Aphorism of the Day, December 31, 2016
December 31st is the last day of our common calendar year though it is the 7th day of Christmas on the Christian calendar. One might note how cultures have "secularized" Lent by moving some of the Lenten intensity to the famous end of the year activity known as the "New Year" resolution. In a New Year resolution a person sets goals for the amendment of one's life behaviors. Ironic how things which are anthropological sound behaviors within the church lose their relevance there for many even while "amendment of life" goals for New Year's resolution are perfectly fine. Amendment of life is a human universal and such intentional goal setting is needed within or outside of the church. So do both; observe a "secular" Lent by having New Year's resolutions and when Lent actually arrives see how you've done and how you can continue the practice of excellence. Intentional resolve towards excellence is good at any time of the year, secular calendar or Christian calendar. Good luck in your resolve!
Aphorism of the Day, December 30, 2016
The Feast of Holy Name celebrates the event of the naming ceremony of Jesus which according to Jewish custom coincided with his circumcision. In popular parlance, baptism is also called "christening." To christen in English means to name, though the actual etymology means to "make Christian," which in fact sums up the baptismal event which includes water baptism and anointing with "chrism" as one is sealed by the Holy Spirit and "marked" as Christ's own forever. In the Episcopal liturgy there has been a change from "Name this child" to a presentation of the child using the child's "Christian" or "first" name. Naming ceremonies are confessional ceremonies signifying the belief that a personal entity can retain the same identity over time even when the "atomic" structure of one's physicality may be in constant renewal and transformation. The "christening" in Christian baptism has a hint of the name of Yesuha/Jesus, meaning the Lord God is our salvation. Christian baptism is a confession that through Christ one believes that the eternal solidity of God can save or preserve or give everlasting health to people so as to attain a continuing singular self-recognizable identity beyond death. In the Holy Name, one aspire to believe in an enduring and continuing identity signified in the act of assigning a name. At death one makes the confession, "I was, therefore I will continue to be in the preserving memory of the memorializing God."
Aphorism of the Day, December 29, 2016
Naming is the ultimate practice of abbreviation. Think of all of the occasions of becoming that are rather reductively reduced to a name. We may think to know someone involves knowing their name but their name is only a faint abbreviation of who they are. Naming is the necessary habit of language; it tries to fix things that are moving. Time means constant motion and change and the conversion of experience in time to its equivalence is impossible. (There is no equivalence to being there while being there). So we have language and naming as our futile effort to "uncomplicate" the fact that we are becoming in time. Language is the production of illusion believing that the experience of the senses can be rendered in words. We as language users need to take the further humble step of actually naming language as the main human occupation even if it is but a life of continuous abbreviation and reduction. The ultimate human reduction in language is the word, "God."
Aphorism of the Day, December 28, 2016
Cultures have naming traditions. Part of the rise of individualism has resulted in the power of the individual expressed as seemingly choosing one's own name or the name of one's child apart from the restrictions of the cultural. There is nothing more powerless than a baby receiving a name since the babe is a person without determining power. The worst of naming power would be a slave owner naming of the slaves. Cultures, families, tribes and clans with naming traditions do not regard their traditions as disempowering the babe but as placing the babe within the overall gift of empowerment which comes through having a group identity. Within empowerment which comes from the group tradition a name can also be the aspiration for the destiny of a child. The tradition of the holy name of Jesus is that his name was God given and that he lived up to the proclamation which his name signified, "God is our salvation." In the holy name of Jesus one finds a confession about God but also a sign in the person of Jesus of how salvation would be instantiated in human experience.
Aphorism of the Day, December 27, 2016
In the rise of hierarchy within human comparison, Jesus was given and bore a "holy" name. The word "holy" designated such a specialness which meant unsurpassable by any other human being. In the general sense of specialness, the sense of unique individuality, everyone is "special" like the claim about each snowflake, viz., each snowflake is unique. Holiness is a specialness which is orientated toward godliness and it refers to how human beings move from holy innocence as babes into holiness as an outcome of knowing good and evil and learning to prevail in the conditions of Freedom which permits both good and evil. By prevail, one might mean how to go beyond good or evil with a sense of the super-good, the supreme Good which in human action and intent involves the continuous habit of overcoming evil with good, and reinforcing good with affirming practice.
Aphorism of the Day, December 26, 2016
We're heading toward January 1, 2017 or the Feast of the Holy Name. As humans with language ability, we name. In the primordial story, first person Adam was given the task of naming all of the animals. This is a really simplistic brilliant way of noting that if Word creates the human world, then the human subject reflects the image of word by being a "Namer." Naming is the way in which humanity differentiates their word experience. Naming is the human effort to try to force identities upon "moving targets." A person is a an accumulation of occasions of becoming in time, a moving subject, who with a name is abstracted from the states of becoming and reduced to a singular word. The name or word is the human way of saying that a subject maintains a unity of being within the changing states of becoming. Yeshua, Jesus was the Holy Name given to the Christ Child. His very name referred beyond his particular earthly identity. It means the "Lord God" is our salvation/preservation. Humanity names the "Lord God" as the ultimate preserver of all identities and values since God as the Greatest and Expanding Container is the Omni-Becomer who preserves all that has previously Become within the Divine Ground of Creative Freedom. To name the Chief Representative of God to humanity, Jesus, means that we confess God to be the one who preserves, ironically, all identities within an overall dynamic of becoming. Holy naming is our task of celebrating unity of identity in the midst of continually changing subjects.
Aphorism of the Day, December 25, 2016
Christmas is a day to differentiate between "secular" humanism and Christian humanism. The "Word" made Flesh or "Incarnation" is a variety of humanism which celebrates the obvious, namely, that anthropomorphism is unavoidable. If we cannot but have human experience we can enshrine that as a counterpart of the old Ptolemaic geocentricism with our own brand of "humanocentricism." After all, if we can only have a human experience of anything, why not enthrone ourselves as those who have been lucky ascenders of the evolutionary convergent impersonal forces to become "persons." Christian humanism does indeed accept our human limitation but within the limitation we value things about what we can perceive as being gifts beyond us and from higher Personality than our own personalities. Higher Personality "tinkered" with the chaotic forces to bring an order, even the order of human personality founded by being inhabited by word ability. In Christian humanism we think it is reasonably faithful to believe that our personality derives from Higher Personality. The story of Jesus in his life and afterlife has given us a revelation of the derivation and the direction of our humanism, and the history of humanity, even "religious" humanity proves that we need creativity in more than science and in our own abilities; we need the Horizon of the Higher Personality to beckon us to include love and justice in the basic pursuit of creative genius.
Aphorism of the Day, December 24, 2016
We with glee participate in the "childification" of Christmas because after all it is about the birth of a baby. Christmas is easier to discuss with children than Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter and so it has taken cultural preference over Easter even though the Christmas story did not really become significant until after the post-resurrection appearances of Christ. As we participate in the cultural excesses of the childification of Christmas, let us not forget the prominence of the "child motif" in the Gospels. Jesus said things were revealed to babes that the wise did not know. He said one had to become like a child to perceive the kingdom of God. He said that one had to be "born again" which could mean that one's second birth is a Sanctified Holy Regression to one's first birth in its original joy and yet unsullied by the process of knowing good and evil that comprises the becoming adult experience. St. Paul said that Christ is "born" in us and that happens because one is over-shadowed by the Holy Spirit. As Christmas is childified by so many secular rituals, let us not forget to access the original blessing of our births. It resides within each person and the original cinders of its flame need to be rekindled as adult cynicism born in the harsh battle between good and evil in the freedom of the world has threatened to extinguish the original innocence. Let us now return to innocence but not in naiveté but in the hard work of holiness. After the freedom of living with all probabilities let us return to our birth as original blessing and hear God say, "It is good, it is very good."
