I had a professor who trained himself to not use either of those; he recognized them as psychological stalling techniques and replaced them with the motion of lifting a finger to suggest “Hang on a moment, I’m thinking here”.
= - = - = - =
I learned that politics is unavoidable if you want to provide shelter for the homeless (among other things) even if government funding is not involved.
I like to think I advanced the kingdom by taking on those campus preachers who depicted God as loving to torment sinners.
These things are sometimes hard to judge. But i’m inclined to think that you did, just as I will never forget the outstanding performance Max McLean gave in reading Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.
This is also outstanding
@St.Roymond check out this closing statement from Edwards’ sermon
And now you have an extraordinary opportunity, a day wherein CHRIST has flung the door of mercy wide open, and stands in the door calling and crying with a loud voice to poor sinners; a day wherein many are flocking to him, and pressing into the kingdom of God; many are daily coming from the east, west, north and south; many that were very lately in the same miserable condition that you are in, are in now an happy state, with their hearts filled with love to him that has loved them and washed them from their sins in his own blood, and rejoycing in hope of the glory of God.
I found this section of Jesus and the Powers both encouraging and convicting. I thought it was worth posting here for others as well:
You might be reading this and thinking, ‘I’m no pastor or prime minister, neither evangelist nor entrepreneur. I’m happy to watch others build for the kingdom from the sidelines, and clap when necessary.’ True, not all of us are called into the vocations of ordained ministry or even full-time kingdom-ventures. Bills must still be paid, young children or elderly parents must be cared for, and ordinary life does not grant sabbaticals. But one must be wary of indifference masquerading as humility, as if to say I am too insignificant to make a difference. As if to presume that God cannot use me, though he has used people less educated and less fortunate than me. Do not fall into the sin – yes, we should use that word – of becoming merely a religious consumer rather than a kingdom-contributor.
Whatever your age, ableness, sex, education, limitations, fears, stage of life or self-doubts, you have something to contribute to the coming kingdom. Why else is the spirit given, other than to convict us, inspire us and empower us to do what we would not ordinarily be able to do ourselves? Let your heart be burdened by the needs you see about you. Let your mind be haunted by a great missionary task that remains unfinished. Let your conscience be pricked by a grave injustice that goes on blighting your land. Then, as far as you are able, in your season of life, pick one ministry in your church to help with and one cause to partner with.
Wright, N. T.; Bird, Michael F… Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies (p. 88). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.
and
Perhaps the single greatest threat is not the rise of secularism or the emptying of churches, but the apathy and indifference of the churches that are still here. People too self-absorbed and too affluent to care for anything outside their own social media bubble, beyond their own circle of friends, and beyond the view of their front lawns. Too many so-called disciples committed to Jesus to the point of convenience, not to the point where their discipleship costs them anything. Yet Jesus bids us all to come and follow him, to leave worldly trinkets behind and to do hard things, crazy things and impossible things, for no other reason than that he is our king, walking alongside us, suffusing our earthly endeavours with the energy of the spirit.
Wright, N. T.; Bird, Michael F… Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies (p. 89). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.
Just came across a gem of a quote in a book of short stories titled Learning To Talk by Hilary Mantel, better known for Wolf Hall and its sequels, winning two Booker Prizes. From the story from which the collection is named in which the author describes going to elocution classes with a Ms Webster:
There should be support groups, like a twelve step program, for young people who hate being young. Since I was at other people’s mercy, I did not care what I did, go to Miss Webster or whatever. It’s only later that you think about the years wasted; if I had to have a youth, I wish now it could have been misspent.
That’s great, Mark!
I’m not sure how I would have misspent it. In some ways, it seems like I did in actuality, by not having the sense to ask people for guidance, when it would have saved me a lot of years going in the wrong direction. Then again, I wouldn’t have learned what I learned by going “off road.”
I had that thought too, that having gotten a good education and having developed her skills as a writer and insight it is easy to look back and identify influences which seem not to have been optimal. But without all the influences which lead to mastery in her craft, would she really have chosen to roll the dice (given the chance) to indulge her whims more as a child at the risk of possibly missing out on the life she has had? A conundrum.
Mine was mostly misspent because I let others define who I was and what I should do.
From Elizabeth Oldfield in her book “Fully Alive” the last chapter (which wasn’t even what that book was mostly about … But was still yielding gems like this anyway.
The crucifixion of Jesus is where we derive the word “excruciating” from, and also “crucial.” It is, literally, the crux of the matter. In Christian thought, and in my life, it is a place of love and sorrow, two things more truly expressed in poetry than in propositions.
