Category Archives: Footnotes

Footnote 19 – Richard John Neuhaus: Jesus and the Druid Princess

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Footnote 19 – Richard John Neuhaus, ed. Theological Education and Moral Formation (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1992), pp. 146-147.

Richard John Neuhaus was editor of the journal First Things, as well as the Encounter Series of volumes published by Eerdmans, of which this is Volume 15. Readers of this blog might also be interested in other volumes in the series, particularly volume 2 (Unsecular America) and volume 5 (The Bible, Politics, and Democracy).

Typically, each volume reports a conference in which four to six featured speakers delivered prepared addresses, following which those speakers and perhaps a dozen others joined in a panel discussion of the issues raised in the prepared speeches. This particular volume reports a conference at Duke University and offers some rare insight into the state of the denominational mentality in America, and I offer excerpts from three different sections of the round-table discussion for your amazement.

Philip Turner, Dean of Berkeley Divinity School, Yale University, speaking of the crisis of authority in the Episcopal church:

“My wife is a priest. In her diocese recently there was another priest who got into New Age channeling. One day she announced that her particular spirit had informed her that Jesus didn’t really die; he married a druid princess, and they had a little druids. This was the content of this priest’s teaching to a group in her church.  The senior warden of the parish thought that maybe something was wrong, so he called the bishop. The bishop, bless his heart, told the priest that she had three choices: she could recant, she could resign her orders, or she could undergo a heresy trial. Well, the bishop is the one who took the flak, because the dominant reaction was, ‘We’re Episcopalians, so we can believe what we want, and a bishop has no rights here.’”

Footnote 18 – D.A. Carson, ed., Worship By the Book

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D.A. Carson, ed. (with Mark Ashton, R. Kent Hughes, and Timothy J. Keller) Worship By the Book (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2002), pp. 48-49, 52-53 (Kindle Edition, @Location 689).

Context: In the opening chapter of this collaborative work, Carson quotes what he describes as “one of the most succinct summaries of such evidence as the New Testament provides” from an essay by Edmund Clowney, who observes that “The New Testament indicates, by precept and example, what the elements of [corporate] worship are.”  Carson then continues:

“I am not sure that we would be wise to apply the expression ‘corporate worship’ to any and all activities in which groups of Christians faithfully engage – going to a football match, say, or shopping for groceries.  Such activities doubtless fall under the ‘do all to the glory of God’ rubric and therefore properly belong to the ways in which we honor God; therefore they do belong to worship in a broad sense. Yet the activities the New Testament describes when Christians gather together in assembly…are more restricted and more focused.  Doubtless there can be some mutual edification going on when a group of Christians take a sewing class together, but in the light of what the New Testament pictures Christians doing when they assemble together, there is something slightly skewed about calling a sewing class an activity of corporate worship.  So there is a narrower sense of worship, it appears; and this narrower sense is bound up with corporate worship, with what the assembled church does in the pages of the New Testament.”

[In the pages of the New Testament] “there is no mention of a lot of other things: drama, “special” (performance) music, choirs, artistic dance, organ solos.  Many churches are so steeped in these or other traditions that it would be unthinkable to have a Sunday morning service without, say ‘special music’ – though there is ot so much as a hint of this practice in the new Testament.44

44 By ‘special music’ I am including not only the solos and small groups that a slightly earlier generation of evangelical churches customarily presented but also the very substantial number of ‘performance’ items that current ‘worship teams’ normally include in worship.  These are often not seen by the teams themselves as ‘special music’ or ‘performance music,’ but that is of course what they are.

45 There are many entailments to these cultural differences beyond the differences in the corporate services themselves. For example, Britain, without much place for “special music” in corporate worship, does not have to feed a market driven by the search for more “special music.” Therefore, a great deal of intellectual and spiritual energy is devoted to writing songs that will be sung congregationally. This has resulted in a fairly wide production of new hymnody in more or less contemporary guise, some of it junk, some of it acceptable but scarcely enduring, and some of it frankly superb. By contrast, our addiction to ‘special music’ means that a great deal of creative energy goes into supplying products for that market. Whether it is good or bad, it is almost never usable by a congregation. The result is that far more of our congregational pieces are dated than in Britain, or are no more than repetitious choruses.

