Monday Morning Music Ministry

10-9-17

We observe the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, of Dr Luther nailing his 95 Theses (complaints to be debated) on the Church Castle door in Wittenberg, Germany.

What momentous forces collided in that sleepy burg! The Holy Roman Empire was shattering; Medievalism was ending; Humanism and the Renaissance were dawning; literacy was sprouting, and with it the seedlings of personal freedom; the arts fiercely bloomed; the Enlightenment was nigh; European land wars and incredible maritime exploration commenced – both of them fueled by nascent commercialism and appetites of a growing middle class; serfdom was yielding to feudalism… and in turn, soon, to democracy and republicanism.

In the death-throes of the Old Order, hoary courts and royals entrenched themselves by  committing atrocities of race, religion, and conscience. The Church of the humble Savior had grown opulent and gaudy: corrupt. To finance the construction and ornamentation of St Peter’s in Rome, schemes like the selling of indulgences – buying late relatives spots in a fictional rest-stop to heaven called Purgatory.

We have outlined this, and I have lost some subscribers, presumably because I mention 500-year-old theological disputes (which objections I do not dismiss strictly on the basis of the vintages). But let us look beyond theology!

Martin Luther was the prophet of a new age. He stood for the individual in the face of organized power. He stood for popular culture, if I may go there, because he reformed the church’s trappings – the Bible for everyone to read; German, not Latin, scriptures and liturgy; congregational singing; priests who could marry; and so forth. He stood for scripture; “Scripture alone,” he bellowed to councils and popes.

He stood.

That, to me, is a notable takeaway from the life of Martin Luther. He was a Reformer, but also a Revolutionary.

In America there is a controversy over people kneeling during the National Anthem. To me, ironies abound: On matters of conscience, Luther stood, he did not abjectly kneel. Viewed from another angle, the press and the liberal Establishment in America (not to mention the NFL) condemned Tim Tebow for kneeling instead of dancing silly after touchdowns. A short prayer to God. However, countless black players are praised for kneeling symbolically to criticize their country. Consistency, thy name is not America 2017.

Luther, standing, was extraordinarily brave. There is a letter in his hand, written the night before his trial, in the Museum of the Bible that is soon to open in Washington DC (I saw it in Steve Green’s traveling exhibition). In the letter Luther calmly assumes he will be put to death and instructs his friend how to dispose of his possessions. And he asserts, once again, his “stand” for truth and for his conscience as informed by the Holy Spirit.

The Individual had come of age in humankind’s history. In Luther’s mature view, he realized that he stood for a world of more, not fewer, responsibilities – something that is scarcely appreciated today.

The crisis of the age – and for many ages – was upon Luther’s shoulders. Ironically (as we may think in the 21st century) Luther fit no mold. He was a Medievalist, not a Modern, even in the dawning days of Modernity. He really did not want to break from the Catholic Church, much less have a denomination rise in his name; but merely desired to reform it. And as the Age of Reason approached, he proclaimed that Reason is the enemy of Faith.

Yes, this New Man, harbinger of a new era and individualism – he considered Reason the enemy of Faith. So he was not a simple contrarian – he had clear but complex standards, living by them; and was prepared to die for them.

Martin Luther would die for what was sacred to him. In 21st-century America we have become a society where nothing is sacred but pleasures of the moment. Life is disposable, increasingly so, at birth and at death. Drugs supply counterfeit tastes of heaven, and our cultural heritage widely is mocked. Our civic life has devolved to games of “gotchas” and revenge. Self-indulgence and materialism are the new religions.

To the remnant and faithful, crises await our contention. We no longer have to wait, surprised when a serious life-dilemma confronts us. But we are at one of those moments in history when crises are unavoidable… and likewise our engagement is unavoidable, every one of us.

I cry for our culture; I cry for what we have squandered of our religious heritage, Western civilization, and our intellectual patrimony.

And I cry, too – every time in my life, I think, when I sing the last verse of my favorite hymn: Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”

Let goods and kindred go,
This mortal life also;
The body they may kill:
God’s truth abideth still,
His kingdom is forever!

