Blog - Page 157 of 318 - John H Armstrong

St. Basil the Great on Living in the Presence of God, Part One

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:19:04-05:00April 12th, 2010|Categories: Church Tradition, Spirituality|

St. Basil was one of the greatest doctors of the church. He was born in Caesarea of Cappadocia around 330 A.D. One of ten children his maternal grandmother died a martyr. He was reared by his father and maternal grandmother thus he was nurtured in Christian piety as a young boy, demonstrating that the home is still a proper nursery for living faith. He went to Constantinople to study rhetoric and philosophy, and then to Athens. In Athens he became the companion of St. Gregory of Nazianzen. He returned to Caesarea in 356 A.D. to teach but soon gave this up to serve God and the church. He later retired to the desert to seek God. In 358 A.D. he wrote two Rules with his friend St. Gregory of Nazianzen. These Rules had a decisive impact upon the monastic movement in the East. In 364 A.D. he was ordained a priest and in 370 A.D. he succeeded Eusebius as Bishop of Caesarea.

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A Paradigm for Understanding Our Present Divided Condition

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:19:04-05:00April 11th, 2010|Categories: Church History, Missional-Ecumenism|

A few weeks ago, at the book launch evening for my new book, Your Church Is Too Small, Father Wilbur David Ellsworth, who happens to also be one of my dearest friends and is an Eastern Orthodox priest, was asked to respond to my book as part of a panel that we assembled for that evening at the Billy Graham Center. (We are going to be putting the video of this presentation on our book web site as soon as possible.) Father Ellsworth was one of three who responded to my book and then shared in the dialogue and Q & A time that followed.

There were several highlights for me that evening. One was when Father Ellsworth sought to describe our present condition in the Christian family in the twenty-first century. Looking back over the two most tragic divisions in Christian history, that of 1054 when the East and West formally broke apart and then that of 1517, when the Protestant Reformers raised their voices against various problems that led to their eventual excommunication by the Roman Catholic […]

An Early Update on Your Church Is Too Small

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:19:04-05:00April 10th, 2010|Categories: ACT 3, Missional-Ecumenism|

I hope every reader of my daily blog will check out our new book web site at www.yourchurchistoosmall.com. You can also sign up on the fan page at Facebook as well. The book has already gone to a second printing in less than seven days after its release. Early sales have thus been very, very good. This is encouraging news and reflects, I sincerely pray, a hunger for unity and mission among a growing number of church leaders, both pastors and non-pastors. Remember, if you want to order a copy the best price is still through Amazon. The best way to order it through Amazon is by going to www.yourchurchistoosmall.com and ordering it there. When you do this ACT 3 gets about 5% of the sale price added to our mission. News about the book is posted regularly at this new site and content is being added along the way. Amazon has also had a significant number of reviews already posted on the book. Some of these are quite rich and detailed if you want to see more about the book’s content […]

Why Independent Voters Will Still Decide the Outcome

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:19:04-05:00April 9th, 2010|Categories: America and Americanism, Politics|

American politics is full contact sport for many. This has especially been true since the death of John F. Kennedy and the Vietnam War era. We had LBJ, Watergate, Carter’s failed presidency, Iran-Contra, “no new taxes,” the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky impeachment episode, the war in Iraq on grounds that were not really there and now the health care debate. In every case, at least since JFK’s death, we have moved, so it seems, further and further toward bitter, acrimonious partisanship.

What particularly fascinates me, since I am at times a political junkie, is that the fastest growing political category is not Democrat or Republican. It is independent. The tea party movement reflects this as do libertarian rumblings, left and right. And if this president continues his course of action in Iran and Afghanistan he is likely to hear from the left pretty powerfully in coming days.

Independents appear to be neither far right nor far left. Sometimes commentators refer to America as a center-right country. I think that is true except for the 18-35 […]

A Way of Looking at My Concern for Unity Among Christians

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:19:04-05:00April 8th, 2010|Categories: Justification and the New Perspective, Reformed Christianity, Roman Catholicism, The Church, Unity of the Church|

A friend wrote an email to me recently that expressed his continued thinking about the practical implications of my call to church unity. He wrote: “As it relates to doctrine, I thought about my concern for growth of character. I think that those in the Protestant camp struggled so much about the issue of good works. As I develop experience working with kids and parenting, I have come more and more to the realization of the importance of character formation.”

