Cotton Mather's hot tips for homeschooling (sort of)

The following excerpts are all from The First American Evangelical: A Short Life of Cotton Mather, by Rick Kennedy.

Speaking of Cotton Mather’s upbringing, Kennedy notes how both sides of Cotton Mather’s ancestors had a “multi-generational reputation for being soft on children.”  I suppose we might qualify that by saying that they were soft for 17th century Puritans.  But the tenor of their home was loving:

Richard Mather, the first Mather in America, wrote on the importance of cherishing one’s children, especially by talking and praying with each child individually.  Cotton grew up in a home where both his parents went out of their way to talk to him and pray with him….  Later in life Cotton Mather carried on family tradition by advising parents that “Our authority should be so tempered with kindness, that our children may fear us with delight, and see that we love them with as much delight.”  What Cotton experienced in his own home growing up he carried over into the pulpit as a minister.  God was a good parent whose power was tempered with kindness, meekness, and tenderness.  Delight should be the character of the bond between creator and creature. 

                                                                                                                               (p. 8)

Kennedy describes the education of a Puritan home.

            Beginning with reading and writing, Puritan education quickly turned to memorizing catechisms.  Catechisms are a type of song, a memorized call and response between a teacher and student.  They introduce children to precise information that society agrees upon….  Catechisms are especially good for affirming traditions of knowledge.  Two people at minimum, but the more the merrier, is the ideal for catechism.  One person calls the question, and others call back the answer.  Nobody is learning to think individualistically or critically.  Nobody is learning to think like a philosopher.  Everybody is learning to think within a tradition of shared knowledge.  Everybody is affirming out loud and in the same rhythm what everybody already knows. 

                                                                                                                            (pp. 9-10)

But teaching children at home was not only about learning shared doctrinal truths about God.  It was also about bringing a child to a right relational orientation toward God, about directing them toward salvation and a personal relationship with God.  

            Along with memorizing catechisms, children were also supposed to learn at home the skills of being “wise unto salvation.”  This began with training infants to be obedient, kind, and patient, to which were added skills of self-examination, spiritual observation, and prayer…. Children were supposed to learn that spiritual warfare wages within them and around them.  Children needed to learn how to weigh both their holiness and their sinfulness…. Children should be encouraged to act “with all possible gravity” and be sensitive to the fact that their souls hung in a balance.  God must choose them for salvation.  In some children this could encourage despair, but it was supposed to encourage hope.  God is good.  “God hath made me, He keepeth me, and He can save me.”  Children were also taught that they were never alone.  This would help them be good and also feel safe.  “Dear children,” Cotton’s grandfather wrote, “Behave yourselves as having the angels of God looking upon you, the angels of God looking after you!”  Prayer was taught from the first day of life.  Young children were not only taught to pray but also to expect answers.  God wanted a two-way relationship with each and every child.

                                                                                                                       (pp. 10-11)

           

Before attending Harvard, Cotton’s grammar school teacher, Ezekiel Cheever, believed that the student’s affections and not only their understanding had to be involved in learning.  Learning is not merely academic, in other words, but also spiritual.

What Cotton did for American evangelical education was to articulate powerfully his own experience in Cheever’s classroom.  It was there that Cotton found a teacher who taught his students “how to make prayers out of what they read.”  It was there that Cotton saw a schoolmaster who was not “so swallowed up with other learning, as to forget religion, and the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures.”  In grammar school Cotton experienced a teacher who wanted to bring children to Christ because through Christ all things become best known.

