Aphorism of the Day, May 2018

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.

Aphorism of the Day, April 2018

Aphorism of the Day, April 30, 2018

Did Jesus have favorites?  In John's Gospel, he graduates his disciples from "servants" to "friends" (philoi).  But also in John's Gospel, it refers to a special friend of Jesus six times as the "disciple whom Jesus loved."  In this reference, the higher love Greek verb form is used (agape).  Programmatically, as a document inviting mystical union with Christ the various characterization of relationships with Christ might be the progress one experiences in one's relationship with the divinely human:  child of God, disciple of Jesus, servant of Jesus, friend of Jesus, special beloved disciple of Jesus.  In friendship love, one can find one exalted by the experience itself to a "favored" place and this is not a reason for arrogant pride, since such a "favored" place is offered to anyone who wishes to find it.  Love and mystical experience makes the one who experiences the same feel beloved and favored.

Aphorism of the Day, April 29, 2018

In the I am the vine, you are the branches metaphor, the branches attain human volition which is what one gets if one is trying to mix human and plant "behaviors" in a metaphor.  Branches do not have the choice about abiding in the vine; the Gospel writer assumed that disciple branches of the Vine Christ, had the choice of abiding in the Vine.  Volitional branches are used to teach spiritual meaning; the Gospel of John presents Jesus as an uncanny presence of God in human life as the Sign of God accompanying humanity in the basic experiences of life.

Aphorism of the Day, April 28, 2018

I would like to note that only two thirds of the Trinity are referrer to in the "I am the vine" discourse of John's Gospel.  Christ is the Vine, the Father is the Vinedresser but where is the Holy Spirit.  Using this metaphor, the Holy Spirit would be the Holy Sap which flows between the branches and the vine which enable the branches to abide and continually live from the flow that derives from the vine.

Aphorism of the Day, April 27, 2018

"Abide in me as I in you."  Linguistically our versions of each other are configurations of word lenses within ourselves, of how we see each other and regard each other.  Mutual abiding in each other is how we live together.  The abiding words of Jesus was an assumption that there was mutual love projection such that one's life would be changed by Christ and his life changed by ours, in the sense of being proof of his capacity for loving all.

Aphorism of the Day, April 26, 2018

I am the vine, you are the branches.  How does one apply plant metaphors to human situations?  Plants are consider non-sentient life even though some talk to their plants to make the grow better.  Christ, being the vine, means that we derive from hybrid stock and should become representative hybrid branches.  The vine/branch analogy breaks down because the author assumes that the "branches" have freedom to bear good fruit or not.  Actual branches don't have volition that we know.  The vine/branch metaphor begins by plant-itizing human experience but when volition is involved the branch gets anthropomorphized with the attribute of having the "freedom" to abide in the vine and having the freedom to bear or not bear fruit.  To study the Gospel of John one must be able to make the twists and turns with the use of language.  Don't take the Bible literally, take it literarily, that is, as artistic literature to make spiritually aesthetic meaningful insights which can be transformatively true.

Aphorism of the Day, April 25, 2018

Probably the greatest theistic definition and tautology is from the First Epistles of John: God is love.  Love is hard to empirically verified in the sense that it has too many human experience facets to place into a scientific laboratory.  Yet most people in human traditions seem to know or come into an experience that they can assign the word to.  If love expresses the ultimate well-being of human living, then to use it as a tautological metaphor for God would certainly help to add fullness of definitional words for "that which none greater can be conceived."  The writers of First John and the letter of James keep love very earth bound in that they specifically say one cannot divide a "pietistic" love of God who is not seen from active love as justice for the brothers and sisters whom we see.  Human beings may not be perfect enough to qualify for the same lovability as a perfect God, but it is the love of God that always already provides the complementing perfectability for everyone and that is what provides the motive for forgiving tolerance which allow imperfect people to keep on keeping on in the relational community of fellowship.

