Google has now added a 3D “Ancient Rome” layer to Google Earth, based off the best scholarship we have; check out this video on it:
Category Archives: History
Ecclesia reformata semper reformanda secundum verbum Dei
or, in English, “The church reformed and always being reformed according to the word of God.” This 16th-century Latin motto captures the spirit and purpose of the Reformation, and so it has continued to be used through the centuries by those of us who consider ourselves heirs of the Reformation and students of the wisdom of the great Reformers. (You know, the sort of people who look at October 31 and think “Reformation Day,” not just Halloween, and write blog posts in honor of the day.)
Unfortunately—aided by a common mistranslation, “the church reformed and always reforming“—in recent times we’ve seen this motto misused in support of ends which are completely contradictory to the spirit and intent of the Reformation and the Reformed tradition; this sort of thing is quite common in the Presbyterian Church (USA), the denomination in which I serve as a pastor. The tendency is to interpret “always reforming” as the ongoing work of the church, reinventing itself to fit the culture, and set that over against “reformed” as if these are two separate things. Thus, for instance, we get this comment from Adam Walker Cleaveland from a few years ago on his blog pomomusings (emphasis mine):
I think that one could fairly easily make an argument that many of our Presbyterian churches today have focused primarily (almost exclusively) on the “Reformed” aspect, and have not critically evaluated how the church may need to continue to be “always reforming” in light of our current context.
Always reforming. Always being sensitive to the radical openness and movement of the Spirit. Always being aware that we may need to be critically evaluate our theology and methodology. While at the same time, being aware of and sensitive to the things that are part of the tradition of the Presbyterian church, and those things that are important in the holy scriptures. The Bible is an important part of the heritage of the Presbyterian church and the Christian tradition, but we must be wary of creating logocentric churches, where we become strict-constructionists when it comes to our theologies and methodologies, only allowing whatever the scriptures and tradition says. That must be balanced and held in tension with the new waves of the Spirit that may be calling for new theologies and new methodologies in a new world.
In Cleaveland’s case, he was coming from a self-consciously “emergent” position, an influence which is only beginning to emerge (if you will) in the PC(USA); but we see this sort of argument all the time from liberals in the denomination. “The Bible is an important part of our heritage, but the world is evolving and we need to evolve with it. Yes, Christians used to believe that homosexuality was sinful, but we know better now. God is doing a new thing, and his Spirit is calling for a new theology that’s appropriate to the times. We’re supposed to be always reforming—we can’t afford to cling to the dead past, we need to move with the present.” And so on, and so forth. In a nutshell: “Always reforming, new wind of the Spirit, therefore whatever we don’t like about historic Presbyterian theology and morality, we can throw out.”
The problem is twofold. First, these are folks who are very interested in reforming the church, but not so interested in the secundum verbum Dei part; I don’t know what “according to cultural assumptions” would be in Latin, but that would be more to the point. This is not to say theyreject the Scriptures, just that they reject the idea that the Scriptures could be telling them something they really don’t want to hear; they want the church to believe what they want the church to believe, and they’re happy to offer any interpretation of Scripture they can which supports that, but if they decide they can’t sustain those interpretations, they don’t respond by changing their position. Instead, they respond by rejecting the authority of Scripture on that point, declaring essentially, “that was then, this is now, and we know better.” (Some would point out that secundum verbum Dei is a later addition, which is true; it is, however, a clarifyingaddition—it adds nothing new to the older motto, but rather makes explicit what was already implicit.)
(It should be noted at this point that most of this can also be said of many who consider themselves evangelicals; the primary difference is that evangelicals don’t justify themselves by explicitly rejecting the authority of Scripture. Rather, the evangelical tendency is to privilege the individual interpretation of Scripture and simply insist that yes it does mean what I want it to mean. It still ends up locating primary authority in the autonomous individual rather than in the voice of God speaking by his Spirit through the Scripture, but by a different route and in less straightforward fashion.)
Second, there is the belief that the church is the agent of its own reformation, and that this is about the church reinventing itself and evolving. As McCormick theology professor Anna Case-Winters pointed out in Presbyterians Today several years ago, this is directly opposed to what this motto actually means, and what the Reformation was all about. As she says, this doesn’t mean that “newer is better,” nor does it leave it to us to determine what “reforming” looks like. Rather, it’s about
restoring the church to its true nature, purified from the “innovations” that riddled the church through centuries of inattention to Scripture and theological laxity. . . .
