Tag: church

All things: from Him

“But who am I, and who are my people,
That we should be able to offer so willingly as this?
For all things come from You,
And of Your own we have given You.”

1 Chronicles‬ ‭29‬:‭14‬, NKJV

Though I did not end up following Jon Gabriel in his journey from the megachurch to Eastern Orthodoxy, some time (years?) ago I read with interest his moving account of Swimming the Bosporus. (Read the whole thing, I recommend.)

Tonight I was listening in the car to a beautiful recording of “My Song Is Love Unknown”, and a single line from Mr. Gabriel’s Chapter 6 (“Angels in the Architecture”) came to mind. In describing the beauty of an Orthodox church, he says simply:

“God expresses Himself through the material world, and His people craft the wood and stone to offer it back to Him.”

Is it not that way with all that we offer, from the two mites given by the widow to the thousands of talents of gold and silver given by the leaders of the tribes of Israel, and everything before, and in between, and since?

Everything that we can give or do in worship, too. If there are crosses or candles or organs or choirs of human voices or melodies that they sing or words that are sung to those melodies, these are all out of the abundance of His gifts to us, and from them we give our offering back to Him. If we present our bodies a living sacrifice…

All things come of thee, O LORD, and of thine own have we given thee.

Interesting

Jim Blackburn, “Was the Early Church ‘Catholic’ or Just ‘Christian’?”:

Some might claim that Ignatius intended to use the term “Catholic Church” not as a proper name for the Church, but only as a general reference to the larger assembly of Christians. If so, then the universal assembly had no proper name yet, but “Catholic Church” continued in use until it became the proper name of the one church that Christ built on Peter and his successors.

… Given the unbroken chain of succession at Antioch—from Peter (sent by Christ) to Evodius to Ignatius—if any Christian today wishes to identify with the biblical Christians of the first century mentioned in Acts 11, it follows quite logically that he must also identify with those same Christians’ universal assembly: the Catholic Church.

Thomas Hopko, “The One True Church”:

And here we would definitely say the Church that we say we believe in is the Eastern Orthodox Church. It’s not the Roman Catholic Church. It’s not an Oriental Orthodox Church. It’s not one of the Protestant churches. It’s not the Anglican Church. …

The Church has what I used to call when I used to teach dogmatic theology, it’s got its “authoritative witnesses.” There are witnesses, testimonies, to this truth, the first of which is the holy Scripture and the Bible itself. And this is our faith, and what we would say is, “Yes, indeed, we think that only this Church holds it completely, truly, fully, and rightly.”

John MacArthur, “The Manhattan Declaration”:

Instead of acknowledging the true depth of our differences, the implicit assumption (from the start of the document until its final paragraph) is that Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Protestant Evangelicals and others all share a common faith in and a common commitment to the gospel’s essential claims. The document repeatedly employs expressions like “we [and] our fellow believers”; “As Christians, we . . .”; and “we claim the heritage of . . . Christians.” That seriously muddles the lines of demarcation between authentic biblical Christianity and various apostate traditions.