Link of the Week #25

Hello readers! As you well know tonight is Christmas Eve. A night when millions of people will gather in churches around the world to remember the night that God's only Son, Jesus Christ, became incarnate to redeem His people from the world. For many believers, this night marks a high point in their year. But those of you who have spent some time in the world of Reformed Presbyterianism will know that these Christmas celebrations can often bring consternation as well. Although the vast majority of Presbyterians now celebrate holy days like Christmas and Easter, it wasn't too long ago that such a thing would have been unheard of. Allow me to explain.


When our forefathers penned the Westminster Standards (which have served as guides for Presbyterian doctrine and practice for hundreds of years) they attached to it what they called a"Directory for Publik Worship." This Directory gave guidance and direction for churches who were seeking to worship God according to Scripture. Many of these churches were emerging from the mass of man-made traditions found in both the Roman Catholic and in the Anglican communions, and they realized the pressing need to reexamine why things were done the way they were. This reevaluation led to a far simpler, more biblical, form of worship in many of these new Puritan and Presbyterian congregations. This new document called for many changes and one of these changes concerned the celebration of holy days like Christmas and Easter. As the Directory says:

"There is no day commanded in scripture to be kept holy under the gospel but the Lord's Day, which is the Christian Sabbath. Festival days, vulgarly called Holy-days, having no warrant in the word of God, are not to be continued."

In essence, the Directory believed that celebrating these holy-days violates the law of God and the regulative principle of worship. (To gain a more thorough understanding of why they thought this was the case go here.)


Ever since that time Presbyterians have been faced with a choice. Will we stand with our forefathers against the church calender, or, will we stand with many other evangelicals with the church calender? This is a question that has been hotly debated for centuries and I doubt that any "quick fix" will emerge to solve our problem. But I do believe that the tension many Presbyterians feel is perhaps a false one. The question is often presented in rather stark terms. Either we buy into the entire Christmas package (like we see in so many churches today) or we will refuse to celebrate or recognize Christmas as some of our brothers do. However, I believe there is a third option, and that brings us (at last) to this week's link.

This week, we'd like to highlight a series of links from the Q & A section of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church's website. These links help us understand how we can perhaps incorporate some of the good aspects of the Christmas season without adopting many of the un-biblical practices and requirements that it often brings. Although there are still many questions that these links don't answer, I believe that they can help us to find a middle ground between the wholehearted acceptance, or the wholesale rejection, of the church calender. Enjoy!

To read this week's links go here, and here.

Link of the Week #24

Hello readers! Those of you who have read this blog for any length of time will know that we are big fans of the Puritans. Over the past 50 years God has blessed the church with far greater access to the works of these wonderful men. Many classic Puritan books, sermons, and journals are being re-typeset and published for a whole new generation of readers. However, this blessing brings with it its own challenges. With so many Puritans (and so many Puritan works) out there, where does one start? Who is publishing these books and how does one sort through the various editions? How can a 21st century reader penetrate the sometimes daunting language of the 16th and 17th centuries? What is unique about the Puritans? Who are the Puritans anyway?

Well, to help answer these questions we would like to highlight two links this week. The first is to a wonderful article by Joel Beeke called "Why You Should Read the Puritans." In this article Beeke helps orient the reader to who exactly the Puritans were, and then he lays out nine helpful contributions that the Puritans have made to Christian doctrine and life. Our second link is for those of you who may have a bit more time on your hands. In 2006 Randall J. Pederson & Joel Beeke co-edited a book called "Meet the Puritans." In this 895 page tome the author provide us with a wonderful resource for all Puritan lovers. As Westminster bookstore puts it:

"The Puritans were unmatched in their ability to combine deep, theological thinking with warm, practical living. In recent decades, many of their writings have been brought back into print but few Christians know who these men were or why their works are worth reading.
In Meet the Puritans, Joel R. Beeke and Randall J. Pederson go a long way toward alleviating this problem. This resource provides biographical introductions to every Puritan whose work has been republished in recent decades. Along with each biography is a guide to the written works of that Puritan author."

We hope that you will take the time to consider these resources, and we hope that you will consider digging into the works of some Puritan authors as you seek to grow in grace in the coming year!

Happy Birthday Jack...

