Aphorism of the Day, April 30, 2021
A metaphor is used to give insights based upon a "false equivalency." Is Jesus, actually Word, Light, Shepherd, Resurrection, Gate, Truth or Lamb of God? No, but a metaphor using the verb "to be" is used to present an "as if" equivalency in identity for expressive meaning. To read the Bible, one has to understand the use of "false equivalency" in identity metaphors using the verb "to be." Expressive meaning is one of nuances of poetic meaning and such meanings are made crude if literalized or assumed to be instances of "empirical verification." The Gospels are mainly expressive language about the special uniqueness of Jesus, with whom the writers had a loving relationship.
Aphorism of the Day, April 29, 2021
With a metaphor one can project human-like volition on a branch as in the metaphor, "I am the vine, you are the branches.....abide in me." A literal branch does not have volitional capacity to "abide." A branch made human with the magic of metaphorical projection means that the impersonal "inter-plant" relationship between two parts of a plant, vine and branches, are anthropomorphized to provide insights about the connectedness necessary for vital relationship between Christ and his follower. This is sheer mystical imagination since the Risen Christ in whom one is to abide cannot be seen nor can the sap of the abiding energy of God's Spirit be seen. Yet this poetic play is meaningful for the mystic.
Aphorism of the Day, April 28, 2021
If one does not appreciate differentiation in discursive practice, one can be led into the loss of "truth traditions," such as the value of empirical verification and eye-witness reporting. A person who tries to live by poetic metaphors alone or by magical realism comes to lose the boundaries between genres. This accounts, in part, for what one is willing to believe in terms of conspiracy theories, because at the heart of one's religion one had falsely made metaphorical teaching narrative into eye witness reporting of "fact based" events, instead of faith based teaching events.
Aphorism of the Day, April 27, 2021
The Vine-Branch metaphor in John's Gospel involves the anthropomorphizing of a plant. Jesus is the Vine, people are the branches who have the volitional ability to abide in the vine. This might be an "over-anthropomorphizing" of a plant since the branches of a grapevine do not have the high degree of "choice" as a person does. One must appreciate how metaphors provide insights even as one understands to literalize a metaphorical comparison leads one to logical absurdity.
Aphorism of the Day, April 26, 2021
The vine-branch connection is presented as a metaphor of connection. It is offered with the injunction: "Abide in me." This is the organic mysticism of the writer of John's Gospel. By the very definition of God, one has no choice about whether one would be contained by or live in God; the question of faith has to do with whether one wants to interpret this as being in an infinite impersonal existence or whether the personal existence which we know ourselves to have in relational contexts derived from a greater sense of cosmic relationship. As language users, we have the freedom to choose our interpretations of what we regard ultimate reality to be.
Aphorism of the Day, April 25, 2021
David as a shepherd-king wrote the metaphor of God as his shepherd to characterize how he believed God to regard him. David analogizes God; I care for my sheep; God cares for me better than I care for my sheep. David the shepherd-king became the chief model for messiah and so Jesus, not a shepherd but a carpenter's son, became seen in the mode of David, the shepherd-king messiah. After the Risen Christ became "all and in all," there was no metaphor which could not be applied to the one who was also identified with eternal Word. If one is eternal Word and all and in all, then a carpenter's son can also be a shepherd.
Aphorism of the Day, April 24, 2021
Probably AI, artificial intelligence can never attain the incredible numbers of linguistic states which language users attain in time. AI language may continue to build volume of language use and then "come up with combinations," and with such a volume might be able to "fool" human language users often, but the subtlety of the switch of discursive codes by a human user is perhaps impossible to replicate in AI.
Aphorism of the Day, April 23, 2021
Jesus was neither a lamb or a shepherd in life but he became that in the metaphors of the traditions that derived from people who looked for ways to explicate the meaning of his life for them.
Aphorism of the Day, April 22, 2021
Language is mostly used strategically to speak on behalf of a "subject position," i.e. defending, promulgating, justifying something that pertains to personal well-being or what one believes to be the rightness or advantage of one's cause. This assumes the esteem of believing in oneself. The language of the justification of oneself or causes does not always reveal the motive in the actual language products. The inner crucible of the production of a language product is often mysterious and hidden.
