Page 2365 – Christianity Today (2024)

It’s easy to ignore the Conservative Bible Project when there are somanyBibles out there tailored to your specificneed. Last week, you could’ve had President Obama on your Bible cover (the website took the offer down).

But while The Green Bible highlights earth-friendly passages in green, The Tennessean finds that the Conservative Bible Project takes translation to a new level, taking out two sections.

One is the long ending of Mark’s Gospel, which includes verses about snake handling and the story of the woman caught in adultery. Neither is found in most of the oldest Greek manuscripts used to translate the Bible. Schlafly says that adultery story, in which Jesus says, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her,” should be cut because it portrays Jesus as being soft on sin.

“It’s a liberal addition, put in by people who wanted to undermine the reality of hell and judgment,” he said.

The story of the woman caught in adultery, known as the “Pericope Adulterae” and found in John 7:53-8:1, has troubled scholars for some time. Most Greek manuscripts have the story but not the oldest manuscripts. St. Jerome included it in his Greek New Testament, which was used as the basis for the King James Version of the Bible. Modern translators put a footnote or bracket around the story, pointing out the questions about its origins. But none removed the text.

Meanwhile, Stephen Colbert and Salon take a few jabs at the project. Colbert’s fans inserted “In the beginning, Stephen Colbert created the heaven and the earth,” which was edited back out.

Back to The Tennessean‘s story, Bob Smietana shows how the Conservative Bible compares to the New International Version and the King James Version (KJV).

For example, Mark 10:25 (KJV) says, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” the Conservative Bible substitutes “a man who cares only for money” for rich man.

“I don’t think Jesus is saying, ‘Let’s all be lazy so we can get to heaven.’ That’s not the message. And, if you translate the word rich as simply rich, some people are going to get the message that ‘I am going to be lazy so I can get to heaven easier,’ ” says Andy Schlafly, founder of Conservapedia and son of Phyllis Schlafly.

Conservapedia’s guiding principles are: Framework against liberal bias, not emasculated, not dumbed down, utilize powerful conservative terms, combat harmful addiction, accept the logic of hell, express free market parables, exclude later-inserted liberal passages, credit open-mindedness of disciples, and prefer conciseness over liberal wordiness.

What do you think of the project?

More Australians are being duped by “romance fraud” or “love scam,” particularly Christian women, according to The Sydney Morning Herald. Through dating or social networking sites and Christian chat rooms, online scammers posing as love interests have convinced people to send millions of dollars to places like Nigeria.

“They go into Christian chat rooms and a lot of the time when they ask for money, there’s a Christian element to the [scammer’s] story,” Queensland police Fraud Squad chief Detective Inspector Brian Hay said. “It’s a comfort thing for the victim. “We are seeing more targeted attacks because people put information about themselves on to the web.”

USA Today‘s Cathy Lynn Grossman poses the question: “Do you worry that sharing your faith on dating or social networking online sites could attract people who treat your values as stepping stones to a scam—financial or spiritual?”Christian Dating Watchdog lists various dating sites that Christians should avoid because of a site’s secular ownership, gay/lesbian profiles, or “questionable methods of advertising.” However, it doesn’t mention any troubling sites due to romance frauds.

There are few places that monitor these frauds, such as Internet Love Scams (ILS), which offers support to victims of romance frauds. It states, “A “normal” person wanting YOU, not what you can give them would not be asking you for money or goods. If they do, you are being scammed.”

The site, which has several thousand members, finds that scammers will use any approaches that will catch your sympathy. Many of the ISL posters still believe the Internet is a powerful tool for finding one’s soul mate. Sometimes, the fraud continues: ILS knows that scammers have the audacity to join as members and then try to con other members who are trying to recover.

Australian police found that sometimes the online relationships develop over months before the scammers ask for money. Queensland Police Commissioner Bob Atkinson called romance frauds “a particularly cruel scam” as it targets people who are oftentimes “lonely and vulnerable.”

Does the potential for romance fraud dissuade you from developing relationships on the Internet? Why do you think Christian women are particularly susceptible to fraud?

