Bible Schools

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Bible colleges divorced the study of the Bible, a religious enterprise, from the study of nature, human nature, and society, the so-called secular disciplines. Whether intended or not, such a divorce ironically reinforced the very process of secularization that evangelicals opposed.

~D.G. Hart, That Old-time Religion in Modern America – Evangelical Protestantism in the Twentieth Century, 50.

The Village Blacksmith

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Under a spreading chestnut-tree
The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands;
And the muscles of his brawny arms
Are strong as iron bands.

His hair is crisp, and black, and long,
His face is like the tan;
His brow is wet with honest sweat,
He earns whate’er he can,
And looks the whole world in the face,
For he owes not any man.

Week in, week out, from morn till night,
You can hear his bellows blow;
You can hear him swing his heavy sledge,
With measured beat and slow,
Like a sexton ringing the village bell,
When the evening sun is low.

And children coming home from school
Look in at the open door;
They love to see the flaming forge,
And hear the bellows roar,
And catch the burning sparks that fly
Like chaff from a threshing-floor.

He goes on Sunday to the church,
And sits among his boys;
He hears the parson pray and preach,
He hears his daughter’s voice,
Singing in the village choir,
And it makes his heart rejoice.

It sounds to him like her mother’s voice,
Singing in Paradise!
He needs must think of her once more,
How in the grave she lies;
And with his hard, rough hand he wipes
A tear out of his eyes.

Toiling, — rejoicing — sorrowing,
Onward through life he goes;
Each morning sees some task begin,
Each evening sees it close;
Something attempted, something done,
Has earned a night’s repose.

Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend,
For the lesson thou hast taught!
Thus at the flaming forge of life
Our fortunes must be wrought;
Thus on its sounding anvil shaped
Each burning deed and thought.


~ BY Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A House of Singing

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“I don’t remember that I ever have passed that house,” he said, “without hearing some one singing. Does it go on all the time?”
Yes, unless mother is sick.”
“And what is it all about?”
“Oh just joy! Gladness that we are alive, that we have things to do that we like, and praising the Lord.”
“Umph!” Said Mr. Pryor.
“It’s just letting out what our hearts are full of, “I told him. “Don’t you know that song: ‘Tis the old time religion
And you cannot keep it still?’ “

-Laddie

Christ is risen!

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Happy Easter, everyone!

What joy is ours, since we are Christians and have a God who would have His Son endure the pangs of death and the sin of the entire world, and then rise that we might rise with Him!

Many people talk (and have written) about how we ought not to put our joy in man or in material things. This is easy to see why, and yet we forget it often, and either trust and rely upon people or things we love to make us happy and joyful. But we would not have either without God! Our joy comes from Him and Him alone. Because Christ endured the cross and Sheol, we need not fear ever losing our joy. In Him we have risen and shall be resurrected!

Bach and World War II

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Even in the winter of 1940, it was difficult to buy or rent a piano; not that the Germans were responsible (their pillage was directed to more useful ends) but because music had become all at once a very real need: for many young Frenchmen J.S. Bach was a powerful and safe ally in the Resistance against Hitler.

H.I. Marrou; Earl F. Langwell, The Review of Politics, Vol. 8, No. 1. (Jan., 1946)

Speaking in Tongues

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There is, however, another dimension to this unusual phenomenon of speaking in tongues, if the tongues in view here and in the church at Corinth were in the nature of foreign languages. In discussing the question of tongues-speaking in 1 Corinthians 14, Paul cites Isaiah 28:11-12 (‘Through men of strange tongues and through the lips of foreigners I will speak to this people, but even then they will not listen to me’) and indicates that tongues are ‘a sign, not for believers but for unbelievers’ (1 Cor. 14:21-22)

Sinclair B. Ferguson, The Holy Spirit – Contours of Christian Theology, 61.

Death & Resurrection

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The one thing that is “not good” in the original creation is Adam’s loneliness. And how does God go about addressing that imperfection? He puts Adam into deep sleep, tears out a rib from his side, closes up the flesh, and builds a woman from the rib. The solution to what is “not good” is something like death, and something like resurrection.

That’s always the solution. When God sees that something is “not good” in us, in our life situation, He tends not to ease us into a new stage. He kills us, in order to raise us up again. That has to happen, because it is a universal truth that “unless the seed go into the ground and die, it cannot bear fruit.”

–Peter Leithart

Turning the Cheek

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A student, Daniel Foucachon, gave some very thoughtful perspectives on Jesus’ instructions in the Sermon on the Mount. He noted that Jesus is not commending non-resistance, but a particular kind of resistance. Our resistance is modeled on Jesus’ own; He conquered by going willingly to the cross, and He instructs us to do the same in the details of life.

