The Advent: A Magazine of Good News

THE ISSUE

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MADE IN BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA

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ADVENT A MAGAZINE OF GOOD NEWS

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C A L L I G R A PH Y C O U RT E SY O F E M I LY C O E

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Andrew Pearson Matt Schneider Brandon Bennett Tom Martin Hawley Schneider Madoline Markham Cort Gatliff James Henderson Joe Cory, Brooke Fleming, Mark Gignilliat, Hewes Hull, Doug Webster

P U B L I S H E R : EDITOR IN CHIEF: A S S I STA N T E D I TO R : ART DIRECTOR: PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR: COPY EDITOR: PROOFREADER: EDITORIAL INTERN: EDITORIAL ADVISORS:

The views and opinions expressed in this publication are those of our contributors and do not always reflect those of the Cathedral Church of the Advent. All copies of The Advent magazine are free of charge. If you would like to support this advertisement-free publication, we welcome a contribution of any amount. Email us at magazine@ cathedraladvent.com for more information.

THE ADVENT is a trademark of the Cathedral Church of the Advent. Copyright © 2017 by the Cathedral Church of the Advent. All rights reserved. This publication or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations.

Printed annually in the fall in Birmingham, Alabama, United States of America.

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ART ON THE COVER: PA I N T I N G BY S A R A H S O U L E W E B B

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ISSUE

C O N T E N T

D E P A R T M E N T S 6 Dear Reader by Matt Schneider

POETRY

9 Contributing Artists

32 MRI by John Goodman

1 1 Featured Artist Sarah Soule Webb

77 Good Thief (for Cat) by John Goodman

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COMMON PRAYER

16 Interview with John Hammontree and Deon Gordon on Birmingham’s Renaissance

78 Worship as Protest

by Zac Hicks on Liturgy and Art

24 Birminghumans: Ellis and Debbie Brazeal, Monika Tataria, Josh Purvis, Donna Dukes

THE LIST

8 4 Books to Reform Our Cultural Outlook

by Doug Webster

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OUR STORY

8 8 About the Cathedral Church of the Advent 9 0 Our Mission and Vision 9 1 Advent Staff and Vestry 92 Advent Stuff

by Frank Limehouse 94 Retrospect: Theses from Our Cathedral Door

by Paul Zahl 96 Always Reforming

by Andrew Pearson

PHOTOGRAPH BY HAWLEY SCHNEIDER

F E A T U R E S 36 Martin Luther’s Continued Relevance

by Piotr Malysz

5 8 Testimony of Coming to a Re-Formed Faith

by Hanno van der Bijl

4 2 Contemporary Protest and Protestantism

by Jason Wallace

6 2 About an Artist’s Depiction of the Reformers

by K. Lee Scott

5 0 Ninety-five Theses

by Martin Luther

6 6 Conversation with Michael Horton on a Modern Reformation

5 2 Personal Essay on the Psalms

by Charlotte Donlon

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7 4 Postcard from Uncle Paul

by Sarah Condon

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PHOTOGRAPHY BY HAWLEY SCHNEIDER

DEAR

READER MATT SCHNEIDER

T

he image to the left is of the address of the Cathedral Church of the Advent outside our church office door on Sixth Avenue North. It’s uncanny that this year is also 2017, and it marks the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. On October 31, 1517, a young Augustinian friar named Martin Luther legendarily nailed his list of Ninety-five Theses to another church door, hoping for a debate about the Roman church. This event would become the catalyst that stimulated the Reformation.

The Advent is just one congregation in the family tree of Protestantism, and when it comes to theological convictions, we double down on our Reformation heritage. We saw fit to address the topic of the Reformation for this year’s issue of the magazine, calling this one the Re-formation issue as we attempted to explore the contemporary relevancy of the theme.

One of the first pieces we worked on was our featured interview with Michael Horton, who helped us see the Reformation as being not only a recovery of the biblical narrative that was lost, but also a recognition that the church’s theology 7

In addition to being the editor of The Advent magazine, Matt Schneider is also the pastor of our Five O’Clock congregation, works with our new members, and gets most excited about reading the Bible with people over lunch or coffee. He lives in the Crestwood neighborhood of Birmingham with his wife, Hawley, and their three children: Eden, Zoë, and Simeon.

had been distorted so as to be marred beyond recognition. In other words, the Reformation was no new thing. It was a re-formation. The form was implicitly there, but it had been corrupted so much so that its meaning was distorted. At the heart of this tension was the topic of human salvation and our role versus God’s role. The church had insidiously commodified salvation when it was always free for the receiving— human justification is by grace, gratis (free).

I’m also really excited about the other interview we captured for you. It’s a very honest and timely discussion with two Birmingham leaders, Deon Gordon and John Hammontree, that plumbs the depths of Birmingham’s racial history and its influence on the city today. What does it look like for the city of Birmingham to re-form in light of its marred racial past and its contemporary revitalization efforts? Read the conversation to hear more.

If this is the essential story of the Reformation, what has been lost in our day that needs to be recovered? What has been marred beyond recognition so as to cruelly lead people astray?

Is salvation being sold again, and in what ways?

Could we possibly apply this understanding of the Reformation to other areas of life that need desperately to be re-formed? These are all the questions behind the content of this issue you hold in your hands. I’m delighted with what we’ve accomplished by God’s grace: not only the written content but also the art.

Finally, at the core of Protestantism is protest, and we have two essays that put the protest back in Protestant. Jason Wallace, a scholar of intellectual history, looks at how we’ve not only lost that risk-taking protest spirit in Protestantism, but also how Western protests in general have become relatively risk-free, placid, and banal affairs. And Zac Hicks, who is on our clergy staff, looks at how church worship relates to protest—that worship is indeed an act of protest, and at its best it is not banal at all!

Our cover artist, Sarah Soule Webb, a member of our church, has created an abstracted version of the doors at Wittenberg where Luther nailed his theses—in a sense re-forming them for us. You can learn more about her inspirations in the pages that follow. Another local artist, Chad Moore, returns to our magazine, adding a touch of humor with a Playmobil Luther toy. And Jamie Harper’s illustration was created in collaboration with Charlotte Donlon for her very honest personal essay on struggles with mental health—a story that finds comfort in the end through the Bible.

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There is so much more I could say. These are just some of the highlights to whet your appetite.

To be sure, the relevancy of the Reformation will likely remain until the Son of Man returns and makes all things new—the final re-forming.

Until then, we do well to constantly recover the biblical narrative of the gospel of Jesus Christ for us, the ungodly. God in his sovereignty has seen fit to give us his godliness as a free gift for the taking—not with grasping but receiving hands.

We must remind ourselves of this message.

Every. Single. Day.

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A R T I S T S

Fadi BouKaram is a Lebanese street and documentary photographer. After more than a decade of pursuing a career in engineering and finance, he decided to pursue photography full-time because people have more interesting stories to tell than numbers do. He is currently working on his first book, covering his fivemonth long American road trip in search of all towns called Lebanon in the country. fadiboukaram.com Emily Wilde Coe is the artist behind Wilde Art Co. She was born and raised in Birmingham and grew up in the Cathedral Church of the Advent. She attended Auburn University, where she graduated with a degree in architecture, and is a registered architect working with Nequette Architecture & Design. In her free time, Emily enjoys drawing portraits as well as honing her calligraphy skills and exploring the wide variety of writing styles out there. She adores bringing beauty to a blank piece of paper. When she is not drawing, Emily loves to spend time with her husband, Matt, and children Adelaide and Oliver. wildeartco.com

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Joe Cory is a painter and an Associate Professor of Art and Design at Samford University. A native of Des Moines, Iowa, he received his BA from Central College (Iowa), a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an MFA from the University of Chicago. He exhibits his work widely across the United States and presents on a number of issues related to his artwork, the arts, and higher education.

He is the recipient of numerous grants and awards. His latest project “Out of the Depths” is a collaboration with Fadi BouKaram (see bio above) that explores the complex nature of the migrant crisis in the Middle East. joecory.com Christina Daniel lives in Birmingham and creates a variety of design projects for both local and national freelance clients from her home studio. She also works under the name Dagger Fingers, an illustration project with work exhibited both locally and in collaborative projects, group shows, and publications with other artists across the world. She spends her spare time sketching at her favorite parks, tending to houseplants, and hiking local trails.

She also makes a pretty good cup of coffee. christinadaniel.net

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Jamison Harper creates from his home studio that he and his wife, Tamara, share. They have adopted the moniker of Smallwoods Studios as the hub for their varying creative outputs from art, embroidery, music, and teaching. Jamison exhibited paintings this summer at the Vestavia Hills Public Library and is teaching art classes for the Birmingham Museum of Art in the fall. smallwoods-studios.com Joy Howard is an Alabama native, wife, and mother of two boys. A graduate of Samford University and UAB, she is a nurse anesthetist by education and trade, but her true passion is photography. jphowardphotography@yahoo.com Chad Moore is a self-taught photographer living in Birmingham. His photography focuses on household items or toys that have escaped from the house and are wandering downtown Birmingham. His approach to his photography (and life) is to find humor and whimsy in even the most mundane subject matter. Chad’s artwork has been featured in an exhibit at the Wiregrass Museum of Art in Dothan, Alabama, and is on display at Naked Art in Birmingham.

His favorite dessert is tiramisu. pifflepics.com

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C O N V E R S AT I O N W I T H F E AT U R E D ARTIST SARAH SOULE WEBB The Advent: Sarah, would you tell us about yourself?

Sarah: I grew up in Pensacola, Florida. I have a lot of family here though. My mom is from Birmingham, but I grew up on the water with a loving family—a beautiful, happy childhood. My mom painted, and she introduced it to me at an early age. In high school, she and I would take PHOTOGRAPHY BY HAWLEY SCHNEIDER

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community college art classes together, and she was the youngest woman there. Then there was me. Also, I grew up in the church, but I probably didn’t really come to believing faith until college.

TA: What changed for you in college?

Sarah: I didn’t really get grace. Nothing bad had ever happened to me, and I never really did anything wrong. I didn’t have a huge complicated hang up.

But I came to know the Lord through a college boyfriend. He actually read his Bible. I knew the Bible from church and Catholic school, but I never read it on my own until he made me feel guilty for not knowing my Bible.

TA: You live in Birmingham now. How long have you been here?

Sarah: Twelve years. I came here right after college to work as a dietician at UAB, and I earned my master’s in nutrition. My husband, Andy, and I had met in college, and we were married about a year and a half after college. I worked as a dietician for several years full-time, but then I really wanted to pursue my art career. I left full-time nutrition work, working part-time for a few years, allowing me to build back up my paintings and to get established.

I’m still scaling the dietician work back to focus on my art.

TA: Would you tell us about your art?

Sarah: I have a studio in an old sleeping porch off of our house. I have a lot of windows, and it’s my space. I can make a mess. When I became serious about my art about six years ago, I was painting a lot of churches. I’ve always loved church architecture. When I look back, that was a very literal way for me to glorify God. I also love nature. I paint a lot related to nature. I would call my painting more impressionistic and not realism because as a child I remembered seeing paintings of the beach, and I hated them. So now, I paint the beach and children on the beach, but I do very impressionistic work. I feel like when I just try to recreate it, it looks fake, and I can’t do it justice.

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TA: How does what you're explaining relate to the art we’re putting on the cover of this issue?

Sarah: When we had the idea to do the door at Wittenberg, I thought about how trees could make the shape of the door. It was an interesting marriage of two different subject matters I had been painting up to this point: churches and nature scenes. It’s a concept I think I might keep running with. I want to explore famous churches with trees, places like Notre Dame.

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TA: How did you arrive at this idea? What was your process?

Sarah: With the theme being Re-formation, the recovering of what is lost, I first had an idea to do a literal cathedral door, but still impressionistic. Then I researched the origin of the Gothic arch, which is trees growing straight up with their branches going out and touching. The idea is that the trees are pointing to God. In the actual Reformation, 500 years ago, it was the church that was pointing to itself for centuries, saying we’re the way to get you to heaven. So in a way that cathedral door had become dead. Literally, a tree had been cut down to make a door, and that door was no longer living. That was the thought process—that a tree is life, and a door is dead. This painting is actually a living door because the trees are alive.

TA: Tell us about the person in there. It looks like a boy.

Sarah: I think it’s a boy. Originally I added him because the top was going to be so heavy. It was too busy up top. I needed something to pull your eye down, but he became the center of the painting as if it’s Martin Luther as a child. It could really be anybody though. Also, someone pointed out that the shadows almost look like pews in a church slanting to the right. Maybe I’m getting too deep here, but the whole thing also looks like an orchard, which produces fruit.

And that’s what we’re supposed to do—produce fruit. I always struggle with the distinction between faith and works, but our works are really the fruit of our faith. And fruit is sweet. Our works don’t earn our way into heaven, but they make us sweet so that we might be taken in by others to spread the Word by planting new seeds.

TA: Thanks for creating this, Sarah. Are there any final thoughts you’d like to share with us?

Sarah: Like I said before, I always want to glorify God with my art, or any work that I do, even as a dietician. Whatever our work is, it can be to the glory of God. For example, we have guys who pick up our trash two or three days per week, and our son loves them. He knows them by name, and they wave to him and honk the horn. They’re picking up trash. They’re doing very low-level work, yet they are so nice to my son. He calls them his friends. Even that is a way of worshipping God. It’s a necessary job they’re doing, and I’m sure it’s not fun work. In this secular world, we think that in order to serve God we have to work in ministry, and that’s just not true. It’s what I want from my art, and I think anybody can have it, whatever we do. sswstudios.com | sarahsoulewebb@gmail.com

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MATT SCHNEIDER BY

A CONVERSATION ON BIRMINGHAM’S ROLE OF LEADING THE WAY TO RACIAL RECONCILIATION

As we considered the topic of re-formation as a recovery and renewal of things lost, I was curious to have an honest conversation about the long-term implications of Birmingham’s current renaissance of new building and cultural developments. Of course, there is a lot of positive energy around things like revitalization, architecturally landscaped walkways, and similar endeavors. But as time goes on, I’m hearing more city leaders and media outlets ask mature question of whether or not all of this energy is actually good for the city. Is too much happening too fast? Are we in the middle of a bubble? Is this merely a positive movement for white middle- to upper-class citizens while poorer citizens and people of color are potentially being left in a wake of gentrification in ways we have seen in other cities? In other words, is this renewal equitable, or are we being shortsighted?

To help me get beyond the surface of all the high fives we’re giving each other about Birmingham’s facelift, I reached out to two city leaders who have very nuanced understandings of what’s really happening when we peel back the onion layers of Birmingham—how its present is still in the long shadow of its past, particularly when it comes to public infrastructures like our schools. Yet they are both hopeful for a positive future.

Deon Gordon is a Birmingham native and the Director of Business Growth for REV Birmingham, an organization involved with much of the city’s revitalization. John Hammontree is the Opinions & Commentary Editor for AL.com and the Managing Producer of Reckon Alabama, a new initiative of AL.com for reporting and discussing important issues in Alabama.

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Matt: Would you two introduce yourselves? Tell us a little bit about you personally, and what you do. Do you mind starting, Deon?

Deon: I’m the Director of Business Growth for REV Birmingham. I spent the early part of my childhood on the west side of Birmingham but grew up throughout the city. I’m a product of Birmingham City Schools and went to Auburn. After starting some online ventures, a few fortuitous encounters led to a career in technology with a local startup. About two years ago, that changed when REV reached out to me about leading our business development efforts in Birmingham.

Matt: John, tell us about you.

John: I was born in Memphis, but moved to Birmingham when I was six. We lived in Hoover until I was going into the sixth grade when we moved to Mountain Brook, and I lived there until I graduated from high school. I thought that I wanted to go into PHOTOGRAPHY BY HAWLEY SCHNEIDER

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film, so I briefly went to DePaul University in Chicago for a year. But I transferred back down to Alabama. Then I bounced around between the Birmingham area, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. A variety of factors, including just something about growing up in Birmingham, tugged me back. My wife and I moved back in 2014. I luckily stumbled into a job as an assistant on the opinions team at AL.com. I now oversee our guest opinions, and we recently launched a new project I’m really excited about called Reckon. The idea is that it will be a place to find investigative and accountability journalism. Our goal is to facilitate an initiative that drives some of the important conversations that Alabama needs to have.

Matt: Can you characterize that “tug” that brought you back to Birmingham?

