Aphorism of the Day, December 31, 2017
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. In the beginning was the Word. There is an incredible difference between the insight about "the beginning" between Genesis and John's Gospel. John's Gospel is perhaps a bit more philosophical. There could not have been a human eyewitness to such a beginning as related in Genesis. The Gospel of John hints about a different sort of beginning, the beginning of human life and experience as we know happening because we are constituted by language. Human life as we know it is created, comes to have existence because of Word, and the confession about Word being our beginning is perhaps the basic insight of human life. Humanity has built endless human products even while forgetting that it all has happened because we begin with Word. Having Word, having words, having language is always, already the big elephant in the room of human existence. As we might be very proud of all of our human products we should offer an important disclaimer: "Oops, I forgot that I have been using language and have been used by it."
Aphorism of the Day, December 30, 2017
The writer of John's Gospel confesses that the Word was God. One can say that the Word is God, in that being within the web of Word is how we have any awareness of anything at all and have our existence confirmed. If Word is God, it is most embracing and comprehensive human platform and we as having some free agency in our role as language used and language user should commit ourselves to be effective translators of language use for the greater benefit of all language users remembering the most profound use of language is body language acts of mutual kindness and regard.
Aphorism of the Day, December 29, 2017
Paraphrase of John 1:1ff.: The beginning of human consciousness as we know happens because of Word, hence Word signifies the Personal Superlative even to the degree of being equal with the Personal Superlative. All things have existence because of Word and nothing can have existence as humans know it without having Word. Through Word comes existence which is also called life and knowing such life through the Word is light or consciousness for humanity.
Aphorism of the Day, December 28, 2017
The beginning of human life as it can be known is the Word and all things come to be known as having existence through having word ability. Descartes said, "I think, therefore I am." He was putting "de cart before de horse." From John's Gospel, one could say, "I think because I have become aware of having language and in having language I know that I am because I use language to tell me the same."
Aphorism of the Day, December 27, 2017
In the Beginning was the Word. Can one see how one gets into a "chicken or the egg" stalemate? One uses words to say that Word was in the beginning before "Word." Does what we refer to with words have a verifiable existence apart from words? The Almighty as a word user? Alas, we've used words to say, "the Almighty."
Aphorism of Day, December 26, 2017
Probably the most empirically verifiable phrase of the Bible is that "all things came into being by the Word." That we have word is the way in which we know that we are language users and being language users we reflexively verify that we use language by using language. It is the most brilliant and valid circular argument of all because we cannot falsify the fact that we are language users.
Aphorism of the Day, December 25, 2017
Lost in the primary naiveté of the Christmas Story so promulgated by "popular" church culture is the ancient mystagogy of the early church which presented the story as a parable for eternal birth of the Risen Christ in the souls of the one's who knew this favor.
Aphorism of the Day, December 24, 2017
The Song of Mary confesses a utopian hopefulness which does not seem to be always, already realized:
He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, * and has lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things, * and the rich he has sent away empty.
Such outcomes may have intermittent realization in actual human history so why confess such utopian optimism? The ideal is always an invitation to people who have freedom and it should continually be confessed and offered as the standard for living. It is a confession of an always already parallel kingdom of heaven to which some have access and they continually pray, "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven."
Aphorism of the Day, December 23, 2017
The Magnificat, the Song of Mary, is like most biblical utopian vision; it is anticipatory of the ideals of the parallel universe of heaven. In the exterior world the reign of probable mixture of good, bad and indifferent events occur proving the general conditions of freedom. The biblical drama is constructed upon free human agents seeking the will of heaven or hell in contributing to outcomes in the mixture of what can actually happen in this world. The Song of Mary is a confession of justice and an anticipation of just outcomes in this world, especially for the poor and suffering.
Aphorism of the Day, December 22, 2017
One might call the Gospel of Luke, a "musical," in that within the narrative of the events people spontaneously break out in poetic songs: The Songs of Zechariah, Simeon and Mary have become the Canticles of the Daily Offices of our prayers. The subject matter of the songs are loaded with confession of utopian ideals of justice and a belief that such should also become the "heaven" on earth actuality.
Aphorism of the Day, December 21, 2017
Even though through the passage of time there has been a "differentiation" of consciousness in humanity based upon discoveries which have changed how people read and interpret, one can still locate discursive practices in ancient texts such as the Bible that are similar to the variety of discursive practices that we have today. Modern science created a preference for establishing empirical verification as the chief mode of propositional truth. Intimidated by the pragmatic realism of empirical verification, may Bible readers gave up the artistic truths of the Bible by making the claim that a "plain" reading of the Bible means that all of the details of the Bible can be empirically verified. By presenting biblical writing as empirically verified, many modern people left the Bible because of the way in which it has been presented. If we return to the text as an artistic text guided by motives of moral and spiritual transformation we allow the writings of the Bible to serve their purpose consistent with their discursive practice.