Aphorism of the Day, April 21, 2021
One of the habits of language which can occur when reading a "classic" text like the Bible is that we are so foreign to the distant past contexts, we easily get locked into just sheer translation of an ancient word to a modern word in our own language as though there could be a one-to-one correspondence without all of the language nuance which happens within one's own native contemporary language. This explains why a "classic" and "holy" book gets read in its "plain" meaning because we are frightened by the poetic imaginations which might untether meanings from what our staid traditions tell us what it is "supposed to mean." And so we diminish the language intelligence of biblical writers as we unwittingly assume they did not know the difference between commonsense observation and poetry and artistic discourses of all types. Even a young boy wearing his Superman pajamas knows that if he jumps off the top bunk, he will not fly but fall. Let's not make biblical writers less evolved than a young child in their language to experience correspondence.
Aphorism of the Day, April 20, 2021
One of the results of modern science for Bible readers is that it made Bible readers ashamed of being poets who use the language of metaphors in different ways than the language of scientific laws. To hyper-correct to the acknowledgement of the "superiority" of scientific truth, many biblical readers began to defend their poetic metaphors as that which was completely empirically verifiable. The way in which poetic metaphors are verifiable is when word becomes flesh in moral action and the experience of the higher power experience of self-control. Moral actions which derive from moving biblical metaphors are empirically verifiable; there is no reason to trade poetic metaphors in for what they are not, even the metaphor of fantastic prose narrative about the life of Jesus.
Aphorism of the Day, April 19, 2021
The biblical poets take poetic license with metaphors; contradiction is not an issue as in Jesus being both Good Shepherd and Lamb of God at the same time. With the poetry of contradiction, one poetically can chew gum and walk at the same time. But we need not confuse the metaphors of poetry with the stark empiricism of naive realism. The physical eyes see empirically; the poetic eyes see from the heart which contains endless morphable metaphors.
Aphorism of the Day, April 18, 2021
The post-resurrection Eucharists bespeak that Christ is not just "out there" but "in here." One consumes bread and wine; they become us integrated in our bodies just as we "consume" what is outside of us and it becomes integrated within us or it can become an irritant within us. The point of Christ outside and Christ inside is the process of receiving a spiritual identity whereby the identity with Christ becomes the "regulating" identity of our lives, as it were, filtering our human experiences of what is outside becoming what is inside.
Aphorism of the Day, April 17, 2021
America has perfected the art of "eating alone," with fast food and eating on the "run." The post-resurrection eating of Jesus was the early church indicating that in fellowship eating, there was another Presence experienced, the hidden Christ known in the communal joy and love and kindness and peace, which happens when hearts are tuned-in to the Agape events.
Aphorism of the Day, April 16, 2021
Jesus proves his "real post-resurrection" presence by eating fish. The Gospel stories of post-resurrection eating were ways of indicating the presence of Christ in the intentional eating events in the community also known as Agape meal or Eucharist. The gathered intention to eat to know the presence of Christ was shown in the Gospels under the narratives of Christ in various ways.
Aphorism of the Day, April 15, 2021
We err like Irenaeus did by privileging the plain reading of New Testament writings, by assuming that they did not know the difference between what we would call eyewitness journalism and poetic metaphorical writing. The physical accounts are used as a metaphors to indicate that the spiritual experiences of the Risen Christ are "really real" experiences, just as real as "being there" type of experience. They are real but different.
Aphorism of the Day, April 14, 2021
Christianity arrived at scientific scorn because things like the resurrection have been presented as empirically verifiable events, because of the tacit assumption that scientific truth is superior truth, rather than just a different truth. Once the truths of faith, love, aesthetics, and poetics are affirmed as equal but different meaningful truth with different life applications, then one admits how it can be fully human to be a person of faith and poetics and science at the same time. The moral: Quit defending faith truths in the wrong way so that a scientist need nor be offended by other meaningful truths.
Aphorism of the Day, April 13, 2021
The Gospel writers believed that resurrection was a "beautiful and moving truth;" not just because they were able to experience a significant continuity of Jesus on both sides of death, but they were also hopeful to promote their own personal continuity beyond their own future graves. The beauty of this resurrection art is that it inspires hope to live in the always already completely "unfinished" process of one's life and the life of the entire universe. The resurrection announces that it is "ok" to be unfinished.