Aphorism of the Day, April 24, 2018

The presumption of a text or writing is that it can preserve or fix a meaning in some final self-evidential way.  This presumption is most egregiously stated in the voice of the Bible pounding preacher who declaims, "The Bible says!"  This really means, "For the purposes of my sermon, to relate a homiletical meaning to my listeners, from my study of the Bible from within my particular hermeneutical circle created by the interpretive community which has influenced me, I want to deliver authority to the particular point that I am stressing to my listeners and so I assert, "The Bible says!"  By so asserting, I assume that all biblical words are equally God's words and so I identify the entire force of almighty God behind my talking points."  Methinks some humility is required.  One can offer lots of true biblical meanings in terms of their anthropological soundness without becoming such a presumptuous asserter of being one who has special privileged meanings of what God really means.

Aphorism of the Day, April 23, 2018

John's Gospels has a two-fold metaphor when red-lettered Jesus says, "I am the vine; the are the branches."  The "fruit" of the vine is branches; the fruit of the branches is "grapes."  Branches are necessary for the "fruit" of grapes.  In term of the afterlife of Christ in the world, the church became the branch for the continual reproduction of the Christ-reality in the lives of people in subsequent years.

Aphorism of the Day, April 22, 2018

In our day of rising kleptocracies, people with money, knowledge and power use the same to gain more control of the same without any sense of distributive justice.  When the poor, weak and the ignorant are those who are exploited, then the message of the Good Shepherd has lost. A bad shepherd can think that anyone has the freedom to have the power to exploit, so it might as well be me.  It is almost as though the model of the bad shepherd who has the power, knowledge and wealth to exploit has become the preferred model of the "free market" economy.

Aphorism of the Day, April 21, 2018

One could view utopia as the conditions when vulnerability is overcome and each individual is "omni-self-efficient" but knowing the conditions of time which includes "babies," such utopia is really like what it means, "no such place."  Given the manifold conditions of vulnerability which are unavoidable in life one looks for the matching the good shepherds of ministry with the vulnerable sheep of need.  Our world has too many sheep in need and not enough good shepherds who do the obvious requirement of justice, viz., sharing wealth, knowledge and power to bring the vulnerable into an invulnerable and safe state of well-being.  Too many people with wealth, knowledge and power actually use the same to exploit the vulnerable so that they can increase their wealth, knowledge and power.  Jesus as the Good Shepherd is a witness to acknowledging that wealth, knowledge and power are gifts of God and we are under judgment if we deploy them in exploitive ways.

Aphorism of the Day, April 20, 2018

Sheep and shepherd metaphors seem more appropriate for the times of paternalism when leaders mediated matters of ideology, volition and material dispersements to a highly dependent mass of people without the power of their participation in determining the direction of a society.  What the post-modern era has come to be is that the "corporation" driven by those who make decisions in the matter of money and power has become the public equivalent person of the shepherd, but they are driven mainly by profit motive.  The societies which require voluntary participation of membership like democracies and parish churches have themselves become the dependent sheep without shepherding participation of membership. 58 % of eligible voters voted in the last election; a far less percentage of "eligible" members of churches participate with regular attendance and ministry.  The parish church has become the new sheep without inspired ministers to tend to its well-being.  In democratic institutions, everyone has to step up to the a shepherd of ministry for the common good.

Aphorism of the Day, April 19, 2019

In the world of New Testament metaphors, the art of the metaphor allows for contradiction since Jesus could be both Lamb of God and Good Shepherd.  In turning to Hebrew Scripture for metaphors for Jesus, the Paschal lamb and the shepherd of the twenty-third Psalm provide the subject matter to generate the metaphor of meanings for how the poetic Christians were bringing their Christ-piety to language.  That Jesus existed has empirical status; how he existed for those who knew him in myriads of ways in the empiricism of piety generated the art of poetry and so it is not limited by the physical laws of cause and effect.  Poetry is true is an different way than science.

