Just As I Am” is one of the few hymns for which we know not only the author’s story but also the exact circumstances in which it was written. Charlotte Elliott of Brighton, England (1789-1871) was either born, or in early life had become, an invalid. Her life was a testimony to patient endurance in suffering, not only physical, but also emotional and spiritual. This was the context in which she wrote the hymn, as her nephew the Rev. Handley C. G. Moule recounted it in 1897:

But ill health still beset her … it often caused her the peculiar pain of a seeming uselessness in her life while the circle around her was full of unresting service-ableness for God. Such a time of trial marked the year 1834, when she was forty-five years old, and living in Westfield Lodge, Brighton… .

Keep Reading →

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin contains a copy of what many people consider the most valuable book in the world. The Gutenberg Bible is not only the oldest surviving book to be printed using moveable type, but also the first complete book to be produced with that technology. The volume in the University of Texas is one of only 20 complete copies to survive. Though its value is merely speculative as it has been almost 40 years since a copy was last sold, there is no doubt that if it were put on the market today, it would shatter all existing records. (The edition at the Harry Ransom Center was purchased in 1978 for $2,400,000.) As we survey the history of Christianity in 25 historical objects, Gutenberg’s Bible represents his great contribution to history in the movable type printing press.

Johannes Gutenberg is one of those rare individuals whose invention literally changed the world. When A&E closed out the second millennium with their list of the 100 most influential people of the millennium, few were surprised to see Gutenberg's name at the very top, above Newton, Darwin, Columbus, Marx and so many other notables.

Movable type had been invented in Asia as early as the fifth century A.D. and in its earliest form used handcut wooden blocks that could be coated in ink and pressed onto paper. The earliest book from this time was printed in China in the ninth century but it has long since been lost. It would be centuries before the art was discovered or rediscovered in Europe.

Johannes Gutenberg was born around the year 1400 in Mainz, Germany. History has recorded few facts about his early life, though we know he was at first a goldsmith. It was not until he was near the age of forty that he began to experiment with printing.

The genius of Gutenberg’s invention was not in the press itself as much as in the type. At that point in history, almost all books were handwritten, painstakingly produced by scribes so that a single Bible might take years to complete. Block printing was also becoming popular, but it, too, was slow as it required an entire page to be carved into a wooden block before being coated in ink and pressed onto paper. Because of the onerous process of production, books were both rare and expensive. Gutenberg understood that printing could be made exponentially faster by splitting text into its most basic parts and using movable blocks of letters and punctuation marks. Sets of these characters could be arranged to form a page of words which could then produce a near-infinite number of facsimiles.

As I survey the contemporary church, one of my gravest concerns is the power and prevalence of mysticism. It appears in pulpits, books, and conversation. It is at the heart of Sarah Young’s bestselling Jesus Calling, it is in all the much-loved books by John Eldredge, it fills the pages of so many books on spiritual disciplines or spiritual formation, it is almost everywhere you look. Language that was once considered the distinguishing language of mysticism is now commonly used by Evangelicals.

Mysticism was once regarded as an alternative to Evangelical Christianity. You were Evangelical or you were a mystic, you heeded the doctrine of the Reformation and understood it to faithfully describe the doctrine laid out in Scripture or you heeded the doctrine of mysticism. Today, though, mysticism has wormed its way inside Evangelicalism so that the two have become integrated and almost inseparable. In an age of syncretism we fail to spot the contradiction and opposition.

Several years ago Donald Whitney attempted to define the boundaries of Evangelical spirituality--the boundaries of how we may rightly live out our Christian faith. His paper has been very helpful to me as I’ve thought this through.

Before we proceed, we need some definitions, and I will turn to Whitney: Evangelical theology is “the theology and practice considered orthodox by a consensus of the heirs of the Reformation.” These are the five solas of the Reformation, the divinity of Jesus Christ, the necessity of his atoning work, and so on--the core doctrines of historic Protestantism. Mysticism refers “those forms of Christian spirituality which attempt direct or unmediated access to God.” Mystics are those who expect to experience “a direct inner realization of the Divine” and an “unmediated link to an absolute.”

I want to track with Whitney as he expresses his concerns and challenges us to think carefully.

