Does anyone have the faintest idea ...

... how Arum Palaestinum came to be known also as 'Solomon's Lily'?

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Martin Luther's "sin boldly" quote in context

If you are a preacher of grace, then preach a true and not a fictitious grace; if grace is true, you must bear a true and not a fictitious sin. God does not save people who are only fictitious³¹ sinners. Be a sinner and sin³² boldly,³³ but believe and³⁴ rejoice in Christ even more boldly, for he is victorious over sin, death, and the world. As long as we are here [in this world]³⁵ we have to sin. This life is not the dwelling place of righteousness,³⁶ but, as Peter says,³⁷ we look for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness³⁸ dwells. It is enough that by³⁹ the riches of God’s glory we have come to know the Lamb that takes away the sin of the world.⁴⁰ No sin will separate us from the Lamb, even though we commit fornication and murder a thousand times a day. Do you think that the purchase price that was paid for the redemption of our sins⁴¹ by so great a Lamb is too small? Pray boldly—you too are a mighty sinner.⁴²

 

³¹ The translation here is based on the text offered by the manuscript copy of this letter; the printed editions have a text which can be translated as: “only fictitiously sinners.”

³² The manuscript copy of this letter has the following text: “et peccaris,” “and you will have sinned,” which makes little sense; therefore the translation is based on the text offered by the earliest printed edition.

³³ Passages such as this were misunderstood and used as main arguments against Luther. Luther was interpreted as encouraging laxity and licentiousness. When the Peasants’ War broke out, this opinion was strengthened. Erasmus, for instance, constantly suspected that Luther was stimulating discontent and even rebellion with his ideas and work. For the proper understanding of this statement, see W. H. T. Dau, Luther Examined and Re-examined (St. Louis, Mo., 1917), pp. 111 ff. See also pp. 12 f.

³⁴ The phrase “but believe and” is missing in the manuscript copy of this letter but is found in the earliest printed edition.

³⁵ The word “here” is missing in the manuscript copy of this letter but is found in the earliest printed edition.

³⁶ The manuscript copy of this letter offers instead animae, i.e., “of the soul”; the translation is based on the earliest printed edition.

³⁷ II Pet. 3:13.

³⁸ The manuscript copy offers instead anima, i.e., “soul”; the translation is based on the earliest printed edition.

³⁹ The manuscript copy offers a text which has to be translated: “that we have come to know the riches of God’s glory”; the translation is based on the earliest printed edition.

⁴⁰ John 1:29.

⁴¹ See I Cor. 6:20 and I Pet. 1:18–19. The printed editions of this letter offer a text which has to be translated: “think that the price and the redemption [paid and] completed for us by … is too small?” The translation is based on the manuscript copy of this letter.

⁴² So according to the manuscript copy of this letter. The printed editions offer a text which has to be translated: “for you are a mighty.…”

Martin Luther, vol. 48, Luther's Works, Vol. 48 : Letters I, ed. Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, Hilton C. Oswald and Helmut T. Lehmann, Luther's Works, 48:281 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1999, c1963).

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A Saviour from Invincible Sins

My guest blogger today is Dr Martin Luther:

“The main knowledge and true wisdom of Christians, then, is this: to regard as very serious and true these words of Paul, that Christ was given over to death, not for our righteousness or holiness but for our sins, which are real sins—great, many, in fact, infinite and invincible. Therefore you must not think of them as minor or suppose that your own works can remove them. Nor must you despair on account of their gravity if you feel them oppressing you either in life or in death. But you must learn from Paul here to believe that Christ was given, not for sham or counterfeit sins, nor yet for small sins, but for great and huge sins; not for one or two sins but for all sins; not for sins that have been overcome—for neither man nor angel is able to overcome even the tiniest sin—but for invincible sins. And unless you are part of the company of those who say “our sins,” that is, who have this doctrine of faith and who teach, hear, learn, love, and believe it, there is no salvation for you.”

