A Meditation with both Palm Sunday and Good Friday in Mind ...

 

"My thesis that the practice of nonviolence requires a belief in divine vengeance will be unpopular with many Christians, especially theologians in the West. To the person who is inclined to dismiss it, I suggest imagining that you are delivering a lecture in a war zone (which is where a paper that underlies this ... was originally delivered). Among your listeners are people whose cities and villages have been first plundered, then burned and leveled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, whose fathers and brothers have had their throats slit. The topic of the lecture: a Christian attitude toward violence. The thesis: we should not retaliate since God is perfect noncoercive love. Soon you would discover that it takes the quiet of a suburban home for the birth of the thesis that human nonviolence corresponds to God’s refusal to judge. In a scorched land, soaked in the blood of the innocent, it will invariably die. And as one watches it die, one will do well to reflect about many other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind."

- Miroslav Volf 

Exclusion and Embrace pgs. 303-304

The Banality of Evil

In Macbeth, Shakespeare uses his considerable genius to express the abhorrent beauty of absolute evil... It's true that lady Macbeth and Macbeth are never more alive than when they contemplate killing the king.  They thrill with vitality and excitement.   But as soon as they commit the act, they're oppressed with the banality of evil.  And I'm not just talking about guilt.  To be sure they are both tormented by guilt.   But even more afflicting that Macbeth's guilt is his ennui.  His awesome will to power, magnificently manifested in Duncan's murder, gives way to an all-consuming listlessness.

He'll murder many more times, but each time it becomes more mechanical, more tiresome, more wearisome.  What really wears on Macbeth is the tedium of evil.   In his wickedness he cannot find contentment or joy or even desire.  There's nothing but this: tomorrow tomorrow and tomorrow creeping at its petty pace to the last syllable of recorded time.  And perhaps this is the ultimate truth of the tragedy.  When decency and goodwill give way to wickedness and evil, life loses its meaning.  It can be no more than a tiresome monotony.  A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

Professor Kent Lehnhof

What Punishments of God are not Gifts?

This from a GQ interview.  Stephen Colbert describes the plane crash that suddenly killed his father and brother when he was 10 years old.

 “ ‘You gotta learn to love the bomb,’ ” he said. “Boy, did I have a bomb when I was 10. That was quite an explosion. And I learned to love it. So that’s why. Maybe, I don’t know. That might be why you don’t see me as someone angry and working out my demons onstage. It’s that I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.”…

I asked him if he could help me understand that better, and he described a letter from Tolkien in response to a priest who had questioned whether Tolkien’s mythos was sufficiently doctrinaire, since it treated death not as a punishment for the sin of the fall but as a gift. “Tolkien says, in a letter back: ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” Colbert knocked his knuckles on the table. “ ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” he said again. His eyes were filled with tears. “So it would be ungrateful not to take everything with gratitude. It doesn’t mean you want it. I can hold both of those ideas in my head.”

He was 35, he said, before he could really feel the truth of that. He was walking down the street, and it “stopped me dead. I went, ‘Oh, I’m grateful. Oh, I feel terrible.’ I felt so guilty to be grateful. But I knew it was true.”

Begbie, Music, and the Problem of Evil

Enjoy

[link: 5809909]

Merry Christmas

There is one God, Yahweh, who created the world good and rules all things.  Violence and evil are not written into the fabric of creation but are due to sin and His righteous judgment on sin, and therefore there is hope of redemption from evil.  Ultimate reality is not a gaggle of gods, nor an autocrat, nor an impersonal Fate.  Rather, ultimate reality is Three Persons in an eternal communion of love.  Above us is a God who is love, whose love overflows in creating a world He did not need and in redeeming a world that had turned from Him.  Heaven is not a battlefield or a prison; it is a dance hall filled with song.  And, one day, earth will join in.

Peter Leithart
The Heroes of the City of Man

Exodus & Wilderness

"In the end, it was a lot easier for God to get Israel out of Egypt than it was to get Egypt out of Israel.
The Passover and Exodus was about getting God's people out of Egypt.  The 40 years in the desert was about getting Egypt out of God's people."

- Pastor Alan Burrow

Dante's Moral Imagination

"Dante does something very, very interesting and - to the limit of my ability to judge such things - something deeply true and wise in his characterization of the deepest level of Hell.
I have in my day seen three different discotheques named "Dante's Inferno".  To name a discotheque "Dante's Inferno" you are, I presume, counting on the notion of heat; transgressive sexuality; wild, hot stuff.  There is a kind of glamour in evil: "bad boys"  I've heard it said that the world of men is divided into husbands and lovers.  The husbands are dull and good, and the lovers are bad and sexy.  Rock stars for my entire lifetime have been cashing in on this motif.
Dante is having none of it.  For him, evil is not glamorous.  If I may be permitted such an observation, Milton gets into a fair amount of interpretative trouble because his Satan is so glamorous.  No one ever said that Dante's Satan is the real hero of The Comedia.  And there's good reason for that.  We only see him in one canto and he can't talk.  He is however very good at drooling.
This is de-glamorizing evil.  And evil is de-glamorized in another way, because the deepest level of Dante's Hell is not fire.  It's ice; cold, motionless, dark, near-absolute zero, frigidity; nothingness.  There's nothing cool - nothing cool - about Dante's Satan...
[Just as at Babel] what thwarts human presumption is a kind of anti-intellect, anti-intelligibility.  So what stands at the center of Hell is gigantic idiocy; literally gigantic, drooling idiocy.  And the punishment here is cold and ice."

