Overheard (after a fashion):
Did you know that Greyhouse was a Christian coffee house?
No! Shouldn’t they warn people?!
That one gets better after it (tea warning) steeps a while (end tea warning).
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Month: February 2018
Only wonder understands
About 51 months ago, I put a Father Stephen Freeman blog in my personal amber. Excerpt:
Everything is far more than it appears.
With the heart of a poet St. Gregory of Nyssa asserts, “Only wonder understands anything.” The role of wonder is (among other things) to slow us down, make us quiet, and help us pay attention. The “flat-landers” sail prosaically through life and miss most of what is true, drawing only the most obvious conclusions, even when what is obvious is incorrect. It is the things that are “out of place” that are easily ignored (they’re so bothersome!), while they are most often the clues that reveal the mystery.
The reduction of the world and its “history,” are the tools of those who lack the imagination and patience to find the truth.
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A Paradox
From my personal journal 4 – 1/2 years ago:
The fundamental difference between Orthodoxy and my former traditions of Evangelicalism and Calvinism is that Orthodoxy does not look to the Bible as the sole and final authority for Christian belief and life. I call that sola scriptura, though some magisterial Protestants might fault the description.
What people may “hear” when I say that is that “if you limit your search to the Bible, you cannot help but come to Protestant conclusions.” But that’s not what I mean, nor do I think it’s true. What I mean is that purported reliance on the Bible as the sole and final authority for Christian belief and life is what it means to be a Protestant historically. Ironically, the Biblical case for the church itself as an authority is stronger than the Biblical case for sola scriptura.
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Maybe my own
Thoughts recorded on a historic and dark day in America:
I dread this nightfall.
(Isn’t it dawn somewhere?)
How long will this night be?
(Do they speak English there?)
I don’t claim authorship of this, though when I journaled it almost five years ago, I gave no credits, which is unusual. The sentiments correspond to my own.
If I was confident I wrote it, I’d be pleased. I’m only the most occasional and untutored poet.
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Do you want to go away?
When I experience Church conflict and disappointment, John 6:67-69 mercifully comes to mind:
Then Jesus said to the twelve, “Do you also want to go away?” But Simon Peter answered Him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. Also we have come to believe and know that You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.
(Those who “went away” were scandalized by Christ’s preceding teaching on the Eucharist, during which teaching whenever anyone objected, Christ upped the ante. Today we have huge swaths of denominations, independent congregations and “parachurch” ministries who have “gone away” but don’t know or admit it.)
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2 questions
“What must I do to be saved?” is not the same question as “What must I do to be saved?”
The latter parsimonious and grudging question comes from a mindset that says “Hell? Of course I’d like to avoid it, but I want to maintain as much ‘freedom’ as possible, too.”
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After the wake of a man-boy
More blogging on stuff I’ve been reminded of, again from something I wrote privately almost 5 years ago:
I attended a Wake Thursday, only we don’t call them that any more.
In the coffin was a 32-year-old man-boy. In line as one approached mother and step-father, were scrapbook pictures of his younger versions, beaming with delight at 4th of July sparklers and other such simple pleasures. He “enjoyed listening to music, watching movies, and sharing his contagious joy. He fought the good fight and is awaiting his crown of glory.”
In the coffin was a bearer of the image of God, knees pulled up, wrists permanently bent, teeth crooked, face oddly shaped. Oh, my! I’d forgotten in the years since I last saw him.
He was born on April Fools Day. His syndrome has a dozen sufferers, maybe, world-wide. I don’t know the name. I couldn’t look it up on Google if I did, probably. Who writes about a disease that afflicts only a dozen people or so in the world at a time?
If I want to know about it, we’d better take mom and step-dad to dinner; she’s the world expert. The life expectancy from birth is two years. Did I mention that the man-boy in the coffin was 32?
Step-dad married mom 20 years ago, eyes wide open. She’d have it no other way. Her first husband, her son’s father, headed for divorce court, then “for the hills,” about 31 years, 364 days ago. May God have mercy on him anyway.
