This has nothing to do with Rob Bell or Love Wins; that’s old news. This week’s controversy is deep inside Roman Catholic territory, as the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Doctrine issued a twenty-page statement detailing how Elizabeth Johnson’s 2007 book Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God fails to line up with Roman Catholic teaching. The best early coverage of the story is in the National Catholic Reporter, and the boost to Amazon sales is reported by Commonweal. Neither of these magazines, to put it delicately, was likely to have taken the bishops’ side against any theologian, but their reports are the best place to pick up the story.

In a one-page letter, the chair of the committee (Donald Cardinal Wuerl, Archbishop of Washington) explained why it took four years for this investigation and warning to appear:

The book in question, published some time ago, is not directed to professional theologians for theological speculation, but rather is used as a teaching instrument for undergraduate students, many of whom are looking for grounding in their Catholic faith. The Bishops’ Committee on Doctrine is first and foremost concerned about the spiritual welfare of those students using this book who may be led to assume that its content is authentic Catholic teaching.

It seems quaint now, but it used to be common for Roman Catholic books to be published with a Nihil Obstat or Imprimatur, certifying that the contents were in agreement with received Catholic doctrine. Readers could then be confident that they were getting the real thing. As the letter from the chair makes clear, what is being applied after the fact to Johnson’s book is the opposite of that: A definite statement from a committee of bishops saying that some of the contents of Johnson’s book certifiably do not accord with the teaching of the Roman Catholic church.

And the letter from Cardinal Wuerl implies that if Quest for the Living God were a book designed only for professional theologians to discuss amongst themselves, no official statement would have been necessary. Their stated concern is that the book is being used in college classes, as a text for Roman Catholic college students to learn about what the church teaches. It is not appropriate for that use, they say.

The bishops’ statement, with its focus on this one book, does not explicitly address Johnson’s overall theology as represented by her other books, or remark on her general activities as a teaching theologian. Elizabeth Johnson has been publishing for a long time, after all. She has a half-dozen influential books, is Distinguished Professor of Theology at Fordham, serves on the editorial board of many important journals, has been president of the Catholic Theological Society of America, and has many other recognitions, distinctions, and honors. And her doctrinal position has been fairly consistent throughout her published works. So why intervene with this one book, four years after its publication? Because of its use in college classes, apparently.

But it’s no wonder that the figurative warning label on the book seems ominous for liberal Roman Catholic theologians more broadly. In the past decade, American Jesuit Roger Haight, a theologian no less prominent than Johnson, was officially silenced by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The CDF’s investigation focused on one late book (Haight’s Jesus: Symbol of God), but called into question his theological method altogether.

And in her 2007 book Quest for the Living God, Johnson is consistent with what she has taught elsewhere. The main difference identified by the committee is the audience: previous books were used by theologians and seminarians, whereas Quest has been used for college students.

As an evangelical Protestant, it’s interesting to watch the dynamics of this controversy playing out inside the Roman Catholic theological scene. The similarities and differences between it and the Rob Bell kerfluffle are equally instructive. On the Roman Catholic side, the provocateur is an accomplished theologian, re-stating for the third or fourth time in book form her basic teaching, through an academic publisher without sensational publicity or a reach that aspires far beyond the textbook market. The critics are recognized teaching authorities (bishops) in the theologian’s own church, they didn’t act until four years after publication, and they scarcely seem aware that there is an internet (releasing pdfs of statements on letterhead). The differences from the Bell case are striking. But the similarity is also striking: unstoppable polarization, as if there are two churches struggling with each other inside the institutional unity of the Roman Catholic church, as much as within the movement known as evangelicalism.

Theological conservatives like me think that both Bell and Johnson have crossed some lines and published books that do not state the Christian message accurately. Bell’s critics were shunted aside with the rhetorical question, “Who made you the judge of what’s orthodox?” But in the case of Johnson’s critics, it’s not a rhetorical question: the Roman Catholic magisterium is who made the council of bishops the judge of what’s orthodox. An evangelical onlooker might understandably think that that will make all the difference between the two cases. But it won’t. Two kinds of Roman Catholic theologians disagree about this book, and the gulf between them is as big as the gulf between Rob Bell and Al Mohler.

(Cross-posted from my home blog, Scriptorium Daily.)

Of course I think it’s exciting; it’s partly my idea to get this thing going. I’ve lived in California a long time now, and am a native (though I spent some formative years “back East,” as we say “out here”). But the project has finally gone from being a mental hobby to being an interdisciplinary collaborative project that is getting traction.

TECC has a website, a steering committee, a call for papers to gather submissions for a proposed session at the national ETS meeting in San Francisco in November 2011 (Richard Mouw is already committed to present at it), and initial plans for a series of conferences and consultations.

This week, Joe Gorra at the Evangelical Philosophical Society’s blog interviewed 2/3 of the steering committee (Jason Sexton and me) about the status of the project. Here’s a key quote from the interview:

It would probably be in bad taste to belabor a Gold Rush analogy, but I think that California as a theological subject is resource-rich and under-explored. I just started poking around a little bit in the area of California literary regionalism as an amateur investigator, trying to solve the small-scale problem of “what are the California great books I should assign?” What I discovered is that there’s been some really good work done on that subject by real literary scholars. But when it comes to theologians, we just haven’t done enough with California. As soon as I started using the tools of my own trade and asking theological questions, I found vast stretches of unexplored intellectual territory. I may not have cried “Eureka,” but I am sending out the word that there’s work to be done here for many hands.

Click on through to read the whole thing, and if you know somebody interested in theology and California, or somebody who ought to be, please forward this information to them.

Candlish knew his church history well, but it seemed to him that the church fathers had not adequately described the adoption of believers into God’s family, because their best energies had (rightly) gone toward establishing the deity of Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity. And the reformers, in (rightly) securing the believer’s justification by faith, had not allowed “the subject of adoption or the sonship of Christ’s disciples… to occupy the place and receive the prominence to which it is on scriptural grounds entitled.” Candlish intended no insult to the fathers or the reformers: “Their hands were full.” And until the Trinity and salvation by faith were in place, the theology of adoption didn’t have a chance.

But now, Candlish argued that the time had come to investigate the theology of adoption by the Father more fully:

I have long had the impression that in the region of that great truth there lies a rich field of precious ore yet to be surveyed and explored, and that, somewhere in that direction, theology has fresh work to do, and fresh treasures to bring out of the storehouse of the Divine Word.

