Status report
For the second week in a row, my Sunday post is pretty thin. I am seriously trying to get my mind off politics.
On the one hand, “Put not your trust in Princes, in sons of men in whom there is no salvation. When his breath departs, he returns to the earth. On that very day his plans perish … The Lord will reign forever.” (Psalm 145/146)
On the other hand, I grew up with the understanding that responsible citizens read the news and “keep up with things.” In my eighth decade, I still reflexively do that. It’s hard to shake. (It might be easier to quit if I read and audited gutter politics, immiserating myself in the process; but I don’t, and the only thing I hate about it is the other things that get crowded out.)
Practicing contra preaching
Even as they claimed to rely on the Bible alone, antebellum Protestants frequently turned to Christian saints, exegetical traditions, the practices of Christians past, and official church teachings, employing these sources to complement or clarify what they took the Bible to mean. Perhaps this betrays a deeper sense that the Bible was not as self-interpreting as many Protestants hoped. At the very least, it shows the inescapability of tradition. American Protestants never read, or argued over, the Bible alone.
Paul J. Gutacker, The Old Faith in a New Nation
When religious freedom goes to far
The story of Baptists was the story of religious freedom, and throughout the work Benedict reinforced the connection between Baptist principles and the American experiment. “We have happily arrived at an age,” he concluded, “in which the spirit of imposition has lost much of its former force.”
Paul J. Gutacker, The Old Faith in a New Nation
This spirit — the spirit of putative rebellion against authority (fomented by a competing authority, the free church pastor) — carries on in nondenominational churches, which are uniformly baptistic – “small-b baptists”.
While Methodists, Disciples, and Mormons disagreed radically on what constituted belief in the gospel, they all shared an intense hostility to the passive quality of Calvinist religious experience, and they all made salvation imminently accessible and immediately available.
Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Religion
Honor to whom honor is due
It is easy to say “give honor to God alone,” but this is contrary to the Scriptures, in which we are told to “give honor to whom honor is due”
Fr. Stephen Freeman, Everywhere Present
Provocation link
On Friday, I published this, which could have been Sunday fare.
Evangelical unawares
I never knew I was an evangelical until I went to a Trump rally.
The speaker of these words was anonymous in the telling, and I lost track of who told the story. I think it was someone on this July 11 Dispatch conversation.
… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 