festival on August 28th. But both of these cults fell into neglect in the second century, when eastern cults of the sun, such as Mithraism, began to win a following in Rome. And in any case, none of these cults, old or new, had festivals associated with solstices or equinoxes. (the explanation)

The conclusion:

Thus, December 25th as the date of the Christ’s birth appears to owe nothing whatsoever to pagan influences upon the practice of the Church during or after Constantine’s time. It is wholly unlikely to have been the actual date of Christ’s birth, but it arose entirely from the efforts of early Latin Christians to determine the historical date of Christ’s death.

And the pagan feast which the Emperor Aurelian instituted on that date in the year 274 was not only an effort to use the winter solstice to make a political statement, but also almost certainly an attempt to give a pagan significance to a date already of importance to Roman Christians. ....

Thanks to Joseph Lawler at The American Spectator for the reference.

Touchstone Archives: Calculating Christmas

Milk instead of meat

John Whitehead interviews Julia Duin, author of Quitting Church: Why the Faithful are Fleeing and What to Do about It:

John Whitehead: Why are people leaving the church?

Julia Duin: People who are leaving have been in church for some time. They’ve been believers more than ten years and are burned out. They’re not getting anything new in their churches. They’re not seeing the three major things—decent preaching, good community and feeding.

JW: What do you mean by “feeding?”

JD: Content and spirituality. What we hear today are slogans. The whole seeker friendly movement has ruined the church.

JW: Why do you call it “seeker friendly”?

JD: The seeker friendly movement started in the 1980s. It was the effort to dumb down a lot of church services, make them shorter, easier to grasp, cut the number of hymns, cut the preaching time and get it to a kind of package deal. The idea was to get nonbelievers interested in going to church because it would not take up too much of their time and wouldn’t challenge them too much. But what happened is that a lot of people who had been believers for some time suddenly found that the sermons were like milk instead of meat. They were so simplistic. Many were finding that what they were getting was pabulum. ....

JW: What type of people are you talking about in Quitting Church?

JD: The people I wrote about in Quitting Church aren’t necessarily the kind attending Osteen’s church. It’s the older Christians. It’s the ones who have been around for more than ten years and are experiencing a spiritual brain drain. These people are the ones heading for the exits. These are the strongest Christians in a given church, the ones who are going out the door. Ironically, a lot of pastors are not asking questions. They’re not saying, “Why are you leaving?” A lot of people who leave church tell me that no one comes after them. No one ever calls them after they’ve left the church. .... [more]

Quitting Church

A better covenant

Denny Burke recommends an interesting new book, Hebrews, Christ, and the Law: The Theology of the Mosaic Law in Hebrews 7:1-10:18 by one of his faculty members, Barry Joslin:

...Joslin is trying to ask and answer the question, “What is the theology of the Mosaic Law in Hebrews?”

The answer Joslin gives will be surprising to some because he does not believe that Hebrews abrogates the Law under the new covenant. According to Joslin, the New Covenant does not abrogate the Old, rather it transforms it. He writes:

The work of Christ has transformed the law, and this transformation involves both its internalization and fulfillment in the NC [new covenant]; the law has forever been affected Christologically. . . The writer of Hebrews does not suggest that the law itself (the OC’s regulations) in toto has been abrogated” (pp. 2, 4).

» Hebrews, Christ, and the Law | Denny Burk

Habit becomes character

Theodore Dalrymple writes that English culture has changed - and not for the better - in "The Quivering Upper Lip" in City Journal. His observations about the older generation of Englishmen remind me of my own American parents, born early in the last century.

.... No culture changes suddenly, and the elderly often retained the attitudes of their youth. I remember working for a short time in a general practice in a small country town where an old man called me to his house. I found him very weak from chronic blood loss, unable to rise from his bed, and asked him why he had not called me earlier. “I didn’t like to disturb you, Doctor,” he said. “I know you are a very busy man.”