What would it take to bring out the riches of the biblical doctrine of adoption? It would take more than a good theology book: Candlish’s was pretty darn good, and in the intervening 150 years or so there have been some even better ones. It would either take a big doctrinal fight (like the ones that clarified and elaborated the other major doctrines), or some kind of revival movement that stirred up Christians at the level of their spiritual experience and their daily practices, motivating them to reflect doctrinally on what was happening.

Something like the former (a doctrinal fight) is what happened in Candlish’s day: Liberal Protestantism began pushing an uncommonly mushy doctrine of God’s universal fatherhood. The universal Fatherhood of God was supposed to secure the universal Brotherhood of Man, at least in the Neighborhood of Boston as we all slid into unitarian universalism and rented our our empty churches to Alcoholics Anonymous groups. Candlish had already devoted a book to refuting F.D. Maurice’s British version of the FOGBOM theology, and that conflict with the heresy of liberalism is what woke him up to the riches of an orthodox theology of Fatherhood and adoption.

But I think something like the latter, a revival, is happening right now in evangelical theology. There is a movement underway in which Christians, and even whole congregations, are committing themselves and their resources to caring for orphans, partly by adoption. The most important book about it so far is Russell Moore’s Adopted for Life, and the most important organization is Together for Adoption. The movement got started with basic, biblical teaching about the gospel and holistic mission. It picked up speed with a network of projects and organizations committed to orphan care. And to this theological observer, it looks like it may have the momentum to reinvigorate evangelical systematic theology. Yes, even the big tomes of doctrine, and the research articles safely hidden in the theology journals! In belated fulfillment of Candlish’s prophecy, theology is about to discover adoption and give it the attention it deserves.

The most promising sign I’ve seen so far is the new book Reclaiming Adoption: Missional Living through the Rediscovery of Abba Father. This is a short (just over 100 pages), readable, popular-level introduction to the theology of adoption, and it is perfectly positioned at the intersection of the practical, the spiritual, and the doctrinal. It’s published by the innovative little publisher Cruciform Press, and I expect its sales will be driven by word of mouth through the orphan care network, and by the fact that it’s got a big ol’ classic John Piper chapter in it (Chapter 8: Adoption, The Heart of the Gospel).

Dan Cruver is the editor and also the anchorman who provides the first four chapters, which give the doctrinal foundation. Check out the titles of chapters two to four:

Adoption and the Trinity
Adoption and the Incarnation
Adoption and Our Union with Christ

Theologically speaking, I don’t need much more than a glance at that table of contents to know that this book is on a firm foundation. And reading the (short –did I mention short?) chapters proves that Cruver has a fine theological mind that knows how to observe the proper order of things, starting with God, moving through the mediator, down into the experience of redemption. It’s a few short steps from adoption to the biggest doctrines of Christian theology, and Cruver takes them.

The whole book is guided by the same deep theological insight. And if you consider that this book is going to be finding its way into the hands of people who are child-proofing their houses, working out passport issues, and giving sacrificially to orphanages, you may see why I say there is a movement going on. A book like Reclaiming Adoption is carrying out the theological task of catechesis, teaching Christians in mid-mission to think more, and think better, about the gospel they are living in. That is going to pay off in the quiet halls of evangelical theology.

In a brief essay (at his blog and reprinted in the book’s study guide), Cruver asks himself the question, “Do we really have time for theology when orphans need our help now?” And he answers,

Yes, we do. If theology is ultimately about our participation in the love between the Father and the Son, then nothing can better mobilize and energize us to care for orphans now than theology.

In fact, the whole tenor of Together for Adoption’s ministry is that “what orphans need … is Christians who are deeply theological.”

When thousands of orphans are being rescued and supported, it may seem small-minded to say that the most exciting thing about this movement is that it might be moving the neglected theological doctrine of adoption onto the agenda of evangelical systematic theology. But I’ll stand by that, because I take theology to be one meaningful indicator of the spiritual health of the church, and an important tether to spiritual reality. Plus we’ve been waiting since 1864 for Candlish’s prophecy to come true.

And the beauty of the current surge of attention to adoption is that it doesn’t come with any temptation to choose between theology and practice. At its best, in church after church, it’s doing both.

(Cross-posted from Scriptorium Daily)

And without any cramming or reductionism, astute readers can follow the imagination of C.S. Lewis as it maps out the coordinates of theological truth and reality in his fairy-tale land of remythologization: Creation and eschatology, objective redemption and individual salvation, the role of the law in the Christian life and obedience to the words of a written revelation are all expounded in Narnian idiom. In none of these cases could we simply have predicted how Aslan would act out the part of Christ in the land of talking animals. But he does it. There are even complex combinations of the major Christian ideas in Narnia, like the way Lewis puts the epic battle of the church militant into the space between the death and resurrection of Aslan.

But what I wonder about lately is, why didn’t Lewis provide a Narnian placeholder for “The Grand Miracle,” the incarnation? Maybe I’m only wondering because the Narnia movies have now become a Christmas event. But doctrinally and spiritually speaking, isn’t it interesting that Lewis didn’t provide an Aslan-Becomes-Talking-Animal storyline? What we get instead is the rumor that “Aslan is on the move” in fulfillment of the prophecies. Father Christmas even shows up, which (as Tolkien pointed out) makes no sense whatsoever. But no nativity!

In one sense, how beautiful the elements of the nativity story could have been, transmuted into fairy tale and populated with Narnians. On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine where Lewis could have stopped if he had taken the first step down that road: At the first mention of baby Aslan as a divine-feline lion cub, you’d have to provide a mother, and soon you’d have the whole lineage of feline David scratching at the stable door. It just wouldn’t work. The fantasy world would collapse under the pressure of parallelism.

But Lewis was clever, and his baptized imagination would probably have found a way around that mythopoeic challenge. I think there is a properly theological reason for the lack of a Narnian nativity. The real impossibility is a Narnian incarnation (try saying that three times fast). Aslan may be how Christ appears in a world of talking animals, but at those key points where Lewis has to indicate how Narnia is related to the real world (England = “the real world”), he gives priority to the real world precisely because Christ is actually incarnate in this world. Lewis’ mind seems to have repelled the idea of multiple incarnations of the one Son of God all over the multiverse. In the Space Trilogy, for example, younger planets are populated by humanoids instead of walking celery sticks, because it just wouldn’t be appropriate for intelligent life to be brought into being in vegetable form once the incarnation happened on that one silent planet. And in Narnia, Aslan is on the move, conducting business with the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, but not becoming Lion to save Lionkind. The word did not become Lion. He was already Lion. And he was already something else, which he had already taken on in our world: human. But in the fullness of Narnian time, he was on the move.

The theological Hootie of our age is NT Wright. He’s everywhere. Multiplatinum, hit singles, the whole package. I happen to like his work, but it doesn’t matter if you like it; you’re getting it from both speakers anyway. This is NT Wright’s world, and the rest of us are just livin’ in it.

