Presby-Musings

This week we are celebrating a very special day in the historic Church calendar--All Saints' Sunday.  All Saints Day, as it is more widely known, follows All Hallows Eve (what we refer to as Halloween) and rarely falls on a Sunday.  I know it's kind of odd to think about, considering the ways we typically celebrate Halloween in our culture, but All Hallows Eve, All Saints Day, and All Souls Day (November 2nd) have all been historic celebration or feast days throughout the history of the Church.   Our Catholic brothers and sisters seem to celebrate these days a bit more than those of us who swim in the Protestant stream of Christianity, but in recent years many Protestant denominations have begun to rediscover some of this ancient worship celebrations and make them their own.   As Presbyterians, we have a bit of a different understanding of All Saints' Day than many of our Catholic counterparts, who see it as a day of celebration and prayers offered to the ve...

I just finished reading N.T. Wright 's short treatise For All The Saints ? Remembering the Christian Departed , which is a distilled version of his larger, academic work The Resurrection of the Son of God. Both works deal with what Wright believes is a "mismatch between what the earliest Christians believed about life after death--and what many ordinary Christians seem to believe on the subject today." If you've got a week to kill, then by all means pick up the Resurrection of the Son of God  and commence reading.  When Wright says it's "academic" he isn't kidding around.  But if you would like to visit his basic arguments about what the New Testament and early Christian tradition have to say about what happens to us when we die, then For All The Saints?  is more than adequate. For All The Saints? addresses particular controversies within the Anglican Communion surrounding the doctrine of Purgatory and also the inclusion of All Souls Day w...