Aphorism of the Day, March 31, 2017
One should not miss the textual fact that women in the Gospel of John receive privileged revelation in direct conversation with Jesus. To the Samaritan women at the well he said, "I am he, the Messiah." To Martha/Mary of Bethany: "I am Resurrection and Life." And to Mary Magdalene the first witness of the resurrection: "Go tell my brothers.." It might make one ponder why women in the intervening years were erased from leadership roles within the church. Authority derives from encounters with Christ; this is the charismatic event which should guide the "office" of ministry. The signs of the "office" without the charismatic encounter can mean official ministry without effective or engaging ministry.
Aphorism of the Day, March 30, 2017
The coming back to life of Lazarus who has to then die again begs a contrast of this kind of resuscitation with the kind of "coming back to life" that is proclaimed about Jesus. The issue is complicated since the same Greek word is used both for what happened to Lazarus and what is confessed about Jesus. The resurrection body of Jesus was different from the resuscitated body of Lazarus. We moderns may be motivated by our scientific proclivities which did not trouble the early writers imbued by mystical experiences regarded to be so genuine and impactful in their lives that they had a equality of true meaning with the perceptual empirically verifiable experience. (See doubting Thomas periscope) Gospel mystic writers believed mystical experience was as "really real" as the eye-witness empirical verification. We on this side of modern science tend to privilege the "truth meaning" of empirical verification because it would assume an openness to all and not be foreclosed to the unique incidence of an individual mystical experience. Lots of Christians had individual mystical experiences of the "Risen Christ" and the experiences were not corporate experience but they were corporate in the interpretative language which was available to them which enabled them to describe their individual experience. The experiences were individually unique while the interpretations of the experience were provided by the community.
Aphorism of the Day, March 29, 2107
John's Gospel is identified by the "ego eimai" εγω ειμαι declarations of Jesus. "ego eimai" is Greek for "I am." There are eight "I am" statements in the Gospel of John. "I am" is an affirmation of existence and it is followed by an equivalence tautology. I am resurrection and life. John's Gospel begins by declaring the beginning of human life as we know it as Word, which was with God, which was God and became flesh in Jesus Christ. Jesus said that his words were spirit and life. In John's Gospel Jesus speaks his personal existence into being in the life of the church. In the poetry of the church, Jesus is way, truth, life, resurrection, good shepherd, gate of the sheep, light of the world, living bread from heaven and even the "I am" who was before Abraham. The printed words of Jesus only have sense when one assumes the entire Worded universe. In John's Gospel there are individual words which only have significance because the entire human universe is essentially a "worded one" since that is the only one we know and having words is the only way we can know that we know.
Aphorism of the Day, March 28, 2017
Blaming the absence of Christ. "Lord if you had been here my brother would not have died." It is sometimes a hard adjustment to reconcile one's belief in Christ and the hard reality of the outcomes of freedom in time, like illness and death. If we think belief in Christ exempts us from probable occurrences in time, we may be asking for an exemption that Jesus did not have for himself.
Aphorism of the Day, March 27, 2017
In the Gospel of John, physicality or naïve realism or commonsense reality is used as a metaphor for substantial experience. Nicodemus was supposed to be "born" again. People were to partake of living water and living bread and actually eat the flesh and drink the blood of Jesus. The writer of John's Gospel repeated mocks the characters in the story who take things so literally, i.e., just the physical sense of something happening as being real while denying or being unaware of the substantiality of an inner spiritual event which really changes one's life. The death of Lazarus and his being called back to life fits in consistently with "physicality" being used as a profoundly expressive metaphor to highlight what it really feels like to be called to spiritual life from the state of spiritual death.
Aphorism of the Day, March 26, 2107
"Again" is the adverb denoting repetition. Repetition means that present action shares something of what has been done in the past and yet since it represents an action later in time it is totally new. Something done for the first time and not repeated will never need the word "again" until the action is done for the second time. Routine actions are done again and again and while they may seem to the same each time, there is a slow accrual of difference based upon the context of the subsequent event. The Gospel of John uses "again" as a metaphor for the spiritual seeing which parallel the physical counterpart. Born and born again. Seeing again refers to spiritual sight. Life can be fresh "again" as the interior lives are reconstituted by word and spirit.
Aphorism of the March 25, 2017
According to the Samuel the Judge when selecting a successor to King Saul, he was told that humanity looks at outer appearance but the Lord looks at the heart. How does one have these "X-ray eyes" to see within? The Gospel of John is all about having these "X-ray eyes" to see things about God that others don't see. How does one receive this kind of "X-ray sight?" By being born from above and receiving the Spirit of God.
Aphorism of the Day, March 24, 2017
People who use the phrase "born again" often limit the phrase. "Again" is an important adverb since it cites what is central to human life, namely, the repetition of actions over and over again. Born again sometimes refers to a one time event of a spiritual rebirth but that places a limit upon the metaphor. Conversion should be continuous and one should never stop being born into new knowledge and insights about God and life. We are going to do things "again" today and while they may seem to be but the repetitive trace of what has been done before, we should appreciate the newness in time of what we do again and so bring an intentional new quality to what we do "again."