The Big Boundary

The first thing Whitney does is tell us where we can and must go to find the boundaries that must surround Evangelicalism. He says that they will and must be found in “the written self-revelation of God.” Whatever the boundaries are, they are God’s own boundaries and have been revealed to us. We cannot depend upon ourselves, our own wisdom or our own desires, to teach us about how we may experience God. The Bible points us to two forms of revelation: natural revelation and special revelation.

In natural revelation God reveals himself through creation, but this is incomplete and insufficient revelation. “It reveals Him to us only as Creator. It does little, if anything, to reveal Him to us as holy, as Judge, as Son, as Savior, or as Spirit.” For us to know God as he is and for us to obey him, we must have more than the revelation God gives us through what he has created.

Have you ever seen one of those videos on YouTube that shows you how something you’ve been doing for your whole life has actually been all wrong? How you’re better off eating an apple from the bottom up instead of wrapping around the sides or how those little ketchup cups are meant to fan out for easier access? Who knew? Well I’m going to give you a little wedding tip.

There’s that moment at a wedding when the groom and his groomsmen have entered the church. The bridesmaids have walked the aisle and taken their places at the front. The ring bearers and flower girls are in their places. The doors at the back are closed. Then those doors burst open and there is the bride standing arm-in-arm with her father.

Now here’s the tip: When those doors open, steal a quick glance at the groom. I know the bride is the star of the show and you don’t want to miss her, but it’s okay to look to the front of the church for just a moment. The more I read and understand Ephesians 5:22-33 and the more I come to grasp the deepest meaning of marriage, the more I find myself not wanting to miss what happens at the front of the room. Because in that moment the groom is just a small picture, a dim reflection, of the love Jesus Christ has for his bride, the church.

There is nothing quite like the expression on a groom’s face when his bride appears before him. There is joy there. There is delight and desire and such love. There is the knowledge that his longing for a bride is being fulfilled and that she will soon be his, that in just moments they will be united together forever.

Yesterday we were able to witness the marriage of two dear friends. They served us well in drawing our hearts and minds to the ultimate marriage their union is meant to represent and they did this in part by choosing The City Harmonic’s song “Holy (Wedding Day)” as the processional music. As Caroline entered, and as Steve looked at her for the first time that day, it was to the words,

This is the story of the Son of God hanging on a cross for me,
But it ends with a bride and groom and a wedding by a glassy sea.
This is the story of a bride in white singing on her wedding day;
Altogether all that was and is, can stand before her God and sing.
‘Holy, holy, holy, holy is the Lord.’

From the very first moment, the ceremony pointed beyond itself and so too did the bride and groom. When the doors opened I looked to the front of the room and in the face of my friend I saw again a glimpse of the love Jesus Christ has for me, for us, for his church. I’m so glad I didn’t miss it.

I am too young to remember much about Margaret Thatcher and to know a lot about her role in world history. I will definitely read a biography of her at some point in the future and learn more about her life and times. (Writer’s note: I am trying to establish that I’m not interested in bickering about the legacy of her policies since I know too little about them.) When she died last month there were the inevitable outpourings of both spite and affection. In the midst of all of this, I saw several people draw attention to one mostly unremarkable interview. As the interview drew to a close, the host asked Thatcher if she would do just one small thing—stand in front of the camera and jump in the air.

Jumping in the air was a gimmick the host asked of all her guests and apparently all of them complied. But Thatcher wanted nothing to do with it. She refused to jump and refused to relent even when the host began to apply pressure (“Gorbachev did it!”). Displaying all of her little verbal and physical quirks, she responded, “I shouldn’t dream of doing that. Why should I? I see no significance whatsoever in making a jump up in the air. I made great leaps forward, not little jumps in studios. … It’s a silly thing to ask. And it’s a puerile thing to ask.” She identified that the only motive behind this little jump could be a desire to be thought normal or popular. She was having none of it.

Mark Steyn, among others, contrasted Thatcher with the President of the United States who has slow-jammed the news with Jimmy Fallon and danced with Ellen. Many consider these silly moments contributing factors in his election to a second term. Many others consider them pragmatic actions that won an election at the expense of the dignity of the office of President of the United States of America.

