Aphorism of the Day, September 30, 2018
In Pauline mysticism, identity with the death of Christ had the effect of indicting unworthy aspects both on the level of the whole self, but also members of the self. One's members were to be transformed and used for righteousness instead of unrighteousness and being identified with the death of Christ was the power which effected this interdiction of wrong use even as the resurrecting power of the Spirit empowered right use. In presenting the story of Jesus, his hyperbolic language in his setting before his death on the cross, was used to teach this interdiction of the unworthy use of human capacity. Hence, he said to pluck out the eye, cut off the hand, make oneself lame, if the use of any aspect of the self was unworthy and offended the ideal and desired use of each human capacity.
Aphorism of the Day, September 29, 2018
The Holy Scriptures are writings of people who grapple with how to best use an unavoidable human discursive habit of always already assuming a totality even while knowing that they are not large enough to encompass such a Totality to be infallible spokespersons for such a Totality. In the universe of language a single word does not exist alone; it exists in the universe of everything that could come to Language. Perhaps this is why the writer of John's Gospel believed that the Word was with God and was God because by so saying it is honest to human existence as it could even be known.
Aphorism of the Day, September 28, 2018
One of the functions of prayer might be the general acceptance of the results of change and time in being in the continual process of loss. We are losing all kinds of things, all of the time and how do we adjust to continual loss? One of the ways of adjusting to the way things are or happen to be is to come to declare life as "God's will," as if totality could be anything other than it is. The variable is how the one experiences time, change, loss and gains in how it comes in the language of one's life through the interpretation of the meaning of personal experience. The sense of the power of freedom to really have significance because of the choice of one's words and body language acts vis a vis Infinity sums up both the grace and the absurdity of prayer.
Aphorism of the Day, September 27, 2018
"and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven." This is added in the account of James for praying for the sick and it is included in the prayer for the sick in the Book of Common Prayer, "of his great mercies may he forgive you your sins." People who are sick and people who are well are sinners and need forgiveness. What I object to in these prayers for the sick is the subtle implication that "one's sins are specifically" connected with the condition of sickness for which the church is offering Holy Unction. In some situations what we do wrong may have causal connection with a condition of "sickness" but to assume that this is always the case is presuming to know too much and can have the overtones of "blaming the victims." As if, if such a person had not sinned he or she would not be sick. I think that language of the rite should be changed to remove the ambiguity.
Aphorism of the Day, September 26, 2018
"Whoever is not against us is for us." If love and justice are the main goals, then whoever is working for the same is in league with all who share the same goal. The notion that my quest for love and justice is superior to yours is in fact an offense to love and justice.
Aphorism of the Day, September 25, 2018
In the hyperbolic language of Jesus, he recommends a millstone necklace to be the anchor for the one who is tossed into the sea because he has "offended the littles" (children?) That is a rather horrifying punishment for those involved in the abuse of "little ones." It seems as though Jesus must have observed the mistreatment of children and he was quite upset to recommend such harsh punishment.
Aphorism of the September 24, 2018
One can have harmful behaviors cease through external intervention like removing accessibility to addictive substances or by imprisonment. The severity of harmful behaviors were stressed by Jesus in his extreme hyperbolic language of "self suppression." "If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off!" The freedom of choice known as fasting is the interdiction by oneself that needs to be done to avoid the juridical intervention by the legal authorities. The hyperbolic use of language by Jesus suggests that serious misuse of any human function is best done through free self agency. As negative as the language seems, it is an affirmation of human freedom to be able to do it. As tyrannical as addictions are, one should never de-humanize a person by saying that one has no choice at all in self-control.
Aphorism of Day, September 23, 2018
Greatness as explained by Jesus is not having wealth, position or knowledge; it involves taking care of children and treating them as though they were Christ. Power, wealth and knowledge are greatest when they are converted to help the vulnerable and to impart worth and value to those who have no affirming environment.
Aphorism of Day, September 22, 2018
The mysticism of Pauline being "in Christ" and Christ in "in me" is hidden in the narratives of Jesus in the Gospels a manuals of mysticism for those who were initiates in Christo-mysticism and who "knew the Messianic secret" and had "ears to hear" the spiritual message which was encoded within the re-telling of the stories and words of Jesus. A crucial aspect of the Gospel qua the mysticism of Paul and others was what one might call neonatal, infant and child theology. The origin of Christ "in me" is being overshadowed by the Spirit. One discovers one's new birth by having it revealed in projecting upon babes and children who bear the wonder that is lost in the cynical world of adulthood. Jesus uses the baby-child motif to bring us back to the depth of wonder that has been lost because being evicted from the nascent Garden of Eden and learning good and evil in adult ways has been like facing the guardian angels preventing a return to the garden of Wonder. Jesus initiated access to the parallel universe of Wonder even while the weeds and wild of the wilderness of the external earthly kingdoms keep us in perpetual trouble.
