"We Believe"

True Believers
"We believe in film" is not heard uncommonly in circles I frequent.  Oh, of course there are a few things that can be done in film that cannot be accomplished in digital (split printing, for example).  But the venue of film is today relegated to a handful of hobbyists, students, and very serious artists.  Those artists have maintained some of the unequaled film features, such as Pl/Pt printing.  Still, there are so few people using film that the availability of film has detracted from opportunity.  No more Agfa APX 100 4x5 or 8x10.  (My favorite.)  No more Panatomic-X.  No more Plus-X.  All that remains is a few of us hobbyists.  But there are no real "true believers" remaining. 

What "Separation of Church and State" Really Means to Liberals & Leftists

Ok, this isn't hard.  In fact, it is quite easy.  It comes down to a very basic question:  Does a group have a right to its own leadership?  In this case the question came down to a religious group, a church, and whether it had a right under the constitution to determine its own leadership. This concern was not onlyin regard to hiring but also firing.  This is known as the "ministerial exception" and has been recognized since the 1964 Civil Rights Act went into place.  (Read the Supreme Court case syllabus and opinion here.) 

Photography and the Communication of Christian Truth

Several years ago I saw a missions picture in a small church north of Butterfield, Minnesota. The picture was of two men concentrating on splitting that proverbial “theological hair” while the world looked in through the church window. The image stayed with me, and I have intended to convert to a photograph for a long time. The picture represents a challenge to minimize concerns which may be relatively trivial and to get about the work of missions.

When Homosexuals Establish Legal Discrimination

The Jennifer Keaton case provides a rich example.  And one need not extrapolate anything obtuse or indefinite.  No strange or conspiratorial abstractions are necessary.  One only need quote the lawyers on this side of the issue.

Just a Few Votes Away

When the Left and the Right debate (and sometimes pontificate) on what being "Constitutional" means, very often both are right.  It's not that non-contradiction has gone out the window.  After all, 1 can never equal 0 and vice versa.  What seems to be the case is that the America view of the function of government was in dispute even in the very beginning.  It is not difficult to see this is situations such as the conflict between the justices Samuel Chase and John Marshall when they butted heads with Thomas Jefferson.

Excitement Trumps Excellence: Considerations on the State of Christian Education in Today's World

John Fletcher Hurst provides us with a set of critical messages, first from Spener regarding the state of education around the time of the Reformation:

If one were to say that catechizing and the Christian instruction of youth is one of the principal, most important, and most necessary of our duties, and not of less value than preaching, would he not be contradicted or even laughed at by many uninstructed preachers, or by others ignorant of their duty, who seek only their own honor; as if such care were too small and contemptible for an office instituted for more important employment? Yet such is but the real truth. Meantime this duty is by many considered so ridiculous that there are preachers who think it degrading to their dignity to undertake it, or even see that it is diligently and faithfully performed by those appointed to it. It is no credit to our evangelical churches that catechetical instruction has been so little or not at all thought of in so many places; though even Luther recommended it so strongly, and gave us so many admirable writings to promote it. But now it either does not exist at all, or is performed negligently, and thrown almost entirely upon schools and schoolmasters.


"These duties should not have been left to schoolmasters; for these are almost wholly unfit to discharge them on account of their own meagre attainments. But preachers should recollect that the souls of the youth are intrusted to them, and that they must give an account of them. They should therefore submit to this as well as to the other duties of their office. It is not anywhere prescribed who among them should perform these duties. In places where there are several clergymen, and the pastors and superintendents are laden with so many other occupations that they cannot perform this duty, we cannot object to its being left for the deacons, or for others who may have more time for it. In large churches able catechists might be appointed. Superintendents, however, and theologians in high office would not do amiss if they would sometimes countenance this exercise by their presence, and even now and then perform it themselves in order to encourage others. If there were some who would voluntarily commence it themselves, it would not be interpreted ill, or thought below their dignity. "I have become acquainted with the character of most instructors of youth, and I find that their real aim is not to lead the soul of youth to God, but their pay also, that they are chiefly not fit to impart a correct knowledge of God since they do not possess it themselves. And indeed there are very many who have not a knowledge even of the letter of that which is or is not to be believed; much less do they comprehend thoroughly and spiritually what is the will of God in faith and its fruits. Catechizing is as necessary to the church as any other religious agency can be.[1]

The question is whether anything much has changed.  At that time the church was the source for its own training -- task not left to the schools.

Now from Calixtus.

We have also the important authority of Calixtus on the sad condition of the education of the young. "The chief cause and origin of the decay of learning," says he, "now tending to extinction, (which may God avert!) I hold for my own part, to be this:--that the younger children are not well grounded in the minor schools. Foundations ought to be laid there, which might afterwards support the whole weight of solid learning and true erudition. The children ought to learn from genuine authors the Greek and Latin languages; the Keys (as they are) of those treasures which preceding ages have laid up for our use. And they ought so to learn, as to be able to appreciate the thoughts of others (specially of the best authors), and to express their own in suitable and perspicuous words.... But now, in many places, we see the reverse of all this. Before they can speak (passing by preposterously, the matters essential to ultimate success), the boys are made to proceed, or rather leap, to higher subjects; 'real' subjects, as we have learned to call them. Pedagogues of this stamp seem to themselves learned, whilst they are teaching what they have never themselves mastered; and what their scholars neither understand, nor at their age can understand. In the mean time the writings of those good authors, who, by all past ages, have been recognized as masters of literature and style, are struck out of their hands, and they (the schoolmasters) substitute their own comments; disputing in a circle of children about Anti-Christ and the doctrine of predestination. [2]

The remarks are scathing.

