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  • The Lesson from "Island Freemasonry" That Bishop Broadbent Needs to Learn

    The Deputy Bishop of London vents on his low opinion of the island of Jersey:

    The Deputy Bishop of London has claimed Jersey was “in the grip of freemasonry” and that there was a “conspiracy of silence” on the island.

    The Right Reverend Peter Broadbent, Bishop of Willesden, also said there was not much nice or defensible” about Jersey politics or society.

    I had a lot of fun writing about “island Freemasonry” of a different kind in my novel The Ten Weeks and its sequels.  But this incident, from here, is what hopefully Freemason parents (and Christian ones too) should be teaching their children:

    “We need to say the blessing, especially with our ‘friends’ here,” Carla observed.

    “We do,” Madeleine agreed. The three girls bowed their heads. Carla glanced a Madeleine, who replied by making the sign of the cross and praying the same grace she did at home, only in English.

    “That means you’re Catholic,” Charles observed. “You know, in our realm, it is illegal to be under the Pope’s authority. Who knows, you might be an agent of the Jesuits. However, as long as I have anything to say about it, if you come in looking like you do now, we’ll overlook your pernicious church association.”

    “And what does that have to do with it?” Joyce asked, finally getting into the conversation.

    “This land you sit on is under our family’s authority,” Charles declared. “We are the masters of all that enter.”

    “‘The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness therein,’” Carla quoted.

    “Ah, yes, the Bible,” Charles said. “For you, it is the Word of God. For us who have joined ourselves to the Lodge, it is but a piece of furniture, a symbol, if you please…”

    “You’d be better off if you followed it,” Carla observed.

    “You Christians are all alike,” Charles retorted. “‘I am the way, the truth, and the life.’ How can you know it? What do you have to show for it? When the Lodge ruled from one side of the Island to the other, we had order and prosperity. Now look at it. The Serelians set up this screwy church of theirs—but they still elect their Senior and Junior Wardens. It’s just the Lodge with a cross and candles at the front. Even the Verecundans are abandoning the faith—you know that better than anybody, Little Miss Muffett,” he said, looking at Carla. “Going to the US won’t help either. It’s the biggest Masonic nation of all. You travel anywhere—I hitch-hiked around last summer. You see all of these monuments to the Ten Commandments, ‘In God We Trust’ on the money. It’s even Florida’s motto. But they have no state church. Why? All of their leaders are Masons. Look at an American dollar bill—the eye in the pyramid’s right there, along with that motto. They know all of this is pure symbolism, just like in the Lodge. When the Masons no longer run the place, and people start taking all of this seriously—one way or the other—they’ll start fighting like we do.” Charles—and everyone else—could see the anger welling up in Carla.

    Finally she said, “Is that what you’re taught at home? And in the Lodge?”

    “He’s taught at home to keep his mouth shut,” a voice came from the adult table. It was the Count, obviously able to hear his son’s speech.

    Evidently someone missed this bit of education in Bishop Broadbent’s upbringing.

  • Another Palm Beach Landmark Bites the Dust

    In this case, Testa’s Restaurant:

    The Testa family received permission from the Architectural Commission on Wednesday to demolish the restaurant, gas station, Via Testa retail shops and other buildings on its 1.3-acre property along Royal Poinciana Way and Sunset Avenue.

    As is commonly the case in Palm Beach, the road to this point has been an ordeal, with ARCOM and the other preservationists being the usual complicating factors.  (For far sorrier exhibitions of this process, you can view this or even this.)

    Testa’s is truly an old Palm Beach landmark; my grandparents ate there, it was a favourite of theirs and the family in general.  They starting coming to South Florida in the 1930’s during my grandfather’s aviation career, then took the yacht south in the 1940’s  and finally moved to Palm Beach in the 1950’s.  We followed suit fifty years ago next month.

    Above: my grandfather’s yacht at the Palm Beach Municipal Marina, 1948.  The top photo has the Flagler Bridge in the background.  Taking that would be a straight shot to Testa’s.  The bridge too is being replaced now after the usual Palm Beach ordeal.

    The basic problem is that commercial property in one era doesn’t always work in another, and so the Testa family has had a tug of war over upgrading their property.  (Personally I think the nearby Royal Poinciana Plaza is better suited for contemporary use as is, but that hasn’t prevented a stink over its redevelopment too).

    The good news is that the Testa family is still doing the developing.  Seeing an old landmark go is sad (and an all to common occurrence in South Florida) but hopefully the family will redevelop well and help move forward this part of Palm Beach’s retail space.