- Dr Timothy Schutt, Dante Scholar  

Enjoying the World As It Is

"They are darkened in their understanding - excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that's in them."

Why are they ignorant?  Because they just don't have a high I.Q.?  No!  It's because of the hardness of their hearts.  The Bible always teaches us that stupidity is the result of moral sin.  There is a moral stupidity which leads to stupid behavior in life.  The book of Proverbs deals with this repeatedly.  People do this that are dumb and basically that arises from the hardness of their heart.  

"These Gentiles have become callous and give themselves over to sensuality for the practice of every kind of impurity with greediness."

And so their lack of feeling, their hard-hearts, means that they have to pursue weirder and weirder forms of stimulation and they can't relax and enjoy the world as it is.

- J.B. Jordan, commenting on Ephesians 4.17-19

Book List [what I've been reading/ listening to lately]...

You are what your mind eats ...

Book List [what i've been reading/listening to lately]...

you are what your mind eats ...

Book List [what I've been reading and listening to lately] ...

Please Speak Directly Into the Microphone ...

" ... there is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pointless indifference. . . . We are machines for propagating DNA . . . . It is every living object’s sole reason for being.” 

-Richard Dawkins  [compilation by William Lane Craig]

[photo: freerepublic.com - sorry, I couldn't resist posting the picture, especially when the quote was about man's chief end being to propogate his DNA ... ]

Book List [What I've been reading Lately]...

You are what your mind eats ...

The Importance of Prepositions: Reflections on the Casey Anthony Trial

While I have to admit I was stunned with the rest of the world at yesterday’s outcome, the really striking thing to me has been hearing our public discourse about the case. After having been involved in several conversations myself, I’ve been astonished at how automatically we resort to therapeutic language: "if she really did do it, she must be sick … mentally ill. No person in her right mind could ever be capable of doing such a thing." And with this axiom, we soothe ourselves and reassure each other.

Worship Guide: Trinity Sunday: OT Lesson

Every week at All Saints, the leadership sends out a traditional-style worship guide for use by our families to prepare for the coming Lord's Day with the readings we'll hear and [hopefully] heed then.  Here's a sample of mine for next week:

Gen 1.1-2.4a

INSIGHT: There is so much to mine from this famous passage, but the main thrust of the author is in the order of the creation process. Notice that if you take the first three days and line them up above the last three days, they perfectly correspond to each other, day by day. God was working in the first half of the week to prepare and then in the second half of the week to fulfill and complete His creation. If you were there on the first part of the first day, it would have been unclear that God was up to anything “good”. Even by the third day, it ‘did not yet appear what the earth should be’. But by the end, God brought it all together in beauty and completion. He loves order. He loves preparation. He works things out to fulfillment according to His plan. Remember where we are in the lectionary readings [and Church History]. This is the Sunday after Pentecost, Trinity Sunday. We remember the way that God had been working throughout all of human history to prepare, then “in the fullness of time” when it was just right, He sent Christ. Then, following this, He sent His Spirit. At the end of this process, we can join Him as we look back on His work in the world and declare it all to be “very good”.

A Well-needed Reminder

"Chance" A Postscript

If chance be the Father of all flesh,
disaster is his rainbow in the sky,
and when you hear:

State of Emergency!
Sniper Kills Ten!
Troops on Rampage!
Whites go Looting!
Bomb Blasts School!

It is but the sound of man worshiping his maker.

-Steven Turner

The other, and much more frightening Recession

"The difference between right and wrong is fast receding. Awareness is being diluted, people are just saying 'such is life'. People are like this now."

- Denis Avey, a British WW2 POW, who used cigarettes to bribe prison camp guards in order to infiltrate Auschwitz, not once - but twice, and witness the conditions first-hand.  "My life depended on 50 cigarettes -- 25 in, 25 out."  His story has only recently gained attention and is the subject of the forthcoming nonfiction work, 'The Man Who Broke into Auschwitz'. 

Dangerous Creatures and Grasping

"I am more and more convinced that man is a dangerous creature; and that power, whether vested in many or a few, is ever grasping, and, like the grave, cries, “Give, give!” The great fish swallow up the small; and he who is most strenuous for the rights of the people, when vested with power, is as eager after the prerogatives of government. You tell me of degrees of perfection to which human nature is capable of arriving, and I believe it, but at the same time lament that our admiration should arise from the scarcity of the instances."

- Abigail Adams [by the way, that 'give, give' quote is from Prov 30]

You Dropped the Ball ... Again!

Steven Johnson is the now-infamous wide receiver on the Buffalo Bills who dropped what would have been the game-winning TD pass against the Steelers last week.  He then issued a statement to the world in the form of the above 'tweet' to God.  It is sad and sadly representative of the state of popular Christianity in our world today.  The God-is-my-vending-machine-in-the-sky theology is as easy to drop as it is to adopt [... or maybe I shouldn't use the word 'drop'.] Hopefully, those words were just a foolish venting that he will be quick to repent of.  True faith, living faith, ... saving faith ... perseveres - there is no other alternative [see Hebrews ... the whole book.]
For a more faithful option, consider with me the words of our spiritual forefather, Job [who, incidentally had lost a lot more than leverage for a potential future signing bonus]:
"Though he slay me, yet will I trust in Him..."
May God grant us Job's heart.

A faith that can be destroyed by suffering is not faith. - Richard Wurmbrand

Snakes in the Garden

“Umberto Eco in his anthology on ugliness made the observation that Rococo and Baroque architecture and Thomas Kinkade paintings fail for the same reason in that they attempt to tell a story without the necessity of redemption.