John: When I graduated high school, there was nothing I wanted more than to get out of Birmingham because I thought of it as kind of this backwoods place. I think it’s something many people from Birmingham go through at some point. You think of it as the most racist place in the world. Martin Luther King Jr. called us the most segregated city in America. I just wanted to get out, so I moved to Chicago. Well, you get to a place like Chicago, and you see that it’s also the most segregated city in America. I started facing naïve questions like, “Do you all wear shoes down there?” and “Have you ever met a black person?” That year I started reconditioning my thoughts, so I moved back to Alabama. But in 2010 jobs were scarce, and I was feeling disenchanted with Alabama again. So I moved to D.C., which is another city that is haunted by racial divides. We talk about gentrification here in Birmingham, but you see it happening in real time in D.C. in a way that’s not happening yet in Birmingham.

Then we moved to San Francisco, which is this liberal Mecca for much of the country.

Matt: It’s where I’m from, and I can tell you from personal experience we have our fair share of racism and inequality.

John: I was shocked in the two years that we lived there. It’s a politically progressive city, yet the racial divide there is very stark. So I think something that has stuck with me in adulthood is this idea that you can’t go anywhere in America without having to confront these issues. I personally believe that if there is going to be any sort of reconciliation, it’s going to happen in cities in the South where we’ve shared the same land for about 300 years. We have to get along. So I came back to help make Birmingham an example of what could be as opposed to the stigma of photographs of police dogs and fire hoses that have characterized us.

Matt: Deon, would you respond to anything that John just said?

Deon: Ditto! Every single point is spot on. Less than two miles from here, you had those clashes that John talked about. We all remember those grainy, black-and-white images. It’s funny to me how we look at those events, and we don’t always recognize the bravery or uphold Birmingham as a city that helped break the back of segregation. If you talk to folks about Birmingham, locally or nationally, they associate it negatively with the events of the civil rights movement. We should correct people 18

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’ HAM and say, “We led the way. The battleground was here, and we prevailed.” It’s a case study in self-sacrifice, love for others, the things we would want people to emulate.

People came to Birmingham to live this out.

Matt: Could you tell us some stories as examples of what you mean?

Deon: Just the fact that elementary and middle school kids poured out of the classrooms into the streets, knowing what they were about to face: state-sponsored terrorism in the form of attack dogs and water cannons. We even see that type of tenacity and audacity going back to Birmingham’s founding. So many times throughout our history we faced existential crises. In 1873 there was a cholera outbreak. There were folks like Madam Wooster literally putting her life on the line. Fast forward to the Great Depression, and again Birmingham is the hardest hit city. We hardly survived it. Fast forward again, and we stumble our way through the civil rights movement. Yet somehow we were able to reinvent ourselves. Move forward, and then steel collapses.

There are all these threats, but somehow Birmingham was able to avoid becoming like its rustbelt peers. We’ve probably missed some opportunities, but we’re starting to hit our stride now. Birmingham is resilient, and I think we’re finally getting to a point where we’re asking ourselves how we can harness this. How can we start to look at who we are and what we’ve done in a positive light? It’s not a scarlet letter that we went through the civil rights movement. If anything, it’s a beacon for other cities who are dealing with issues of inclusivity.

John: If you walk through the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, you see videos of Chinese people singing “We Shall Overcome” in Tiananmen Square. The rest of the world draws inspiration from us. Birmingham has to capitalize on this idea. Freedom might have been born in Philadelphia, but, to borrow a church metaphor, it was reborn in Birmingham. That’s kind of what draws me. It’s a weird sort of inspiration to know that as a white person my ancestors weren’t necessarily on the right side of things. People look to our founding fathers as Christian and spiritual leaders, but so were the leaders of the civil rights movement. Fred Shuttlesworth was a pastor.

King was a pastor. So I think if we’re looking for a sort of faith-based mission for America, we have a much more recent example in the last fifty to sixty years than having to go back 250 years.

Deon: That’s right. Here we have an actual concrete claim to that Christian ethos, but we’re not telling that story through the proper lens—at least not yet.

Matt: John, one other thing you mentioned that I’d like to tease out is that Alabama has a lot to reckon with. Could you say more about what you mean?

John: Despite all the progress we’ve just talked about, the Birmingham area has more than 20 communities. If you look at Birmingham and how it compares to the growth of Huntsville and Mobile right now, it’s hard not to say that if we weren’t all competing for resources and having to spend money on 20 plus fire departments, 20 plus police departments, and 20 plus school superintendents, then our combined 19

resources for the Birmingham area could do phenomenal things. If we look at these decisions that were made many years ago, we have these big lingering issues where it’s almost like a two-state solution where we have resources that go to black people and resources that go to white people. When you divide those resources, it’s impossible to have a unified sense of purpose.

Matt: I’ve noticed since being here that schools are really important to this topic.

Not just symbolically but acutely. Something is happening at the school level that seems to maintain a sort of ad hoc segregation.

Deon: Schools are funded through property taxes, so as soon as people are born, they can be behind in a lot of ways if they’re from certain zip codes with lower property values. Chances are schools in poor zip codes are not going to be funded as well as others in wealthier neighborhoods. Yet somehow we expect different outcomes.

Matt: Is it even possible to get beyond such a scenario?

John: I don’t know. Every major city in the country seems to be figuring out ways to separate—either by class or race—the wealthy and white kids from the poor and minority kids. We can say this is happening everywhere, so we’re never going to fix it here. Or we can say it’s happening everywhere, but we could be a model for how 20

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’ HAM to fix it. Now, we do have some issues that make it harder, such as having so many different municipalities versus a unified government like Nashville. I don’t anticipate Vestavia giving up its own fire department anytime soon, let alone a school, so we have to figure out other ways.

Deon: There is the Denver Model, which is basically regional cooperation. It’s a good alternative to unifying regional government. The suburbs don’t dissolve as municipalities, but there could be an economic development pact to speak with a unified voice.

Matt: It’s funny because if you think of the region as an organism, then the city of Birmingham, especially its central core, is at the heart. Things flow out of the center.

So the suburbs are co-dependent. They thrive as much as the city itself thrives. Yet we seem to be shooting ourselves in the foot regionally.

Deon: Right, unfortunately that is as old as Birmingham, even going back to its founding as a steel town with a lot of northern money. We in a lot ways exported our decision making to Pittsburgh. Once we started to diversify our economy with the emergence of UAB, finance, and insurance, it was the first time Birmingham really started to speak economically with its own money. We’re a bit behind, but again I do see indicators that let me know we’re probably in the best position in our history to collaborate and to come together on some things. Folks are starting to recognize that so goes Birmingham, so go the cities over the mountain. It’s a reflection of changing demographics with Millennials. They want to be downtown, and they’re a bit more exposed to how things are intrinsically linked. So they’re more compelled to get involved.

Matt: John, what do you think about the recent influx of people moving downtown?

John: I think the number of people who are moving downtown is causing some growing pains, but it’s certainly promising. Jefferson County as a whole is not growing. We’re seeing a lot of internal movement of people of my generation who grew up over the mountain and are now choosing to live in Birmingham. That leads to some major business wins. Obviously the work that REV is doing in terms of growing small businesses is fantastic, but we haven’t in the last few years gotten the kind of Lockheed Martin or other Fortune 500 company that would be a major win. I think that’s something that needs to happen, and I think we’re laying the foundation to make it happen. But all these people who are moving downtown need to decide to collectively reinvest with their children in the Birmingham education system. Obviously that carries a lot of risks. Birmingham schools were the best in the state at one time, but they became bad because a large group of people pulled their resources from the system. If we invest our resources in them, they could become good again.

The more people wrestle with Birmingham’s history, hopefully the more people will make these individual decisions and encourage friends to do the same. Hopefully not all will just move downtown for three years and then move back home to the suburbs when they have kids.

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Matt: It’s as if living in a place for a limited time is kind of like being a tourist in a neighborhood for two or three years. But a movement of people will need to have some skin in the game for things to change.

Deon: But it’s like we had a nuclear disaster, and now we’re expecting people to move back into that fallout. I’m pretty certain nobody in Chernobyl made a decision to blow up the reactor, but they still have to deal with the consequences. You can’t blame somebody for not wanting to live there anymore, so we’re going to have to be creative. We’re going to have to be vigilant. We can draw on the tenacity and audacity of Birmingham to make these schools the absolute best somehow, whether it is cradle-to-career pipelines or other initiatives. We have to make those schools competitive, and I dare say the best somehow. There are two major issues that we have to look at to determine a community’s health: education and entrepreneurship. If we take care of the education, then the other starts to be pulled in the same successful direction. That’s where partnerships with corporations can be powerful.

John: I don’t want to imply that you need white kids to make schools great, but there was this exodus of resources. Part of the exodus was during the last decade before we started to see the economic turnaround. It wasn’t even as much white flight as much as it was middleclass black flight. We’ve had resources going out in all directions. So you not only need to attract white resources back, you also need to attract black resources.

Matt: Are there any hopeful signs of this?

Deon: I just love looking at the stories of the people that we’ve worked with who enter our pipeline not knowing which way to go, how to really take their business idea to the next level. Now they’re local rock stars, like Zebbie Carney of Eugene’s Hot Chicken. We recently celebrated his grand opening in Uptown. He came through our capital access competition, and he’s a graduate of Co.Starters, a program we run with Create Birmingham. Joe Brown and Lauron Pijeaux of Laced Up Boutique are also Co.Starters graduates. When they came to us, they were selling high-end shoes for 400 bucks out of the trunks of their cars. Now they have their own brick-andmortar storefront downtown. I’m encouraged by the direction we are going with small businesses because they can transform lives. By just showing people how to provide a product and a service to fill a need, you’re impacting that family. You do that enough, and you’re impacting that neighborhood by providing jobs. We’re going to need a really good handle on inclusive innovation and entrepreneurship, making sure we’re intentionally reaching out to folks who have an idea, but they’ve been overlooked.

Matt: Any final thoughts, anything that you wanted to say that you haven’t said?

Deon: I’ll just leave with empathy. I consider Chervis Isom to be a friend, and I remember the first time I met him, a prominent attorney around town who was instrumental in getting the memorial for the four little girls. His first words to me 22

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after I met him were, “I used to be a racist.” Quite an impression, right? But he went on to tell me about the story of how he was a product of his environment and then the people and the interactions started to chip away at his worldview. We talked about his evolution, which he describes in his book The Newspaper Boy. There was a family on his paper route, a black family from the North, who had an impact on him. If I were alive at the time, our friendship probably would not have happened.

I very well could have grown up to have those same worldviews and attitudes. I’m not absolving people or saying it was right by any stretch, but it’s easy to understand how folks adopted certain views just because of their environment.

John: Part of what I think makes Birmingham unique compared to other cities is, despite our history and our reputation, you can’t walk into a diner without seeing white and black folks sitting at the same table and eating together. Partly it’s our history. We have to wrestle with it every single day, and we have to figure out ways to improve because it’s as much a reputation and branding thing as anything else.

If a racist incident happens in Birmingham, that’s going to get much more national attention than if it happens in Denver. I’m hopeful that because of our history, we have a mission and a necessity to move forward and improve on those things. My dad was telling me the other day that the main doctor at a cast-iron pipe company is black, and all of his patients are these rural, elderly white folks who probably wouldn’t have been comfortable with a black doctor 30 years ago. Now they ask for him by name. There are still a lot of systemic issues holding us back, but I don’t think these conversations are happening to the same extent in other cities.

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BIRMINGHUMANS DONNA DUKES PR I N C I PA L A N D F O U N D E R O F MARANATHAN ACADEMY

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y mother was a teacher, and when I was out of school, she would bring me to work with her and let me tutor her kids. There was this young man in her class who was in the eighth

grade. He was reading at a second-grade level. She let me bring my books from school, and I sat with him and helped him read.

I was much younger; I was about seven years old. It really did a world of good for both of us—for him and for me because I was saying to myself that I liked helping him. I felt so bad that nobody had stopped to help him before he got to my mother’s class. He was considered a “bad kid.” He was always fighting; he was always getting into trouble. But a lot of it was because he got teased for not being able to read.

I love kids; I’ve always loved them. I also loved the law, and I was going to be a lawyer. But then I volunteered at the juvenile detention center and met amazing kids. I couldn’t find a school that would take them—private or public. I felt the Lord change the whole direction of my life and had to tell my parents I wasn’t going to go to law school. I graduated from Miles College in May of ‘91. I started Maranathan Academy on September 3, 1991.

One student. One table. Four chairs.

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HEART FOR THE

’ HAM

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF JOY HOWARD

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PHOTOGRAPH BY HAWLEY SCHNEIDER

HEART FOR THE

’ HAM

BIRMINGHUMANS ELLIS AND DEBBIE BRAZEAL ON THEIR THIRD MARRIAGE ( M E T A P H O R I C A L LY S P E A K I N G )

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llis: “Our first marriage was war. Our second marriage was truce. We had laid down our arms so to speak in our second marriage, and things were wonderful.

Our third marriage is now unity.”

Debbie: “I began to understand that original sin is wanting everything created in my own image. I kept thinking once the Lord worked on Ellis enough, he was going to be so much more like me. What a prideful thing! I don’t want Ellis to be anybody other than who God wants him to be.”

Ellis: “There are several pictures of Debbie when she was a child, and she always had this little grin on her face. And you knew based on that grin that she was ready to get into some mischief. And that’s who I wanted to be married to. I wanted her to be who God made her to be. I didn’t want her to be some Stepford wife, which is what I set out to have. I began to love her for who she is.”

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BIRMINGHUMANS JOSH PURVIS SENIOR NEUROSCIENCE MAJOR AT UAB

I

didn’t realize until I was a senior in high school that research would be a perfect fit for me. My high school wasn’t big, so I didn’t get to choose advanced science courses. But I was really drawn to these subjects, so I would go to Books-A-

Million or Barnes & Noble and go to the science section. I’d just pick up a book like Incognito by David Eagleton, who has a PBS special on the brain now. He’s a really cool neuroscientist, and I love his writing. I just started reading about the unconscious mind and how it drives processes but not in a Freudian way. I’d read these books in my free time at school or during class when I was supposed to be paying attention. What really drew me to neuroscience was that I loved asking questions, and I loved finding answers, whether someone told me or I had to go find it myself. With neuroscience, every single one of these books at some point said something like, ‘Yeah, this is really cool, but we don’t know why that happened.’ Or they would talk about memories, and they’d say, ‘We actually have no idea how memories are stored in the brain.’

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PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF JOY HOWARD

HEART FOR THE

’ HAM

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HEART FOR THE

’ HAM

BIRMINGHUMANS DR . MONIKA TATARIA FOUNDER OF CAMELLIA WOMEN’S IMAGING

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have diagnosed many women with breast cancer, and I’ve seen how stressful the process of coming to this diagnosis can be. In all my years in private practice, I always felt that it didn’t need to be this way. I created Camellia

Women’s Imaging because I wanted to create a safe place where I can treat women the way they deserve to be treated, and to me, that means with consideration and respect. That’s why I have designed everything to minimize women’s stress as much a possible. I named it Camellia Women’s Imaging because the camellia is the state flower of Alabama, but camellias are actually from Asia. They were brought over here and thrived. I feel like this represents me. I am not from Alabama, but this is where I am setting down my roots.

PHOTOGRAPH BY HAWLEY SCHNEIDER

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P O E T RY

MRI

By John Goodman “People come in here covered in tattoos and tell me they can’t stand the sight of a needle,” says the technician right before she says “big stick.”

Once the IV is in I wait in a chair beside a chummy ex-tumored fellow who tells me he’s been clean a year.

The tube is a little grave, it’s best to close your eyes, wait to be summoned out again.

Feel the warmth course up your arm and live into the clings and clangs.

It’s like confession but you can’t lie.

The dye will tell how poorly or well you heal, and let the doctors see normalization or abnormality.

“Big stick,” yes: the neurologist will speak softly but tell whether it is right or wrong, whether the machine will work or if it is under sabotage; and then of course the penance that will be yours.

Bless me doctor for my tumor hasn’t thinned.

It has been three months since my last MRI.

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" E L E G Y 1 " C O U R T E S Y O F J O E C O R Y, 2 0 1 7.

1 0 ” X 14 ” D I G I TA L LY A LT E R E D C O L L A G E USING FOUND MATERIALS.

