I love hymns (an example)

If you know me very well at all, you know that I've come to have a tremendous amount of respect for the traditions of the Christian Church, especially the (relatively) recent tradition of singing hymns. Even a year ago, that was not the case, but it is now, even if I cannot exactly pinpoint the reason why (though I plan to expound upon the beauty of the hymn in contrast with the advent of contemporary worship music in a later post).

This morning in the traditional old Lutheran church of my youth, we celebrated the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, and sang the hymn "Holy Spirit, Light Divine." One verse in particular made me think of some diagrams used by CCC. The verse reads:

Holy Spirit, all divine, dwell within this heart of mine
Cast down ev'ry idol throne, reign supreme, and reign alone.

Amen.

Summer plans

As was mentioned in a previous post, this blog's founder (Jordan) is gone for the summer on a summer project in Australia. However, I am not. I'll be bouncing around for the next week or so before settling in Nebraska. I will continue to post as much as I can, so I hope people keep reading. Speaking of reading, I figured I would spend a little time detailing what books I have planned to read this summer. I am not sure how many future comments will be spent on my thoughts on these books, but I imagine there will be a few.

Anyway, here's what I'll be reading:

• The Ragamuffin Gospel, by Brennan Manning
• The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, by Robert Louis Wilken
  
• On Christian Liberty, by Martin Luther
• True Spirituality, by Francis Schaeffer
• The God Who is There, by Francis Schaeffer
• Escape from Reason, by Francis Schaeffer
• He is There and He is not Silent, by Francis Schaeffer
• The Reformation: A History, by Diarmaid MacCulloch
  

Additionally, I will be studying a few more reference-style books:

• Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, by William Lane Craig, and J.P. Moreland
• Faith Has Its Reasons, by Kenneth D. Boa and Robert M. Bowman, Jr
• Aquinas' Shorter Summa, by Thomas Aquinas
  

So obviously this is all going to take a long time, and I likely will not finish this summer. I am nearly done with The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, and I am getting into The Ragamuffin Gospel. Also, On Christian Liberty (also known as On the Freedom of a Christian) is very short. I look forward to reading what many consider to be a groundbreaking work by Luther; additionally, the works by Schaeffer are considered classics, and I look forward to familiarizing myself with his monumental contributions to twentieth-century Christian thought.

"Happy the people whose God is the Lord" -- Religion, politics, and Jerry Falwell

I wanted to pass along this article (reprinted in its entirety at the end of the post), written by a California pastor I have much respect for, Paul Viggiano. I was introduced to this man last fall when he appeared on the Apologetics.com weekly radio show on the Reformation (a fantastic two-hour listen, if you have the time).

For me, the highlight of the article is his statement near the end regarding those who would have Christians leaving their faith and Biblically-based ethics out of their politics, a criticism of the religious right that has never made any sense to me. Pastor Viggiano writes,

Those who take part in the political process, at some level, do what Falwell did - they marshal their efforts to promote what they believe to be in the best interests of the people. There is a veiled hypocrisy lurking in the bosom of those who seek to chastise Falwell simply because they disagree with the source of his value system, which happened to be the texts of the Old and New Testaments. Why should his sources be excluded form the marketplace and other sources accepted? People hated his ethics and thought they should be excluded, but they love their own ethics and promote them with gusto.

Exactly. The USA is a nation of ideas. In many ways, it is more of an idea than a place. There is a free market of ideas and we have always taken pride in that. Of course, I cannot agree with the secularist and his/her basic presuppositions about the nature of reality or ethics, but I will not attempt to unduly silence those who hold those viewpoints. At the same time, I expect to be able to argue and reason from my own presuppositions and arrive at conclusions like a reasonable man. When I hear someone say something like "religion should be kept out of the political process," I am simply incredulous. Even should I not refer to my religious convictions explicitly, they are intrinsic to my person and govern my thoughts and actions each and every day so that I may not extricate myself from them. An example: without referring to Jesus, I simply do my best to treat people as He would have me do, as people created in the very image of God Himself. I am to love others; even my enemies.

Now, of course I very often fail at doing all of this. But I know it, and regret it.

Anyway, here's the article.

Falwell's impact will remain

Minister isn't being judged by the espousers of modern liberalism and apostasy. He's facing a higher judge and will have little reason to apologize.

