All posts by Phil

Authors

MacArthur Accused of Overlooking Abuse

2 Comments

Last week, Julie Roys published a report of evidence and testimony from wounded people in the ministry orbit of Grace Bible Church. It’s not something I want to repeat here, maybe because I don’t have an axe to grind with MacArthur. He’s one of the big voices on my side of the church–that would be the big tent side (small ‘r’ reformed or Calvinist), not my specific side (PCA). But like the accusations against Zacharias, this seems important and relevant enough to post.

There are many details, and I don’t understand how there wasn’t an accountability structure in place to take accusations seriously without preferring the victim or the perpetrator. It’s an application of the doctrine of original sin, that being anyone is capable of sin, even pastors, and the perpetrators of heinous sins are going to work on appearing to be above such things. On the other hand, accusers can lie, therefore accusations should be given some amount of due diligence to uncover the truth.

I’m worried that this story is an example of the corrupting nature of power. I’m worried this shows MacArthur and his people chose mega ministry over responsible shepherding. But even as I type that, it sounds false, because I know the pastor of a fifty-member church, the owner of the greasy spoon down the street, and the head flight attendant on a single aircraft can all be tyrants of their domains. Power doesn’t need size to corrupt; it just fertilizes the seed already planted.

The gist of this account is read in these paragraphs toward the end. Wendy, the primary victim, wanted to put everything behind her, but she read the report last month of Grace Baptist excommunicating a woman for not returning to her abusive husband.

Wendy said that similar to how she naïvely assumed her father had not sexually molested anyone else, she also assumed MacArthur had not covered for other pedophiles like her father. Wendy said she now believes covering for abusers is a pattern with MacArthur that needs to be confronted.

“It’s not okay to believe the perpetrator,” Wendy said. “I just don’t want other people to be damaged by Grace Church or other churches not handling things in an appropriate manner.”

Music

Sunday Singing: Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior

Leave a comment
“Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior” performed by Nathan Drake

This long-favored hymn was written by Methodist Episcopal Fanny Crosby in 1868 to a tune by industrialist William H. Doane, who “wrote over twenty-two hundred hymn and gospel song tunes, and he edited over forty songbooks.”

Savior, Savior,
Hear my humble cry,
While on others Thou art calling,
Do not pass me by.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Publishing

Big Publishers, Writer’s Complaints, and Blogroll

Leave a comment

Novelist and screenwriter Raymond Chandler, who took up writing as a career after losing his respect and position at Dabney Oil in 1932, read a laudatory profile on Ernest Hemingway in The New Yorker and said, “I realize that I am much too clean to be a genius, much too sober to be a champ, and far, far too clumsy with a shotgun to live the good life.”

Well, someone should have told Chandler he had his own genius as well as his own version of the good life, which needed amending.

Mark Twain vented his spleen on the writing skill of James Fennimore Cooper with many accurate complaints like this one:

For several years, Cooper was daily in the society of artillery, and he ought to have noticed that when a cannon-ball strikes the ground it either buries itself or skips a hundred feet or so; skips again a hundred feet or so — and so on, till finally it gets tired and rolls. Now in one place he loses some “females” — as he always calls women — in the edge of a wood near a plain at night in a fog, on purpose to give Bumppo a chance to show off the delicate art of the forest before the reader. These mislaid people are hunting for a fort. They hear a cannon-blast, and a cannon-ball presently comes rolling into the wood and stops at their feet. To the females this suggests nothing. The case is very different with the admirable Bumppo. I wish I may never know peace again if he doesn’t strike out promptly and follow the track of that cannon-ball across the plain in the dense fog and find the fort. Isn’t it a daisy?

Mark Twain, “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” 1895

What are other people saying about books?

Big Publishers: There are five powerhouses in U.S. publishing today: Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group, and Macmillan. If judges approve a currently contested merger, Penguin Random House would be allowed to buy Simon & Schuster, reducing the big publishers to four. This would make German media group Bertelsmann, which owns Penguin Random House and is already the world’s largest trade book publisher, in an Amazon-sized company. (via ArtsJournal)

Today is St. George’s Day in England, a day celebrated on par with Christmas at one time.

We fairly hope … that this day
Shall change all griefs and quarrels into love.
To cry “Amen” to that, thus we appear.
You English princes all, I do salute you.