I skipped last year’s Wheaton Theology Conference (probably the best annual theology conference anywhere in the US) because it was all about NT Wright. But then the main program of the national ETS conference was also all about Wright, so there was no avoiding it. Change the channel, more NT Wright. The ETS event was exquisitely well planned, with dueling plenaries and an extended panel discussion. Look elsewhere for commentary on the event: Summaries of what went on in Atlanta are available at reputable places, including here at Evangel.

Here in Hootie’s world, I’ve had to develop a few rules for how to keep livin’ in it. I want to make a few brief, impressionistic remarks about Wright’s work, and I want to have the freedom to speak irresponsibly –in a certain sense which I will now define. By “irresponsibly” I don’t mean gossipy or overblown or inflammatory comments. I would prefer to avoid both sin and boorishness. But I want permission to speak irresponsibly in the sense that I haven’t read most of Wright’s work, and haven’t paid close attention to most of the controversy surrounding his views. I didn’t even attend all the ETS sessions where he and his interlocutors mixed it up.

Over the past few years, as an informed Christian person who just isn’t devoting scores of hours to tracking this massive discussion, I’ve developed some rules for getting along in the age of NT Wright. As I listened to the panel discussion among Wright, Schreiner, and Thielman, I thought about how I’d been processing the Wright I’ve read over the years, and a few things became clear to me. Here are my new, modified rules for “livin’ in Hootie’s world.”

1. NT Wright is more helpful than I thought. Tom Schreiner spent a good ten minutes in his plenary address listing the many ways in which NT Wright’s work has been helpful. This wasn’t just the obligatory lip service before a mainly critical presentation; it was sustained, specific, and heart-felt. Schreiner nailed it: NT Wright has presented the world of biblical history in a gripping and fascinating way. He has struck a great balance between historical responsibility, open to academic and even secular standards of investigation, and a faith-motivated reading of the Bible as a Christian believer. His book on the Resurrection of the Son of God is masterful in this regard. Here is an Anglican on the side of the angels when it comes to most biblical issues. And every time Wright spoke in Atlanta, he did that Wright thing: taking any particular passage and putting it in a breathtakingly large context, teasing out the historical, cultural, and hermeneutical threads that make you look at the passage anew. This is Bible scholarship in the grand style, and I love it. The church has a desperate need for a few Bible scholars who know their technical stuff but who also know how to ask the big questions and point us to the big picture. Wright is one of our best, page after page after page.

2. I should try not to think about NT Wright himself. The reason I had sort of forgotten how helpful NT Wright is, is that his relentless airplay had distracted me from Wright’s arguments and made me look at Wright’s public persona. That public persona is not something I enjoy. Wright the public speaker comes across to me as smug. He is at his worst in the field of controversy, where he indulges in describing his critics as people who just don’t quite believe in heliocentrism. He constantly complains that anybody who disagrees with him hasn’t read him fairly. Hardly the happy warrior of Wordsworth’s poem, he tends to adopt a Nixonian tone (“The media’s out to get me… they even attacked my little dog Checkers!”). His book on Hope is vitiated by an “everything everybody has ever believed about heaven is wrong, and only I speak unto you the truth” tone of voice. It just makes my eyes cross; I can’t read on.

So far my rule of thumb has been that NT Wright’s big books are great, but his small books are to be avoided. That’s still not a bad guideline: make some time to study through any of the Wright books that top 500 pages, and you’ll get a blessing. The smaller books (where he can’t show all his work) give him too much opportunity to indulge in cutting a figure, in putting himself out there and invoking his own credibility. From these performances I will avert my eyes when possible. Life is too short, and reading time too precious, and the big books too good, for me to read the little ones with the regrettable passages. Your response to the Wright literary persona may be different; I admit this is subjective. But in the future, I’m not going to let my Wright annoyance factor cheat me out of benefiting from Wright’s plentiful good stuff.

3. NT Wright’s big idea is smaller than I thought. Somewhere in the second hour of panel discussion, it became clear to me that what Wright is insisting on in the justification debate is that there is such a thing as conversion, getting saved, and being forgiven by God, but the dikaio- word-group doesn’t refer to it. Here is a parallel: There is such a thing as growing in grace as a Christian, moving on from being oppressed by sin to living in victory over certain sins. The New Testament knows of that process and progress. But it doesn’t call it sanctification, as Protestants tend to in popular discourse. In other words, the hagio- word-group doesn’t refer to it in the NT. “Sanctification” in the NT tends to refer to a divine action in which he sets something apart for special use, or renders it appropriate for God’s presence. Now, I’ve noticed that, but I don’t correct people when they say things like “After being justified, do you go on to make progress in being sanctified?” I especially don’t correct them over the course of thousands of pages in which I warn them that they are seriously distorting the biblical message and are enslaved to traditions. Again, I speak here as somebody who is barely paying attention, so I could be wrong about everything. But I have provisionally made a different decision about how much it matters that the dikaio- word group does not map onto traditional Christian usage in a straightforward way. I decided it is not one of the major issues facing us today. I’m well aware that New Testament experts speak with greater precision than the rest of us about things like this, and I’m glad that they have epic battles amongst themselves about very precise matters. I want to learn from them, and to be accountable to them as the relevant experts. But precisely because there are hundreds of such arguments, I don’t norm all of my communication by the standards of that guild.

4. NT Wright is definitely not helping me think about justification. I’ll keep listening to the ongoing discussion, because I don’t really have a choice with the way the airwaves work. I’m on a long drive and NT Wright and his critics are what’s on the radio. But when I do make time to read Wright on justification, or New Perspective on Paul stuff in general, I can never quite keep the tune in my head long enough to hum it afterwards. I might just be too dense and too hidebound to be talked out of the rut I’m in. I might be one of those benighted souls who can’t quit thinking the sun goes around the earth (as portrayed in the opening pages of Wright’s Justification book). But I might also just be persuaded by something more like the classic Protestant interpretation of Paul’s writings, as represented by its current advocates who have studied this more responsibly than I can.

I wasn’t able to stay for all of Tom Schreiner’s paper on justification, so I asked a friend at the conference to tell me the bottom line. “The bottom line?” he said. “Basically, it turns out that what you think justification is, is what justification is.”

There’s something I read in Newman some time ago, early in seminary I think, that has stuck with me ever since. I know it’s important to me because I’ve mentally cataloged it with some mnemonic shorthand. As it turns out, I’ve mis-remembered it slightly, but here it is.