By Paul Viggiano

I never considered myself a huge Jerry Falwell fan - at least until now. The hue and cry cascading off the walls of the dark caves of Western paganism at the mere sound of Falwell's name leads me to conclude that the man was acutely efficient at leading a vanguard of righteousness.

It appears men would have preferred a duplicitous Falwell. For all the talk of hypocrisy and double-mindedness in the church, Falwell is castigated for being single-minded and a man of conviction. "No," his detractors say, "it was not his convictions. It's was his binding of conservative Christianity with conservative politics." As if his particular world view is not allowed to penetrate the sacred halls of government - where, by the way, the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are commonly ground in granite.

Falwell is no longer suffering the cackling hens of modern liberalism and apostasy. He stands before God and will, I suspect, apologize less than most of us for not acknowledging Jesus as king of kings.

It's telling to hear the caviling of those who have no bones speaking ill of the dead. Falwell made a huge difference, and the enemies of biblical ethics would exhume his bones, grind them to powder and have them cast off the Golden Gate.

Leftist angst against Falwell is due in large part to his success. I doubt that Falwell will go down in history as a master theologian. A broader historical examination will reveal that it was the ethical anarchy of the 1960s that made Falwell's career. As we slid into a moral freefall, those who were maintaining their sanity (not me, I saw Woodstock six times in my banana pants and tye-died shirt) wanted to know if God cared about cultural licentiousness or if the Bible had any significance when it came to the reality of a society and its laws and leadership.

Falwell, mirroring historical, biblical Christianity, said yes.

Crimes, by their very nature, are (or at least should be) immoral. The popular slogan that you can't legislate morality is a staggeringly daft proposition. Why in the world would something be a crime if it were not immoral? Falwell's simple argument was that morality makes a difference in terms of the success and happiness of a nation - or as the Bible would put it, "blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord."

Those who take part in the political process, at some level, do what Falwell did - they marshal their efforts to promote what they believe to be in the best interests of the people. There is a veiled hypocrisy lurking in the bosom of those who seek to chastise Falwell simply because they disagree with the source of his value system, which happened to be the texts of the Old and New Testaments. Why should his sources be excluded form the marketplace and other sources accepted? People hated his ethics and thought they should be excluded, but they love their own ethics and promote them with gusto.

There is truly a sad irony that so many would seek to vilify a Christian man simply because he sought to be faithful to the very God the vast majority of our founding fathers appealed to in the process of creating this nation. It would be helpful if his detractors showed us their sacred text so that we might hold it under the same scrutiny.

The Rev. Paul Viggiano is pastor of the Branch of Hope Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Torrance. His e-mail address is pastorpaul@integrity.com.

Away for awhile

Hey all. I just wanted to let you all know that I will be out of communication for 6 or 7 weeks and sorry about not responding to comments, I'll get to that when I'm back. Pray that God works through me while I am preaching.
Thank you,
Jordan

Plantinga on Dawkins: "The Dawkins Confusion"

I just thought I'd pass along an interesting article over at Christianity Today by Alvin Plantinga (one of the preeminent Christian philosophers working today) on the ideas of Richard Dawkins, noted atheist and the author of books such as "The God Delusion."

Plantinga's conclusion is, interestingly enough, that

People like Dawkins hold that there is a conflict between science and religion because they think there is a conflict between evolution and theism; the truth of the matter, however, is that the conflict is between science and naturalism, not between science and belief in God.

The weight of our sins.

"About the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, 'ELI, ELI, LAMA SABACHTHANI?' that is, 'MY GOD, MY GOD, WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME?'"
-Matthew 27:46


A friend and I were sharing the gospel with a guy over supper. He was interesting. One of the biggest stumbling blocks he had was that he didn't believe the Bible was anything more than a book written by some men. My friend asked him if he were to be hit by a bus today and die, what would be the percentage of him going to Heaven? "100%, I'd go to Hell"... he wasn't confused about this. He then proceeded to let me share the gospel with him and he reiterated it all back to me: he understood all of it. As we were talking with him, he asked me why Jesus would say "MY GOD, MY GOD, WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME?"; sadly, and with much regret now, I didn't have an answer for him. I believe I do now.

