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July 31 - November 3, 2019
presumed familiarity has led to unfamiliarity, unfamiliarity has led to contempt, and contempt has led to profound ignorance.
Dogma is what you have to believe, whether you believe it or not. And law is what you must do, whether it is good for you or not.
Jesus and his words have never belonged to the categories of dogma or law, and to read them as if they did is simply to miss them. They are essentially subversive of established arrangements and ways of thinking.
And our “real life” is our truth and reality.
The life and words that Jesus brought into the world came in the form of information and reality.
The early message was, accordingly, not experienced as something its hearers had to believe or do because otherwise something bad—something with no essential connection with real life—would happen to them. The people initially impacted by that message generally concluded that they would be fools to disregard it. That was the basis of their conversion.
It is a matter of how we cannot but think and act, given the context of our mental and spiritual formation.
More than any other single thing, in any case, the practical irrelevance of actual obedience to Christ accounts for the weakened effect of Christianity in the world today, with its increasing tendency to emphasize political and social action as the primary way to serve God. It also accounts for the practical irrelevance of Christian faith to individual character development and overall personal sanity and well-being.
The Bible is, after all, God’s gift to the world through his Church, not to the scholars. It comes through the life of his people and nourishes that life. Its purpose is practical, not academic.
one not governed by obscure and faddish theories or by a mindless orthodoxy
Our future, however far we look, is a natural extension of the faith by which we live now and the life in which we now participate. Eternity is now in flight and we with it, like it or not.
there now is no recognized moral knowledge upon which projects of fostering moral development could be based.
The trouble is precisely that character is connected with the intellect. The trouble is what is and is not in the intellect.
For life as a whole, Keynes’s words apply: “I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.”
The truly powerful ideas are precisely the ones that never have to justify themselves.
world as well as individual events ride upon the waters of an ideational sea. The killing fields of Cambodia come from philosophical discussions in Paris.6
Cuteness, like cleverness, has certain aesthetic possibilities—as do sex and violence—but they are very limited.
Absurdity reigns, and confusion makes it look good.
The peasants now watch TV and constantly consume media. There are no peasants now.
The mantle of intellectual meaninglessness shrouds every aspect of our common life.
We are immersed in birth-to-death and wall-to-wall “noise”—silent and not so silent.
But try instead “Stand up for your responsibilities” or “I don’t know what I need to know and must now devote my full attention and strength to finding out” (consider Prov. 3:7 or 4:7) or “Practice routinely purposeful kindnesses and intelligent acts of beauty.” Putting these into practice immediately begins to bring truth, goodness, strength, and beauty into our lives.
What is the point of standing up for rights in a world where few stand up for their responsibilities? Your rights will do you little good unless others are responsible.
the beautiful is never absurd. Nothing is more meaningful than beauty.
the popular sayings attract only because people are haunted by the idea from the intellectual heights that life is, in reality, absurd.
The only sincerity bearable is clever insincerity.
Familiarity breeds unfamiliarity—unsuspected unfamiliarity, and then contempt.
Genius, it is said, is the ability to scrutinize the obvious.
In its deepest nature and meaning our universe is a community of boundless and totally competent love.
Our usual “gospels” are, in their effects—dare we say it—nothing less than a standing invitation to omit God from the course of our daily existence.
The obviously well kept secret of the “ordinary” is that it is made to be a receptacle of the divine, a place where the life of God flows.
To be ordinary is to be only “more of the same.” The human being screams against this from its every pore. To be just “another one of those” is deadening agony for us.
The fifteen minutes of fame that Andy Warhol said everyone would someday have, in the modern media-saturated world, may give desperate souls an assurance of uniqueness that could protect them from being “nobody,” at least in their own eyes.
Egotism is pathological self-obsession, a reaction to anxiety about whether one really does count.
Unlike egotism, the drive to significance is a simple extension of the creative impulse of God that gave us being.
John was, Jesus remarked, as great as any human being who ever lived. Yet, he still functioned from within the limited framework where God’s action, rule, or governance was primarily channeled through the official practices of Jewish rituals and institutions: through “the law and the prophets,” as that phrase was then used. But since John, Jesus continued, we no longer “stand on proprieties.” “The Kingdom of the Heavens is subjected to violence and violent people take it by force” (Matt. 11:12). That is, the rule of God, now present in the person of Jesus himself, submits to approaches that
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We must not overlook the connection between faith and love.
(We really do have to use colloquial language to capture responses to Jesus. More formal, literary, or theological language cannot do it.)
Scribes, expert scholars, teach by citing others. But Jesus was, in effect, saying, “Just watch me and see that what I say is true. See for yourself that the rule of God has come among ordinary human beings.”
Jesus was not just acting for God but also with God—a little like the way, in a crude metaphor, I act with my power steering, or it with me, when I turn the wheel of my car.
we are made to “have dominion” within an appropriate domain of reality. This is the core of the likeness or image of God in us and is the basis of the destiny for which we were formed.
Our “kingdom” is simply the range of our effective will.
Any being that has say over nothing at all is no person.
having a place of rule goes to the very heart of who we are, of our integrity, strength, and competence.
attacks on our personhood always take the form of diminishing what we can do or have say over, sometimes up to the point of forcing us to submit to what we abhor.
We are meant to exercise our “rule” only in union with God, as he acts with us. He intended to be our constant companion or coworker in the creative enterprise of life on earth. That is what his love for us means in practical terms.
In the biblical account of our fall from God, we were assigned to earn our bread by the sweat of our face. The sweat comes from our own energies, which is all we have left after losing our roots in God’s own life.
at every moment, we live in the interface between our lives and God’s kingdom among us.
his brilliant ideas and incredible energy and effectiveness derived from his practice of constant conscious interface with God.
Share what your Lord enjoys”; that is, share the larger direction or governance of things for good (cf. Luke 16:1–12). For God is unlimited creative will and constantly invites us, even now, into an ever larger share in what he is doing. Like Jesus, we can enter into the work we see our Father doing (John 5:17–19).