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FEATURES

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JUSTIFIED FOR GOOD: LUTHER’S MESSAGE FOR TODAY By

Piotr J. Małysz

M

artin Luther belongs to another era. This year we commemorate half a millennium since this Augustinian friar and Bible professor nailed his Ninety-five Theses (or so the story goes) to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. The event to be sure changed the landscape of Christendom. Its unintended aftershocks, some argue, can still be felt in Western culture. And yet, the passage of time alone makes it perfectly reasonable to ask: Does Luther have anything to say to us? Of course, we wouldn’t be the first ones to ask this. But perhaps this year’s Reformation anniversary at

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95 REESE’S COURTESY OF CHAD MOORE

F I V E H U N D R E D Y E A R S A G O, A M E N T I O N O F G O D M A D E C H R I ST I A N S FRANTIC AND FRENZIED—SO MUCH S O T H AT W I T H G O D I N M I N D T H E Y PA I D L I T T L E AT T E N T I O N T O G O D. long last gives us an opportunity to put the question to rest. As much as we celebrate Luther’s posture of protest, complete with a hammer poised to sound blows with far-reaching echoes, we—let’s be honest— can’t even quite recall what the fuss over indulgences was all about.

Even more so, when Luther desires to address minds in “extreme despair,” when he insists his “theology pertains only to the consolation of the afflicted, miserable, and despairing,” to those who “droop and fall because they have broken and crushed hearts”—we may wonder if the show hasn’t outlived its charms. Hearts crushed by despair? Aren’t Luther’s concerns, to use the Reformer’s own metaphor, a play without an audience in our day—a curious idea that witnesses to bizarre and, frankly, morbid sensibilities that we have long outgrown, thank you very much? If so, then the current Reformation anniversary may be just the time to finally bury the dead and, for God’s sake, move on.

But perhaps precisely for God’s sake, we ought to stop and consider what Luther once said. For him, theology is actually far less about our sensibilities, whether then

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or now. Preaching, teaching, the liturgy, the church, but also “clothing and shoes, food and drink, house and home, spouse and children … and all I have”—in a word, all those things a theologian may consider—have God at their center. Theology concerns itself above all with God—His goodness and its lavish splendor! And here’s the rub. “It is a great and difficult art,” Luther observes, “to fix our eyes only on the steadfast love of God and his abundant mercy.” When we look at Luther’s program from this angle, the difficulty may be just as serious in our day as it was in his. And Luther may yet have something to teach us.

Five hundred years ago, a mention of God made Christians frantic and frenzied—so much so that with God in mind they paid little attention to God. They became wrapped up in themselves, preoccupied with their own performance before God, whom they judged to be extraordinarily judgmental. They failed, as Luther repeatedly pointed out, seriously to consider what God had done.

Indulgences and all kinds of self-imposed tasks were easier to grasp and rely on than believing God is truly good, even

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to the point of not sparing Himself for the sinner’s sake.

Today nothing remains good for good.

All appears restricted in its goodness by utility or fads. A state-of-the-art phone may be a godsend now, but tomorrow it will be only an ugly embarrassment.

In our context, where both things and people are disposable and replaceable, God’s goodness cannot but be a cipher, too. If it stands for more than bland and blanket acceptance of all that a person’s heart desires, God’s goodness turns into a burden. It sounds incomprehensible at best that God should be good and that he is a giver of all that is good—that what he gives is good. It sounds even more incomprehensible that all we have and at bottom are is first and foremost good because it has come from God’s fatherly hand. God’s generosity sounds like a liability and constraint. Why? Because it shows—and insists—that people, bodies, and things are not incidental or blank, subject to our use and abuse. God’s goodness calls us into a new relationship to the world and to ourselves, and because it does this, it appears to constrain and compel us. The message of the gospel— that by his own giving and self-giving God justifies the ungodly for good—is foolishness in the world of extreme makeovers and free-range desire. That we are God’s workmanship (Ephesians 2:10) in a world that is God’s own before all else is a tough pill to swallow. To echo Luther, to fix our eyes on God’s goodness remains a difficult art, a tall order, not to say an impossibility. The sinful heart rebels.

AND YET, EVEN WHEN T HE sinner is finally left alone, wrapped up and cocooned in the sinner’s own self, and not even the sky is the limit any more, the depths of the sinful heart open onto no paradise vista of long-craved liberty. Today we may actually be more anxious than anything Luther witnessed. For even when turned in on the self, the sinner still desires justification, recognition, and acceptance. There is no human who does not wish for a place, a purpose, and some meaning in the world.

But the world’s justification always comes at a steep price. Where nothing is good for good, the cost of the world’s approbation is constant alertness to all the recent fads and fleeting goods, the hot stuff of the day that, we hope, will make us desirable and worth other people’s while.

Making sure your phone is upgraded to the recent model is one of the least of modern worries. Making sure you know the right people, avoid the undesirables, and keep your network responsive is much harder work. The late medieval problem of assuring God is merciful pales in comparison to the relentlessness of keeping fellow human beings attentive, engaged, and ready to bestow the much-craved thumbs up.

Here Luther’s insight is of abiding value.

God’s justification—unconditional and apart from works of the law—rather than placing a person under constraint, actually declares that the person is distinct from his or her works. The person is God’s good work. What does this mean? Contrary to the résumé-like outlook of our day, people come before and are not reducible to the their accomplishments or acquisitions. Be-

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fore any accomplishments or sins are even taken into account, the sinner is above all and irrevocably a beloved creature of God. God declares the sinner good and in good standing. As God justifies sinners, he not only makes more of us than we could ever hope for. But he also makes us into much more: his beloved creatures on whom he bestows also temporal blessings. he does all this so that we would recognize his abiding goodness, a goodness that truly renews the face of the whole earth beyond death. Not the restless world but God alone is the author of peace. he alone makes rest possible.

Beyond insisting on the abiding relevance of divine justification for our identity, Luther goes further in his exploration of divine goodness. He draws attention to God’s ongoing public work for the sake of salvation. Luther realizes the goodness of God in the world is often obscured by the mystery of human and natural evil. Luther is aware the patience of God must often lead to human impatience and groaning.

Like the author of the Book of Revelation, he knows that Christians are tempted to give up on the world, as if it were nothing but Satan’s playground beyond redemption, and as if God resided only in some spirit dimension beyond it all. Luther also knows that Christians may eventually be tempted to give up on God, recognizing his good-naturedness in some abstract way but doubting whether God is actually good to them. The danger of excessive introspection is that it often suggests to us the apparent impotence or arbitrariness of God Himself.

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Hence Luther insists that God has not only instituted but also continues to work though material means. Through them the benefits of Christ’s cross are bestowed on one generation after another. Luther is adamant that in baptism it is God’s hands that thrust you and me into the water.

There the old sinner died and was set aside by none other than God, and there God granted to us his irrevocable gift of a new life in the world he is renewing at its very core. Similarly, in the Lord’s Supper, God uses ordinary bread and wine to offer the body and blood of his Son to those gathered at the table. That is how gracious God is! If sinners find themselves questioning whether God’s favor extends to them, or even whether God is indeed a God of undeserved favor, Luther has this to say: Look at what God has done to you!

Look at what God continues to do for the sake of the undeserving, the doubters, the weak-minded and weak-willed. Trust Him! It is not about how you feel at this or that moment, but it is all about what God is up to—even now, for you and for me.

Through Word and sacrament, God constantly reiterates and makes into reality the distinction between a person and the person’s works. He arrests our doubt, our spiraling into the self. he captivates us, and calls us out of ourselves. He calls on us to take him at his Word. In this distinction between what God has irrevocably made (of) me and what I have done lies my freedom. Luther was above all a theologian of freedom, countering the sinner’s debilitating retreat into the self and proclaiming God’s many-splendored gifts.

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I CAN BE CREATIVE WITH ALL THAT GOD HAS GIVEN ME.

W H AT F LOWS F RO M T H I S I S a new way of being in the world. A person who is no longer in thrall to the ever-changing goods of this world can now see circumstances for what they truly are. God’s gifts—whether clothing, a roof over one’s head, or even a new phone—are not ballasts that we may one day find ourselves stuck with. They are not to keep us on our toes as a source of temptation and anxiety. They are means and opportunities through which creatures, created in God’s very image, can act toward each other and the rest of creation the way God has acted toward them. They are good because through them I—yes, even I—can be a blessing to others. The core question of life is no longer, “By what means can I win the approbation of others?” The question is rather, “How can I serve others and do so with my whole being?”

My very self, redeemed and made lovable for good, together with all that I have, is a summons to make room in my world for the displaced, the undesirables, and those that otherwise “don’t exist.” Justified by God, I can now ask myself, “What does my neighbor need? With all that God has provided, with all the goods in my life—who can I now be for my brother’s and sister’s sake?”

In answering this question, I can be creative with all that God has given me. I can share,

in Luther’s words, my righteousness with the neighbor. I can justify my neighbor!

I can do it for the sake of Christ’s gospel, which grants this freedom to all of us, both here and as far as life everlasting.

The half-millennium since Luther’s protest may be a temptation to leave Luther behind, but Luther won’t be put to rest—not for good. What he has to teach us may seem like a message addressed to an old-fashioned mindset, but it is fundamentally a message about the goodness of God. This goodness is called into question today just as it was in Luther’s time. Yet only in this goodness can we find true dignity, a home larger than ourselves where we belong, as well as real freedom for the world’s sake. Luther’s still urgent message—even to reckless workers like us—is that God has made good on his word. This is good news for us too!

Piotr J. Małysz is Associate Professor of Divinity at Beeson Divinity School and is an ordained Lutheran pastor. His research interests lie in systematic theology and the intellectual history of the Christian tradition. He is the author of Trinity, Freedom, and Love: An Engagement with the Theology of Eberhard Jüngel (T&T Clark, 2012), and co-editor of Luther Refracted: The Reformer’s Ecumenical Legacy (Fortress Press, 2015).

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PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF FADI BOUKAR AM

THE LONG P R O T E S T, 500 YEARS ON By

Jason Wallace

“People seldom do what they believe in. They do what is convenient, then repent.” – b o b d y l a n

P

ublic protest is in vogue. Of late people are gathering en masse to declare that they are not happy with the drift of Western politics.

Outrage is in the air from Great Britain’s Brexit, to France’s National Front Party, to Italy’s Five Star Movement, to Germany’s Alternative for Deutschland, to the Netherlands Party for Freedom, to the United States’ last presidential election.

As nervous promises of globalist panaceas yield to nervous entrenchment of nationalist boundaries—geographical and cultural—some folks are demanding to be seen and heard.

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IN MANY WAYS MODERN POLITICAL PROTESTS ASSUME THE MOST BANAL OF MIDDLE CLASS CHAR ACTERISTICS— R E S P E C T A B I L I T Y.

In the United States modern-day protesters vocalize their discontent in relative ease and comfort. Their displays rarely if ever face ominous threats or suppression.

There are no royalist bayonets pointed at hungry and determined French housewives, no Tsarist Imperial Guard firing into a crowd of unemployed hymn-singing workers holding icons, no Tiananmen Squares, no Selmas or Sowetos. Contemporary American protests lack all the trappings of dramatic historical contests. They are, in the main, rather placid affairs: afternoons in manicured parks, earnest but polite conversation with like-minded strangers, crude inflected celebrity screeds tempered by coffee and collective disquiet. Danger is far away. Risk and sacrifice are calculated according to convenience. In many ways modern political protests assume the most banal of middle class characteristics—respectability. At best this is perhaps a testimony to the strength of a settled democratic people, at worst an indication of boredom and cheap outrage when life’s necessities are met in excess and personal peril is not required.

Some try, but even the best efforts fall short of seriousness. According to their website, the Washington, D.C.-based DisruptJ20, an organization that opposed the election of President Donald Trump, planned a “series of massive direct actions” that “shut down the Inauguration ceremonies and any related celebrations—the Inaugural parade, the Inaugural balls, you name it.” They intended “to paralyze the city itself, using blockades and marches to stop traffic and even public transit.” If all this direct action proved too taxing, however, they assured that “because we like fun, we’re even going to throw some parties.”

In between the parties, many DisruptJ20 protesters were arrested, and some even faced prosecution for felony rioting. This drew the indignation of their spokesperson Samantha Miller, a UCLA graduate who “specializes in creative direct actions, large-scale mobilization logistics, and group facilitation.” Prior to her work with DisruptJ20 Collective, she interned for CODEPINK, an organization that amongst other ambitions supports “life-affirming activities.”

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Miller urged that those demonstrators are “showing rage and fear of what’s coming. It’s going to take a lot more than asking nicely to create change and stop the threats from the Trump administration.”

Jeffrey Light, a Washington, D.C.-based lawyer who provided legal support to DisruptJ20, agrees. He argued that even though the protesters were not “asking nicely,” authorities nevertheless used excessive force against them as well as “a number of weapons we haven’t seen Washington, D.C., police use in recent memory, flash-bang grenades and tear gas. In addition to chemical irritants, they were assaulting people with batons. They were beating people.”1 Their present sufferings were not, however, worthy to be compared with the glory that followed. Ryan Harvey, an activist and musician who supports DisruptJ20, noted the Saturday after the Thursday inauguration hundreds gathered to show their support to those being released from custody. “Every time people came out, the crowd would cheer and chant,” said Harvey. “For many, it was like a surprise birthday party, and their faces lit up. Street medics were on-scene, and many supporters brought food, clothes, coffee, tea, and water.” It was not exactly a harrowing tale from the Tower of London, but it was an inconvenient twenty-four hours nonetheless.

WEST ERN POLI T ICAL PROT EST S ARE ANCIEN T in origin, but as the experience of a determined dissenting force like DisruptJ20 proves, modern versions are mostly benign. For this we should be grateful. Full-throated expressions of offence never quite hit the right octave when your throat may be cut for such expression. For most of history, though not as much presently, protest involved substantive challenges to power and authority. That is to say historically, though not as much presently, protest was dangerous business. To protest was to dissent from forces that held coercive sovereignty—forces that could kill you if your dissent undermined the stability of the standing order. Presently, though not as much historically, to protest is less about challenging power and more about registering a complaint under the common umbrella of a constitutional order.

It is less about martyrdom and more about not getting your way. American protests do not markedly confront politics, nor do they face any real danger of being extinguished. More often than not, regardless of disposition to the regime in power, modern protests are affirmations that the system actually works. They are public safe spaces for the disaffected yet gainfully employed.

1. http://www.alternet.org/trumps-america-felony-riot-charges-against-inauguration-protesters-signal-dangerous-wave-repression

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WEST ERNERS SOMET IMES FORGET T HAT T HE longest continuous protest in the West is not political but religious. Specifically, it is theological, and at one time it was dangerous. Far removed from the shelter of a liberal constitutional order, early Protestants often staked their livelihood and lives on the conviction that the established church and the political apparatus supporting it were wrong. Their protest had to do with the question of how individuals come to be saved from sin and be eternally united with God. In the early modern period this kind of activity carried high stakes because the question at hand not only encompassed salvation and eternity but also the nature of authority, the meaning of morality, and the assurance of public concord. At a basic level Protestants argued that the Catholic sacramental system of salvation was mistaken and misshapen. The church was failing to communicate the biblical order of salvation, and distorting the freedom of the human will as a catalyst for God’s mercy. At a more involved level, Protestants slowly pushed European princes into an hour of decision: Accept the protest and protect it, or reject it and expunge the perpetrators. It was dangerous business indeed.

In 1517 Martin Luther, an Augustinian friar and professor of Hebrew Bible, disputed the practice of penance through the sale of indulgences based upon his study of the Bible, particularly the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans. By 1521 he was charged with heresy, excommunicated, summoned before an imperial court, and had gone into hiding. Luther’s challenge eventually evolved into a full-blown reappraisal of Western theology, the Bible, and the purpose of the church. In time this reappraisal found adherents across Europe as well as profound articulations and adjustments through the likes of John Calvin in Switzerland, Philip Melanchthon in Germany, and Thomas Cranmer in England.

It also produced theological radicals in the form of Anabaptists, Hutterites, and Mennonites who winnowed the “true church” down to a tiny remnant of adult believers. Whichever form early Protestantism took, a constant of the movement was a rejection of the theological authority of the Catholic Church and often the political authority of the magistrates who forbade dissent. Theirs was a protest of enormous consequence, for if they were wrong, they faced not only exile or death but also damnation.

