We are starting our new Wednesday evening Bible study on Exodus using a new book by Asbury professor, John Oswalt.  We will start promptly at 6:00 and finish at 6:55.

CS Lewis fans will appreciate David Virtue’s recent attempt to look at AB Welby’s latest revision from the perspective of the “other team.”  While it is witty, this is actually quite serious business.  Scripture teaches that clearly that words matter.  Romans 10:9-10 is a bulwark of our faith.  “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.” 

The church has always believed that verbal confession and verbal renunciation have actual spiritual power.  When we quit renouncing the devil and all his forces this is a real omission. But behind this lies the important question: Why is this revision being made?  What lies behind it?  What would make a global spiritual leader think renunciation of Satan is no longer significant?

Screwtape Proposes an Anglican Toast
With apologies to C.S. Lewis

By David W. Virtue
www.virtueonline.org
January 11, 2014

My dear Wormwood,

What an absolute stroke of genius. Our father the Devil is now dead, killed off by the Anglican Mother Church. A sterling performance, if ever there was one.

With a stroke of the pen, they have done away with those words that stung our father so deeply.

“Do you reject the devil and all rebellion against God?” which prompted the reply, “I reject them.” They were then asked: “Do you repent of the sins that separate us from God and neighbor?” with the answer: “I repent of them.”

The rewrite of the solemn assembly now has parents and godparents no longer having to “repent sins” and “rejecting the devil” during christenings in the Church of England.

This is a stunning collapse to political correctness, if ever there was one. Our father was actually heard to chortle with glee which is a pleasant change from his usual grumpy self. That they have attempted to do away with our Leader is a stunning display of hubris and pride. What they have done is open the way to an even deeper invasion of Our Father into the church’s territory.

That these changes are backed by Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby and already in practice in 1,000 parishes is a stunning victory for us, Wormwood.

The very fact that they are asked to “reject evil, and all its many forms, and all its empty promises” – with no mention of the devil or sin, is a brilliant move thus consigning even more into our camp. It is a victory even greater than sodomite marriages being slowly accepted through the Pilling Report. Another noble victory for our side.

We also like the fact that the new text, to be tested in a trial lasting until Easter, also drops the word “submit” in the phrase “Do you submit to Christ as Lord?” because it is thought to have become “problematical”, especially among women who object to the idea of submission. This is classic submission to feminism, Wormwood. Another triumphant moment.

We are hearing that some Church of England priests are actually preaching from their pulpits that there is no longer a literal Devil. What news, indeed.

We have successfully carried out the biggest theological coup ever attempted. We have made them believe that they have killed off the Devil. To the collective mind of secular man and not a few clergy, there is no Devil. Imagine that. This accomplishment tops their earlier elimination of the concept of Sin now bandied about by Episcopal leaders in the American Episcopal Church.

Speaking of which, we were particularly delighted to learn this past week that Atlanta Episcopal Bishop Rob Wright urged a rededication to “common good” at an interfaith inaugural worship service at Cascade United Methodist Church with these words, “Greetings to you in the name of Yahweh the Almighty, in the name of Allah the beneficent and merciful. Greetings to you in the name of the Eternal One who gave the Buddha his great enlightenment, and in the name of the Hindus’ Supreme Being that orders the cosmos.”

One wonders if these bishops learned anything in seminary at all about their faith with all its exclusive claims. We particularly liked these lines of his, “Greetings in the name of generosity and human compassion that guides some of us who claim no faith at all. Greetings to you to in the name of Jesus of Nazareth through whom many of us hear the words of God.”

We love the one option among many notions. Reducing all these faiths to a common denominator of the “good” the “generous” and the “compassionate” plays right into our hands. It is sweet music to our father’s ears.

Mohammed, the “compassionate”, is with us and winces when he is made to hear these words. This Gnostic interfaith rubbish is precisely the direction we want everyone to move towards. Reducing their savior to one among many saviors is precisely the direction we want to see the whole church heading.

We especially like the subtlety of the bishop’s comments here, “We have a mayor that understands that God speaks in many tongues and that all of those wonderful tongues and traditions are important to address and honor. Especially because when we get past the ego that sometimes infects our time together, we realize that each tradition at its core and at its best agrees that the cosmos has a brilliant and benevolent bent and that all creation and every human being has worth and dignity that is non-negotiable.”

I doubt we could have said it more brilliantly. Making ANYONE who feels they have an exclusive gospel claim feel like they are fundamentalists and literalists who should be ashamed of themselves is precisely the way to go. Any talk of sin and salvation and ghastly talk of a cross and notions of a “suffering servant” must be expunged for the higher “truth” of humanity’s greatness and liberation from all such notions of his fallenness.