  • One More Time: My Thoughts on Greg Griffith's Conversion to Catholicism

    It seems that pieces on “Tiber swimming” have become my stock in trade.  Recently I did one on the conversion of Swedish Charismatic pastor Ulf Ekman to the Roman Catholic Church.  I must admit, however, that I was blindsided by the piece simply entitled “Waypoints” by the proprietor of the Anglican blogosphere’s premier conservative site, Stand Firm in Faith.  Greg Griffith’s piece started with a very simple but surprising revelation:

    After more than ten years on the front lines of the Anglican wars, I have made a major change. This past Easter vigil, my family and I were confirmed in the Roman Catholic Church.

    Although it’s tempting to try to draw parallels with the last high-profile conversion reviewed,  the two really don’t compare.  The two situations are entirely different, a difference enhanced by the fact that Griffith is a layman.

    Rather than rehash his well-written piece, I think some takeaways are in order.  Let’s start with this one:

    So for me, a move to Rome is not about a revolution in my theology, and certainly not about a rejection of Anglicanism. It is about a very painful choice between two dilemmas:

    On the one hand there is Anglicanism, an expression of faith that in the abstract – its doctrines and theology – is as nearly perfect as I believe man has ever succeeded in achieving, but which in practice has unraveled into a chaotic mess…On the other hand there is Roman Catholicism, some of whose doctrines give me serious pause, but which in practice has shown itself to be steadfast in its opposition to the caprices of the world.

    I think that puts into a nutshell the practical core of the dilemma between being Anglican and Roman Catholic.  My most popular piece is this comparison (which I hope Greg read somewhere along the way).  My point and his is that the choice between the two isn’t as clear-cut as one would like, especially when viewed from the pew.

    …the promise of the orthodox Anglican movement outside of The Episcopal Church never materialized either. Populated as that movement is by many good people, it has the institutional feeling of something held together by duct tape and baling wire. It is beset by infighting and consecration fever, and in several of its highest leadership positions are people of atrocious judgement and character.

    My guess is that some of the bad actors he’s thinking about are the likes of Chuck Murphy, John Hepworth and of course Tory Baucum.  But there are some more general problems in North American Anglicanism that would challenge any leader.  I’ve mentioned these before but they bear repeating.

    The first is that the seceding people, with or without their parishes or dioceses, brought two very divisive and unresolved issues with them: women’s ordination and the Anglo-Catholic/Reformed divide.  The former is fairly recent; the latter goes back to the nineteenth century. Setting aside personality problems (and, of course, coming up with golden parachutes for the redundant bishops), these have perpetuated many divisions and added to the confusion.

    The second is the obsession with union with Canterbury.   Had this not been on so many people’s agenda, it would have simplified the setup of orthodox North American Anglicanism considerably.  That misplaced focus lead to the multiple provincial jurisdictions which tried to achieve that on an indirect basis.  It was great in its own way but hindered things when it was time to unify.  That said, I still believe that the last hope for Anglican Christianity to be anything else than a footnote are the Africans.  But even here a unified North American entity, unconcerned with communion with Canterbury and reaching out to the orthodox provinces, would have made things simpler on both sides of the Atlantic.

    And that doesn’t take into consideration the problems with either Rowan Williams or Justin Welby…

    There’s one more thing that I’d like to comment on, and it’s this:

    We began attending services in March of last year. At first just once a month, then with increasing frequency. One morning I noticed that my daughter had recited the confession and the Creed purely from memory, while I still had to read the text to keep from reciting the Anglican versions. A month or so later, we were literally having to drag her – I mean, knock on the door and walk in and take her by the arm – from Sunday School to get to Mass on time. It was impossible not to see that she was very, very happy, a perception punctuated by the knowledge that all she has known her entire life is that her parents have been in a very public and very pitched war with her church.

    Choosing a church isn’t the straightforward proposition that enthusiasts make it out to be.  One has to deal with many things: local situations, parish variations, different ministers or priests, family requirements (especially with children), the perennial class stratification of American Christianity, and what not.  Having done enough of it in my lifetime, I’m sympathetic to what Greg has gone through.  The key, as always, is keeping what’s really important in front of you; God will take care of the rest.

    And as for Stand Firm?  That, to borrow a phrase from the Occupant, is beyond my pay grade.  There are non-Anglicans on the bloggers list already; throwing one greenhorn Roman Catholic into the mix won’t hurt.  But I think that the centre of the drama of the Anglican Revolt is pretty much past, and Greg’s conversion is a sign of that about as much as anything.  Stand Firm will continue to enlighten and sometimes entertain, but now we all should focus on the mission that God put us here to do.  I think it sad that we have had to spend so much time and energy on trying to fix churches that won’t be fixed.