Regarding the instructions to give more than adversaries ask, he points out that the Bible says the borrower is the slave of the lender. When we give more than is demanded of us, we become lenders and place our opponent in the place of a borrower. Giving more than asked thus reverses the power relationship, so that the “oppressed” takes mastery of the situation. We really do “overcome” evil with good.

-Dr. Leithart, Leithart.com

Of Bede, Malmesbury, & Hollister

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A Few Historical Personages

Ethelbert

  • King of Kent
  • Had a Christian wife, Bertha
  • Talked with Augustine, finally converted to Christianity and was baptized
  • Pope Gregory corresponded with this king
  • Died in 616 – he ruled for 56 years

    Edwin

  • Ruled over all England except Kent
  • Became a Christian through the teaching of Paulinus – baptized 627
  • Married Ethelbert’s daughter Ethelburh
  • King of Wessex sent Eomer to assassinate him
  • Received correspondence from Boniface and Honorius
  • Brought peace to Britain
  • Died in 633 at the Battle of Hatfield Chase

    Oswald

  • King of Northumbria
    “the most Christian king of the Northumbrians” – Bede
  • Asked for a bishop from Ireland (Aidan came)
  • Ruled 9 years
  • Killed at the battle of Maserfelth

    Alfred

  • d. 899
  • Crowned king by Pope Leo in 872
  • Son Edward took the throne in 901
  • Buried in Winchester
  • Occupied London 886

    Canute

  • Denmark / England
  • Reigned from 1016 – 1035
  • Laid everything to waste from Sandwich to Wessex -1016
  • 1017 – 1031 Reigned in England
  • Went to Rome in the fifteenth year of his reign – to atone for sins
  • Died and was buried at Winchester

    Edward the Confessor

  • Reigned 1042 – 1066
  • Son of Etheldred the Unready
  • Crowned at Winchester
  • Promised the kingdom first to William of Normandy, and then to Harold Godwin

    Harold Godwin

  • 1066 – was crowned Jan. 5, (having been promised the kingdom on the deathbed of Edward the Confessor
  • died in October 1066 at the Battle of Hastings, against William of Normandy (who was the first to be promised the kingdom by Edward the Confessor)

    William of Normandy (William the Conqueror)

  • Lived from 1035 to 1087
  • Ruled England from 1066 to 1087 after beating Harold Godwin at the Battle of Hastings
  • Ended Saxon age of England, fused Norman culture to that of England, thereby establishing the start of modern English culture

    William Rufus

  • William the Conqueror left the throne of England to Rufus
  • Rufus scorned religion, exploited the church, ruled with a rod of iron.
  • 1089 seized the lands of Canterbury
  • (Rufus was killed by an arrow while hunting.)

    Henry I

  • ruled from 1100 to 1135
  • Anselm threatened to excommunicate him in 1105 AD
  • Norman & Saxon combine under his reign, and he married a Saxon (Matilda)
  • “Henry I’s reign marks the coming of age of the royal administration. Indeed, some historians have sen it as the seedbed of the modern state. The functions of the royal household officials were growing in importance and specialization.” – Hollister, 135.

Homeschooling in Germany

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From The Washington Post:

Earlier this month, a German teen-ager was forcibly taken from her parents and imprisoned in a psychiatric ward. Her crime? She is being home-schooled.
On Feb. 1, 15 German police officers forced their way into the home of the Busekros family in the Bavarian town of Erlangen. They hauled off 16-year-old Melissa, the eldest of the six Busekros children, to a psychiatric ward in nearby Nuremberg. Last week, a court affirmed that Melissa has to remain in the Child Psychiatry Unit because she is suffering from “school phobia.”
Home-schooling has been illegal in Germany since Adolf Hitler outlawed it in 1938 and ordered all children to be sent to state schools. The home-schooling community in Germany is tiny. As Hitler knew, Germans tend to obey orders unquestioningly. Only some 500 children are being home-schooled in a country of 80 million. Home-schooling families are prosecuted without mercy.
Last March, a judge in Hamburg sentenced a home-schooling father of six to a week in prison and a fine of $2,000. Last September, a Paderborn mother of 12 was locked up in jail for two weeks. The family belongs to a group of seven ethnic German families who immigrated to Paderborn from the former Soviet Union. The Soviets persecuted them because they were Baptists. An initiative of the Paderborn Baptists to establish their own private school was rejected by the German authorities. A court ruled that the Baptists showed “a stubborn contempt both for the state’s educational duty as well as the right of their children to develop their personalities by attending school.”

HT: Right Mind

Lordship of Jesus Christ

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This world belongs to our Saviour, and we have been given custodial charge of it. We are responsible to him for how we use it. The problem of sin includes not only questions of personal morality but also the careless use of Christ’s environment. A host of matters, in the personal, political and social arenas, are transformed when we see Christ’s mediatorial kingship in this way.

-Robert Letham,
The Work of Christ – Contours of Christian Theology, 208.