tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9479398.post5473940353417950805..comments2024-03-28T11:33:16.271-05:00Comments on Adventus: Winter Is ComingUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9479398.post-5847937028183269962018-07-05T15:09:40.342-05:002018-07-05T15:09:40.342-05:00"Nationalistic religion vs those who’ve been ..."Nationalistic religion vs those who’ve been broken open by some experience of either conscious suffering or the Divine: I think that’s the age-old challenge facing Christianity and pastors and the message of this winter for me."<br /><br />'Aye, there's the rub.' Willie the Shake, again. And probably why I'm happy to see the church go into its winter of discontent (!). Although a message of absolute challenge can be an idol (what does "the dreadful image of a mutilated innocent as the truth of history" say to the mother mourning the death of her infant? To the wife trying to decide whether or not to remove the life support from her husband? To the person with multiple-personality disorder brought on by childhood trauma?), it has to be part of the challenge to us, so that we always see God more clearly, love God more dearly, and follow God more nearly day by day.<br /><br />That challenge is multi-faceted, and our only hope is in humility and recognizing the power of powerlessness.<br /><br />Yup.Rmjhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06811456254443706479noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9479398.post-87208024519208424102018-07-05T13:00:13.809-05:002018-07-05T13:00:13.809-05:00Expanding on the familiar quote from the masthead ...Expanding on the familiar quote from the masthead of this blog:<br /><br />“The Christian faith holds that those who are able to look on the crucifixion and live, to accept that the traumatic truth of human history is a tortured body, might just have a chance of new life – but only by virtue of an unimaginable transformation in our currently dire condition. This is known as the resurrection. Those who don’t see this dreadful image of a mutilated innocent as the truth of history are likely to be devotees of that bright-eyed superstition known as infinite human progress, for which Dawkins is a full-blooded apologist…. <br /><br />“The central doctrine of Christianity, then, is not that God is a bastard. It is, in the words of the late Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe, that if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you.”<br /><br />I would add to Eagleton here and say that those who don’t see the dreadful image of a mutilated innocent as the truth of history are probably my church-going neighbors who are fine with Trump ripping away the innocent children of immigrants and refugees and imprisoning them. And if forced to face the discomfort of being called out on this issue long enough they’ll have no problem calling for detractors to be imprisoned, or worse, in the name of safety and security. <br /><br />Nationalistic religion vs those who’ve been broken open by some experience of either conscious suffering or the Divine: I think that’s the age-old challenge facing Christianity and pastors and the message of this winter for me.<br />trexhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16838170190127187564noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9479398.post-8802180654949477142018-07-04T08:38:45.712-05:002018-07-04T08:38:45.712-05:00My parish experience left me jaded and cynical. So...My parish experience left me jaded and cynical. Some want to experience the divine. Some want the divine to experience them. Most want to be left alone.<br /><br />Then again, such thoughts reflect my limitations as a pastor, not the state of reality.Rmjhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06811456254443706479noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9479398.post-73268284170747303592018-07-04T08:10:09.596-05:002018-07-04T08:10:09.596-05:00Rahner was a great advocate of encountering God in...Rahner was a great advocate of encountering God in everyday life by everyday people, he was a great advocate of the necessity of the direct experience of the divine. <br /><br />I think it's one of the advantages, at times disadvantages, that to an extent the hierarchical structure of Catholicism can shield a priest from the dislike of the congregation they're assigned to. Sometimes that results in priests being free to tell hard truths to people who might not want to hear it but who don't have the power to fire them, sometimes it works out pretty badly. The town next to ours had a really awful priest, a horrid old Jansenist who liked to preach Easter sermons about what cheapskates the parishioners were, who loved to rail against what he said was the inadequate housekeeping of the women of the parish(more on which below) and on one memorable occasion scandalized the flock by telling them that God hated them when they sinned.<br /><br />We learned about this when my mother's best friend, a member of that parish, said that when the priest came on his irregular parish visit, she stood in the door and told him he couldn't come in because her house was too messy. <br /><br />Many of the members of the parish merely started going to mass in the town next to theirs until he retired. The Thought Criminalhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01381376556757084468noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9479398.post-39442276940568785672018-07-03T19:15:25.745-05:002018-07-03T19:15:25.745-05:00It crossed my mind, while writing this, to mention...It crossed my mind, while writing this, to mention how Rahner seemed to be following in the footsteps of Bultmann's "demythologizing." I was even going to mention I first heard of Bultmann in college, in the works of Francis Schaeffer (who isn't fit to untie Bultmann's scholarly sandals), so how do we get Bultmann to the masses, as Rahner seems to want to do?<br /><br />You don't. Bultmann was off-base with that shtick (like most Biblical scholars, he sucks at theology and is even worse with homiletic). The belief that people will believe if you just pitch it the right way is another false idol. True, I cannot speak of the God of Abraham and Jesus the way Paul did in 1st century Palestine, but neither need I speak in terms of process theology (does anybody do that anymore? I think it went the way of logical positivism.) or even Tillich's "ground of being" (never had much use for Tillich, actually).<br /><br />I prefer Kierkegaard's experiential existentialism and the concept of "wounding from behind," mixed with Crossan's idea of the "dark interval," where the parables have more to do with creating intellectual (or even cognitive) conflict than with being allegories for God and heaven. Then again, I prefer the Jewish (one branch, anyway; Judaism is no more monolithic than Christianity) otherness of God, the emphasis on the Creator of the Universe rather than the White Guy with Long Beard.<br /><br />But insisting there is a better way, if everybody would just listen to me? I finally gave that one up. True, it makes me wishy-washy on hard questions, but I prefer to make people figure those out for themselves by looking hard at the answers. The rest is about taking care of each other, as Micah said: doing justice, loving mercy, walking humbly with God (whether God is Cosmic Thunderer or unfathomable Ground of Being, or both and a little of neither).<br /><br />Theology is best understood as an act of humility, not of understanding. If anything, especially after reading so much Derrida, I tend to disavow understanding, except as a way to understand how much you don't understand. Especially about other people.<br /><br />And what is knowing God about, except other people?Rmjhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06811456254443706479noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9479398.post-80185054683056499422018-07-03T18:19:29.250-05:002018-07-03T18:19:29.250-05:00I suspect that even the most unsophisticated belie...I suspect that even the most unsophisticated believer, when pressed, would acknowledge that most of our language about God is metaphorical. Few would say, for example, that God has a right hand that you could see or shake or sit beside.<br /><br />But when our theologians--not that I blame them for this--try to express what the metaphor is a metaphor for, I'm not sure that we get any farther. God as, say, the "transcendental horizon of thrownness" is still a metaphor, just one harder to understand.<br /><br />I read Rahner's "Grundkurs des Glaubens" a few years ago. It's the only thing of his I know, and I got a lot out of it. But nothing that would make me think less of those with neither the education nor time to make head or tails of it. rick allenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07612435616018593956noreply@blogger.com