Aphorism of the Day, March 23, 2017
As much as we strive for agreement in science for having a common way of agreeing about what is seen outside of us and agreeing upon how nature behaves, the way we see is determined by how our internal lives are constituted by the language of this interior and parallel life. Our language constituted insides is our spirit and our life and determines the way in which we see. Our interior lives can become re-constituted through interaction with new word influences in such a way that we become converted to see things anew. Former states of seeing become regarded to be blindness in contrast to the new ways in which we come to see things. This is the sight and blindness model found in the Gospel of John to account for why some people found Jesus to be the telling insight of their lives and why some found him to be one to oppose because he was "over-throwing" a familiar way of seeing the world.
Aphorism of the Day, March 22, 2017
The Gospel of John treats the outward and visible life as a metaphor for an inward and spiritual life. One can be born from above, walk again in Jesus as the Way, see again, live again after death, believe again after doubt, eat living bread, be quenched by living water, and restored to pastoral ministry after denying Christ. The physical world and ordinary passages of life are but the vehicle for the spiritual in the Gospel of John.
Aphorism of the Day, March 21, 2017
What is most literal about the Gospels is that they are literal about being non-literal in their interpretation and appropriation of the theological symbolic order of Judaism. St. Irenaeus said one was suppose to prefer a "plain reading" of Scripture. But the most "plain" reading of "I am the gate of the sheep," is in fact an appreciation of metaphors that are quite distant from "empirical verification." Even the seeming plain narrative of the life of Jesus in the Gospel is a metaphorical reading encoding the practices of the early Christian churches who trace the origins of their practices to the root event of Christianity, the life of Jesus. All of the Gospel writing is but variations in metaphorical discourses. So the Gospel should be read in a literary and artistic way and not in a journalistic literal way.
Aphorism of the Day, March 20, 2017
The writers of the Gospel of John looked for answer as to why people could resist the otherwise irresistible truth of the Gospel. Why do people disagree with us by benignly ignoring the relevance of our good news for them or by actively, even violently opposing us as a mortal threat to their way of existence? One can see the Kuhnian notion of people living in different paradigms as a way for accounting to the fact that people "see" things quite differently even to the point of characterizing another person as being "blind" to one's truth. The Gospel of John uses "sight" and "blindness," "light" and "darkness" to account for irreconcilable differences and incommensurable world views.
Aphorism of the Day, March 19, 2017
Jesus promised the Samaritan woman "living water." Baptism and the immersion in mikvah were supposed to be done in "living water" such as a river or spring, signifying their direct connection with divine creation. The "living water" which Jesus promised was an inward baptism so that one could worship in "Spirit" and in truth. Jesus told Nicodemus he had to be born of water and the Spirit. He told the Samaritan woman that he could provide living water within her life to help her worship in Spirit and truth. This is that answer to the perpetual prayer request: "Create in me a clean heart, O God and renew a right spirit within me."
Aphorism of the Day, March 18, 2017
The non-literal New Testament writers co-opted the symbolism of Judaism and "spiritualized" them. The church was the new "Israel" (how could anyone who remained in the synagogue accept this?). The meeting between Jesus and the Samaritan woman is an origin discourse for the Jesus Movement in Samaria and since Samaritans were the offspring of the divided Northern Kingdom, the New Testament writers were announcing the reunification of the two divided kingdoms in the New Israel, the church. One needs to appreciate the "creative" interpretation going on here.
Aphorism of the Day, March 17, 2017
In analysis of how the meanings of words attach in approximation to empirical verification, one can note that John's Gospel move such approximations to quite a "poetic" distance. The Gospels presents the Christ acts and words as "Signs." The semiotic switch in the Gospel of John makes elements like wine, light, water, bread, flesh, blood, sight, blindness, death, life, being lame, gate, vine, birth, shepherd and storm on the sea into poetic metaphors quite a distance in verisimilitude from the actual empirical signification of the words themselves. One can note that the author of John's Gospel is quite comfortable with the notion that Word creates the reality of human experience and all of the nuances therein. Word creates the very notion of "physicality" in the Gospel of John whereas in the other Gospels one can still sense that their authors believe that outer physical world determines the world of words. This has been overturned in the "advanced" Word metaphysics of John's Gospel. Birth from above means one lives in a realm of "word reality" in different way than commonsensical "naïve" reality.
Aphorism of the Day, March 16, 2017
The recorded insults of the opponents of Jesus in the Gospels include being in league with the devil, being mad and being a Samaritan. Could be that Jesus and the Jesus Movement was a "Samaritan sympathizing" movement in that followers of Jesus befriended members of the Torah-based Samaritan faith whose members also had expectations of a messiah. The living water discourse of Jesus with Samaritan woman at the well represents evidence of a Samaritan/Jesus Movement rapprochement.
