Alfred Kropp

In a lighter vein I had the occasion recently to find a book left in the narthex by one of our young people. Naturally, I picked it up, and even more naturally I started reading it. It wasn’t great literature, of course, but it was a darned good read. What’s more, in addition to being enjoyable, it had a really solid theme. The book was The Extraordinary Adventures of Alfred Kropp, by Richard Yancey, and it offers some good lessons. At one point, when the hero was commenting about his various failures, one of the characters addresses him with “But we fall only that we might rise, Alfred. All of us fall; all of us, as you say, screw up. Falling is not important. It is how we get up after the fall that’s important.” Just so. As I said, good solid concepts there. Later in the book he is being overly critical of himself and is berated for it by another character, who advises him that he doesn’t know how rare it is to do the right thing, “Not only doing the right thing, but understanding what the right thing is.” If this is the sort of thing our young people are reading, then we know the future of our church will be in good hands.

Papa Bene

A recent topic in the news has been the remarks of Pope Benedict XVI at Regensburg University. Well, to be accurate, his remarks have not been in the news so much as the reaction of the moslem world. We in the west see clearly the irony of moslems who use violence to demonstrate that Islam is not inherently violent! What we westerners, we Catholics, and dare I say we Anglicans do not see clearly is the point that his holiness was trying to make in his brief speech. He was addressing not Islam but Europe and America, and asserting that our failure in the West is the error of secularism. Secularism, of course, is the error of attempting to separate faith from the rest of our lives. Especially in America we face a culture that views religion as a private affair and tries to relegate all religious discourse to private venues. Christians, of course, know better. We know that our relationship to God in Christ through the Holy Spirit is not something we can keep sequestered away in some little closet or other out-of-the-way part of our lives. Our faith, if it is to be at all real, must be the compass that guides our actions, the map that charts our course, and the force that sustains our being. The biggest enemy of Christianity, bigger even than the false imaginings of Islam, is secularism. Rather than trying to compartmentalize our lives we should try even harder to ensure that our religion spreads into our work, our study, our friendships.

Faithful Remnant?

Below is an excerpt from Bp George Langberg's address to the 2005 synod of the Diocese of the Northeast of the Anglican Church in America, a member of the Traditional Anglican Communion. I offer it for comment.

"Faithful Remnant?
by Bishop George Langberg

So here we are, keeping the faith whole and intact, even when that puts us at odds with the world around us, worshipping as our parents and maybe our grandparents did, using a [liturgy] last revised when much of the man-made stuff around us existed only in science fiction..."
click here to read the rest.

Quizzes

I know. Taking quizzes on all sorts of things is usually the province of magazines aimed at a teenage market, but when I saw this one from quizfarm.com that Al Kimel had taken over on his world famous blog, Pontifications, well, I just had to take it myself. I think it's interesting, but I wonder...what in the world is "Neo orthodox?" And what happened to the Lutheran in my heritage, that I thought was much stronger than the Holiness strain? Where do these things go?

Roman Catholic 100% Neo orthodox 79% Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan 71% Fundamentalist 39% Classical Liberal 36% Charismatic/Pentecostal 29% Reformed Evangelical 29% Emergent/Postmodern 29% Modern Liberal 25% What's your theological worldview? created with QuizFarm.com

Beginnings

The intention here is to afford a space for me to muse out loud...well, in print, that is, about Christianity and the Culture. I don't presume to produce anything comparable to Niebuhr's opus, but I hope to think about...and more importantly cause others to think about...what relationship there ought to be between the two.

rs+