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On July 23, 2013 By In Culture

The Twitter Pope

popebanner1“The pope is not the head of the Church, but he is that Antichrist.” It is with that flowery language that the 1646 Westminster Confession of Faith describes the highest office of the Roman Church. a As a Protestant who cares deeply about preserving some level of catholicity with my Roman Catholic brothers, I take exception to that clause as does the congregation in which I serve. There are theological reasons to believe the early Reformers were a bit too quick on their assumption, however, it is no small thing to consider that were we in their circumstances that proposition would not look as foreign to 21st century Reformed Protestants.

If the papal office were the Antichrist it is safe to assume that the world is still not under his spell. If Twitter is any indication, the pope has a long way before reaching Bieber-esque popularity. b

Indulgences from Twitter

The Guardian summarizes:

In its latest attempt to keep up with the times, the Vatican has married one of its oldest traditions to the world of social media by offering “indulgences” to followers of Pope Francis‘ tweets.

The indulgences are granted to those who cannot attend the Catholic World Youth Day, in Rio de Janeiro, a week-long event starting on the 22nd of  July. But it’s not as easy as you think:

A senior Vatican official warned web-surfing Catholics that indulgences still required a dose of old-fashioned faith, and that paradise was not just a few mouse clicks away. c

It’s not simply about following the pope’s Twitter account, it’s about praying and accompanying the week-long youth event in Rio. So there are a few qualifications that would keep us from overly trivializing the actions from the Vatican.

New Times, New Methods

This social awareness of the Roman church is a result of a global decline in membership. Pope Benedict XVI stepped down in a time of tremendous turmoil as the well-publicized sex-abuse scandal resulted in an increasing distrust of Roman Catholic leadership. Overall, Roman Catholic churches in America have lost 5 percent of their membership during the last decade, and the decline would have been much steeper still if not for the offsetting impact of Roman Catholic immigrants from Latin America. d These drastic measures taken by the Roman church are a sign that new times require new methods, and that entails seeking new followers.

Pope Francis may prove to be the right man for the right time. He has re-energized the Roman Catholic faith in a short period of time more so than did Benedict in his entire papacy. Francis, who has been referred to as an “unconventional pope,” has shown himself to be savvy politician. He shakes hands and kisses babies with tremendous ease. Gone is the day of the inaccessible Holy Father. Francis cracks jokes and delivers unscripted remarks, much to the occasional dismay of staffers scrambling to keep up. e He knows that his church is overwhelmed with bad PR and he appears to have a clear, albeit unconventional plan to rescue her from  herself. His success is likely to turn the negative perception of the papacy.

“Like a spiritual rock star, he routinely packs St. Peter’s Square for his weekly appearance to bless the faithful. Hundreds of thousands of devotees, perhaps millions, are expected to turn out to see Francis, the first Latin American pontiff, during his trip to Brazil, the world’s most populous Roman Catholic nation.” f This is the new face of Roman Catholicism in the world. The pope may be far from dominating the Twittersphere, but for the catholic youth indulging in the pope’s latest tweet may be the quickest way to improving the church’s reputation.<>продвижение ов яндекс и google

  1. WCF, XXV.6  (back)
  2. Justin Bieber has the largest twitter following in the world with over 42 million  (back)
  3. Ibid.  (back)
  4. Pope Bedict and the Decline of American Catholicism  (back)
  5. Pope Francis the Unconventional  (back)
  6. Ibid.  (back)

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On July 14, 2013 By In Culture

5 Revealing “If I ever see Zimmerman I will…” Tweets

by Steve Macias

In case you live under a rock, Zimmerman was charged with the shooting death of Florida Teen Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman pleaded not guilty, claiming he shot 17-year-old Martin in self-defense. The court case is a circus – the entire deck of race cards and their corresponding jokers have declared their opinion about the case, including President Obama.

Zimmerman stood in a courtroom today as a jury declared him not guilty of all charges. The ruling spawned the hashtag #IfIEverSeeZimmerman to trend  almost immediately on the social networking site Twitter.

