“We are sending our young people into the marriage bed as virgins (good) but also as morons (bad).”
I enjoyed today how although I was worried that I wasn’t going to be able to bring anything to church, at the last minute as we approached our taking of the wine and bread, I thought of “What A Friend I’ve Found” by Delirious?, which I had just run through with Carla, the Rookes, and Ben last weekend on a whim. I need to remember not to worry so much. Just follow my whim. Especially with music making. I ought not make music simply because I have a voice for it. I ought to make music when it is in the service of love only. Is love the post hoc pretext that covers a selfish ambition for praise or usefulness? Or is love the actual, prompting reason I’m doing the singing? Let it always be the latter.
Is it possible that the anxiety that arises in me when I read the opinions of folks on the Internet about God arises because I overestimate other people’s reasonability?
“God loved us while we were yet monsters.”
In reply to an entry a year ago about “God sending a deluding influence” on people, I understand there to be a possible better translation: “And because [they refused to love the truth], God will abandon them to the strong influence of delusion, leading them to believe the lie, so that they…will be judged or condemned” (2 Thessalonians 2:11-12; see this hermeneutics Stack Exchange comment). This is God playing the, “OK, children, I give you over to what you already seem given to. It’s not going to turn out well for you.”
“I often think our broken church/social structures reflect our homes. Families teach us that even when are different and disagree, we are one.”
From church last week in greatly abbreviated form: Jesus’ lesson of the fig tree is not embarrassing in the slightest if we hear Him to be saying, “Guys, don’t marvel at this. This is God we’re talking about. If you know God has set to do something, to intervene in some way in the created order, then know that He is God and that therefore all you’ll have to do is say the word, and He’ll do it. Fig trees? Mountains? No problem. He is God.” Jesus’ words aren’t carte blanche. They are carte divine, and while we get to sign it, God is the one who does the deed.
For us who are heterosexual, the task as it regards the sexual behavior of our brethren who are homosexual or bisexual is to support their clean conscience. If I am open and affirming of chaste homosexual expression but my gay friend is not, I will not try to persuade my gay friend toward my point of view. I will support him in his efforts to keep to the ethic he thinks is right. See Romans 14.
It may help in interpreting Jesus’ parables to picture Him saying them to people, or perhaps to picture yourself saying them to people. That clarified the Parable of the Wedding Feast for me today.
“God will send upon them a deluding influence so that they will believe what is false” (2 Thessalonians 2:11).
This evening, I am uncomfortable with men ascribing action to God. It makes me want to throw out all of the parts of the Bible where that happens. Why would God send a deluding influence on anyone?
Since the parousia has taken so long, It is functional to replace “the day of Christ,” and other such phrases with “the day you die.”
The Bible is very clear about condemning sexual immorality. But there is but one moral absolute: love, that is, self-donation for the benefit of another motivated by a view of that other as wonderful. While that pole means a lot of human-facing behavior will remain classified as immoral in almost all situations (adultery [although not, perhaps, consensual extramarital sex], stealing, killing), some behavior, like same-sex sexual activity, will be reclassified over time. Culture will condition to what degree a specific act is immoral.
We rehabilitated the doctrine of the Final Judgment today in church. That’s nice.
I don’t always mind the aches and pains and the memory glitches that attend aging. They remind me that night comes. My hope is that light shines in the darkness.
— Dale Allison, “Heaven and Experience,” Night Comes (2016)
I don’t care what you think about sola gratia. If you don’t do what Jesus says in the Sermon, you’re building on sand.
I want include idle solitude in my life. I also want to read Richard Foster again.
I must remember that friendship is the gift I am most able to give the world, and that it’s people that matter most before anything else earthly.
I rode my rented bike today from the hotel to Kerry Park Overlook to the Fremont Troll to the Chittenden Locks to West Point at Discovery Park.
I sent a message to Carla upon watching the sunset from West Point saying, “If God is only as beautiful as this, He is enough to hold my attention for eternity.”
After returning the bike to Velo, I spent the entire walk back to the hotel worrying about where to put my stickers—the place stickers I get for my bike and the Restoring Eden stickers—in a place where they can be on display forever (so my computer, water bottle, and bike, which I think I’ll be replacing in the next ten years) but not call too much attention to myself or violate the virtue of humility.
As I read again a few reviews and the publisher’s description of Alan Jacobs’ The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, this time from the corridors surrounding the escalator well at the Washington State Convention Center, I teared up in gratitude as I concluded, tentatively as always, that You, God, had once again spoken directly to me for my good.