What makes a leader? Ideas. Courage. Contact with great thinkers. What makes a Christian leader? Great ideas, courage, and contact with great thinkers shaped by the gospel. So, I offer to you a list of my top ten books for leaders, and none of the titles of these books have the word “leader” or “leadership” in it. Some of these are overtly Christian classics; others are not. These books have the ability to swell the chest, flood the mind, and reshape how we see the world around us – and a gospel-reshaping of these great works can inspire a leader to new levels.

From the classical world, though one could choose all sorts of great works, I recommend a soaking in Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, to see how the great philosopher constructed a set of ethics that shaped the Western world. Homer told the story of Odysseus and Virgil in The Aeneid. Homer’s story came into the Roman world and gave to all of us the power of a journey into ideas and ideals, sanctifying place and history. Dante took Homer and Virgil to the next level in his Divine Comedy, and if you follow him all the way down into the inferno, up through purgatory and then climb into the swirling glorious presence of God you will find new dimensions to life’s journey.

I’ve heard the case made that St. Augustine’s Confessions reshaped the entire Western world, not least in his probing of his own soul and conscience, but I’m confident that the great North African can lead each of us to the potent truth of original sin and the need to read our lives before God. Not long ago I began to re-read John Milton, Paradise Lost, and was mesmerized not only by his language and meter, but by the brilliance of his vision for the cosmic battle of human life.

No one on this side of the Atlantic can fail to be captured, humbled and even humiliated before God by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It brings into living reality the evil of slavery and the heart of darkness, a heart that was eschewed by the arch-individiual, Henry David Thoreau in On Walden Pond. Americans need to dip into this classic work of human independence and freedom if only to capture again what makes so many Americans still tick.

Hemingway said Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was the great American novel. I’m not expert enough on American novels to pose such a conclusion, but I can say that very few have probed more deeply the foibles of the human heart, whether Twain does so with withering wit or raw finger-pointing.

For some reason few today have read C.S. Lewis’ Dymer, his first work, a saga, a journey, and a portrait of human hubris at its apex – and the work provides for us a revelation of what Lewis was like, what his yearning was like, before it became Surprised by Joy. I confess to being one of the few who have not read all of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings – I have read The Hobbit – but I return regularly to his short story, “Leaf by Niggle,” and often wonder if there is a better way of describing our vocation and its relation to eternity.

Every summer, somehow, I find my way to Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea, and whether it is the combination of the hunt with baseball in the old man’s musings or not, the struggle to catch and never show what one found … Hemingway reminds me of the intangibles of the human struggle.

Probably the deepest and most penetrating book I read during my seminary days was Martin Buber’s I and Thou, a philosophical, theological essay into the relational nature of what matters most.

Not your usual list of books on leadership, but I wonder sometimes if leadership might best be described by those who are leaders instead of by those who talk about it.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee comes in first among likely Republican voters for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination, according to a new Rasmussen Reports poll released today.

And even though former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s forthcoming autobiography has topped Amazon book charts for weeks, she trails (18 percent) Huckabee (29 percent) and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (24 percent). In July, voters placed Romney (25 percent) and Palin (24 percent) in a close tie while Huckabee finished a close third at 22 percent.

This time around among evangelicals, Huckabee leads Palin by 17 percent while Palin beats Romney by 14 percent.

In other news:

– Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, apologized last week for giving a “Josef Mengele Award” (referring to a Nazi doctor) to President Obama’s health care adviser Zeke Emanuel.

“I was using hyperbole for effect and never intended to actually equate anyone in the Obama administration with Dr. Mengele,” he wrote. “I apologize to everyone who found such references hurtful,” Dr. Land continued. “Given the pain and suffering of so many Jewish and other victims of the Nazi regime, I will certainly seek to exercise far more care in my use of language in future discussions of the issues at stake in the healthcare debate.”

– U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder focused mostly on hate crimes in his address to the Anti-Defamation League Saturday night, touching on anti-Semitism and crimes against Muslims.

– While the world waited for each update on balloon boy last week, another boy–4th-grader Terence Scott–asked Obama at the University of New Orleans, “Why do people hate you?” “They supposed to love you,” said the youngster, “and God is love.”