I recall Newman talking about the Trinity, and saying that the doctrine had to be presented in such a way that it wasn’t just a set of notions gathered together in the mind, but a real, living idea embraceable by the imagination.

It’s not just for students, he said: It’s for the young, the unlearned, the busy, and the afflicted. The main truths of Christianity, not least the Trinity, are for these people: Not just students, but also for the Young, the Unlearned, the Busy, and the Afflicted. That struck me. I took the first letters of the nouns and put them in my mind: YUBA. Young, unlearned, busy, afflicted.

Since then, YUBA has been a constant check-point for me. Am I as a theologian spending my time on things that could only matter to students, scholars, and savants (SSS)? Or are the theological truths I dedicate my work to the kind of things that can matter to kids, to people without formal education, to people who have to put in full days at hard jobs, and to people in pain?

Here’s how Newman himself puts it, in his Grammar of Assent:

I ask, then, as concerns the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, such as I have drawn it out to be, is it capable of being apprehended otherwise than notionally? Is it a theory, undeniable indeed, but addressed to the student, and to no one else? Is it the elaborate, subtle, triumphant exhibition of a truth, completely developed, and happily adjusted, and accurately balanced on its centre, and impregnable on every side, as a scientific view, “totus, teres, atque rotundus,” challenging all assailants, or, on the other hand, does it come to the unlearned, the young, the busy, and the afflicted, as a fact which is to arrest them, penetrate them, and to support and animate them in their passage through life? That is, does it admit of being held in the imagination, and being embraced with a real assent? I maintain it does, and that it is the normal faith which every Christian has, on which he is stayed, which is his spiritual life, there being nothing in the exposition of the dogma, as I have given it above, which does not address the imagination, as well as the intellect.

You might have noticed the order was UYBA. But I don’t know how to pronounce that, so it was a lucky accident that I inverted the letters. Newman’s YUBA has been a warning note in my ears ever since my first reading of Grammar of Assent. (The rest of his Trinity discussion surrounding this passage is also greatly instructive)

As a college professor, I spend a lot of time encouraging students to think more deeply, to really clear their schedules and do some pondering. They are not allowed to cry YUBA! to get out of thinking. After all, they are no longer the kind of Young that Newman is talking about; they are in the process of becoming Learned rather than Unlearned; they should manage their college time in such a way that they are not too Busy to think hard. Some of them are in fact Afflicted. Though affliction is a sliding scale and it’s not edifying to play the “More Afflicted Than Thou” card, there’s plenty of trouble to go around to everybody. But mostly I’m not thinking of them when I call the YUBA to mind. I’m trying to think of how to serve the great big church with all kinds of people in it, many of them –most of them– YUBA.

Rolling around in the back of my mind has been that constant blogger’s question, “Do I have anything worth saying about that?”

I never gave it my full attention, but the possible-blog ideas that came into mind were all pretty Protestant. No fan of the Oxford Movement or its effects, I felt a little irked about the symbolic date chosen for the Newman Beatification. All the ceremony and pageantry of papal visits leaves me cold. I have a lot of sympathy for Roman Catholic culture at the popular level, but the official stuff makes me feel belligerently low-churchy. The tension surrounding a face-to-face meeting between the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury made me think of about fifty punch-lines for fifty snotty jokes. In general, as a deeply satisfied free church evangelical Protestant, a lot of funny quips have flashed through my mind. Hate to waste funny quips.

But then I couldn’t ignore the “protest the pope” invective, which got louder and more insistent. Protesters making up nasty slogans, holding up signs with “messiah” mis-spelled, voicing their outrage that things like Popes are permitted on their British soil. I don’t even want to describe the scope of these things. It has been extremely ugly.

And through all this, Benedict’s leading message has been a high-level critique of the aggressive secularism that has such a death-grip on the British mind. It’s a powerful argument, and he’s honed it very well over the years. I’ve been reading Benedict since he was Ratzinger; since he was just a theologian. Of course he’s said lots of other, capital-R capital-C Roman Catholic stuff, but the main point he’s been driving home has been his sustained, principled critique of the secular ideology of the contemporary world.

It seems to me that my interests are being represented by the Pope. What I mean is, the reproaches that fall on him are also directed at me and mine. When the tribes of village atheists come out to the streets with their postmodern versions of “écrasez l’infâme,” they are not upset about the things that divide my Protestant principles from his Catholic commitments. These semi-literate stepchildren of Voltaire simply hate religion, period, and want it all to go away. They lash out at the Pope because he’s famous, he’s said Christian things in public, and now has dared to come near enough to yell at. That’s mere Christian hate there.

So here’s what I learned from the public reaction to the Papal visit. I have a lot of objections to the distinctive elements of Roman Catholic theology. It occurs to me to blog them, or say them, or bring them up on this occasion. But that would be stupid. The Pope protesters are protesting me and my church as well. He’s using his platform to deliver my message to that hostile crowd, and I’m grateful for that.

Besides, when the last king is hung with the entrails of the last priest, I would rather be found among the blessed dead than in the howling crowd trying to shout “sola scriptura” over the deafening roar of “to hell with religion.”

I don’t know who invented the argument that anybody lower than you on the sacramental realism scale is supposed to be called gnostic, but it’s an argument that has caught on. Any defection from high sacramentalism is gleefully identified as matter-hating, body-denying, salvation-by-cognition, capital G, gnosticism.

Once people glimpse the connection, they tend to be hooked. They see ironies everywhere in low-church observances. The charge of gnosticism has never made much sense to me, because it explains too much and seems to offer a glimpse into the secret motivations of the opponent. Plenty of people claim their opponents are gnostic, but nobody ever claims for themselves the badge or category of gnosticism.

Except Farrer.

The great, quirky, brilliant, and flawed Anglican theologian Austin Farrer set out to be gnostic, and on his own terms, he succeeded. But his terms were the opposite of the gnosticism we hear noised abroad in our day.

Farrer (1904-1968) was an Anglican priest who served as Fellow and Chaplain of Trinity College, Oxford from 1935-1960, then as Warden of Keble College from 1960 until his death in 1968. He was a close friend of C.S. Lewis (one of the witnesses to Lewis’ marriage to Joy, and the officiant at her burial).

It was about 1927, when Farrer was just a 22-year-old Oxford student (Baillol College), that he indulged in a binge of reading about the gnostic socio-cultural milieu from which early Christianity emerged. He wrote a series of wild letters to his Baptist father and some friends, in which he speculated that “the atmosphere in which the early Church grew up was indeed one of mystery, that St. Paul was not a rationalist, and that the original meaning of the sacraments and the incarnation should be considered in the light of Gnostic logic.” (Most of these quotes are from the Farrer biography A Hawk Among Sparrows).

