Uri Brito

On October 20, 2016 By Uri Brito In Theology 1

On The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, A Review

As we approach the 500^th anniversary of the Reformation, Martin Luther’s 95 theses remain the most revolutionary document in Western History. Luther’s attempt to begin a conversation about indulgences provoked an ecclesiastical and sacramental revolution. This revolution reverberated through the last 500 years and will continue to do so for many centuries to come. But Luther’s theses served the purpose, unbeknownst to him, of catapulting this Augustinian monk to the center of the church’s disputes of the day. Spurred by a prolific genius, this trilinguist sought comfort in the liberating power of God’s revelation.

Luther wrote on a host of issues, but particular to his concerns, was a hunger to recover proper worship in the Church. Martin Luther’s On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church[1] is a biblical examination of the seven sacraments of the medieval church. The Luther-revolution began as he opened his Bible and examined the practices of the Church in light of scriptural teaching. The reformer was compelled “to become more and more learned each day” implying a continual testing[2] of these practices in light of his voracious commitment to the Scriptures.

For Luther, the Papacy is a “kingdom of Babylon,” twisting the clear articulation of Holy Scriptures.

In his treatise, he begins by addressing the Lord’s Supper. In direct fashion, Luther viciously attacked the church, claiming its “tyrants” were denying the laity reception of both elements. Luther argues from Paul and the Gospels that the Lord’s Supper belongs to the entire Church. (more…)

On October 5, 2016 By Uri Brito In Culture Like

My Cell Phone Love Affair

Researchers have determined that we have a problem. Yet we cavalierly attempt to rationalize our ways acting as if everything is just fine. But it’s a subtle problem. It’s barely noticeable because our lives are wrapped up in it. I speak of that technological innovation known as the cell phone. For all its charm and effectiveness, it has left us desolate for attention and craving for more of it. Like a drug, it smiles upon us and gives us the image we want of ourselves.

When I first pointed this out some time ago, folks reacted in humorous opposition: “I had to check social media on my cell to read your critique of cell phone usage.” Of course, this is not a contradiction. I am articulating in opposition to the excessive use of cell phones, not the occasional “catch-up,” or pragmatic use thereof. I am no more contradicting myself than CNN does when it reports that according to researchers watching too much TV can cause long-term damage. The means is simply a popular avenue to communicate ideas, even if these ideas contradict the excessive use of the means.

Ultimately, this is about stewardship. You can use it wisely or not. I can quote Neil Postman on Facebook, though Postman would probably be unhappy about its overwhelming use in our day. The means does not negate the message. And the message is that too much of the means can be harmful for you. As Luther once observed, “The Abuse of something is not an argument against its proper use.” We need to understand that using something does not negate the reality that that something can be abused. (more…)

On October 4, 2016 By Uri Brito In Family and Children, Music 3

Why Don’t Men Sing in Church?

Why are men not singing in Church? Various articles have attempted to answer that question recently. But before we can try to offer a rationale for such a spectacular question, we need to observe that some are entirely comfortable allowing this trend to continue. After all, music plays a minimal role in their worship expressions. Others find the issue of congregational singing irrelevant due to the trained praise bands that lead worship each Sunday. “Let the professionals lead.”

Certain environments encourage people to hear and feel the music rather than sing it. And some groups have placed such high priority on the preached word that the very idea of a singing congregation seems secondary, if not tertiary in the priority list.

But on to better things.

Fortunately, there are a vast amount of churches and leaders that still treasure congregational singing and long for a time when men return to the old-fashioned task of singing God’s melodies. The cruel reality is that we are far from the mark. In my many visits to evangelical churches over the years, the few men who opened their mouths, timidly read the words like a child attempting to spell out his phonics assignment.

Timid singers make for timid Christians. (more…)

On September 1, 2016 By Uri Brito In Scribblings 1

Obsession with the End

When I was younger, fascination with how the world was going to end was an all-consuming passion. I read the books, marked the proof-texts, speculated alongside Bible prophecy “experts,” and proclaimed the Gospel that the “end is near.” Almost 20 years have gone by since I left that world. What fascinates me today is not so much the chronology of the end, but the joys of the present. God is doing a work in our midst. He is building awe among his creatures. And we must see the good he is doing around us, lest we miss his good gifts. Here is what I know: Fairy tales are good and noble. Giggles from children are beautiful, community life is sublime, the Church is motherly, and the “love of wife,” to quote Luther, is desirable. Obsession with the end robs us of the present joys. Your eschatology forms your theology of the present.