From a rational point of view, this was absurd. What could I possibly need to do that was more important than attending to such an ill man? But I found his self-effacement deeply moving. It was not the product of a lack of self-esteem, that psychological notion used to justify rampant egotism; nor was it the result of having been downtrodden by a tyrannical government that accorded no worth to its citizens. It was instead an existential, almost religious, modesty, an awareness that he was far from being all-important.

I experienced other instances of this modesty. I used to pass the time of day with the husband of an elderly patient of mine who would accompany her to the hospital. One day, I found him so jaundiced that he was almost orange. At his age, it was overwhelmingly likely to mean one thing: inoperable cancer. He was dying. He knew it and I knew it; he knew that I knew it. I asked him how he was. “Not very well,” he said. “I’m very sorry to hear that,” I replied. “Well,” he said quietly, and with a slight smile, “we shall just have to do the best we can, won’t we?” Two weeks later, he was dead.

I often remember the nobility of this quite ordinary man’s conduct and words. He wanted an appropriate, but only an appropriate, degree of commiseration from me; in his view, which was that of his generation and culture, it was a moral requirement that emotion and sentiment should be expressed proportionately, and not in an exaggerated or self-absorbed way. My acquaintance with him was slight; therefore my regret, while genuine, should be slight. (Oddly enough, my regret has grown over the years, with the memory.) Further, he considered it important that he should not embarrass me with any displays of emotion that might discomfit me. A man has to think of others, even when he is dying.

My wife, also a doctor, worked solely among the old, and found them, as I did, considerate even when suffering, as well as humorous and lacking in self-importance. Her patients were largely working-class — a refutation of the idea, commonly expressed, that the cultural ideal that I have described characterized only the upper echelons of society.

Gradually, but overwhelmingly, the culture and character of British restraint have changed into the exact opposite. Extravagance of gesture, vehemence of expression, vainglorious boastfulness, self-exposure, and absence of inhibition are what we tend to admire now — and the old modesty is scorned. .... (more)

The Quivering Upper Lip by Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal Autumn 2008

Religious liberty

We have a First Amendment, guaranteeing religious liberty. Not everyone does. An interesting story from the Washington Times points out what should be an example of appropriate reciprosity:

The Saudis have recently asked permission to build a mosque in Moscow, a city where there are only four mosques and 2 million Muslims. The Russians, however, are saying they want, in return, an Orthodox church in Saudi Arabia. ....

Not only are hapless Christians terrorized and jailed for daring to hold private prayer services in Saudi Arabia, but God help them should they try to convert someone to their religion. And that's for a fellow People of the Book: One can only guess at what the treatment of Buddhists and Hindus must be like.

Wouldn't it be so ironic if the Russians were the first Christian body to win acceptance of the right to build a church in, say, Riyadh? ....

The image is of the minaret of the Islamic Center in Washington D.C., where religious liberty is protected by law.

A Russian church for a Saudi mosque? - Duin - Religion Commentary - Washington Times

"'Till death do us part"?

A site called Divorce 360 provides a calculator which predicts your liklihood of getting divorced, based on comparing your experience with the census data. The calculator is here.

Since we have all read that about half of all marriages end in divorce - an extraordinarily discouraging statistic - this calculator can provide encouragement. Maggie Gallagher at NRO:

My husband sent it to me. His risk of divorce is 1 percent. Mine is 5 percent. Statistics are wonderful things.

divorce360.com | Marriage Calculator, What's Your Divorce Risk? - Maggie Gallagher - The Corner on National Review Online

Sabbath Recorder, December 2008

The December, 2008, Sabbath Recorder is available online here as a pdf.

This is a Christmas issue of the Sabbath Recorder with several articles about the significance of the Incarnation including one by my pastor, Herb Saunders. A short quotation from his contribution:

God chose to enter our human drama as a baby to be like one of us. He chose to accept our human frailty. He grew up facing the very same situations in life that any baby, toddler, child or teenager faces. Francis Thompson shared:

Little Jesus, was Thou shy
Once and just so small as I?
And what did it feel like to be
Out of heaven, and just like me?

