Not exactly a pithy quote, but if you are unfamiliar with this email /blog, I have found it quite interesting:
2 Likes
…where religion stops, we have the deep awareness of being with God. Religion ends because God is present. Everything is earthly because God has been seen in stark reality. Wherever one needs that holy, secluded, special world that is called religion, there one cannot be sure that God is near, there one needs a substitute - namely, religion. Where God is a self-evident, supremely clear, all-penetrating reality, there he can be seen in all things, can be felt in all things, can be honored in all things, can be served in all things. The world is truly his temple; therefore the special temple falls by the wayside. All people automatically become priests; therefore a special priesthood is not need. All days become holy; therefore special holy days are not needed. Every deed becomes an act of worship; therefore worship services are no longer needed. Everything becomes holy; therefore nothing remains that is specially holy or unholy. Religion tumbles before God.
That is the revolution of Jesus, the immesasurable, still listtle understood revolution. To be sure, the religion of his time understood it, and the result was the cross. Many more crosses will be raised before it is clearly understood. But precisely here lies the endless drawing power of Jesus for all human souls, pious and “godless.”
-Leonhard Ragaz
1 Like
I wonder what is the source for your excerpt and also if it is the same Leonard Ragaz as mentioned here:
On New Year’s Eve of 1933 a train carrying a single passenger crossed the border into Switzerland. The passenger was the German-Jewish poet, philosopher, and literary critic Margarete Susman (1872-1966). Reflecting on the reasons for her departure, Susman later recalled: “When I left … my true Heimat I did so above all as a German who could not bear this new Germany. The Jewish destiny was not apparent in its entire horror at the time.”1Sixty-one years old at the time of emigration, Susman was granted asylum in Switzerland. Soon, she would find a spiritual home among the religious socialists that had begun coalescing around the figure of the Protestant theologian Leonhard Ragaz (1868-1945) almost three decades earlier.2
https://academic.oup.com/leobaeck/article-abstract/59/1/141/984173?redirectedFrom=fulltext
One and the same! Actually, my source was reading his essay (or excerpt) in a “Following The Way” compilation of many different writings that we are working through in Sunday school. Looking at the citations in the back of that, I see that his essay (part of which I shared above) was apparently from: “Signs of the Kingdom” - translated by Paul Bock (Eerdman’s Publishing). Ragaz died in 1945. He was very much a Christian Socialist (and pacifist). He was Swiss Reform.
1 Like
More from Zahnd’s “Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God.”
The book of Revelation is easily the most misunderstood and misused book in the Bible. It’s the book that had the hardest time gaining admission into the New Testament canon of Scripture. Fifteen centuries after its composition, in the early days of the Reformation, Martin Luther wanted to remove it from the Protestant Bible. Luther derided Revelation as …
…neither apostolic nor prophetic….I can in no way detect that the Holy Spirit produced it….Again, they are supposed to be blessed who keep what is written in this book; and yet no one knows what that is, to say nothing of keeping it….Christ is neither taught nor known in it.
Luther had no use for the book of Revelation, until he used it to preach that the pope was the Antichrist. Pope Leo X returned the favor and used Revelation to preach that Luther was the Antichrist. Protestants and Catholics have been weaponizing the book of Revelation ever since. Unfortunately, this kind of mistreatment of the Apocalypse has been common throughout church history. Revelation has been regularly shanghaied as a polemic against enemies and as a warrant for violence. All of this abuse is sad, since Revelation gives us one of the most stunning, creative, and beautiful portrayals of Jesus Christ and his kingdom in all the Bible.
Though I often cringe at how Revelation is typically preached, the book is perhaps the most important biblical text for the American church right now. Its particular relevance has to do with Revelation’s intensely political nature. If there is one book in the Bible that is written specifically for Christians living as citizens in a superpower, Revelation is it. The Apocalypse brings the Bible’s most creative and powerful critique of the idolatry inherent within economic and military superpowers. Regarding Revelation as a political work, Eugene Peterson says, “The gospel of Jesus Christ is more political than anyone imagines, but in a way that no one guesses.” For Christians living in an economic and military superpower and called by Christ to resist the idolatrous greed and militarism of empire, Revelation is supremely important. But to serve this purpose it has to be rescued from its sensationalist and outrageous misinterpretations.