Aphorism of the Day, December 20, 2017
The confessions about God as found in the famous Song of Mary, are sometimes "true." Why only sometimes? "He has filled the hungry with good things; the rich He has sent away empty." How is it that it is verified that God has always already filled the hungry with good things? The confession about who God is and what God stands for still needs the cooperation of humanity to make the God-ideal true in actual life circumstance. While we live confessing the perfect will of God in the parallel reality of the kingdom of God, we still need in time and the external world to make God's will done on earth as it is done in heaven. Prayer and persuasion to express our "better angels" are not yet finished.
Aphorism of the Day, December 19, 2017
In the mystagogy of the early church, people were confessing to events of the heart in a realization that general divine omnipresence was becoming particular presence within them. They used the language of being filled with the Holy Spirit or having the Risen Christ "born" in them. The early churches believed that they were moving from external signs and markings of religious identity to the inward verification of God's presence. We read the Christmas stories as plays for our Christmas Pageants but the first use of the infancy narratives were "mystagogic" texts hiding the inward verifiable event of the birth of Christ into one's life within the infancy narratives of the Gospel. One needed to have "ears" to hear what was being proclaimed in the model of Mary as the paradigm for the Christ-mystic. Over-shadowed by an interior event, one in acquiescence confessed the Marian words, "Let it be unto your servant according to your word." The way in which words are constituted within a mystic are the words which are mirrored in the infancy narratives which comprise the significant realities of identity within the early churches.
Aphorism of the Day, December 18, 2017
The Hebrew word "beit" or house has duel meanings. It can refer to people of one's household, present, past and future and it can refer to a structure, such as the Temple, as being the House of God. King David wanted to build a structural house for God and he wasn't able to do it. His house or lineage was to last forever. Joseph, was from the house of David as the Gospel writers were tracing lineage of family for Jesus. History indicates that structures can be destroyed but God resides in the lineage of people even though certain spaces might be regarded to be "sacred."
Aphorism of the Day, December 17, 2017
"Gaudete" or Rejoice! Rejoice always! Quite a command given the actuarial probability of lots of things happening at any given time which defies the logic of being joyful. And it might even seem irreverent to be joyful since the appearance of joy might seem inappropriate in the company of people who are faced with immediate suffering and afflictions. The command to rejoice is not naïve optimism; it can be a spiritual methodology of garnering the inward capacity to day-dream to focus upon the energy of psychic analgesia and beyond analgesia to an actual "high," not to deny the external reality of troubles and woe but to cope and inspire creative response to what one is facing within one's exterior circumstances. Rejoicing as opposed to possession with gloom is a greater orientation toward creative action to play the hand that one has been dealt. To tap the capacity for joy at all time is to tap an elixir for creativity with what is in one's life.
Aphorism of the Day, December 16, 2017
Interlocutors to John the Baptist: "Are you the Messiah, Elijah, a prophet?" John the Baptist: "No, No, No. I am but a Voice crying in the wilderness..." This conversation reveals the eschatological speculation of their time. It was a time of suffering and speculation about how intervention by a hero Messiah could bring justice. The collective daydreams of all suffering people produce eschatological speculation about justice, superheroes and intervention all of the time. That such speculation came to biblical literature should not demand that we treat it as prediction in the sense of a future verifiable specific event; the visualization functions as the "eternal return" in human experience of justice and intervention to achieve the same in all human history. Most of modern eschatology has moved into the cinema, comic books and science fiction. Whether religious or secular, the eternal return, viz., the repetition of visualization of attained justice occurs.
Aphorism of the Day, December 15, 2017
It interesting to note the spiritual genealogy of John the Baptist in John's Gospel. In the beginning was the Word, the Word was God, the Word created life that that life was the light of humanity. John the Baptist, we are told, was sent from God and denied being the light, but to testify to the light. Word, Life, Light is a sequence in John's Gospel and each is a metaphor for Christ who has such a metaphorical exclusivity in the New Testament, and all other confessing people are lesser words, life and light in comparison. The metaphorical exclusivity of Christ in the confession of the church is the way in which the hierarchical value of Jesus was experienced and proclaimed.
