Tag Archives: Martin Luther

How We Conceive of Conversion and Pushing Against a Classic Separation

I didn’t make any progress on The Road this week. (Perhaps I should write about it before I finish, make two posts.) I’ve been reading other books too, which is new for me. Last year, I bought a few books to challenge myself and have picked up more since then, so now I’m reading four at once sorta kinda. Saying it that way doesn’t sound right, because I’m not reading four books together. I just have books I intend to but have yet to finish.

One of those books is Karen Swallow Prior’s The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images & Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis. It describes the recent history of several ideas in Christianity, such as spiritual awakening, conversion, sentimentality, and materiality. They may not be ideas emphasized by our church traditions, but I’m sure I’ll find some challenging thoughts as I keep reading.

In talking about the concept of conversion, she notes a reader of Pride and Prejudice who remarked that Mr. Collins doesn’t appear to be a Christian at all. How could he be a minister? He could be a minister, she says, because the state church made political appointments to these positions. This was the context of the Great Awakening. She writes that evangelicals emphasize reaching the lost among those in the world or of other faiths, so there’s a bit of irony in the development of evangelicalism from a society that claimed to be Christian on the whole. How we imagine the conversion experience shapes our faith and influences how we teach others, especially children, to think about their commitment to Christ.

That’s the kind of thing Prior gets into in that book. I’ll write about it again another time.

Christian Nationalism: Hunter Baker reviews a couple books on the Christian Nationalism debate for Modern Age. “For Wolfe, the answer is to become a transgressor against the boundaries of church and state that today appear to be so firmly drawn by the liberal regime. . . . You can’t fight the something of secular progressivism with the nothing of a disarmed faith that lives in the confining pen made for it by modernity, so set forth a vision of the nation as one that is unashamed to call itself and its people Christian.”

Poetry: Five poems from Dorothy Sayers

I sit within My Father’s house, with changeless face to see
The shames and sins that turned away My Father’s face from Me;
Be not amazed for all these things, I bore them long ago
That am from everlasting God, and was and shall be so.

Humanities: The good people at The New Criterion had abandoned the annual Modern Language Association conference, saying, “we felt that, like Macbeth, we had ‘supped full with horrors’ and resolved to leave those annual exhibitions of narcissistic nullity to others.” But this year, they looked back again and found a curiosity or two.

Scripture: Luther on “the chief point of all Scripture” being the certainty of God’s promises.

Photo: Norwest Bank terra cotta detail, Owatonna, Minnesota, 1988. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Sunday Singing: From Depths of Woe I Raise to Thee

“From Depths of Woe I Raise to Thee” sung by Kayla and Naomi of Trinity Reformed Church of Martinsburg, WV

For the next four weeks preceding Palm Sunday and Easter, I want to feature hymns related to salvation. “From Depths of Woe I Raise to Thee” is an English translation by Richard Massie of Martin Luther’s German hymn based on Psalm 130. Massie’s first translation was published in Martin Luther’s Spiritual Songs in 1854. I believe the text was altered last century, as hymn publishers will do, but the tune sung above is Luther’s 1524 original.

1 From depths of woe I raise to thee
the voice of lamentation;
Lord, turn a gracious ear to me
and hear my supplication:
if thou iniquities dost mark,
our secret sins and misdeeds dark,
O who shall stand before thee?

2 To wash away the crimson stain,
grace, grace alone, availeth;
our works, alas! are all in vain;
in much the best life faileth:
no man can glory in thy sight,
all must alike confess thy might,
and live alone by mercy.

3 Therefore my trust is in the Lord,
and not in mine own merit;
on him my soul shall rest, his Word
upholds my fainting spirit:
his promised mercy is my fort,
my comfort, and my sweet support;
I wait for it with patience.

4 What though I wait the live-long night,
and ’til the dawn appeareth,
my heart still trusteth in his might;
it doubteth not nor feareth:
do thus, O ye of Israel’s seed,
ye of the Spirit born indeed;
and wait ’til God appeareth.

