Rev. Henry Luke Orombi, archbishop of Uganda, is scheduled to speak to a Tennessee Valley Presbytery worship service at my home church, Covenant Presbyterian (PCA), in Chattanooga, Tennessee on September 23. If you’re in the area, you may–may–want to drop in around 6:00 that Sunday. It should be glorious. I’m starting to wonder if there will be room to breathe within the sound of Rev. Orombi’s voice. I hope they pipe audio into the hallways.

The archbishop writes about Anglicanism in the current issue of First Things, in which you can see his heart for the word of God and advance of His Kingdom. You can read excerpts, as well as my pastor’s enthusiasm for this service, on Covenant’s website.

Frank Wilson points out an article on Christopher Hitchens’ rant against Christianity, and this statement by Henry Newman is worth requoting. He said, “if anything seems to be proved by astronomer or geologist, or chronologist, or antiquarian, or ethnologist, in contradiction to the dogmas of faith, that point will eventually turn out, first, not to be proved, or secondly, not contradictory, or thirdly, not contradictory to any thing really revealed, but to something which has been confused with revelation.”

Tonight, a Christian Fundamentalist joke to start with:

Q: What do you call a Pre-Trib eschatologist with a drug problem?

A: Hal Lindsey Lohan



(Ba-rump-bump)

It was a good day. I not only got a start on a project I’ve been struggling with, but I caught our former IT guy, recently departed from the staff, on a visit to the school. I begged him to help with a bar code project I’d asked him about just before he left. He’d told me clearly where to find the Microsoft Access file I needed, but I’d been able to locate nothing there. So he came up and looked on my computer, and on the network, and behold, I was right (someone write that down. It doesn’t happen that often). The file had disappeared, like an 80s TV star. So he spent more time than he’d planned on, creating a couple new reports for me. Now I’m back in business. Thanks, Brian, in case you happen to read this.

Earlier I spoke to Dennis Ingolfsland of The Recliner Commentaries. He’s the librarian at a Christian college in our general area, and I’d been asked to call around and find out how those schools figure overdue fines, since we’re considering revising our policies. Nice to speak to Dennis, whose blog I enjoy very much.

Here’s something that occurred to me today:

I was thinking about how, through the centuries, so many of God’s best servants have had very short life-spans. Thinking about Oswald Chambers brought it to mind, but there are many examples. In the great days of the Missions Movement, young people from all over Europe and America trooped onto ships that sailed to Africa or India or Southeast Asia, and the casualty toll was horrendous. Some were lost in storms at sea, hundreds succumbed to disease, and a few were killed by natives. Living in a time when passion for the gospel has narrowed to a trickle in our civilization, that seems like an awful waste.

But you know, God doesn’t build as man does. His Church is the solidest of edifices, as C. S. Lewis says in The Screwtape Letters: “spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners.” In terms of this temporal world, though, God builds like a contractor putting up a house made of ice in Saudi Arabia (or in Minnesota, today). His construction material is forever dwindling away under His hand, and one piece after another has to be replaced.

But this is not a bad thing. He chose that form of architecture, and it may be that the constant replacement prevents problems of petrifaction or rot that He particularly wants to avoid.

Or so it seems to me.

I’m late to point this out. Jared links to a video presentation of part of a message by John Piper in which he decries the idea that following Jesus will make you rich and trouble-free. That’s a lie, as the book of Acts proves on its own.

Here’s a post from Roy Jacobsen’s Writing, Clear and Simple blog, explaining an actual physiological reason why active verbs are better than passive verbs. So use active verbs, already!

Oh yes, he also has a blog called Dispatches from Outland.

I had an IM conversation last night with a friend who is an agnostic.

He talked about the idea of missionaries in space travel stories. He was assuming that if we found intelligent life on other planets, missionaries from various religions would go to them.

I suppose that’s probably true.

But I said that, for my own part, I’d never been certain whether the Atonement had anything to do with people on other planets (assuming there are any).

He had trouble understanding that.

