I find joy in every day, not because life is always good, but because God is.

The very thing that makes us feel trapped””God’s omniscience””is the very thing that reveals the depth of God’s grace. If we can muster the courage to allow God’s omniscience to judge us, we will see that before and after the righteous judgment, there has been the omniscience of grace. Let me give an example of an early experience of this.

Read it all.

Keep us, O Lord, from the vain strife of words, and grant us a constant profession of our faith. Preserve us in the way of truth, so that we may ever hold fast that which we professed when we were baptized into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, and may give glory to thee, our Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier, now and for evermore.

—-Hilary of Poitiers (300-368)

O God, who hast made thyself known to us as Trinity in Unity and Unity in Trinity, in order that we may be informed of thy love and thy majesty: Mercifully grant that we may not be terrified by what thou hast revealed of thy majesty, nor tempted to trespass upon thy mercy by what we know of thy love for us; but that by the power of thy Spirit we may be forever drawn to thee in true adoration and worship; who livest and reignest, one God, world without end.

–Euchologium Anglicanum

Praise be to thee, O God the Father, who didst create all things by thy power and wisdom, and didst so love the world as to give thy Son to be our Saviour.
Praise be to thee, O God the Son, who wast made man like unto us in all things, sin except, and wast delivered for our offences and raised again for our justification.
Praise be to thee, O God the Holy Spirit, who dost lead us into all truth, and dost shed abroad the love of God in our hearts.
All praise and glory be to thee, O God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, for ever and ever.

Mormons consider it ironic that they believe in such core Christian beliefs as the Virgin Birth, the Atonement, and the Resurrection and yet are not considered Christian by some of their fellow believers, whereas many mainline Christians who no longer hold such beliefs are considered so.

–Bob Rees in an RNS opinion piece last year responding to the NY Times Op-ed from David Mason entitled “I’m a Mormon, Not a Christian”

Near the bottom of the pit of hell, Dante encounters a man walking with his torso split from chin to groin, his guts and other organs spilling out. “See how I tear myself!” the man shrieks. “See how Mahomet is deformed and torn!” For us, the scene is not only gruesome but surprising, for Dante is not in a circle of false religion but in a circle reserved for those who tear the body of Christ. Like many medieval Christians, Dante views Islam less as a rival religion than as a schismatic form of Christianity.

A handful of Western scholars now think there is considerable historical truth to Dantes view. According to the standard Muslim account, the Quran contains revelations that Allah delivered to Mohammed through the angel Jibril between 609 and 632. They were fixed in written form under the third Caliph in the mid seventh century. Islamic scholar Christoph Luxenberg doubts most of this. In 2000, he published the German edition of The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran, whose restrained title and dispassionate tone belie its explosive arguments-explosive enough for the author to hide behind a pseudonym. The book has been banned in several Islamic countries.

Read it all.

Christians have not come to believe that the God of the Bible is a Trinity because they have sensed his resemblance to some leaf, drink, or political structure. Christians insist on the Trinity because of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As the Son of God, Jesus reveals a God who is a Father. Before anything else, that is the eternal identity of the God revealed in Jesus. “Father,” says Jesus in John 17:24, “you loved me before the creation of the world.” Before all things, the God made known in Jesus was a Father loving his Son.

This is precisely why the apostle John can write that “God is love” (1 John 4:8, emphasis added), for this God would not be who he is if he did not love. If at any time the Father did not have a Son to whom he gave his life and love, then he simply would not be a Father. To be who he is, then, this God must give out life and love. And so we begin to see why the Trinity is such good news: God is love because God is a Trinity, because for eternity this God has been giving out””positively bursting with””love for his Son.
How the Father loves and delights in his Son is something we get to see in the baptism of Jesus. There the Father declares his love for his Son and his pleasure in him as the Spirit rests on the Son like a dove. For the Spirit is the one who makes the love of the Father known, causing the Son to cry “Abba!”….

All of which is to say, briefly, that when you start with the Jesus of the Bible, you inevitably arrive at a triune God. John wrote his gospel, he tells us, “that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:31). But even that simplest call to faith in Jesus is an invitation to a Trinitarian faith: Jesus is described as the Son of God. God is his Father. And he is the Messiah, the one anointed with the Spirit.

Yet while Jesus does reveal a triune God, this triune God that he makes known does not come across as anything like a philosophical headache. Here is a God who is delightfully different from all others, a God who is love: a Father, loving and giving life to his Son in the fellowship of the Spirit.