                                                                                                                         (pp. 13-14)

In a passage that resonates with the famous scene in C.S. Lewis’s, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, where Peter and Susan consult Professor Kirk about Lucy’s stories of finding a world in the wardrobe vs. Edmund’s denial of such a place, and the professor (lamenting that they don't teach logic in school anymore) judges their respective testimonies not based on what seems more rational but based on what better accords with logic – whose testimony is more likely to be true based on which of the two siblings is usually most truthful and honest – here is an excerpt about the reliability of testimony and social or traditional knowledge vs. purely individual rationality:

[Through his father’s catechizing] a foundation of social thinking was being established in Cotton Mather’s mind that would always uplift the authority of the Bible, Christian tradition, neighborhood fellowship, and congregational life.  “Inartificial argument” was an old Latin name for what we might describe as information known socially, the kind of information that a single person cannot think up by himself or herself but has to learn from other people in the form of books, maps, or conversation.  In courtrooms, what the jury learns from witnesses is “inartificial.”  History and geography are the school subjects most obviously learned by inartificial means.  In churches people learn from each other about God’s recent activities by inartificial means.  The events of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection are learned by inartificial means.  Using what was called in Mather’s textbook the “rule of reciprocation,” the credibility of a witness’s testimony depends more upon the trustworthiness of the person testifying than the seeming incredibility of the testimony.  For example, if trustworthy neighbors tell Cotton – as they would later in his life – that they saw a girl levitate to the ceiling of her room, Cotton should not judge the credibility of the story based on whether levitation is impossible or not; rather, the credibility of the story is based on whether the eyewitnesses are conscientious men and women who can be trusted to tell the truth.  Cotton knew of levitation – the ascension – of Jesus in a similar way: by means of trustworthy eyewitness reports written in the Bible.  By the reciprocation rule in logic, the appropriate first question should not be whether the even it impossible; rather, the listener should first question the trustworthiness of the source of the information.  If the eyewitnesses are trustworthy, then the report should at least by entertained as probably true.

                                                                                                         (pp. 21-22)

In a passage that reminds us that “Evangelical” was not always associated with individual interpretation of Scripture, or with technique over tradition, regarding the socialness of learning/knowledge, and talking about Cotton Mather’s learning of Logic, or Dialectic, or the Art of Thinking, Kennedy comments:

The Harvard curriculum placed a high value on teaching “reasonableness.”  This felicitous term described something both bigger and softer than hard and narrow rationality.  Cotton learned at Harvard that knowledge, like politics, was a fellowship.

          Cotton learned in his logic classes that a lone and anti-social boy could be a great mathematician, a rational genius, and even a brilliant thinker, but no such boy could be the wise leader of a state or the pastor of a church.  The most common analogy used for teaching reasonableness was courtroom jurisprudence: witnesses introduce external information into the court, prosecutors and defenders analyze the information, judges set rules of evidence and certainty, and a jury decides by consensus.  Truth rises out of the interaction of many people.  Jurisprudence – like the leading of a state, a church, or a family – was too important to leave up to a lone individual thinking rationally.

          Another analogy for social reasonableness that Cotton learned at Harvard was the classical tradition of bee imagery.  Working together, bees gather pollen (information) from widely diverse sources, organize the pollen in a honeycomb (a book or library), and, mysteriously, honey is produced.  Books that gather together diverse information and libraries that gather together many books are “honey-producing”: they are “inspired” in a mysterious way.  Going to college was bee-like and honey-producing.  Education in all the liberal arts, reading in the library, living with other students and the tutors was inspirational.  Cotton wrote that he loved large encyclopedia-style books because each was like a “hive.”  Such books gathered together the thoughts of many authors from multiple books.  The Bible was the greatest of all hives.  The canon of books in the Bible was a honeycomb of entangled divine and human testimony that was uniquely inspired in such a way as to be “infallible.”  An individual using his intuition, mind, and senses could think with pure human reason and claim to be rational; however, reasonableness was social.  At Harvard Cotton learned mathematics and philosophy and the high arts of individual rationality; however, he also learned that if he aspired to be a pastor or a civic leader, he needed to cultivate the social art of reasonableness. 

          Throughout Cotton’s most important books he would always be careful to follow the rules of social logic.  He became a great gatherer of trustworthy information and a consensus-builder of judgment.  In the pulpit he upheld the Bible as divine testimony.  In a book he titled Reasonable Religion, he declared that Christians are not reasonable “if we don’t receive that book which we call the Bible, or, the Scripture, as a Divine Testimony.”  Note that Christians “receive” the book as a community rather than individually interpret, argue, or prove its truth.