Aphorism of the Day, March 15, 2017
John's Gospel begins with the creating Word. The creating Word in John is able to show how the signs of God are able to convert one to awareness of an alternate linguistic universe that one is born into and in this alternate universe one drinks living water and eats living bread and Jesus as this new word universe is Way, Truth, Life and Messiah and I Am, and Gate, Vine, Good Shepherd, Light, Truth, Resurrection, Life, Healer, Calmer of the sea, Alchemist of water to wine, Gospel text and much more. The creating Word of John reveals that anything human can only be so because it comes to word. Word in John is revealed to be the only valid human metaphysics and because of Word, humans name God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit. That we have Word is the precursor to the confession of what is extra-linguistic and so Word is co-extensive with everything including the consciousness of humanity being word users.
Aphorism of the Day, March 14, 2017
One can understand the scientific frustration with "biblical poetic discourse" when metaphors of equivalency can seem to be on "steroids" and seem to lose all connection with empirical verification. In John, Christ is Word and the words of Jesus are spirit and truth and God is spirit and must be worshiped in spirit and in truth. One can see the trouble that the empiricist might have in wanting "exact" language that can gain community objectivity wider than a group of people using poetic words of faith. On the other hand, the answer is rather obvious; don't limit language and fail to appreciate contextual use. Let your science be science and let your poetry be poetry and don't confuse the two and don't limit the valid truth values of either. The two can have overlapping interaction, as when actual aesthetic, "spiritual," poetic truths move and guide that actual body language(empirically observable) of a person in morals and ethics.
Aphorism of the Day, March 13, 2017
An underlying dynamic of the learning process presented in the Gospel of John is a transformation in understanding discursive practices. Disciples and interlocutors of Jesus are presented as being crassly literal about everything and do not have the discursive insight which comes from being "born from above" to embrace the transformative meanings derived from the appreciation of an entire range of metaphors for the meaning of the life of Jesus presented within the Gospel discipleship manual of the community that has come to have the name of John assigned to its Gospel.
Aphorism of the Day, March 12, 2017
Evangelical means something different today than it meant in the early Jesus Movement. Evangelical means sharing the Good News of Christ. Nascent Christianity was essentially evangelical because it was good news for a wider audience than the audience of the synagogue members who observed ritual purity. It was an alternate theology to Roman citizens who had a smorgasbord of divinity choices and who knew the effects of the chief practical god of their everyday lives, namely, the Caesar and his political presence everywhere. Evangelism in this context meant that Christians and their message was adaptive and winsome in the interstitial personal spaces of private lives and political context.
Aphorism of the Day, March 11, 2017
In a Monty Python satire, a vicar in the pulpit declares, "My text for today is: "My brother Esau is an hairy man but I am a smooth man."" Part of the satire points out that we read the Bible selectively privileging certain portions and certain verses because they represent key features of our own group identity. There are too many biblical words to give each word the same complete "inspirational" status. For fundamental Evangelical Christians, they privilege John 3:16 as a verse of their identity and it is found in the same discourse which trumpets another marker of their identity: Ye must be born again. Does the editorial selection of what is read from the Bible expose the fact that not everything in the Bible is regarded equally? When is the last time you heard a sermon preached on the verse in Song of Solomon, "We have a little sister and she has no breasts?" Such satires work because of the uneven way in which people regard various portions of the Bible. One should not be too proud of how one regards biblical inspiration, especially if one has both purported it is all inspired and each word has equal inspiration in one's daily application. Inspiration may have to do with the always already potential sublime effects of the biblical texts.
Aphorism of the Day, March 10, 2017
The biblical record involves a posthumous theological deliberation on people in the past. Abraham was a pre-historic, patriarch who fulfills an important role in establishing the coming to "self identity" of the covenantal people of Israel. But much, much later Abraham becomes for Paul, the pre-Mosaic person who had a valid relationship with God before the Mosaic law existed. Therefore if people could have valid faith before the Mosaic law and before covenantal relationship had become limited to keeping the Mosaic law within a community, then the Gentiles could be seen like Abraham; they could have valid faith without the benefit of living under the conditions of the Mosaic law within a segregated Mosaic community. Abraham was "used" by Paul as a way to tie the Gentiles in with how Paul needed to understand Gentile Christianity in continuity with his "Mosaic" of "pre-Mosaic" roots.
Aphorism of the Day, March 9, 2017
The writer of John's Gospel presents Jesus as challenging the unenlightened who see things with a literal mind. Nicodemus asks how he can get back into his mother's womb. The disciples say that if Lazarus is sleeping, it is good. The Samaritan woman at the well has a mind set on actual water. The seeing religious folk ask they are blind. Jesus is not literally a shepherd, a gate, way, life, vine and light. Disciples appear to be offended at the horrendous thought of eating flesh and drinking blood. John's Gospel is about the "mysticality" of Word. Word is Spirit and Word is Life. Having word and language is the essence of human life. That language is able to use physicality as its metaphor is also one of the magic effects of language. As much as we trust an objectivity of the observations of our senses, such observations are both pre-constituted and post-constituted in word and language. The Gospel of John mocks people who are trapped in the discursive habit of "physicality" being the only valid and true presentation of language. Word and language are metaphorical in being and so being essentially metaphorical, word and language cannot help but spin endless metaphor. John's Gospel asks us not to favor the metaphorical discourse of empirical physicality over the variety of discourses in language including the poetic. The language of faith and love forces us to wax poetic beyond being limited to the metaphor of physicality. Since seeing with our eyes is a most commonsensical discourse (based on our ability to manipulate things in our outer world), in a comparative sense, such physicality is used to reinforce the reality/realness/actuality of other discursive truths, namely the aesthetic "moving" truths.
