millinerd @millinerd - Tumblr Blog

Posts

And finally we must attend to one particular aspect of what is promised to and then by Mary: her son will be called “holy… the Son of God,” huios theou (Luke 1.35). How are we to read this? At first, we may read it as a messianic title. But does not the fact that the Messiah can be so designated have further theological import? In the creed, this title appears in a sequence with the “Father” title of the first article and the “Holy Spirit” of the third. Moreover, it acquires the modifier “only,” stipulating that Jesus’ filial relation to the Father is ontologically unique. All that is to say that the creed makes the Son be one of the Trinity, so that “Son of God” can even be reversed to be “God the Son,” theos ho huios. Gabriel announces to Mary that her son will be God the Son. That makes her the mother of God. But obvious though the logic is, theologians have often tried to avoid it. Can God really be born of a woman? A man who somehow may be called God the Son, yes; but God the Son himself? It may be noted that the church’s actual misogynists have generally been the heretics: thus those who in the fifth century denied that God could have a mother were openly moved by sheer disgust at the notion that God could have inhabited that musky place, a woman’s womb.

Robert Jenson, Canon and Creed (WJK Press, 2010), p. 106. Thanks to the amazing Dr. Matthew Bruce, teaching in Wheaton’s theology department, for this wonderful quote.

#mary #Robert Jenson

The merger of Jesus and Jefferson that propelled the New Christian Right was neither made in heaven, as in the eyes of its proponents, nor was it a cynical exercise in hypocritical self-interest, as often portrayed by its opponents. It was rather a historically constructed contingency that, judged from a broad Christian perspective, deserves to be both applauded and denounced. It can be approved in classical Christian terms for trying to protect the lives of unborn innocents, but criticized for not seeing the need to mobilize on behalf of other weak and marginalized members of society, such as those who are trapped in urban ghettos. It can be praised for efforts at protecting families from the ravages of modern sexual and gender revolutions, but criticized for not acknowledging the stress placed upon families by postwar economic growth, 24/7 advertising, and runaway consumption. It can be praised for standing firm against atheistic communism, but criticized for treating the complex realities of the modern political world as a Manichean cartoon. It can be praised for insisting on personal responsibility in the face of Big Labor and Big Government, but also criticized for not exercising the same vigilance with respect to Big Finance, Big Insurance, and Big Business. Above all, both books make abundantly clear that, in the recent United States, evangelical conservative politics has been a movement without a philosophy. The great irony of Dochuk’s story is that the jobs that drew practitioners of Southern plain-folk religion to California—and that enabled them to become advocates for local rights opposing dictates from Washington—were either created directly by government action or facilitated by government subsidies to oil, gas, aerospace, and defense industries. Yet to deal with such complexities—to bring together solidly grounded conceptions of government, employment, education, capitalism, race, history, world affairs, and even Christianity into practical political action—requires political philosophy of the sort that American evangelicals have never possessed. Theirs is not the tradition of Rerum Novarum, Quadragesimo Anno, or Mater et Magistra. It is instead the tradition of Charles G. Finney, who in the 1830s declared that the problem of slavery could be resolved “in three years’ time” if only slaveholders would recognize that slaveholding was a sin. It is the lineage of Billy Sunday, who in 1919 predicted that Prohibition would empty American prisons and transform the country into a heaven on earth. The flourishing of conservative evangelical politics in recent American history has done considerable good through the exercise of instinct, anger, energy, and zeal. It would have done much more good, and also drawn nearer to the Christianity by which it is named, if it had manifested comparable wisdom, honesty, self-criticism, and discernment.

Mark Noll, Jesus & Jefferson, The New Republic (May 2011)

...now he started studying art history. He found it to be a good lens through which to keep making sense of his injuries. First, there was the discipline’s implicit conviction that every work is shaped by the viewer’s perspective. He remembers looking at slides of ancient sculptures in a dark lecture hall, all of them missing arms or noses or ears, and suddenly recognizing them for what they were: fellow amputees. “We were, as a class, all calling these works monumental, beautiful and important, but we’d never seen them whole,” he says. Time’s effect on these marble bodies — their suffering, really — was understood as part of the art. Medicine didn’t think about bodies this way, Miller realized.

On triple amputee B.J. Miller studying art history at Princeton in the 1990s (story in The New York Times). Hard to think of a better refutation of the utilitarian arrogance that would cast art history aside as unnecessary frosting.

#arthistory

The measure which the museum curator takes to present the thing to the public are self-liquidating. The upshot of the curator’s efforts are not the everyone can see the exhibit but that no one can see it. The curator protests: Why are they so indifferent? Why do they even deface the exhibits? Don’t they know it is theirs? But it is not theirs. It is his, the curator’s. By the most exclusive sort of zoning, the museum exhibit, the part oak tree, is part of an ensemble, a package, which is almost impenetrable to them. The archaeologist who puts his find in a museum so that everyone can see it accomplishes the reverse of his expectations. The result of his action is that no one can see it now but the archaeologist. He would have done better to keep it in his pocket and show it to strangers. Does this mean we should get rid of museums? No, but it means that the sightseer should be prepared to enter into a struggle to recover a sight from a museum.