+ + +
Click: The “Battle Hymn of the Reformation,” A Mighty Fortress Is Our God

10-26-15

A Reformation lesson.

The observance of Reformation Sunday also provides an umbrella over a discussion of “tolerance,” Christian charity, “turning the other cheek,” loving your enemies, and similar topics. In the United States Reformation Sunday has come to be observed on the last Sunday in October, but is conterminous with All Saints’ Day. It is a legal holiday in parts of Germany, in Slovenia (despite its majority Catholic population), in Chile, and elsewhere.

October 31 is when the German monk Martin Luther, pushed to holy exasperation by the Catholic Church’s selling of indulgences (certificates promising to keep one from hell) and other extra-biblical practices, nailed a list of his complaints to the cathedral door in Wittenberg. These were the “95 Theses” – a lengthy set of arguments indeed – and are regarded as the spark that ignited the kindling of resentment and reform within the Catholic church.

Protestantism – now myriad denominations – resulted. First followers of Luther, then Calvin, the Wesleys, Pietists, Puritans, Baptists, Anabaptists, Anglicans, through evangelicals to perhaps the church’s very first manifestations again, Pentecostals. The Roman Church remains, as do various Orthodox traditions.

The Reformation came to my mind when, as occasionally happens, a subscriber to this blog “unsubscribed.” Actually it was an old friend, and the spark for him was an essay in which I criticized recent social trends, and took President Obama to task, I think over his advocacy of homosexual marriage or abortion, contrasted to his professed Christian faith; or perhaps it was his Administration’s virtual silence in the face of Christian persecution around the world.

I thought, and think, that such attitudes and national policies deserve criticism. “Not interested in political critiques,” my friend wrote. To me, policies make politics, no avoiding it. And Protestants originally were those who Protested.

Once I asked the cartoonist Al Capp about making a distinction between commentary and pure humor. He saw none, and replied, “Every cartoonist is a commentator. Even when you draw a cat, you automatically are commenting on cats.” In a similar manner, contemporary life has tuned everything political: much affects us, and reactions are inevitable; this is politics, in a way. But everything is not “partisan” – this party or that; liberal or conservative – and many people confuse the two P words.

Many Christians cite the scriptural admonitions to love our enemies, turn the other cheek, “render unto Caesar,” and, at the extreme of these modes, to honor the “divine right of kings.” My friend objects to receiving blogs with points of view, and I can sympathize. Many of us fends off scores of these every day. I have a friend who submits magazine articles critical of the Christian Right, a shorthand term, and even has invented conversations with Christ in the manner of the Socratic elenchus. Between this and an essay mentioning policies that are counter-Christian… a distinction perhaps without a difference.

Speaking personally – which I do in these messages – I wrestle with the challenge of resisting laws, rules, and practices that I consider inimical to the cause of Christ.

Yes, we should obey laws; and the Bible says that has God has ordained those in authority, that He has placed those in authority. But, obviously, we are free in God’s eyes to resist the appeals of incumbents to vote for them, and instead support their opponents. No? Should Jews have been compliant in Nazi Germany? Were Blacks wrong to commit civil disobedience against segregation? If our Christian beliefs convince us that abortion is murder, must we remain silent? decline to work for change if we can?

God has given us brains (that is, consciences — not always the same thing) as well as hearts, and I am quick to acknowledge the slippery slope of applying the argument that we can love our own enemies but not God’s. Possibly too facile, so we rely on prayer and the Holy Spirit. But yet, challenges and contradictions confront us.

It brings me (a happy inspiration) to Reformation. The attitude that we must without deviance obey ecclesiastic and civil authority, as Christians, would condemn the martyrdom of uncountable saints past and present. What of those in the Age of the Apostles who defied Rome in order to establish Christian communities? What of those who defied their superiors to translate Scripture, and to evangelize? What of the reformers, in centuries before and centuries after Luther, who worked to return Christianity to biblical foundations?

Among others, if the Wesley brothers had been compliant clergymen, not dissenting nor resisting, where would our faith, our hymnals, our churches be today?