Aphorism of the Day, December 14, 2017
John of the Cross coined the phrase "dark night of the soul" to describe a phase of spiritual desolation, a sense of forsakenness. On first reading one might think that the writer was suffering from severe depression. Or it could be that in spiritual methodology, depression energy is named and something creative arises out of the chaos of wanting to be in a dark closet only smelling the leather of one's shoes. Today we don't have time for the energy of the depression to be transformed; it has to be immediately cured so that we can be "functional." Perhaps the mystics had the time for depression and the structure of community to rework the energy by progressively renaming it and reconstituting the interior word structure of one's life.
Aphorism of the Day, December 13, 2017
The Gospel of John is full of "ego eimi" sayings, "I am" sayings of Jesus. In contrast John the Baptist is the disclaimer, the one who says, "I am not he, Elijah, the messiah, the light." His recorded disclaiming in the Gospels is the set up message for proclaiming Jesus and the contrast was an important persuasive oracular device for the members of his community who were being asked to switch their allegiance to Jesus.
Aphorism of the Day, December 12, 2017
John's Gospel is about the personification of Word, which is God. After the declaration that Word is God, such a notion would refer to the "hum" of the universe of all possible discursive practice such that differentiation could not be recognized. So, from the realm of all possible discourse a discursive figure arises who is life of differentiation by setting the hierarchy of values of how Word is to become known within an actual human person. Such a person on top of the hierarchy is called life and light in the midst of people whose lives are in "word disorder." Jesus as the superlative case of instantiating Word becomes the incarnate corrective for human "word disorder." So, John the Baptist calls him the light shining in the darkness of human "word disorder."
Aphorism of the Day, December 11, 2017
Since four books of the New Testament are called Gospels, one might think that the notion of Gospel originated with Jesus and the early church. Gospel or good news was taken directly from the writings of the prophet Isaiah: "he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed." If one does not think that Gospel has anything to do with political conditions, think again. Good news for the oppressed does not mean just learning how to tolerate the conditions of oppression; it is a promise of deliverance. Anyone who claims to be honest to the Gospel needs to be one who is working to relieve and overturn the conditions of the oppressed people of the world. People who live in the conditions of being free from the conditions need to remember their Gospel duty.
Aphorism of the Day, December 10, 2017
In a figurative way, the earliest Gospel, the Gospel of Mark present, not the birth of Jesus, but perhaps the birth of the Jesus Movement out of the John the Baptist Movement. It is interesting to note that the writer of the earliest Gospel is more interested in presenting the birth of the Jesus Movement rather than the birth of the person of Jesus. There seems to have been some compunction about showing continuity with the John the Baptist Movement because the core followers of Jesus may have been first in the John the Baptist Movement.
Aphorism of the Day, December 9, 2017
There is an obvious truth to the "last shall be first" phrase of Jesus. A person who interprets in the present tense is always interpreting in the latest day; the present tense is always the latest time. As such, the one who is latest cannot but interpret all of the memories of the past in a way that serves in some way the present, which is the latest in time. So John the Baptist and his community are chronologically before Jesus and his significance is interpreted by later followers of Jesus Christ in a way that John himself could not have foreseen in his own time. The oracles of the early church function somewhat like playwrights trying to assign significance to the life of John the Baptist in light of what their experience was in the early churches. So John was viewed as the water-man and Jesus was viewed as the Spirit-man. A baptism or immersion in the Spirit assumes a deeper inward event than the external washing of a ritual baptism in the Jordan River. In the present, we conveniently make the past serve what we understood to have become. If this seems unfair, we can only note that we too must serve the ends of future people who will make us what we never were in our own time, if we are remembered at all.
Aphorism of the Day, December 8, 2017
Both the words of John the Baptist and Jesus are presented as oracles within the early churches, particularly in the effort to show the transition for the followers of John to become followers of Jesus. So the oracle of John the Baptist speaks within the early church: "I baptize with water but he will baptize with the Holy Spirit." This is a contrast which seems to imply that John's baptism was not accompanied by Holy Spirit. Was John's baptism a "lifeless" ritual? As a baptism of repentance, it would seem to be a public ritual about a person's intention to change or transform one's life. How could such a transformation be regarded as being a transformation with being "Holy Spirit" aided? This oracle of John the Baptist is an indication of the development of Pneumatology in the early church, or a doctrine of the rising personal omnipresence of the Holy Spirit as a distinctive cause of personal transformation.
