Zion
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The Deepest Part of You
We make choices and experience feelings, and our choices shape our feelings and our feelings shape our choices. This is how God made us, and this is how he is remaking us in the image of his Son. With our new hearts and transformed minds, we willingly offer our bodies (including our passions) to God as our spiritual act of worship (Romans 12:1). We put off the old man, with its desires and practices, and we put on the new man, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of our Creator (Colossians 3:10).
This is how God made us, and this is how he is remaking us in the image of his Son. With our new hearts and transformed minds, we willingly offer our bodies (including our passions) to God as our spiritual act of worship (Romans 12:1). We put off the old man, with its desires and practices, and we put on the new man, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of our Creator (Colossians 3:10).
Which is more revealing of the “real you”: your spontaneous and unguarded emotions, or your purposeful and intentional choices? Put another way, which is more fundamental to who you are: the feelings that spontaneously erupt from your heart, or the choices that you intentionally make?
At Bethlehem College & Seminary, I teach a class called “Foundations of Christian Hedonism.” Alongside the Bible, we read Piper, Edwards, Lewis, and more. We talk about the supremacy of God, the indispensable importance of the affections, the Christian life, and pastoral ministry. I love it.
One stimulating aspect of the class is identifying tensions and disagreements between our favorite Christian Hedonists and wrestling together with them. Last semester, we discovered a seeming dissonance between how Piper talks about feelings and how Lewis talks about the will.
Piper’s Grief
In chapter 3 of Desiring God, Piper explores “Worship: The Feast of Christian Hedonism.” In doing so, he accents the importance of feelings, emotions, and affections in worship.
Piper emphasizes that genuine feelings are spontaneous and not calculated. Feelings are not consciously willed and not performed as a means to anything else. He gives numerous examples of feelings — hope (that spontaneously arises in your heart when you are shipwrecked on a raft and catch sight of land), fear (that spontaneously arises when camping and you hear a bear outside your tent), awe (that overwhelms you as you stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon), and gratitude (that spontaneously erupts from the heart of children when they get the present they most wanted on Christmas morning).
“Feelings are spontaneous, unsought, unplanned. They are our immediate and natural reactions to reality.”
The most poignant example of spontaneous feeling that Piper describes, however, is the grief that poured from his heart when he received the news that his mother was killed in a car wreck. In that moment, “The feeling [of grief] is there, bursting out of my heart” (91). No planning, no performance, no decision — just emotion and feeling. And here’s the crucial bit: “It comes from deep within, from a place beneath the conscious will” (91).
Lewis’s Prayers
At the same time, we were reading Lewis’s Letters to Malcolm. In Letter 21, Lewis discusses the frustrating irksomeness of prayer and the nature of duty. One day, when we are perfected, prayer and our other obligations will no longer be experienced as duties, but only as delights. Love will flow out from us “spontaneously as song from a lark or fragrance from a flower” (154). For now, we contend with various obstacles and impediments.
Even still, we have rich moments in the present — “refreshments ‘unimplored, unsought, Happy for man so coming’” (156, quoting John Milton). But then Lewis makes this statement:
I have a notion that what seem our worst prayers may really be, in God’s eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling and contend with the greatest disinclination. For these, perhaps, being nearly all will, come from a deeper level than feeling. (157)
In other words, our best prayers may be the ones we pray even when we don’t want to pray, when our prayers are not riding on positive feelings toward God, but are actively, deliberately trying to overcome resistance within us. The will, Lewis might say, rises from deep within, from a place beneath even our feelings, proving who we really are at bottom.
Clarifying the Tension
We can see the tension, can’t we? Are feelings deeper than the will (as Piper says)? Or is the will deeper than feelings (as Lewis claims)?
Before evaluating, we need further clarity. We can begin by noting key areas of agreement. First, both Piper and Lewis agree that we ought to distinguish feelings from the will.
Second, they seem to agree about some of the key differences between feelings and the will. Feelings are spontaneous, unsought, unplanned. They are our immediate and natural reactions to reality (like birds singing and flowers blooming). The will, on the other hand, involves intention, planning, choice, and execution.
