Great post from Richard John Neuhaus, editor in chief of First Things
How, in the right ordering of our loves and loyalties, the Church gives effective expression to being a distinct society within the societies of the world is the burden of American Babylon and, I would add, the defining mission of First Things. It is the question that the Church has been addressing in a multitude of different ways over the centuries. My disagreements with Stanley Hauerwas are to be understood within the context of our agreement on the perennial question of how the Church orders its life as a “contrast society” in distinction from all temporal sovereignties. To be a Christian is to be out of step, until, as St. Paul writes to the Philippians, every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord (Phil. 2:10-11).
Meanwhile, and as members of the “contrast society” that the Church is to be, Christians exercise the courage of their convictions in trying to bring clear reason and moral truth to bear in the temporal order. This is the mission betrayed by Catholics and others who resort to embarrassingly contrived complexifications in order not to be seen as adherents of “single-issue politics” in a political season in which we are confronted by the starkest alternatives on the single issue that distinguishes the culture of life from the culture of death.
Just like you, I’ve heard all the rhetoric about “a strong middle class” being the engine of growth, etc. But one gets the sense that all of this talk is simply polite speak for worldliness and selfishness and comfort-seeking and big-house-buying, SUV-driving, flat-screen-TV-watching gratification of the flesh. Bound up in that phrase, “the middle class,” is a certain view of the “good life” that exalts worldly and passing comforts over the truly good life of faith in Christ, advancement of the gospel, sacrifice for the kingdom, and serving those in need. And you get the sense that many Christians have bitten and swallowed that bait and are hooked by the world’s lure.
God is doing sermon preparation when your throat is blazing with yellow pustules and you have a fever and you feel like quitting. He is doing sermon preparation there. Don’t begrudge the seminary of suffering. Don’t begrudge the marriage difficulties. Don’t begrudge the parental stuff that is so hard. He is making you a preacher. He is making you a pastor.
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I do APTAT, before I stand up.
A—I admit, O Lord, that I can do nothing of any lasting value.
P—I pray for self forgetfulness, for fullness of the Holy Spirit, for love, for humility, for passion, for zeal, for prophetic utterance that may come to my mind while I am preaching so that I can say things that I hadn’t prepared that might penetrate where nothing else would.
T—I trust a particular promise from the Lord that I have found in my devotions early in the morning.
A—Then you act.
T—Thank God. And when you have acted and you go sit down, you thank him. He is going to do, and is doing what he is going to do, and he regularly does more than you think he does.
The new book is entitled The Prodigal God and it should be out October 30. It is an expansion of my sermon on the Prodigal Son parable in Luke 15. Kathy and I have long felt that this was the clearest and best single exposition of the gospel I’ve been able to do over the years. My interpretation of the parable was originally based on a sermon called “Sharing the Father’s Welcome” that I heard preached by Dr. Edmund P. Clowney over 35 years ago. That sermon had a profound impact on how I preached for the rest of my ministry. In some ways the teaching of this sermon is at the very foundation of Redeemer’s ministry. I have preached on the text three times at Redeemer over the years. The initial time was in the first several weeks of our church’s life in 1989.The second was about ten years later, and the last time was to start off the 2005 Vision Campaign. Each time I felt God helping me get deeper into the meaning of the story. .After the 2005 sermon, I began to turn it into a short book.
What’s the book about? It’s about being ‘prodigal.’ The word ‘prodigal’ is an English word that means recklessly extravagant, spending to the point of poverty. The dictionaries tell us that the word can be understood in a more negative or a more positive sense. The more positive meaning is to be lavishly and sacrificially abundant in giving. The more negative sense is to be wasteful and irresponsible in one’s spending. (Some people think prodigal means ‘wayward,’ but there is no dictionary that indicates that the word means ‘immoral.’) The negative sense obviously applies to the actions of the younger brother in the Luke 15 parable. But is there any sense in which God can be called ‘prodigal’? I think so.
First, the elder brother is offended by the father’s extravagant and (to him) irresponsible welcome of his younger brother. The father, of course, represents God, and legalists are always offended by the gospel of free grace. They see it as wasteful and unfair. After all, they worked for their acceptance. These are the people to whom Jesus was telling the parable in the first place—the Pharisees who objected to Jesus’ lavish grace to tax collectors and sinners. They certainly thought Jesus was being far too free and irresponsible with the love and favor he was promising them from God. Jesus depicts them in the parable as the elder brother upset with his father’s prodigality.
Second, the positive meaning of the term ‘prodigal’ is definitely true of God. He spent himself to the uttermost on the Cross. He did so ‘recklessly’ in the sense that he did not reckon the cost to himself. Jesus was someone who spent himself into helpless poverty (2 Corinthians 8:9) and was ‘in want’ in the most extreme way.
So the title ‘Prodigal God’ calls attention not only to the mistaken way that legalists regard God’s gospel of grace, but also to how Jesus, though he was rich, spent everything without thought for himself, that we might be saved. Charles Spurgeon’s sermon on this text was entitled ‘Prodigal Love for the Prodigal Son,’ which sums up well all the senses of the word in one sentence.
