Maggie's Farm

"Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting today for costly grace. Cheap grace means grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system. It means forgiveness of sins proclaimed as a general truth, the love of God taught as the Christian "conception" of God.

Cheap grace means the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner. Grace alone does everything they say, and so everything can remain as it was before ... let the Christian live like the rest of the world ... and not presumptuously aspire to live a different life under grace from his old life under sin. That was its heresy ..."

In 1939, Bonhoeffer joined a hidden group of high-ranking military officers based in the Abwehr, or Military Intelligence Office, who wanted to overthrow the National Socialist regime by killing Hitler. He was arrested in April 1943 after money used to help Jews escape to Switzerland was traced to him. He was charged with conspiracy and imprisoned in Berlin for a year and a half. After the unsuccessful July 20 Plot in 1944, Bonhoeffer's connections to the conspirators were discovered. He was moved to a series of prisons and concentration camps ending at Flossenburg. Here, he was executed by hanging at dawn on 9 April 1945, just three weeks before the liberation of the city. Also hanged for their parts in the conspiracy were his brother Klaus and his brothers-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi and Rüdiger Schleicher.

It might be a bit chewy for a Monday morning, but Bob at One Cosmos has the answer. You know you want it, as the beer man says at Yankee Stadium.

He does get into Schopenhauer a bit:

"If I take away the thinking subject, the whole material world must vanish, as this world is nothing but the phenomenal appearance in the sensibility of our own subject, and is a species of the subject's representations."

I think I exist to drink wine and to wonder why I exist, after work. After a few wines, one wonders whether one does exist at all, and whether "I" is an illusion. Sometimes, I wonder why other things, like ham sandwiches, exist. The cosmos itself just gives me vertigo.

Image: From the Hubbell scope

This excerpt is from John 17, in which Christ is praying about his followers. We have been reading The Great Divorce, and talking about what it means to be "in the world, but not of it."

14 I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. 15 I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. 16 They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. 17 Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. 18 As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. 19 And for their sake I consecrate myself, that they also may be sanctified in truth.

From G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy, as posted in Dr. Bob's good recent piece on Faith and Reason:

… [T]he materialist philosophy (whether true or not) is certainly much more limiting than any religion. In one sense, of course, all intelligent ideas are narrow. They cannot be broader than themselves. A Christian is only restricted in the same sense that an atheist is restricted. He cannot think Christianity false and continue to be a Christian; and the atheist cannot think atheism false and continue to be an atheist. But as it happens, there is a very special sense in which materialism has more restrictions than spiritualism. … The Christian is quite free to believe that there is a considerable amount of settled order and inevitable development in the universe. But the materialist is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle. … The Christian admits that the universe is manifold and even miscellaneous, just as a sane man knows that he is complex. The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman. But the materialist’s world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane. The materialist is sure that history has been simply and solely a chain of causation, just as the interesting person before mentioned is quite sure that he is simply and solely a chicken. Materialists and madmen never have doubts.

Middlebrow has a good piece on the subject. I too have noticed how unsophisticated the thinking is about religion for those who haven't been adequately exposed/educated. I never see the sneering in my personal life, but maybe folks are being polite. I hate to be presumed stupid: at least give me a chance to prove it. A quote:

Lately, secularists have taken to sneering rather than arguing. They simply assume all thoughtful people agree . . . and move on.

When is a “silly” belief disqualifying? Very great men have believed very odd things . . . I would love to be tutored by Socrates (!) whatever his views on government.

But the new secularism has no time for nuance or self-doubt. If a man is religious, then secularists know him to be a fool, an idiot, or a cad. If a secular writer is bright enough, then he might get away with calling a believer all three!

To such folk there are good religious, folk like Cornel West, whose religious views are secularism with God-talk added.

and 

Secularists who are fools, idiots, or cads (the dear leader of North Korea, the Hollywood secularist of the moment, and Stalin in no particular order) are merely misguided . . . or not true secularists to the modern writer of such rot.