    We, like Our Lord, must be about our Father’s business.  May God bless Greg and his family in the days ahead.

    ,

  • The Endless Need for Moral Certainty

    Hasn’t gone away:

    But in fact, as people have turned away from the religious framework, they have not jettisoned that interior certitude, that feeling of absolute confidence that used to be associated only with religious doctrine and belief. When people stop believing in God, they quickly find surrogate beliefs, construct surrogate values, and embrace a conviction that, in its force and depth, is no different, from that which had previously been supplied by religion.

    Newfoundland–where Rex Murphy, the author, grew up–is on the opposite end of the continent’s Atlantic coast from South Florida, where I grew up.  This is so in every sense of the word (and a fine point that some of my visitors, ahem, don’t quite grasp).  The world that he describes at the beginning of his post is as alien to me as it is to most people born on this continent the last half century.

    The social changes that have altered our civilisation (and I use that phrase loosely) ostensibly were for the liberation of people.  And in a place like I started out in, that meant that people who had any kind of moral certainty were the “odd people out” and were treated accordingly, although in a place with a limited sense of community that long reach wasn’t as long as it could have been.

    Our punditry (and when I say “our” I’m principally thinking of Christian punditry) likes to speak of post-modern society (which began, according to this, in 1973) where all values and morality are relative.  But that’s not what the end game of this revolution is all about.  What it’s about is the change from one moral certainty to another.  That’s reflected in the way the “discussion” goes in our society: same-sex civil marriage rather than none, the endless appeals to “science” as an authority, and mob action when the law is either too slow or too ambiguous.

    I think that the process our society has undergone is, to borrow a term from thermodynamics, irreversible.  But that doesn’t mean that the system isn’t headed for a crash, which it is.  When that happens, what comes next depends upon how we prepare for it.

    In the meanwhile, don’t hesitate to challenge their moral authority.  They need the humility.

  • The Reasons Christ is Really Present in the Eucharist

    It’s always amazing that the “fundamental” Protestants pass over this, but they do.  From Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 3 q.75 a.1:

    The presence of Christ’s true body and blood in this sacrament cannot be detected by sense, nor understanding, but by faith alone, which rests upon Divine authority. Hence, on Luke 22:19: “This is My body which shall be delivered up for you,” Cyril says: “Doubt not whether this be true; but take rather the Saviour’swords with faith; for since He is the Truth, He lieth not.”

    Now this is suitable, first for the perfection of the New Law. For, the sacrifices of the Old Law contained only in figure that true sacrifice of Christ’s Passion, according to Hebrews 10:1: “For the law having a shadow of the good things to come, not the very image of the things.” And therefore it was necessary that the sacrifice of the New Law instituted by Christ should have something more, namely, that it should contain Christ Himself crucified, not merely in signification or figure, but also in verytruth. And therefore this sacrament which contains Christ Himself, as Dionysius says (Eccl. Hier. iii), is perfective of all the other sacraments, in which Christ’s virtue is participated.

    Secondly, this belongs to Christ’s love, out of which for our salvation He assumed a true body of our nature. And because it is the special feature of friendship to live together with friends, as the Philosopher says (Ethic. ix), He promises us His bodily presence as a reward, saying (Matthew 24:28): “Where the body is, there shall the eagles be gathered together.” Yet meanwhile in our pilgrimage He does not deprive us of His bodily presence; but unites us with Himself in this sacrament through the truth of His body and blood. Hence (John 6:57) he says: “He that eateth My flesh, and drinketh My blood, abideth in Me, and I in him.” Hence this sacrament is the sign of supreme charity, and the uplifter of our hope, from such familiar union of Christ with us.

    Thirdly, it belongs to the perfection of faith, which concerns His humanity just as it does His Godhead, according to John 14:1: “You believe in God, believe also in Me.” And since faith is of things unseen, as Christ shows us His Godhead invisibly, so also in this sacrament He shows us His flesh in an invisible manner.

    Although Aquinas starts with it as a matter of faith, he doesn’t let the matter rest there, proceeding with reasons why a proposition is so.  In  addition to a truly Biblical eucharistic theology, his method separates him from many others in that he always wants to answer the question “why,” a question that’s getting harder and harder to even ask these days.

  • Everyone Knew the Charismatics Were Nuts

    Well, almost everyone:

    God hasn’t stopped frustrating expectations. Who in 1900 expected that there would be 150 million Pentecostals and Charismatics in Latin America? Sure, charismatic prophets predicted it, but everyone knew they were mad. In 1900, there were 9 million Christians in Africa. Now it’s pushing half a billion, and many are members of AICs—African Independent (or Initiated or Instituted) Churches—that have no counterpart in the North and West. Who saw that coming?