                          (pp. 22-23) 

 About collecting useful information into “commonplace books”: 

            Harvard also taught Cotton the quiet scribal appreciation of making notebooks and copying passages.  Students were not given textbooks but instead were expected to make a personal copy of a textbook by copying one that was being passed around the class.  Often tutors would create an “epitome” of a textbook, a sort-of synopsis like the Catechismus Logicus that Cotton’s father had made for him.  The tutor would pass this epitome to his students who would share it as they copied it into their notebooks.  Students, fingernails dark with ink, not only spent many hours copying textbooks, they were also supposed to create their own set of “commonplace books.”  Such books were where students transcribed useful quotes from whatever book they happened to be reading.  Ideally students were supposed to later transcribe these initial notes into much more organized commonplace books with indexes.  The highest ideal of this classroom tedium was that, in the end, the student would have a collection of commonplace books that would be an encyclopedia-like personal information storage and retrieval system.

Cotton Mather loved all this scribbling and was a master at information storage and retrieval.  He kept at it all his life.  Cotton’s largest and most complex books – his Magnalia Christi Americana, Biblia Americana, and even his more private Diary – are understood best as creatively expanded commonplace books.  Cotton found it relaxing to fold, cut, and sew several large sheets of paper into a clean new notebook, then, in his precise and clear handwriting, spend an evening organizing and copying passage from published books.

                                                                                          (pp. 26-27)

George Steiner (1929-2020), RIP

I am surprised and saddened by the death of holocaust survivor and brilliant literary and cultural critic, George Steiner, yesterday.  It was from him that I learned to see the religious nature of anti or post-Christian secularism and other post-Christian isms.

Steiner taught me that modern atheistic secularism is not merely the lack of religion but a new, replacement religion, a "meta-religion", and "anti-theology", a "surrogate-creed" (Nostalgia for the Absolute, 2).  He taught me that modern atheistic/anti-Christian secularism is a competing mythology with its own social, psychological, and spiritual "doctrine or body of thought" which fulfills three necessary conditions of mythology, just as Christian or Jewish theology and faith does (Nostalgia, 2-3).

First, the modern mythology of secularism makes a "claim of totality"; it affirms "that the analysis which it puts forward of the human condition - our history, of the meaning of your life and mine, of our further expectations - is a total analysis.  A mythology, in this sense, is a complete picture of 'man in the world'."  Secondly, a mythology "will have certain very easily recognizable forms of beginning and development.  There will have been a moment of crucial revelation or diagnostic insight from which the entire system springs.  This moment and the history of the founding prophetic vision will be preserved in a series of canonic texts" (Nostalgia, 3).  Third, "a true mythology will develop its own language, its own characteristic idiom, its own set of emblematic images, flags, metaphors, dramatic scenarios.  It will breed its own body of myths.  It pictures the world in terms of certain cardinal gestures, rituals, and symbols" (Nostalgia, 3).

Steiner classes Marxism, Freudian or Jungian "diagnoses of consciousness", the "account of man offered by what is called structural anthropology", as mythologies in this sense (Nostalgia, 4).  To those we might add any number of other ideologies or meta-narratives - ways of viewing reality that seek to explain the way things are in support of the tightly held beliefs of the group.  We might call them world-views also, but 'mythology' as Steiner uses it gets beyond the merely rational which might be associated by some with the term world-view, to note the deeply religious nature of such all-encompassing movements.  Its not hard to see many more current mythologies which qualify as anti-theologies or meta-religions.  C.S. Lewis's critique of modern anti-theistic scientism also fits this model, for it is the absolute faith in modern science, belief that science eventually will solve all human problems, the dogma that science doesn't just uncover facts and explain the way things work but imparts truth, meaning and purpose.

