The Internet Monk Archives

Gospel Week: Let’s discuss some definitions

PaulConversion — The Conversion of Saul, Michelangelo

By Chaplain Mike

This week our focus will be on The Gospel.

You might think Christians would have this one nailed down, but many conversations continue in the church today about the definition and nature of the biblical Gospel.

For example, I am looking forward to reading Scot McKnight’s upcoming book, The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited, in which he argues that “evangelicals have built a ‘salvation culture’ but not a ‘gospel culture,'” reducing the gospel to “the message of personal salvation.”

McKnight’s statement points out one of the issues that emerges in today’s discussions. As Ed Stetzer puts it in an enlightening post on the subject, “One of the key issues is this question: Is the gospel only God-Man-Christ-Response or does it include elements of Creation-Fall-Redemption-Restoration?”

Trevin Wax has compiled an impressive number of definitions that fill several pages at his blog, (you can download a PDF to view them in a single document. We may comment on a few of these this week, and we will be looking at Wax’s book, Counterfeit Gospels: Rediscovering the Good News in a World of False Hope.

Last year, Rachel Held Evans ran a post asking readers to answer, “What is the gospel?” and then she followed it up by polling some of her friends in ministry with the same question. When I read those posts, I came up with the following definition (newly edited).

Give it a test drive, compare it with some of the others who are linked here, chime in with your own thoughts and definitions, and let’s have a discussion to kick off this Gospel Week.

The Gospel (as I understand it at this point)

The Gospel (Good News) is the divinely-authorized proclamation that the appointed time has arrived and God has come to restore his blessing to his broken creation.

The Gospel announces that the climactic act of God’s story has been accomplished through the birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, his promised King who fulfilled the story of Israel and inaugurated the Messianic Age. Christ’s finished work atoned for sin, defeated the powers of sin, evil, and death forever, and reconciled this lost and dying world to God.

The Gospel invites all people to turn from their own wisdom and ways that separate them from God and his blessing, and to trust Jesus for forgiveness and new life in the Holy Spirit as members of his new community of faith, hope, and love.

The Gospel promises that God’s Kingdom inaugurated in Jesus will be consummated when he returns to raise the dead, pronounce final judgment on all evil, and transform this fallen creation into a new creation in which heaven (God’s realm) and earth (the human realm) are one.

Or more simply, “Let us proclaim the mystery of faith: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.”

A Hymn for Ordinary Time (9): For the Beauty of the Earth

By Chaplain Mike

On this Lord’s Day, we present a familiar hymn of praise by which we thank God for his common grace and the gifts of beauty and love that flow from it.

For the Beauty of the Earth

For the beauty of the earth
For the glory of the skies,
For the love which from our birth
Over and around us lies
‘Lord of all, to Thee we raise
this our joyful hymn of praise.

For the beauty of each hour
Of the day and of the night,
Hill and vale and tree and flow’r
Sun and Moon and stars of light
‘Lord of all, to Thee we raise
this our joyful hymn of praise.

For the joy of human love,
Brother, sister, parent, child.
Friends on earth and friends above
For all gentle thoughts and mild.
‘Lord of all, to Thee we raise
this our joyful hymn of praise.

For each perfect gift of Thine
To our race so freely given.
Graces human and divine
Flow’rs of earth and buds of heav’n.
‘Lord of all, to Thee we raise
this our joyful hymn of praise.

For thy church that evermore
Lifteth holy hands above,
Offering up on every shore
Her pure sacrifice of love
‘Lord of all, to Thee we raise
this our joyful hymn of praise.

• Note: An alternate refrain is sometimes sung:
Christ, our God, to Thee we raise
This, our sacrifice of praise.

Text: Folliot S. Pierpoint
Music: This hymn is usually sung to the tune DIX, by Conrad Kocher

• • •

Here is a beautiful alternate arrangement that was composed by Philip Stopford in 2003 for the Harvest Festival Service at St Anne’s Cathedral, Belfast. Stopford conducts his chamber choir, Ecclesium.