Aphorism of the Day, April 18, 2018

From the confession of a cosmic Risen Christ of St. Paul one moves in a seeming backward way to Jesus of Nazareth who is the incarnate "launching" personality for the eventual cosmic Christ.  John's Gospel traces the origin of Jesus to the Cosmic Word of God who is God and the Cosmic Omni-Textual Word of God becomes editorially limited in the person of the historical Jesus of Nazareth only to become once again Omni-textual and omnipresent as the Risen Christ who is All and in All.  The glaring contradiction is that even discourse of totalities become particular linguistic events.  We can't avoid totalities even as we can't avoid stating the reality of totality in the linguistic event of articulate in speaking or writing, "Totality." When one says that one "feels" that one belongs with and in Everything one still commits linguistic reductionism.

Aphorism of the Day, April 17, 2018

In the Pauline confession, "Christ is all and in all."  How does that poetic "Omni-presence" get presented in a Gospel?  John's Gospel is the confessional effort to show how Christ is all and in all.  Christ is Word and God from the beginning.  Expressed another way is when Jesus is quoted as saying, "before Abraham was, I am."  What kind of empirical sense do these phrases make at all unless the confession of the essence of messiahship (Christliness) is the co-extensivity of language with God, as in The Word was God?  When Word is God, then metaphoricity reigns as definitive of both anthropocentrism and theism.

Aphorism of the Day, April 16, 2018

The Gospel of John is a quintessential book of metaphors, using often the tautological equation formula "ego eimi" /I am followed by term of equivalency, as is I am the Good Shepherd.  The Gospel of John, more than any other biblical reading teaches us that it is not a "literal" book but a "literary" book with many true meaningful phrases for the poetry of the soul.  In occupation, Jesus was not a shepherd nor are people sheep.  However the shepherd/sheep metaphor can be understood as a true analysis and recommendation for people who have power, wealth and knowledge in relationship to those who do not have enough of the three for sufficient health/salvation of their lives.

Aphorism of the Day, April 15, 2018

Readers of the Gospel of John often miss one of the not so subtle interpretive cues.  Jesus consistently chastises the "literal" interpreters.  The message behind this interpretative cue is that readers should read the Gospel in non-literal ways for the spiritual meanings therein.  And fundamentalists"ruin" the Gospel for making it into a piece of modern historical writing with exact empirical accounts of Jesus of Nazareth.  Reading a piece of literature as the wrong genre results in confusion and misrepresentation.

Aphorism of the Day, April 14, 2018

A trademark phrase of Jesus in his post-resurrection appearance was "Peace be with you."  In Semitic languages the same is standard greeting equivalent to the English, "Hello, how are you."  The "Peace be with you" phrase is at center of the Eucharistic liturgy as a greeting of love and reconciliation among people who gather on the first day of the week to realize the presence of Christ in the particular modes of the Eucharistic event.  One cannot separate the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharistic elements from the Real Presence of Christ known in the reconciling passing of the Peace among the people who have gathered in the name of Christ.

Aphorim of the Day, April 13, 2018

The post-resurrection appearances of the Risen Christ are presented as the serendipitous ways in which Christ came to be known to the few who were called to be witnesses to the fact that it seemed to be God's personal response to their grief.  Appearance and disappearance of Christ in one's life is the tale of the apparent and non-apparent awareness of Christ as eternal word and Christ as particular manifestation of telling apparent presence of one's life being God-touched.  Particular word events in one's life can seem to be "erased" or "deconstructed" as one's particular word events in time retreat or are lost in the great hum of the universe of every possible word being articulated at once, and so individual recognition is, as it were, lost in the hum.  Word is always animating life even when we don't acknowledge the particular awareness of the same because we are always already manifesting the redundancies of Word.  I/we have come to know that we exist because we use language and are used by it.  The worded existence is the Omni-presence given equality with God (John 1:1).

Aphorism of the Day, April 12, 2018

The phenomena the post-resurrection appearances of Christ are described in various ways.  Some disciples saw, talked with, touched the Risen Christ.  Some ate with him and he ate to prove that he had a corporality like the biblical angels who could appear and disappear.  To Paul the Risen Christ was a bright blinding light and a voice.  To others the Risen Christ was the profound inner impression of a Presence attributed to the work of the alter-personality of God as Holy Spirit.