Walker Percy, Message in a Bottle, p. 62

#museum #art

The arts are not the pretty but irrelevant bits around the border of reality. They are highways into the center of a reality which cannot be glimpsed, let alone grasped, any other way…. Perhaps art can glimpse the future possibilities pregnant within the present time. Perhaps art can help us to look beyond the immediate beauty with all its puzzles, and to glimpse that new creation which makes sense not only of beauty but of the world as a whole, and ourselves within it. Perhaps.

N.T. Wright, Simply Christian (closing pages)

Despite all that I have gone through, and despite all that I now face, I am still struck by the singular nature of the pain in the weeks after my diagnosis. It was not simply the fact itself searing through all the circumstances of my life, nor was it, as many people might suspect, the full impact of meaninglessness, the arbitrary nature of our existence, the utter illusion of God. No, it was an excess of meaning for which I had no context. It was the world burning to be itself beyond my ruined eyes. It was God straining through matter to make me see, and to grant me the grace of simple praise. I believe in grace and chance, at the same time. I believe in absolute truth and absolute contingency, at the same time. And I believe that Christ is the seam soldering together these wholes that our half vision - and our entire clock-bound, logic-locked way of life - shapes as polarities. Christ's life is not simply a model for how to live, but the living truth of my own existence. Christ is not alive now because he rose from the dead two thousand years ago. He rose from the dead two thousand years ago because he is alive right now. [W]hat we imagine is pure oblivion is actually some immense, unimaginable, and utterly specific attention turning toward us, as the force that scours us out of this existence loves us into another.

Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss

The second thing is to teach an appreciation of God’s beauty and use beauty as a guide post toward what is good and virtuous. Plato said in Symposium, “He who would proceed aright in this matter should begin in youth to visit beautiful forms.” First, the outward forms, and from outward forms would become an appreciation that the beauty of the mind is higher than the beauty of the form. From that, it would become an appreciation of the beauty of laws and the beauty of existence and that he who follows the trail of beauty, Plato wrote, will come to see “a nature of wondrous beauty, a nature which in the first place is everlasting and not growing or decaying, a beauty absolute, separate, simple and everlasting, which without diminution and without increase or any change is imparted to ever growing and perishing beauties of all other things.” Colleges can thrust objects of beauty before their students and hope for one in a thousand you will provoke one of those primordial experiences of wondering awe that can transform a life and point toward a vocation, a marriage or a faith.

David Brooks, The Cultural Value of Christian Higher Education

The Reformation was a time when men went blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late medievalism, a whole cellar full of fifteen-hundred-year-old, two-hundred proof Grace–bottle after bottle of pure distilate of Scripture, one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us single-handedly. The word of the Gospel–after all those centuries of trying to lift yourself into heaven by worrying about the perfection of your bootstraps–suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home before they started…Grace has to be drunk straight: no water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale; neither goodness, nor badness, not the flowers that bloom in the spring of super spirituality could be allowed to enter into the case.

Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace, via Scott Jones’s fantastic Mockingbird interview with Krista Tippet

If we say yes to the invitation to repent, we may experience enormous freedom for a few months or for even a year or two. Our former way of life, in some degree, is cleaned up and certain relationships healed. Then, after a year or two, the dust stirred up by our first conversion settles and the old temptations recur. As the springtime of the spiritual journey turns to summer — and fall and winter — the original enthusiasms begin to wane. At some point, we have to face the fundamental problem, which is the unconscious motivation that is still in place, even after we have chosen the values of the gospel. The false self is the syndrome of our emotional programs for happiness grown into sources of motivation and made much more complex by the socialization process, and reinforced by our over-identification with our cultural conditioning. Our ordinary thoughts, reactions, and feelings manifest the false self on every level of our conduct. When the false self learns that we have been converted and will now start practicing all the virtues, it has the biggest laugh of a lifetime and dares us, saying, 'Just try it!' Now we experience the full force of the spiritual combat, the struggle with what we want to do and feel we should do, and our incredible inability to carry it out.... Such insight is the real beginning of the spiritual journey.

Thomas Keating, Invitation to Love, p. 10.

#contemplative prayer

Not so long ago artists and theorists alike thrilled to the idea of such breaks: not only was representation, painting or art as such declared to be kaput, but also ideology, history or even man himself (recall the face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea that Foucault imagined being washed away at the end of The Order of Things). The avant-garde penchant for rupture was carried over into the rhetoric of critical theory, structuralist, poststructuralist, feminist queer, and postcolonial, which effectively became its own avant-garde after the artistic one had dissipated, an avant-garde that wanted to put paid to metaphysics, humanism, patriarchy, heterosexism and racism. The worm has turned of late; today there is a preoccupation with stories of survival and models of persistence across a range of discourses, especially, as these two books suggest, in art history. The grands récits of modernity might be gone, but there is now a fatigue with the rhetoric of rupture. What this shift portends, intellectually and politically, it is too early to say.

Hal Foster, Presposterous Timing, in The London Review of Books.