Martin Luther, vol. 26, Luther's Works, Vol. 26 : Lectures on Galatians, 1535, Chapters 1-4, ed. Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, Hilton C. Oswald and Helmut T. Lehmann, Luther's Works, 26:35 (Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1999, c1963).

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Rob Bell's train wreck on same-sex sex

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Après cela, le déluge — from women bishops to LGBT inclusion in the elections to General Synod

Here in the Diocese of Chelmsford we have a casual vacancy for General Synod in the House of Clergy. Nominations are in (no, I’m not standing) and voting papers are going out.

Mine haven’t arrived yet (!), but I have seen the list of candidates and the addresses they give in support of their election. As one might expect, the position of candidates on the issue of women bishops is generally made clear. What is perhaps less expected is that in some cases, so is their explicit support for ‘full inclusion’ of same-sex relationships.

Of course this was bound to happen at some stage. I had long thought that if the matter of women bishops were not sorted out this summer (and what are the chances of that, I wonder?) then the next round of elections to the Synod, in 2015, would be a two-issue race. In the event I was just a year and a half out.

So watch this space. Perhaps when the votes are in I will be able to offer an analysis.

Certainly, however, it bears out the prognosis of many (and a statement made to me by a leading Anglican theologian) that there has been an agenda: defeat the Anglican Covenant, get women bishops, get LGBT inclusion.

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He Ascended into Heaven

Today is Ascension Day (or the Feast of the Ascension), when we remind ourselves of something affirmed in the Creeds and made explicit in the Thirty-nine Articles:

Christ did truly rise again from death, and took again his body, with flesh, bones, and all things appertaining to the perfection of Man’s nature; wherewith he ascended into Heaven, and there sitteth, until he return to judge all Men at the last day. (Article IV)

For some, of course, this is a piece of nonsense. “You don’t mean to say Jesus went up like a rocket into the sky, until he disappeared? There’s nothing up there — only space.”

And no, we don’t mean to say that (although one of the shrines at Walsingham dedicated to this festival does have an impressive and amusing pair of feet disappearing into the ceiling). For a start, I’ve long taken it that the cloud that hid Jesus from the sight of his disciples (Acts 16:9) had more to do with the glory of God (cf Dan 7:11) than the meteorology of Israel.

But in any case, the point being acted out before the disciples has more to do with the issue raised in our Articles than with the geography of the universe (though let’s face it, we still think of heaven as somehow ‘out’ or ‘up’ there — it is simply natural to us, like thinking of the sun ‘rising’).

Look again at Article IV. “Christ did truly rise from death”. I think it would be fair to say virtually all Christians agree he ‘rose from death’. The Article pins down what this means — how he ‘truly’ rose, and that is in his body of flesh and bones. It was, as we say, a ‘physical’ resurrection. Notions of a ‘spiritual’ resurrection are excluded by this, as they are by the resurrection accounts themselves.

But the Article also seems to be making another, and fundamentally important point, namely that these things — his flesh and bones — are included in those “appertaining to the perfection of Man’s nature”.

Now this immediately goes against the grain of a lot of people’s thinking. ‘Flesh and bones’ we easily regard as secondary to the true ‘nature’ of humanity, or even as an impediment to spirituality.

The notion of Christ’s ‘flesh and bones’ ascending to the heavens is in danger of being derided as a ‘primitive’ understanding, unworthy of a ‘higher’ spirituality. It was not what he meant, but it comes close to what a former Bishop of Durham sounded like he was saying when he referred to a ‘conjuring trick with bones’. Careless talk costs souls.

But it is precisely for this reason that the Ascension confronts us with its uncompromising physicality, reminding us that human nature is embodied. We are not souls ‘in’ bodies, we are “ourselves, our souls and bodies”.

The Ascension, in short, is an affirmation of physicality — of the fact that God made a world of ‘stuff’. Where there was ‘formless void’ (Gen 1:2), he introduced substance and ‘shape’. And that was a good thing — a very good thing (Gen 2:31)!

