Joy & Strength
One of the things I like about Joy & Strength is the sense of continuity of heartfelt faith and thinking it gives from our siblings of the past. …Including Matthew. 
Joy & Strength
In Chapter 4 - Exercises in Attention, of “How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy”, O’Dell discusses the work of a number of artists, whose pieces require fixed attention and which cause one to see other things differently, once one disengages from the art work. The she discusses this experience of being unmoored from the familiar view of everything. I think the discussion of “I-Thou” is particularly valuable.
Anyone who has experienced this unmooring knows that it can be equally exhilarating and disorienting…
So why go down the rabbit hole? First and most basically, it is enjoyable. Curiosity, something we know most of all from childhood, is a forward-driving force that derives from the differential between what is known and not known…
This leads into a second reason to leave behind the coordinates of what we habitually notice: doing so allows one to transcend the self. Practices of attention and curiosity are inherently open-ended, oriented toward something outside of ourselves. Through attention and curiosity, we can suspend our tendency toward instrumental understanding—seeing things or people one-dimensionally as the products of their functions—and instead sit with the unfathomable fact of their existence, which opens up toward us but can never be fully grasped or known.
In his 1923 book I and Thou, the philosopher Martin Buber draws a distinction between what he calls I-It and I-Thou ways of seeing. In I-It, the other (a thing or a person) is an “it” that exists only as an instrument or means to an end, something to be appropriated by the “I.” A person who only knows I-It will never encounter anything outside himself because he does not truly “encounter.” Buber writes that such a person “only knows the feverish world out there and his feverish desire to use it…When he says You, he means: You, my ability to use!”
In contrast to I-it, I-Thou recognizes the irreducibility and absolute equality of the other. In this configuration, I meet you “thou” in your fullness by giving you my total attention; because I neither project nor “interpret” you, the world contracts into a moment of a magical exclusivity between you and me. In I-Thou, the “thou” does not need to be a person; famously, Buber gives the example of different ways of looking at a tree, all but one of which he classifies as I-It. He can “accept it as a picture,” describing its visual elements; he can consider an instance of a species, an expression of natural law, or a pure relation of numbers. “Throughout all of this the tree remains my object and has its place and its time span, its kind and condition,” he says. But then there is the I-Thou option: “it can also happen, if will and grace are joined, that as I contemplate the tree I am drawn into a relation, and the tree ceases to be an It. The power of exclusiveness has seized me.”
Here, we encounter the tree in all its otherness, a recognition that draws us out of ourselves and out of a worldview in which everything exists for us. The tree exists out there: “The tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, no aspect of a mood; it confronts me bodily and has to deal with me as I deal with it—only differently. One should not try to dilute the meaning of the relation: relation is reciprocity.” (In his translation from the German, Walter Kaufmann notes that “it confronts me bodily” uses a highly unusual verb— leibt, where leib means body—so that a more precise translation would be “it bodies across from me.”) Does this then mean that the tree has consciousness in the way that we would understand it? For Buber, the question is misguided because it relapses into I-It thinking: “must you again divide the indivisible? What I encounter is neither the soul of a tree nor a dryad, but the tree itself.” "
Later on she describes a surprising encounter with a few more pieces of art and gains this insight:
“Incidentally, this points to another way in which attention brings us outside the self: it’s not just the other that becomes real to us, but our attention itself that becomes palpable. Thrown back on ourselves by a “wall” and not a window, we can also begin to see ourselves seeing.”
and a bit farther:
“These paintings taught me about attention and duration, and that what I’ll see depends on how I look, and for how long. It’s a lot like breathing. Some kind of attention will always be present, but when we take hold of it, we have the ability to consciously direct, expand, and contract it. I’m often surprised at how shallow both my attention and my breathing are by default. As much as breathing deeply and well requires training and reminders, all of the artworks I’ve described so far could be thought of as training apparatuses for attention. By inviting us to perceive at different scales and tempos than we’re used to, they teach us not only how to sustain attention but how to move it back and forth between different registers. As always, this is enjoyable in and of itself. But if we allow that what we see forms the basis of how we can act, then the importance of directing our attention becomes all too clear.”
One of my philosophy professors raised an idea in connection with Abraham that shocked and troubled us: how many times might God have tried before but those He had called failed the test? How many said, “I trust!” but failed to actually do so?
