Deep Creek Anglican Church Blog

Paul Kelly, Editor-at-large for The Australian, pens an article today that is well worth reading, and responding to, via Federal parliamentarians: Brown’s euthanasia bill a perilous test for Gillard.  He writes:

“The bill is facilitated under new parliamentary procedures and the Labor-Greens alliance.

Gillard has announced that Labor will allow a conscience vote but that cannot gainsay the political question: Will the Gillard government become the means to authorise legalised killing in Australia by abandoning the 1997 law of the national parliament?

This would be a threshold and false step for Australia. It is difficult to imagine that Gillard wants this stamp on her prime ministership.

During the past dozen years euthanasia has won little acceptance in most Western nations beyond The Netherlands and Belgium in Europe and the states of Oregon and Washington in the US. Two years ago human rights champion Frank Brennan told a Senate committee: “Since the commonwealth exercise the US Supreme Court has said there is no right to euthanasia. It would seem to me that on balance nothing has changed or, if anything, the anti-euthanasia case is probably slightly strengthened if we look at developments in equivalent jurisdictions.”

The clinching case against euthanasia has been put by Australian-Canadian lawyer and ethicist Margaret Somerville in evidence to the Australian parliament: “If you look at the most fundamental norm or value on which our type of societies are based, it is that we do not kill each other. No matter how compassionate and merciful your reasons for carrying out euthanasia, it still alters that norm that we do not kill each other to one where we do not usually, but in some cases we do.”

Once this threshold is crossed and killing is sanctioned, what are the terms, conditions and safeguards? Given the fraility of human history, does anybody doubt the scope and scale for abuses?”

Chapter Four: A Violin Called Messiah

The focus of this chapter is on God becoming flesh (the Incarnation) and what this means for the follower of Jesus.

The big point of this chapter is that “being a follower of Jesus does not involve imitaiton as much as it does implantation and impartation.”

Our authors describe the Incarnation as “the most shocking doctrine of the Christian religion.  It is the mystery of God’s self-emptying in Jesus Christ so that we could one day be indwelt by the Holy Spirit.”

Sweet and Viola coin the phrase ‘a gotcha moment’ to describe “when Jesus gets you for life.”  How will we know if this has happened?  In the author’s words, “you begin to live out of Jesus-love” – our behaviour is directed and impacted by the presence of the indwelling Christ, and not commandments.  In elaborating this key point, Augustine’s quote: ‘Love God, and do what you will’ is explained as follows:

“If you love God, or love another, the one thing you cannot do is what you will, for love bends the will.  To live in God’s love is not license for hedonism, but liberty for sacrificial living where we’re all working off the same brief, which reads, “As I have loved you, so you must love one another….”(John 13:34)”

The authors state that the theology of becoming “more Christlike” cheapens the gospel.  I don’t think their case is well argued as they put up a strawman of ‘likeness’ (human effort) and then dismantle it.  However Sweet and Viola are surely right when they stress the sharing of Jesus’ resurrection life in His followers and the call on His followers to manifest Jesus’ presence.

The chapter finishes with the reminder that the call on us to radiate Christ is an all-encompassing call (ie. regardless of the circumstances of our life).  And in my experience, this radical call is definitely something that requires me to keep in step with the Spirit, through His empowerment and presence (Galations 5:25).  When I step out of His ‘footsteps’ into my own, the radiation of Jesus through me falls away very rapidly.

Chapter Fourteen: Searching for the True Church

What do we do about the inevitable differences between churches?

In the context of John Armstrong’s call for relational unity, he explores in this chapter of your church is too small the issue of denominations.

The basic question is: are groups of churches (united on the basis of a common set of beliefs and practices or as historical reality) a problem or a solution?

Our author uses ‘denomination’ broadly to include the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches and notes that:

• Rome still claims to be the true (ideal) church, and
• Orthodoxy believes it constitutes the one visible church in continuity with Christ and His apostles.

How should we respond?  John’s encouragement is for all Christians to go back to Scripture and the earliest ecumenical creeds.  The ideal church is made up of all people everywhere “who call on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor 1:2).

Our author recognises the difficulty in agreeing on the ‘essentials’ of the Faith .  His suggestion?

“We must lovingly read Scripture together if we want to preserve a proper balance between unity and diversity.”

Our author challenges the false opposites in the debate about the true church.  He calls us to resist:

• the exclusivism of any single position – whether Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Magisterial Protestant or Pentecostal.  Lesslie Newbigin in The Reunion of the Church argues that the church is mutually compromised factions with continuing, legitimate ecclesiological claims on one another; and
• an inclusivistic approach that ends up with “compromised pluralism.”

Does this chapter bring us to a clear, practical answer?  No, I don’t think it does.  Perhaps this is no accident and might therefore encourage the reader to keep reading!!

We’ve been recently chatting amongst our Worship Leaders about how to better integrate the Lord’s Prayer into our Corporate Celebrations and avoid ‘going through the motions’ repetition.  Obviously using some different formats can be helpful  - one of which is reflective words on the screen.