First published in English translation in the 1960s but now available for the first time in the form the author intended, In the First Circle makes an excellent introduction to Solzhenitsyn.

Henry VII, that dull Tudor king who saves the day (as Richmond) at the end of Richard III, didn’t, in fact, live forever, despite the triumphalist impression that concludes Shakespeare’s play. The real king died at 11:00 on the night of April 21, 1509. Two days later, after some jostling for power by counselors and courtiers, his 17-year-old son was proclaimed Henry VIII. This new king of England would be many things, as this splendid catalogue to the exhibition Vivat Rex! makes clear. This much has always been clear: Henry VIII was never dull.

The exhibition, which commemorates the 500th anniversary of Henry’s accession, includes rare books, iconic portraits, engravings and aquatints, and sundry other items and curios borrowed from the Grolier Club (which hosted the exhibition in New York City this spring), the Folger Shakespeare Library, Harvard’s Houghton Library, the Morgan Library, and elsewhere. The show will return stateside, to the Folger Library in Washington, D. C., in the fall of 2010. In the meantime, the catalogue handsomely reproduces the many objects on display, along with ample commentary: detailed captions accompanying each item; short chapter summaries that distinguish and contextualize the many phases of Henry VIII’s life; and, most substantively, three opening essays by leading scholars on, respectively, this king’s personification of power, his divorce from Catherine of Aragon and its seismic consequences, and the reformation he initiated within the English Church. This last essay, by Susan Wabuda, is the longest of the three, and nicely surveys the complexities of religious change under Henry, from his break with the Roman Catholic Church and the Dissolution of the monasteries to his reactionary anti-Lutheranism late in life.

The exhibition’s curator, Arthur L. Schwartz, acknowledges that some information is occasionally repeated throughout the volume. He defends himself by saying the overlap will help readers who may not know the period well, or who may prefer to read around amid the entries. Such readers will be well served, but as a Tudor devotee who has lately read this volume from start to finish, I can report that this or that repetition was hardly off-putting; in fact, the unfamiliar and informed alike will find much to enjoy in this visually rich collection, which presents the memorable tumults that marked Henry VIII’s long reign. (Tudor Englishmen would have used the word “hurlyburly.”) Less defensible is Schwartz’s rather simplistic view of the experiences of the faithful before and after the Reformation: one’s entire existence in early Christendom, he declares, was dominated by fear, followed by a Protestant liberation from the “threat of the terrors of hell.” Really? A brief encounter with either St. Bernard or Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus would confirm this historical summary as overgeneralizing at best. Fortunately Schwartz is far more sound as a collector and bibliographer.

Henry VIII is never a historical figure to get lost in a crowd, but a large part of what made him and his era so memorable were the many people around him—serving him, loved by him, challenging him, destroyed by him—from the good and great to the terribly abused. The sixteen thumbnail portraits that constitute the catalogue’s frontispiece announce this fact from the outset. Here, for instance, is the older brother, Arthur, whose early death ensured Henry’s monarchy as well as the first of many marriage fiascoes that would unsettle it. Here is Henry’s main rival in Renaissance splendor, the French king Francis I, and the fashionably frenchified second wife of Henry, Anne Boleyn, whom he eventually beheaded (Dale Hoak in his essay speaks of “five long and sexually frustrating years” before Henry married Anne). Thomas Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell are here as well, who so hugely influenced English worship and policy during this period, and royal victims such as the humanist martyr Thomas More and Cardinal Wolsey, as represented by John Gielgud in a 1957 production of Henry VIII.

Wolsey made the fatal mistake of overgoing his own king when it came to displays of riches; he eventually gave to Henry his opulent residence of Hampton Court, but his destruction proved to be inescapable. A preoccupation with splendor marks Henry VIII as England’s first great Renaissance king, and he was sensitive to outdazzling his rivals on the Continent. His and Francis I’s ostentatiously chivalric meeting at the Field of the Cloth of Gold was, according to Schwartz, a “display of wealth rarely seen in human history.” Henry would come to own sixty residences and two thousand tapestries, and a roll of the New Year’s gifts he received in 1539 spanned eight and a half feet. Finally, there are among these first portraits various images of the king himself, including an engraving from old age where he most resembles (forgive me) a Mr. Potato Head whose pinched look brings to mind the medieval cruelties of a Finno-Ural tyrant.