On August 31, 2016 By Uri Brito In Scribblings Like

Experiential Genealogies

It is hard to read the story of the prodigal son and not be undone by the grief of the father and his jubilance as his son returns. Can you read that story and simply conclude: “Well, that young man certainly made a rational decision to come back home?” I doubt the common man stops there. He immerses in the agony and glory of this reconciliation story. It’s a kind of death and resurrection narrative. But our tendency is to see this experience as unique in the Bible. Everything else is propositional truth which serves the purpose of enlightening our minds and nothing else. What if, however, these propositions are meant to change our experiences? What if genealogies, temple tools, and descriptions of sacrificial rituals were meant to build us in truth and enhance our emotional taste buds to the entire meal of Scriptures? What if these “random” details were meant to make us more human and better friends and worshipers? What if Paul was right when he said, “All Scripture is profitable for training in righteousness?” Have we become selective in what is profitable and what is not? All texts shape us, even the ones we choose to overlook.

On August 29, 2016 By Uri Brito In Scribblings Like

We are all historians

We are all historians. We all look at events around us and offer the most cogent interpretation of those events. But not all historians are created equal. Some historians can offer a healthy interpretation of facts. These historians read well and are well read. They have a good grasp of biblical reality and its future. They engage others by listening, meditating, and even deliberating over ideas that may conflict with their own interpretations. Other historians are immersed in silly little novels and TV shows. I am not opposed to informal reading and watching, but if this satisfies your intellectual curiosity, then count me in the opposition party. These latter historians will offer very different accounts of history.

The first historian is judicious; she listens, learns, and therefore interprets. The other will make dogmatic assertions based on his microscopic worldview. In fact, his world is so little that dogmatism is the only response he has (“How dare you oppose the party spirit!”). He can’t engage since engagement requires eclectic habits. He makes assertions about how things have always been in his thinking and how they shall ever be world without end.

To avoid this solitary world, we must become good historians; historians in need of refinement and eager journalists of time. We read, listen, and watch carefully and discerningly. We talk to one another. We should be slow to speak and quick to listen. Some historians drink deeply while others find contentment with a few drops.

We are all historians. So historicize well so your children and those closest to you may add a better chapter than the one you wrote. That’s a good thing. In fact, good history is like good wine: it gets better with time.

On August 27, 2016 By Uri Brito In Scribblings Like

Amputating Scriptural Intent

We must confess the truthfulness that evangelicalism has turned the Old Testament pages into a series of unconnected moralistic stories. This reminds me of a lecture delivered by R.C. Sproul one time where he asked for a copy of the Bible. A young college student threw a copy of the New Testament Gideon’s Pocket-Size Bible to him. Sproul looked at it and threw it right back and said, “I asked for a Bible, young man!” We have disassociated the Scriptures and treated it as a collection of unrelated stories. The reality, however, is that the Bible is a collection of unified stories made to build on one another with each story adding a more nuanced and elevated art form to the big picture. The Old Testament Scriptures are far more than moral lessons, it’s the very environment that makes the New Testament coherent. The presuppositions of the Gospels and Apostolic writings depend heavily on the assumptions of the Law and the Prophets. The Bible, to paraphrase Luther, “is alive, it speaks to me; it has feet, it runs after me; it has hands, it lays hold of me.” To categorically divide Old and New is to amputate the Scriptural intent to hold and illumine our hearts and minds.

On July 9, 2016 By Uri Brito In Politics Like

Reconciliation at the Table

We are a divided people. Children turn against parents, parents turn against children, politicians turn against politicians, and we turn against those who rule over us. From within, we have been working steadily to undo Paul’s great theme in his writings: the reconciliation of Jew and Gentile in Christ Jesus. Our oneness is challenged daily as we hear of reports of brothers and sisters tearing one another, gossiping, cursing one another. Authority figures are being killed and authority figures are unjustly killing. If you try to find a consistent trend there is none. We destroy our unity because we have sabotaged the image-bearing status of humanity, as Al Stout noted here.

But our solution is near us. It seems too simple; too safe and yet too dangerous.

When we taste the Eucharist we taste physical elements offered to God’s people for edification, wisdom, and nurture. Yet when tragedy strikes we run away from the meal that brings together male and female, slave and free. What would the world be like if police officers and their black neighbors were to eat and drink at the table together? What would it look like for the one in authority to partake of bread and wine with the tattooed Hispanic convert? What would it look like to be formed by something given to us, something served each week by a minister of the Gospel? What would it take to get estranged brothers to embrace each other at the culmination of worship, and then say, “Peace be with you,” as they look into each others’ eyes and drink the blood of Christ and eat his body?

The Gospel of the sacraments ought to do that for us. The Apostle Paul understood this when he wrote: “For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit.” ^a Baptism unites us into the oneness formed by the Spirit. God takes us from our diversity and unites us into his Threeness and Oneness.

Why have conversations about unity abandoned conversations about the table?