I expect to hear more from you Wormwood about the ongoing decline of the Episcopal Church. We hear they might have to sell their precious headquarters in NYC for money to continue litigation over properties is good news. When they have spent their last penny we will take them. Death will be their final existential reality. Our father can’t wait; meanwhile he is exercising considerable restraint especially as how he doesn’t exist anymore.

Your affectionate Uncle,

Screwtape

Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby has taken sin and repentance out of the Baptismal vows.  Here is the link to the report.

Update: On her way from Rome.

We received a text at 5 AM today saying that Helene had cleared immigration at Lusaka and is on her way home via Addis, Rome, DC, Knoxville.  We are eager to see her tomorrow evening.  Please pray for safe and uneventful travel.

Many of us are almost a week into our reading through the Bible in 2014 adventure.  While the Bible contains the answers to the most important questions we will ever consider, it also raises a few quite a few questions.

For those who would like to go a little deeper, especially in understanding the Old Testament, let me recommend a very helpful resource, Encountering the Old Testament, by Asbury professor, Bill Arnold. This is a good undergraduate-level book, readable and reliable.  (Click the title for the Amazon link.)

The following post comes from David Virtue of virtueonline.org, an Anglican blog worth following.  I highly recommend this post for your consideration and discussion.  How do we offer Christ effectively in our time?

Pope Francis and Archbishop Welby Face Enormous Hurdles in a Post-Christian World
Can they succeed in reaching Millenials for Christ?

COMMENTARY

By David W. Virtue DD
www.virtueonline.org
December 27, 2013

By any standard, the challenge facing both Western Protestant churches and the Roman Catholic Church in the coming decade is how and who will reach Millenials for Jesus Christ.

With mainline Protestant denominations in the US and Canada aging and dying, and having played out liberal Protestantism to its logical conclusion – a total loss of transcendence and an attendant focus on social issues – a whole generation has been lost to the gospel.

Evangelicalism in America has become so vapid and lightweight it is little more than a sentimental repetition of Bible verses, bad “Christian” TV, and simplistic choruses that fail to touch the deepest roots of the angst that Millenials presumably feel when they are alone with nothing but their thoughts.

I know whereof I speak. I have a nephew who is an American None. He believes in nothing. No, he is not an angry atheist — that would take hard work. He is not even an agnostic, because that presumes he knows enough to care about what he does or does not believe. He is not a bad person. He abides by the law. He has never had so much as a speeding ticket. He is not a skeptic about religion. He is not against religion nor is he against Jesus. He quite simply sees no point in believing anything that does not touch him. Cajoling him about his need of a Savior doesn’t touch him. He has never taken drugs. He doesn’t drink. He has a job; he is not interested in marrying or having children. He simply exists from day to day, mindlessly going through life as though nothing really matters. He is probably depressed but denies it. He watches sports on a large TV screen with his friends, goes out on the town with his friends, and then, when they all get bored they go their separate ways. He can be induced into having sex with a girl but there is no sense of commitment to her or to marriage. He rents because he doesn’t want the angst of owning a house and paying a mortgage because he might lose his job and then lose the home. He has seen enough of his friends already getting divorced so he says he will never marry even though he is 38. He has no ticking clock because he never wants children. He works out to keep his body fit, but doesn’t know why. It fills in a few hours each week. He is alone and doesn’t care. He is the new American male.

He is not alone. I am told there are literally millions of American men like him. He is one of the reasons women are angry that they can’t find a husband, because men like my nephew won’t make a commitment to anything or anybody for very long.

I have also met better-educated Millenials with better paying jobs, but the mentality is just the same. They are not interested in committing themselves to a woman because they are now so wealthy that they fear losing it in the event of a divorce. Some of these men are nominal Catholics, but their faith means nothing. They go to church only when their parents insist, but it leaves them feeling empty. Secular Jews I meet are no different or better. They maybe smarter, more aggressive in business, but when it comes to religion they have none. If they observe the high holy days, it is at the insistence of parents, but for them, it means nothing. They too are Nones. To all intents and purposes God is dead. They are not even waiting for Godot…and so for Millenials, Christianity and Judaism are quite simply irrelevant. Some of them believe in something called “spirituality”, but they don’t really know what it means. They don’t believe in Oprah or Jesus, care little for politics, and could not care less if you are Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, or Baptist. They simply don’t care.

Let me be absolutely clear. Nones are not bad people. They don’t go around breaking the law; they hold down jobs; they save money; but they are committed to NOTHING spiritually. That is the tragedy.