Aphorism of the Day, December 7, 2017
In the "solo scriptura" position of some Reformation groups, the Bible was elevated to something it never was nor ever could become, namely the exhaustive words of God. The writer of John's Gospel states that the Word from the Beginning was God, not the writings that eventually formed the canon(s) of the Bible after several hundred years. A person who is serious about hermeneutics and charitable toward writers of the past who lived under different conditions, can say that the Bible is adequate to the concerns and issues that were being raised in the time that they were written without saying that the writings are "Omni-adequate" or "Omni-applicable" to the details of all human knowledge past present and future. One can have a humble view of the Bible without denying its divinity in providing the universal and eternal patterns of humanity within language such that the divine and enduring principles of love and justice can be discovered for inspiring people of all time to find correspondences in their own time.
Aphorism of the Day, December 6, 2017
The main message of John the Baptist is "Repent," which in Greek μετάνοια, metanoia, literally means the "after mind" or the renewal of the mind. John the Baptist emphasized the freedom of volition in the transformation of one's inner life. Advent is a season of believing in "one's perfectability" and in one's real choices to participate with this progressive transformation to surpass oneself in a future state. The emphasis on choice and human free will in transformation does not nullify God's grace because one never arrives at a final state of perfection where one no longer needs the complementing grace of God. Grace and free will work together in the process of repentance.
Aphorism of the Day, December 5, 2017
John the Baptist is a fixture in the season of Advent and models the kind simplicity of an uncluttered life before we clutter our lives with the excesses Christmas. John the Baptist's prominent role in the Gospel is an indication that early Christians were making an appeal to his long continuing followers to move on to Jesus. In the Gospels, John is the "set up" man for Jesus. Pharisees, Sadducees, Zealots were different religious parties; the community of John the Baptist was probably the one that was evangelized the most by early Christians. We wrongly assume that all followers of John the Baptist just automatically became followers of Jesus. The Gospels are proof that various kinds of appeals were being made to the followers of John to persuade them to made the transition to the community of Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, December 4, 2017
The life style of John the Baptist, who pops out in our Advent lessons, is inaccessible for most of us who live closer to the stylistic norms of our society. What he can model for us is the direction for simplifying our lives and to remind us that we should possess our possession and not have our possessions, possess us with maintenance demands competing with our devotion to God and commitment to charity.
Aphorism of the Day, December 3, 2017
The anthropological soundness of apocalyptic and utopian literature of the Bible is established by the way in which people appropriate it. If the language is literalized as predicting tea leaves of actual events to come, it is equivalence of people acting out upon the dream material from last night's dream. But if it is seen as deriving from the corporate day dream space coming to language and vision to complement the actual conditions of living in the actual ambiguities of the free conditions of this world, it is inspired and true. Being created equal, having the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is the great American utopic dream that is not fully realized in actual life but it accompanies actual life to inspire our better angels to make it actual. Don't appropriate the utopian in Disney's vision or the apocalyptic in Tolkien or Star Wars or D.C. Comic Superheroes and then deny this valid genre within the Bible to inform the direction of our ideals and to hold onto to the actual normalcy of justice enforced and injustice interdicted.
Aphorism of the Day, December 2, 2017
Utopian and apocalyptic discourses within the Bible represent radical discontinuities from the way things are. Lion and lamb as normal playmates? Actuarial probability indicate that eventually lions will eat lambs. But what if preditor-prey relations were magically reversed? Probability in human life most often have the strong and the fittest surviving and imposing their will on the weak, the ignorant and the poor. What if a super hero who was strong actually intervened and brought equal justice for the poor, the naïve and the weak? Utopian and apocalyptic discourse are "dream" discourses and Marx criticized religion for having such discourses as "opiates" to not just survive present woe but to accept it as God's will. Religion is often accused of "wishing" away the woes of the world and providing discourse to justify the maintenance of those "woes." Utopian discourse represents a magically discontinuity with the way things are; apocalyptic discourse involves a stronger force actually doing some serious overwhelming of the "bad guys." These discourses in the Bible have now become the common themes driving cinema and modern versions of futurism. Is it human to create and imagine alternate worlds with alternate just outcomes? If so, to what purpose? Ponder this as we appropriate apocalyptic and utopian biblical discourse for Advent.