The NT Haustafeln (House-Tables)

johnston149 — Members of Roman Family, Relief from the Ara Pacis

By Chaplain Mike

We would be remiss if we did not include some consideration of Biblical teaching about family relationships during this week on Internet Monk when we are talking about them. In this post we will look at one way the apostles taught the early church to live out their faith in the home.

Some of the primary instructional passages in the New Testament regarding family life are the “haustafeln”. This is the German word for house-tables or household codes; a word used since Luther’s time to describe Biblical passages detailing family duties.

For example,

Ephesians 5:22-6:9
Colossians 3:18-4:1
1Peter 2:18-3:12

P.H. Towner gives an overview of these household codes and related NT texts:

Colossians 3:18-4:1 and Ephesians 5:22-33 represent teaching addressed to the various members of the household. What distinguishes these blocks of teaching as a special form is the tendency to address church members according to household role and status (wives/husbands, children/parents, slaves/masters), reciprocity (each member being addressed), the delineation of appropriate behavior with a verb enjoining subordination (hypotasso) or obedience (hypakouo). These two passages represent the fullest expression of the NT household code. But 1Timothy 2:1-15; 5:1-2; 6:1-2, 17-19; Titus 2:1-3:8 and 1Peter 2:13-3:7 also contain teaching very similar in tone and form. And shorter sections of related teaching in 1Corinthians 14:33-35 (cf. 1Corinthians 11:3-16) about men and women…and in Romans 13:1-7 about the church’s posture toward the government appear to come from the same basic source.

• From Dictionary of Paul and His Letters, Hawthorne/Martin/Reid, eds.

These forms of ethical and relational instruction can teach us a great deal about how to think and teach about family matters in the church.

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Saturday Ramblings 8.20.11

It’s that time of week again, time to do some light housekeeping here at the iMonastery. There are brooms and rags and mops aplenty if you want to pitch in and help. Or, if you prefer, you can simply sit back and ramble…

Ok, let’s start with the most important story of the week. The economy? No. Who is and who isn’t running for president? Oh my, no. The surfboard-like confessionals being used in Madrid at the World Youth Day? No, although we will get to that. This week’s most pressing news is that beings from other galaxies may be upset with us earthlings for spreading greenhouses gases into space. “Green” aliens might object to the environmental damage humans have caused on Earth and wipe us out to save the planet. Well, why not? I can’t tell you how much I love this job…

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IM Book Review: Home

By Chaplain Mike

And now here he is, Glory thought, haggard and probationary, with little of his youth left to him except the wry elusiveness, secretiveness, that he did in fact seem to wear on his skin. He stood propped against the counter with his arms folded and watched his father while his father pondered him, smiling that hard, wistful smile at what he knew his father saw, as if he were saying, “All those years I spared you knowing I wasn’t worth your grief.”

But the old man said, “Come here, son,’ and he took Jack’s hands and caressed them and touched them to his cheek. He said, ‘It’s a powerful thing, family.”

And Jack laughed. “Yes, sir. Yes it is. I do know that.”

“Well,” he said, “at least you’re home.”

The prodigal son has come home. Before his arrival, after twenty years in self-induced exile doing God knows what to bring disgrace on himself and the family, one of his more respectable siblings, demure younger sister Glory had traveled back to Gilead, Iowa and taken up residence in the old family house to care for her aged father.

That would be the Rev. Robert Boughton, retired Presbyterian minister, father of eight, widower, true believer and gentleman. It was he who loved Jack more than all his other children–Jack, the aforementioned prodigal, who had not even come home for his mother’s funeral. Yet such was the old man’s love that, were it not for his age and frailty, one might have witnessed him girding up his loins and racing down the quiet streets of Gilead to embrace his lost son with robe and ring and promise of fatted calf. Long had he waited. Long had he watched.

“At least you’re home,” he said, suggesting there was more to it than that. Indeed there was, as Rev. Boughton, Glory, and Jack himself would learn. In that scruffy old house, and on that unkempt property inhabited by ghosts of joy and regret (as much a character in this story as any of the individuals residing there) two worn and wounded middle-aged children and an elderly patriarch come to terms with their longings for home.

