Filed under: Book Reviews
I picked up this book at the local bookstore to browse through as I drank my tea…hours later I was 100 pages in and couldn’t put it down. I ended up reading the book in one sitting there in the bookstore. Needless to say, wonderful book! This book is written by a journalist in Italy who followed an American priest who was sent to Rome for training in exorcism. There has been a resurgence of this ministry and the Church of Rome is seeking to equip its leaders appropriately. This book highlights the new course taught in Rome concerning the rite of exorcism, the priest’s apprenticeship there in Rome and does this all while weaving in the Church’s teaching on evil and exorcism. If you are at all interested in this topic, read this book! May God grant more qualified, godly, experienced exoricists to His Church.
Filed under: Wisdom from the Ages
…it is the cross which is the great revelation of the divine agape, because it is in the cross that we can clearly see that God’s love does not wait for us to merit it, but is a purely generous and creative love, that it does not need to find some good in us to love, but rather makes us good by loving us ans only God can love.
Louis Bouyer, Liturgical Piety
Filed under: The Home
“As theologian David McCarthy argues in his provocative book Sex and Love in the Home, a Christian ethics of sex, love, and marriage needs to reconceive sex and love as practices that exist ideally only within the basic prosaic rhythms of house and home: candlelight, long-stemmed roses, and lingerie can’t sustain love, but domestic economies can. This is not, at root, an argument based on realism or expediency. Rather, the point is that it is only through household practices that Christians come to embody the Christian virtues of mutual care, forgiveness, generosity, community, interdependence, and reconciliation. Our humanity cannot be separated from the moments of joy, anger, friendship, sadness, attention, confusion, tedium, and wonder that unfold over time and in specific places. Human intimacy is hammered out on an anvil made of nothing more, in McCarthy’s phrase, than the ‘day to day ebb and flow of common endeavors, joys, and struggles of love int he home.’ Love, sex, and marriage, to be theological, must drink from the very same wells. Love, sex, and marriage, to partake in their transcendent mission of revealing God’s grace, must embrace life’s decidedly untranscendent daily goings-on.
In a Christian landscape, what’s important about sex is nurtured when we allow sex to be ordinary. This does not mean that sex will not be meaningful. Its meaning, instead, will partake in the variety of meanings that ordinary life offers. Sex needs to be clumsy. it should at times feel awkward. It should be an act we engage in for comfort. It should also be allowed to hold any number of anxieties–the sorts of anxieties, for instance, we might feel about our child’s progress in school, or our ability to provide sustenance for our family. Sex becomes another way for two people to realistically engage the strengths and foibles of each other. Not only sexual intercourse is transformed as we allow it to take on the varieties of the commonplace; the varieties of the commonplace themselves are transformed as well. If we allow sex to be ordinary, we might better understand that human love is forged in, say, time spent cooking together, or in picking up our loved one’s laundry, or in calming our children’s fears. Through sexual practice, we come to find each other fallible, and we come to love each other for the way we see each other creating very human lives out of those very fallibilities.”
Lauren F. Winner, Real Sex, p. 81-82
Filed under: Wisdom from the Ages
John Henry Newman, commenting on his own spiritual pilgramige in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua , relfects on a time when his thoughts on the nature of reality changed for him. He is speaking specifically about the role of angels in the created order. This is apocalyptic realism:
“Again, I ask what would be thoughts of a man who, ‘when examining a flower, or a herb, or a pebble, or a ray of light, which he treats as something so beneath him in the scale of existence, suddenly discovered that he was in the presence of some powerful being who was hidden behind the visible thigns he was inspecting, who, though concealing his wise hand, was giving them their beauty, grace, and perfection, as being God’s instrument for the purpose, nay, whose robe and ornaments those objects were, which he was so eager to analyze?’ and I therefore remark that ‘we may say with grateful and simple hearts with the Three Holy Children, ‘O all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord, praise Him, and magnify Him for ever.””