AS T HE YEAR 1521 DREW to a close, an Augustinian monastery in Antwerp, Belgium, found itself under threat of condemnation by the local authorities. Inspired by Luther’s teaching, the monks regularly preached the doctrine of salvation through grace to large crowds of townspeople. Having grown exacerbated with the monks, Catholic officials arrested James Probst, the prior of the monastery, and took him to Brussels, where he appeared on trial before high-ranking clergy.

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THEIRS WAS A PROTEST OF ENORMOUS CONSEQUENCE, FOR IF THEY WERE WRONG, T H E Y FA C E D N O T O N LY E X I L E O R DEATH BUT ALSO DAMNATION.

Threatened with imprisonment and forbidden to teach, Probst retracted his opinions, but the monks in Antwerp continued to expound the tenets of Protestantism.

By October 1522, local authorities had enough. The magistrates barricaded the monastery and threw the monks into prison. A number of townspeople sympathetic with Protestantism were cast into prison as well. With the help of several women from the town, three of the monks escaped. Henry Voes, John Esch, and Lambert Thorn, all young men in their early twenties, managed to hide from the inquisitors for a time.

When informed of the proceedings in Antwerp, Luther is reported to have said, “The cause which we defend is no longer a simple game; it looks for blood, it seeks for life.”

The inquisitors scoured the country, eventually captured Esch, Voes, and Thorn, and took them to Brussels for trial. When asked if they would retract their beliefs and teachings, Esch and Voes replied, “No, we will not retract anything. We will not deny the word of God. We will rather die for the truth of our faith.” Thorn, however, requested a respite of four days to further consider his position. His request was granted, but Esch and Voes were handed over to the executioner. When they were at the scaffold prepared for their burning, the confessors approached the young martyrs and asked them if they were willing to receive the Christian faith. “We believe in the Christian church, but not in your church,” they replied. The men were bound to the pyre, and after an intentional delay of half an hour designed to intimidate them into a recantation, the inquisitors exhorted, “Become converted, or you shall die in the name of the devil.”

“No,” replied the martyrs. “We will die like Christians and for the truth of the gospel.” The pyre was lit, and as the flames rose slowly towards the victims, they repeated again and again in loud voices, “O Domine Jesus, Fili de David, miserere nostril!” (Lord Jesus, the Son of David, have pity on us!), until the smoke suppressed their voices and they were reduced to ashes.

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The execution lasted a total of four hours on July 1, 1523. Voes and Esch were the first martyrs of the Protestant Reformation. After weighing his conscience, Thorn died a similar death a few days later. When Luther heard of the young monks’ fate, he composed a hymn eventually sung across Germany and the Netherlands in both celebration of the martyrs and defiance of their persecutors: No! their ashes shall not perish, In every place this holy dust, Scattered to a distance, must Bring brave soldiers God to cherish.

Satan truly snatched them from us, And consigned them to the grave; Still at their death he’ll madly rave, When we sing aloud of Jesus.

T HOUGH T HE CRISIS OF PROT ESTAN T ISM has waned, critics of Protestantism, as to be expected, have been harsh at times. In particular Luther has drawn his share of ire. His detractors, both lay and learned, provide endlessly creative invective—Luther had daddy issues, Luther was constipated, Luther misunderstood Paul and the context of second-temple Judaism. All three may be true to one degree or another, but all three may also be irrelevant to his original insights. His discernment that the church cannot delimit the word of God through its practices—but the word of God delimits the practices of the church—forever changed Christianity. This deceptively simple formulation revolutionized the nature of theological authority and galvanized the greatest and lengthiest protest in history. It turned theology away from speculation and back to the texts of scripture. It produced an educated clergy who commanded precision in their study of ancient languages and ancient history. It reprioritized the role of faith in the life of the believer and put Christ and his righteousness at the center of redemption. Significantly, it also demonstrated that fidelity to scripture may require great risk, possibly even risk of one’s life.

The world of Luther and the Reformation is long gone, and for much of that world, we can say good riddance. Living under a constitutional order that tolerates a variety of religious expressions muted the religious violence of the early modern period. As a result, like contemporary Western political protesters, contemporary Western Protestants have never been safer. Even though Protestants have been protesting now for half a millennium, most probably do not think of themselves in this light. Yet, every time they gather for worship they are in fact

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EVERY TIME THEY GATHER FOR WORSHIP THEY A R E I N FA C T DISSENTING FROM THE SACRAMENTAL AND MAGISTERIAL AUTHORITY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH.

dissenting from the sacramental and magisterial authority of the Catholic Church.

It remains to be seen how much the ease and comfort of modern Western Protestantism might dilute the power of the original theological claims of the early reformers. As evidenced by the last century, Christian truth is not so much about assent to a particular confession of faith as it is a commitment to the social, cultural, and therapeutic utility this assent provides. For many contemporary Protestants, unity and usefulness take priority over the messy acrimony of history and dogma. Political and cultural causes unite where earlier forms of creedal Protestantism divided. Social agendas that curtail doctrinal differences gather more energy than serious questions about salvation and the eternal state of the soul. As with modern political protests, danger is far away. Risk and sacrifice are calculated according to convenience. Again, Protestantism assumes the most banal of middle class characteristics—respectability.

Still, the last chapter on this great protest is not yet written, and unseen trials of the century ahead may yet inspire future Protestant clergy and laity alike to risk convictions similar to those who first dissented many centuries ago. If such sacrifice proves too tall an order in the short run, perhaps in the long run the trials of the early theological protesters will encourage a rare seriousness in matters of the soul that eclipses in importance the rare seriousness in matters of politics. Until such a time, O Domine Jesus, Fili de David, miserere nostril!— Lord Jesus, the Son of David, have pity on us.

Dr. William Jason Wallace specializes in intellectual and religious history and holds the Stockham Chair of Western Intellectual History at Samford University. He joined Samford University’s History Department in 2002, and since 2012 has directed Samford’s freshmen Core Texts Program, a required two-semester course sequence that introduces students to great works of literature, philosophy, history, and theology.

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D I S P U TAT I O N O F D O C T O R M A R T I N L U T H E R ON THE POWER AND EFFICACY OF INDULGENCES1 b y martin lu ther Out of love for the truth and the ception of the article of death desire to bring it to light, the foland of necessity. lowing propositions will be discussed at Wittenberg, under the 10. Ignorant and wicked are the presidency of the Reverend Father doings of those priests who, in Martin Luther, Master of Arts and the case of the dying, reserve of Sacred Theology, and Lecturer canonical penances for purgain Ordinary on the same at that tory. place. Wherefore he requests that those who are unable to be present 11. This changing of the canonical and debate orally with us, may do penalty to the penalty of purso by letter. gatory is quite evidently one of the tares that were sown while In the Name our Lord Jesus Christ. the bishops slept.

Amen.

12. In former times the canonical 1. Our Lord and Master Jesus penalties were imposed not Christ, when He said Poeniafter, but before absolution, as tentiam agite, willed that the tests of true contrition. whole life of believers should be repentance.

13. The dying are freed by death from all penalties; they are al2. This word cannot be underready dead to canonical rules, stood to mean sacramental and have a right to be released penance, i.e., confession and from them. satisfaction, which is administered by the priests.

14. The imperfect health [of soul], that is to say, the imperfect love, 3. Yet it means not inward reof the dying brings with it, of pentance only; nay, there is no necessity, great fear; and the inward repentance which does smaller the love, the greater is not outwardly work divers morthe fear. tifications of the flesh.

15. This fear and horror is sufficient 4. The penalty [of sin], therefore, of itself alone (to say nothing continues so long as hatred of of other things) to constitute self continues; for this is the the penalty of purgatory, since true inward repentance, and it is very near to the horror of continues until our entrance despair. into the kingdom of heaven.

16. Hell, purgatory, and heaven 5. The pope does not intend to reseem to differ as do despair, mit, and cannot remit any penalmost-despair, and the assuralties other than those which ance of safety. he has imposed either by his own authority or by that of the 17. With souls in purgatory it seems Canons. necessary that horror should grow less and love increase.

6. The pope cannot remit any guilt, except by declaring that 18. It seems unproved, either by it has been remitted by God and reason or Scripture, that they by assenting to God’s remission; are outside the state of merit, though, to be sure, he may grant that is to say, of increasing love. remission in cases reserved to his judgment. If his right to 19. Again, it seems unproved that grant remission in such cases they, or at least that all of them, were despised, the guilt would are certain or assured of their remain entirely unforgiven. own blessedness, though we may be quite certain of it.

7. God remits guilt to no one whom He does not, at the same 20. Therefore by “full remission of time, humble in all things and all penalties” the pope means bring into subjection to His not actually “of all,” but only of vicar, the priest. those imposed by himself.

according to the canons, they 35. They preach no Christian docwould have had to pay in this trine who teach that contrition life. is not necessary in those who intend to buy souls out of pur23. If it is at all possible to grant gatory or to buy confessionalia. to any one the remission of all penalties whatsoever, it is cer- 36. Every truly repentant Christian tain that this remission can be has a right to full remission of granted only to the most perpenalty and guilt, even without fect, that is, to the very fewest. letters of pardon.

24. It must needs be, therefore, that 37. Every true Christian, whether the greater part of the people living or dead, has part in all are deceived by that indiscrimithe blessings of Christ and the nate and highsounding promise Church; and this is granted him of release from penalty.

by God, even without letters of pardon.

25. The power which the pope has, in a general way, over purgatory, 38. Nevertheless, the remission and is just like the power which any participation [in the blessings of bishop or curate has, in a special the Church] which are granted way, within his own diocese or by the pope are in no way to be parish. despised, for they are, as I have said, the declaration of divine 26. The pope does well when he remission. grants remission to souls [in purgatory], not by the power 39. It is most difficult, even for the of the keys (which he does not very keenest theologians, at one possess), but by way of interand the same time to commend cession. to the people the abundance of pardons and [the need of] true 27. They preach man who say that contrition. so soon as the penny jingles into the money-box, the soul flies 40. True contrition seeks and loves out [of purgatory]. penalties, but liberal pardons only relax penalties and cause 28. It is certain that when the penthem to be hated, or at least, ny jingles into the money-box, furnish an occasion [for hating gain and avarice can be inthem]. creased, but the result of the intercession of the Church is 41. Apostolic pardons are to be in the power of God alone. preached with caution, lest the people may falsely think them 29. Who knows whether all the preferable to other good works souls in purgatory wish to be of love. bought out of it, as in the legend of Sts. Severinus and Paschal. 42. Christians are to be taught that the pope does not intend the 30. No one is sure that his own conbuying of pardons to be comtrition is sincere; much less that pared in any way to works of he has attained full remission. mercy.

31. Rare as is the man that is truly 43. Christians are to be taught that penitent, so rare is also the man he who gives to the poor or who truly buys indulgences, i.e., lends to the needy does a better such men are most rare. work than buying pardons; 32. They will be condemned eter- 44. Because love grows by works of nally, together with their teachlove, and man becomes better; ers, who believe themselves sure but by pardons man does not of their salvation because they grow better, only more free have letters of pardon. from penalty.

33. Men must be on their guard 45. Christians are to be taught that against those who say that the he who sees a man in need, and 8. The penitential canons are im- 21. Therefore those preachers of inpope’s pardons are that inestipasses him by, and gives [his posed only on the living, and, dulgences are in error, who say mable gift of God by which man money] for pardons, purchases according to them, nothing that by the pope’s indulgences a is reconciled to Him; not the indulgences of the pope, should be imposed on the dying. man is freed from every penalty, but the indignation of God. and saved; 34. For these “graces of pardon” 9. Therefore the Holy Spirit in the concern only the penalties of 46. Christians are to be taught that pope is kind to us, because in 22. Whereas he remits to souls in sacramental satisfaction, and unless they have more than they his decrees he always makes expurgatory no penalty which, these are appointed by man. need, they are bound to keep 1 Courtesy of The Project Gutenberg.

Originally published in Latin, October 31, 1517.

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back what is necessary for their easily, but only gather them. contrive the injury of the traffic pious soul of a friend of God, own families, and by no means in pardons. and do not rather, because of to squander it on pardons.

58. Nor are they the merits of that pious and beloved soul’s Christ and the Saints, for even 74. But much more does he intend own need, free it for pure love’s 47. Christians are to be taught without the pope, these always to thunder against those who sake?” that the buying of pardons is work grace for the inner man, use the pretext of pardons to a matter of free will, and not and the cross, death, and hell contrive the injury of holy love 85. Again:—“Why are the penitenof commandment. for the outward man. and truth. tial canons long since in actual fact and through disuse abro48. Christians are to be taught that 59. St. Lawrence said that the trea- 75. To think the papal pardons so gated and dead, now satisfied the pope, in granting pardons, sures of the Church were the great that they could absolve a by the granting of indulgences, needs, and therefore desires, Church’s poor, but he spoke man even if he had committed as though they were still alive their devout prayer for him according to the usage of the an impossible sin and violatand in force?” more than the money they word in his own time. ed the Mother of God—this is bring. madness.

86.

Again:—“Why does not 60. Without rashness we say that the pope, whose wealth is to49. Christians are to be taught that the keys of the Church, given by 76. We say, on the contrary, that day greater than the riches the pope’s pardons are useful, Christ’s merit, are that treasure; the papal pardons are not able of the richest, build just this if they do not put their trust in to remove the very least of veone church of St. Peter with his them; but altogether harmful, 61. For it is clear that for the renial sins, so far as its guilt is own money, rather than with if through them they lose their mission of penalties and of concerned. the money of poor believers?” fear of God. reserved cases, the power of the pope is of itself sufficient. 77. It is said that even St. Peter, if 87. Again:—“What is it that the 50. Christians are to be taught that he were now Pope, could not pope remits, and what particif the pope knew the exactions 62. The true treasure of the Church bestow greater graces; this is ipation does he grant to those of the pardon-preachers, he is the Most Holy Gospel of the blasphemy against St. Peter who, by perfect contrition, would rather that St. Peter’s glory and the grace of God. and against the pope. have a right to full remission church should go to ashes, and participation?” than that it should be built up 63. But this treasure is naturally 78. We say, on the contrary, that with the skin, flesh and bones most odious, for it makes the even the present pope, and 88. Again:—“What greater blessof his sheep. first to be last. any pope at all, has greater ing could come to the Church graces at his disposal; to wit, than if the pope were to do a 51. Christians are to be taught that 64. On the other hand, the treathe Gospel, powers, gifts of hundred times a day what he it would be the pope’s wish, as sure of indulgences is naturally healing, etc., as it is written in now does once, and bestow on it is his duty, to give of his own most acceptable, for it makes I. Corinthians xii. every believer these remissions money to very many of those the last to be first. and participations?” from whom certain hawkers 79. To say that the cross, emblaof pardons cajole money, even 65. Therefore the treasures of the zoned with the papal arms, 89. “Since the pope, by his parthough the church of St. Peter Gospel are nets with which which is set up [by the preachdons, seeks the salvation of might have to be sold. they formerly were wont to ers of indulgences], is of equal souls rather than money, why fish for men of riches. worth with the Cross of Christ, does he suspend the indul52. The assurance of salvation is blasphemy. gences and pardons granted by letters of pardon is vain, 66. The treasures of the indulgencheretofore, since these have even though the commissary, es are nets with which they 80. The bishops, curates and theoequal efficacy?” nay, even though the pope now fish for the riches of men. logians who allow such talk to himself, were to stake his soul be spread among the people, 90. To repress these arguments upon it.

67. The indulgences which the will have an account to render. and scruples of the laity by preachers cry as the “greatest force alone, and not to resolve 53. They are enemies of Christ and graces” are known to be truly 81. This unbridled preaching of them by giving reasons, is to of the pope, who bid the Word such, in so far as they promote pardons makes it no easy matexpose the Church and the of God be altogether silent in gain. ter, even for learned men, to pope to the ridicule of their some Churches, in order that rescue the reverence due to enemies, and to make Chrispardons may be preached in 68. Yet they are in truth the very the pope from slander, or even tians unhappy. others. smallest graces compared with from the shrewd questionings the grace of God and the piety of the laity.