Steiner also brilliantly noted that, while these replacement post-Christian surrogate-creeds would chastise Christianity for imposing its pervasive and all-encompassing doctrines and life style upon all those under its sway, they seek to do the very same thing.  And though they might be born and grow in reaction against Christianity (or other old faiths), they quickly develop their own standards of orthodoxy and their own version of the Inquisition to punish those of their own numbers who do not keep the faith delivered once for all (think of the successive waves of radical Feminism, or the morphing gender movements that break with and attack each other, or the splintering within political perspectives and parties that frequently fight their closest neighbours more passionately than their opposite ideology - like the splintering of the right-wing in the US.  Traitors and betrayers are worse than mere unbelievers.  Speaking of these modern anti-Christian mythologies, Steiner says

Soon some of these disciples will break away into heresy.  They will produce rival mythologies or submythologies.  And now watch something very important.  The orthodox in the great movement will hate such heretics, will pursue them with an enmity more violent then that which they vent on the unbeliever.  It's not the unbeliever they're afraid of - it's the heretic from within their own movement (Nostalgia, 2-3). 

I will let Steiner speak further:

Now consider these attributes: totality, by which I simply mean the claim to explain everything; canonic texts delivered by the founding genius; orthodoxy against heresy; crucial metaphors, gestures, and symbols.  Surely the point I am making is already obvious to you.  The major mythologies constructed in the West since the the early nineteenth century are not only attempts to fill the emptiness left by the decay of Christian theology and Christian dogma.  They are themselves a kind of substitute theology.  They are systems of belief and argument which may be savagely anti-religious, which may postulate a world without God and may deny an afterlife, but whose structure, whose aspirations, whose claims on the believer, are profoundly religious in strategy and in effect (4).

Those great movements, those great gestures of imagination, which have tried to replace religion in the West, and Christianity in particular, are very much like the churches, like the theology, they want to replace (5).

Steiner examines Marxism, as a test case, in light of his thesis, and notes that it meets the criteria at every point.  After all, it wasn't capitalists who killed Trotsky.  Speaking of the eventual failure of Marxism, "if failure indeed it be", Steiner perceptively notes:

What was at stake was no mere technical critique of certain economic institutions; it is not over theoretical questions of investment, division of labour, or trade cycles, that generations of men and women fought, died, and killed others.  The vision, the promise, the summons to total dedication and a renewal of man, were, in the full sense, messianic, religious, theological (11). 

This perceptive brilliance comes from just the opening chapter in a little book which was originally the 1974 Massey Lectures.  The whole book is gold.  Steiner's cultural and societal critiques are typically overarching and broad rather than narrow and detailed, which is why they are so applicable and ring so true, for they are critiques of broad movements and the critiques make sense of the overarching way such movements work and think.  I this, Steiner resonates with the spirit of Lewis's statement of why he embraced the Christian faith:

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

This is what all 'mythologies' (in Steiner's sense) are trying to do: make us see everything through their lens.  And that is because, no matter what objections people might have to the Christian faith's portrayal of reality, when you remove it you don't succeed in removing the human need to inhabit a narrative and a universe with inherent meaning.

I am grateful to Kevin Vanhoozer, who ten years ago first put me on to George Steiner's work, Real Presences, and who references Steiner many times in two of his works in particular, Is There a Meaning in this Text? and First Theology.   Steiner's insight and wisdom will be missed.

Soberminded hopefulness

"Spring passes into summer and through summer and autumn into winter, the more surely by its ultimate return to triumph over that grave towards which it resolutely hastens from its first hour.  We mourn for the blossoms of May because they are to wither.  Yet we know withal, that May shall have its revenge upon November, in the revolution of that solemn circle that never stops and that teaches us in our height of hope ever to be sober, and in our depth of desolation never to despair." 

                                                 - John Henry Cardinal Newman

Sermon for December 29 - John 3:1-16 "The New Birth"

Read  -  John 3:1-16

   

Imagine this scene.  It is night time.  Nicodemus, a Pharisee, a religious ruler and teacher, comes to talk to Jesus while it is dark. 

Boys and girls, why would someone sneak over to visit when it is dark?  Why didn’t Nicodemus come to talk with Jesus in the day time? 

-          Maybe because he doesn’t want anyone to recognize him, or to see that he is going to talk with Jesus. 