No matter what you happen to believe about the case, the tweets show how the American public views the case. I’ve picked five of the most revealing tweets:

 

Prosecutors called Zimmerman a liar and portrayed him as a vigilante who had grown frustrated by break-ins in his neighborhood committed primarily by young black men. Zimmerman assumed Martin was up to no good and took the law into his own hands, prosecutors said. The case was heavily politicized. Those who feared the case would be used to attack self-defense and the right to own a gun held their ground in favor of Zimmerman. Others saw the case as an opportunity to demonstrate the existence of violence in and against black communities in modern America.  In some cases, demonstrating that in this country it is almost worse to be racist than a murderer. If Trayvon wasn’t black, the case would never have made the news.

Trayvon_Martin_on_the_backseat_of_a_car

Those who are upset about the ruling feel this was unjust, so much that rumors and tweets about riots and violence have become an equally big news story. What are they to do when they feel slighted? How do they respond to what they perceive is injustice? A young man is dead – the jury’s acquittal of Zimmerman can not rob him of his victim’s humanity. The jury’s acquittal is not necessarily a declaration of wrongdoing on Trayvon’s behalf.

In any possible verdict, it still remains tragic that Trayvon is dead.

I hope the jury is correct. I can not say for sure that what they did is right. I surely hope it is, but we are still left with feelings that don’t belong in a criminal case.

This case transformed from a homicide trial into a divisive political circus. Quickly. Instead of questing for truth, people took sides and swallowed talking points. Justice in this one case became secondary to the vision of justice for society that each party following the case had in mind. I mostly ignored the headlines, but a few did catch my eye. One was about the political affiliation of the judge, another about the witnesses chosen to testify which asked — was justice or simply victory being sought?

OJ Simpson Trayvon MartinI was just four years old when OJ Simpson was acquitted. High profile cases like his pushed their way out of the courtroom onto our television screens — “courtrooms” became primetime money makers for the entertainment industry with characters like Judge Judy. The justice system is now a content producer for entire television channels and weekly programming. Is this cultural obsession with courts healthy?

Strangely enough, the culture that obsesses over courtrooms is a most savage and brutal one. They kill millions of their own innocent children, wage endless wars in foreign countries, and steal and lie to their own countrymen in a pursuit for “liberty and justice for all.”

Fallen man cannot have justice for all. Complete justice is God’s alone and we can not hope to right every wrong in our world. What we have seen in my short lifetime is the duplicity of injustice because of our bureaucratic efforts to have justice for all. Vengeance is the Lord’s. A victim is reconciled on God’s terms — not the whims of a state legislator. God’s burden is light.

Man has attempted to escape God’s sovereign justice and to erase his standard for justice. In looking around we can see the language of justice constantly being used in the absence of real justice. Courts and legislatures invent crimes and punishments, apply them as they feel appropriate, and enforce them at their whim. They place their hope for true justice in the hands of fallen men, fallen governments, and degenerate institutions that trade justice for political gain, power, and profit.

Contrary to what the left says, prisons will not reform man. Contrary to what the right says, brute strength will not save man from his nature.  Only the transformational power of Christ upon each individual will reform man — one by one and from the bottom up. RJ Rushdoony said that only “an order dedicated to the whole word of God and Christ’s regenerating power can give justice because it rests on a new man of God’s making.” Christ’s regeneration produces self-control.

The same invisible hand that rewards good ideas and innovation in the market, metes out justice in our culture. A marketplace is first a marketplace of ideas, which are always religious ideas that guide our wants, desires, choices, and morals. The invisible hand of the Holy Spirit doesn’t depend on the black robes of courtrooms to administer true justice. The Supreme Court of Roe V. Wade is supreme evidence of a partition of man’s justice against God’s.

