Faith the fruit of suffering

Many times we have to suffer very acutely until we finally quit being like a crustacean that sits in its hard shell and is always alone with its own self, caring for nothing going on around it.

Eduard Schweizer in God’s Inescapable Nearness

(from Jason Goroncy's excellent blog

Crazy how this is only true when it has actually happened to you (in this case me).

Yay!!

Impossible love

.... 'In this is love, that we become pathetic nothings. Forlorn, forsaken, foolish, empty, and pathetic. Only so do we live. In any sense whatsoever. According to the gospel, the pathetic life of love is the only truth, the only way, and the only life."

Halden

Led Zep in the CSI Sunday School

A long time ago when I was a Sunday School teacher, I had to teach something to my kids for the Anniversary program. So I decided to write up a song with the tune I really liked. The song was called, "A Stairway to Heaven" and I did not know who sung it. I loved the tune but did not know or could not figure out the words (this was long before Googling). In any case it reminded me about the vision of Joseph's ladder which he saw while running away from home.

I thought it appropriate to put this vision into words to this tune. Then I played the song to the children but they were not too enthusiatic about the song and about my being able to teach them. So they abandoned it and instead chose a song of their own to present.

Reading this made for a really interesting read of the history of that song.

The story of the Trinity

This is something I have to learn by heart.
At the beginning of the fourth century, there were many models by which Christian theologians attempted to grasp the nature of the interrelations of Father, Son, and Spirit, and to determine to which of the three Persons—and in what manner—it was correct to apply the name “God.” Scripture made it impossible, of course, to deny Christ at least some ascription of divinity, and equally difficult to reject the divinity of the Spirit. But it was by no means clear to all that the three divine Persons should be understood as co-equally, co-eternally, or “co-essentially” one and the same God. Hence, the most appealing, intellectually sophisticated, and plausible fourth-century alternative to what would become Nicene orthodoxy was some variant of “subordinationism.” This was the school of thought (especially well established in the great city of Alexandria) that saw the Son and Spirit as derivative and lesser emanations of the Godhead of the Father—“economically” reduced versions of God mediating between the transcendence of the Father, who dwelt in light inaccessible, and the darkness of the material world.


Quoted from David B. Hart at First Things.

On the objective Knowlege of God

“The danger of … abstractionist thinking [we can gain "objective knowledge" of God] has always been that things are viewed as existing in themselves without taking into consideration the relationships in which they stand to other things. It asks, What is God in Himself? No movement can be applied to God; therefore we confess that he is immutable and eternal. No limitations can be applied to God; therefore we hold that he is infinite, almighty, and invisible. No composition can be ascribed to God; therefore he is simple and good. Finally, no essential multiplicity can be ascribed to God; therefore God is one.” (p. 218)

Harvie Conn in his book "Eternal Word Changing Worlds" (h.t. to Peter Enns)

72 Rules

+Rowan Williams said in his talk on Benedictine spirituality.

The holy person is not simply the one who keeps the commandments with which the catalogue of tools (referring to the 72 tools in chapter 4 of the Rule) for good works begins, but he who struggles to live without deceit, their inner life manifest to guides and spiritual parents, who makes peace by addressing the roots of conflict in him or herself, and, under the direction of a skilled superior, attempts to contribute their distinctive gifts in such a way as to sustain a healthy 'circulation' in the community.

How much will you give to save yourself and how much to save your neighbour

Andrew Leonard of "How the world Works" says that the amount of money given in aid by the whole world is paltry compared to how much the US government is are willing to lend GM to buy the almost worthless Chrysler.

At the same time is the whole system collapsed he says that even worse things would happen to the poor. Still given a problem to the economy we spend huge sums of otherwise unobtainable money.

Can I do this on my own. How much should be my financial safety net? Is that even the right question. ... (I wish I could say see my upcoming post in which I will provide a neat insight and solve this painful issue.)

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.

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.

