this will be my last post from italy for awhile. April and I are finishing up our last minute details and sitting on our suitcases while the other zips it up. we’ll be back in the states for the summer. more details to come later.

in the meantime, while i am out of commission for a few days, check out the following links:

The business of making saints – eugene peterson [HT: Jason]

Everyone a Missionary? – Missions misunderstood

Myth of a Christian Religion - Greg Boyd (book review)

Christian music over the past few decades has really come into its own niche and market. Some of it is decent, most of it isn’t. As I was watching this short clip with Ken Burns talking about how he sees the importance and influence of music in film, I began to wonder if the Church could benefit from thinking along the same lines when it comes to Sunday morning.

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What if the Church began to think in such terms about the choice of music that it uses to compose Sunday morning? When I was at Durham last month, N.T. Wright took a segment of the class to play Bach’s Passion According to John. He explained that what we now hear in this classical piece, is just classical music. But back then, what Bach was doing as a composer for the Church, was much more than that. Bach was trying to portray the Gospel in terms that would allow the Church to hear once again, the Gospel for the first time, and re-cover it’s potency.

Now, the contemporary evangelical landscape may not have the genius that God gave to the Church through Bach, but it does make me wonder why this way of composing songs for the Church has not been considered in our churches. The artistic caliber that Bach represents makes contemporary christian artists look quite silly.

So how could the Church begin to encourage Christians in the arts? Recently, there have been many evangelical institutions like Regent College and Fuller Seminary that have been trying to forge this unknown territory for evangelicals. There have also been several evangelical publishing houses that have published books on this topic recently as well. These are hopeful signs that Christians may be taking the arts seriously once again, but only time will tell.

What are some ways or ideas that you have seen in which you or your church has tried to bridge the gap between the arts and the Church?

Make sure and pick up N.T. Wright’s new book on Justification. It’s a breath of fresh air in an evangelical climate that’s been saturated by John Piper.

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H/T: Halden

The Pope and The Papacy

By José M. Castillo Theologian and ex-Jesuit. Former professor of theology at the University
of Granada, where he was expelled during the 80’s by Ratzinger. He is considered
among the great men of modern theology
There is no doubt that the exercise of the
papacy is extremely difficult. Benedict XVI said he was alone. And years ago,
Paul VI and John Paul II had asked for help from bishops and theologians to
find new ways to exercise “the ministry of Peter”, i.e., the papacy.

And the fundamental problem is not
motivated primarily by the person as pope (whether conservative or progressive),
but rather by the position as such, i.e., the mode and manner in which the Papacy
has come to be organized.

It is clear that a global institution like
the Catholic Church requires a supranational authority that can coordinate the
activities that go beyond borders and resolve problems that cannot be solved
locally. But as true as that is, as an authority, they can organize themselves in
many different ways.

It can be either a democratic or monarchical
authority. The most ancient form in the Church was democracy. The same word
“Ecclesia” was taken from the technical language of Greek democracy
and means the “assembly” of free citizens gathered to make their own decisions.
So the church worked for over a thousand years with this kind of organization until
the eleventh century.

In those centuries, the popes were
precisely the great defenders of democracy in the Church. To quote the text of
St. Leo the Great (s. V): “He who must be placed at the head of all,
should be elected by all” (Epist. 14, 4).

Moreover, in those centuries, the bishop
of Rome did not have the role you have now. Since Justinian (sixth century), the
Church was ruled by five patriarchs: Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch
and Jerusalem ( “Novella” 109). Rome always aspired to the
presidency, based on the tradition that St. Peter was buried there.

But it is remarkable that St. Gregory the
Great always resisted being designated as the “universal pope.” In
addition, even in the West (Rome) the government was not concentrated in any
patriarch but was rather shared in the local synods by all the bishops, doctrinal
decision-makers and government.

We also know that throughout the Middle
Ages the text of Matthew 16:18-19, which now applies to the primacy of Peter, applied
to the twelve Apostles and was read as “Gospel” in the Mass of the ordination
of bishops. It was realized that the Apostles had received the same
“honor” and “power” as that of Peter (Yves Congar).

Starting from 1073, Gregory VII made the
worst decision in the history of the papacy. The pope decided to concentrate
all power into the bishop of Rome. A decision that would be reinforced in the
following centuries, especially after Innocent III (1196-1216) whose theologians
invented the theory of plenitudo potestatis, which in practice, made the
pope the absolute master of the world—a madness that could not even balance the
Great Schism in 1409 when the church found itself with three popes, none of
them willing to relinquish power.

The Council of Constance (1415) said that the
council was above the Pope, which was equivalent to making sure that the
episcopate had authority over the papacy. This decision was ratified by the Council
of Basel (1431). However being short-lived, the council of Florence (1439)
defined that “the Apostolic See and the Roman Pontiff hold primacy in the
entire universe.”

Things remained the same until the Second
Vatican Council, when the Constitution on the Church (No. 22) stated that the
pope is the subject of supreme and full authority in the Church, but
immediately added that it also has this power with the bishops worldwide. It
was, however, not resolved how to harmonize these two powers.

The recent Code of Canon Law resolved this
enormous theological problem by affirming the pope’s supreme power over all of
the bishops and the Church (Can. 331 and 333). So the whole Church has been at
the mercy of the decisions of one man. This is something that can be proved neither
from the New Testament, nor from the previous twenty centuries of Church tradition
and history.

This situation, over all, has three grave consequences:

1)  While the papacy continues “as is”, the union of all Christians is impossible. This
is because the other Christian confessions know very well the history that I
have just condensed into a few words. And these Christians do not feel, nor are
they able to feel, motivated in conscience to submit to a power that is not
justified from the Christian faith.

2) When the Papacy is organized as an absolute monarchy, it also makes it impossible to
endorse and integrate Human Rights within the life of the Church (and in its
international relations). The problems and conflicts with pop culture and
public power is and will be relentless as we live every day and everywhere.

The papacy will continue exhorting others to implement human rights, but the Church
will continue on without practicing them. This involves violent assaults to
individuals, human groups and public institutions.

3) So, the Church lives and will continue to live in constant contradiction with the
Gospel. Jesus never allowed any of the apostles to claim to be the first, the most
important, or the one who positions himself over the other.

This fundamental fact, is insistently repeated in the Gospels, and is not integrated into the
theology of the papacy. And that is more or less serious than that of “You
are Peter …” You cannot take from the Gospel that which is suitable and
leave out that which is uncomfortable.

I agree that Benedict XVI has taken a wrong path. It is a path of decline, not progress. But the problem is not the
pope, but in the papacy.

José M. Castillo

Translated
by Josh Furnal