Aphorism of the Day, May 31, 2018
As sacrosanct as we often regard the "Law" to be, the fact that it has to be interpreted in application in new situations means that the "Law" is always "political" in that it comes to the defense of a "polis" or group of people. Laws can be used in ways to supports positions and they can be used as a polemic against "political" opponents. Should Jesus be judged by the law for doing healing "work" on the Sabbath? Defining "work" and implying that healing is somehow something that God would not do though a person on a particular occurrence of Sabbath shows the way in which interpretation of the law involves the politics of a particular party.
Aphorism of the Day, May 30, 2018
Kant's Categorical Imperative was to act in such a way that one could will that it be a universal maxim. This seems to imply that there would be no exceptions. Does this imperative not take into account the intention within a particular situation and whether the resulting act would be salutary again in a different situation? No work on the Sabbath, except healing? How does one maintain the general imperative of needing Sabbath Rest and yet allowing that some human activity on the Sabbath serves higher justice? Old "Blue Laws" for Sunday in some states used to allow beer to be purchased on Sunday but not baby bottles? Can Categorical Imperatives actually predict every future case of how it might be articulated with completely just practice? Love and Justice can be Categorical Imperatives while being fluid about particular articulation of the same in future situations.
Aphorism of the Day, May 29, 2018
While we might use the term God's law to designate "universal and unchanging" rules of human behavior, it is not as easy as it seems. All laws exist within societies of practice and it might be more godly to claim that God's Law is about Justice and Love. Particular laws and ordinances arise from the attempt to articulate what justice and love look like in actual practice. Details of cultures can arise and change which require the adjustment of laws to articulate what justice and love means in a different time than from the times when they were originally generated. The 10 Commandments and our U.S. Constitution were generated in a time when slavery was the accepted practice. How could such "enlightened" and even "divine" laws omit such a glaring injustice? When St. Paul wrote that love is fulfilling the law, it could be that he was referring to the call we continuously have to make our behaviors and rules of behaviors more closely approximate what justice means for everyone.
Aphorism of the Day, May 28, 2018
Legalism is when laws are applied in absurd ways and actually hinder the common good, even in a particular situation. Could Jesus heal on the Sabbath? Would healing be against the labor laws of the Sabbath? What is labor and what is rest? What is prayer and what is not prayer? Healing as oblationary prayer is a way to honor the intent of the sabbath. Nurses and doctors work at all times. Enlightened justice allows humane adjustments.
Aphorism of the Day, May 27, 2018
While Christians have argued about the Trinity for centuries, they have often forgotten that they are unified by having language as the prior condition for positing any position at all on the Trinity. One should never forget that everything known begins to be known because we first have Language.
Aphorism of the Day, May 26, 2018
In pondering the Holy Trinity one might ponder a comparison between the Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed. The Apostles Creed embodies the early baptism formulaic command to baptize in the Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit after the candidate has expressed belief in the Three. The Nicene Creed from a later period is the Creed of the Council to require belief about how the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit are related. Such a Creed derived from an effort to standardize church unity in a presentation of an "official" understanding of God.
Aphorism of the Day, May 25, 2018
It cannot be missed that the Trinity arose in the history of Christianity as an attempt to standardized the presentation of God in the midst of different presentations of meaningful understandings of God. Standardization occurs because of success; successful but conflicting Christian communities can spill into the socio-political contexts. Emperor Constantine saw Christian success and he saw Christian divisions and how it could and did "divide" the Empire. Hence, the Council of Nicaea was an Emperor driven meeting for bishops to gather and standardized the presentation of Christian meaningful truths. The result of such a standardization was the "excommunication" of large number of Christians, perhaps the majority, and it took a century for it to become more uniformly enforceable, since the "losing parties" at Nicaea had protecting governors to allow them their continued practice and promulgation of their post-Nicaea "declared non-standard"= heretical truths. An extra-church figure like Constantine influenced the direction of the church. One can see how the extra-ecclesiastical Constitution of the United States in protecting all religious beliefs is in fact an attempt to "repair" Nicaea as it concerns freedom of religious beliefs. Constantine tried to enforce the "canon" law of Nicaea upon the entire population; the U.S. Constitution does not permit any "canon" law to be the law of the land. Is Catholic, meaning "on the whole" as defined by church councils, enforceable as Universal Canon Law or would such an enforcement be the loss of freedom?