God is the agent of reformation. The church is rather the object of God’s reforming work. God’s agency and initiative have priority here. . . . Theologian Harold Nebelsick put it well: “We are the recipients of the activity of the Holy Spirit which reforms the church in accordance with the Word of God.” The church is God’s church, a creature of God’s Word and Spirit. As we say in our Brief Statement of Faith, “we belong to God.” God’s Word and Spirit guide the church’s forming and reforming.
What we need to understand here is that this motto isn’t about justifying anything we might want to do; it is rather about acknowledging that being the church isn’t about justifying what we want to do. It isn’t about getting what we want, or believing what we’re comfortable believing; instead, it’s about the negation of that approach. It’s about recognizing that the reason we keep needing God to reform us is that we keep slipping back into building churches that are about us, giving us what we want and keeping us comfortable, and thus keep needing to be called back to the will of God as revealed in Scripture. It’s also about recognizing that yes, God still speaks by his Spirit—but that he will not contradict anything he has already said, because who he is doesn’t change, and thus that if we think we feel God leading us, we need to test that sense against what he’s already revealed in Scripture.
This is why what Dr. Case-Winters says about the 16th century remains true for us today:
In the 16th-century context the impulse it reflected was neither liberal nor conservative, but radical, in the sense of returning to the “root.” The Reformers believed the church had become corrupt, so change was needed. But it was a change in the interest of preservation and restoration of more authentic faith and life—a church reformed and always to be reformed according to the Word of God.
Being Reformed means being radical in precisely that sense, for it means not that we’re always becoming something new, nor that we’re always changing, but that we’re always being conformed and reconformed to the unchanging standard of the Word of God, which means of the character and will of the one “whose beauty is past change,” as Hopkins put it. It means not that we adapt to this world, but rather we’re pulled away from adapting to this world; the goal is not to let this world squeeze us into its mold, but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. It means accepting that we don’t set the agenda, but rather that we’re called to surrender to God’s agenda, and thus recognizing that we’re people under authority—the authority of God, and thus of his revelation to us in his Word—and that we must bow to that authority even when we don’t like what we hear, rather than trying to find ways to rationalize what we want to do instead.
It means, in short, allowing ourselves to be Reformed, not by our word and our will, but by the will of God in accordance with his Word.
The problem of Roger Williams
Most people, if they even remember hearing of Roger Williams the Puritan and founder of Rhode Island, have a vague memory of him as an early advocate of religious liberty—usually contrasted with those awful Puritans, about whom we have all sorts of negative modern fantasies. The truth is, yes, the Puritans had some things wrong, but they were a lot better than their enemies make them out to be; and as regards Williams, it’s important to understand not just what he believed, but why.
The Puritans present an interesting problem of definition to the historian. Puritanism wasn’t a coherent philosophical movement; instead, it was a loose collection of English Calvinists who were determined to purify the Church of England but had differing ideas of what needed to be done. The name itself, like the names of so many movements, was not their own self-description but a label of reproach applied by their Anglican opponents. One of the greatest historians of the Puritan movement, Edmund S. Morgan, could only conclude a lengthy description of the teachings and effects of Puritanism by writing, “Puritanism meant many things.”
Given the amorphous nature of Puritanism, Williams at first seemed to fit right in. He was as Calvinist as any Puritan, sharing the basic assumptions of Puritan thought; his first position after taking holy orders was as the chaplain to a man with wide Puritan connections, and he was included in the planning for the Massachusetts Bay colony—which, given his youth, argues that he had earned considerable respect from his fellow Puritans.
He began to run into trouble, however, with John Cotton and other leaders of the colony due to his essential extremism; as Morgan put it, he had a pronounced tendency to “follow a belief to its conclusion with a passionate literalness that bordered on the ridiculous.” This reared its head within days after his arrival in Boston; on being asked to serve as the teacher for the church there while the man who normally filled that position, John Wilson, was in England, he refused because “I durst not officiate to an unseparated people.” Since the Church of England admitted unregenerate people to communion, it was a false church, and Williams felt that to stay pure he must renounce not only the false church but also any who accepted it as a true church.
Williams’ quest for perfection drove him further. When the General Court required all freemen to take an oath of loyalty, he objected, arguing that they would be forcing an act of worship upon the unregenerate, which would be an offense against God. He argued that a man could not pray or say grace over a meal if anyone unregenerate were present. Within two years of his departure from Massachusetts and the founding of Providence, he abandoned infant baptism among his congregation and had all the members rebaptized, since clearly their baptisms weren’t valid or they would have been pure enough for him; finally, whittling down the church and whittling it down again, he got to the point that he would only take communion with his wife—and then he wrote her off as insufficiently pure, concluding that purity was impossible and that there could be no true church at all.