The volume also contains a Tudor genealogy, a thorough chronology of the Henrician era, and appendices reprinting interesting documents, including an embattled letter from Henry’s first wife and a list of censored passages in an early folio text of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. Yet all of these aids are clearly secondary compared with the catalogue entries themselves. They are why some readers will be perusing this volume attentively, returning to it again and again. The several portraits by Hans Holbein are unsurprisingly ravishing. John Guy in his essay on royal power claims that Henry “struck gold” when he found Holbein, whose inimitable style created a kind of “brand” for the king and his court.

Texts represent the majority of the exhibition’s objects, and Schwartz points to the coinciding “advent of printed books” to explain Henry’s popularity and historical durability. Several remarkable editions are represented. For example, Henry’s schoolboy copy of Cicero’s De officis features the inscription, “Thys Boke Is Myne,” an early sign perhaps of the possessive streak that England’s displaced monks would come to rue. Several religious treasures appear here: a Book of Hours belonging to Henry’s mother, Elizabeth of York, and the Golden Gospels of Henry VIII, a 10th-century manuscript thought to be a gift from pope Leo X, following Henry’s Assertio against Martin Luther. This modest effort earned Henry the title “Defender of the Faith,” but it also made him embarrassingly vulnerable to the stout replies of Luther, who called him “dear Junker” and “King Harry” by “God’s ungrace.” The most important of these books are the early English Bibles. Contrasting title pages reflect the massive shift in Henry’s sense of himself as a sacred ruler. On the 1535 Coverdale Bible, Henry appears at the bottom clearly receiving the scriptures from his clergy, while the more fully approved Byble in Englysche (1539) features the king appearing rather godlike at top center, handing the Good Book to his ministers Cranmer and Cromwell on each side. The speech balloons surrounding this image proclaim, “God save the Kinge” and “Vivat Rex!”

Other texts shed light on Henry’s rather complicated love life. One document intriguingly suggests that his obsessive quest for the perfect queen may have begun with his father. As a widower, Henry VII commanded his ambassador to “check out” (my term, not his) the young Queen of Naples: “marke whether hir nekke be longe or shorte[,] smale or grete.” The ambassador cautiously describes this prospective royal neck as “fully & comely & not mysschapen.” We also catch revealing glimpses through the books of Henry’s queens. Boleyn shrewdly gave the king her copy of William Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man, which sought to reassure Henry that reformers need not be political radicals. The strongly Protestant Catherine Parr, his sixth and final wife, could both speak of “papal riffraff” and write moving prayers: “O Lorde God, which art sweetnesse unspeakable.” The king’s third wife, Jane Seymour, may have been his favorite; she did bear him his desired son, after all (the future Edward VI), and he chose to be buried next to her in Windsor. (For more on this particular textual emphasis, see also James P. Carley’s Books of King Henry VIII and His Wives.)

A final group of objects contribute to a long, conflicted record regarding King Henry’s posthumous reputation. One Englishman in 1769 speaks of “an honest open-hearted man” and “Patriot King,” while Arthur Sullivan in an 1877 arrangement points to Henry’s purported authorship of the lyrics, “Youth Will Needs Have Dalliance.” An image arises here of a jolly, ballad-singing ruler. Other assessments, however, shimmer in revulsion. For Walter Ralegh, who knew something about royal caprice as a prisoner in the Tower, Henry VIII was a “mercilesse Prince” who cut off and cast off those closest to him. In his Child’s History of England, Charles Dickens describes the king as “one of the most detestable villains that ever drew breath” and “a blot of blood and grease.” Other dismissals have more levity, such as a cartoon from Punch that portrays Henry as a weeble-wobble buffo hunting on horseback a fleeing monk.