Christianity may have helped invent modern science, the University, and produced much of the world’s great cultural treasures, but living Christianity is only to be despised, though to be fair any other religious group is hated just as heartily by these thoughtless secularists.

Today is Christmas in some of the various denominations of the Eastern church.

Image is the Hagia Sophia, built in 537 - one of the architectural wonders of the world, but not a Christian basilica since 1453, when Moslem invaders conquered Constantinople and slaughtered the Christians - men, women and children.

Speaking of which, here's a great time-line of what sorts of things prompted the Crusades. The Crusades were a reaction to Moslem imperialism, and Moslem imperialism never quit. It's part of their religion. As in Europe today, they will conquer without guns - when they can get away with it...but there is always a threat in the background.

And yes, the image of Hagia Sophia has been photoshopped to reveal its original grandeur. Across the inlet lie some of the fancy Istanbul neighborhoods overlooking the Bosporus - some of the most expensive real estate in the world.

A clever reader coined the term "evangelical atheists" the other day. Yesterday, an opinion piece by Tobias Jones in The Guardian on "secular totalitarianism." A quote:

That is why these (secular) fundamentalists are so in evidence. They're not only needled by their own hypocrisy; they are also furious that believers have broken the old pact to stay out of public debate. Witness, for example, Mary Riddell's astonishing sentence in the Observer last month (try replacing "religion" with "homosexuality" to get the point): "secularists do not wish to harm religion or deny its great cultural influence. They simply want it to know its place." In other words: get back in the closet.

Christians feel particularly aggrieved because we believe that Jesus invented secularism. Jesus's teachings desacralised the state: no authority, not even Caesar's, was comparable to God's. As Nick Spencer writes in Doing God, "the secular was Christianity's gift to the world, denoting a public space in which authorities should be respected, but could be legitimately challenged and could never accord to themselves absolute or ultimate significance". Christianity, far from creating an absolutist state, initiated dissent from state absolutism.

Right. Whole thing here.

That is why Statists hate religion: it competes in significance. Why else would they care so much - or even care at all?  Science is generally and properly humble about its offerings (the global warming scam excepted), but The State is never humble.

We do not really have a bleak one here, this year, with Palm Trees sprouting up in Yankee-land, and dinosaurs returning to latitudes in which they have not been seen for many years, but I love this song:

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign.
In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.

Angels and archangels may have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air;
But His mother only, in her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the beloved with a kiss.

What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him: I can give my heart.

Christina Rossetti wrote these memorable lines. The music is perfect, too. The music Midi file here.

^{Psalm 72}

¹Give the king your justice, O God, and your righteousness to a king’s son.
²May he judge your people with righteousness, and your poor with justice. ³May the mountains yield prosperity for the people, and the hills, in righteousness.
⁴May he defend the cause of the poor of the people, give deliverance to the needy, and crush the oppressor.
⁵May he live while the sun endures, and as long as the moon, throughout all generations.
⁶May he be like rain that falls on the mown grass, like showers that water the earth.
⁷In his days may righteousness flourish and peace abound, until the moon is no more.
⁸May he have dominion from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth.
⁹May his foes bow down before him, and his enemies lick the dust.
¹⁰May the kings of Tarshish and of the isles render him tribute, may the kings of Sheba and Seba bring gifts.
¹¹May all kings fall down before him, all nations give him service.
¹²For he delivers the needy when they call, the poor and those who have no helper.
¹³He has pity on the weak and the needy, and saves the lives of the needy.
¹⁴From oppression and violence he redeems their life; and precious is their blood in his sight.
¹⁵Long may he live! May gold of Sheba be given to him. May prayer be made for him continually, and blessings invoked for him all day long.
¹⁶May there be abundance of grain in the land; may it wave on the tops of the mountains; may its fruit be like Lebanon; and may people blossom in the cities like the grass of the field.
¹⁷May his name endure forever, his fame continue as long as the sun. May all nations be blessed in him; may they pronounce him happy.
¹⁸Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, who alone does wondrous things.
¹⁹Blessed be his glorious name forever; may his glory fill the whole earth. Amen and Amen.