Aphorism of the Day, March 8, 2017
The last shall be first. This ironic statement found in the Gospel is hermeneutically true since the last or latest one who interprets anything actually creates the meaning of what happened in the past for the present. St. Paul exalted the more obscure Abrahamic tradition to rewrite Gentiles into a spiritual lineage which pre-dated those who had inherited the Mosaic law. When it comes to the Bible or to the U.S. Constitution, the latest interpreters are always reconstructionists since they make it serve their own current political needs. We build our own view of the past and use the designation of antiquity to say, "See my tradition is longer and therefore more venerable than yours; ergo you must agree with my views." We should be very humble about being the last or latest interpreter since very shortly we will be used to justify other people in the position of the latest.
Aphorism of the Day, March 7, 2017
Sometimes the religious discussion about faith and works seem to be like a dog chasing its own tail. We are told that by our works we cannot make ourselves "acceptable" to God and yet we have the words of Jesus which say belief or having faith in Jesus Christ is the work of life. And so some religious people purport to be better in their work of believing in Jesus than others. It is like congratulating oneself for being wise to take a gift and forgetting about the generosity of the Giver. It might be that the work of belief has to do with the continual effort in time not to accept the habits of the inner sense of alienation from living and having our being in God. We can easily become so locked into egocentric and ethnocentric limitation we act as though the divine Ground is so negligible as to be absent in its relevance to our lives. Accepting the Risen Christ nature within us means that we work to acknowledge our connectedness with the Plenitude of the Divine Environment.
Aphorism of the Day, March 6, 2017
One might re-appropriate the Gospel of John as a "deconstructive post-modern" Gospel in that the physical creation story of Genesis is re-visited as a linguistic creation of the world since awareness only happens because of Word and the derivative languages. In John words are "spirit and life" and making word equivalent to spirit reveals the fact that words are invisible mystifications of interior states of human being. Within worded beings, who are created by the Word, the Gospel of John also shows that one is re-born by Spirit-word to continuously be converted to the wider contexts humans can have as they explore the endless discursive realms of words. Remember we have to use words even to talk about what we think generates words, such as "mind" or "consciousness" or even the science of the places in the brain responsible for "language." We use words even to create the origin of words. Words about words perhaps is the only valid circular argument because it is unavoidable.
Aphorism of the Day, March 5, 2017
Opponents of Jesus said that his great works were achieved because he was in league with the devil. The temptation of Jesus presented his resistance to Satan and the asserted his perfect agency as God on behalf of God within the human situation. Jesus is God's bilingual expression in humanity uniting the mystery of God with what can knowably come to human word in personal manifestation. Jesus as eternal word used his words to defeat the shadowy Satan at the horizon of consciousness. The shadow of evil still lies at the edge of consciousness waiting as a possibility to tempt human agents to make it actual. Following Jesus, we must resist and keep evil in its shadow form and not let it become actual in the agency of our lives.
Aphorism of the Day, March 4, 2017
It could be that temptation and the valuing behaviors designating sin arise in the training liminal phase of moving from infant/child sense of time to the sense of time as chronological sequence of occasions or events which adults are attempting to give children orientation into. When time as sequence of events results in comparative judgments as something bad or good or better and worse, people are vulnerable to the main issue of temptation, namely, the timing and frequency of human behaviors. Learning proper timing is expressed in the famous verses of Ecclesiastes: there is a time and purpose for everything under heaven. Wisdom faith is about finding "Kairos" timing or purposeful timing for doing everything in life. Temptation involves possible choices set before us to mistime what we do in both when we do something and frequency (how many times we do something). It may be fine to drink an alcoholic beverage at the right time. We may be tempted to drink at the wrong time and the wrong frequency or repetitions. Temptation is about mistiming in the choices before us that instigate the actions we end up performing.
Aphorism of the Day, March 3, 2017
Satan asked Jesus to cast himself down from a high place to prove his faith that God's angels would catch him. And he quoted a Psalm as a text to support his suggestion. There are several elements to this temptation. Mistiming: Die before your appointed time. Literalism: Take the Scriptures literally and not metaphorically. Anti-natural laws: Belief in God allows one to defy gravity and its effects. All of these temptations still occur for people today and to fall for these tricks makes religious folks often look very silly.
Aphorism of the Day, March 2, 2017
Temptation involves being thrown off in our timing of what, when and where we should do certain things in our life. Fasting as a religious discipline is a corrective measure for interdicting mistimed behaviors in our lives and reasserting a true freedom of self-control.
Aphorism of the Day, March 1, 2017
If we are supposed to be perfect as the Father in heaven is perfect, then we are assigned the perpetual state of being "less than God" as the state of sin. And if sin means perpetually shooting the arrows of our mind, soul and strength toward an unreachable perfection, what is important is that we are shooting the arrows of our intentional words, deeds and thoughts in the right direction toward the right target.