What is “Gnostic logic?” Farrer said:

Gnosticism has a logic in which A can be B and not-B at the same time, and this should be considered by those who are treating the original meaning of the sacraments, or the Incarnation. One must go further, and see how infinitely more plausible are the Catholic than Protestant theses….And what’s more, it looks to me as though the Christian Religion lifted out of this mental atmosphere becomes a fish out of water, and rationalistic arguments used against the sacraments and ministry, just as destructive of the Incarnation, in the hands, that is, of a man who would consent to be consistent. And is not this what is happening to ‘enlightened’ Protestantism?

Farrer dreaded the rationalism of liberal Christianity, and he thought that recourse to the original thought-forms of the early church could deliver moderns from the crush of liberal rationalism. “So the business of theology,” he later argued, “appears to me to be with these questions.

1. What categories of thought did the apostles use?
2. Which are essential to the apprehension of the saving fact?
3. How can they be cleared up, modernized?
4. What is their general philosophical type and what is its justification?

If this is opaque, it’s because Farrer is framing his ideas and connecting them with leaps of logic (he later apologized to his father for saying various alarming and inflammatory things in these letters).

But the basic idea is this: The early apostolic church, as soon as it stopped simply quoting the Old Testament and using its Hebrew categories whole, did all its fresh thinking in Greek categories, which meant Gnostic categories, which meant categories that used the physical to be simultaneously, mind-blowingly, identical and non-identical with the spiritual.

For the young Farrer, the idea that God himself could be experienced in physical churchly ordinances was not just about salvation, it was the principle by which God was knowable, or known to be personal or even objective at all:

If God is to be more than just the power which energizes in his creatures, if he is to be so over-against them that he can have reciprocal dealings with them, there must be events in the world’s history which stand out as being God’s action towards us, i.e. not just his universal action in creating and sustaining, but his subsequent action in opening up contacts with us. But that can only mean something like an incarnation and a sacramental system. Thus the acknowledgement of Christ incarnate is the only way we can make sense of a God who is effectively personal in his relation to us.

The only hope for a personal God, for Farrer, was “something like an incarnation and a sacramental system.” And that high view of the metaphysical necessity of the sacraments was a development of Farrer’s avowed intention to recover the gnostic framework of early Christianity. It was what connected made God encounterable, knowable.

In other words, he preferred Anglo-Catholicism to the somewhat liberal Baptist faith of his family precisely because it was more gnostic. And the more gnostic a presentation of Christianity was, the more in touch with reality it was.

I think I see holes in Farrer’s argument at the historical level (the pervasive gnosticism that, in Farrer’s generation was thought to predate the New Testament, has rather evaporated upon closer analysis), at the philosophical level (that A and non-A stuff should be a warning sign to anybody), and at the dogmatic level (sacraments directly tied to an abstract principle of enfleshment rather than to the death and resurrection of Christ; sacraments as Christmas presents rather than Easter events). And the mature Farrer would move away from this way of putting things, and into his lifetime project of explaining how the first cause could work through secondary causes without obliterating their reality.

But what continues to interest me is the now-unfashionable way in which he sought to be gnostic, and moved from Baptist to Anglo-Catholic in his quest.

Donald Bloesch, evangelical theologian, died this week. He was a unique figure in twentieth-century theology, and now that he has passed from the scene, what strikes me about his work is his noble isolation. I don’t mean that he was personally lonely: by all reports he sustained many close friendships, and inspired long-term loyalty and affection in those who knew him. But Bloesch ran several paces ahead of the pack, and had to make his own way.

Bloesch (whose oddly-spelled name is easy to pronounce: just remember that it rhymes with “keepin’ it fresh,” “nativity creche,” and “the word became flesh”) made his most influential contribution to theology by publishing the two-volume Essentials of Evangelical Theology in the late 1970s. Essentials stood alone for a long time in the evangelical field: where else could you find a comprehensive overview of all the major doctrines, written from an evangelical point of view, in dialogue with the great tradition and with recent mainline theology, and put forth in an active voice by a living theologian putting his own name on the line? Essentials may not have been perfect, but it became an inescapable reference point for serious evangelical theology for years to come. It was as if he wrote for an audience that didn’t exist yet, and when that audience came of age and started looking around for books of doctrine, there was Bloesch waiting for them.

Obviously a man with a rigorous work ethic, Bloesch wasn’t satisfied with writing one systematic theology. He went on to produce the seven-volume Christian Foundations series, a more elaborate account of the whole field of doctrine. Again, what evangelical theologian has produced seven volumes like this? What’s remarkable about Bloesch is not that he kept winning the theology races; it’s that he was often the only runner on the course. Evangelicals produced good single-volume overviews of theology, and good introductory textbooks, and good studies of individual topics. But who cranked out seven volumes of consistently high quality doctrinal studies as the twentieth century gave way to the twenty-first? Bloesch alone.

(Well, okay, maybe Carl Henry. But his project had a different focus, clustered around issues of authority and culture. Bloesch was a theologian’s theologian.)

Donald Bloesch hasn’t founded any school of thought, and there are no identifiable “Bloeschians” in the next generations. He is one of the most important evangelical interpreters of Karl Barth, cautiously and consistently interacting with Barth’s thought during the decades when the slightest whiff of Barth’s influence was enough to get a theologian invited to leave the Evangelical Theological Society. Bloesch’s attempted resolution of the quandaries of evangelical Barthianism was only satisfying to a small minority. Anybody who was worried about the way neo-orthodoxy destabilized the doctrine of Scripture was probably just as unsatisfied by Bloesch’s account as they were with Barth’s own (here I raise my own hand, as politely as possible).

But even when it comes to the influence of Barth, Bloesch’s main contribution was to mediate to evangelical readers the determined Christocentric impulse. From first to last, Bloesch was focused on Christ as the main thing. He brought this from his own evangelical background, cultivated and elaborated it in dialogue with Barth, and channeled it to evangelicals for decades.

Bloesch also planted his feet in a mainline denomination (the United Church of Christ) and stayed there for his whole career, even as that denomination continued its intentional move deeper into liberalism. Sticking with his liberalizing denomination was a major decision for Bloesch’s legacy: One could wish that every mainline denomination had an evangelical voice like Bloesch’s in it somewhere, bearing witness for decades. When the history of the UCC is written, it has to include the fact that its most distinguished theologian in the late 20th century was blatantly evangelical. On the other hand, staying in the liberal mainline ensured that Bloesch was always at the margin of the central institutions of evangelicalism, unable to benefit fully from those strategic alliances and cooperation.

