Recently my wife raised this question to me, and I thought it a good one.  We like to enjoy and appreciate the rich history and heritage of liturgy that we have as “western” Christians, but to what extent is this liturgy appropriate in non-”western” churches?  For example - the Nicene Creed, while it expresses Biblical truth is also grounded and based on a particular theological debate which occurred within the historical context of the early Roman church.  Maybe a Korean church, for example, would be better off formulating their own creeds and liturgy rather than using ours?  Maybe they already have?  What do our resident liturgical-minded folk think about this question?

I don’t remember how I came across this, but a few years ago I found this (pdf) article about John Calvin’s view of creation. It’s a good read, here is a quote:

How then did Calvin teach us to regard the world in which
we live? We should be attentive spectators in the theater of
God’s glory, who seek to recognize the actor on the stage by
means of the powers revealed in his actions. We should
contemplate and meditate on the world as the living image of
God, in which the invisible God renders himself somewhat
visible, so that the powers we behold, feel, and enjoy in this
image might lead us by anagoge to the God representing
himself to us in this image. We should be ravished with
amazement and astonishment at the beauty of the fabric of the
universe, which reveals the goodness of God to us and sweetly
allures us to seek God.”

-Randall C. Zaclunan in the article:
The Universe as the Living Image of God: Calvin’s Doctrine of Creation Reconsidered

From Ron Paul’s The Revolution: A Manifesto:

Excessive government spending has done more than just put us in debt.  Charles Murray offers us a useful thought experiment that illustrates the welfare state’s enervating effects on our communities and our character.  Imagine that all the programs that constituted the federal “safety net” were all of a sudden abolished, and for whatever reason could not be revived.  And pretend also that the states chose not to replace them with programs of their own, which they almost certainly would.  The questions Murray wants us to focus on are these: How would you respond?  Would you be more or less likely to volunteer at a food bank?  Would you be more or less likely to volunteer at a literacy center?  If you were a lawyer or physician, would you be more or less likely to offer pro bono services?

We would all answer yes to these questions, wouldn’t we?  But then we need to ask ourselves: why aren’t we doing these things already?  And the answer is that we have bought into the soul-killing logic of the welfare state: somebody else is doing it for me.  I don’t need to give of myself, since a few scribbles on a tax form fulfill my responsibility toward my fellow man.  Do our responsibilities as human beings really extend no farther than this?

My wife and I have been recently reading together through Theirs Is The Kingdom: Celebrating the Gospel in Urban America by Robert D. Lupton.  The book is a collection of short essays reflecting on the author’s experiences living in urban Atlanta.  Rather than being heavy-handed and guilt-inducing, the book strives to simply cause the reader to question some of their preconceived notions about the poor, and urban culture in America.

Here is a lengthy, but good, section from the chapter entitled, When Winning Is Losing:

My competitiveness reached its peak one day in my twenty-sixth year.  I was flying door-gunner on a helicopter in Vietnam, and we were on a search-and-destroy mission.  Suddenly the ground beneath us came alive with enemy fire.  The intense battle that followed demanded the ultimate in combat strategy, skill, and commitment.  The stakes were never higher and victory was never more exhilarating.  I accepted with pride a medal for heroism in aerial combat.

It was only later, while still in Vietnam, that I began to understand the implications of my competitiveness.  As I flew back from another “successful” mission, I realized that the emotions I experienced were the same I once felt while wrestling or debating.  They were more intense because the stakes were higher, but they were unmistakably the same emotions.  I was taking human life and feeling the thrill of victory.  This thrill was inversely proportional to the agony of defeat — in this case death and maiming.

I began to suspect there was something wrong with a system in which my winning was built upon the defeat of another human being.  When I returned to the United States I was unable to put this new insight behind me.  I began working with disadvantaged people who were losers in a competitive economy.  I saw young men, broken men, crippled by too many years of defeat…And although I felt unpatriotic for thinking such thoughts, I wondered if all was well with an economic system where winning meant defeating another human being.  Could it be that among human beings cooperation was a better way than competition?

I pray that one day God will bring in a new order in which human beings will rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep.  Perhaps on that day we will refuse the gains made at the expense of others and our success will be measured by the quality of our servanthood to humanity.

We’ve all heard that bad company corrupts our good character - that is, the company we keep affects we who are and how we act. I think this is true, although certainly not an excuse to avoid spending time with sinners (as Jesus taught us by example).

Today though, I’ve been thinking about how “bad culture” can affect our good character. For example, if we willingly surround ourselves by the culture and thinking of the world, then perhaps that will rub off on us. This is hard for me because I find the closed-mindedness and “circle-the-wagons” mentality of Christians frustrating. This frustration, in turn, leads me to venture deeper into the thinking of the world then perhaps many of my brothers and sisters in Christ dare go. Is this dangerous or bad for me? Sometimes I think it is…but I’m still trying to figure it out.

A good example of this is music. I like to think that the music I listen to doesn’t affect me, but maybe I’m just being arrogant and haughty while in reality surrounding myself with music and lyrics that prominently display and idolize evil is bad for me? How far does my Christian liberty extend?

