Tag: Christianity

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A major, major answer to prayer came through today.  It was something that affects my ability to get work, so it could make quite a difference to the Pearse household finances over the next few months.   The diet coke will flow tonight!

When my mobile rang with the news, I was walking on a path through a churchyard in Norwich city centre, and I found it hard to refrain from a jig of joy.  (Passers-by, however, no doubt edged noticeably away from this capering, heavily muffled, manically grinning figure.)

I’d written this prayer off, you know.  I’d written “rejected” against it.  Literally written, in fact.

You see, I have a notepad by my bed, in case I think of something that I want to remember, and the prayer was on that.  I’d realised that I needed to pray for it one evening when in bed, and scribbled it in there.   Because there’s nothing worse than trying to fall asleep while trying to make sure you remember something, and many of my best ideas come to me in bed, or in the middle of the night, and I think of things  that I need to pray about.

After all, God does not answer all our prayers.  I didn’t hold it against Him, of course.  In many cases the things that we ask for would be bad for us.

But on this one, little did I know that matters were in hand.  Tonight I shall cross out “rejected” and write “fulfilled”.

I think that it is a good habit to write down what we have prayed for, and to tick them off as they are answered. God answers many more of our prayers than we realise, yet how many of us fire off a prayer and never think of Him again in that respect?  It builds confidence, once we realise that God is listening, and doing, much more for us than we might otherwise notice.

When the news came through, I promised two people on the other end a bottle of something as a solid form of thanks.  This led me to think that I need to thank God also.  Which means a donation to some useful charity.  There’s always the Salvation Army, or the London City Mission.

But I wish that I knew of a charity that helps people like me, rather than the poverty-stricken working class types.  The latter have many charities to help  them.  But I fear that a goodly number of university educated people need help and find it not.

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Not quite Tennyson

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In the Winter 2011 edition of Evergreen magazine, p.125, there appeared a poem which struck a chord with me.

End of the Day

Is anyone happier because you passed this way?
Does anyone remember that you spoke to them today?
The day is almost over, and its toiling time is through,
Is there anyone to utter now a kindly word to you?

Can you say in parting with the day that slipping fast
That you have helped a single person of the many you have passed?
Is a single heart rejoicing over what you did or said?
Does anyone who hopes were fading, now with courage look ahead?

Did you waste the day or use it?  Was it well or sorely spent?
Did you leave a trail of kindness, or a scar of discontent?
As you close your eyes in slumber, do you think that God would say,
That you have earned “tomorrow” by the way you lived today?

(Sent in by Mrs J. Rawsthorne of Rufford, Lancashire)

It’s unfortunate that the first two verses do not scan, but it’s still worth a read.

UPDATE: After posting this, I did a Google search and found that it is not original, and indeed is slightly corrupt, in that the verse does not scan.  The version I found online is also evidently corrupt, in that it also does not scan, but at different points.  By combining the two versions, I get this.

What did you do today?

Is anybody happier because you passed this way?
Does anyone remember that you spoke to them today?
The day is almost over, and its toiling time is through,
Is there anyone to utter now a kindly word of you?

Can you say tonight in parting with the day that’s slipping fast,
That you helped a single person of the many that you passed?
Is a single heart rejoicing over what you did or said?
Does the one whose hopes were fading now with courage look ahead?

Did you waste the day or use it? Was it well or sorely spent?
Did you leave a trail of kindness, or a scar of discontent?
As you close you eyes in slumber, do you think that you can say:
That you have earned “tomorrow” by the way you lived today?

It’s a small bit of textual criticism, perhaps; to use the metre to correct the versions.  It is my guess that the real title is “what did you do today”?

So… I wonder if we can locate the real original of these?  Clearly the original author was a poet, and belonged to a period when poetry was read.

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Eight Evil Thoughts

Posted on by Roger Pearse

An incoming link drew my attention to a wonderful series at Patristics and Philosophy, entitled Eight Evil Thoughts.  The summaries of each Evil Thought are marvellous!  The material is drawn from Evagrius.

Particularly interesting to me was the Sixth Evil Thought.  It is:

…a type of restlessness that comes upon the monk around noon. What generally happens is this. First, the monk begins to feel that the day is just dragging along or that the task set before him is too difficult. Then, the monk searches to see if any of the other monks are coming to visit him. If not, he returns to his task. However, soon there grows dissatisfaction with where he is at in his life and that none of the other monks care about him. If anyone has done him wrong, he begins to think on that which then leads to anger. Since where he is at now is so terrible, he dwells on thoughts of foreign places and thinks about how wonderful they would be. He then begins to rationalize the need to leave his current location…

I was tempted to replace the word “monk” with “programmer”.  I’ve worked in places like that, in truth!

One of the very nice elements of the series is the references, which include “ET” (which I think means “English translation”).  Far more blog posts should have these.  It is, in my opinion, a failing of WordPress and other blogging software that it is actually rather awkward to add footnotes. 