God, knowing everything: omniscient, knew everything and everyone before he created the heavens and the earth. He knew you, me, your friends, family, enemies, neighbors, every single person to ever have lived since the first man (and before). He knew our minds, our hearts, our thoughts, our actions, our every move...our sins: every single sin.

Think for a moment about today, ask yourself what sins you have done...just today. If you don't believe you can make a list, then you need to learn what God's standard is for what is right and wrong. Make a mental list of all the sins you have committed today...trust me, I'm sure you can fill up a few pages if you are truly honest. First of all you need to know that Jesus Christ came to die for your sins, let me emphasise this: JESUS CHRIST DIED FOR YOUR SINS, and bring you to Himself, if you don't know this then ask.
Take one item off of your list of sins, actually take the "smallest" sin from your list. That single "small" sin of yours is what put Jesus Christ to death...yes, that one single "small" sin hung our Savior, Redeemer, God, beaten and torn on a cross. Now focus on the fact that Jesus suffered and died for the sins of the entire world and because of God's omniscience, He died for every sin committed by every human being since. He knew what he was dying for.

If only one single "small" sin put Jesus Christ to death, imagine how horrible it must have been for Him to take on every sin of every human being then to now to when He returns. If you didn't catch that or didn't understand that, I said he took on every sin...think about that and let it sink in. I'm not a theologian or a scholar of metaphysics, so I can't explain how this happened but I can understand it. The Father turned his face from the Son because the Son for a short time took on EVERY SINGLE SIN OF EVERY SINGLE MAN AND WOMAN TO HAVE EVER LIVED! How painful that must have been. Any words I use do not, or can not, come close to what happened in those moments.



Jesus cried out..."ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACTHANI" : "MY GOD, MY GOD, WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME"



I cry out...MY GOD, MY GOD, WHY DO I FORSAKE YOU!

About Mike

Jordan requested that I tell everyone a little bit about myself. So I'm going to do that; specifically, I will discuss how I came to be a Christian.

In 1980, Charles Malik, a former UN ambassador and Greek Orthodox Christian, spoke on the campus of Wheaton College. His talk was entitled "The Two Tasks of Evangelism." These two tasks, he said, were "saving the soul and saving the mind," converting people both spiritually and intellectually. As such, I think it is unwise of me to tell the story of my conversion to Christianity without recounting both.

I grew up in a wonderful family, attending what I now understand to be a pretty solid Lutheran church (doctrinally). I came to know that God had come down in the form of Jesus of Nazareth and died on a cross for the sins of the world. I knew that I was a sinner, and that if I believed these things, that I would be saved. And looking back on it, I really think that I did believe that. Thus, even though I was not familiar with the "personal relationship" buzzword, I am starting to wonder if I wasn't saved. Regardless, it wasn't terribly relevant to me. I felt disconnected from my church and most of the people I knew that were strong Christians were of the what-is-he/she-doing Pentacostal variety, and so I ultimately was confused.

When I came to college, I was mildly involved with the Lutheran campus ministry on campus my freshman year, and basically not at all as a sophomore. I was just doing the "church thing" because I thought that I should, but it wasn't a great situation. I was not living like a disciple of Jesus Christ, and again, the Luther Center seemed irrelevant to my life.

In mid-May of 2005, I moved into an apartment here in Vermillion, and decided that, since I was going to be in Vermillion allllll summer long, I had better find a church to go to. I don't know why I thought that. I hadn't regularly attended a Sunday-morning service since high school. So I did whatever any 20-year-old would do and went to Google to find a listing of area churches. I figured I would just church shop until I found one I liked. So, late one Saturday night, I checked out some websites, found a service time for my first stop, and went.

I fell in love with the place. There were people there my age, some of whom I even knew, and I had a completely new perspective on the Body of Christ. I got involved in a Bible study that summer that challenged me intellectually and emotionally and helped me to a true and lively faith. Additionally, I met one or two members of the local chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ, a movement which I joined the following year and had the privilege to serve as a student leader of this past year. Both of these organizations contributed to my changed heart, but my mind was slower to turn around.