Aphorism of the Day, December 23, 2016
Interaction between people involves having words drawn out of people something like a magnet. We are magnetically, perhaps by human desire, drawn to commit language acts towards each other in a wide variety of ways. When we look at the people who have come to be called in our history, "Great," we can analyze the kinds of language products that have been used to tell how and why such a person was Great. The Christmas Stories, the infancy narratives of Jesus are particular story form ways of how the writers of the Gospel were drawn to commit language products to members of their community as they used existing rhetorical forms in their linguistic environment to wax eloquent about the greatness of Jesus Christ. With insight and intuitions of our own reconstruction of their contexts we can seek to appreciate why they were drawn to write about Christ's greatness in the way in which they did and we can in corresponding ways of our own time be drawn to make the stories of the greatness of Christ live again and in new ways contextually specific to our own lives.
Aphorism of the Day, December 22, 2016
When one grinds coffee beans, the longer the grinder is on the more powdery the beans become and more surfaces are created through which hot water can help to release the taste of the bean. When one reads and study more, each word, "as it were" attains more surfaces and so when one has created more "word" surfaces through reading, reading continually becomes a new and different experience. This means that when there is an effort to communicate same words, they have different meanings for people who have different reading contexts for their vocabularies. A person who has read the entire Western Philosophical tradition, history and most of the holy books and mythologies of all people of faith as well as the founders of modern psychology, sociology and anthropology and then added findings of modern science, such a person reads the biblical words differently than those who do not have the same word contexts into which the biblical words have their signifying possibility and colored moods. So biblical words attain different meanings of truth based upon the context of their "hearing." In this way the experience of the same words can be both truthful and contradictory for different people; they can be truthful meanings in different way. Since context specific means "located" in time, the truth of one context in time using the same word can be different at another moment in time for a person or persons in a different context. One can confess the universal truth of Language as the Container of all meanings even while noting that the experience of individual language products within this great Container can be contradictory.
Aphorism of the Day, December 21, 2016
If we understand the name Emmanuel to be "God with us," then the very notion of God would open the meaning of "us" to mean every human being. It was written within a context to have "us" perhaps refer to a group of people who were feeling oppression during the time of Isaiah. By coming to writing the particular "us" has become a generalized "us." And it is an "us" which transcends our own small contextual us. We have to admit that God is also with the "us" who on the surface of things might be our enemies. When the early followers of Jesus believe Emmanuel to be a title of relevance for Jesus Christ, they had already proclaimed Jesus as relevant to the lives of the Gentiles and so the "us" of Isaiah was generalized to include all Gentiles or all people. What happens when "us" becomes all inclusive? The "them" is eliminated.
Aphorism of the Day, December 20, 2016
The last shall be first. The experience of Jesus Christ in his risen life by the church meant that how Christ appeared to his followers began to give shape to the Christian notion of the messiah. We sometimes just assume the notion was fully developed in Hebrew Scriptures and it was exactly instantiated in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. This far from the case; the Risen Christ redefined the meaning of the Messiah for Christians and so the Hebrew Scripture references to messiah are worn like Christmas ornaments upon the tree of Jesus the Messiah for what he had become for Christians. People who are more interested in enforcing doctrine as precisely formed meaning that the herd must "subscribe" to or be "excommunicated" lose the Spirit of the Messiah which is a luring and beckoning way for many people in many ways to know how God is with them. The notion of the Messiah became instantiated in a new way in the Risen Christ and the notion of the Messiah is still flexibly inviting and friendly today for people to discover their lives touched by the divine.
Aphorism of the Day, December 19, 2016
The most philosophical Christmas Story in the Gospels is not the birth in Bethlehem but the Gospel of John which states that the Word was from the beginning and the Word was with God and the Word was God and the Word became flesh. So Word is what preexists and creates all particular human experience of everything including language users becoming conscious of the fact that it is their use of language which is the preexistent condition for creation of any human life as we know. And to deconstruct this, I must be brutally honest that I am using words to say all of this. So we are on a whirling referential cycle of words continually referring to other words and yet those words attain a concrescence in become flesh or material existence. Material existence may have existence apart from words but without words we could not know it. The Bethlehem story needs to be appraised in its function as qualifying a constellation of words within the overall universe of words.
Aphorism of the Day, December 18, 2016
Reading the Gospels and biblical literature fully clouded by all of the scientific finding that have happened since has meant that people import too much of what has happened since the Gospels were written back into the Gospel writing. This is "natural" because where else can readers be but here and now? It is also like a foreign invasion of people of a later time into the "recreated" straw people that we make of biblical characters. Our questions are not the ones raised and answered in the same way that biblical writers wrote for their readership. Our taken for granted logic and science is vastly different than theirs. What sanguine Bible readers try to do is to translate between the reconstructed paradigms of biblical writers and our own paradigms which govern what we take for granted in our constellation of knowledge.
Aphorism of the Day, December 17, 2016
The Infancy narratives are in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, but not in Mark and John. They represent the heuristics, the inventions of writers who determined using the familiar ethos, pathos, logos criteria of discourse to communicate with their readership. They determined the make up of their readership, they devised the kinds of appeals to the hearts of their readership and they presented the logic of their story. Their audience was familiar with the titles of the Caesar (Bringer of world Peace, Savior, son of god, divine one) and they were familiar with the miraculous birth stories used to legitimize the Caesar's greatness=August nature. They were also aware of the templates of the Messiah from Hebrew Scriptures and so the infancy narrative discourses plumbed the familiar word and story "vocabularies" of their readership to present the uniqueness of Jesus Christ. All the while, they also hid the mystagogy of the early church within the Gospels as spiritual manuals for an exclusive readership, the ones who knew that Christ had been born within them when their lives had by overshadowed by the Holy Spirit. One can only applaud the inspired rhetorical achievement of the Gospels within their original settings.
Aphorism of the Day, December 16, 2016
Who can avoid interpreting God, revelation and holy books? Even if one says something is self-evidential or obvious it still involves human interpretation. Interpretation can only be inexact and partial. The best that we can say is that interpretations which become established within a community which agrees about interpretations, then such interpretations become "infallibly" adequate for the sustaining the unity of that community until more infallibly adequate interpretations come to prevail for the functional success of the community. Infallibility is a function of the community which accepts it as a designation for the preferred method of a standardized unity even while all members may not really be in agreement with the specifics of how anything is interpreted. Infallibility is a functional designation to give force to community cohesion. Scientific paradigms do not need to declare "infallibility" about their theories; their theories reign with functional significance even as the specifics of the functional significance can change overtime. In science one can be honest about the changing functional significance of a theory since everything is always open to falsification in the future. The height of delusion is for anyone to assume to have the "final" interpretation on anything or to presume to be a final oracle on anything, but particularly the plenitude of God. By the very definition of God, God would always be more than the progressive knowledge and the interpretations of God which come to language. About God and scientific truth, it is equally true that "More can be said," since both still have a future within human experience meditated by human language.