Aphorism of the Day, September 21, 2018
The child-motif of the Gospels probably reached a height when the infancy narratives came to writing in Matthew and Luke. Instead of teaching directly the mystical theology of being born again by the birth of Christ into one's life, they hide the new birth in a mystagogic story of Christ being born in Mary, the paradigmatic Christian, whose life is overshadowed by the Holy Spirit in the conception event. One can say that the world has been "Christmasized" because of the effect of the holiday in the society at large. For some reason, we are drawn to that which we can never fully consciously recover, viz., our earliest memories of our lives when we were not conscious users of language but was in the process of being codified by the language users who controlled us. That mystical state of unknowing Innocence is the potent force of the power of New Birth, which in fact is just the return of the memorial traces of our conception and first birth.
Aphorism of the Day, September 20, 2018
The Gospel child-motif of Jesus is striking. How much closer to childhood can one be than the metaphor, "born again?" How is that that Jesus said mysteries have been withheld from the wise and revealed to infants? It could be that infant and child represent the state of contemplation; a state of being where one does not use language and does not interpret anything. Learning language and becoming an interpreter means that one's view of the world is already clouded by the taxonomical grids given to one by one's teaching cultural situation, hence it is biased and limited and completely relative to the context. The state of wonder is the before and beyond language state that one tries to access in attaining a state of mystery or the humility of being suspended in unknowing because of recognition of one's smallness and yet connection with an infinite number of others. Such a connection without knowing in any precise way all causal connections incites the wonder of any interpretation dying the death of a thousand qualifications and in the cloud of such unknowing one can be content with wonder.
Aphorism of the Day, September 19, 2018
The disciples are presented in the Gospel as those who do not understand the meaning of the life of Jesus and the things that will happen to him. The disciples are those who are presented as those who are still steeped in the common paradigms of their culture and have not yet had the conversion experience to the new Christo-mysticism which occurred after his death and the advent of the variety of appearances of the Risen Christ. The Risen Christ can inhabit people who live within most any cultural paradigm and the task is to give up our old paradigms of not understanding what the Risen Christ is doing in a new place and a new time.
Aphorism of the Day, September 18, 2018
The importance of the child-motif in the words of Jesus could be read in several ways. It could be an indication that children were not treated very well in the time of Jesus just as they have often in history been viewed as mainly part of the labor force or future brides for financial well being of the family. Many people regard religion being mainly for children and something that one can grow out of as an adult. I suspect that Jesus regarded children as being the little people on whom adults can project the lost naivete of one's forgotten early life and there is a "born again" energy in being able to access one's child aspect of personality in bringing fresh wonder into the most adult situations of life. If one is missing the fresh energy of one's "child aspect of personality" then one can live as a pessimistic adult Scrooge pronouncing "bah humbug" on everything that one does.
Aphorism of the Day, September 17, 2018
The child motif in the Gospels is significant and even sacramental. Jesus receives a child and said, "If you receive a child, you have received me." Jesus identified himself with a child and that is as significant as being identified with bread and wine. The church has often made bread and wine holy objects while the church has existed in cultures which tolerated child labor and child exploitation and neglect. Church leaders are faced with their own record of child abuse and cover up. It is much easier to take care of bread and wine than it is to take care of a child. What will the church do about the child as sacrament, as making Christ present?
Aphorism of the Day, September 16, 2018
Belief in Jesus as the Messiah occurred in the serendipity of those who had an experience of the Risen Christ. Those who did not have the spiritual and charismatic experience could not affirm that he was still alive and had conquered death. Even though religious experience is open for everyone, that does not mean that everyone has the serendipity of having the experience in such a way as to affirm belief and practice of fellowship in a community that shared the experience. The difference between a religious movement and an established church is that movement participants are more likely to have happened upon a conversion event; in the well established church cultures, one subscribes to the experiences whether one has had the conversion events or not. In evangelical church culture, even the conversion experiences are fully institutionalized and routinized, such that on cue most children eventually have the "rite of passage" religious experiences.