He was, in short, a Puritan extremist, a hyper-Puritan; this was at the root of his argument with Cotton and the other leaders of the Massachusetts colony. Cotton in particular tried to reason with him, denying the need for absolute purity as a precondition for joining the church. Instead, he argued for membership for those who would “professedly renounce and bewaile all knowne sinne,” even if they “[did] not yet see the utmost skirts of all that pollution they [had] sometimes beene defiled with.” According to Cotton, the church did not require people to be perfectly pure to be godly; instead, it took godly people and showed them the areas of sin in their lives. He argued that to impose a standard of perfect repentance for church membership was to “impose a burthen upon the Church of Christ, which Christ never required at their hands nor yours.” Cotton finished by arguing that the presence of unclean people within a church did not make it any less a true church.
As odd as it may seem to us, Williams’ surface toleration was rooted in a deeper intolerance, while Cotton’s support of policies that seem intolerant to our age arose out of his belief in grace. We can reject Cotton’s insistence that “It is a carnall and worldly, and indeed, even ungodly imagination, to confine the Magistrates charge to the bodies, and goods of the Subject, and to exclude them from the care of their Soules”—and still more his position that “Better a dead soule be dead in body, as well as in Spirit, then to live, and be lively in the flesh, to murder many precious soules by the Magistrates Indulgence”—and still appreciate his motivation: his belief that grace is for everyone and no one should be written off because they aren’t good enough. By contrast, while Williams’ positions match those of our own enlightened time, we should look carefully enough to recognize that his support for tolerance was rooted in part in a belief in the spiritual inferiority of those tolerated.
(I should note, I had meant to draw out a point or two for reflection on the contemporary political climate, but I need to head off, so I think I’ll leave that for another day.)
Educational Alzheimer’s
When individuals lose their memory to Alzheimer’s or another form of dementia, we universally recognize this as a tragedy, and so we pour large amounts of money into research to identify the causes and work toward developing a cure. But when the nation loses its collective memory? As any lover of history knows, that’s what’s happening year by year. The great historian David McCullough put it this way thirteen years ago in his National Book Award acceptance speech:
We, in our time, are raising a new generation of Americans who, to an alarming degree, are historically illiterate.The situation is serious and sad. And it is quite real, let there be no mistake. It has been coming on for a long time, like a creeping disease, eating away at the national memory. While the clamorous popular culture races on, the American past is slipping away, out of site and out of mind. We are losing our story, forgetting who we are and what it’s taken to come this far. . . .The decided majority, some 60 percent, of the nation’s high school seniors haven’t even the most basic understanding of American history. . . .On a winter morning on the campus of one of our finest colleges, in a lively Ivy League setting with the snow falling outside the window, I sat with a seminar of some twenty-five students, all seniors majoring in history, all honors students—the cream of the crop. “How many of you know who George Marshall was?” I asked. None. Not one.At a large university in the Midwest, a young woman told me how glad she was to have attended my lecture, because until then, she explained, she had never realized that the original thirteen colonies were all on the eastern seaboard.
As Brian Ward of Fraters Libertas notes, the situation hasn’t improved in thirteen years, either.
The liberal news site MinnPost celebrates this glimpse into the state of public education in Minneapolis:When asked what historical figure they’d most like to study this year, an astounding 22 of the 35 students in Ms. Ellingham’s eighth-grade history class at Susan B. Anthony middle school in Minneapolis answered, “Yoko Ono” and/or “John Lennon.”I weep for the future. The great historian David McCullough was on C-SPAN this past week, looking like a beaten man while describing the crushing level of historical ignorance among America’s youth. He summed up with the warning that one can never love a country one doesn’t know. It sounded like an epitaph.
A lot of people will look at this and blame it on history being boring—a perception which I’ve never understood, since history is the human story, the summation of all the interesting (and not-so-interesting) things that have ever happened; sure, it’s boring if badly taught, but so is anything else. The real problem, I think, is ideological: the teaching of history, and especially American history, just isn’t valued by the elites who controle public education, because too many among them don’t especially value the country which that history has produced. Like Barack Obama, their chosen candidate, their conception of the good of America is primarily forward-looking—it’s about the changes they want to make and the good they believe they can create; they don’t want to learn from history, they want to be free of it. Thus John Hinderaker writes,
My youngest daughter started middle school this year. After around a month of classes, as far as I can tell the curriculum consists largely of propaganda about recycling. My high school age daughter told me tonight that in Spanish class she has been taught to say “global warming,” “acid rain” and “greenhouse effect” in Spanish. . . .The schools can teach anything if they care about it. The problem is that they don’t care about teaching history, least of all American history. Public education is agenda-driven, and American history—the facts of American history—is not on the agenda.
