Calvin - Sacraments

God did not establish the sacraments so that if men strove to keep them they would obtain some virtue which would count for righteousness. Rather, he did it so to teach them that they need to find righteousness in him.

...

What do I mean? Well, baptism teaches us that we are full of filth and corruption within. Why else do we wash hands, face and body, but because we desire to wash off the dirt? We are told that baptism is our washing; therefore it follows that when we come to be baptised, and when we bring our children, we are declaring that from the mother's womb our children are already lost and condemned....

Secondly, when we receive the Lord's Supper, what is it we are doing? Are we there to acquire some merit in God's eyes? No, we are there to confess that we are like dead men who have come to seek for life outside of ourselves. The flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ must be our meat, and his blood our drink, for in him we find all that we need. Thus, the sacraments should not make us swollen with vain pride, but they should make us walk in humility, so that, empty of pride, we only seek the provision that God has made out of his infinite bounty, and that he would bestow upon us the treasures of his grace according to our need.

John Calvin, Sermon on Galatians 2:14-16

Images of Mohammed

Silly mess with Gillian Gibbons getting jailed for letting her class vote to call the teddy bear Mohammed. The whole thing raises far too many questions...

• Was this the same Gillian Gibbons who was my form tutor when I was 11?
• How does Islam cope with the huge inconsistency in not allowing images of people but allowing a) TV and b) retinas?
• What would they do if we all named our teddy bears / dogs / pigs Mohammed? Not after the "prophet", of course, but after the child who suggested they name the teddy after him?
• Is this finally going to make the Islamists look too stupid for words?
• Do they have photo ID in Muslim countries?
• How many teddies or equiv called Mohammed are there in Muslim countries? I'm guessing at least hundreds, if those kids were happy to call theirs Mohammed.
• Isn't this the sort of thing that the army is for? Aren't British passports meant to help in this?

(NB - the picture on the right is a picture of Mohammed (the famous one), but it was made by a (Persian) Muslim in the 16th century, so it's probably ok). From Wikipedia.

O Holy Night

It's starting to be the Oxbridge Christmas season, due to stupidly early holidays and so on. But hey, it's nearly Advent in the real world. I've got some interesting stuff to write on Paul's understanding of law, but at the moment I've got too much work to write something sensible.

So here is a rendition of "O Holy Night"; one of the things that is pretty much guaranteed to get me laughing.

Wow - Botafumeiro

I saw this video this morning on the Bishop of Buckingham's Blog, and was somewhat amazed. It's at the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela (supposed burial place of Jesus' brother, in Spain).

The physics is somewhat cool - it's a pendulum, and you can see the rope-pullers pulling in phase with the pendulum swing, hence adding in energy at a frequency which the pendulum can't lose easily, which means it swings more and more.

Plenty of other random thoughts too though:

• health and safety... Apparently in 1499, it came off the rope and flew through a high window in the cathedral. But that's about the size and weight of a person - how much damage could it do if the rope broke? (Geeky note - the tension in the rope is highest at the bottom of the swing) Or if someone got in the way?
• Distraction from the service - like anyone is going to be paying any attention to anything else...
• How do the rope-pullers keep breathing with that much incense around them?
• I'm really not a fan of applause in church
• I think the whole thing seems to detract from the point of incense. As Catholic friends have explained it, incense is about emphasising God's transcendence through production of CO, impairment of vision, strong aromatic odour, etc. But all it would do in that context would be reminding you of how nifty and whatever the botafumey thing was.

Piper, the Prosperity Gospel, suffering and evangelism

Well, John Piper really really really doesn't like the prosperity "gospel"...

Shocking stuff. But it reopened the bit of my mind that had been mulling on the context of 1 Peter 3:15-16 for a while.

But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience
1 Peter 3:15-16, NIV

They're so often trotted out as the standard verses for evangelism, and so often we ask why evangelism in the West is so much harder than evangelism elsewhere, and we completely ignore the context of those verses.

But even if you should suffer for what is right, you are blessed. "Do not fear what they fear; do not be frightened." But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behaviour in Christ may be ashamed of their slander. It is better, if it is God's will, to suffer for doing good than for doing evil. For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God.
1 Peter 3:14-18, NIV

The opportunities for real evangelism that are talked about in 1 Peter 3 are the opportunities that come from the way that we suffer for doing what is right. And by and large, the church in the West is not willing to suffer for doing what is right. And so we don't get the people asking us for the reason for the hope that we have in the same way. And so evangelism is so much harder.

I've only led two people who weren't already Christians to Christ. In one case, someone close to me was regularly attempting suicide. In the other, my gran had just died. Evangelism works through suffering.

(more stuff on why the Prosperity Gospel is wrong here)

The Prosperity "Gospel"

A friend asked me for resources about why the so-called Prosperity "Gospel" is wrong.

Ben Witherington III, a noted New Testament scholar, tackles it here.

Mark Driscoll points out that Jesus's life refutes the prosperity "gospel".

Good News

Some good news for everyone this Christmas...

Except for the waistline that is, and for those struggling with food addictions. I honestly don't understand why we as a society treat food addictions any differently from alcohol or drug addictions, and yet we do. Or why gluttony is such an easily overlooked sin. Or, for that matter, why so much of the church seems to hold a neo-Platonist view of food that says that if it tastes nice it must be evil.

