Monthly Archives: November 2009

Presbyterianism = the haunting fear someone somewhere might hear unmediated Scripture?

1 Reply

From James Hastings Nichols, Corporate Worship in the Reformed Tradition, p. 102-103.

“Lecturing” was a running exposition of Scripture and was especially popular through the system of Puritan [i.e. not Presbyterian] “lectureships,” of endowed preaching posts outside the regular benefices.  The Directory permitted lecturing, but specified that Scripture was to be expounded, it should wait till the end of the chapter.  What was merely permissive soon became general practice.  The minister added an expository “lecture” to his reading of Scripture in addition to the sermon.  The Scots Assembly had to set the hour for morning worship half an hour earlier to accomodate the additional time added by the “lecturing.”

Scottish Episcopalians were better Presbyterians in worship

Leave a reply

From James Hastings Nichols, Corporate Worship in the Reformed Tradition, p. 109.

…in most cases the legatees of the Westminster Assembly Puritans did not care to maintain the full prescriptions of the Directory.  The anti-liturgical current moved most of them still farther to the left.  Perhaps the most faithful exponents of the Directory after the Restoration were the Episcopalian minority in Scotland, who were distinguished, not by the Anglican prayer book, which they did not follow, but by their use of the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, and the “Glory be to the Father” in a service modeled on the Westminster Directory.  The Church of Scotland itself had by the end of the century come close to the position maintained by the Congregationalists against the Presbyterians at the Westminster Assembly.  Presbyterians generally gave up the liturgical use of the Lord’s Prayer, despite the recommendations of the Directory, and adopted the Congregationalist fear of the uncommented reading of Scripture.  And eighteenth-century Scottish Presbyteians could get into trouble for following the instructions in the Directory as to reading Scripture and using the Lord’s Prayer.  Even metrical psalmody suffered.  The custom of “lining out,” conceded by the Directory in cases “where many in the congregation cannot read,” became the normal practice in Scotland and America in Presbyterian and Congregational churches.

Huguenot Psalmody and Illegal Whistling

Leave a reply

Many of these melodies are very vigorous. This is often not recognized, because in many traditions the tunes are sung slowly, and often with simplified rhythm. However, in their original rhythms, at a brisk ‘folk-song’ tempo, some can be hair-raising, such as Psalms 2, 47, 99, or 148. It was not for nothing that Queen Elizabeth disdained them as “Genevan jigs.” Psalm 68 was sung by the French Calvinists (Huguenots) going into battle. This association became so strong that in certain places even whistling the tune was outlawed.

source

Huguenots v. Puritans

Leave a reply

From James Hastings Nichols, Corporate Worship in the Reformed Tradition, p. 109.

Some measure of the revolution effected by the Puritan movements in Reformed worship can be seen in the contrast with the French experience.  When the storm troopers of the Counter-Reformation drove the Huguenots by the thousands into exile abroad in the 1680’s, many were brought into contace with the churches of England and her American colonies.  Although they were scarcely prepared to accept the Arminianism introduced by the court into Anglicanism in the 1620’s and [that was] virtually official since the Restoration, they found the worship of the English Presbyterians and Congregationalists equally alien.  In worship, the Book of Common Prayer seemed closer to the Calvinist heritage than did anti-liturgical Puritanism.

Congregational Psalmody in the Huguenot Church

Leave a reply

From James Hastings Nichols, Corporate Worship in the Reformed Tradition, pp. 58, 59.

The Huguenots quite caught Calvin’s concept of congregational psalmody.  It became their hallmark, in homes, in corporate worship, or on the battlefield.  The French Discipline required all to own and bring their liturgical psalters, and to share in the singing.  The synods took the sung prayers very seriously.  Figeac censured the practice of lining out (1579).  Rochelle censured those who did not sing in service (1581).  Synods o fthe early seventeenth century required the use of the whole psalm and ruled against the use of one or two stanzas only.  They were not strictly held to the psalms.  Beza had introduced some hymns and these were authorized by the synod of Montpellier (1598).  However, in general, little but psalms were sung in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French Reformed Church.

Huguenot Psalter in Martyrdom and Resistance

1 Reply

From James Hastings Nichols, Corporate Worship in the Reformed Tradition, pp. 38-40

As the staple of private and family  as well as of the services of the church, the psalms became known to many by heart.  No other book of the Old Testament, at least, could rival the psalms in the affections and knowledge of the Reformed laymen.  Ministers frequently preached from the Psalms also; the psalter was the only Old Testament book on which Calvin preached on Sundays.  For every occasion, it seems, an appropriate verse would leap to the tongue of a Huguenot.  And all over France, wherever Huguenots of the first generation were confined, often sometimes by the score, guards and jailers became familiar with the psalms, even to prisons on Santo Domingo and Martinique.  The colporteurs who carried the psalters, with Bibles and catechisms, all over France, were frequently caught and burned. Many martyrs died with the words of the Apostles’ Creed, but it is surprising to see what a range of the psalter was drawn on by others.