And the gut punch: into which of those group categories did we think we would fall – Abraham, or the failures?
Some of us ended up thinking that it may have been Isaac who had the real faith; Abram only had to wield a knife, but Isaac, who was old enough and likely strong enough to have escaped from a very elderly father, had to surrender to the altar.
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This made me think of a statement by an Orthodox scholar in response to a question about faith alone v faith and works. He said that Orthodox believers fail to see that there is a question, and pointed to Abraham, saying that to an Orthodox believer there is no faith v works because faith is works. The closest I can think of in the west in the last several centuries was Martin Luther’s comment that while faith alone saves, the faith that saves is never alone, and that indeed saving faith doesn’t have to ask whether it should do good works because it is already out and about and busy doing them.
If you think in propositional patterns, faith alone v faith and works is a serious matter, but if you think “organically”, as an Antiochene Orthodox priest I knew put it, faith and works can’t be separated because they are two sides of a single coin.
That Antiochene Orthodox priest I mentioned had a comment that applies to propositional theology: he said that unless your question’s answer begins with “Who is Jesus?” then it isn’t a theological question. That throws the majority of systematic theology in the west right into the trash bin!
There is a theme in Orthodoxy that our lives as Christians are dedicated to becoming human. Early Fathers considered that martyrdom was a great gift because at the moment of death in faith trusting Christ a believer “became human”. As St. Francis said, it is in giving that we receive and in dying that we are born.
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I remember arguing that in a philosophy/ethics course. One guy spoke up and totally changed the argument by saying that while on the outside he was thinking that the particular crime under discussion was horrible and knew he could never commit it, on the inside he was working at hiding from the knowledge that there were crimes just as bad that he could commit.
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Not to nitpick, but
is an inaccurate translation of
The “of” doesn’t belong there.
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Yeah. If we listen to “The Binding,” thinking, “Yeah, God. I’d totally be like Abraham. We got this! Bring it on!” we are not paying attention or thinking. We had better ready ourselves for epic failure and the process of figuring out what grace and forgiveness mean to us as well as humility.
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Well … who says the line between “successes” and “failures” runs cleanly between different persons (i.e. Abraham, and all those others whose names we would never know)? Aren’t the biblical narratives passed down to us honest enough to show us Abraham’s many failures too? But in and among all that failure of his, he still managed to follow through on a trusting response when it counted! And it was credited to him as righteousness. And all those others who also will no doubt have long litanies of failure as well … who’s to say God never broke in to their lives in some special way, even though the recording of all that work into holy books for rememberance would drain an ocean of ink dry were it all in like mannner put to printed page for our edificaiton. Just as it is exciting to think about a vast universe beyond our reach and all the possibilities that could fill such a space in our imaginations, so it is also to God’s glory to think of the anthropological universe beyond our reach (both in past and present) - and see it as a reservoir for eternal ponderance and praise!
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That was something we memorized for Greek class . . . sixth quarter, I think. The interesting thing is that when we first memorized it, it was just something to memorize, but as we went on in Greek we began to grasp the import of the word choices. Nowadays when I read it in English it seems but a shell of the real thing.
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That’s the beginning of the Orthodox view. To the ancient Fathers, at least, the priest was merely one set apart to serve as the one who loaned Jesus his mouth and hands that the Savior might serve at His table – once again, to our mortal view, but just continuing the one Supper, from His view.
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Didn’t need to – the monastery the Elector gave him as a residence came with a substantial beer and wine supply.
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Yeah, he did, for fellowship. 