Why are the people so angry? Why do they threaten with riots and revolution? People are upset about injustice. People long for true justice. Many look for this justice in the failed solution of a man-centered state, not understanding it can only be found in our reigning King Jesus.

Even the pagan poet Virgil longed for a hope greater than man’s ability — a hope from above to rescue us below.

“Jam nova progenies coelo demittitur alto-

Te duce, si qua manent sceleris vestigia nostri,

Irrita perpetua solvent formidine terras”

“A new race descends from the lofty sky;

and that should take away sin-

Thy influence shall efface every stain of corruption,

And free the world from alarm.”

  Like Steve on Facebook and follow @SteveMacias on Twitter.<>стоимость контекстной рекламыпродвижение а москва цены

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On July 10, 2013 By In Books, Culture, Worship

10 Reasons to Sing the Psalms

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By Uri Brito

Many of us grew up in theological backgrounds where the psalms were known, but not sung. These theological backgrounds are anomalies throughout the history of the Church. E.F. Harrison observed that “Psalmody was a part of the synagogue service that naturally passed over into the life of the church.” Calvin Stapert speaks of the fathers’ “enthusiastic promotion of psalm-singing” which he says, “reached an unprecedented peak in the fourth century.” James McKinnon speaks of “an unprecedented wave of enthusiasm” for the psalms in the second half of the fourth century. Hughes Oliphint Old argued that Calvin appealed to the church historians (e.g. Eusebius, Socrates, Sozomen) as well as the church fathers (e.g. Augustine, Basil, Chrysostom) for the singing of psalms. While the Reformers did not advocate the exclusive singing of Psalms they did express “a partiality for Psalms and hymns drawn from Scripture.” a 

The Reformer Martin Luther urged that Psalms be sung by congregations so that “the Word of God may be among the people also in the form of music b.“ By the end of the 19th century, however, most hymnals produced had limited psalms to a couple of well-known pieces like Old One-Hundredth. Beyond that, scriptural references had all but disappeared. Terry Johnson summarized the state of psalmlessness:

This eclipse of psalmody in the late nineteenth century is quite unprecedented. The psalms, as we have seen, have been the dominant form of church song beginning with the Church Fathers, all through the Middle Ages, during the Reformation and Post-Reformation eras, and into the modern era. By the beginning of the twentieth century the church had lost the voice through which it had expressed its sung praise for more than 1800 years. c

Though the last hundred years were not psalm-friendly, we have seen in the last 30 years a kind of revival of psalmody in the modern church, especially in the Reformed tradition. New hymnals, like the Cantus Christi, and many others are including old and new psalms ( metrical and chants).

So why should we sing the psalms? Aren’t the 19th century hymns and contemporary songs sufficient to fulfill the worship demands of the modern congregation?

The answer is a resounding no!

There are ten reasons I believe congregations should begin to sing psalms once again:

First, Psalm-singing is an explicit biblical command (Ps. 27:6). The Scriptures encourage us to sing “psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God” (Col. 3:16). To have the word of Christ dwell in you richly means to invest in the rich beauty of the Psalter. How can we sing what we do not know? Is there a better way to internalize the word than to sing it?

Second, Psalm-singing was the ancient practice of the Church and it continued for 1,800 years. We honor our forefathers and our history when we sing their songs.

Third, Calvin observed that the psalms are “An Anatomy of all Parts of the Soul; for there is not an emotion of which any one can be conscious that it is not represented here as a mirror.” The psalms are satisfying to the human being. We are homos adorans; worship beings. God is not against emotions, he is against emotionalism. The Psalter is an emotional book. It provides comfort for the people of God at different stages of life. As a minister I have never once walked into a hospital room and been asked to read a text from Leviticus or Romans, but rather every time I have been asked to read a psalm (most often Psalm 23). The psalms reach deep inside our humanity in time of pain.

Fourth, singing the psalms builds our Christian piety. It is nurturing to our souls. It is God’s devotional book; God’s hymnal. Singing the psalms restores the joy of our salvation. Ask me what book of the Bible I would take to a desert island, and I will not hesitate to say “The Psalms.”

