Month: February 2005

Here is the text of a brief treatise Martin Luther wrote on prayer. His barber Peter had asked Luther for advice on how to pray, and this was his response. Luther recommends taking a portion of Scripture such as the Ten Commandments or a Psalm, or the Creed or the Lord’s Prayer, and making of it a “garland” of four strands: to pray the words as a teaching, a thanksgiving, a confession, and a petition.

It is, of course, full of the inimitable Luther style:

Then repeat one part or as much as you wish, perhaps the first petition: “Hallowed be thy name,” and say: “Yes, Lord God, dear Father, hallowed be thy name, both in us and throughout the whole world. Destroy and root out the abominations, idolatry, and heresy of the Turk, the pope, and all false teachers and fanatics who wrongly use thy name and in scandalous ways take it in vain and horribly blaspheme it.”

This post on heresy generated some very good comments, so I thought I would just throw one last thing into the mix. Lutheran theologian Ed Schroeder (whose Thursday Theology column has become a must-read for me) discusses here how “good fruits” must be rooted in the Gospel:

The object of Christian faith, the reality that faith trusts, what Christian faith is “in”–is never a doctrine. Not even a “true” doctrine. Faith’s object is the promised forgiveness offered us in the crucified and risen Messiah. And that object, the promise, is what’s to be proclaimed. Not JBGTF [justification by grace through faith]. When folks do indeed trust that promise, the CONSEQUENCE is “JBGTF.” […]

…Promise-preaching aims to bring sinners to confident trust in Christ–and keep them there. There is no “getting beyond” that. Or if there is, what is “beyond” confident trust in Christ? What is “real growth” that goes beyond this? What is the “solid food” that supercedes this “milk” of the gospel? Placing add-ons onto the Gospel is the Lutheran definition of heresy. Gospel-plus is what the Galatian legalists were promoting. Paul called it an “other” Gospel. […]

That raises the same question that confronted the Lutherans at Augsburg. Their critics hollered at them: “Where are the good works in your version of the gospel? We go to God’s law to fill out the package and get folks to attend to ethics. What we hear you saying all the time is faith, and faith ALONE. When to you ever get around to sanctification?” […]

To get “fruits of faith” happening again, you need to get faith happening again, and there’s only one way to get faith to happen. Offer the Gospel-promise –milky or not. To commend good works, proclaim the promise. Use it or lose it. […]

Needed is to re-root the tree so that it “naturally” bears fruit. “Roots of faith” produce “fruits of faith.” So says Jesus. And no surprise, that’s the apostolic axiom too. That’s what Paul does to/for the Galatians [“you’ve gotten hooked into an OTHER Gospel, so I’ve got to go back to square one and proclaim the REAL GOSPEL, the promise, again so that maybe you’ll trust it this time–at least for a while. And then the ‘fruits of the Spirit’ (chapter 5) will come. Nothing else will produce them.”]

A recent poll suggests that Bob Casey Jr. stands the best chance of any of the potential Democratic contenders of unseating Rick Santorum in 2006. Casey was just installed as state treasurer and it’s not clear yet if he’s going to run. Like his father, Casey is pro-life and anti-gun control, which suggests he will be able to compete handily with Santorum among the socially conservative voters who populate much of the state. It’ll be interesting to see how things play out.

Camassia has a typically insightful post on the question of war for Christians. She raises two points in particular that I think are worth thinking about: What, if anything, makes just war theory a particularly Christian approach to war? And is JWT an attempt to substitute our justice for God’s?

Also, here’s a discussion from 2001 between Jean Elshtain, Stanley Hauerwas, and James Turner Johnson on some of these issues. Good stuff there.

I would be the last to claim that “reality” TV reflects reality in any more than a distorted, often grotesque, way. Still, sometimes I do think that moments of truth slip through the carefully choreographed nonsense.

For instance, we were watching American Idol last night (yes, yes – get all the chortling out), and there was one point where a roomful of AI hopefuls are waiting to hear whether they’re going to proceed to the next round. And you see all the people in the room (maybe 20-30 kids) holding hands in a prayer circle!

The wife observed: “Reality TV makes you realize how religious most of America is,” and that struck me as a true observation. On most network TV religion is presented (when it is presented at all) largely as I imagine most people in Hollywood perceive it: ridiculous and/or threatening. Reality TV, for all its many, many vices, occasionally gives us a moment of insight – like what a very large part of the rest of the country looks like: religous and basically normal.

The Internet Monk has two very good posts on the question of inerrancy and how he reads the Bible. Well worth reading.

There is a long-running debate about whether a “demand side” or “supply side” approach is the best way to bringing down the abortion rate. Myself, I favor both – more support for moms and kids and restrictions on abortion when and where moral consensus exists (e.g. parental notification laws, PBA ban, etc.). And an ongoing effort to expand that moral consensus so that every baby is “welcomed in life and protected in law” as they say. This is not an either/or kind of issue.

A good model here is the late Bob Casey, two-term governor of the great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Casey was not a “conservative Democrat” in the Zell Miller mold, but a progressive populist committed to the traditional Democrat position that government has a responsibility to protect the most vulnerable. Casey acted on this by, among other things, pushing for progressive tax reform, creating school-based child care programs for teen parents, and signing into law a program providing health insurance for poor children who were ineligible for Medicaid (see here).

