Dumbing Down

If you've listened to the track from YouTube mentioned in the previous post, you'll know why the following question from a pupil really sent me into despair:
"Sir, can you tell me what to think?"

Tears and the Truth

I was listening to the White Horse Inn this week, and they played this song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cr4DBnB7aNQ . It was absolutely mind-blowing when I then looked it up on YouTube and listened to it. I was listening to it and crying - I just burst into tears. The song parodied, but in a serious tone, the religiosity of many Americans - oh, and Europeans, and Africans, and wherever, I guess. The sadness of the song expresses perfectly the terrible thought that God's people live under such slavery. Oh God, oh God, oh God, my heart breaks for people suffering such slavery! Give me a pulpit!

Romans, Preaching, and, er, Facebook?

I can still remember the first time I didn't just listen to a sermon, but experienced "preaching". It was MR-W on Romans 12. We'd looked at it together: I thought I had a handle on the passage. But I hadn't heard it preached - only as the word came through the ordained instrument of preacher did it have its full effect. Hence my rather funny wording in the post on the London Mens' Convention. Preaching is something more: the fact that it is indicates the power with which the Spirit invests it.
By the way, what's MR-W doing on Facebook?

Sansom, "Revelation"

The latest offering from C J Sansom is "Revelation". Matthew Shardlake, the Tudor lawyer/sleuth, pursues a killer around London.
The book is fourth in a series. The first, Dissolution, now looks like a slow start, when one compares it with its successors; Sansom does appear to have just done his own version of Name of the Rose in order to show us the inside of the dissolution of the monasteries. The next two, Dark Fire and Sovereign, used the vehicle of the detective genre to unpack for us genuine mysteries of Tudor England: why the sudden fall of Cromwell at that moment, and why the speculation concerning the lineage of the Tudors? The genre exposits the material: Sansom goes beyond mere detective fiction, opening up (largely fictional, admittedly) new vistas on how history might/might have been.
You'll note I read Sansom as a historian-novelist, and not just a pure novelist.
"Revelation" involves a series of killings driven by a reading of Revelation 15-17. As a Christian, evangelical at that, I might be expected to moan: Revelation is terribly misread by all the characters, and Sansom in his historical note. But the misreadings are historically plausible, and
the character of Cranmer, even that of the King's coroner, never let us see the book as anti-Christian. I would in fact take major issue with brethren objecting to the book.
Finally, Sansom needs to be read as a more serious novelist here: the three mad characters stand for the religious world (make of that what you will). There are those driven to evil by their faith, there are those driven to despair, but then there are those, often overlooked, who quietly love others. Perhaps Swift's dictum should come to mind: "we know enough religion to hate others, but not enough to love" (or something like that).

Truly Unexpected Largely Intuited Poetry (TULIP)

Turned away
Truly I have turned away
Totally rejected You
Traitor to Your righteous rule

Unmerited
Unsought is Your great love for me
Utterly the product of
Unending steadfast love

Lovingly
Leaving heaven far behind
Lost redeeming by a cross
Lord You gave Your life for me

In Your good time
Irresistibly Your Spirit came
Into Your arms to draw my soul
Invisibly my heart to transform

Perfectly
Perseverance won by Christ
Pulled out of every danger now
Perfected in heaven to be

Geddit?

Freedom of Speech

Isn't it ironic that both in London and in Paris, huge numbers of police, including in Paris at least riot police, had to be put on the streets to limit the demonstrations against Chinese policy in Tibet, and - I hope, although I haven't noticed it in the media - their other human rights abuses. In other words, our police forces, put in an impossible position by the folly of granting the Olympic Games to China, have had to limit free demonstration in our own countries for the sake of a vicious dictatorship. We are so concerned not to upset China that we have compromised our own values. Good on those who today extinguished the Olympic flame: it's long been in principle extinguished by the Chinese.
BTW, I've been looking at the latest issue of Modern Reformation, on Dawkins, Hitchens et al. I wonder which religion it is that poisons China so greatly? Presumably these gentlemen blame the Chinese house churches and Falun Gong for their own oppression and for poisoning an otherwise pleasant atheist society?

J. Gresham Machen

Need a good read? Not much money? Want something out of copyright, but in relatively modern English? Has it got to be relevant, intellectually challenging, yet able to stand the test of time? I've just started "Christianity and Liberalism" by J Gresham Machen. I'd recommend it to anyone, Christian or not Christian, wanting to understand Christianity, the Church today or the nature of religion over and against secularism. And I've only started reading! What are you reading?

A heart for the lost?

It's obvious to most careful Bible readers that the parables of Luke 15 - the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost Son (often called "prodigal") - are spoken to critical Pharisees(v1).
So in the Lost Son, the key contrast is between the father and the elder son, for these two characters represent the main protagonists in the debate: namely, the One Jesus represents, His Father, and the Pharisees.
The father has a passionate heart for his lost son; so God also is passionately concerned for the lost. The elder son cares nothing for the lost, only for advantage won by his loyalty; so to the Pharisee cared nothing for the lost, but only that his piety bring spiritual privilege.
I was left wondering, as I finished reading these familiar words, two things:
1. When will I actually finish mining the treasure of Scripture?
2. When will I have a heart so concerned for the lost that I am not a Pharisee?