Author: Jason (Page 1 of 2)

Literacy Regained – An Ongoing Struggle

October 2, 2025 / Jason

Everyone knows the Internet is bad for our powers of concentration. The Internet, in its current state, is full of chaos energy that pulls and pushes us in a billion different potential directions. Hyperlinks, recommended videos, “if you like THAT, you’ll love this” – the algorithms learn what we want and feed us accordingly.

Ironically, it was one of the few sane voices on X (forever in my heart, Twitter), https://x.com/SketchesbyBoze, that changed things for me recently. He was posting about the pleasure of reading Middlemarch by George Eliot. It sounded so sublime and challenging that I shortly thereafter picked up a copy.

Within the first three pages, I had to look up about six words. I like to consider my vocabulary robust, but this book had my number. And it obviously wasn’t flexing on me. She was just writing in her own voice as a brilliant late nineteenth century novelist. I read the first chapter of the first book (she had originally published it as eight little installments) and I was exhausted.

Maybe exhausted isn’t the right word. I felt like I needed to recover. It felt like I had just lifted a personal record with the barbell or set a new pace for the mile. Winded, sweating, and flooded with endorphins. I could tell that it was obviously beautiful prose. It was lucid and insightful and wonderful and just fun to read. It was fun to be challenged.

But even as I finished that chapter, mentally huffing and puffing, I wondered if I had received any new emails. What was happening on Instagram? What new ads was I missing on Facebook? Sirens, the lot of them. I can still hear them calling me.

Detox will take time. I know that. Guardrails will have to be put in place. I still “need” my phone for some basic things. But I’m going to try and recapture my ability to focus. Slow pace. Progressive overload. At least, until I can lift and run with the giants.

There’s Something About Mary

August 16, 2025 / Jason

I am a dyed-in-the-wool Protestant. I have great appreciation for many aspects of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, but the Protestant Reformation was a necessary renewal movement that called the Church back to herself, back to her beginnings under the apostles. That said, Protestants often don’t know what to do with Mary.

We love the incarnation. We love Christmastime. But because Mary is made so much of in different parts of Christianity, we tend to overcorrect and only mention her during a Christmas pageant or maybe on Mother’s Day. But the holy mother of Christ matters. I don’t want to make converts from Rome uncomfortable, but I also don’t want us to throw the Marian baby out with the papal bathwater.

Mother of Who, Now?

She is the blessed Virgin. If she were not, we would have no salvation through Christ. She is the mother of God. If she were not, we would have no salvation through Christ. And so, we ought to immensely honor our sister in Christ, the mother of our Lord. And all God’s people said? If we do not, we are in danger of slipping into Nestorianism.

This is one of the early heresies about Jesus that the early church had to battle. Nestorius was an elder in the church who did not want to call Mary the Mother of God (theotokos – “God bearer”). He wanted to call her the Christ-bearer (chrisotokos) because he argued that God cannot undergo changes like death or birth. Like many heretics, he started with good intentions and proceeded to overstate things.

Cyril of Alexandria (the defender of Nicene orthodoxy over-against Nestorius) agreed that Jesus suffered in his own physical body, but the Son of God also suffered in his own physical body. This is because both his human and divine natures work together in the divine Person (or hypostasis). Because of the hypostatic union of Christ, we really can speak of God being born or God dying. We can rightly say with Paul, in 1 Cor.2:8, that they “crucified the Lord of glory”. God was crucified because the man Jesus was crucified, and the man Jesus is God.

The Jesus that grew in Mary’s womb was human in nature. A human body and a human soul. Supernaturally, her egg was fertilized under the ministry of the Holy Spirit (Luke’s Gospel says that she was “overshadowed” by the Spirit) in order to for a true human. And that true human was also God the Son. This is what the term Mother of God (theotokos) safeguards. She gave birth to his human nature, not his divine nature. But she birthed, mothered, and raised the Son of God. If she is not the mother of God, then Jesus is not God. As one theologian said, the Son is begotten from the Father before all time, and the Son is begotten of Mary, the mother of God, in time.

