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Thinkin’ About the New Day
The unpredictable state of the 2008 election means that every day is a new one, which makes "New Day," the title track to Cookin’ Mama’s dynamic album, a good anthem for these strange times (although the new day they sing about is vastly different than a political one) and our podcast this week. The whole album can be found here. -
Of Course American Christianity is Turning Charismatic!
Pentecostal or charismatic Christianity is viewed by some Americans as an emotional, theologically suspect form of the Christian faith. It is widely thought to be a very vocal and visible, but numerically small slice of the grand religious pie in the United States. Two new surveys from The Barna Group, however, indicate that things are changing dramatically in the religious landscape. Those surveys – one among a national sample of adults and the other among a national sample of Protestant pastors – show that the number of churches and adherents to Pentecostal perspectives and practices has grown significantly in the past two decades.
Read it all.
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A Verse for Epiphany
“For from the rising of the sun even unto the going down of the same my name shall be great among the Gentiles; and in every place incense shall be offered unto my name, and a pure offering: for my name shall be great among the heathen, saith the LORD of hosts.” Malachi 1:11.
From the Morning Prayer opening sentence for Epiphany from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer.
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The Unsolved Mystery of Judge Hagler and the Murder of Integrity Leader Marty Davis
In 1997 Episcopal Rev. Marty Davis, a leader in the TEC GLBT group Integrity, was murdered. Recently a tape surfaced made by Judge John Hagler (who had known Rev. Davis at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland, TN) has led to the re-examination of the case:
The former secretary to Judge John Hagler testified Thursday afternoon that when she read a tape made by the judge she "felt a crime had been committed" and believed it related to the 1997 murder of Episcopal priest Marty Davis in Brainerd.
Nona Rogers said Judge Hagler went to church with Mr. Davis, and she said the priest would visit the judge’s office and call him on the phone.
Ms. Rogers said, "Because of the male topic, he was the first person who came to mind."
Ms. Rogers said after she first listened to the tape that she accidentally discovered on the back side of dictation from the judge, "I shook all over. I was just numb."
This has led to calls for the release of the tape, which has been under wraps:
The brother of slain Episcopal priest Marty Davis is pleading for former Bradley County Judge John Hagler to release a tape recording that police have said could be connected to the decade-old homicide.
"I’m asking the judge specifically for justice," said Thomas Davis, 52, of Cleveland, Tenn. "Judge, we need to know. If it’s your brother or son, you would want to know. We’ve waited a long time. Just allow us to rest."
Looks to me like someone is trying to cover up a gay affair. But we’ll see.
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You Never Know Who’s Listening
Some times you hear the idea that we as Christians, when out and about in the world, can draw the people around us to Christ by our conversation with each other. There’s some Biblical justification for this:
Let your conversation always be kindly, and seasoned, as it were, with salt; that you may know in each case what answer you ought to give. (Colossians 4:6)
A really good example comes from Dick Staub:
And then in my dream I heard another voice — a British philosopher from Oxford named Anthony Flew. After years of advocating atheism, he concluded there must be a God, and wrote about it in "There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind."
I remembered hearing Flew two years ago in Oxford, when he was asked if he had ever met C.S. Lewis, who in 1930 made the journey from atheist to theist to Christian.
Flew shared that as an Oxford student, he and his friends would go for drinks at the "Bird and Baby" pub in Oxford, and would sit as close as they could to the "inklings" — Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Hugo Dyson and other literary types who were also Christian. Flew was taken by their cheerful disputation, their witty repartee, their willingness to take on any idea and consider it from every angle. In short, he was awed by their intelligence, their comprehensive knowledge and fearlessness in the face of argumentation.
These men of good will had sought the truth and found it, and the truth had set them free. They found this truth — not by placing blind faith in an alethiometer, nor in an authoritarian religious bureaucracy — but in a child who was a savior and king, born in a manger in Bethlehem.
And then I heard a voice in my dream say: "Wise men still seek him."
And remember that Tolkien, Lewis, Owen Barfield and the rest were drinking beer in a pub!
You never know who’s listening, nor the seeds you are planting…
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Messing In Our Own Box
It’s indicative of the sad state of what is conventionally termed Christianity (but I have my doubts) when an avowed atheist calls our bluff, as Brendan O’Neill does in his article Mankind is more than the janitor of planet Earth:
In his Christmas sermon, delivered at Canterbury Cathedral, Dr Williams finally completed his journey from old-world Christianity to trendy New Ageism. His sermon was indistinguishable from those delivered (not just at Christmas but for life) by the heads of Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth. Williams did not speak about Christian morality; in fact, he didn’t utter the m-word at all. He said little about men’s responsibility to love one another and God, the two Commandments Jesus Christ said we should live by. Instead he talked about our role as janitors on planet Earth, who must stop plundering the ‘warehouse of natural resources’ and ensure that we clean up after ourselves…
Christian teaching was once concerned with man, meaning and morality, with questions of free will, inner life and human destiny. As it happens, atheists, at least progressive ones, were concerned with exactly the same things. The chasm-sized difference between atheists and Christians occurred over the question of whether the moral meaning of man came from within or without; whether, as some atheists believed, the purpose of humanity was to be found within humanity itself; or, as Christians believed, humanity achieved meaning only through an external deity, God…
The cult of environmentalism embraced by the Christian churches does away with morality altogether. Some sceptics claim that environmentalism is a new form of moralistic hectoring; it is better to see it as amoralistic hectoring. In judging everything by how much CO2 or pollution it creates, environmentalism dispenses with questions of moral worth and judgement. So a flight to visit a newborn nephew in Australia (5.61 tonnes of CO2) is as wicked as taking a flight to Barbados to lounge in the sun; and the transportation of delicious food from Africa to Britain is as unforgivable as the transportation of weapons and drugs from Latin America to Los Angeles: after all, both involve exploiting the ‘warehouse of resources’ and upsetting the ‘fragile balance of species and environments’, as Williams put it (5). When human actions are judged by their levels of pollution alone, the issue of meaning – of why we do things, who we do them for, and how we might do them better – is implicitly downgraded.
This last comment has a parallel with one I made about Islam:
And that leads to the next problem–what works are acceptable? As an example, one of the pillars of Islam is the haj, the trip to Mecca. They believe this is good. For the environmentalist, however, all this does is add to global warming. That kind of problem is why works salvation doesn’t cut it.
If this were the entire province of liberals, that would be one thing. But there are Evangelical leaders who are going down the same road.
So whatever happened to the following:
“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” Genesis 1:26-28, KJV.
Buff ruling the bridge, Ocean Reef, Key Largo, 1965. Dominion. That grant was the beginning of the Christian concept of stewardship. Now stewardship in Christian churches is almost exclusively understood in regard to lay people giving money to the church. But stewardship is more than that: it is the active, intelligent and productive management of the resources that God has given us. He gave us this planet, and the intelligence (that’s the created in his image and likeness business) to productively manage and develop these resources so that they will continue to sustain life. That implies more than just cutting back or making us feel like we’re rubbish; that means getting busy and creative to solve our problems.
My father (who hated environmentalists and environmentalism with a passion) nevertheless observed that man was the only animal who “crapped in his own box.” Our cat (shown in a previously unreleased photograph) addressed this problem by always squatting near the edge of his, which meant that the result occasionally ended up in the floor. The solutions that are tendered by environmentalists and their New Atheist and Christian sympathisers alike don’t show much more imagination than the cat did. It’s time that Christian leaders wake up and take a really Biblical position on this subject, one that shows that our Creator’s confidence in us was not entirely misplaced.
Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
Positive Infinity 