The Doctrine of Sin Gives Hope!

The doctrine of sin . . . means that not everything that exists in the present ought to be as it now is. . . . Both good and evil are present after Genesis 3, but they are present asymmetrically. Evil is not original, nor will it linger forever. Genesis 3 tells us that evil is real and serious. . . . It also tells us that evil is not ultimate and not intrinsic to the nature of the world. . . . An important function of the fall in the biblical narrative is in fact, and perhaps a little surprisingly, to limit evil, to say that it is not original, that it has a beginning in history, and that it is not a future of humanity as originally created. . . . The biblical account of sin . . . limits evil . . . and legitimates hope and radical transformation.

——Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture, 159, 167-68

Fault Line

The history of Western thought and culture is strewn with a catalog of attempts to draw a fault line between good and evil: either between different parts of creation, between different human faculties, or between different social groups. . . . But Christianity frames matters altogether differently. . . . The fault line runs down the middle of us all.

—Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture, 125, 129

Pride

it is hard to underestimate the extent to which many in our society today fail to consider what the Bible has to say about God on its own terms because that would require admitting that our own autonomous reason may not be the most reliable truth-discerning tool in the universe.

—Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture, 135

Contingent

A self-made man . . . worships his “creator.” . . . To assert in defiance of [God’s] rightful claim on my life that I am “the master of my fate,” is an irony aptly captured in the scene Van Til reports observing in a railway carriage: “I saw a little girl one day on a train sitting on the lap of her daddy slapping him in the face. If the daddy had not held her on his lap, she would not have been able to slap him.” The relationship of this girl to her father is like that of [the unbeliever] to God: [his] refusal of his Creator is contingent on his grace.

——Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture, 139

Church and Me

“Ask not what your church can do for you; ask what you can do for your church.”

Webinar

FYI: I will be giving a free webinar this Saturday, 8:30-9:30 CDT. Sponsored by the Robert E. Webber Institute for Worship Studies, I will be covering some of the important topics in my book Let Us Draw Near: Biblical Foundations of Worship (www.letusdrawnear.org). You can sign up by clicking on the image below.

Worship as Witness and Source

[Worship] is the bold, public witness of God’s people that there is a God, and that this true God meets with humans—the highest order of creation—to gather them, speak to and hear from them, nourish them, and send them to proclaim the good news of God’s love. God meets with them through and with the real presence of the Risen Lord Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. Worship is the basis of our discipleship, the spiritual source for all of the ministries of the church with which we engage.

—Constance Cherry, Worship like Jesus: A Guide for Every Follower, 20-21

Standing in for Us

Jesus comes as our brother to be our great high priest. . . . He comes to stand in for us in the presence of the Father when in our failure and bewilderment we do not know how to pray as we ought to, or forget to pray altogether. . . . Christ takes what is ours (our broken lives and unworthy prayers), sanctifies them, offers them without spot or wrinkle to the Father. . . . He takes our prayers and makes them His prayers. and He makes His prayers our prayers, and we know our prayers are heard “for Jesus’ sake.”

—James B. Torrance, Worship, Community, and the Triune God of Grace, 14-15

Stewards

Let everyone regard himself as the steward of God in all things that he possesses.

—John Calvin, Commentary on Genesis

Unity and Diversity

God’s world is a creative order: all snowflakes are the same, and all snowflakes are different. All insects are insects, yet there were around 900,000 species of insect. All humans are humans, but no two humans are identical. Everywhere we look, the creation is a symphony of similarity and difference that is reminiscent of the trinitarian equal ultimacy of the one and the many.

—Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture, 73

Free Gift

How many religions in the world work: human beings are in a bartering relationship with the gods: first I offer a sacrifice that the god desires, and then I can hope to receive the God’s help as a consequence. We trade. . . .
The Bible picture of human beings is not as wheelers and dealers in the corporate boardroom, signing contracts with the gods or ultimate reality in order to get ahead; instead we are joyful children on Christmas morning, receiving unexpectedly lavish gifts from loving parents. Free gift, not contractual obligation, is at the heart of the Bible’s picture of reality, just as it is at the heart of the Bible’s picture of redemption.

—Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture, 62, 64

To ponder . . .

[Most] contemporary worship songs come from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, even while most of the growth in the church is happening in Asia, South America, and Africa.