#hal foster

Looking for a biblical image of this second journey into the deep masculine… I eventually decided to name it the journey of John the Baptist. In the Gospels this John is pictured as the complete opposite of John the Beloved. He is a wild man who lives alone on the edge of the desert, wearing course clothing and eating crude food. He knows all about people’s sinfulness, so those who are willing to face it themselves he calls to conversion, and those who are unwilling to face their own sinfulness he calls hypocrites and liars… John doesn’t mince words. He’s not out to be a nice guy. This spiritual journey into the deep masculine is difficult to hear about because it is all too easy to misunderstand what is said about it. So much of what the Baptist represents can be mistaken for the independent tough guy, the crude macho hero, which is in reality the shallow (negative) masculine…. The whole journey, the full development of the male spirit, has to walking the steps of both Johns [John the Beloved and John the Baptist], not just one of them. The basic reason why the journey of the second John is hard to make is because if you stick your neck out your head may wind up on somebody else's platter…. ...[T]his take immense courage and self-possession. Such man has life for other and knows it. He does not need to push, intimidate or play the power games common to other men because he possesses his power with surety and calm self-confidence. He is not opinionated or arrogant, but he knows. He is not needy or bother by status symbol because he is. He does not need monogrammed briefcases… He possess his soul and does not give it lightly to corporations, armies, nation-state or the acceptable collective thinking.

Richard Rohr and Joseph Martos, The Wild Man’s Journey: Reflections on Male Spirituality (pp. 33-34, 233). Or, more to the point, such a man can say, “He must increase, I must decrease” (John 3:30).

#john the baptist

Contrary to Foucault, whom we have called a post-Nietzschean, Meillassoux is by all means an anti-Nietzschean. For whereas Nietzsche, at the close of the nineteenth century claimed that the Age of Reason (introduced to us by Kant among others) has caused us to murder God, Meillassoux claims exactly the opposite. He states that Kantian thinking, in which the absolute has been closed off from thought for good, expelled from the metaphysical, has caused the remarkable return of religious fundamentalism today as it allowed for the absolute to be removed from knowing and thus to be revived in the form of believing.

New Materialisms: Interviews and Cartographies (169)

#post-secular #new materialism

"No sooner do I consider the One than I am enlightened by the radiance of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish them than I am carried back to the One. When I bring any one of the Three before my mind I think of him as a Whole, and my vision is filled, and the most of the Whole escapes me. I cannot grasp the greatness of that One in such as way as to attribute more greatness to the rest. When I contemplate the Three together, I see but one Torch, and cannot divide of measure out the undivided Light."

Gregory of Nazianzus, Orations 40.4

Still, we’re wondering if the college can withdraw its recommendation to fire Hawkins, as well as end its suspension of her. We’re wondering if it would be possible for Hawkins to agree to resume talking with the college, and stop talking to the public, about this matter. We’re wondering if everyone can take a deep breath, acknowledging they haven’t always done right by those with whom they disagree. We’re wondering if the college can initiate a public conversation on the topic that ignited the firestorm, inviting people of various views to argue their case. We’re wondering if this could become a model for the world, that when it comes to the most important issues, we Christians can speak with wisdom and charity to one another.

Mark Galli (Christianity Today), who is not the only one so wondering.

if typing, printing, and mailing a letter is too much trouble for you, then it could be that the things you have to say aren’t that important, even to you, and you’d be better off using your time in a different way. Well, that may be too extreme. I’m not a big fan of printing and mailing either, though I use those technologies when I need to. So perhaps email is slow enough, provides enough of a buffer between people and their immediate impulses. Still, I can’t help thinking of the great computer scientist Donald Knuth, who famously doesn’t have an email address. He explains why: “Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.” My work may not require the same intensity of concentration that Knuth’s requires, but it requires more than I have been accustomed to give it for the past few social-media years.....

Alan Jacobs, I’m Thinking it Over, being his response to why he does not yet have a response to SameGodGate.

A quick look into how Wheaton has handled the recent conversation in America about Muslims suggests the opposite of bigotry…. Wheaton College is frequently a lightening rod for controversy, and has been so from its very founding as an immediate - not gradual - abolitionist institution (not a common position among white Americans, even white Christians at the time) whose main building was a stop on the underground railroad. A senior colleague once told me that people from multiple perspectives will likely continue their pattern of condemning Wheaton as either hopelessly conservative (and therefore a dangerous force), or as hopelessly liberal (and therefore a tool of the devil). However, the debate has the potential to be good for us all if handled with care and respect.

Karen Johnson, Wheaton College and Islam at Religion in American History.

Holding to the old faith that everything is in principle knowable or comprehensible by us is a little like assuming that every human structure or artifact must be based on yards, feet, and inches. The notion that the universe is constructed, or we are evolved, so that reality must finally answer in every case to the questions we bring to it, is entirely as anthropocentric as the notion that the universe was designed to make us possible.

from Marilynne Robinson’s latest book, The Givenness of Things, via Mockingbird’s weekly roundup, Another Week Ends

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

millinerd