    Pentecostals love to take shots at human logic, but here it works: to say that “everyone knew” is an ad populum argument, which is logically fallacious (like these, although educating people in this difficult, as you can see).  But God, who has the resources to make it happen, did so, and the rest, as they say, is history.

    I don’t agree with Leithart’s decision to stay put; the fact that his church is liberal and Reformed is a double whammy to me.  But it’s his; as long as he’s ready to admit that Truth comes from somewhere other than Geneva or Dordrecht, he’ll either do well or get the boot, in which case he’ll do really well.

  • Born to be Alive: The People Respond

    For the entire work and an interactive table of contents, click here.

    When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?”

    Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven.  And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.  The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off — for all whom the Lord our God will call.”

    With this and many other words he warned them and he pleaded with them, “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.”  Those who accepted his message were baptized, and about three thousand were added to their number that day.[1]

    Peter has finished his preaching it was now time for the people to make their response.  This they did three thousand saved and baptized is a good response for any sermon.

    By virtue of this and his other discourses, Peter is the first Pentecostal preacher, and this is the first Pentecostal sermon ever given.  In fact, this is the Pentecostal sermon, as it was given on the Pentecost when the Holy Spirit first fell.  Yet, looking at our modern Pentecostal (and Charismatic) preaching, it is odd in many ways.  It is very short to begin with, five or ten minutes at the very most.  There was no altar call, yet literally thousands came for repentance and baptism there was not even an offering here, although the Jerusalem church was to become very successful in its stewardship program.  Seeing these kinds of differences, we need to ask ourselves a basic question: What is real Pentecostal preaching?

    Pentecostal Preaching

    As is the case with worship, there are a lot of well defined ideas afloat about what a true Pentecostal preacher is all about.  According to some, Pentecostal preachers must look the part they must have on certain clothes and style their hair a certain way.  Their voice must take on a wholly new complexion when they mount the pulpit.  They must hold the Bible in a certain way, and know when to use it — both in the sermon and physically — according to well established practice.  If they get happy or run the aisles when they preach, all the better.  If they have all of these qualities in abundance, they are expected to go on for at least an hour and a half.

    While great preachers do some or all of these things, by themselves these activities make neither a real Pentecostal preacher nor a real Pentecostal sermon.  As is the case with worship, this can only be done through the move of the Holy Spirit, and attempting to pump the Spirit up with purely human methods will not get the job done.

    This book is a layman’s look at Acts 2, although up until now most of it does not really have much of a particularly layman’s emphasis.  What the Holy Spirit poured out on Pentecost was for all flesh, clerical and lay alike.  But this is one point where this layman, having heard and seen many Pentecostal and Charismatic sermons and preachers, would like to speak from the pew on what a person needs to be a real Pentecostal preacher.

    The qualifications for overseers and pastors is well laid out in the New Testament Paul left neither Timothy nor Titus nor the church hanging on this issue.  But Pentecostal and Charismatic preachers, operating in the spiritual realm that they do, need to have two qualities from God to be where they are.  These are the call and the anointing.

    Pentecostal preachers should be first and foremost called by God to do what they do.  Pentecostal preachers should know when they were called and under what circumstances they were called.  This experience be of such a nature that those who must decide whether or not they be given their license to preach must believe and be convinced this calling is real.  And this calling must be from God parents, church, friends, or other worldly factors are not legitimate callings into the ministry.  Jesus called each of his disciples his ministers today should hear no less.

    The second requirement is the anointing.  When most people think of the anointing, they think of many if not all of the requirements that we listed earlier for preachers.  But these are not sure signs of anointing charlatans and people without the call have been simulating these for years.  The most important sign that a preacher has the anointing is the response he gets when he preaches.  When an anointed preacher speaks forth, the blind should see, the deaf hear, the lame walk, the dead live again, and most important of all people should be compelled to seek and find salvation, sanctification, and the baptism of the Holy Spirit.  Peter shows us this in his first Pentecostal sermon, for thousands were transformed under his preaching the second sermon followed another act of his anointing, namely the healing of the lame man.  A preacher’s anointing can only be measured by the lives that are changed under his ministry.

    These lofty requirements are necessitated by a simple fact: those who are preachers are in reality the successors to the apostles.  Now the words “apostolic succession” are fighting words to most evangelical Christians, because they are used by the liturgical churches to justify their primacy amongst Christian denominations.  And, if the truth be known, these churches can trace an organizational continuity from the present back through their divisions and onward to the church under the Roman Empire, which includes that of the Apostles themselves.

