Good Discussion

Over at Pontifications there is a good discussion about Rome, sola Scriptura, etc. These seem to be happening more and more lately, I wonder why? One comment there says:

As a convert from Evangelical Protestantism about two years ago, I have been amazed at the differences between converts from Protestantism to Catholicism vs. Catholicism to Protestantism. Generally speaking, Catholics who convert seem to me grossly uninformed regarding the Faith. They often had an anemic faith life and were simply “churched.” Then, by the Grace of God, they had a genuine conversion to Christ outside of the Catholic Church (which I agree is a scandal to the Church). They then blame Catholicism (which they never understood or really practiced) and leave. I’ve essentially never heard of an orthodox Catholic priest converting to Protestantism (though many theologically liberal priests have done so).

Conversely, converts from Evangelical Protestantism are usually well studied and understand their Protestant faith. They have already had a coversion of heart and are a follower of Christ, not just churched. However, despite knowing their Protestant faith, they come to see the truth of Catholicism. This is especially striking given the large numbers of Protestant pastors (seminary trained) or actual theologians who have converted.

I just think this is an interesting aspect of the conversion paradigm.

Oasis – Whatever

My dear and loving wife bought me the Oasis single Whatever and I got it in the mail from Europe today. This was the first song I ever heard from Oasis, back when I was in Japan. I was instantly blown away. Here were the Beatles of the 90′s, hanging out with Evan Dando and writing a song called Purple Parellelogram. Those were the days. They put the nail in the coffin of grunge, but America never got it.

Whatever is one of their top 2 or 3 songs ever. Along with Masterplan it soars to heights and is right up there with the Beatles. Unfortunately, it was never on an album. If you’ve got high speed access you can see a poor version of the video here.

Other great and unhearalded songs from them: Sad Song, D’Yer Wanna be a Spaceman (my favorite), and Nowhere on a Train.

Holding the Line

This article says it all when it comes to who will really defend traditional, orthodox Christianity going forward.

“The gap between the traditional wing, represented mainly by Orthodox churches and the Roman Catholic Church, and the liberal wing, represented by many Protestant churches, is only growing day by day,” he said.

“We (Orthodox and Catholics) are on the same side of the divide.” “Traditional Christianity’s very survival is in jeopardy. We have no right to delay this strategic alliance, because in 20-40 years it will be too late,” he said in an interview, citing threats like “warrior secularism, warrior Islam or warrior liberalism present in Protestantism.”

Alfeyev, the Bishop of Vienna also in charge of Russian Orthodox Church relations with the European Union, said the alliance should not be a matter of dogma and should precede the resolution of many centuries-old differences between the two oldest branches of Christianity, some dating back to the Great Schism of 1054.

His comments echoed ideas supported by Roman Catholic Pope Benedict, who has said closer ties with Orthodox churches are a top priority of his papacy. The Catholic Church represents over half of the world’s 2 billion Christians but is not a member of the Geneva-based WCC.

Alfeyev said Russian theologians thought decades ago to “establish full Eucharistic contact” with the Anglican church.

“In the past years, it has become clear that it is completely impossible – dogmatically, ideologically and from the point of view of moral teaching, as the Anglican church shifted very far away from Orthodox dogma,” he said.

Some Anglican churches in North America and Europe, as well as other Protestant churches, ordain non-celibate gay clergy and bless same-sex unions. Some also ordain women bishops.

These stances, Alfeyev said, make “any talk of unification very hard nowadays.” The Orthodox Church does not accept the idea of female clergy as it attributes that development to the influence of secular processes of the past few decades.

Alfeyev said “a revelation from above” is needed for Orthodox churches to start ordaining women.