Aphorism of the Day, December 1, 2017
In looking at biblical futurism of the apocalyptic and utopian variety, I would ask the prior question to both of these varieties of discourse, "Will there be language and language users in the future, even as the very notion of future is linguistically mediated?" According to the biblical account, God in the indeterminate pre-beginning with no human present to empirically verify, spoke, i.e, used word/language to create the world as we know it and God created language users to mediate all that was not language. This creation was re-visited in John's Gospel by calling Word as being with God and being God. While apocalyptic and utopian discourse may be meaningful within human contexts, they still reside in the scope of Word being God as the prior condition for any discursive practice.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. In the beginning was the Word. There is an incredible difference between the insight about "the beginning" between Genesis and John's Gospel. John's Gospel is perhaps a bit more philosophical. There could not have been a human eyewitness to such a beginning as related in Genesis. The Gospel of John hints about a different sort of beginning, the beginning of human life and experience as we know happening because we are constituted by language. Human life as we know it is created, comes to have existence because of Word, and the confession about Word being our beginning is perhaps the basic insight of human life. Humanity has built endless human products even while forgetting that it all has happened because we begin with Word. Having Word, having words, having language is always, already the big elephant in the room of human existence. As we might be very proud of all of our human products we should offer an important disclaimer: "Oops, I forgot that I have been using language and have been used by it."
Aphorism of the Day, December 30, 2017
The writer of John's Gospel confesses that the Word was God. One can say that the Word is God, in that being within the web of Word is how we have any awareness of anything at all and have our existence confirmed. If Word is God, it is most embracing and comprehensive human platform and we as having some free agency in our role as language used and language user should commit ourselves to be effective translators of language use for the greater benefit of all language users remembering the most profound use of language is body language acts of mutual kindness and regard.
Aphorism of the Day, December 29, 2017
Paraphrase of John 1:1ff.: The beginning of human consciousness as we know happens because of Word, hence Word signifies the Personal Superlative even to the degree of being equal with the Personal Superlative. All things have existence because of Word and nothing can have existence as humans know it without having Word. Through Word comes existence which is also called life and knowing such life through the Word is light or consciousness for humanity.
Aphorism of the Day, December 28, 2017
The beginning of human life as it can be known is the Word and all things come to be known as having existence through having word ability. Descartes said, "I think, therefore I am." He was putting "de cart before de horse." From John's Gospel, one could say, "I think because I have become aware of having language and in having language I know that I am because I use language to tell me the same."
Aphorism of the Day, December 27, 2017
In the Beginning was the Word. Can one see how one gets into a "chicken or the egg" stalemate? One uses words to say that Word was in the beginning before "Word." Does what we refer to with words have a verifiable existence apart from words? The Almighty as a word user? Alas, we've used words to say, "the Almighty."
Aphorism of Day, December 26, 2017
Probably the most empirically verifiable phrase of the Bible is that "all things came into being by the Word." That we have word is the way in which we know that we are language users and being language users we reflexively verify that we use language by using language. It is the most brilliant and valid circular argument of all because we cannot falsify the fact that we are language users.
Aphorism of the Day, December 25, 2017
Lost in the primary naiveté of the Christmas Story so promulgated by "popular" church culture is the ancient mystagogy of the early church which presented the story as a parable for eternal birth of the Risen Christ in the souls of the one's who knew this favor.
Aphorism of the Day, December 24, 2017
The Song of Mary confesses a utopian hopefulness which does not seem to be always, already realized:
He has mercy on those who fear him *in every generation.
He has shown the strength of his arm, * he has scattered the proud in their conceit.He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, * and has lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things, * and the rich he has sent away empty.
Such outcomes may have intermittent realization in actual human history so why confess such utopian optimism? The ideal is always an invitation to people who have freedom and it should continually be confessed and offered as the standard for living. It is a confession of an always already parallel kingdom of heaven to which some have access and they continually pray, "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven."
Aphorism of the Day, December 23, 2017
The Magnificat, the Song of Mary, is like most biblical utopian vision; it is anticipatory of the ideals of the parallel universe of heaven. In the exterior world the reign of probable mixture of good, bad and indifferent events occur proving the general conditions of freedom. The biblical drama is constructed upon free human agents seeking the will of heaven or hell in contributing to outcomes in the mixture of what can actually happen in this world. The Song of Mary is a confession of justice and an anticipation of just outcomes in this world, especially for the poor and suffering.
Aphorism of the Day, December 22, 2017
One might call the Gospel of Luke, a "musical," in that within the narrative of the events people spontaneously break out in poetic songs: The Songs of Zechariah, Simeon and Mary have become the Canticles of the Daily Offices of our prayers. The subject matter of the songs are loaded with confession of utopian ideals of justice and a belief that such should also become the "heaven" on earth actuality.
Aphorism of the Day, December 21, 2017
Even though through the passage of time there has been a "differentiation" of consciousness in humanity based upon discoveries which have changed how people read and interpret, one can still locate discursive practices in ancient texts such as the Bible that are similar to the variety of discursive practices that we have today. Modern science created a preference for establishing empirical verification as the chief mode of propositional truth. Intimidated by the pragmatic realism of empirical verification, may Bible readers gave up the artistic truths of the Bible by making the claim that a "plain" reading of the Bible means that all of the details of the Bible can be empirically verified. By presenting biblical writing as empirically verified, many modern people left the Bible because of the way in which it has been presented. If we return to the text as an artistic text guided by motives of moral and spiritual transformation we allow the writings of the Bible to serve their purpose consistent with their discursive practice.
