Blessed are you, Lord God,
Father all-holy,
for your boundless love
The tree, once the source of shame
and death for humankind,
has become the cross
of our redemption and life.
When his hour had come to
return to you in glory,
the Lord Jesus,
Our King, our Priest, and our Teacher,
freely mounted the scaffold of the cross
and made it his royal throne,
his altar of sacrifice, his pulpit of truth.
On the cross,
lifted above the earth,
he triumphed over our age-old enemy.
Cloaked in his own blood,
he drew all things to himself.
On the cross,
he opened out his arms
and offered you his life;
the sacrifice of the New Law
that gives to the sacraments
their saving power.
On the cross,
he proved what he had prophesied:
the grain of wheat must die
to bring forth an abundant harvest.
Father,
we honour this cross as the sign
of our redemption.
May we reap the harvest of salvation
planted in pain by Christ Jesus.
May our sins be nailed to his cross,
the power of life released,
pride conquered,
and weakness turned to strength.
May the cross be our comfort in trouble,
our refuge in the face of danger,
our safeguard on life’s journey
until you welcome us to
our heavenly home.
O LORD, Master of my life,
grant that I may not be infected with the
spirit of slothfulness and inquisitiveness,
with the spirit of ambition and vain talking.
{Making a prostration}
Grant instead to me, your servant,
the spirit of purity and of humility,
the spirit of patience and neighborly love.
{Making a third prostration}
O Lord and King,
grant me the grace of being aware of my sins
and of not thinking evil of those of my brethren.
For you are blessed, now and ever, and forever.
Amen.
Lord Jesus Christ, King of Kings,
You have power over life and death.
You know what is secret and hidden,
and neither our thoughts nor our feelings
are concealed from You.
Cure me of duplicity;
I have done evil before You.
Now my life declines from day to day
and my sins increase.
O Lord, God of souls and bodies,
You know the extreme frailty of my soul and my flesh.
Grant me strength in my weakness, O Lord,
and sustain me in my misery.
Give me a grateful soul that I may
never cease to recall Your benefits,
O Lord most bountiful.
Be not mindful of my many sins,
but forgive me all my misdeeds.
O Lord, disdain not my prayer –
the prayer of a wretched sinner;
sustain me with Your grace until the end,
that it may protect me as in the past.
It is Your grace which has taught me wisdom;
blessed are they who follow her ways,
for they shall receive the crown of glory.
In spite of my unworthiness,
I praise You and I glorify You,
O Lord, for Your mercy to me is without limit.
You have been my help and my protection.
May the name of Your majesty be praised forever.
To you, our God, be glory.
Amen.
After the previously-planned interview fell through at the last minute, David sat down to record a solo episode to talk about his newborn son, Sidecar Day, blue flowers in Narnia, and also to make his tongue-in-cheek case as to why C.S. Lewis is better than J.R.R. Tolkien.
The Gray Havens are an American Christian folk pop husband and wife duo, David and Licia Radford, from Crystal Lake, Illinois. On October 8th they will be releasing their new album, Blue Flower, so David Radford came on the show to talk to Andrew and David about how C.S. Lewis inspired their recent work.
As we approach the end of Season 4, David is joined on the show by Michael “Gomer” Gormley. Among other things, they discuss Ted Lasso, tea, and the Atonement. Also, find out what Gomer would do if he ever became the Pope!
New York Times bestselling author, Patti Callahan, returns to the show to talk about her forthcoming book, “Once Upon A Wardrobe”, which will be released on October 19th.
A few months ago, John and Greta from The Tolkien Road podcast did a series of episodes on religion in Tolkien’s Legendarium. David invited him onto the show to talk about those episodes and to encourage the Pints With Jack listeners to listen to them.
Author Rod Bennett joined David to talk about a presentation on he gave at a big Christian rock festival about C.S. Lewis’ relationship to “Pulp Fiction”.
I was recently having a discussion online with a Muslim and he said “The Qur’an even tells you exactly how to disprove it if you’re in doubt of its authenticity, so if no one has disproved it in 1440 years, and you can’t disprove it”. Here he was referring to the Qur’anic challenge to “produce a chapter like it”, as evidence that the Qur’an is of divine origin.
I have to say, this challenge is bizarre for a number of reasons…
Firstly, the challenge is rather light on details! Do we have to produce it in Arabic? What does it mean to be “like” the Qur’an? What objective criteria can we use to measure it? How do we know when the test has been fulfilled?
Secondly, entire websites devoted to poetry in the Qur’anic style. Why do these fail the test?
Thirdly, it’s just an odd argument. Even if I couldn’t produce something like the Qur’an, it doesn’t mean it’s divine. I can’t produce a Beethoven Symphony or a Shakespeare sonnet either! Even if Muhammad was the only person in history to produce something like the Qur’an, I still don’t see why that would demonstrate it’s divine. Alternative explanations would be that Muhammad was uniquely skilled, or you could even suggest that it comes from a nefarious spiritual source.
Personally, I think the poetry of Kahlil Gibran greatly superior to the Qur’an, both in terms of beauty and wisdom. The English is great and I’m sure the original Arabic is as well.
This video pretty much sums up the most common misconceptions I’ve found about Qur’anic preservation among Muslims – the Birmingham Manuscripts being a complete Qur’an, the different manuscript traditions, assuming that the Qur’an memorized today is the same as the “original” etc.