If the Church wishes to see unity, let’s encourage the weak and strong, young and old to build ecclesiastical patterns of weekly eating, weekly partaking, weekly loving, weekly embracing, and weekly serving one another—in and through our diversity—that we may find union with Messiah Jesus: the source of all true reconciliation. So this Sunday ^b come and serve your brother and sister with intentionality as you eat and drink in the name of One Lord, one faith, and one baptism.

I Corinthians 12:13 (back)
or whenever your church communes at the table (back)

On May 23, 2016 By Uri Brito In Books Like

A Review of Joseph Loconte’s A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-1918

Guest Post by Tom Robertson

The little knots of friends who turn their backs on the ‘World’ are those who really transform it. -C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Joseph Loconte gives needed attention to the part played by the Great War – the “cataclysm of 1914-1918,” as he calls it – in helping to shape the men we would come to know, simply as Tolkien and Lewis. This horrific experience, far from killing the imaginations of these beloved men, and far from causing them to retreat from the world, provided a context for friendship and imagination. Rather than extinguishing the idea of heroism and of true friendship, as it did for many of their contemporaries, their imaginations were aflame with deep fellowships, enduring love, ultimate sacrifice, and epic valor.

Loconte has managed to capture the spirit of the rapidly changing culture that existed both before and after World War I while presenting Tolkien and Lewis as valiant men in their own right, who not only resisted the lure of “the myth of progress,” which helped to usher in the Great War, but emerged to become hopeful, prolific, influential men even after the myth was shattered. One is presented with two men who, against all odds, helped one another swim against the stream of pessimism, pacifism, and realism that flooded the literary imaginations of postwar Europe as the great myth burst. And they did this in the most heroic fashion. Loconte says although “the Great War produced many cynics and pacifists” who found “nothing heroic about the folly of war, yet, as veterans of this conflict, Tolkien and Lewis chose to remember not only its horrors and sorrows: they wanted to recall the courage, sacrifice, and the friendships that made it endurable.” These two, with the encouragement of their little knot of friends – ‘The Inklings’, as they called themselves – provided a little rivulet of their own.

Their hopeful stories, filled with heartbreaking tragedy, acts of valor, and happy endings, provide a spring of cool fresh water for many thirsty would-be Hobbits and Narnians. They are the kind of stories that are seeded in the experience of pain and watered by joy. “It is a good bet,” says Loconte, “that only men who…experienced [friendships] on the field of combat…could write passages of such compassion, grit, and courage.” The Inklings, says Loconte, was their attempt “to recapture something like the camaraderie that sustained them during” the Great War. “It is a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.” In A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, And A Great War, Loconte has given us a book which may very well serve to inspire the next “little knot of friends” to enter into the “dangerous business…of going out your door,” and to “turn their back’s on the ‘World.'” For they, like Lewis and Tolkien, may one day be “those who really transform it.”

Tom Robertson leads a weekly gathering of future military aviators centering around the writings of C.S. Lewis. Debbie and he will have been married 30 years in June of this year. They have two children, Jourdan and Andrew.

On May 6, 2016 By Uri Brito In Politics 8

Scholars Speak on Trump’s Nomination

Ted Cruz’s departure from the Republican race, and most recently, John Kasich’s, catapulted long-time front-runner, Donald Trump, to become the national representative of the GOP in this election cycle. Trump’s remarkable rise has shocked the media and many of the conservative voices of our day. Many of these conservative voices have made it abundantly clear that voting for Donald Trump will precipitate the end of the party and the end of the conservative ethos of the party of Ronald Reagan.

This entire process has left conservative evangelicals asking the question: “How shall we then think?” Kuyperian Commentary asked several Christian scholars to offer their answers to such a profound question.

Andrew Sandlin
Founder and President, Center for Cultural Leadership

More troubling than Trump the candidate are the cultural forces that have propelled his success. That long list is topped by the erosion of classical liberalism ( = modern conservatism). Its chief features include the dignity of the individual, the separation of powers, the priority of reasoned discourse, the protection of private property, and the universality of moral standards. The cultural Marxism that gradually captured the Democratic Party since the late 1960’s undermines every tenet of classical liberalism. The truly shocking development has been the more recent and swift adoption of Trump’s populism, which also abandons classical liberalism:

He champions his own form of identity politics that mirrors cultural Marxism.

He considers Congress an obstructionist institution that should be bypassed.

He shouts down thoughtful opposition, just like campus neo-Marxists.

He disdains reasoned discussion in favor of ad hominem denunciations.

He advocates trade policies that raid the wallets of middle-class American consumers.

He employs almost any gangbanger tactic — just like the neo-Marxists — as long as it accomplishes his sordid political objectives.

The most ominous aspect of this development is that classical liberalism, the political theory of the Founding and rooted in Christianity, is no longer represented by a major American political party.

This development is unprecedented in American history.