91. If, therefore, pardons were 54. Injury is done the Word of God of the Cross. preached according to the when, in the same sermon, an 82. To wit:—“Why does not the spirit and mind of the pope, all equal or a longer time is spent 69. Bishops and curates are bound pope empty purgatory, for the these doubts would be readily on pardons than on this Word. to admit the commissaries of sake of holy love and of the resolved; nay, they would not apostolic pardons, with all revdire need of the souls that are exist.

55. It must be the intention of the erence. there, if he redeems an infinite pope that if pardons, which are number of souls for the sake of 92. Away, then, with all those a very small thing, are celebrat- 70. But still more are they bound miserable money with which prophets who say to the people ed with one bell, with single to strain all their eyes and atto build a Church? The former of Christ, “Peace, peace,” and processions and ceremonies, tend with all their ears, lest reasons would be most just; the there is no peace! then the Gospel, which is the these men preach their own latter is most trivial.” very greatest thing, should be dreams instead of the commis93. Blessed be all those prophpreached with a hundred bells, sion of the pope.

83. Again:—“Why are mortuary ets who say to the people of a hundred processions, a hunand anniversary masses for Christ, “Cross, cross,” and dred ceremonies.

71. He who speaks against the the dead continued, and why there is no cross! truth of apostolic pardons, does he not return or permit 56. The “treasures of the Church,” let him be anathema and acthe withdrawal of the endow- 94. Christians are to be exhorted out of which the pope grants cursed! ments founded on their behalf, that they be diligent in followindulgences, are not sufficientsince it is wrong to pray for the ing Christ, their Head, through ly named or known among the 72. But he who guards against redeemed?” penalties, deaths, and hell; people of Christ. the lust and license of the pardon-preachers, let him be 84. Again:—“What is this new pi- 95. And thus be confident of 57. That they are not temporal blessed! ety of God and the pope, that entering into heaven rather treasures is certainly evident, for money they allow a man through many tribulations, for many of the vendors do 73.

The pope justly thunders who is impious and their enethan through the assurance not pour out such treasures so against those who, by any art, my to buy out of purgatory the of peace.

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FORMED AND RE-FORMED BY THE PSALMS By

Charlotte Donlon

I

n the fall of 2007, I had been married to Tim for nine years. We were the parents of a four-year-old girl and a two-year-old boy. We had recently moved into a new house in the Crestwood neighborhood of Birmingham.

We were also enmeshed in a church drama that created ripples in our faith community, rattled our beliefs, and filled us with questions and doubt.

After a few days of intense irritability and paranoia that had been building up within me and worsening over the course of three or four months, Tim gets a psychiatrist from our church to call some meds in for me to take until we’re able to see him in person. My parents come in town to help care for me and our children. But I think everyone is conspiring against me and believe the meds are unnecessary, so I dump a whole container full of medicine into our sink and turn on the disposal. I continue to spiral downward into further instability and insanity, which now include hallucinations. Several hours later, Tim manages to convince me to go to the emergency room.

It takes us five minutes to get to the closest ER. It’s around 10 p.m., and few cars are on the roads. Even in the dark I can see the concern and confusion in my husband’s eyes as he drives. We park near an entrance, but it must have been the wrong one. We wind our way through a tunnel of hospital corridors. My husband is walking at a brisk pace, and I resort to ballet to keep up with him.

I dance as if I’m moving from one side of a stage to the other.

ILLUSTR ATION COURTESY OF JAMISON HARPER

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Soute step glissade grand jete Soute step glissade grand jete Soute step glissade grand jete We finally locate the ER lobby. My husband speaks with a nurse, and minutes later we are called back to an exam room.

I don’t want to be here.

I don’t want to be here.

I don’t want to be here.

It takes four emergency room personnel to hold me down so they can give me a shot in my hip. As their hands subdue my body and the needle enters my skin, my hallucinations are pierced with reality. For a few moments I know I’m crazy. I know I need help.

The stress of my life circumstances and feelings of abandonment from my community prove to be the perfect storm for the onset of a major manic episode, and an eventual diagnosis of bipolar disorder.

IN T HE SUMMER OF 1996, three guys came into O’Henry’s Coffee and walked up to the cash register where I was stationed for the night. I knew two of them. One was an assistant coach for the men’s basketball team at my college, and one was a guy I recently dated a few times. (I was a new Christian, and I spent our first date interrogating him at a local jazz club about how Christian dating worked. My main takeaway was that kissing was reserved for girlfriend/boyfriend status only. We never kissed.) Even though I knew two of the trio, my eyes were drawn to the stranger. Because of his height, it was difficult to not pay attention to him. I also noticed his green eyes. And his smile.

They placed their orders. He introduced himself. His name was Tim. Three weeks later, when I was starting my senior year of college, Tim and I went on our first date to a concert with a large group of his friends. When Tim kissed me after our third date, I officially had my first Christian boyfriend.

Eight months later I sat at the corner table opposite the cash register at O’Henry’s. It was the same table Tim claimed during many of my work shifts. I was attempting to study and complete some assignments for my final semester of

SHE TOLD ME IF I COULDN’T FIGURE OUT ANY WORDS T O P R A Y, I SHOULD USE THE PSALMS.

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college. But it was the day after Tim broke up with me, and I was a wreck. He said I was too clingy. (I was.) He wasn’t ready for marriage. (I was.) My cup of bold roast coffee, black against the heavy white mug, went untouched. I tried to imagine my future without him, but he kept appearing in every picture my mind formed.

That night I called my friend and Bible study leader, Lisa. She encouraged me to turn to God for comfort. She told me if I couldn’t figure out any words to pray, I should use the Psalms starting with Psalm 16.

For the next twenty-four hours I read Psalm 16 over and over. I spoke it out loud when I could manage to form the syllables. I whispered it in between sobs. Sleep descended upon me for a few hours at a time, but whenever I woke up, the tears reappeared. I couldn’t study.

I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t talk to my roommate or other friends. All I could do was lay in bed with a box of tissues, read this Psalm, and try to believe the words in verses 5-6 that say,

I DISCOVERED THE PSALMS AREN’T A PL ATFORM FOR ME TO STAND ON; THEY ARE A CRADLE FOR ME TO REST IN.

Lord, you alone are my portion and my cup; you make my lot secure.

The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; surely I have a delightful inheritance.

After my breakup with Tim, I inhabited a space of sadness and despair that was unlike anything I had ever known. During this first significant trial as a Christian, I clung to Psalm 16. These words were written by David under very different circumstances, but they were the words I needed. I flipped through the thin pages of my new navy Bible to where the blue ribbon marked its place. I prayed those verses to a God I was still getting to know—a God I hoped was listening.

BECAUSE I WAS FORMED BY the language of the Psalms since my first encounter with Psalm 16, I knew where to turn for words to express my fear and for words to find comfort after my bipolar disorder diagnosis. A few months after my trip to the ER and a subsequent week in a psychiatric ward, I was at the lowest point of my life. Thanks to mood stabilizers and anti-psychotics, I escaped the grasp of the claws of mania, but I was left in the belly of the whale of depression. I was crazy, and everyone knew it. The scaffolding I built for myself and was accustomed to standing on had fallen down.

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As I immersed myself in the Psalms, their rhythm, repetition, and familiarity calmed my mind and soul. During those months of intense depression, I began to experience the power of the Psalter in a new way. I discovered the Psalms aren’t a platform for me to stand on; they are a cradle for me to rest in. One passage I clung to during this season was Psalm 31:1-4.

In you, O Lord, do I take refuge; let me never be put to shame; in your righteousness deliver me!

Incline your ear to me; rescue me speedily!

Be a rock of refuge for me, a strong fortress to save me!

IF I DON’T CONNECT WITH A PA RT I C U L A R P S A L M I N A S PE C I F I C M O M E N T, I K N O W T H E R E ’S A PA ST M E OR A FUTURE ME T H AT H A S N E E D E D OR WILL NEED THOSE WORDS O F T RU T H A N D C O M F O RT.

For you are my rock and my fortress; and for your name’s sake you lead me and guide me; you take me out of the net they have hidden for me, for you are my refuge.

I connected with David’s words recorded in the Psalter in my depression as I had during the grief of my breakup with Tim 10 years earlier. Although David and I are generations apart, I was able to make his declarations about God and his longings for God my own. It’s like admiring a glorious masterpiece at the Louvre when a docent notices you and your awe and tells you this work of art is yours for the taking.

Now, more than twenty years after my first encounter with Psalm 16 when the man I loved—and would eventually marry—broke up with me, I’m better at finding words for what I experience.

The Psalms are a compass I use to navigate suffering, grief, and loss as well as beauty, joy, and hope. When I read selections from the Book of Common Prayer on an app on my phone, the words take me on a journey from joy or lament into thanksgiving and praise. If I don’t connect with a particular Psalm in a specific moment, I know there’s a past me or a future me that has needed or will need those words of truth and comfort. I know there are people in my life who might need these words of truth and comfort.

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THE ADVENT

I’m wrapped in a wool blanket waiting for a pot of coffee to finish brewing.

I see signs of the early morning outside the window I’m facing. The sun is rising. Beads of dew are sprinkled on the grass. There’s a stillness in this place thousands of miles from my home that’s similar to what I experience in the quiet moments at my house in Birmingham when I awaken before the rest of my family. One of the Psalms for today is Psalm 138. Verses 8-9 contain words that satisfy a craving I didn’t know I had.

Though I walk in the midst of trouble, you keep me safe; you stretch forth your hand against the fury of my enemies; your right hand shall save me.

The Lord will make good his purpose for me; O Lord, your love endures for ever; do not abandon the works of your hands.

When we speak the Psalms, our voices mingling with the voices of others around the world or others in church pews, we are all one. We are one with the great host of witnesses throughout time who have turned to the Psalms in worship and prayer. We are one with each other in the space of our local church. I’m reminded I’m not the only subject of this narrative. The Psalter was not given to me. It was given to all of us. The corporate reading and rereading of these windows into our souls result in a corporate forming and re-forming that began generations ago and will continue generations into the future and into eternity. I know God is listening to our feeble prayers. He’s present in both our joys and our struggles. And he’s continuing to mold us all into who he wants us to become.

Charlotte Donlon lives in Homewood, Alabama, with her husband and their two children. She is earning an MFA in creative writing from Seattle Pacific University and does freelance writing and copywriting. Some of her favorite things are gorgeous golden ginkgo trees in the fall, steaming hot toddies in the winter, new signs of life in the spring, and reading under an umbrella on the beach in the summer. Regardless of the season, she finds joy in quiet mornings alone while the rest of her family is still sleeping, in learning about new musicians, authors, and artists who do good work, and in experiencing those “A-ha” moments during the creative process.

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THE ADVENT

ILLUSTR ATION COURTESY OF CHRISTINA DANIEL

BUT NOW By

Hanno van der Bijl

I

enjoy washing the dishes if only because it serves as a valid excuse for being alone.

Shortly after becoming president, Barack Obama said he would miss doing the dishes back home because it was “soothing.” The attraction of the kitchen sink lies in the fact that it is a secret door to one’s internal universe.

In 2013, my young family and I were living in an apartment in Mobile without a dishwasher. We had just moved from an apartment in Boston, also without a dishwasher. It was an ideal situation, because I had a lot to process.

I grew up as a missionary and pastor’s kid in South Africa, Namibia, and South Carolina.

(You’d be surprised how much those places have in common.) I studied Greek in college. I went to seminary. I was a professional Christian.

Every day I thought about my life. Where I had been. What I had accomplished. Where I was going. I was going to do something great, but, more importantly, I was going to be someone great. That didn’t happen after grad school. It didn’t happen working for a Christian nonprofit organization. And it certainly didn’t happen while trying to teach Saudi Arabian students English.

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B UT IT D OESN’ T M ATTER I F YOU JU ST D O N’ T GET THE G O SPEL OR G OD. THR O UGH TH E G OSPEL , G OD GETS YOU. Then my family life took some unexpected turns. Due to severe preeclampsia, my wife had to deliver our firstborn son early by C-section.

He was in the NICU for six weeks, and my wife suffered from post-partum depression.

My father was treated for thyroid cancer. Our local church had a leadership fight, and those of us who remained were cast as accomplices to injustice. Walking down a sidewalk in the middle of a summer day in Boston, it felt as though someone had hit the lights.

Our crash landing in Mobile in 2012 wasn’t so bad except for the fact that I didn’t know where I was going anymore. This was a new experience for me. There were no more struggles or dreams. Just nothing.

What does it say when a seminary grad is working at Chick-fil-A? How do you get back to, “I’d like to do another degree—preferably at Harvard”? How do you tell people you want to be a missionary when you’re not even sure you’re a Christian? All the doors were shut.

Hope came from an unexpected place: my in-laws. While at their house, my father-in-law gave me a big hug and said he wanted to get to know me better.

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He also gave me an iPhone. My motherin-law encouraged me to listen to sermons from Tim Keller—the pastor whose marriage sermons they had introduced to me after my wife and I were engaged. I decided to work my way through all Keller’s sermons on Redeemer Presbyterian’s podcast feed.

One day while getting ready to wash the dishes, I took out my phone, put on my headphones, and opened the podcast app. The next Keller sermon on the list was “Justified

by Faith.”

Justification. Great. Justification is a boring, highly technical issue Presbyterians get really worked up over. I don’t see the attraction or why it matters. But, hey, it would be interesting to hear what Keller has to say.

He preached on Romans 3:21: “But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law.”

“The righteousness of God.” Righteousness, like holiness, was a strange if not negative religious term I didn’t understand. As it turns out, I had been dying for it—approval, significance.

Keller called it “a validating performance record that opens doors.” If you have a good resume,

THE ADVENT

you get the job. If you do a good job, you will be accepted.

“Apart from the law.” Like everyone else, I had been trying to get these things by keeping the law—the law of my professors, my generation, my family, but most of all, the law I had written for myself. Laws were made to be broken, even my own. And that was killing me.

Keller referenced an interview with film director, producer, and actor Sydney Pollock shortly before he died. Pollock’s family had asked him not to work so hard so they could spend more time with him. But he wouldn’t stop. “Every time I finish a picture,” he said, “I feel I’ve earned my stay for another year or so.”

What did I have to justify my existence?

The glow of my previous accomplishments was fading. What was I supposed to do when I couldn’t see and the doors were all shut?

“But now” there was a validating performance record that didn’t come from me. It came from God—the only one who could claim a perfect standard. So it was guaranteed to stick. This was breaking news that changed everything.

The slate wasn’t just wiped clean. Mere forgiveness of sins always made me feel baited:

“I forgive you, so now you better behave.” I couldn’t behave in the first place, so how was I going to start now? Now, not only did Jesus Christ take my punishment, but he also gave me his life—his righteousness, his record, his character, his accomplishments, his merits.

There was now a realistic way forward for me to be at peace with my life and myself. So this is what it means to be a Christian, I thought.

My identity does not rise or fall on my chances at making it, but rather, it is determined by who Jesus Christ is and what he has done and is doing. It’s not up to me or my feelings. I’m justified whether I feel like it or not. This is why it’s called “good news.” The lights came back on.

“Has been manifested.” How is it possible to grow up in Christendom and not know the gospel? The offensiveness of the gospel to the human heart in both religious and secular cultures, of course, provides a clue. Both struggle with the fact that you can be broken and sinful yet loved and accepted at the same time.

The gospel is God’s message of life to you in the midst of all the death within and without you. But it doesn’t matter if you just don’t get the gospel or God. Through the gospel, God gets you.

Hanno van der Bijl is Digital Producer at the Birmingham Business Journal and Web Editor for the Theology of Work Project.

He is married to Lauren, and they have three children, Jeremiah, Beatrix, and Constance Advent.

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AN ARTIST’S GRAND VISION OF THE R E F O R M AT I O N By

K. Lee Scott

“The lines are fallen to me in goodly places; yea, I have a goodly heritage.”

–Psalm 16:6

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n November 2016, I was privileged to present as a gift to Beeson Divinity School a large nineteenth century steel plate engraving entitled, “The Noble Army of Martyrs and Great Champions of the Protestant Reformation.” The print was the creation of Thomas Jones Barker and his engraver, C. G. Lewis, and is dated March 9, 1869. This is the story of how the print came into my possession.

One afternoon several years ago, I wandered into an antique mall to bide my time. There, spread across a table, was a large unframed antique print. I was hesitant to buy it since I was overextended financially at the time, but after thinking about it for two days, I went back and bought it. The message was strong to me. I recently had been faithful in professional commitment, with God’s help, to complete a musical recording from a Reformed perspective. God seemed to confirm my decision and encouraged me with the rich gift of this engraving celebrating the very heritage I had sought to honor in my music.

