Statistics

News report says: “Teen Birth Rates Higher in Highly Religious States.”

Thomas Peters sees different reasons.

Who Was Roland Carnaby?

Roland Carnaby claimed to be a CIA agent–and was gunned down by Houston Police Officers during a traffic stop in 2008. Most local news agencies dismissed him as a nut and never followed up the story. The Houston Press stayed on the case, and has written a fascinating report.

Dan Brown’s Latest

So, during a lull in my busy day, I popped into Wal-Mart and read the last few chapters of Dan Brown’s latest book. Freemasonry is front and center in this tale, but the message is the same as in his previous books: don’t believe or trust the Bible; instead, believe those esoteric philosophies that reject the literal message of the Bible in favor of a contrary, “spiritual,” interpretation. The bottom line is, “You shall be as gods.”

Advent Conspiracy

It’s not too early to be thinking about Christmas. You know the decorations will soon be in the stores. Are you disappointed with the commercialism and the crush of the crowds and the stress and the co$t? Then check out Advent Conspiracy.

From the webpage:

The story of Christ’s birth is a story of promise, hope, and a revolutionary love.

So, what happened? What was once a time to celebrate the birth of a savior has somehow turned into a season of stress, traffic jams, and shopping lists.

And when it’s all over, many of us are left with presents to return, looming debt that will take months to pay off, and this empty feeling of missed purpose. Is this what we really want out of Christmas?

What if Christmas became a world-changing event again?

There’s a DVD available with four short videos that can be discussion starters, and there’s a book with discussion guide, too.

Encourage a different attitude in your young adult ministry, campus, or church. Join the conspiracy.

More Dan Brown. Sigh.

Dan Brown’s latest book is soon to be published. This is said to be about the freemasons.

He’ll sell lots of books because he knows how to tell a compelling story (no matter how illogical it may be–any novel is bound to be a “page turner” when its chapters are only two pages long!). And he’ll entice the gullible by his gnostic claims (yeah, they’re “fiction,” he says with a wink, but also claims a factual basis for much of his bunk). His nose will continue to grow as he tells whoppers like, “The Christians got holy communion from the Aztecs,” or, “The Church took the name ‘Satan’ from Islam because it was a dirty language,” or “That’s really Mary next to Jesus in the Last Supper!” And he will laugh all the way to the bank.

Richard McBrien on the Eucharist

Fr. Richard McBrien is one of the best known Catholic scholars. And he’s often getting himself publicity by articles taking issue with Catholic teaching. Take this, for example: Perpetual Eucharistic Adoration.

After clearing the air about an article that was in the Boston Globe (a good job), he then throws out some gratuitous swipes at the theology and practice of his church:

Notwithstanding Pope Benedict XVI’s personal endorsement of eucharistic adoration and the sporadic restoration of the practice in the archdiocese of Boston and elsewhere, it is difficult to speak favorably about the devotion today.

Now that most Catholics are literate and even well-educated, the Mass is in the language of the people (i.e, the vernacular), and its rituals are relatively easy to understand and follow, there is little or no need for extraneous eucharistic devotions. The Mass itself provides all that a Catholic needs sacramentally and spiritually.

Eucharistic adoration, perpetual or not, is a doctrinal, theological, and spiritual step backward, not forward.

Eucharistic adoration is inseparable from Catholic Eucharistic theology.  The Catholic church believes that the substance of the bread and wine of the Eucharist are, when consecrated by the priest in the mass, transformed into the substance of the body and blood of Christ, and that this presence perdures beyond the celebration of the mass. If you believe that, you will engage in Eucharistic adoration.

I think the reality here is that McBrien doesn’t really believe Catholic teaching. And yet he is a priest in good standing with a very public platform as a professor of Catholic theology.

Funny thing–some Catholics say the reason you have heresy in liberal Protestant churches like the ELCA is because there is no magisterium. Well, Catholicism has a magisterium, but it still can’t keep its own house in order.

The Blind Leading the Blind

Robert Benne, one of the ELCA opponents of homosexuality, reflects on the ELCA assembly for Christianity Today: “How the ELCA Left the Great Tradition.”

But Benne doesn’t see that his own views on Scripture are part of the problem. All ELCA theologians embrace the historical-critical method. Scripture is, in this view, at best, a human document recording human experience of the divine.

Consider this from Carl Braaten, from Christian Dogmatics (co-edited with Robert Jenson), the systematic text used in ELCA seminaries:

…Biblicism holds to an infallible Bible that can be the absolute authority in matters of belief and morals. The ancient doctrine of verbal inspiration survives. In some Christian groups the theory of inspiration is used to vouch for the absolute reliability of the Bible on all matters that relate to cosmology, biology, geography, chronology, and history. The Bible is used as a bulwark against the evolutionary hypothesis of modern natural science. …

Fundamentalist biblicism is rejected by most theologians and is out of favor in most of the seminaries that train clergy for the parish ministry. They reject biblicism not merely because historical science has disclosed errors and contradictions in the biblical writings, but rather because the authority of the Bible is elevated at the expense of the authority of Christ and his gospel. Non-fundamentalist Protestants also accept the Bible as the Word of God in some sense, but they point out that the concept of the Word of God, as Barth made clear, cannot be confined to the Bible. We  cannot say that the Bible is the Word of God in a simplistic way ….