Our nature is to be ‘embodied’. A ‘disembodied’ person might exist, but they would be incomplete — in biblical terms ‘imperfect’ (which can mean not ‘defective’ but ‘unfinished’, cf Heb 2:10).

Of course our flesh is frail and fallible, but as I indicated elsewhere, this perhaps ought to be given more recognition in terms of the interconnectedness of the physical and spiritual that we find in Scripture.

Meanwhile, on this Ascension Day, rejoice at the value God puts on your body:

¹³ “Food for the stomach and the stomach for food”—but God will destroy them both. The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. ¹⁴ By his power God raised the Lord from the dead, and he will raise us also. (1 Cor 6:13-14)

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My apologies to those who like poetry

My apologies to those who like poetry. This was ‘inspired’ by a number of things I’ve heard over the years and prompted by something else.

THE LIFEGUARD

1.         The day had seemed to start quite well,
The ‘sea of life’ a gentle swell.
When all at once I felt a change,
The world around was growing strange.

2.         I felt a ‘rip-tide’ drag me down,
I felt myself begin to drown.
Fear rose, a tide within my breast,
A band of panic round my chest.

3.         I struggled in the waves alone,
I searched around, all help had flown.
And then a voice came, close at hand,
“To call the lifeguard, raise your hand.”

4.         “You need not shout, but only wave,
He looks for whom he needs to save,
He watches closely sea and sand.
To call the lifeguard, raise your hand.”

5.         “For some, it is the grip of sin,
That threatens, like the circling fin
of ‘Great White’ shark, whose mouth of death,
Can take away your very breath.”

6.         “For others, it’s the weight of life’s
pains, thorns and thistles, griefs and strife,
That drags them far away from land.
To call the lifeguard, raise your hand.”

7.         My hand went up, and lo, HE SAW!
My hand went up, I did no more.
He ran across the far-off beach,
He ran, this drowning soul to reach.

8.         But all of this was lost to me,
As I was drifting out to sea,
By death’s dread terrors quite unman’d
All I could do was raise my hand.

9.         And then I heard a voice draw near,
Me, overwhelmed by waves of fear,
He, strong to bring me back to land,
Said, “Mate, looks like you need a hand.”

10.       My fear for what lay underneath,
Began to give way to relief,
For where I had imagined harms,
I found were everlasting arms.

11.       When Jordan’s verge I someday tread,
These words I’ll hear inside my head,
“If you would see the Promised Land,
To call the lifeguard, raise your hand.”

12..      So if you see my hand go up,
Don’t hand to me the water cup,
Or fetch the bedpan, next of kin —
These cannot save me from my sin.

13.       And do not think that I am calm,
That’s not why I lift up my arm!
It’s just this thing (you’ll understand),
“To call the lifeguard, raise your hand.”

13.       For he’ll be looking for that wave,
That says, “Saviour, come now to save,”
My anxious fears he’ll bid subside,
He’ll land me safe on Canaan’s side.

14.       The lifeguard, who himself once died,
Who sank under death’s awful tide,
Knows how it feels to be so weak,
You cannot pray, you cannot speak.

15.       He asks only we trust in him,
And not ourselves, to draw us in,
To land us safely on the sand,
“To call the lifeguard, raise your hand.”




(PS: In case you’re wondering, I’m OK.)

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Where Shall Wisdom be Found, if Not in Waterstones?

Today I was in Waterstone’s bookshop in Cambridge, buying yet another book that will have to get in the queue.

Reflecting later about the material on display, however, I find myself thinking about Paul in Athens. In his case, his spirit was provoked because, “he saw that the city was full of idols”. In my case, it was not idols that filled the bookshop, but it was certainly idolatry.

Here was volume after volume on the same issue: why are we here and what does it mean?

And as we know, idolatry has a strong component of worshipping and serving the creature, but failing to acknowledge the Creator (Rom 1:25).