The problem is, we cannot get free of history—not as long as human beings are still sinful; the attempt to do so only leaves us blind to what others may do. The study of history is in large part a way of learning from the mistakes (and the insights!) of others so that we don’t have to reinvent them all ourselves. This is why the philosopher George Santayana was right to declare that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it; it’s also why progressives who try to evade this truth by dismissing it as a truism are self-defeating, because any true progress requires escaping the historical loop, which requires learning the lessons of history and taking them seriously. True progress must be founded on a chastened realism about human behavior, not on utopian optimism about human potential.The nub of the matter here is that the command of the Delphic oracle is still essential to any human wisdom: “Know thyself”—and our ability to do so rests on our memory, because to a great extent, as I’ve said before, memory is identity. We cannot know ourselves if we’ve forgotten who we are, what we’ve done and why we’ve done it and whom we did it for (or to, or against)—and this is no less true of us as a nation than it is of us as individuals. We cannot understand who we are and why we do things the way we do if we don’t understand how we got here; and as a consequence, we may well throw away treasures because we don’t know enough to see their value.The last word on this really should belong to David McCullough, of whom I am a great and fervent admirer, who put it beautifully in his 1995 acceptance speech (which is well worth reading in its entirety):
History shows us how to behave. History teaches, reinforces what we believe in, what we stand for, and what we ought to be willing to stand up for. History is—or should be—the bedrock of patriotism, not the chest-pounding kind of patriotism but the real thing, love of country.At their core, the lessons of history are largely lessons in appreciation. Everything we have, all our great institutions, hospitals, universities, libraries, this city, our laws, our music, art, poetry, our freedoms, everything is because somebody went before us and did the hard work, provided the creative energy, provided the money, provided the belief. Do we disregard that?Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude. It’s a form of ingratitude.I’m convinced that history encourages, as nothing else does, a sense of proportion about life, gives us a sense of the relative scale of our own brief time on earth and how valuable that is.What history teaches it teaches mainly by example. It inspires courage and tolerance. It encourages a sense of humor. It is an aid to navigation in perilous times. We are living now in an era of momentous change, of huge transitions in all aspects of life-here, nationwide, worldwide-and this creates great pressures and tensions. But history shows that times of change are the times when we are most likely to learn. This nation was founded on change. We should embrace the possibilities in these exciting times and hold to a steady course, because we have a sense of navigation, a sense of what we’ve been through in times past and who we are.
This sounds very familiar
This from a 1979 Atlantic article by James Fallows, who had been one of Jimmy Carter’s speechwriters:
Sixteen months into his Administration, there was a mystery to be explained about Jimmy Carter: the contrast between the promise and popularity of his first months in office and the disappointment so widely felt later on. Part of this had to do with the inevitable end of the presidential honeymoon, with the unenviable circumstances Carter inherited, with the fickleness of the press. But much more of it grew directly from the quality Carter displayed that morning in Illinois. He was speaking with gusto because he was speaking about the subject that most inspired him: not what he proposed to do, but who he was. Where Lyndon Johnson boasted of schools built and children fed, where Edward Kennedy holds out the promise of the energies he might mobilize and the ideas he might enact, Jimmy Carter tells us that he is a good man. His positions are correct, his values sound. Like Marshal Petain after the fall of France, he has offered his person to the nation. This is not an inconsiderable gift; his performance in office shows us why it’s not enough.After two and a half years in Carter’s service, I fully believe him to be a good man. With his moral virtues and his intellectual skills, he is perhaps as admirable a human being as has ever held the job. He is probably smarter, in the College Board sense, than any other President in this century. He grasps issues quickly. He made me feel confident that, except in economics, he would resolve technical questions lucidly, without distortions imposed by cant or imperfect comprehension.He is a stable, personally confident man, whose quirks are few. . . .But if he has the gift of virtue, there are other gifts he lacks. . . .The second is the ability to explain his goals and thereby to offer an object for loyalty larger than himself. . . .The third, and most important, is the passion to convert himself from a good man into an effective one, to learn how to do the job. Carter often seemed more concerned with taking the correct position than with learning how to turn that position into results. He seethed with frustration when plans were rejected, but felt no compulsion to do better next time. He did not devour history for its lessons, surround himself with people who could do what he could not, or learn from others that fire was painful before he plunged his hand into the flame.I worked for him enthusiastically and was proud to