Most of the Pharisees didn’t like Jesus or the message he was teaching.  Most of them didn’t believe that Jesus was God’s Son, the Messiah.  But it seems like Nicodemus is interested in Jesus and his message.  Nicodemus thinks the miracles Jesus is doing might be signs which show that God is with Jesus in a powerful way. 

We know from later in John’s gospel that Nicodemus is sympathetic to Jesus. 

In Jn. 7 when the religious authorities want to arrest Jesus, Nicodemus reminds them that the law requires a fair hearing and a fair judgment Jesus’ actions. 

In Jn. 19, after Jesus’ crucifixion, Joseph of Arimathea, who is a disciple of Jesus secretly because he is afraid of the religious leaders, and Nicodemus, take Jesus’ body and prepare it for burial (here it doesn’t mention that Nicodemus is a secret disciple).

It seems like here in Jn. 3, Nicodemus is drawn to Jesus and wants to know more about his teaching, but he is afraid that certain people might see him with Jesus. 

Jesus tells Nicodemus something that sounds very strange:  he says that to become one of God’s true children, you need to be “born again.”  At least it sounded strange to Nicodemus. 

Nicodemus doesn’t understand Jesus.  He asks Jesus how an old man like him can get into his mother’s womb to be born a second time.  Even you girls and boys know that can’t happen, right?

Jesus says, “that’s not what I am talking about, Nicodemus.”  Jesus explains that to be “born again” means that God makes us into new people, into his own children; that God gives us new hearts. 

Well, let’s get right to the point of what Jesus spoke to Nicodemus about.  We are going to look at what Jesus means when he says that to enter the kingdom of God, a person must be born again.  

**  We are going to look at what it means to be ‘born again’ in terms how our passage speaks of the three persons of the Trinity –  God the Holy Spirit, God the Son, and God the Father.  **

So…. Nicodemus the Pharisee comes to Jesus by night to speak with him. 

v.2:  Nicodemus says to Jesus, “we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs unless God is with him.”  Nicodemus recognized that God was with Jesus, but not that Jesus was God-with-us.  Jesus is Immanuel, God in the flesh, come to dwell among us and bring salvation to a world lost in darkness. 

Jn. 1 tells us that “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God….And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (Jn. 1:1, 14). 

v. 3:  Jesus cuts right to the heart of the matter: he says that “unless one is born again they cannot see the kingdom of God.”  Nicodemus doesn’t understand what it means to be born again. 

Let’s look at Jesus’ answer to Nicodemus……

1)  First, lets look at what Jesus says to Nicodemus about the Holy Spirit.

The term “born again” can also mean “born from above”.  I think it has this double sense here.  To be born again is to experience heavenly birth, spiritual birth, a rebirth from above.

It is through a special work of God’s Spirit that someone can enter God’s kingdom, or become part of God’s family. 

As Calvin says, by ‘born again’ Jesus “means not the amendment of a part but the renewal of the whole nature” since every part of us is affected by sin.  It is not merely a case of thinking new thoughts, or of doing new actions.  To become part of God’s family, to enter God’s kingdom, one must be given new life by the Holy Spirit. 

In v. 5, Jesus uses different language for being born again: “unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.” 

Being “born of water” probably means several things here, including baptism and baptism’s relationship with repentance.  But most importantly, if we look at Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well in the next chapter (Jn. 4), he tells her of living water that he gives.  If someone drinks his living water, it will “become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (Jn. 4:14).  The water Jesus gives is a metaphor for new life of the Spirit, new life in God by the Spirit.

The language of being born of water and of the Spirit comes from Ezek. 36:25-27.

I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you….

This passage comes right before Ezekiel 37, which is one of the OT’s most powerful images of re-birth and new life.  There God tells the prophet Ezekiel to preach to a valley full of dry bones, and as he preaches the bones become living people once more.  God tells Ezekiel that someday he will send a servant-king of David’s line who will accomplish this kind of regeneration, who will shepherd God’s people, and through whom God will dwell among his people forever.

So, taken together, being “born of water and of the Spirit” means to be born again to new life by a miraculous work of God’s Spirit; it means the life-giving Spirit dwelling inside a person, graciously given by God through Christ, and not attainable through any human effort.