Caring for her son was the dominant feature of their lives. Step-dad’s grieving with mom.
Mom’s a teacher. The Middle Schoolers from her school came and sang at the funeral. They returned to school shaken. Some of them had never been to a funeral. Many of them, probably, had never met teacher’s son. If the image of God, twisted and angular, shocked this jaded old curmudgeon, I reckon it was a real eye-opener for them.
Mom and step-dad can’t sleep. The house is too quiet. The life-supporting machinery is off. This respiratory infection, starting like all the others, ended quickly in death despite treatment.
God bless and comfort them. May they have, for their remaining lives and into eternity, all the blessings none of us deserve, but some of us don’t deserve a lot less than others.
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Equivocal Nominalism
I may be blogging a little extra for a while. I’ve generally been blogging much less because blogging had become a monster devouring chunks of life I now want to use otherwise. I didn’t notice until I retired and still had no time left.
But I’m now working on a project that reminds me of some things written privately in the past that may seem worth sharing. For instance, when I was trying to wrap my head around the “nominalism versus realism” distinction and its importance, I wrote this privately:
- Evangelical nominalism: It’s not really heartfelt. He’s living in a garage saying that makes him a car. (You’re not a car until you really feel it in your heart.)
- Philosophic nominalism: There is no dogness, only individual dogs; no human nature, just a bunch of homo sapien singularities.
- Theological nominalism: God said it; I believe it; that settles it! Right and wrong have nothing to do with created reality; only with propositional divine commandments.
I’m convinced that a lot of “separation of Church and State” talk, including politicians who are “personally opposed” to something their Church opposes, is rooted in a sort of nominalism: that every moral prohibition of their Church is really just a cultic peculiarity, not something rooted in human nature.
Based on long observation, I’m convinced that my formerly inhoate, now explicit, theological Realism:
- Is in keeping with the weight of Christian opinion over two millennia;
- Makes me an oddball in our debased age; and
- Came I know not whence. Just lucky I guess.
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Candor trumps cant
Reporting on the reporting on the National Prayer Breakfast, Julia Duin is pleased at what she sees as an uptick in quality. Example:
Michelle Boorstein of the Washington Post found out about an alliance of evangelicals and Muslims connected with the breakfast.
The best paragraphs were the following:
(The Rev. Steve) Bezner and others said one reason evangelicals are becoming more comfortable with Muslim engagement is because this generation isn’t called “interfaith” – which makes evangelicals nervous because many are theologically conservative and don’t like the concept of watering down the differences among religions. They call it “multifaith,” which to Bezner feels more frank about the goal: different faiths standing side by side, not one big squishy group.
“The first time I met an imam in my neighborhood, we’re five minutes into the conversation, and he said: ‘Do you think I’m going to hell?’ I said: ‘That’s what my tradition teaches, yes.’ He said: ‘Good, I think you’re going to hell, too, so now we can have an honest conversation.’ ”
I admire the candor of both, and agree that such candor permits trust that cant undermines.
Had I been in Bezner’s place, though, I think my answer would have been just as candid, but slightly different: “Yes, probably. But I also know that God is gracious, and loves humankind. He does not will that you be damned. If you do not go to hell, it will be only because somehow, in a way I don’t understand and upon which you dare not presume, the Christ that you now reject saves you.”
UPDATE: I changed my hypothetical quote.
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Wrong language for the job
The most radical influence of reductive science has been the virtually universal adoption of the idea that the world, its creatures, and all the parts of its creatures are machines – that is, that there is no difference between creature and artifice, birth and manufacture, thought and computation … As a result, we have a lot of genuinely concerned people calling on us to “save” a world which their language simultaneously reduces to an assemblage of perfectly featureless and dispirited “ecosystems,” “organisms,” “environments,” “mechanisms” and the like. It is impossible to prefigure the salvation of the world in the same language by which the world has been dismembered and defaced.
(Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle — emphasis added)
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We develop heart and mind in parallel, that the mind will protect us from the wolfs, and the heart will keep us from becoming wolves ourselves. (Attributed to Serbian Patriarch Pavle)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 