That is a profoundly helpful insight. So many evangelicals have forgotten that salvation is not about affirming a few solas but rather about trusting Christ in such a way that character formation becomes basic, even instinctive. My friend went on to write:

“Some Protestants focus so much on proclaiming that we are justified by the appropriation of Christ's death on the cross through faith that they are reactive against any suggestion that we need to mature in our character (sanctification). But the Scriptures seem to point to the importance of the fruit of the spirit. My point […]

Where is the Fault Line in Sports and the Church?

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:19:05-05:00April 7th, 2010|Categories: Baseball, Pastoral Renewal, The Church|

I read Sports Illustrated for several reasons. One is, of course, my love of sports. But there are a lot of magazines and papers that cover sports. Few do it with the journalistic excellence of Sports Illustrated. The March 29 issue brought this out in a remarkable way, with a fantastic story (“True Confessions”) written by one of the best sport’s writers of my lifetime, Frank Deford. I may say more about this article at some other point but today I want to comment on Joe Posnanski’s piece: “The Fault Line of Pro Sports.” Posnanski writes: “We live in a time when sports public apologies are judged more or less in the same way we judge figure skating performances. Did he sound sincere? How was the choreography? The artistic interpretation? Did he complete all the technical elements?”

Posnanski is writing, not about Tiger Woods as you might expect, bur rather about Texas Rangers manager Ron Washington, who recently admitted […]

Katyn

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:19:07-05:00April 6th, 2010|Categories: Film, History|

I frequently think about the history of Poland. It is a nation with immense pride and a people who have known incredible hardship, hardship beyond belief at times. Sadly, the only thing I knew about Poland, at least until I was a little older, were the crazy Polish jokes that circulate routinely. My guess is that Poles themselves tell jokes simply because it is a coping mechanism for all the suffering these people have known.

As everyone who looks at a map should know Poland is bordered by Germany on one side and the former Soviet Union on the other. This made Poland the center piece in the political chess game of World War II. The Germans came from the West and the Russians from the East. And as soon as the Germans were driven out the Russians began there oppression of the Poles which led to another four and a half decades of misery until the events of 1989. These events were brought about by a confluence of actions but none was more important than the […]

Burning the Future: What Do You Know About Coal in America?

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:19:07-05:00April 5th, 2010|Categories: Environmentalism, Film|

I have frequently noted that documentary films are almost always biased. This does not mean they are worthless, not in the least. It just means they take a stance, in advance of the making of the film, and then pursue demonstrating the rightness of that stance through the medium of film. This is not true of all documentary films but it is clearly true of most.

This is surely the case in Burning the Future: Coal in America (2008). Coal provides half of the electricity in the United States. This is fact. But how is this coal extracted from the ground and at what cost to people, nature and the environment? In the 2008 presidential campaign we heard both candidates talk a lot about “clean coal.” What is that? Most of us, I would guess, know next to nothing about coal and how it is used.

Consider, for starters, that 36% of […]

Easter Sunday

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:19:07-05:00April 4th, 2010|Categories: Christ/Christology, Church History, Church Tradition, Jesus, The Church|

The name Easter has been problematic for some Christians, especially over the last two hundreds years or so. No orthodox Christian denies the importance of the day, that is the celebration of Christ’s resurrection from the grave. Some think the event should be celebrated each Sunday, noting correctly that the very fact that we worship on Sunday is related to the first day of the week and Christ’s victory over sin and the grave. But should we celebrate one day as Easter?

The term Easter comes from the Germanic root “dawn” and came into Anglo-Saxon, perhaps, by way of reference to the spring and the goddess of the spring. This, in itself, is not a reason to reject the celebration at all, since it clearly pre-dates the Germanic root. But this has caused some Christians to quibble more than a little about Easter.

The point is not about the word but rather about the celebration of the greatest mystery […]

Holy Saturday

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:19:07-05:00April 3rd, 2010|Categories: Church History, Church Tradition, Jesus, Spirituality, The Church|

Holy Saturday is the one day, and the last in the Easter Triduum, that is least understood by Protestants. Growing up in a non-liturgical background I paid some attention to Good Friday, and a lot more to Easter Sunday, but Saturday seemed like a big hole in the whole week, a hole that was left unfilled until Sunday morning. That is no longer the case for me once I began to understand and study the occasion of Holy Saturday about ten years ago.

Holy Saturday commemorates Jesus’ burial, which of course is specifically mentioned in the creed as a part of the mystery of our salvation. This is also the day where the phrase “he descended into hell” is mentioned. The only liturgical service in Catholicism is the liturgy of the hours, though from the fifth century on daytime masses have been held. The Easter Vigil, as this day developed over time, became the evening service which prepared the church […]