It is good to remember here that baptism, because it is a sacrament, commanded by God and not an optional statement that some serious Christians make about their personal commitment to Jesus, is not a work but part of the grace of God in the process of the new birth.  It is ineffective without faith, which is itself a gift of God, but it isn’t a human work.  It is a gracious work of God.

Paul tells us in 1 Cor. 15:50 that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.”  Jesus explains “that which is born of the flesh is flesh and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit” (v.6). 

Jesus uses the imagery of wind to describe being born again by the work of the Spirit:

We can witness the effects of the wind, but we can’t see it.  So it is with the Spirit:  we can witness the effects of the new birth – people go from spiritual death to life and their lives are different (Jn. 3:21).  But because it is a work of the Spirit, like the wind, it is not something we can predict or control. 

This is the Spirit’s part in new birth. 

Ø  Is this new life something you have experienced?  Do you think being ‘born again’ is only for radicals?  Jesus says that unless someone is born again, they cannot enter the God’s kingdom, God’s family.

2)  Second, lets look at the work of the Son in the new birth.

v. 9-10:  Nicodemus asks how these things can be.  He is a teacher of Israel, but he doesn’t understand Jesus.  It is here we see the Son’s work in the new birth.

In vv. 11-13 Jesus says that he knows what he is talking about because he himself comes from heaven.  Jesus is God the Son, the Word made flesh as John ch. 1 puts it.  Jesus is the Son of Man, who has descended to earth in order to do the work which makes the new birth possible. 

v. 14 Jesus recalls a story from Numbers 21: 

After God freed Israel from slavery in Egypt, Israel grumbled against God.  God sends poisonous serpents among the people.  Some people are bitten and die.  The rest of the people repent of their grumbling and cry out to God for mercy.  God tells Moses to make a bronze serpent and raise it up on a pole, so that whoever is bitten may look to the bronze serpent in faith and live. 

v. 15:  Jesus says that just as the serpent was lifted up in the wilderness and all who looked to it were saved, so also the Son of Man must be lifted up so that “whoever believes in him may have eternal life”. 

* Jesus is talking about the cross.  This is the Son’s role in the new birth. *

He gives “his life as a ransom for many” (Mt. 20:28).  He makes atonement for the sins of all those “who like sheep have gone astray and turned each one to their own way” (Is. 53:6).  Jesus came to pay the penalty for our sin by his death on the cross, so “that whoever believes in him may have eternal life” (v. 15). 

The bronze snake was a symbol of the judgement of sinful Israel, a bronze rendering of God’s wrath against sin.  And Jesus became sin for us (2 Cor. 5:21), and in our place received the penalty that our sin deserved when he was lifted up on the cross.

It is this belief in Jesus that Jn. 1 speaks of when it says that “to all who did receive him, to all who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of human will, but of God” (vv. 12-13). 

This is the Son’s part in the new birth. 

“Where meek souls will receive him, still the dear Christ enters in.”

Ø  Can you say that you have looked to the Son of Man as he is revealed to us as lifted up on the cross for the sins of the world…..for your own sin?  Can you say that you continue to look to the cross of Christ, daily, and trust in Christ’s own sacrificial giving of himself “for us and for our salvation”? 

3)  Now for the Father’s part in the new birth. 

v. 16 is perhaps the most famous verse in the NT.  Like many of you, it was one of the first passages of Scripture I ever memorized.  We had it on a wooden plaque in our home when I was a kid.  It speaks of God’s love for the world, a love so deep that the Father gave his Son to accomplish salvation by his death on our behalf.

This interpretation of Jn. 3:16 has fallen on hard times lately.  What kind of a loving Father would send his innocent Son to die in the place of the guilty?  Some say this isn’t a demonstration of love; it is divine child abuse. 

But this criticism can only come from a faulty view of the Trinity.  When the Father, out of his great love for the world, sends the Son, the Son for his part, out of that same love, willingly offers himself to make atonement for sin. 

The Son says, “No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again” (Jn. 10:18). 

