A pervasive error
…the most pervasive error one encounters in contemporary arguments about belief in God—especially, but not exclusively, on the atheist side—is the habit of conceiving of God simply as some very large object or agency within the universe, or perhaps alongside the universe, a being among other beings, who differs from all other beings in magnitude, power, and duration, but not ontologically, and who is related to the world more or less as a craftsman is related to an artifact.
David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God
Well I don’t believe in that God, either
[V]ery often the God who’s being attacked and questioned by the Dawkinses and the Graylings and the Pullmans of this world is a God I don’t believe in, either: an individual who sits in the remote parts of the universe and treats the rest of the universe as an intriguing hobby for himself, rather than the God who is much more like the ocean that soaks through everything that is and yet is infinitely beyond it.
I found recently in the work of a 17th-century Welsh Catholic writer, Augustine Baker, a wonderful image: that the soul without God, the soul cut off from God, is like a whale stuck in a pond. It longs for the ocean, he said. It can’t be in the depths where it belongs. Now, I don’t hear very much of that sense in the New Atheists. They come up with all sorts of very neat and, as far as they go, perfectly rational arguments about how difficult it is to believe in some chap out there in midspace.
I want to say, “Well, yeah. I have no interest in a chap out there in outer space, none at all.” But I am quite interested in what the infinite, unconditioned life of generosity is within which I and everything else live. And I have every interest in the story of how that life astonishingly comes to fruition in the middle of our history in the life of Jesus. Now, that’s something I do think I can spend my life thinking and praying about and something that transfigures the horizons in which we live.
Making sense of Creation
Christians make sense of Creation doxologically and liturgically. Christian liturgy and worship unfold and illumine spiritual knowledge and wisdom about Creation that modern life forgets.
Vigen Guroian, The Melody of Faith
Infinitely burdensome and earnestly enforced
[T]he Reformation meant not the elimination of the Church’s control over everyday life, but rather the substitution of a new form of control for the previous one. It meant the repudiation of a control which was very lax, at that time scarcely perceptible in practice, and hardly more than formal, in favour of a regulation of the whole of conduct which, penetrating to all departments of private and public life, was infinitely burdensome and earnestly enforced.
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
I first heard an observation close to this during law school, when another older student (I entered law school at 30) explained why, improbably to me, he had left Protestantism and entered Roman Catholicism. His version had a Pope far away in Rome who claimed all kinds of authority but left people alone in practice versus a pompadoured tyrant who claimed only to be interpreting and applying the Bible but micromanaged personal lives.
The limits of rejoicing
Waugh, taking stock of the Church in America, was impressed by her variety, her energy, her schools and colleges, her magazines, her convents and monasteries. He was struck especially by the experience of Ash Wednesday in New Orleans, where, across the street from his hotel, which was full of Mardi Gras revelers, “the Jesuit church was teeming with life all day long; a continuous, dense crowd of all colors and conditions moving up to the altar rails and returning with their foreheads signed with ash.… All that day, all over that light-hearted city, one encountered the little black smudge on the forehead which sealed us members of a great brotherhood who can both rejoice and recognize the limits of rejoicing.”
Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own. I like that “can both rejoice and recognize the limits of rejoicing.”
Today marks the completion of week 2 of a 3-week limitation of rejoicing (i.e., a fast) in the Orthodox Church.
Latent consciousness of wrong
While bishops and emperors did not legally abolish slavery, Child observed throughout the patristic and early medieval era a “latent consciousness of wrong” reflected in Christian practices—especially the frequent practice of Christians freeing their slaves upon baptism or when nearing death.
Paul J. Gutaker, The Old Faith in a New Nation. Be sure to note that he’s speaking of the patristic and medieval periods; I somehow missed that and thought at first glance that he was talking about practices among American slaveholders.
I’m surprised how often quotes from this book rise to the surface of Readwise because, subjectively, I didn’t like it all that much. Objectively, I highlighted the heck out of it.
America the the self-sufficient
Against the background of the new national culture emerging in the United States, the insistence by such capable spokesmen that genuine Christianity required organic deference to the historic episcopate could only be a provocation.
Mark A. Noll, Assumptions and Assertions of American Theology in America’s God
The Beatitudes, tell us the way blessedness works. I’ll take that over political “strength,” “force,” or “power” any day of the week, not just Sundays.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 