What I want to know is: who and how is someone going to reach my nephew and the millions of other men (and women) like him for Christ? I have been praying for my nephew for more than a quarter of a century to no avail. I once told him I had been praying for him for over three decades and he simply said, “Well it hasn’t done much good has it?” He wasn’t mad or disappointed. It was simply an observation. He was not trying to hurt me. He just simply didn’t see the point.

I can tell you this. Billy Graham crusades won’t touch Millennials, neither will ALPHA courses. Mega churches won’t touch them, either. Bishops who wear pointy hats and clergy in collars leaves them unmoved. They are way too cynical for the health and wealth prosperity gospel they see and hear on TV. Islam sends them flying to the hills. Death and destruction on TV leaves them unmoved when it happens in real life. They have seen so much of it on television that it now leaves them cold. Watching Aleppo (in Syria) being bombed might just as well be a scene from a movie. For them, Jesus does not save. They don’t even know what the questions are.

The raw naked truth is that virtually nobody has a handle on reaching a generation of men and women who have no denominational loyalty, no sense of sin, no apparent fear of God, and no apparent real need of God or a savior.

If you think I exaggerate, go to any local bar and start talking to men and women in their 20s, 30s and 40s. Ask them what makes them really tick. It might be money, it might be sex or sports, for a few it might be power. One thing it won’t be is fear of God, or judgment or eternity without Christ.

Enter two new religious leaders.

First on the scene is an evangelical Anglican, Archbishop Justin Welby, an ALPHA convert who came by it honestly through family tragedy. He is not a None. (Rowan Williams was staggeringly irrelevant not only to the Anglican Communion but to anyone without faith.) Welby really believes in Jesus. There is no doubt about his own personal conversion and, like St. Paul, he wants to spread the word. To date he has not been very successful. He is flip flopping on (homo)sexuality issues (most Nones really don’t care about what sexual preference you like or have) so he is coming across as weak and insecure.

Ninety percent of the British public could not care less about the Church of England and, if Archbishop George Carey is right, the CofE won’t be around in 25 years anyway. Disestablishment might hold off disintegration for a while, perhaps even jump start things, but don’t hold your breath. Death is in the air for the Church of England. You can smell it. Islam is quietly growing and become more insistent in its demands with each passing year in the British Isles. They will not be stopped. The whole homosexual enterprise and drive is nothing more than the bankrupt end of a dying decrepit church. Pansexuality saves no one and nothing.

Next on the scene is a Global South leader in the person of Pope Francis. To no one’s surprise, the election of Pope Francis was selected as the year’s No. 1 religion story by the journalists in the Religion Newswriters Association, with the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI being the No. 2 story. Pope Francis was also named “Religion Newsmaker” of the Year.

This humble man has shown that he wants a church focused on mission, that keeps Catholic doctrine but with a renewed commitment to mercy and pastoral care for the poor, the powerless and those of little or no faith. He wants to build a church defined by its actions, not just by words, as one commentator noted. He lambastes the rich, feels for the poor, practices humility and will probably pick up a Nobel Prize for peace at least once in his life time.

Fair enough. But will that jump start Millenials who don’t give a damn about doctrine. They have heard, seen and been inundated with calls to give money to more organizations than you can swing a cat at. They have been solicited by organizations ranging from the Salvation Army to the ASPCA and everything in between and they are inured to it. Reaching out with a helping hand works for healthy seniors and retirees with money and time on their hands, but it won’t move Millenials.

For all his humility, honesty and love of the poor, admiration for this man will temper over time because the culture, already in free fall, will catch up with him and ultimately sideline him. Mainstream media will get bored with him. Pansexualists will rise up to call him homophobic because they will discover that he really hasn’t changed his or his church’s teaching on sexuality. They will quickly discard him.

There is no William Buckley with his cool Catholic intellectualness or a Cardinal Sheen capable of jumpstarting faith in Millenials waiting in the wings.

Orthodox Protestant soteriological differences with Rome won’t touch Millenials. That day is gone.

So the question must be asked, what will jump start Millenials in North America and Western Europe to faith in Jesus Christ?

There are seeds of hope. Small non-denominational storefront churches are reaching out to Millenials with some success, but they are few and far between. Pastors of these churches I talk to have to work through layers and layers of fundamentalism, fear, abuse, and rejection before they get to first base with the faith. The few they reach are drops in the bucket, but they are drops.

Christian therapists I talk to spend hours with Millenials untangling horror stories of faith once believed, then lost, and now hated.

Is revival possible? Can there be a revival without the ground work being laid first? Perhaps. Or is it, as one theologian wrote, “I am so weary of the tyranny of the gay lobby. I fully expect physical persecution from this quarter soon. What accounts for the sudden contagion in so many societies? It can’t be nature all of a sudden. It has to be a moral plague as a result of psychological susceptibility to Satanic suggestion exerted culturally with enormous persuasive force in a blind and godless world.”