All Baptists should be required to read everything in the early church Fathers about Baptism, especially when a proper Baptism might be necessary because what was done before was not valid (though “valid” isn’t an ancient concept – but I can’t recall the right word just now, just that it is relational and not propositional). One big point is that the ancient church regarded immersion as preferable but recognized that “baptize” does not mean “immerse” – which is easily seen in the common use of the word where it is used in reference to storage jars and couches which were made of stone! The ancient measure was that of availability and necessity: if there was enough water available (preferably “living water”, i.e. flowing water) to immerse, then immerse; if enough was available only for drenching, then drench’ if only enough was available for pouring, then pour, etc. I recall several classic examples of the necessity aspect: one where a member of a caravan crossing a desert became a Christian in a situation where everyone thought death was imminent; the only liquid available in quantity was beer and so the eldest Christian member of the caravan baptized the new Christian with beer (in grad school this prompted the invention of a new word coined late one night at a pub: “beerptism”) – when they in fact didn’t die and the Christian who had done the baptism brought the new Christian to church things ended up that the bishop wasn’t certain that what had been done counted as a Baptism, and so the matter got discussed by a local council, with the conclusion that while it was irregular it counted because the form was correct, the need had been urgent, and after all beer is primarily water. The ultimate one, though, was another, similar situation in a desert where all of a party’s beverages had run out so that the only “water” available was saliva; a council of bishops judged that it counted because the greatest amount of water available had been applied, yet for the sake of doubters whose faith might be trouble they required the man to go through the forms and be immersed, not as a Baptism but as a re-affirmation of his actual Baptism done with saliva.
That last is where I think the Baptists should be: as the Orthodox (and Catholics and Lutherans and many others) insist, the term “re-baptism” is meaningless; there was either a Baptism or there wasn’t, and if the maximum available water was used and the rest was done correctly then it was valid. If the Baptists want a re-affirmation ceremony to make their members happy, that’s fine, but insisting on immersion is idolatry because the word just doesn’t mean that – though that said, it’s hard to imagine in our times in the developed world how there could be a situation where there wasn’t enough water available for immersion since we have an abundant supply of water and even if that fails we have the ability to travel to a location where there’s a river or lake.
[Thinking of rivers, another situation that brought about a local council was when the only available water was a very shallow stream, less deep than the width of a palm; the baptizer took the one to be baptized into the middle of the stream and rolled him to drench every part of his body – an instance that got us laughing about “holy rollers”.]
In my view it’s idolatry because a review of ancient literature in the couple of centuries preceding Christ’s ministry it’s darned obvious that “baptize” does not mean “immerse”; the actual meaning comes close to “wash thoroughly” i.e. with as much water as is available. The word is used of washing stone furniture and there is no sensible way to claim that people lifted half-ton seats, carried them to somewhere deep enough to immerse them, maneuvered them down into the water, then hauled them out of the water and back to where they came from. In fact in the time of Alexander the Great, the word was on one occasion used of a cavalry horse, and there just weren’t very many places where there was deep enough water for a horse to swim in, much less be immersed! [I wish I had my grad school notes on early Koine in the time of Alexander; there are some very illuminating uses of words that have mostly slipped my mind and it drives me crazy, especially the couple I remember as being important for understanding Colossians.]
The idea of “believe enough” totally misunderstands the Gospel. One of Martin Luther’s colleagues and successors took a theme from Luther and explained that faith is like a cord; it doesn’t matter if the cord is just one thread or if it’s a cable, what counts is that one end is in the heart of the believer and the other is in Christ’s hand! A modern version is that faith is like a wire to a tiny LED; you can use a wire so thin it isn’t even visible, or you can use one as thick as your little finger and the electricity will still flow.
For moments of “Do I believe enough?” I always go back to Luther’s exposition of the third article of the Creed, where he begins, “I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in my Lord Jesus Christ or come to Him – but the Holy Spirit has called me by the Gospel…”: it isn’t the depth or strength of my faith that makes the difference, what makes the difference is that the Holy Spirit called me through the Gospel; my eyes aren’t to be looking at me but set on Christ.
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My favorite observation about Moody is that what they teach there directly resulted in Bart Ehrman losing his faith,
Oh, so true!
I recall at a gathering at a Foursquare Gospel church once being told that my study of Koine Greek showed a lack of faith because the Holy Spirit speaking through the King James Version was enough.
Glad I didn’t let on that I read Hebrew!
That’s the Bart Ehrman story. If I ever got a chance to talk to him, I’d tell him that he hasn’t rejected Christianity because he never learned it in the first place.
That is very Orthodox in thought!
It also touches on points that have caused issues at a few denominational seminaries where fundamentalism has crept in.
In the west especially: “belief” has come to indicate propositional truth that is assented to. Orthodoxy holds that faith has to precede belief or belief is useless.
That’s also rather Orthodox – the cerebrum is not the leader, it is a tool.
Heh – my sister said that if I could remember where I had learned things – i.e. if I had a mental bibliography – then I could easily be earning a mid six figure salary. My trouble is best expressed in a comment I once made about my knowledge of scripture: I know many of the passages quite well, but I have a hard time remembering their addresses.