Third, both Lewis and Piper agree that the will and the feelings ought to be viewed in some sort of hierarchical arrangement, with one being “deeper” than the other.
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United Methodism’s Iliff Seminary Embraces Paganism
There’s nothing wrong with United Methodists wanting to have good interfaith relations, whether it’s with Pagans, Jews, Muslims, atheists, or adherents of other religions. There’s also no problem with studying other philosophies and theologies that are non-Christian, but doing so from a distinctively Christian standpoint. Yet, given that Iliff has an admissions counselor who is pagan, multiple student-elected leaders who are pagan, a web page highlighting one of their pagan students and a class dedicated to pagan spirituality, the situation seems go beyond just seeking good interreligious relations.
One might assume that the official seminaries established and still heavily funded by the United Methodist Church would have a core commitment to the Christian faith, broadly understood. More informed United Methodists would at least expect that even the progressivism in our seminaries would remain Christian liberalism. But our denomination’s Iliff School of Theology in Denver has actually progressed so far to be oddly atheism-friendly and actually promote completely different religions – Unitarian Universalism and outright Paganism. And Iliff’s pagan connections run deeper than many realize.
Iliff, as a United Methodist seminary, receives funding from the church’s Ministerial Education Fund (MEF). The MEF is a large chunk of the apportionment payments demanded of local United Methodist congregations. According to official data compiled by Joe Kilpatrick, between 2009-2016, Iliff was supported by an average contribution of $806,763 per year from the fund. But with all of that money, they only educated an annual average of a mere 11 people ordained into American United Methodist ministry (out of a yearly average of 516 total ordinands). Iliff is not merely generously subsidized by United Methodist apportionments, but it is disproportionately supported, receiving an average of $71,712 per ordinand, well above the $48,942-per-ordinand average for all 13 official U.S. United Methodist seminaries. (Attempts to seek updated statistics from the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry, the General Council on Finance and Administration, and Iliff itself were unsuccessful.)
Given this amount of support, it may surprise the average United Methodist that Iliff intentionally trains clergy to promote Unitarian Universalism and that outright Paganism is openly practiced by people who study and work at Iliff.
Iliff’s extensive statement of its many “Core Values” makes clear the United Methodist seminary’s commitment to intersectional, progressive social justice, but says nothing directly about God, Jesus Christ, or the Bible. This official statement does not even have anything particularly Christian beyond passing references to the school’s “United Methodist heritage.” Another official statement declares, “Support of the LGBTQIA+ community is a core value at Iliff” and reports, “Since we began tracking the metrics in 2015, 35% of our student body has consistently identified as LGBTQIA+.” In deference to this constituency, the seminary has offered an entire course devoted to “Queer Spirituality in the Visual Arts,” in which students can explore such topics as “Queer Tarot.”
Iliff School of Theology: where commitment to the LGBTQIA+ cause is a core value, but following Jesus Christ is not.
This sidelining of Christianity seems to deliberately reflect the school’s commitment to a pluralist religious ethos. One current staffer and alumna has publicly said, “The Iliff School of Theology is a United Methodist school of higher education but its alumni and students are Hindus, Universalists, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, atheists, agnostics….” An alumni profiles section of the website—the sort of place where schools brag about select alumni of whom they are particularly proud and with whom they want to publicly identify the institution’s reputation—includes a glowing profile of a minister of a “social justice-oriented” United Methodist congregation in Iowa in which “people identify as Catholic, Methodist, Buddhists, Unitarians, agnostics and spiritual seekers.”
Apparently, even something as basic as belief in God is not a boundary for Iliff. The alumni profiles section also celebrates a chaplain who is part of the atheistic American Humanist Society. And a faculty profile highlights an Iliff professor who “now describes himself as a ‘lapsed Buddhist,’ and a current atheist.”
Iliff’s influences from neo-paganism and Unitarian Universalism are especially noteworthy. The former is a loose movement of Westerners rejecting mainstream religion to re-adopt various religious beliefs and practices from pre-Christian Europe. The latter is a liberal, post-Christian religion known for its belief in the relativistic equality of different religions. Unitarian Universalists often call themselves “UUs” for short.
