Hebrews 12:22-23: You have come to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, to the sprinkled blood that speaks better than the blood of Abel. God called Abraham from a city to a city. The city he left behind had walls, houses, rulers and people, markets and temples, a regular supply of . . . . Continue Reading »
I offer some reflections on contemporary worship music at http://www.firstthings.com/ this morning. As noted there, I owe most of my ideas to Ken Myers. . . . . Continue Reading »
John Paul II wrote, “Today, as yesterday, musicians, composers, liturgical chapel cantors, church organists and instrumentalists must feel the necessity of serious and rigorous professional training. They should be especially conscious of the fact that each of their creations or . . . . Continue Reading »
Page again: “For those who oped to rise in the flesh for the Millennium and then the general judgement, ritual singing was a way to celebrate the continuity of bodily existence on both sides of the grade. The voice was one of the higher faculties of the body that Tertullian and others . . . . Continue Reading »
Christopher Page observes ( The Christian West and Its Singers: The First Thousand Years ) that the European-wide diffusion of plainsong created created for monks and clergy “a means to record contingent events so that they would be perceived, wherever the account was read, not just in terms . . . . Continue Reading »
Exodus 20:8: Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. We live in a world of total labor. All time and space is valued by its use, its productivity, its function. There is no place that, in principle, withdrawn from productive use. There is no time “set aside from working hours and days, . . . . Continue Reading »
In his discussion of baptismal debates in early New England, Holifield emphasizes that for most New England ministers baptism did not constitute the church but served rather to confirm and seal a covenant that was created by the voluntary agreement among the members of the body. Nor did they . . . . Continue Reading »
One of the curiosities in Holifield’s study is the appearance of a Protestant form of what Louis Bouyer and others have called “mysteriological piety” among Puritans. Here, for instance, is Holifield’s summary of Perkins’s interpretation of the rite of the Supper: . . . . Continue Reading »
In his classic The Covenant Sealed: The Development of Puritan Sacramental Theology in Old and New England, 1570-1720 , E. Brooks Holifield (who has the classiest name among all church historians) describes the oscillation of Reformed sacramental theology and practice. High views of the real . . . . Continue Reading »
Thomas Goodwin compared the benefits of sermons to the benefits of participation in the Supper, and the Supper came out slightly ahead: “Many things in a Sermon thou understandest not, and haply not many Sermons; or if thou doest, yet findest not thy portion in them; but here to be sure thou . . . . Continue Reading »
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