LiturgicalCredo.com’s Blog

NEW DELHI, December 31 – In their campaign against Christians, Hindu extremists in India are increasingly relying on a key weapon: police officers. Local police in Bangalore recently arrested and harassed five workers from the Indian Church of Christ after Hindu extremists attacked the Christians in the capital of Karnataka state. Police from the Indira Nagar police station arrested the five Christians but allowed the attackers to go free. Rights activists have long been calling for reform in the police system. “The police, who are supposed to protect all citizens from criminal assaults, are often found to be conniving with the ruling government to organize religion-related violence or harass the victims hoping to get bribes,” said a representative of the Christian Legal Association.

-Compass Direct News

This is a funny, and true, story about two contemporary philosophers who apparently have it in for each other. Read it here: http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2007/12/30/when-philosophers-attack/

Almost all cult leaders and Christians who manipulate place a high emphasis on being “led by the Lord.”… In the first century those who thought that personal revelation was an authority above Scriptures were called Gnostics…. We must ever guard ourselves against the words and pet phrases that hint of superior spirituality…. When we divide life into snug “spiritual” and “nonspiritual” compartments, we are thinking heretically and may blindly accept a cultic view of life.

– Harold Bussell, in his book By Hook or By Crook: How Cults Lure Christians

In the liturgy of the Church we approach that perfect harmony between the outward and the inward.  We celebrate Redemption, which has begun to knit things back together.  We anticipate the final Redemption of all things when that restoration will be completed.  We recall the Incarnation, in which we find the perfect uniting of form and matter, that is, of perfect wholeness and purity with human flesh.  We see in the Second Adam the perfection that was to have been exhibited in the first.

The ceremonies of the liturgy answer to all of this.  For in the liturgy we step into redemption, in faith, and bespeak the perfect uniting of the outer and the inner that will be unfurled in the new heavens and the new earth.  We renounce the divided world where body wars against heart and where gesture struggles with thought.  By enacting what is true, we learn what is true.  By bowing our heads as well as our hearts, we testify to the restored seamlessness of outer and inner.  By bowing with the knee we teach our reluctant hearts to bow.  By making the sign of the cross with our hands we signal to heaven, earth, hell, and to our innermost beings that we are indeed under this sign — that we are crucified with Christ.  No longer do we refuse the outer gesture in the name of the inner faith.  Buddhism, Platonism, and Manichaeanism may do so, but Christian faith cries out to be shaped.

-from Evangelical is Not Enough: Worship of God in Liturgy and Sacrament, by Thomas Howard

How should modern-minded people reconcile their knowledge and their faith? Each of us will arrive at our own answers. To my way of thinking, at least, wisdom begins with rethinking how holy books were meant to be read.

So writes David Frum, conservative thinker and scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, in a provocative piece entitled “Truth Among Fiction.” Read it here, and tell us what you think.

NEW DELHI – At least four Christians are feared dead, many injured and more than 50 churches and 200 homes are either destroyed or damaged in Orissa state in anti-Christian violence that began Christmas Eve. Violence by Hindu extremists continues in some pockets despite the state imposing a curfew and deploying hundreds of police officers. Extremists have pursued Christian leaders into forests where they fled. The Delhi Catholic Archdiocese fears a repeat of 1998 attacks on Christians in Gujarat, followed the next year by the burning alive of Australian missionary Graham Staines and his sons in Orissa.

-Compass Direct News

Here’s what L.A. Times TV critic Mary McNamara said about NBC’s ‘Life’:

NBC’s new show about Charlie Crews, a cop sprung after 12 years in the pen for a frame job, is the best new show of the season. Balancing Zen and vengeful rage, Crews (Damian Lewis) is the most interesting quirky cop since Columbo.

I couldn’t say it better and briefer than McNamara, but I’ll add a layman’s evaluation of the religious and philosophical content of the show:

I’m drawn to this show because Damian Lewis does a thoroughly convincing job of portraying a peculiar character who (1) genuinely appreciates every little thing in life following his time in prison, and (2) seeks a religio-philosophical path to mitigate a barely visible but driving anger. As with the ambiguities of all personalities in a fallen world, Crews’ cassette recordings of Eastern spiritual-philosophical texts help him remain calm at times, and don’t make a difference at other times, when he comes close to losing his cool or leaves his partner at a crime scene to pursue answers to why he was unjustly imprisoned. This points to the value, and to the limits, of ethical philosophies and religions — they help control human nature, but they cannot transform human nature. So when a friend of mine said most evangelical Christians are functionally Buddhists — denying passions instead of allowing God to transform those passions, managing desires instead of learning how to relate to God and others in love – I thought he was onto something. Furthermore, in the ethical systems that have interested me, Stoicism and Confucionism, as well as in Buddism, there are purposeful guidelines and rich thinking, but never a Person who will love you.