Aphorism of the Day, December 20, 2017
The confessions about God as found in the famous Song of Mary, are sometimes "true." Why only sometimes? "He has filled the hungry with good things; the rich He has sent away empty." How is it that it is verified that God has always already filled the hungry with good things? The confession about who God is and what God stands for still needs the cooperation of humanity to make the God-ideal true in actual life circumstance. While we live confessing the perfect will of God in the parallel reality of the kingdom of God, we still need in time and the external world to make God's will done on earth as it is done in heaven. Prayer and persuasion to express our "better angels" are not yet finished.
Aphorism of the Day, December 19, 2017
In the mystagogy of the early church, people were confessing to events of the heart in a realization that general divine omnipresence was becoming particular presence within them. They used the language of being filled with the Holy Spirit or having the Risen Christ "born" in them. The early churches believed that they were moving from external signs and markings of religious identity to the inward verification of God's presence. We read the Christmas stories as plays for our Christmas Pageants but the first use of the infancy narratives were "mystagogic" texts hiding the inward verifiable event of the birth of Christ into one's life within the infancy narratives of the Gospel. One needed to have "ears" to hear what was being proclaimed in the model of Mary as the paradigm for the Christ-mystic. Over-shadowed by an interior event, one in acquiescence confessed the Marian words, "Let it be unto your servant according to your word." The way in which words are constituted within a mystic are the words which are mirrored in the infancy narratives which comprise the significant realities of identity within the early churches.
Aphorism of the Day, December 18, 2017
The Hebrew word "beit" or house has duel meanings. It can refer to people of one's household, present, past and future and it can refer to a structure, such as the Temple, as being the House of God. King David wanted to build a structural house for God and he wasn't able to do it. His house or lineage was to last forever. Joseph, was from the house of David as the Gospel writers were tracing lineage of family for Jesus. History indicates that structures can be destroyed but God resides in the lineage of people even though certain spaces might be regarded to be "sacred."
Aphorism of the Day, December 17, 2017
"Gaudete" or Rejoice! Rejoice always! Quite a command given the actuarial probability of lots of things happening at any given time which defies the logic of being joyful. And it might even seem irreverent to be joyful since the appearance of joy might seem inappropriate in the company of people who are faced with immediate suffering and afflictions. The command to rejoice is not naïve optimism; it can be a spiritual methodology of garnering the inward capacity to day-dream to focus upon the energy of psychic analgesia and beyond analgesia to an actual "high," not to deny the external reality of troubles and woe but to cope and inspire creative response to what one is facing within one's exterior circumstances. Rejoicing as opposed to possession with gloom is a greater orientation toward creative action to play the hand that one has been dealt. To tap the capacity for joy at all time is to tap an elixir for creativity with what is in one's life.
Aphorism of the Day, December 16, 2017
Interlocutors to John the Baptist: "Are you the Messiah, Elijah, a prophet?" John the Baptist: "No, No, No. I am but a Voice crying in the wilderness..." This conversation reveals the eschatological speculation of their time. It was a time of suffering and speculation about how intervention by a hero Messiah could bring justice. The collective daydreams of all suffering people produce eschatological speculation about justice, superheroes and intervention all of the time. That such speculation came to biblical literature should not demand that we treat it as prediction in the sense of a future verifiable specific event; the visualization functions as the "eternal return" in human experience of justice and intervention to achieve the same in all human history. Most of modern eschatology has moved into the cinema, comic books and science fiction. Whether religious or secular, the eternal return, viz., the repetition of visualization of attained justice occurs.
Aphorism of the Day, December 15, 2017
It interesting to note the spiritual genealogy of John the Baptist in John's Gospel. In the beginning was the Word, the Word was God, the Word created life that that life was the light of humanity. John the Baptist, we are told, was sent from God and denied being the light, but to testify to the light. Word, Life, Light is a sequence in John's Gospel and each is a metaphor for Christ who has such a metaphorical exclusivity in the New Testament, and all other confessing people are lesser words, life and light in comparison. The metaphorical exclusivity of Christ in the confession of the church is the way in which the hierarchical value of Jesus was experienced and proclaimed.
