Back in Germany

And a few books the richer.

And I was ill, flippin eck. Hence the lack of blogging.

But my health returned today, thankfully, so time to inflict more posts on the world of biblioblogdom...

One of the books I purchased in England is Robin Parry's Worshipping Trinity. Robin has written an immensely readable book, encouraging that the charismatic church re-grasps the Trinity in its worship. Even though his message is very important and thus serious, it had me laughing aloud on the tube every now and then. Having detailed the problematically practically 'unitarian' and 'Jesus only' content of much evangelical worship, he writes:

I vividly recall a sermon illustration used some years ago in the church. The visiting preacher took a frog and placed it in a pan of cold water and slowly heated the water until it boiled. The point was that if you turn up the heat slowly the frog doesn't notice and will hang around whilst getting boiled alive! I hasten to add that the illustration is in fact mythical and the frog was not a real one (although, interestingly, this fact was not revealed until later and yet we all sat smiling uncomfortably as the chap boiled what we took to be a real frog – fuel for psychology books there). I suspect that slowly but surely there has been a shift away from full Trinitarian worship towards worship that is often in practice 'unitarian'. This shift is not uniform, it is not the same in all churches, it sometimes waxes and wanes, and it has hardly reached boiling point, but I want to blow the whistle and say, 'FROGS OF THE WORLD UNITE! We're being boiled alive here! Let's leap out of the pan before the bubbles start rising!' One simply has to ask the painful question, 'At what point does worship cease to be Christian worship and become simply Christians worshipping?' (pp. 2-3)

Especially if you are an evangelical with charismatic leanings, like myself, this book is a real 'word in season'. This reminds me to point out the online English translation of Jüngel's Trinitarian Prayers for Christian Worship (a pdf file).