Aphorism of the Day, September 15, 2018
The cross of Jesus is perhaps evidence of the greatest makeover in history. An instrument of torture is now rendered in jewels and gold and silver and adorns the bodies of people, even babies. Invisible crosses are marked over our bodies and drawn in with unseen chrism on the forehead as the sign of Christian branding. What about the untold thousands of people who died on Roman crosses? Who remembers them and why are their crosses not remembered? The cross of Jesus is singular in human importance because the experience of his resurrected afterlife by his disciples rewrote the Cross of Jesus into the mystical power of being able to died to what is unworthy within us as we bear sacrificial identity with Jesus for the salvation of the world.
Aphorism of the Day, September 14, 2018
Christianity is founded upon the irony of the event of capital punishment becoming an event of fame and salvation. The Romans lifted up the cross with Jesus on it near Jerusalem in the performance of an event of public torture for the local residents as a warning about being involved in any movement construed as political insurrection. They lifted up Jesus to end his time on earth and yet the lifting up of Jesus in his fame which grew throughout the Roman Empire was based upon the evidence of his afterlife in the lives of his disciples and the ability of his Spirit-trace afterlife to be replicated in the lives of many. The irony is that the cross then became regarded as the launching pad of the spectacular afterlife of Jesus in its many manifestations in becoming actualized in the lives of people.
Aphorism of the Day, September 13, 2018
In the development of aspirations for an afterlife to the subjective immortality as anchored in resurrection belief, it seems as the power of hope overwhelmed people with the sense of their lives being "unfinished," and if unfinished, one needed more time to be in the process of finishing one's life. Hope might seem to be a tyrant if it has created wishing behaviors for what can never be actually achieved in space-time bodily existence. Across humanity there is a great unevenness in what is actually achieved in the lives of people, and the unevenness of what is attained might seem to be cosmically unfair. The contemplation of all future possibility for one to become actual for one is the lure of resurrection theology. Hope cries all things are possible and incites one to want all possibility even while the actual is dreadfully lacking in comparison with the possible. The gap of Hope and the Actual created the conditions for resurrection theology.
Aphorism of the Day, September 12, 2018
The New Testament, as regard to Judaism, is wanting to have one's cake and eating it too. The writer claim full continuity with Hebrew Scripture traditions even while the preponderance of the mission to the Gentile made that continuity questionable to those who chose to remain in the synagogue. The "Christian version of Judaism" became so paradigmatically different from Judaism, it was no longer regarded to be a movement within Judaism. Mutual segregation behaviors came to define two different missions of Judaism and Christianity in how faith was lived and articulated within the Roman Empire.
Aphorism of the Day, September 11, 2018
One can easily forget how "flexible" the notion of messiah was. The most general notion might be the designation of anything as "providential." And providence is the faith of hindsight in saying something or someone in the past turned out to be a very blessed precursor to every greater subsequent blessing.
Aphorism of the Day, September 10, 2018
The New Testament writings are mainly about certain topics. Was Jesus an apocalyptic prophet ushering the imminent end of the world? Was Jesus in his life witness a "suffering servant" Messiah or an intervening Kingly Messiah to save the nation of Israel? Can the Gentiles become "legitimate" people of God without subscribing to Jewish ritual purity? How can the churches survive and thrive in adapting to various location of Christians throughout the Roman Empire? How can the Hebrew Scriptures be reinterpreted in ways that support and affirm what was happening the Jesus Movement? The Gospel writers, using a life narrative of Jesus and becoming his oracles in the church, used their writings to anticipate the questions which faced the nascent Christ-Movement communities.
Aphorism of the Day, September 9, 2018
Their need not be an opposition between works and grace though faith, if faith is seen as the main work of being human. Faith is acting upon the hope of a more complete existence completely supplemented by a Plenitude of which we are a part and which makes up the completeness that we lack in any space-time moment. Faith is accepting the perfect supplement of Plenitude.
Aphorism of the Day, September 8, 2018
The famous Socrates took an slave boy ignorant of geometry and through "socratic" questioning proved that the boy could be like the granite rock which included the statute of knowing geometry through the art of dialogue. The Marcan author used a challenging riddle of Jesus to provoke a Syrophoenician woman, the foreigner and stranger to the faith of the Torah, to the event of saving faith. Thus the Gospel writer proved that Jesus the Christ could draw faith out of all people regardless of their previous status in life. Faith is nascent to all; it has to be exercised or drawn out by the One on whom worthiness can truly be projected.