5 Though great our sins and sore our woes,
his grace much more aboundeth;
his helping love no limit knows,
our utmost need it soundeth.
Our Shepherd good and true is he,
who will at last his Israel free
from all their sin and sorrow.

As a bonus, let me share Michael O’Brien’s arrangement with you as well.

Sunday Singing Easter! Christ Jesus Lay in Death’s Strong Bands

Two hymns for Easter Sunday

“Christ Jesus Lay in Death’s Strong Bands” performed by choir and congregation of the Te Deum Conference at Concordia University (2015)

This moving hymn by Martin Luther comes to us through Englishman Richard Massie (1800-1887). The tune is a modification of a chant by German Johann Walther (1496-1570). The Psalter Hymnal Handbook states Luther may have worked on this arrangement as well.

1 Christ Jesus lay in death’s strong bands
For our offenses given;
But now at God’s right hand He stands
And brings us life from heaven.
Therefore let us joyful be
And sing to God right thankfully
Loud songs of alleluia! Alleluia!

2 No son of man could conquer death,
Such ruin sin had wrought us.
No innocence was found on earth,
And therefore death had brought us
Into bondage from of old
And ever grew more strong and bold
And held us as its captive. Alleluia!

3 Christ Jesus, God’s own Son, came down,
His people to deliver;
Destroying sin, He took the crown
From death’s pale brow forever:
Stripped of pow’r, no more it reigns;
An empty form alone remains;
Its sting is lost forever. Alleluia!

Continue reading Sunday Singing Easter! Christ Jesus Lay in Death’s Strong Bands

Sunday Singing: A Mighty Fortress Is Our God

“A Might Fortress Is Our God” performed by the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge

We needed a battle hymn this weekend, and there isn’t a better one than this by Dr. Martin Luther, a little known professor at the University of Wittenberg, Germany, in the 1500s.

1 A mighty fortress is our God,
a bulwark never failing;
our helper he, amid the flood
of mortal ills prevailing:
for still our ancient foe
doth seek to work us woe;
his craft and power are great,
and, armed with cruel hate,
on earth is not his equal.

2 Did we in our strength confide,
our striving would be losing;
were not the right man on our side,
the man of God’s own choosing:
dost ask who that may be?
Christ Jesus, it is he;
Lord Sabbaoth, his Name,
from age to age the same,
and he must win the battle.

Continue reading Sunday Singing: A Mighty Fortress Is Our God

Writing by Hand, Beastly Boy band, Blogroll, and Fear

Paul Auster has written a biography on Stephen Crane and several other works without a word processor. He drafts by hand and types a paragraph with a typewriter (via Literary Saloon).

I have shelves of encyclopedias, foreign dictionaries, and all the reference books I use. And I must have five or six English dictionaries of various sizes and editions. I even have slang dictionaries. When I’m really stuck I look at a thesaurus, but it never helps me. I know all those words, but I always think, “Well, there’s one word I’m not remembering that would be better than the one I’m stuck on.”

City of Fear, by Alafair Burke, “a tight, pacy police procedural, in which three Indiana college girls hit New York for their spring break.” One of them doesn’t come back.

The Album of Dr. Moreau, by Daryl Gregory, “deliberately and imaginatively breaks every one of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Rules of Detective Fiction.'” It’s a crazy premise, a genetically engineered boy band who find their producer dead in his hotel room, that apparently works.

Martin Luther: How Luther helped my depression. “I somehow found myself holding a copy of a Luther biography written by Roland Bainton.”

Why should we fear the Lord when perfect love casts out fear?

Halloween meditation: Jesus defines hell as the place when everyone is “salted by fire.”

No matter what you call your church or church movement, I think you’ll go astray if you claim your side is the one breathing life into dead orthodoxy. The message of the Reformation is still needed.

Photo by Andrew Seaman on Unsplash

New Podcast Dramatizes Martin Luther as Events Unfold

On October 10, 1520, Martin Luther received an official church statement charging him with heresy. Today’s Luther says the bull got to him by a circuitous route.