Fifth, the psalms are ultimately made for the body. You may sing the psalms on your own, but they reach their culmination when sung together. They are meant to be roared (Ps. 47:1), because they were written by the Lion of Judah. When we sing together we are both being edified and edifying one another. “We sing because in singing we join together in common breath and melody in a manner that no other medium can duplicate…We become an assembly unified in purpose and thought. And by our singing, we hear God’s Word for us, and the world hears it loud and clear.” d

Sixth, we should sing the Psalms because they re-shape us; they re-orient our attention. We are a people constantly being sanctified by the Spirit of God, and the Spirit has specifically inspired 150 psalms for our sanctification. How should we pray? How should we ask? How should we lament? The Psalms helps us to answer these questions, and thus shape us more and more after the image of Christ.

Seventh, by singing the Psalms we are worshiping the Spirit. The Spirit hovers, shapes, re-makes in the Bible. He is the music of God in the world. In an age when the Third Person of the Trinity has become the source of theological confusion, the Psalms keeps us focused on His role and purposes in history.

Eighth, we should sing the Psalms because our current songs are often cheap and shallow. The Psalms are rich and full of substance. If we wonder why the evangelical community is so powerless, one reason for this is its trivialized worship. Modern worship is often a pietistic exercise, which is manifested in poorly constructed and pessimistic theology. But the Psalms teaches us that God is full of mercy and powerful over all His enemies (Ps. 2). The Psalms are political statements. They are direct attacks on those who challenge the supremacy of King Jesus.

Ninth, the Psalms should be sung because our children need them. Our little ones need to know the God they worship in profound ways from their earliest days. We become what we worship, and so our children will become what we sing.

Tenth, you should sing the Psalms because the world needs them. The world does not need a weak Gospel. She sees plenty of it already. She needs to hear a Gospel of a God who delights in praise, who will not allow evil to go unpunished, and who prepares a table for us.

This may all sound daunting and strange. But I’d encourage you to take that first step. What first may appear to be strange may become a wonderful journey into praise and thanksgiving to the God from whom all blessings flow.

For more information on how to sing the psalms, or for resources, please contact me at uriesou@gmail.com.<>заказ статьи ваккак определить тиц

  1. See Terry Johnson’s The History of Psalm Singing in the Church; I depended heavily on that article for the quotes on this paragraph  (back)
  2. Luther, Martin. Tischreden. No. 2545. Quoted in F. Blume et al., Protestant Church Music (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1974  (back)
  3. Ibid.  (back)
  4. From the article: “Why do we sing the Psalms?”  (back)

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Symbolism of Bread SteveMacias.com

On June 17, 2013 By In Culture, Theology

What’s In a Name?

by Peter Jones

Naming is an essential part of the human experience. We all place names on things around us. That is a car. That is a Toyota Sienna minivan. That is a 2001 tan Toyota Sienna minivan with three dents in the hatch. And on and on it goes. We follow after our Creator who named the night, the day, the sun, the moon, and man. But he did not just name things as nouns, he also declared them to be good or very good. After the fall he named things good or bad, righteous or unrighteous. The Scriptures explicitly forbid us from calling good evil and evil good (Isaiah 5:20). The Christian life is one of naming things correctly.

In our postmodern era, it is hard to hold this line. Our world is a complicated one. Things were simple once, back in the day. But now we have become more aware of the overwhelming complexity of this world. Names used to be so obvious. But we were deceived then. There used to be truth that we could name, but now there are only truths, socially constructed ideas that help us name our various realities.  We used to know a woman from a man. Now is it a woman or man? Who knows? (more…)

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On June 11, 2013 By In Books, Culture, Politics

The Abuse of Power and the Power of Abuse: Dealing with an Inconvenient Truth

By Uri Brito

Republicans are the party of small government. Democrats are the party of big government. These distinctions no longer hold true. Reagan’s first term, perhaps, in recent history, is the last to come close to the type of small government Republicans say they envision. But for too long the scenery of the political landscape is replete with big government towers. We, the people, stare hopelessly at those babel-like towers wondering if any of them have read Genesis 11. We are Tolkien’s hobbits wanting to be left alone smoking our tobacco and drinking the finest beer, but alone they will not let us be.