Aphorism of the Day, September 7, 2018
The Bible is literature, not to be understood literally in the sense of empirical verification of meaning, but to be understood literarily or artistically meaningful corresponding to human artistic nature, but art done with the morality of justice. The Marcan dialogue between Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman about the "bread intended for the children and crumbs for the dogs under the table" is a highly staged piece of literature. The "children" (wink,wink) are the Jews favored by their heritage as recipients of a special revelation of God in their history; the dogs are the Gentiles hoping to get the discarded leftovers of the blessed revelation. What do the dogs have? They have faith in Jesus and his healing, saving work. What does the Johannine Jesus say the work is? Believing in him. If believing in Christ or faith in Christ is the "work," how does that not throw a wrench into Luther's seeming riving of faith and works as he seemed to interpret in the writing of the Epistle of James? Having faith in or believing in Christ's saving/healing works also implies that one becomes in works, an active participant in the saving work of Christ in all manner of active justice toward all, who are our neighbors.
Aphorism of the Day, September 6, 2018
In the Rite One Prayer of Humble Access, said before the words of administration, we say, "we are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table." These words echo the words of the Syrophoenician woman who said to Jesus, "even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs." Such an abject penitential phrase serves to reinforce the equal dignity of all humans in needing mercy. The family pedigree of "having been chosen" meant that eating bread at the table was a family birthright which did not need faith; those who wanted to be included in the family meal had to have faith to believe that they were included. The New Testament, in part, is about the social leveling function of "having faith." The Hebrew Scriptures are such an early profound identity marker of "favoritism" for the Hebrew-Jewish people who were made favored by having such an literature generate in and for one's community identity, it took quite a sea change for others to be convinced of the greater largesse of God's inclusive love.
Aphorism of the Day, September 5, 2018
The author of the Epistle of James asks rhetorically, "Can faith save you?" Can one have faith in God's grace and mercy without offering in faithful actions grace and mercy to everyone else? Can faith be about having a confidence that I'm alright with God because of God's intervention, and live as though God does not exists as equally generous toward everyone else? Where does the division between grace and faith occur? One might have faith about God's grace but can one also assume that such faith should be gracefully faithful in the fruitful actions of faith? It is easy to turn the sense of having faith into the sense of being specially favored such that others are not favored in a similar way and with one's faithful neglect one misrepresents God in whom one has faith in the first place. One should do a playful inversion of the words: one can be faithfully graced and gracefully faithful to express a unity of grace and faith and even if Luther wanted to make a historical correction of emphasis of seeming to replace grace with human faithful works. However, one cannot throw out the baby of faithful works with the bathwater of grace. One cannot "de-canonize" the Epistle of James because of the unity of faith and grace.
Aphorism of the Day, September 4, 2018
"Even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumb." A feisty rejoinder of a Syrophoenician to Jesus. As a presumed foreigner to God's blessings supposedly limited to the "favored children of God's choosing," she represented the view that the leftovers of God's favor are still enough. This vignette illustrates the dynamics of faith being a universal attribute of humanity and its exercise is a blessing that cannot be limited to preconceived limitations about who is God's favorite.
Aphorism of the Day, September 3, 2018
In Gospel irony, Jesus opens the mouths of the deaf mutes and then commands them not to speak about their marvelous healing. Why? Is this the Gospel writer's Messianic Secret of anachronistically writing silence into the life narrative of Jesus so as to explain why his fame was not recognized in advance of "God's timing" for what would happen to the Messiah? The Gospel writers, writing decades after Jesus pondered the timing of everything that had happened to arrive at the successful situation of a surviving post-resurrection community totally baffled by their survival, success and their sense of the destiny of the Gospel beyond Palestine. Having Jesus command silence about his own success was a way of inferring the irresistibility of the timing of God, otherwise called Providence.
Aphorism of the Day, September 2, 2018
When a person of such mal-behaviors is the given the highest place of publicity one can see where what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil sets in. The public bar of decency get sets so low and the one in the position of such power gives permission for the worst shadow behaviors of the public to come forth to set up the banal conditions. "If our leader is behaving this way, then so can we."