This is the profound, sad story Marilynne Robinson tells in Home: A Novel, a tale of three family members, their secrets, their conversations, meals, relationships, and their faith and questions.

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The Empty Church

(Chaplain Mike asked for family stories this week. Here is mine.)

I was born and raised (I always thought that sounded kind of funny—I thought barns and flags and hands were raised) in southwestern Ohio. Lebanon, Ohio to be exact. Some of my ancestors were among the first settlers of Lebanon and Warren County. According to my uncle Chester, we are related to most everyone in Lebanon in one way or another. I believe it.

Chester was the family’s genealogist for many years, and collected oral histories from those who are now long gone. Chester is now 89 and has passed the research torch to me. I spent several years digging into our past, mostly on the internet, and ended up writing a book for my cousins called Hathaway Road. In it I traced four branches of my family, one that goes back with reasonable assurance to Emperor Charlemagne. Funny though—the branch that I cannot trace very far is the Dunn lineage. The most reliable records only take me back six generations to Thomas Dunn who moved to Ohio from Virginia in 1812. Yet I continue to search for Thomas’ father and mother. I now have a container full of papers, family trees, and notes that perhaps will be passed on to one of my children to continue.

All of that was done online and on paper. The part of finding out about my ancestors I like the best is going to see where they lived. About ten years ago my dad, Chester, my uncle Willie and I took a day to visit all of the places these brothers had lived in and around Lebanon. Great stories were told—some of them might have even been true. Then we went further out into the farmlands to see where my great-great grandfather Walter Dunn lived, and past that a house my gr-gr-gr grandfather Amos Dunn built. Just beyond that house is a one-room school house buried in some trees. And just beyond that is … an empty church.

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Indulgences

As a follow-up to the post on Purgatory, and to fulfill the promise therein where I said we would speak of indulgences, here we treat of that most vexed topic.

Before we begin, an acknowledgement: Yes, there was Tetzel and the sale of indulgences for the dead and yes, Tetzel was in the wrong. You can’t just purchase an indulgence and bingo! Uncle Titus who got run over by the ox-cart before he finished his penance for being a miserly liar who cheated his employees, used false weights in his trading and cackled gleefully while twirling his moustache on the way home from evicting widows and orphans into the freezing, snowy night from their wretched hovels where he was a slum-lord, only pausing along the way to kick a three-legged puppy into the slush-filled gutter, is out of Purgatory! And yes, it was a fundraising push (though I find that the fundraising was in fact for the Archbishop of Mainz to pay off the Pope for giving him the archbishopric, not for the building of St. Peter’s as is commonly believed). So yes, it was an example of abusing both doctrine and the trust of the people for gain – like Chaucer’s Pardoner faking relics – or Prosperity Gospel hucksters, or those who apply Acts 19: 11-12 to healing prayer cloths, or “pray this prayer for 30 days and you will gain blessings” Prayer of Jabez-style regimens? Abusus non tollit usum and any doctrine can be abused.

As a side-note, if you ever come across anyone either in person or on the Internet offering to sell you Lourdes water, earth from the Mount of Olives, or stuff like this, this is a good indicator that they’re not kosher, if you will pardon the expression. That’s simony – so named after Simon Magus – and refers to selling sacred goods or offices for gain, and you are not permitted to sell holy water or relics or any such things. In other words, they can charge you for the container or the medal or the tin or the rosary beads, but the contents should come free, and you both have to be very clear that you’re selling the bottle, not the water. Any promises of miracles, blessings or divine intervention are, of course, completely bogus. You can’t guarantee mystical experiences with every souvenir). This also means that one day I’ll have to talk about relics, won’t I? I swear, I have no idea when I morphed into the Cranky Irish Woman version of the Catechism, but you can be assured that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, if they were aware of it, would probably be as unhappy about it as the rest of us.

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family. unique characteristics of each.

