“The spirit which proceeds out of truth and beauty is the holy spirit of joy. These are realities and these alone give and sustain life.”
"We are not going to be able to reason ourselves back to paradise."
"... I cannot use the objective truths of Christianity to tear down others and think that I am thereby communicating the truth of the gospel."
"What is also true of prophets, then, is that while they challenge and even speak against their traditions, they are also more deeply committed to them than those who are comfortable in the status quo. It is precisely because they are so committed to their tradition and believe in its deepest impulses that prophets sometimes attack it. The prophetic call is always to a deeper fidelity to the founding event of the tradition, but not in such a way that controls it or even tries to make it into a univocal, monochromatic tradition."
"Paul engages believers and unbelivers, Jews and Greeks, men and women, slaves and free, all patiently and carefully in terms of their concrete, particular identities within the context of their actual situations. He lives with those to whom he preaches. He eats with them. He works and worships with them. Consequently, his theological categories do not blind him to the particularities of those to whom he witnesses - to the point where Paul does not even think of others in terms of a "universal human condition," Paul's preaching calls the people of the nations not to be conformed to the theological categories he inherited from Jewish orthodoxy (e.g., "circumcision"), but to faithful confession of Jesus as Lord within their cultural forms, whatever they may be. It is as if for Paul, as missiologist Andrew Walls observes, Christianity "has no fixed cultural element" and is therefore "infinitely transferable." For not only can the Christian gospel be translated into new cultural and linguistic thought forms, but given the missionary imperative explicit in Paul's letters (and the entire biblical narrative", there is a sense in which the truth of the gospel requires this kind of translation: 'It is as though Christ himself actually grows through the work of mission.'"
The modern concern with truth marks a sharp departure from the premodern focus on natural substances that make the world what it is and, in turn, make it possible for our words or thoughts about them to be true. It is because things are already true to themselves that premoderns believe we can perceive, think, or talk about them truly. Prior to modernity, just as with reason and rationality, it is the cosmos and its being - the it is - that make our thoughts and our words about it possible. It is because things have forms or essences that are identical to themselves, as it were, that our minds and our words can ever have any thruth in them. This is not the case, however, for moderns who reject the old-world cosmology. Modern thinkers tend to believe that our thoughts and statements can be true when the things we speak and think about are self-evidently the same as our words and thoughts.
When we speak about edification and witness, we are never talking about a purely private relation to anything......There is something of an intrapersonal and public element to truth, and because we are social beings, the edification of an individual person necessarily takes place within a community of other persons wo share (very nearly) the same commitments, values, and vocabularies.
Irony generally involves an incongruity between how we act in, talk about, or think about a situation and the usual expectations for that situation - between what is formally presented in a statement or situation and what is obviously true about it.The above is another quote from Chapter 3 of The End of Apologetics by Myron Penner. For some things irony is the best way to communicate. Irony is indirect. Jesus ministry is full of the indirect. He often uses reverse wisdom like in "the first shall be last". Have you ever wished that Jesus would just come right out and say it sometimes. Why did he use parable? Are you or aren't you? Speak to us with what we think are words of common sense. Say it like it is? But he often does not. He replies with a question or story. His life was the ultimate irony. God and Man.
This is the supreme irony, as Kierkegaard would say: that God was a human being and there were people who lived with him, spoke with him, ate with him, and heard him speak, and yet did not realize they were in the presence of God.......God, to put it another way, is a master ironist whose Word comes to us in a form that is not directly identical to the message.
The nature of reality, the world, and God himself is such that truthful speech about them - the kind of speech that communicates what is most important - ultimately is ironic.
"faith is tied to often-unacknowledged background values, assumptions and practices that give shape to our perspectives and meaning to our lives."
"When I witness, I do not take up a self-centered, asymmetrical stance closed off to the needs, wants, desires, goals, dreams, story, or insights of the person to whom I witness."---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To put it another way, when we take prophetic speech as the basis for apologetic witness, we move from an abstract epistemology of belief to an ethics of belief. When I speak of an ethics of belief, I mean a focus not just on what one believes but also on how one believes.
One of the serious problems for modern apologetics is that it treats Christianity as if it were an objective "something" (e.g., a set of propositions or doctrines) that can be explained, proven, and cognitively mastered.Well, Christianity does seem to have some of that, propositions and doctrines, but I am coming around to a belief that Christianity is not one thing but a moving, shape-shifting, adaptive, progressing, thing that is growing and changing with those who live in it.
Kierkegaard's favorite response is to point out that being a Christian is far less a matter of knowing the truth than that of becoming the truth - that is, of being truly rather than thinking trulyEveryone would agree with this. It seems that one should be able to figure things out mentally. The Enlightenment inside me would agree with this. But this statement does not support that. One can only know the true if one practices truly. There is something about that which rings true. I can intuit that but I wish I knew better how to put it in words, coming up with a rational explanation for it.
In order to accommodate this, we will need to shift from an epistemological approach to something like a hermeneutical one.The next quote expands on this. We have a text and a tradition that we have received. It is a reality that is here and now. Myron says that it is the Word from God.
The pressing issue is not solving an abstract set of theoretical problems but interpreting the symbols and texts of a received tradition in order to understand their meaning and significance in relation to a concrete set of problems and exigencies that we encounter.This is how many Jewish thinkers have approached the scriptures through the centuries and that now makes a lot more sense to me than it did when I was younger.
Reason is useful to us when employed to understand where and how we live, but is "suspended" (or limited) in this paradigm, as it does not plumb the depths of reality, nor is it capable of functioning as a context-free judge or standard for human belief and action.Important to the developing narrative in Myron's book is that "reason" is limited. It has a gaping wound. He says in one place.