Aphorism of the Day, September 1, 2018
In Pauline mysticism, identity with the death of Christ had the effect of indicting unworthy aspects both on the level of the whole self, but also members of the self. One's members were to be transformed and used for righteousness instead of unrighteousness and being identified with the death of Christ was the power which effected this interdiction of wrong use even as the resurrecting power of the Spirit empowered right use. In presenting the story of Jesus, his hyperbolic language in his setting before his death on the cross, was used to teach this interdiction of the unworthy use of human capacity. Hence, he said to pluck out the eye, cut off the hand, make oneself lame, if the use of any aspect of the self was unworthy and offended the ideal and desired use of each human capacity.
Aphorism of the Day, September 29, 2018
The Holy Scriptures are writings of people who grapple with how to best use an unavoidable human discursive habit of always already assuming a totality even while knowing that they are not large enough to encompass such a Totality to be infallible spokespersons for such a Totality. In the universe of language a single word does not exist alone; it exists in the universe of everything that could come to Language. Perhaps this is why the writer of John's Gospel believed that the Word was with God and was God because by so saying it is honest to human existence as it could even be known.
Aphorism of the Day, September 28, 2018
One of the functions of prayer might be the general acceptance of the results of change and time in being in the continual process of loss. We are losing all kinds of things, all of the time and how do we adjust to continual loss? One of the ways of adjusting to the way things are or happen to be is to come to declare life as "God's will," as if totality could be anything other than it is. The variable is how the one experiences time, change, loss and gains in how it comes in the language of one's life through the interpretation of the meaning of personal experience. The sense of the power of freedom to really have significance because of the choice of one's words and body language acts vis a vis Infinity sums up both the grace and the absurdity of prayer.
Aphorism of the Day, September 27, 2018
"and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven." This is added in the account of James for praying for the sick and it is included in the prayer for the sick in the Book of Common Prayer, "of his great mercies may he forgive you your sins." People who are sick and people who are well are sinners and need forgiveness. What I object to in these prayers for the sick is the subtle implication that "one's sins are specifically" connected with the condition of sickness for which the church is offering Holy Unction. In some situations what we do wrong may have causal connection with a condition of "sickness" but to assume that this is always the case is presuming to know too much and can have the overtones of "blaming the victims." As if, if such a person had not sinned he or she would not be sick. I think that language of the rite should be changed to remove the ambiguity.
Aphorism of the Day, September 26, 2018
"Whoever is not against us is for us." If love and justice are the main goals, then whoever is working for the same is in league with all who share the same goal. The notion that my quest for love and justice is superior to yours is in fact an offense to love and justice.
Aphorism of the Day, September 25, 2018
In the hyperbolic language of Jesus, he recommends a millstone necklace to be the anchor for the one who is tossed into the sea because he has "offended the littles" (children?) That is a rather horrifying punishment for those involved in the abuse of "little ones." It seems as though Jesus must have observed the mistreatment of children and he was quite upset to recommend such harsh punishment.
Aphorism of the September 24, 2018
One can have harmful behaviors cease through external intervention like removing accessibility to addictive substances or by imprisonment. The severity of harmful behaviors were stressed by Jesus in his extreme hyperbolic language of "self suppression." "If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off!" The freedom of choice known as fasting is the interdiction by oneself that needs to be done to avoid the juridical intervention by the legal authorities. The hyperbolic use of language by Jesus suggests that serious misuse of any human function is best done through free self agency. As negative as the language seems, it is an affirmation of human freedom to be able to do it. As tyrannical as addictions are, one should never de-humanize a person by saying that one has no choice at all in self-control.
Aphorism of Day, September 23, 2018
Greatness as explained by Jesus is not having wealth, position or knowledge; it involves taking care of children and treating them as though they were Christ. Power, wealth and knowledge are greatest when they are converted to help the vulnerable and to impart worth and value to those who have no affirming environment.
Aphorism of Day, September 22, 2018
The mysticism of Pauline being "in Christ" and Christ in "in me" is hidden in the narratives of Jesus in the Gospels a manuals of mysticism for those who were initiates in Christo-mysticism and who "knew the Messianic secret" and had "ears to hear" the spiritual message which was encoded within the re-telling of the stories and words of Jesus. A crucial aspect of the Gospel qua the mysticism of Paul and others was what one might call neonatal, infant and child theology. The origin of Christ "in me" is being overshadowed by the Spirit. One discovers one's new birth by having it revealed in projecting upon babes and children who bear the wonder that is lost in the cynical world of adulthood. Jesus uses the baby-child motif to bring us back to the depth of wonder that has been lost because being evicted from the nascent Garden of Eden and learning good and evil in adult ways has been like facing the guardian angels preventing a return to the garden of Wonder. Jesus initiated access to the parallel universe of Wonder even while the weeds and wild of the wilderness of the external earthly kingdoms keep us in perpetual trouble.