Aphorism of the Day, May 24, 2018
The writer of the Gospel of John continuously makes fun of literal interpreters, as when the literal Nicodemus thought about getting back into his mother's womb when being told he needed to be born again/from above. In the same discourse the implicit Trinity is referred to: Born of the Spirit, God so loved the world he sent his Son. The Trinity has come to be regarded in literal term when it should be regarded in literary, aesthetic and relational terms, when in fact, the Gospel of John indicates that all is literary, because the writer says, In the Beginning the Word was God.
Aphorism of the Day, May 23, 2018
In the history of the church one can note that we have the ability to complicate beliefs because in success parties divide and religious meanings become "administrative" truths that religious authorities feel that they need to enforce by council and so heretics are declared. Eucharistic presence "over-explained" as transubstantiation became an administrative truth which divided the church; some believed that Christ in me and I in Christ was the Real Presence of a Real Relationship with Christ, renewed in the Eucharistic event not because one had lost the Real Relationship but simply because we live in time and living in time means that Real Relationship is celebrated in renewal events and acts. The Trinity is another meaningful truth that became an administrational truth after the Council of Nicaea. In its nascent form in the Gospel of John, one finds that the Trinity is the relationship between Jesus, his Father and the Spirit. In a world of differences, it is easy to live with impaired relationship denying the sameness that we have with each other, the mutual versions we have of each other because of the ability for mutual experience to be able to be conducted between different persons. In the practice of Jesus, the Trinity is the elevation of Relationship of Different Persons into the One Harmony of God as the chief value of life itself and thus the primary model for us to organize our human experience around. The Trinity is a Relational Meaningful Truth; it loses something when regarded as mere administrational truth of who believes rightly or wrongly.
Aphorism of the Day, May 22, 2018
The Gospel of John is the most "Trinitarian" Gospel since in the long discourses of Jesus there are words of relationship regarding Father, Son and Spirit. One might say that the doctrine of the Trinity relies heavily upon the words of Jesus in John which so obviously refer to a relationship occurring within God and that spills into human experience as men and women are invited to know themselves as sons and daughters of God. The Trinity is about Relationship but hints that the unity of the harmony of differences is a more honest presentation of the needed immanence of God than the unity of an aloof mono-Self of pure apophaticism. (Honestly, how could one even know pure transcendence existed?)
Aphorism of the Day, May 21, 2018
In the discourse between Jesus and Nicodemus, Jesus referred to earthly and heavenly understanding. In a cosmological universe that is not a flat earth, domed sky, and highest heaven is through the top of the dome how does one appropriate the notions of earthly or heavenly, or natural and spiritual? The heavenly must be a interior constitutions of the word lenses through which one interprets and sees one's world. Jesus came and his words which were spirit, in the sense of reorganizing the inner word constitutions of people, brought about this experience of being born "again" or from above. God, Spirit and Son has become a part of the dynamic heavenly understanding of God. Ponder this as we move toward Trinity Sunday.
Aphorism of the Day, May 20, 2018
Pentecost is a further explanation as to why the early church grew and survived and flourished in the way it did. How could an "absent" Jesus become a translatable and trans-historical reality to attract people to claim a personal relationship and personal identity with this man who was absent? How? The Holy Spirit was the explanation. People came to believe that their lives were inhabited by an inner constitution with a Higher Power Personality who not only kept the Personal Traces of Jesus alive; but magnified them into a mystical experience of Identity. When such an experience is corporate and replicating in nature, it ceases to be an idio-pathological event; it becomes an objectively confirmed community experience and the resulting behaviors are then judged by all other communities. This means that Christians should be very concerned that all that we do should be judged by the standard of love, joy, peace, gentleness, goodness, patience, faith, self-control and humility. If behaviors do not measure up to these standards, one cannot claim a genealogy with Christ or the Spirit.
Aphorism of the Day, May 19, 2018
How did the early churches understand the Day of Pentecost and the Holy Spirit? They understood the Holy Spirit to be the future of Jesus, the Son, and God the Father known after the risen Christ was gone from this world. Sometimes the church claims to be the "preserver" of the tradition of Christ and sometimes the efforts of preservation are over-identified with practices that have arisen at times in the history of the church, and Anglicanism has generated some of these. But we must never forget that the Spirit is about the future of Christ, of God and about creating and sustaining love of this world.
Aphorism of the Day, May 18, 2018
Jesus said, "My words are spirit and they are life." One could say that Word is what is truly unifying about human life. Everyone had Word or Language even though we use language to name of world of differences. Spirit=Word=Life is the unity of all. Onto the big problem: translating human use of language into peaceful, loving and just outcomes for everyone.