Welcome back to the dichotomy: one man’s “injecting politics” is another man’s “defending Christianity” or defining morality. To navigate the slippery slope recognizes the need, as we said, for prayer and Holy Spirit guidance at all times.

I am reminded of David’s petition to God, in Psalm 109, that He punish and discomfit those who accused and disagreed with him. And – on Reformation Day – I cite the words of Martin Luther, the priest who defied the Pope; criticized his fellow, corrupt, churchmen; published 95 scathing critiques; publicly burned the Papal Bull (arrest warrant) against him; refused to renounce his writings; was caught up in the “politics” of the day and went into hiding to save his life; and, commanded to renounce his views, declared: “Here I stand. I can do no other.”

From his great hymn, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”:

Though this world, with devils filled, should threaten to undo us,
We will not fear, for God has willed His truth to triumph through us.
The prince of darkness grim, we tremble not for him;
His rage we can endure, for lo! his doom is sure; one little word shall fell him.

That Word above all earthly powers, no thanks to them, abideth;
The Spirit and the gifts are ours, through Him who with us sideth.
Let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also;
The body they may kill: God’s truth abideth still. His kingdom is forever!

+ + +

I have heard the Battle Hymn of the Reformation performed, in many venues large and small, including on the 500th anniversary of Luther’s birth, in the cathedral chapel in the city of Augsburg, Germany, where he defended his faith. And I have sung it myself uncountable times, frequently with tears in my eyes. But few performances have the impact of Steve Green, singing it a cappella before 70,000 men at a Promise Keepers gathering.

Click: A Mighty Fortress Is Our God

12-1-14

A dialog, as if overheard. This has been a “crowded” week in America – a confused jumble of social unrest and riots; of Thanksgiving holiday and prayers – or at least thoughts, maybe – of traditions and faith.

“Look at those protesters! They have no hope!”
“Are they protesting or looting? And, I think they have plenty to hope for.”
“OK. They have nowhere to go but up. But they need schools.”
“Schools are not magic. If kids don’t attend, no learning can take place.”
“Well, look around the world. Drugs, prejudice, oppression, greed!”
“It sounds like the end times the Bible talks about.”
“Oh, the Bible. Christians haven’t helped anything – they’ve caused a lot!”
“You ignore Christian charity? The Words of Christ?”
“I’m smart enough to see the bad that has been done, is done, in His name.”
“So your problem is with followers who are mistaken, who sin; not Him.”
“My problem is with the hypocrites who fill the churches.”
“How about the Ferguson church that was torched? It had preached peace.”
“So why didn’t their Jesus save that church?”
“Why do you hate the gospel message of love so much?”
“Why do YOU talk about messages? Can’t you see what people WANT?”
“In Ferguson?”
“No! People everywhere, oppressed by the system, who want justice.”
“Justice… Peace. Those things begin with each one of us.”
“Fool! People everywhere want self-esteem!”
“I think people everywhere need self-respect.”
“Churches don’t deliver self-respect.”
“Maybe not; sometimes not. But Jesus does.”
“Jesus doesn’t bring justice to the streets.”
“But Jesus brings justice to our hearts. His sacrifice justified our sins.”
“All religions say those things. And life is still miserable everywhere.”
“No other god than the Lord defeated death and promises life… and peace.”
“Fairy tales. I don’t see that working anywhere.”
“Then you haven’t looked around you, at healed, saved, peaceful souls.”
“I hear stories, but that’s all they are!”
“Well, you are talking to someone who knows that peace.”
“Easy for you to say. You don’t live in poverty, you are not oppressed.”
“Christians, missionaries, everywhere are some of the poorest of people.”
“But Christians are still on the side of the powerful classes.”
“Nearly a thousand Christians every day are imprisoned, tortured, killed.”
“Maybe THEY should rise up and riot and take the streets back!”
“Maybe they’re busy praying God’s mercy on the souls of their oppressors.”
“And where will THAT get them?”
“Maybe to eternal life. Certainly to a place where their souls are at peace.”
“We’re back to that again. They’ll still be poor and get no respect…”
“Go on: no self-respect? No hope? Still with that awful hole in their souls?”
“You just don’t understand. You don’t understand what people WANT!”