A great example is the following video from Dan Stevers, a wonderfully creative producer whose material is available at WorshipHouse Media:

Deep Creek Anglican begins another Alpha course on Wednesday, 29th September. In the September edition of AlphaLife, Bear Grylls comments:

“It’s hard for us to believe, really believe, that God cares for us and wants good things for us…Some people are just scared, and they go, ‘Oh, God just wants me to be religious’, but actually He just loves us.  He just wants us to be with Him, and that’s been the journey to discover that.”

Last Sunday we showed the following video as a promo for the upcoming course (people love it!!):

Here’s a short interview with Philip Payne, author of Man and Woman, One in Christ:

If you love New York City (as I do) and find Woody Allen….at a minimum, very interesting, then it’s worth reading the recent New York Times article, Woody Allen on Faith, Fortune Tellers and New York.

Amongst lots of interesting comments on the arts, and film making in NYC, there were two comments that really stood out to me.  He was asked:

Q. How do you feel about the aging process?

And his response?

A. Well, I’m against it. [laughs] I think it has nothing to recommend it. You don’t gain any wisdom as the years go by. You fall apart, is what happens.”

Woody’s comment on wisdom caught my attention.  As I sought to say on Sunday, in the first week on a series from the Book of Proverbs, there’s a lot more to wiisdom that simply clocking up the years!

And then on the subjects of the supernatural and faith, Woody remarked:

“…there’s no real difference between a fortune teller or a fortune cookie and any of the organized religions. They’re all equally valid or invalid, really. And equally helpful….I was interested in the concept of faith in something. This sounds so bleak when I say it, but we need some delusions to keep us going. And the people who successfully delude themselves seem happier than the people who can’t.”

I find such a relativistic perspective very sad.

In stark contrast, the Apostle John had an unshakeable faith in Jesus Christ (who is indeed Reality):

^“1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ²He was with God in the beginning.

³Through Him all things were made; without Him nothing was made that has been made. ⁴In Him was life, and that life was the light of men. ⁵The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.

¹⁰He was in the world, and though the world was made through Him, the world did not recognize Him. ¹¹He came to that which was His own, but His own did not receive Him. ¹²Yet to all who received Him, to those who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God— ¹³children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.

¹⁴The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”  (John 1:1-4, 10-14)

^“1That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. ²The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. ³We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ.” (1 John 1:1-3)

Chapter Three: If God Wrote Your Biography

The authors make one big point in this third chapter:

If God were to write your biography, it would be Jesus Christ….the history of Jesus is both the experience and the destiny of every believer.

Their approach brings to mind Irenaeus’ recapitulation of all things in Christ.  There is much to be appreciated in Sweet and Viola’s approach to the wonder of the believer’s union with Christ; our growth within the context of the Church and the summing up of all things in Christ (Eph 1:10).

Although our authors state:

“with the exception of Christ’s deity and atoning work, the spiritual biography of every child of God is a repetition of His life“,

I don’t think there is sufficient attention given in the chapter to the differentiation between Christ and the believer (viz. God and redeemed creature).  And a statement such as, ”As you yield to the Holy Spirit, He will take the history of Jesus and duplicate it in you“, requires substantial qualification/elaboration.

Although much Scripture is used in this chapter, greater theological precision would have been appropriate.

The article on Pope Benedict XVI by Michael Burleigh in the Telegraph is worth reading.  The writer traces the “stations” of Josef Ratzinger’s life and the influences that have shaped the current Pope.

Burleigh writes:

“Secularism is at the heart of Benedict’s concerns. By this the Pope does not mean the delimitation of Church and State, the sacred and profane – which is intrinsic to Christian culture as well as political society since the Reformation – but the amnesiac eradication of one of the principal roots of Western civilisation and the deliberate marginalisation of all religion to the private sphere. In its stead has come a society that thinks its existential despairs can be ameliorated by limitless consumer goods, or worse, by a state that racks up fathomless amounts of debt so as to throw money at problems that may have no material resolution.”

And finishes with:

“Let’s hope that this serious man’s message about the West in the world manages to come across clearly, despite all the efforts that will be made to obscure it by liberals whose ears have long been closed.”

I was brought up in a strongly dispensational environment.  When I finally stopped running away from Christ about 20 years ago (God’s faithfulness and pursuing love is mind blowing) I readily adopted a dispensational schema of Last Things.  Not only did I adopt – I consumed books on eschatology, but only from a dispensational perspective!

However as I rolled up my sleeves in Scripture, I increasingly found classic dispensationalism wanting, including the doctrine of the pretribulation rapture of the Church.

With this background it is perhaps not surprising that I read Roger Olson’s recent post, Why I am a premillennialist with considerable interest as:

• his journey parallels nearly exactly my own (self-indulgent, I know!);
• he cites A Case for Historic Premillennialism: An Alternative to Left Behind Eschatology (which I found good but not great); and,
• he shares my conviction that our responsibility of followers of the King and citizens of the Kingdom is to be at the “forefront of social transformation and environmentalism because of the revelation of the coming Kingdom on earth.”

The certain hope of Christ’s return and coming of the New Heaven and New Earth are fantastic prospects and are part of ‘core orthodoxy.’  Millennial details are not of the same order and certainly should never break the bonds of Christian fellowship with those of different views.

Giving the certainty of the return of Jesus, what sort of people ought we be?

“You ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming.” (2 Peter 3:11b-12a)