“Thus says the LORD GOD: ‘Clap your hands, and stamp your foot, and say, Alas! because of all the evil abominations of the house of Israel; for they shall fall by the sword, by famine, and by pestilence. He that is far off shall die of pestilence; and he that is near shall fall by the sword; and he that is left and is preserved shall die of famine. Thus I will spend my fury upon them. And you shall know that I am the LORD, when their slain lie among their idols round about their altars, upon every high hill, on all the mountain tops, under every green tree, and under every leafy oak, wherever they offered pleasing odor to all their idols. And I will stretch out my hand against them, and make the land desolate and waste, throughout all their habitations, from the wilderness to Riblah. Then they will know that I am the LORD.“ Ezekiel 6:11-14
This is not an uncommon theme in redemptive history, namely that God demonstrates his God-ness through the judgment of some nation, people, king, etc. We see this with His destruction of the Egyptians to be sure. This judgment was so devasting and powerful, the Canaanites heard of it and were terrified and it caused some to turn to Him in faith (i.e. Rahab). The point I want to make is that part of our witness as followers of Christ is that He judges. When we shy from this, we diminish our witness and weaken the gospel. God is who we witness to. We don’t have the option as to what parts or actions of His that we like and choose those as our “talking points.” Let us not draw back from his overwhelming, all demanding love or His unapproachable holiness or His passionate jealousy for His name.
Filed under: Missional Musings
“The life of the community is the primary form of its witness, and it is also the equipper and supporter of each individual Christian in the practice of his or her vocation as witnesses for Christ.” Darrell L. Guder, The Continuing Conversion of the Church, p. 68.
Filed under: Missional Musings
“All in all, the result of twenty years of work is not some renewed vision of mission, nor a penetrating challenge to the secularism of a barren church, nor a revitalized clergy devoted to the rescue and saving of lost sheep under the sovereign rule of the Good Shepherd. What we have is considerable theological disarray, shallowness, or indifference, a fostering of false hopes concerning what can be achieved by research and programing, and a rather conspicuous failure to face up to the radical demads of the Christian gospel.”
This is the evaluation of William Abraham in 1989 regarding the work of the “Church growth movement.” I would say that this applies 20 years later as well.
William J. Abraham, The Logic of Evangelism p. 81.
I was reading in the Catechism of the Catholic Church last night and ran accross this entry for merit. Wow! I think there is some serious misunderstanding from the Protestant perspective on what in fact the Roman Catholic Church teaches on this topic. Here is the section entitled Merit (with my comments set off in [ ] ):
- You are glorified in the assembly of your Holy Ones, for in crowning their merits you are crowning your own gifts. [This is a quote from St. Augustine that every Protestant evangelical should agree with and they set the whole topic of merit within this thought...interesting]
2006 The term “merit” refers in general to the recompense owed by a community or a society for the action of one of its members, experienced either as beneficial or harmful, deserving reward or punishment. Merit is relative to the virtue of justice, in conformity with the principle of equality which governs it. [No problem here. Merit and justice go together; yes we protestant evangelicals agree.]
2007 With regard to God, there is no strict right to any merit on the part of man. Between God and us there is an immeasurable inequality, for we have received everything from him, our Creator. ["no strict right to any merit" Why do we always argue against Catholics as though they hold to a "strict" view of merit?]
2008 The merit of man before God in the Christian life arises from the fact that God has freely chosen to associate man with the work of his grace. The fatherly action of God is first on his own initiative, and then follows man’s free acting through his collaboration, so that the merit of good works is to be attributed in the first place to the grace of God, then to the faithful. Man’s merit, moreover, itself is due to God, for his good actions proceed in Christ, from the predispositions and assistance given by the Holy Spirit. [A clear denial of any kind of Pelagianism or semi-Pelagianism...God is the first to act in grace, we respond to that grace. All "merit" (remember, "not strictly concieved") is to be attributed to the Father's grace first, is accomplished by the believer "in Christ" as a result of the "predispositions and assistance given by the Holy Spirit." Can anyone be more clear that God is the source of all good works that ever come from a Christian?]