Actually, the answer-man in this dialog might be right. We cannot always understand want people WANT.

What do people want? is a question that doesn’t go away, and burns hotter every day. But to me, more important is: What do people NEED?

Answer to the quiz: People need the Lord.

+ + +

“We are called to take His light To a world where wrong seems right. What would be too great a cost For sharing life with one who’s lost? / People need the Lord, people need the Lord. At the end of broken dreams, He’s the open door. People need the Lord, people need the Lord.” These are words from the beautiful song by Steve Green. Covered here by Fiona Hui.

Click: People Need the Lord

10-27-14

This is Reformation Week, commemorating the traditional date of October 31, when the Augustinian monk Martin Luther nailed 95 theses – point-by-point criticisms of contemporary Roman Catholic practices – onto the wooden door of Wittenberg Cathedral in Germany. All throughout northern Europe, churches were the centers of each town’s social, as well as spiritual, life, and their doors were the precursors of our day’s “postings to your wall.”

Everyone in the town square saw Luther’s manifesto. It was not startling except, perhaps, for its formality and audacity. But Luther had been complaining about practices in the Church for some time: corruption in its operation, committing errors in doctrine. And so had many others complained. In other German cities and states. And in Switzerland. And the Netherlands. In northern Italy. Even a hundred years earlier, when a dissident Moravian priest, Jan Hus, was burned at the stake. I have stood in reverence before his statue in Prague’s Old Town Square. And even before Hus, one who protested the ethical and doctrinal corruption in Rome: John Wycliffe, of England. One of his “crimes” was translating the Bible into English (the “language of the people,” instead of Latin), as Luther later dared to do with his German translation.

For all the brewing opposition to the Vatican, the Reformation, if not Reformed theology, is popularly regarded as having begun with Luther, and specifically on that day in 1517 when he nailed those 95 indictments to the church door. That is because a dam burst, metaphorically, in the Catholic Church, in larger Christendom, in society, in politics, in the arts, on all cultural levels. Half the German princes opposed the Pope’s political and military prerogatives, as well as papal ecclesiastical authority. After Hus’s martyrdom, major social upheavals led to Bohemia soon becoming 90 per cent Hussite (today’s Moravian church) or other variety of Protestant.

So the 95 Theses were the spark that lit a bonfire, but there were burning embers and brushfires aplenty for two centuries previous. Also, the times were right for a revolution like the Reformation. Rome’s corruption was outrageous; extra-biblical doctrines were offending the pious; and, hand-in-hand with the ideas behind the Renaissance, men were learning to think for themselves. And act for themselves; and organize, and trade, and read, for themselves. Literacy: a few centuries earlier, Luther’s manifesto would have a been a paper with meaningless scribbles to passersby. On that Sunday, however, the theses were read, and devoured, and discussed. The Pope was furious when he was told that Luther’s tracts were best-sellers of the day in Germany.

It is frankly the case that the revolution that Luther sparked was not fully intended by him. He did not want to break away from the Catholic Church, least of all have a denomination named for him. He scolded his followers who stormed Catholic churches and knocked over statues (“idols,” to them). But… he was excommunicated. For a time he was hidden by protectors because the Church wanted him dead. He married a former nun, settled into a life of preaching and writing (many volumes!) and preaching “sola Scriptura” (Scripture Alone) as the basis for faith, and for salvation.

His era’s handmaidens, Renaissance thought, humanism, and neo-Classicism, were not particularly welcome movements to Martin Luther. If anything he was closer to Orthodoxy, at least in rejecting “modern” trends in theology. He went so far as to say that “Reason is the enemy of Faith.” Remember, he relied on “Scripture Alone.” Ironically, he was especially venerated during the Enlightenment because (despite some history books claiming the period to be one of liberation from the Bible) Newton and others saw scientific discoveries as explaining God, not marginalizing Him. So Luther, father of the Reformation, was not the first of the Moderns, but the last of the Medievalists.

