Happy (belated) Gustavus Adolphus Day!

Last updated on: November 10, 2011 at 5:30 am By Gene Veith

November 6 was the commemoration day for one of my heroes, the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus, the military genius and devout Lutheran who arguably was used by God to save Protestantism from extermination during the Thirty Years’ War. Sometimes honored as the greatest Lutheran layman, King Gustav makes for an interesting and inspiring example of vocation.

The blog of the LCMS leadership, Mercy, Witness, Life Together, has a great post about him, including an informative sermon by Rev. Eric Andrae: Feast of Gustavus Adolphus, King and Martyr, 1632.

HT: Mary

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How to honor the saints

Last updated on: November 1, 2011 at 11:13 am By Gene Veith

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Thanks to Cincinnatus for bringing into focus for me a great paradox: On the day after we mark the breaking of the church due to the always necessary struggle against how the church tends to fall into corruption and the obscuring of Christ’s Gospel (Reformation Day), we celebrate the unity of the church, how all who have faith in Christ constitute the everlasting “communion of the saints” (All Saints’ Day).

And now on that holiday, we can turn to the Lutheran Confessions to see how saints ought to be honored:

Our Confession approves honoring the saints in three ways. The first is thanksgiving. We should thank God because He has shown examples of mercy, because He wishes to save people, and because He has given teachers and other gifts to the Church. These gifts, since they are the greatest, should be amplified. The saints themselves, who have faithfully used these gifts, should be praised just as Christ praises faithful businessmen (Matthew 25:21, 23). The second service is the strengthening of our faith.When we see Peter’s denial forgiven, we also are encouraged to believe all the more that grace truly superabounds over sin (Romans 5:20). The third honor is the imitation, first of faith, then of the other virtues. Everyone should imitate the saints according to his calling. The adversaries do not require these true honors. They argue only about invocation, which, even if it were not dangerous, still is not necessary.

Source: Apology of the Augsburg Confession Article XXI Paragraphs 4-7. Concordia CPH: 2006, p. 202.

HT: Paul McCain @ Thoughts for All Saints Day: We Feebly Struggle, They in Glory Shine | CyberBrethren-A Lutheran Blog.

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Reformation Day as Halloween

Last updated on: October 31, 2011 at 6:00 am By Gene Veith

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I think it’s wonderful that Reformation Day is now the most popular holiday after Christmas. We scare ourselves as a reminder of death and damnation. Children go around receiving unmerited candy, which symbolize the gift and the sweetness of salvation. We wear masks to symbolize the doctrine of vocation. We carve pumpkins. . . .uh, I don’t know why we do that. Someone help me in my crusade to co-opt Halloween for Reformation Day.

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And the winner is. . .

Last updated on: October 18, 2011 at 6:00 am By Gene Veith

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Interesting discussions about “Manliness” in that contest we started last weekend. As was noted in the thread, many of the virtues that were put forward could also apply to women. Perhaps they apply to men, though, in a distinctive way, but that way is what we are trying to get at. There were lots of thoughtful comments. I appreciated especially things said by sg, SKPeterson, Kirk. I liked Helen’s point that “man” is not only the opposite of “woman,” it is also the opposite of “boy.” Many males just never grow up, which is part of our problem today. That was the point too of that great Kipling poem.

Helen also got off a line that deserves to become a classic, in responding to FWS’s interesting comments about Adam & Eve and the curses we suffer, while trying to mitigate them. Helen said, of Adam and Eve, respectively: “He got the weeds. She got him.”

But here are the runners up and the winner:

4. Tyler (#49), with his close reading of a line from Homer’s Odyssey, quoting Telemakhos on his father Odysseus. Both classical and apt.

3. JunkerGeorge (#77), me being a sucker for all of those literary references, which culminated in what Pilate said of Christ: “Ecce Homo.” Behold the Man. So that when we want to see what a man is, we need to behold Christ.

2. Abby (#59), with her moving and perceptive tribute to her late husband.

AND THE WINNER of The Book of Man: Readings on the Path to Manhood (a book that would probably be good for all of us to read, so many are the confusions about the issue, so you can click on the link to buy it here) IS:

1. Joe (#35):

Seriously, I think manliness is nothing more than attempting to faithfully fulfilling your vocation as son, husband, father, etc. God has given to all men many vocations but certain of them can only be fulfilled by a man – attempting to fulfill these vocations is manliness.

As my students have learned (including those who worked on that book), whenever I ask them something that they don’t know the answer to (“What is this poem about?” “What is the theme of this novel?” “How can Christians influence the culture?” “What’s the relation between faith and good works?” etc., etc.), a good guess that will be correct most of the time is “Vocation.”

But “seriously,” as Joe says, I think he nails it. The two sentences are short, but unpack them and we’ll discover all kinds of things about manliness. Indeed, this is basically the approach the book takes, with chapters about men at work, at the specialized calling of war, with women, with children, as citizen, with God. Maybe my students had an influence on Mr. Bennett in the methodology of the book! At any rate, please join me in congratulating Joe.

(If you want and if this didn’t make those of you who lost too angry, maybe we’ll have more contests like this!)

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Should ministers have any legal protections?

Last updated on: October 17, 2011 at 6:00 am By Gene Veith

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A reader of this blog with quite a bit of expertise on employment law and who is also sensitive to the religious issues involved has sent me what I think is the best analysis I have seen of the Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC case currently before the Supreme Court, having to do with a Lutheran school that fired a called teacher because of her disability, then claimed a “ministerial exemption” from having to follow the disability laws because the employee was a “minister.” Here is part of what he said, which I post with his permission (honoring also his request for anonymity):

The argument of Hosanna-Tabor that their action was based on religious reasons seems to be cooked up post-facto, and so I imagine that Ms. Perich would be able to successfully prove them pretextual–which then puts the burden of proof back upon the school to show that they are not in fact pretextual. Since their case as represented in the court documents doesn’t seem strong in this area, I think they ought to lose the case, if it is argued on those lines.