Mary, Mary, Not Contrary

I make much of this because in the Western Church calendar (for Protestants and the church of Rome), today is the feast day of St. Mary the Virgin. We know from John 19:26-27 that Jesus entrusted his mother into the care of his friend, the apostle John. We now from Irenaeus of Lyons (the disciple of Polycarp, the disciple of John) that John (and so also, Mary) lived in Ephesus until the reign of the Roman emperor, Trajan. There’s such a strong tradition that Mary lived out the rest of her days in Ephesus that there’s actually a little stone chapel on Mt. Koressos just outside the town to commemorate her home.

Those of us who try to pray the Daily Office get to pray her song, the Magnificat, every day for evening prayer. In the Roman tradition, this day (August 15^th) commemorates Mary’s bodily assumption into heaven. Of course, that’s just an assumption (*rimshot). Since 1950, Roman Catholics have been obliged to believe this as dogma. While Rome goes too far in binding consciences to believe this, it might behoove us to remember that the Protestant Reformers reflected often and deeply on the blessed virgin.

The Swiss reformer, Ulrich Zwingli, in his 1530 treatise, A Reckoning of the Faith, said, “I believe and understand that the Son assumed flesh, because he truly assumed of the immaculate and perpetual Virgin Mary the human nature, yea, the entire man, who consists of body and soul.” While they strongly rejected Marian mediation and Rome’s over-emphasis, her immaculate sinlessness and alleged perpetual virginity were assumed and believed by the Reformers.

Protestant Piety, Marian Marvels

The Tetrapolitan Confession (1530), an Augsburg document that was prepared by Martin Bucer and Wolfgang Capito, says, “Mary and the saints are to be held in high esteem, even honored, but appropriate devotion is found not in prayer to them, but in following their holy examples.” The Confession of Basel (1534) by Oswald Myconius states that “we believe that [Christ] was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the pure, undefiled Virgin Mary.” In the second of Basel’s confessions, prepared and produced by Henrich Bullinger, we read, “From the undefiled Virgin Mary by the cooperation of the Holy Spirit, this Lord Christ, the Son of the living, true God, has assumed flesh which is holy through its unity with the Godhead in all things like unto our flesh yet without sin.” Chapter 11 of the Second Helvetic Confession (1566) calls Mary the “Ever-Virgin”, “most chastely conceived by the Holy Spirit.”

Devotion to Mary and the saints, for the Reformers, was all about imitation and galvanizing examples toward holiness. In the Church of England, article 2 of the Thirty-nine Articles declare that Christ “took man’s nature in the womb of the Blessed Virgin, of her substance.” The Westminster Confession of Faith and Shorter Catechism all affirm Mary’s virginity, Christ’s humanity, conception by the Spirit, and her substance being pass onto Jesus. And all the while, these confessional documents guard against idolatry, any other mediation than that of Christ, and placing the saints in their wrongful place in our piety.

John Calvin famously refused to call Mary the mother of God. Many have followed his lead even to his day, alas and alack. But with all the historic confessional language of “Virgin”, it’s most natural to view that as an abbreviation of her title “Ever-Virgin” that we see as early as Hippolytus of Rome, Irenaeus, Augustine, and Athanasius. Tim Perry has an excellent article going over this and I leaned on his work for much of the above citations.

We don’t have to agree with Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli on the perpetual virginity of Mary. In fact, I’m not convinced the dogma is actually necessary. But we can at least follow their admiration and affirmation of the faith and virtue of our sister in Christ, the mother of God and blessed virgin. If we can get past the smell of incense, these titles and adjectives will do us good in affirming the deity and humanity of Jesus, and the exemplary faith of the obedient handmaiden of the Lord who said “yes” to the incarnation that saved us.

O God, you have taken to yourself the blessed Virgin Mary, mother of your incarnate Son: Grant that we, who have been redeemed by his blood, may share with her the glory of your eternal kingdom; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. – collect for Saint Mary the Virgin, Book of Common Prayer

Creedal Christianity

August 14, 2025 / Jason

Creed (Not Just an Amazing Band) and Sola Scriptura

I had the privilege of helping to teach a small group at our church this summer. It’s perhaps my most favorite thing to do and I don’t get enough chances as a retired pastor. For my part, we spent the first five weeks looking at the Nicene Creed at a high level. But we first had to ask the question, “Why do we need creeds today?” Isn’t it enough that we have the Bible and the Holy Spirit? Christians can probably figure things out on our own without anyone else’s help. What could be harmful in that approach?