Aphorism of the Day, April 11, 2018

One of the chief insights which come from the presentation of the post-resurrection appearances of the Risen Christ, is that the Risen Christ wanted to be made known to his profoundly grieving friends.  The disciples were shown in poignant ways that Jesus still had personal continuing identity after he was crucified and the continuing identity was revealed to them in his incorruptible Risen spiritual body, which was the witness of the proto-body for all who had hope in their continuing future personal identity.

Aphorism of the Day, April 10, 2018

One of the results of the Enlightenment and the rise of modern science as the gold standard of "truth," was the resulting inferiority complex of many expositors of faith.  What can one do after theology, the queen of the sciences is dethroned and replaced by reason enthroned in the Cartesian transcendental subject who existed because "he thought" "cogito ergo sum?"  What the proponents of older theology and the newer scientific reason failed to realize appropriately is that they are both unified by being language products and as such there are different truth facets to the language of empirical observation and aesthetic, moral and spiritual values.  When truth facets are confused in how they are assigned to discursive practices much symbolic confusion has resulted and people have ended up defending the Bible and faith language in the wrong way and for the wrong reasons.  Everyone one needs to remember that in the end, having language unifies everyone.  The work of peace involves the perpetual translation among uses of discursive practice toward living together in the values of love and justice.

Aphorism of the Day, April 9, 2018

The Risen Christ appeared to the disciples and others.  The Gospel writers want to emphasize that this is "really real."  St. Paul stated that continuing personal identity after death would be in an "incorruptible spiritual body."  One would assume that the Risen Christ appeared in an incorruptible spiritual body in a way that included being able to verify actuality to the disciples.  Seeing and touching and eating a meal were the physical metaphors used to relate the interaction of the disciples and the incorruptible spiritual body of Christ.

Aphorism of the Day, April 8, 2018

We have inherited the word "spirit" to speak about the invisible yet effectively and essential presence of God or of a person.  Yet, the words for spirit in various language essentially mean "wind" or "breath."  Wind can seems to be an invisible breath that gives indication that creation is alive and so one can see how the experiences of invisible but obvious breath and wind became a fitting words to speak about invisible yet actual realities.  John's Gospel perhaps adds a further insight when Jesus is quoted as saying, "My words are spirit and they are life."  When one thinks about words and language, they represent an invisible but actual essence of what it is to be human.  We are invisibly constituted by the words within us as the script which guides what we do, say and write.  So spirit as the constituting words of our lives is a perhaps more insightful way to think of spirit than the notions of breath or wind.

Aphorism of the Day, April 7, 2018

Legislation making is often called "sausage making;" an unsightly tedious process.  Practice and rehearsal sessions for performance are often stop and start and sessions of frustration trying to get ready for performance, and it is good that they are mostly out of the sight of the public.  The public gets the final product in the artistic occasion and might thrill about how easy the performers make it seem, when such is truly not the case.  Reading the Bible can be like the performance occasion; one gets the end product of the biblical writers and one can have devotional interaction with the literal meaning of the words (literal to the reader) and swoon with the sublime.  The Bible scholar digs into the "sausage making" elements regarding the author, context or provenance of the writing, contrasting original language with other similar language documents of the time and often scholars end up with stark disagreement on many elements that go into a biblical text.  The presentation of "such sausage making" can seem to diminish the devotional reading based upon presuming that God wrote the text directly through a willing writer without needing any historical context at all.  In naiveté, one can assume the words have self-evidential meanings from the Holy Spirit.  Such limited naïve reading has led to conclusion that one cannot read the Bible seriously as a Christian and still be a scientist and a person who acknowledges the methods of modern history.