With that chase scene in mind, allow me to mention a curious phenomenon during my writing of this review, done near the medieval mountain town of Todi, in Italy. As it turns out, Todi’s ancient Latin name is Tuder, and one still encounters it in shop windows, road signs, and business names (Tudernum Vini, for example). As I’ve been writing, and offering my own comments on Henry VIII rather recklessly, it has felt as if the royal name of “Tudor” is finding me out at every corner. Perhaps this impression, and association, is merely odd, or perhaps it speaks somehow to the ongoing force of Henry, the Tudor line, and its legacy.

Today, we are no more likely to find a neutral opinion of Henry than we would have centuries ago, although those who currently study him tend to hold an understandable ambivalence. John Guy calls him a “supreme egoist,” a “dictatorial bully,” and “one of the strongest and most remarkable rulers to sit on the English throne”— all in the same essay. Guy describes Henry in his younger years as a “companionable, ebullient, statuesque athlete,” and this is in fact the pop cultural version of the king today, the one lately beamed through our televisions in Showtime’s cable series The Tudors, due to begin its fourth (and concluding) season in 2010. Henry is played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers, whose version of the young king was described by Charles McGrath in The New York Times as a “moody, gym-buffed horndog.” I doubt the many scholars visiting L.A. this spring for the Renaissance Society of America conference were the intended audience for the countless posters on billboards and bus stops announcing season 3’s premiere. Still, the fitting advertising was appreciated. The show may best be described as a soap opera in ermine, and the poster, too, was pure Hollywood: we see the backs of two nude figures, in front of whom imposingly sits Rhys Meyers, clad in black leather and satin. Upon closer look, he sits and has his boots upon further muscular, contorted nudes. Over the top, to be sure, but there is also a wild historical accuracy within the potent configuration: one of the most copied images of Henry VIII during the 16th century appeared in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, or “Book of Martyrs,” where a woodcut features our formidable king enacting a biblical echo—he makes a footstool of the stumbling Clement VII, the pope who defied the king’s divorce wishes.

Guy’s description and Rhys Meyers’ Showtime performance help us to appreciate Erasmus of Rotterdam’s positively exultant reaction at the news of Henry VIII’s accession. It was enough to prompt the already renowned humanist scholar to leave Renaissance Rome and make his way to England. Erasmus was fed up with the militant behavior of Julius II, the warrior pope, whereas he had two years before received from the young English prince a letter, atop which was written “Jesus is my hope.” Erasmus also saw in the new English king someone around whom the promise of a learned, elegant court, friendly to scholars and artists alike, might arise. And it did, sort of. Henry VIII oversaw a court the likes of which had never before existed in England, but he also carried out royal prerogatives, and did so with a certain audacity and ruthlessness, which Erasmus was barely able to fathom. As for the age’s two major poets, Henry imprisoned one and executed the other. (So much for being “arts-friendly.”) This king was far from the politically enlightened ruler that Erasmus and his friend Thomas More deliberated upon in their humanist works, as More eventually discovered firsthand, at the chopping block.

Vivat Rex! ultimately applauds Henry, foregrounding his many royal accomplishments and his perceived modernity. Some will welcome this view, while others, following Ralegh and Dickens, will remain skeptical. Fortunately, this is only one of many debates and developments marking the present anniversary year. A major international conference took place at Hampton Court in mid-July, and nearby, the British Library hosted another ravishing exhibition, “Henry VIII: Man and Monarch.” Recently the Vatican’s Secret Archives revealed a long hidden 1530 letter from Henry to Pope Clement VII, requesting an annulment from his first Catherine. The archive’s prefect, Monsignor Sergio Pagano, insisted that the timing of the news was merely coincidental with the accession anniversary: “We do not celebrate kings, only popes,” he said, especially a king whose troublesome desires brought Clement VII to tears, according to a report from Peter Vannes, one of Henry’s many diplomats dispatched to Rome during this time.