And sometimes not know or understand even if you have been crushed. I recall clearly the feel of the blackness one evening crumpled on the floor by the pool table in the house I was sharing, utterly certain that if I were to pass from existence then entire alien societies in this and other galaxies would look up in wonder as they noticed that the universe had become a brighter, happier place. Yet when I listen to people crushed by despair I often find I have no link, no bridge, that their despair remains alien to me.
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I heard this commented on by an Orthodox theologian as one reason they tend towards apophatic theology: denying all the false assertions about God is a cleaner way to approach Him because it doesn’t bring nearly so much baggage about Who/What He is.
This reminds me of a philosophy professor who would take on the persona of a philosopher [he was an extremely convincing Descartes and a devastatingly chilling Hegel] we were studying and the class session would be a Q & A between students and philosopher. When we hit Kierkegaard, he didn’t schedule such an interchange, and when asked why he said, “Only Kierkegaard can do Kierkegaard”.
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I like that. C.H. Spurgeon would call those only assenting ‘mere professors’. Maybe assent can masquerade as faith, or convince the assenter so? It’s dangerous in any case, but I certainly don’t want to discourage any that have ‘faith as small as a mustard seed’.
That was the driving reason behind a moderately prominent Lutheran priest/pastor leaving a denomination that has been heavily infected by fundamentalism and turning Orthodox!
I’m reminded of a line in a modern liturgy that puts the individual subtly in his/her place: “His blood set us free to be people of God” – not individual followers of God, but a people; as the scripture has it, a people of His own choosing.
We conceive of each individual standing alone before God, but I think that this is misleading, that we stand as the People of God – no soloists, just orchestra and choir.
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My point was that no one needed to go to the pub with Luther since his home served the same function.
Nor did he need to go anywhere for fellowship; at any given time, according to my church history notes, Luther had as fellow residents in that monastery a dozen to twenty students, and as guests three or four visiting scholars, a couple of noblemen, and any number of prominent people who just wanted to meet and talk with the Reformer – not only did his home have all the makings of a pub, it had its own continual supply of “clientele” (which some evenings swelled to overflowing the great/common room as university students not living there dropped in).
[Poor Katie]
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This Baptist gets it and couldn’t care less how wet people get or by what means.
Likewise regarding faith. Sadly, however, many people struggle with serious doubt about the legitimacy of their own faith. It’s torturous for them.
But I get your points.
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I understand Katie was a fine Braumeisterin in her own right. So as long as there were supplies, das Lutherhaus could be open for guests.
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As a teen I loved our walks with my dad on the beach when storms were coming in! We reveled in the strength of the wind, learned to watch out for big gusts (our storms have this habit of winds going along tidily at 60-65 mph, sometimes climbing up to 75-80, then throwing in gusts that break anamometers that can’t handle more than 120 – and the shift between 75-80 up to 120 is enough to knock a 110-pound teenager over with a few tumbles before coming to a stop). We learned that there aren’t really many “rogue waves”, that there’s an actual pattern where roughly every seventh wave was bigger – and every seventh seventh could be a monster (many years later in meteorology class we applied calculus to ocean waves and found why the seventh wave thing happens). I wasn’t much of a Christian then, but I remember yelling, "Go, God!’ while laughing at our escape from a seventh seventh wave we could look into the face of and see a log being carried along (then watched it pop up to the surface when the wave broke).
We even hiked out to the end of a mile-and-a-half long cape during one storm to face the wind that much farther from shore (something our mother forbade our dad even thinking about when she learned that we had lost the trail due to fallen trees and limbs and found ourselves looking over a near-vertical cliff to where waves were hitting the edge of a 3/4-circle cove and shooting sixty feet up the rock face while turning that cove into a whirlpool of death).
At that stage of life the “calamities” I was unhappy with God for was losing a wrestling match or a two-mile race on a track, or getting knocked out of second or third chair trumpet by a challenger [there’s a story in that; I finally decided that being fourth chair, the top of second section, was good enough and let a friend beat me at a challenge – and earned an A for the entire year right there because the director recognized I’d done it on purpose, and that as fourth chair – something I didn’t figure out till he told me – I was an unbeatable block guarding first section, which gave the band a stable first section, something very valuable when learning complicated pieces for concerts or contests; this taught me that there is sometimes greater value in being second or even third].
