I finally feel comfortable with my grasp of the relationship between non-retaliation, forgiveness, and reconciliation, together with God’s will regarding all three:
Mercy can be unwise.
Mercy is by definition unjust.
Just finished reading “Die With Me: Jesus, Pickton, and Me” (2006) by Brita Miko, who argues that we need to love and forgive even the worst of sinners if we’re going to follow Jesus. My take: Not if you think forgiveness should be granted without confession and repentance, as it seems Miko does.
To love God is to want to delight Him.
I am the In-Betweener:
I’m never satisfied.
Is that I’m keener,
Or am I just a bag of pride? ✏️ 🎤 🎵
Is it passionate love
Or just a love for passion? ✏️ 🎤 🎵
May all of our eros be agapified.
The degree to which you don’t buy the fundamental idea I put forward in this essay that amends are necessary for a just forgiveness is the degree to which you can stand even more amazed at the love of Jesus in subjecting Himself to crucifixion to provide that (proxy) amends. You may not believe amends are necessary for forgiveness (and if you don’t, that itself may be an indication of Jesus’ ideological success), but Jesus’ contemporaries and forbears did think so. If the idea is mere cultural contingency rather than ethical fact, that only makes Jesus’ sacrifice all the more amazing in its condescension—and thus more apt as reason to sit at His feet and align yourself with His overall ethical program.
“Having different gracious gifts, according to the grace given us: if prophecy, according to the proportion of faithfulness…” (Romans 12:6, DBH). If Hart’s translation is correct, then one should prophesy in proportion to one’s demonstrated faithfulness, not according to one’s faith, the latter word being the majority translation in this context vacant of meaning.
In other words, only prophesy if your deeds warrant you time with the microphone.
One option for fitting together the forgiveness on offer from God: If forgiveness is nothing more than disavowal of hatred and claims to requital or punishment, then He judges us, but He does not sentence us. And He always, always loves us and never hates us. It is still a terrible thing to fall into it. Fire and fear, and all that. But no punishment other than the mortification of being seen.
How I agree with Hardin:
- The Father did not kill Jesus.
- The Father did not abandon Jesus to crucifixion because He was angry with humanity.
- Jesus’ crucifixion, rightly understood, puts an end to blood sacrifice. (Note the torn curtain.)
- We are to imitate Jesus.
- The Father does not like blood or violence.
How I disagree with Hardin:
- Making amends, which is what some of the Levitical sacrifices, including the big one (Yom Kippur) were all about, is good and right.
- God instituted, or at least did not contradict Jewish belief that He instituted, the Levitical sacrifices.
- Jesus’ death affirms the logic of the Levitical sacrifices as just even if it simultaneously exposes their form (violence against innocent victims) as unjust.
- It is unclear to me what Hardin can make of John the Baptizer’s insistence that Jesus was the “lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29,36).
Part of 1 Corinthians 16 is as a good a motto as one can find: “Do everything in love.” Since so much of my life comprises words, and since the biblical proverbialists, Jesus, and James all emphasize the power and importance of our words, I’m going to provisionally subset the motto to concentrate its effect: “Say everything in love.”
Cheerful, curious, grateful, harmonious, sympathetic, brotherly, humble. That’s what I want to be.
“If you find honey, eat just what you need, lest you have your fill of it and throw it up” (Proverbs 25:16). Anything, even very pleasant things like musicmaking or music listening, can become noxious if too much.
“The secret to faith is to have two loves: one for God and the other for whoever happens to be standing in front of you at any given time” (Eloy Cruz to Jimmy Carter, as quoted by Randall Balmer in The Christian Century).
“Do not strain to become rich; through your understanding, leave off” (Proverbs 23:4).
When I’m deciding what to create next—and especially whether to write new music or spend time rehearsing music someone else has written—I can consider the cultivation of my own fruits of God’s spirit (peace and joy in particular) in addition to those of other people.
Listen, Merriam-Webster: You descriptivists do good work. It’s important we have maps of the lay of our linguistic land as it lies. But don’t purport to explain to the world that prescriptivists are only interested in “‘correctness’ set forth in ‘rules’ that [we] imagine.” Just like poorly developed roads, a poorly designed language (as I concede every language is to some degree) sometimes leads to confusion, frustration, and hazards. To suggest prescriptivists are always wrong to do what they do is the equivalent of saying city planners are always wrong to do what they do.
Misdevelopment of the land has consequences. So it is with lexicons—especially when the words in question are of moral value. Consider “forgive.” If “forgive” is “actually used,” as you write, “by writers and speakers of the English language,” to include by definition reconciliation, forgetting, and anger abatement, which in some circles, although thankfully not quite in your dictionary, resentment being different from anger, it does, then descriptivism can be guilty of abetting the deformation of our moral vocabularies and thus the persistence of harm, including domestic abuse and white supremacy, because despite your protestation, people look to your publications as a guide.
We need people alerting us to semantic hazards and dead ends.
Inspired by part of this interview with Lisa Silvestri, the author of Peace by Peace: Risking Public Action, Creating Social Change, which I may read soonish with my friend Neill—after I finish:
- Forgiveness: An Alternative Account, which Ruth and I both got excited about roughly simultaneously and thus co-purchased (co-purchasing books—what a fun idea! an interpersonal nano-library…),
- parts of Stricken by God?, another of Neill’s recommendations after he read my essay about the Cross, and
- Watchmen, recommended to me by both my son and my wife—
here is a list of what bothers me:
- barriers to walkability,
- the predominance of solo, receptive, junky entertainment,
- words whose poor definitional boundaries cause moral problems,
- faulty exegesis,
- parroting, and
- roadkill.
Currently, there are only five Christmas albums I can listen to all the way through with pleasure:
- Banjo Christmas by The Clarke Family (sounds like what its title suggests)
- Merry Christmas by Mariah Carey (duh)
- Christmas With The New Black Eagle Jazz Band (Dixieland jazz)
- A Very Ping Pong Christmas by Shawn Lee’s Ping Pong Orchestra (charmingly jokey Stax pastiche)
- A Charlie Brown Christmas by Vince Guaraldi Trio (duh)
“All a man’s ways are pure in his eyes, but the LORD takes the spirit’s measure” (Proverbs 16:2). The first part isn’t true of everyone all the time. But it’s probably true of everyone some to most of the time. And certainly very often true of me. Lord, help us to discern.
Just re-listened to A King and His Kindness (2021) by Caroline Cobb. My favorite nuthin’-but-Jesus album since Rich Mullins’ 1997 demo tapes. Definitely square and very devout, hence the kind of album my enjoyment of which will lose me cool points with just about everyone I can think of. But these are the kinds of songs that make you not give a damn about cool points.
Proverbs also very frequently locates wisdom in how we receive correction.
Proverbs so often puts the locus of wisdom on what we say.