There’s more nuance in the extended discussion – read for more observations. Usual caveats apply – without accepting every conclusion or using terms identically, these comments have the ‘ring of truth.’   (Hat tip to John Gentry for the Kindle reference) –SW

Footnote 17 – Robert Coles, The Moral Intelligence of Children

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Footnote 17 – Robert Coles, The Moral Intelligence of Children: How To Raise a Moral Child (New York: Random House, 1997), pp. 32-34.

Robert Coles is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and research psychiatrist for the Harvard University Health Services.  He has spent much of his career researching, interviewing, and analyzing how children learn moral/ethical concepts. His more than 80  books include the Pulitzer Prize-winning, landmark five-volume Children of Crisis, and the best-selling work, The Moral Life of Children.  Many people, including those professing moral values deriving from Christianity, maintain skepticism of psychiatry, but Coles is worth listening to as he describes what he has observed through decades of working with many children, and discussing his observations with scholars and non-scholars, the famous and the unheralded.

In the following excerpt, Coles is discussing (with Anna Freud) psychoanalyst August Aicchorn’s work with “wayward youth.”  Even after more than a half-century, important lessons can be learned by those with ears to hear and eyes to see.

“’My dad says one thing, he’s a great talker, but he does another thing.’ The words of a cynical teenager. A school psychologist and a district court judge declared this boy a ‘juvenile delinquent’ in 1958, and I was learning to talk with such a person. [Aicchorn had an] uncanny knack for working with extremely troubled, ‘anti-social’ adolescents…[knowing] that the waywardness of these young men [mostly] was in direct proportion to the peculiarities of their ‘moral education.’ …[He] figured out early on in his work that some young people who seem headed in the wrong direction have been headed there for a long time…[saying] ‘many of these boys headed for trouble and more trouble have parents who seem so upright.  They are very good talkers – but their children have found them out, that is the sad truth. The family secret is being revealed by the child, who is telling the world, ‘See, they may strike everyone as “straight and narrow,” but I know something else, and what I have found out has become a big part of my life!’”

“…Sometimes the trouble is cognitive: a child is in intellectual difficulty, in need of ‘testing.’ …Yet often, I have thought to myself, then said to colleagues, that the issue at hand is very much moral: a child has gotten into trouble, all right – done something wrong, hurt someone, or violated a school regulation, a community’s customs, or even laws. Often under such circumstances we explain the matter through resort to psychology, or, yes, sociology – the child’s ‘psychodynamics,’ home life, background, medical history, ‘cognitive functioning’ as shown in various tests. Nor is all that to be ignored or downplayed. Still, Erik H. Erikson once commented, ‘These days, we sometimes spend a lot of time avoiding the obvious, and sometimes, psychology helps us do so!’

“…At what point do we face squarely that side of a child’s life and conclude that a moral crisis is at hand, one requiring a candid assessment of character, an assessment of what a boy’s or girl’s moral assumptions, attitudes, and values have turned out to be, and with what likely outcome in terms of behavior – law-abiding or ‘antisocial’?”

Coles follows this with several case studies involving cheating; drinking and drugs; and early sexual activity in adolescents.  Well worth a read – even if one may dissent from some observations. Credit to my wife Bette (my resident psychologist) for steering me to this!

Footnote 16 – Stephen Prothero, Religious Illiteracy (2)

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Footnote 16 – Stephen Prothero, Religious Illiteracy: What Every American Needs to Know – and Doesn’t (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 132-139.

Stephen Prothero is Chair of the Religion Department at Boston University.