Returning to the subject, however, I think we need to be a little wary.  Asceticism is not the way that Christ preached, but is really borrowed from the world, I think.  But there is much practical wisdom to be found in these ideas for the Christian.

And for the programmer.

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The headline-grabbers of yesterday

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A curious and rather sad article by Mark Tooley, Celebrating the Resurrection, at the American Spectator, (via Curious Presbyterian):

The Jesus Seminar, founded in 1985 to adjudicate over which Scriptures were historically accurate, and which always excluded any talk about miracles, once gained widespread attention for its routine objections to traditional Christian belief.  “Christ’s Body Actually Eaten by Wild Dogs!” was a typical headline from a Jesus Seminar gathering, where liberal scholars would vote with color marbles over which biblical verses were valid.

Eventually these self-selected academics ran out of incendiary claims, and the media mostly stopped heeding their pronouncements after founder Robert Funk died in 2005, if not well before.  Co-founder and former Roman Catholic priest John Dominic Crossan, now about 76 years old, still soldiers on.  He and other kindred academics routinely speak around the nation, gathering usually small audiences of gray-headed, mostly retired clergy.

. . . Another aging survivor of the Jesus Seminar is nearly 80 year old retired Episcopal Church Bishop John Shelby Spong, though his fame preceded his induction.  In the 1980s and 1990s, while Bishop of Newark, Spong penned books speculating that the Virgin Mary was a prostitute impregnated by a Roman soldier, and that St. Paul was a self-hating homosexual, among other saucy assertions that once gained headlines but now excite yawns.  He earned audiences with Phil Donahue and other breathless talk show hosts, most of whom are now themselves faded from view.

Spong always claimed that “fundamentalist,” i.e. orthodox Christianity, was dying, and he was its savior.  That his New Jersey diocese lost 40 percent of its members while he was providing enlightened leadership as bishop never seemed to provoke self-reflection.  One bemused observer who recently went to hear him speak at a New Jersey college campus remarked he was able to locate the event by following the trail of “old people.”

Liberal revisionism was always mainly the project of upper middle class, white Mainline Protestants, with advanced degrees and a certain disdain for the ostensibly superstitious masses who heed a more literal version of Christianity.  The evangelical mega-churches of today’s America, not to mention the surging faith of Global South Christianity, especially in Africa, usually befuddle and irritate this audience, most of whom are now long retired.

. . . These “intellectual tyrants” were long ascendant in liberal Protestant academia for over a century.  Despite their decades of turgid exertions, the fully resurrected Jesus remains as captivating as ever.  Happy Easter!

In retrospect, it was all just an exercise in self-promotion, wasn’t it?  They were a small group of people, who found themselves in jobs where their personal beliefs were at odds with what they ought to believe.  They resented those who did believe it.  Feeling inferior, they decided to make themselves superior.  They decided to make money and have fun, in baiting those they resented.  They were trolls, in truth.  Now they’re all old, and tired, and washed-up.  And now what?  The TV news has moved on.  The excitment has gone.  They sit alone at home, wondering what happened.

To say “Darkness, be thou my Light”, for whatever reason, even frivolously, becomes a choice.  It involves taking a road which proves psychologically irreversible.

Is it really possible for a man to throw away a life of mocking something; and instead embrace it, submit to it?  I do not think so.  And so a choice, made perhaps lightly, determines a life, and, of course, a death.  The wrong choice can empty that life of value.

They sold themselves for the bright lights and the flattery.  The flatterers despised them, of course, even as they interviewed them; but Crossan and co never realised that.  As with all such bargains, they found that the sale was binding, but the money they received for their souls just evaporated from their hands.  The damned get nothing for their self-betrayal.

For all of them knew what they were doing was wrong.  How could they not?  Their consciences told them that it violated, in the simplest terms, the moral golden rule.

They chose not to listen.  They told themselves and others that it was not so.  But of course it was, and such choices have consequences.

May God have mercy on them.

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The need to uphold biblical inerrancy

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have just read an article at Cranmer’s Curate, Edmund Grindal and the need to uphold biblical inerrancy, with much interest.

 In the course of his spiritual reflections at Wycliffe, it struck your curate forcibly that the need for a clear conviction about biblical inerrancy is the underlying issue facing the modern Church.

Inerrancy is essentially the conviction that the Bible does not err in the theological, moral and historical truths that the God of all truth wishes to reveal to mankind this side of the Second Coming.

The word ‘inerrancy’ is one that I never came across as a young Christian.  I suspect it is the badge of a US position unfamiliar to me.

Nor do we need much familiarity with the fathers to know of the allegorical interpretations of the Old Testament by Origen and his school, but also that such an interpretation of Genesis could be regarded as ad litteram by Augustine. 