join his Administration, for I felt that he, alone among candidates, might look past the tired formulas of left and right and offer something new. . . .But there were two factors that made many of us ignore these paper limitations. One was Carter’s remarkable charm in face-to-face encounters. All politicians must be charming to some degree, but Carter’s performance on first intimate meeting was something special. . . . I met very few people who, having sat and talked with Carter by themselves or in groups of two or three, did not come away feeling they had dealt with a formidable man. . . .Those who are close enough to Carter to speak to him frankly—Powell, Jordan, Rafshoon, perhaps Moore—either believe so totally in the rightness of his style, or are so convinced that it will never change, that they never bother to suggest that he spend his time differently, deal with people differently, think of his job in a different way. Even that handful speaks to him in tones more sincerely deferential than those the underlings use. No one outside this handful ever has an opportunity to shoot the breeze with Carter, to talk with no specific purpose and no firm limit on time.If he persists in walling himself off from challenge and disorder, Jimmy Carter will ensure that great potential is all he’ll ever have. Teaching himself by trial and error, refusing to look ahead, Carter stumbles toward achievements that might match his abilities and asks us to respect him because his intentions be been good. I grant him that respect, but know the root of my disappointment. I thought we were getting a finished work, not a handsome block of marble that the chisel never touched.
Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter aren’t the same person, of course; but there really are some strong, and worrisome, similarities between the two of them. Like President Carter, Sen. Obama offers his person to the nation. This is not an inconsiderable gift; but for him, too, his performance in office so far shows us why it’s not enough.HT: Beldar
The Gospel for 9/16/01
For me (and, I suspect, for many preachers), 9/16 is a date inextricably linked to 9/11: it was the day we had the task of standing in the pulpit and presenting the gospel response to the terrorist attack on America. That day found me the guest preacher at the Church of the Good Shepherd, a congregation of my denomination (the Reformed Church in America) in Lynnwood, WA, on the north side of the Seattle area. They were between permanent pastors at that point, and I had agreed several weeks before to fill in for the Sunday between the departure of one interim pastor and the arrival of the next. To preach to a strange congregation five days after 9/11 was a daunting task, especially with one as inexperienced as I was, but it had one great benefit: it gave me something to focus on that helped me absorb and process the shock of what had happened.It’s interesting, seven years on, to go back to that sermon; it certainly shows my inexperience, but I think the thrust of it was right. If I needed to use it again, I would no doubt rewrite a fair bit of it, but I could keep the core as is. Indeed, when almost three years later, our community in Colorado was hit by what I think we can fairly call an act of local terrorism, that’s pretty much what I did. For all that it’s clearly the work of someone who hadn’t preached very much, I can stand by what I was doing my best to say. (For anyone who’s interested, the sermon follows after the jump.)***********The world changed this week. When terrorists flew airliners into the twin towers of the World Trade Center and into the Pentagon, the earth shook, and those towers, those great mountains raised up by human effort, fell; and the world changed. It was not just Manhattan or Washington, D.C. that shook, it was the earth under our feet; we were shaken, as these symbols of our country were attacked in a way that we have never been attacked before. We were shaken by the loss of life—the hundreds aboard those four airliners, the thousands more who died in the buildings which were hit; the firefighters and police officers who died trying to help those caught in the wreckage. Through the network of relationships that unites us across this country as family, friends, and colleagues, we have all been touched by the fear and pain of this last Tuesday. September 11, 2001: this day will live in infamy alongside December 7, 1941, and we will never be the same again; we mourn the loss of thousands of lives, but we also mourn the loss of a little more of our innocence. What words can possibly work to describe what happened? Unthinkable? Unbelievable? Horrific? This was a disaster movie produced and directed by Satan; it was designed to kill and to destroy, as our enemy so loves to do, but also to shatter the foundations of everything we hold true. The world has changed, the earth has moved, and we will never again trust it in quite the same way. Yet there is hope, even as the horror of last Tuesday echoes in our minds and hearts: in the midst of this upheaval, there is still a place to stand where we will not be shaken. With all that has changed, we need to remember what has not changed. We need to remember that God is, and what that means for us.Let’s look to the Psalms this morning, and hear God’s reassurance. Open your Bible with me to Psalm 46, and let’s read that together:God is our refuge and strength,
an ever-present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way
and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea,
though its waters roar and foam
and the mountains quake with their surging. Selah
There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
the holy place where the Most High dwells.