The Quran makes mention of 32 people, and all of them are defined as “prophets” without distinguishing between them. Among these names there are only 6 people that can NOT be clearly identified in the Bible. Nevertheless, the remaining 26 people come mostly from the Pentateuch. Thus, here’s a list statistically aligned from most referred in the Quran:
Jesus (130 times)
Moses (130 times)
Abraham (69 times)
Mary (11 times by name and 34 times as “mother” of Jesus)
Noah (43 times)
Adam (25 times)
Lot (25 times)
Aaron (20 times)
Isaac (17 times)
Solomon (17 times)
David (16 times)
Jacob (16 times)
Ishmael (12 times)
Jonah (4 times; the Arabic form Yūnus is taken from the LXX form Iōnas rather than the Hebrew Yōnāh)
Job (4 times)
Elijah (2 times)
Elisha (1 time)
Saul (1 time; Surah 2:247-249 is erroneously fused with Gideon’s story from Judges 7:4-7)
Joseph (mentioned only as the name for Surah 12)
John the Baptist
Zechariah. – Shu‘ayb (Jethro)
Idris (Enoch)
Hūd (Eber)
Dhū ’l-Kifl (Ezekiel)
Luqmān (a figure whose origin is in Nubia, Sudan, or Ethiopia)
Ṣāliḥ (believed to have prophesied to the Arabian tribe of Thamūd)
You’ll often hear Muslims say that the Qur’an is the message for all mankind. However, the Qur’anic data doesn’t back this up…
P1. Every nation has been sent a messenger (16:36, 10:47 and 35:24)… despite the historical record not being able to substantiate this.
P2. Messengers are sent in the language of his people (14:4).
P3. Muhammad was the first person sent to warn the Arabs (36:6, 34:44 and 32:3)… despite Abraham and Ishmael supposedly having established the Kaaba generations before.
C. Muhammad was sent to those living in and around Mecca (42:7) to give them a warning in Arabic so that it would be clear to them (41:3, 43:3, 44:58, 26:195-196).
The Qur’an says that the Jews and Christians are to follow their own Scriptures (5:43, 5:68). Rather than having to trust what Christians and Jews *say* about their Greek and Hebrew Scriptures, the Qur’an is sent confirming it in *Arabic* (46:12), a revelation in their own tongue (41:44, 6:155-157).
Say ‘If God had willed I would not have recited it to you nor would He have made it known to you nor would He have made you aware of it the lā of wa-lā adrākum is for negation and is a supplement to what preceded; a variant reading has the lām sc. la-adrākum ‘He would have made it known to you’ as the response to the conditional law ‘if’ in other words He would have made it known to you by the tongue of someone other than myself. For I have already dwelt among you a whole lifetime of forty years before this Qur’ān not relating to you anything of the sort so will you not understand?’ that this Qur’ān is not from myself?
Mormons, Muslims, and most Protestant groups all have the same fundamental contention. While the details change depending upon the group, they all believe that the Early Church got things wrong, and pretty dramatically wrong at that…
I would suggest that’s a very problematic position to hold. One has to contend that the Apostles were terrible teachers and failed in their mission. Jesus effectively abandoned His Church until either Muhammad, Luther, Calvin, Joseph Smith, or some other figure came along to set things right centuries later.
As an aside, Atheism is a bold position for someone to hold as it necessarily asserts that everyone throughout history who claimed any kind of religious experience was fundamentally mistaken. I would suggest that many groups make a similarly bold claim, that most Christians throughout history have been fundamentally mistaken on core doctrines.
If one claims the Early Church was in deep error, cherry-picking inevitably results. For example, Baptismal Regeneration is universally believed in the Early Church. Yet, many Protestants reject this entirely, but basing this on the New Testament canon discerned by those who held to Baptismal Regeneration! They reject Apostolic Succession, but accept the Trinitarian doctrine which was developed by those who led the Church through Apostolic succession! Many other examples could be given.
Responses
I said this in a recent discussion online and my friend said:
“Yeah, it seems to me that heresies developed fairly quickly…”
Unfortunately, this is just another way to say that Jesus and the Apostles failed, that the long-awaited Messiah’s message was radically corrupted even within the lifetime of the Apostles, and long before the canon of the Bible was settled. Contrary to Biblical prophecy and the words of Jesus, the Kingdom doesn’t even get out of the gate. My friend went on to say:
“That’s an argument from silence, at best.”
Actually, *his* position is the argument from silence, positing that the Church was completely usurped without any “true believer” offering the slightest resistance.
Mormons claim the Early Church were Mormon, yet we find no proto-Mormons in the Early Church and nobody in the “official” Church wrote against a heresy which looked anything like Mormonism. The same is true for Islam. In contrast, we know about Docetism, Gnosticism, Modalism etc. because they offered a significant enough challenge to the Church that Her apologists wrote works against them. Do we find anyone in the Early Church writing against how you understand the Faith? If not, why not?
> “But I don’t say they weren’t “real Christians.” They may have simply been “confused real Christians.” After all, they had a lot of theology to sort out. There was a lot of confusion.””
This seems rather like having your cake and eating it. According to you, the earliest Christians seem to have completely misunderstood even the basic mechanics of salvation. So, either these are grave heresies, or not a big deal. Which is it?