It is important to remember that the love of God the Father for the world is also the love of God the Son and God the Holy Spirit for the world.  Their love is one, for they are one God. 

When one person of the Trinity acts for our salvation, all the triune persons act together.

v. 17-18 tell us that in his great love, the Father sent Jesus not to condemn the world but to save the world from the condemnation that it was already under due to sin, rebellion against God, and alienation from God.  It tells us that any who reject God’s Messiah, Jesus, remain under that condemnation because they refuse and reject God’s Rescuer, who is himself God come in the flesh.

This is the Father’s loving part in the new birth.

Ø  Do you view the Father as the cranky person of the Trinity?  As a God of wrath and judgement, whereas Jesus, the Son, is the loving one?  Do you need to readjust your understanding of God?  Further, do you know God’s love personally?  Do you see yourself as an adherent to correct Christian doctrine and moralse, or do you know yourself even more fundamentally to be a child of God the Father, your Father, beloved by God?

Conclusion:  To wrap up…..

God’s triune wisdom planned our salvation, and then his triune action accomplished salvation. 

The language in each collect we pray throughout Advent and Christmas is trinitarian.  However, none more overtly so than today’s.  In our collect today, we thank the Father for giving his only-begotten Son, born in flesh, so that we might be born of the Spirit, “born again and made God’s children by adoption and grace.”  And we pray for daily renewal by the Holy Spirit for those who are born again. 

Because of the Father’s great love, whoever believes in the Son should not perish but have eternal life through the Spirit.

Let us pray our collect together again (Dec. 29):

Almighty God, you have given your only-begotten Son to take our nature upon him, and to be born of a pure virgin: Grant that we, who have been born again and made your children by adoption and grace, may daily be renewed by your Holy Spirit; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom with you and the same Spirit be honour and glory, now and for ever.  Amen. 

Quotes from some recent reading...

...of dead German theologians.

"Those who regard themselves as holy love God with a concupiscent love, i.e., for the sake of their salvation and eternal rest and in order to avoid hell, and thus not for God's sake but for their own." 

"God saves none but sinners, instructs none but the foolish and stupid, enriches none but paupers, gives life to none but the dead."

                                                                   - Martin Luther

"If a person really asks himself what he is looking for when he reads the Gospels, he will admit to himself, 'I am not seeking someone like myself, but rather my opposite, my fulfillment, my Savior."

"...the reason we commune with the Jesus of our Gospels is because it is through them that we learn to know that same Jesus whom, with the eyes of faith and in our prayers, we meet at the right hand of God, because we know, with Luther, that God cannot be found except in his beloved Son, because he is God's revelation to us, or, more accurately and specifically, because he who once walked on earth and now is exalted is the incarnate Word of God, the image of the invisible God - because he is for us God revealed."

                                                                   -  Martin Kahler

"In the gospel, anyone who encounters Christ is impelled either to worship him or pick up stones with which to stone him.  Evidently, the gospel does not foresee any other kind of response."
                                        
                                                                   -  Hans Urs von Balthasar

"For modern man the problem of the possibility of divine revelation is scientific and epistemological; for the Old and New Testaments, however, it is moral and religious."

"The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is the key to the whole reality and perceptibility of salvation history."

                                                                  -  Klaus Bockmuehl

A Benediction by St. Irenaeus

Our family recently went on a retreat in which the speakers, a husband and wife who both minister in the Christian academic sphere, encouraged the attendees by reminding us all why the church and the world need Christians in every walk of life who can do biblical, thoughtful, wise, and applicable theology.  They spoke of temptations unique to academic pursuits, which, it turns out, are not unique to academic pursuits.  Things like impatience with God, feelings of inadequacy to do what God has called me to do, envy of the gifts and abilities or callings of others, temptations to soft-peddle the truth to be more palatable to in the culture, temptation to compare with how God is working in others and be disappointed with his work in me, desire for recognition rather than just being satisfied with faithfulness, wishing for God to work differently in my life than he is, etc.  Or else those were just the personal applications the Holy Spirit was making to my heart....  It was simultaneously a challenge and an encouragement.