During the years I was working on these two books, my provisional titles were “The Gospel for Non-believers” (The Reason for God) and “The Gospel for Believers” (The Prodigal God.) This second book is my way of doing what Martin Luther directed us Christian ministers to do. “This…truth of the gospel…is also the principal article of all Christian doctrine, wherein the knowledge of all godliness consists. Most necessary it is, therefore, that we should know this article well, teach it unto others, and beat it into their heads continually.” [From - redeemer.com]
Josh Harris’ church is beginning a fantastic series to memorize ten hymns. Here is his intro
At our church we sing many different songs in many different musical styles. We sing a good number of hymns. But this year we’d like to deepen our appreciation and love for some great hymns. So in the coming year I’m going to challenge members of our church to memorize ten of the best Christian hymns. The plan, led by Bob Kauflin and Ken Boer, is to record the hymns this summer on a CD that will produced by two gifted musicians in our church—Dave Campbell and Roger Hooper—and will feature the voices of members of the congregation. Then, after we distribute the CD to the church, we’ll set a schedule of memorizing one each month. [From Top 10 Hymns (Josh Harris)]
In my estimation, marginalization and oppression can ultimately be traced to a combination of sin and raw physical power. White Europeans oppressed Native Americans both because they wanted to, and because they could (they had greater physical superiority through weaponry and numbers). We in the United States enslaved Africans for the same reason. It is latent within the fallen psyche for the greater to oppress the weaker. Simply put, to the strong goes the spoils.
In my mind, this same dialect between physical power and oppression applies to the relationship between the sexes. In 1 Peter 3:7, Peter refers to the woman as the “weaker” vessel. It seems evident the weakness Peter has in mind is physical (as opposed to moral, intellectual, or spiritual weakness). It is because of this weakness that women so often suffer under the hands of men. And I am not referring simply to physical suffering. Historically speaking, virtually every culture has marginalized women. At a root level, it is because men are physically stronger than women that women are marginalized. If women possessed the same physical power as men, oppression and marginalization would be not take place. Of course, the relationship between physical power and oppression is masked in our civilized, Christian/post-Christian, law-abiding culture. But the privileged status of women within our culture is only there because of the thin veneer of civilization that masks and restrains the Beelzebub that lies beneath the male psyche. It is in fact, only in a civilized culture that protects the equality of women with the use of force that we can even have a discussion about the equality of men and women. So what are we to make of the inherent physical inequality that exists between men and women? Should we be for it or against it?
Lest we suppose that the greater physical strength of the man is a product of the fall, it seems evident that the vulnerability of the woman is part of God’s original design. Too often the complementarian/egalitarian debate gets lost in a discussion about what should be, rather than embracing what is. Peter is not saying that women should be vulnerable before men; he is saying that they are. There is nothing that we can do to change this reality. I often get the sense when interacting with egalitarians that they resent the vulnerability of the woman before the man. For many egalitarians, equality of power is the ultimate goal. As long as the woman is vulnerable before the man, the egalitarian goal has not been realized. Complete independence from the power of men is what this form of egalitarianism seeks. But God does not desire the woman to be independent from the man (or man from the woman). He detests the abuse of power to be sure, but the imbalance of physical power is by his design. I fear that many egalitarians are balking at an inevitable God-ordained inequality, when what they should be fighting against is the abuse of this inequality.
In light of such chronic abuse, one appropriately wonders why God created women with an inherent physical weakness that so easily translates into marginalization. Why make one sex vulnerable before the other? I think that there is no way of satisfactorily answering this question—or the questions regarding “gender roles”—without considering the typological relationship that exists between human gender and the divine anti-type. God created the woman to be vulnerable and dependent upon the man as a reflection of the Church’s vulnerability and dependence upon Christ. It should not be our goal to help women be less vulnerable before men—which is physically impossible anyway—but rather to work toward the realization of the image of Christ’s self-sacrificial relationship to the Church.
Women by their very nature will always be vulnerable before men. The call of Christ is not to pursue an ill-fated attempt to abolish this vulnerability, but rather to protect and honor women in the midst of it . The man is to use his God-given strength for the exaltation and honoring of the woman. This is the way of Christ, who used his greater power for the exaltation and honoring of his beloved.
It is very bad theology to suggest that the controversy over the reception of Holy Communion by Catholic politicians who actively support the abortion license is a matter of “using the sacrament as a political tool.” On the contrary, it is a question of maintaining the integrity of the church’s central act of worship, and of calling Catholics with an ill-formed sense of the moral requirements of both faith and reason to a serious examination of conscience. As for divisiveness, well, there are times when bishops are morally required to be “divisive,” as when Catholic bishops deliberately “divided” their flocks on the question of the segregation of Catholics schools by excommunicating segregationists.
The root of the problem is a culture in which Americans live beyond their means, in the moment, without taking any responsibility for their actions, and assume that American ingenuity will find a way to fix the problem somewhere down the road — at somebody else’s expense.