Most of these books were what might be called pop-science or pop-philosophy. There was inevitably little that would qualify as hard science or serious philosophy and that was in the specialist sections upstairs. (I was grateful that serious philosophy was only on the third, not the fourth, floor or I would be writing this from a hospital bed.)

One can therefore easily dismiss these works precisely for their popular appeal, their lack of seriousness: Darwin By Design, Why Your Brain Can Think for Itself — I made these up, but as titles they would easily be at home amongst the works on offer. Yet for all their fatuousness, they would just be the equivalent of “To An Unknown God”. Real books purporting to explain reality to us (and to explain us away as a side effect of the real world) were everywhere.

There was even a stack of books on something like Reading the Bible as Science. Everyone got a look in. (Perhaps there was an Agnosto Theo, after all!) But just as there was little serious science or philosophy, so it seemed there was no genuine Christian input. The Christian books were also in a little section to themselves, up on that third floor where you really felt the lack of oxygen.

Yet surely if the displays on lower floors say anything about market forces, there is a crying need — indeed a desperate want — of something telling the truth.

On my way out of the shop, therefore, the words that came to mind were those of Job 28 (9–12, ESV)

Man puts his hand to the flinty rock and overturns mountains by the roots. He cuts out channels in the rocks, and his eye sees every precious thing. He dams up the streams so that they do not trickle, and the thing that is hidden he brings out to light. “But where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding?”

Science? Been there. Technology? Done that. Big Bang? Sorted. Evolutionary psychology? Sussed.

But wisdom and understanding — where are they? If anyone possessed them, surely people of all nations would travel the earth to hear it, sent by the kings of whole world, just as they did to Solomon.

Dear brother, dear sister, you and I have the wisdom that is from God.

You do believe that, don’t you? Whether you are an ‘evangelical’ or a ‘liberal’, a ‘conservative’ or a ‘radical’, a ‘traditionalist’ or a ‘reformer’, indeed whether you believe it or not, it is true:

For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption ... (1 Corinthians 1:26–30, ESV)

Make no mistake though! This ‘wisdom from God’ is not confined to ‘the good news about Jesus’. Solomon’s wisdom encompassed botany and horticulture (1 Ki 4:33). He could hold his own with the wisest of Egypt and the East, just as in another generation, three young Jewish boys surpassed the ‘magi’ of the Babylonian court. And his forerunners in the business of Temple building, men like himself “filled with the spirit of wisdom” (Ex 28:3, KJV, Heb) were both craftsmen and artists of the first order.

It is emphatically not wise to say, “All you need to know is Jesus.” The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Prov 9:10), but it is not the end, nor is it a substitute for wisdom. Rather, it is the gateway through which we enter into that elusive storehouse where wisdom is actually to be found.

Thus it is that which takes a ‘big bang theory’ or indeed (dare I say) the process of natural selection (which is not so much a theory but, as I think John Lennox says, a truism – a commonplace statement of the obvious) and interprets them — critiquing them so as to question some of the assumptions made by those who hold to them, and applying them in such a way as they fit the known facts of the universe (including consciousness, reason and moral value), not the doctrinaire assertions of those who assume what the facts must be.

Thus we will engage with the likes of the Nobel-prizewinning biologist Jacques Monod and, whilst relishing his discoveries about biology, shout ‘phooey’ to his pronouncements about the meaning(lessness) of it all.

When I read his Chance and Necessity back in the 1970s, even I could see that smuggling in the principles of French Socialism on the back of a case that life is the result of biological accident and chemical determinism was a bit far-fetched. Yet there are pronouncements about ‘the meaning of life’ being made to day by those of the same mind which are no less tosh for the fact that the fanfare accompanying them is louder and more socially acceptable.

Soldiers of Christ, arise and put your armour on — or rather, take up the sword which is the word of God and the pen which is supposedly mightier than the sword. Write, write and keep writing until what you’re writing finally takes a form that will penetrate even the ears of those who gather round them people to tell them what their itching ears yearn to hear.

