Sissel wishes you a blessed Christmas.
(You’ll note that they use the original “Born to raise the sons of earth” line, rather than a PC revision. That’s like a Christmas present right there.)
Category Archives: Religion
Platt on Rebelling Against the American Dream
Pastor and author David Platt writes:
We American Christians have a way of taking the Jesus of the Bible and twisting him into a version of Jesus that we are more comfortable with.
A nice middle-class American Jesus. A Jesus who doesn’t mind materialism and would never call us to give away everything we have. A Jesus who is fine with nominal devotion that does not infringe on our comforts.
Platt has written the bestselling book Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream
"The House of Christmas"
The Nativity, by Federico Barocci, c. 1597
By: G. K. Chesterton
There fared a mother driven forth
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome.
For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay on their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.
Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
And chance and honour and high surprise,
But our homes are under miraculous skies
Where the yule tale was begun.
A Child in a foul stable,
Where the beasts feed and foam;
Only where He was homeless
Are you and I at home;
We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
But our hearts we lost – how long ago!
In a place no chart nor ship can show
Under the sky’s dome.
This world is wild as an old wives’ tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.
To an open house in the evening
Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.
On the dating of Christmas
I’ve dealt with this before, among other places here. As many times as you’ve heard it said that Christians just “took over” the Roman Saturnalia celebration and turned it into Christmas, that “fact” actually rests on fairly shaky ground.
There’s good reason to believe that the date was chosen for symbolic and theological reasons, not simply as a substitutionary placeholder for Roman orgies.
First Things links to this article from Biblical Archaeology Review, which affirms the argument. The case is strengthened by the fact that the author is plainly not a believer in biblical inerrancy.
To be clear, the argument here is not that Jesus was in fact born on December 25. The argument is that the early church had other reasons for choosing the date than just usurping a heathen festival.
Which means that that guy in your church who says you’re going to hell because you have a Christmas tree is putting his confidence in questionable scholarship.
Have a Simeon Christmas
What follows may look, to start with, suspiciously like a pity party. I understand why you might think that, since I haven’t been above such fishing expeditions in the past. But I’m going to do my level best to avoid “poor me” games here. I mean to address, not my own situation, but that of others.
Lindsay Stallones over at Evangelical Outpost has posted a meditation pretty much guaranteed to bring us all down. In We Need a Darker Christmas, she notes that the true Christmas story is not a merry and bright Claymation special: Continue reading Have a Simeon Christmas
Failed Assassin Turned Minister
A North Korean sent to assassinate South Korea’s president back in 1968 failed to achieve his mission, despite remarkable successes along the way, and has since become a South Korean citizen and Presbyterian minister. He comments on his past and recent North Korean aggression.
He didn't lay His glory by quite this much…
A friend on Facebook linked to this remarkable collection of some of the most tasteless Nativity Scenes that ever unaccountably failed to bring down the wrath of angels.
Except for the Dog Nativity, of course. The Dog Nativity is awesome.
Links of interest. To me, anyway
Photo credit: Jorge Barrios.
The picture above is intended to induce holiday cheer, and possibly petit-mal seizures. Also because I haven’t gotten my own tree up yet.
Under the tree, a few links, just for you.
At First Things, Joe Carter points us to an interesting article from First Principles, on the true worth of the Puritans and Puritanism.
At City Journal, Andrew Klavan has a short story. Not Christmasy.
Mike Gray at The American Culture links to a Telegraph report on a debate on religion, between Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens.
And Standpoint has an excellent (what else?) review of a new book about Chesterton, with an appreciation, by the inestimable Paul Johnson. I forget who pointed me to it.
What is Sin?
In a letter to John Wesley in June 1735, his mother Susanna Wesley wrote these words:
The beauty, pleasures, and ease of the body strangely charm us; the wealth and honours of the world allure us; and all, under the management of a subtle malicious adversary, give a prodigious force to present things; and if the animal life once get the ascendant of our reason, it is the greatest folly imaginable, because he seeks it where has not designed he shall ever find it. But this is the case of the generality of men; they live as mere animals, wholly given up to the interests and pleasures of the body; and all the use of their understanding is to make provision for the flesh to fulfil the lusts thereof, without the least regard to future happiness or misery.
I take à Kempis to have been an honest weak man, with more zeal than knowledge, by his condemning all mirth or pleasure as sinful or useless, in opposition to so many plain and direct texts of Scripture. Would you judge of the lawfulness or unlawfulness of pleasure; of the innocence or malignity of actions? Take this rule: whatever weakens your reason, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, or takes off the relish of spiritual things; in short, whatever increases the strength and authority of your body over your mind, that thing is sin to you, however innocent it may be in itself.
(from Susanna Wesley by Eliza Clarke LONDON: W. H. ALLEN & CO., 1886)
No irony deficiency in my life
I made a mistake today. I did a web search for an old friend.
Sometimes it’s better not to know.
This was a guy who, once upon a time, was (to quote Proverbs) “closer than a brother” to me. A guy I shared long road trips with, prayed with, shared confidences with, and sat up late with over pizza, talking about Jesus and how to win the world for Him.
I haven’t been in contact with him in years. We were drifting apart even then. I knew he was a pastor. I now learned that he’s been, for some time, an aggressive advocate, within the Very Large Lutheran Church Body Which Shall Remain Nameless, of what’s called “gay issues.”
My thoughts went back, inevitably, to an evening long ago, when I’d had dinner with him and his wife. The subject of homosexuality came up and I (on the basis of some very superficial recent reading) said that I thought I could make an argument for evangelical Christians supporting the homosexual movement.
“They seem to be just fighting for the right to be different from everybody else,” I said. “I think maybe we ought to support that. We can’t be confident that America will always be a Christian country. Someday we may be the ones who are different. We need to make sure that there’s a right not to conform in this country.”
My friend and his wife disagreed, spiritedly. I don’t clearly remember what they said, but I have the idea they pointed out that homosexual activists showed no particular inclination to respect the rights of those who disagreed with them. They pointed, I think, to the shameful treatment received by Anita Bryant, who paid with her career for daring to oppose their agenda.
In hindsight, I think it’s clear that they were right and I was wrong. I did not cling to that point of view much longer.
But, in one of those ironies that seem to me so common in life, today I’ve taken their side, and they’ve taken what was mine at the time (and gone far beyond it).
And I have to wonder, was that conversation the beginning, for them, of their movement to feelings-based ethics and zeitgeist-uber-alles theology? Or a significant step on the way?
I honestly can’t recall any argument I’ve ever won, in my whole life.
Is it possible the only one I did win was one in which I was completely wrong?