I make lists. Here’s one: “Scriptural snippets that may indicate everyone makes it to The Party.”
Here’s my latest working definition: “forgive”
“Hold fast to reproof, don’t let go. Keep it, for it is your life” (Proverbs 4:13, Alters). Lord, may I cherish correction.
Holy smokes. Beloved is not remotely a Christ figure. Claiming as much amounts to literary malpractice.
So far, Potts’ Forgiveness seems beautiful…and spurious.
Crucifixes > crosses.
Idea for a novel: Upon His arrest, Jesus goes ahead and does appeal to the Father to send twelve legions of angels. Then what happens?
In response to Brad East, Tyler Hummel, and a baptism I attended today, I feel compelled to say that I, for one, currently detect zero indication—in scripture as well as in observation—that there is magic at work in baptism and the Eucharist. That is precisely why they need to be attended by high ceremony.
O, for hymnody that combines awe, piety, and moral effort.
Surely, Psalm twenty and three shall follow me all the days of my life. ✏️ 🎤 🎵
Just re-listened to: Glo (2000) by Delirious? The technicolor final feather in the caps of this Sussaxon anthemic rock worship band whose early records, more than those of DC Talk or Jars, served as the heart of my enjoyment of CCM from 1994–2002. Delirious? released four more studio albums after this, but none of those hit the spot for me, which implies that my continued enjoyment of their early records may be a matter of nostalgia. But on Glo there’s a combination of the Muse-like sonic pleasures of their stellar 1999 outing Mezzamorphis with the get-really-into-it instrumental worship jams—which, as far as I was concerned, these guys invented—of 1996’s Live & In the Can that made and probably still makes Glo a favorite of mine.
Faith, hope, and love can all be misguided.
Hope is:
- an imagined, desired future that you feel could come to pass and which prompts you to act accordingly,
- the supposed bringer of that future, or
- the feeling that accompanies imagining that future
Fear is the undesired version of the same.
Revive us, O Lord.
But this time, do it right. ✏️ 🎤 🎵
Karl Barth and Warren Buffet look like fraternal twins and they were/are both polyamorous? It’s all too much.
I have concluded that:
- hell as traditionally rendered is biblically indefensible and morally reprehensible,
- everyone will make it to the afterlife party eventually,
- believing in the Trinity and the virgin birth are not dogma but options, albeit ones I believe,
- monogamous same-sex marriage is a societal good,
- the universe is 13.8 billion years old,
- all biblical talk that seems to point to the Second Coming has already been fulfilled in the Transfiguration, the Cross, the Resurrection, the destruction of the Second Temple, and the conversion of the Roman Empire, and/or will be fulfilled for each of us when we die,
- abortion should be legal during some of pregnancy, and
- the Bible contains factual errors,
yet I still feel like a conservative Christian. It probably has something to do with me maintaining in my Christianity a robust vertical dimension. God is real, personal, and knowable. It seems so many who hold positions similar to those I outlined above jettison theology altogether—or at least any theology they feel comfortable sharing or acting on in any social context—limiting their observable Christianity to horizontal, that is, human-to-human relationships.
As such, it’s often hard to feel at home anywhere.
Familiarity breeds laxity.
By this I mean that in my relationships with my wife and kids, I am not consistently stanced to apply the same effort toward socially sensitive demeanor and diction that I do in my relationships with friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. My habitus outside the family is more disciplined and sympathetic than that within. There’s a certain alertness and natural effort to fit with other people that seems to arise only outside the comfortable confines of home.
I’d like to reimport that stance back into my home life. Sure, home is for relaxation. But I sense in myself a slackness of love. Carla, Sullivan, and Éa deserve better.
I have occasionally found myself wondering whether journaling and posting as frequently as I have been is good. Doing so requires time and attention that I could deploy toward other, more directly interpersonal matters. And it’s probably sometimes a neurotic response to the fear of death. But the fact is I do feel more fully alive when I have been writing. And just now, as I was grabbing a late-morning protein snack from the kitchen, it occurred that I would pay a non-significant sum to have access to the collected written output of my parents, my grandparents, or my great-grandparents. The more voluminous and representative of their psyches I knew their output to be, the higher sum I would pay. I want to know them. It would be good for me to know them. It would be good in the way similar to how reading a great novel is good: You get to know your fellow humans, you cultivate sympathy, and you get to know yourself, all of which foster loving, harmonious, sympathetic, self-controlled interactions with others.