The Rector of the University of Wittenberg, Peter Burkhard, received the bull from a citizen to whom a Leipzig militiaman had given it. This was, to say the least, an unusual mode of delivery of an official document, probably intended to prevent the University from refusing to accept it.

The Papal Bull condemns him for statements that are “either heretical, false, scandalous, offensive to pious ears, or misleading to the simple.” Clearly Luther was playing precursor to Osteen at this point in his career.

Ligonier Ministries has a new Reformation Day podcast starting October 10 to dramatize Luther’s actions and thoughts, starting at this point, called “Luther: In Real Time.”

Ligonier is also streaming documentary on Luther for free all this month.

Luther’s “Utterly Improbable” Career Shown in New Biography

Lyndal Roper has a new scholarly biography on Martin Luther’s “utterly improbable” life.

Roper took ten years to write this book, which the NY Times calls, ” a fresh and deeply illuminating study of the man who somewhat reluctantly divided a continent.”

Roper is especially good on Luther’s unusual upbringing as the son of a mining family. It was a hard life, full of risk; they lived well, but always one bad business decision away from disaster. Young Martin knew that the price of his education was an investment in the family’s future, and how much his decision to abandon his legal studies in favor of a church career would disrupt his father’s plans.

But reviewer Melanie Gilbert suggests Roper crops out the full picture. “When read for its smaller insights – his prolific letter writing, for instance – this book offers a rewarding look at a specific time and place in history. But in a story where the Gutenberg printing press isn’t even mentioned, and the English Reformation gets only a one-page mention, the larger importance of Luther’s life is lost in translation.” (via Prufrock News)

He Who Waits For the Best Time to Act

The hobbit at his table
The hobbit at his table

One of my life quotes, which I wish I could say I’ve actually given proper attention, is a verse from a song in the Rankin/Bass version of The Hobbit.

“A man who’s a dreamer and never takes leave,
Who lives in a world that is just make-believe,
Will never know passion, will never know pain.
Who sits by the window will one day see rain.”

It’s a Glenn Yarbrough song, which you can hear here.

That verse is loosely related to a quote attributed by some to Martin Luther. “For truth and duty it is ever the fitting time; who waits until circumstances completely favor his undertaking, will never accomplish anything.” As our readers often say, “That’s the truth,” but did Luther actually say this?

The Quote Investigator doesn’t believe he did and has evidence to support his belief that another German theologian with a curiously similar name is the one who first put this thought (in his own words) on paper.

Luther Documentary Kickstarter

On October 31, 1517, Dr. Martin Luther posted ninety-five theses on the door of the Wittenberg church, intending to invite debate on the doctrine of indulgences and its implication. Next year is the 500th anniversary of that decision.

LUTHER Official Teaser Trailer from Stephen McCaskell on Vimeo.

Now, the makers of the film Through the Eyes of Spurgeon are raising money to fund their production of a documentary on Luther.

The Reformation: Here to stay

This morning, in an e-mail discussion I participate in, someone lamented the Reformation. They wished and hoped we could all come together again soon.

That’s a nice dream, and I applaud the sentiment. But in my view it’ll never happen.

Here’s the thing — who’s going to be in charge of this new universal church?

The pope? Then how will you force all the Christians who think the pope is the Antichrist into your church?

Local congregations? How will you persuade the people who think an episcopacy is necessary?

You won’t be able to do this without some kind of coercive force. A new Inquisition.

And I don’t think even Catholics want that.

Besides which, the divisions are far deeper and more complex than just Rome vs. Wittenberg.

The divisions in Christianity go way beyond denominations. I have Catholic friends to whom I am far closer, in the fundamentals, than I am with many of my Lutheran friends.

Even if you somehow shoehorned all the denominations into your new World Church, the conservative vs. liberal divisions would persist.

And would probably, if history is any guide, lead to new institutional divisions.