Donald Bloesch had an intellectual style that focused on staking out positions and contrasting them with alternative positions. Page after page and decade after decade, he generated a lot of slogans and labels in an attempt to capture the sort of theology he was doing. At one point he dubbed his approach “fideistic revelationism,” and distinguished it from mysticism, rationalism, fundamentalism, experientialism, relativism, etc.

Refusing to choose between liberalism and fundamentalism, he nevertheless expressed his preference for a kind of Christianity that preserved the doctrinal deposit of orthodoxy: “In liberalism truth is dissolved so that only an amorphous experience remains. In rigid orthodoxy truth is frozen into a formula or credo. But there is hope that it can be brought back to life.”

Ultimately, Bloesch’s favorite name for his kind of theology was the one he gave to the first volume of Christian Foundations: A Theology of Word and Spirit. “To speak of Word and Spirit,” Bloesch said, is

to reintroduce in theology the critical role of the experience of faith, which is qualitatively different, however, from ordinary human or even religious experience. … To affirm a theology of Word and Spirit is to affirm that the experience of faith is correlative with God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ. Since faith is a work of the Spirit in the interiority of our being, the truth of the gospel is not only announced from without but also confirmed from within. In the theology presented here both revelation and salvation have to be understood as objective-subjective rather than fundamentally objective (as in evangelical rationalism) or predominantly subjective (as in existentialism and mysticism).

Today’s evangelical theologians may not be able to follow all of Bloesch’s theological moves, and we may have to make other decisions on important points. But without trying to land in his exact footsteps, we still have to run a lot harder if we want to catch up with the pace that Donald Bloesch set for evangelical theology. He leaped out to an early lead, kept it for decades, and finished still ahead of the pack.

When the people of God are gathered to hear the word of God, the informal, “Hi there folks!” is not the right way to start a service. Wax uses the memorable analogy, “It’s like eating steak on a paper plate.”

It would be easy to miss the point, and to settle into the well-worn rut of worship wars. The gravitational pull of the old liturgical-versus-nonliturgical black hole can already be felt. But that wasn’t Wax’s intention, and it isn’t mine in bringing this up. Low-church evangelicals may or may not be trending toward more traditional liturgical forms, I don’t know. Hunter Baker thinks so, and Hunter Baker sees the future.

The big question for me is, how does a church send the signal to its Sunday morning congregation that it is serious about what it’s doing?

As a free church evangelical in suburban southern California, I participate in the general trend of casual service-openers. I think it’s a great, culturally appropriate way to start out a gathering. I suppose we could bang a gong, or plunge the sanctuary into darkness, or bring up the music to a dramatic opening. But it seems more normal and natural for somebody to go up front and say nice human things like “Hello” and “Welcome” and “Have a seat, let’s get started.” That’s how the indigenous peoples talk in my country, and that’s how church starts.

But here’s the key: At some point in the service, and it has to be a pretty early point, one of the ministers presiding over the worship service needs to get our attention and let us know that we’re doing a very serious thing. We’re going to worship God together. We’re going to hear his word proclaimed and applied. We’re going to place ourselves under the authority of that word and take the consequences of admitting we are not our own. We’re going to pray with one another, to try to say and hear the things we most need to say and hear. The prophet Isaiah is going to shout at us from across the centuries! The apostles are going to tell us what they saw and heard and touched! God himself will speak through his own holy word.

This is church! We’re not messing around.

Happily low churchy guy that I am, I am always straining my ears to hear the modern version of the ancient anaphora, the Sursum Corda, the pastor’s call to the congregation to “Lift up your hearts!” It doesn’t usually happen in the first sixty seconds in the kind of church I’m at home in. It usually waits. First we say some normal, hospitality-minded words of welcome; and then some normal, information-distributing words of announcements; and maybe even some normal, defenses-lowering words of casual friendliness. Maybe even a joke, maybe even a quick reference to current events.

But the Sursum Corda‘s coming. One of the pastors is going to do something to send the signal that we are approaching the holy. There will be some summons, some expression of an intentional elevation of our minds and hearts to consider the things above, where Christ sits at the right hand of the Father. And when that happens, we all know we’re officially having church.

Just like all the millions of believers snoozing and waking their way through a more formal Sunday liturgy, I can’t promise I’m always catching all the cues that are being sent to me. And I can’t promise that everybody in the congregation is catching the same cues I am. Sometimes I know to lift up my heart at the sound of the first serious quotation of Scripture. Sometimes it’s the opening prayer, or the tone of the first words after the announcements. Often it’s the drum or the bass guitar in the first song that gets through to me at a deeper level. My pastor is especially good at calling us to stand up together and sing, and the way to the heart is often through the feet. After more than a decade in a stable, healthy church, sometimes I get the Sursum Corda just from seeing the face of a faithful preacher or worship leader, regardless of what words he’s saying. He gets the benefit of me remembering that time he spoke the word of God to us six years ago.

I’m no liturgist or worship leader; I’m an amateur and a lay participant at all that stuff. I don’t have real opinions about it, and wouldn’t expect anybody to listen to me if I did. But here’s what I know for sure: The message we gather to hear on Sunday morning is serious business, and the medium needs to fit the message. The call of Sursum Corda sounds a lot of different ways, but it’s got to be heard every time we gather. I am always listening for it, because I always need to lift up my heart to the Lord.

Instead, what I’ve got is a list of favorites, inevitably emphasizing theology and unfortunately ignoring fiction. It’s basically the same list as the one on my home page, but with new commentary to incite you to read them.

1. Ephesians.  The best book of the Bible. I’m not talking about a canon within the canon, but there is an Ephesians fan club running down through history, from Irenaeus through Jerome and Calvin and J.N.Darby to me, and (however else we may differ) we look to this little letter as the capstone of progressive revelation. I remember a senior theologian telling me once that Romans was the special favorite of all Protestants, and that after that the Lutherans opt for Galatians (“my wife,” as Luther said) while the Reformed go for Ephesians. As a Wesley guy, I realize I’m supposed to opt for 1 John. But I can’t help it. Ephesians found me, and I have stayed found.

2. Church Dogmatics Volume IV (Karl Barth). Let me first direct five seconds of ritual hatred toward Barth’s lapses from my own sterling evangelical orthodoxy, especially on the doctrine of Scripture. Grrrr. Okay, now check out how rich and involving this amazing dogmatic work is. Volume IV, the Doctrine of Reconciliation, is astonishingly good and stimulating. From the exposition of grace at the beginning, to the rejection of infant baptism at the end, this is theology that reads like an adventure novel with doctrines as the main characters. In the words of Flannery O’Connor, “I distrust folks who have ugly things to say about Karl Barth. I like old Barth. He throws the furniture around.” Nowhere does the furniture fly faster than in volume IV.

