Chad the Elder, over at Fraters Libertas, links to a (subscription only) story at First Things, about how the availability of abortion made unplanned pregnancies entirely “the woman’s problem,” and encouraged irresponsibility in men.

But once continuing a pregnancy to birth is the result neither of passion nor of luck but only of her deliberate choice, sympathy weakens. After all, the pregnant woman can avoid all her problems by choosing abortion. So if she decides to take those difficulties on, she must think she can handle them.

Birth itself may be followed by blame rather than support. Since only the mother has the right to decide whether to let the child be born, the father may easily conclude that she bears sole responsibility for caring for the child. The baby is her fault.

In the radio blackout, I opened the little plastic packages which contained the bread and the wine. I poured the wine into the chalice our church had given me. In the one-sixth gravity of the moon, the wine slowly curled and gracefully came up the side of the cup. Then I read the Scripture, ‘I am the vine, you are the branches. Whosoever abides in me will bring forth much fruit. Apart from me you can do nothing.’ I had intended to read my communion passage back to earth, but at the last minute [they] had requested that I not do this.

When Buzz Aldrin and his teammates landed on the moon, Buzz took the communion of the Lord Jesus. Eric Metaxas writes about it on his blog today.

Do I remember what I was doing when man first walked on the moon?

Indeed I do.

I was traveling that summer with a team from Lutheran Youth Encounter, a “parachurch” ministry that sent teams of college-aged Lutherans to work with the youth in various congregations. We usually spent a week in each church, but we’d had a cancellation for this week, and our team’s leader (a Type-A overachiever of whom I was in awe at the time) had put us to work cold-calling churches all over the Ohio District (because that was where we were). Finally we’d found an urban Cleveland church that was a little desperate because it was between pastors, and somebody apparently thought bringing us in would provide “something for the kids.”

As I recall it, it was a pretty bad fit, and I’m not at all sure they felt they got their money’s worth. Continue reading 40 years ago Monday →

Albert Mohler reports on how Dr. Katherine Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, has finally found a teaching in the church so awful, so scandalous and offensive, that she’s willing to apply the term “heresy” to it.

Denial of the Trinity? Denial of the Virgin Birth? Denial of the Resurrection?

No, no. It’s much worse than that.

She’s found that some people actually believe that Jesus is Lord.

The overarching connection in all of these crises has to do with the great Western heresy – that we can be saved as individuals, that any of us alone can be in right relationship with God. It’s caricatured in some quarters by insisting that salvation depends on reciting a specific verbal formula about Jesus. That individualist focus is a form of idolatry, for it puts me and my words in the place that only God can occupy, at the center of existence, as the ground of being. That heresy is one reason for the theme of this Convention.

She goes on to describe a further, related heresy–believing that Jesus is the one way to God.

Tip: Dr. Paul McCain at Cyberbrethren.

In what could be a severe blow to recent critics who have claimed that “Jerusalem is not a Jewish city” and “David never existed,” a Jewish archaeologist has (on the basis of a biblical clue) found what looks very much like David’s palace on a hill overlooking the original Jebusite city site.

But Mazar always suspected that the palace was outside the original city, and cites the Bible to prove it. When the Philistines heard that David had been anointed, they went on the attack to apprehend him. This occurred after he conquered the Fortress of Zion, which was the actual nucleus of the city, and built his palace. The Bible says that David heard about it and “descended to the fortress,” (2-Samuel 5:17), implying that he went down from his palace, which was higher up on the mountain than the citadel/city.

Mazar told Aish.com: “I always asked myself: Down from where? It must have been from his palace on top of the hill, outside the original Jebusite city.”

Mazar says she was confident in her assessment of where the palace would be. What she discovered was a section of massive wall running about 100 feet from west to east along the length of the excavation (underneath what until this summer was the Ir David Visitors Center), and ending with a right-angle corner that turns south and implies a very large building.

Tip: Dr. Gene Edward Veith.

Today I was going through some stuff in our Archives. A pastor had donated some material he’d accumulated in researching a book a few years ago, and I’d been letting it sit. Today, I decided, I will start putting it in some kind of order.

