Strength in Weakness

I finally grasped a central principle of holy folly: strength in weakness. God’s power flows into and then gushes out of human vulnerability. It’s the principle of engaging our brokenness, running into it rather than fleeing it our denying it, but then finding true strength–God’s strength–smack in the middle of our brokenness.

Holy Fools: Following Jesus with Reckless Abandon by Matthew Woodley

(H.T. to PoserorProphet )

Immanent Frame - what is it?

1. "...Charles Taylor describes our modern 'secular age' as one existing in an Immanent Frame. That is, over the last 500 years we have moved from an 'enchanted' age, with its gods, demons, spirits, and magic, to our modern, scientific 'disenchanted' age. A two-dimensinal plane of existence with a horizontal human dimension and a transcendent vertical dimension has now been reduced to the flat, horizontal line. The only minds, meanings, concerns, goals, purposes, and values are human ones. Beyond us, there is nothing."

2. "... Charles Taylor discusses the "malaise of modernity." That is, with the collapse of the transcendent, spiritual dimension secular persons face various challenges that our forbears did not face in bygone "enchanted" eras. Taylor notes that in the secular age, due to the flatness of the Immanent Frame, where no meaning is to be found outside of human strivings, we find meaning fragile. That is, if there is nothing deeper or above us, spiritually speaking, we struggle to find our projects of lasting value, meaning, and significance. We live and die and are forgotten. This realization continually threatens our psychological equilibrium in the secular age. Existential crises are common and ubiquitous. In the Immanent Frame we are constantly asking, "What's the point?" Work, work, work to get the gold watch? Is that the goal of human life? If there is nothing transcendent and lasting beyond me and beyond death then why not collect toys and distract myself with entertainments? These nagging questions are symptoms of the malaise of modernity. Meaning is hard to secure and protect in the secular age "

3. William James in his book The Varieties of Religious Experience:

"What keeps religion going is something else than abstract definitions and systems of logically concatenated adjectives, and something different from faculties of theology and their professors. All these [abstract] things are after-effects, secondary accretions upon a mass of concrete religious experiences."

"These direct experiences of a wider spiritual life...form the primary mass of religious experience on which all hearsay religion rests, and which furnishes that notion of an ever-present God, out of which systematic theology thereupon proceeds to make capital in its own unreal pedantic way." "The mother sea and fountian-head of all religion lies in the mystical experiences of the individual, taking the word mystical in a very wide sense. All theologies, and all ecclesiasticisms are secondary growths superimposed."


(h.t. to Experimental Theology the whole article is based on a theology of Calvin and Hobbes)

Why history is a lot more interesting than I thought

I read something new at Faith and Theology here . Since Dr. Myers and Archbishop Rowan Williams and the famous historian Quentin Skinner all say this, there probably is something true in it. What they say is that we should not judge history from today's perspective. Like separating bran from wheat. This is because doing so would mean that we claim to have the ultimate clarity in knowing things - which certainly isn't true. So what we can gain from history is to try and see how it was that people at that time could hold something we absolutely hate or absolutely take for granted as true today.

Only by sympathetically getting into the "epistemic rationality" of that day can we learn from history.

Judge ye not

from the wise Dr. Ben Myers here (talking about a method of learning from the thoughts of great men of the past ):

.. If we learn from the past by distinguishing the timeless “perennial core” from the nonessential (i.e. flawed) elements, then we’re acting as though our own commitments are the final arbiter of history — we’re assuming that history has found its goal in us. And one of the unfortunate side-effects of this approach is that we’re no longer in a position to be critiqued by history. ...

The thing I can't understand is the side effect thing. May be what we choose to understand as the perennial elements are not correct and thus open us to critique ?

Vengeance is not yours

from Exclusion and Embrace, Miroslav Volf

“My thesis that the practice of nonviolence requires a belief in divine vengeance will be unpopular with many Christians, especially theologian in the West. To the person who is inclined to dismiss it, I suggest imagining that you are delivering a lecture in a war zone (which is where a paper that underlies this chapter was originally delivered). Among your listeners are people whose cities and villages have been first plundered, then burned and leveled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, whose fathers and brothers have had their throats slit. The topic of the lecture: a Christian attitude toward violence. The thesis: we should not retaliate since God is perfect noncoercive love. Soon you would discover that it takes the quiet of a suburban home for the birth of the thesis that human nonviolence corresponds to God’s refusal to judge. In a scorched land, soaked in the blood of the innocent, it will invariably die. And as one watches it die, one will do well to reflect about many other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind. (p. 304)"

Quoted from here. My feeling is that our word vengeance has a history that is human so we picture it one way. The very presence of God is trembling and fear for those who believe (Moses?) so how much more painful for those who cannot or will not believe.