3. The Hidden Life: Thoughts on our Communion with God (Adolph Saphir). A nineteenth-century Hungarian Jew converted to Christian faith by Scottish Free Church missionaries, Adolph Saphir had a prodigious beard, a consecrated heart, and an unparalleled mastery of the great themes of the Bible. He got a lot of mileage out of the “I’m a Hebrew, I read the whole Bible from the inside” schtick, and I find that his books can say things to me that I don’t give anybody else permission to say. Saphir had perfect evangelical poise; things that seem to have lost their center in recent decades were all held together perfectly in his ministry. This is his best book; watch for a new edition of it soon from Kregel.

4. The Spirit of Christ or With Christ in the School of Prayer (Andrew Murray) or just about anything else by Andrew Murray. I once gave an Andrew Murray book to a friend of mine, a profound Christian philosopher who had just had a baby. It was a book about raising children to love God, and like nearly all Murray books, it was divided into 30 chapters so you could read one each day for a month. It also had a sentimental, icky, cheesy cover, which publishers insist on putting on all Murray reprints. My friend thanked me for it politely. A few months later, he came back to me and said, “When you gave me that book, I was sort of disappointed in you, that you would give me some dumb devotional book about parenting that you just grabbed at the Christian bookstore. But then I read it. WOW. This is the real stuff.” Indeed.

5. Mere Christianity (C. S. Lewis), especially Book Four, “Beyond Personality.” Here’s a test of a great book: Can it grow up with you? Book Four of Mere Christianity was one of the books (along with a key chapter of Packer’s Knowing God) that introduced me to the doctrine of the Trinity when I was seventeen and didn’t know much about much. Then I read it again after earning a PhD on the doctrine of the Trinity, and I found it even more impressive. How can a man write in a way that edifies and instructs folks at both extremes of the educational spectrum? There may be a “too smart for C.S. Lewis” stage of theological puberty, and it may be a helpful part of coming of age (though some bishops may be stuck in it), but the interesting stuff happens when you grow back into C.S. Lewis.

6. A Compendium of Christian Theology (William Burt Pope) Pope. 1822-1903. Unjustly neglected, bypassed in an age of controversy because he fixed his attention on the main, broad lines of Christian thought and emphasized continuity. Theological genius. Three-volume Methodist dogmatics. He handled theological themes as if they were holy things.

7. The Principles of Theology (W. H. Griffith-Thomas) All the solidity of the Anglican tradition (in form, the book is a commentary on the 39 Articles), all the fire of evangelicalism (he collaborated in the founding of Dallas Theological Seminary), all the details of close attention to Scripture, and all the breadth of an organic systematics. No novelties, but “Deep simplicities and simple profundities which will strike his readers as new revelations,” said J.I. Packer of Griffith-Thomas’s work. Rather patrician, almost Olympian in his broad-mindedness and his mastery of the great tradition. So he’s inerrantist, premillenial, and Keswick. Deal with it.

8. Calvin’s Institutes If you know a living theologian who is a master craftsman capable of apprenticing you, go and study with him. In the absence of such an opportunity, work through the Institutes. It is specifically designed, by this master craftsman who knew the arts of Renaissance humanism and applied them to the task of teaching Christian doctrine, to lead theologians through the tensions, dangers, and possibilities of theology. Calvin brings the alternatives before your vision, weighs them, and reminds you that your doctrinal decisions are being made in real time, coram Deo: before the face of God.

9. The Heidelberg Catechism (Ursinus and Olevianus) I recently talked with a woman who had grown up in a Dutch denomination that imposed the Heidelberg Catechism on its congregational life in a way that made it seem (to her, at least) to be a cold and heartless system. Though I believe that she experienced it as such, I am astonished that this is possible, because this little masterpiece is systematically geared to summarizing the main ideas of Scripture and applying them, personally and pastorally, to the believer. The opening question is, “What is your only comfort in life and in death?” and repeatedly throughout, the catechism explores part of the work of Christ and then poses the question “What benefit do you derive from this?” The answers are well worth writing on your heart.

10. Tie: The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification (Walter Marshall), or The Life of God in the Soul of Man (Henry Scougal) For practical purposes, there’s no theological decision more important than figuring out how justification and sanctification cohere in the Christian life. Mistakes here can tie you in knots that take years to untangle, knots that go deeper than ideas. Marshall’s book is great and comprehensive, but not the greatest reading experience. Scougal’s book is a delight to read, and makes its main point in the first few pages. Lively minds like Susannah Wesley and George Whitefield knew where to go next after getting pointers from Scougal.

Love is patient and kind;

Love does not envy or boast;

It is not arrogant or rude.

It does not insist on its own way;

It is not irritable or resentful;

It does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Jesus is patient and kind;

Jesus does not envy or boast;

He is not arrogant or rude.

He does not insist on his own way;

He is not irritable or resentful;

He does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.

Jesus bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

_______ is patient and kind;

______ does not envy or boast;

__ is not arrogant or rude.

__ does not insist on ___ own way;

__ is not irritable or resentful;

__ does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.

______ bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

In fact, there’s great Old Testament precedent for the recognition that both are necessary: In that great, book-centered worship service reported in Nehemiah 8, the priests “read from the book, from the Law of God, clearly, and they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.” (verse 8). You’ve got to give the people the sense of it. And in the New Testament churches, Paul exhorts Timothy to devote himself “to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching (I  Tim 4:13).”

I belong to a nearby Evangelical Free church whose worship calendar is shaped by a commitment to preach through entire books of the Bible. For several years, our practice has been to kick off the sermon series with a special service in which we read the book itself aloud, with no sermon. Before we preached through I John, our Sunday morning service was a public reading of the text of the epistle. Back when we preached through Acts, we did a unique marathon reading service that took up most of the day and included breaks for fellowship meals.

Right now we’re engaging the book of Isaiah, whose 66-chapter length makes a single reading service impractical if not impossible. So the elders chose to break the book down into meaningful sub-sections, and launch each sub-section with its own reading service. This past Sunday was our second such reading service, covering Isaiah 7-12, and it was a powerful confrontation with the word of God in all its wildness and weirdness.

Isaiah is one tough book. When Augustine of Hippo became a Christian, he asked bishop Ambrose for book recommendations. Ambrose recommended Isaiah, and Augustine failed pretty seriously in his attempt to read it profitably. A modern congregation isn’t likely to do much better: while the good stuff in Isaiah is dazzlingly good and wonderfully clear, those bits are scattered across a terrain that is both dark and difficult.  Chapter after chapter of Isaiah is devoted to God’s wrath and judgement, for one thing. And then there’s the difficulty of the language and the poetic forms.