Aphorism of the Day, December 15, 2016
All writing if it is continued to be read dies a death after it is written. It dies the death of time in originating in a time that is no more after it is written. The life of a written text is based upon how it get used in its future and a text gets reused and misread over and over again because the original context is lost. When the original setting is lost, what remains are the words and the words have embedded within them universal transhistorical traces which can be re-interpreted into new context. Immanuel was a name which derived in an Isaian situation and many years later other readers of Isaiah applied this name to another person, Jesus of Nazareth as a way to express the significance of who Jesus had become in the early church. One can say that all past language predicts all future language because word bears within its very usage by users the possibility of the eternal return of meanings, not exact same meanings, but the reworked traces of former meanings.
Aphorism of the Day, December 14, 2016
"Emmanuel" or God with us was to be the name of a child born in the time of Isaiah. Much has been made out of this Isaian reference about this child to be named "Emmanuel." It became for Gospel writers one of the names of Jesus since in their method of interpretation the template of Hebrew Scriptures provided the predicative referential framework for speaking about the significance that Jesus came to have in the house churches spreading through the cities of the Roman Empire faster than Starbucks franchises. There is not a little irony in "God with us" because of the meaning of "us." In the fullest sense "us" means all of humanity, though that is not probably what it meant in the Isaian context. "God with us" has been claimed by Christians fighting each others in all sorts of battles both ideological and also with the weapons of war. Every theist presumes to have "God with us" as somewhat of a personal "possession." God being with all and God being with me and mine is the continuum between and the general and the particular. And the generalized "God with us," with humanity as a whole ends up deconstructing "God with us as church, communion, country, tribe, clan, parish, family, person since we are the contained and not the Container in the grand scheme of things. God as the Container of All has no external environment to the Divine Self; as the contained we have environment and so we end up making everything "relative" to our location. In the greater environment, our "relativity" gets deconstructed.
Aphorism of the Day, December 13, 2016
How does the past "predict" the future? Humanity get all excited about Nostradamus-type prediction even if like the daily horoscopes the mind is clever enough to project how one interprets one's current life as fitting the "predictions" of the horoscope. We exist upon a reservoir of language and our particular language base within a cultural tradition upholds us with access to particular word habits which predict how we are going to describe current events. When something great happens in the present, we use the traditions of greatness of the past, to speak about current greatness. Past greatness predicts future greatness since the superlative is a category of human language and when the superlative is articulated it will be like the superlative in the past and it will seem "predictive" because a group of people have a Yogi Berra experience of it's like "Deja vu all over again." We would rather believe in specific clairvoyance rather than the general eternal return of the same when past language structuring will continue to restructure what comes to language in the future in a like manner because we like to think current greatness compares favorably with past greatness.
Aphorism of the Day, December 12, 2016
Isaiah wrote about a sign being a young woman with child and this child will be called "Emmanuel" meaning "God is with us." There is something rather generic about this in that many parents who have had a child have felt the child to be such a special gift as to be able to declare that indeed "God is with us" in the birth of the child. St. Paul, long before the birth narratives of Jesus were written, spoke about the spiritual birth of "Christ in you, the hope of glory." How did Christ become in one? One was over-shadowed by the Holy Spirit, essentially fathered and mothered by the Holy Spirit. One can see how this Christian reality of being made aware of one being a child of God in the event of spiritual awakening could be coded in the birth narratives of Jesus as the mystagogy of the early church. The Christmas story is cryptic mysticism and it can ruined by literalism even as literalism is a very attractive "primary naivete" to live in.
Aphorism of the Day, December 11, 2016
As human beings we sometimes use religion and science to pit specific human language capacity against the other even if this denies the human language capacity to deploy many discursive practices of language. What is the discursive practice of language which is occurring in the continuous "day-dreaming" going on within a person? Such language products rarely are brought to conscious life even though they perhaps consist of the creative abstractions which help us solve problems even while providing entertainment and relief in the midst of the tedium of life. Such day-dreaming and imaginations which manifest themselves in "interior" language are true even if they don't attain the same "external" visible verification in actual events of spoken or written word or acted out deed. The Bible uses multivalent discourse, some of which is naïve realism about events which could have been empirically verified. It also contains language of inspiration which is more of the nature of "day-dream" language. This kind of language is equally true as the language which pertains to what could be "empirically verified" since it makes no sense to say that one human way of using language is intrinsically superior to another human way of using language. The problems comes when people interpret dream language as empirically verifiable referential language. Language use in both production and interpretation is validated by the pragmatic function of a language event in being insightful. What needs to be said is that many adult religious people still treat much of the biblical language in childish, and not child-like ways. Childish language use occurs when poetic imagination is treated as the empirically verifiable. Child-like language use as an adult is when an adult can be unafraid to use poetic imagination to express wonder at Plenitude.
Aphorism of the Day, December 10, 2016
Christians treat "Gospel" as though it originated with them. It was in fact taken from the Hebrew Scriptures. Jesus used the Hebrew word "basar" or "good news" to characterize the essence of his mission. An aspect of the Messiah as understood from the prophet Isaiah was that there would be one who was "divinized" by having the Spirit of the Lord be upon such a Messiah. For what purpose? To proclaim good news to the poor, release the prisoner, comfort the afflicted and liberate the captive. When John the Baptist and his "followers" had doubts about Jesus, the response was to let them know that in the ministry and mission of the Isaian messianic prerogatives were being fulfilled in Jesus. Sometimes we treat all of the later definitions of Messiah as having been final in the times when the notion was still in fluid development.
Aphorism of the Day, December 9, 2016
The Enlightenment and modern science dethroned God as center of the intellectual universe and placed Reason there. Reason became accessible by the Cartesian transcendental subject who "thinks, therefore he or she is." Science dethroned theology as the "queen" of the sciences. In order to be credible biblical literature had to be paraded as recounting events that all could be "empirically" verifiable. This contortion of presentation has resulted in scientists discounting religious people as weak minded mythologists and religious people feverishly trying to prove to scientists and to themselves that all of the stuff of the Bible was and happened in empirically verifiable ways. And so we have the situation where the heads of the congressional science committee believe that the world is only a few thousand years old because that's what the "Bible says." The false stand off between Bible reading and science is quite easily resolved by embracing the fact that both parties are using words and language. Word and language embody universal recurring experiences of humanity dressed up in the particular details of the prevalent cultures. Word and language have created human beings in discursive ways and with many nuances of how the ways of being human are translated into language products. Science creates language products which have functional and pragmatic uses for humans; modernity seems to prefer the pragmatic results of science even while denying the relevance of the discourses found in the Bible. Persons who have come to privilege science over biblical relevance for the most part have allowed the discursive aspects that once was engaged by biblical writings to now be nourished in the plethora of other kinds of literature and within the cinematic and cyber by-products of language. Scientific people now just interact and embrace the "universal themes embedded in biblical writings" in non-biblical formats. Narrow biblicists decry such secularity when they should be those sewing the correspondences between universal biblical themes together with how those universal themes are present always already in modern and post-modern culture. Biblicists have chosen to be cloistered and irrelevant to anyone except those who want to escape and live within the cloister of those who pretend that everything written in the Bible is and was "empirically verified and comports to the scientific method."