Why God is not Top Gun

Here we have Halden on why God is not like us only much much bigger :

The only god we could ever “act directly on behalf of” is precisely that, “a god,” an inhabitant of the universe, a “top person” who legitimated our activities. The God of the Christian confession is not a top-person, a mere existent whom we could claim to represent directly. Rather God is the reason there is anything at all, the source of all being, and as such lies beyond our ability to directly mediate or claim. McCabe notes that most atheists think of the question of God as though religious people “claim to have discovered what the answer is, that there is some grand architect of the universe who designed it, ..... that there is a Top Person in the universe who issues arbitrary decrees for the rest of the persons and enforces them because he is the most powerful being around. Now if denying this claim makes you an atheist, then I and Thomas Aquinas and a whole Christian tradition are atheist too” (God Matters, 7). Only if God is some sort of existent, a “top person” who issues arbitrary decrees could we conceptualize God as the justification for acts of violence. And this is not the God of the Christian faith.

Yippy Yae! Halden and McCabe.

Strange belief

To believe in Jesus’ God, the God of unconditional accessibility and even-handed compassion, to believe in an anarchic mercy that ignores order, rank and merit, is to accept that our projects and patterns are the mark of failure, of illusion, of the infantile belief that we can dictate truth and reality. Because it is menacing and painful to be confronted with the knowledge that our constructions of controlled sense are liable to be empty self-serving, we readily turn to violence against the bearers of such knowledge: in Johannine terms, we have decided that we want to stay blind when the light is there before us, claiming we can see perfectly well.”

– Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1990), 17.

Thanks to Halden

Do I truly believe in the God that the Archbishop talks about? He is talking about a God whose ways are not my ways and who remains for most part in a dark mist. What does it mean to believe is something so darkly wonderful? At the same time Jesus is a very strange and clearly only a very dimly understood answer.

A quote stolen from here :

“An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.”

Wittgenstein

4 more are there worth reading.

Orthodoxy to be vulnerable

I really like what Ben Myers says here about the vulnerability of orthodoxy to failure and the connection to its ability to grow by renouncing its capacity to give a final authoritative vision.

The problem with my liking this is -- do I like it because it resonates with my general way of thinking or because that is what we learn from the gospel? The gospel did call outcasts to repent and be a part of the Kingdom. This was something that the orthodoxy at the time could not comprehend. It was a scandal.  Just one amongst many shocking things that Jesus advocated. A brief extract from his extract.

“This rejection of the idolatrous notion of a ‘successful’ church, this willingness to fail, is at the same time a profoundly apocalyptic gesture: the church’s identity is not immanent within its own practices and institutions; its identity is that which exceeds it, that which comes to it as gift, that which fills its own emptiness and abasement. "

Apostacy and the Intellect

From Jesus Creed

Scott Mc Knight reviews a book and speaks of the loss of faith. The article was really helpful to me and is worth reading. An abstract follows :

... a common feature of deconversion for many is the overarching role played by a search for intellectual coherence. Reason alone brings few if any into the faith - but reason alone drives many away despite significant social and personal cost. Those who walk away find not faith and fellowship but freedom and intellectual coherence. I cannot overemphasize this point. The intellectual questions and struggles are painfully real. In many of the cases - especially for those with clearly developed commitment to the faith before being swamped by doubt - the issue is not sin, rebellion and self. Occasionally a desire for moral, particularly sexual, freedom plays a significant role - but this is not a major driving factor in most cases. Changes in behavior often result from, rather than precipitate, a loss of faith. 

The shame is that the church - rather than dealing with the problem at its core, rather than providing a forum for Christians to question and grow - has often responded in a reactionary and destructive fashion. It is easy (incredibly easy in fact) to find an advocate to lead one to reject the church and join the freedom of the secular world; it is hard, often well nigh impossible, to find an advocate to help one explore the hard questions of the faith.

Creator of Freedom to Create

I like the quote below because true freedom which can only come from true love is a possibility if what this theologian says is right.