“The rising tide of religious ignorance in public schools and higher education might have been stemmed by the churches … But many of the same trends that led public school teachers and college professors to marginalize and trivialize religion paralyzed the churches too. … Many trends transformed Christian congregations and voluntary associations into aiders and abetters of religious amnesia.  The most important of these shifts were: from the intellect to the emotions, from doctrine to storytelling, from the Bible to Jesus, and from theology to morality. In each case new approach to religion was offered to Americans with all the seduction of the serpent in the Garden of Eden. In each case Americans succumbed to the temptations. This time, however, knowledge was lost rather than gained.”

“…Changes in the American sermon also contributed to the decline of religious literacy…The minister learned to give his parishioners what they wanted, and what they wanted was to be entertained…. Many ministers – on both the theological left and the theological right – had largely surrendered to old-fashioned doctrinal sermon in favor of the sort of thing American churchgoers hear today: colloquial sermons peppered with personal stories about friends dying and giving birth, salted with entertaining anecdotes…and light on both biblical exegesis and Christian doctrine…These ministers served up the theology of everyday life, subordinating biblical teaching to literary flourishes.  Their entertaining sermons ‘employed daring pulpit story-telling, no-holds-barred appeals, overt humor, strident attack, graphic application, and intimate personal experience.’ Ministers embraced story sermons because…they increasingly (and correctly) understood themselves to be in competition not only with peers in nearby pulpits but also with secular entertainments, including newspapers, plays and novels.

“American ministers became storytellers because…some believers have always found it easier to find God in stories than in dogmas.  But the main reason many preachers fled, as historian Ann Douglas put it, ‘from dispute, doctrine, and scholarship’ to sentimentalism, sensationalism, and stories is that the narrative sermon worked. It produced conversions. It filled the churches. It also had something of a pedigree in the parables of Jesus…Once upon a time, the sermon had educated parishioners about such Christian staples as the Trinity and the Ten Commandments, and the stories ministers told from the pulpit were restricted to the grand biblical narratives of Moses, Abraham, Sarah, Jesus, and Mary.

“…This legacy is with us today in the narrative preaching style, which according to one historian of the sermon now aims ‘to achieve a happening rather than an understanding.’  It is with us as well in “seeker-sensitive’ megachurches, many of which have decided to stop preaching the basic teachings of the Christian tradition because marketing research has indicated that ‘seekers’ find that kind of teaching to be a turnoff.”

Footnote 15 – Religious Illiteracy and Secularism

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Footnote 15 – Stephen Prothero, Religious Illiteracy: What Every American Needs to Know – and Doesn’t (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 53-55.

Stephen Prothero is Chair of the Religion Department at Boston University.

“The sociologist Peter Berger once remarked that, if India is the world’s most religious country and Sweden the least, then the United States is a nation of Indians ruled by Swedes. Not exactly.  Like citizens of India, US citizens are extraordinarily religious. But so are their leaders. …

“All of this to say that the old wishful thinking about religion’s death at the hands of modernity is starting to look delusional, at least in the American instance. Some still label the United States as ‘post-Christian,’ but smart sociologists and historians have admitted the errors of their ways.  Berger, one of the star secularization theorists of the 1960’s, confessed in a book called The Desecularization of the World (1999) that secularization theory is bunk, at least as a general proposition.  ‘The world today, with some exceptions…is as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more so than ever,’ Berger wrote.  ‘This means that a whole body of literature by historians and social scientists loosely labeled ‘secularization theory’ is essentially mistaken.’

“…religion has always mattered, not least in American public life. Today what needs explaining is not the persistence of religion in modern societies but the emergence of unbelief in Europe and among American leaders in media, law, and higher education.”

Footnote 14 – Virkler and Ayayo, Hermeneutics

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Footnote 14 – Henry A. Virkler and Karelynne Gerber Ayayo, Hermeneutics: Principles and Processes of Biblical Interpretation (2nd ed.; Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007), pp. 195, 197.