Shakespeare’s Henry V, Act 5

Birthday: It is also Shakespeare’s birthday. He was born April 23, 1564, which is a date deduced by the record of his baptism in the Parish Register at Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon on Wednesday 26 April 1564. 

Block Party: Thoughts of Shakespeare naturally turn one’s mind to Brooklyn and “a timeless block party that could be 400 years old,” notes the NY Daily News.

Word Game: And when you think about block parties, you think about the word guessing games that are all the rage amongst the hip kids. The Folger Shakespeare Library has their own version called Prattle. This one is new to me. I’ve been playing Wordle and Quordle for several weeks now.

Photo: Bus Depot, angle view, Bond Street, Bend, Oregon 1987. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Music

Sunday Singing Easter! This Joyful Eastertide

Leave a comment
“This Joyful Eastertide” performed by Akua Akyere Memorial Youth Choir

George R. Woodward of England (1848-1934) wrote “This Joyful Eastertide” to a seventeenth-century Dutch folk tune. The Akua Akyere Memorial Youth Choir of Ghana performs above.

1 This joyful Eastertide
away with sin and sorrow!
My love, the Crucified,
has sprung to life this morrow.

Refrain:
Had Christ, who once was slain,
not burst his three-day prison,
our faith had been in vain:
but now hath Christ arisen,
arisen, arisen;
but now has Christ arisen!

2 Death’s flood has lost its chill
since Jesus crossed the river.
Lover of souls, from ill
my passing soul deliver. [Refrain]

3 My flesh in hope shall rest
and for a season slumber
till trump from east to west
shall wake the dead in number. [Refrain]

Music

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

Leave a comment

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 →
Blogs, Socials, Bookselling, Music, Reading

Read Good Books for Your Soul, and Walk While You Read

Leave a comment

It’s Holy Saturday, so let’s begin with a few words about Christ.

By oppression and judgment he was taken away;
    and as for his generation, who considered
that he was cut off out of the land of the living,
    stricken for the transgression of my people?
And they made his grave with the wicked
    and with a rich man in his death,
although he had done no violence,
    and there was no deceit in his mouth.

Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him;
    he has put him to grief;
when his soul makes an offering for guilt,
    he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days;
the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.
Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied;
by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant,
    make many to be accounted righteous,
    and he shall bear their iniquities. (Isaiah 53:8-11 ESV)

As for other subjects:

Read good books: Reading thoughtfully, like having a good conversation with an author, may be the very thing you need to reset your soul and rebel against the spirit of the age. “Christians who immerse themselves in creative writing are good stewards of their time — not wasteful — because writing, reading, and ruminating on words can glorify our Maker.”

Read and walk too: Some people have taken to walking while reading; some of them really can’t see where they’re going.

Quotation Research: Who said, “For reasons I have never understood, people like to hear that the world is going to hell“?

Said Tolkien to Lewis: Listen, friend, I’ve based a character on you.

Booksellers New Friend? Once considered the embodiment of everything that was wrong in bookselling, Barnes & Noble is succeeding and many indie booksellers are rooting for it. (via ArtsJournal)

Isaac Watts’s “Alas! and Did My Savior Bleed” set to a common Irish folk melody
Religion

Does God View All Sins to be Equal?

4 Comments

This being Good Friday, I want to write about an idea that has confused some people, the nature of sin. I’ve heard recently of people saying all sin is equal in God’s eyes so does God condemn an abuser with the same severity as the gossip? No, he does not, and you wouldn’t have to read far into the law God gave Israel in Exodus through Deuteronomy to see that the proscribed punishments intend to fit the severity of the crime.

All sin does separate us from God, even the minor ones, and that is because these sins are the fruit of the original sin that accomplished our separation. The Fall is our original rebellion, the act that put all of us into a state of sin. The toddler screaming at his parents isn’t divinely separated for screaming. The teenager repeatedly refusing parental accountability isn’t marked a divine rebel for these acts. Both of these are examples of the fruit of original sin, and this is the sin that separates all of us from God. Only in this way are all sins equal.

 “Just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned— for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given” (Rom 5:12-13 ESV).

Even before we had a law to identify the fruit of sin, deadly sin was in the world, and this is the sin for which Christ atoned on the cross. This is the reason for Good Friday.

The root of sin, the source of every sinful act we have done, has been nailed to the cross and blotted out by the blood of atonement. “As one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men” (Rom 5:18 ESV). That life is available to all who take Christ Jesus at his word–that this sin is a deadly serious matter, deeply engrained in all of us, and that he has atoned for it completely on the cross.