Pastor quoted somebody on Christmas Eve - I forget who - but the gist of it was that many people first experience God by His absence in their lives.

Assistant Village Idiot wrote a suberb, short piece on the Christmas of nostalgia. What does it feel like to base your festivities on your past; to be on the outside, looking in?

It's not the usual kind of "Keep Christ in Christmas" piece. One quote:

We are so aware of how many things pull us away from Christ at Christmas that we have forgotten how dangerous it is for those outside to look in. They sense, as we should know but have forgotten, that to step inside might mean never coming back. If emotional distance does not bring warmth, it at least brings memories of warmth, with no danger of burning.

Read the whole thing.

Luke 2:15

When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.” So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger. When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told.

I urge you to take a few minutes to read Gagdad Bob's latest, which concerns education and religion. A few quotes, to tempt you:

Anyway, like me, Professor Taylor is worried. However, we are worried about opposite things. While I am worried about his influence on students, he is worried that “more American college students seem to be practicing traditional forms of religion today than at any time in my 30 years of teaching,” which he calls “religious correctness” -- thereby confusing the disease with its cure.

He is obviously upset, because these religiously correct students seem immune to the charms of his academically correct vacuities. “Indeed,” he writes, “it seems the more religious students become, the less willing they are to engage in critical reflection about faith.” Translated, this means that these dangerous students are less willing to confuse a prideful ability to doubt anything with the discernment of truth.

and

Taylor then says that “In the most egregious cases, defenders of the faith insist that only true believers are qualified to teach their religious tradition.” To which one can only reply, “well duh.” Any religion, in order to be understood, must be understood “from the inside,” because that is precisely the sort of knowledge embodied in religion: interior knowledge. Religions are not about the horizontal, objective, or quantitative world, and to treat them as such is to misunderstand them, precisely. They are specifically roadmaps of the cosmic interior, and only someone who knows the territory on a first hand basis is qualified to teach about it.

It is absolutely no different with, say, psychoanalysis, which cannot be understood objectively, but only subjectively. Its truths must be experienced, or they are no truth at all, just empty “k.” It is no coincidence that the most egregious misunderstandings and misapplications of psychoanalysis have always come from academia, because intellectuals naturally believe it is something that can be greedily understood just like any other merely intellectual system.

The purpose of an elite university education is no longer to become educated -- to acquire a well-furnished mind and familiarize oneself with the best things that have been thought and said -- but to become stupid by elevating a means to an end. Thus, upon contact with his luckless students, Professor Taylor tells them “that if they are not more confused and uncertain at the end of the course than they were at the beginning, I will have failed.” In short, the goal of education is to make students as lost and confused as Professor Taylor, through the deification of man’s capacity to doubt anything.

Enough? Bob always leaves me thinking. Read the whole thing. America's first colleges: King's College (Columbia now), Harvard, Yale, the College of New Jersey (now Princeton) - were all begun as places to mainly educate clergy, and/or religiously-interested lay people. Have they simply been co-opted by a new religion? Are colleges still doctrinal seminaries, with new doctrines?

^{Luke 3, 7-18}

⁷John said to the crowds that came out to be baptized by him, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? ⁸Bear fruits worthy of repentance. Do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. ⁹Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” ¹⁰And the crowds asked him, “What then should we do?” ¹¹In reply he said to them, “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.” ¹²Even tax collectors came to be baptized, and they asked him, “Teacher, what should we do?” ¹³He said to them, “Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you.” ¹⁴Soldiers also asked him, “And we, what should we do?” He said to them, “Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages.”

¹⁵As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, ¹⁶John answered all of them by saying, “I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. ¹⁷His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” ¹⁸So, with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people.

Image: Bachiacca's late Renaissance (c.1540) Madonna and child, with the young John the Baptist

Paul to the Philippians, 1: 1-11

Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus, To all the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi, with the bishops and deacons: ²Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

³I thank my God every time I remember you, ⁴constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you, ⁵because of your sharing in the gospel from the first day until now. ⁶I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ.