…
In her magisterial book on the cross, Fleming Rutledge helped me relax about the fact that I don’t seem able to make it work like math: “None of the symbols, motifs and themes ‘work’ in any logical way, either as analogies or as theories to explain what God in Christ is doing on the cross. They are figures of speech, and as such require imagination and participation. As people of faith, we do not interpret them so much as we inhabit them—and indeed . . . they inhabit us.”
I hear that as saying the cross isn’t a concept to be mastered and possessed but rather a symbol to find oneself possessed by to help you to master yourself. It isn’t the world or the divine that is to be mastered.
I suspect she’d agree - maybe all the way up to the part about ‘help you to master yourself’. That part could probably use more unpacking, since to some extent, I think she’s saying we can’t even master ourselves. But in another sense - as in cultivating self-control, yeah. All the way.
Another teaser from earlier in the book … (the bulk of which is about trying to layout a ‘secular’ appeal for many of these fruits since ‘church’ and ‘religion’ is so off-putting to so many by now.)
Most ancient societies, of which we know most about the Greeks and Romans, did not believe all humans were equal. It was the claim of the tiny nation of Israel, and later the steadily spreading Christians, that painfully, centuries-slowly, via myriad personal and institutional screwups, embedded the idea that being a human was the baseline measure of value. It has become utterly foundational in many civilizations, to the extent that its origins are now largely invisible. The French and American Revolutions may have claimed it to be “self-evident,” the authors of the International Declaration of Human Rights may have excised the religious underpinnings, but they were building on a framework laid by medieval monastic scholars interpreting Scripture. Seidentop concludes that “the Christian conception of God became the means of creating the brotherhood of man . . . that both required and justified the equal moral standing of all humans.”
Secular humanism, while it has made a land grab for the brand, is actually a cousin of Christian humanism, drawing deeply (and often wisely) from Christian anthropology. Even though there may be family squabbles, and some secular humanists could be accused of stealing the family silver, I’d want to say, like the Bishop in Les Misérables to Jean Valjean, take it. Take it all. Spread it. Use it. I don’t know how you ground a belief that all humans are equal outside of some kind of faith, but that’s ok. The belief is so important and so liberating I just want more of it in the world.
Oldfield, Elizabeth. Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times (pp. 136-137). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
To me, Oldfield’s carefree cutting loose of the grounding for these important beliefs - a grounding which so many apologists of recent centuries have championed Christianity as being so necessary for, is itself an interesting challenge. In contrast, I remember a Jewish Rabbi (in conversation with Catholic Bishop Barron on an interview by David Rubin) referred to all this as “cut-flower ethics”. Meaning - yes - go ahead and pretend that you can have all these great values sans the religious underpinnings that gave them to you, and maybe you will prize them successfully enough in your own lifetime; but what about your children? And their children? Will it be good enough for them that this just happened to be grand-dad’s preference? His answer to his own rhetorical question there being - probably not. Like a beautiful flower that’s been cut and removed from its nourishing soils - yes - it’s still beautiful for the moment, but its beauty will now fade much more quickly.
And that all sounded convincingly reasonable to me as an analogy. Maybe even still does. But Elizabeth’s appeal - isn’t so much (I think) to exorcise Christianity as it is to convince people to take another look at it peaking in through the back door as it were. Will have to think about this more, though, as I’m suspecting the cracks are showing in this so-called apologetic too.
I agree with all of this but I’m finished for today. Briefly, by mastering ourselves I mean to stop prioritizing our self interest over the community, the divine and every other individual the way we so often do. Religious perspective helps a lot. Lots more to say on that score but nothing short and punchy.
While I’ll never think there is historic reason to prioritize one religious tradition over another for everyone I do think there is far more reason to choose a religious perspective over one that prioritizes material naturalism.
@Mervin_Bitikofer , @MarkD I really enjoy Oldfield as an interviewer; I think her show The Sacred really allows her to shine as she engages with people directly, whose work she has thoroughly digested ans about which whe has thought deeply. She is both intellectually and emotionally brilliant. And spiritually. She often makes me squirm, thinking in ways I find uncomfortable, exploring in places I have not thought to go, BUT her thinking is always well-informed and firmly Christian. I find our common anchor – love for and faith in Jesus – helps me hear better what she has to say.
I also value the way she has chosen to live her life in an intentional Christian community, where she can live as single but within a family-like community, which attemps to practice their faith together and for the well-being of others.