Read it all.

God always makes the first move. To know the God of the Bible is to trust the God who created everything out of nothing, not because more was needed to somehow complete the circle, but simply because it pleased God. There’s nothing necessary about our existence, just as there’s nothing we can do to force God’s movement in the world. God always makes the first move. Faithful action, then, is always a response.

So, if you’re a bishop of the church in the turmoil of the fourth century, there’s nothing you can do to guarantee the future of the church. And if you’re a passionate, thoughtful person at the beginning of the twenty-first century, eager to sort out the big questions about God and life, there’s nowhere you can go to start figuring everything out for sure. However strong our desire, however fervent our initiative, it’s never enough. God always makes the first move. The Spirit blows where it will. When it does, it often blows our minds.

But after you’ve been knocked off your feet””after the Spirit has hovered over the chaos of your life and hurled you forward into a future beyond the limits of your vision””the questions are still there. God’s interruption doesn’t answer our questions. It doesn’t erase them either. It leaves us, rather, with a photo album full of pictures of hope.

Read it all.

To God the Father, who first loved us, and made us accepted in the Beloved; to God the Son, who loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood; to God the Holy Ghost, who sheddeth the love of God abroad in our hearts: to the one true God be all love and all glory for time and for eternity.

This is the so-called Mormon Moment: a strange convergence of developments offering Mormons hope that the Christian nation that persecuted, banished or killed them in the 19th century will finally love them as fellow Christians.

I want to be on record about this. I’m about as genuine a Mormon as you’ll find ”” a templegoer with a Utah pedigree and an administrative position in a congregation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I am also emphatically not a Christian.

For the curious, the dispute can be reduced to Jesus….

Read it all.

When we speak about the doctrine of God the Holy Trinity, we approach with fear and trembling a great mystery. For many modern Christians, any attempt to think about the mystery is considered impious; but this cannot be: because “unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of God”. Not to receive this gift of knowledge is the true impiety. And though the mystery ever exceeds our comprehension, yet “now we know in part” however imperfectly, the mystery which God has chosen to reveal to us. This attempt to understand is not an act of pride, but of humility ”“ ”˜standing under’ the bright heaven of divine truth, in openness to its vitalizing gifts.
In explaining the mystery of God, resort is commonly had to the acts of God in history. Thus, for example, the answer to the question about the Apostles’ Creed in the Prayer book Catechism, “What dost thou chiefly learn in these Articles of thy belief? Answer. First, I learn to believe in God the Father, who hath made me, and all the world. Secondly, in God the Son, who hath redeemed me, and all mankind. Thirdly, in God the Holy Ghost, who sanctifieth me, and all the [elect] people of God.” That is to say, the persons of the Holy Trinity are revealed in the acts of God in history, the “economy” of salvation.

This is helpful, and yet a false conclusion may be drawn ”“ that the meaning of “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost” is expressed fully in the formula “Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier”. The latter phrase speaks of God’s acts in history (in each of which all three persons are involved); the former of God in himself. For that we must engage with the paradoxes of the technical language of theology, developed to uphold the Biblical revelation: that there is but one divine substance, essence, or nature; infinite in power, wisdom, and goodness. Within this unity of substance there is a distinction of persons, each of them fully God, co-equal, co-eternal, consubstantial ”“ and yet “there are not three Gods, but one God”. God is not a committee.

According to Saint Augustine, the best image of the Trinity is in the life of the human soul itself, made in the image of God. When we look at the soul itself, we see a certain image and likeness of God. Robert Crouse summed up Augustine’s teaching: “One says of the soul three things: it is; it knows; and it wills, or loves. And these three powers are one soul: being, knowing, and willing. God is; God knows; and God wills. God eternally begets his Word, the Son ”“ that is the divine knowing; and in that knowing, there proceeds God’s love, God’s will, the divine Spirit. The Word begotten, the Spirit proceeding; Father, Son, and Spirit: one spiritual life, one substance, in which these three are co-equal, co-eternal persons. God is not some abstract principle, physical or mathematical or whatever; God is not some impersonal force in the universe. The actuality of God, being, knowing, and loving, Father, Son, and Spirit, is the actuality of life. He is the living God.” Since our end is to know and to love God, our salvation consists finally in our worship ”“ by knowing and loving ”“ the living God. So the doctrine of the Trinity is not some arcane obscurity, but the truth which shapes the spiritual life of Christians, as they turn to God and grow into his likeness in Christ. To a limited degree we may know God through God’s knowing of himself; we may love God through God’s delight in his own infinite goodness; our knowing and loving God is a participation in the life of God himself. Not to think the Trinity, therefore, not to believe and profess this doctrine, is to shut oneself out from salvation.