Although divine, He chose to become fully human having the capacity to sin. [....]

Had He come to us in any other way than as a baby we would not be able to relate to His life or example. C.S. Lewis wrote, “The Son of God became the Son of Man so that sons of men may become sons of God.”

According to Athanasius, “He became what we are that He might make us what He is.” ....

The Sabbath Recorder is the magazine of the Seventh Day Baptist General Conference and has been regularly published in some form since 1844.

A flaw in comprehension

From The Paris Review, a long interview with Marilynne Robinson, author of Gilead and, most recently, Home. She is a Christian and, at one point the intervewer asks her whether she thinks of herself as a "religious writer." Robinson answers "I don’t like categories like religious and not religious. As soon as religion draws a line around itself it becomes falsified. It seems to me that anything that is written compassionately and perceptively probably satisfies every definition of religious whether a writer intends it to be religious or not." Later the interview turns to the relationship between religion and science:

ROBINSON
I read as much as I can of contemporary cosmology because reality itself is profoundly mysterious. Quantum theory and classical physics, for instance, are both lovely within their own limits and yet at present they cannot be reconciled with each other. If different systems don’t merge in a comprehensible way, that’s a flaw in our comprehension and not a flaw in one system or the other.

INTERVIEWER
Are religion and science simply two systems that don’t merge?

ROBINSON
The debate seems to be between a naive understanding of religion and a naive understanding of science. When people try to debunk religion, it seems to me they are referring to an eighteenth-century notion of what science is. I’m talking about Richard Dawkins here, who has a status that I can’t quite understand. He acts as if the physical world that is manifest to us describes reality exhaustively. On the other side, many of the people who articulate and form religious expression have not acted in good faith. The us-versus-them mentality is a terrible corruption of the whole culture.

INTERVIEWER
You’ve written critically about Dawkins and the other New Atheists. Is it their disdain for religion and championing of pure science that troubles you?

ROBINSON
No, I read as much pure science as I can take in. It’s a fact that their thinking does not feel scientific. The whole excitement of science is that it’s always pushing toward the discovery of something that it cannot account for or did not anticipate. The New Atheist types, like Dawkins, act as if science had revealed the world as a closed system. That simply is not what contemporary science is about. A lot of scientists are atheists, but they don’t talk about reality in the same way that Dawkins does. And they would not assume that there is a simple-as-that kind of response to everything in question. Certainly not on the grounds of anything that science has discovered in the last hundred years.

The science that I prefer tends toward cosmology, theories of quantum reality, things that are finer-textured than classical physics in terms of their powers of description. Science is amazing. On a mote of celestial dust, we have figured out how to look to the edge of our universe. I feel instructed by everything I have read. Science has a lot of the satisfactions for me that good theology has.

INTERVIEWER
But doesn’t science address an objective notion of reality while religion addresses how we conceive of ourselves?

ROBINSON
As an achievement, science is itself a spectacular argument for the singularity of human beings among all things that exist. It has a prestige that comes with unambiguous changes in people’s experience—space travel, immunizations. It has an authority that’s based on its demonstrable power. But in discussions of human beings it tends to compare downwards: we’re intelligent because hyenas are intelligent and we just took a few more leaps.

The first obligation of religion is to maintain the sense of the value of human beings. If you had to summarize the Old Testament, the summary would be: stop doing this to yourselves. But it is not in our nature to stop harming ourselves. We don’t behave consistently with our own dignity or with the dignity of other people. The Bible reiterates this endlessly.

Thanks to GetReligion for the reference.

The Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 198

A day of Thanksgiving to God

Ira Stoll, author of Samuel Adams: A Life, writes about the first Thanksgiving - not the one most of us were taught to remember.

When was the first Thanksgiving? Most of us think of the Pilgrims at Plymouth in 1621. But if the question is about the first national Thanksgiving holiday, the answer is that the tradition began at a lesser-known moment in 1777 in York, Pa.

