Tomorrow, we will bury my youngest brother, who died Tuesday. So it has been a busy and stressful week.

Jonathan’s life on earth was, by upper-middle class, first world standards, unusually afflicted, and he was not afraid of death. We, his surviving brothers, all practicing Christians of varying traditions (our parents did well), see God’s gracious hand in this in many ways.

If you do such things, pray for God’s servant, Jonathan, who has “fallen asleep” in hope of resurrection, though in his tradition he would have called it something else.

Here’s what I have for you today.

Christians did not worry that absence of the pagans from their services constituted a lost opportunity. Their worship was not evangelistic; it was not “seeker sensitive.” Their intent in worshiping was to glorify God rather than to attract outsiders. And since they believed that authentic worship formed the worshipers, they believed that in the course of time the behavior of those so formed would attract outsiders.

Alan Kreider, The Patient Ferment of the Early Church

In 1184, bishops who previously might have been content to let sleeping heretics lie had been instructed actively to sniff them out. Then, in 1215, at the great Lateran Council presided over by Innocent III, sanctions explicitly targeting heresy had provided the Church with an entire machinery of persecution.

Tom Holland, Dominion

For what it’s worth, I seem to recall a trustworthy source affirm that there was never any sort of inquisition in the Eastern (Orthodox) Church, and I know I have heard of none.

Those who, like him, had dared to repudiate the Roman Church but had then been guilty of what Luther condemned as a failure properly to understand the Spirit, had also been the objects of his ire. Theologians in Swiss or German cities who presumed to dispute his views on the eucharist; Anabaptists, with their wild contempt for infant baptism and secular authority; Henry VIII, who seemed to think he was God. Luther, fretting where it all might lead, had not shrunk from contemplating a nightmarish prospect: a world in which the very concept of truth might end up dissolving, and everything appear relative. ‘For whoever has gone astray in the faith may thereafter believe whatever he wants.’

Tom Holland, Dominion

Protestants made the sixteenth century an era of unprecedented emphasis on doctrine. In their divergent ways, all Protestants thought that the most fundamental problem with the Roman church was its mistaken truth claims, that is, its false doctrines. As we saw in the previous chapter, they offered their respective corrections based on scripture, variously supplemented by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and the exercise of reason. Because Lutherans and Reformed Protestants were supported rather than suppressed by political authorities, theirs were the particular Protestant truth claims institutionalized in cities, territories, and countries whose leaders rejected Rome.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

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