I said that from a biblical perspective, sin is passed down from Adam, and the Redemption pays for that sin. But space aliens are not descended from Adam. So either a) they would not require redemption at all, or b) they might require an entirely different sort of remedy for whatever problem they might have gotten themselves into.

He said that that was a new thought to him.

It occurred to me that this might be a common problem of perception, and a sign that we Christians haven’t been making our case clearly.

He assumed (I take it. Could be wrong) that believers in proselytizing religions spread their messages out of a simple desire to make people agree with them. A conviction that “I’m right, and I won’t rest until I’ve convinced everybody else that I’m right.” A sort of intellectual bullying impulse.

While from my point of view, the central question is a purely practical one. I believe that there is something radically wrong with the human heart. It is literally “sick unto death.” And I have been entrusted with the medicine that cures that sickness. If I didn’t believe people were perishing, I wouldn’t be greatly troubled that people in Madagascar have a different world view than I do.

Context matters. A man running down a city street shouting, “Follow me to the exit!” is a nut. A man shouting “Follow me to the exit!” in a burning theater is very probably a hero.

Psalm 18 (English Standard Version)

To the choirmaster. A Psalm of David, the servant of the LORD, who addressed the words of this song to the LORD on the day when the LORD rescued him from the hand of all his enemies, and from the hand of Saul. He said:

1I love you, O LORD, my strength.

2The LORD is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer,

my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge,

my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.

3I call upon the LORD, who is worthy to be praised,

and I am saved from my enemies.

4The cords of death encompassed me;

the torrents of destruction assailed me;

5the cords of Sheol entangled me;

the snares of death confronted me.

6In my distress I called upon the LORD;

to my God I cried for help.

From his temple he heard my voice,

and my cry to him reached his ears.

7Then the earth reeled and rocked;

the foundations also of the mountains trembled

and quaked, because he was angry.

Continue reading “Then the Earth Reeled and Rocked” →

Dr. Chris Hook says, “To be most blunt, the American church generally . . . can at most charitably be described as apostate, idolatrous, narcissistic, materially self-indulgent, has sold its soul to a civic religion that has attempted to democratize God’s Kingdom, and is the most pathetically ignorant . . . since the English Reformation.”

Here’s the text of my talk, given at the Old Stone Church (Hauge Lutheran Church), Kenyon, Minnesota, on Sunday, June 24, 2007

The year was 1846. A boat docked in Muskegon, Michigan, and one of my distant relations—actually the half-brother of my great-great-grandfather—disembarked along with his family and a group of other Norwegians. They looked around them, blinked in the sunlight—and hadn’t the faintest idea what to do next. They wanted to see a man in Lisbon, Illinois, but they’d never imagined that America was so big—or so wild. So they hunkered down in Muskegon for a while, to try to figure out their next step.

One day a wagon rolled up, and a man jumped off and greeted them in Norwegian. He was a preacher, and he said he knew Lisbon, Illinois very well. He invited my relation to get on his wagon, and he’d take him there.

They traveled over open prairie, sleeping under the wagon at night. When they reached Lisbon, they found the man they were looking for, and then the preacher took my relation back to Muskegon to arrange for the whole group to relocate.

The preacher’s name was Elling Eielsen, and what he did for that group was all in a couple weeks’ work for him. Wherever there were Norwegians in America in the mid-nineteenth century, Eielsen would be there sooner or later, to preach the gospel and to help them adjust to the new country.

Elling Eielsen was born in Voss, in Norway, in 1804. He was converted in the Haugean revivals, and soon began to follow in Hauge’s steps, preaching all over Norway, as well as Sweden and Denmark, as a layman. And, like Hauge, he spent time in prison for his preaching activities.

In 1839 he came to America. He came because there was a need. More and more Norwegians were immigrating to this country, and there was not a single Norwegian Lutheran pastor here to minister to them. Many newcomers were converting to the Mormon church.

Eielsen settled first in Fox River, Illinois, where he began a small congregation in his home, a congregation which still exists and is part of our AFLC today. This may have been the first Norwegian Lutheran church in America—though that claim is disputed.