Aphorism of the Day, December 8, 2016
One could say that modern science brought about changes in how the Bible was read. Modern science caused a reappraisal of myth. Myth in New Testament era was used in the pejorative if it referred to non-Christian or non-Hebraic topics within the Greco-Roman traditions. Modern science brought about modern historicism when the empirical verification insights were applied to the past, namely, that a uniformity of natural causes in a closed system pertained in New Testament times in the same ways as they do now. Some Christian apologists who embraced the truth of empiricism decided that everything in the Bible had to be defended as "could have been empirically verifiable" in order to be "true." They did this even though they conveniently ignored the notion that something had to be able to be replicated and tested in order to be a "true" theory. Things like walking on water, virgin births and resurrection tended to be "one-time unique" events with the scientific verification being that they "might" happen again in the future and therefore they cannot be diminished in having "scientific" truth status.
Aphorism of the Day, December 7, 2016
The book of Isaiah is a book with lots of visions of a much better world, even a world of perfect harmony. Such utopian visions function as invitations to become better than we are now or for the oppressed, they function as rhetorical analgesics. The words hit the memory places in the brain which retain original innocence and activate soothing effects in very unsoothing times. Such visions are given to wish away the cruel wound of freedom which includes the outcome of the powerful not caring for the weak but exploiting them. The cruel wound of freedom is the freedom for things to go wrong for lots of people. Visions of utopia spin a return to innocence when there is the total lack of awareness of good or evil. Utopian views pretend a state of innocence and pretend to heal permanently the wound of freedom in time. But the state of automatic innocence is but the parallel memorial state accessible to all because all were once infants and children who were yet unaware of the meaning and value of the great wound in freedom, namely that bad things can and do happen. This is an unavoidable outcome of true freedom. The conditions of freedom do not falsify the rhetorical function of utopian vision as long as one realizes that the Ground of Freedom is greater than the visions of utopia.
Aphorism of the Day, December 6, 2016
The oracle words of Jesus which arose in the early church and were written in the Gospels are sometimes rather enigmatic and baffling, but as a wisdom teacher his words were meant to baffle the logical mind to think beyond. Baffling words? The least in the kingdom of heaven are greater than John the Baptist? The first shall be last and the last first? Huh? When something is written or said in the present, it is always the latter or latest day in time. This means that the one with the last word is always the first in determining meanings of all that came before. Even when we try to be "true to the history of things as they were" we are doing it from our selective perspective now and so our last word makes it first in explicating the meanings of what went before. This also highlights the fact that we think we have "insider" information about past because we actually know what happened. The Gospel writers knew what happened and from the success of the Jesus Movement into the churches in the cities throughout the Roman world, they wrote the meanings of the life of Jesus and the life of John the Baptist. And now I have claimed a first while being last, since I am now writing about the meanings and intentions of the Gospel writers. So it's not so baffling after all; it's quite unavoidable.
Aphorism of the Day, December 5, 2016
Visions of utopia, words about the end of life as we know it, presentations of a an intervening super-hero Messiah or Son of Man are included in the Bible lectionary for Advent. Be patient, prepare and rejoice are the commands of Advent. We swim in a universe of Christian teaching discourse and we hope to find in the ocean of discourse rafts of insights to help us survive for some moments within the plenitude of all possible discourse which is always present. It might be wise to accept the exciting serendipity of what can come to insight in the context specifics of our moments rather than try to fit the cookie cutter ideological certainty of Group Mob Think trying to conform us as robots of the idols of objectivity which in fact get their objectivity dissolved within the plenitude of discourse much like a sugar cube in a body of water.
Aphorism of the Day, December 4, 2016
The biblical writers from their agrarian settings used metaphors about trees and vines. In the phases of plant life with the intentional direction of bearing fruit, there is a pruning phase. Pruning is necessary and inevitable. The biblical writers often find their communities in a "pruning" phase when they are knowing some sharp cuts of seeming loss of once flourishing states of existence. The pruning phase is not all that attractive; but pruning means that there is the intention of future growth and revitalization. The Jesse Tree was actually the highly pruned Jesse Stump of the prophet Isaiah. A stump can be the remnant of a tree left to rot or it can be the source of life for new branches. The prophet Isaiah believe the condition of his people to be in their stump phase, not as an end of the Davidic glory, but as a pruning phase which was the prelude for something glorious to arise because there was still amazing life in the roots of the stump. We should not forget the root of life is the always, already Holy Spirit, invisible and yet continuously sustaining and life giving and ready for new branches to flourish.
Aphorism of the Day, December 3, 2016
The irony of the Advent Jesse Tree is that the Jesse Tree for the Isaian prophet was called the Jesse Stump. One thinks of a stump as a tree on the way to death. One thinks of a stump as the end of something beautiful and leafy and fruit bearing or perhaps useful for the lumber derived in the cutting of the tree. Advent is the time of the stump as the metaphor for significant outward and visible changes in the continuity of institutional life. For the Isaian writer, the Jesse stump referred to what had passed away in the visible glory of Israel. The stump is cherished for the continuous life contained in the roots and its ability to engender new life. A scion or grafted branch can be a different variety of surface and visible manifestation of the root life which previously supported a different visible manifestation. The prophets, John the Baptist and St. Paul, used this metaphor of grafting to explain the end of visible aspects of institutions without denying the continuing divine life of the roots which can bring forth new life in the grafted branches. John the Baptist and Jesus both grew out of the Jesse stump. We need to believe that the root experience of God can ever bring forth new and different kinds of life to adjust to new environments. America and the Episcopal Church are confronted with stumps which we nostalgically still regard to be trees but they are phantom appearances. We need to return to the root life and see what new kind of growth will thrive within the setting of the postmodern world.
Aphorism of the Day, December 2, 2016
John the Baptist is recorded as calling some religious people, a "brood of vipers." The viper is a serpent; the Bible serpent was the original liar and trickster in the Garden of Eden story. John the Baptist, an Advent figure, also said the axe was chopping down the trees which did not bear fruit, even while it was written in Isaiah that the tree of Jesse had become a stump, out of which a branch would grow. Circumstances may reduce institutions to stumps out of which new branches can grow because the roots of the stump are still deeply connected with life, a life that is able to engender new growth. The creative force of God is still present even when institutions have risen to their own incompetence to the point of irrelevance in being beneficial function in the lives of enough people to keep a critical mass of interest alive to perpetuate the specific structures of the dying institutions. Out of the stump of Jesse in the post-Temple world, new synagogue life for the Jews grew and the Jesus Movement grew as a branch into a new tree to adapt the salvation found within the Hebrew Scriptures to the Gentile populace. The post-Temple synagogue "revival" and the Jesus Movement both became new branches out of the stump of Jesse. Christians usually only center upon the Jesus Movement branch. The New Testament writings represent the gradual struggle for the separate identity of the church from the synagogue and the founding words of the Jesus Movement includes words which are harsh critiques of what Christians felt they left and adopted in a direction which would account for the way in which the message of Christ found a hearing among the Gentiles.
Aphorism of the Day, December 1, 2016
December 31st is the last day of our common calendar year though it is the 7th day of Christmas on the Christian calendar. One might note how cultures have "secularized" Lent by moving some of the Lenten intensity to the famous end of the year activity known as the "New Year" resolution. In a New Year resolution a person sets goals for the amendment of one's life behaviors. Ironic how things which are anthropological sound behaviors within the church lose their relevance there for many even while "amendment of life" goals for New Year's resolution are perfectly fine. Amendment of life is a human universal and such intentional goal setting is needed within or outside of the church. So do both; observe a "secular" Lent by having New Year's resolutions and when Lent actually arrives see how you've done and how you can continue the practice of excellence. Intentional resolve towards excellence is good at any time of the year, secular calendar or Christian calendar. Good luck in your resolve!
