I have just watched the BBC report on the Airbus A380 maiden flight. I am particularly pleased since I had a part to play in the design of one of the turbines (there are three) in the Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engines, taking it from initial concept to first static test.
Then I left to study theology…
If you have ever wondered how Jesus defeated Satan on the cross then you could do worse than listen to Sinclair Ferguson’s lecture on “Christus Victor” at the Highland Theological college. You can find it on this page. In it he gives a superb defence of the penal substitutionary view of the atonement.
You need to be prepared, though. This is an academic lecture, and you may need to listen two or three times to get all of it, but I think it is well worth the investment of time.
John Piper has a chapter in his book (Brothers, We are Not Professionals) on worship. In typical Piperian fashion he speaks of worship as ‘treasuring Christ in our hearts’. While discussing this at length he notes a subtle change that can occur in our public worship:
If the focus shifts onto our giving to God, one result I have seen again and again is that, subtly, it is not God that remains at the center but the quality of our giving. Are we singing worthily of the Lord? Are our instrumentalists playing with quality fitting a gift to the Lord? Is the preaching a suitable offering to the Lord? And little by little the focus shifts off the utter indispensability of the Lord himself onto the quality of our performances. And we even start to define excellence and power in worship in terms of the technical distinction of our artistic acts.
John Piper, Brothers p. 239
This speaks to me. I’ve had it up to here (hand well above head) with people discussing worship in functional terms. I’m guilty myself. Has the right effect been achieved? Instead of our focus being on God himself, the gravitational pull of self is so attractive, subtly distorting our public worship.
It is interesting, then, that yesterday Tim Challies should also write about worship. He likens the problem to someone admiring a sunset, but then that person ends up admiring himself admiring the sunset! Daft, eh?
Al Roberts also has a challenging post on how the worship experience becomes all important. The analogy he uses is much less palatable than Tim’s.
The astute regulars to this site may notice an addition to my Links section to the right. There is now a link to Grace Church, Belper.
Over the last six or seven months Dr. Gareth Crossley and David Anderson have been working towards planting a new church in Belper, Derbyshire. (I have been working in a support role, while my main work is at Derwent Free Church in Derby.)
Like many small towns in Derbyshire, the situation in Belper is bleak. There is no shortage of groups and churches meeting, and we have visited them all. But there is a distinct lack of evangelical preaching founded upon the Bible. This new work seeks to break up the ground and sow the seed of the wonderful gospel of Jesus Christ, the Lord.
Go and take a look around!
A few days ago I suddenly realised that I have rapidly approaching essay deadlines.
Blogging shall be light.
Reading shall be heavy.
O people of Zion, who live in Jerusalem, you will weep no more. How gracious he will be when you cry for help! As soon as he hears, he will answer you. Although the Lord gives you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, your teachers will be hidden no more; with your own eyes you will see them. Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, “This is the way; walk in it.” Then you will defile your idols overlaid with silver and your images covered with gold; you will throw them away like a menstrual cloth and say to them, “Away with you!”
Isaiah 30:19-22 (NIV)
We visited York Thursday and Friday last week. I finally got round to sorting some pictures out. We did some touristy things, and took a few snaps. It was nice to get away, but I had to be back to preach on Sunday.
Well, this is me putting on my best thinking pose in Starbucks. Susan kept saying, “Stop it! Stop it!”. Girl just laughed. Can’t think why.
See! I told you! Susan was laughing as well! “Why?” I ask you!
“Oooh look at that”, says Girl. Shopping in the Shambles – cute little shops in an old part of the city. The best part for me was finding a sweet shop that sells Soor Plooms.
York Minster is a stupendous building. It really is quit stunning. Every ounce of my Non-Conformist body was screaming “this is not church!”. But you have to admire the scale and craftsmanship. Girl asked, “What does the ‘M’ stand for?” Can you see it? (It doesn’t mean anything, by the way – it was just an accident.)
On the way home from York, on the A1(M), just before Pontefract, there is a little village called Brotherton. My Grandfather was a Church of England vicar or curate way back in the 1920s, long before he found his way to Ayrshire. I am pretty sure this was his church building, since it is the only one in the village. Unfortunately, it was closed, there was no sign on the outside and the clock on the tower had stopped. Looked suspiciously like it was no longer in use. The village itself is not very pretty. As you can see from the photo, in the background there is a whopping great power station, and power pylons everywhere.
The White Horse Inn has an interesting programme this week on the trouble within atheism. Last year the well known atheist philosopher Anthony Flew underwent a conversion of sorts to a form of deism. It has made waves in academic and religious circles last year.
Flew has written what are now standard works for atheism. But, as I understand it, it was his consideration of the arguments for intelligent design which have caused this seismic shift in his thinking. To his credit he came out and said so.
His shift is to a form of deism, but not theism and certainly not Christian theism. As the WHI programme notes, he stills sees the God of Christian faith to be reprehensible.
I don’t know much about Intelligent Design theory. I only came across it a couple of moths ago and added it to my (ever-lengthening) list of topics to mug up on. I know that it is not creationism. It is a scientific approach to the data – an alternative to evolutionary theory. However, it clearly supports creationism.
Here’s an Intelligent Design blog I came across at the weekend. Two of the contributors, Behe and Dembski, I recognise as book authors in the ID field. Worth a quick scan, don’t you think?
John Piper (in Brothers, We Are Not Professionals) quotes G. K. Chesterton, who wrote in 1908,
What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled on the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert — himself. The part he doubts is the part he ought not to doubt — the Divine Reason. . . . We are on the road to producing a race of man too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
For these reasons he foresaw the culture hijacking the word arrogance and using it to refer to conviction and the word humility to refer to uncertainty (Brothers p. 161).
Just look at the comments on any blog discussing the emerging/ent church. Is this true, or is this true?
Doggie's Breakfast 