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.

Sudden Heat

I have to say it although it may sound like I am belittling those who are suffering due to the activities surrounding the economic chaos in the U.S.A.

I wish there would be an economic collapse of the financial system. I have loved ones in the U.S. who would suffer. So would I, because most of my current savings are U.S. dollar denominated. But, and this is a really bit but, I would choose to suffer now because the cancerous economic system in the U.S. is the progenitor of almost every other nations model. There are obviously big differences between India's policies and the U.S. but ultimately the only measure accepted by both systems is a quantifiable value - something that can be measured in cold Dollars or Rupees.

The food crisis of a few months back is said to have been caused by unfounded rumors but the real fact is that prices of all food commodities have risen far more than they have in the previous five years put together. I know I cannot talk in detailed economic terms but I do know that the major reason for price rises is that demand outstrips supply. I know there are a host of mitigating factors and what I said sounds too cut and dried.

I think a collapse of the financial networks and there obscene power to destroy anything that stands in their way would work wonders for all of us. There may be a magnitude of suffering rivaling the tsunami but it will not be the end of the world. Right now we are like the proverbial frog that is slowly being cooked in water that is being warmed on a slow fire of environmental rapine and social anomie. The financial collapse would be like a sudden full flame that would perhaps make us the foolish frog jump out of this mess in sudden reflex.

Subsidizing our way to stupidity

Another example of hypocrisy in the so called free market economy that we idolize so much both in the West and in the keeping up with the Jones's economies of the developing coutries. I don't know of any way of getting out of this hole that we keep digging ourselves into. Pouring money into the private sector which at other times always cries "wolf" when any hint of regulation threatens their ability to make money, seems to me the ultimate betrayal of government.

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.

Story from Tolstoy

A great story by Tolstoy about an angel who was sent to earth to learn.

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.