Aphorism of the Day, December 14, 2017
John of the Cross coined the phrase "dark night of the soul" to describe a phase of spiritual desolation, a sense of forsakenness. On first reading one might think that the writer was suffering from severe depression. Or it could be that in spiritual methodology, depression energy is named and something creative arises out of the chaos of wanting to be in a dark closet only smelling the leather of one's shoes. Today we don't have time for the energy of the depression to be transformed; it has to be immediately cured so that we can be "functional." Perhaps the mystics had the time for depression and the structure of community to rework the energy by progressively renaming it and reconstituting the interior word structure of one's life.
Aphorism of the Day, December 13, 2017
The Gospel of John is full of "ego eimi" sayings, "I am" sayings of Jesus. In contrast John the Baptist is the disclaimer, the one who says, "I am not he, Elijah, the messiah, the light." His recorded disclaiming in the Gospels is the set up message for proclaiming Jesus and the contrast was an important persuasive oracular device for the members of his community who were being asked to switch their allegiance to Jesus.
Aphorism of the Day, December 12, 2017
John's Gospel is about the personification of Word, which is God. After the declaration that Word is God, such a notion would refer to the "hum" of the universe of all possible discursive practice such that differentiation could not be recognized. So, from the realm of all possible discourse a discursive figure arises who is life of differentiation by setting the hierarchy of values of how Word is to become known within an actual human person. Such a person on top of the hierarchy is called life and light in the midst of people whose lives are in "word disorder." Jesus as the superlative case of instantiating Word becomes the incarnate corrective for human "word disorder." So, John the Baptist calls him the light shining in the darkness of human "word disorder."
Aphorism of the Day, December 11, 2017
Since four books of the New Testament are called Gospels, one might think that the notion of Gospel originated with Jesus and the early church. Gospel or good news was taken directly from the writings of the prophet Isaiah: "he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed." If one does not think that Gospel has anything to do with political conditions, think again. Good news for the oppressed does not mean just learning how to tolerate the conditions of oppression; it is a promise of deliverance. Anyone who claims to be honest to the Gospel needs to be one who is working to relieve and overturn the conditions of the oppressed people of the world. People who live in the conditions of being free from the conditions need to remember their Gospel duty.
Aphorism of the Day, December 10, 2017
In a figurative way, the earliest Gospel, the Gospel of Mark present, not the birth of Jesus, but perhaps the birth of the Jesus Movement out of the John the Baptist Movement. It is interesting to note that the writer of the earliest Gospel is more interested in presenting the birth of the Jesus Movement rather than the birth of the person of Jesus. There seems to have been some compunction about showing continuity with the John the Baptist Movement because the core followers of Jesus may have been first in the John the Baptist Movement.
Aphorism of the Day, December 9, 2017
There is an obvious truth to the "last shall be first" phrase of Jesus. A person who interprets in the present tense is always interpreting in the latest day; the present tense is always the latest time. As such, the one who is latest cannot but interpret all of the memories of the past in a way that serves in some way the present, which is the latest in time. So John the Baptist and his community are chronologically before Jesus and his significance is interpreted by later followers of Jesus Christ in a way that John himself could not have foreseen in his own time. The oracles of the early church function somewhat like playwrights trying to assign significance to the life of John the Baptist in light of what their experience was in the early churches. So John was viewed as the water-man and Jesus was viewed as the Spirit-man. A baptism or immersion in the Spirit assumes a deeper inward event than the external washing of a ritual baptism in the Jordan River. In the present, we conveniently make the past serve what we understood to have become. If this seems unfair, we can only note that we too must serve the ends of future people who will make us what we never were in our own time, if we are remembered at all.
Aphorism of the Day, December 8, 2017
Both the words of John the Baptist and Jesus are presented as oracles within the early churches, particularly in the effort to show the transition for the followers of John to become followers of Jesus. So the oracle of John the Baptist speaks within the early church: "I baptize with water but he will baptize with the Holy Spirit." This is a contrast which seems to imply that John's baptism was not accompanied by Holy Spirit. Was John's baptism a "lifeless" ritual? As a baptism of repentance, it would seem to be a public ritual about a person's intention to change or transform one's life. How could such a transformation be regarded as being a transformation with being "Holy Spirit" aided? This oracle of John the Baptist is an indication of the development of Pneumatology in the early church, or a doctrine of the rising personal omnipresence of the Holy Spirit as a distinctive cause of personal transformation.