In July 1776, the American colonists declared independence from Britain. The months that followed were so bleak that there was not much to give thanks for. The Journals of the Continental Congress record no Thanksgiving in that year, only two days of "solemn fasting" and prayer.

For much of 1777, the situation was not much better. British troops controlled New York City. The Americans lost the strategic stronghold of Fort Ticonderoga, in upstate New York, to the British in July. In Delaware, on Sept. 11, troops led by Gen. George Washington lost the Battle of Brandywine, in which 200 Americans were killed, 500 wounded and 400 captured. In Pennsylvania, early in the morning of Sept. 21, another 300 American soldiers were killed or wounded and 100 captured in a British surprise attack that became known as the Paoli Massacre.

Philadelphia, America's largest city, fell on Sept. 26. Congress, which had been meeting there, fled briefly to Lancaster, Pa., and then to York, a hundred miles west of Philadelphia. One delegate to Congress, John Adams of Massachusetts, wrote in his diary, "The prospect is chilling, on every Side: Gloomy, dark, melancholy, and dispiriting."

His cousin, Samuel Adams, gave the other delegates — their number had dwindled to a mere 20 from the 56 who had signed the Declaration of Independence — a talk of encouragement. He predicted, "Good tidings will soon arrive. We shall never be abandoned by Heaven while we act worthy of its aid and protection." ....

He turned out to have been correct, at least about the good tidings. On Oct. 31, a messenger arrived with news of the American victory at the Battle of Saratoga. The American general, Horatio Gates, had accepted the surrender of 5,800 British soldiers, and with them 27 pieces of artillery and thousands of pieces of small arms and ammunition.

Saratoga turned the tide of the war - news of the victory was decisive in bringing France into a full alliance with America. Congress responded to the event by appointing a committee of three that included Samuel Adams, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia and Daniel Roberdeau of Pennsylvania, to draft a report and resolution. The report, adopted Nov. 1, declared Thursday, Dec. 18, as "a day of Thanksgiving" to God, so that "with one heart and one voice the good people may express the grateful feelings of their hearts, and consecrate themselves to the service of their divine benefactor." [more]

Sam Adams was one of the leading revolutionaries, a Christian, and, of interest especially to Seventh Day Baptists, a friend of Samuel Ward, and one of the appointed members of the committee that organized Ward's funeral.

'A Day of Thanksgiving' - WSJ.com

The gracious gifts of the Most High God

President Abraham Lincoln's Thanksgiving Proclamation, October 3, 1863:

The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added which are of so extraordinary a nature that they can not fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever-watchful providence of Almighty God.

In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign states to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere, except in the theater of military conflict, while that theater has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union.

Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defense have not arrested the plow, the shuttle, or the ship; the ax has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well as the iron and coal as of our precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege, and the battlefield, and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom.

No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.

It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice, by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the imposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the divine purpose, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity, and union.

In testimony whereof I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the city of Washington, this 3d day of October, A.D. 1863, and of the Independence of the United States the eighty-eighth.

Abraham Lincoln

By the President:
William H. Seward,
Secretary of State.

Thanks to Justin Taylor for the idea and the reference.

With ever joyful hearts

Now thank we all our God, with heart and hands and voices,

Who wondrous things has done, in Whom this world rejoices;
Who from our mothers’ arms has blessed us on our way
With countless gifts of love, and still is ours today.

O may this bounteous God through all our life be near us,
With ever joyful hearts and blessèd peace to cheer us;
And keep us in His grace, and guide us when perplexed;
And free us from all ills, in this world and the next!

All praise and thanks to God the Father now be given;
The Son and Him Who reigns with Them in highest Heaven;
The one eternal God, whom earth and Heaven adore;
For thus it was, is now, and shall be evermore.
Mar­tin Rink­art, c. 1636

Identifying the differences

In, I think, the spirit of the post immediately below, and of honest ecumenism, Stan Guthrie at Christianity Today, in "All Monotheisms Are Not Alike", suggests that the Apostles Creed is a good test of the differences between Islamic and Christian belief:

• I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth.