One should not miss the textual fact that women in the Gospel of John receive privileged revelation in direct conversation with Jesus. To the Samaritan women at the well he said, "I am he, the Messiah." To Martha/Mary of Bethany: "I am Resurrection and Life." And to Mary Magdalene the first witness of the resurrection: "Go tell my brothers.." It might make one ponder why women in the intervening years were erased from leadership roles within the church. Authority derives from encounters with Christ; this is the charismatic event which should guide the "office" of ministry. The signs of the "office" without the charismatic encounter can mean official ministry without effective or engaging ministry.
Aphorism of the Day, March 30, 2017
The coming back to life of Lazarus who has to then die again begs a contrast of this kind of resuscitation with the kind of "coming back to life" that is proclaimed about Jesus. The issue is complicated since the same Greek word is used both for what happened to Lazarus and what is confessed about Jesus. The resurrection body of Jesus was different from the resuscitated body of Lazarus. We moderns may be motivated by our scientific proclivities which did not trouble the early writers imbued by mystical experiences regarded to be so genuine and impactful in their lives that they had a equality of true meaning with the perceptual empirically verifiable experience. (See doubting Thomas periscope) Gospel mystic writers believed mystical experience was as "really real" as the eye-witness empirical verification. We on this side of modern science tend to privilege the "truth meaning" of empirical verification because it would assume an openness to all and not be foreclosed to the unique incidence of an individual mystical experience. Lots of Christians had individual mystical experiences of the "Risen Christ" and the experiences were not corporate experience but they were corporate in the interpretative language which was available to them which enabled them to describe their individual experience. The experiences were individually unique while the interpretations of the experience were provided by the community.
Aphorism of the Day, March 29, 2107
John's Gospel is identified by the "ego eimai" εγω ειμαι declarations of Jesus. "ego eimai" is Greek for "I am." There are eight "I am" statements in the Gospel of John. "I am" is an affirmation of existence and it is followed by an equivalence tautology. I am resurrection and life. John's Gospel begins by declaring the beginning of human life as we know it as Word, which was with God, which was God and became flesh in Jesus Christ. Jesus said that his words were spirit and life. In John's Gospel Jesus speaks his personal existence into being in the life of the church. In the poetry of the church, Jesus is way, truth, life, resurrection, good shepherd, gate of the sheep, light of the world, living bread from heaven and even the "I am" who was before Abraham. The printed words of Jesus only have sense when one assumes the entire Worded universe. In John's Gospel there are individual words which only have significance because the entire human universe is essentially a "worded one" since that is the only one we know and having words is the only way we can know that we know.
Aphorism of the Day, March 28, 2017
Blaming the absence of Christ. "Lord if you had been here my brother would not have died." It is sometimes a hard adjustment to reconcile one's belief in Christ and the hard reality of the outcomes of freedom in time, like illness and death. If we think belief in Christ exempts us from probable occurrences in time, we may be asking for an exemption that Jesus did not have for himself.
Aphorism of the Day, March 27, 2017
In the Gospel of John, physicality or naïve realism or commonsense reality is used as a metaphor for substantial experience. Nicodemus was supposed to be "born" again. People were to partake of living water and living bread and actually eat the flesh and drink the blood of Jesus. The writer of John's Gospel repeated mocks the characters in the story who take things so literally, i.e., just the physical sense of something happening as being real while denying or being unaware of the substantiality of an inner spiritual event which really changes one's life. The death of Lazarus and his being called back to life fits in consistently with "physicality" being used as a profoundly expressive metaphor to highlight what it really feels like to be called to spiritual life from the state of spiritual death.
Aphorism of the Day, March 26, 2107
"Again" is the adverb denoting repetition. Repetition means that present action shares something of what has been done in the past and yet since it represents an action later in time it is totally new. Something done for the first time and not repeated will never need the word "again" until the action is done for the second time. Routine actions are done again and again and while they may seem to the same each time, there is a slow accrual of difference based upon the context of the subsequent event. The Gospel of John uses "again" as a metaphor for the spiritual seeing which parallel the physical counterpart. Born and born again. Seeing again refers to spiritual sight. Life can be fresh "again" as the interior lives are reconstituted by word and spirit.
Aphorism of the March 25, 2017
According to the Samuel the Judge when selecting a successor to King Saul, he was told that humanity looks at outer appearance but the Lord looks at the heart. How does one have these "X-ray eyes" to see within? The Gospel of John is all about having these "X-ray eyes" to see things about God that others don't see. How does one receive this kind of "X-ray sight?" By being born from above and receiving the Spirit of God.
Aphorism of the Day, March 24, 2017
People who use the phrase "born again" often limit the phrase. "Again" is an important adverb since it cites what is central to human life, namely, the repetition of actions over and over again. Born again sometimes refers to a one time event of a spiritual rebirth but that places a limit upon the metaphor. Conversion should be continuous and one should never stop being born into new knowledge and insights about God and life. We are going to do things "again" today and while they may seem to be but the repetitive trace of what has been done before, we should appreciate the newness in time of what we do again and so bring an intentional new quality to what we do "again."