The uniqueness, the authority, and the value of the Bible, therefore, continue to be central for contemporary theological work. By means of Scripture, Christ is pictured and proclaimed as God’s message and answer to the human predicament. Subsidiary to this central idea, the Bible is also treated as a collection of ancient documents which give us information about the history of Israel and the beginnings of Christianity. The Bible is also appreciated as a library of great literature …. The Bible is also a source document for the imaginative construction of church doctrines …. The Bible is also a devotional book full of inspiring passages to cultivate the religious life. But beyond all these viewpoints, the Bible is the unique book of the church because of its original and intrinsic connection with the history of the promises of God and its astonishing climax in the career of Jesus the Christ. (I:74-76)

So even those in the ELCA who oppose homosexuality mock “the theory of inspiration,” and treat the Bible as a human document to be interpreted in light of something else. Braaten says that something else is the gospel. That’s what those in favor of homosexuality say. That’s what led them to say the forgiving, accepting Jesus, would not turn any away. The Bible has been stripped of any claim to divine inspiration, and is reduced, in Marcionite fashion, to a proclamation of Gospel, not Law.

In this situation where the Bible has no divine authority as Law, for either party, it is not surprising that Benne says,

Sola Scriptura, a Lutheran principle adopted by evangelicals, did not seem to be sufficient in such circumstances. An authoritative tradition of interpretation of the Bible seemed to be essential. More was needed than the Bible alone.

Sola Scriptura only works when Scripture is accepted as God’s authoritative self-communication. When it is reduced to merely another human voice in the conversation, it’s not surprising that Benne must appeal to a human referee.

It is disingenuous for Benne to say, “The ELCA has formally left the Great Tradition for liberal Protestantism.” The ELCA has been a part of liberal Protestantism since it was founded in 1988. It was formed of three liberal Protestant denominations, the American Lutheran Church, the Lutheran Church in America, and the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches–and this latter group had its origin in a battle within the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod over Biblical inspiration. The liberals were driven out from the LCMS seminaries to form their own “Seminary in Exile” (Seminex). This was the seedbed from which the ELCA grew.

The solution to the questions of how Christians should address issues of morality and theology is not to turn from one human authority to another; it is to embrace Scripture as the inspired Word of God. It is to affirm what Paul told Timothy:

“All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16).

Our refuge is in Christ, who has revealed his will to men in this book. It is our firm foundation.

God’s Word is our great heritage
And shall be ours forever;
To spread its light from age to age
Shall be our chief endeavor.
Through life it guides our way,
In death it is our stay.
Lord, grant while words endure,
We keep its teachings pure
Throughout all generations.

To abandon it, or to treat it as just some other human book, to turn to either the authority of the individual or the authority of an individual, is to build on sand. That was the foundation of the ELCA from the very beginning.

Revisiting the JDDJ

We’re coming up on the 10th anniversary of the “Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification,” signed by the Vatican and the Lutheran World Federation. I’ll have to write my own reflection on that.

Meanwhile, here’s a reflection by Paul McCain: Betraying the Reformation: The Sad Legacy of The Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification.

More Lutheran Voices

Carl Braaten.

… the ELCA has succumbed to the same ailment as liberal Protestantism. What is that? Modern Protestantism is an amalgamation of historic Christianity and the principles of the Enlightenment, its rationalism, subjectivism, and anthropocentrism. The underlying assumption is the neo-gnostic belief in the inner-dwelling of God, such that everyone is endowed with the inner light that only needs to be uncovered. The light of truth does not shine through the Scriptures and the Christian tradition as much as through scientific reason and individual experience. This is what happened in Minneapolis: appeals to reason and experience trumped Scripture and tradition, punctuated with pious injunctions of Lutheran slogans and clichés. The majority won. And they said it was the work of the Spirit, forgetting that the Holy Spirit had already spoken volumes through the millennia of Scriptural interpretation, the councils of the church, and its creeds and confessions.

Robert Benne.

It is not meet, right, and salutary that this assembly vote on God’s commandments as understood by the one, holy, catholic church throughout 2000 years. The Word of God should not be put to vote. The great orthodox churches of the world do not even consider the changes we have in mind.

Voting on these matters is doubly problematic because we have no compelling biblical or confessional grounds, nor anything approaching a consensus, to make these momentous changes. This church should not vote on the binding teaching of the church. If it does, this church may soon find itself outside of the church.

Strange Doings in Scranton

Joseph Martino has resigned as Catholic Bishop of Scranton for “health reasons.” You always gotta wonder what that means.  David Gibson speculates.