Aphorism of the Day, December 30, 2016
The Feast of Holy Name celebrates the event of the naming ceremony of Jesus which according to Jewish custom coincided with his circumcision. In popular parlance, baptism is also called "christening." To christen in English means to name, though the actual etymology means to "make Christian," which in fact sums up the baptismal event which includes water baptism and anointing with "chrism" as one is sealed by the Holy Spirit and "marked" as Christ's own forever. In the Episcopal liturgy there has been a change from "Name this child" to a presentation of the child using the child's "Christian" or "first" name. Naming ceremonies are confessional ceremonies signifying the belief that a personal entity can retain the same identity over time even when the "atomic" structure of one's physicality may be in constant renewal and transformation. The "christening" in Christian baptism has a hint of the name of Yesuha/Jesus, meaning the Lord God is our salvation. Christian baptism is a confession that through Christ one believes that the eternal solidity of God can save or preserve or give everlasting health to people so as to attain a continuing singular self-recognizable identity beyond death. In the Holy Name, one aspire to believe in an enduring and continuing identity signified in the act of assigning a name. At death one makes the confession, "I was, therefore I will continue to be in the preserving memory of the memorializing God."
Aphorism of the Day, December 29, 2016
Naming is the ultimate practice of abbreviation. Think of all of the occasions of becoming that are rather reductively reduced to a name. We may think to know someone involves knowing their name but their name is only a faint abbreviation of who they are. Naming is the necessary habit of language; it tries to fix things that are moving. Time means constant motion and change and the conversion of experience in time to its equivalence is impossible. (There is no equivalence to being there while being there). So we have language and naming as our futile effort to "uncomplicate" the fact that we are becoming in time. Language is the production of illusion believing that the experience of the senses can be rendered in words. We as language users need to take the further humble step of actually naming language as the main human occupation even if it is but a life of continuous abbreviation and reduction. The ultimate human reduction in language is the word, "God."
Aphorism of the Day, December 28, 2016
Cultures have naming traditions. Part of the rise of individualism has resulted in the power of the individual expressed as seemingly choosing one's own name or the name of one's child apart from the restrictions of the cultural. There is nothing more powerless than a baby receiving a name since the babe is a person without determining power. The worst of naming power would be a slave owner naming of the slaves. Cultures, families, tribes and clans with naming traditions do not regard their traditions as disempowering the babe but as placing the babe within the overall gift of empowerment which comes through having a group identity. Within empowerment which comes from the group tradition a name can also be the aspiration for the destiny of a child. The tradition of the holy name of Jesus is that his name was God given and that he lived up to the proclamation which his name signified, "God is our salvation." In the holy name of Jesus one finds a confession about God but also a sign in the person of Jesus of how salvation would be instantiated in human experience.
Aphorism of the Day, December 27, 2016
In the rise of hierarchy within human comparison, Jesus was given and bore a "holy" name. The word "holy" designated such a specialness which meant unsurpassable by any other human being. In the general sense of specialness, the sense of unique individuality, everyone is "special" like the claim about each snowflake, viz., each snowflake is unique. Holiness is a specialness which is orientated toward godliness and it refers to how human beings move from holy innocence as babes into holiness as an outcome of knowing good and evil and learning to prevail in the conditions of Freedom which permits both good and evil. By prevail, one might mean how to go beyond good or evil with a sense of the super-good, the supreme Good which in human action and intent involves the continuous habit of overcoming evil with good, and reinforcing good with affirming practice.
Aphorism of the Day, December 26, 2016
We're heading toward January 1, 2017 or the Feast of the Holy Name. As humans with language ability, we name. In the primordial story, first person Adam was given the task of naming all of the animals. This is a really simplistic brilliant way of noting that if Word creates the human world, then the human subject reflects the image of word by being a "Namer." Naming is the way in which humanity differentiates their word experience. Naming is the human effort to try to force identities upon "moving targets." A person is a an accumulation of occasions of becoming in time, a moving subject, who with a name is abstracted from the states of becoming and reduced to a singular word. The name or word is the human way of saying that a subject maintains a unity of being within the changing states of becoming. Yeshua, Jesus was the Holy Name given to the Christ Child. His very name referred beyond his particular earthly identity. It means the "Lord God" is our salvation/preservation. Humanity names the "Lord God" as the ultimate preserver of all identities and values since God as the Greatest and Expanding Container is the Omni-Becomer who preserves all that has previously Become within the Divine Ground of Creative Freedom. To name the Chief Representative of God to humanity, Jesus, means that we confess God to be the one who preserves, ironically, all identities within an overall dynamic of becoming. Holy naming is our task of celebrating unity of identity in the midst of continually changing subjects.
Aphorism of the Day, December 25, 2016
Christmas is a day to differentiate between "secular" humanism and Christian humanism. The "Word" made Flesh or "Incarnation" is a variety of humanism which celebrates the obvious, namely, that anthropomorphism is unavoidable. If we cannot but have human experience we can enshrine that as a counterpart of the old Ptolemaic geocentricism with our own brand of "humanocentricism." After all, if we can only have a human experience of anything, why not enthrone ourselves as those who have been lucky ascenders of the evolutionary convergent impersonal forces to become "persons." Christian humanism does indeed accept our human limitation but within the limitation we value things about what we can perceive as being gifts beyond us and from higher Personality than our own personalities. Higher Personality "tinkered" with the chaotic forces to bring an order, even the order of human personality founded by being inhabited by word ability. In Christian humanism we think it is reasonably faithful to believe that our personality derives from Higher Personality. The story of Jesus in his life and afterlife has given us a revelation of the derivation and the direction of our humanism, and the history of humanity, even "religious" humanity proves that we need creativity in more than science and in our own abilities; we need the Horizon of the Higher Personality to beckon us to include love and justice in the basic pursuit of creative genius.
Aphorism of the Day, December 24, 2016
We with glee participate in the "childification" of Christmas because after all it is about the birth of a baby. Christmas is easier to discuss with children than Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter and so it has taken cultural preference over Easter even though the Christmas story did not really become significant until after the post-resurrection appearances of Christ. As we participate in the cultural excesses of the childification of Christmas, let us not forget the prominence of the "child motif" in the Gospels. Jesus said things were revealed to babes that the wise did not know. He said one had to become like a child to perceive the kingdom of God. He said that one had to be "born again" which could mean that one's second birth is a Sanctified Holy Regression to one's first birth in its original joy and yet unsullied by the process of knowing good and evil that comprises the becoming adult experience. St. Paul said that Christ is "born" in us and that happens because one is over-shadowed by the Holy Spirit. As Christmas is childified by so many secular rituals, let us not forget to access the original blessing of our births. It resides within each person and the original cinders of its flame need to be rekindled as adult cynicism born in the harsh battle between good and evil in the freedom of the world has threatened to extinguish the original innocence. Let us now return to innocence but not in naiveté but in the hard work of holiness. After the freedom of living with all probabilities let us return to our birth as original blessing and hear God say, "It is good, it is very good."