God is within her, she will not fall;
God will help her at break of day.
Nations are in uproar, kingdoms fall;
he lifts his voice, the earth melts.
The LORD Almighty is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress. Selah
Come and see the works of the LORD,
the desolations he has brought on the earth.
He makes wars cease to the ends of the earth;
he breaks the bow and shatters the spear,
he burns the shields with fire.
“Be still, and know that I am God;
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth.”
The LORD Almighty is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress. Selah“God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.” “Trouble” seems far too mild a word for what the psalmist has in mind—“disaster” would be more to the point. First, there is natural disaster, and the language is vivid, evoking the earthquake to end all earthquakes: the earth heaves so fiercely that the very mountains crack and collapse; their rubble falls into the ocean and causes great waves, great enough to shake the remaining mountains all over again. It is a scene of incredible physical terror—but the psalmist says, “We will not be afraid, because God is our refuge, our strength and our help.” Second, there is potential national disaster, the threat of the nations against the city of God; but the city will not fall, because God is there. No matter what disaster may come, God is very near to us, and he is our refuge.In the midst of disaster, God is our refuge. We can rest in him and he will protect and comfort us, body and soul. If you look at your outline you’ll see the opening of another psalm, one of my favorites, Psalm 91: “He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty,” as the NIV has it. The psalm gives us the image of a bird comforting its chicks, protecting them from the traps left by the hunter and from diseases which could kill them; under God’s wings, in his shadow, we are safe from diseases of the spirit and those who would attack our souls. We may not be free from pain, but we are comforted.But as we look out at the world this week, we still see the suffering. Who can forget the images of a 110-story building collapsing into so much twisted, broken wreckage? Who can forget the nightmare thought of secretaries, janitors, and receptionists who actually found jumping out of windows 90+ stories up their best hope of survival? And it doesn’t end there. The television still shows us shattered buildings, rubble everywhere, people in grief and shock; how could this happen? Is the Devil bigger than God after all?The Psalmist’s answer is firm: No. Even in the midst of suffering, destruction and war, God is in control. In Isaiah 45, the prophet puts this even more strongly, as God declares, “I am the LORD, and there is no other. I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the LORD, do all these things.” In other words, what happened on Tuesday didn’t take God by surprise; he isn’t pacing around his throne room pulling out his hair trying to figure out what to do about this situation. In all the circumstances of life, in all the trials we face both huge and smaller, the one who is our refuge and our help is in control of the situation. As your congregation looks for a new pastor, and as you suffer setbacks in your search, God is in control. As you struggle with difficult relationships, whether in your family, at work, or elsewhere, God is in control. As you or someone you care about fights serious illness, God is in control. As those of us who are unemployed look for jobs, God is in control. And yes, as men with evil in their hearts turn our airlines into weapons of inconceivable mass destruction, God is in control. He has not been outwitted; he has not lost the battle, much less the war. The God who is our fortress and our help is still the one writing the story, and evil will not have the last word.But this raises a hard question: if God is in control, if he is the one writing the story, then why do we get chapters like this week? Why does he allow such evil and suffering?I don’t have any easy answers; and if I did, I don’t imagine you’d trust them. There aren’t any easy answers. In part, we know that when God created us, he gave us the dignity of freedom, to choose to follow him or not; and he respects us and leaves us free to choose, even though so often our choices pierce his heart. At the end, God will tell all the nations, “Be still, and know that I am God,” and all evil will be banished, but until then he gives us the dignity of being able to say no to him. But that’s only part of the answer; it doesn’t tell us why evil succeeds, why things don’t go right the first time. How much of a change, really, would it have taken for the men who carried out this attack on our country to fail rather than succeed in their efforts? A few alert, suspicious security guards, perhaps, and none of those planes are hijacked.I don’t know; but if I have learned anything in my life, it is the lesson C. S. Lewis put so well: that “God whispers in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain.” God is shouting to us in this time—it may just be a coincidence, but did you notice that the date of this attack was 9/11? 911. Perhaps this is an emergency call to a nation that is in desparate need of God. And people are picking up the phone. On CNN, a newscaster admitted that “Even if you don’t believe in God, at times like this you want to reach out to a higher being for salvation.” As horrific as this attack was, even this God can turn to his purposes, even this he can use to rescue people who are lost and need him; even from these black, evil, poisonous roots, God can grow beautiful flowers.God whispers in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain. And so, as the great Catholic mystic Julian of Norwich once wrote, God did not promise us, “You will not be troubled, you will not be belabored, you will not be disquieted”; but he did promise us this: “You will not be overcome.” Therefore we will not fear, though the earth shake, the mountains fall, and our cities be attacked; we will not fear, though we struggle financially, or with our families, or with our past; for God is our fortress and our help, and he is still in control, whatever may come.And we will not fear because in the midst of our weakness, God is our shepherd. Let’s turn to our second psalm, Psalm 23:The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not be in want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures,
he leads me beside quiet waters,
he restores my soul.
