Fortress Madonna

Seventy years ago the Soviets encircled the German Sixth Army outside Stalingrad. More than 100,000 men were cut off as the winter closed in.  

One of these was Lieutenant Kurt Reuber, a doctor and Lutheran minister before the war. As Christmas 1942 approached he completed a large charcoal drawing, now known as the Fortress Madonna, as he described in a final letter to his family:

“Christmas week has come and gone. It has been a week of watching and waiting, of deliberate resignation and confidence. The days were filled with the noise of battle and there were many wounded to be attended to. I wondered for a long while what I should paint, and in the end I decided on a Madonna, or mother and child. I have turned my hole in the frozen mud into a studio. The space is too small for me to be able to see the picture properly, so I climb on to a stool and look down at it from above, to get the perspective right. Everything is repeatedly knocked over, and my pencils vanish into the mud. There is nothing to lean my big picture of the madonna against, except a sloping, home-made table past which I can just manage to squeeze. There are no proper materials and I have used a Russian map for paper. But I wish I could tell you how absorbed I have been painting my madonna, and how much it means to me.

“The picture looks like this: the mother's head and the child's lean toward each other, and a large cloak enfolds them both. It is intended to symbolise security and motherly love. I remembered the words of St. John: light, life and love. What more can I add? I wanted to suggest these three things in the homely and common vision of a mother with her child and the security that they represent. When we opened the Christmas Door, as we used to do on other Christmases (only now it was the wooden door of our dug-out), my comrades stood spellbound and reverent, silent before the picture that hung on the clay wall. A lamp was burning on a board stuck into the clay beneath the picture. Our celebrations in the shelter were dominated by this picture, and it was with full hearts that my comrades read the words: light, life and love.

“I spent Christmas evening with the other doctors and the sick. The Commanding Officer had presented the letter with his last bottle of Champagne. We raised our mugs and drank to those we love, but before we had had a chance to taste the wine we had to throw ourselves flat on the ground as bombs fell outside. I seized my doctor's bag and ran to the scene of the explosions, where there were dead and wounded. My shelter with its lovely Christmas decorations became a dressing station. One of the dying men had been hit in the head and there was nothing more I could do for him. He had been with us at our celebration, and had only that moment left to go on duty, but before he went he had said: 'I'll finish the carol first. O du Frohliche!' A few moments later he was dead. There was plenty of hard and sad work to do in our Christmas shelter. It is late now, but it is Christmas night still. And so much sadness everywhere." 

The letter and drawing were flown out on the last transport plane from Stalingrad. It now is displayed in the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin.

Kurt Reuber was taken prisoner when the Sixth Army surrendered in February 1943. He created a similar drawing, known as the “Suffering Madonna" (Leidens-Madonna) in captivity for Christmas 1943 before he died in January 1944 in a Soviet prisoner of war camp. Only 6,000 men from the Sixth Army survived the war.

Star of Bethlehem

Colin Humphreys, a physicist from the UK, has authored several papers on the dating of Biblical events.  In the spirit of the season here is his classic article which argues that the “Star of Bethlehem" was a comet which dates the birth of Christ to the spring of 5BC.  This is consistent with a range of evidence, including the death of Herod in 4BC.

Click here to view the paper

Royal Commission announced in Australia

Following further harrowing testimony at the Victorian state parliamentary inquiry, Prime Minister Julia Gillard today announced a national royal commission into child abuse.

Parliamentary Inquiry into Child Abuse

Here in Australia the Victorian state parliament is currently conducting an inquiry into the handling of child abuse by religious and other organisations.

Hearings have just begun but the focus so far is overwhelmingly on the Roman Catholic church.