⁷It is right for me to think this way about all of you, because you hold me in your heart, for all of you share in God’s grace with me, both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel. ⁸For God is my witness, how I long for all of you with the compassion of Christ Jesus.

⁹And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight ¹⁰to help you to determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, ¹¹having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.

Yes, it is a Giotto

A quote from one of our favorites, who wrote one of our favorite books (h/t, Anchoress, via Maxed Out). No comment needed:

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is, so to speak, His name written in us…It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely.

The first church? 4th Century Church of the Ark found on West Bank

How about polygamy? Evangelical Outpost

Ancient prayers, at Real Meal. One example (Origen, 185-254):

Lord, inspire us to read your Scriptures and meditate upon them day and night. We beg you to give us real understanding of what we need, that we in turn may put its precepts into practice. Yet we know that understanding and good intentions are worthless, unless rooted in your graceful love. So we ask that the words of Scriptures may also be not just signs on a page, but channels of grace into our hearts. Amen.

On Advent, from Frederick Buechner's Whistling in the Dark (h/t, It Takes a Church):

The house lights go off and the footlights come on. Even the chattiest stop chattering as they wait in darkness for the curtain to rise. In the orchestra pit, the violin bows are poised. The conductor has raised his baton.  In the silence of a midwinter dusk, there is far off in the deeps of it somewhere a sound so faint that for all you can tell it may be only the sound of the silence itself. You hold your breath to listen.  You walk up the steps to the front door. The empty windows at either side of it tell you nothing, or almost nothing. For a second you catch a whiff of some fragrance that reminds you of a place you've never been and a time you have no words for. You are aware of the beating of your heart…The extraordinary thing that is about to happen is matched only by the extraordinary moment just before it happens. Advent is the name of that moment.

Ann Althouse reminded me, with her piece, that we have never written about any of the projects of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, including their interest in supporting faith in the workplace.

I am happy to have met, and listened to, David Miller on a number of occasions. He is inspiring, funny, and self-deprecating and, as an ex-Wall Streeter, he knows the business world very well indeed.

Do we like the idea of workplace chaplaincy? Definitely. And the Yale Center does lots of interesting things. Check it out.

Luke 21: 25-36

^{Revelation 1:4-8}

⁴John to the seven churches that are in Asia: Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven spirits who are before his throne, ⁵and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth. To him who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, ⁶and made us to be a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen. ⁷Look! He is coming with the clouds; every eye will see him, even those who pierced him; and on his account all the tribes of the earth will wail. So it is to be. Amen. ⁸“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.

The most interesting book I've read this year - George Marsden's recent biography of Jonathan Edwards. I am about halfway through it, but find it difficult to put down. (It won the Bancroft Prize.)

Marsden weaves late colonial history, theology, Edward's complex life (his struggles with faith, struggles with temptation, struggles with character flaws, his depressions, his never-resting intelligence), and the daily life of the times into a darn good tale. And Marsden does know his theology.

Connecticut's Edwards (1703-1758) is one of the most compelling and important figures in American history - probably more important than the Founding Fathers: he helped lay the cultural foundation on which the national institutions were constructed. I see him as the evolutionary link between the Puritan Pilgrims and the world of the Founders. His view of the world was far better known in the colonies in 1776 than were the works of John Locke - or of anyone else: sermons were best-sellers in those days. Isolated: not really.

Did Edwards read Locke? You bet. Locke was his great inspiration (except for scripture), at Yale (then a divinity school). Newton and Rousseau too: these New Englanders were plugged into the latest European thinking.

His life and preaching remain a part of America's national DNA. As theologian, theological logician, preacher, and the preeminant evangelist of the Great Awakening, he has been and remains the dominant figure in the history of American religious life - and a major international figure, too, because of his role in the worldwide movement that puritan Reform (Calvinism) represented.

So he is well worth reading about.