If you’ve spent any amount of time studying the Protestant Reformation, you’ve probably come across something called the five solas (or solae – they’re in Latin because everyone in the 16^th century was writing theology in Latin): solus Christus (Christ alone), sola fide (faith alone), sola gratia (grace alone), soli Deo gloria (glory to God alone), and sola scriptura (Scripture alone).

In the last century, these were used as summary statements to express what the Reformation was trying to emphasize and call the Church back to. Now, with respect to sola Scriptura – the Bible alone – this does not mean that we as Protestants believe the Bible is our only source of authority. I’ll say that again – Protestants do not believe that the Bible is our only authority. We never have. When the Reformers appealed to the Scriptures to explain why they were renewing the Church catholic, they did not do so in a vacuum. They appealed to reason, yes, but they also appealed to church history – to the creeds and councils, to our early church fathers. It was not the Bible alone that was their only authority. It was the Bible alone that was their highest authority.

When you read Martin Luther’s The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520), John Calvin’s Institutes (1560) or John Jewel’s Apology for the Church of England (1562), these men are constantly appealing to the creeds of the early church and what we might call the first seven ecumenical (or global) councils of the Church. In their historical moment, they were looking back at St. Augustine and St. Chrysostom and Basil the Great and were saying, “They actually agree more with us than with Rome.” Protestants have always insisted on reading the Scriptures through the lens of the Church. Creedal Christianity is simply Christianity.

Creed as Anchor

Do you have to understand everything in the Nicene Creed to be a Christian? No. I would argue that no one can understand it fully! Some of what you’ll read in the creed is a mystery. And I mean that as an actual category: mystery. I don’t mean that as a cop out to say, “who knows, can’t explain it”.

Can you not understand some things in the Nicene Creed and still be a Christian? Yes. Can you reject anything in the Nicene Creed and still be a Christian? No.

In other words, if you take any statement in the Nicene Creed and say, “No, I don’t believe that”, you have left biblical Christianity behind. And therein lies the powerful help and guardrail that is the Creeds. I’m grateful to be at a church that believes in the great creeds of the faith (the Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds). But she believes in the Nicene Creed not because the Creed has any binding authority in and of itself. But our church believes in the Nicene Creed because it is a summarization and an explanation of the truth of the Scriptures. The creeds anchor us to Jesus.

Does the Nicene Creed address everything? No. The Creed was written to answer very specific questions that we’ll discuss tonight, but it doesn’t summarize absolutely everything in the Bible. But in the Creed contains the essentials – the gospel essentials – that tell us who God is, who Jesus is, who we are, and who we can become. The Holy Spirit used his Church and guided her into two councils that produced this one document, what is perhaps the most beautiful and concise expression of the gospel that exists today.

Creed as Guardrail

Some Christians (particularly those churches influenced by the Stone-Campbell movement, the Restorationist movement from the Second Great Awakening (1790-1840) will say that we should have no creed but Christ and no book but the Bible. But as soon as you ask the question, “who is Jesus”, you need the Creed.

I’ll go further, as soon as you show up on a Sunday morning and start singing a worship song to Jesus, you need the Creed. Because if Jesus is less than completely divine and we’re worshipping him, we are all idolators and need to stop immediately. If the Holy Spirit is an impersonal force, if the Spirit is an “it” and not a “he”, then we need to stop doing baptisms the way we’re doing them – in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. If Mary was not the mother of God, then we are still dead in our sins because a mere human tried to die for us, and it didn’t work.

If we don’t believe in one holy, catholic, and apostolic church then we are completely alone without community, without sacraments, without the word preached on a Sunday morning and we’re better off trying to do this all on our own. The creeds anchor us to Jesus. That’s why we need the Creed as the Church.