Prayer for ANZAC Day

Today is ANZAC Day in Australia and New Zealand, commemorating the landings at Gallipoli in the First World War.  Here is a prayer for the day from the Anglican Prayer Book for Australia:

God of love and liberty,
We bring our thanks today for the peace and security we enjoy,
We remember those who in time of war faithfully serve their country.
We pray for their families, and for ourselves whose freedom was won at such a cost.
Make us a people zealous for peace, and hasten that day when nation shall not lift up sword against nation neither learn war any more.
This we pray in the name of the one who gave his life for the sake of the world: Jesus Christ, our Redeemer. Amen.

Funeral of Margaret Thatcher

The funeral of Baroness and former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has just concluded at St. Paul's Cathedral in London. Here is the final blessing by the Archbishop of Canterbury:

Support us, O Lord, all the day long of this troublous life, until the shadows lengthen and the evening comes, the busy world is hushed, the fever of life is over and our work is done. Then, Lord, in your mercy grant us a safe lodging, a holy rest, and peace at the last; through Christ our Lord.

Now unto him that is able to keep us from falling, and to present us faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy, to the only wise God our Saviour, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and for ever. And the blessing of God almighty, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit be with you and remain with you this day and always.

For her views on Christianity and politics I strongly recommend her 1978 speech at St. Lawrence Jewry “I Believe" (click here) which is as relevant today as ever.

Additional links:
-  Text of funeral address by the Bishop of London Richard Chartres
-  Full order of service including readings and hymns

Let There Be Light

The Planck space telescope of the European Space Agency has made the most detailed observations yet of the first light in the universe (see full details here).

Elementary particles cooled enough to form hydrogen atoms 380,000 years after creation, rendering the universe transparent to light for the first time.  Amazingly this light still permeates the universe, albeit shifted into the microwave spectrum due to the expansion of space since that time.

This cosmic microwave background represents the most ancient image that will ever be seen, a map that points to the subsequent development of all structure in the universe.

The Reconciliation of All Things

For God has consigned all to disobedience, that he may have mercy on all
(Romans 11:32 ESV)

Recently there has been a resurgence of interest in the ancient idea of universal salvation.  As a starting point I recommend an essay by Bishop Kallistos Ware, an Orthodox bishop in Great Britain, entitled “Dare We Hope for the Salvation of All?"

Luther did not subscribe to a “universalist" view that all men would definitely be saved, or that there were multiple pathways to God.  At one point he even lectured against a straightforward interpretation of 1 Timothy 2:4 “God desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth".

On the other hand, Luther holds open the possibility of salvation after death in a letter to Hans Von Rechenberg when he says:

It would be quite a different question whether God can impart faith to some in the hour of death or after death so that these people could be saved through faith.  Who would doubt God's ability to do that?

Above all Luther stressed that salvation, whenever offered, would be through faith in Christ and not through any other means.

I believe that a perspective on this issue in modern context would include the following key points:

1. As Lutherans we do not believe in a predestination to damnation
2. God is an infinitely loving and just God - it follows that his ultimate plan for salvation (which has not been revealed to us and cannot be ascertained by human reasoning) is not arbitrary or unjust
3. It is within the power of God to offer his grace and love to those who have not accepted it during this life - this is a matter for Him alone however it could be a means by which His grace may operate in ways we don't know about
4. Finally, it is through Christ that we are saved - God may continue to extend his grace after death but “the way, the truth and the life" remain the same

In his essay, Bishop Ware points to an alternative to universal salvation called “conditional immortality" which is worth considering:

“I am He who is," says God to Moses at the burning bush in the Septuagint version of Exodus 3:14; “I am the Existing One" (ego eimi ho on). God is Being and Reality, and He is the sole source of all existence. Evil, on the other hand, is in the strict sense non-being and unreality. Evil and sin have no substantive existence, for they are not a “thing  that God has made; they are a distortion of the good, a parasite - not a noun but an adjective...

Existence, then, is good, for it is gift from God; and everything that exists, by the very fact of existing, retains some link with God, who is the only source of existence. From this it follows that nothing that exists can be entirely and utterly evil. To posit something totally evil would be a nonsense, a contradiction in terms; for such a thing would be altogether unreal and could not actually exist. Even the devil, because he exists, still has a continuing relationship with God. Thus where there is existence, there is hope - even for the devil.

A possible conclusion from this line of argument is not universal salvation but conditional immortality. At the end God will indeed be “all in all", not because all rational creatures have been saved but because at a certain point the radically wicked have simply ceased to be. Cut off from God, the unique source of existence, they have lapsed into non-being. At the end-time, that is to say, there will be a resurrection to eternal life, but no resurrection to eternal death; or, rather, there will be resurrection to a death that is final but not continuing, for it will entail annihilation.

This seems to me to resolve many of the issues involved.  As Christians we do not believe in a Manichean universe where good and evil are balanced and offsetting. Rather everything exists in relation to the ultimate good and eventually all things will either be reconciled to God or cease to exist.

Newtown

It saddens me to see how the LCMS President and ultraconservative legalists within the synod have overreacted to the participation of a LCMS minister in a prayer service for the young victims of the Newtown school shooting.

See here for a good response from a former president, who was caught up in a similar controversy when a LCMS minister participated in a prayer service following the September 11 terrorist attacks.

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.