Aphorism of the Day, April 12, 2021
A biblical method of establishing the valid meaning of some is to use the metaphor of physicality or empirical verification to indicate that something is really "real." The Risen Christ in his appearances eats fish to "prove" he is real. But of course, eating occurs and is real in visionary states, just like eating is real when it occurs within a dream. One does not deny the validity of a dream or what happens within a dream, even though dream state is compared with waken state. In the post-resurrection appearances of Christ, both Christ and those to whom he appeared were in an enlightened state. This is indicated by the record of people being in or out of the state of being able to recognize the Risen Christ. It is explained as he "opened the eyes" of the beholder of the Risen Christ. "Seeing Christ," depends upon the state of the one who sees. To deny the resurrection appearances of Christ is to deny the enlightened states of such encounters. That makes as much sense as denying dreams and everything that happens within them under the dreaming scenario. It is silly to say that things don't happen in dreams. It is silly to say things did not happen in "enlightened encounters with the Risen Christ." But it is silly to say that everyone had these encounters to verify what those who said they had such encounters.
Aphorism of the Day, April 11, 2021
How could the early church know that the Risen Christ was still with them? The Doubting Thomas story addresses this. The experience of peace, the practice of the forgiveness of sins and the experience of the Holy Spirit is how the churches believed that Christ continued with them as another presence. And in John's Gospel, Word is God, Word of Jesus are Spirit and Life as Godly presence, Word about Jesus became the Spirit of the written text which evoked the presence of Christ resulting in belief. This is the nutshell summary of the Doubting Thomas story.
Aphorism of the Day, April 10, 2021
The "earthly" personality of Jesus gets diluted within the plethora of the Risen Christ, as the All and in All. The particular becomes lost in the general and the general returns in the particular when like one can say like Paul, "Christ lives in me." "Christ" is the "Messiah" or the anointed. The Jesus of History returns to the General Anointed to be omni-available for particular human experience of the divine.
Aphorism of the Day, April 9, 2021
Are the good ol' days when Jesus walked the earth better than the days when he is no longer seen? The Doubting Thomas story is how the church adapted in making the "real absence of Jesus into the real presence of Christ" in manifold ways, including through the writing of the Gospel words.
Aphorism of of the Day, April 8, 2021
After it is written that Christ is all and in all, it makes no sense to limit the presence of Christ to Word and Sacrament. Once one believes that Word and Sacrament exhaust the presence of the Christ, one has wandered in a kind of idolatry and lost the purpose of the sacraments which is to promote the sacramentality, the mysticality of Christliness that corresponds to the image of the Maker/Originator upon all beings.
Aphorism of the Day, April 7, 2021
If Christ is All and in All, what does real presence of Christ mean? Apparent presence, receptive presence, presence as being in the eye of the beholder? If anything, the resurrection of Christ meant the morphing of Christliness into the potential for every occasion to be Christ behind the curtain of visible reality for any beholder.
Aphorism of the Day, April 6, 2021
The Doubting Thomas story was presented by the Johannine community to encourage people who never walked with Jesus regarding the significance of their own spiritual experience. Thomas saw and touched, you didn't, blessed are you, and blessed are you who come to belief even through reading words about Jesus. Why? Words can evoke insightful presence of Spirit, peace, and forgiveness. Such characterize valid divine presence.
Aphorism of the Day, April 5, 2021
The Doubting Thomas story is interesting because it is a writing which promotes itself. "These things are written...." This represents an institutional paradigm shift from a rather inexact passing of the "oral tradition about Jesus and what he said." Inexact because oral traditions are not like "fixed" text; they get "re-oraclized (a new word) in new applications to new situations. This makes oral tradition transmission very "fluid," and so the "fixing" of the tradition by putting it in the memory technology of writing represents a new phase of institutionalization. Ironically, it is a return to what happened in Judaism in the coming to text of their traditions in "holy Scriptures" and when in text it seems "fixed," it is not fixed because commentary traditions keep it a living text in new applications.
Aphorism of the Day, April 4, 2021
With Easter hope, we cannot rewrite the past events of our lives; they remain as they were and as they were processed at the time. What we can rewrite are the meanings of past events filtered through better subsequent events which with reconciliation and redemption can render more hopeful outcomes.
Aphorism of the Day, April 3, 2021
Holy Saturday commemorates a liminal threshold time when those who have lost their best friend ponder the reality of life never being the same again with the one they have loved.
Aphorism of the Day, April 2, 2021
The "Good" of Good Friday, is that the cross of Christ can not be separated from the resurrection. The Cross is on revisited from the perspective of the resurrection.
Aphorism of the Day, April 1, 2021
On Maundy Thursday, rather get caught up in liturgical minutiae about how to do it "correctly," one can note the main principles. The institution of the gathering meal for Christians when the esprit de corps would result in the presence of the one who originated the purpose of the meal for the future physical social reality of the church. And if the Jesus as teacher and mentor served, then service is what makes the church survive because service is what continually reconstitutes the "church."