—The Rev. Gavin Dunbar is rector of Saint John’s, Savannah, Georgia

Dorothy Sayers, the British intellectual and theologian and ”“ not incidentally ”“ writer of mystery novels, once remarked that for the average churchgoer of her day, the mystery of the Trinity meant “The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, the whole thing incomprehensible; something put in by theologians to make it more difficult ”“ nothing to do with daily life or ethics.”

Well, in fact the mystery of the Trinity has everything to do with daily life and ethics, though it is also, it must be said, “incomprehensible.” Which is why in the Church we are accustomed, as we have been this morning, to talking about this revelation as a “mystery.”

But, in this theological sense, when we talk about a mystery, we’re not talking about a sort of intellectual puzzle….No, in the Church, when we talk about a mystery, and especially when we talk about this Mystery of Mysteries, the ultimate mystery which is the Most Holy Trinity, we are using the word in almost the opposite way. Instead of a logical puzzle, a question, we are talking about a truth, a revealed truth, which we may know to be true even though it is impossible to wrap our little heads all the way round it.

Read it all.

Keep us, O Lord, from the vain strife of words, and grant us a constant profession of our faith. Preserve us in the way of truth, so that we may ever hold fast that which we professed when we were baptized into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, and may give glory to thee, our Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier, now and for evermore.

–Hilary of Poitiers (300-368)

O God, who hast made thyself known to us as Trinity in Unity and Unity in Trinity, in order that we may be informed of thy love and thy majesty: Mercifully grant that we may not be terrified by what thou hast revealed of thy majesty, nor tempted to trespass upon thy mercy by what we know of thy love for us; but that by the power of thy Spirit we may be forever drawn to thee in true adoration and worship; who livest and reignest, one God, world without end.

–Euchologium Anglicanum

Praise be to thee, O God the Father, who didst create all things by thy power and wisdom, and didst so love the world as to give thy Son to be our Saviour.
Praise be to thee, O God the Son, who wast made man like unto us in all things, sin except, and wast delivered for our offences and raised again for our justification.
Praise be to thee, O God the Holy Spirit, who dost lead us into all truth, and dost shed abroad the love of God in our hearts.
All praise and glory be to thee, O God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, for ever and ever.

Bettany Hughes, an expert in ancient history, was quoted recently in London’s Daily Telegraph as saying that Christianity “was originally a faith where the female of the species held sway. To oppose the ordination of women bishops in the Church of England is to deny the central role women played in the faith’s founding.” She added: “Who knows whether God is a girl, but mankind has turned to the female of the species for good ideas.”

It is not clear from the report whether Ms. Hughes was speaking as a Christian or as an expert in ancient history, but it doesn’t really matter, for she is wrong on both counts. In fact, though, her remarks can be connected loosely with two very old Christian heresies, Marcionism and Montanism, which seem to have undergone something of a revival among trendy religion pundits.

Read it all.

Politicians and academics have paid tribute to a world-renowned Birmingham philosopher who “would not flinch from controversy” and who was once accused of heresy.

Professor John Hick, seen by many as the most influential philosopher of religion of recent times, has died just weeks after celebrating his 90th birthday.

The former University of Birmingham academic and church minister is remembered for helping to stop South African apartheid-era cricketers playing in Birmingham.

Read it all.

what I tried to convey remains true: There are unbridgeable gaps between traditional Christian orthodoxy and the theological positions taken by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As Brigham Young University professor Robert Millet notes, “Latter-day Saints are not in the line of historic Christianity and ”¦ do not accept the concepts concerning God, Christ, and the Godhead that grew out of the post-New Testament councils.” The theological affirmations contained in the great creeds of the historic church are held by Orthodox, Catholics and Protestants alike; the Mormon church teaches that all of these branches of the historic Christian family tree are apostate and not authentically Christian.

I know many individual Mormons and historic orthodox Christians who believe people in one another’s communities to be genuine followers of Jesus Christ. But the religious movements of historic Christianity on the one hand and Mormonism on the other do not recognize one another’s movements as Christian. That doesn’t mean individual people within those movements reject one another as citizens, or as political leaders ”” let alone as friends and colleagues. But it does mean that these religious traditions have things to say about one another.