Aphorism of the Day, December 23, 2016
Interaction between people involves having words drawn out of people something like a magnet. We are magnetically, perhaps by human desire, drawn to commit language acts towards each other in a wide variety of ways. When we look at the people who have come to be called in our history, "Great," we can analyze the kinds of language products that have been used to tell how and why such a person was Great. The Christmas Stories, the infancy narratives of Jesus are particular story form ways of how the writers of the Gospel were drawn to commit language products to members of their community as they used existing rhetorical forms in their linguistic environment to wax eloquent about the greatness of Jesus Christ. With insight and intuitions of our own reconstruction of their contexts we can seek to appreciate why they were drawn to write about Christ's greatness in the way in which they did and we can in corresponding ways of our own time be drawn to make the stories of the greatness of Christ live again and in new ways contextually specific to our own lives.
Aphorism of the Day, December 22, 2016
When one grinds coffee beans, the longer the grinder is on the more powdery the beans become and more surfaces are created through which hot water can help to release the taste of the bean. When one reads and study more, each word, "as it were" attains more surfaces and so when one has created more "word" surfaces through reading, reading continually becomes a new and different experience. This means that when there is an effort to communicate same words, they have different meanings for people who have different reading contexts for their vocabularies. A person who has read the entire Western Philosophical tradition, history and most of the holy books and mythologies of all people of faith as well as the founders of modern psychology, sociology and anthropology and then added findings of modern science, such a person reads the biblical words differently than those who do not have the same word contexts into which the biblical words have their signifying possibility and colored moods. So biblical words attain different meanings of truth based upon the context of their "hearing." In this way the experience of the same words can be both truthful and contradictory for different people; they can be truthful meanings in different way. Since context specific means "located" in time, the truth of one context in time using the same word can be different at another moment in time for a person or persons in a different context. One can confess the universal truth of Language as the Container of all meanings even while noting that the experience of individual language products within this great Container can be contradictory.
Aphorism of the Day, December 21, 2016
If we understand the name Emmanuel to be "God with us," then the very notion of God would open the meaning of "us" to mean every human being. It was written within a context to have "us" perhaps refer to a group of people who were feeling oppression during the time of Isaiah. By coming to writing the particular "us" has become a generalized "us." And it is an "us" which transcends our own small contextual us. We have to admit that God is also with the "us" who on the surface of things might be our enemies. When the early followers of Jesus believe Emmanuel to be a title of relevance for Jesus Christ, they had already proclaimed Jesus as relevant to the lives of the Gentiles and so the "us" of Isaiah was generalized to include all Gentiles or all people. What happens when "us" becomes all inclusive? The "them" is eliminated.
Aphorism of the Day, December 20, 2016
The last shall be first. The experience of Jesus Christ in his risen life by the church meant that how Christ appeared to his followers began to give shape to the Christian notion of the messiah. We sometimes just assume the notion was fully developed in Hebrew Scriptures and it was exactly instantiated in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. This far from the case; the Risen Christ redefined the meaning of the Messiah for Christians and so the Hebrew Scripture references to messiah are worn like Christmas ornaments upon the tree of Jesus the Messiah for what he had become for Christians. People who are more interested in enforcing doctrine as precisely formed meaning that the herd must "subscribe" to or be "excommunicated" lose the Spirit of the Messiah which is a luring and beckoning way for many people in many ways to know how God is with them. The notion of the Messiah became instantiated in a new way in the Risen Christ and the notion of the Messiah is still flexibly inviting and friendly today for people to discover their lives touched by the divine.
Aphorism of the Day, December 19, 2016
The most philosophical Christmas Story in the Gospels is not the birth in Bethlehem but the Gospel of John which states that the Word was from the beginning and the Word was with God and the Word was God and the Word became flesh. So Word is what preexists and creates all particular human experience of everything including language users becoming conscious of the fact that it is their use of language which is the preexistent condition for creation of any human life as we know. And to deconstruct this, I must be brutally honest that I am using words to say all of this. So we are on a whirling referential cycle of words continually referring to other words and yet those words attain a concrescence in become flesh or material existence. Material existence may have existence apart from words but without words we could not know it. The Bethlehem story needs to be appraised in its function as qualifying a constellation of words within the overall universe of words.
Aphorism of the Day, December 18, 2016
Reading the Gospels and biblical literature fully clouded by all of the scientific finding that have happened since has meant that people import too much of what has happened since the Gospels were written back into the Gospel writing. This is "natural" because where else can readers be but here and now? It is also like a foreign invasion of people of a later time into the "recreated" straw people that we make of biblical characters. Our questions are not the ones raised and answered in the same way that biblical writers wrote for their readership. Our taken for granted logic and science is vastly different than theirs. What sanguine Bible readers try to do is to translate between the reconstructed paradigms of biblical writers and our own paradigms which govern what we take for granted in our constellation of knowledge.
Aphorism of the Day, December 17, 2016
The Infancy narratives are in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, but not in Mark and John. They represent the heuristics, the inventions of writers who determined using the familiar ethos, pathos, logos criteria of discourse to communicate with their readership. They determined the make up of their readership, they devised the kinds of appeals to the hearts of their readership and they presented the logic of their story. Their audience was familiar with the titles of the Caesar (Bringer of world Peace, Savior, son of god, divine one) and they were familiar with the miraculous birth stories used to legitimize the Caesar's greatness=August nature. They were also aware of the templates of the Messiah from Hebrew Scriptures and so the infancy narrative discourses plumbed the familiar word and story "vocabularies" of their readership to present the uniqueness of Jesus Christ. All the while, they also hid the mystagogy of the early church within the Gospels as spiritual manuals for an exclusive readership, the ones who knew that Christ had been born within them when their lives had by overshadowed by the Holy Spirit. One can only applaud the inspired rhetorical achievement of the Gospels within their original settings.
Aphorism of the Day, December 16, 2016
Who can avoid interpreting God, revelation and holy books? Even if one says something is self-evidential or obvious it still involves human interpretation. Interpretation can only be inexact and partial. The best that we can say is that interpretations which become established within a community which agrees about interpretations, then such interpretations become "infallibly" adequate for the sustaining the unity of that community until more infallibly adequate interpretations come to prevail for the functional success of the community. Infallibility is a function of the community which accepts it as a designation for the preferred method of a standardized unity even while all members may not really be in agreement with the specifics of how anything is interpreted. Infallibility is a functional designation to give force to community cohesion. Scientific paradigms do not need to declare "infallibility" about their theories; their theories reign with functional significance even as the specifics of the functional significance can change overtime. In science one can be honest about the changing functional significance of a theory since everything is always open to falsification in the future. The height of delusion is for anyone to assume to have the "final" interpretation on anything or to presume to be a final oracle on anything, but particularly the plenitude of God. By the very definition of God, God would always be more than the progressive knowledge and the interpretations of God which come to language. About God and scientific truth, it is equally true that "More can be said," since both still have a future within human experience meditated by human language.
Aphorism of the Day, December 15, 2016
All writing if it is continued to be read dies a death after it is written. It dies the death of time in originating in a time that is no more after it is written. The life of a written text is based upon how it get used in its future and a text gets reused and misread over and over again because the original context is lost. When the original setting is lost, what remains are the words and the words have embedded within them universal transhistorical traces which can be re-interpreted into new context. Immanuel was a name which derived in an Isaian situation and many years later other readers of Isaiah applied this name to another person, Jesus of Nazareth as a way to express the significance of who Jesus had become in the early church. One can say that all past language predicts all future language because word bears within its very usage by users the possibility of the eternal return of meanings, not exact same meanings, but the reworked traces of former meanings.