Casey took this concern for the most vulnerable to what he thought was its logical conclusion. He asked “Since when does America abandon in despair an entire class of people, the most defenseless, innocent, and vulnerable members of the human family? How can we justify writing off the unborn child in a country which prides itself on leaving no one out and no one behind?”

On a related note, New Zealander (incidentally, is “Kiwi” considered a disparaging term by NZers?) John at Home, Throne & Altar questions the efficacy of a sex-ed/contraception/cradle-to-grave-socialism approach to reducing abortions.

New Over the Rhine album, March 29th! See here.

Jeremy Lott reviews a new book on the various quests for the historical Jesus and their limitations. Sounds like a good read:

Yes, Jesus was a teacher of Jewish wisdom, the author says, but he also warned that the end would come, and many would be caught unawares. He was kind, but he was also “a totalitarian,” insisting that he was the one true path to God the Father.

In contrast to what McClymond calls the “family values Jesus” of modern evangelicalism, the author issues some “hard sayings” of his own in the final chapter. The two most stinging are “Jesus sided with the poor”—which might call for some family sacrifices—and “Jesus was a home wrecker” (recall his warning that following him would bring division). McClymond’s own all-too-brief portrayal of Jesus is what the kids in Narnia would have called “not a tame lion.”

You can also download an excerpt at the Eerdman’s site here.

Chris at Progressive Protestant took issue with my somewhat tongue-in-cheek post calling for the return of the heresy trial:

I’ve read a handful of posts in the last week (this one today) about doing quality control on Christianity or various denominations, weeding out gays, kicking out the “heretical,” counterbalancing the open, seeker-friendly stance taken by a few denominations in recent years by some good, old-fashioned roastings at the stake. (Metaphorical ones, naturally—this is a kinder, gentler Christianity.) Looking at the withered fruit such ass-kicking, high-tension churches have born, I’m understandably wary of the usefulness of heresy trials.

I suggest Christians use a different rubric. If a branch of the Christian movement stops bearing fruit, cut it off before it infects us. As I’ve noted before, anti-abortion advocacy sucks up millions of dollars every year and only makes the problem worse—it should be torn out, and then we can actually engage the problems of teen pregnancy, poverty, and children born addicted to drugs. The heterosexist and anti-marriage rights movements (which are at their heart anti-family, holding to an idolatrous belief in the nuclear family above all others) deprive us of pastors, deprive faithful Christians of comfort and basic rights to health care and access to loved ones, and deprive children of good adoptive parents. The Christian Right shows signs of a blackened, cancerous faith—the emphasis on orthodoxy is not bearing fruit. Faith is not about answers to a couple of cultural questions about sex and the creation.

I’m not sure if Chris takes my post to be representative of all the evil nasty things he mentions or even if he means to include me in the category of the dreaded Christian Right (not an interpretation that would be borne out by much of what I’ve written – unless you can be a peacenik, a Green Party voter, a vegetarian, and pro-redistribution and still be a member of the Christian Right), but to forestall any confusion let me just explain what I was trying (no doubt ineptly) to get at.

The possibility of heresy is implied by the very definition of the church as I understand it. And it has nothing to do with any political laundary list. Let’s go back once again to good old Article 7 of the Augsburg Confession:

Also they [i.e. the evangelical churches] teach that one holy Church is to continue forever. The Church is the congregation of saints, in which the Gospel is rightly taught and the Sacraments are rightly administered.And to the true unity of the Church it is enough to agree concerning the doctrine of the Gospel and the administration of the Sacraments. Nor is it necessary that human traditions, that is, rites or ceremonies, instituted by men, should be everywhere alike. As Paul says: One faith, one Baptism, one God and Father of all, etc. Eph. 4, 5. 6.

As this makes clear, the right teacing of the Gospel and the right administration of the Sacraments are necessary and sufficient for the existence and unity of the church. There’s your Christian liberty right there! For the church to be present no one can demand any more of it than that. It is enough (satis est) to agree concerning the doctrine of the Gospel and the administration of the sacraments.

Now, in the Lutheran understanding the office of the ordained ministry is that the minister is the one charged with ensuring that the congregation is, in fact, rightly preaching the Gospel and rightly administering the sacraments. The minister is the “paradigmatic preacher” as Robert Jenson puts it; she shows the rest of the congregation how to do Gospel.

But what if the minister fails to do her job? What if she is not preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ but some other gospel (the gospel of “positive thinking,” or the gospel of political revolution, or the gospel of saving the unborn, the rainforests, the whales, or the gospel of American power, etc.)? Well, in the ELCA the minister is accountable to the synodical bishop and ultimately the church at large. And if it isn’t also the bishop’s job to ensure that the church is preaching the Gospel, well, what is his job exactly? The possibility, at least in principle, of something that looks very much like a heresy trial seems to follow as a matter of course.

So “heresy” has nothing to do with politics per se, nor does it even have to do with “doctrine” as such. Preaching the Gospel and administering the sacraments are the church’s first-order activity; doctrine is second-order reflection on that activity. I take it that ACVII does not preclude church unity amid doctrinal disagreements (which is not to say doctrinal division is unimportant, it just needn’t call into question the unity of the church). But where there is a denial of the Gospel, then you have heresy.*
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*Obviously someone could be unintentionally failing to preach the Gospel. The first step in any kind of church discipline should always be fraternal correction (cf. Matt. 18: 15-20) . Any kind of formal proceedings would only be necessary in the case of someone who obstinately persists in teaching manifest heresy.