His divine nature still had all the divine attributes of God that he had before the incarnation. But in his humanity, the expression of those attributes was limited. In his humanity, Jesus took on all that means to be a human. That includes being little, weak and helpless. 

Christmas continues to provide a rich source of blog material at the minute. A couple of days ago, I gave my yearly reminder that what you do at Christmas is not a measure of your spiritual temperature. Off the back of that, yesterday, I wrote about how we can go a bit gnostic at Christmas and how that often affects all sorts of aspects of our lives as believers. Today, I thought I would stick with the ancient heresy theme.
If ever there was a time that heresy slips under the radar in our churches, I think Christmas is it. We either stick it in our carols, or we pick up on lines in carols and then import heresy ourselves by ‘correcting’ what is already perfectly credible, or we just end up preaching it straight up. After all, the trinity and the incarnation are tricky business, are they not? One mere slip of the tongue and we’re in trouble. When the difference between orthodoxy and rank heresy boils down to one letter in a foreign language (ὁμοούσιος, homoousios or ὁμοιούσιος, homoiousios) I can understand how people end up in shtook.
I am reminded of the year that we sang the carol, Once in Royal David’s City. The following lines caught the attention of the person leading the meeting:
For He is our childhood’s pattern,Day by day like us He grew,He was little, weak, and helpless,Tears and smiles like us He knew,And He feeleth for our sadness,And He shareth in our gladness.
Those lines met with the incredulous comment: ‘I take real issue with this. Jesus was NEVER little, weak and helpless. He was the eternal Son of God!’
Except, of course, whilst he was the eternal Son of God incarnate, the eternal Son of God had indeed submitted to all that it meant to be a little human baby, including being little, weak and helpless. Unless we believe that Jesus – much like our Muslim friends – was chatting in full sentences from birth, what else are we supposed to think?
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Written by Aaron M. Renn |
Wednesday, September 13, 2023
The negative world is almost defined by institutional incompatibility or hostility to historical Protestantism. This necessitates a countercultural approach and bars the door to a mainline relationship of the church to culture. 

Jake Meador wrote a recent interesting piece on a topic of great interest to me, namely about a call to attempt to create a new Protestant mainline. He says:
So to bring the discussion to reformed catholicity and what reformed catholic churches can do in our current context, here it is: The old Mainline is dead. American Catholicism is likely terminal as well, even prior to the plausible turmoil to come under Pope Francis’s successor. American Evangelicalism is now encountering its own dechurching crisis and loss of influence. The Christian movement in America is thus at a crossroads. Something new will need to be built. But I do not think we should build a new evangelicalism; I think we should build a new mainline.
That mainline should be centered around the EPC, PCA, and ACNA with room for the possible addition of Lutheran, Methodist, or Baptist denominations, should denominations interested in this project emerge from those streams. The old mainline encompassed Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Methodists, Lutherans, and Baptists. We currently have Presbyterian and Anglican communions that might plausibly grow into the “continuing church” vision once articulated at the PCA’s founding. It remains to be seen if the Global Methodists can join this movement, let alone if the LCMS can stave off its own demographic collapse or if a strengthened Baptist commujnion can emerge from the chaos and corruption currently vexing the SBC. These are the institutional pieces to watch, then: the PCA, EPC, ACNA, Global Methodists, LCMS, maybe WELS, and SBC.
I agree that America lost a lot with the decline of the mainline denominations. Attempts to at least salvage or reclaim some of that is of great interest to me, and also others as well. I think you can see Tim Keller’s plan for the renewal of the American church through this lens, and I might be collaborating on an article about that in the future.
Lind’s Four American Republics
Before digging in, however, I thought it was interesting to see Meador lay out a “four Americas” framework from Michael Lind that was very similar to my own version. I did not draw from Lind, though had heard he had something like this. But I think this sort of division of American history is one very obvious way to do it, so I’m sure it has recurred many times.
Where I differ from the framework Meador gives is that I see the “fourth republic” or “America 4.0” as less emerged than he does (or at least that’s my impression). I see us as in a liminal period where we can’t yet see the contours of what the future system will look like, just as those in the Depression didn’t know what postwar America would be like. The old is passing away but the new has not yet been born. Hence we should be cautious about over fitting solutions to the present movement.
Through Catholic Eyes
Meador is also influenced by Joseph Bottum’s An Anxious Age, which I actually read after I saw him make a previous reference to it. It’s an interesting book in which Bottum makes the common argument that contemporary elite morality and culture is a form of secularized mainline Protestantism (a view with some degree of truth). In his telling, Catholics (with evangelicals in a supporting role as public mouthpiece for Catholic natural law arguments) were the would be replacement for the mainline role in society, but that project failed because America ended up being too Protestant to submit to a Catholicism that was weakened at the time by internal issues.
You won’t be surprised to hear that Bottum himself is a staunch Catholic. That is, like 90% of the people I read who center America’s problems in mainline Protestantism, he himself is not a Protestant. Invariably in these readings, any role Ellis Islanders (like my family) might have played in contemporary America’s failings is minimized or avoided altogether. Just once I’d like to see a Catholic writer say something like, “The WASPs handed over the keys, but we ran the car into a ditch.”
This is one reason I have been arguing that Protestants must stop outsourcing their thinking to Catholic intellectuals. Invariably this leads to us repeating essentially Catholic serving talking points, as Bottum himself basically says in his book (e.g., of George W. Bush).
Meador’s Mainline Restoration Project
With those preliminaries, what does Meador’s mainline restoration project look like?
Institutionally, he sees it centered in the conservative “shadow denominations” of the mainline, mostly splinter groups (EPC, PCA) but some which are not (LCMS). He goes on to say:
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The process of compiling an anthology of devotional classics was for me a continuous process of tracking down bits and pieces that were part of my literary and religious life that I had never pursued in detail. I will feel rewarded if my readers come to love the entries in my anthology as I have come to love them, and I will be doubly rewarded if my readers catch a vision for finding devotional riches in overlooked corners of their own reading lives.