“The story of Nadab and Abihu is interesting both because of its brevity and because and because of the sternness and uniqueness of the judgment on them… God had carefully shown the way by which the Israelites might atone for their sins and maintain a right relationship with himself. The distinctions between holy and unholy, clean and unclean, had been clearly demonstrated by God to Aaron and his sons, who had been instructed to teach these things to the people. Nadab and Abihu, in an act of self-will, had substituted their own form of worship, obscuring the distinction between the holy (God’s commands) and the common (man’s self-initiated religious actions).  These actions, had they not been quickly rebuked, might easily have led to the assimilation of personal pagan practices in the worship of God.

“A second lesson is found in the fact that reconciliation with God depends on the grace of God, not on man’s self-willed and self-initiated practices. The means of reconciliation and atonement had been given by God. Nadab and Abihu attempted to add something to God’s means of reconciliation. As such they stand as an example to all people and all religions that substitute their own actions for God’s grace as the means of reconciliation and salvation.”

Footnote 13 – Martin Hengel, Crucifixion in the Ancient World and the Folly of the Message of the Cross

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Footnote 13 – Martin Hengel, Crucifixion in the Ancient World and the Folly of the Message of the Cross (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977),  pp. 83, 87, 89-90.

        “When Paul spoke…about the ‘crucified Christ,’ every hearer in the Greek-speaking East…knew that this ‘Christ’ …had suffered a particularly cruel and shameful death, which as a rule   was reserved for hardened criminals, rebellious slaves, and rebels against  the Roman state.”    

      “That this crucified Jew, Jesus Christ, could truly be a divine being sent on earth, God’s son, the Lord of all and the coming judge of the world, must inevitably have been thought of by any educated man to be utter ‘madness’ and presumptuousness.”

     “By the public display of a naked victim in a prominent place – at a crossroads,  in the theater, on high ground, at the place of his crime – crucifixion also represented his utmost humiliation…  With Deuteronomy 21:23 in the background, the Jew in particular was very aware of this.”                       

     “When Paul talks of the ‘folly’ of the message of the crucified Jesus, he   is therefore not speaking in riddles   or using an abstract cipher…he deliberately wants to provoke his opponents, who are attempting to water down the offence caused by  the cross.”                       

      “Thus in a way the ‘word of the cross’ is the spearhead of his message…it  is impossible to dissociate talk of the atoning death of Jesus or the blood  of Jesus from this ‘word of the cross.’  The spearhead cannot be broken off the spear.”                            

Hebrews 12:2 – Fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.     NASB

 Hebrews 13:13 – Let us, then, go to him outside the camp, bearing the disgrace he bore.  NIV

Acts 5:41– So they went on their way from the presence of the Council, rejoicing that they had been considered worthy to suffer shame for His name.   NASB

1 Peter 2:6– Because it is contained in scripture, Behold, I lay in Zion a chief corner stone, elect, precious: And he that believeth on him shall not be put to shame.   ASV        

Footnote 12 – History of Hymns – Steve Wolfgang

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Click to access wolfgang.pdf

Since my lecture at Faulkner University a few weeks ago, I have received several inquiries about an article I wrote several years back, surveying the history of hymns and hymnals, especially have they hve influence hymnody in the “Restoration Movement.”  Since I have posted this reference on several other sites and FB pages, why not put it on my own? As with any human endeavor, it has some errors and other flaws, and stands in need of revision.  But it will have to do for now.

Footnote 11 – Bernard A. Weisberger, “Reflections on the Dry Season”

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Footnote 11 –  Bernard A. Weisberger, “Reflections on the Dry Season,” American Heritage, May/June 1990, 28-30.

Through the years, there has been a useful body of pertinent research done by well-recognized historians on the general background of Prohibition.