    Unfortunately, quite a lot has gotten lost in the shuffle through the centuries were it not so, all of the divisions that have taken place would have been unnecessary.  To illustrate our point, in 1220 the Roman Catholic Church recognized the Dominican order of priests, named after its founder, the Spaniard Dominic de Guzman.  This same Dominic is reputed to have been standing outside of the complex of St. Peter’s in Rome with the Pope.  Thinking of his claim as Peter’s successor as ruler of the church, the Pope pointed to his magnificent papal complex and said to Dominic “Peter can no longer say, `Silver and gold have I none,’” to which Dominic replied, “No, and neither can he now say, `Rise and walk.’”

    Neither the Apostolic Age nor the New Testament church were man-made both were created by Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit.  If our preachers and pastors do not have the same charism as the Apostles had in leading the church, how can we hope to experience the same Pentecostal power that they did?

    Cut to the Heart

    If the anointing is measured with results, Peter was well endowed with both his listeners were “cut to the heart.”  They literally responded en masse, of such a nature that any church growth advocate would be well pleased.  But the impact of Peter’s message was two dimensional not only did he affect a large number of people, but he affected them deeply.  His message got to the root of their problem his words were the Word of God.  “For the Word of God is living and active.  Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.”[2]  In addition to reaching many people, Pentecostal preaching must also reach deeply into the depths of the human being.  This is only done when the preaching is fueled and the people are moved by the Holy Spirit.

    This is also a controversial subject, because for centuries the essence of getting people saved was their faith being accounted for righteousness, and their name being written in the Lamb’s Book of Life.  If this could be accomplished, then a person was going to heaven.  Originally, since this line of thinking was frequently coupled with Calvinistic predestination, people would look for evidence of election in a person’s life and conduct.  Later, as Arminian influences began to be felt in evangelical churches, people began to get the idea that a person could, by their own free will, make the act of faith and repentance and be saved, and neither murder nor apostasy could change the fact.

    Make no mistake about it a church that does not first emphasize the justification and salvation of its members, both present and potential, is doing both them and itself the most serious disservice possible.  By playing down the importance of people acquiring justification from God, it will not only consign them to Hell in the next life, it will also pack its pews with apathetic box checkers.  These merely make an appearance every Sunday and then disappear into the woodwork during the week to live whatever life they see fit, approved of God or not.  People need the assurance that their sins are forgiven and that they are right with God.  A right relationship with God, both in this life and the next, is based precisely on this assurance.

    However, salvation is not the end of the Christian life it is the beginning.  If the only object of the outreach of the church is to get people initially saved, it doesn’t take a very deep view of the human condition to achieve this all we must do under these circumstances is to induce some feelings of being sorry and some desire to get right with God through Jesus Christ.  There is no real demand to get at the root of the depths of the human condition.  This is especially tempting in the middle class congregations that many pastors are faced with today.  These people have learned the art of external respectability, and how to look right when they may or may not be right.

    It is on this account that Jesus insisted that we be born again.  Paul expands on this to say that, when we make Jesus Savior, the old man of sin dies, and the new man in Christ is born in both cases we become new people.  This is a radical transformation of the human self that is all too often conventionalized into oblivion.  When we say that someone is a “born-again Christian,” do we really stop and consider how major an overhaul of a person this implies?  The human condition in its unsaved state is one of complex rottenness.  There are so many nooks and crannies of unredeemed sinfulness in our lives, each one must be worked so we can say “And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.”[3]

    It is the work of the Holy Spirit which makes this major transformation possible it is this which took place under the ministry of Peter.  Traditional Pentecostal parlance would refer to this as placing the people “under conviction.”  This isn’t quite strong enough the wretchedness of their own sinful condition must be forcefully thrust to the center of their attention, and this realization must produce abject surrender in the life of the sinner, which in turn leads him or her to turn to God in love with a whole heart.  Any less than this and the process of rebirth will frequently be stillborn.

    Once this had been accomplished in Peter’s hearers, the first thing that was done was to have the new believers baptized.  Some like it and some don’t, but the New Testament church knew of no other kind of baptism than immersion of believers after their conversion.  This is too powerful a statement of a believer’s rebirth to consign it to those who cannot appreciate it.

    But then what happens after a person is saved?  We have considered the baptism in the Holy Spirit, but there is one other work that is very important in the life of the believer, and that work is sanctification.

    Sanctification

    The word sanctification comes from the Latin it means “to make holy.”  Sanctification is especially important to Pentecostals because many of the early Pentecostal pioneers and churches were originally “holiness” people or churches.  Before we get back into history we need to stop and take a look at what it means to be holy.