Read it all but please note that what Mr. Poling attributes to Luther [“With Luther, I would rather be governed by an honest and capable man of a different religious faith than by a corrupt and ineffective politician who attended my church”] is something you often see quoted, but no one has ever been able to show me a reference where this was said in Luther’s own works [and I recall the now late Richard John Neuhaus saying much the same]. If any blog readers can find such a reference, do let me know–KSH.

Bishop T.D. Jakes says he has moved away from a “Oneness” view of the Godhead to embrace an orthodox definition of the Trinity — and that some in the Oneness Pentecostal movement now consider him a heretic.

Jakes — long a controversial figure among evangelicals because of his past unwillingness to affirm the Trinity — stated his belief Wednesday (Jan. 27) at the second-annual Elephant Room (theelephantroom.com), an event that brings together Christian figures from different backgrounds for what organizers call “conversations you never thought you’d hear.” This year’s Elephant Room was held at Harvest Bible Chapel in Illinois and was simulcast to other locations nationwide.

Read it all.

The United States is currently in what some have called the “Mormon Moment” ”“ a time when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is gaining attention due, in part, to the popularity of Mormon celebrities and politicians. Many Mormons, however, are leaving the church to embrace traditional Christianity, but such radical shifts in thought don’t come easily.

The Western Institute for Intercultural Studies (WIIS), a think-tank organization dedicated to helping Christians understand and witness to those of other religions, has come up with a program which includes DVDs and a workbook that are designed to help ex-Mormons have an easier transition into Christianity.

Nearly 70,000 people left the Mormon Church in the U.S. in 2007, according to the Mormon Social Science Association via the first Transitions DVD. Some of the thousands of Mormons who have left the church have turned to Christianity, which is why WIIS created “Transitions: The Mormon Migration from Religion to Relationship,” a six-part program that helps “immigrants” to Christianity address both personal and doctrinal issues.

Read it all.

The eternal embodiment of the divine is metaphysically audacious, and it explains why Mormonism is so inventive. Mormon metaphysics is Christian metaphysics minus Origen and Augustine””in other words, Christianity divorced from Plato. Mormons are so materialistic that they insist that the same unchanging laws govern both the natural and the supernatural. They also deny the virgin birth, since their materialism leads them to speculate that Jesus is literally begotten by the immortal Father rather than conceived by the Holy Spirit.
By treating the spiritual as a dimension of the material, Smith overcomes every trace of dualism between this world and the next. Matter is perfectible because it is one of the perfections of the divine. Even heaven is merely another kind of galaxy, far away but not radically different from planet earth. For Mormons, our natural loyalties and loves have an eternal significance, which is why marriages will be preserved in heaven. Our bodies are literally temples of the divine, which is why Mormons wear sacred garments underneath regular clothing.

This should not be taken lightly. The Mormon metaphysic calls for the revision of nearly every Christian belief. Still, not all heresies are equally perilous. If Gnosticism is the paradigmatic modern temptation””spiritualizing Jesus by turning him into a subjective experience””Mormonism runs in the exact opposite direction. If you had to choose between a Jesus whose body is eternal and a Jesus whose divinity is trivial (as in many modern theological portraits), I hope it would be an easy choice.

Read it all.

On the most fundamental issue, traditional Christians believe in the Trinity: that God is the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit all rolled into one.

Mormons reject this as a non-biblical creed that emerged in the fourth and fifth centuries. They believe that God the Father and Jesus are separate physical beings, and that God has a wife whom they call Heavenly Mother.

It is not only evangelical Christians who object to these ideas.

“That’s just not Christian,” said the Rev. Serene Jones, president of Union Theological Seminary, a liberal Protestant seminary in New York City. “God and Jesus are not separate physical beings. That would be anathema. At the end of the day, all the other stuff doesn’t matter except the divinity of Jesus.”

Read it all.

But the object of divine action in the Incarnation is man. God’s free decision is and remains a gracious decision; God becomes man, the Word becomes flesh. The Incarnation means no apparent reserved, but a real and complete descent of God. God actually became what we are, in order actually to exist with us, actually to exist for us, in thus becoming and being human, not to do what we do-sin; and to do what we fail to do”“God’s, His own, will; and so actually, in our place, in our situation and position to be the new man. It is not in His eternal majesty”“in which He is and remains hidden from us”“but as this new man and therefore the Word in the flesh, that God’s Son is God’s revelation to us and our reconciliation with God. Just for that reason faith cannot look past His humanity, the cradle of Bethlelhem and the cross of Golgotha in order to see Him in His divinity, Faith in the eternal Word of the Father is faith in Jesus of Nazareth or it is not the Christian faith.