David Shipler’s The Rights of the People: How our Search for Safety Invades our Privacy (2011) detailed some of these abuses. Shipler wrote that the Bill of Rights were “embedded in the first ten amendments to the Constitution…to climb and counter the might state, to keep their speech free, their confessions true, their trial fair, their homes and files sealed from cavalier invasion by police.” We are losing that right as speedily as the government (NSA) is tracking your e-mail or Verizon phone call right now.

What we are seeing today is more than the undermining of the Constitution; we are seeing the undermining of morality. And this implies that we need the objectivity of Christendom. We can no longer amen the actions of any party, because both major parties do not care about the shire. They will make deals with anyone. We need the boldness to assert the foolish actions of our party and then condemn them each election.

Obama’s promise to secrecy and the respecting of civil liberties in 2007 has quickly derailed into a Mordor-like crystal ball. They have looked and accessed every conceivable file. They have found what they wanted and used that information for their own purposes. “We cannot have 100% safety without inconvenience,” the president argues. Inconvenience? An absurdly burdensome tax system,  the waste of our taxpayer money, TSA, a destructive economic policy, reckless wars led by reckless leaders, the murder of the unborn? This is more than inconvenience; this is abuse; and all in the name of an agenda.

What we are witnessing is not the era of inconvenience; those days were relatively comfortable. At least we knew when the inconveniences would come. We are entering the era of abuse. We are in an era where the words “abuse of power” have become redundant. In an abusive society, led by abusive leaders, we do not know what to expect. Power corrupts, but absolute power in the hands of fools leads to abuse.

We are not claiming that this is a distinctly Obama problem. Bush’s Patriot Act opened the doors to this type of infringement. The tyranny of technology began long ago. And we are now recipients of a president who is continuing those policies.

The Economist observed in 2007, that in the past, information was gathered by drawing conclusions about citizens from fragmented reports by party loyalists. They would tap phones, send informers to workplaces, and follow people around. Today, “data about people’s whereabouts, purchases, behavior, and personal lives are gathered, stored, and shared on a scale that no dictator of the old school ever thought possible.”

We are living in a new era. This is an era where privacy is becoming extinct. The security of e-mail exchanges, counselor to counselee phone calls, and a host of other matters are sacrificed at the altar of safety. But are we safe? The answer to that is an inconvenient truth to our president.<> как продвинуть в гугл

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On June 7, 2013 By In Culture, Worship

We are what we Worship: Idols and their Makers

by Uri Brito

John Calvin

Calvin c. 1554.

Human beings are a marketable people. Those who shop around for us see our lifestyles and develop an entire strategy aimed at purchasing our wants at an exceedingly rapid speed. But not only are we easily bought, we are also very creative. We are idol-makers, to quote Calvin’s famous line. We are industrious, and the consequences of our hard work are a boost to the Baal factories and stock.

Unfortunately, this type of productivity is not encouraging. St. John quietly, but forcefully exhorted us in the last verse of I John to keep ourselves from idols. We have not heeded the apostle’s words. We have approached the idols and bargained with them about producing an entire new line of idol fashion and idol currency. We take the idol money and invest it into our own companies. We are good at what we do. In fact, we produce the best idols in town. We make them in all colors and shapes. We sell them at a discount during the Christmas holidays. All we want is for everyone to share in our pleasures. We make idols and the idols make us. We are what we worship. The more we consume the more marketable we become for the more sophisticated idol seller. We become like the gods. We treasure their style. They roam around speechless and blind, and we perceive that to be the new fad.

