Transcript GALATIANS

Evangelicals, Catholics Try to Adapt to Gays' Legal Wins
Tuesday, 28 Oct 2014 12:04 PM
By Jennifer G. Hickey
With advocates of gay marriage achieving legal victories, many conservative Christians and
evangelicals are trying to adapt to the evolving change in the courts and broader society.
“One of the embarrassments that I have to bear is that I have written on some of these issues for
30 years. At a couple of points, I’ve got to say I got that wrong, and we’ve got to go back and
correct it,” Southern Seminary President Albert Mohler said yesterday at a Southern Baptist
Convention (SBC) conference on homosexuality, reports Nashville Public Radio.
Mohler says his error was in preaching that homosexuality is a choice, but remains firm in his
belief that it is sinful. He also told the audience that Baptists know what the Bible teaches, but
need to figure out how to apply those teachings to the present day, according to Nashville Public
Radio.
Pope Francis: “Evolution Is Not Inconsistent With The
Notion Of Creation”
Religion News Service
| By Josephine McKenna
Posted: 10/27/2014 5:43 pm EDT Updated: 10/28/2014 11:59 am EDT
VATICAN CITY (RNS) Pope Francis on Monday (Oct. 27) waded
into the controversial debate over the origins of human life, saying the
big bang theory did not contradict the role of a divine creator, but
even required it.
The pope was addressing the plenary assembly of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, which
gathered at the Vatican to discuss “Evolving Concepts of Nature.”
“When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician,
with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so,” Francis said.
“He created human beings and let them develop according to the internal laws that he gave to
each one so they would reach their fulfillment.”
Francis said the beginning of the world was not “a work of chaos” but created from a principle
of love. He said sometimes competing beliefs in creation and evolution could co-exist.
“God is not a divine being or a magician, but the Creator who brought everything to life,” the
pope said. “Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation, because evolution
requires the creation of beings that evolve.”
“Thus, this work of creation has been going on for centuries and centuries, millennia and millennia
until it has become what we know today, because God is not a demiurge or wizard but the
Creator who gives being to all entities. The beginning of the world was not a work of chaos that
has some other origin, but it derived directly from a supreme principle which creates by love. The
Big Bang, which currently appears to explain the origin of the world, does not contradict the
intervention of a divine creator but demands it. The evolution of nature is not inconsistent with
the notion of Creation because evolution presupposes the creation of beings that evolve...
“The scientist must be moved by the confidence that nature conceals, in its evolutionary
mechanisms, potential that our intelligence and freedom can discover and implement in order to
develop the design of the Creator. So, no matter how limited, the action of man partakes of the
power of God and is able to build a world fit for his dual life, bodily and spiritual, to build a
humane world for all human beings and not for a group or class of privileged people.”
Music and Worship
I.
References
II.
Technical Development
A.
Musicology
B.
Beauty
C.
Physiology of Music
III. Biblical Development
A.
Directive/Descriptive/Principle
B.
Textual Exposition
IV. Sacred Music—Standards and Hymnody
V.
FAQs
VI. Summary/Conclusion
Standards
A. Content
B. Arrangement
C. Instrumentation
www.bible.ca
Alexander Campbell
(1788-1866)
“[Instrumental music in worship] was well adapted to churches founded on the
Jewish pattern of things and practicing infant sprinkling. That all persons singing
who have no spiritual discernment, taste or relish for spiritual meditation,
consolations and sympathies of renewed hearts should call for such an aid is but
natural. So to those who have no real devotion and spirituality in them, and whose
animal nature flags under the opposition or the oppression of church service I think
that instrumental music would... be an essential prerequisite to fire up their souls to
even animal devotion. But I presume, that to all spiritually-minded Christians, such
aid would be as a cow bell in a concert.” recorded in Robert Richardson's
biography, Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, Vol. 2., p 366)
www.bible.ca
Benjamin Franklin
(1812-1878)
“If any one had told us, 40 years ago, that we would live to see
the day where those professing to be Christians who claim the
Holy Scriptures as their only rule of faith and practice, those
under the command, and who profess to appreciate the
meaning of the command to 'observe whatsoever I have
commanded you' would bring instruments of music into a
worshipping assembly and use it there in worship, we should
have repelled the idea as an idle dream. But this only shows
how little we knew of what men would do; or how little we
saw of the power of the adversary to subvert the purest
principles, to deceive the hearts of the simple, to undermine
the very foundation of all piety, and turn the very worship of
God itself into an attraction for the people of the world and
entertainment, or amusement.” (Benjamin Franklin, Gospel
Preacher, Vol 2, p. 411, 419-429)
www.bible.ca
Benjamin Franklin
(1812-1878)
“Instrumental music is permissible for a church under the following conditions:
1. When a church never had or has lost the Spirit of Christ. 2. If a church has a
preacher who never had or has lost the Spirit of Christ, who has become a dry,
prosing and lifeless preacher. 3. If a church only intends being a fashionable
society, a mere place of amusements and secular entertainment and abandoning the
idea of religion and worship. 4. If a church has within it a large number of
dishonest and corrupt men. 5. If a church has given up all idea of trying to convert
the world.” (Ben Franklin, editor of American Christian Review, 1860.)
www.bible.ca
David Lipscomb
(1831-1917)
“Neither he [Paul] nor any other apostle, nor the Lord Jesus, nor
any of the disciples for five hundred years, used instruments.