Aphorism of the Day, September 21, 2018
The child-motif of the Gospels probably reached a height when the infancy narratives came to writing in Matthew and Luke. Instead of teaching directly the mystical theology of being born again by the birth of Christ into one's life, they hide the new birth in a mystagogic story of Christ being born in Mary, the paradigmatic Christian, whose life is overshadowed by the Holy Spirit in the conception event. One can say that the world has been "Christmasized" because of the effect of the holiday in the society at large. For some reason, we are drawn to that which we can never fully consciously recover, viz., our earliest memories of our lives when we were not conscious users of language but was in the process of being codified by the language users who controlled us. That mystical state of unknowing Innocence is the potent force of the power of New Birth, which in fact is just the return of the memorial traces of our conception and first birth.
Aphorism of the Day, September 20, 2018
The Gospel child-motif of Jesus is striking. How much closer to childhood can one be than the metaphor, "born again?" How is that that Jesus said mysteries have been withheld from the wise and revealed to infants? It could be that infant and child represent the state of contemplation; a state of being where one does not use language and does not interpret anything. Learning language and becoming an interpreter means that one's view of the world is already clouded by the taxonomical grids given to one by one's teaching cultural situation, hence it is biased and limited and completely relative to the context. The state of wonder is the before and beyond language state that one tries to access in attaining a state of mystery or the humility of being suspended in unknowing because of recognition of one's smallness and yet connection with an infinite number of others. Such a connection without knowing in any precise way all causal connections incites the wonder of any interpretation dying the death of a thousand qualifications and in the cloud of such unknowing one can be content with wonder.
Aphorism of the Day, September 19, 2018
The disciples are presented in the Gospel as those who do not understand the meaning of the life of Jesus and the things that will happen to him. The disciples are those who are presented as those who are still steeped in the common paradigms of their culture and have not yet had the conversion experience to the new Christo-mysticism which occurred after his death and the advent of the variety of appearances of the Risen Christ. The Risen Christ can inhabit people who live within most any cultural paradigm and the task is to give up our old paradigms of not understanding what the Risen Christ is doing in a new place and a new time.
Aphorism of the Day, September 18, 2018
The importance of the child-motif in the words of Jesus could be read in several ways. It could be an indication that children were not treated very well in the time of Jesus just as they have often in history been viewed as mainly part of the labor force or future brides for financial well being of the family. Many people regard religion being mainly for children and something that one can grow out of as an adult. I suspect that Jesus regarded children as being the little people on whom adults can project the lost naivete of one's forgotten early life and there is a "born again" energy in being able to access one's child aspect of personality in bringing fresh wonder into the most adult situations of life. If one is missing the fresh energy of one's "child aspect of personality" then one can live as a pessimistic adult Scrooge pronouncing "bah humbug" on everything that one does.
Aphorism of the Day, September 17, 2018
The child motif in the Gospels is significant and even sacramental. Jesus receives a child and said, "If you receive a child, you have received me." Jesus identified himself with a child and that is as significant as being identified with bread and wine. The church has often made bread and wine holy objects while the church has existed in cultures which tolerated child labor and child exploitation and neglect. Church leaders are faced with their own record of child abuse and cover up. It is much easier to take care of bread and wine than it is to take care of a child. What will the church do about the child as sacrament, as making Christ present?
Aphorism of the Day, September 16, 2018
Belief in Jesus as the Messiah occurred in the serendipity of those who had an experience of the Risen Christ. Those who did not have the spiritual and charismatic experience could not affirm that he was still alive and had conquered death. Even though religious experience is open for everyone, that does not mean that everyone has the serendipity of having the experience in such a way as to affirm belief and practice of fellowship in a community that shared the experience. The difference between a religious movement and an established church is that movement participants are more likely to have happened upon a conversion event; in the well established church cultures, one subscribes to the experiences whether one has had the conversion events or not. In evangelical church culture, even the conversion experiences are fully institutionalized and routinized, such that on cue most children eventually have the "rite of passage" religious experiences.