Thatcher did not jump, and doubtlessly would not have danced or slow-jammed either, at least in part because she considered it demeaning. She understood that to demean herself was to demean her office. In that interview she was speaking not only as a woman, but as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (or former Prime Minister; I’m not sure when this was filmed). Even if she was willing to behave in a silly way on her own, she did not want her office to be seen as silly. She gave her trademark, “No, no, no.” 

John Wycliffe’s body had been buried outside St. Mary’s Church for more than forty years when his grave was disturbed. Upon the orders of Pope Martin V, his remains were exhumed, his bones burned and the ashes scattered on the river Swift. This act of desecration was deemed fitting for one who had been posthumously condemned as a heretic. But, as Donald Roberts says so eloquently, it was by no means the end of his legacy for, “As history has revealed, Wycliffe's bones were much more easily dispersed than his teachings, for out of a sea of controversy and angry disputation rose his greatest contribution—the English Bible.”

St. Mary’s Church in Lutterworth is now more than 800 years old and remains an active congregation. Visitors to that church will have the opportunity to see many artifacts related to the life and ministry of John Wycliffe, none of them more noteworthy than the pulpit. Wycliffe’s pulpit is the eighth of the twenty-five objects through which we are tracing the history of Christianity. It was through this pulpit that Wycliffe would preach the Word of God and defy the corrupt doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church.

John Wycliffe was born in a small village in Yorkshire, England in 1330. These were the late Middle Ages, still two hundred years before the Reformation. English was in its infancy, slowly developing into the language of the common people. Whether a man was born high or low, whether he was a peasant or a ruler, the Church would dominate his life; yet the Church was increasingly corrupt and had become a political force as much as a religious body.

Wycliffe attended Oxford University, receiving his Bachelor of Divinity in 1369 and his doctorate in 1372. Gifted with a brilliant mind, he was soon recognized as one of the world’s foremost theologians and philosophers. In 1374 he was appointed rector of Lutterworth and he remained in that position until his death ten years later.

It was as a scholar that he first came afoul of the Church, for he backed the government’s right to seize the property of corrupt clergy, elevating civil authority over ecclesiastical authority. Over time his growing understanding of Scripture and Christian doctrine coalesced into three critiques of the Roman Catholic Church. These critiques were related to the church, the Eucharist and the Scriptures.

As he studied the Bible Wycliffe came to understand that Christ’s church was composed of the “congregation of the predestined” and that Christ was the church’s only head. He rejected papal authority and indulgences and instead emphasized the Christian’s need for holiness and the necessity of a direct relationship with God through Jesus Christ.

One of the significant difficulties many husbands and wives encounter is the place of sexual desire and pleasure in marriage. I want to speak to this today by answering a representative question, one of many I’ve received. “You speak of sex like it is a pure and holy thing. Yet when my husband wants to have sex with me, I feel like he is just responding to bodily urges and wants to use me as a way to relieve those urges. It’s all about the release. What is holy about this?”

I want to begin by assuring you that your concern is a common one and that at one time or another most couples struggle with the place of sexual desire and gratification within marriage. We all know that sex is meant to be an expression of mutual love, yet so often a wife finds herself responding to her husband’s physical needs or desires. She can feel like she is little more than an outlet for his urges. Sadly, there are many marriages in which this is exactly the case.

False Messages

I believe that the heart of the issue here is that very few Christians have developed a Bible-based theology of sex. Fewer still live out that theology of sex. Instead, much of what we believe has been imported from outside the Bible and carries messages antithetical to God’s desire for the sexual relationship.

From an evolutionary perspective sex is little more than a means of spreading genes, of ensuring survival from one generation to the next. From a pornographic perspective, the meaning of sex is physical gratification so that a person’s worth extends no farther than her (or his) ability to satisfy another person’s cravings. From a romantic comedy perspective, sex is a component of an exploratory phase of a relationship and one that precedes expressions of love and loyalty. These are ubiquitous, powerful messages that compete with truth.

A Christian perspective on sex could hardly stand in sharper contrast. There we see that sex belongs to marriage and that marriage has been created by God for a very specific purpose. Before it is anything else, marriage is a picture, a metaphor, of the relationship of Christ and his church. Within that picture, that representation of Christ and his church, we have sex. Sex is a necessary component of marriage so that a couple desiring to live in obedience to the Bible will regularly have sex together (see 1 Corinthians 7:1-5). And here is where we come to your concern.