Finally, to complement the success of Showtime’s series, it seems that Henry VIII remains a draw in high-art circles as well. The curators of the Los Angeles County Museum decided to acquire, for $420,000, the photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto’s hauntingly lifelike series of photos entitled “Henry VIII and His Six Wives,” taken of wax figures modeled on Renaissance portraits. “The story of Henry VIII is sexy,” said one of the curators, explaining the acquisition. “It’s something you could market. I don’t go to a museum to see a chair.” In the end, all of these efforts at appreciation have their limitations: they must rely on interpretations of Henry’s eventful rule and the substantial reception history that followed. These efforts, in other words, all resemble those wax figures, made from other models. It may be best to settle for the judgment of the king’s 17th-century biographer Edward Herbert, who called him simply “the most glorious Prince of his times.”

Brett Foster is assistant professor of English at Wheaton College. His Renaissance writings have recently appeared in The Common Review, Modern Philology, and the essay collection The Sacred and Profane in English Renaissance Literature, edited by Mary A. Papazian (Univ. of Delaware Press).

Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Books

The Year of Living Like Jesus

My Journey of Discovering What Jesus Would Really DoEd Dobson (Zondervan)

You’re familiar with the genre: A secular Jew follows Old Testament laws for one year. A Brown University student spends a semester at Jerry Falwell’s college. Now Ed Dobson, a pastor in evangelical Grand Rapids, seeks to live like Jesus—not the bridge-crossing endeavor we generally encounter in such books. In the end, though, it’s not the lengths to which Dobson goes that make his book noteworthy; it’s how little he must do to expose the shallow self-centeredness of much of our everyday faith.

Patron Saints for Postmoderns

Ten from the Past Who Speak to Our FutureChris R. Armstrong (Intervarsity Press)

Chris Armstrong’s biographical collection ignores the usual suspects—the likes of Augustine, Aquinas, and Bonaventure are nowhere to be found. Nor is his a white-dudes-only club. Instead, Armstrong profiles some oft-overlooked saints, including several women, and reminds us in a postmodern-friendly fashion that all history is biography, and that the past is more unpredictable, complicated, and instructive than the way it is often presented.

Deep Church

A Third Way Beyond Emerging and TraditionalJim Belcher (Intervarsity Press)

Jim Belcher is a Presbyterian Church in America pastor. He also was emerging before it was called emerging. That makes him part of a very small tribe, so small that he’s probably the only member. Yet his insights into church life are broadly useful, and the balance he strikes between tradition and mission, certainty and creativity, could provide a way forward for many.—Books reviewed by Madison Trammel

* * *

In Theaters

More Than a Game

Lionsgate | Rated PG | October 2

In this true coming-of-age story about nba superstar LeBron James’s teen years in Akron, Ohio, we see his team go through various ups and downs. Their tight friendships are tested through thick and thin—especially as James’s celebrity status explodes in his senior season. But behind it all, coach Dru Joyce, a Christian, shapes and molds these boys, teaching them about prayer, leadership, perseverance, and integrity.—Mark Moring

The Road

Weinstein | Rated R | October 16

The last time a Cormac McCarthy novel was adapted to film—with No Country for Old Men—it won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director. Now comes The Road, which earned McCarthy a Pulitzer Prize. The post-apocalyptic tale depicts a father (Viggo Mortensen) and son desperately seeking hope and life on their journey across a desolate landscape. The boy believes there is still goodness in the world; the father isn’t so convinced. It’s a story of love and sacrifice in a dark and lonely world.—Mark Moring

* * *

DVD

The Sold Project

Independent | Unrated

Rachel Sparks was just a “normal” girl from Indiana when she heard about Thailand’s child sex trade. She ended up forming an organization and making a documentary by the same name, The Sold Project, which includes short pieces about the problem and how viewers can help. The highlight is a 12-minute feature of a bright, beautiful Thai girl named Cat—and how the Sold Project stepped in to help when she was most at risk, likely preventing an ugly future. (More: TheSoldProject.com)—Mark Moring