NT Wright on Thought-Crime

In a speech to the House of Lords:

And since the crimes in question have to do, not with actions but with ideas and beliefs, what we are seeing is thought crime. People in my diocese have told me that they are now afraid to speak their minds in the pub on some major contemporary issues for fear of being reported, investigated, and perhaps charged. My Lords, I did not think I would see such a thing in this country in my lifetime. All that such a situation can achieve is to add another new fear to those which minorities already experience. The word for such a state of affairs is ‘tyranny’: sudden moral climate change, enforced by thought police.

Have you ever tried to voice Christian opinions of sex outside of marriage or Jesus as the only way to salvation in the workplace? We have thoughtcrime here as well. I think the call of Jesus is to be unafraid of thoughtcrime, no matter what the consequences (loss of job, etc).

Anglican Mission blogs

A couple of AMiA bloggers:

Abbot Gregory’s Cloister
Peter Matthews

Paul Owens wrote about why he jumped into being Anglican on Matthews blog. He says:

I must admit, I am a fairly zealous new convert to Anglicanism. I finally feel like I have found a spiritual home, having been raised in a nominal Mormon environment in southern Idaho (Bit of trivia: Brigham Young is my 5th great grandfather), converted through Pentecostal evangelism, and then moving from Calvary Chapel, to Free Church of Scotland, to PCA congregations. I finally believe I have found a spiritual home. Some of the reasons I love the Anglican Church are as follows:
1. The Anglican 39 Articles are stated in such a way as to allow for both Calvinism and Arminianism (cf. Art. X & XXXI), which I believe is healthy for a church, in that it better reflects the true breadth of the Christian tradition. Denominations which demand adherence to Calvinism among their pastors tend to focus on the “doctrines of grace” in a grotesque way. The Bible does not highlight the so-called doctrines of grace with any great degree of systematic clarity, so neither should we as the collective Church. I am glad my church has a statement of faith which could be affirmed by both Whitefield and John Wesley, by both Calvin and Melanchthon, by both J. I. Packer and Arminius.
2. The Anglican Church strikes a fine balance between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. They openly define themselves as a Reformed Catholic church, which retains the high regard for the precedent of Tradition characteristic of the Great Church, alongside the Protestant emphasis on sola Scriptura as the Church’s only infallible Rule of Faith. The Anglican Church has from the beginning understood sola Scriptura (Art. VI & XX) in such a way as to give tremendous respect and deference to the consensus of Faith from the first five centuries. The agreed teachings of the Fathers and early Creeds do not constitute our Rule of Faith, but they do authoritatively define and clarify it.
3. The Book of Common Prayer contains the finest collection of prayers, devotional exercises, and liturgies that in my opinion could ever be hoped for. I honestly cannot even begin to compare what I have experienced of modern, glib evangelical worship over the years, with the aesthetic beauty, depth of biblical allusion, and mastery of the art of capturing the theological sense of Holy Scripture, which characterizes the Anglican worship service. It is like eating steak and lobster for the first time, washed down with fine wine at a first class restaurant, after years of subsisting on tater tots and corn dogs (washed down with warm chocolate milk) from those junior high school cafateria lunches.
4. The Anglicans are not afraid to call the sacraments what they are. The Anglican Catechism tells us that baptism and the Supper of the Lord are “generally necessary to salvation,” and that the sacraments are not only visible signs of spiritual graces, but that they are “means whereby we receive the same.” In baptism and the Eucharist, saving grace is not only outwardly and visibly signified, but actually received by believers and their children through the operation of the sacramental sign.
5. The Anglican Church maintains the apostolic structure of bishops, presbyters and deacons. They have not departed from the Bible to engage in the democratic experiment of Bible church congregationalism, with its structure of “fellow elders,” who rule autonomous churches with an authority that rises no higher (and no further back) than the ability of the elders to “exegete” the New Testament out of the modest arsenal of their seminary training in Greek.
6. The Anglican Church recognizes the sacrificial (though not propitiatory) character of the Eucharist. As the Invocation during the Holy Communion service directs us to pray: “And we earnestly desire thy fatherly goodness, mercifully to accept this our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving; most humbly beseeching thee to grant that, by the merits and death of thy Son Jesus Christ, and through faith in his blood, we, and all thy whole Church, may obtain remission of our sins, and all other benefits of his passion.”
7. The Anglican Church affirms a soundly Protestant doctrine of justification (Art. XI), which avoids the teachings of Rome on the one hand (which can harm Christian assurance if wrongly understood) and modern Evangelicalism on the other (which tends to promote a carnal sense of security in its denial of the possibility for Christians of real apostasy).
8. The Anglican Church (unlike the Roman Catholic) allows for a variety of views on the role of women in the ministry. I personally am convinced of the biblical propriety of women deacons (Rom. 16:1), and am open to the possibility of women presbyters (Tit. 2:3; Rom. 16:3-5), though not bishops (1 Tim. 3:2-5). The Anglican Church has conservative, orthodox voices which range in opinion from limiting all such offices to men, to opening all such offices (including the bishopric) to women. This is an important debate, which has to wrestle with some complicated issues, and I think it wise for this matter to be handled with caution. Perhaps local arrangements will eventually be worked out, in which the ecclesial roles of women may vary from Province to Province, or even diocese to diocese.
It is an exciting time to be Anglican! A new communion of orthodox Anglicans is being drawn together by the Spirit of God. Various denominational pools from orthodox Episcopal parishes and dioceses, the Anglican Mission in America, the Anglican Province of America, the Reformed Episcopal Church, and the orthodox Anglican Provinces of the global South, are working together to bear witness to the Reformed Catholic faith for the salvation of the nations. I am truly excited to be a part of it.