I don’t know if there’s a free version any longer, but there used to be a program where you could take a screen shot of text and it would turn that into a NotePad document – I knew a guy online who brought an entire technical manual back into print that way after the company the manual was from went out of business.
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(I’ve discovered on my iPad that you can import a screenshot into Google Translate and ‘translate’ from English to English and get all the text which you can then copy and paste. You have to select and drag to copy though – there’s no ‘Select all’ in a context menu. I suspect you could do it similarly on a lap or desktop computer.)
ETA: A copy and paste from guess where:
It translated the image of the URL into a hypertext link, too.
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Another very Orthodox thought. In a lecture I heard recently the proposition was advanced that it is not even possible to be a theologian if you try to address what is beyond your obedience.
A bit of Goa’uld tech doesn’t hurt–
One of my professors once, sitting in the campus commons, responded to someone who said that with “In the Greek and Hebrew?” It totally derailed the harangue of the fundamentalist who was trying to convince a seminary grad student of some offbeat point… and the guy shifted right into claiming that learning Greek and Hebrew was “the world’s wisdom”.
One of my uncles said that once when it was learned that some of us kids (family reunion) who’d gone off biking had stopped at a swimming hole and gone skinny-dipping. We’d been told, “Don’t come back with your clothes wet!”, which was supposed to mean not to go swimming, but we decided to take it literally. He managed to stop the tirade one aunt was about to launch into.
Interesting. My grandmother appointed herself referee and rarely even had to tell someone they’d talked enough; she had a skill with misdirection that got people to pause and thus let someone else speak up. She applied it both ways – to make sure everyone could get a word in, and to keep people saying something significant to not be interrupted.
A great aunt had the same talent, though not quite as potently, but then she had a voice that could cut through forty conversations and shut them all down.
My uncles and even my dad to an extent used “Boys will be boys”. But that ended when we turned 18: the uncle who was a Navy officer stated that bluntly at an attempt to use that justification when my older brother had just turned 18. It was on a July 4 which happened to be my brother’s birthday, and being a sharp one he fired back that he hadn’t been born till almost midnight so he wasn’t technically 18 yet. But my uncle had used his “command voice” and had been heard by everyone there and as my brother was the oldest of the kids we all got the point. His response to my brother’s point was, “Old enough to be drafted, no longer a boy” [and that really hit home because shortly before high school graduation my brother was one who’d gotten a notice to report to the draft board and every one of those and their families were still reeling in relief after conscription was cancelled shortly after graduation].
Though my uncle commented a couple of years later that while “Boys will be boys”, “Men may be boys” – if they’re mature enough to know when that is acceptable . . . such as when most of his command down in Panama got a “beach day” and from the way they let off steam observers would have thought they were a bunch of junior high teenagers.
I would have told that pastor that if he’s old enough to sign a marriage license he no longer counts as a boy – and that as a pastor I knew at university put it, for a married man to take the time to be a boy he needs his wife’s permission!
When I worked with youth, in church groups and Boy Scouts, I always drove home the point that they could do all the pranks and goofing off they wanted, so long as:
- They’d taken care of all their responsibilities for the day and
- They were ready to stand up and take the consequences if something went wrong.
because they were supposed to be ready to qualify as men once they were old enough to join the military, and it was better to work that out before than later.
I had to have that concept explained to me. The first time I enountered it I had several thoughts–
- Who could afford to buy seed and just scatter it out in the wild?
- If you were going to sow oats, why wouldn’t you use the best seed, not wild?
- Where would you sow wild oats, anyway? (the only wild places I knew growing up were coniferous forests, where oats wouldn’t stand a chance anyway)
Obviously I didn’t have much of a normal childhood (my brother and I spent most of our summers working the moment we were old enough to tell a weed from a vegetable in the garden; we were splitting and stacking firewood at 8, building and repairing fences at 10).
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Interesting thought. It makes relational sense too. You cannot squeeze your eyes together, scrunch up your face and clench your fists to summon more faith either. Maybe reading the Bible through is more important than many like to think. (That’s part of obedience too. Loving God’s words and thoughts is possible – not always easy, but possible. And you have to, to love him.)