–Karl Barth (1886-1968)

From Gerald McDermott’s conclusion:

In sum, then, Mormon beliefs diverge widely from historic Christian orthodoxy. The Book of Mormon, which is Mormonism’s principal source for its claim to new revelation and a new prophet, lacks credibility. And the Jesus proclaimed by Joseph Smith and his followers is different in significant ways from the Jesus of the New Testament: Smith’s Jesus is a God distinct from God the Father; he was once merely a man and not God; he is of the same species as human beings; and his being and acts are limited by coeternal matter and laws.

The intent of this essay is not to say that individual Mormons will be barred from sitting with Abraham and the saints at the marriage supper of the Lamb. We are saved by a merciful Trinity, not by our theology. But the distinguished scholar of Mormonism Jan Shipps was only partly right when she wrote that Mormonism is a departure from the existing Christian tradition as much as early Christianity was a departure from Judaism. For if Christianity is a shoot grafted onto the olive tree of Judaism, Mormonism as it stands cannot be successfully grafted onto either.

Read both essays carefully.

From here:

I take exception to Marilyn Gibson’s letter, “Placing Mormon faith” (Forum, Oct. 20), when she claims that Episcopalians “don’t think Mormons are Christian.” While I applaud her ability to back up her research using the trusted source Wikipedia, I urge her to broaden her research before asserting that my religion does not consider our Latter-day Saint brothers and sisters to be Christian.

Read it all.

In recent years, [Richard] Land has numbered himself among those who describe Mormonism as a kind of fourth Abrahamic tradition, a new faith that has reinterpreted the past under the guidance of its own prophet and its own scriptures. In this case, he said, “Joseph Smith is like Mohammad and The Book of Mormon is like the Koran.” Mormons believe they have restored true Christianity, while Trinitarian churches reject this claim that they have lost the faith.

Thus, it’s not surprising that a new LifeWay Research survey of 1,000 liberal and conservative Protestant clergy in America found that 75 percent disagreed with this statement: “I personally consider Mormons (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) to be Christians.” The surprise was that 48 percent of mainline Protestant pastors strongly agreed that Mormons are not Christians.
Meanwhile, the Vatican in 2001 addressed the issue of “whether the baptism conferred by the community The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, called Mormons in the vernacular, is valid.”

The response from the late Pope John Paul II was blunt: “Negative.”

Read it all.

A common argument runs this way:

Mormons aren’t Christians. Why? Because Mormons differ dramatically from the Christian mainstream, rejecting major doctrines (for example, the Nicene Trinity) that developed in the centuries after Christ.

Critics often accuse us of deceptively claiming to be traditional Christians, and puzzled outsiders sometimes ask why we claim to be Christians while rejecting certain doctrines and traditional creeds.

But we don’t claim to be mainstream Christians, and these objections conflate or confuse “mainstream Christianity” or “traditional Christianity” or “historical Christian orthodoxy” with “Christianity” as a whole. They mistakenly assume that “Christianity” and “mainstream Christianity” are synonyms.

Make sure to read that last statement again several times (my emphasis). Then take the time to read it all–KSH.

Jaroslav Pelikan, an important historical theologian who became Orthodox late in life, once told me, “You evangelicals talk too much about Jesus and don’t spend enough time thinking about the Holy Trinity.” Can one talk too much about Jesus?

I would not want to contrast faith in Jesus with faith in the Holy Trinity. My faith in Jesus is precisely that I believe him to be not only truly human, but also to be the eternal Son of God. I cannot think of a faith in Jesus that does not also involve faith in God the Father.

How is Jesus present to us personally at this moment? How is it that he is not merely a figure from the distant past, but that he also lives in my own life? That is through the Holy Spirit. Therefore, I cannot understand a faith in Jesus Christ that would not also involve faith in the Holy Spirit.

I don’t think we can have too much faith in Jesus. But faith in Jesus, if it is to be truly such, is necessarily Trinitarian. If you look at the lives of the Orthodox saints, you will find a very vivid faith in Jesus. Their affirmation of the Trinity did not in any way diminish their sense of Jesus as their personal Savior.

Read it all.

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