This too, in the face of the fact that the Jews had used
instruments in the days of their prosperity and that the Greeks
and heathen nations all used them in their worship.
“They were dropped out with such emphasis that they were not taken up till the
middle of the Dark Ages, and came in as part of the order of the Roman Catholic
Church. It seems there cannot be doubt but that the use of instrumental music in
connection with the worship of God, whether used as a part of the worship or as an
attraction accompaniment, is unauthorized by God and violates the oft-repeated
prohibition to add nothing to, take nothing from, the commandments of the Lord.
It destroys the difference between the clean and the unclean, the holy and unholy,
counts the blood of the Son of God unclean, and tramples under foot the authority
of the Son of God. They have not been authorized by God or sanctified with the
blood of his Son.” (David Lipscomb, Queries and Answers by David Lipscomb pp.
226-227, and Gospel Advocate, 1899, p. 376-377)
www.bible.ca
John William McGarvey
(1829-1911)
“We cannot, therefore, by any possibility, know that a certain element of worship is
acceptable to God in the Christian dispensation, when the Scriptures which speak of
that dispensation are silent in reference to it. To introduce any such element is
unscriptural and presumptuous.” (J. W. McGarvey, The Millennial Harbinger, 1864,
pp. 511-513)
www.insearchofthetruth.org
Charles Spurgeon
(1834-1892)
“'Praise the Lord with the harp.' Israel was at school,
and used childish things to help her learn. But in these
days, when Jesus gives us spiritual food, one can make
melody without strings and pipes. We do not need
them. They would hinder rather than help our praise.
Sing unto Him! This is the sweetest and best music.
No instrument is like the human voice....
“David appears to have had a peculiarly tender remembrance of the singing of the
pilgrims, and assuredly it is the most delightful part of worship and that which
comes nearest to the adoration of heaven. What a degradation to supplant the
intelligent song of the whole congregation by the theatrical prettiness of a quartet,
the refined niceties of a choir, or the blowing off of wind from the inanimate
bellows and pipes! We might as well pray by machinery as praise by it.” (The
Treasury of David, comment on Psalm 42:4)
www.stempublishing.com
STEM Publishing: C Knapp: Musical Instruments
Harry A. Ironside (1876-1951) Lectures on Daniel, pages 47-50
“The special place given to the great orchestra is very noticeable;
as much so as in large worldly religious gatherings at the present
time. It excites the emotions, and thus, working upon the
feelings, gives people a sense of devotion and religiousness,
which after all may be very unreal. In the Old Testament
dispensation musical instruments were used in the ornate temple
services; but there is certainly no warrant for it in the New
Testament. People may call it worship to sit and listen to a trained, and possibly
unconverted, choir and orchestra rendering sweet and touching strains; but music
simply acts upon the sensuous part of our natures, and has nothing to do with true
adoration of the Father and the Son, which must be in spirit and truth to be acceptable
to God. Those who plead for its use, because of the place it had in Old Testament
times, should remember that that was a typical dispensation... A minister once
remarked to me that many aesthetic persons attended his church to worship God in
music; so he sought to have the best performers and the finest music it was possible to
obtain, as otherwise the people would not attend. What a delusion is all this!”
crossandquill.com
Cheryl Stansberry
Western Civilization Research Paper, Fall 2007
“The cantata, a genre of vocal music in the Baroque period and a key part of the German
Lutheran service, was primarily used in Bach’s music. A deeply religious man, Bach
signed his cantatas 'S.D.G.', which stands for Soli Deo Gloria—'to God alone the glory'
(Schippe 237). Many other forms of music known today have Christian roots such as the
sonata, the symphony, and the oratorio. Most forms of music began as psalms, hymns,
and spiritual songs and the outgrowth from there progressed as the monks and churches
spread throughout the ages. Ambrose (340-97) first had members of his congregation
sing psalms antiphonally and allowed all people to participate in the morning and evening
church services by setting the words of his hymns to 'an easy metrical form, the iambic
diameter' (Schippe 316). Biblical stories were dramatized and performed in song as early
as the ninth century. A well-known church drama in the tenth century was Visitatio
sepulchri (The Visit to [Christ’s] Sepulcher). Schmidt notes there is good reason to
believe the opera evolved out of church dramas that appeared five hundred years before
the Renaissance (Scippe 316-17). The works of Handel, Beethoven, Mozart, and
Mendelssohn among others have greatly been influenced by the words of the Bible;
oftentimes the music itself directly reflected that influence (Schippe 328-29).”