But in some ways whatever hesitations we might have about this miss the point.

The question is really whether we take our rule of life and thought from the bible, or from some approved subset of the customs and shibboleths currently in vogue in the society in which we happen to live.   Which of these twain is, for us, “the word of God”; “the laws of the Medes and the Persians”? 

Those seem to be the real choices before us.  And let us bear this in mind, in our own thoughts as much as in public debate. 

There is much too much writing which presumes that Christians must prove things, which leaves silent what the alternative is and what, if any, justification there might be for it.  It is possible, and common, for some to demand before agreeing that Christians must be able to prove X and Y and Z, to a level that a professor might find daunting, while at the same time accepting whatever is said on the TV evening news.  It is not unknown for Christians to do this to themselves!

There is very little that can be said for the conformity position, of course.  It is the lazy choice, usually, the path of least resistance, the path of convenience.  Let’s remember that, before we criticise ourselves.

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Very bad things happening in Britain to Christians

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The tide of public opinion in Britain is becoming increasingly hostile to Christianity.  In the last year the establishment has begun to move to force Christianity to the margins of society. 

The tool being used is “gay rights”, but of course it could be anything.  Everyone knows that Christianity condemns unnatural vice.  So, as in the days of the Restoration, the establishment has chosen something to which believers cannot agree, and is demanding that they do so.  When they refuse, they are dragged into court.  If they conform, they know in their own hearts that they have abandoned their beliefs.

In the last couple of years, Catholic adoption agencies have been forced to shut.  Christians offering Bed & Breakfast in their own homes have been prosecuted for refusing to offer double-beds to homosexual agents provocateurs. 

A couple of weeks ago a Christian couple who had fostered children for the local council for many years were struck off after refusing to say that they would tell future foster-children (aged under 10) that unnatural vice is OK.  They challenged this in court, on the grounds that this infringed their human rights, as it must obviously do.  But the judges cheerfully said that Britain is a secular country — which must come as a surprise to the Queen, who had to swear to uphold the established church — and that gay rights trump the right to religious freedom.  The sinister “Equality and Human Rights Commission”, a state body, delivered a submission to the court in which it expressed concern that the couple might “infect” the children with Christian beliefs.  Last week they withdrew the term, but not the idea.

Peter Hitchens has commented on the implications of all this here, although he sounds very tired of being tormented in the comments by atheist and gay headbangers and is not perhaps as calm and clear as he might be.  But the points made are spot on.

All this is under existing legislation.  It is sobering to reflect that the Labour government intended to go even further.  But many of us may have hoped that the election of a Conservative government would mark an end of this process.

Apparently not.  The Prime Minister, David Cameron, is reported as saying that the judgement was correct, and that, therefore, no Christian can foster children.

Just think about where we are so far.  Christians may not:

  • Run adoption agencies
  • Foster children
  • Rent out rooms to strangers

unless they undertake to endorse unnatural vice in the process.

This should sober us all.  It matters nothing what the vice is, that the state has chosen to make an article of faith.  It should trouble everyone that a state has decided to do this. 

Nor need we suppose that the list of prohibited professions is complete.  It is plainly merely a start.   The list will grow longer, of that we can have no doubt.  The message is plain: “conform … or face the consequences.”  The method chosen is not different, in any important regard, from that chosen by Julian the Apostate — to harass rather than imprison. 

I myself am unlikely to be affected very much, or until the process has gone much further, because of the nature of my profession.  But let us pray for those who are, and also for Britain.  For no country can decide to persecute the good folk among them, without suffering.  What goes around comes around.

While we remember the martyrs and confessors of antiquity, let us remember also the modern confessors.  Let us discuss the matter without reviling, and let us remember that the Lord predicted that they would hate us, for they hated him too.

UPDATE: Peter Saunders has a list with links of some of the climate-forming incidents here.  The eChurch blog has a list of blog posts commenting here.  Thankfully the widely-read Cranmer is one of them.

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Superstition and fraud: the saludadores of early modern Spain

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I picked up Arthur Bryant’s Samuel Pepys: the saviour of the navy from my shelves, and opened it at a passage where Pepys was travelling through Spain, while assigned to the evacuation of Tangier.  One of his aims was to investigate the Spanish saludadores — people supposed to have supernatural powers of healing.  He met one, who claimed to be able to stand in a red-hot oven unharmed, arranged for such an oven to be provided, and brought the saludador to it.  The latter confessed that it was merely an imposition on the credulity of the people.

I had never heard of these people before, and searched the web.  I found an academic article here by M. Tausier discussing them, and their powers of witch-finding — and the attitude of the ecclesisatical courts and the inquisition to  them.  Tausier records that ecclesiastical courts tended to investigate the claims, and recounts many instances of the saludador being convicted for fraud.

It is a salutory reminder to us all that people claiming the blessing of God sometimes do so purely for purposes of fraud.

 

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