Aphorism of the Day, May 17, 2018
In the Genesis story, creation took place by the speech acts of God: "God said, let there be ....and it came into being." The Genesis story relates that Adam was made in God's image and what does Adam do? Adam names things, meaning that a God who spoke Adam into existence made Adam as one with language ability to name creation. While the story seems to indicate that God and Adam are beings which can be signified by words of language, the hidden reality is that God and Adam are all taking place in and because of there being language in the first place. Language is the field of being and in this field is an endless crop of signifiers endlessly signifying other signifiers while the signifying agents of language try endlessly to name what is beyond signification. Alas, beyond signification is but more signifiers. Significations if what humans do.
Aphorism of the Day, May 16, 2018
A major disagreement between the Eastern and Western church is the phrase in the Nicene Creed, "and the son," added by the Western church. The debate about the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son has been a hot issue except for the theologically clueless not appreciating the finer distinctions of Trinitarian theology. Though if one is being biblical one could simple quote the words of Jesus in John's Gospel. "When the Advocate comes, whom I will send from the Father...." we could simplify the argument about what it means for the Holy Spirit to be sent from the Father according to the promise of Jesus: "I will send." It is probably ironically all too human for us to project our disputes onto the perfect relationship of the Trinity?
Aphorism of the Day, May 15, 2018
One of messages of the Day of Pentecost is that a message of unity is translatable. Jews from the Diaspora were in Jerusalem and they spoke the languages of the countries of their residencies but on the Day of Pentecost, they heard the message about Christ in their own languages. It is ironic how the Western Church went to a "Latin" only policy to "unify" the church and they forsook that original policy of how the message of Christ was translatable into the languages and experiences of all people. One can understand enforced Latin for administrative control in a growing church but the end result was a passive and spectator laity and the baptismal order of lay ministry truly was treated as the inferior order of ministry.
Aphorism of the Day, May 14, 2018
Sometimes a negative is used to explain what is regarded to be a positive phenomenon. Leaven/yeast was used to explain the grow of the "kingdom of God." Fire was also a symbol for what was used to explain the growth of the church, i.e., the Holy Spirit. The early Christians themselves were rather shocked at the effervescence of the Jesus Movement and the Spirit, an unseen but creating life-affirming breath and creating wind was the explanation for the surprising growth of the Jesus Movement. Holy Spirit Movements have their negative counter movements in the collective mob-ism of the socio-political phenomenon of Nazism and Stalinism et al. One must judge the fruits of the deeds and rhetoric of any movement to see the nature of the "inner spirit" of the movement whether it be truthful or lying. Countries which had Christianity as their "main" religion have become "Anti-Christ" in the actual behaviors that took over political leadership.
Aphorism of the Day, May 13, 2018
Speaking in the name of Christ and making the name of God known was important in the writings of the early churches. What does it mean that Jesus made the name of God known? Does it mean that he transgressed the holy "tetragrammaton" unpronounceable to Jews who revered the sacredness of the name of G-d? Who would dare to speak or write the name of G-d? Is the holy transcendence of G-d mocked when Jesus revealed G-d's name to be for him, "Father" or "Daddy?" Was Jesus encouraging the original experience of knowing G-d something akin to a young infant saying for the first time, "mama" or "dada?" An outcome of the "new birth" experience referred to in John's Gospel was to make an intimate "Daddy" confession of God and in such spiritual innocence ego is absent to trivialize divine presence or to limit G-d to the word "Daddy" when "Mommy" would also be analogically accurate and appropriate in the sense of expressing intimacy with G-d as one's generating parent because one has been generated within the Plenitude of All.
Aphorism of the Day, May 12, 2018
How does one take a religious word like "sanctify" and understand it to be functionally useful today? Try the route of using of Thesaurus? Sanctify means to make holy. But what does make holy mean for us today? Probably the way to appropriate sanctify and make holy today would be to use the words "the intensely intentional specification of something as being most highly valued such that one would organize the rest of one's life around such an intensely intentional value." One would have to qualify such a definition by a disclaimer: "The most highly valued "thing" does not happen because of the applied energy of intention; rather the intention is drawn because of the attraction to the highly valued thing. Sanctification pertains to being drawn in devotion to what is most highly valued which has sublime overtones.
Aphorism of the Day, May 11, 2018
When the mystical practices of St. Paul resulted in a "spiritual poetic," it resulted in hiding these practices in the Gospel narratives of the life of Jesus. His Ascension was presented as the way in which one became "seated with Christ" in heavenly places. Minds which externalize and demand empirical verification of the same get trapped in the confusion of missing the poetry in narrative events. Using the wrong discursive interpretive tool for the wrong event leads to schizoidal behaviors of living by the laws of gravity while pretending in some cases they don't pertain.