In spite of Luther – or, rather, an inevitable component of the Protestant Reformation – social and political freedoms were unleashed. Literacy spread, and as people split from the church they increasingly asserted their civil rights too. In a very real sense, we can say for convenience’s sake if not dramatic effect, that Western civilization was one way before Oct 31, 1517; and another way afterward. With Martin Luther, formally, on that day, began the battle of the individual against authority, the primacy of conscience over arbitrary regulations.

Those battles continue, of course. But blessings flowered… and malignant seeds sprouted too. Democracy has led to social disruption and near-anarchic relations between classes and nations. With broken ecclesiastic authority, public morality has degenerated. And as denominations have multiplied, their influence has virtually evaporated in Western culture and in the United States.

It can be said – and has been said, frequently – that the Roman Catholic Church brought the Reformation onto itself. Perhaps (for instance) some of the mistresses and illegitimate children of Popes would have a say in that discussion. The widespread device of selling “indulgences” still stands as a major offense: common people were persuaded to pay money to guarantee that their dead ancestors would be delivered from torture in Purgatory (despite the fact the Bible does not say that we can have influence of the souls of the departed… or even that there is such a place as Purgatory). Yet an enterprising priest, Tetzel, invented a rhyme, “When a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from Purgatory springs.” Much of this was a scheme to build and decorate St Peter’s in Rome. Clever venture capitalism, bold entrepreneurial management, perhaps; but rotten theology.

Very specifically, these vile offenses confronted Luther when he travelled on foot from Germany to the Holy See on a mission. He was aghast at the corruption, decadence, sin, money-grubbing, and countless heresies – not in the city of Rome, but in the Vatican itself. A biographer of Luther wrote, “the city, which he had greeted [from afar] as holy, was a sink of iniquity; its very priests were openly infidel and scoffed at the services they performed; the papal courtiers were men of the most shameless lives.”

Let me fast-forward 500 years, and let us ourselves enter the Holy See of Protestantism (as it were) and assess what Reform has brought to the Church of Jesus Christ, those portions of the Body.

Do we see denominations inventing and “discovering” their own doctrines? Do we see churches bending their theology in order to fill the pews? Do we see widespread moral failings in the clergy – everything from pedophilia to homosexual encounters? Do we see story after story in the news about financial shenanigans? How many churches wallow in obscene opulence, as the poor live in their shadows? How many charities are shams; how many mission outreaches, we learn with sad hearts, are looted? How often are “modern” sins excused by the heretical lies of relativism in the church? How have seminaries become breeding-grounds of Progressivism; why are entire denominations denying the divinity of Christ, the existence of Absolute Truth? What is this extra-biblical “Prosperity Gospel”? – when preachers procure “seed-faith” offerings, and offer “prayer hankies” to customers who are assured of God’s blessings – HOW is that different from selling indulgences?

Racing through that list, you will recognize problems that are endemic to this or that denomination; sometimes still the Catholic church; mainstream or evangelical Protestants; Pentecostal or post-modern; “Seeker” or emergent. I believe that the Christian churches of contemporary Europe and America might grieve the Heart of God no less than the corrupt Church of the Popes 500 years ago.

We need a New Reformation. We need “Scripture Alone” as our guide again. We need holy indignation from the remnant of faithful followers of Jesus Christ.

I intend to compose a New 95 Theses (knowing that a list of problems with today’s churches could be a larger number!). I will be writing more, as I compose this, but as I look for hammer and nails to post them, or publish them, I invite readers to nominate some of the practices in today’s churches that need reforming. We ARE Christ’s representatives here on earth; and a royal priesthood of believers. We have a responsibility. And let us be guided by Martin Luther, in one of the greatest moments of human history. Hauled before a court of the Holy Roman Empire, condemned by the Pope himself, threatened with excommunication and death, ordered to renounce his thoughts and denounce his books and sermons… nevertheless he was defiant in opposition: “Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me.”

A mighty fortress is our God.

