A blessed Christmas to you all. Here’s Sissel with what I think is my favorite Christmas hymn. We sang it in church tonight, complete with the old lyrics: “Pleased as man with man to dwell,” “Born to raise the sons of earth,” and all that. I felt like I’d gotten a Christmas present. I punch those lyrics when I sing them.
Category Archives: Religion
Controversial Exhibit of Artwork on Mary Rebuffs Art Snobs
So a straw man walks into a bar. Except he doesn’t.
The National Museum of Women in the Arts is running what appears to be a fabulous exhibit, Picturing Mary: Woman, Mother, Idea on view December 5, 2014–April 12, 2015. Terry Mattingly has a video on it and writes about a review in The Baltimore Sun that reports on how some art critics are irritated that this exhibit doesn’t shove back the faces of Christians who actually like Mary, the mother of Jesus. “In other words, this exhibit has – among a elite art critics – become controversial because it is not causing controversy among (wait for it) religious believers who are, by definition, opposed to modern art.”
Apparently controversy is what exhibit planners want to avoid on a regular basis, but not all controversy is created equal. The only way to avoid the right kind of controversy is to show that your museum is too sophisticated to show respect for anything that isn’t the latest in trendy, Ivy League expressions.
“The [Baltimore Sun] story makes it clear, for example, that this astonishingly deep exhibit could not have taken place if its planners had decided to include modern art about Mary that would have offended the very churches and museums that controlled some of these priceless masterpieces.” But the straw men these critics hate so much are anywhere to be seen.
He Can’t Make a Christian
In her regular Thursday column, Bethany Jenkins gives us Martin Luther on the nonexistence of a sacred/secular divide . Here’s part of it.
The pope or bishop anoints, shaves heads, ordains, consecrates, and prescribes garb different from that of the laity, but he can never make a man into a Christian or into a spiritual man by so doing. He might well make a man into a hypocrite or a humbug and blockhead, but never a Christian or a spiritual man. As far as that goes, we are all consecrated priests through baptism, as St. Peter says in 1 Peter 2:9, “You are a royal priesthood and a priestly realm.” The Apocalypse says, “Thou hast made us to be priests and kings by thy blood” (Rev. 5:9-10).
Today: Through the Eyes of Spurgeon
Watch a new documentary on C. H. Spurgeon today for free. It’s called Through the Eyes of Spurgeon. Get the details here.
“You’ll have to find somewhere else to sleep”
Chicken coop, Coupeville, Island County, WA. Photo by Anne E. Kidd. Library of Congress
Today I was reminded of a man I wrote about here some years back. He’s gone now, and one of his relatives came to the library today to donate several cartons of books from his personal collection.
I think it’s all right to give his full name now. It was Marvin Rodvik, and he lived in Franklin, Minnesota. I met him a couple times in my life. The last time he gave us another gift of books. He also told me a story, which I passed along in this blog. I’ll tell it again now, because it is, in my opinion, one of the best stories I ever heard for the Christmas season.
Marvin was a pastor’s kid. The story happened when he was a teenager, probably (by my calculations) around the time of World War II.
An entertainment event of some kind (he didn’t say what) was planned in their small town. Marvin announced at supper that he was going.
“You’re not going,” said his father. They belonged to a strict church, a congregation of the forerunner to my own church body.
“Yes I am,” said Marvin. “You can’t stop me.”
His father paused a moment. Then he said, “You’re right. I can’t stop you. But know this. If you go to that event, you’ll be locked out of this house when you come home tonight. You’ll have to find somewhere else to sleep.”
Continue reading “You’ll have to find somewhere else to sleep”
N.D. Wilson on Adapting ‘The Hound of Heaven’ for Film
Author N.D. Wilson has directed a short film of the Francis Thompson poem, “The Hound of Heaven.” Shadowlocked.com has part of an interview with Wilson on how everything came together.
So what’s it like adapting somebody else’s work as opposed to your own?