I’m enjoying becoming acquainted a bit more with her through the quotes you’re sharing, Merv. Regarding Oldfield’s quote and your response to it, cultures are subject to influences and are constantly changing, generally slowly, but always moving. Our lives are short, so it seems as if they are stable, or had been up until the turbulant times in which we live – whenever that turbulant lifetime existed or will exist.
The cut flower anaology assumes that cultures are stable, and that things that influence them are only superficial and will die away from that surface without really altering the culture. But we have seen, after a few thousand years, that that isn’t the case. However, with or without religious influence, cultures will continue to change. Because that is what they do.
At this point, many of us are noticing something quite the opposite of the cut flowers. Religion, Christianity, can be influenced and altered by the culture in which it exists. And not in a good way. This doesn’t seem to be on Oldfield’s mind, at least when she wrote the section above.
Yes! - that (and what you wrote leading up to that) is what I was trying to see and express. Thanks for putting it that way, which prompts me toward further insights (at least I hope they’re insights.) The ‘cut-flower’ analogy seems to presume that good and nourishing soil is only found among the formality of organized religion. And I don’t want to dispute too strongly with that (having James K. Smith in mind with his work on the importance of liturgy). Yes - there is much of value to be found among formal religion, and I don’t want to add fuel to the fires of those who entirely discount that. But even among our own sacred writings (having recently read through 1 John again - especially chapter 4) we are reminded that the true lovers of God (whom they can’t see) are the ones who love their brothers (whom they can see). Lack of the latter implies lack of the former. And the presence of organized religion or correct doctrine or ritual - whatever, in the absence of love, will not amount to anything of lasting value. So, the way I read this is that yes - there is a soil with nourishment for a beautiful flower. But organized religion is not some privileged and only gatekeeper providing access to that soil. There is a deeper reality or active substrate underneath - one that predates law and prophet (a deeper magic, Aslan might say!).
In short, the solution to the “problem’” stated at the end of your editorial is that it doesn’t exist. Our actions and feelings are equally shaded, and equally characterisable completely within old-fashioned Aristotelian Logic. As for why that fact is so, the best answer I have seen to date can be found in Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” but that is another, and vastly more complicated, question.
Robert Wolff, Letter to Astounding Science Fiction, 1953
My change in perspective about the sufficiency of material naturalism is largely the result of reading and thinking about what Iain McGilchrist has to say in The Matter With Things. I do think he presents a very cogent grounding for preferring something more. Here is a sample from Chapter 26 on Values which I reread on our trip to the NIH last week. Here is a pithy bit though not simple to take in at a glance. I find my tendency to read slowly a great help here:
P 1726-7, chapter 26 of TMWT
My view … is that truth … is an act; one of trust in, or faithfulness towards, whatever is. It characterizes the proper relationship between consciousness and the world. It is therefore not a function of some other value. Nonetheless it does imply that being faithful - though not blindly so - has value in and of itself; and that the ’something else’ to which we are faithful also has intrinsic value, perhaps goodness or beauty or the faith would be blind. In other words, rather than closing down on a single foundational element in a causal chain, we find this process leading to leading in the opposite direction, to a web of interconnectedness that we cannot by any means get behind, or beneath, in which values cohere and sustain one another. This web of values is foundational, underwriting the meaning of our actions - including those of the reductionist, though he won’t be aware of it. Kant believed not in moral values because there is a God, but in God because there were moral values: not in a rule-engendering Nobodaddy in the sky, that we better obey, but in an ultimate moral force in the universe to which we are intrinsically attracted. Truth is a moral value, like beauty and goodness. Only our familiarity with truth, beauty and goodness makes us take them for granted; but they didn’t have to exist at all. We miss their essentially mysterious - indeed essentially good, beautiful and true nature.
Edited to add that this isn’t the whole argument but it is a pretty important part of it.
I’m not at all sure about the Kant reference. But I’m going to take some time enjoying thinking about this part.
I think it is in recognition that beauty, truth and goodness are wonderful but could as easily not have been at all for any reason we understand that leads Kant to see their existence as reason to believe in God. Of course belief in a particular understanding of God isn’t supported but that moral feeling draws us to these values is reason enough to acknowledge something greater.
Maybe so but I think it still works in the sense that even if an unanchored openness to. something greater fills the bill for any of us in terms of our lived experience it probably could not be passed on to future generations. We would still be beholden to religion for keeping the high regard for the sacred in the cultural mix for those of us who don’t imprint on a traditional religion at the right age. So generationally speaking, the flower still fades.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
This is a place for gracious dialogue about science and faith. Please read our FAQ/Guidelines before posting.