+ + +

Two clips this week. The first is the dramatic confrontation, and Luther’s dramatic defense, at the Council in Worms, Germany, that presumed to judge him. From the classic black-and-white, award-winning biopic starring Niall MacGinnis. The second clip is a signature performance, a cappella, by Steve Green, singing “A Mighty Fortress” before thousands. “Let goods and kindred go, This mortal life also; The body they may kill: God’s truth abideth still, His Kingdom is forever!”

Click: “Here I stand”: Luther’s defense

Click: The Reformation’s battle hymn, composed by Luther; sung by Steve Green

12-2-13

There is an exhibition quietly and modestly making its way across the United States that is one of the most astonishing displays I have ever witnessed. I choose my words carefully – actually, an unbreakable habit of mine, even on good days – but I have been to America’s great museums, as well those of the world, including the Louvre, the Musee d’Orsay, the Uffizi, down to treasure-filled Halls of Fame. But currently (until Feb 1) housed in an otherwise ordinary former retail space in a neighborhood of Colorado Springs, is “Passages: The Experience.”

I think the weak link in their chain might be “branding,” since it is impossible to guess the exhibition’s theme from its title. And this is counter-intuitive, since the person behind this exhibition is one of America’s great marketers: Steve Green. The President of Hobby Lobby, Steve recently has been the focus of news – and prayers – because of his determination to resist the government’s ObamaCare guidelines to provide and pay 100 per cent of abortifacients , contraceptives, and abortion procedures for his employees. He and the Green family have sacrificed much to fight this battle, which has this week been accepted by the Supreme Court for a hearing.

“Passages” is an exhibition of Steve Green’s substantial collection of Bibles, illuminated manuscripts, ancient scrolls, biblical relics, and artifacts of the faithful. After Colorado Springs
( http://www.explorepassages.com ) the exhibition will continue its tour to other cities, ultimately top reside permanently in Washington DC.

Papyrus 39

After the Colorado Christian Writers Conference in May, my friend Diane Obbema read about the exhibition and suggested we visit. It was a great day of my life. First, we were impressed by the sheer scope. An iPod audio guide is eight hours long, for visitors who visit every display case and presentation. Cases, captions, actors and robotics, videos and interactive stations. Portions are designed for younger visitors. History comes alive. You see a Gutenberg press, you can pull one’s own prints.

More than that is the impressive display of scarce, often one-of-a-kind, artifacts. The second-largest private collection of Dead Sea Scrolls. Many cuneiform tablets; illuminated manuscripts; the world’s largest collection of vintage Jewish scrolls and ancient Torahs. Wycliffe’s likely Middle-English translation of the New Testament; the majority of the rare Gutenberg Bible; many of the famous early printed Bibles, like the Geneva Bible and the first King James Version. The exhibition’s surprises are… very surprising, and inspiring to see: a letter Martin Luther wrote night before his trial in Worms, half will and testament of the presumed martyr, half a rehearsal of his defiant “Here I Stand’ statement. In another display case, the manuscript copy of Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Amazing.

Martin Luther’s Will

This is the story of Christendom – the Church through the ages, managing to survive and spreading gloriously.

There is an overarching story beyond the gospel story itself, yet usually missed by most of us. Often it is willful ignorance or rejection. My mother-in-law was one of myriad, in this land of many churches, who fundamentally doubted the Bible’s authenticity or reliability. “It was written by men,” its first putative offense, and she also indicted its authorship “by many people, over many places, across many years, and through many translations.”

A slippery slope it is, of course, to dismiss the Bible as a collection of fables, or purloined wisdom, or irrelevant stories and lies. And, at first glance in the presence of the Green Family’s collection, the sheer variety of translations and versions can seduce the credulity of an average believer.

But none of us should be average believers! We are indwelt by the Holy Ghost, the same Spirit of the Living God who inspired – literally, “breathed life” into – these scriptures. “The word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword” (Hebrews 4:12). It has advanced despite hideous persecution. It has survived, sometimes, in remote outposts where Christianity was anathema and believers were hounded. It has also at times triumphed, in the worldly sense… inviting corruption and diluting its tenets.

