2023-12-29T16:00:51-05:00

Last updated on: December 29, 2023 at 4:00 pm   By
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We made our predictions for 2024, but other people have been making predictions too.  In addition, there are a few things ahead of us in the coming year that we know will happen.

Things That Are Actually Planned for 2024

NASA is planning a manned flight to the moon in November.  Not a landing but an orbit of the moon, followed by a return to Earth.  The 10-day flight with four crew members will be the first time humans have ventured to the moon since 1972, over 50 years ago.

Not only the United States but half the world will be voting.  As it happens, 2024 will be a “mega-election year,” with some 4.2 billion people–over half the world’s population–able to vote in over 70 countries.  That’s a lot of democracy!

The 2024 Summer Olympics will be held July 26-August 11 in Paris.

Predictions from 100 Years Ago about 2024

Mark J. Price of the Akron Beacon Journal gathered together  predictions made in 1924 about what will happen in a hundred years.  You have got to read the resulting article, From world peace to extinct horses: 100-year-old predictions about 2024.

The world peace prediction comes from the pioneering filmmaker D. W. Griffith.  It isn’t just about peace, it’s about the way we will achieve world peace:

“In the year 2024, the most important single thing which the cinema will have helped in a large way to accomplish will be that of eliminating from the face of the civilized world all armed conflict,” Griffith predicted. “Pictures will be the most powerful factor in bringing about this condition. With the use of the universal language of motion pictures, the true meaning of the brotherhood of man will have been established throughout the earth.”

One of Griffith’s own contributions to bringing about “the brotherhood of man” was his movie Birth of a Nation, celebrating the rise of the Ku Klux Klan.

Taking a different position, Professor Leo H. Baekeland, president of the American Chemical Society, predicted that future weapons technology could devastate civilian populations:

“The largest and best protected cities, irrespective of their size or distance, will be continuously exposed to destruction and mutilation,” he said. “Death and torture of the inhabitants will occur whether they are slumbering in their beds at night or whether they are reading their newspapers in their comfortable clubs, or saying their prayers in church. There will be no way of safeguarding women or children, the old or the infirm.”

Archibald M. Low, a British scientist, writing about the new “wireless” technology, seemed to predict how it would develop into the internet and working from home:

“Doubtless in the future we shall be able to sign our checks by the rapid transmission of motion; we shall be able to trace criminals, send out their fingerprints, and carry on very many classes of business which, at present, require our bodily attention,” Low wrote.

 

Illustration by Jernej Furman from Slovenia, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

 

2024-01-03T13:28:11-05:00

Last updated on: January 3, 2024 at 1:28 pm   By
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What can we say about the year just past?  Kenzie Bryant, writing for Vanity Fair, is calling 2022 the year of implosions. In her article, she explains what she means by that:

An implosion can occur because the middle is hollow. There is no there there, and nothing can’t support something, so it’s all done in. Collapsed. It’s categorically different from an explosion—those take out everything around them. With an implosion, if anything was relying on the imploded thing for support, it too would topple. With enough of them, it adds up to a general atmosphere—a vibe even!—of broader social flimsiness.

She goes on to list and discuss the “best” ones, the ironic quotation marks being hers.  I’ll briefly explain, but you can read what she says about them at the article:

The Spectacular Failure of FTX  [Referring to Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto-currency company.]

Ticketmaster’s Big “Taylor Swift Eras Tour” Whoopsy [The ticket-selling monopoly implodes by being unable to handle the demand for tickets to a popular singer.]

Donald Trump’s Second Career as Kingmaker [She thinks he has lost his mojo.]

On Notice: Twitter  [She thinks that, though the jury is still out, Elon Musk and Twitter are imploding.]

Liz Truss’s Prime Minister Sprint [The UK prime minister who quit after only 45 days.]

I think the writer is on to something, but I would add some more implosions of 2022, some of which are more significant:

The Russian military. [Once feared by all, but getting completely whipped on the battlefield by the Ukrainians.]

Vladimir Putin. [The textbook example of the “strong man” mode of government, the president of Russia is imploding before our eyes, due to the failure of his invasion of Ukraine. But we must beware:  When a star implodes, it first gives off a burst of devastating energy, and then it becomes a black hole, dragging everything around it into annihilation.  The man has nuclear weapons and, his back against the wall and wanting to go out in a vengeful blaze of glory, he might use them.]

The American conservative movement. [I’m not only referring to its failures in the midterm election.  Many of its intellectuals are giving up on its long-time ideals of freedom, small government, and free market economics and are imploding into illiberalism, arguing for authoritarianism, big government, and state-controlled economics.]