The courage and joy of these martyrs who, like the ancient Christians, could have had release for a word, won converts among the onlookers.  The authorities tried gags, but the cord would burn and from out of the smoke the psalm would again begin.  The bishops then ordered that the tongues of the Huguenots should be cut out before they were burned.  This became the general practice.  At Orange, peices were torn from the Bible and psalters and forced into the mouths and wounds of the victims.  “Eat your fill; tell your God to come rescue you.”

When the fifty-seven Protestants of Meaux were led off to the dungeon they lamented (to use a modern English version [I’m using the ESV–MH]):

O God, the nations have come into your inheritance;
they have defiled your holy temple;
they have laid Jerusalem in ruins.
They have given the bodies of your servants
to the birds of the heavens for food,
the flesh of your faithful to the beasts of the earth.

The fourteen of them who were later led out to execution sang on from the same psalm until their tongues were cut out:

Why should the nations say,
“Where is their God?”
Let the avenging of the outpoured blood of your servants
be known among the nations before our eyes!
Let the groans of the prisoners come before you;
according to your great power, preserve those doomed to die!

When Armed resistance began, Psalm 68 became the “Huguenot Marseillaise”[vv 1-2]:

God shall arise, his enemies shall be scattered;
and those who hate him shall flee before him!
As smoke is driven away, so you shall drive them away;
as wax melts before fire,
so the wicked shall perish before God!

At the battle of Coutras, the Reformed soldiers knelt and prayed and sang.  Roman Catholic courtiers, observing, cried out that they were afraid and were confessing, but a more experienced officer said it was not so.  They were singing [Psalm 118.24-25]:

This is the day that the Lord has made;
let us rejoice and be glad in it.
Save us, we pray, O Lord!
O Lord, we pray, give us success!

To know and love the psalms was the mark of the Protestant.  The use of the psalter became a significant issue in the long nibbling away of the assurances of the Edict of Nantes.  In 1623 singing of psalms was forbidden in the streets and shops.  In 1657 it was prohibited at executions; in 1658, anywhere outside “temples,” as Protestant places of worship must be called.  In 1659 psalms could not even be sung privately if audible outside, and in 1661 the singing of psalms anywhere in French territory became a felony.

Does state help the poor or does it help businesses?

Leave a reply

Following up on my last post, I started reading this paper.  It looks quite good but it brings up an idea that I think needs to be challenged:

To assist low-wage workers and their families, the federal and state governments provide a set of “work supports”—benefits such as earned income tax credits, child care subsidies, health care coverage, food stamps, and others.

But do these things really “assist low-wage workers”?  How about this: They enable companies to keep labor costs low. eve

All these things that workers need to pay for are supposed to put upward pressure on wages.  By paying for these things, the state takes away this pressure.  Worse, it pays for these “work supports” by either taxing others–which further puts downward pressure on the lower wages–or by inflation which hits the lower end most heavily on average.

These are business subsidies.  In fact, they even make it harder for the work force to move elsewhere.  Servile state, anyone?

The trap set for the poor

1 Reply

I’ve been pretty skeptical/opposed to preaching a “benefits revolution” for some time now.  I see it as abuse of the poor by middle class Christians (who get plenty of benefits themselves that they don’t feel guilty about).

But this post almost changes my mind:

Despite the EITC and child credit, the poverty trap is still very much a reality in the U.S. A woman called me out of the blue last week and told me her self-sufficiency counselor had suggested she get in touch with me. She had moved from a $25,000 a year job to a $35,000 a year job, and suddenly she couldn’t make ends meet any more. I told her I didn’t know what I could do for her, but agreed to meet with her. She showed me all her pay stubs etc. She really did come out behind by several hundred dollars a month. She lost free health insurance and instead had to pay $230 a month for her employer-provided health insurance. Her rent associated with her section 8 voucher went up by 30% of the income gain (which is the rule). She lost the ($280 a month) subsidized child care voucher she had for after-school care for her child. She lost around $1600 a year of the EITC. She paid payroll tax on the additional income. Finally, the new job was in Boston, and she lived in a suburb. So now she has $300 a month of additional gas and parking charges. She asked me if she should go back to earning $25,000. I told her that she should first try to find a $35k job closer to home. Also, she apparently can’t fully reverse her decision to take the higher paying job because she can’t get the child care voucher back (the waiting list is several years long she thinks). She is really stuck. She tried taking an additional weekend job, but the combination of losing 30 percent in increased rent and paying for someone to take care of her child meant it didn’t help much either.