While Muslims and Christians both ascribe omnipotence to the Creator, only in Christianity is he revealed as Father. "Christians," Timothy George has noted, "predicate something essential and irreducible about God that no Muslim can accept: We call him our heavenly Father."

• I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary
  

…Although our Muslim friends revere Jesus (calling him Isa) and believe he was born of a virgin and is coming again, they deny his divinity, saying he is one of many prophets. But Christians see him as the second person of the Godhead, in a community of love from all eternity with the Father and the Holy Spirit. This is not just a theological disagreement. The deity of Christ is the sine qua non of Christian theology and mission. There is no salvation if Christ is not truly God and truly man. "No one who denies the Son has the Father," the disciple whom Jesus loved stated categorically. "Whoever acknowledges the Son has the Father also."

• … suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried; he descended to the dead.

Most Muslims believe Jesus only appeared to die on the cross. They reason that God would never allow his prophet to suffer such ignominy. But Christianity holds that Christ's crucifixion, which is foolishness to Jew, Greek, and Muslim, atones for sin and offers peace with God. "And being found in appearance as a man," Paul said, "he humbled himself and became obedient to death, even death on a cross!"

• On the third day he rose again; he ascended into heaven, he is seated at the right hand of the Father, and he will come to judge the living and the dead.

Muslims deny the Resurrection and certainly don't believe that Isa can stand in God's place as judge. But Christians do, affirming Paul's confession that "every knee should bow" to Jesus, "the name that is above every name."

• I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints …

Muslims also believe the Holy Spirit supported the ministry of Isa, but, being strict unitarians, they deny the Spirit's deity.

• … the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.

Muslims have no assurance of salvation. According to Muslim scholar Abul A'la Maududi, "Man will stand by himself—helpless and alone—to render his account, and awake the pronouncement of judgment, which shall be in the power of God alone." This produces fear. Such fear should be alien to Christians, however, who believe that Christ intercedes for us, having entered the Most Holy Place, thus ensuring our firm hope: "I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God," says John, "so that you may know that you have eternal life."

Let the dialogue continue, but with the Apostles' Creed in hand. (more)

Can't we just disagree?

Alan Jacobs on Pope Benedict and the fruitlessness of most modern ecumenism:

... Pope Benedict XVI has aroused the consternation of the New York Times by appearing to “cast doubt on the possibility of interfaith dialogue.” The Vatican has been making soothing noises every since, but in fact Benedict was stressing a point that he has been making for a very long time: that the whole ecumenical movement of the twentieth century — which was originally focused on creating better understanding among various Christian groups but later morphed into “interreligious dialogue” — has never made much progress, and has never made much progress because it has assumed that the way you have to talk about people you disagree with is by talking largely, or wholly, about points of agreement. “Can we agree that Jesus is the only Son of God? Ummmm, okay . . . Well, can we agree that Jesus is important? Can we agree that there is a God? Wow . . . um, let’s see: Can we agree to support the U.N. Millennium Development Goals? Moved, seconded, passed!”

Benedict, having watched all this going on for many fruitless decades, wonders if we shouldn’t try holding the stick at the other end: what if we try talking about where we don’t agree, and see where that leads us? This violates every tenet — or perhaps the only tenet — of the ecumenical movement, so it’s not going to gain any traction among the professional ecumenists, but still, it’s an interesting and hopeful gesture.

when barry met sally | Culture | Politics | The American Scene

"Arrogant, impatient and insensitive"

Another blog analysis site, Typealyzer, categorizes One Eternal Day as belonging to:

INTP - The Thinkers

The logical and analytical type. They are especialy attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

I like being among "The Thinkers," but the second paragraph gives considerable pause for introspection and examination.

Typealyzer