For example, Bernard Weisberger, a nationally-recognized historian who wrote a current-events column (“In the News”) for the popular historical journal American Heritage, addressed in one such article the widespread (mis)conception that Prohibition “didn’t work.”  Among the facts cited by Weisberger are:

“Prohibition did reduce drinking. The average annual per capita consumption of alcohol by Americans of drinking age – that is, the total alcoholic content of all the beer, wine, and distilled spirits they consumed – stood at 2.60 gallons” in 1910. In 1934, after more than a decade of prohibition, Weisberger reports the per capita average of 0.97 gallons.

“Census Bureau studies show that the death rate from chronic or acute alcoholism fell from 7.3 per 100,000 in 1907” to “2.5 in 1932, Prohibition’s last year. Deaths from cirrhosis of the liver, one cause of which is alcohol abuse, dropped from 14.8 per 100,000 in 1907 to 7.1 in 1920 and never rose above 7.5 during the 1920’s. Economic studies estimated that savings and spending on household necessities increased among working-class families during the period, possibly from money that once went to drink.”  These are not the propaganda of some biased zealot, but the factual report of a nationally-known historian.

Furthermore, Weisberger reports that one reason why Prohibition may be commonly thought so unsuccessful is that even the above improvements were achieved with a minimum of enforcement. He continues:

“Drinking might have been cut back even further if more resources had been devoted to enforcement. In 1922 Congress gave the Prohibition Bureau only $6.75 million for a force of 3,060 employees (including clerical workers) to hunt for [violators] in thousands of urban neighborhoods, remote hollows, border crossings, and coastal inlets. State legislators were equally sparing: in 1926 state legislatures all together spent $698,855 for Prohibition work, approximately one eighth of what they spent on enforcing fish-and-game laws. Even so, by 1929 the feds alone had arrested more than half a million violators.”

Nor was this “new” information, even 20 years ago; a 1968 article by historian of science John C. Burnham of Ohio State University in the Journal of Social History revealed even more data along the lines Weisberger adduces. To imply that attempts to restrict alcohol sales can’t be effective ignores the available evidence. Professor Norman H. Clark’s 1976 study, Deliver Us From Evil, makes a persuasive cause that during Prohibition, arrests for drunkenness and alcohol-related crimes declined markedly.

Of course, a much earlier author reminds us across the ages that “Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging, and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise” (Proverbs 20:1).

–Adapted from Truth Magazine XXXVI:15 (August 6, 1992), p. 457

Footnote 10 – Atheist Delusions (2)

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Footnote 10 – David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 111-112.

“We are far removed from the days when one’s baptism could be said to be the most momentous event — and perhaps the most dramatic, terrifying, and joyous experience — of one’s life.  …For most of the Christians of the earliest centuries, baptism was altogether of a more radical nature.  It was understood as nothing less than a total transformation of the person who submitted to it; and as a ritual event, it was certainly understood as being far more than a mere dramaturgical allegory of one’s choice of religious association.  To become a Christian was to renounce a very great deal of what one had known and been to that point, in order to be joined to a new reality, the demands of which were absolute; it was to depart from one world, with an irrevocable finality, and to enter another.

“…the period of one’s preparation for baptism could not conclude until one had been taught the story of redemption: how once all men and women had labored as slaves in the household of death, prisoners of the devil, sold in bondage to Hades, languishing in ignorance of their true home; and how Christ had come to set the prisoners free and had, by his death and resurrection, invaded the kingdom of our captor and overthrown it, vanquishing the power of sin and death in us, shattering the gates of hell, and plundering the devil of his captives. For it was into this story that one’s own life was to be merged when one at last sank down into the “life-giving waters”: in the risen Christ, a new humanity had been created, free from the rule of death, into which one could be admitted by dying and rising again with Christ in baptism and by feeding upon his presence in the Eucharist.”

Atheist Delusions is an engaging polemic which is not only a trenchant critique of the pretensions of modern unbelievers, and a learned exposition of some of the history of the tension between Christianity and atheism, but is also filled with insights on many relevant topics encountered along the path of the development of this story.  One need not necessarily accept all the premises advanced, nor use all of its terminology, to grasp the essential nature of the truths expounded here. A good read!