This also raises the question: Can a church or religious institution justify any action on the basis of religious motive? It seems to me Hosanna-Tabor already stepped outside the recognized limits of LCMS ecclesiology by purporting to treat a woman teacher at a Christian school as a “minister,” when, quite properly according to their theology, the priestly office is limited to men in the LCMS. The application of this category to religious school teachers only, it seems, to circumvent labor laws, strikes me as both cynical and irreligious. Can any employment action can be dragged into the category of religious conviction when the stated institutional convictions of the supervising denomination are clearly at odds with it? This is the elephant in the room which the EEOC has been mighty delicate not to take a shot at.
I worry that the outcome of this case, whether Hosanna-Tabor wins or loses, will be to confuse 1st Amendment jurisprudence and set bad precedents in one direction or another.

Exactly. However the course rules, harmful precedents are going to be set. This raises another question: Do ministers have any legal protections? If the ruling goes in favor of the school, that would seem to mean that churches and other religious organizations could mistreat their pastors and probably other employees with impunity, claiming a “ministerial exception” that makes them exempt from honoring the legal rights that other citizens have.

I know the New Testament prohibitions about going to court to solve church disputes–it’s much better to be defrauded–but it’s possible for a church to obey the law in regards to its ministers without anyone going to court. The Reformation battled the notion that the church needs only follow canon law and not the laws of the state, addressing the situation that priests and nuns were subject only to canon law, even when they committed overt crimes. The doctrine of vocation taught that the laws of the state also were instruments of God’s social order, and that the church didn’t have the right to impose a competing legal system of its own.

We have the rights of the church vs. the rights of the pastors. (Since the plaintiff here is a teacher, perhaps many pastors haven’t been seeing how the case would also apply to them.) Or should pastors claim no legal rights other than those of the church?

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You’ve been saved. Now what?

Last updated on: October 4, 2011 at 6:00 am By Gene Veith

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Michael Baruzzini at First Things has a thoughtful discussion of novelist Walker Percy, bourbon, and existentialism. But it all comes down to vocation:

Will Barrett, the protagonist of Walker Percy’s novel The Last Gentleman, complains that he cannot figure out “how to live from one minute to the next on a Wednesday afternoon.” Even Christians, with a solid theological and philosophical grounding, can find the question troubling. So you believe in God, and you believe the Second Person of the Trinity became incarnate and died for your sins. You’ve been baptized. You’ve been saved. Now what?

Here is where Percy’s existentialist-inclined Christianity comes in, and his famous paean to the South’s whiskey. In his essay, “Bourbon, Neat,” Percy’s literary mind was perceptive enough to find the connection between taking an evening drink and finding meaning in a daily life. The mind inclined to the questions of existentialism, like Percy’s, struggles with a particular problem: the question of how to be in a particular time and place. Percy slyly suggests that bourbon is the answer. No, not in the sense of drowning sorrows in alcoholic stupor, but in recognizing that it is in concrete things and acts that we are able to be in the world. “What, after all, is the use,” Percy asks, “of not having cancer, cirrhosis, and such, if a man comes home from work every day at five-thirty . . . thinking: ‘Jesus, is this it? Listening to Cronkite and the grass growing?’”

No, this isn’t it, says Percy. It isn’t all just about the fatal acts of nature and the crass manipulation of mass society. It is distinctively personal acts, like having an evening glass of bourbon, that construct a life. It is this aesthetic, this incarnation, simply this way to be, which gives a glass of bourbon its real value. But this incarnation of being extends beyond evening drinks, and informs every action we make in our lives. Take affection, for instance. Husbands and wives do not merely sit across the room maintaining a cerebral love for each other. Affection is made concrete with actions. Handshakes between colleagues, hugs and kisses between friends not only display, but actually create or make real the respect and affection between people. The true value of a family dinner lies at this level: we are a family because we eat together; we eat together because we are a family. It is in this act that our being as a family is made real, not fantasy. To take what may be the most powerful example, marital love is incarnated in the marital act. The coy euphemism “making love” has more truth to it than we may realize.
Looking to the concrete helps us discover the Christian notion of sacramentality. It is in water that we are born again; it is with bread and wine that we encounter Christ in the flesh in today’s world. It is these things that make our Christianity more than an academic exercise. So Percy would answer Barrett’s question by saying: just do it. It is Wednesday afternoon and you are a Christian: sing a song of praise, or go to Mass and eat God’s flesh. You are a loving husband, so kiss your wife. You are a father: play catch with your son or help him with his homework. You are a man at the end of a day of work: make a cocktail. If you want to be these things—a husband, a father, a son of God—there are things to do to make it real.

Christians must choose, among myriad options, how to be in specific ways in the world. But how do we know what to choose? Percy’s own conversion was motivated by his reading of the Catholic realist Thomas Aquinas, in addition to the Christian existentialist Kierkegaard. Rejecting the nihilistic varieties of existentialism, Percy recognized that there is an absolute truth surrounding the multiple ways to choose to be. Some ways are in more conformity with truth and happiness than others.

The Christian answer to the dilemma of how to be lies in the concept of grace and vocation. Here is where the Holy Spirit comes in. Vocation is the Christian call to be in a specific way in the world. It is a call to truly be, in a concrete way, who God has called you to be. It is not to be a robot obeying a program; it is to be an eagle joyfully choosing to fly or a mole enthusiastically choosing to dig, because that is what you are, what you are good at, what you love. It is an existential choice, but one that is grounded in God, outside of the isolated self.

via Walker Percy, Bourbon, and the Holy Ghost | First Things.

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