Aphorism of the Day, May 10, 2018
One of the outcomes of Christianity becoming the religion of the Roman Empire and every citizen becoming passively assimilated into the church through infant baptism was the externalization of the mystagogy of the church. St. Paul understood the Ascension as the mystical elevator of being raised with Christ into heavenly places. With the lost of mystagogy in the church, the Ascension became the physical ascent of Jesus into the abode heaven, something like finding the opening at the top of the dome of the sky to an actual physical place in heaven.
Aphorism of the Day, May 9, 2018
In John's Gospel, it is written that God so loved the world, yet his disciples were not to love the world and they were to be in the world but not of the world. The Johannine use of "world" refers to the orientation of a person towards the exterior world as one's primary home versus orientation toward an interior realm, the very interior life where words are born and arise to name value for everything that one experiences. In mysticism, one tends first to the interior world of words where values are created and so one sets the orientation of one's life. One can still love the world of the God's created order as the Christ nature loves the world in a healthful caring way.
Aphorism of the Day, May 8, 2018
Modernity has broken down religion has Folk Religion, in the sense of a religious identity unifying the practice of a larger group of people. Cloistered community such as the Amish try to resist such a break down. A similar religious identity maintains because it rides the coat tails of homogeneous ethnic identity where religious practice is embedded in ethnic identity. The melting pot of America is based upon no one religious identity being enforced upon the entire country and as nomadic behaviors increase, even regional or clannish religious identity no longer attain the impact of being "folk religious" practice.
Aphorism of the Day, May 7, 2018
Oneness in diversity is Trinitarian dilemma and oneness is a topic in John's Gospel. Jesus is One with the Father. And the disciples are to be One as he is One with Father. This oneness is often used in reference to the ecumenical "scandal" (Christians divided by having a common Savior) of divided "churches," when it fact it probably refers to the disciples' oneness with God the Father. Oneness in diverse churches can still be adhere two since diversity can be an expression of different missions which different people are called to in affirming the overall Oneness of All.
Aphorism of the Day, May 6, 2018
Personality and the event of friendship are perhaps two of the highest human experiential notions. Since they have such high regard in human experience, it follows that the superlative case of personality and friendship is a higher order. Hence analogically, for Christians, the Trinity is the higher friendship model among the Divine Persons.
Aphorism of the Day, May 5, 2018
How did the disciples go from being clumsily clueless about the knowledge of Jesus to the status of being able to speak in his name and be able to say like Paul, "I have the mind of Christ?" In John's Gospel there is something akin to a graduation ceremony when Jesus says, "I have called you friends; you are no longer servants. What the Father has shared with me, I have shared with you." The continuing identity of the disciples with Jesus and the Father through the Holy Spirit expresses the reality of the authority of the leadership practice of the early churches.
Aphorism of the Day, May 4, 2018
The Gospel of John includes a presentation of the radical identity of Jesus with his Father. "If you have seen me, you have seen the Father." Sometimes we through iconography split the Trinity into spatial identities because our perception often is limited to Newtonian two planes of existence. Poetry allows other modes of perception such that Jesus can be identified fully with the Father in ONENESS, not just because he bears the image of God most fully in human form, but because he does not ever regard himself separated from the Plenitude of All. Jesus invites all to the experience of ONENESS or being able to regard ourselves in continuous unseparated existence with ALL.
Aphorism of the Day, May 3, 2018
Conditional friendship? Jesus said, "You are my friend if you do what I command." Sounds like there are strings attached but Jesus also said that he followed the commands of his Father. Friendship is "winsome" authority because choosing to do what is good and right is not a burdensome command. If a command was about doing something that was not in a person's well-being, it would not be a friendship.
Aphorism of the Day, May 2, 2018
Jesus said that the greater love is "laying down one's life for one's friends." One can think of sacrificial death of fallen heroes in battle, but the life referred to here is pseuche life or soul life. This means that a person comports oneself in thinking, feeling, choosing and acting so as to make room for another person in the significant way that has come to define friendship. The reward of friendship does not make "checking one's ego" burdensome because friendship happens in the dynamic of people "mutually checking their egos" in the event of love.
Aphorism of the Day, May 1, 2018
"I have not called you servants; I have called you friends." These words in John are something like a graduation ceremony. The apprentices are made to be teachers who would also have students. They became certified by Christ to speak in his name even so that they words they spoke could be designated as worthy of Him and inspired by the spirit. The New Testament are collections of writings by "friends" of Christ who taught, preached and wrote in his name and so the councils of the church have designated the words as inspired. Each is called to be an "inspired" friend of Christ, but we don't need our words canonized since the canon provides sufficient examples of universal language patterns that can find correspondences in any time.