I confess now that even last year, my first year truly living my faith, I was sort of embarrassed about my new passion for God. Being involved in the University Honors Program put me around a host of intelligent people, and if there's one thing many intelligent people are is arrogant. They will often deride God's faithful, and sometimes rightly so. We do not always communicate in a way that is intelligible to secular people, and we should be embarrassed about that. It is our God-given responsibility to care for them, and if we come off looking like nutjobs, we are not doing our duty to our fellow brothers in Adam or to our Lord. One of the things we should be doing a better job of is thinking. The Christian faith has a deep, rich intellectual history that many of the faithful know nothing about, and that is, quite frankly, pathetic. I feel uniquely qualified to say that because of the predicament I felt myself in last year. A classmate would make a disparaging remark about Christianity or the wackos many of us seem to be, and I had to admit his point. Worse, I had no retort. None. I was a vacuous Christian who was saved, but did not have a converted mind. I remember as a freshman having a discussion with a friend of mine who expressed incredulity at the idea of God writing a book: "If he wanted me to know something, why doesn't he just tell me?"

I had no response.

However, one day last April I was browsing through the podcast directory on iTunes and found a very interesting entry in the Education directory: Apologetics.com. It's a two-hour weekly radio show in the greater Los Angeles area that had recently begun releasing its weekly shows for download in MP3 format. It literally changed my life. Their slogan is "Challenging believers to think, and thinkers to believe" -- I definitely fit under the first category, and they pushed me. Of course, I enjoyed their personalities and banter, but more than that, I enjoyed the high level of scholarship presented. For the first time in my life, I could see the truth of the Christian religion, why it explains so well our human nature, and why, among other things, it made sense to think that God would write a book (and how that book came to be what we know as The Bible). I felt as though I had good reason to believe the things that I had come to believe. I felt whole, and like I had finally found my unique way of serving Christ's body, the Church, through a ministry of providing apologetical, polemical, and philosophical answers.

And that's me, in a nutshell.

Just War Theory...and then some

Today I went to a speaker who talked about "Just War Theory in the Contemporary World". Maj. Kevin Cutright was the speaker, he is currently teaching philosophy at the United States Military Academy, West Point, NY; he earned his undergraduate in international relations and earned his graduate degree in philosophy at Vanderbilt. I ended up going to lunch with him, his wife and son, the head of the philosophy dept. at USD, a retiring philosophy teacher who taught on ethics and philosophy, and the former student government association president for USD. Needless to say I was pretty stoked to have the head of the philosophy dept. to my left and a philosophy teacher from West Point to my right and be eating lunch with them. But here is a brief overview of my understanding of Just War Theory:

If you polarize the philosophies of war you end up with either the view that war is never justified in any circumstance or that war is always justified in every circumstance. Just War Theory, on a very basic level, states that at times war is justified and at others war is not justified. I find that this theory, though I truly don't know everything about it, is coherent and fits with reality and experience. What's interesting is that if you do believe this then you must acknowledge that:
1) Not every idea and action is equal to another.
2) Right and Wrong are based on standard.
3) Justice is not a convention of society.
4) All human beings have an equal inherent value (Every human being has certain rights...maybe intrinsic value is a better wording)

World War II is a prime example of a Just War. Hitler was had ideas that we say are logically incoherent and violate human rights. His ideas and actions were bad. He believed that not all humans were equal and we saw this played out in his belief in Nietzsche's idea of the Ubermensch or Superman. If every idea/action were equal, then we were not justified in going to war against Germany.
One might say: Nazi Germany was wrong because they violated basic human rights. I agree that happened, but why is that wrong? If those actions are wrong, why are they wrong and where does the idea of right and wrong come from? And if an idea/action is right or wrong must there not be a standard by which to judge what is right and wrong? "If," as Ravi Zacharias puts it, "there is a moral law, must there not, then, be a moral law giver?" Where do we get our standard for morality (right and wrong)? If right and wrong, or Justice, is a convention of society then who's society is correct? How can I say that Nazi Germany was wrong? Because there is a standard of right and wrong, and of Justice.
To sum up, I believe that our moral law comes from God. God's moral nature (Because God is completely good) shows us what is good or bad, right or wrong, just or unjust. God, by is own nature, is the moral standard. Because God is the moral standard and we are made in the image of God, we can understand why what Nazi Germany did to people was wrong and how their actions violated basic human rights: They not only went against God's moral nature but violated beings that contained the image of God.

I know this is a little sporadic, but hopefully you understand what I'm saying...and if not, then please question me...or do anyway.
Jordan