Aphorism of the Day, April 6, 2018

Once something has come to writing, the writing is itself a trace method of memory, about how past events have been or were interpreted by those who experienced them directly or had the hearsay from those who were there.  The trace of writing cannot be a reconstruction of everything that happened and so it is layered with selection of recounted events.  Selection is made with a purpose, namely the purpose of the writer who selects to present his or her system of values regarding what is important to present for the particular writing purpose.  This is such an encumbered way to view biblical writings; it is much more pleasurable to discount the writing baggage and enjoy the "as if" experience of actually being there.  In the joy of the "as if" of being there, one can forget the art of the writer who has successfully transported the reader into thinking that one is really there.  One can have both the sublime artistic effect of a text while at the same time processing all of the artistic devices which went into the construction of the text.  Lots of Bible readers only want the sublime artistic effect of the sense of "being there" which suspends the rational mind's doubt that it really is so.  One of sad outcomes of what is called "fundamentalism" is that people read the Bible as though it were a scientific document and not a sublime artistic experience. By elevating scientific discourse as setting the criteria for the highest experience of truth, they diminish the aesthetic experiences as being "impoverished" truth.  In actual experience the aesthetic truths are actually more "moving" and inspirational in impelling human transformation.  One could wish that Bible readers would be truer to a privileged place for the sublime artistic reading of Holy Scripture.

Aphorism of the Day, April 5, 2018

John's Gospel purports the unity of people across space, time and history because all equally are constituted by the Word.  Word constitution of human experience is layered and with word we explicate the kinds of layering of word experience.  We use the interpretive lenses of word to designate a "face to face" encounter, even as we use words to describe "hearsay" as in "I saw Jesus face to face, do you believe me?"  We use word to preserve word in a certain way through writing, as in "these things are written so that you may believe."  Empirical experience, oral account of experience and written account of experience are all equal Word experiences in that each can be a vehicle of a different layering of Word experience which is designated as the "Sublime."  All who dwell in the realm of the Word, have the potential of knowing the "Sublime" which can come within certain interpretive communities to be known as encounters with the "Risen Christ."

Aphorism of the Day, April 4, 2018

The passing of the "Peace" in the Eucharistic liturgy derives in part from the "doubting" Thomas story.  Jesus appears to his frightened disciples and imparts the greeting of peace.  This signified to Peter that he,  and the disciples who fled Jesus during his trial were forgiven and reconciled with him.  It is included with the injunction not to retain sins but forgive them.  In the Eucharistic liturgy, the passing of the peace is not just a quaint friendly gesture; it is the opportunity for persons to be reconciled to one another before they approach the altar.  The passing of the peace hides within it the active confession and forgiveness of sins so needed for the maintenance of community.

Aphorism of the Day, April 3, 2018

A way to read the Gospel of John is to see it as a study in words.  The Word is God from the beginning.  The spoken words of Jesus are Spirit and Life.  The Gospel of John is written words and by reading them one can come to believe in the identity of Jesus.

Aphorism of the Day, April 2, 2018

The "low" Sunday Gospel of the Doubting Thomas periscope, encodes in a brilliant way the affirmation of the validity of the many ways that the Risen Christ can be present to people.  The Risen Christ is differently but equally present to all and the equality is known through the experience of peace, not fear, the presence of the Holy Spirit and the forgiveness of sins, not the retaining of each other's sins.

Aphorism of the Day, April 1, 2018

The resurrection of Christ and our future resurrection tells us what we believe about God.  It tells us that God loves us enough to cherish our unique personal identity enough to preserve it in a recognizable way into the future forever.  And if you're like I am, I don't feel all that worthy to be preserved forever, but I think it is wonderful to believe that God believes that I am worth preserving in some way for ever.

Aphorism of the Day, March 2018

Aphorism of the Day, March 31, 2018

Biblical mystical-ity has to do with how the inward identities of people are constituted by words.  The inner world of words in someone is a mystery and to give it "substance" one makes reference to the "outside" world.  Physicality in biblical writing is used as a metaphor for something being substantial=really real=actual; it does not necessarily mean that something has empirical verification.  Confusing poetic mystical-ity with empirical verification accounts for the varieties of "fundamentalisms" that have trapped so many people in staying in the state of what Ricoeur called "primary naivete" where external things can become idols if one lingers too long there without moving on to mystical transformation.