College sports. [Broadscale conference re-alignment; big money for college athletes through name, image, and likeness deals; transfer portals destroying teams; universities using sports to keep their constituents distracted from what they are teaching in the classroom.  College sports sever their ties to actual education and become just minor leagues for the pros.]

University Education.  [Academic freedom has been replaced by cancellation, censorship, and thought policing.  Education has been replaced by woke propaganda.  Relativism has destroyed academic standards.  This academic collapse is related to an institutional implosion.  Right before a star implodes, it expands.  Stanford has 16,937 students, but 18,038 employees:  15,750 administrators and 2,288 faculty.  Like the Catholic index of prohibited books that must not be read, those administrators have published a 13-page index of prohibited words that must not be uttered at Stanford (including “American,” “immigrant,” and “stupid”).  Meanwhile, the cost of going to Stanford has risen to $77,034 per year.

To be sure, there are exceptions.  Lots of scientists and other scholars are doing good work despite it all.  And some schools, especially Christian schools, are still keeping learning alive.  But institutionally, which includes institutional values, universities are imploding.]

Your turn.  What else has imploded during 2022?  Churches?  Celebrities?  Corporations?  Government?  I’ll let you take it from here. . . .

 

Illustration:  “Artist impression of a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy” by ESO/L. Calçada, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

 

 

2024-01-03T13:28:13-05:00

Last updated on: January 3, 2024 at 1:28 pm   By
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Since it is still Christmas and will be until Epiphany on January 6, I want to commend to you a reflection on the theological meaning of Christmas by Anthony Costello entitled What Christmas Is Really About: Part 1 – The Theology of Christmas at the Patheos blog Theological Apologetics.  (He goes on to write about the historicity of Christmas and the philosophy of Christmas.)

In the first installment, Costello quotes St. Athanasius’ On the Incarnation.  (The edition I linked to, costing only 99 cents for rhe Kindle edition, includes an introduction by C. S. Lewis, reprinted later as “On the Reading of Old Books,” one of explanations of why it is so valuable to read the classics that I have ever encountered.)  Athanasius writes,

But to treat this subject it is necessary to recall what has been previously said; in order that you may neither fail to know the cause of the bodily appearing of the Word of the Father, so high and so great, nor think it a consequence of His own nature that the Savior has worn a body; but that being incorporeal by nature, and Word from the beginning, He has yet of the loving-kindness and goodness of His own Father been manifested to us in a human body for our salvation.

Costello then unpacks this statement.  He begins with a remarkably succinct and lucid explanation of the argument from contingency and its implications:

Nothing material existed before the universe. Nor is the material universe of particles, waves, energy and gravity itself eternal. And since particles, waves, energy and gravity are not eternal, neither is nature, nor any of nature’s particular bodies. These contingent realities were not “from the beginning,” in the same way the Word was “from the beginning.” The phrase “from the beginning” means, in this context, from eternity.

Even if there were an infinite number of universes, ours just being one of them, still that infinite number of material universes would require a non-material explanation or cause. Something would still be required that exists outside the panoply of worlds that either brings them into being or, minimally, eternally holds them in being. We know this from basic analysis: for matter cannot not only cause itself to exist, neither can it give rise to mind, morality, or reason (see Rasmussen, How Reason Can Lead To God, 2019). In the light of reason, then, the first point Athanasius makes about Christmas starts to become clear to us: God, the eternal and immaterial Creator became a material, finite creature.

And this first point just is the main point of Christmas. And so we can summarize the true meaning of Christmas this way: The eternal, immaterial God of the Universe became material in the world of His own making.

The second point, which you can read about for yourself, is that God did not become just any material object, such as a block of marble; rather, He became a human being.

Next, He did this out of His “loving-kindness and goodness.”  Costello point out that many religions do not consider their deities to be particularly good or moral. But the Incarnation, as revealed in Scripture and as celebrated at Christmas, is an action of God’s love, thus defining His character.

Further, as Athanasius says, the second person of the Trinity became incarnate “for our salvation.”  That, in turn, implies that we need saving.  Why that is, and how this was accomplished–not simply by God’s Incarnation but by His atoning death and resurrection–constitute the “rest of the story” in Scripture.

But Christmas celebrates the heart of Christianity.  Costello sums up the “true meaning of Christmas” in this way:

First, we know that the immaterial, eternal, good and loving Creator of the universe took on a human body. Second, we know God did this in order to save us. If we were just to isolate what the meaning of Christmas itself is, then this is it.

