A Prayer for Insight

Composed for St. Paul's and St. George's Church, March 4, 2012
Sermon Passage: 1 Cor. 11:2-16, 14:34-35 ("Women in the Church")

Lord, we thank you for this difficult passage that we have studied this morning, and for the call it presents to us to wrestle anew with your Word, the much-needed reminder that we cannot take Scripture for granted, but must be prepared to be confused, surprised, and even alarmed by it at times.  We pray that we would embrace such opportunities; instead of accepting the temptation to shut the Bible and shove it away when it says something unpleasant, or to retreat immediately to the stronghold of our preconceived paradigms and interpretations, help us to study its words with faith and love, opening our hearts to the guidance of your Spirit.  We pray this not only for us today, but for your whole Church, especially in Britain and throughout the West, where passages such as this have bitterly divided churches and congregations over the question of the role of women in the church. Lord, we repent for this division, for the stubbornness and the impatience that have provoked rifts, the unwillingness to listen to others and the pride that makes us imagine that we speak with the voice of God when we utter our opinion or interpretation.  Lord, bless the churches with fresh light from your Word that may help resolve this and other issues of debate, and grant us the grace and charity, even in the midst of ongoing disagreement, to unite in the common work of the gospel.

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A Prayer for Church Unity

Composed for St. Paul's and St. George's Church, the Second Sunday of Epiphany; on the passage 1 Corinthians 1:1-17

Blessed God and Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ, 

We thank you for this challenging passage before us today, and the challenging message we have just heard.  May the words we have heard today stick in our hearts and strengthen us to be your Body in the world, one in faith, hope, and love.  

We give thanks to you God for the grace that has been given us in Christ Jesus, that in every way we have been enriched in him in all speech and all knowledge, so that we are not lacking in any spiritual gift.  Lord, you have blessed us immensely.  You have blessed us with material gifts, with the gift of great freedom, with gifts of knowledge, as we today have the theological learning of two thousand years literally at our fingertips. 

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Still Machen's Warrior Children?

My friend Davey Henreckson pointed me to a recent blog series in which Carl Trueman examines, with rather more balance and perceptiveness than is typical in such discussions, the anatomy of denominational slides into liberalism.  Conservatives often like to paint such backslidings as the result of some dark conspiracy or a full-on war against the gospel by wicked and recalcitrant liberals, but Trueman suggests it ain't necessarily so: 

"the underlying story I am trying to tell is that sometimes (oftentimes?) churches go liberal without any initial intention of so doing.   Indeed, I believe a functionalist, rather than an intentionalist, account will often provide a more adequate explanation of why a denomination loses the plot: the cumulative force of a set of often disparate circumstances and actions leads to a sudden collapse in orthodoxy, with the conscious intention of going liberal perhaps only emerging comparatively late in the process."

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Controversy and Homosexuality

This is the final post about the Controversy Conference in Aberdeen last month, summarizing Vigen Guroian's lecture on same-sex marriages and the roundtable discussion at the end on how the Church should deal with the homosexuality issue.

Guroian, a pugnacious Armenian Orthodox priest, offered a provocative lecture that, unlike the others, explored a contemporary manifestation of controversy in the Church--in particular, the conflict over same-sex marriage.  He confined himself narrowly to the question of same-sex marriage, rather than venturing into related questions about homosexuality.  He argued, fascinatingly, that on a Protestant view of marriage, it was impossible to continue to hold the ground against homosexual marriage, since Protestantism had desacralized marriage, made it essentially a civil, rather than an ecclesial, matter, and had taught that a marriage is constituted by the consenting wills of the two parties.  Indeed, he pointed out that the notion of consent as the essential constituent of a marriage infected the entire Western tradition, including the Catholic Church, deriving as it did from Roman law.  

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The Church and Controversy: Provocations and Consensus

I’ve finally had the opportunity to go back and finish my review of the Aberdeen conference on Controversy and the Church, though I was forced to end much more concisely than I began.  Four short posts will follow on some remaining highlights--Robert Jenson’s lecture “On Creative and Destructive Provocations,” Markus Muhling on “The Church’s Unity without Consensus,” Vigen Guroian on “Debating the Status of Same-Sex Marriages,” and then the roundtable discussion about the controversy over homosexuality.

Jenson, as one might imagine, was a joy to listen to--he, like Hart, had to join us via videoconference, but he still exuded a powerful presence.  In his lecture, he sought to sketch two examples of provocations that were destructive, but which God turned to the good, two that were just plain destructive, and always have been, and two that proved creative and edifying for the Church. 

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