I looked over the blurb and synopsis a while back when this title bubbled up in this thread or another. The book as a whole is out of my comfort zone, but you pulled out some really good quotes. So, thanks for sharing them.
The things that Rohr is reminding us that we are called to are hardly on the radar of first world christians by any means. Loving God as Rohr describes and sharing that transcendent vision he mentions are simply not how we are used to thinking about our “mission.”
We? For something like this, please speak for yourself.
Keith Giles in “Sola Mysterium” (quoting Rohr) …
God is always bigger than the boxes we build for God, so we should not waste too much time protecting our boxes.
I’m looking forward to his most unexpected and glorious return, and I believe Paul speaks to how some boxes will get torched and other boxes will bring a reward.
We all bring forth the treasure we most want to share. Blessed are they who realize that there is treasure still to be had from others, and that their own treasuries will always be insufficient to hold the whole.
Some bring that which they perceive to be the treasure of what God must not be - burning hot in wrath.
I admire the person who can love God for all that he has revealed himself to be, even to the point they exclaim “Woe is me!”
I see a lot of popular wisdom here. Is it a surprise that this verse occurs to me?:
For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.
2 Timothy 4:3
That is well said. Your own riff? If not can I get the source?
Meanwhile I read this last night inMcGilchrist’s The Matter With Things which I think applies to why ‘proofs’ and logical arguments are not enough to redirect our worldviews. @Kendel - as time and duty permit.
An argument is not a single decontextualised event that must compel a conclusion in anyone, ever, at all. It is just one more piece of evidence to sit with, and be weighed with, many others. If it does not fit with the tendency of everything else one knows, from thinking and from the business of life, it may be wise to doubt it. Equally, there may be many truths to which one cannot climb by one thread, but only by a rope woven of many strands. There is profound wisdom in CS Peirce’s remark that
…philosophy ought … to trust rather to the multitude and variety of its arguments than to the conclusiveness of any one. Its reasoning should not form a chain which is no stronger than its weakest link, but a cable whose fibres may be ever so slender, provided they are sufficiently numerous and intimately connected.
Moral evaluation in particular involves, or should involve, moving on from what the left hemisphere [essentially serial rational arguments] sees as a simple causal sequence, step by step, to what the right hemisphere [seat of intuition informed by all our embodied experience] sees as a whole narrative: how the person arrived at those particular circumstances, what was going on in his or her mind at the time, what sort of a person would think or act in that way, whether we would like to live in a world where such people form the majority – in other words, the whole human picture, not the mechanistic part picture: Anna Karenina as a troubled spirit, not a sum to be solved.
@Randy you got me interested in Enns. I listened to this podcast in the wee hours before getting back to sleep. Very interesting to hear more from Rohr who I think @Mervin_Bitikofer pointed me to originally. I found it very interesting.
If you’re referring to this …
Then I guess I could claim it as my own “riff” … starting with the scripture passage (Matthew 13:52) that refers to somebody bringing out their treasures both old and new… and using that and then adding in thoughts of the sort that we hear from Brown (“Holy Envy”), or any of Rohr.
If the occasion should ever arise and a couple of my neurons can line up, I’ll be sure to give you credit. But I liked the sentiment.
Matthew 13:52 was a big encouragement to me as I began to consider what reason can and cannot determine about the world.
In a variety of contexts I have found this to be the case. Often as the recipient of the argument. To quote Bono, “A change comes slow. It’s not a hill but a mountain, when we start out the climb.”
As the recipient of argument, I have sometimes be utterly blindsided. In one case, in a lifetime of hindsight, I understand the need for it in the context, but the process of understanding came long, long after the event. Sometimes the swift fist out of nowhere is not so much for the benefit of the recipient, but of the onlookers; there may not be time to explain in the context, when the ignorance must be quelled to prevent more damage.
In less desperate circumstances, however, the arguments that have changed my thinking, that is changed me, were not carefully constructed, rationally-presented chains of propositions. They were disjointed, unrelated, life-oriented talk, in many forms, about experience. Sometimes mere experience with no talk. Learning about other people’s experiences has been life-altering for me. No argument has been necessary, but knowing more about experiences from many different independent sources over years. Yes, these “claims and support” are subjective things. Some can be verified, but I have to evaluate other things by a sense of feel, or have the patience to see how something develops over time. In the end, I am evaluating the truthfulness of the thing that has functioned to convince me, as well as the thing of which I have become convinced.
Which sounds very much like evaluating the truthfulness of claims in an argument as well as the truthfulness of the thing it was supposed to convince me of. Yet it came about through an entirely different, non-rational means.
Putting the shoe on the other foot, though, I could try to say, “I know what I know.” But I find it more accurate to say, “I know better today what I don’t know, than I knew yesterday.” What I find I don’t know expands exponentially, daily. That’s a lot of compound interest.
Which makes using argument harder all the time, to say the least. Listening to people, really listening, can be hard on certitude. I often recognize that people are telling me the truth, and the truth they’re telling me about themselves simply doesn’t fit the categories I hold (or have held). It’s hard to argue much, when the presuppositions I had had in mind are no longer useful. At this point, which has been in process for a long, long time, there are a good many things I don’t know how to argue for or against, and I suspect that it’s simply not possible to handle them in the way of argument. If I desire to convince someone of the verity of a thing I hold, a thing that is not a matter of the rational, then I must find some other way to make it clear, to demonstrate it to be something worth considering much less believing.
And why would I say this? Believing many things that I do, that I believe would be invaluable for others as well? Not being an orator or apologist, I have no experience in convicing or not convincing people by these means. But I do have experience of not being convinced myself. Or of understanding the reasoning that demonstrates how unconvincing my attempt has been.
There is an enormous cost to listening to other people and learning from them, I find. Most of the coin is in certitude, which I cannot conjure with wizard-like power.
One reading down, more to follow. My first thought is of the way I started writing paragraph-like sentences while reading Kant. OMG, are you channeling Soren? Also, what I’m really, really convinced of is something I discover again every day. I’m not eager to be done with the problem of life.
Ah, Mark, you have nothing on the German philosophers and literari! You write clear, understandable, intelligent, formal prose. German grammar, and I suspect Danish as well (and our friend was fluent in German as well), have features that not only allow but encourage (when in the right hands) the most elaborately-stuctured, brain-straining sentences. I dispaired of Thomas Mann in the first paragraph-length sentence of one of his novels, when my German was at it’s peak. My German grammar instructor handed my class a “bit of Kant” one day to show us how far we had come, I suppose. Poor man. I think he had intended to be encouraging.
Too funny. Never know if it is just incompetence. In junior college before transferring to Berkeley I took a logic class. The instructor was a very old man in a green suit covered in chalk powder. Literally the first words out of his mouth as he looked at the very full classroom were “half of you will not be here by the end of the semester”. I remember thinking “can you really be that bad”? He was.
God is a mystery to be explored, not a doctrine to be memorized.
Keith Giles in “Sola Mysterium”
Not with you Mervin, and I don’t know Keith Giles, but I totally don’t believe those who claim to have gone deep into these mysteries, and there are many out there, and are not ever convicted of their sinfulness.
God is a person to be loved and experienced, not to be talked about as a mere abstraction.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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