On the last Sunday in October, Christians around the world remember the Reformation in the church in the 16th Century, in which the gospel of Jesus was restored to the heart of western Christianity. It was October 31 1517, when Martin Luther, a priest and scholar in the church, nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church in the German town of Wittenburg.
Luther’s goal had been to reform the church from within, but in fact he was unsuccessful in this endeavour. What followed was a sharp divide between Roman Catholicism and what came to be known as the Protestant Church. The Protestants, led by men like Luther, Calvin and Zwingli in Europe and Cranmer and Tyndale in England, sought to return the church to the Bible’s message that salvation from sin and rebellion against God is not earned by doing good works, but can only be received as a free gift. In God’s grace, his undeserved favour, we can be saved from the penalty of sin and rebellion by faith in Jesus’ life, death and resurrection.
In a few weeks I'm giving a talk on "Technology, Connectedness and the Christian Life." In preparation, I've been doing some reading on how different people use various aspects of technology to communicate the gospel of Jesus.
On the website of Global Recordings Network, I came across something that I saw first-hand more than 20 years ago and which ever since I've struggled to convince people actually exists!
It's the "Card Talk" cardboard record player, pictured at right. Back around 1989 we discovered one out the back of our school library. Initially we couldn't work out what this strange piece of folded carboard was and why it had a needle attached to one end, but the fact that there was a vinyl record with the cardboard suggested this was in fact a record player!
Sure enough, we placed the record on the eyelet on the cardboard, folded the end of the carboard so that the needle rested on the record and when we spun the record, we could hear the sound! The vibrations of the needle were amplified by the 'baffle' of cardboard and we could clearly understand the spoken word recording.
Justification: “The act of declaring or pronouncing one to be righteous”
On October 31 1517, Martin Luther, a priest in the church and professor of theology at the University of Wittenberg in Germany, nailed a document to the door of Wittenberg’s “Castle Church.” It was the statement which came to be known as Luther’s 95 Theses, and which sparked the Protestant Reformation that swept across Europe in the 16th Century.
The 95 Theses were a response to the Roman Catholic practice of selling “Indulgences”- the promise of partial remission of the punishment for sin, which could be secured by giving money to the church. The church at the time was raising money for the rebuilding of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.
In 1942, Austrian doctor Viktor Frankl was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in what is now the Czech Republic. Although the lone survivor of his family from the Holocaust, Frankl emerged from his time in various concentration camps with a strong view on the importance of meaning in life.
He went on to found what is called the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy, which operates on the assumption that the major psychological problem experienced by people today is the feeling of the loss of ultimate meaning to one’s existence. Frankl called this the Existential Vacuum; people feel an absence of anything that would make life worthwhile.
This Sunday is the 2nd of week of our “If I Were God…” series. As we’re doing for each of the statements in our series, we’ll spend some time reflecting on our own experiences and then we’ll hear what the Bible says about, and to make sense of, those experiences.
For some though, there may be a prior question. How do we know the Bible accurately records the life and teachings of the man at its centre, Jesus Christ. And most of us are not entirely pragmatic; simply the fact that the Bible makes sense of my experiences is not enough. It’s not sufficient to know that something works, but is it true? Is the Bible reliable? Can the Bible be trusted?
“Silver and Gold I do not have…” Peter said to the crippled man, who lay begging at the Beautiful Gate of the Jerusalem temple. The rest of Peter’s sentence shows he has something even more valuable than silver or gold, faith in the powerful Lord Jesus Christ, and of this he is willing to give.
Scholars and archaeologists love to pore over excavations and historical records to identify the various locations described in the Bible. Sometimes their efforts are complicated by the fact that, as with the Beautiful Gate, no known sources other than the New Testament documents use a particular name. Nevertheless there is some scholarly consensus that the gate called “Beautiful” in Acts 3 should be identified with the Nicanor Gate, which was paid for by an extraordinarily wealthy Jewish man from Alexandria.
Unlike the other temple gates which were overlaid with silver and gold, the Nicanor gate was either constructed from, or covered with, sheets of Corinthian bronze. Items made out of Corinthian bronze were considered priceless, even more valuable than those made from silver and gold. The Roman historian Josephus recorded that the Nicanor Gate “far exceeded in value those plated in silver and set in gold.”
Here on our site, you can read The 39 Articles, the historic statement of faith of the Anglican Church. These short statements written in the 16th Century, are a brief and condensed summary of what the Church considers the most central doctrines and teachings of the Christian faith.
My co-blogger Andy and I have been discussing the value of having the Articles on the website. We believe they are "eminently Protestant and eminently Evangelical" (as Bishop J C Ryle wrote in 1900) but how comprehensible are they to modern ears? Can we expect people to even know what they mean?
Therefore, starting with this post which will serve as a bit of an introduction, I'll be blogging on The 39 Articles, the Statement of Faith of Trinity Mount Barker, and in fact, all churches in the historic Anglican tradition. At this stage, I'm not sure whether I'll examine each of them, or just choose a few which may be of particular interest to 21st Century Christians. We'll see what happens as we go along! You can make requests, too, if you want to hear about an Article you think I may otherwise skip!
On the last Sunday in October, Christians around the world remember the Reformation in the church in the 16th Century, in which the gospel of Jesus was restored to the heart of western Christianity. It was October 31 1517, when Martin Luther, a priest and scholar in the church, nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church in the German town of Wittenburg.
Back around 1989 we discovered one out the back of our school library. Initially we couldn't work out what this strange piece of folded carboard was and why it had a needle attached to one end, but the fact that there was a vinyl record with the cardboard suggested this was in fact a record player! 