At any rate, Irenaeus (c. 130-c. 202) was one of the sources the speakers drew upon.  One of our worship times included this beautiful and truth-packed benediction from St. Irenaeus:

It is not thou that shapest God;
     it is God that shapest thee.
If thou art the work of God,
     await the hand of the artist
     who does all things in due season.
Offer him thy heart,
     soft and tractable,
     and keep the form
          in which the artist has fashioned thee.
Let thy clay be moist,
     lest thou grow hard
     and lose the imprint of his fingers.

What happens in gospel preaching?

The following is taken from pp. 242-43 of Darrell W. Johnson's book, The Glory of Preaching: Participating in God's Transformation of the World [Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2009]:

The good news is that the Spirit of God is involved in every aspect of the communication loop.  As Fred Rogers, famous as "Mr. Rogers," is reported to have said: "The space between my mouth and your ears is the land of the Holy Spirit."  And it is in that out-of-our-reach feedback loop that we stand when we stand before other human beings and speak the Word.  (See Acts 10:42; 14:3; Hebrews 2:3-4.)

And, as already hinted at, the Spirit is at work quite apart from anything we are doing.  This is the real wonder of the mystery in which we stand.  In John 15:26, Jesus says of the Paraclete, "He will bear witness about Me" (ESV).  I had for years taken this to mean that he will help us bear witness, that as we seek to speak of Jesus in the world, the Spirit will be present to help us.  And he does.  But that is not what Jesus is speaking about in the promise of John 15:26.  It was Lesslie Newbigin who, in his brilliant theological commentary on the Gospel of John, written while serving in India, helped me see what Jesus is saying; and it changed the way I understood the preaching moment (Lesslie Newbigin, The Light Has Come: An Exposition of the Fourth Gospel [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1982]), p. 206).  We are not the primary actors in the event. 

"It is important to note what is not said," Newbigin begins (ibid).  "It is not said that the Spirit will help the disciples to bear witness.  That would make the action of the disciples primary and that of the Spirit auxiliary.  What is said is that the Spirit will bear witness and that--secondarily--the disciples are witnesses" (ibid).  Newbigin goes on to remind us that it is not the work of humans to bring other humans to acknowledge Jesus as he really is; it is always the work of God (Jn. 6:44--the Father 'draws' us to Jesus).  Then Newbigin writes this:

What is promised here is that the Spirit will perform His own miracle in the hearts and consciences of people so that they are brought to recognize Jesus as the one he is.  The words, the works and--above all--the suffering of the community will be the means by which the witness is borne, but the actual agent will be the Spirit who, because he is the Spirit of the Father, is the Spirit of truth.  When the Lord says to Israel, "You are my witnesses" (Isa. 43:10), there is no suggestion that this is a summons to proclamation.  Israel is the witness to the majesty and glory of the Lord, not on account of anything that Israel says or does, but on account of those mighty works of which the Lord is the subject and Israel is the object.  It is in this sense that the disciples will be witnesses.... Their life, their words, their deeds, their sufferings will thus be the occasion, the place, where the mighty Spirit bears his own witness in the hearts and consciences of men and women so that they are brought to look again at the hated, rejected, humiliated, crucified man and confess: "Jesus is Lord."  It is the Spirit who is sovereign.  The promise to the community of the disciples is not that they will have the Spirit at their disposal to help them in their work of proclamation.  That misunderstanding has profoundly distorted the missionary action of the Church and provided the occasion for a kind of missionary triumphalism of which we are right to be ashamed.  The Spirit is not the Church's auxiliary.  The promise made here is not to the Church which is powerful and "successful" in a worldly sense.  It is made to the Church which shares the tribulation and the humiliation of Jesus, the tribulation which arises from faithfulness to the truth in the world which is dominated by the lie.  The promise is that, exactly in this tribulation and humiliation, the mighty Spirit of God will bear his own witness to the crucified Jesus as Lord and Giver of life (ibid, 207-8). 

That is the mystery.  That is the space into which we enter when we stand up before other human beings (some eager, some weary, some afraid, some hostile) and, Bible in hand, try to faithfully say what God is saying in a text.