Entries from March 2008 ↓

Here is a holiday–a holy day–we don’t have to rehabilitate, re-claim, or re-interpret, a holy day that the secular world is oblivious to, the day we commemorate Christ giving us His body and His blood in an ongoing sacrament, so as that “as oft as ye do this,” He is with us, giving the Gospel to us, tangibly and experientially, in bread and wine.

I have always thought that we ought to bring out the more mind-blowing dimensions of our faith in our efforts at evangelism, that instead of downplaying them to the people we expect would have the hardest time with them and saving them for later, we should highlight such things to the secular world, especially now, as postmodernists crave mystery, are actually attracted to things they don’t understand, and in many cases yearn for an authentic reality outside themselves that they have been told does not exist.

How could we lift up the sacraments in evangelism?

So, we have now been in Iraq for five years. Our troops did win the war part, brilliantly, in a short time. But it’s that nation building that keeps bogging us down.

In hindsight, should we have invaded Iraq? And even if we shouldn’t have, wouldn’t it be another kind of disaster if we gave the jihadists a great victory from Allah and just pulled out?

Any suggestions?

I don’t want this to be just a Lutheran blog, so I don’t usually blog about inside-Lutheranism issues. But I appreciated how the recent “Things We Don’t Have Anymore” thread was taken over by laments that we don’t have the radio program “Issues, Etc.” anymore! So “Issues” is a valid issue. That hard-hitting interview show, led by Todd Wilken and produced by Jeff Schwartz, would host people like Bishop Spong (that Christianity-denying Episcopal Bishop who would then be taken apart) and, well, me (treating me always very kindly), always making a strong case for Biblical truth and Reformational Christianity, relating them to the cultural “issues” of our day. It was one of the few places where Missouri Synod Lutherans DID interact with outsiders, with Christendom as a whole, and with the secular marketplace of ideas.

Then, suddenly and with no warning, the synod cancelled the program. One of the few outreach vehicles amidst an emphasis on outreach that was working! Untold numbers of people (as has been testified on this blog) have come to our church and even to Christianity because of the influence of this program! Then it gets killed.

I don’t know anything about why, nor does anyone else I’ve communicated with. It’s a mystery. Did it get too controversial in its criticism of, say, Islam or American evangelicalism for our church hierarchy? What did the show air that was the catalyst for this sudden decision? Is this action a sign that the hierarchy is cracking down on its conservative and confessional voices in favor of some new and more liberal direction? I don’t want to believe that, I’m just saying, especially for those of you who wonder what the fuss is about, that this is one reason many people think this is a big deal. If I learn more, I’ll let you know, but I will not pass along rumors, only things I can verify.

Thanks–again–to Paul McCain at Cyberbrethren for keeping up with the Lucas Cranach boom. This achingly lovely portrait of Princess Sybille of Cleves is on sale for $4-$6 million.

And Paul quotes from the catalog description. Here is just a sampling of what it says about this young woman, a true saint of the Reformation:

This portrait of Princess Sybille of Cleves (1512-1554) was painted when she was fourteen years old and newly betrothed to Johann Friedrich I (1503-1554), the future Elector of Saxony. The oldest daughter of Johann III, Duke of Cleves, and Maria of Jülich-Berg, Sybille grew up at court in Düsseldorf with her sister Anne, one of the future wives of Henry VIII. Her marriage into the House of Saxony placed Sybille in the middle of the greatest ideological struggle of the sixteenth century, a reformation not only of the church but also of the state. A committed friend and supporter of Martin Luther, Johann Friedrich was actively engaged in the Reformation and took dramatic political and military risks to protect the reformatory movement. Sybille conducted a correspondence of her own with Martin Luther and actively supported her husband’s many campaigns, defending Wittenberg in his absence during Emperor Charles V’s siege of the city in 1546.

The Emperor’s siege of Wittenberg after Luther’s death was a huge conflict. Luther’s son Hans is said to have fought on the walls. That this woman led the defense is incredible. The Emperor eventually won, thinking he crushed the Reformation. Little did he know.

Anyway, that Cranach’s art speaks so strongly to people today should be an opening for us to explain the faith and the worldview that underlies his greatness.