It does remind me of so many teachers of theology -- of all stripes.  As they say, teachers speak of things that they have not mastered.  Preachers preach of things that they have not mastered.  Scholarship is of little concern.  We would rather today, 500 years later, speak of the Anti-Christ than of the richness of redemption, the apologetic truth of the faith, the error of secular philosophy (especially the neo-Platonism of the rationalist),  Excitement trumps excellence.


The solution is hard work.  Construct a church educational program that encompasses all of the challenges of our day and attack the issues.  Of course we will not do it.  We're happy with a few lessons about Moses, Abraham, and Noah for the young children.   So sense in making S.S. "no fun" and no sense in making adults do anything but feel good about their faith.






Ok, I'm pretty cynical about this.  But look around and find a church that is taking the full scope of education seriously.  They are few.  And I am becoming pessimistic about the capacity of Christianity in the US (the West in general) to get past this challenge.


There is a solution.  But do we want to hear it.  How many pastors/preachers would hear this criticism of the then-equivalent of today's therapeutic sermon? [3]

A sermon on Zaccheus from the words, He was little of stature, claims for its theme, "The stature and size of Zaccheus." The first division is, he; the second, was; third, small stature. Application first, The text teaches us the variety of God's works; second, it consoles the poor; third, it teaches us to make amends for our personal defects by virtue. Tholuck well asks, who would imagine that the author of this sermon was the minstrel of "When the early sun arises," "Oh Jesus, all thy bleeding wounds," and so many other deeply earnest Christian songs which have touched the hearts of many generations,--the immortal Hermann von Köben? A pastor of Wernigerode preached from Matthew x. 30. His divisions were, 1: Our hair--its origin, style, form and natural circumstances. 2: On the right use of the human hair. 3: The memories, admonition, warning and consolation that have come from the human hair. 4: How hair can be used in a Christian way! A Brunswick pastor commenced his Sabbath discourse on one occasion with the words, "A preacher must have three things; a good conscience, a good bite, and a good kiss;" wherefore his transition was made to the theme under consideration: "an increase of my salary." But it is needless to continue illustrations of the almost universal dearth of preaching. One hardly knows whether to laugh at its absurdity or weep over its prostitution.

Does anyone wonder why secularism flourishes and evangelicalism, the most militant of orthodox theologies, is stagnant?

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[1] Hurst, John F.. History of Rationalism (Kindle Locations 888-906) manybooks.net, and
Hurst, John F.. History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology, 1895, Hunt & Eaton, 63-64. 
[2] ibid, 907, 64-65. 
[3] ibid, 971, 70-71

The Scope of Conservatism and Liberalism

Here's a thought.  More of a thought experiment -- just a starting point.  The idea is that conservatism, at least in the U.S., is a populist movement while liberalism is a magisterial movement.  That's reformation-type of language.  Some history might be useful here.

The Election is Coming, the Election is Coming!

Electioneering
Here in Ohio there is a battle brewing about congressional redistricting.  Here are the current map and the proposed map.

The Result of a Lack of Theological Education

Look beside your computer.  You probably see a mouse, or perhaps a trackball.  If you are like me there is a cup of coffee or tea.  And some books.  I've got a stack of three that I'm reading now -- The Peace Maker, Premarital and Remarital Counseling, and Android Wireless Application Development.  In front of me is the obvious computer screen and keyboard. My time is now consumed with learning.  I hope it always is.

Welcome to the (worst of the) Progressive Movement

For decades the pro-life movement has been talking about progressive eugenics.  From long before Sanger, but reaching its peak with 1930s US and European policies, the eugenics movement has gone from distinction to an endemic philosophy.  Today it haunts science with its utilitarian mask and proclaims that it can produce the sort of people that are most productive and beneficial.  It is all about creating "Captain America" through science.  Science, that is, as Reason without the need to answer to Theism.

Rock Center reports about eugenics in North Carolina.

Elaine Riddick was 13 years old when she got pregnant after being raped by a neighbor in Winfall, N.C., in 1967.  The state ordered that immediately after giving birth, she should be sterilized.  Doctors cut and tied off her fallopian tubes.

“I have to carry these scars with me.  I have to live with this for the rest of my life,” she said.

Riddick was never told what was happening.  “Got to the hospital and they put me in a room and that’s all I remember, that’s all I remember,” she said.  “When I woke up, I woke up with bandages on my stomach.”

Can you read this without seeing it as racist, or at least elitist/classist?  The language of "feeble" and "promiscuous" comes straight out of Sanger[1].  Certain behaviors are unacceptable and certain people are to be treated as inferior.

But these things do not happen any more, do they?  Riddick was in 1967.  Have things changed?  Not much.  In the 1990s (though it might have been in the late 1980s) Oklahoma treated black children with spina bifida differently, and the courts supported it.  It never became a scandal because the children were black.

Many know of the work of Jill Stanek in exposing infanticide within the abortion industry.

Not much has changed.

This is a time for education.  When you talk to proponents of abortion, mention Riddick.  And when you talk to Christians who have suffered because of this progressive deception, proclaim forgiveness, mercy, and most of all grace.  And when to talk to women in general who have also suffered:  The message is the same.

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[1] See Margaret Sanger: A Life of Passion by Jean H. Baker.  Baker notes that "there were political reasons for Americans to accept sterilization that grew out of progressive attempts to provide protection for the poor.  Along with criminals whose antisocial instincts were no believed inherited by their children, the unfit were becoming expensive in an era that was installing programs and institutions to support those who could not take care of themselves."  Sanger was a progressive through and through.

They Hate Christianity Soooo Much ...

You've seen little children exclaim their love for Mommy and Daddy.  With outstretched arms and a beautiful smile they proclaim their love "This much."  It's a joy for any parent to receive, and joy for the child to give, and even a joy to watch.  Some things are soooo special that they cannot but be appreciated by all.