—Glenn Stallsmith, “Languages of Worship: Four Liturgical Theologies,” Ethnodoxology Volume 12 (2024), https://artsandchristianfaith.org/index.php/journal/article/view/209

Imperfect Praise

Wir preisen, was er an uns hat getan.
We praise what He has done for us.
Muss gleich der schwache Mund von seinen Wundern lallen,
Even if our weak mouths have to babble about His wonders,
So kann ein schlechtes Lob ihm dennoch wohlgefallen.
yet imperfect praise can still please Him.

—J. S. Bach, Cantata No. 51 “Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen!” (trans. Francis Brown)

Worship Not a Work

Both revelation and response, both proclamation and prayer, are gifts of divine grace. . . . Only God can effect perception of the revelation of God. Only God can grant communion with God. Only by the Spirit do we confess Jesus as Lord. The human self cannot achieve these lofty ends. . . . The trinitarian formula [we worship the Father through the Son in the power of the holy Spirit] frees us of this pretension and this burden. Part of the pastoral significance of this theme is to restore a vision of worship that is marked by grace, not works; joy, not obligation.

—John D. Witvliet. “Prism of Glory: Trinitarian Worship and Liturgical Piety in the Reformed Tradition” in The Place of Christ in Liturgical Prayer, 271-272

Christ and Culture

Christ should not fit comfortably in any culture, and if he nestles snuggly into our own, then we have almost certainly lost sight of the biblical Christ.

—Christopher Walken, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture, 30

The Real Christ

What our culture needs is not a model of Christ made in its own image (it has shelves full of those already) but the real Christ, who comes in grace and truth to confront, complete, and console every culture for its good and his glory.

—Christopher Walken, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Aense of Modern Life and Culture, 30

Lenses

The Christian story provides us with . . . a set of lenses, not something for us to look at, but for us to look through.

—Leslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 38

Every Sunday

For Christians Sunday is the chief festival occasion of the faith. About this there is much misunderstanding. Many active Christians would say that Christmas is their chief festival. Closer to the mark, but still missing it, are those who would say that Easter Day is the principal feast of the church. What is amiss about such assessments? Simply this: No observance that occurs only once a year can connote the continuing work of God in daily life. Therefore the chief festival occurs weekly, and from it all else is derived, including those annual festivities that may be more visible and certainly are the more popular cultural occasions.

—Laurence Stookey, Calendar: Christ’s Time for the Church, 44

Eastertide

“Easter” is the period of eight Sundays [until Pentecost], comprising fifty days, often called as a unit “the Great Fifty Days.” For the explosive force of the resurrection of the Lord is too vast to be contained within a celebration of one day.  

The recovery of Easter as “the Great Fifty Days” of the year can move the church along toward a fuller understanding of what the resurrection of its Lord implies. Easter is not one closing day at the end of a lengthy period of Lent. Easter is one extended rejoicing in the resurrection that more than exceeds in length the Lenten disciplines. The first day of the season, Easter Day, is the opening of a protracted celebration, even as the Resurrection is itself the opening to a vast new reality. 

“The First Sunday After Easter” implies Easter is over, having lasted only one day. But “the Second Sunday of Easter” (for the same date) indicates that Easter is an extended season, whose essential character is shared by all of its parts. The careful use of “Easter Day” rather than “Easter” for the opening occasion further presses this point. 

Once Easter is seen as a season, congregations can work at distinctive worship practices throughout the Great Fifty Days in order to tie the weeks together more clearly in the hearts of worshipers. For example, on Sundays Two through Seven, one stanza of a hymn used on Easter Day might be sung as an acclamation (“Christ the Lord Is Risen Today” is one possibility). 

—Laurence Stookey, Calendar: Christ’s Time for the Church, 54, 56-7

Believers in Eastern Europe greet one another, at church and on the street, with “Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!” throughout the fifty days of Easter. It is not just a day!

The Lamb’s High Feast

At the Lamb’s high feast we sing
praise to our victorious King,
who hath washed us in the tide
flowing from His piercéd side;
praise we Him whose love divine
gives His sacred blood for wine,
gives His body for the feast,
Christ the Victim, Christ the Priest.

Where the paschal blood is poured,
death’s dark angel sheathes his sword;
Israel’s hosts triumphant go
through the wave that drowns the foe.
Praise we Christ, whose blood was shed,
Paschal Victim, Paschal Bread;
with sincerity and love
eat we manna from above.

Mighty Victim from the sky,
pow’rs of hell beneath Thee lie;
death is conquered in the fight,
Thou hast brought us life and light;
hymns of glory and of praise,
risen Lord, to Thee we raise;
Holy Father, praise to Thee,
with the Spirit, ever be.

—Latin hymn, translated Robert Campbell (1849)