But then he said something that scared me. “Divine restraint is being withdrawn [in the land] and horrible violence and inhumanity will inevitably ensue. Government and media and worthless celebrities are ensnared in the deceit. I tremble.” And so will Millenials. Perhaps then and only then will the fear of the Lord be the beginning of wisdom.

Many of you know and admire Bishop Mark Lawrence of South Carolina.  I want to share with you these reflections taken from his blog.  I found them particularly meaningful.

Dear Friends in Christ,

My mother died last year shortly before Christmas.  It was a gentle death and so for her perhaps the best of Christmases.  I recall, however, that during my childhood and early adult years, she was always hoping for the perfect Christmas Eve.  It was a misplaced hope from the beginning.  Sometimes the failure exceeded human control—the lemon pies didn’t set up, the meat was tough, the turkey dry.  On one occasion the culprit was my father having stayed too long at a local watering hole.  Sometimes it was my brother Porter who was the spoiler—high on drugs one Christmas, in prison for two, and dead on a third.  One year it was her son, Mark, who played the troubler of Israel—declaring himself an agnostic and having no interest in attending the midnight service.  So far as I know my mother’s perfect Christmas Eve never came in this mortal life. 

Perfection in this world is hard to come by.  And when it does occasionally show up—such as when a major league pitcher throws a no hitter retiring 27 batters in a row—it is only in one small compartment of life. That same man who delivered perfection on the mound may go home and end the evening in a conflict with his wife.  The actor who delivers a perfect performance on film may not keep her marriage together or her children happy.  We humans are a troubled and troubling lot.  Nature’s riddle, wrote a sometime Archbishop of Canterbury, God’s problem children….

If our holiday observance is only about dinners and presents, eggnog and rum, nostalgia and home, than like my mother’s hope for a perfect Christmas Eve it is a futile effort.  But, No! That is not the case: there are three ways we can make Christmas Eve if not perfect then at least good.  These come down to us from the pages of the Bible.

First, a good Christmas Eve is when God’s Savior is received. Hear the words of the Angelic messenger: “Do not be afraid.”  Though sin, guilt and shame lurk in the closets and storage rooms of  our lives, though insecurities and imperfections are at every turn, and debts and failures abound—“…unto you is born a Savior….”  The One born in Bethlehem, who lived a perfect life in obedience to his Father dying a shameful death bearing the sins of the world, and rose from the tomb in the power of the Spirit, is alive today.  He speaks a word to each of us:  “Behold I stand at the door and knock and if anyone hears my voice I will come into him and sup with him and he with me.” When we open to him, accepting his forgiveness, his perfection is draped over us and our true dignity is restored.  In the words of a famous carol, “When charity stands watching/and faith holds wide the door/the dark night wakes, the glory breaks/and Christmas comes once more.”

Secondly, Christmas Eve is made good when God’s Truth is pondered and treasured.  “But Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart.”  What a gracious gift of God—to treasure and ponder the work and ways of God.  Consider this, that when you were conceived in your mother’s womb someone who had never existed before came into being.  Yet, when Jesus was conceived in the womb of the Virgin Mary no new person came into being.  Rather the Second Person of the Trinity, the Son of God entered into a world that was created through him, and by him, and for him.  He was united to manhood forever.  “God from all eternity willed to become man in Jesus Christ for our good; did become man in time for our good, and he will remain man in eternity for our good.”  (Karl Barth) 

Thirdly, Christmas is rightly observed when God is praised and his feast re-membered.  “The Shepherds returned glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen as it had been told them.”  The carols, choir anthems and liturgy are our offerings of praise and thanksgiving to the glory of God.  Whether we sing on pitch or off-key, say the responses by memory or barely mumble the words, it is what we were created to do as our participation in the Christ Mass, the Holy Communion, which is his wonderful gift of himself to us.    

All this is summed up well in the John Betjeman’s poetic lines:

Merry Christmas,

Mark Joseph Lawrence
Bishop of South Carolina

I try to keep up with our friends at Anglican TV.  Here is their Dec 21st episode including a conversation with NT scholar Robert Gagnon and author of “The Bible and Homosexual Practice”.  His website includes a collection of video teachings on the topic.

This is a wonderful resource for those who may not come from faith traditions that followed the church calendar–and a good refresher for the rest of us.  Highly recommended during this Advent Season.

I really respect the writings of Mary Eberstadt.  Here is an essay that is worth reading, I think, though the topic is certainly controversial.  What she, and others, say about Ritalin is important, but the real insight lies in her analysis of what has happened more broadly to the family since the sexual revolution.