This Monday marked the anniversary of the birth of one of the single greatest influences on my life and thought. On November 29, 1898 C.S. Lewis (or "Jack" as he like to be called) was born to a middle class family in Belfast, Ireland. The story of Lewis's life has been well recounted in many places (notably in George Sayer's book "Jack: A Life of C.S. Lewis" and in Lewis's own book "Surprised by Joy: The Shape of my Early Life") so I'll restrain my historian's impulse to recount his life story. Instead, I'd like to recount some of the quotes I've come across recently in my reading of Lewis. I've been re-reading "Out of the Silent Planet" which is even better than I had remembered, but another gem that I've been reading for the first time is Lewis's wonderful collection of essays called "Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories"

"An unliterary man may be defined as one who read books once only. There is hope for a man who has never read Malory or Boswell or Tristram Shandy or Shakespeare's Sonnets: but what can you do with a man who says he 'has read' them, meaning he has read them once, and thinks that this settles the matter?"

"We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative; lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which merely wants cold wetness. The children understand this well when they ask for the same story over and over again, and in the same words. They want to have again the 'surprise' of discovering that what seemed Little-Red-Riding-Hood's grandmother is really the wolf. It is better when you know it is coming: free from the shock of actual surprise you can attend better to the intrinsic surprisingness of the peripeteia."

"I will not say that a good story for children could never be written by someone in the Ministry of Education, for all things are possible. But I should lay very long odds against it."

"A critic not long ago said in praise of a very serious fairy tale that the author's tongue 'never once got into his cheek'. But why on earth should it? - unless he had been eating a seed-cake. Nothing seems to me more fatal, for this art, than an idea that whatever we share with children is, in the private sense, 'childish' and that whatever is childish is somehow comic. We must meet children as equals in that area of our nature where we are their equals."

"The modern view seems to me to involve a false concept of growth. They accuse us of arrested development because we have not lost a taste we had in childhood. But surely arrested development consists not in refusing to lose old things but in failing to add new things? I now like hock, which I am sure I should not have liked as a child. But I still like lemon-squash. I call this growth or development because I have been enriched: where I formerly had only one pleasure, I now have two. But if I had to lose the taste for lemon-squash before I acquired the taste of hock, that would not be growth but simple change. I now enjoy Tolstoy and Jane Austen and Trollope as well as fairy tales and I call that growth: if I had had to lose the fairy tales in order to acquire the novelists, I would not say that I had grown but only that I had changed.
A tree grows because it adds rings: a train doesn't grow by leaving one station behind and puffing on to the next. In reality, the case is stronger and more complicated than this. I think my growth is just as apparent when I now read the fairy tales as when I read the novelists, for I now enjoy the fairy tales better than I did in childhood: being now able to put more in, of course I get more out. But I do not here stress that point. Even if it were merely a taste for grown-up literature added to an unchanged taste of children's literature addition would still be entitled to the name 'growth', and the process of merely dropping one parcel when you pick up another would not. It is, of course, true that the process of growing does, incidentally and unfortunately, involve some more losses. But that is not the essence of growth, certainly not what makes growth admirable or desirable. If it were, if to drop parcels and to leave stations behind were the essence and virtue of growth, why should we stop at adult? Why should not senile be equally a term of approval? Why are we not to be congratulated on losing our teeth and hair? Some critics seem to confuse growth with the cost of growth and also to wish to make that cost far higher than, in nature, it need be."

"Once in a hotel dining-room I said, rather too loudly, 'I loathe prunes.' 'So do I,' came an unexpected six-year-old voice from another table. Sympathy was instantaneous. Neither of us thought it funny. We both knew that prunes are far too nasty to be funny. That is the proper meeting between man and child as independent personalities."

Selections from Table Talk

The following story is taken from Martin Luther's Table Talk.

Of the Archbishop of Mentz, one of the Spiritual Princes Electors, his Censure of the Bible.

Anno 1530, at the Imperial Assembly at Augsburg, Albertus, Bishop of Mentz, by chance had got into his hands the Bible, and for the space of four hours he continued reading therein; at last, one of his Council on a sudden came into his bed-chamber unto him, who, seeing the Bible in the Bishop's hand, was much amazed thereat, and said unto him, "what doth your highness with that book?" The Archbishop thereupon answered him, and said, "I know not what this book is, but sure I am, all that is written therein is quite against us."

Inversnaid

THIS darksome burn, horseback brown,

His rollrock highroad roaring down,

In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam

Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

A windpuff-bonnet of fawn-froth

Turns and twindles over the broth

Of a pool so pitchblack, fell-frowning,

It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

Degged with dew, dappled with dew,

Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,

Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,

And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.

What would the world be, once bereft

Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,

O let them be left, wildness and wet;

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.




- Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)