The way Jesus goes about loving and saving the world are personal: nothing abstract. noting impersonal. Incarnate, flesh and blood, relational, particular, local.The ways employed by our North American culture are conspicuously impersonal: programs, organizations, techniques. general guidelines, information detached from place. In matters of ways and means, the vocabulary of numbers is preferred over names, ideologies crowd out ideas, the gray fog of abstraction absorbs the sharp particularities of the recognizable face on the familiar street.

My concern is provoked by the observation that so many who understand themselves to be followers of Jesus, without hesitation, and apparently without thinking, embrace the ways and means of the culture as they go about their daily living “in Jesus’ name.”

-Eugene Peterson in The Jesus Way:a conversation on the ways that Jesus is the way

This is not primarily a political blog, and though politics is one of my great passions, I’m trying hard to stay away from a large amount of political discourse on a website devoted to all things Christian (of course, politics falls under the realm of Christian-thought).

I’ve been recently reading Ron Paul’s new book, The Revolution: A Manifesto and really been enjoying it. For those who don’t know, Dr. Paul is a Republican candidate for the Presidential nomination; which, of course, is fairly unattainable at this point. He is a staunch “old school” Republican and values such things as: individual liberty, small and decentralized government, a foreign policy of non-intervention, and drastic cuts to federal spending so as to produce a budget surplus rather than budget deficit every year.

Last night while reading I came across a few brief words on the topic of abortion. Dr. Paul is opposed to the federal government mandating laws on abortion and believes such decisions should be made at the local and state level.

One of the most contentious issues in our public life over the past three and a half decades has been abortion. As a physician, and in particular as an obstetrician who has delivered over 4,000 babies, I have always had a special interest in the subject of abortion…

…I have heard the arguments in favor of abortion many times, and they have always disturbed me deeply.  A popular academic argument for abortion demands that we think of the child in the womb as a “parasite” that the woman has the right to expel from her body.  But the same argument justifies outright infanticide, since it applies just as well to an infant outside the womb: newborns require even more attention and care, and in that sense are even more “parasitic.”

If we can be so callous as to refer to a growing child in a mother’s womb as a parasite, I fear for our country’s future all the more.  Whether it is war or abortion, we conceal the reality of violent acts through linguistic contrivances meant to devalue human lives we find inconvenient.  Dead civilians become “collateral damage,” are ignored altogether, or are rationalized away on the Leninist grounds that to make an omelet you have to break some eggs. (The apostle Paul, on the other hand, condemned the idea that we should do evil that good may come.)  People ask an expectant mother how her baby is doing.  They do not ask her how her fetus is doing, or her blob of tissue, or her parasite.  But that is what her baby becomes as soon as the child is declared to be unwanted.  In both cases, we try to make human life into something less than human, simply according to our will.

Sometimes, following God’s will for our lives can be a difficult thing to do. I’m not even entirely sure what the phrase “God’s will” means in context of talking about one’s life. I’m not convinced that when presented with an array of choices, one is “God’s will” and the others are not. Rather, I guess being a good Presbyterian I remain committed to the idea that God knows what choice we will make before we will make it, but the choosing is still our own.

Practically I suppose this means that we have the freedom to make choices in life without agonizing over the question of whether it is God’s will for us or not. Certainly we should seek wisdom and counsel in decision making, but sometimes it’s good to move beyond fear and embrace our freedom in Christ to “just do it.”

More on this later - lots going on in my own life right now preventing me from posting more regularly, but expect some updates later this week.

Here is a passage from Are Christians Human on what happens when we try to go truer then true:

There is a distortion, an imbalance which, while claiming to stress what is good, results in a fatal disturbance of the truth. Some thing is emphasized in such a way as to deny other things that are true, in the process it ceases to be true. For when truth is exaggerated, it does not become some kind of super truth… What happens is that exaggerated truth becomes sub-truth, and sub-truth is falsehood.

So a distorted, exaggerated notion of faith leads to a denial of reason, an exaggerated idea of divine guidance distorts our understanding of Christian responsibility, an over emphasis on self-control effectively denies that man is an emotional creature, a naive concept of providence can so stress God’s care for the Christian as to lead him to expect to be lifted right out of the real world.”

-Nigel Cameron in Are Christians Human?

In this case, the metaphor of ‘bending the card the other way’ is not applicable. We must not compensate for or previous errors by going beyond the truth, but must always aim for the exact mark.

What is God’s relationship to time? In his book Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis describes God as an author writing a story. Lewis pictures God as able to step away from his book (our universe) and deal with the events of the story while time stands still in the book. He uses this illustration to seek an answer to the question, “how does God have time to answer millions of prayers at the same time?”

This explanation of God’s relationship to time seems a bit too much like Santa Claus to me. Rather than proposing that God steps into and out of time in some sort of fairy-tale way, it seems to me that a proper view of God’s sovereignty necessitates that we accept that God can adequately uphold our universe and address all of our needs simultaneously.

Clearly God is supreme over time and could stop and start time without our knowing it, but I think it’s an unnecessary weakening of his supremacy to say that He does.