As sacrosanct as we often regard the "Law" to be, the fact that it has to be interpreted in application in new situations means that the "Law" is always "political" in that it comes to the defense of a "polis" or group of people. Laws can be used in ways to supports positions and they can be used as a polemic against "political" opponents. Should Jesus be judged by the law for doing healing "work" on the Sabbath? Defining "work" and implying that healing is somehow something that God would not do though a person on a particular occurrence of Sabbath shows the way in which interpretation of the law involves the politics of a particular party.
Aphorism of the Day, May 30, 2018
Kant's Categorical Imperative was to act in such a way that one could will that it be a universal maxim. This seems to imply that there would be no exceptions. Does this imperative not take into account the intention within a particular situation and whether the resulting act would be salutary again in a different situation? No work on the Sabbath, except healing? How does one maintain the general imperative of needing Sabbath Rest and yet allowing that some human activity on the Sabbath serves higher justice? Old "Blue Laws" for Sunday in some states used to allow beer to be purchased on Sunday but not baby bottles? Can Categorical Imperatives actually predict every future case of how it might be articulated with completely just practice? Love and Justice can be Categorical Imperatives while being fluid about particular articulation of the same in future situations.
Aphorism of the Day, May 29, 2018
While we might use the term God's law to designate "universal and unchanging" rules of human behavior, it is not as easy as it seems. All laws exist within societies of practice and it might be more godly to claim that God's Law is about Justice and Love. Particular laws and ordinances arise from the attempt to articulate what justice and love look like in actual practice. Details of cultures can arise and change which require the adjustment of laws to articulate what justice and love means in a different time than from the times when they were originally generated. The 10 Commandments and our U.S. Constitution were generated in a time when slavery was the accepted practice. How could such "enlightened" and even "divine" laws omit such a glaring injustice? When St. Paul wrote that love is fulfilling the law, it could be that he was referring to the call we continuously have to make our behaviors and rules of behaviors more closely approximate what justice means for everyone.
Aphorism of the Day, May 28, 2018
Legalism is when laws are applied in absurd ways and actually hinder the common good, even in a particular situation. Could Jesus heal on the Sabbath? Would healing be against the labor laws of the Sabbath? What is labor and what is rest? What is prayer and what is not prayer? Healing as oblationary prayer is a way to honor the intent of the sabbath. Nurses and doctors work at all times. Enlightened justice allows humane adjustments.
Aphorism of the Day, May 27, 2018
While Christians have argued about the Trinity for centuries, they have often forgotten that they are unified by having language as the prior condition for positing any position at all on the Trinity. One should never forget that everything known begins to be known because we first have Language.
Aphorism of the Day, May 26, 2018
In pondering the Holy Trinity one might ponder a comparison between the Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed. The Apostles Creed embodies the early baptism formulaic command to baptize in the Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit after the candidate has expressed belief in the Three. The Nicene Creed from a later period is the Creed of the Council to require belief about how the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit are related. Such a Creed derived from an effort to standardize church unity in a presentation of an "official" understanding of God.
Aphorism of the Day, May 25, 2018
It cannot be missed that the Trinity arose in the history of Christianity as an attempt to standardized the presentation of God in the midst of different presentations of meaningful understandings of God. Standardization occurs because of success; successful but conflicting Christian communities can spill into the socio-political contexts. Emperor Constantine saw Christian success and he saw Christian divisions and how it could and did "divide" the Empire. Hence, the Council of Nicaea was an Emperor driven meeting for bishops to gather and standardized the presentation of Christian meaningful truths. The result of such a standardization was the "excommunication" of large number of Christians, perhaps the majority, and it took a century for it to become more uniformly enforceable, since the "losing parties" at Nicaea had protecting governors to allow them their continued practice and promulgation of their post-Nicaea "declared non-standard"= heretical truths. An extra-church figure like Constantine influenced the direction of the church. One can see how the extra-ecclesiastical Constitution of the United States in protecting all religious beliefs is in fact an attempt to "repair" Nicaea as it concerns freedom of religious beliefs. Constantine tried to enforce the "canon" law of Nicaea upon the entire population; the U.S. Constitution does not permit any "canon" law to be the law of the land. Is Catholic, meaning "on the whole" as defined by church councils, enforceable as Universal Canon Law or would such an enforcement be the loss of freedom?
Aphorism of the Day, May 24, 2018
The writer of the Gospel of John continuously makes fun of literal interpreters, as when the literal Nicodemus thought about getting back into his mother's womb when being told he needed to be born again/from above. In the same discourse the implicit Trinity is referred to: Born of the Spirit, God so loved the world he sent his Son. The Trinity has come to be regarded in literal term when it should be regarded in literary, aesthetic and relational terms, when in fact, the Gospel of John indicates that all is literary, because the writer says, In the Beginning the Word was God.