The Devoted Heart
The following reflections on the devoted heart are occasioned by the recent release of my anthology of devotional classics, a book in which each devotional text is accompanied by a 500-word explication by me. I called the texts classics to denote that they possess qualities that raise them above the conventional entries in a daily devotional guide. The problems with the conventional devotional guide are multiple, as Charles Spurgeon discovered when he made a survey of existing devotional books. What Spurgeon found was predictability, monotony, a tendency toward abstraction, and lack of fresh insight and expression.
In compiling my anthology, I worked hard to find devotional riches in unexpected places. Many of the authors would doubtless be surprised by what I chose for devotional purposes. Although I did not primarily go in quest of superior expression, I found that freshness of insight and expression just naturally appeared, often because of the real-life situations from which the devotionals arose.

I will adduce four examples to illustrate what I am describing, and then I will explore the common ingredients that the selections in my book share, in effect offering a definition of the genre of a devotional classic.

Devotional Riches in Unexpected Places
The burial service in The Book of Common Prayer was not composed as a devotional. It was instead intended to be part of a funeral service. Yet it is a moving meditation on human mortality and immortality. Here is a brief excerpt:
In the midst of life we are in death; of whom may we seek for help, but of thee, O Lord, who for our sins art justly displeased? . . . O holy and most merciful Savior, deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death . . . [and] suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from thee.
When Victorian poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson was walking with a visitor in a garden, the visitor asked the poet what he thought of Christ. Tennyson’s response was not offered as a devotional, but it nonetheless rises to that status: “What the sun is to that flower, Jesus Christ is to my soul. He is the sun of my soul.”
William Shakespeare finalized and signed his will a month before his death in 1616. In doing so, he did not envision himself as writing something devotional, yet part of the preamble reads as follows: “I commend my soul into the hands of God my Creator, hoping and assuredly believing through the only merits of Jesus Christ my Savior to be made partaker of life everlasting. And my body to the earth whereof it is made.”
Painter Lilias Trotter made a practice of drawing plants in Algeria, where she served as a missionary in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Trotter pondered the plants that she came to know intimately, the idea occurred to her that they were parables of spiritual truths. One of these parables was built around the idea that just as plants die and then revive to new life, for people, too, death is in multiple ways the gate of life. Here is a brief excerpt: “A gateway is never a dwelling-place; the death-stage is never meant for our souls to stay and brood over, but to pass through with a will into the light beyond . . . for above all and through all is the inflowing, overflowing life of Jesus.”
A Devoted Life is the Seedbed of a Devoted Heart
Before I turn to an analysis of the common ingredients of the genre of a classical devotional, I will pause to draw a conclusion from the examples I have just quoted.
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