Recently in church history Category

Last Friday, I completed the first draft of a book on the Didache for Paraclete Press.  It'll come out sometime this fall, but in the meantime, here's a top ten list of my favorite lines from that wonderful little manual on the Christian faith (these come from our new, contemporary translation, which I hope to make available online via a Creative Commons license):

10. Give to every one who asks you, and don't ask for it back. The Father wants his blessings shared.

9. Welcome anyone coming in the name of the Lord. Receive everyone who comes in the name of the Lord, but then, test them and use your discretion.

If he who comes is a transient, assist him as far as you are able; but he should not remain with you more than two or three days, if need be.
If he wants to stay with you, and is a craftsman, let him work for his living.
But if he has no trade, use your judgment in providing for him; for a Christian should not live idle in your midst.

8. On the Lord's day, gather yourselves together and break bread, give thanks, but first confess your sins so that your sacrifice may be pure.

7. Come together often, seeking the things that are good for your souls. A life of faith will not profit you if you are not made perfect at the end of time.

6. The way of life is this:

First, you shall love God who made you.
And second, love your neighbor as yourself, and do not do to another what you would not want done to you.

For the last couple weeks, I've written some ecclesial and theological provocations. For the next couple weeks I'm going to focus on spirituality -- namely, prayer -- as well as blogging about other things.

I've got a couple books out that focus specifically on praying the Bible: the first one is about the ancient art of lectio divina; the second about using prayers from the Bible in our daily lives. I'm going to be posting some material from those books here. This, I hope, will generate discussion in the comment section and throughout the blogosphere in a way that the books themselves cannot. Today, a preface to the practice of lectio divina:

A friend of mine calls the Bible "the nonfiction storybook of God's interaction with humankind." Some of us may get hung up on the word storybook, thinking it implies a lack of truth or historicity. But the Bible is a collection of stories, some from the ancient past of Israel and some from the more recent past of Jesus and his early followers. The stories are very much true and very much alive.

I'm going to close out this week's topic by looking back to the history of the church -- the very early church -- to gain a bit more perspective on ordination.

I'm currently writing a little book reflecting on the Didache and its use for us today (the image at left is the 10th century manuscript, lost for 800 years, and rediscovered in 1873). If you're unfamiliar, the Didache is a manual of Christian living from the second half of the first century -- contemporaneous with the letter of Paul and the synoptic Gospels. The Didache is basically broken into four parts:

1. the moral teaching drawn from a Jewish document known as the "Two Ways" (chaps. 1-6);
2. a liturgical treatise (chaps. 7-10);
3. a church organization treatise (chaps. 11-15);
4. and an apocalyptic section (chap. 16)

I hope to make our contemporary translation, which will be chapter two of the book, available online under a Creative Commons license. In the meantime, there are lots of public domain translations available online, most of which use King James type language.

Of most interest to this discussion are the middle two sections.

In light of the recent ordination discussion here, I'm reposting an ordination sermon that I preached for a friend in 2005. Looking forward to your comments.

Last weekend, I preached at the ordination service of a friend. I thought it was strange of her to ask me, being that I don't really find ordination helpful anymore (I did once, and I am ordained). It's not so much the institution itself (though I do have problems with it), but the way it's used that I find so troubling. It's too often used as some kind of worldly power grab, an excuse to make someone call you "Pastor," or a reason to get a really lucrative tax break, or the chance for an otherwise relatively culturally powerless person to be in charge -- of a pulpit and microphone on Sunday, a staff meeting on Monday, a board of elders on Tuesday, etc.

Thankfully, I was involved in the ordination of a friend who is tempted toward none of these abuses. Here is an edited version my sermon

John,

Here's the continuation of my response to your blog post and my petition asking Adam to consider withdrawing from the ordination process in the PC(USA).

5) You write,

What historians know but Tony doesn't seem to understand is that he is following precisely the path of the American Fundamentalists of the 1900s. In their zeal to create a purer, more faithful church, they ended up attacking fellow believers and crippling what should have been a golden age of spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ. I am calling on Tony and others to stop this destructive behavior now, before it's too late.

Your statement here is particularly untrue. First of all, I don't know that everyone would concur with your verdict that the Christian fundamentalism crippled the spreading of the gospel. Instead, A) I think many would say that mainline Protestantism's embrace of historical critical methods in the late 19th century left biblical literalists with little choice but to propose an alternative. B) There's little evidence that liberals would have ever developed much interest in "spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ." C) The chasm between liberalism and fundamentalism gave rise to the mid-20th century evangelicalism of which our alma mater, Fuller Seminary, is a product.

But second, and more importantly, there is a great difference between what I am doing and what the fundamentalists of the 1890s were doing. They were, as you say, zealous for a purer, more faithful church -- a zeal driven by theology.  My dispute with denominationalists is surely not theological. No, my quest is more like that of Calvin, Luther, Zwingli, Simons, Wesley, and Wimber. I see a system that has outgrown its usefulness, and I am calling those who run that system to reform it, radically and immediately.

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