Thomas Jones Barker was one of England’s most noted painters of the nineteenth century. Born at Bath in 1815 into a long line of artists, Barker traveled to Paris at age nineteen to study with Horace Vernet, a famous painter of military themes. Returning to England and settling in London in 1845, he also established himself as a painter known for his military works. There was certainly no lack of possible subject matter at the time as England was involved in the Napoleonic, Crimean, and Franco-Prussian Wars. Some of these paintings include “The Meeting of Wellington and Bucher” (1851) and “Riderless War Horses after the Battle of Sedan” (1873). All these and similar 62

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works contain large numbers of figures in sweeping landscapes. Many were created to be further processed into steel plate engravings for wider publication and enjoyment. Barker died in London in 1882.

It was common in past centuries for engraved prints to be made of paintings, either by the painters themselves (Rembrandt, for example) or by others. In the case of “The Noble Army of Martyrs,” it is entirely possible that the painting was encouraged or even commissioned by the publisher of fine art prints R. Turner, Fine Art Publishers, Newcastle-on-Tyne and London. An indication of their involvement in the project is their publication of a 22-page booklet entitled Description and Analysis of the Historical Painting by T. Jones Barker of the Noble Army of Martyrs. The booklet is signed “Delta” in Greek, but I suspect that R. Turner himself is the author, and though it’s undated, it was likely published in 1867 because R. Turner also published the print that year. The booklet makes the case that Barker created his painting in response to the movement called Ritualism, which was sweeping the Church of England in the nineteenth century. This movement sought to carry the British church back toward medieval church thought and practice. To counter the Ritualist movement, according to the booklet, Barker “boldly took his stand in 1863 at his easel to do what he could to arouse the spirit of England to take action ere it be too late.”1 In Barker’s grand vision, the figures of martyrs and contributors to the Reformation sweep across the surface in a broad landscape in keeping with the style of his military paintings. The English martyrs comprising the central group include William Tyndale, Thomas Cranmer, and Nicholas Ridley. To the left of this group is a single gentleman looking steadfastly at them, but standing apart. He has the foot of a lion. This is Sir Thomas More. Barker seems to indicate that More, who was not part of them, was one with them in spirit. To the far left is Martin Luther and his German compatriots. To the far lower right is a group of Englishmen who were not martyred, but were notable for their contributions—including John Bunyan, who is holding a copy of his The Pilgrim’s Progress.

For several years the print hung in my living room and then in the choir room at St. Thomas Episcopal, where I served as Organist/Music Director for five years. I gifted the engraving to Beeson Divinity School because such a monumental piece belongs in a place where it can instruct and inspire for generations to come.

1. Description and Analysis of the Historical Painting by T. Jones Barker, The Noble Army of Martyrs, probably 1867, by Anon., p. 4

IMAGE COURTESY OF K. LEE SCOTT

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K. Lee Scott is recognized as one of America’s foremost composers of music for the church during the past two decades. His hymns appear in eight hymnals, and he has published more than three hundred compositions. He lives in Birmingham.

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BY

To better understand the Protestant Reformation in this anniversary year and its relevancy to us 500 years later, I could think of no better person to talk to than Dr. Michael Horton. He wears many hats as a professor, pastor, radio host, magazine editor, and prolific author, focusing always on the essential truths of Christianity that the churches of the Reformation heritage share in common. In other words, Michael embodies the Reformation. If you’ve never listened to his radio program and podcast, the White Horse Inn, it’s a real gem worth adding to your podcast subscriptions or finding online.

Matt: Would you introduce yourself?

Michael: I teach at Westminster Seminary California. I teach systematic theology and apologetics. I’m a minister in the United Reformed Church, and I have a wife and four children.

Matt: The theme of our issue is Re-formation, and the reason I wanted to interview you is you are someone I naturally think of as a scholar working in light of the Protestant Reformation.

Before we go in depth, what was the Reformation, and why was it necessary?

Michael: The Reformation was a confluence of various movements that were surging throughout the Middle Ages, but the thing that made it really different in the case of Martin Luther was that he really sought reforms not just with church government and the immorality of the clergy and the debauchery of Rome and their abuses. He was also concerned centrally with the fact that the medieval church had obscured Christ—basically Christ was necessary but not sufficient for our salvation. The Reformation came down to that really.

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Matt: What are some examples of ways they obscured the sufficiency of Christ?

Michael: First, with other. They said Christ’s mediation is essential but that there are other mediators. So it’s also the merit of the saints and your own obedience too. Basically, Christ was the most important of many mediators and meritors for redemption.

Matt: You’re the editor of a magazine called Modern Reformation. The idea of a modern reformation is one thing I’d like to talk to you about. What do you mean by modern reformation in light of what you just said about Luther? Why is it still relevant today?

Michael: I think that we need one more desperately than they did in the sixteenth century. When you look at the state of the medieval church, it was pretty serious. But at least you couldn’t outright deny the doctrines of original sin and the necessity of faith in Christ. Today even those basic assumptions are being questioned. If the problem with the medieval church was that it embraced a half-way view that we save ourselves, then today within Protestantism we have a fullfledged salvation by self-effort alive and well in so-called churches of the Reformation.

Matt: In terms of a modern reformation, are you hoping for something like a revival, or is that too high of a hope for a culture that is so far gone?

Michael: I think people still fear death. That’s a parallel with the medieval world. People were afraid of death, and they were afraid of judgment. We’re not necessarily afraid of judgment, but we’re afraid of death, which is a kind of judgment. The issues that the Reformation

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addressed are perenniOUR TENDENCY al, human issues. Is life IS TO TRY TO meaningless? If there is purpose, then what FIT GOD INTO is that purpose? Surely O U R S T O R Y. I T ’ S if there is a God and he has a purpose for N O T T H AT W E my life and the world, D O N ’ T H AV E A then I must be held responsible for whether PLACE FOR GOD. I fulfill that purpose WE DO. HE’S A or not. If I don’t fulfill that purpose, what SUPPORTING happens then? It’s realACTOR IN OUR ly important for us to rearticulate this story LIFE’S MOVIE. for a new generation that has never heard it—the biblical story from Genesis to Revelation. We can’t just reduce this to four spiritual laws or three clever sentences. It’s really a story that unfolds from a good creation to a tragic fall to the history of Israel to Christ being the true Adam and faithful Israel to our being united to Christ through the work of the Holy Spirit. It’s about the kingdom of God and the resurrection of the dead at the end. Even if you don’t believe it, you could wish that it were true because it’s such a great story. But I fear Christianity has been reduced to platitudes and moralisms with a few doctrinal slogans rather than a great dramatic narrative.

Matt: Your most recent project is the curriculum Core Christianity: Finding Yourself in God’s Story. Does what you just said explain why you put this together?

Michael: Absolutely. Our tendency is to try to fit God into our story. It’s not that we don’t have a place for God. We do. He’s a supporting actor

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in our life’s movie. He has cameo appearances.

He has a very important role to make me happy and to fix my marriage and to make sure that my kids are good. But it’s a supporting role in my life movie to make me a better me. What a small story compared to the great story of God and what he has done in Christ for me.

It’s not about me. With the gospel, instead of God being a supporting actor in my movie, he casts me into his unfolding drama. I’m now in the greatest story ever told, even if it’s as a recipient of God’s mercy. I’m an adopted child of God. I go from being a dead, selfish, lifeless, condemned son of Adam to being a justified, sanctified, and one day glorified adopted child of the Father in Christ. That’s unbelievable—far better to be a supporting member of the supporting cast in that story than to be the star of my own show about nothing.

swer to everyone who asks, but we have to do it with gentleness and respect. That doesn’t always happen. How we communicate is very important. At the same time, what we say should not be tailored to what people want to hear. The bottom line is people don’t want to hear what they don’t want to know when it comes to religion. And the gospel is not something people already know. The purpose of religion is to help reinforce what you already know about life and the world, namely that you are supposed to be good and you could be better if you just had some coaching. The gospel is counterintuitive, that God justifies the ungodly. That’s crazy! I’m amazed at how many times complete skeptics who really hate the idea of a God who is just and might even send some people to hell are also so offended by the pure grace and mercy of a God who actually declares righteous those who in themselves are wicked.

Matt: So you put Core Christianity together to get this across to everyday people?

Matt: If the doctrine flows out of the drama, what are some of the key Reformation doctrines that everyone should know?

Michael: Exactly. What we’re hearing about younger generations is that if you give them a doctrine that is abstracted, they say, “Hmm, I’m glad you find that interesting.” Give them a story that includes them—that they might wish that they could be characters in—and it’s totally different. The great thing about the Reformation was the doctrine came out of the story. The Reformers didn’t just say Rome had a few doctrines wrong. The Reformers said Rome got the plot wrong.

Michael: The Reformation, when it came to the doctrine, was not a wholesale reconstruction of Christianity. The Reformers were not out to create a new doctrine of the Trinity or the deity of Christ, for example.

Matt: So the Reformation was a recovery of what was lost.

Michael: Yes. It was the recovery of what was lost, and not everything was lost. Not even the gospel was completely lost. It was just distorted so far beyond recognition that it was really hard for people to hear and embrace it. What was given with the right hand would be taken away with the left. When you think of the main doc-

Matt: Do you think we need to figure out winsome ways to tell this story, or do you think the story tells itself—that it’s timeless?

Michael: Of course we have to be winsome. As Peter tells us, we have to be ready to give an an-

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trines that were at the core of the Reformation, it was first of all Christ alone. In Christ we have justification. We have sanctification. We have adoption. We have glorification. All the blessings that we have from God the Father come to us in the Son. We don’t look for any of the gifts of God apart from Christ. If you have Christ, you have everything. This is so hard for us to believe. Yet it’s what the Scriptures teach—that Christ’s righteousness is imputed to us, sort of like someone’s wealth being credited into the account of someone who is penniless or in debt.

That means we can stand before God, clothed in his righteousness. The Bible uses so many metaphors for this, and the Reformers were delighted to talk about this great exchange: his riches for our poverty, his righteousness for our rags of sin. This exchange affects all kinds of other doctrines. How is it that we grow in the Christian life? Is it by trying to become a better person, or is it through union with Christ, being gradually conformed to the image of the Son through the gospel and the sacraments in the power of the Holy Spirit? On all of these points the Reformers differed from Rome. It all really came down to this: is God a gift-giver or a gift-receiver? Is he gifting the kingdom to us, or are we are building the kingdom and doing stuff for him that he then rewards us for?

them to the door IT’S HARD TO of the church, he R E A L LY E V E N TA L K wasn’t trying to start a reformation. He A B O U T U LT I M AT E was simply raising T H I N G S T H AT questions for debate among scholars. LitM AT T E R B E C A U S E tle did he know that THINGS ARE SO it would be picked up by everybody POLITICIZED, AND and the press would T H AT ’ S T H E WAY carry it as a headline in the morning.

T H E Y W E R E AT There are lots of theTHE TIME OF THE ses I think we could think of in our day, R E F O R M AT I O N . but I think that a lot of them would come down to the same thing: commercialization of the gospel. That was what the Roman church was doing by selling indulgences. If you do enough, if you give enough, if you can become enough, then you are fit for the kingdom of God. All of those issues are still alive and well for us today.

Matt: What would be the Ninety-five Theses that we ought to nail to the American church’s door?

Matt: Just in terms of rhetoric these days, we can’t really disagree anymore, can we? We don’t have this type of discourse that Luther wanted to have back then. It’s no longer an open discussion as disagreement is taken as insult. People react with violence and vitriol.

Michael: A lot of them are there in Luther’s Ninety-five Theses. The main thing for him was Rome was selling salvation literally for money in order to build the largest cathedral up to that point, which stands even now: St. Peter’s in Rome, where the Pope gives his speeches.

That was the reason for the Reformation. At that point when Luther wrote the Ninety-five Theses and, according to legend at least, nailed

Michael: It’s both on the left and the right. It’s hard to really even talk about ultimate things that matter because things are so politicized, and that’s the way they were at the time of the Reformation. At the end of the day the Popes didn’t care who was right doctrinally.

What they cared about was that the Pope got to decide because of the political hegemony of Christendom. Politics has always had a way of

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insinuating itself into the life of the church in ways that actually turn the church into something other than the embassy of God’s grace in a world that is so bent on division and rivalry.

fathers were not of one mind. There was a spectrum in their emphases, just as you always had in the history of the church even among those who all agreed on the orthodox doctrines of the Trinity and the deity of Christ. Some were more influenced by the Greek heritage of Plato and the Stoics. Others were more willing to challenge their philosophical heritage by the drama of biblical redemption. So I’m a great fan of Irenaeus. I also love the Cappadocian Fathers: Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, and Basil of Caesarea. Augustine, of course, is a favorite of mine too.

Matt: I feel like we can be to blame for these types of things. Often folks who come from Reformation traditions want to view the Reformation as the only bright spot in church history, but like you said earlier, the Reformers were recovering the work of the early church, particularly folks like Augustine.

Michael: That’s a very important point. The reformers themselves won many people, including really highly placed church leaders, to the Reformation cause precisely because they quoted the church fathers. They demonstrated that the church fathers were actually on their side—that the church fathers had defended everything they were arguing for as well. The argument of the reformers was not novelty, that we need a new church with new doctrine. Quite the contrary, they said it was medieval Rome that had invented new doctrines and new practices and new forms of worship. What they were trying to do is go back to the apostles’ doctrine, worship, and practice that are in accord with the best of the early church. They were saying not only had medieval Rome departed from the New Testament, they had even departed from the church fathers. So basically, what you’re doing are brand new innovations.

Matt: If folks were going to read one thing by Augustine, what should it be?

Michael: It’s hard to say. Probably his The Trinity. It’s really his whole theology built around the doctrine of the Trinity. It’s a marvelous piece of work by a mature Augustine. Good grief, if you read The City of God, you’ll almost think he’s responding to our recent election. It reminds you that the wisdom of the past is wisdom regardless of whether it’s past. Let’s honor the dead, the dead who really thought deeply and profoundly about the Word of God and how to apply it in their time and place. They have more to say to us than the shallow people of our own time. I have tremendous respect for people who know far more than I do about the Scriptures, far more than I do about their own culture, and Augustine was one of those people. John Chrysostom would be another example—the patriarch of Constantinople who was also a great favorite of John Calvin’s along with Augustine. The danger for evangelicalism is though it claims to be and in a lot of ways really is the passing on the heritage of the Reformation, in many ways it does not carry the DNA of the Reformation. It isn’t churchly. It doesn’t really have a connection with what went before the

Matt: Who are some people that we can be reading in the early church that might be worth recovering today?

Michael: My favorite is Irenaeus. There is a sharp contrast between the trajectory of Irenaeus in the early church. I could go into greater detail there, but it’s interesting that the church

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Reformation and has a tendency at least to see the church beginning with Billy Graham.

Matt: As someone who has just written his version of Mere Christianity or Basic Christianity, do you feel like “mission accomplished” with Core Christianity, or are there some other projects on your horizon?

Michael: One thing I’ve become really clear about is the Lord certainly doesn’t need me to write. I’ve been really impressed with a lot of things I’ve read lately by other people that have really made a difference to me. I’m very encouraged actually. There’s a groundswell of interest in a new Reformation. I just finished a book on the Holy Spirit that I’m eager to see published.

There are other projects that I’m interested in though. I have a book on justification coming out in a series on dogmatic theology. It’ll be a little more on the academic side. I still want to write. I still want to research. I still want to defend the theology of the Reformation. But I’m really encouraged that there are people who are better writers than I am.

Matt: You call this recent interest in Reformation teaching a groundswell. What do you think is happening? And who are some of those folks out there right now who are worth reading?

Michael: People like Michael Allen, Scott Swain, and Justin Holcomb. Others I could mention would be Kevin DeYoung and the sort of Gospel Coalition folks. Those would be examples of a new generation of people from all sorts of different denominations not historically out of the Reformation who are excited about these doctrines. I think that one of the things that really surprises me is the extent to which some churches of the Reformation are losing their connection with and interest in these doctrines that ignited the Reformers. At the very same 72

time so many non-Lutheran and non-Reformed people are just thrilled to death about these truths. We’ll see what happens. One of the things that excites me is the fact that around the world in the Global South—Africa, Latin America, and Asia—the churches that are proclaiming these doctrines of grace most faithfully are exploding while many churches in America that descended from the Reformation are dying precisely because they are no longer interested.

