Theology is mystery
Ultimately, theology is not a set of definitions or theories. Theology is mystery since it transcends the rational mind and attempts to express the inexpressible. In schools of theology and seminaries, theology is indeed an academic subject and, as such, it requires accuracy and embraces a certain “intellectual rigour,” as Met. Kallistos remarks. This does not conflict with Orthodoxy, since “we do not serve the Kingdom of God through vagueness, muddle and lazy thinking.” But he also notes that in other sciences or areas of investigation, the personal sanctity of the scientist or inquirer is irrelevant. This is not the case with theology, which requires metanoia (repentance), catharsis (purification), and askesis (spiritual struggle).
Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox
The Christian revolution
Only a few peoples—the odd German tribe and, inevitably, the Jews—had stood aloof from the exposure of unwanted children. Pretty much everyone else had always taken it for granted. Until, that was, the emergence of a Christian people.
Tom Holland, Dominion
Inevitability
Looking back, it seems inevitable that I would find a career in writing. Marks on a page are less overbearing than the shrill voices I heard in church revival meetings and in Bible college. They give me a quiet space in which to make up my own mind, to decide what should be salvaged and what jettisoned.
Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell. Not my story, but very relatable. (And Phil Yancey has been a fairly big-name Evangelical writer for, I’m fairly sure, more than five decades.)
The Great Integrity-Maker
Walking backwards into our own graves, so filled with denial because we lived not really once thinking that such a thing could one day happen to us. We miss the needed consciousness that sitting with a dead body will sober and sanctify us into. We haven’t been done a favour by having the end of life ushered out of sight.
Part of getting made into a human is the final part. Getting un-made. That preparing for death is not the same as what was before it … It’s not my time is not the appropriate mantra of a grown up. One day, any day, it will be my time, is better.
…
Death is the great integrity maker of us all, if we agree to bend our heads. There is some terrible deficit in the way many of us are born into this world, and it seems there is an equal absence in many of our departures.
UPDATE: I failed to say initially that Shaw’s whole post is excellent.
Avoidance
McLuhan has said that religion dies when it becomes “concept,” not “percept.” The interviewer asks, “If I were to say that the traditional Christian doctrine of the Incarnation can be expressed in the phrase, ‘Christ is the medium and the message,’ is that a percept or a concept?” McLuhan answers:
It is a percept because, as Christ said over and over again, it is visible to babes, but not to sophisticates. The sophisticated, the conceptualizers, the Scribes and the Pharisees — these had too many theories to be able to perceive anything. Concepts are wonderful buffers for preventing people from confronting any form of percept.
Rod Dreher, ’A Serious House On Serious Earth’
Denial
Team Trump’s in denial about January 6.
Team Biden is already moving into denial about June 27.
How long will America remain in denial about the need for deep repentance, individual and national?
… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 