Aphorism of the Day, May 23, 2018
In the history of the church one can note that we have the ability to complicate beliefs because in success parties divide and religious meanings become "administrative" truths that religious authorities feel that they need to enforce by council and so heretics are declared. Eucharistic presence "over-explained" as transubstantiation became an administrative truth which divided the church; some believed that Christ in me and I in Christ was the Real Presence of a Real Relationship with Christ, renewed in the Eucharistic event not because one had lost the Real Relationship but simply because we live in time and living in time means that Real Relationship is celebrated in renewal events and acts. The Trinity is another meaningful truth that became an administrational truth after the Council of Nicaea. In its nascent form in the Gospel of John, one finds that the Trinity is the relationship between Jesus, his Father and the Spirit. In a world of differences, it is easy to live with impaired relationship denying the sameness that we have with each other, the mutual versions we have of each other because of the ability for mutual experience to be able to be conducted between different persons. In the practice of Jesus, the Trinity is the elevation of Relationship of Different Persons into the One Harmony of God as the chief value of life itself and thus the primary model for us to organize our human experience around. The Trinity is a Relational Meaningful Truth; it loses something when regarded as mere administrational truth of who believes rightly or wrongly.
Aphorism of the Day, May 22, 2018
The Gospel of John is the most "Trinitarian" Gospel since in the long discourses of Jesus there are words of relationship regarding Father, Son and Spirit. One might say that the doctrine of the Trinity relies heavily upon the words of Jesus in John which so obviously refer to a relationship occurring within God and that spills into human experience as men and women are invited to know themselves as sons and daughters of God. The Trinity is about Relationship but hints that the unity of the harmony of differences is a more honest presentation of the needed immanence of God than the unity of an aloof mono-Self of pure apophaticism. (Honestly, how could one even know pure transcendence existed?)
Aphorism of the Day, May 21, 2018
In the discourse between Jesus and Nicodemus, Jesus referred to earthly and heavenly understanding. In a cosmological universe that is not a flat earth, domed sky, and highest heaven is through the top of the dome how does one appropriate the notions of earthly or heavenly, or natural and spiritual? The heavenly must be a interior constitutions of the word lenses through which one interprets and sees one's world. Jesus came and his words which were spirit, in the sense of reorganizing the inner word constitutions of people, brought about this experience of being born "again" or from above. God, Spirit and Son has become a part of the dynamic heavenly understanding of God. Ponder this as we move toward Trinity Sunday.
Aphorism of the Day, May 20, 2018
Pentecost is a further explanation as to why the early church grew and survived and flourished in the way it did. How could an "absent" Jesus become a translatable and trans-historical reality to attract people to claim a personal relationship and personal identity with this man who was absent? How? The Holy Spirit was the explanation. People came to believe that their lives were inhabited by an inner constitution with a Higher Power Personality who not only kept the Personal Traces of Jesus alive; but magnified them into a mystical experience of Identity. When such an experience is corporate and replicating in nature, it ceases to be an idio-pathological event; it becomes an objectively confirmed community experience and the resulting behaviors are then judged by all other communities. This means that Christians should be very concerned that all that we do should be judged by the standard of love, joy, peace, gentleness, goodness, patience, faith, self-control and humility. If behaviors do not measure up to these standards, one cannot claim a genealogy with Christ or the Spirit.
Aphorism of the Day, May 19, 2018
How did the early churches understand the Day of Pentecost and the Holy Spirit? They understood the Holy Spirit to be the future of Jesus, the Son, and God the Father known after the risen Christ was gone from this world. Sometimes the church claims to be the "preserver" of the tradition of Christ and sometimes the efforts of preservation are over-identified with practices that have arisen at times in the history of the church, and Anglicanism has generated some of these. But we must never forget that the Spirit is about the future of Christ, of God and about creating and sustaining love of this world.
Aphorism of the Day, May 18, 2018
Jesus said, "My words are spirit and they are life." One could say that Word is what is truly unifying about human life. Everyone had Word or Language even though we use language to name of world of differences. Spirit=Word=Life is the unity of all. Onto the big problem: translating human use of language into peaceful, loving and just outcomes for everyone.