Yes, many men wrote the first lines; and many were there who copied, and translated, and transliterated, and remembered verses, and strove to record the words of Christ and the testimony of apostles and martyrs, who saved the songs of poets, the wisdom of the anointed, and the letters of evangelists. When men first sought to put the Words of God into the languages of the people, they were, for hundreds of years, pursued, humiliated, tortured, and killed for so doing. Yet more than a thousand tongues now have Bibles in their own languages.

… are these prescriptions for error and mistakes, prejudices and bias, carelessness and sloppiness; for local churches and leaders with tempting agendas, to bring distortion? Would it not be logical – with all the people, places, and possibilities over the years represented in the display cases of “Passages” – that, instead of one True Bible of thousands of translations and versions, that there be thousands of competing Bibles?

Yet discrepancies are a tiny fraction, seldom close to any major theological or historical point, and always quickly reconciled. To me, THIS is the evidence of the authority, even inerrancy, of scripture. Tried, tested, true: a living document that is not malleable to suit every generation’s distractions. No: living, to be a vital source of hope, truth, and salvation; a reality to every one in every time and every place.

The texts studied in Northern Africa, in the Fourth Century, say; or the lessons taught in Asia Minor or to the heathen in northern Europe at the same early times; or the sermon themes in faraway Ireland – all are virtually identical to the words of the Bibles we have in our homes today. About what other books can this be said?

To visit “Passages” is inspiring. Yet when Diane and I left the “Experience,” I could not help but see the physical evidence of devotion, scholarship, sacrifice, martyrdom, and enterprise of uncountable saints through the millennia… and not feel a chill of caution.

Is America today capable of such fidelity to the Word of God? Does Western civilization have the loyalty to Christianity that it once did at Saragossa and at the Gates of Vienna? Right now, no.

The Word of God will survive always: axiomatic for the Eternal Truth. But if the Church of Christ dies in what is left of Western Civilization, it ultimately will be due not to persecution by its enemies, but neglect by its adherents.

+ + +

For those who cannot visit the “Passages” exhibition, or until its goal of a permanent home in the nation’s capital, books and other materials are available from the organizers: https://store.explorepassages.com

I have chosen a beautiful performance in a beautiful setting of Mozart’s beautiful “Laudate Dominum.” The text is the entire Psalms 117, shortest in the Bible, followed by the doxology. The music, if I might presume to characterize it so, is by the Holy Spirit, received and passed to us by Mozart. One of his supernal masterworks. The singer is the beautiful – yes, beauty abounds – Katherine Jenkins. The captions are the Latin text and Czech. Here is the English:

Praise the Lord, all ye peoples,
Praise Him, all ye peoples.
For his loving kindness
Has been bestowed upon us,
And the truth of the Lord endures for eternity.

Glory to the Father, Son, and to the Holy Spirit;
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be,
World without end. Amen.

Click: Laudate Dominum

6-10-13

I recently visited an exhibition of biblical artifacts that, weeks later, still has me breathless. Properly, the traveling exhibition called “Passages” is an enormous presentation of ancient texts, original documents – letters from the early Church Fathers; even a portion of the Dead Sea Scrolls – illuminated manuscripts, Torah scrolls, first printings of the Bibles of Wycliffe, Tyndale, Gutenberg, Calvin, and more.

One item particularly caught my attention: a letter – not a reproduction, you understand – from Martin Luther to a friend, written the night before his trial before in Worms, Germany. He thought it likely he would be convicted of heresy, surely then to be tortured and executed. So there were elements of a Last Will. But in a slight rehearsal, he wrote in strong words that were spoken the very next day – that before God and his conscience, he could not recant what he had written about the Bible and about corruption in the Church.

I lingered over this letter. It is not only a foundational document of the Protestant Reformation; nor is it merely a notable artifact by a famous figure in history. That humble hand-written letter is one of the great documents of mankind, representing a fulcrum of history. Metaphorically, a stone thrown into the lake of Western civilization, and among its ripples were the liberty of men and women to know Scripture on their own… the invitation to people to learn to read… to be free to think… to challenge people in authority… to worship freely. These were the ripples that also empowered people to assemble freely and form their societies and governments just as they could run their churches.

