Posts tagged Christianity
Thales’ circles
“All is water”
Fred Clark’s attempt to create a new meme: “The Committee Will See You Now”.
Remember you are the beloved of Christ and, as St. Paul said, nothing can separate you from the love of Christ, not even being called the ecclesiastical equivalent of a feminist or a bitch.
Bishop Katherin Jefferts Schori to a gathering of women priests in the C of E.
(via galesofnovember)
Poor Paul!
I’m just reading this litany of all the people who hate Paul: Gentiles, Jews, other Christians, urban dwellers, rural dwellers, the ocean, and I wonder if even a single person ever said to him, “Paul, have you noticed that the only common denominator here is you?”. Maybe they did. Maybe they are those “false brothers and sisters” he’s complaining about.
I gotta say though. I appreciate following a religion whose foundational texts were written by a failed revolutionary and total social reject who oscillates between beautiful, mystical images of an all loving God and passive aggressive whining about how people don’t appreciate just how right he is about everything. It totally speaks to my human condition, man.
Paul also speaks to me.
GPOY.
The central text of Christianity is the Bible, as mysterious and labyrinthine a library as that portrayed by Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose. … It describes ancient encounters with God which are far from straightforward. God knows who God is, as he once remarked to Moses out of the fire of a burning bush. Jewish and Christian traditions want to say at the same time that God has a personal relationship with individual human beings and that he is also beyond all naming, all characterization. Such a paradox will lead to a constant urge to describe the indescribable, and that is what the Bible tries to do. It does not have all the answers, and – a point many forget – only once does it claim to do so, in one of the last writings to squeeze into the biblical canon, known as Paul’s second epistle to Timothy. The Bible speaks with many voices, including shouts of anger against God. It tells stories which it does not pretend ever happened, in order to express profound truths, such as we read in the books of Jonah and Job. It is also full of criticism of Church tradition, in the class of writings known as prophecy, which spend much of their energy in denouncing the clergy and the clerical teaching of their day. This should provide a healthy warning to all those who aspire to tell other people what to do on the basis of the Bible.
If history, if facticity in this sense, is an essential dimension of Christian faith, then faith must expose itself to the historical method - indeed, faith itself demands this.
LORD, shall we not bring these gifts to Your service?
Shall we not bring to Your service all our powers
For life, for dignity, grace and order,
And intellectual pleasures of the senses?
The LORD who created must wish us to create
And employ our creation again in His service
Which is already His service in creating.
For Man is joined in spirit and body,
And therefore must serve as spirit and body.
Visible and invisible, two worlds meet in Man;
Visible and invisible must meet in His Temple;
You must not deny the body.
Now you shall see the Temple completed:
After much striving, after many obstacles;
The work of creation is never without travail;
The formed stone, the visible crucifix,
The dressed altar, the lifting light,
Light
Light
The visible reminder of Invisible Light.
By the way, a prison cell like this is a good analogy for Advent; one waits, hopes, does this or that — ultimately negligible things — the door is locked and can only be opened from the outside.
(via invisibleforeigner)
In recent elections one would have thought that homosexuality and abortion were the new litmus tests of Christianity. Where did this come from? They never were the criteria of proper membership for the first 2000 years, but reflect very recent culture wars instead! And largely from people who think of themselves as “traditionalists”! The fundamentals were already resolved in the early Apostles’ Creed and Nicene Creed. Note that none of the core beliefs are about morality at all. The Creeds are more mystical, cosmological, and about aligning our lives inside of a huge sacred story. When you lose the mystical level, you always become moralistic as a cheap substitute. Jesus is clearly much more concerned about issues of pride, injustice, hypocrisy, blindness, and what I have often called “The Three Ps,” or power, prestige, and possessions, which are probably 95% of his written teaching. We conveniently ignore this 95% to concentrate on a morality that usually has to do with human embodiment. That’s where people get righteous, judgmental, and upset, for some reason. The body seems to be where we carry our sense of shame and inferiority, and early-stage religion has never gotten much beyond these “pelvic” issues.
(via invisibleforeigner)
In their frantic effort to escape the fleshly vices and so to be “holy,” many fell unwittingly into the far more crippling sins of the spirit, such as pride, rejection, and lovelessness. This, I continue to feel, has been the greatest tragedy of Protestant life.
The Christian life is not a means to heaven. War is not a means to peace, freedom is not a prerequisite for following Christ. The Christian life is about practicing heaven now, on earth, even if it gets you killed. It’s not about making our way to Christ in some far-off eschaton; Christ is the way.
William Cavanaugh, Liturgy as Politics
I think I’m just going to reblog this regularly.
(via invisibleforeigner)
(via invisibleforeigner)
The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.
Christ will never be cool. Terrifying, life-changing, shocking, and iconoclastic, but never cool. Jesus is not my homeboy. The Gospel will always be ‘relevant’ but never trendy.
(via badwolfcomplex)
“In matters that are so obscure and far beyond our vision,” Augustine wrote, “we find in Holy Scripture passages which can be interpreted in very different ways without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such cases, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search for truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it.”
…
As it turns out, God is not threatened by science or honest inquiry. If all truth is God’s truth, then we shouldn’t be afraid of what this world has to teach us. God is big enough and deep enough and eternal enough to handle our toughest questions and our most baffling discoveries.
Even in the life of a Christian, faith rises and falls like tides of an invisible sea. It’s there, even when he can’t see it or feel it, if he wants it to be there. You realize, I think, that it is more valuable, more mysterious, altogether more immense than anything you can learn or decide upon in college. Learn what you can, but cultivate Christian skepticism. It will keep you free - not free to do anything you please, but free to be formed by something larger than your own intellect or the intellects of those around you.
(via invisibleforeigner)
The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely, the *saints* the Church has produced and the *art* which has grown in her womb. Better witness is borne to the Lord by the splendor of holiness and art which have arisen in the community of believers than by the clever excuses which apologetics has come up with to justify the dark sides which, sadly, are so frequent in the Church’s human history. If the Church is to continue to transform and humanize the world, how can she dispense with beauty in her liturgies, that beauty which is so closely linked with love and with the radiance of the Resurrection? No, Christians must not be too easily satisfied. They must make their Church into a place where beauty — and truth — is at home. Without this the world will become the first circle of hell…. A theologian who does not love art, poetry, music and nature can be dangerous. Blindness and deafness toward the beautiful are not incidental: they necessarily are reflected in his theology.
(Source: wesleyhill, via invisibleforeigner)