Even when students first apply to Iliff, they may interact with an admissions representative who is a self-described member of the “LGBTIQ+ community” and pagan priestess, or as her official bio puts it, she “is ordained with a Norse pagan organization called Forn Sidr of America and serves as their Gudellri/head clergy.” Shouldn’t official ambassadors for a school so heavily funded by the UMC be Methodist, or at least some sort of Christian?
Such pagan influence is seen in the culture of Iliff’s student body. The seminary’s student government is “an elected representative body” called the student Senate. An official seminary email sent in November to alumni celebrated the election of five student leaders to this body. Two stand out in particular: Kyndyl Greyland and David Dashifen Kees.
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Leslie Land and His Forgotten Influence on the Evangelical Church – an Interview with Author Ian Shaw
Leslie Land clearly had a growing conviction that God was calling him to the ministry, and the letters through the late thirties and the forties trace this. Lloyd-Jones spoke at Land’s induction to Melbourne Hall, Leicester, in 1947 and Land preached quite often at Westminster Chapel through the 1950s. Melbourne Hall continues to exercise a faithful ministry in the heart of Leicester, the most ethnically diverse city in the UK.
Ian Shaw, Professor Emeritus at the School for Business and Society of the University of York, UK, has just done the church a great service by writing a well-researched book on the life of Leslie Land, a rather forgotten pastor in mid-20th-century England who influenced his generation and the next more than most of us could imagine.
The book, Leslie Land: His Life and Ministry, will be published through Joshua Press, an imprint of H&E Publishing, later this year. He has graciously accepted to answer some questions about Leslie Land and this new biography.
What inspired you to write this book?
Well, I guess there may be direct and more distant inspirations. It must have been the early 1950s when, as a little boy, I first heard Leslie Land. I was sixteen when he left his church in Leicester, in the English Midlands. A small group of us went to visit him one Saturday morning, uninvited. It must have been the first time a pastor had talked to me as one Christian to another. I never forgot. When he died after a long illness in 1985, I wrote a couple of obituaries. The seeds were sown.
Over the last decade I have transcribed and published a series of his studies on the second advent of Christ, and written a series of articles about him, but it was the awareness that I had probably the most complete deposit of information about Leslie Land that eventually pushed me to make a fuller record.
Can you give a brief overview of Leslie Land’s life?
The facts – as much as we know them – are readily told. I tell the story in the opening pages of the book. Tracing his life is like a jigsaw puzzle with many missing pieces. He was brought up in Derbyshire, an English county. ‘William Leslie Land, born 20 January 1903 at Wirksworth; son of Samuel Land, retired Draper and Outfitter. Educated at the Grammar School, Wirksworth. Admitted 1 March 1921.’ So reads the Christ’s College, Cambridge, Admissions Book.
He became a science teacher at a private college on the south coast of England and quickly rose to be the Headmaster, when still in his thirties. He left the college just after the Second World War and after a brief spell at a church in the south of England was called to Melbourne Hall, Leicester, where he stayed for fourteen years until 1961. He suffered the early onset of a serious degenerative illness and died in 1985. His wife, Katherine, survived him for a few years as did their son, Peter, who himself had lifelong learning and social disabilities.
How difficult was it to gather information for this book?
Katherine Land, who I never spoke to face to face, was shown one of the obits I wrote. She asked someone to mail to me a small number of artefacts from his ministry – his annotated bible, some sermon notes, and so on. Someone else – a man who had been a minister in Leicester at the same time as Land – mailed to me some reel-to-reel tapes of Leslie Land. I felt a kind of obligation.
Another unusual factor is that Melbourne Hall at that time produced a monthly church magazine of sixteen closely typed pages. Three or four of these pages would be taken up with an extended outline of a Leslie Land sermon. The church would bind the magazines between hard covers every three years. I don’t know any other church that would do that. One way or another I was given all but one of the bound volumes covering his ministry. So, although he never wrote anything for publication – despite Martyn Lloyd-Jones urging him to do so – there is a rich archive of his ministry.
Preserving the archive is, as it happens, one of the challenges regarding Leslie Land, and one I have not been able to resolve. I have a significant number of audiotapes of his ministry and have had them digitised, but they need a permanent home.
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