Basically, we have a system that pays people to stay poor.  It is a system, incidentally, that also supports higher economic groups: those who manage these bribes-for-poverty program, and an educational establishment to train the bribers.

How do you save people from this without making them feel bad for receiving the benefits that they lose when they get a better job?!

We act like we are soooo superior to the societies of the past with their lords and landed serf.  What hypocrisy.

Have I mentioned today how much I hate the state?

Remembering Tolkien’s killed friends

4 Replies

Among young men in Britain, 1 in 8 were killed in WWI. However, among those going to Oxford, Cambridge and their feeder schools, the number rises to 1 in 5. The leadership class, for all its flaws, took a lead in the risks of war.

One might wonder what would happen in a society when its more educated class virtually never went to war and never took the riskier tasks in any war. What sort of foreign policy decisions would such leaders make?

The Future of Jesus, 4: Will He Make a Difference in the World?

2 Replies

First Post in Series

Second Post in Series

Third Post in Series

The Great Commission tells Christians to persuade people to become disciples of Jesus and train them to obey everything that Jesus commands because he has won all authority in Heaven and on Earth.  Yet somehow we are supposed to believe that God wants some kind of minority of Christians throughout world history and is content to allow the majority of the Human race to manage its own affairs independently.  This brings out a weirdly paradoxical attitude in which “the world” is looked down upon as sinful and yet is also seen as having the ability to live without God or his son.

Would this view make any sense in Athens that served under a Roman Emperor who claimed to be divine and in which the city civic ceremonies were to other gods?  Paul preached,

Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.

No one could have possibly heard in this a call for people to have a new private religious experience.  Paul was talking to the residents of a city named after one of those imaginary divinities. He was calling Athens to become Christopolis.

So we see the same in Ephesus where, though the city is not named for Artemis, she is still the civic deity:

About that time there arose no little disturbance concerning the Way. For a man named Demetrius, a silversmith, who made silver shrines of Artemis, brought no little business to the craftsmen. These he gathered together, with the workmen in similar trades, and said, “Men, you know that from this business we have our wealth. And you see and hear that not only in Ephesus but in almost all of Asia this Paul has persuaded and turned away a great many people, saying that gods made with hands are not gods. And there is danger not only that this trade of ours may come into disrepute but also that the temple of the great goddess Artemis may be counted as nothing, and that she may even be deposed from her magnificence, she whom all Asia and the world worship.”  When they heard this they were enraged and were crying out, “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!”

The consistent portrayal in Acts is that the Apostles are constantly in danger of a) being accused of treason for “acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus” and b) for disrupting the economy.  One of those disruptions involved a slave girl who was demon possessed.  While in the gospels this would be an “unclean spirit,” Luke uses a different description: she has a “spirit of divination,” or literallistically, a spirit of Pythia.  This is a reference to the spiritualist center of the Classical Roman world.  “Pythian” means “Of or relating to Delphi, the temple of Apollo at Delphi, or its oracle.”  Clearly, the way the healing power of the Gospel disrupted an economy of slavery and demonic possession is meant to be understood as the threat that Christianity represented to the entire Classical world.

It is worth noting that Paul not only preached against the idols in Athens, but preached in the synagogues because of the idols in Athens:

Now while Paul was waiting for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him as he saw that the city was full of idols. So he reasoned [1] in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons, and [2] in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there.

Taking this sentence at face value, Paul saw the predominance of idolatry in the public square and in private to be a sign that something was lacking in the synagogue.

What seems to have happened is that there has been incomplete but widespread discipleship of the nations.  Now that we have fallen into an era of unbelief, no one wants to credit Jesus with the things that work about he world.  So we have been encouraged to believe that such culture is “natural” and “neutral” and properly belongs to an alleged “secular” space.

But this isn’t a rational perspective on the way the world really is.  Jesus has made the difference and Jesus will do even more in the future.  Jesus expects disciples to recruit other disciples personally, and to live as disciples in every aspect of life.  The great abuses and misunderstandings that can result can never justify disregarding Jesus’ orders to those who claim to follow him.

If there was ever a time when God allowed human societies to exist apart from loyalty to him, that time is over.  God now expects everyone to acknowledge the Lordship of His Son and to obey Him.

Fifth Post in Series

Sixth Post in Series

Seventh Post in Series