Some of the reported testimony includes:

• Victoria Police identified 2110 offences committed against 519 victims since January 1956, more than 70% of whom were abused within the Catholic church system (to put this in context Catholics represent approximately 25% of Australians) - during this entire period not a single case has been referred by the church to police
• Professor Patrick Parkinson, a child protection expert and Sydney University law professor, testified that there is six times as much abuse in the Catholic Church as in all other churches combined
• Analysis of Catholic clergy ordained in Victoria and Tasmania from 1940 to 1972 by Professor Des Cahill found that nearly 5% have either been convicted of child sexual abuse or died with the church subsequently admitting they were abusers

Links to articles and testimony cited:

-  Melbourne Age 19 October 2012

-  Melbourne Age 22 October 2012

-  Transcripts from the inquiry

Christ And Nothing

“Christ and Nothing" is a beautiful essay by Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart that explores how Christianity triumphed over the ancient gods, unleashing the nihilism against which we struggle today:

As modern men and women — to the degree that we are modern — we believe in nothing. This is not to say, I hasten to add, that we do not believe in anything; I mean, rather, that we hold an unshakable, if often unconscious, faith in the nothing, or in nothingness as such. It is this in which we place our trust, upon which we venture our souls, and onto which we project the values by which we measure the meaningfulness of our lives. Or, to phrase the matter more simply and starkly, our religion is one of very comfortable nihilism... 

We live in an age whose chief moral value has been determined, by overwhelming consensus, to be the absolute liberty of personal volition, the power of each of us to choose what he or she believes, wants, needs, or must possess; our culturally most persuasive models of human freedom are unambiguously voluntarist and, in a rather debased and degraded way, Promethean; the will, we believe, is sovereign because unpremised, free because spontaneous, and this is the highest good. And a society that believes this must, at least implicitly, embrace and subtly advocate a very particular moral metaphysics: the unreality of any “value” higher than choice, or of any transcendent Good ordering desire towards a higher end. Desire is free to propose, seize, accept or reject, want or not want — but not to obey [...] But, of course, if the will determines itself only in and through such choices, free from any prevenient natural order, then it too is in itself nothing. And so, at the end of modernity, each of us who is true to the times stands facing not God, or the gods, or the Good beyond beings, but an abyss, over which presides the empty, inviolable authority of the individual will, whose impulses and decisions are their own moral index.

 Click here for the full essay

Engaging with the Augsburg Confession

The Augsburg Confession of 1530 was the first great confessional statement of the Reformation, yet like many historic confessions it is underappreciated today.

If we are to revive the spirit of confessionalism, we need to remove the barriers to engaging with the confessions themselves.  One of these barriers is the harsh language of sixteenth century doctrinal and sectarian disputes.

If one looks past this language, the core becomes highly relevant again.  To demonstrate this, I have focused on the first 21 articles which are the positive expressions of belief (the last seven articles focus on correcting errors of the Roman Catholic church).  I have also removed the rhetorical “condemnation" of various Christian groups at the end of each article, which mainly serves to contrast with the positive articulation in the main part of the article.

I am not suggesting we sweep the original text away, but rather that we consider new ways to express a positive and powerful vision of our faith. Hopefully we can then restore the relevance and power of these confessions in the modern context.

I've posted my abridged version of the Augsburg Confession here.

Christianity in Australia

The first data from the 2011 Australian census was released today and it doesn't make for encouraging reading. The tables below show key trends in religious affiliation over the last 20 years.

Over the last ten years, the share of the population identifying as Christian has declined by 7% (to 61%) while the share of those explicitly identifying themselves as non-religious has increased by 7% (to 22%).

Table 1: Religious affiliation - total population

Affiliation	1991 (000)	2001 (000)	2011 (000)	1991 (%)	2001 (%)	2011 (%)
Christianity	12,466	12,764	13,151	74%	68%	61%
Buddhism	140	358	529	1%	2%	2%
Islam	147	282	476	1%	2%	2%
Hinduism	44	95	276	-	1%	1%
Judaism	74	84	97	-	-	-
Other	40	92	342	-	-	2%
No religion	2,177	2,906	4,797	13%	15%	22%
Not stated	1,762	2,188	1,840	10%	12%	9%
Total	16,850	18,769	21,508	100%	100%	100%