A quote from Schillebeeckx:

If we are created, and that means if we are created in the image of God, then people must be other than conservers, restorers and discovers of what is already given…God creates man as the principle of his own human action, who thus himself has to develop the world and its future and to bring them into being within contingent situations. For God can never be the absolute origin of man’s humanity, in other words, we cannot be a creator, if he makes man only the one who implements a blueprint predetermined by the divine architect.

(thanks to Aaron)

The Church is not for the Nation

A nice article from Douglas Harink at F&T where he talks about Jim Wallis's book, "God's politics". I am a subscriber to email newsletter from Sojourners a journal from Jim Wallis's organisation and this book is heavily promoted in the newletter. A quote from the article :

"As those statements reveal, one of the most remarkable characteristics of Wallis’s vision, obvious on nearly every page, is the thoroughly instrumentalized understanding of religion. God, church, faith, and prophetic religion are all parts of the greater whole which is America, completely absorbed into the discourse of American politics, taken up for use in the cause of the American nation – of a just, compassionate and democratic American nation to be sure, but it is the nation that religious discourse is made to serve as its proper end."

And another one :

"The good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is that it is God’s radical and decisive invasion of our humanly constructed worlds, and God’s deliverance from and destruction of the powers that hold us in bondage. The American nation, or the Canadian nation, or any other nation for that matter, is a humanly constructed world; it is a power that enslaves human beings and makes us serve its ends. Every nation is in the first place an idolatrous regime to which God comes in the Gospel to set his people free. Before the church and its discourse can be of any use to American people, it must learn that it does not exist in the first place as America, or to be of use to America, but it exists as the church, constituted in its worship and service of the one true God."

All relationship Mediated

I can help posting quotes from Bonhoeffer this time from here

What does it really mean to live keeping Jesus as a mediator in all our relationships? I can't even imagine.

“So people called by Jesus learn that they had lived an illusion in their relationship to the world. The illusion is immediacy. It has blocked faith and obedience. Now they know there can be no unmediated relationships, even in the most intimate ties of their lives, in the blood ties to father and mother, to children, brothers and sisters, in marital love, in historical responsibilities. Ever since Jesus called, there are no longer natural, historical, or experiential unmediated relationships for his disciples. Christ the mediator stands between the son and the father, between husband and wife, between individual and nation, whether they can recognize him or not. There is no way from us to other other than the path through Christ, his word, and our following him. Immediacy is a delusion.”

“But it is precisely the same mediator who makes us into individuals, who becomes he basis for an entirely new community. He stands in the center between the other person and me. He separates, but he also unites. He cuts off every direct path to someone else, but he guides everyone following him to the new and sole true way to the other person via the mediator. … Those who left their fathers for Jesus’ sake will surely find new fathers in the community, they will find brothers and sisters; there are even fields and houses prepared for them. Everyone enters discipleship alone, but no one remains alone in discipleship. Those who dare to become single individuals trusting in the word are given the gift of church-community. They find themselves again in a visible community of faith, which replaces a hundredfold what they lost.” (Discipleship, 97-98)

Grace precedes sin

Another short quote from Ray S. Anderson's continuation guest post at Faith and Theology

My puzzle is that without labelling something as sin (as Ray says "Jesus did not label people sinners") and therefore someone who does it as a sinner  how does one know how to engage with it. It could be that one cannot do this kind of labelling even to ones own sins without grace.

Sin is not a condition that precedes grace. For until one is welcomed into the Kingdom of God through grace, the tragic only is a condition to be overcome, sometimes by religion, rather than by a relationship in which the tragic is brought under the promise of redemption. Until we each have discovered our own sin, always through grace, to be called a sinner by others is not only graceless, it is tragic. It breaks the common bond that makes us human. Saul of Tarsus would never have accepted the accusation that he was a sinner until he experienced the grace of God through his encounter with the risen Christ. Until the tragic nature of sin is revealed though grace, it lies untouched and unredeemed, hidden like a deadly virus that thrives on self-affirmation only to emerge in self-condemnation.