Aphorism of the Day, May 17, 2018
In the Genesis story, creation took place by the speech acts of God: "God said, let there be ....and it came into being." The Genesis story relates that Adam was made in God's image and what does Adam do? Adam names things, meaning that a God who spoke Adam into existence made Adam as one with language ability to name creation. While the story seems to indicate that God and Adam are beings which can be signified by words of language, the hidden reality is that God and Adam are all taking place in and because of there being language in the first place. Language is the field of being and in this field is an endless crop of signifiers endlessly signifying other signifiers while the signifying agents of language try endlessly to name what is beyond signification. Alas, beyond signification is but more signifiers. Significations if what humans do.
Aphorism of the Day, May 16, 2018
A major disagreement between the Eastern and Western church is the phrase in the Nicene Creed, "and the son," added by the Western church. The debate about the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son has been a hot issue except for the theologically clueless not appreciating the finer distinctions of Trinitarian theology. Though if one is being biblical one could simple quote the words of Jesus in John's Gospel. "When the Advocate comes, whom I will send from the Father...." we could simplify the argument about what it means for the Holy Spirit to be sent from the Father according to the promise of Jesus: "I will send." It is probably ironically all too human for us to project our disputes onto the perfect relationship of the Trinity?
Aphorism of the Day, May 15, 2018
One of messages of the Day of Pentecost is that a message of unity is translatable. Jews from the Diaspora were in Jerusalem and they spoke the languages of the countries of their residencies but on the Day of Pentecost, they heard the message about Christ in their own languages. It is ironic how the Western Church went to a "Latin" only policy to "unify" the church and they forsook that original policy of how the message of Christ was translatable into the languages and experiences of all people. One can understand enforced Latin for administrative control in a growing church but the end result was a passive and spectator laity and the baptismal order of lay ministry truly was treated as the inferior order of ministry.
Aphorism of the Day, May 14, 2018
Sometimes a negative is used to explain what is regarded to be a positive phenomenon. Leaven/yeast was used to explain the grow of the "kingdom of God." Fire was also a symbol for what was used to explain the growth of the church, i.e., the Holy Spirit. The early Christians themselves were rather shocked at the effervescence of the Jesus Movement and the Spirit, an unseen but creating life-affirming breath and creating wind was the explanation for the surprising growth of the Jesus Movement. Holy Spirit Movements have their negative counter movements in the collective mob-ism of the socio-political phenomenon of Nazism and Stalinism et al. One must judge the fruits of the deeds and rhetoric of any movement to see the nature of the "inner spirit" of the movement whether it be truthful or lying. Countries which had Christianity as their "main" religion have become "Anti-Christ" in the actual behaviors that took over political leadership.
Aphorism of the Day, May 13, 2018
Speaking in the name of Christ and making the name of God known was important in the writings of the early churches. What does it mean that Jesus made the name of God known? Does it mean that he transgressed the holy "tetragrammaton" unpronounceable to Jews who revered the sacredness of the name of G-d? Who would dare to speak or write the name of G-d? Is the holy transcendence of G-d mocked when Jesus revealed G-d's name to be for him, "Father" or "Daddy?" Was Jesus encouraging the original experience of knowing G-d something akin to a young infant saying for the first time, "mama" or "dada?" An outcome of the "new birth" experience referred to in John's Gospel was to make an intimate "Daddy" confession of God and in such spiritual innocence ego is absent to trivialize divine presence or to limit G-d to the word "Daddy" when "Mommy" would also be analogically accurate and appropriate in the sense of expressing intimacy with G-d as one's generating parent because one has been generated within the Plenitude of All.
Aphorism of the Day, May 12, 2018
How does one take a religious word like "sanctify" and understand it to be functionally useful today? Try the route of using of Thesaurus? Sanctify means to make holy. But what does make holy mean for us today? Probably the way to appropriate sanctify and make holy today would be to use the words "the intensely intentional specification of something as being most highly valued such that one would organize the rest of one's life around such an intensely intentional value." One would have to qualify such a definition by a disclaimer: "The most highly valued "thing" does not happen because of the applied energy of intention; rather the intention is drawn because of the attraction to the highly valued thing. Sanctification pertains to being drawn in devotion to what is most highly valued which has sublime overtones.
Aphorism of the Day, May 11, 2018
When the mystical practices of St. Paul resulted in a "spiritual poetic," it resulted in hiding these practices in the Gospel narratives of the life of Jesus. His Ascension was presented as the way in which one became "seated with Christ" in heavenly places. Minds which externalize and demand empirical verification of the same get trapped in the confusion of missing the poetry in narrative events. Using the wrong discursive interpretive tool for the wrong event leads to schizoidal behaviors of living by the laws of gravity while pretending in some cases they don't pertain.