The simple letter represented a wind that would blow across Europe to the American colonies and back to Europe, ultimately around the world. Religion, philosophy, the arts, science, economics, and government were never the same.

It is seldom that one document can represent so much: sum up, codify, and forecast great shifts in human history.

Another such document is a book, an American book. I thought of it this week, with everything going on in the headlines. It once was a best-seller, and its author one of the major celebrities of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Except for occasional historical reassessments, the book and its author have tended to slip into relative obscurity. And that is why every year or two, I re-visit “Witness” by Whittaker Chambers.

Chambers was a genius, a sensitive product of a troubled family. He drifted for a while in the corridors of intellectual and artistic pursuits, a student at Columbia University and a convert to radicalism. He became a Communist, and a spy; he also translated “Bambi” to great acclaim. He underwent a spiritual journey that led to his break with Communism, and embracing of Christ. Thus began his painful testimony against former friends in the Communist underground who had risen to the highest posts in government.

It was his conflicts — the pain of revealing old friends as enemies of the nation, of the American heritage, of Christianity; as well as his one-time adherence to these heresies – that makes “Witness” compelling reading. Chambers captured the sweep of history and the war of ideas. He precisely defined the choices that thoughtful people of his generation had to make, in eloquent, persuasive words.

… those choices still confront people today. Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss are dead. So are Stalin and his Soviet Union. Yes, the American flag still waves.

But the brutal choices of the recent century still confront us: liberty vs tyranny; spirituality vs secularism; values vs relativism; the Bible vs “Das Kapital” by Karl Marx. The choices should be easy. They always have been easy. But the wrong choices almost prevailed in Chambers’ day. And it is clear they are losing today, in America, in Western Civilization.

At a flash-point in Chambers’ conversion, he wrote in “Witness”:

At some point, I sought relief from my distress by trying to pray … As I continued to pray raggedly, prayer ceased to be an awkward and self-conscious act. It became a daily need to which I looked forward … The torrent that swept through me … swept my spirit clear to discern one truth: “Man without mysticism is a monster.” I do not mean, of course, that I denied the usefulness of reason and knowledge. What I grasped was that religion begins at the point where reason and knowledge are powerless and forever fail — the point at which man senses the mystery of his good and evil, his suffering and his destiny as a soul in search of God.

This brings me, here today, full circle, because Martin Luther, the harbinger and prophet of individualism, freedom, and democracy, also once declared that “Reason is the enemy of Faith.” Does this mean we are to reject our learning, distrust our intelligence, deny science? No! But it does remind us that Man cannot serve two masters.

This week, many citizens are face-to-face with a situation that seems like it is from another popular book of the recent past, “1984” (Saturday was the 64th anniversary of its publication, coincidentally). Americans are reaping a harvest of years of social policies that encouraged trust in the state before trust in God. We see the fruits of denying God in schoolhouses and courthouses – a culture and an Establishment that have no anchors, adrift. And a government that has grown to be a power unto itself, seeking us ill instead of serving us first.

Whittaker Chambers, despite his spiritual conversion, was convinced he had joined the losing side in the world’s great, historic battle. Liberty against tyranny; self-reliance against entitlements. He was aware of the forces at work. He knew how the public could be flattered into submission. He was familiar with the ways of infiltration and subversion. Whittaker Chambers wrote to Bill Buckley toward the end of his life a rueful assessment and prediction:

The enemy – he is ourselves. That is why it is idle to talk about preventing the wreck of Western civilization. It is already a wreck from within.

+ + +

When society – Western Civilization itself – is threatened and seems doomed, we need to remind ourselves of one sure thing on which we may rely: It is described in Psalm 62:2, “He only is my rock and my salvation; He is my defense; I shall not be greatly moved.” Millions of people have found comfort in this truth through the hymn composed by Augustus M. Toplady in 1775. This impressive video features a performance of “Rock of Ages” by the Antrim Mennonite Choir, thanks to the Sesamonte Channel.

“Witness” and other books by Chambers are in print today, published by Regnery. Click “Passages” for information about the biblical artifacts exhibition.

Click: Rock of Ages