Brian Mattson
Senior Scholar of Public Theology, Center For Cultural Leadership

Vote your conscience. Some musings:

My loyalty and obligations are to the truth, not a political party. The GOP electorate has decided it will no longer be a welcome home for classical liberalism, and therefore it is no longer my home. Political realignment is now a full-scale reality, whether I realize it, like it, or even participate in it.

One approach: vote for Donald Trump and hope for the best. Stack a final, tiny, leaky sandbag on the pile, hoping and praying it stops the torrent of radical leftism while not producing something even worse. But with the distance between two evils so slight (in my view), I think subsidizing this ideological decline with our votes might be the real abdication of our civic responsibilities.

Another approach: Reject Donald Trump. Energetically participate in the political realignment. Congress is the levee wall: support solid down-ballot candidates. Bolster institutions that stand for the truth, strengthen alliances, and plant long-term seeds that will flourish when (if) our national nightmare recedes. I am sitting here looking at my daughters, and I owe them better than a sandbag and a wish.

Maybe you can do both. But I can’t and won’t.

Peter Leithart
President of the Theopolis Institute

Andrew Sullivan has determined that the Donald’s candidacy is a blast from the last trump, announcing the end of democracy. Sullivan underestimates the federal government’s blessed capacity for gridlock, and Trump’s capacity for compromise, change, and moderation.

The real worry is less that, if elected, Trump will make good on his promises; he won’t. The real worry lies elsewhere. Trump’s campaign has been a masterpiece of scapegoating, blaming our economic stagnation on China and Mexico and our decline in global prestige on feckless political and media elites. You can be morally certain he won’t accept responsibility for his failure. And then who will the Trump tribe find to blame?

If Trump isn’t the end of the world or American democracy, he may be the end of the GOP as we know it. To that, we can say a hearty Good riddance. It’s become difficult to see what the conservative party still conserves, other than the wealth of its donors and the lifestyle of its Beltway elites.

What we’re hearing is not the last trump, but Trump may be an agent of divine judgment against the Party that has been most promiscuous in invoking God’s name. Here’s hoping He shakes the GOP down to the foundations, and keeps shaking until only permanent things are left standing.

Thomas S. Kidd
Distinguished professor of history, Baylor University

I’ve said for months that I could never vote for Donald Trump for president. Trump becoming the presumptive GOP nominee has not changed that. I will not vote for either Trump or Hillary Clinton, assuming she becomes the Democrats’ nominee. Christians will argue about which of these two options is worse, and I’m honestly not sure how I would distinguish between the two. In any case, I can’t vote for either of them.

What to do in November, then? I will wait to see if there is a reasonable choice for a third party or write-in candidate. If not, I won’t cast a vote for president. I do believe that we have a civic obligation to participate, however, so I will vote for the down-ballot offices. I generally won’t vote for Democrats, but this time, I also won’t vote for GOP candidates who actively support Trump. I may have a relatively incomplete ballot!

We Christians should remember that as we express dismay about election 2016, we are hardly without hope. American Christians have too often put too much importance on politics, anyway. It’s a great time for us to remind ourselves that our ultimate citizenship is in the Kingdom of Jesus Christ.

George Grant
Pastor of Parish Presbyterian

During that particularly distressing post-Nixon, pre-Reagan period in American history, Francis Schaeffer prophetically declared,

“This is our moment of history and our responsibility: not to just to write and talk of far-off ideals, but to struggle for Scriptural and practical means of doing what can be done in a fallen world to see people personally converted and also to see what our salt and light can bring forth in the personal life and the political and the cultural life of this moment of history.”

His exhortation is as apt today as it was then—and perhaps, even more so.

Faced with the prospects of a desultory presidential electoral cycle, many Christians today have given vent to handwringing jeremiads. In truth, this election affords us a tremendous opportunity:

We have the opportunity to stand courageously for Biblical truth severed from the compromises of political partisanship. The Republican Party has long disregarded us. Now, it has altogether discarded us. We are thus morally, culturally, and politically unencumbered by their half-measures, empty promises, and feeble entreaties.

We have the opportunity to mobilize a groundswell of support for principled and purposeful reformation at a time when the two major parties have little more to offer than revolutionary fantasies.

We have the opportunity to model ardent prayerfulness. It was John Bunyan who quipped, “You can do more than pray, after you have prayed, but you cannot do more than pray until you have prayed.” We have acted as if the opposite were true. We no longer have the luxury of that foolhardy project.

Finally, we have the opportunity to display an unwavering confidence in the Gospel hope. When all about us are despairing, we can reaffirm that the throne room of the Most High has not been vacated, that the Ascended Christ still has His iron scepter and the earth remains His footstool. As Chuck Colson asserted, “Thankfully, hope doesn’t ride on Air Force One.” We need not set our hopes upon either Tweedledee or Tweedledum.

This is our moment. It is past time for us to roll up our sleeves and go to work. It is high time for the church to be the church.