Let my prayer arise
We read, “Let my prayer arise in your sight as incense,” but what we hear is, “Let the incense be like my prayer…” In the inverted world of modernity, ideas are considered spiritually “real,” while actions and rituals are somehow suspect. “If incense is like prayer, then perhaps it is legitimate,” we reason. And this is precisely how its use is often explained to those who ask.
But this reasoning inverts the Scriptures themselves. For the writer of Psalm 141, the offering of incense to the Lord is spiritual reality. It is an obedience to the command of God and a fulfillment of His divine will. It is “prayer” that is suspect – so much so that he must ask that his prayer be accepted in the same manner as incense.
During the early Roman persecutions of the Christian Church, among the most common demands made of Christians was that of the offering of incense before the image of the Emperor. It was perceived as an act of worship – an honor that belonged to a god. Christians did not disagree with this interpretation – and chose martyrdom instead. The modern Christian would today argue, “But it’s only incense.”
What our thoughts betray is a deep disconnect between the material world and the world of our thoughts. Ideas, with all of their abstract qualities, are seen as the stuff of reality, while material things are somehow superficial and devoid of content. What matters for us is not matter itself – but the ideas that we associate with it. Thus nothing has any inherent meaning – only imputed meaning. Things are only valuable and important because we think they are.
Fr. Stephen Freeman, The Sweet Smoke of Prayer
Excarnation
As Western culture has shifted its focus inward, toward disengaged reason, [Charles] Taylor sees a parallel move within Christianity—a move from embodied forms of religious worship to those in which religion is essentially something that only happens in your head.
Alan Noble, Disruptive Witness. See the preceding item, too.
Foreshadowing
May your roots go down deep into the soil of God’s marvelous love; and may you be able to feel and understand, as all God’s children should, how long, how wide, how deep, and how high his love really is; and to experience this love for yourselves, though it is so great that you will never see the end of it or fully know or understand it. And so at last you will be filled up with God himself.
For whatever reason, this passage, in that very translation, became my favorite during High School. The ethos is different enough from bog standard Evangelicalism, and close enough to Orthodoxy, that I see it now as a foreshadowing of what took a bit more than 30 more years to begin resume in earnest.
Crypto-baptists
According to legend, Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate, having failed to suppress Christianity, at his death uttered: “Thou has conquered, oh thou Galilean.”
Nobody has ever tried to suppress Baptists in America since colonial church establishments were overthrown. But the Baptists and the non-denominationals who are mostly Baptist in all but name have indeed conquered. Nearly every other branch of U.S. Christianity is shrinking. The Baptist ethos is prevailing. That ethos includes independent churches governed congregationally with pastors ordained by their congregations with a spiritual authority, believers’ baptism instead of infant baptism, the centrality of pulpit preaching, deemphasis on liturgy, typically more contemporary in worship, and more often than not, affirming once saved, always saved, precluding a fall from grace.
Mark Tooley, Thou Has Conquered, Oh Thou Baptists
“Small-B baptists” is what I’ve called non-baptist Evangelicals for decades now.
Is there any such thing as a non-evangelical non-denominational church? I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such a thing.
Ordinary Glory
[W]hat use is a religion that only produces characters in history books? Was there not room for more ordinary glory? Civil rights activists inspired me, but the people who changed my life were regular members of my congregation.
…
My mother recently purchased about an acre of land on the plantation where many of the Black Bones lived and died. She got it for around $500 because it was the slave burial site. Their bodies, never finding rest on land owned by others, now repose on land purchased by their descendants. We hold it in trust for them as their due. If the hope of Christians is true and there is a indeed a resurrection of the dead, they will emerge from those graves as free people, and their last moments on this side of the new creation will be spent on their own soil. That is a hope worthy of my allegiance.
Esau McCaulley, Why I Am Still a Christian
European Values
A reference to Christianity as an important part of European identity in the Preamble to the EU Constitutional Treaty provoked such an angry reaction that it had to be dropped as allegedly incongruent with what the EU calls “European values.” Even acknowledging the historical role of the Christian heritage is now thought too extravagant to be tolerated.
Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy
Dubious decision
Recently, Ancient Faith has announced that it will be discontinuing its blog publishing ministry in order to concentrate on other areas.
More evidence that I’m a dinosaur. I plan to continue blogging, and wish that Ancient Faith would continue its blog publishing ministry as well.
I question Ancient Faith’s judgment at times: for instance, what improvement is it to add to a wonderful audio teaching or Bible study podcast by turning it into a YouTube of — wait for it! —the podcaster sitting in her study with headphone, boom mike, computer screen and notes? Seriously?
The Devil probably didn’t make you do it
I do believe, like billions of the world’s Christians, in the existence of the Devil. But it is precisely those who have believed in such an entity the longest, as part of a disciplined tradition of theological reflection, who will tell you how fruitless it often is to invoke Satan as the direct cause of events.
Paul Christmann, The Monster Discloses Himself, 25.1 Hedgehog Review
Words to live by
Turn off your radio. Put away your daily paper. Read one review of events a week and spend some time reading such books as the above. They tell too of days of striving and of strife. They are of other centuries and also of our own. They make us realize that all times are perilous, that men live in a dangerous world, in peril constantly of losing or maiming soul and body.
Part of Dorothy Day’s diary entry for September 28, 1940.
A fundamental reality of human existence is that vice often leaves virtue with few good options. Evil men can attach catastrophic risks to virtually any course of action, however admirable.
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 