Munyurangabo

Film Movement | Unrated | October 6

In the summer of 2006, Lee Isaac Chung went to Rwanda as a volunteer with Youth With a Mission, and decided that his best gift to Rwanda’s youth would be helping them use art to work through the trauma of the 1994 genocide. Chung taught filmmaking, allowing the students to tell their own stories in a documentary that ended up at many top festivals. Variety‘s Robert Koehler described it as “the finest and truest film yet on the moral and emotional repercussions of the genocide that wracked Rwanda.”—Brett McCracken

* * *

Music

Electric Dirt

Levon Helm

(Dirt Farmer Music)

When Nina Simone sang, “I Wish I Knew How It Feels to Be Free,” she was singing about liberation from racial inequality; when Levon Helm sings it, he’s singing about liberation from all the trappings of this world. The singer and drummer for the Band, this recent cancer survivor has mortality—but also the gospel—on his mind on this album. If he continues to do work as joyful as this, it will be a blessing to us all. —Josh Hurst

Songs from Jacob’s Well

Mike Crawford & His Secret Siblings

(Independent)

When King David exhorted us to make a joyful noise, Mike Crawford took the call seriously. The worship pastor at Jacob’s Well Church in Kansas City, Crawford—and about 22 other musicians, according to the credits—helms a fascinating worship album here, full of Scripture, truth, and beautiful poetry, all wrapped up in, well, a joyful noise. Some of it is melodic, some funky, some dissonant, and some downright weird (think Sufjan Stevens meets Sigur R—s meets Jon Foreman). Singalongs? Not many here. But for intelligent, contemplative songs honoring the Creator, this is it. —Mark Moring

Roadsinger

Yusuf

(UMe)

“All kinds of people make up my life / All kinds of faces show me their love / All kinds of lanterns light up the dark / But there’s only One God has a place in my heart.” You won’t hear these lyrics on your favorite Christian radio station, because they are from Yusuf Islam—the former Cat Stevens—who became a Muslim over 30 years ago. On his latest CD, Roadsinger, you’ll find plenty of beautiful music about love and peace, several songs of worship—and nary a mention of Allah. Yusuf has said he hopes to ease Western apprehensions about Islam; this soothing, soaring music is a good step. —Mark Moring

Wheeler

Wheeler

(Mountain Roads Records)

Bluegrass and the Good News have long been companions, but it’s an outright marriage—literally, with founders Kevin and Tiffany Wheeler—for this new group from rural southwestern Virginia. There’s plenty of foot-stomping pickin’ and grinnin’, but the vocal harmonies are what make this album soar. “From the Third Day On” is especially lovely, with this uplifting lyric: “From the third day on / Christ is risen / From the third day on / Hope is alive / From the third day on / We are forgiven / Make sure you’re livin’ / From the third day on.”—Mark Moring

Copyright © 2009 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

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It’s you and me, moving at the speed of light into eternity ….” So begins this past summer’s viral YouTube video, “Jill and Kevin’s Wedding Entrance.”

What at first seems like a somber church processional becomes choreographed exuberance, as the couple and their friends shake and boogie down the aisle to Chris Brown’s club hit, “Forever.” Little did Jill and Kevin know that 22,875,767 others would join those in the pews to watch the show.

The video has triggered varied responses from evangelicals. Many have compared the couple’s dancing to King David’s joyful jig, while others have questioned the couple’s silliness upon entering such a serious affair. Others just turned their speakers up and watched again, “because it just makes me feel so darn good!” as one commenter put it. In the midst of this, perhaps it’s time for the church to ask, What is the purpose of the wedding ceremony, anyway?

To answer faithfully, it’s wise to start by forgoing the persistent myth that the wedding ceremony is all about you, the individual that also looms large in contemporary politics and all consumerist rhetoric. Since marriage is at root about two individuals fulfilling their needs and wants, the cultural logic goes, the wedding day is therefore about reflecting those needs and wants. This creed is especially pervasive in Modern Bride and other wedding industry magazines, which remind every young woman that “her day” will be a disaster unless all the details match her wishes. Other couples design the ceremony based on their personalities and shared history, wanting attendees to walk away thinking, “That was so Kevin and Jill.”