    Simply put, holiness is the state of being set apart something or someone that is holy has first and foremost been chosen and set apart by God for a particular purpose.  “But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.”[4]  When God sets someone apart, three things take place.  First, the person is set apart from something, specifically the world, its prince the Devil, and the flesh.  Second, the person is set apart into something, namely God himself.  Third, to make this all happen, God induces the necessary transformation in a person so that this transition from darkness to light might be effective.  This is what sanctification is all about.

    Now some will argue this transformation takes place at the time of salvation, or others during the process of salvation.  But sanctification and justification are two different things.  Once salvation has taken place, even though a new birth has taken place, we are still bound to our human flesh.  Even Paul discovered “For in my inner being I delight in God’s law but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members.  What a wretched man I am!  Who will rescue me from this body of death?  Thanks be to God — through Jesus Christ our Lord!”[5]  To truly be set apart for God this other law must be effectively dealt with, and this is what sanctification is all about.

    The doctrine of sanctification as a special work was a common inheritance of many early Pentecostal pioneers, coming out of holiness churches as many did.  It represented a healthy reaction against a lot of “cheap grace” and lackluster Christian living that was floating around then and now.  In the beginning, it was the desire of these people to create a church membership that was, individually and collectively, truly set apart for God, faithfully walking close to God on a daily basis.  This is an admirable objective, a living statement of the basic truth that being a Christian is more than just an external whitewash, but a total transformation.  In the process of implementing sanctification in the life of the church, these pioneers created a climate of strictness in the churches that has been controversial ever since.

    Those who carried out this holy mandate ran into two problems.  The first grew out of the central problem in monitoring spiritual development, namely the inability of people to read the mind and discern the heart of others.  This is best reserved for God, even though people who are not up to par spiritually can corrupt the others.  Systems of conduct were instituted to give people some idea of what to look for in holy people.  These spiritual yardsticks became holiness themselves, and so we find may being excluded from church for deviant external practices rather than lack of internal holiness.

    The second problem concerned isolation.  Because of the strictness of the churches, those within became an elite group they would not have outlasted the rigors of church had they not been elite in some way.  But this led to serious isolation of these churches from the rest of humanity, and more often than not from the rest of Christianity.  While some isolation is necessary to insulate the church from external corruption, the isolation was of such a nature that in some cases the witness of the church was hindered by it.

    It is easy for us to criticize those who have gone before.  In some circles it has become fashionable to do so, all the while living a lifestyle totally opposed to that of their Pentecostal predecessors.  But before we write off the sincere efforts of those who have gone before and then make equally appalling mistakes of our own we need to consider some basic facts.

    The idea of church discipline is a biblical one the New Testament spends some time on the subject.  Its purpose is both to restore errant Christians to spiritual health and to protect the rest of the Body of Christ from corruption, and both of these are essential for the life of the church.  The methods outlined in the New Testament are aimed at achieving both.  To be successful in this endeavor requires a great deal of pastoral wisdom and Christian love.  The absence of either will make for miserable church discipline, but this is no excuse for dispensing with same altogether.  Doing so will result in a church where anything goes, at which point a church has lost it purpose for existence.

    More than this, a church has a right and an obligation to expect a certain level of commitment from its members, both in terms of what the members are supposed to do and don’t.  Jesus Christ expects us to give everything to him when we are his.  Should his church be honored when we simply show up?  More than this, a church that expects little or nothing from its members implicitly devalues them, because it tells them they have nothing to contribute.  This is the condition of many liberal churches today.  They have become so open and undemanding of their members that many of their members have lost the purpose for being there and have left.  A church that demands much from its members is a church that needs them.

    Finally we must return where we started, to the subject of sanctification.  Today we see a great emphasis on church growth, on the addition of numbers to the flock, and not just numbers but large numbers.  This is not an illegitimate pursuit.  Large numbers reveal that our outreach efforts are reaching a large number of people, that we are casting our nets wide in being fishers of men.  But what will these people do when we catch them?  Will they take on a few lifestyle changes and call it Christianity?  Will they contribute to our churches by simply filling our pews and our coffers?  Or will they experience a total transformation of life, not just in doing, but in being, that people who see them will know that they are the Lord’s?

    The whole business of sanctification is one that sets us apart from the world and for God, and in the meanwhile makes the inner transformation necessary to make this setting apart real.  Sanctification starts on the inside and works its way out, not the other way around.  No matter how we make ourselves up or don’t, where we can go or can’t, what we can say or can’t, no matter how much external “holiness” we put on, unless this is more than show, unless it is more than to keep our nosey fellow church members off our back, then real sanctification is not ours.  We are then back to external observance of Law, and that is what Jesus came to free us from.  When we are made holy on the inside, the results will come out in a beauty that the world can see and want to have for themselves, and one that also will increase our peace with ourselves.  At this point, the purpose of the Gospel will be fulfilled and we, by the way we are, will be part of that fulfillment.