Aphorism of the Day, December 14, 2016
"Emmanuel" or God with us was to be the name of a child born in the time of Isaiah. Much has been made out of this Isaian reference about this child to be named "Emmanuel." It became for Gospel writers one of the names of Jesus since in their method of interpretation the template of Hebrew Scriptures provided the predicative referential framework for speaking about the significance that Jesus came to have in the house churches spreading through the cities of the Roman Empire faster than Starbucks franchises. There is not a little irony in "God with us" because of the meaning of "us." In the fullest sense "us" means all of humanity, though that is not probably what it meant in the Isaian context. "God with us" has been claimed by Christians fighting each others in all sorts of battles both ideological and also with the weapons of war. Every theist presumes to have "God with us" as somewhat of a personal "possession." God being with all and God being with me and mine is the continuum between and the general and the particular. And the generalized "God with us," with humanity as a whole ends up deconstructing "God with us as church, communion, country, tribe, clan, parish, family, person since we are the contained and not the Container in the grand scheme of things. God as the Container of All has no external environment to the Divine Self; as the contained we have environment and so we end up making everything "relative" to our location. In the greater environment, our "relativity" gets deconstructed.
Aphorism of the Day, December 13, 2016
How does the past "predict" the future? Humanity get all excited about Nostradamus-type prediction even if like the daily horoscopes the mind is clever enough to project how one interprets one's current life as fitting the "predictions" of the horoscope. We exist upon a reservoir of language and our particular language base within a cultural tradition upholds us with access to particular word habits which predict how we are going to describe current events. When something great happens in the present, we use the traditions of greatness of the past, to speak about current greatness. Past greatness predicts future greatness since the superlative is a category of human language and when the superlative is articulated it will be like the superlative in the past and it will seem "predictive" because a group of people have a Yogi Berra experience of it's like "Deja vu all over again." We would rather believe in specific clairvoyance rather than the general eternal return of the same when past language structuring will continue to restructure what comes to language in the future in a like manner because we like to think current greatness compares favorably with past greatness.
Aphorism of the Day, December 12, 2016
Isaiah wrote about a sign being a young woman with child and this child will be called "Emmanuel" meaning "God is with us." There is something rather generic about this in that many parents who have had a child have felt the child to be such a special gift as to be able to declare that indeed "God is with us" in the birth of the child. St. Paul, long before the birth narratives of Jesus were written, spoke about the spiritual birth of "Christ in you, the hope of glory." How did Christ become in one? One was over-shadowed by the Holy Spirit, essentially fathered and mothered by the Holy Spirit. One can see how this Christian reality of being made aware of one being a child of God in the event of spiritual awakening could be coded in the birth narratives of Jesus as the mystagogy of the early church. The Christmas story is cryptic mysticism and it can ruined by literalism even as literalism is a very attractive "primary naivete" to live in.
Aphorism of the Day, December 11, 2016
As human beings we sometimes use religion and science to pit specific human language capacity against the other even if this denies the human language capacity to deploy many discursive practices of language. What is the discursive practice of language which is occurring in the continuous "day-dreaming" going on within a person? Such language products rarely are brought to conscious life even though they perhaps consist of the creative abstractions which help us solve problems even while providing entertainment and relief in the midst of the tedium of life. Such day-dreaming and imaginations which manifest themselves in "interior" language are true even if they don't attain the same "external" visible verification in actual events of spoken or written word or acted out deed. The Bible uses multivalent discourse, some of which is naïve realism about events which could have been empirically verified. It also contains language of inspiration which is more of the nature of "day-dream" language. This kind of language is equally true as the language which pertains to what could be "empirically verified" since it makes no sense to say that one human way of using language is intrinsically superior to another human way of using language. The problems comes when people interpret dream language as empirically verifiable referential language. Language use in both production and interpretation is validated by the pragmatic function of a language event in being insightful. What needs to be said is that many adult religious people still treat much of the biblical language in childish, and not child-like ways. Childish language use occurs when poetic imagination is treated as the empirically verifiable. Child-like language use as an adult is when an adult can be unafraid to use poetic imagination to express wonder at Plenitude.
Aphorism of the Day, December 10, 2016
Christians treat "Gospel" as though it originated with them. It was in fact taken from the Hebrew Scriptures. Jesus used the Hebrew word "basar" or "good news" to characterize the essence of his mission. An aspect of the Messiah as understood from the prophet Isaiah was that there would be one who was "divinized" by having the Spirit of the Lord be upon such a Messiah. For what purpose? To proclaim good news to the poor, release the prisoner, comfort the afflicted and liberate the captive. When John the Baptist and his "followers" had doubts about Jesus, the response was to let them know that in the ministry and mission of the Isaian messianic prerogatives were being fulfilled in Jesus. Sometimes we treat all of the later definitions of Messiah as having been final in the times when the notion was still in fluid development.
Aphorism of the Day, December 9, 2016
The Enlightenment and modern science dethroned God as center of the intellectual universe and placed Reason there. Reason became accessible by the Cartesian transcendental subject who "thinks, therefore he or she is." Science dethroned theology as the "queen" of the sciences. In order to be credible biblical literature had to be paraded as recounting events that all could be "empirically" verifiable. This contortion of presentation has resulted in scientists discounting religious people as weak minded mythologists and religious people feverishly trying to prove to scientists and to themselves that all of the stuff of the Bible was and happened in empirically verifiable ways. And so we have the situation where the heads of the congressional science committee believe that the world is only a few thousand years old because that's what the "Bible says." The false stand off between Bible reading and science is quite easily resolved by embracing the fact that both parties are using words and language. Word and language embody universal recurring experiences of humanity dressed up in the particular details of the prevalent cultures. Word and language have created human beings in discursive ways and with many nuances of how the ways of being human are translated into language products. Science creates language products which have functional and pragmatic uses for humans; modernity seems to prefer the pragmatic results of science even while denying the relevance of the discourses found in the Bible. Persons who have come to privilege science over biblical relevance for the most part have allowed the discursive aspects that once was engaged by biblical writings to now be nourished in the plethora of other kinds of literature and within the cinematic and cyber by-products of language. Scientific people now just interact and embrace the "universal themes embedded in biblical writings" in non-biblical formats. Narrow biblicists decry such secularity when they should be those sewing the correspondences between universal biblical themes together with how those universal themes are present always already in modern and post-modern culture. Biblicists have chosen to be cloistered and irrelevant to anyone except those who want to escape and live within the cloister of those who pretend that everything written in the Bible is and was "empirically verified and comports to the scientific method."
Aphorism of the Day, December 8, 2016
One could say that modern science brought about changes in how the Bible was read. Modern science caused a reappraisal of myth. Myth in New Testament era was used in the pejorative if it referred to non-Christian or non-Hebraic topics within the Greco-Roman traditions. Modern science brought about modern historicism when the empirical verification insights were applied to the past, namely, that a uniformity of natural causes in a closed system pertained in New Testament times in the same ways as they do now. Some Christian apologists who embraced the truth of empiricism decided that everything in the Bible had to be defended as "could have been empirically verifiable" in order to be "true." They did this even though they conveniently ignored the notion that something had to be able to be replicated and tested in order to be a "true" theory. Things like walking on water, virgin births and resurrection tended to be "one-time unique" events with the scientific verification being that they "might" happen again in the future and therefore they cannot be diminished in having "scientific" truth status.