2009 Filial adoption, in making us partakers by grace in the divine nature, can bestow true merit on us as a result of God’s gratuitous justice. This is our right by grace, the full right of love, making us “co-heirs” with Christ and worthy of obtaining “the promised inheritance of eternal life.” The merits of our good works are gifts of the divine goodness. “Grace has gone before us; now we are given what is due. . . . Our merits are God’s gifts.” [Umm...do you think that Roman Catholics believe that merit is a gift as opposed to something "earned in accordance with strict justice?"]
2010 Since the initiative belongs to God in the order of grace, no one can merit the initial grace of forgiveness and justification, at the beginning of conversion. Moved by the Holy Spirit and by charity, we can then merit for ourselves and for others the graces needed for our sanctification, for the increase of grace and charity, and for the attainment of eternal life. Even temporal goods like health and friendship can be merited in accordance with God’s wisdom. These graces and goods are the object of Christian prayer. Prayer attends to the grace we need for meritorious actions. [This would be the one that Protestants would frown at for sure. But before you light the fire to burn the Catechism or me, let me ask a question regarding the statement that "we can merit for ourselves (the "and for others" part I will deal with separately below) the graces needed for our sanctification, for the increase of grace and charity, and for the attainment of eternal life..." Why do some Christian's attain greater degrees of holiness? Is it because God arbitrarily or in some secret way decreed it so, or is it because they applied themselves to the pursuit of it in greater degrees and with greater committment? If you answer in the latter, then what is the difference between that view and the Roman Catholic view? As it relates to "meriting for others" all I can say is that this is indeed "strange" to our Protestant ears, but what do verses like Colossians 1:24; 1Timothy 4:16; Titus 2:10 mean. Please, get your bible and read them.]
2011 The charity of Christ is the source in us of all our merits before God. Grace, by uniting us to Christ in active love, ensures the supernatural quality of our acts and consequently their merit before God and before men. The saints have always had a lively awareness that their merits were pure grace.
- After earth’s exile, I hope to go and enjoy you in the fatherland, but I do not want to lay up merits for heaven. I want to work for your love alone. . . . In the evening of this life, I shall appear before you with empty hands, for I do not ask you, Lord, to count my works. All our justice is blemished in your eyes. I wish, then, to be clothed in your own justice and to receive from your love the eternal possession of yourself.
[What can be said, but Amen. Because Catholics believe (or should believe based on their teachings) that grace unites us to Christ in "active love" any work that is ever done by the Christian issues from that supernatural source. This is in fact teaching the same thing that Calvinistic Protestants do when they declare that salvation is by grace through faith, it is the gift of God... What the Calvinistic Protestant means by quoting this verse from Ephesians is that the whole thing is a gift; the grace and the faith. In the same way, the Catholic says, the gift of "active love" or faith (because after all, they are synonymous--"faith that works through love" Gal 5:6) is given and is the source of all good deeds.]
Comments welcome.
My story is like many who were converted to Christianity in an “Arminian” setting. In those days we were not self-consciously so, we just were because “that’s what the bible says.” I became interested in theology and began reading those who differed with us on the issues of how grace works in the life of the believer. I became a Calvinist…really a neo-baptistic-Calvinist (because I didn’t know anything of Calvin’s doctrine of covenant, sacrament or Church). In this transition, the term sovereignty began to take on very important meanings, the central one being that God predetermined all that would happen. That is what I believed the word sovereignty meant…and I suspect that is what the majority of those in my “Calvinistic” churches believed as well. But that is really not at all what the word means. We should not get our understanding of biblical concepts from modern English dictionaries, but I want to pose a challenge by way of a question using the definition of sovereignty from the American Heritage Dictionary. Here are the four entries for the word sovereignty:
- Supremacy of authority or rule as exercised by a sovereign or sovereign state.
- Royal rank, authority, or power.
- Complete independence and self-government.
- A territory existing as an independent state.
It seems that this view of sovereignty has to do with ability not predetermination. The question I want to pose is this, is the picture of God in the bible primarily one of a God who is sovereign in the sense that He will do what he wants to do when and how he wants to do it? Or is it a picture of a God who predetermined every detail before it was to take place?
Think about it.