The message: You and those around you will be enriched if you heed Jacobs’ advice about reading, which Oxford University Press outlines as:
- read at whim,
- read what gives you delight,
- and do so without shame.
I’d add to this, as I’m sure he will in the book: read deeply and at length.
Why so grateful to God? Well, first of all, because You continue to speak to me in these little words and names I remember upon waking from a night’s sleep. I think I can tell the difference between a random surfacing of my subconscious mind and when You are speaking. But also because this speaks directly to an inner predicament I have felt acutely since having children, namely, that I want to read, but find it such a chore.
Relatedly, I delight so much more in the children’s books I’ve read than in the “adult” books I’ve set before me to read. Books are not to be broccoli.
For movies, I have no illusions: It is for beauty and entertainment and admiration. Same for music. But for books, I absorbed the idea that you should read in a utilitarian fashion.
Problem number 352 with Christian worship music: too much singing about the relationship and not enough singing about the ones who we are related
friend:
So have you seen your “Kings have no power other than what their subjects give them” anywhere else? Thinking more and more about it in light of 1 Corinthians 1:18 and the Cross being the demonstration of the power of God—precisely because it is the means by which he frees his subjects to become like him.”
me:
I’m not aware of anyone who formulated that thought before I did, although I do connect the highly circumscribed nature of human kingly power to the highly circumscribed nature of divine kingly power posited via the theodicy work of Greg Boyd, Thomas Jay Oord, Christopher McHugh, and John Caputo via Richard Beck. That last link you may find too progressive and deconstructed (as I do), but nevertheless useful. That last link is especially useful because come to think of it, Beck isn’t doing theodicy work with that blog series: He is formulating a rally cry for action. And so are you.
friend:
Hmmm interesting. He is using 1 Corinthians 1:18.
me:
Indeed. Caputo’s ontological assertions aside, Beck’s point sticks.
friend:
Ahh the age of “everyone’s a theologian.” I suppose I’m in that now, too. I think it’s good to have so many eyes on the thing, eh? It just makes for some fun googling—oh, wow, he’s saying angelic beings don’t exist?
me:
Beck is agnostic on the question. He doesn’t think it matters. He wrote a whole book about Satan and purposely plays cagey the whole time about whether he actually believes Satan exists.
friend:
Interesting…where did you come upon him? Now that I consider it, if the whole thing is summed up in love God and love my neighbor, I could be agnostic. Of course, I would have to account for what Jesus was doing and saying all the times he was casting demons out. Hmmm…we should be monks. Then we could just read and contemplate all day.
me:
A friend of mine from my Teen Mania days referred me to him when I first started my soteriology project. For a good understanding of why he doesn’t think it matters whether they’re real (or even, when push comes to shove, whether God is real), see “Is Santa Claus Real? A Parent’s Epistemological Meditation.” As for me, the historical facts before me, both ancient and modern, are easier to explain if there are such beings.
friend:
Yeah…woah this is a rabbit hole…
me:
’Tis. Anyway, yes, let’s be monks. Then we could read, meditate, pray, discuss, eat, and serve. And that could be it. It’d be great. There’s Franciscan monastery in Hollidaysburg. Screw it all. Let’s go.
We are ready to send Everett and Oak home. But we’re not. I’m sure these are the typical feelings of a foster parent. Life is going to be different. Quieter. This evening without them because they’re with Mommy and Daddy makes that sure. But as Everett would surely reciprocate, “I will miss you, Everett.” And I will miss you, Oak. We still have three weeks with them, so let’s make them count.
We asked Éa and Sullivan today whether they’d like to foster again. Sullivan said, “I’d like a year.” And Éa said, “Yeah, in like, five thousand weeks.”
A home is fuller if you’re stretched for the sake of relationships. Let us dig in to more people. Let us “love [our] enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return” (Luke 6:35). Then I will live without regret.
“Now you together are the Messiah’s body” (1 Corinthians 12:27, KNT). In other words, I extrapolate, we are how Jesus acts on this earth.
As much as I’d like to start posting about what is lost when we use transliterations like ‘baptism’ and ‘apostle’ instead translating them “immersion” and “emissary,” I am inspired to start thinking in terms of positive formulations of my faith, rather than critical ones. OK, Scott, we know what you don’t believe: What do you believe?
Clinging to a Man who is no longer perceptibly with us is not a sufficient ethic, as the very fact that we have the term “aberrational Christian or Bible-based groups” attests. It’s too loosy-goosey. People can make stuff up about what He is saying. Therefore, we must hermeneutically extract principles from His biographies.