Songs are a powerful means of teaching. The melodies, rhythms, and rhymes that characterize songs make the words easier to remember. The best and most effective songs combine lyrics and music to cultivate feelings that complement the meaning.

All throughout history God’s people have used songs to teach. We can see this as early as Exodus 15 where Moses records the song Israel sang after crossing the Red Sea. It taught everyone who heard and sang it about God’s character in that great act of delivering his people. In the New Testament we encounter simple but important truths in the earliest Christian hymns.

The Rev. Samuel John Stone was well aware of the effectiveness of singing when he wrote and published Lyra Fidelium in 1866. As a curate in the small town of Windsor, England, he was aware of his parishoners’ habit of using the Apostles’ Creed in their private prayers. But he was concerned that many of them did not grasp the meaning of what they said. The prose felt too academic, disconnected from the average worshipper, and lacking a devotional spirit.

It was in this context that he wrote Lyra Fidelium, which consisted of twelve hymns, one for each article of the Apostles’ Creed. With each hymn he included a short “summary of truths confessed” in that article, along with a list of the Scripture passages supporting it. “The Church’s One Foundation” was the hymn he wrote for article 9 of the Creed, which affirms belief in “the holy catholic church” and “the communion of saints.”

“The Church’s One Foundation” is the best known of the twelve hymns in this collection. Louis Benson quotes one English archbishop as saying that “wherever he was called upon to open or dedicate a church, he could always count on two things--cold chicken and ‘The Church’s one Foundation’.”

The hymn’s long legacy undoubtedly owes to the many sweet doctrines it includes, its use of the words and concepts of Scripture to express them, and its uniqueness in teaching the doctrine of the church. Benson describes it as embodying “practically every doctrince concerning the church [Stone] held most dear (its divine origin, its unbroken continuity, its catholicity and essential unity, its orthodoxy, its sacramental grace, its communion with God and with the departed saints, its militancy and final triumph).”

The Church's one foundation
Is Jesus Christ her Lord,
She is His new creation
By water and the Word.
From heaven He came and sought her
To be His holy bride;
With His own blood He bought her
And for her life He died.

She is from every nation,
Yet one o'er all the earth;
Her charter of salvation,
One Lord, one faith, one birth;
One holy Name she blesses,
Partakes one holy food,
And to one hope she presses,
With every grace endued.

The Church shall never perish!
Her dear Lord to defend,
To guide, sustain, and cherish,
Is with her to the end:
Though there be those who hate her,
And false sons in her pale,
Against both foe or traitor
She ever shall prevail.

Though with a scornful wonder
Men see her sore oppressed,
By schisms rent asunder,
By heresies distressed:
Yet saints their watch are keeping,
Their cry goes up, "How long?"
And soon the night of weeping
Shall be the morn of song!

'Mid toil and tribulation,
And tumult of her war,
She waits the consummation
Of peace forevermore;
Till, with the vision glorious,
Her longing eyes are blest,
And the great Church victorious
Shall be the Church at rest.

Yet she on earth hath union
With God the Three in One,
And mystic sweet communion
With those whose rest is won,
With all her sons and daughters
Who, by the Master's hand
Led through the deathly waters,
Repose in Eden land.

O happy ones and holy!
Lord, give us grace that we
Like them, the meek and lowly,
On high may dwell with Thee:
There, past the border mountains,
Where in sweet vales the Bride
With Thee by living fountains
Forever shall abide!

Indelible Grace has a recording of the song set to a new melody and they are offering it to you for free. You can visit NoiseTrade to get it. There is the option there to leave a tip, but feel completely freedom to take the song for free.

Except for a brief foray to Manchester, our quest to trace the history of the Christian faith in twenty-five objects, twenty-five historical relics that survive for us to see and even touch today, has kept us in Italy, in the heart of the ancient Roman Empire. But today we depart from Italy and move west until we have touched down in Dublin, Ireland. In the heart of Dublin City is Trinity College and housed in its library we find Ireland’s national treasure: The Book of Kells.