By Chaplain Mike

In our consideration of God’s common grace gift of family this week, I keep coming back to this sentence: “Bottom line, life is about how we deal with the family stuff, what we do with it, where we run from it, how we get reconciled to it.”

Today, we break down “the family stuff” into a few observable categories. Discuss any or all.

• • •

1. family size. Some families, like my own, are small, with only one or two siblings on most branches of the family tree. Our gatherings are modest affairs. In this mobile society, we are few and far between. My wife’s family, on the other hand, took “be fruitful and multiply” seriously. But then again, they have been farmers and rural folk, requiring many hands to harvest and tend to daily chores. At one recent event, celebrating two branches of the family, there was the possibility of over 800 people coming together. Small and large families carry different dynamics and yield different experiences.

2. table habits. In some homes and in some clans, the table is sacred. As much care is taken to prepare and enjoy breakfast and the midday meal together as with evening supper and Sunday dinner, it seems. You’d better have a good reason not to be present. In my wife’s extended family, everyday lunch (or dinner) looked to me like Thanksgiving, heaping plates of steaming hot food on generous platters. These tables served hard-working people who had risen long before light, feeding and tending to animals, cultivating fields and calloused hands, their work preventing the heat of the day.

Many families today struggle with the pace of urban and suburban life, the daily commute, the time demands of organized school and sports activities. The table is a lonely place. Instead, chauffeur (mom, dad, older sibling, or carpool driver) and children make a quick sprint through the drive-up lane, dropping paper waste and crumbs on the floor of the car, catching up on each other’s day through snatches of conversation at red lights, visiting with neighbors while watching football or band practice.

And “the table” can be everything in between. Table as cafeteria line. Pick up your food and carry it to your own TV tray. Table as occasional get reacquainted place. Table as “we’re going to have Sunday dinner together every week if it kills us” commitment. Table as eating out nearly all the time. But at least we’re together.

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Another Look: The Family (a trilogy)

giving-prodigal-son — The Prodigal Son, Swanson

By Chaplain Mike

Originally posted in April, 2010

• • •

THE FAMILY (A Trilogy)

I. The Younger

Here I am, father, at the eleventh hour once more,
Reaper’s scythe poised to harvest fruit of seeds I’ve sown.
Shamefaced, knowing full well the paucity of yield,
I slump low with downcast eyes, near resigned to table bare.
And perhaps this is that Hand–
Why should I escape heaven’s natural law?
What special exemption is stamped upon my page,
Faithless wayward child?

Yet something is that tells me I should rise,
Brush off the slop I’ve fed (which now appears my hope!)
Confess my riotous disregard of wisdom, prudence, love,
And manfully take up servitude low, secure.
I dare not ask for more!
Surely your face is turned toward those toiling well.
Surely you dine with those compliant, true,
Who honor the name they bear.

What right have I to hold within my heart
The slightest hope of more than stern offended gaze?
A rendezvous from which I shrink, besmirched and chastened;
And yet, am willing to accept my due.
So haltingly I walk–
Yet one more turn ahead before the sight.
Yet one more bridge to cross, a boundary long transgressed.
At sound of distant cry I lift my eyes.

Continue reading “Another Look: The Family (a trilogy)”

A Family Story from The Book of God

Chagall_56Bible_Abraham_Sar — Abraham and Sarah, Chagall

Today, a story about the family, by Walter Wangerin.

• • •

Soon after the destruction of Sodom, Abraham struck camp and traveled south into the Negev. Near Gerar he found new pasture for his flocks, so he stayed a while.

In the fall he and his men sheared the sheep, causing a daylong bawling from the terrified creatures while the women washed the fleeces clean of dirt and oils. They combed the wool out and packed it in bales. During the winter Abraham’s household transported it to the city of Gerar and bartered for articles of copper and bronze, tools, utensils, weapons, pottery–and perhaps something pretty for one’s wife if she were about to have a baby.

In the spring the sheep dropped new lambs.

And then the Lord kept his promise to Sarah.

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