(more…)

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On June 7, 2013 By In Culture

Putin, Manning, the NSA’s Verizon, Pop Tarts, Drones, and Me

Nathan and David

Nathan and King David

by Luke Welch

Yesterday, Vladimir Putin and his wife Lyudmila announced on state television that they are divorcing. Sometimes politicians hold these things together. But Putin’s 30 year marriage is ending. And so some argument or division that has been private within them now for who knows the length of time, is bubbling to the surface. And now we all know it.

Speaking of the former USSR, do you remember the KGB? How they used to read people’s mail? That used to be scary, but now it’s the cost of living without fear of imminent doom.

Speaking of imminent doom, it sure seems like the cap-gun and Pop Tart pistol patrolling has gotten out of hand. These school administrations must know something we don’t about the deep dark motives of 8 year olds. It may not have been a simple gun. It might have been that the Pop Tart resembled Idaho where you can carry a rifle over your shoulder in town. A child like that needs help. Or maybe they know something we don’t.

(more…)

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On May 31, 2013 By In Culture

Day Six of Creation and Christian Ethics

by Uri Brito

When God made the world he made it in divine priority. He made all things with an agenda, and to use the oft-repeated line, “he saved the best for last.” He made man on day six, and at the end he breathed with the breath of perfection (Gen. 1:31): “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.”

Could God have created man on day one or day three? No. This was a divine priority. Man was created last purposefully. He made him on day six and then affirmed (Gen. 1:26-28) that he was to be over all things. Man receives a place of honor in creation because he is made in the image of God.

(more…)

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On May 16, 2013 By In Culture

Gosnell Verdict: Victory or Defeat?

On Monday, abortionist Kermit Gosnell was found guilty for the first-degree murders of three babies and for the involuntary manslaughter of one female patient. Those who actually knew about Gosnell’s trial are hailing his life sentence as a victory. Pro-abortionists and pro-lifers are united in this respect, though for different reasons. Pro-abortionists cite Gosnell’s monstrous practice as an example of the “back-alley abortions” they want to prevent; while pro-lifers are overjoyed that a serial killer is unable to harm newborn-babies ever again. Not everyone is celebrating, however.

The folks over at AbolishHumanAbortion.com (AHA) say the Gosnell verdict is a failure to the abolitionist movement. On their Facebook page Tuesday, an image was uploaded with the following text:

Kermit Gosnell should have been tried for 40,136 counts of murder and been found guilty for every last one of them. This trial was not a victory. It was an exoneration of mass murder.”

(more…)

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On April 30, 2013 By In Culture

How Christians Can Utilize Twitter

The latest issue of The Weekly Standard includes a rant against Twitter by Matt Labash, who does not have a Twitter account. I am on Twitter, and I like it a lot. Of course, it has its vapid and vicious aspects, but all in all, I find that Twitter is the most useful means of staying apprised of a ideologically and geographically wide range of opinion and news, and simultaneously the easiest means of connecting with like-minded folks. It is also striking another damaging blow against the tunnel vision of the mainstream media.

I sympathize with Labash to a certain extent – anything truly novel is likely to be bad, and a reflexive opposition to newfangled ideas is probably going to be vindicated much of the time. Newfangled technology, however, may just improve upon older, useful products, and the best of today’s information technology often represents methods of communicating that are very similar to what scrolls, books, newspapers and magazines have been doing for a long time. Twitter’s limit of 140 characters is not nearly as significant as people like Labash suggest – 95% of what I share on Twitter includes links to longer-form material, such as articles in The Weekly Standard.

Twitter_Town_Hall

Read the rest with more helpful links at The Anxious Bench

Thomas Kidd is a contributing scholar to The Kuyperian Commentary. His newest book is Patrick Henry: First Among Patriots, published in 2011 with Basic Books.

Further Topical Reading:
“Why Most Christians Should Use Facebook!” ~ Uri Brito, KuypComm Founder

Find us on Twitter & Facebook #KuypComm<>как продвигают ы

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