Zahnd, Brian. Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News (pp. 149-150). PRH Christian Publishing. Kindle Edition.
<woops! - I see that I had already posted the above excerpt a couple years ago! - but I’ll leave it here again, and post something else actually new from a little later in the same chapter.>
The final book of the Bible is not a coded newspaper foretelling of future geopolitical events. Rather, it is a glorious depiction of the triumph of Jesus Christ. Revelation is not about the twenty-first century, but nothing could be more relevant for the twenty-first century than the vision John saw! With consummate skill the Revelator shows us how Jesus’s lamb-like kingdom is the saving alternative to the beast-like empires of the world. Through his masterful use of drama and symbol, those who read John’s theatrical play are shown that the way of the Beast leads only to the hellish lake of fire, while the way of the Lamb leads to the heavenly city. Revelation isn’t about the violent end of the world; it’s about the end of the evil of violence. The book of Revelation doesn’t anticipate the end of God’s good creation; it anticipates the end of death-wielding empire.
Zahnd, Brian. Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News (p. 155). PRH Christian Publishing. Kindle Edition.
2 Likes
“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.”
― Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
2 Likes
I’ve just been tripping through old posts here and came across this offering of your’s Jay, at least here is part of the article you shared there which stood out for me:
What changed my mind?
In some ways, it was a philosophical appreciation for the limits of philosophy—a rational conclusion about the limits of reason. A decade ago I read Marcel Proust’s early critical work Contre Sainte-Beuve and was jarred by the opening line of his prologue: “Every day I set less store on the intellect.” This is the sort of thing that makes philosophers nervous, the charge of “irrationalism!” on a hair trigger. But as I listened to Proust consider the failures of the intellect to evoke the past or probe the depth of emotion, an insight was rumbling to the surface. Proust’s poetic prose was doing something propositions could never do. “Compared with this past,” he concluded, “this private essence of ourselves, the truths of intellect seem scarcely real at all.”
While Proust never intended it, a theological insight was welling up in my imagination: that the “truths of intellect” were inadequate to the fullness of grace experienced in friendship with Christ and his body. While Proust’s focus was artistic, I was sensing important parallels with theology and the importance of recognizing what Proust called “the relative inferiority of the intellect.” And yet, he emphasized, there is a paradox at work here, since “it is the intellect we must call on to establish this inferiority. Because if intellect does not deserve the crown of crowns, only intellect is able to award it.” I found myself nodding in agreement with Proust and worried that I was becoming a traitor to my discipline.
And here I quote what you quoted back then:
I think this mirrors the rebirth I experienced when I retired and discovered my love of good fiction. May as well keep looking for something that lights the heart because the urge to win arguments is not only not sustaining but makes love even harder to find.
Observation and measurement is how we advance our empirical knowledge but the imagination is how we make progress toward love, beauty and the divine.
3 Likes
Sounds like an early echo of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
1 Like
From Conrad Hyers’ essay: “Dinosaur Religion”
Even if evolution is only a scientific theory of interpretation posing as scientific fact, as the creationists argue, creationism is only a religious theory of biblical interpretation posing as biblical fact. And to add to the problem, it is a religious theory of biblical interpretation which is heavily influenced by modern scientific, historical and technological concerns. It is, therefore, essentially modernistic, even though attempting, and claiming, to be truly conservative. A genuine conservatism would, above all, seek to conserve the original conception and concern of the biblical materials-not measure and test it by contemporary canons.
- my own emphasis added
2 Likes
Oh, that is well said!
Both are points I’ve made, which just get ignored by YECers.
1 Like
Just watched the movie Clara and wondered if any of your may have seen it too. It nicely folds together science and the stuff of religion.
Found this trailer.
1 Like
Art is like chocolate. Neither is essential for survival. Both are luxuries. Yet taste – like aesthetic experience – carries memory and emotion. It lingers. We would notice its absence.
–Henrike Naumann (summarized)
2 Likes
Free anywhere?
Probably not. Currently I’m paying YouTube so that is how I watched it. Not that long since it came out. It definitely has weaknesses though.
For those “Anne of Green Gables” fans, this will make us smile:
“It’s the over opinionated who wind up unhappy, and meaner than second skimmings.”
(in the movie version, Marilla admonishing Rachel to be careful with her tongue; a good reminder to me, as well).
2 Likes