Aphorism of the Day, May 10, 2018
One of the outcomes of Christianity becoming the religion of the Roman Empire and every citizen becoming passively assimilated into the church through infant baptism was the externalization of the mystagogy of the church. St. Paul understood the Ascension as the mystical elevator of being raised with Christ into heavenly places. With the lost of mystagogy in the church, the Ascension became the physical ascent of Jesus into the abode heaven, something like finding the opening at the top of the dome of the sky to an actual physical place in heaven.
Aphorism of the Day, May 9, 2018
In John's Gospel, it is written that God so loved the world, yet his disciples were not to love the world and they were to be in the world but not of the world. The Johannine use of "world" refers to the orientation of a person towards the exterior world as one's primary home versus orientation toward an interior realm, the very interior life where words are born and arise to name value for everything that one experiences. In mysticism, one tends first to the interior world of words where values are created and so one sets the orientation of one's life. One can still love the world of the God's created order as the Christ nature loves the world in a healthful caring way.
Aphorism of the Day, May 8, 2018
Modernity has broken down religion has Folk Religion, in the sense of a religious identity unifying the practice of a larger group of people. Cloistered community such as the Amish try to resist such a break down. A similar religious identity maintains because it rides the coat tails of homogeneous ethnic identity where religious practice is embedded in ethnic identity. The melting pot of America is based upon no one religious identity being enforced upon the entire country and as nomadic behaviors increase, even regional or clannish religious identity no longer attain the impact of being "folk religious" practice.
Aphorism of the Day, May 7, 2018
Oneness in diversity is Trinitarian dilemma and oneness is a topic in John's Gospel. Jesus is One with the Father. And the disciples are to be One as he is One with Father. This oneness is often used in reference to the ecumenical "scandal" (Christians divided by having a common Savior) of divided "churches," when it fact it probably refers to the disciples' oneness with God the Father. Oneness in diverse churches can still be adhere two since diversity can be an expression of different missions which different people are called to in affirming the overall Oneness of All.
Aphorism of the Day, May 6, 2018
Personality and the event of friendship are perhaps two of the highest human experiential notions. Since they have such high regard in human experience, it follows that the superlative case of personality and friendship is a higher order. Hence analogically, for Christians, the Trinity is the higher friendship model among the Divine Persons.
Aphorism of the Day, May 5, 2018
How did the disciples go from being clumsily clueless about the knowledge of Jesus to the status of being able to speak in his name and be able to say like Paul, "I have the mind of Christ?" In John's Gospel there is something akin to a graduation ceremony when Jesus says, "I have called you friends; you are no longer servants. What the Father has shared with me, I have shared with you." The continuing identity of the disciples with Jesus and the Father through the Holy Spirit expresses the reality of the authority of the leadership practice of the early churches.
Aphorism of the Day, May 4, 2018
The Gospel of John includes a presentation of the radical identity of Jesus with his Father. "If you have seen me, you have seen the Father." Sometimes we through iconography split the Trinity into spatial identities because our perception often is limited to Newtonian two planes of existence. Poetry allows other modes of perception such that Jesus can be identified fully with the Father in ONENESS, not just because he bears the image of God most fully in human form, but because he does not ever regard himself separated from the Plenitude of All. Jesus invites all to the experience of ONENESS or being able to regard ourselves in continuous unseparated existence with ALL.
Aphorism of the Day, May 3, 2018
Conditional friendship? Jesus said, "You are my friend if you do what I command." Sounds like there are strings attached but Jesus also said that he followed the commands of his Father. Friendship is "winsome" authority because choosing to do what is good and right is not a burdensome command. If a command was about doing something that was not in a person's well-being, it would not be a friendship.
Aphorism of the Day, May 2, 2018
Jesus said that the greater love is "laying down one's life for one's friends." One can think of sacrificial death of fallen heroes in battle, but the life referred to here is pseuche life or soul life. This means that a person comports oneself in thinking, feeling, choosing and acting so as to make room for another person in the significant way that has come to define friendship. The reward of friendship does not make "checking one's ego" burdensome because friendship happens in the dynamic of people "mutually checking their egos" in the event of love.
Aphorism of the Day, May 1, 2018
"I have not called you servants; I have called you friends." These words in John are something like a graduation ceremony. The apprentices are made to be teachers who would also have students. They became certified by Christ to speak in his name even so that they words they spoke could be designated as worthy of Him and inspired by the spirit. The New Testament are collections of writings by "friends" of Christ who taught, preached and wrote in his name and so the councils of the church have designated the words as inspired. Each is called to be an "inspired" friend of Christ, but we don't need our words canonized since the canon provides sufficient examples of universal language patterns that can find correspondences in any time.
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