 

Illustration:  “Adoration of the Shepherds” by Matthias Stom (ca. 1650), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

2024-01-03T13:28:14-05:00

Last updated on: January 3, 2024 at 1:28 pm   By
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The Lord is come.

Let Heaven and nature sing.

 

Painting:  “The Virgin of the Lilies” by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1899), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

2022-12-18T18:23:12-05:00

Last updated on: December 18, 2022 at 6:23 pm   By
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When we meditate on the End Times, which we are supposed to do during Advent, we think of the Second Coming of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, and Judgment Day.  But there is another aspect of Christ’s return–indeed, of the Christian faith–that we often forget about.

When this world comes to an end, God will create the world again.  There will be a new creation.  “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away” (Revelation 21:1).

The Fall will be undone; Paradise will be regained.  Everything will be restored to what God initially intended it to be.  Including us.

Yes, meditating on the End Times can be daunting, especially as we reflect on the horrors described in the Book of Revelation that seemingly must come first, and, what is even more terrifying, as we reflect on the Last Judgment, knowing ourselves as we do.  But the prospect of the New Creation should fill us with joy.  This is certainly the mood when Christians of the past anticipated Christ’s return and what that will mean.

Jonathan Warren Pagán has written an article for Christianity Today entitled Come Thou Long Expected Judgment.  He says that Christians should welcome the Last Judgment.  The church fathers and other Christians of the past certain did.  They saw the connection between that judgment–along with salvation itself–and God’s new work of creation.  Here are some of the quotations he cites:

In a homily on the 96th psalm, [St. Augustine] writes that Adam fell and broke into a thousand pieces that filled the earth with dissensions, wars, and hatred, “but the Divine Mercy gathered up the fragments from every side, forged them in the fire of love and welded into one what had been broken. That was a work which this Artist knew how to do. … He who remade was himself the Maker; he who refashioned was himself the Fashioner.”. . .

“Just as a bronze vessel that has become old and useless becomes new again when a metalworker melts it in the fire and recasts it,” wrote St. Symeon the New Theologian in the tenth century, “in the same way also the creation, having become old and useless because of our sins, … will appear new, incomparably brighter than it is now. Do you see how all creatures are to be renewed by fire?”. . . .

In a famous sermon, John Wesley declared that “the whole brute creation will, then, undoubtedly, be restored, not only to the vigor, strength and swiftness which they had at their creation, but to a far higher degree of each than they ever enjoyed. They will be restored, not only to that measure of understanding which they had in paradise, but to a degree of it as much higher than that, as the understanding of an elephant is beyond that of a worm.”

In this new creation, we ourselves will be created again.  God created each of us and sustained us ever moment of our lives.  He knows us completely.  Though we die and return to the dust, we still exist, both in our souls and in the mind of God.  And in the New Creation, He will re-create us all, as we were, out of dust as he did originally, but with a new body.  That is to say, the dead will be resurrected.
But then comes the judgment!  This is the frightening part.  And yet, the final judgment, Pagán writes, is not just about consigning sinners to hell.  “It was primarily a final victory over the three cosmic enemies of Christ—sin, death, and the Devil, according to Martin Luther.”
Every time we are frustrated when the world seems to be going wrong; every time we wish people would do what is right for a change; every time we are repelled by evil and yearn for what is good–we are craving Christ’s judgement, in which he will eradicate evil and make everything right.
Part of ridding the universe of evil will involve ridding the world of evildoers.  And if we are honest, we realize that we are included among those evildoers who have wreaked such harm on others.  This is why the prospect of the Last Judgment is terrifying.
But the Adam of the old creation, who brought death into the world and all our woe  and whose nature we share, gives way to the New Adam of the new creation, namely, Jesus Christ.  “For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous” (Romans 5:19).  And, as St. Paul says again, in the context of the final resurrection of the dead, “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Corinthians 15:22).

Indeed, we learn that the New Creation has already begun:  “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17).

If we are “in Christ”–by faith, by baptism (see Romans 6:3-5)–we need not fear the Last Judgment.  Our verdict has already been announced:  “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1).

In the meantime, we can say with St. Peter, in his reflections on the Second Coming of Christ, “according to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells” (2 Peter 3:13).

So much for Advent!  Starting tomorrow, this blog will shift its attention to Christmas!

 

Illustration:  “All Things New” by Sharon Tate Soberon, via Flickr, CC 2.0

2022-12-10T11:14:49-05:00

Last updated on: December 10, 2022 at 11:14 am   By
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We’ve blogged about Coptic Christians and their tattoos.  We’ve even blogged about this particular Coptic family, the Razzouks, that moved to the Holy Land 700 years ago and have been providing tattoos to pilgrims as a permanent memento of the experience.  (See their website.)