The Book of Kells is a lavish illuminated manuscript that contains the four gospels in Latin along with a collection of texts and tables. Its 340 folios are of the finest vellum and its text is an expert example of the script known as insular majuscule. But what most stands out are the extravagant illustrations with their brilliant colors and elaborate ornamentation. The Book of Kells is not only a Bible, but also a stunning work of art. Some have called it an Irish equivalent to the Sistine Chapel and this is by no means an outrageous comparison.

While the Book of Kells survives largely intact, its origins and history are difficult to trace. Most historians believe that it was produced in the scriptorium of a monastery on the Isle of Iona off the west coast of Scotland, and that it was prepared in honor of St. Colum Cille, or St. Columba. It dates from around 800 A.D. or perhaps slightly earlier. In 806, after a Viking raid that left 68 of the island’s residents dead, the Columban monks fled to the Abbey of Kells in Ireland’s County Meath. Whether the book was produced at Iona or Kells or partially at each is a matter of much debate.

That the book has survived at all is nearly miraculous. Edward Sullivan describes some of its challenges:

In 899 the Abbey was sacked and pillaged. In 918 the Danes plundered Kells, and laid the church level with the ground. Rebuilt, it was again spoiled and pillaged by the Danes in 946. Three years later, Godfrey, son of Sitric, plundered the Abbey. In 967 the town and Abbey were pillaged by the King of Leinster’s son, supported by the Danes; but the allied forces were assailed and defeated by Domnald O’Neill, King of Ireland. Only a year later the Abbey and town were despoiled by a united force of Danes and Leinster people; while in 996 the Danes of Dublin made yet another pillaging raid on both the town and Abbey.

There is more. Not long after that final raid the book was stolen and before it could be recovered it suffered significant water damage. The gold and jewel-encrusted cover had been torn off and as the cover was removed, so too were some of its pages. Neither the cover nor these missing pages have ever been recovered. In modern times it has been poorly rebound and the leaves harshly cropped. And still The Book of Kells has survived largely intact and still stunning in its beauty.

I am rather a skeptic when it comes to many of the claims of global warming and environmentalism. However, this skepticism about the prognostications of doom and gloom does not indicate that I am unconcerned about the planet we live on. It is quite the opposite, really. I want my skepticism to allow me to find better solutions than those posited by the green movement. I want my diagnosis of the problem and my understanding of solutions to be grounded in the Bible. I have been helped here by Francis Schaeffer and his book Pollution and the Death of Man. It is, in my assessment, still one of the best treatments of a Christian understanding of creation care.

Schaeffer begins with the reassurance that as Christians we are able to acknowledge what today’s secular humanists cannot: That mankind has been called by God to exercise dominion over the earth. We are not here by chance and we are not here by mistake. We were placed here by God to care for this planet and have been called to be faithful stewards of it. But like everything else in this world, our ability to exercise this kind of stewardship has been affected by our sinful state. “By creation man has dominion, but as a fallen creature he has used that dominion wrongly. Because he is fallen, he exploits created things as thought they were nothing in themselves, and as though he has an autonomous right to them.” We no longer consistently tend the world in love, but instead ravage and pillage it. Though we may not believe in all of the dire claims being made about the state of our planet and its perilous future, we must at least acknowledge that we have not cared for the world as God has called us to.

The answers to this crisis lie not in our own efforts and not in the dictums of former Vice Presidents. Rather, if we are to understand the crisis, its roots, and its solutions, we must turn to Scripture. And this is precisely what Schaeffer does. Though his book was originally published in 1970, it reads as if it was written yesterday (if, that is, the reader is willing to replace the ecological crises of thirty years ago with those of our day, perhaps substituting global warming in place of DDT).

Schaeffer looks at the spirit of the day and examines how people are dealing with ecological issues. Perceptively, he understood that ecology, bereft of any firm, biblical foundation and without any consistent basis for morality, must breed a kind of pantheism. He saw that people would deal with environmental issues by making themselves one with the planet and it one with them, and this decades before the film Avatar. He responds with classic Schaefferian thought: “Pantheism,” he says, “will be pressed as the only answer to ecological problems and will be one more influence in the West’s becoming increasingly Eastern in its thinking.” Almost forty years later, his words have proven true. Witness the rise of Yoga right alongside and intertwined with the rise of the green movement.