Throwback Thursday: Muslim Friendly Worship?
[Note: This is a different kind of throwback. I published this on my Father Hollywood Blog on April 19, 2008. It is fitting that it be republished today, on the Feast of St. John of Damascus, an Arab Christian who lived under Muslim rule, and who resisted the Muslim friendly iconoclasm in his own day.
I believe this is part of what led to the closure of Concordia - Portland as a divine judgment. Why was nobody ever disciplined when this “missional” professor was teaching this? Where was the COP? Where was President Kieschnick? Where were all of our “missional” guys when this was happening?
And why do so many of our “missional” churches have that artless, iconoclastic look to this very day, lacking even a font, pulpit, or altar? Is it likely that any sermon, newsletter article, devotion, podcast, or anything produced by our “missional” guys will even mention St. John of Damascus? Do they even know who he is? Do they care? Do their congregations ever sing either of the two hymns that he authored that are in our hymnal? And once again, here we are in a synodwide disagreement as to what constitutes Lutheran identity.
Thanks be to God for St. John of Damascus, his faithfulness, his theological acumen, and his courage. Thanks be to God for our Lutheran forbears who threw out the iconoclasts and embraced art. - Ed.]
The delightfully candid cowardly amoral anti-hero Harry Flashman in the series of novels by George MacDonald Fraser was so despicable, one could not imagine anything being shocking to him. There is a line Flashman would utter once in a great while when he witnessed something so debased that even he had to raise an eyebrow:
"For an instant even I was appalled - but only for an instant."
Caught between the pincers of the world and the church, I find myself so jaded these days as to rarely find the energy to even shrug my shoulders at what I see going on around me. But, in the case of the following published paper by the chairman of the Missions Department of Concordia University, Portland, the Rev. Dr. Herb Hoefer, who is, of course, an ordained minister of the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod, I have nothing else to do than to quote Sir Harry Flashman.