At the request of his congregation, Eielsen went to Chicago and found a German Lutheran pastor there who was willing to ordain him. Thus he may have become the first Norwegian Lutheran pastor ordained in America—though that claim is also disputed.

What is not disputed is that he was the first Norwegian Lutheran publisher in America. Needing teaching material for his confirmation classes, he traveled to New York to get an English translation of Luther’s Small Catechism printed. Later he went back to get a Norwegian book printed—Pontoppidan’s Explanation of the Catechism, the first Norwegian language book ever published in this country. That job involved a side trip to Philadelphia to get the typeface he wanted, and when the books were finished he carried them on his back, back to Illinois, on foot, in the dead of winter.

Elling Eielsen was not afraid of hard work.

He served many congregations over the years, but his chief work was traveling as an evangelist. He preached to Norwegian settlers in Texas. He preached in Kansas. He preached in the Dakotas. And, of course, he preached right here. The origins of Hauge and Immanuel Congregations are obscure, but it seems certain that they began with meetings led by Eielsen in this area.

As Eielsen’s ministry bore fruit, congregations were established, and they looked to him as their leader. So in 1846 a new church body came to be. Its name was—and I’m not joking here—the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. But it was better known as the Eielsen Synod.

Eielsen was probably not the best choice for a leader. His gifts were for evangelism. He was not a good organizer. He did not work well with people. He had a fiery temper, and he tended to see disagreement as heresy.

There was conflict in the Eielsen Synod. It had already split twice when, in 1876, a majority of the congregations decided they could no longer accept a paragraph in the constitution concerning church membership. Eielsen would not hear of a change. And so the majority of the congregations went on to become the Hauge Synod. A small group continued under the old constitution and Eielsen’s leadership.

The Hauge Synod chose as its first president a man whose name ought to be familiar around here. His name was Arne Boyum. But the second president should be a familiar name too. He was Østen Hanson, and he was pastor of Immanuel and Hauge churches, Kenyon, Minnesota. He served this parish for 37 years, and never took another call. Unlike Eielsen, Hanson knew how to stay put.

Østen Hanson was born in Telemark, Norway. Although his faith was every bit as solid and biblical as Eielsen’s, he had the ability to disagree with people without being disagreeable. He had a gift for organization, and he knew how to choose his battles.

He was not an educated man by the standards of this world. None of the early Haugeans were. But N. N. Rønning, in his book Fifty Years in America, says of him:

Hanson was a brainy man…. He was a converted man…. He had an insatiable hunger for knowledge and was an assiduous and discerning reader. He sought every occasion to talk with learned men. He had a passion for thinking things through.

The Bible was the book for Hanson. Everything he preached was riveted in the Bible. He wrestled with the Word. He found no peace of mind before he had mastered it, only to find, of course, that it was not fully mastered. He must have known the Letter to the Romans by heart; at least he had the more significant passages at the tip of his tongue.

I’m happy to be able to report that the synodical split did not make Eielsen and Hanson lifelong enemies. Later in his life Eielsen visited Pastor Hanson in the parsonage over in Aspelund, and he held meetings in this parish.

Ole Rølvaag tells us, quoting the Bible, that there were giants in the earth in those days. These stone walls have echoed to the voices of prophets. Hauge and Immanuel congregations have a powerful—even a heroic—spiritual heritage.

It’s not a heritage just for looking back on. I think it’s a heritage that has something to teach us today. Just as our ancestors had to find ways to practice the old, true faith in a strange new environment, so we face a strange new environment today. America was less different from Norway in the 19th Century than it is today from the country many of us grew up in. Once again our task as Christians is to work in new circumstances, speaking the timeless gospel in a new language.

May the same Spirit who worked in Eielsen and Hanson work in all of us here today, pastors and laity alike, as we carry on the ministry of repentance and faith.

Read about neopagan meditation in public schools. And I don’t want to hear about the separation of church and state, because this obviously does not have anything to do with church.

I’m in the American Spectator Online again today:

I have very shrewdly tied this column in to my novel, Wolf Time.