From the Booklist review:

In the first full critical biography of Edwards in 60 years, a distinguished Notre Dame scholar humanizes America's greatest colonial clergyman, a man highly esteemed in his own time but since singled out for decades of abuse by Puritan-bashers. To be sure, Edwards' brimstone pulpit rhetoric (most famously deployed in his 1741 sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God") offends modern sensibilities. But Marsden--drawing heavily on recent scholarship--restores Edwards to an eighteenth-century New England where most shared his doctrines, though few could rival him in the power with which he preached them. Exceptional insight shines through a felicitous style as Marsden recounts how Edwards acquired that power, the intellectual rigor of his Yale studies gradually lending force to his intense spiritual vision. His rare gifts enabled Edwards to kindle the Great Awakening, emblazoning his name on the pages of American history.

A quote from Marsden's excellent Introduction:

Historians of the United States have been prone to give much more attention to Benjamin Franklin than to Edwards as a progenitor of modern America. That is understandable because Franklin seems so congenially to represent tendencies that triumph in mainstream American life and politics. Yet a good case can be made that stories of America are deficient if they do not at least temper emphasis on the Franklins of the heritage with a serious reckoning with its Edwardses. Most strikingly, the modern narratives fail to account for why levels of religious practice came to be so much higher in the United States than in other modernized nations. They also do little to explain why evangelical Christianity  flourished in America and why its revivalist style became one of America's leading exports.

Literally.

The new head of American Episcopalians doubts Jesus' unique divine nature. (h/t, News for Christians).

Maybe she should find another job?

But could she find one? Divinity School does not prepare anyone for anything but help with worship. That is a fine thing indeed, but what if you want to worship anything?

What if everything and anything is sacred? That's not religion - that's something else.

WalMart always needs cheerful greeters.

I have no doubt that she is a bright gal, but I am not sure that she has heard the music.

Image: Yes, that is the golden calf which is, no doubt, a path to God for modern Episcopalians. And all the people said "Moooo." Hey - we do dig cows, but we do not worship them, golden, or otherwise. Hmmm... if those ancients had discovered ice cream from those cattle, they might have had a worthy object of devotion. Just kidding.

Tillich, quoted by Jimmy J, quoted by Shrinkwrapped:

Do we know what it means to be struck by grace? It does not mean that we suddenly believe that God exists, or that Jesus is the Savior, or that the Bible contains the truth. To believe that something is, is almost contrary to the meaning of grace.

Furthermore, grace does not mean simply that we are making progress in our moral self-control, in our fight against special faults, and in our relationships to men and to society. Moral progress may be a fruit of grace; but it is not grace itself, and it can even prevent us from receiving grace.

Too often there is a graceless acceptance of Christian doctrines and a graceless battle against the structures of evil in our personalities. Such a graceless relation to God may lead us either to arrogance or to despair.

It would be far better to refuse God and the Christ and the Bible than to accept them without grace. If we accept without grace, we do so in the state of separation, and can only succeed in deepening the separation.

We cannot transform our lives, unless we allow them to be transformed by that stroke of grace. It happens; or it does not happen. And certainly it does not happen if we try to force it upon ourselves, just as it shall not happen as long as we think, in our self-complacency, that we have no need of it.

Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness.

It strikes when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when we feel that our separation is deeper than usual, because we have violated another life, a life which we loved, or from which we were estranged.

It strikes us when our disgust for our own being, our indifference, our weakness, our hostility and our lack of direction and composure has become intolerable to us.

It strikes us when, year after year the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage.

Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: "You are accepted. You are accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted.

If that happens to us, we experience grace. After such an experience we may not be better than before, and we may not believe more than before. But everything is transformed. In that moment, grace conquers sin, and reconciliation bridges the gulf of estrangement. And nothing is demanded of the experience, no religious or moral or intellectual presupposition-nothing but acceptance."

Image is William Blake's

Prayer (1633. Herbert's bio here.)

Prayer the Churches banquet, Angels age,   
   Gods breath in man returning to his birth,
   The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth;



Engine against th’ Almightie, sinners towre,
   Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
   The six-daies world transposing in an houre,
A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear;



Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and  blisse,
   Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,
   Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,
The Milkie way, the bird of Paradise,



     Church-bels beyond the starres heard, the souls bloud,
     The land of spices; something understood.