If I can provide my descendants with a thick account of who I was, I find myself suddenly quite confident they will be the better for it. And not because I’m a paragon. No, even if I were a scoundrel, I think they’d be the better for it.
Just listened to: Portraits of a Mind (2023) featuring works composed by Ralph Vaughan Williams and Ian Venables performed by Alessandro Fisher, The Navarra Quartet, and William Vann. Maybe an hour of a tenor emoting impressionistic and devotional lyrics atop a string quartet and a piano isn’t your cup of English breakfast. It, or at least this particular hour of it, is certainly mine.
And maybe you’ll listen anyway to share in Vaughan Williams’ love for Dorian and Mixolydian modes, or to hear strong evidence in the Venables that the craft of contemporary art song lives on beautifully, or to wonder at or join in on the ardently devotional lyrics the agnostic RVW chose to set to equally ardent music.
If the 35–40 minutes it’ll take to read my essay about the reasons for and mechanisms of the cross of Christ is too verbose, Richard Beck, professor of Psychology at Abilene Christian University, has managed to encapsulate almost all of my answer in the just five short paragraphs that close this post.
The only fault I can find with his take isn’t really even a fault per se: He puts forward no explicit caveat that the forgiveness on offer is not human-to-human forgiveness but rather God-to-human only. I’m sure, however, Beck would agree with that if asked. I suppose also don’t agree with some of the ontology and hamartiology he puts forward in the posts leading up to the one I’m recommending.
But still, “A Theology of Everything: Part 7, Love Made Visible Within History” is well worth your four minutes.
Lord, help me to distinguish righteousness from scruples.
The Holy Spirit ≠ spontaneity. The Holy Spirit ≠ awe at nature. The Holy Spirit ≠ frissons, feelings, or warm fuzzies. The Holy Spirit’s presence and activity may sometimes be coterminous with these phenomena. But He is not them, and the presence of these phenomena does not mean He is at work. Thinking otherwise can be quite misleading. Look instead for the fruit.
Related to my last post, the average Peruvian woman (4'11¾") would see me as pretty tall, but the average Dutchman (6'0") would see me as of average height. Meanwhile, the average adult blue whale would see me as larger than its food but still pretty tiny, and the average sugar ant probably wouldn’t see me to notice me at all, but if it did, would think me beyond colossal.
Of course, there’s a non-relative right answer: I stand 5'11¾ inches tall. But none of the four viewers in the above paragraph is wrong in seeing what they see. I’m not saying people couldn’t be wrong about my height or about the nature of God. But I am trying to give people like me who worry about the problem of religious pluralism a little less to worry about.
In in attempt to reply to Éa’s examining questions on Friday night that were essentially restatements of the problem of religious pluralism which came after she returned from a school field trip to Buddhist, Sikh, Hindu, and Jain temples in Pittsburgh, I stumbled into what I now take as a highly satisfactory answer: Think of how various people would describe me. Carla would describe me one way. Sullivan would describe me another way. You would describe me still another. A stranger on the street looking at me for the first time would describe me still a fourth way. And so on. In fact, everyone would describe me at least a little bit differently. The various takes on me would be accurate in part but inaccurate in others. Descriptive patterns and similarities would be evident, but never total. And a person who had never seen me wouldn’t really be able to describe me at all—nor even be able to say with any confidence that I exist. (Here we bump up against the problem of divine hiddenness, but that’s a different problem.)
Sure, I’ve recreated Hick’s elephant. But putting it in personal, rather than pachydermal, terms helps me embrace it more readily and thus be more at ease in our increasingly pluralistic world. So does explicitly allowing—no, stating as a sound prediction—that people in my illustration will obviously be wrong about me in some of the ways they describe me—even the people closest to me like Carla and Éa and Sullivan. That much is obvious when talking in terms of people. How much more so when talking about the invisible God?
Our Father, who are in heaven…
…hallowed be Your name.
…how I want You here.
…help me get some sleep.
…how long will it take? ✏️ 🎤 🎵