I came across a new interview with the latest Razzouk who practices this profession, and he said something that struck me and started me thinking.

From Jovan Tripkovic in Religion Unplugged, This Family Has Tattooed Christian Pilgrims For 28 Generations:

Jovan Tripkovic: For 700 years the Razzouk family has been tattooing marks of faith. Your family has been in this business for 27 generations (28 with your sons). Tell me about the beginning of this great journey. 

Wassim Razzouk: We are a Coptic Christian family. We started the tattooing tradition back in Egypt, where we used to tattoo Christian Copts with a small cross on the wrist. That was the sign of their Christianity. It was used to mark Christians, so Christians can know and identify each other with this little cross. It was also used to enter churches, as a pass code. It was the ultimate sign of your Christianity because you had to prove you are a Christian to enter a church.

A Christian Egyptian looks and sounds just like a Muslim Egyptian.  So the Coptic Christians marked themselves with a permanent, indelible tattoo of a cross to set themselves apart.  That way, they could recognize each other, seeing who was a fellow Christian.  This, as Razzouk says, became a pass code for who could enter a church, preventing militant Muslims from disrupting the services.

Which brings us to another side of this practice.  The mark also identified the Copts for persecution.  Even today, Copts are often targets for riots, beatings, arson, and even murders.  These crimes are often overlooked by officials, who treat Coptic Christians as second class citizens.  Egypt ranks #20 in the Open Doors list of the top 50 countries that persecute Christians, describing the level of persecution as “very high.”

How do the Muslim extremists know whom to persecute?  They can tell who is a Copt and who is not by looking for the tattooed cross on their wrists.

The Copts could avoid a lot of trouble by simply dropping the tattoo custom.  They could blend in with the rest of the population.  No one would ever know.  People would leave them alone.  But they keep their mark as a public profession of their faith, even in the face of persecution.

Which got me thinking. . . What is the mark of a Christian?

In the Baptism rite in the Lutheran Service Book, we have this:

The pastor makes the sign of the holy cross upon the forehead and heart of each candidate while saying:

Name , receive the sign of the holy cross both upon your T forehead and upon your T heart to mark you as one redeemed by Christ the crucified.

So in our Baptism we are marked with the cross of Jesus Christ.  This is what baptism does to us, even if we were baptized with a rite that doesn’t use the sign of the cross.  But when the pastor or we ourselves make the sign of the cross, as the Lutheran Service Book often reminds us, this is a remembrance of our baptism.

In Advent we are supposed to meditate on the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.  In the book of Revelation, we learn about the mark of the Beast placed on the right hand or forehead (chapters 13 & 14).  We need to worry about receiving that mark.  But we also read of the redeemed of the tribes of Israel receiving a “seal” on their foreheads that protects them from judgment (Revelation 7).

We know the “Marks of the Church“:  According to the Augsburg Confession (Article VII), “The Church is the congregation of saints, in which the Gospel is rightly taught and the Sacraments are rightly administered.”  Luther, in “On the Councils and the Church,” expands that description into seven “marks”:  (1) Possession of God’s Word, (2) Baptism, (3) Holy Communion, (4) Office of the Keys  (5) pastors (6) public worship, and (7)  the possession of the holy cross, that is suffering.  Yes, suffering–not prosperity–is a mark of the church.

Is there a public mark, so that non-believers can recognize who is a Christian, like the Coptic cross tattooed on the wrist?  I found this:

A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:34-35)
I fear that many of us, me included, fall short here.  The ESV has a heading “Marks of the True Christian” for Romans 12:9-21, which lists behaviors that we should all follow (“abhor what is evil”; “bless those who persecute you”; “overcome evil with good”), though the Scripture does not use that term.  Again, I don’t know if, by these standards, there is enough evidence to convict me of being a Christian.
 In our beliefs and moral convictions we certainly are different from our secularist neighbors, and they know it.  Our rejection of extra-marital sex, homosexuality, transgenderism, and the like is certainly marking us today in the eyes of the world.  Those differences may intensify, to the point of persecution.
And yet, in most ways, we are not all that different from non-Christians.  We should be, and in some cases are.  But we remain sinners.  What sets us apart, ultimately, is faith in Christ and His work on our behalf.  That is, the mark of the cross.
(For more about the Copts, the dropping of the charge of heresy against them, and their similarity to Lutherans when it comes to Christology, see this and this.)
Photo from Open Doors
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