Blog - Page 159 of 318 - John H Armstrong

Lent

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:19:08-05:00March 29th, 2010|Categories: Church Tradition, Spirituality, The Church|

The season of Lent ends during Holy Week. The word lent comes from Middle English and means “springtime.” In the church this period is the forty-day time before Easter, or a period of preparation to celebrate Easter. It ends with the Easter Vigil. Early in the development of this ancient tradition fasting became a part of Lent. This may have originated in Egypt as a remembrance of Jesus’ forty-day fast in the wilderness. By the middle of the fourth century a forty-day fast began the sixth Sunday before Easter in Rome. By the sixth century the days before the sixth Sunday were added thus Lent begins on the Wednesday before the sixth Sunday. The forty days are calculated as forty by adding up the days through Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday, without the Sundays! (Do the math, it works.) The rite of imposing ashes did not begin until the tenth century, thus the day was called Ash Wednesday. The ashes are imposed […]

Holy Week

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:19:08-05:00March 28th, 2010|Categories: Christ/Christology, Church Tradition, The Church|

Traditionally Holy Week is the week before Easter Sunday. It is also called the “Great Week” in the Eastern Churches. It includes the last days of Lent and the first days of what is commonly called the Easter Triduum. (The Triduum comes from the Latin for the “three-day period” which is the three-day celebration of the most solemn mysteries of our Christian faith: Jesus’ passion, death, burial and resurrection.)

From at least the second century, if not earlier, this has been a time in which the church gave itself to prayer and fasting in preparation for the Easter Vigil, which is the final part of the week and spills over into the celebration of Sunday. Holy Week begins with Passion Sunday, or Palm Sunday as many of you know it. Historically it includes a reading of the story of Jesus’ arrest, trial, suffering, death and burial. It has been called Palm Sunday because of the procession with […]

Storm: A Deeply Probing Film

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:19:08-05:00March 27th, 2010|Categories: Film|

Storm, the winner of the Amnesty International Film Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2009, is one of the finest independent foreign films I have seen in some time. It is superb for narrative story-telling which, to me, is the key to a truly great film.

Hannah Maynard (Kerry Fox) is a prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague. She is leading a trial against a former commander of the Yugoslavian National Army who is accused of the deportation and killing of scores of Bosnian-Muslims during the war there in the 1990s. Hannah takes her key witness back to the scene of the crimes and he commits suicide, thus causing her case to seem futile. But Hannah, who is not the real hero in the film, will not give up. She goes to the burial site of her witness in Sarajevo and there meets his sister Mira, who has been living in Germany with her husband and […]

Christians and the New World Order

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:19:08-05:00March 26th, 2010|Categories: America and Americanism, Film, Politics|

Conspiracy theories abound in America. Though the mainstream media pays little or no attention to these theories, or to the figures who personally promote them, the theories are there and the people who promote them are armed and very aggressive. Most of these theorists proclaim to be Christians, a claim that is dubious in almost every serious sense of the name Christian. These same theories even exist in Great Britain and Canada according to the documentary film, New World Order.

According to these alarmists the Holocaust never happened, or at least it is vastly over-rated by serious historians. 9/11 was “an inside job” staged by a powerful group of global leaders who want to take America over and control the people. And the Twin Towers were brought down by explosives placed there by conspirators, not by the planes that were flown into the buildings by the terrorists. (I wondered how they explain the attack on the Pentagon? The film […]

Confessing the Faith Faithfully

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:19:08-05:00March 25th, 2010|Categories: Church History, Church Tradition, Emergent Church, The Church|

It should be apparent, if you have read my previous three posts, that confessing the faith is important business. It is not to be taken lightly by the individual or the church. Jaroslav Pelikan, in his magnum opus five volume work, The Christian Tradition, says in volume one that Christian doctrine is "what the church of Jesus Christ believes, teaches and confesses on the basis of the word of God." He says in a later book (Credo, 53), that the proper emphasis should be seen in the subtitle of his work: "A history of the development of doctrine." The real point he wants to make is that the Christian faith must be taught, that is, passed on by and through faithful confessing. Thus Pelikan's emphasis in his last great work on doctrine was on "confessing the faith" (Credo, 53).