Aphorism of the Day, March 23, 2017
As much as we strive for agreement in science for having a common way of agreeing about what is seen outside of us and agreeing upon how nature behaves, the way we see is determined by how our internal lives are constituted by the language of this interior and parallel life. Our language constituted insides is our spirit and our life and determines the way in which we see. Our interior lives can become re-constituted through interaction with new word influences in such a way that we become converted to see things anew. Former states of seeing become regarded to be blindness in contrast to the new ways in which we come to see things. This is the sight and blindness model found in the Gospel of John to account for why some people found Jesus to be the telling insight of their lives and why some found him to be one to oppose because he was "over-throwing" a familiar way of seeing the world.
Aphorism of the Day, March 22, 2017
The Gospel of John treats the outward and visible life as a metaphor for an inward and spiritual life. One can be born from above, walk again in Jesus as the Way, see again, live again after death, believe again after doubt, eat living bread, be quenched by living water, and restored to pastoral ministry after denying Christ. The physical world and ordinary passages of life are but the vehicle for the spiritual in the Gospel of John.
Aphorism of the Day, March 21, 2017
What is most literal about the Gospels is that they are literal about being non-literal in their interpretation and appropriation of the theological symbolic order of Judaism. St. Irenaeus said one was suppose to prefer a "plain reading" of Scripture. But the most "plain" reading of "I am the gate of the sheep," is in fact an appreciation of metaphors that are quite distant from "empirical verification." Even the seeming plain narrative of the life of Jesus in the Gospel is a metaphorical reading encoding the practices of the early Christian churches who trace the origins of their practices to the root event of Christianity, the life of Jesus. All of the Gospel writing is but variations in metaphorical discourses. So the Gospel should be read in a literary and artistic way and not in a journalistic literal way.
Aphorism of the Day, March 20, 2017
The writers of the Gospel of John looked for answer as to why people could resist the otherwise irresistible truth of the Gospel. Why do people disagree with us by benignly ignoring the relevance of our good news for them or by actively, even violently opposing us as a mortal threat to their way of existence? One can see the Kuhnian notion of people living in different paradigms as a way for accounting to the fact that people "see" things quite differently even to the point of characterizing another person as being "blind" to one's truth. The Gospel of John uses "sight" and "blindness," "light" and "darkness" to account for irreconcilable differences and incommensurable world views.
Aphorism of the Day, March 19, 2017
Jesus promised the Samaritan woman "living water." Baptism and the immersion in mikvah were supposed to be done in "living water" such as a river or spring, signifying their direct connection with divine creation. The "living water" which Jesus promised was an inward baptism so that one could worship in "Spirit" and in truth. Jesus told Nicodemus he had to be born of water and the Spirit. He told the Samaritan woman that he could provide living water within her life to help her worship in Spirit and truth. This is that answer to the perpetual prayer request: "Create in me a clean heart, O God and renew a right spirit within me."
Aphorism of the Day, March 18, 2017
The non-literal New Testament writers co-opted the symbolism of Judaism and "spiritualized" them. The church was the new "Israel" (how could anyone who remained in the synagogue accept this?). The meeting between Jesus and the Samaritan woman is an origin discourse for the Jesus Movement in Samaria and since Samaritans were the offspring of the divided Northern Kingdom, the New Testament writers were announcing the reunification of the two divided kingdoms in the New Israel, the church. One needs to appreciate the "creative" interpretation going on here.
Aphorism of the Day, March 17, 2017
In analysis of how the meanings of words attach in approximation to empirical verification, one can note that John's Gospel move such approximations to quite a "poetic" distance. The Gospels presents the Christ acts and words as "Signs." The semiotic switch in the Gospel of John makes elements like wine, light, water, bread, flesh, blood, sight, blindness, death, life, being lame, gate, vine, birth, shepherd and storm on the sea into poetic metaphors quite a distance in verisimilitude from the actual empirical signification of the words themselves. One can note that the author of John's Gospel is quite comfortable with the notion that Word creates the reality of human experience and all of the nuances therein. Word creates the very notion of "physicality" in the Gospel of John whereas in the other Gospels one can still sense that their authors believe that outer physical world determines the world of words. This has been overturned in the "advanced" Word metaphysics of John's Gospel. Birth from above means one lives in a realm of "word reality" in different way than commonsensical "naïve" reality.
Aphorism of the Day, March 16, 2017
The recorded insults of the opponents of Jesus in the Gospels include being in league with the devil, being mad and being a Samaritan. Could be that Jesus and the Jesus Movement was a "Samaritan sympathizing" movement in that followers of Jesus befriended members of the Torah-based Samaritan faith whose members also had expectations of a messiah. The living water discourse of Jesus with Samaritan woman at the well represents evidence of a Samaritan/Jesus Movement rapprochement.