Aphorism of the Day, September 15, 2018
The cross of Jesus is perhaps evidence of the greatest makeover in history. An instrument of torture is now rendered in jewels and gold and silver and adorns the bodies of people, even babies. Invisible crosses are marked over our bodies and drawn in with unseen chrism on the forehead as the sign of Christian branding. What about the untold thousands of people who died on Roman crosses? Who remembers them and why are their crosses not remembered? The cross of Jesus is singular in human importance because the experience of his resurrected afterlife by his disciples rewrote the Cross of Jesus into the mystical power of being able to died to what is unworthy within us as we bear sacrificial identity with Jesus for the salvation of the world.
Aphorism of the Day, September 14, 2018
Christianity is founded upon the irony of the event of capital punishment becoming an event of fame and salvation. The Romans lifted up the cross with Jesus on it near Jerusalem in the performance of an event of public torture for the local residents as a warning about being involved in any movement construed as political insurrection. They lifted up Jesus to end his time on earth and yet the lifting up of Jesus in his fame which grew throughout the Roman Empire was based upon the evidence of his afterlife in the lives of his disciples and the ability of his Spirit-trace afterlife to be replicated in the lives of many. The irony is that the cross then became regarded as the launching pad of the spectacular afterlife of Jesus in its many manifestations in becoming actualized in the lives of people.
Aphorism of the Day, September 13, 2018
In the development of aspirations for an afterlife to the subjective immortality as anchored in resurrection belief, it seems as the power of hope overwhelmed people with the sense of their lives being "unfinished," and if unfinished, one needed more time to be in the process of finishing one's life. Hope might seem to be a tyrant if it has created wishing behaviors for what can never be actually achieved in space-time bodily existence. Across humanity there is a great unevenness in what is actually achieved in the lives of people, and the unevenness of what is attained might seem to be cosmically unfair. The contemplation of all future possibility for one to become actual for one is the lure of resurrection theology. Hope cries all things are possible and incites one to want all possibility even while the actual is dreadfully lacking in comparison with the possible. The gap of Hope and the Actual created the conditions for resurrection theology.
Aphorism of the Day, September 12, 2018
The New Testament, as regard to Judaism, is wanting to have one's cake and eating it too. The writer claim full continuity with Hebrew Scripture traditions even while the preponderance of the mission to the Gentile made that continuity questionable to those who chose to remain in the synagogue. The "Christian version of Judaism" became so paradigmatically different from Judaism, it was no longer regarded to be a movement within Judaism. Mutual segregation behaviors came to define two different missions of Judaism and Christianity in how faith was lived and articulated within the Roman Empire.
Aphorism of the Day, September 11, 2018
One can easily forget how "flexible" the notion of messiah was. The most general notion might be the designation of anything as "providential." And providence is the faith of hindsight in saying something or someone in the past turned out to be a very blessed precursor to every greater subsequent blessing.
Aphorism of the Day, September 10, 2018
The New Testament writings are mainly about certain topics. Was Jesus an apocalyptic prophet ushering the imminent end of the world? Was Jesus in his life witness a "suffering servant" Messiah or an intervening Kingly Messiah to save the nation of Israel? Can the Gentiles become "legitimate" people of God without subscribing to Jewish ritual purity? How can the churches survive and thrive in adapting to various location of Christians throughout the Roman Empire? How can the Hebrew Scriptures be reinterpreted in ways that support and affirm what was happening the Jesus Movement? The Gospel writers, using a life narrative of Jesus and becoming his oracles in the church, used their writings to anticipate the questions which faced the nascent Christ-Movement communities.
Aphorism of the Day, September 9, 2018
Their need not be an opposition between works and grace though faith, if faith is seen as the main work of being human. Faith is acting upon the hope of a more complete existence completely supplemented by a Plenitude of which we are a part and which makes up the completeness that we lack in any space-time moment. Faith is accepting the perfect supplement of Plenitude.
Aphorism of the Day, September 8, 2018
The famous Socrates took an slave boy ignorant of geometry and through "socratic" questioning proved that the boy could be like the granite rock which included the statute of knowing geometry through the art of dialogue. The Marcan author used a challenging riddle of Jesus to provoke a Syrophoenician woman, the foreigner and stranger to the faith of the Torah, to the event of saving faith. Thus the Gospel writer proved that Jesus the Christ could draw faith out of all people regardless of their previous status in life. Faith is nascent to all; it has to be exercised or drawn out by the One on whom worthiness can truly be projected.