    The development of internal sanctification is not an easy task, either for individuals or for the church at large.  This is why churches and members have all too often settled for external observance it is the easy way out.  But this is one of those things that will yield a hundred fold, both in terms of the inner peace of the Christians and the effect it has on others.  There is no proportion, however, in what we give to God and in what God gives to us, and in this context any price we must pay is a mere pittance to what God has in store for us when we allow him to set us apart for himself.  No matter how much people in the past have misinterpreted the implementation of holiness and sanctification — and we cannot honestly say that they missed the meaning as well, for they did not — we must go on to see the holiness of ourselves and our brothers and sisters in the church implemented in the fullest, not in meanness or pettiness but in love, so that in the end we and others can see Christ alive in us.

    The Sun Sets

    With the conversion of the three thousand, the account of the first day of Pentecost ends.  The sun sets over Herod’s Palace, darkness falls, and it’s a serious darkness without electric lighting.  Unlike the westerns, however, when the cowboy rides into the sunset with “The End” on his back, the sunset of the day of Pentecost is not the end, but just the beginning of the life of the church and the move of the Spirit.

    The Second Chapter of Acts does not end here either, and while the chapter and verse numbering is not an inspired part of the Scriptures, it is none the less fitting that, in the same chapter as the day of Pentecost, there is some account of the activity of the church.  For the church was not stillborn its life started at Pentecost and continues to the present time.  So we must turn now to that brief look at the church in the wake of Pentecost and in particular one aspect of that life that is of ample relevance in our day.

    [1]Acts 2:37-41

    [2]Heb 4:12

    [3]2 Cor 3:18

    [4]1 Pt 2:9

    [5]Rm 7:22-25

  • It's Important to Know a Competitor When You See One

    And the Roman Catholic Church in the UK hasn’t quite figured that out about the EU:

    Bishop Noel is of the view that the European Union “is a noble and historic project”. “It is vital,” he says, “that we participate in the European elections to ensure the EU and its institutions continue to evolve democratically in the face of the massive political, social, economic and ethical challenges it is now facing.”

    And therein lies the clearest guidance you could possibly get that Christians should not vote for Ukip, for they favour secession, not participation. And they would prefer that the the whole continental construct implode rather than that its institutions continue to evolve democratically, thereby incrementally undermining national sovereignty and diminishing the historic rights of the people. For the Bishop, the EU is a Catholic construct; for Ukip, it is intrinsically anti-Christian (and this debate has been had time and again).

    I’ve said elsewhere that Roman Catholicism has Christianity’s best intellectual tradition (in some ways its only one, the Protestant effort is stillborn and the Orthodox bailed on theirs with the death of John of Damascus).  But there are some topics where the church lays an intellectual egg, and this is one of them.

    The RCC is very insistent of a positive role of the state, especially if that state is a Roman Catholic state.  But those are few and far between these days (I can’t really think of one any more except the Vatican itself) and so the Church looks for a substitute.  Since another one of the Church’s ideals is to restore the unity of Europe (one broken with the Reformation) an institution that comes along promising to accomplish same is bound to get a sympathetic view from Rome.  That institution is the EU, and so the RCC bishops in the UK basically tell the faithful that they have no business voting for UKIP.

    The Church would get a clearer picture looking at things historically rather than through an ideal construct.  While the unity of Europe would be nice, the EU is a godless, undemocratic institution that has no real use for the RCC or any other church.  As Cranmer points out:

    Of course, in issuing his guidance, Bishop Noel is mindful of Roman Catholic Social teaching, centred around the right to life; the uniqueness of marriage between a woman and man; the promotion of justice, social inclusion and concern for the poor; and the pursuit of peace and reconciliation. 

    And therein lies the tension, for the political entity that is the European Union certainly promotes peace, mutual understanding and reconciliation, and yet, in the pursuit of justice and equality, it negates the right to life and nullifies the God-ordained institution of marriage.

    While the RCC is certainly capable of tolerating the undemocratic part, you’d think that it would have enough sense to at least skip being the cheerleader for such an enterprise.  The EU is, in reality, a competitor to the RCC. (A more balanced Roman Catholic view of the subject is here).