Aphorism of the Day, March 15, 2017
John's Gospel begins with the creating Word. The creating Word in John is able to show how the signs of God are able to convert one to awareness of an alternate linguistic universe that one is born into and in this alternate universe one drinks living water and eats living bread and Jesus as this new word universe is Way, Truth, Life and Messiah and I Am, and Gate, Vine, Good Shepherd, Light, Truth, Resurrection, Life, Healer, Calmer of the sea, Alchemist of water to wine, Gospel text and much more. The creating Word of John reveals that anything human can only be so because it comes to word. Word in John is revealed to be the only valid human metaphysics and because of Word, humans name God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit. That we have Word is the precursor to the confession of what is extra-linguistic and so Word is co-extensive with everything including the consciousness of humanity being word users.
Aphorism of the Day, March 14, 2017
One can understand the scientific frustration with "biblical poetic discourse" when metaphors of equivalency can seem to be on "steroids" and seem to lose all connection with empirical verification. In John, Christ is Word and the words of Jesus are spirit and truth and God is spirit and must be worshiped in spirit and in truth. One can see the trouble that the empiricist might have in wanting "exact" language that can gain community objectivity wider than a group of people using poetic words of faith. On the other hand, the answer is rather obvious; don't limit language and fail to appreciate contextual use. Let your science be science and let your poetry be poetry and don't confuse the two and don't limit the valid truth values of either. The two can have overlapping interaction, as when actual aesthetic, "spiritual," poetic truths move and guide that actual body language(empirically observable) of a person in morals and ethics.
Aphorism of the Day, March 13, 2017
An underlying dynamic of the learning process presented in the Gospel of John is a transformation in understanding discursive practices. Disciples and interlocutors of Jesus are presented as being crassly literal about everything and do not have the discursive insight which comes from being "born from above" to embrace the transformative meanings derived from the appreciation of an entire range of metaphors for the meaning of the life of Jesus presented within the Gospel discipleship manual of the community that has come to have the name of John assigned to its Gospel.
Aphorism of the Day, March 12, 2017
Evangelical means something different today than it meant in the early Jesus Movement. Evangelical means sharing the Good News of Christ. Nascent Christianity was essentially evangelical because it was good news for a wider audience than the audience of the synagogue members who observed ritual purity. It was an alternate theology to Roman citizens who had a smorgasbord of divinity choices and who knew the effects of the chief practical god of their everyday lives, namely, the Caesar and his political presence everywhere. Evangelism in this context meant that Christians and their message was adaptive and winsome in the interstitial personal spaces of private lives and political context.
Aphorism of the Day, March 11, 2017
In a Monty Python satire, a vicar in the pulpit declares, "My text for today is: "My brother Esau is an hairy man but I am a smooth man."" Part of the satire points out that we read the Bible selectively privileging certain portions and certain verses because they represent key features of our own group identity. There are too many biblical words to give each word the same complete "inspirational" status. For fundamental Evangelical Christians, they privilege John 3:16 as a verse of their identity and it is found in the same discourse which trumpets another marker of their identity: Ye must be born again. Does the editorial selection of what is read from the Bible expose the fact that not everything in the Bible is regarded equally? When is the last time you heard a sermon preached on the verse in Song of Solomon, "We have a little sister and she has no breasts?" Such satires work because of the uneven way in which people regard various portions of the Bible. One should not be too proud of how one regards biblical inspiration, especially if one has both purported it is all inspired and each word has equal inspiration in one's daily application. Inspiration may have to do with the always already potential sublime effects of the biblical texts.
Aphorism of the Day, March 10, 2017
The biblical record involves a posthumous theological deliberation on people in the past. Abraham was a pre-historic, patriarch who fulfills an important role in establishing the coming to "self identity" of the covenantal people of Israel. But much, much later Abraham becomes for Paul, the pre-Mosaic person who had a valid relationship with God before the Mosaic law existed. Therefore if people could have valid faith before the Mosaic law and before covenantal relationship had become limited to keeping the Mosaic law within a community, then the Gentiles could be seen like Abraham; they could have valid faith without the benefit of living under the conditions of the Mosaic law within a segregated Mosaic community. Abraham was "used" by Paul as a way to tie the Gentiles in with how Paul needed to understand Gentile Christianity in continuity with his "Mosaic" of "pre-Mosaic" roots.
Aphorism of the Day, March 9, 2017
The writer of John's Gospel presents Jesus as challenging the unenlightened who see things with a literal mind. Nicodemus asks how he can get back into his mother's womb. The disciples say that if Lazarus is sleeping, it is good. The Samaritan woman at the well has a mind set on actual water. The seeing religious folk ask they are blind. Jesus is not literally a shepherd, a gate, way, life, vine and light. Disciples appear to be offended at the horrendous thought of eating flesh and drinking blood. John's Gospel is about the "mysticality" of Word. Word is Spirit and Word is Life. Having word and language is the essence of human life. That language is able to use physicality as its metaphor is also one of the magic effects of language. As much as we trust an objectivity of the observations of our senses, such observations are both pre-constituted and post-constituted in word and language. The Gospel of John mocks people who are trapped in the discursive habit of "physicality" being the only valid and true presentation of language. Word and language are metaphorical in being and so being essentially metaphorical, word and language cannot help but spin endless metaphor. John's Gospel asks us not to favor the metaphorical discourse of empirical physicality over the variety of discourses in language including the poetic. The language of faith and love forces us to wax poetic beyond being limited to the metaphor of physicality. Since seeing with our eyes is a most commonsensical discourse (based on our ability to manipulate things in our outer world), in a comparative sense, such physicality is used to reinforce the reality/realness/actuality of other discursive truths, namely the aesthetic "moving" truths.
