The Gospel communities had strategies for sharing the message of the obvious. Invoke peace on potential recipients and don't get bogged down with people's rejection. Move on and leave the timing of reception up to endless future invitations to those who reject the obviousness of God's love and realm.
Aphorism of the Day, June 29, 2020
Does the preaching and acceptance of the love of God make the love of God true? No, it is the obvious, always, already truth ready to be discovered. It was there before Jesus was born. The biblical story is about the recovery from human alienation from the always already truth of God's love.
Aphorism of the Day, June 28, 2022
The evangelical message of the "the kingdom of God" has come near to you is shorthand for the kingdom of God has always already been with us; now take the opportunity to realize it.
Aphorism of the Day, June 27, 2022
If the Gospel of love is turned into God favors me and my views about God in such a way as to be triumphant over others, then the Gospel of love is abrogated. The Gospel of love means equality of dignity.
Aphorism of the Day, June 26, 2022
To be spiritual does not mean having fantastic inner experience from hours of extra praying time and meditation, being spiritual means acting out the fruits of the Spirit which is a more holistic spirituality than a resume of pietistic events. Acting out the fruits of Spirit means that no one is yet "spiritual" because in time there is always more acting out to do. Rather than say, I am not religious, but spiritual, let us humble say, "I hope that I can manifest the fruits of the Spirit today." By one's fruits one is known, and it takes creative to make the fruits flesh and blood in action. What do love, joy, peace, faithfulness, kindness, generosity, gentleness,patience, and self-control look like in practice today? For the net yet spiritual, let us try to act out these fruits.
Aphorism of the Day, June 25, 2022
Some people who claim faith believe in calling down the fire of God from heaven to eliminate those who don't accept and agree their views. So much for a God of love who lures us with love to persuade free people.
Aphorism of Day, June 24, 2022
St. Paul lists the nine fruits of the Spirit to counter some of the worst human behavior. This is an indication that human attributes need a force for transformation. Cultural conditions plus our own individual volition determine how we act out and speak out our lives. St. Paul believed that we could access a deep experience of Holy Spirit to be a higher power toward the perfection of expressing the virtues in word and deed.
Aphorism of Day, June 23, 2022
For one who does not think that one has has a call to God, what about being called to love, joy, peace, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, patience, and self-control? Being called to these are the main call of God to everyone. Success at these will necessarily result in details of living consistent with these great fruits of the Holy Spirit.
Aphorism of the Day, June 22, 2022
Concerned about "unordained" status? Everyone is called by the Spirit to the fruits: Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. In the blooming of these fruits there is endless "ordained" ministry.
Aphorism of the Day, June 21, 2022
The general call of God has to do with the fruits of the Spirit, love, joy, peace et al. In accepting the general call, one naturally finds specificity for ministerial call. If one is working on activating the gifts of the Spirit, the vocations of one's life unfold, whether ordained or lay.
Aphorism of the Day, June 20, 2022
There are various ways to be related to our "God-calling." We can be too certain and proud about it. We can be impatient with those who don't embrace our particular call and who are not on our time schedule. We can want signs and proof of specific places or ministries that we might embrace. We can find it incompatible with other callings like family responsibility. We can be perpetual procrastinators with other things to do, and so we delay until "tomorrow." We can feel inadequate for what we feel asked to do with the unwitting assumption that God would call us for things we're not capable of. And what kind of God would that be?
Aphorism of the Day, June 19, 2022
In Pauline thinking, being "in-Christ" would be to return to realization of one's original blessing of being made in God's image. Christ as the "second Adam" was the instigator of this restorative process.
Aphorism of the Day, June 18, 2022
Being "in Christ" was what Paul called the mysticism of the new creation. It was a radical inward way of seeing and interpreting which was to have significant outer world consequences in how one behaved.
Aphorism of the Day, June 17, 2022
Paul believed that one attained a different sort of personhood "in Christ." The new person was not a gendered being or one with national origin. He was writing about being in a state beyond bias which gave one a freedom to love without limit.
Aphorism of the Day, June 16, 2022
In a purity code, to have one's inner life be referred to as an unclean spirit would be the epitome of "persona non grata."
Aphorism of the Day, June 15, 2022
St. Paul sometimes treats laws as the external counterpart to faith which is the work of the grace of the Spirit. Law is regarded to be persuasion by external suppressive force through the threat of punishment. Faith is being persuaded and acting from internal motivation. So, much for some more over-simplifications for today in search of insights.