He guides me in paths of righteousness
for his name’s sake.
Even though I walk
through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil,
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff,
they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies.
You anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.
Surely goodness and love will follow me
all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever.Our God is no impersonal God—he knows each of us by name, and he watches closely over each of us; he cares for us and takes care of us as a shepherd watches over and takes care of his sheep. He wants us to know and love him as he knows and loves us, and he wants us to call on him when we are uncertain, when we are in need, when we are in pain, when we are in danger. That, after all, is what a sheep does: when it realizes that it is lost in the wilderness and has no idea where its flock and shepherds are, it will lie down and begin to bleat at the top of its lungs so that the shepherd can come and find it and bring it back to the flock. The sheep knows it’s in a bad situation, but it trusts the shepherd to take care of it, and God wants us to trust him in the same way.We can trust him for a couple of reasons. First, in our uncertainty, God is our guide; he leads us as a shepherd leads his sheep. He leads us in the paths of righteousness—not crooked paths which will wear us out uselessly and waste our efforts, but the right paths, those which will take us where he has called us to be; the paths which will lead us to growth in righteousness. When we wander from the path, he leads us back, even when that means lifting us up and carrying us. But the straight path is often not the easy one; in Israel, the best way from one pasture to the next often led through deep, narrow canyons and ravines where the steep, high slopes kept out the light, where the sheep could only trust and follow the sound of their shepherd’s voice. In the same way, the path for us often leads us through pain and suffering, through valleys like this week when the road is too dark for us to see beyond the next step. In times like these for our nation, when the weight of suffering and loss seems too great to bear, God is our shepherd. In this time of uncertainty for you in this church, God is your shepherd. We are in this place, we are in this time, dark as it is, because God has led us here, because this is the right path, the path that will bring each of us where he wants us to be; but he has led us into the valley of the shadow of death in order to lead us through it and out into the light once more, and he is here to comfort and protect us in the darkness. “God did not say, ‘You will not be troubled, you will not be belabored, you will not be disquieted’; but God said: ‘You will not be overcome.’” That is a promise for us this morning, here in the valley of the shadow.The promise, too, is that God will meet our needs, because he is our shepherd; in our need, he is our provider. That, after all, is how Psalm 23 begins: “The Lord is my shepherd, I will not be in need.” He provides us with green pastures and quiet streams, not merely meeting our physical needs but doing so in a way which refreshes us and gives us rest. He restores my soul, the Psalmist says.Do any of you feel the need to have your souls restored this morning? I know I do; there have been times in the last few days when it seemed wrong and unfair somehow that we had blue skies and sunshine and could still see the beauty of the day when at the World Trade Center the sun had not shone since Tuesday for all the smoke. Others I know felt violated by this attack; my brother’s comment, after a long conversation, was, “I want my country back.” Another friend of mine said he has been walking around in shock since hearing the news, that part of him is frozen up inside. The promise to us this morning is that God meets us at this place of our need, that he will restore our souls.God is our strength in the midst of disaster, and our shepherd in the midst of our weakness; he provides for us in our need and guides us through the darkness. Through everything we face, God is with us. That is why we need fear no evil as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death—because God isn’t leading us from up ahead somewhere, he isn’t sending us on from behind, he is walking through the valley with us, carrying his staff to keep us on the right path and his rod to drive away enemies. That’s why he is able to restore our souls, because he is with us in our hurts and losses and fears. That’s why he is our refuge and strength when we are under attack. And it’s why we can trust him when we don’t know how we’ll pay the bills . . . when we fear what the future holds for us . . . when we don’t know what to do next . . . when someone we love is sick . . . and even when we watch the news and hear the death toll from Tuesday’s attack: because he is with us. He was there with those people who lost their lives in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, he was there with the passengers who died on the airliners, he was there with the firefighters who rushed in when the first tower was hit and died when it fell on them, he is there with those who have lost sons, daughters, husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters; he is here with us this morning as we struggle to come to grips with what has happened, as we think of those we know who escaped or are among the missing, and as we deal with all the other problems and struggles that fill our lives. He is here with us in his Spirit, and his Son came and walked the very same earth we walk. He knows us, he knows us inside and out, he loves us more than we will ever understand, and he is here with us to care for us as a shepherd cares for his sheep. We worship a God whose name is Immanuel, God with us, and if we are too weak to stand that is just fine with him; he wants us to lean on him as he leads us through—and out of—the valley of the shadow of death and into his glorious light.
