The American Bible Society has a superb collection of old and rare Bibles. The Society began this collection in 1818, just one year after its founding, and much of it is now on display in New York's Museum of Biblical Art. It includes a rare treasure: a first edition Novum Instrumentum omne, Desiderius Erasmus' Greek New Testament of 1516, the first printed edition of the New Testament in Greek. This Bible was to go on to play a key role in the Reformation and for that reason it is one of the 25 objects through which we can trace the history of Christianity.

Desiderius Erasmus was born in Holland in 1466, the illegitimate son of a Roman Catholic priest. He was given a fine education at monastic schools and, when he was twenty-five years old, was ordained as a priest. Three years later he began studies at the University of Paris and there he was exposed to Renaissance humanism and seeds were planted which would later make him a fierce opponent of excess and superstition within the Catholic Church. He soon travelled to England and while there was persuaded by John Colet, an English scholar, to study the New Testament. Erasmus believed that to properly understand the New Testament he would need to first learn Greek and for that reason he began an intense, three-year study of the language. Before long he was not only fluent in Greek, but had become an eminent scholar.

This dedication to Greek would eventually lead Erasmus to begin work on a Greek New Testament, his greatest contribution to the history of the church. At that time the Latin Vulgate remained the authorized Bible of the Church even though it had been translated over 1,000 years prior and even though Latin had long since become a dead language known only by scholars and clerics. Erasmus came to see that the Vulgate had certain inaccuracies and that the language could be polished, and for those reasons he set out to create a new Latin text. To do this, he first had to collect available Greek manuscripts, rather a difficult task since Greek was regarded with suspicion. He borrowed manuscripts from fellow scholar Johann Reuchlin and from the Dominican Library at Basel, Switzerland. While he had relatively few manuscripts available to him, and while he ignored some of the best of those at his disposal, the final result was still remarkably good. James White points out that Erasmus' success, "is more a witness to the preservation of the Scriptures over time than the (admittedly) great scholarship of Erasmus."

We all know that the story of Jonah is really the story of Jonah and his whale, right? Every childrens' Bible majors on that whale and its role in miraculously delivering Jonah from the depths of the sea. The whale is the hero of the story, the knight in shining blubber who comes to the rescue.

Except, of course, that he isn't (and may not be a whale at all since the Bible identifies him only as a "giant fish"). We just need to fast-forward a little bit and go to the life of Christ where he tells us that the story of Jonah is really all about him. Jonah is about Jesus. Jesus is the hero of the story. Here is what Jesus says in Matthew 12 after the Scribes and Pharisees ask him for a sign, a circus trick that would validate his claims.

An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.

As Jesus interprets Jonah he shows that it points to him. He shows that Jonah serves as a type of Christ, a pointer to the future Savior, and says that there is a correlation between Jonah's three days in the belly of the fish and Jesus' three days in the tomb ("the heart of the earth"). This is not to say that the story of Jonah isn't real and didn't have immediate, historical application. It really happened and was really meant to teach God's people in that day. However, Jonah's story was to serve a greater and longer-lasting purpose in pointing people to a future Savior and in teaching something about that Savior. Today we read Jonah in both of these ways, as a prophetic book that speaks to God's people in Jonah's day, and as a book that points us to Jesus Christ.

As I thought about this I was struck by an application: If we are going to make the story of Jonah all about a giant fish, we should make the story of Jesus' death and resurrection all about a tomb. The childrens’ Bibles should spend a whole chapter and all kids of illustrations showing that tomb and discussing its intricacies. We should spend all kinds of time talking about the way a tomb was carved out of rock, and consider the type of rock, and what color it was, and what it would have felt like and smelled like and how a door would have been constructed and placed in front of the opening, and what it would have cost, and all the rest.

If Isaac Watts is known as the father of English hymnody, William Williams (1717-1791) is considered by many to be the father of Welsh hymnody.

In 1738 Williams heard a sermon by the revivalist preacher Howell Harris, a fiery Welsh layman who had been influenced by the Methodist movement in England. It was through this sermon that Williams discerned his calling to go into the ministry.

Williams first pursued becoming an Anglican priest (in the Church of Wales) and entered as a deacon in 1740. However, he soon came to discover that his heart was with Harris and his itinerant work, and before long he left his small curacy in the mountains to join with the traveling Methodist preachers.

The revivalists realized that the Welsh language was lacking in hymns--the church in Wales was still primarily singing metrical psalms in their worship services. In order to promote the creation of hymns, Harris put together a hymn-writing competition between the different preachers.

As Louis Benson relates, “the prize fell easily to Williams Williams, who had the poet’s passion and a gift of verse-writing. Therefore it was not very long before he was recognized as poet laureate of the Welsh revival.”

Williams would go on to write many hymns in both Welsh and English. “Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah” appeared in Welsh in 1745. Twenty six years later, in 1771, a Rev. Peter Williams translated the first verse into English, prompting William Williams to translate the rest of it into English as well.

God spoke to me on Sunday morning. It was clear. It was undeniable. God spoke to me in a moment of need, he brought me a word of comfort, and gave me exactly the message I needed to hear.

Preaching a sermon is one of the most difficult things I do. It is a good kind of difficult, the kind that pushes me into areas I would otherwise avoid. There is even a part of me that loves to preach and I am so grateful that my church allows and even asks me to do it. But even while I believe in preaching and while I believe that I am called to do it on occasion, it doesn’t get a whole lot easier with time.

The process of preparing a sermon is right in my wheelhouse; I love to sit at a desk with an open Bible, with reference books, and with an open word processor. I love the process of studying, understanding, interpreting, writing, editing, sharpening, applying, illustrating and everything else that goes into preparing a sermon. This fits who I am--just one man alone with his books. It is not always a simple or straightforward process, but it is very comfortable.

But delivering a sermon, preaching it, is everything I'm not. The preacher is the guy who stands front and center; my natural tendency is to be in the back corner. The preacher proclaims with a loud voice; I prefer a quieter tone. The preacher has every eye upon him; I am glad to have every eye turned away. Whoever I am at my most comfortable is everything preaching takes away. Preaching is me contorted out of my natural posture, stretched to my most unnatural state.

I was feeling the weight of this on Sunday morning. It was the dawn of a new day and the beginning of a new week, but the previous week had not yet quite cleared my consciousness. It had been a long and distracted few days, one of many responsibilities and difficult discussions. In retrospect I think it was also a week with some spiritual attack meant to frustrate and discourage me. It worked.

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… .

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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.