Well, honestly I’m far more comfortable adapting other people’s stuff than my own. And actually, in some ways, because I can be a stickler. I can be a stickler to try to stay true as I possibly can to their vision, when I’m adapting their stuff. But when I’m adapting my stuff, I don’t feel any loyalty at all to it. I feel complete and total authority to change whatever I want, whenever I want.
And so when I’m adapting C.S. Lewis or even trying to serve Francis Thompson, I felt like I could write an intro, like I could write an opening monologue for Propaganda, but I couldn’t bring myself to edit the poem. No matter how many people told me, “Well, surely you’re not going to do the whole poem”, it was like, “No, I’m gonna do the whole poem. I’m doing all of it.” Because I really wanted it to come through.
If I’m doing my own things, like I’m doing 100 Cupboards, I’m thinking, like, “Oh, wow, I can throw this part away, and do this other thing that I was going to have in the novel, and I needed to cut it for space, but now I can put it in. I can take things that ended up on the cutting room floor of my novel, and put them into the film.” And I feel completely at liberty to do that. And that’s dangerous.
Read more about the movie here.
“I fled him . . . in the mist of tears . . .
‘All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.’”
Do Some Protestants Believe in Purgatory?
Gene Edward Veith points out a news story about Professor Jerry L. Walls, who teaches the idea of purgatory and has written about it in Purgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation
“’To suggest instead that Christians will enjoy a kind of express executive elevator at the time of death is to suggest that those who work hard on holiness in this life are wasting their efforts,’ John G. Stackhouse, Jr., a popular evangelical author at Canada’s Regent College wrote in an essay on Walls’ ideas in The Christian Century.”
This Catholic writer explains, “Catholic theology takes seriously the notion that ‘nothing unclean shall enter heaven.’ From this it is inferred that a less than cleansed soul, even if ‘covered,’ remains a dirty soul and isn’t fit for heaven.” But I guess Christ’s atonement does not accomplish this, so though we are fully saved by his grace, we must be fully purified by purgatory’s refining fire, which has been a big problem historically (not to mention the fact that the Protestant Bible doesn’t allow for even prayers on behalf of the dead).
New Book on George Whitefield
Thomas Kidd has a new biography on one of America’s great evangelists, George Whitefield.
Although I deeply respect and appreciate him, my Whitefield is not a perfect man. As Whitefield readily admitted, he struggled with the temptations of fame, and I also show his besetting difficulties in relating to other evangelical leaders such as the Wesleys. Most disappointing (as Dallimore noted too) was Whitefield’s advocacy for slavery, and his personal owning of slaves.
I thought I had read that he opposed slavery and got into trouble with some Georgian businessmen for saying so.
Your Reformation Day Treat: A treasury of insults
“Your words are so foolishly and ignorantly composed that I cannot believe you understand them.”
The Luther Insult Generator may be found here. Hours of innocent fun for you and your family.
Why Read Calvin’s Institutes?
Justin Taylor quotes J.I. Packer on how great and necessary reading Calvin’s Institutes is for modern believers.
Packer explains that Calvin’s magnum opus is one of the great wonders of the world:
Calvin’s Institutes (5th edition, 1559) is one of the wonders of the literary world—the world, that is, of writers and writing, of digesting and arranging heaps of diverse materials, of skillful proportioning and gripping presentation; the world . . . of the Idea, the Word, and the Power. . . .
The Institutio is also one of the wonders of the spiritual world—the world of doxology and devotion, of discipleship and discipline, of Word-through-Spirit illumination and transformation of individuals, of the Christ-centered mind and the Christ-honoring heart. . . .
Calvin’s Institutio is one of the wonders of the theological world, too—that is, the world of truth, faithfulness, and coherence in the mind regarding God; of combat, regrettable but inescapable, with intellectual insufficiency and error in believers and unbelievers alike; and of vision, valuation, and vindication of God as he presents himself through his Word to our fallen and disordered minds. . . .