July 2011
33 posts
3 tags
“The reason produced for condemning the opinion that the earth moves and the sun stands still is that in many places in the Bible one may read that the sun moves and the earth stands still. Since the Bible cannot err, it follows as a necessary consequence that anyone takes an erroneous and heretical position who maintains that the sun is inherently motionless and the earth movable.
With...
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Archbishop of Canterbury’s Presidential Address... →
excerpts:
“God’s incalculable love for every person is the only solid foundation for a human dignity that is beyond question.”
“We want to see growth, spiritually and numerically. In this connection, spiritual growth must mean growth in the strength I have mentioned – that is, growth in awareness of what it means that God does not abandon us, out of which grows the...
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“There is a certain kind of humility in hell which is one of the worst things in hell, and which is infinitely far from the humility of the saints, which is peace. The false humility of hell is an unending, burning shame at the inescapable stigma of our sins. The sins of the damned are felt by them as vesture of intolerable insults from which they cannot escape, Nessus shirts that burn them...
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'The Assumption of God's Presence'
“For [George] Steiner, the questions ‘What is poetry, music, art? How can they not be? How do they act upon us and how do we interpret their action?’ are ‘ultimately theological questions’ [Real Presences]. In itself the claim is far from new. St Bonaventure elaborated it, in a quite different context and style, in his De reductione artium ad theologiam: all debates...
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'Faith as a Deconstructive Principle'
“Joseph O’Leary thinks of faith as a deconstructive principle that can be used to overcome Western metaphysics.”
— Kevin Hart, “Postmodernism,” The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology (edited by Andrew W. Hass, David Jasper, and Elisabeth Jay)
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“If we take Christology as our starting point, recognizing that (unless Dan Brown turns out to be right) Jesus was unmarried, not sexually active, and produced no children, we come to some very different conclusions [from the one Karl Barth arrives at, in which he “makes sex and marriage the definition, or at least the full expression of the meaning of humanity”]. If the One who,...
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“Within the Christian tradition, I think it’s fairly uncontroversial that Jesus Christ is the archetype, the ultimate definition, the mesoform of what it means to be human. I suppose this could be disputed, but within Christian theology this is pretty axiomatic. Jesus’s own historical, contingent, particular human life defines what it means to be human in a way that is more significant...
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“As long ago as 1967, George Steiner published a volume of essays entitled Language and Silence. Steiner and many others after the Holocaust, such as Theodore Adorno, have struggled with the question as to whether it is possible to say anything after such an event in human history. Arguably, however, where theology has stumbled and fallen silent, the voices of the poets and writers have...
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“To be truly man means to be fully oneself. The confirmation is the confirmation of man in his own, unique ‘personality.’ It is, to use again the same image, his ordination to be himself, to become what God wants him to be, what He has loved in me from all eternity. It is the gift of vocation. If the Church is truly the ‘newness of life’—the world and nature as...
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“My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will...
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“I will sing a song to you And you will shake the ground for me And the birds and bees and old fruit trees Will spit out songs like gushing streams
And Jesus will come through the ground so dirty With worms in his hair and a hand so sturdy To call us his magic we call him worthy Jesus came up through the ground so dirty”
— Page France, “Jesus”
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“[F]or [Frederick] Buechner, it is precisely our doubts and struggles that mark us as human. And that insight girds his theological twist on Socrates: The unexamined human life is a lost chance to behold the divine.”
— Rich Barlow, Minister sees divine in everyday struggles
if our longing for love is ultimately a longing for God, who is the author of love and indeed is Love, then our fear of loneliness is essentially a fear of death, not just physical but, more crucially, spiritual death, which is the true death, which is separation from God.
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“ of all the rooms in my childhood, God was the largest and most empty.”
— Li-Young Lee, “Stations of the Sea”
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” even now her voice seems a lasting echo of my heart’s calling me home, its story an ocean beyond my human beginning,
each wave tolling the whole note of my outcome and belonging.”
— Li-Young Lee, “Echo and Shadow”
as God’s voice is to my heart.
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The Bible subverts the Freudian and, following him, the Lacanian notions that woman lacks that which man possesses—that is, the phallus—which perpetuates the damaging belief that woman is inferior to man. Scripture tells us that it is man who lacks a rib, which woman possesses (Gen. 2:21-22), and thus woman is a “suitable helper” (Gen. 2:20) to man, not in the sense of a lab assistant...
9 tags
'A Hermeneutics of Adoration'
“Earlier (in Chapter 1) I referred to Karl Barth’s reference to the ‘strange new world within the Bible.’ He passionately, relentlessly insisted that this is a book like no other book. Every expectation that we bring to this book is inadequate or mistaken. This is a text that reveals the sovereign God in being and action. It does not flatter us, it does not seek to please...