By contrast, the Protestant Reformers—and indeed, Scripture—leave little room for any church ceremony not focused on the foundational relationship between God and humans, and, by extension, the human bonds that are essential for a stable, just society. Rejecting the idea that marriage is a sacrament that only clergy can bless, the Reformers saw marriage as a primary social institution God blesses as one gift in his creation (Gen. 2:18).

John Witte, a legal historian who has written much on marriage and family, says the Reformers saw marriage as “a covenantal association of the entire community,” wherein the pastor, families, witnesses, and the couple commit to a contract before God. Like the covenant between Yahweh and the Israelites, the marriage covenant establishes a bond that withstands all the difficulties of human life (“for better, for worse,” and so on). God is present in the covenant bonds and becomes “party, witness, and judge” to the union, writes Witte; leaving out any of the parties is to effectively “omit God from the marriage covenant.”

While no Christian wants to omit God from the wedding guest list, many weddings do so functionally by drawing attention to all the wrong things. More time is devoted to the processional than the vows. Eye-popping amounts of money are spent on details that few will remember a week later. Clothing and music are chosen expressly to stand out rather than to honor and edify those gathered. Vows are made up to reflect the couple’s individuality rather than scriptural wisdom or church teaching on marriage. If Augustine of Hippo was right about finding virtue in properly ordered loves—a hierarchy where God is our supreme love, who rightly orients all our other loves—it seems the Christian wedding has become disarranged.

The key to reordering the Christian wedding is not to strip it of personal touches or references to the marrying couple. A healthy congregation does not erase each member’s identity, but places it in the context of community; likewise, a good wedding ceremony does not ignore the things that make the couple the couple, but puts them in the larger community of those gathered.

Nor is the key to remove all light, celebratory elements because of marriage’s seriousness. This is the beginning of life together, not the end of it. As one commenter said in response to the video, “On our wedding day, we danced with the choir, after the sermon, through the offering, and all through the reception, because dancing means joy and relief that you got to this point.”

As it turns out, the key to a properly ordered wedding ceremony has less to do with us than we think. It begins with the Holy Spirit, giving all parties in the marriage covenant a desire to honor God, admonish and encourage one another, and invite to the big day those who do not know the gospel, allowing the celebration to become a witness to Christ and his Bride and their own wedding day in the new kingdom. Who knows? Maybe there will be dancing there, too.

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Related Elsewhere:

Laura Leonard also wrote about the wedding dance on Her.meneutics, the Christianity Today blog for women.

Previous articles on marriage and love include:

The Case for Early Marriage | Amid our purity pledges and attempts to make chastity hip, we forgot to teach young Christians how to tie the knot. (July 31, 2009)

Does the Bible Really Say All That About Romance? | The Bible pictures God as a passionate, pursuant, and perfect lover. (February 3, 1984)

Sex in the Body of Christ | Chastity is a spiritual discipline for the whole church. (May 13, 2005)

The new documentary Oh My God, due out next month, interviews men and women from all walks of life, from atheists to devout believers of a myriad of faiths, in an attempt to get to the bottom of the age old question, “What is God?” Director Peter Rodgers, frustrated over how God is increasingly politicized in our culture, spent more than two years making the film in a journey that crisscrossed 23 different countries.

“I was fed up with the childish schoolyard mentality that permeates this world,” Rodgers says. “I call it the “My God Is Greater Than Your God” syndrome, where you have grown men flying into buildings shouting “God is Great, “where you have the leader of the free world telling the BBC in 2003 that he invaded Iraq because God told him to. None of these concepts made any sense to me, so I decided to go around the world and ask people what they think.”

Rodgers interviewed everyone from rabbis to Christian fundamentalists, Muslim radicals to Buddhist monks, Hindu Swamis to Catholic priests. (He also interviews a handful of celebrities including Hugh Jackman, Ringo Star and Seal — though I’m not entirely sure why we should care what they think).

See the trailer here or go the official website where you can submit your answer to the question: “God is _______.”

Skye Jethani will be presenting at the STORY Conference next week, Url will be blogging from the event, and Leadership’s editors will be hosting video interviews with the speakers. Be sure to check out more at StoryChicago.com.