They forbid people to marry and order them to abstain from certain foods, which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and who know the truth. For everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, because it is consecrated by the word of God and prayer.
1 Timothy 4:3-5, NIV

So enjoy chocolate, but enjoy it responsibly!

Beowulf

One of the bizarre things about ratings is that violence or sex in animation doesn't attract the same ratings that it does if non-animated (with, I think, the exception of displaying genitals). The problems with this get greater and greater as animation gets better and better, as is hugely obvious in Beowulf.

How was this (12A) less gory or sexual than Apocalypto (18)? In my opinion, it was significantly more gory and more sexual. In Apocalypto, they don't show hearts being ripped out, only the before and after, but in Beowulf they do. There's blood splattered everywhere, people ripped in two, lots of corpses, far more nudity than in Apocalypto, etc. And the animation is so good that a lot of the time you can't tell that it is animation.

Having said that, the animation is still far from perfect when it comes to living bits of living things - I suspect they're only using a single layer technique for human skin for example, which needs multi-layer treatment to get it right, and the eyes aren't great either. Ditto with the horses, which didn't seem to run quite right, rats, etc.

The story is a retelling and a reworking of the Anglo-Saxon epic of the same name. It says something that every other retelling of the story got an R rating in the US, but this one sexed it up a lot, literally, and got a PG-13. It's basically a hero-kills-monsters type story, but with a significant twist, which is a change from the epic poem, and certainly makes a lot of characters a lot more ambiguous. As such stories go, it's done pretty well. Good if you like that sort of thing...

Some great questions that can come out of this about the nature of sin, why we give into it, the effects, etc. Christianity Today's review is good on that front.

Disinterested Good?

I wrote some background to this post here. Lots of bits of Greek philosophy have got picked up by Christians over the years, and it takes a long time to get rid of them. One of the bits which is still hanging on in there is the idea that if we're doing something because we enjoy it, then it can't be good.

So, for example, some people think that it's wrong to follow Jesus with the aim of going to heaven.

Compare that with the Biblical attitude:

By faith Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be known as the son of Pharaoh's daughter. He chose to be mistreated along with the people of God rather than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a short time. He regarded disgrace for the sake of Christ as of greater value than the treasures of Egypt, because he was looking ahead to his reward.
Hebrews 11:24-26, NIV

The key to doing what is right isn't acting against our own interests - it's acting by faith. Faith is recognising that it is more in our interests to follow Jesus than not to.

Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?
Mark 8:34-36, NIV

A major motivation the Bible gives for being a Christian is consistently self-interest. But it is a self interest that has faith, and sees that the only way to save our lives is to lose them, and that it does us no good to gain the world yet forfeit our souls.

And I know this is very Piper-esque, but that's because he's right on this.

Greek Philosophy and Christianity

This is part 1 of 2. I started trying to write something about the idea of disinterested good, but realised I needed too much background. This is the background (here's the main point).

One of the big problems that the Church struggled with (largely unconsciously) for hundreds of years was the relationship between Christianity and Greek philosophy. Greek philosophy, in various forms, was widely and popularly held in the Roman Empire when Christianity was growing and spreading. It was easy for Christians to see that they should reject worshipping Caesar or Artemis; it was harder for them to see that there was a problem with Greek philosophy or to see what to do about it.

To create a huge generalisation, the Church in the Eastern Roman Empire, especially Alexandria, where Greek philosophy was strongest, tended to try to integrate philosophy and Christianity. In the West, they tended not to, spurred on by Tertullian's famous rhetorical question:

What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?
Tertullian of Carthage

The influence of philosophy on the early church wasn't wholly bad, but it did have lots of major problems. Almost all of the early heresies were caused by people putting their philosophical considerations ahead of what the Bible said. Early Church History (patristics) often concentrates on the East, because that was where most of the big arguments were. On the big questions that they argued about - how the Father, Son and Spirit could all be one God and how Jesus could be both human and divine - Tertullian in the West was hundreds of years ahead of the East. Even by 451, at the Council of Chalcedon, the big arguments in the East were only settled when Pope Leo of Rome wrote a letter explaining what they'd believed in the West for hundreds of years, which was what they ended up agreeing on. And then the arguments rumbled on even longer in the East, with the Syrian and Egyptian churches rejecting the compromise and splitting off.

But Rome wasn't immune either. During the Middle Ages, the western church got more and more influenced by Greek philosophy, especially Aristotelian metaphysics and physics and Ptolemaic astronomy to the point where they came to assume the place of dogma. Some of the difficulties in the Reformation with Luther et al and most of the difficulties in the Scientific Revolution with Galileo et al were because of the way that Aristotelianism had become entrenched as orthodoxy, and so to argue against it was seen as heresy.

Some of it is plainly wrong. The idea, for example, that God cannot suffer ("divine impassibility") is straight from Platonism rather than Christianity. If someone read the Bible with a mind open to the possibility of God being able to suffer, they would almost certainly conclude that God suffered in the person of Jesus. And yet through so much of the history of the church, that last sentence would have been immensely controversial.

All of which goes to show that it's easy for us to confuse parts of the surrounding worldview with the gospel, and then to end up elevating them as the truth. In part 2, I look at one bit of Greek philosophy that is still hanging on today.