Archiving is a very odd occupation, and one for which (I might mention) I have no formal training. Do I catalog a pamphlet as a book, or file it as a document? How do I organize my document files? It appears the previous librarians weren’t sure either, so I can’t even refer to their precedents most of the time.

I decided to catalog the Christmas annuals as books. Our predecessor church body published a Christmas annual, and (God bless ’em) operated with such humility that they didn’t even include publishing information in many of them (no bragging from the editors!). One issue didn’t even contain any mention anywhere of what year it was for. I had to work it out deductively, and I’m not entirely sure I got the right answer. Continue reading The Archive of the covenant →

(Due to popular demand, or at least my own demand not to have to come up with an idea tonight, here is the text of my talk at the 150th anniversary celebration of Hauge Lutheran Church, Kenyon, Minnesota, on June 28, 2009.)

At 10 o’clock on the evening of November 22, the bailiff came and delivered to me the provincial government’s order to read, which said that I should, under strict guard… be transported to Christiania…. The bailiff brought only his servant along and drove me to Christiania. He expressed his opinion that I would either be imprisoned in Munkholmen [prison] or exiled to the islands of the South Seas, so that I must not expect ever to see any of my faithful friends again. I answered him that as long as there is life there is hope of better things; and that if his prophecy should be fulfilled, my God would certainly take care of me, and “I am in His hands and satisfied to accept whatever tribulations He wills that I encounter.” With such thoughts and words I kept my courage up, and since the bailiff, as I experienced, did not care for my religious conversation, I spoke mostly with him of various projects for the public good of which I, here and there in the country, had been the initiator, of which I said, “It is sad to think that they should all be shipwrecked. Many will thereby lose their livelihoods. But even concerning that I will be at peace, if only I am myself satisfied that I have done what I could for the benefit of my homeland and my fellow men’s benefit, both temporal and eternal.”

These are Hans Nielsen Hauge’s own words, from his account of the arrest in 1804 which led to his long imprisonment. I read them here because they express something we sometimes forget about Hauge. He lived his message. He preached, first of all, that the gift of salvation must be received in the heart, and secondly, that true salvation must lead to good works. And he demonstrated that teaching by doing good—getting his hands dirty, sharing useful information and ideas, and building businesses that provided jobs.

It’s interesting that, while early critics of Hauge and his followers accused them of being shiftless, superstitious vagrants, later critics accused them of the exact opposite—they worked too hard, studied too much, were obsessed with money and profit. They didn’t have enough fun, and tried to spoil the fun of others.

These changes in criticism are really testimony to Hans Nielsen Hauge’s tremendous success. He changed the very character of his country. When Hauge was born, the best the average Norwegian could hope for was to be just what his father had been—and that was only if he was lucky enough to be the firstborn. If he wasn’t firstborn, he was lucky to make a living at all.

After Hauge, all Norwegians knew they had a multitude of possibilities. They could go into business. They could be teachers or pastors. They could write for a newspaper. And many of them did what was perhaps the most Haugean thing of all—they emigrated to America, where there was no class system and no state church, and no law prevented anyone from improving his situation and “edifying” his fellow men. Continue reading Hauge and social change →

On days like this, I should be legally barred from posting. We’ve got the deaths of not one but two pop icons from my youth, on top of the ongoing awfulness in Iran (which everybody seems to have forgotten all of a sudden), topped by the systematic transformation of our country into a European-style social democracy. Hmm, what shall the tone of tonight’s blog post be?

Speaking personally, Michael Jackson never really took up much of my mental square footage (and I do mean square). He was one of those phenomena, like the Rocky Horror Picture Show, that I observed from afar, uncomprehending.

But Farrah! The perfect face, at the perfect time of my life for emotional imprinting. She even resembled (sort of, in a distant way, in the right light) the girl who’d broken my heart about a year previously.

I forget what night of the week “Charlie’s Angels” was on. I do recall that it was opposite “Grizzly Adams,” because my roommate was a huge GA fan, while I always wanted to see CA. I don’t recall how we worked it out. Very likely we took turns. There was only the one TV. Continue reading De mortuis →