Aphorism of the Day, December 7, 2016
The book of Isaiah is a book with lots of visions of a much better world, even a world of perfect harmony. Such utopian visions function as invitations to become better than we are now or for the oppressed, they function as rhetorical analgesics. The words hit the memory places in the brain which retain original innocence and activate soothing effects in very unsoothing times. Such visions are given to wish away the cruel wound of freedom which includes the outcome of the powerful not caring for the weak but exploiting them. The cruel wound of freedom is the freedom for things to go wrong for lots of people. Visions of utopia spin a return to innocence when there is the total lack of awareness of good or evil. Utopian views pretend a state of innocence and pretend to heal permanently the wound of freedom in time. But the state of automatic innocence is but the parallel memorial state accessible to all because all were once infants and children who were yet unaware of the meaning and value of the great wound in freedom, namely that bad things can and do happen. This is an unavoidable outcome of true freedom. The conditions of freedom do not falsify the rhetorical function of utopian vision as long as one realizes that the Ground of Freedom is greater than the visions of utopia.
Aphorism of the Day, December 6, 2016
The oracle words of Jesus which arose in the early church and were written in the Gospels are sometimes rather enigmatic and baffling, but as a wisdom teacher his words were meant to baffle the logical mind to think beyond. Baffling words? The least in the kingdom of heaven are greater than John the Baptist? The first shall be last and the last first? Huh? When something is written or said in the present, it is always the latter or latest day in time. This means that the one with the last word is always the first in determining meanings of all that came before. Even when we try to be "true to the history of things as they were" we are doing it from our selective perspective now and so our last word makes it first in explicating the meanings of what went before. This also highlights the fact that we think we have "insider" information about past because we actually know what happened. The Gospel writers knew what happened and from the success of the Jesus Movement into the churches in the cities throughout the Roman world, they wrote the meanings of the life of Jesus and the life of John the Baptist. And now I have claimed a first while being last, since I am now writing about the meanings and intentions of the Gospel writers. So it's not so baffling after all; it's quite unavoidable.
Aphorism of the Day, December 5, 2016
Visions of utopia, words about the end of life as we know it, presentations of a an intervening super-hero Messiah or Son of Man are included in the Bible lectionary for Advent. Be patient, prepare and rejoice are the commands of Advent. We swim in a universe of Christian teaching discourse and we hope to find in the ocean of discourse rafts of insights to help us survive for some moments within the plenitude of all possible discourse which is always present. It might be wise to accept the exciting serendipity of what can come to insight in the context specifics of our moments rather than try to fit the cookie cutter ideological certainty of Group Mob Think trying to conform us as robots of the idols of objectivity which in fact get their objectivity dissolved within the plenitude of discourse much like a sugar cube in a body of water.
Aphorism of the Day, December 4, 2016
The biblical writers from their agrarian settings used metaphors about trees and vines. In the phases of plant life with the intentional direction of bearing fruit, there is a pruning phase. Pruning is necessary and inevitable. The biblical writers often find their communities in a "pruning" phase when they are knowing some sharp cuts of seeming loss of once flourishing states of existence. The pruning phase is not all that attractive; but pruning means that there is the intention of future growth and revitalization. The Jesse Tree was actually the highly pruned Jesse Stump of the prophet Isaiah. A stump can be the remnant of a tree left to rot or it can be the source of life for new branches. The prophet Isaiah believe the condition of his people to be in their stump phase, not as an end of the Davidic glory, but as a pruning phase which was the prelude for something glorious to arise because there was still amazing life in the roots of the stump. We should not forget the root of life is the always, already Holy Spirit, invisible and yet continuously sustaining and life giving and ready for new branches to flourish.
Aphorism of the Day, December 3, 2016
The irony of the Advent Jesse Tree is that the Jesse Tree for the Isaian prophet was called the Jesse Stump. One thinks of a stump as a tree on the way to death. One thinks of a stump as the end of something beautiful and leafy and fruit bearing or perhaps useful for the lumber derived in the cutting of the tree. Advent is the time of the stump as the metaphor for significant outward and visible changes in the continuity of institutional life. For the Isaian writer, the Jesse stump referred to what had passed away in the visible glory of Israel. The stump is cherished for the continuous life contained in the roots and its ability to engender new life. A scion or grafted branch can be a different variety of surface and visible manifestation of the root life which previously supported a different visible manifestation. The prophets, John the Baptist and St. Paul, used this metaphor of grafting to explain the end of visible aspects of institutions without denying the continuing divine life of the roots which can bring forth new life in the grafted branches. John the Baptist and Jesus both grew out of the Jesse stump. We need to believe that the root experience of God can ever bring forth new and different kinds of life to adjust to new environments. America and the Episcopal Church are confronted with stumps which we nostalgically still regard to be trees but they are phantom appearances. We need to return to the root life and see what new kind of growth will thrive within the setting of the postmodern world.
Aphorism of the Day, December 2, 2016
John the Baptist is recorded as calling some religious people, a "brood of vipers." The viper is a serpent; the Bible serpent was the original liar and trickster in the Garden of Eden story. John the Baptist, an Advent figure, also said the axe was chopping down the trees which did not bear fruit, even while it was written in Isaiah that the tree of Jesse had become a stump, out of which a branch would grow. Circumstances may reduce institutions to stumps out of which new branches can grow because the roots of the stump are still deeply connected with life, a life that is able to engender new growth. The creative force of God is still present even when institutions have risen to their own incompetence to the point of irrelevance in being beneficial function in the lives of enough people to keep a critical mass of interest alive to perpetuate the specific structures of the dying institutions. Out of the stump of Jesse in the post-Temple world, new synagogue life for the Jews grew and the Jesus Movement grew as a branch into a new tree to adapt the salvation found within the Hebrew Scriptures to the Gentile populace. The post-Temple synagogue "revival" and the Jesus Movement both became new branches out of the stump of Jesse. Christians usually only center upon the Jesus Movement branch. The New Testament writings represent the gradual struggle for the separate identity of the church from the synagogue and the founding words of the Jesus Movement includes words which are harsh critiques of what Christians felt they left and adopted in a direction which would account for the way in which the message of Christ found a hearing among the Gentiles.
Aphorism of the Day, December 1, 2016
The Gospels present "many" Pharisees and Sadducees coming to be baptized by John the Baptist and he is offended by their hypocrisy. He viewed them as simply adding his baptism to their collection of ritual purity acts on their resumes. The purpose of his baptism was to be the outward sign of an interior life changing repentance. For the Gospel writers, the Pharisees, Sadducees and John the Baptist were set in contrast to what was happening in the post-Pentecost church, i.e. baptism of the Holy Spirit. This was an interior cleansing of the heart, a renewal of a Right Spirit. The nascent Jesus movement was more about interior life changing grace than it was about the outer sign of one's religious party identity. On the continuum between the group identity and the individual identity, reform movements without institutional trappings emphasize the interior life of the individual. Reform movements go "outside of the institutions" while parasitically borrowing the vocabulary of the former institutions and re-valuing the theological concepts within a new paradigm. Same words, different meanings. Messiah meant something different for the Pharisees and the Sadducees than it did for Christians who took the word and understood it quite differently.
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