Aphorism of the Day, December 7, 2017
In the "solo scriptura" position of some Reformation groups, the Bible was elevated to something it never was nor ever could become, namely the exhaustive words of God. The writer of John's Gospel states that the Word from the Beginning was God, not the writings that eventually formed the canon(s) of the Bible after several hundred years. A person who is serious about hermeneutics and charitable toward writers of the past who lived under different conditions, can say that the Bible is adequate to the concerns and issues that were being raised in the time that they were written without saying that the writings are "Omni-adequate" or "Omni-applicable" to the details of all human knowledge past present and future. One can have a humble view of the Bible without denying its divinity in providing the universal and eternal patterns of humanity within language such that the divine and enduring principles of love and justice can be discovered for inspiring people of all time to find correspondences in their own time.
Aphorism of the Day, December 6, 2017
The main message of John the Baptist is "Repent," which in Greek μετάνοια, metanoia, literally means the "after mind" or the renewal of the mind. John the Baptist emphasized the freedom of volition in the transformation of one's inner life. Advent is a season of believing in "one's perfectability" and in one's real choices to participate with this progressive transformation to surpass oneself in a future state. The emphasis on choice and human free will in transformation does not nullify God's grace because one never arrives at a final state of perfection where one no longer needs the complementing grace of God. Grace and free will work together in the process of repentance.
Aphorism of the Day, December 5, 2017
John the Baptist is a fixture in the season of Advent and models the kind simplicity of an uncluttered life before we clutter our lives with the excesses Christmas. John the Baptist's prominent role in the Gospel is an indication that early Christians were making an appeal to his long continuing followers to move on to Jesus. In the Gospels, John is the "set up" man for Jesus. Pharisees, Sadducees, Zealots were different religious parties; the community of John the Baptist was probably the one that was evangelized the most by early Christians. We wrongly assume that all followers of John the Baptist just automatically became followers of Jesus. The Gospels are proof that various kinds of appeals were being made to the followers of John to persuade them to made the transition to the community of Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, December 4, 2017
The life style of John the Baptist, who pops out in our Advent lessons, is inaccessible for most of us who live closer to the stylistic norms of our society. What he can model for us is the direction for simplifying our lives and to remind us that we should possess our possession and not have our possessions, possess us with maintenance demands competing with our devotion to God and commitment to charity.
Aphorism of the Day, December 3, 2017
The anthropological soundness of apocalyptic and utopian literature of the Bible is established by the way in which people appropriate it. If the language is literalized as predicting tea leaves of actual events to come, it is equivalence of people acting out upon the dream material from last night's dream. But if it is seen as deriving from the corporate day dream space coming to language and vision to complement the actual conditions of living in the actual ambiguities of the free conditions of this world, it is inspired and true. Being created equal, having the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is the great American utopic dream that is not fully realized in actual life but it accompanies actual life to inspire our better angels to make it actual. Don't appropriate the utopian in Disney's vision or the apocalyptic in Tolkien or Star Wars or D.C. Comic Superheroes and then deny this valid genre within the Bible to inform the direction of our ideals and to hold onto to the actual normalcy of justice enforced and injustice interdicted.
Aphorism of the Day, December 2, 2017
Utopian and apocalyptic discourses within the Bible represent radical discontinuities from the way things are. Lion and lamb as normal playmates? Actuarial probability indicate that eventually lions will eat lambs. But what if preditor-prey relations were magically reversed? Probability in human life most often have the strong and the fittest surviving and imposing their will on the weak, the ignorant and the poor. What if a super hero who was strong actually intervened and brought equal justice for the poor, the naïve and the weak? Utopian and apocalyptic discourse are "dream" discourses and Marx criticized religion for having such discourses as "opiates" to not just survive present woe but to accept it as God's will. Religion is often accused of "wishing" away the woes of the world and providing discourse to justify the maintenance of those "woes." Utopian discourse represents a magically discontinuity with the way things are; apocalyptic discourse involves a stronger force actually doing some serious overwhelming of the "bad guys." These discourses in the Bible have now become the common themes driving cinema and modern versions of futurism. Is it human to create and imagine alternate worlds with alternate just outcomes? If so, to what purpose? Ponder this as we appropriate apocalyptic and utopian biblical discourse for Advent.
Aphorism of the Day, December 1, 2017
In looking at biblical futurism of the apocalyptic and utopian variety, I would ask the prior question to both of these varieties of discourse, "Will there be language and language users in the future, even as the very notion of future is linguistically mediated?" According to the biblical account, God in the indeterminate pre-beginning with no human present to empirically verify, spoke, i.e, used word/language to create the world as we know it and God created language users to mediate all that was not language. This creation was re-visited in John's Gospel by calling Word as being with God and being God. While apocalyptic and utopian discourse may be meaningful within human contexts, they still reside in the scope of Word being God as the prior condition for any discursive practice.
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