Ratings haven’t been great for “Life,” but there’s good news.

“The action-fantasy ‘Chuck’ and the crime drama ‘Life’ have both received full-season orders, despite less-than-stellar ratings,” reported the Contra Costa Times.

Give the ratings a bump. Catch up at NBC.com/Life and then tune in when the holidays — and hopefully the writers’ strike — are over.

-Colin Foote Burch

I’m reading a book that argues aggressively against the validity of the field of neurophilosophy. Excerpts from the introduction:

“The name ‘neurophilosophy’ itself, and the hyphenated expression ‘mind/brain’, are both part of the propaganda, intended to suggest the closest, intimate connection between neuroscience and philosophy….

“It is not physiology which drives this philosophical orthodoxy, but metaphysics, the idea that the findings of the sciences are now providing answers to the questions raised by metaphysics, providing a definitive statement as to what there really (ultimately) is….

“Opposition to the idea that science can be the fulfillment of metaphysics does not involve in any way opposition to science. If the objectives of metaphysics are spurious, then they cannot be fulfilled by science any more than they can be by metaphysics. The error which promotes the orthodoxy is, in an important respect, very simple and basic: it is to suppose that ‘what anything is’ is identical (in the very strongest sense) with ‘what it is made of’.”

- from Brain, Mind, and Human Behavior in Contemporary Cognitive Science: Critical Assessments of the Philosophy of Psychology (The Edwin Mellen Press, 2007) by Jeff Coulter of Boston University and Wes Sharrock of the University of Manchester

-Colin Foote Burch

I have posted several times in the forums of the Association of Former Pentecostals, and I have read many posts from other participants.

I had never previously seen the kind of violent rhetoric that published reports allege had originated from Matthew Murray, the young man police say killed two people at a Youth With A Mission center in Colorado, and killed two more people at a community church, before taking his own life after being confronted by a security guard.

What I had read at the association’s Web site, ex-pentecostals.org, were difficult, personal stories written by people who were very upset or troubled by their present or past experiences in Pentecostal, charismatic, and Word-of-Faith churches.

It is true that people posting on the forums have expressed anger and frustration with pastors, prophets, fellow church members, and assorted self-styled ministers. Some posters have mocked public figures.

It is also true the people have expressed anger and frustration with every president in our nation’s history. Most public figures are mocked at some point in their careers.

Legitimate frustrations, properly expressed, have nothing to do with violent, anti-social behavior.

What I find interesting is that many people on the forums shared the experiences I had in the Pentecostal-charismatic movement: controlling ministers and laypersons, emotional abuse, outrageous claims of special knowledge, promises that one can manipulate God into granting material blessings, and — I cannot state this too strongly — a complete incapacity to express the Gospel in a way that Martin Luther, Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Cranmer, St. John Chrysostom, or the Apostle Paul would have recognized it.

I say this after spending approximately 23 years in nondenominational charismatic churches; you can read about part of my journey by clicking here.

Furthermore, I’m completely baffled by the way some people have suggested that the Association of Former Pentecostals is an extremist group or an anti-Christian group. Based on my experiences while reading the forums and posting on the site, I would estimate that approximately half of the regular posters have remained Christians, while the other half were driven into atheism, agnosticism, or other religions solely by the craziness and unhealthiness of Pentecostal, charismatic, and Word-of-Faith churches.

The media and irresponsible commentators need to stop all attempts at guilt-by-association — Murray’s postings and actions have nothing to do with the tone that is common to the Association of Former Pentecostals’ forum.

And, perhaps most importantly, the administrators of the association’s Web site state in a long-standing note that that purpose of the forums is to share and to heal — and then to move on in freedom and in peace.

-Colin Foote Burch

This is an admittedly silly parody of Mitt Romney’s recent speech defending his Mormon faith, and probably not for anyone who demands his humor to be sophisticated. Read “What Mitt Romney Should have said.”