Aphorism of the Day, June 14, 2022
The Pauline perspective was to present the inward perspective of battles against interior principalities and powers, in a world where it was obvious that Caesar and his surrogates were the main principalities and powers. The Jesus Movement was an "inward movement" in a world that knew the outward control of the Roman authorities. This inward movement depicted by St. Paul's mysticism became in the Gospel genres what Jesus as an external figurative presentation of the Risen Christ in confronting people who were controlled by those inward principalities and powers. The Gospels are outward parables of the inward Jesus Movement.
Aphorism of the Day, June 13, 2022
A worthy scholarly task would be to link the constellation of Pauline words regarding Christ-identity and how the narratives of the Gospel were formed to be a different kind of appeal genre to embed spirituality within parables of the life of Jesus.
Aphorism of the Day, June 12, 2022
The "empirical" evidence of the Trinity are to be found in the effects in the behaviors of those who claim to be in relationship with the Holy Family of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Original Dynamic Love is known in the effects of love within the behaviors of those who claim Trinitarian heritage.
Aphorism of the Day, June 11, 2022
How can the Trinity be intuitively true? The incarnation is the mode of understanding how any knowledge of the divine is anthropomorphic, and embedded in language. Christ the way to say that the divine is co-extensive with Eternal Word which is the essence of anthropomorphism.
Aphorism of the Day, June 10, 2022
The Holy Trinity is not empirically verified "truth." It is relational, intuitive, moral, and spiritual truth. These are valid truth criteria with empirical behavioral consequences when people who hold these truths of the Trinity act in the manner of love and justice. Human behaviors are empirically verified; the Trinity who motivates such behaviors does not conform to scientific lab conditions.
Aphorism of the Day, June 9, 2022
The ground of the consideration of the Trinity is the same ground that we have for considering anything at all, Word. Everything we know presumes first that we are language users using words. And we may say that divinity precedes word but we have to assume words to assert the same.
Aphorism of the Day, June 8, 2022
Why is the incarnation an important insight? In saying God is with us, we admit the obviousness of our anthropomorphism, our "humano-centric" prison in understanding everything. The God-insight for humanity is the transcendence of future self-surpassability in excellence, because we can genuinely confess that we live in the Being who has Omni-Become and we are never separated from everything that is, was, might have been, and will be. The God-insight is accepting our participation in such Oneness.
Aphorism of the Day, June 7, 2022
The most humanly accessible notion of the oneness of the Trinity is in Word. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have come to human language by human language users. They are one in having come to language. Word is prior to all knowing or understanding of anything. And are there "elephants" and "giant turtles" on which Words reside?Elephants and turtles are also words and so in saying it's "turtles all the way down," one is saying it is words about words all the way in something like an infinity mirror.
Aphorism of the Day, June 6, 2022
The story of the Trinity coming to language as a doctrine of belief is the story of how a narrative gets reduced or abbreviated into a standardized unit for administering beliefs in a community which was expressing heterodox beliefs within the hegemonic goals of an Emperor who did not want his empire to be divided by religion.
Aphorism of the Day, June 5, 2022
As we are on the quest of causation on the sub-molecular level, and seeking the sub-sub-molecular level, while we wait to "empirically" discover the most interior of the interior, the fragile minded people of faith opt to say "Spirit" for the yet to be empirically discovered mystery.
Aphorism of the Day, June 4, 2022
On the eve of Pentecost, we ponder the Holy Spirit, as the clean heart and right spirit which we want within us as person but also expressed in communal unity for the common good. Holy Spirit is contrasted with evil spirit, which in a person unifies one to do evil to self and others, and the evil spirit of unity within mob is a group unified to to do corporate and social evil. Spirit as a metaphor derived from wind or breath comes to language use as a way to evoke the deep mystery of the sources of good and evil.
Aphorism of the Day, June 3, 2022
The unity of a mob can be dangerously evil. Fragmented diversity can be an "everyone for self" chaos. Holy Spirit means finding the golden mean between unity and diversity which honors and balances both.
Aphorism of the Day, June 2, 2022
Word or Spirit? A chicken or the egg exercise. Spirit is the omnipresent ground of being, even the being of language or word. But one has to use words to say, "Spirit is the omnipresent ground of language or word." One might humbly conclude that word is co-extensive with anything that can be known.
Aphorism of the Day, June 1, 2022
Pneumatology: the use of the Spirit metaphor. When one is looking for unity among all people, an obvious similarity is to say all living people have breath, which is mostly unseen yet has definite recognizable effects. The Holy Spirit is like breath; obvious even as being unseen.