We are in some respects, then, caught between the rock of modernity and the hard place of the premodern worldview. Premodernity, with its hierarchical universe and naive picture of the world, is simply no longer viable, but we are also far too aware of the problems of the modern paradigm to find its program tenable. A shift to a hermeneutical approach to Christian faith, like the kind I propose, carefully negotiates faith in reference to the texts and traditions out of which we hear the apostles and prohets speak.
The apostolic message does not have authority because it is demonstrably rational or exceptionally brilliant but because it is a word from God. God's word does not come to us as the result of human calculation or brilliance and cannot be improved upon, nor will it ever become obsolete. The truths of revelation are not realities humans will inevitably discover through their research projects, nor will they be able to assimilate them into their collective potential.
the claims of revelation are what Kierkegaard describes as a "paradox" to human reason, because they seemingly eclipse the rational reach of any human epistemic community - yet, as genuine truth claims, they are not utter nonsense to reason either.
The paradoxical result of the modern apologetic defense of Christianity, then is that when God's existence is established according to modern secular reason, all that really is demonstrated is the dispensability of anything that resembles belief in God.........so belief must be coaxed and cajoled from the crowd in terms they find acceptable and appealing.
Philosophical modernism and the Enlightenment is marked by an attempt to free human thought from its dependence on external sources - such as traditions, assumptions, or other authorities - for the grounds of belief.
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In the modern philosophical paradigm, then reason forms what I will call the "objective-universal-neutral complex". ....No longer is reason thought of as the structuring feature of the world external to the human mind, as in the premodern view. Instead, reason is internal to (and possessed only by) human beings in a way that is universal, objective, and neutral.
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It is true that postmodern perspectives usually understand human consciousness and rationality as the product of the cultural, social, linguistic, psychological, and other historical forces at work in a person's concrete situation.
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For my part, I believe postmodernism functions as a genuine critique of modernity and its atheistic impulses. This means that postmodernism has a relative value to Christians who are trying to think in different categories than the inherited modern values and assumptions that shape our culture.
So it is that many attempts to articulate the reasonableness of Christian faith in our context paradoxically end up doing something different than defending genuine Christianity.
I begin by noting that the goal of traditional apologetics is to justify the objective truth of the propositions of Christian doctrine. Christianity, the "essentially Christian," is therefore assumed, implicitly or explicitly, to be captured in these propositions. The Christian truths defended by such modern apologetics are taken to be ahistorical, unsituated, abstract, and universal. I then use Kierkegaard's concept of truth as subjectivity to launch a critique on apologetic propositionalism and to provide an alternative way to think about Christian truth.
Within the limits of Catholic "orthodoxy" what is encouraged by most is a strong and active hope that all will be saved.
To some, such a change in perspective may seem to be merely another example of modernity's relentless dilution of the gospel, a superficial optimism that refuses to acknowledge the power of evil in our world and our responsibility for it. In fact an ancient Christian instinct or sensibility for the power of divine grace, precisely in the face of the grim reality of human evil, lies at the hear of this "new" attitude.
According to Clement, God's absolute goodness implies that punishment can only have a pedagogical, purifying, and healing function, not only in this life, but after death as well. God does not take vengeance, for that would be simply to return evil for evil. But in loving providence God "chastens with a view to the good" of all, much as a father or teacher disciplines a child.
Can such a fire really burn eternally? The answer to this question is of central importance for understanding Origen on the subject of apocatastasis. A number of different perspectives emerge in his thought. First, simply with respect to the word and concept of the eternal, Origen often notes the ambiguity of the word "eternal," pointing out that aiôn and aiönios can mean duration without end or simply a very long period of time, an "age" or an "aeon," which would have an end.
Granted there are those among us who are to easily satisfied, who enjoy a sham serenity; but in contrast to them we also have men and generations of men whose serenity is not playful shallowness, but earnest depth. .. In the last years of his life this man possessed the virtue of serenity to such a degree that it radiated from him like the light from a star; so much that it was transmitted to all in the form of benevolence, enjoyment of life, good humor, trust and confidence. It continued to radiate outward from all who received it, all who had absorbed its brightness....
Even though whole peoples and languages have attempted to fathom the depths of the universe in myths, cosmogonies, and religions, their supreme, their ultimate attainment has been this cheerfulness.
“I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
(Hat Tip to Lynn Schofield Clark)
The Joy of Math: Keith Devlin on Learning and What It Means To Be Human
Mathematical equations are like sonnets says Keith Devlin. What most of us learn in school, he says, doesn’t begin to convey what mathematics is. And technology may free more of us to discover the wonder of mathematical thinking — as a reflection of the inner world of our minds.
- See more at:
http://www.onbeing.org/program/the-joy-of-math-keith-devlin-on-learning-and-what-it-means-to-be-human/5946
I think, especially for those who might be a little uncomfortable with concepts like mysticism or contemplation, Immortal Diamond can be a wonderful introduction to the visionary and optimistic of Richard Rohr’s teaching. Even long-standing fans of his work will enjoy this book, if for no other reason than to see his profoundly spiritual insights presented in a new way. If this is your first book by Rohr. You’re in for a treat. Follow up with either Everything Belongs or The Naked Now (and if you’re over 40 years old, Falling Upward as well).
Thinking a bit more broadly, though, we might also observe that in setting forth ideas over the unexpected scale of several books, Ellul follows in the footsteps of other prominent thinkers, including Socrates/Plato, Jesus, and Kierkegaard, who have each in different ways recognized that pursuing the truth often requires a certain obliqueness in approach. And herein we glimpse an important strategy for doing public theology in this present technological society.I discussed this indirectness here in a summary of previous blogs. And a commenter gave the contra case, also very edifying for me.