Matt: What’s one of those places in particular in the Global South where it’s blossoming?

Michael: I think of Africa for example.

All of Africa really, I’VE BEEN but sub-Saharan AfriR E A L LY ca I especially have in mind. There are more IMPRESSED Reformed Christians WITH A LOT OF in Nigeria for example than there are in THINGS I’VE North America. ActuR E A D L AT E LY B Y ally, the confessional Presbyterian denomOTHER PEOPLE ination in Mexico is T H AT H AV E larger than any of the confessional PresbyR E A L LY M A D E A terian denominations DIFFERENCE TO in North America. The Presbyterian church ME. I’M VERY of Brazil has 2 million ENCOURAGED members. The largest Presbyterian church A C T U A L LY. in the United States, the PCA, has 360,000 members by comparison. In Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world, there are Reformed churches growing all across the nation. The same thing with India. I’m very excited to see what the Lord is doing through the witness of people who don’t have the support of

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religious freedom and other benefits, but they are simply telling others about the gospel. It’s like a fire igniting.

have intense catechesis before people are confirmed—about a year of taking catechism classes. They’re really serious about it, yet they have four and a half million members. And that doubles every couple of years. Meanwhile, how easy it is to join a church in North America and then leave the church if you don’t like the music?

Matt: That’s really encouraging. Are there some things you’ve learned from how the Reformed church is operating and communicating this message from the Global South that is worth paying attention to, maybe duplicating?

Matt: It’s a paradox: The barrier for entry is high, yet people stick around and are even more committed

Michael: I’ll refer specifically to what I’ve seen in Nigeria. There is an intense concern to really be faithful to a word and sacrament ministry.

For example, when the church growth movement came to Nigeria, the churches said no to it. They said, “We’re not going to learn from North Americans how to sell hamburgers. The church is in a different line of business than McDonald’s. We’re not going to go down that path. Christ is not a product to sell.”

Michael: Exactly! It’s called discipleship. We can either build an industry, or we can join the church Jesus is building. That’s what a lot of Christians around the world are doing. And a lot of churches in United States we might add.

Matt: Any final thoughts about all that we’ve talked about?

Matt: So they rejected consumerism and church growth and focused on the basics, and they’re blossoming?

Michael: Just that I’m encouraged by what you’re doing and looking forward to learning more about how God is using the Cathedral Church of the Advent and the larger ministries that you’re all engaged in. Power to you.

Michael: Yes, they’re exploding. I asked them how they do it, and they explained that they

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BY

SARAH CONDON

P O STC A R D AT T H E BOTTOM OF THE BOX

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n my last visit home to Mississippi, my father pulled out a box from his uncle Paul. “I have been avoiding going through this,” he muttered, “but if you’re here, I don’t have to go through it alone.” Uncle Paul never had children, so he set aside a box of his things specifically for my dad. Most of it was from World War II. There was a gorgeous photo of my great grandmother, papers acknowledging Paul’s military service, and some Nazi medals he took off dead soldiers’ bodies. At the bottom of the box was a postcard of Martin Luther.

I gasped. My father took one look at me and said, “Of course you can have it.”

Anne Lamott once wrote that it is important that we find mothers and fathers in people other than those we are biologically given.

Realistically, we cannot expect our parents to cover all the bases.

Luther began to feel like a father to me years ago. His message of the gospel felt like something I had always known but never heard fully explained. We know that lineage matters in scripture.

Through it, we learn that events were long ago plotted out by the heavens—like uncles, fathers, spiritual fathers, daughters, and postcards that were intended for the right person at the right time.

Sarah Condon is an Episcopal minister in Texas. In her spare time she reads all the Martin Luther they didn’t assign in seminary.

IMAGE COURTESY OF SARAH CONDON

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" E L E G Y V " C O U R T E S Y O F J O E C O R Y, 2 0 1 7.

1 0 ” X 14 ” D I G I TA L LY A LT E R E D C O L L A G E USING FOUND MATERIALS.

P O E T RY

Good Thief (for Cat)

By John Goodman Oh I have deserved this, I have deserved worse, unlike those who cheer on my oblivion, who never knew, or knew but dimly, the Gordian knot of me, my fate not to bless, but curse.

My thought was ever to self-lacerate, but others seemed to be about my knives, always. Two quarts daily were midwives to the hates I birthed, I nursed, I raised.

A man’s past keeps growing, even when (as now) his future has come full stop: I now can see that the hands I slapped reached out in love for me.

But did I not always know it? Can you allow

a portion of the grace I did not show?

Forgive me, forgive me! Not for the edifice of scorn I built for those at peace with this, my ending, but instead for my affront to you,

who could have, had I only mouthed the word, clean erased the blackness in this soul, roomed with love this emptiness, this hole.

I say it now. Remember me, O Lord.

John Goodman is a Pharisee (lawyer) who is married to a beautiful opera singer and a rambunctious Rottweiler. He is a member of the Advent, where he can be heard on Sundays in the choir stalls singing vigorously off-key. More of his poetry can be found at tumblr.com/blog/oatlandgoodman.

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LITURGY + MUSIC

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BY

ZAC HICKS

#worshipmarch: God’s Reconstructive Protest

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he label “Protestant” has taken on a life of its own in the last 500 years since the dawn of the Reformation. It has become associated with many things, some worthy of applause, others worthy of everything from a face-palm to full-blown lamentation. Contained in the title “Protestant” is a word that has come to signify the essence of the movement: protest.

As a pastor, worship leader, and artist, I live daily in the world of liturgies, prayers, music, and spiritual formation. I think often about how worship services shape people into flourishing human beings. From this perspective, I have come to believe that worship itself acts on us. It does something to us. It molds us. It chisels shape out of our shapelessness. And I further believe that one of the ways worship acts is through protest.

Jean-Jacques von Allmen, forgotten Swiss theologian, friend and contemporary of Karl Barth, introduced me to the idea of worship as protest.1 Through von Allmen’s spectacles, I see worship marching on the streets of our souls each and every week, picketing against the values and powers that too often have rule and reign in our hearts. Worship shouts mantras. Worship makes claims.

Worship holds up a megaphone to the seemingly immovable stony fortresses of our psyches. How does worship do this work? Worship protests against and for, and in that order.

1. Jean-Jacques von Allmen, Worship: Its Theology and Practice (New York: Oxford, 1965), 62-74.

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When I got to Birmingham, I wasn’t prepared for the warning of my fellow ministers: college football is king. It’s amazing how much our Sunday morning attendance is affected by Saturday’s outcome. A friend recently told me that attending a game in Tuscaloosa feels like participating in a worship service.

And he’s not far off.

Von Allmen powerfully thunders: “Every time the church assembles to [worHOW DOES WORSHIP ship], to ‘proclaim the death of Christ’ (1 DO THIS WORK? Corinthians 11:26), it proclaims also the end of the world and the failure of the WORSHIP PROTESTS world. It contradicts the world’s claim AGAINST AND FOR, to provide men with a valid justification for their existence.”2 The world around A N D I N T H AT O R D E R . us erects all kinds of literal and metaphorical edifices in order to find a “valid justification for our existence.” They are monuments to our success and our vision of the good life. They reflect our passions and values. A football stadium is one such construction project. Let’s entertain a few others.

We build banks. The world spins on the axis of wealth. The good life is the abundant life, the life of plenty. And so we create institutions in our countries and in our hearts dedicated to the preservation of this abundance, hedging all our bets on them—everything from economic theories like free-market capitalism, to political policies on trade in the global market, to solutions for the national debt.

We erect shelters for the impoverished. Another one of the world’s tactics is to deal with the guilt we all feel about the poor among us by championing institutions and mechanisms that “solve” the problem of poverty. We pass laws, earmark national dollars, form non-profits, and galvanize local efforts.

We construct storage facilities, forming programs or institutions to save up for the lean times or the day of reckoning—whether it be institutions for us to accrue, amass, or preserve our wealth, or building up our military for impending conflict. We value our power and strength, and so we store up for ourselves what we need to ensure our stability.

We create courthouses. Justice is a big issue, and so we reserve real estate for confronting injustice—national movements to raise awareness about racial

2. von Allmen, Worship, 63.

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inequality, staged protests against unjust policies and presidents, city or state ordinances to protect the rights of the underprivileged or exploited.

The world embarks on all these construction projects and more. And these efforts aren’t all bad. In some cases, they’re downright biblical. They share the heart and values of God himself. Even so, there is a perpetual human tendency for us to turn these penultimate institutions of the world into fortresses of ultimate hope. We give them our heart. This is what von Allmen means when he describes these works as efforts of “self-justification.” Then worship comes along each week to protest this idolatry, to remind us that we shouldn’t entrust ourselves to “horses and chariots,” but to “the name of the Lord our God” (Psalm 20:7, ESV). When we are called into worship, we are confronted with a choice: hope in the world, or hope in God. Worship protests any blending or blurring of the either/or. I half think that this is why it’s so hard to face God the day after a football game—worship confronts us with the truth that our hearts have been poured out upon another altar.

WORSHIP PROT EST S AGAINST ME

It gets more personal, though. We not only build world edifices that become monuments to the global systems and structures that we value more than God. Self-justification is at its heart personal and individual. In addition to constructing worldwide kingdoms, we are also busy tending to our own local municipalities.

We erect buildings dedicated to personal wellness—healthy eating, hitting the gym, appropriate work-rest rhythms and the like. When we succeed, we feel pretty good about ourselves. When we fail, we try to bury our sense of weakness and defeat.

We build skyscrapers to elevate our personal prestige. Sometimes these towers look like obsessing over perfect grades and performance in our college and graduate education. Other times it looks like being “crazy busy,” as we say—long hours in the office at our startup companies, to the neglect of our friendships or families.

We construct recreational facilities. Perhaps our overwork has left us dry, or maybe our work is simply unfulfilling, so we put our eggs in the “fun” basket.

We work to play. We live for evenings, weekends, and vacations, binging on the things we really love to do—gaming, Netflix, reading, drinking, hiking, socializing, fancy dinners, clubbing. They stimulate us or give us a shot of life and adrenaline. We recreate to feel alive.

We even build prisons. Some of us carve out space in our life for self-discipline,

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self-punishment, or self-loathing. Perhaps we feel the emptiness or vanity of the construction projects described above, and so to show God or ourselves that we’re serious, we reserve a corner block for self-flagellation. Our prisons make us feel devout, dedicated, and sincere amidst the nagging notion that our relationships with God and others are perpetually strained because of our own misdeeds. We could go on and on with the metaphor, but I think we get the point: our life is one big “urban project.”

WHEN WE ARE Into that metropolis each week marches the Word of God in worship, floodC A L L E D I N T O W O R S H I P, ing the streets and alleys of our heart WE ARE CONFRONTED with signs and shouts. Hashtag worshipmarch—#worshipmarch. Worship WITH A CHOICE: speaks truth to power by claiming that HOPE IN THE WORLD, all these edifices we’ve erected are hopeless Babel-towers—they will never fulfill, OR HOPE IN GOD. never get us to God. This is precisely what Paul meant when he said that “by works of the law no human being will be justified” (Romans 3:20, ESV). (This recovered insight, by the way, just might be the epicenter of the earthquake of the Protestant Reformation.)

I confess to being a prison-builder. I have always been one of the “good kids,” with a sensitive conscience and magnetically charged moral compass.

In one worship service not long ago, the preacher said something that hit my puritanical self right between the eyes: “Perhaps some of us here need to repent, not of our unrighteousness but of our righteousness.” In that moment, I was confronted by worship’s protest: “You’re not good enough! You’re an imposter!”

Worship forces us to reckon with what our souls really are—ghost towns.

Their facades might appear to house all kinds of life, but inside our walls are unfinished rooms, rotting studs, and rusted wiring and plumbing. It is why those of us in the Anglican tradition pray that little line in our confession:

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“there is no health in us.” We are finally yielding to the street picketers whose shouts are shaking our paper-thin walls.

WORSHIP PROT EST S FOR CHRIST

We’re used to hearing “protest” as we’ve used it above, as a negative word—to testify against something. Protestantism has unfortunately come to be defined by this negativity: we are not Roman Catholic. While there is truth in this attribution, I would hope that Protestantism would come to stand first for something positive, in keeping with the original idea of “protest.” “Pro” is a positive prefix.

It is for something. Our pro-test is nothing more and nothing less than our testimony for Christ. In the words of Paul, the best of Protestantism should be that we “know nothing” with such surety, such conviction, “except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2, ESV).

All good and true worship makes a positive case for the power of the cross of Christ. After deconstructing all other self-salvation projects, worship lifts high—in prayer, preaching, sacrament, and song—that place where justice and mercy meet, once for all time. It is at the cross and through the cross where all other meaning-making finds its center. Extending our metaphor, we see the cross not only as the town square or central fixture of our city. We might be better served to see its wooden beams as the very building material for all our other edifices. Worship, by testifying to the cross’s power to reconcile us to God and to one another, reminds us of the chief cornerstone on which all other projects build. From the protest for the cross, we can work for justice.

From the protest for the cross, we can seek reconciliation. From the protest for the cross, we can pursue personal wellness. From the protest for the cross, we’re free to receive the world as a gift, to play.

When worship protests against us and for the cross, all of a sudden, humanity is re-given the world as a re-construction project where all the edifices we erect, unique as they are, share the uncanny architectural resemblance of cruciformity.

This is the power of the #worshipmarch.

Zac Hicks is Canon for Worship and Liturgy at Cathedral Church of the Advent and author of The Worship Pastor (Zondervan, 2016). In a vain thrust toward humility, his phone’s home screen displays a picture of his wife, Abby, giving him the “you’re not as cool as you think you are” look.

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REFORMING C U LT U R A L OUTLOOK

By Doug Webster

D O U G W E B S T E R teaches pastoral theology and preaching at Beeson Divinity School. He and his wife, Virginia, enjoy the Advent, where he serves as Teaching Pastor. Their three married children are living in Seattle, San Diego, and Costa Rica, which always means a hike to visit the grandkids.

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1

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

by J. D. Vance (2016) “I want people to understand,” writes J. D. Vance, that “the demons of the life we left behind continue to chase us.” What made his childhood grim was a litany of everyday experiences endured by millions of Americans who live in Greater Appalachia, in the Post-Industrial Midwest, and in the Deep South: bad public schools, an epidemic of prescription drug addiction, a distorted work ethic, racism, sexism, folk religion, patterns of deception and manipulation, resentment, broken families, physical and sexual abuse, vulgar language, fierce family loyalty, unhealthy eating habits, and a systemic culture of blame, low expectations, and excuses.

Vance dedicated the book to his hillbilly grandparents who loved and protected him from his abusive mother. Some parts of his story are hard to read. “Though I hated school,” writes Vance, “I hated home more . . . You never knew when the wrong word would turn a quiet dinner into a terrible fight, or when a minor childhood transgression would send a plate or book flying across the room. It was like we were living among land mines – one wrong step, kaboom.”

The loving loyalty of his grandparents and sister gave Vance something to live for, but it was the Marines who gave him an identity and helped him to grow up. He learned helplessness and resentment at home, but the Marines turned him around and gave him a sense of self-respect, purpose, and confidence.

The Marines assumed “maximum ignorance from its enlisted folks” and then proceeded to teach them everything the Marine Corps thought they needed to know. They taught him that his choices mattered and that giving it your all was a way of life.

Hillbilly Elegy challenges our conformity to cultural patterns. The systemic sins of our ancestors and culture are often too deeply ingrained in us to be cast off without a fight. As we grow in the grace of Christ, the habits and strategies of our “home” culture are confronted. To read this book is to analyze our family of origin and the cultural prejudices that haunt our outlook on life. No matter how independent and self-made we may think we are, we are the product of cultural forces that have a major impact on our lives. These forces often lie unexamined in our psyche, hidden beneath our public persona and cultural self.

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2

Death by Suburb: How to Keep the Suburbs from Killing Your Soul

by David L. Goetz (2006) Death by Suburb and Hillbilly Elegy use the genre of memoir to critique the pervasive and undetected dangers of a spiritually oppressive culture. For J. D. Vance it is the Ohio Rust Belt and the Greater Appalachia region. For Goetz it is the upscale western suburbs of Chicago, specifically Wheaton, Illinois. They are two very different places, but both cultures are hard on the soul. Neither place is conducive to living the Christian life.