Religion

Easy to Make Counterfeits of Christ

Leave a comment

I’ve been reading C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength with friends over the last few weeks. We came to an appropriately seasonal chapter this week. The plans of both heroes and enemies are being revealed, and the theologically minded villain says, “The Head has sent for you. Do you understand–the Head? You will look upon one who was killed and is still alive. The resurrection of Jesus in the Bible was a symbol: to-night you shall see what it symbolised. This is real Man at last.”

The kingdom of God is of this earth, the man says in another place, and we will bring it about in this generation by pursuing this counterfeit Christ called the Head, the first artificial man.

I won’t reveal the particulars of this grotesque evil, in case you haven’t read this one yet, and it doesn’t matter for my point. This is a creative effort of anti-humanist planners who carry on the tradition of the best eugenicists. They wish to remake man in their own image and call him God Almighty.

The creation of divine counterfeits occurs in every generation. Some of them run like a bad sequel; some make even Christ’s followers comfortable.

In a sermon on the importance of gospel ministers in following Christ’s example, Calvin says, “We need not to have our hearts overcharged and time filled up with worldly affections, cares, and pursuits.”

Of very great importance, in order to do the work that Christ did, is that we take heed that the religion we promote be that same religion that Christ taught and promoted, and not any of its counterfeits and delusive appearances, or anything substituted by the subtle devices of Satan, or vain imaginations of men, in lieu of it. If we are zealous and very diligent to promote religion, but do not take good care to distinguish true from false religion, we shall be in danger of doing much more hurt than good with all our zeal and activity.

edited from “Christ the Example of Ministers,” John 13: 15-16

Calvin apparently thought it easy to raise up ourselves even though we intend to raise up Christ, easy to be conformed to the world and call it conforming to Christ.

And didn’t Christ Jesus say, “See that you are not led astray. For many will come in my name, saying, ‘I am he!’ and, ‘The time is at hand!’ Do not go after them” (Lk 21:8 ESV).

Photo by Maria Petersson on Unsplash

Music

Sunday Singing: Ride On, King Jesus

Leave a comment
“Ride On, King Jesus” performed by the youth choir of Washington Ghanaian S.D.A. Church, Columbia, Maryland

Today’s hymn is a spiritual that has been arranged by many musicians since it gained common ground over 150 years ago. The words easily apply to Palm Sunday, as demonstrated by the Scripture read at the beginning of this video.

Ride on, King Jesus, no man can a-hinder me.
no man can a-hinder me.
In that great gettin’ up morning,
fare ye well, fare ye well.

Blogs, Socials, Music

Coming in Humility to Conquer and Blogroll Links

Leave a comment

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion!
    Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem!
Behold, your king is coming to you;
    righteous and having salvation is he,
humble and mounted on a donkey,
    on a colt, the foal of a donkey.
 I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim
    and the war horse from Jerusalem;
and the battle bow shall be cut off,
    and he shall speak peace to the nations;
his rule shall be from sea to sea,
    and from the River to the ends of the earth.
As for you also, because of the blood of my covenant with you,
    I will set your prisoners free from the waterless pit.
Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope;
    today I declare that I will restore to you double. (Zachariah 9:9-12 ESV)

Our Lord comes in humility and cuts off the warcraft of his enemies. Should that apply directly to our public discourse, to our perception of the culture war?

Bach’s greater Passion has a lot of moving parts: two choirs, four soloists, a narrator, an orchestra, and an organist. And in last week’s performance [2019], there was also the audience, as Saint Thomas participated in the German Lutheran Good Friday tradition of singing congregational chorales surrounding the main musical event. Saint Thomas’s associate organist, Benjamin Sheen, played Bach’s prelude to Johann Böschenstein’s “Da Jesu an dem Kreuze stund” (“When on the cross the Savior hung”), and then the audience was encouraged to sing along in English.

Prayer: Can prayer make your anxiety worse? “My self-centered pity party lamented my situation always instead of rejoicing in the Lord always.”

Jesus: How is Jesus the Bread of Life?

Tapestries: Here is some beautiful tapestry work by Ukrainian artist Olga Pilyugina

Manhood: There’s a new book that claims it’s good to be a man, and it’s isn’t that the world still needs isolated rebels with personal agendas.

Photo: Rube & Sons Shell gas station, Kingston, New York. 1976. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.