Aphorism of the Day, March 8, 2017
The last shall be first. This ironic statement found in the Gospel is hermeneutically true since the last or latest one who interprets anything actually creates the meaning of what happened in the past for the present. St. Paul exalted the more obscure Abrahamic tradition to rewrite Gentiles into a spiritual lineage which pre-dated those who had inherited the Mosaic law. When it comes to the Bible or to the U.S. Constitution, the latest interpreters are always reconstructionists since they make it serve their own current political needs. We build our own view of the past and use the designation of antiquity to say, "See my tradition is longer and therefore more venerable than yours; ergo you must agree with my views." We should be very humble about being the last or latest interpreter since very shortly we will be used to justify other people in the position of the latest.
Aphorism of the Day, March 7, 2017
Sometimes the religious discussion about faith and works seem to be like a dog chasing its own tail. We are told that by our works we cannot make ourselves "acceptable" to God and yet we have the words of Jesus which say belief or having faith in Jesus Christ is the work of life. And so some religious people purport to be better in their work of believing in Jesus than others. It is like congratulating oneself for being wise to take a gift and forgetting about the generosity of the Giver. It might be that the work of belief has to do with the continual effort in time not to accept the habits of the inner sense of alienation from living and having our being in God. We can easily become so locked into egocentric and ethnocentric limitation we act as though the divine Ground is so negligible as to be absent in its relevance to our lives. Accepting the Risen Christ nature within us means that we work to acknowledge our connectedness with the Plenitude of the Divine Environment.
Aphorism of the Day, March 6, 2017
One might re-appropriate the Gospel of John as a "deconstructive post-modern" Gospel in that the physical creation story of Genesis is re-visited as a linguistic creation of the world since awareness only happens because of Word and the derivative languages. In John words are "spirit and life" and making word equivalent to spirit reveals the fact that words are invisible mystifications of interior states of human being. Within worded beings, who are created by the Word, the Gospel of John also shows that one is re-born by Spirit-word to continuously be converted to the wider contexts humans can have as they explore the endless discursive realms of words. Remember we have to use words even to talk about what we think generates words, such as "mind" or "consciousness" or even the science of the places in the brain responsible for "language." We use words even to create the origin of words. Words about words perhaps is the only valid circular argument because it is unavoidable.
Aphorism of the Day, March 5, 2017
Opponents of Jesus said that his great works were achieved because he was in league with the devil. The temptation of Jesus presented his resistance to Satan and the asserted his perfect agency as God on behalf of God within the human situation. Jesus is God's bilingual expression in humanity uniting the mystery of God with what can knowably come to human word in personal manifestation. Jesus as eternal word used his words to defeat the shadowy Satan at the horizon of consciousness. The shadow of evil still lies at the edge of consciousness waiting as a possibility to tempt human agents to make it actual. Following Jesus, we must resist and keep evil in its shadow form and not let it become actual in the agency of our lives.
Aphorism of the Day, March 4, 2017
It could be that temptation and the valuing behaviors designating sin arise in the training liminal phase of moving from infant/child sense of time to the sense of time as chronological sequence of occasions or events which adults are attempting to give children orientation into. When time as sequence of events results in comparative judgments as something bad or good or better and worse, people are vulnerable to the main issue of temptation, namely, the timing and frequency of human behaviors. Learning proper timing is expressed in the famous verses of Ecclesiastes: there is a time and purpose for everything under heaven. Wisdom faith is about finding "Kairos" timing or purposeful timing for doing everything in life. Temptation involves possible choices set before us to mistime what we do in both when we do something and frequency (how many times we do something). It may be fine to drink an alcoholic beverage at the right time. We may be tempted to drink at the wrong time and the wrong frequency or repetitions. Temptation is about mistiming in the choices before us that instigate the actions we end up performing.
Aphorism of the Day, March 3, 2017
Satan asked Jesus to cast himself down from a high place to prove his faith that God's angels would catch him. And he quoted a Psalm as a text to support his suggestion. There are several elements to this temptation. Mistiming: Die before your appointed time. Literalism: Take the Scriptures literally and not metaphorically. Anti-natural laws: Belief in God allows one to defy gravity and its effects. All of these temptations still occur for people today and to fall for these tricks makes religious folks often look very silly.
Aphorism of the Day, March 2, 2017
Temptation involves being thrown off in our timing of what, when and where we should do certain things in our life. Fasting as a religious discipline is a corrective measure for interdicting mistimed behaviors in our lives and reasserting a true freedom of self-control.
Aphorism of the Day, March 1, 2017
If we are supposed to be perfect as the Father in heaven is perfect, then we are assigned the perpetual state of being "less than God" as the state of sin. And if sin means perpetually shooting the arrows of our mind, soul and strength toward an unreachable perfection, what is important is that we are shooting the arrows of our intentional words, deeds and thoughts in the right direction toward the right target.
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