Aphorism of the Day, September 7, 2018
The Bible is literature, not to be understood literally in the sense of empirical verification of meaning, but to be understood literarily or artistically meaningful corresponding to human artistic nature, but art done with the morality of justice. The Marcan dialogue between Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman about the "bread intended for the children and crumbs for the dogs under the table" is a highly staged piece of literature. The "children" (wink,wink) are the Jews favored by their heritage as recipients of a special revelation of God in their history; the dogs are the Gentiles hoping to get the discarded leftovers of the blessed revelation. What do the dogs have? They have faith in Jesus and his healing, saving work. What does the Johannine Jesus say the work is? Believing in him. If believing in Christ or faith in Christ is the "work," how does that not throw a wrench into Luther's seeming riving of faith and works as he seemed to interpret in the writing of the Epistle of James? Having faith in or believing in Christ's saving/healing works also implies that one becomes in works, an active participant in the saving work of Christ in all manner of active justice toward all, who are our neighbors.
Aphorism of the Day, September 6, 2018
In the Rite One Prayer of Humble Access, said before the words of administration, we say, "we are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table." These words echo the words of the Syrophoenician woman who said to Jesus, "even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs." Such an abject penitential phrase serves to reinforce the equal dignity of all humans in needing mercy. The family pedigree of "having been chosen" meant that eating bread at the table was a family birthright which did not need faith; those who wanted to be included in the family meal had to have faith to believe that they were included. The New Testament, in part, is about the social leveling function of "having faith." The Hebrew Scriptures are such an early profound identity marker of "favoritism" for the Hebrew-Jewish people who were made favored by having such an literature generate in and for one's community identity, it took quite a sea change for others to be convinced of the greater largesse of God's inclusive love.
Aphorism of the Day, September 5, 2018
The author of the Epistle of James asks rhetorically, "Can faith save you?" Can one have faith in God's grace and mercy without offering in faithful actions grace and mercy to everyone else? Can faith be about having a confidence that I'm alright with God because of God's intervention, and live as though God does not exists as equally generous toward everyone else? Where does the division between grace and faith occur? One might have faith about God's grace but can one also assume that such faith should be gracefully faithful in the fruitful actions of faith? It is easy to turn the sense of having faith into the sense of being specially favored such that others are not favored in a similar way and with one's faithful neglect one misrepresents God in whom one has faith in the first place. One should do a playful inversion of the words: one can be faithfully graced and gracefully faithful to express a unity of grace and faith and even if Luther wanted to make a historical correction of emphasis of seeming to replace grace with human faithful works. However, one cannot throw out the baby of faithful works with the bathwater of grace. One cannot "de-canonize" the Epistle of James because of the unity of faith and grace.
Aphorism of the Day, September 4, 2018
"Even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumb." A feisty rejoinder of a Syrophoenician to Jesus. As a presumed foreigner to God's blessings supposedly limited to the "favored children of God's choosing," she represented the view that the leftovers of God's favor are still enough. This vignette illustrates the dynamics of faith being a universal attribute of humanity and its exercise is a blessing that cannot be limited to preconceived limitations about who is God's favorite.
Aphorism of the Day, September 3, 2018
In Gospel irony, Jesus opens the mouths of the deaf mutes and then commands them not to speak about their marvelous healing. Why? Is this the Gospel writer's Messianic Secret of anachronistically writing silence into the life narrative of Jesus so as to explain why his fame was not recognized in advance of "God's timing" for what would happen to the Messiah? The Gospel writers, writing decades after Jesus pondered the timing of everything that had happened to arrive at the successful situation of a surviving post-resurrection community totally baffled by their survival, success and their sense of the destiny of the Gospel beyond Palestine. Having Jesus command silence about his own success was a way of inferring the irresistibility of the timing of God, otherwise called Providence.
Aphorism of the Day, September 2, 2018
When a person of such mal-behaviors is the given the highest place of publicity one can see where what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil sets in. The public bar of decency get sets so low and the one in the position of such power gives permission for the worst shadow behaviors of the public to come forth to set up the banal conditions. "If our leader is behaving this way, then so can we."
Aphorism of the Day, September 1, 2018
Can one who loves music and appreciates it be properly called a musician? Musicians without an audience are in perpetual "rehearsal," and so the music lover plays a role in the scene, even though musicians probably get the greatest satisfaction in the presence of other musicians. That analogy does not hold for "justice." Can one who merely loves justice and not practice it be called a "just" person? Hearing the word of God and not doing it does not allow one to be but "action" impaired. The words of Justice are greater and more ideal than any of imitative acts towards those ideals, and yet to be lovers of justice we need to always be doing acts of justice toward the ideal of never ending justice in never ending time.
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