    Moreover it’s worth noting that Roman Catholicism’s point of highest place in European history was when the Roman Empire–the last “universal” state in Europe–went away.  To some extent the Church became its substitute, with results that were probably better for Europe than they were for the Church.  A similar argument could be applied to civil marriage.  When the Roman Empire fell, it fell to the church to marry people.  When the states came back, they took that “ultimate” right to themselves.  So why does the RCC, with its sacramental view of marriage, fight so hard to keep out same-sex civil marriage when it should be applying its considerable resources to dumping it altogether?

    All of this avoids another question: should the UK be in the EU in the first place?  When the EC was first formed, the idea was to keep the French in, the Germans down and the British out.  So when that idea become passé?

  • The Imaginary Land of American Foreign Policy

    The world’s largest democracy has swept Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) into power, and they’re trying to figure out what he’s going to do to change India:

    The new composition of parliament is significant, as are a number of other factoids about this election. The BJP has returned at least 279 seats in the partial count while its coalition, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), has comfortably secured leads in over 330 constituencies, giving it absolute control of the lower house (Lok Sabha), while the BJP itself has a majority in the house. This means stability – that one word missing from the dictionary of Indian politics for the past 25 years.

    Meanwhile back in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Braves, we’re fixated on his past and our own legal finickiness:

    India’s voters had brought to power a man who is not permitted to visit the United States, having been denied a U.S. visa in 2005 on account of a State Department determination that he had violated religious freedoms in the Indian state of Gujarat. (Some 2,000 Muslims had died in riots that scarred Gujarat in 2002. Modi was the state’s chief minister at the time, and his critics hold him responsible for the deaths.) The visa ban was still in place when Modi was nominated last September to lead the Bharatiya Janata [Indian People’s] Party into the elections; and most awkwardly for Obama, the ban was still technically in place on the day of his victory. American diplomacy has been decidedly maladroit.

    “Decidedly maladroit” is an understatement.  Given that nothing is ever really closed in our legal system, should Modi even risk coming to these shores? He may not have to:

    Modi’s keenest ally—potentially his BFF—is likely to be Japan’s Shinzo Abe, who was one of the first to send his congratulations to the Indian politician when it became apparent that he would be the next prime minister. Abe and Modi are, in many ways, made for each other: Ardent nationalists yearning to break free from their respective nations’ patterns of international passivity, they both face the terrifying challenge of a China that plays by its own unyielding rules, a maximalist hegemon which has the economic and military heft to dispense with diplomacy as the primary means of dispute resolution.

    The United States’ position wouldn’t be so hypocritical if, in its theoretical obsession with the rule of law, it wouldn’t be so busy trying to bury its own inconvenient scandals–Fast and Furious, the IRS/Tea Party business, Benghazi–which its chattering classes find so distasteful to discuss.

    A long time ago I wrote this; some of this stuff reminds me of what I put there as fantasy.  If we’re not really careful, we’ll end up with the same result, too.

  • The People Who Love Going to Church

    Are more and more non-white:

    “What I see among Millennials are African Americans, and Asians Americans, and Latinos who are vibrantly growing in faith and leading the future of what the church will become,” says Gray.

    About a third of young (18-29 year old) Americans — and more than half of younger Christians — are people of color, according to data from the Public Religion Research Institute. White Christians, on the other hand, make up only a quarter of younger Americans. In fact there are more Nones — those with no religion — than white Christians in this age group.

    But the switch from most Christians being white to the majority being non-white has largely gone unnoticed. Instead, most of the focus has been on the idea that “young people are leaving the church.” That idea is true among white evangelicals, who show a dramatic decline in PRRI’s polling. Among Americans 65 and older, nearly 3 in 10 (29 percent) are evangelicals. That number drops to 1 in 10 for younger Americans.

    That makes me think of something that happened to my wife and I last fall when we went to South Florida for my high school reunion.  She wanted to go to the Swap Shop, the big indoor (mostly) flea market in Ft. Lauderdale.  She also wanted a screen protector for her new iPhone.  So we went from one booth to another until we found one at the price we liked, and not only that the nice young lady at the counter agreed to put it on.  While she was doing this my wife asked her whether she went to church anywhere (a common question in the South, a whole different matter in South Florida).  She, who looked like her family came from Mexico or Central America, told us the name of an independent Hispanic full-gospel church, and then added “I love going to church”.  At that point I noted the “Jesus te ama” bracelet on her arm.

    One of the pleasures of working for the Church of God–which I did for 13 1/2 years–was ministering to and interacting with non-white churches and people,–Hispanic, Caribbean, Indian, Roma, you name it.  Combined with my years of international business and the engineering profession, I find that life is better when you can share it with people from so many different backgrounds.

    I also think that people like this young lady make South Florida a sweeter place, something the region needs badly.  And the same effect is in store for Evangelical Christianity in this country, too.

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