Speak against the idols. Or even better, do as Paul did and begin from those idols to tell them about the God who actually made the world and everything in it (big bangs, black holes and all), who is not far from every one of us and who desires that we should seek him and reach out for him and perhaps find him.

It is a task beyond me, I’m afraid, but it could be you.

Good luck. God bless you. I’ll see you in the assembly area.

(Sorry, I completely slipped into another character there.)

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#ugleyvicar @ugleyvicar

"The Role of the Bible in the Contemporary Church" (Review)

Few Anglicans in Brisbane have any depth of knowledge of the Bible; few read or study the Bible regularly; and few have any sense of encountering the reality of God in and through scripture. Consequently, few Anglicans speak passionately about their experience of God or feel comfortable speaking about their faith with others.

So says the Archbishop of Brisbane, and those who are not tired of the subject will find an erudite analysis of some of the reasons why this is so here in Mark Thompson's review of "The Once and Future Scriptures: Exploring the Role of the Bible in the Contemporary Church".

As one, however, who has grown very tired of the level of discussion about the subject on this blog, I am keeping comments here closed.

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Misleading Headlines

I love it when newspapers publish stuff like this:

Bungalow partially demolished after new £25,000 Audi smashes into wall when convertible driver collapses at the wheel

Obviously they should make those drivers less 'bendy'.

Thanks to the online Daily Mail.

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Towards a Christian aesthetic

I have just had one of those 'penny dropping' moments when you feel you have been unbelievably slow to spot something that is blatantly obvious.

For some time now I've been teaching on the biblical wisdom literature and enjoying the study this involves. One thing in particular is the way that the structure of 1 Kings 1-11 emphasizes stresses Solomon's wisdom as absolutely foundational to his kingship. It is not just that he is a king who 'happens to be wise'. He is the expression of wisdom.

1 Kings 1-11 follows a precise 'chiastic' structure, at the heart of which is the building of the Temple. (I'll post on this another time.)

Up until now, however, I'd simply presented the temple-building as the necessary 'hinge' in this passage - allowing the narrative to stress Solomon's wisdom both on the 'way in' and the 'way out' of the chiasm.

Doh!

Then today on Facebook (yes, I know), I saw a post about Christianity and aesthetics. This is also a subject that interests me, and as I was putting in my two penn'orth, the light slowly began to dawn. This is (pretty much) what I posted:

I often ask, "Who were the first people in the Bible we are told were specifically filled with God's Spirit and why was this?"

The (surprising) answer is: 

“See, I have called by name Bezalel the son of Uri, son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, and I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with ability and intelligence, with knowledge and all craftsmanship, to devise artistic designs, to work in gold, silver, and bronze, in cutting stones for setting, and in carving wood, to work in every craft. And behold, I have appointed with him Oholiab, the son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan. And I have given to all able men ability, that they may make all that I have commanded you (Exodus 31:2–6 [ESV]).

Unfortunately, the ESV (even more so than the NIV) blows it in 28:3, which it translates, "You shall speak to all the skillful, whom I have filled with a spirit of skill, that they make Aaron’s garments etc." Compare the AV: "And thou shalt speak unto all that are wise hearted (חַכְמֵי־לֵב) whom I have filled with the spirit of wisdom (רוּחַ חָכְמָה), that they may make Aaron’s garments etc."

Putting the two together, building the Tabernacle is a task requiring wisdom expressed in the aesthetic crafts. Who is the next 'Tabernacle builder'? Solomon, the 'man of wisdom'.

And who is the true Tabernacle Builder?

Of course there should be a Christian aesthetic, flowing out of the Wisdom of God through us, into the world. Wonderful, eh? 

So in other words, the chiasmus of 1 Kings 1-11 is not built around the temple building merely because of its importance as an event, nor just to give us two bites at the 'cherry' of Solmon's wisdom, but because Wisdom is the key to temple building.

Make of this what you will. I need to give my poor brain a rest.

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