Seven years ago today
Please take a few moments today to remember those who died on 9/11, and to pray for those they left behind; to give thanks for the courage and heroism of the passengers who took down the hijackers of Flight 93, and for those who gave their lives to save others in the Twin Towers and the Pentagon; to pray that those who plan such attacks would be brought to repentance; and to give thanks, in the words of Hugh Hewitt, for “the men and women of the United States military and their civilian counterparts who have fought so hard and sacrificed so much to prevent another such attack.” (NB: the link is my addition.)
“May the Lamb that was slain receive the reward of His suffering!”
I just realized, I hadn’t remembered to post this. It’s a powerful little clip, and truly, as Jared says, a vivid picture of gospel-driven living.
I am the descendant of the original spinner
I don’t know what to make of this tidbit that John Steele Gordon pulled up, but it’s interesting. It also makes my great-great-ever-so-great-granddaddy look like a pretty conniving politician, which isn’t an image I’d ever associated with him before.
When William Henry Harrison ran for president in 1840, his supporters put out one of the earliest pieces of American political ephemera, a handkerchief printed with scenes of his life. It featured, of course, the Battle of Tippecanoe, but it also showed his supposed birthplace: a small log cabin with smoke curling out of the chimney. Just plain folks was Ol’ Tippecanoe.There was only one problem. William Henry Harrison, in fact, was born at Berkeley Plantation, one of Virginia’s grandest 18th-century houses, on the James River. It was the home of his father, Benjamin Harrison, who was governor of Virginia and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. The lawn at Berkeley was capacious enough for the Army of the Potomac to camp there during the Civil War.The Whig campaign of 1840 accused Harrison’s main opponent, President Martin Van Buren, of being an aristocrat, eating off gold spoons in “the Palace.” But Van Buren’s father had been only a simple farmer and part-time tavern keeper.It was all exceedingly fake. It also worked: Harrison clobbered Van Buren in the election.
What the Internet was made for
(which too often isn’t what it’s used for)Since I first discovered Pauline Evans’ blog, Perennial Student, I’ve come to appreciate her work for a number of things—not least that she has a sharp eye for all sorts of interesting stories that I would otherwise miss. A few days ago, for instance, she pointed me to a real piece of good news in the world of biblical scholarship: the guardians of the Dead Sea Scrolls have launched a five-year multi-million dollar project to put them on the Web. Specifically,
the fragments will be photographed first by a 39-megapixel colour digital camera, then by another digital camera in infra-red light and finally some will be photographed using a sophisticated multi-spectral imaging camera, which can distinguish the ink from the parchment and papyrus on which the scrolls were written.Eventually all the fragments will be available to view online, with transcriptions, translations, scholarly interpretations and bibliographies provided for academic study. “The aim in the end is that you can go online and call up the scrolls with the best possible resolution and all the information that exists about them today,” said Pnina Shor, head of the Artefacts Treatment and Conservation Department at the antiquities authority. “We want to provide opportunities for future research on the scrolls. We feel it’s part of our duty to expose them to the world as a whole.”
This is truly splendid, and should be a huge boon to biblical and historical scholarship—especially as it’s already produced unexpected side benefits:
The new infra-red photography has picked out letters that had not previously been visible to the naked eye. “The ink stays dark and the leather becomes light and suddenly you can see text that you may no have been able to see,” said Tanner. “We have revealed some text that has not been previously seen by scholars.” The detailed colour photographs of papyrus fragments may help to identify pieces that fit together and to identify fragments written by the same scribes. Scholars hope this new information might enable them to piece together more of the fragments and so come closer to putting complete sections of the scrolls together.