The second table shows the breakdown of Christian respondents by denomination:

Table 2: Religious affiliation - Christian denominations

Affiliation	1991 (000)	2001 (000)	2011 (000)	1991 (%)	2001 (%)	2011 (%)
Protestant	7,223	7,048	6,940	58%	55%	53%
- Anglican	4,019	3,881	3,680	32%	30%	28%
- Uniting	1,388	1,249	1,066	11%	10%	8%
- Presbyterian	732	638	600	6%	5%	5%
- Baptist	280	309	352	2%	2%	3%
- Lutheran	251	250	252	2%	2%	2%
- Pentecostal	151	195	238	1%	2%	2%
- Other	404	527	752	3%	4%	6%
Catholic	4,607	5,002	5,439	37%	39%	41%
Orthodox	475	529	563	4%	4%	4%
Other*	161	185	208	1%	1%	2%
Total	12,466	12,764	13,151	100%	100%	100%

* Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh-day Adventists and LDS

Within the Christian population the traditional British Protestant denominations (Anglican, Uniting and Presbyterian) continue to contract sharply. Almost uniquely, Lutheran numbers are neither growing nor shrinking but remain steady at approximately 250,000 and represent 2% of all Christians.

Stars of heaven

The total number of stars is estimated to be greater than 100 sextillion (10^23), or more than ten trillion stars per person. On the face of it we are insignificant in the context of the universe.

And yet despite half a century of searching there is no scientific evidence to suggest that life is present anywhere in the universe except here in our solar system.  At the end of his recent book “The Eerie Silence" noted cosmologist Paul Davies, an enthusiast for finding extraterrestrial life, says that his scientific opinion weighing up all the factors is that “we are probably the only intelligent beings in the observable universe, and I would not be very surprised if the solar system contains the only life in the observable universe."

Rather than being an insignificant part of creation we are perhaps the rarest and most precious component of it.

LCMS theological discussions with the ACNA

The Lutheran Church Missouri Synod has just released a report on theological discussions with the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA).

Another example of common ground across conservative denominations in the context of an increasingly secular society.

Can confessionalism be revived?

Here is a great interview with Ross Douthat of the New York Times exploring the themes of his new book “Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics", chronicling the decline in institutional Christianity in the United States over the last fifty years.

Douthat hopes for a return to confessionalism and strong institutional churches as a way to address the issues facing contemporary Christianity.

Confessionalism does seem to be undergoing a minor revival among Christians online (as shown by this blog and many others) and within mainline Protestant denominations more traditional churches seem to be holding their own in the context of overall decline.

However there are several barriers to a widespread confessional revival:

1. The basis of confessionalism, the confessions themselves, were composed in the sixteenth to eighteen centuries and carry a lot of archaic language and historical context that is not directly relevant to the way theological issues are discussed by most people today
2. In many cases, even “confessional" churches downplay or ignore sections of the historical confessions
3. Most importantly, the members of confessional churches frequently don't know, understand or necessarily agree with the key confessional beliefs of their denomination and (more positively) reject an exclusive, sectarian approach to Christianity

Is there a way then to preserve all that is good about a confessional approach while ensuring it is relevant and viable?

For Lutherans this could potentially take the form of a dynamic new expression of the essence of our historic confessions.

However the more intriguing possibility may cross denominations.  We are seeing signs that traditional Christians of all denominations recognise they have much in common in the face of secular and “accommodationist" trends.  Perhaps it is time for a grand ecumenical council in the tradition of the early church councils - a Chalcedon for our age.

Tree of Life

If you haven't seen it yet check out the Terrence Malick film Tree of Life.

The revealed and unrevealed God

Christianity is a revealed religion: God reveals Himself to us in His creation, in His Word and in His Son. However our knowledge of God is limited because there is much about His plan and divine purpose that is not revealed.

In this selection from his lectures on Genesis, Luther speaks to the divine mystery of election and why we can never understand God's plan from a purely rational point of view. However we can take comfort from what has been revealed that our place in His plan is secure.