The relationship between believing and confessing is both close and complex. Yale theologian Miroslav Volf (photo at right) puts this well: "Without personal identification […]

The Imperative of Creed and Confession

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:19:08-05:00March 24th, 2010|Categories: Church History, Church Tradition, The Church|

With only small variations the ancient formulas of the seven ecumenical councils of the undivided church, in both the East and the West, agreed that real, saving faith was to begin with the creed of faith. The creed was not an end in itself, as if saying words made one a true Christian, but the church universally believed that the teaching of the church was settled and should be accepted and revered.

Some readers might say, "Well, the Reformation surely changed all of this." If you think so then you are quite wrong. The Protestant confessions of faith, at least during the early stages of the Reformation era, are even stronger on this matter than the formularies of Roman Catholicism from that same period (Pelikan, Credo, 41).

Almost every known confession of the first and second generation of the Reformation begins with "We confess" or We affirm and avow." Words like "We confess and acknowledge" and "the confession of our faith" […]

What Place Does the Creed Have in Our Salvation?

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:19:09-05:00March 23rd, 2010|Categories: Uncategorized|

Does confessing the Christian faith and saying openly that you believe the creed make you a Christian? The simple answer, of course, is no. But I urge you to think about this question differently. The question is not: "How much do I have to understand and believe to be saved?" The question must be framed by a text like Romans 10:9-10 it seems to me. Here the apostle makes it abundantly plain that what you believe and confess is a matter of being "justified" and "saved." As one popular comic puts it, "Not too fast my friend, not too fast." Maybe creeds and confessions are somehow vital to living faith.

The famous Augustine of Hippo, in quoting from a variety of Western creeds in various forms, opens one of his earliest written works, On Faith and the Creed, with the assertion that "we cannot secure our salvation unless . . . we make our own profession of the faith that we carry in our […]

The Importance of Creeds and Confessions to the Church

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:19:09-05:00March 22nd, 2010|Categories: Church History, Church Tradition, The Church|

Creeds and confessions of faith have their origin in the earliest expressions of the Christian faith. They are not foreign to the Bible, as some fundamentalists and evangelicals have been prone to suggest. Their origin, said the late Jaroslav Pelikan was "in a twofold Christian imperative, to believe and to confess what one believes" (Credo, 35). The term creed comes from the first idea, what I believe, what we believe, is creed. All Christians, even the most anti-creedal ones, have a creed, written or not. The idea of a confession of faith, or of confessing the faith, comes from confessing what one believes. The apostle said, "I believed, so I spoke." We have the same faith so we believe and confess. The apostles, in fact, quotes the Psalmist to explain to the Corinthian church "we too believe, and so we speak" (2 Cor. 4:13; cf. Psalm 116:10).

The English word creed is derived from the Latin verb credo, which […]

Keith Green: Redux

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:19:09-05:00March 21st, 2010|Categories: American Evangelicalism, Renewal, Spirituality|

Almost every day a new person, someone I have never met or corresponded with, writes me an email in response to my blogs or one of my books. I do my best to answer such writers if the tone and spirit of their correspondence is gracious and invites a thoughtful reply. The only exception is when a person simply wants to trash me personally and or attacks my work in a way that offers me no real room for cordial conversation. In such a case I will usually provide a short answer that expresses my inability to respond to such a letter since there is no room for dialog and mutual respect. I desire dialog and mutual respect and always offer the same back wherever I can.

Harshly negative responses once deeply troubled me. I still struggle with this kind of criticism. It leaves me feeling fragile and defenseless. It is humiliating. I was too sensitive while I was a pastor, and I have had a hard time dealing with the same kind of thing over the last nineteen years […]

Understanding the Language Spoken by Icons: Part Two

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:19:09-05:00March 20th, 2010|Categories: Church Tradition, Prayer, Spirituality, The Church|

In the most interesting interview OSV conducted with Catholic iconographer Marek Czarnecki, that I referred to yesterday, we gain a sense of how we can properly understand the real language of icons. Before I quote from the second part of that OSV interview let me answer a question or two about this subject.

Am I suggesting that you cannot worship fully without icons? Not in the least. Am I suggesting that icons must be used in public worship? No. But are icons a form of idolatry? Those who answer yes to this question are numerous in evangelical Protestant circles and can easily impress others to follow their simplistic and iconoclastic reasoning without the evangelical having a framework for considering this subject. I am attempting to give such a framework and at the same time telling you why I use icons in my own worship.

Here is the second part of the interview […]