There’s a basic reading comprehension challenge here: When the prophet demands, “Is not Calno like Carchemish? Is not Hamath like Arpad?,” it would take a pretty accomplished Old Testament professor to know immediately what point was being made.  And when he says that the Lord will make you like a hut in a cucumber field, is that a promise or a threat? (Sometimes I think it sounds idyllic to be a hut in a cucumber field… ). Speaking of promise or threat, how am I to take “In that day a man will keep alive a young cow and two sheep, and… he will eat curds, for everyone who is left in the land will eat curds and honey?” That sounds good, but in context it’s mostly bad.

Most of these comprehension questions can be cleared up fairly easily; in fact most of them are clarified by the notes in the ESV Study Bible. But when you’re experiencing the public reading of the book of Isaiah, such questions come at you too fast to sort out. The public reading of a section of Isaiah is a pretty blunt instrument: the details wash over the audience, but certain key points stand  out, and the overall tone is powerfully communicated powerfully.

And of course the explanation is not lacking. We have not in fact decided to scrap the sermon and just read the Bible. First, the reading service is one part of an entire season of preaching, and the pastors will be “giving the sense” of these words in the coming weeks, passage by passage. And second, the reading service itself was not just somebody standing up and reading impromptu from an opened Bible. It was carefully planned and structured, with a variety of readers’ voices, some silence, some prayers, a few visual clues (the stump, the shoot, and the leveled forest are recurring images), and plenty of congregational sung responses. A seasoned pastor of worship guided our understanding of the text as it went along, arranging all the components of the service to bring out certain points for emphasis. The readers knew their passages well, and read with understanding and feeling.

So the safety rails are necessary, and they were well placed. Used prudently, those guidelines do not tame the word of God; they open up a space where God’s word through Isaiah can be itself. All the strange figures of speech, artifacts of a culture that is not mine, are right there. And all the ancient bizarre names are spoken aloud. The numinous, suggestive power of these strange, foreign sounds has some kind of incantatory power to transport the hearers out of their own situations and into the meeting with God’s ancient word.  Think of all the bogus religions that had to invent weird old names and difficult faux-ancient texts, just so they could feel like real religions. We’ve got the real thing, oddities and all, and though it takes care and wisdom to deploy it properly for a congregation, the word of God proves itself to be living and active, going out from the mouth of God and not returning without having accomplished its goal.

Evangel readers probably don’t need much persuasion that the internet can be an effective tool for ministry. Just off the top of my head, I remember Abraham Piper (though not speaking ex cathedra) offering a pretty convincing Six Reasons Pastors Should Blog back in 2008, and Ted Bolsinger pleading “Blog, for Christ’s Sake” in 2005.

The Pope’s arguments and encouragements come in a different register, though. For one thing, he’s the Pope, so when he says it, it’s in the headlines. Every news writer is trying to figure out a clever way to say “what’s Latin for blog?” or “Thus saith the Lord: Tweet,” or “www.GollyWowTheChurchGetsModern” or something equally stimulating.

Also, Benedict’s writing style is, you know, Benedictine: erudite, allusive, intense, orotund even in print. His characteristic range of biblical and classical allusion inform everything he writes.  Who else makes a case for blogging by alluding to Paul’s “how can they hear without someone to preach?” and ““Woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel” (Insert the verb “to blog” in there and your irreverent headlines write themselves!)

Other pull quotes of note:

Gathered and called by the Word, the Church is the sign and instrument of the communion that God creates with all people, and every priest is called to build up this communion, in Christ and with Christ.

Priests present in the world of digital communications should be less notable for their media savvy than for their priestly heart, their closeness to Christ. This will not only enliven their pastoral outreach, but also will give a “soul” to the fabric of communications that makes up the “Web”.

…I encouraged leaders in the world of communications to promote a culture of respect for the dignity and value of the human person. This is one of the ways in which the Church is called to exercise a “diaconia of culture” on today’s “digital continent”.

Just as the prophet Isaiah envisioned a house of prayer for all peoples (cf. Is 56:7), can we not see the web as also offering a space – like the “Court of the Gentiles” of the Temple of Jerusalem – for those who have not yet come to know God?

May the Lord make all of you enthusiastic heralds of the Gospel in the new “agorà” which the current media are opening up.

I was going to make a list of pastors who make good use of new media (blogs, facebook, and twitter in particular) for ministry purposes, but, gripped with the fear of leaving somebody out, I’ll ask for good recommendations in the comments. I’m especially interested in specifically pastoral and church-based examples, rather than all the other kinds of swell Christian internet usage.

That’s how Isaac Watts wrote it back in the eighteenth century, when he wrote Joy to the World.

This line gets changed from “men” to “us” or “all” pretty often in performances of the song. I know why it gets changed: “Men” sounds like an invitation for just the guys to sing, because “men” sounds like “the males in the audience.”  I don’t have a problem with making sure everybody knows they’re included, and language does change over time.

But when Watts wrote it, he meant “men” in the sense of “human beings.” And that matters in this song: The second line of the second verse needs to go out of its way to specify that human beings are doing the singing.

Why? Because Joy to the World is a versification of Psalm 98, and Psalm 98 posed a problem for Isaac Watts. That psalm exhorts “all the earth” to make a joyful noise to the LORD, going so far as to command the sea to roar, the rivers to clap their hands, and the hills to sing for joy together before the LORD.

Hills don’t sing, though; not literally. And though Isaac Watts was a poet who knew all about techniques like personfication, he was also a careful Bible interpreter who knew that his songs were going to be used as tools for teaching. He wanted to teach people what Psalm 98 actually means by what it says. His solution was to portray humans as using their human songs, which would then echo off of the “fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains.” Men would employ their songs, and nature would “repeat the sounding joy.” At the coming of Christ, all creation is an echo chamber of praise for this “new song” (Psalm 98, verse 1) that we, we men, sing to the Lord. Humanity has the leading voice in bringing all creation to sing articulate praise to God. The redemption of the earth comes through a man, a human being, who redeems and rules and blesses, weeding out sins and sorrows and even thorns, “far as the curse is found.”

Isaac Watts was no dummy, and we ought to thing twice or thrice before tweaking his lyrics. They are almost always deeper than moderns give them credit for when they tweak a word here or there, because we rarely join him in the biblical meditative process he went through in crafting them. If you’re invited to sing along with a tweaked version of Joy to the World this Christmas, by all means obey your host (and the song!), and join in the singing. Men and women alike, let us, let us all, employ our songs.  As men.