DEUS CARITAS EST

I am going to interact with Pope Benedict’s first encyclical over the next who knows how long. This is the first stab at it:

Thoughts on the latest Encyclical

The Pope discusses the degradation of humanity in the sexual perversion of prostitution. It is telling to reflect on how ancient fertility cults and modern liberated women resemble one another. The cult prostitute became an object, as the Pope writes:

this counterfeit divinization of eros actually strips it of its dignity and dehumanizes it. Indeed, the prostitutes in the temple, who had to bestow this divine intoxication, were not treated as human beings and persons, but simply used as a means of arousing A“divine madness”: far from being goddesses, they were human persons being exploited.

This seems like a trenchant critique of the modern notion of women functioning as goddesses. Indeed it is a word we throw around about the young and beautiful. The Pope rightly points out that this view of the person sees people only as means to an end – the end being pleasure. The desire for the beautiful form leads to lust, the desire to take whatever we want that will give us the sense of power and achievement at the expense of the others being. Women may not realize that they are being used in this exchange until through age or disease they are cast off as discarded commodities.

There is a Dionysian school of thought that giving ourselves over to pleasure seeking will in some sense lead us to a transcendent experience. Drugs provide ecstasy and connection to the spirit world, sex takes us outside of ourselves and is the coinage with which we measure our identity. Benedict says of this philosophy:

An intoxicated and undisciplined eros, then, is not an ascent in “ecstasy” towards the Divine, but a fall, a degradation of man. Evidently, eros needs to be disciplined and purified if it is to provide not just fleeting pleasure, but a certain foretaste of the pinnacle of our existence, of that beatitude for which our whole being yearns.

Sex is a foretaste of the divine vision. The God who created pleasure and specifically sexual pleasure (He didn’t have to), who created the ability to enjoy ice-cream, beer, and air conditioning is obviously a God who can give us the ultimate pleasure. Our eventual dwelling with Him in His fullness will be the pinnacle of existence.

(more later)

Opus Dei

An article describing a day in the life of Opus Dei:

UPDATE: Here is the Opus Dei guy’s blog.

bought a Mac!

We bought an iMac yesterday – I am so happy! I’ve wanted one for years and it was finally possible. This is my first Mac, so I have a lot to learn, but so far, so good.