Consider the range of his work and notice how free Cranach is. Notice how he appreciates individual human beings. Notice how he appreciates the beauty of nature and of ordinary life. Notice his edge in ridiculing vice and condemning corruption in both individuals and in the church. Notice how he experiences no contradiction between creativity and order, Biblical reality and his own reality. Notice his sense of vocation, of loving and serving his neighbor through his God-given gifts as an artist, a businessman, the mayor of Wittenberg, a lay leader in his congregation. How can we get this Christian sensibility back in our own times?

Judging from the different justices’ comments on the oral arguments over Washington, D.C.’s gun ban, it appears that the Supreme Court will rule that the 2nd Amendment does indeed give individuals and not just corporate militias the right to keep firearms.

The linked article said that the ruling might provide for some regulation, such as of military weapons such as machine guns. But if the Constitution specifies the role of individual ownership of weapons for militias, shouldn’t that apply specifically to military weapons? And doesn’t the 2nd Amendment amount to a constitutional requirement for local militias, of local civilians keeping weapons in their home so they can, if needed, be organized into a local defense or law enforcement force? That’s basically what Switzerland does. And 18th century America. The right should indeed inhere with individuals, but what should we do with the militia provision?

Science fiction author Arthur C Clarke dies aged 90.

I used to read science fiction, particularly Clarke, Heinlein, Asimov, and that generation. I haven’t read any in a long time. Can any of you make any recommendations about good science fiction writers today?

What struck me about the controversy over Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s inflammatory anti-American and anti-White preaching is that in the television coverage I saw the African-American pastors and laity who were asked about it seemed to basically agree with him! He does articulate what lots of black people believe. So I’ll give credit to Barack Obama for his speech on racial relations. Here is the transcript. He talks about the anger felt by black people AND, in something I don’t ever remember hearing in this context, the anger of white people, which unlike most Democrats he does not simply reduce to racism:

For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co- workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or the beauty shop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians to gin up votes along racial lines or to make up for a politician’s own failings. And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews.

That anger is not always productive. Indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems. It keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity within the African-American community in our condition, it prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real, it is powerful, and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience. As far as they’re concerned, no one handed them anything, they built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pensions dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and they feel their dreams slipping away. And in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense.

So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town, when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed, when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudice, resentment builds over time.

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation.

Can this anger gap be healed instead of being stirred up?

The posts below are too pessimistic and nostalgic to leave by themselves for Holy Week, so I will give you something better to contemplate from a great Christian writer who is strangely not known as well as he should be by Christians today:

“Not only do we know God by Jesus Christ alone, but we know ourselves only by Jesus Christ. We know life and death only through Jesus Christ. Apart from Jesus Christ, we do not know what is our life, nor our death, nor God, nor ourselves.” Blaise Pascal

Here is an amusing feature, by Anna Jane Grossman, of things that have become or are fast becoming obsolete. She adds a list of such things as:

Carbon paper
Wite-Out
Lickable stamps
Printer paper with holes on the sides
Walkmans
Tie tacks
Dial-up
Sound of the modem starting up
Non-wireless Internet
Diaper pins
Wall-mounted pencil sharpeners
Calculator watches
Mimeograph machines
Manual car windows
Getting out to open the garage door
TripTiks
Stovetop popcorn poppers
Film
Flash cubes
Mercurochrome
Water beds
High diving boards

What other things in recent memory that we used to think were high-tech or way cool have faded away?

is collapsing. So the government is working to bail out the big investment firms that have made easy credit possible. It seems that everyone is a free market capitalist during good times, but once a downturn happens, everybody wants to state to intervene into the economy after all.

See E. J. Dionne Jr. - The Street on Welfare - washingtonpost.com

Perhaps these interventions are necessary. (We need our resident economist, EconJeff, to advise us.) But I worry that this is just the beginning of a turn back to a state run economy.

I sense that liberalism is rising from the dead, that a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress will re-regulate the whole economy and utterly undo the Reagan revolution.

Supreme Court to Review FCC Ban on Profanity. This refers to the ban on bad words on broadcast television, which has already been loosened quite a bit. I wager that the court will open the floodgates.

Something our pastor said in church yesterday threw into high relief what we mean by “Passion Week.” It isn’t about our passion. It’s about Christ’s passion. That is to say, His feeling and His suffering, His zeal to accomplish our salvation, His passion for us!