There’s no debate that living in an upscale suburb is easier and nicer than living in hillbilly country, but that’s not the issue. Goetz’s thesis is that comfortable, sheltered suburban living produces “inverse spiritual cripples,” people with “bloated, tiny souls.” Well-educated, well-mannered suburbanites are trained to be superficial, self-centered, and superior. “Too much of the good life ends up being toxic, deforming us spiritually,” he writes. “The drive to succeed, to make one’s children succeed, overpowers the best intentions to live more reflectively, no matter the piety. Should it be any surprise that the true life in Christ never germinates?”

According to Goetz religion doesn’t solve the problem of the “bloated little soul.”

The temptation in suburbia is to leverage every relationship, every purchase, and every effort in the interest of shoring up a fragile ego. We want friends who make us feel better about ourselves rather than friends who will make us better Christians. His advice for overcoming Perpetual Spiritual Adolescence (PSA) is to stay rooted in Christian community, even when, as he says, “everything inside me screams to pack up my hurt feelings and find a more ideal community.”

Goetz is convinced that knowing Christ involves participating in the suffering of others for the sake of the gospel. “You find a place to serve where no matter how many resources you leverage for the kingdom of God, you don’t see much change . . . You do it, not because you will be successful, but out of old-fashioned obedience to what God has asked you to do.” Goetz quotes a father in early midlife commenting about his special needs son who was approaching his teenage years: “God has been merciful, patient, and steady through our experience with Jacob. I loathe the thought of who I might be had God not brought him into my life.”

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3

To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, & Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World

by James Davison Hunter (2010) University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter makes a strong case for the faithful presence of Christ’s followers in a world that will not change. The ways of the world are far more complicated and deeply rooted in the human condition than we can imagine. “Most of what really counts, in terms of what shapes us and directs us, we are not aware of;” Hunter claims, “it operates far below what most of us are capable of consciously grasping.”

Hillbilly Elegy and Death by Suburb illustrate Hunter’s sociological hypothesis: The ugly and beautiful sides of evil are too deeply entrenched in culture. We cannot change the world, but we can be transformed by Christ in the world.

Many Christians who think that they are “on fire for Jesus” have no idea how they have been influenced by the world. They see themselves as world changers, but in reality they are products of the world.

If culture changes from the top down through networks of powerful elites, should not Christians aspire to assume these critical positions of influence? Hunter’s answer is emphatic: “Elitism for believers is despicable and utterly anathema to the gospel they cherish.” Any quest for power and superiority is “abhorrent for the Christian” and runs contrary to the stewardship of the kingdom of God. Hunter challenges believers to “disentangle the life and identity of the church from the life and identity of American society” and embrace a “salt and light” impact that is “decoupled” from worldly power.

To be the faithful presence Christ calls us to be is bound to set us apart as resident aliens, as strangers in our home culture. The world is the world. Instead of trying to change the world, be the people of God in the world. Instead of worrying about what the world thinks, instead of growing angry about what the world does, be concerned about living according to God’s will. Instead of focusing on the badness of the world, focus on the goodness of God. If the church spent more time ridding itself of “all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander,” (1 Peter 2:1) then she would have a far greater witness to the world.

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O U R S TO RY

AF TER WORSHIPPING FOR SEVER AL MON THS WITHOU T A SUFFICIEN T AND PERMANEN T GATHERING S PAC E , I N 1 8 7 3 T H E C H U R C H O F T H E A DV E N T B EC A M E T H E F I R ST E P I S C O PA L C H U R C H B U I L D I N G I N B I R M I N G H A M A N D T H E S E C O N D I N J E F F E R S O N C O U N T Y. I T W A S A S M A L L F R A M E S T R U C T U R E O F 6 0 X 2 5 F E E T W I T H A S E AT I N G C A PAC I T Y O F 2 0 0 P EO P L E . T H E C O N G R EG AT I O N C A L L E D T H E I R L I T T L E ST R U C T U R E “ O U R S T R A I G H T- U P - A N D - D O W N C H U R C H ” B E C A U S E I T S C L A P B O A R D S I D I N G W A S S E T P E R P E N D I C U L A R .

T H E B U I L D I N G WA S PA I N T E D A S O F T TA N A N D O C H R E W I T H R E D -B R OW N T R I M . I T FAC E D N O RT H O N SIX TH AVENUE AND WAS SET BACK SOME FROM THE STREET ABOU T WHERE CLINGMAN COMMONS , OUR F E L L O W S H I P H A L L , I S N O W. U N F O R T U N A T E LY, A F I R E D E S T R O Y E D T H E L I T T L E C H U R C H B U I L D I N G O N T H A N K S G I V I N G D A Y, N O V E M B E R 2 4 , 1 8 9 2 .

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ABOUT THE CATHEDRAL CHURCH OF THE ADVENT The Cathedral Church of the Advent was founded in 1872, one year after the city of Birmingham, making the Advent one of the oldest churches in the city.

Our 3,600-member congregation comprises one of the largest Episcopal parishes in the United States, and since 1982 the Advent has served as the cathedral for the Episcopal Diocese of Alabama.

The Advent is a gospel-centered church, with a “living, daring confidence in God’s grace” (Martin Luther) evident in our many programs and ministries.

Holding to what the Letter of Jude calls “the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints,” this gospel focus finds the cross and resurrection of Jesus ever and only at the center. The most comprehensive summation of our traditional Anglican doctrine is found in the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion. The “fruits” of our theology are: A HEART FOR THE GOSPEL When we say we have a heart for the gospel, we mean that we are passionate about lifting Jesus up in his life, death, and resurrection. Only Jesus has the power to change the heart of a sinner.

A HEART FOR THOSE WHO HAVE NOT HEARD THE GOSPEL There are still people in the world (even in Birmingham) who have never heard the gospel. In obedience to Christ and with compassion for others, we who are consciously aware of our own sinfulness put forth this message of Christ’s love for those who have never heard it.

A HEART FOR THOSE WHO HAVE BEEN BURNED

BY THE CHURCH Many in our culture have had an experience with the church that has turned them away from the faith. A majority of those whom sociologists call “nones”— those who claim no religious affiliation—say they grew up in the church. Jesus has a particular love for those burned by the church.

A HEART FOR THE CITY OF BIRMINGHAM The Advent has been a presence in Birmingham from its very beginning. We are a vibrant congregation full of talented and creative believers in the Lord Jesus. We have always sought to bring the transforming power of grace to those in need around us, and we have also worked to bless the city through the arts, historical preservation, and community involvement. The gospel touches all areas of life, and we have a heart for the city that God has called us to minister to.

In all of these things we pray that Jesus Christ is glorified and that he might use us in Birmingham and beyond.

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OUR VISION In fall 2016, the Advent began a visioning process to discern prayerfully God’s vision for our church. Being aware of all that we have received from generations of Adventers who have given generously of their time, talent, and treasure, as well as our strong succession of leadership with faithful preaching and teaching, we want to remain good stewards of these gifts.

OUR IDENTITY

The Advent is a church with a living, daring confidence in God’s grace through the gospel of Jesus Christ.

OUR PURPOSE

The Advent exists to proclaim the freeing power of the gospel of Jesus Christ and make disciples wherever God has placed us.

OUR TENANTS

Worship: We will hold the gospel at the center, rooting our worship in the English Reformation, making it always accessible and hospitable. (Psalm 100:3-5; Romans 12:1) Communication: We will communicate in ways that effectively enhance and further the ministry and purpose of the Advent. (Romans 10:17; Psalm 19:14) Shepherding: We will focus on the reconciling word and work of Jesus Christ as they propel us in the way we care for and live with one another. (Isaiah 40:11; Jeremiah 23:4) Outreach: We will serve the Lord Jesus Christ by engaging in His spiritual and material restoration of our city and world. (John 13:34-35; Matthew 28:19-20) Discipleship: We will equip every member of the Advent for the work of discipleship by creating and nurturing a culture that responds to the grace we have received from Jesus Christ. (Romans 12:6; Ephesians 4:11-12) Ministry Development: We will identify, develop, and equip leaders for full-time professional ministry at the Advent, in the Episcopal Church, and in the Anglican Communion. (Romans 10:14-15; Acts 13:2-3)

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OUR CLERGY AND STAFF For email addresses and phone numbers, please see our staff listing on adventbirmingham.org.

Andrew Pearson ■ DEAN AND RECTOR Craig Smalley ■ CANON PASTOR AND DAY SCHO OL CHAPL AIN Deborah Leighton ■ CANON MISSIONER AND DIRECTOR OF WOMEN’S MINISTRIES Matt Schneider ■ CANON FOR PARISH LIFE AND EVANGELISM Zac Hicks ■ CANON FOR LITURGY AND WORSHIP Katherine Jacob ■ DEACON Doug Webster ■ TEACHING PASTOR Mark Gignilliat ■ L AY CANON THEOLO GIAN Michael Weeks ■ CLERGY ASSO CIATE Bryan Helm ■ ADMINISTRATOR Gil Kracke ■ DIRECTOR OF MINISTRIES AND PRO GRAMS Fred Teardo ■ DIRECTOR OF MUSIC AND ORGANIST Charles Kennedy ■ ASSO CIATE DIRECTOR OF MUSIC AND ORGANIST Cameron Cole ■ DIRECTOR OF CHILDREN, YOUTH, AND FAMILY Elizabeth Wilson ■ DIRECTOR OF CHILDREN’S MINISTRIES Mary Beth Cunningham ■ SENIOR HIGH YOUTH DIRECTOR Rachel Cain ■ JUNIOR HIGH YOUTH DIRECTO r Tucker Fleming ■ JUNIOR HIGH B OYS YOUTH PASTOR Fontaine Pope ■ DIRECTOR OF SMALL GROUPS AND NEWCOMERS’ CO ORDINATOR Bethany Rushing ■ DIRECTOR OF MISSION AND OUTREACH Brandon Bennett ■ YOUNG ADULT AND COLLEGE MINISTER Lila Wooten ■ DIRECTOR OF NURSERY MINISTRIES Kathy Logue ■ ADVENT HOUSE CO ORDINATOR Stella Schreiber ■ AFTERCARE & PARISH VISITORS MINISTRIES OUR VESTRY Troy Haas ■ SENIOR WARDEN Jane Menendez ■ JUNIOR WA RDE N James Bradford ■ CLE RK Hewes Hull ■ TRE ASURE R Ricky Bromberg, Kane Burnette, Martin Clapp, Kathryn Corey, Emily Curran, Charlie DeBardeleben, Marilyn Dixon, Edmund Doss, Jay Ezelle, Ron Flowers, Rachel Fry, Sally Goings, Judy Greenwood, Jon Harbuck, Leland Hull, Duncan Hulsey, Shannon Lisenby, Tommy Mayfield, David McKee, Emily Menendez, Kate Nielsen, Oscar Price, Pete Pritchard, Emily Pruet, Elizabeth Sharman, Caroline Springfield, Robin Wade, Louise Yoder

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By Frank Limehouse

F R A N K L I M E H O U S E served as the Dean and Rector of the Cathedral Church of the Advent from 2005 to 2014. He now lives in Clemson, South Carolina, and serves part of the year as Chaplain of Christ Memorial Chapel in Hobe Sound, Florida.

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" Woe t o m e if I do no t preach the gosp el !"

1 Corinthians 9:1 6 M ay 18 , 2 0 06

MAN Y YEARS AGO IN A little countryside antique bookstore in Wales, I came across a piece of paper inserted in a careworn old book. On this tattered page I found these hand-inscribed words from a poem by Margaret Chaplin Anderson: O Preacher, holy man, hear my heart weeping; I long to stand and shout my protests: Where is your power? And where is your message? Where is the Gospel of mercy and love? Your words are nothingness! Nothingness! Nothingness! We who have come to listen are betrayed. Servant of God, I am bitter and desolate. What do I care for perfection of phrase? Cursed be your humor, your poise, your diction. See how my soul turns to ashes within me. You who have vowed to declare your Redeemer, give me the words that would save!

God used this old poem to speak to this sin-sick preacher who had vowed to declare the Redeemer of the world. In 2006, my second year at the Advent, I suggested 1 Corinthians 9:16 be inscribed on brass and inserted in the hardwood of the pulpit: “Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!” Two members of the church had it done within a week.

From that day, before I began a sermon I rubbed my finger across the plaque—not as a superstitious fool might rub a rabbit’s foot, but as a reminder that preachers are ambassadors for God (2 Corinthians 5:20). Ambassadors do not come with special insight, theories, or philosophical ideas. Preaching Jesus Christ and him crucified, they come with words that would save.

ILLUSTR ATION BY TOM MARTIN

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RETROSPECT

T H E S E S F R O M O U R C AT H E D R A L D O O R

IN THE L ATE 1990S AND UNDER THE EDITORSHIP OF C . FREDERICK BARBEE, T H E A D V E N T B E C A M E T H E O F F I C I A L H O ST PA R I SH O F T H E A N G L I C A N D I G E ST .

D U R I N G T H AT PE R I O D PAU L Z A H L , T H E F O R M E R D E A N A N D R E C T O R O F T H E A D V E N T, W O R K E D W I T H B A R B E E A S C O - E D I T O R O F T H E M A G A Z I N E . D E A N Z A H L ALSO CONTRIBUTED A COLUMN TO EVERY ISSUE THAT WAS ENTITLED “ THESES F R O M O U R C A T H E D R A L D O O R .” ( T H E R E F E R E N C E W A S T O M A R T I N L U T H E R ’ S NINET Y-FIVE THESES ON THE WIT TENBERG CHURCH DOOR .) THAT PERIOD BECAME A GOLDEN ONE FOR THE ANGLICAN DIGEST AND HELPED SET A COURSE F O R T H E T H E O L O G I C A L D I R E C T I O N O F T H E A D V E N T.

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I M A G E S C O U R T E S Y O F P A U L F. M . Z A H L

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SEMPER REFORMANDA

By Andrew Pearson

O

ctober 31, 2017, marks the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther posting his Ninety-five Theses to the door of Wittenberg’s Castle Church. Neither he, nor anyone else, expected it to cause such a sensation. Luther saw himself as a faithful Christian defending the truth of the gospel. Of course, Luther’s position would progress as time went on, eventually giving birth to the Reformation. His ministry not only impacted Germany, but also the entire world.

I remember my first encounter with Luther. I was a third-year student in college and going through some family difficulties, and I found myself in a class on the Reformation that happened to be taught by an Augustinian monk. For our class we had to read Luther’s Bondage of the Will. The book made me angry. God used this work to open my eyes and heart to the gospel. Christianity to me, up to this point, consisted of right living and right believing. But what happens when you struggle in both categories? I had a relationship with the Lord Jesus, but it was based on action/consequence. I had reached a place of maturity where my sins were not so easily hidden.

For the first time in my life, I understood the good news of God’s great love for me in Jesus Christ. He did it all. FULL STOP. Luther wasn’t just a man with an axe to grind; his ministry extended even to me and to countless others. The Reformation is still important today because what is at stake is the very person and work of Jesus Christ. This is why the English Reformers were willing to go to the stake and burn, why Wesley and Whitefield were willing to be locked out of churches, why J.C. Ryle was prepared to stand alone, why Jawani Luwum would risk his life by standing up to Idi Amin.

Andrew Pearson is the Dean and Rector of the Advent. He is an avid golfer, outdoorsman, and reader.

He is married to Lauren Saddler Pearson, and they have three daughters, Lily, Mary Cabell, and Ware.

Semper Reformanda, always reforming, is a Reformational watchword that should be on our lips today. Not as a justification for progressive attitudes but as an understanding that God doesn’t have grandchildren—he has sons and daughters. It is up to every generation, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to rediscover the life-saving message of the gospel and to stand upon it to the very end, as it is a matter of life and death. It does no good to simply harken back to the sixteenth century, but the truth of justification by grace through faith must be a reality for us today.

Soli Deo Gloria, andrew

PHOTOGRAPH BY HAWLEY SCHNEIDER

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ADVENT A Magazine of Good News @cathedraladvent #adventbham magazine@cathedraladvent.com adventbirmingham.org/magazine Made in Birmingham, Alabama By the Cathedral Church of the Advent