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'The Spears Were Real'
“Martin Luther famously distinguished between a ‘theology of glory’ and a ‘theology of the cross.’ In the former you find yourself substituting a crown of thorns and a body of nailed flesh for a more palatable scene. But with a ‘theologia crucis,’ you can call a spade a spade. You can look grief and loss in the face and identify them for what they are....
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'Exegesis is An Act of Sustained Humility'
“[E]xegesis does not mean mastering the text, it means submitting to it as it is given to us. Exegesis doesn’t take charge of the text and impose superior knowledge on it; it enters the world of the text and lets the text ‘read’ us. Exegesis is an act of sustained humility: There is so much about this text that I don’t know, that I will never know. Christians keep...
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'Exegesis is An Act of Love'
“Exegesis is the furthest thing from pedantry, exegesis is an act of love. It loves the one who speaks the words enough to want to get the words right. It respects the words enough to use every means we have to get the words right. Exegesis is loving God enough to stop and listen carefully to what He says. It follows that we bring the leisure and attention of lovers to this text, cherishing...
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“[E]xegesis cannot be slighted. The scriptural text is complex and demanding. The primary witnesses to God’s revelation are the Old and New Testaments: Torah and Prophets and Writings in the Old Testament, Gospels and Letters and Apocalypse in the New. And written in Hebrew and Aramaic and Greek, languages that have, as all languages do, their own peculiar way of inflecting nouns,...
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“Exegesis introduces another dimension into our relation to the text. The text as story carries us along, we are in on something larger than ourselves, we let the story take us where it will. But exegesis is focused attention, asking questions, sorting through possible meanings. Exegesis is rigorous, disciplined, intellectual work. It rarely feels ‘spiritual.’ Men and women who...
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“I would wrestle with the dark angel until he dislocated my hip. For he is also the light and the blue sky which he withholds from me.”
— Carl Gustav Jung, C. G. Jung Letters, Vol. II
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“The mystery of Christian godliness does not consist of services, sacrifices and vows, which God demands of us, but of promises, fulfillments and sacrifices which God has made for our benefit. Again, the mystery of Christian godliness does not consist of the finest and greatest commandment that God has imposed, but of the supreme good that he has given us. Once again, the mystery of...
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“This [a passage from John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, Volume 1, Book 3, Chapter 7] is a very profound passage in the sense that it merges many things that are characteristic of the Bible as a whole, one of them being, of course, the idea of Jacob’s encounter with the angel. The idea that in the fiercest struggle, the most frightening adversary may have come to...
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“We often infect the Bible with our own values and morals, not asking what the Bible’s values and morals really are.”
— Sidnie White Crawford, quoted in Actually, that’s not in the Bible by John Blake
“I think we all, inescapably, bring our prior beliefs to the Bible, and read the Bible in a way that reflects those. I think the damaging thing is when people say that...
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“In the wilderness the devil tempts Jesus with a series of choices. By the seaside Jesus says to four fishermen ‘Follow me!’, an order, not an option. Nothing is more alien to serious Christianity than the contemporary ideology of choice.”
— Kim Fabricius, A few more doodlings
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“The journey away from God took Jonah hundreds of miles. But coming back ready to do God’s will was a journey of only 18 inches—the distance from his head to his heart.”
— Woodrow Kroll
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“[S]exuality beyond biological reproduction is the one foremost in the biblical use of sexual metaphors for God’s relation to humanity. God as the husband of the land is a familiar enough trope, but Hosea’s projection of the husband-and-wife story onto the history of Israel deliberately subverts the God-and-the-land clichés of Near Eastern cults: God is not the potent male sower...
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'God Loves Us as God Loves God'
“Grace, for the Christian believer, is a transformation that depends in large part on knowing yourself to be seen in a certain way: as significant, as wanted.
The whole story of creation, incarnation, and our incorporation into the fellowship of Christ’s body tells us that God desires us, as if we were God, as if we were that unconditional response to God’s giving that...
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“I would answer, ‘I believe in a God who loves humankind so intensely, so totally, that he chose himself to become human. Therefore, I believe in Jesus Christ as fully and truly God, but also totally and unreservedly one of us, fully human.’ And I would say to you, ‘The love of God is so great that Christ died for us on the cross. But love is stronger than death, and so the...
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Mystery
“The crucial difference between the Catholic and common uses of the word ‘mystery’ lies here. When the term is applied to divine realities, the mystery involved is by definition without end. This is not to say (as nominalists, in contrast to Aquinas, seemed to want to say) that the things of God are permanently or radically incomprehensible and ineffable, but that they are...
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“I fight the temptation to set ‘serious’ lyrical subject matter (creation, fall, redemption, consummation) against ‘light-hearted’ instrumentation, refuse an either-or fallacy. To do so would be akin to the Christian who says, “If we really believed in sin and salvation … if we really believed in judgment, then … .” That kind of conditionality...