Aphorism of the Day, March 30, 2018

The cross of Jesus is the ultimate case of revisionary history when Christians proclaimed that God meant it to happen.  Providence is when history is seen specifically as a seeming direct action of God.  This means that Providence is significant revisionary history.  Providence is Revised history.  It is history injected with the interpretive rose glasses of faith.

Aphorism of the Day, March 29, 2018

The early churches had to deal with competition in ministry and with betrayal within the leadership.  The Johannine church used a last supper discourse to highlight the fact that betrayal was found in the beginning of the Movement and so was competition between disciples of Jesus necessitating the foot-washing example of service being the mark of genuine leadership.  Service is the expression of someone who is comfortable enough with the esteem given by God so as to be able put others first and not feel diminished.  The universal tendencies of human beings account for the Gospels being teaching tools in blending current community issues under the guise of a oracle of Jesus teaching about loyalty and service.

Aphorism of the Day, March 28, 2018

The story of Judas Iscariot a disciple of Jesus is quite tragic.  He was close to Jesus and yet was conflicted by the popularity of Jesus and how that popularity was perceived as a threat to religious leaders who also influenced Judas enough to persuade him to betray Jesus.  Judas is perhaps a paradigm of those who are conflicted about "having fallen in love with Jesus" and what that might do to one's former loyalties.  The strength of one's former loyalties has the power to undo the love that changes one's life.

Aphorism of the Day, March 27, 2018

Dying or being crucified with Christ was a spiritual motif in the theology of Paul.  When this theology came into the life of Jesus as a parable, the oracle of the words of Jesus in the early Gospel churches was, "take up my cross and follow me."  This theme was most literally instantiated the life of Simon of Cyrene who in the Passion of Christ, bore the same cross that Jesus did.   Simon was the teaching motif for "taking up the cross of Christ."  This same theme is reiterated in the Pauline theology of the negative experiences being understood as "suffering with Christ," and "filling up what was lacking in the afflictions Christ."  In this theology of vicarious suffering with Christ in all of the suffering of the world, one can see the acknowledgment of affirming true freedom in the world for some really bad things to happen and these bad things get unevenly distributed into the experiences of people in the world.  People of faith do not get exempt from "bad things happening" in their uneven distribution, and people of faith accept their having been "incorporated" in humanity and further, in Christ, sharing in the general affliction that does and can come to all. Thus in Holy Week on our way to remembering the Cross of Jesus, we embrace the impoverished side of true freedom, namely, the freedom for a wide variety of things to happen to the full variety of humanity.  The Cross of Jesus is a symbol for us to be "really" real about the conditions of freedom.

Aphorism of the Day, March 26, 2018

Holy Week is a remembrance week for the liminal phase of preparing to have the physical body of Jesus removed from sight and accessibility of people never to be again placed under such time space limitation.  It is prelude to the universalization of Christ freed from the constraints of have only one location at a time.

Aphorism of the Day, March 25, 2018

King David was both a melek, a king with political authority and a meshiach, an anointed messiah chosen one of God.  From Hebrew to Greek: melek=basileus, meshiach=Christos.  Jesus was not regarded to be the Christos by his Jewish religious interrogators, however they presented Jesus as a pretending basileus to the Roman authorities who knew the Caesar to be a basileus and Herod to be a basileus.  The early Christians believed that Jesus in his death and resurrection was the Christos derived from the suffering servant theme of the prophet Isaiah.  They believed that the resurrection was proof of his also being a "basileus" whose political sway would be realized in the future coming.  And when the Roman Empire became the Holy Roman Empire or Christendom, the trappings of Christ as basileus were seen as instantiated.

Aphorism of the Day, March 24, 2018

The ambiguous notion of "king" figures significantly in the Passion accounts.  When the Sanhedrin brought Jesus to trial, they asked him if he was the "king," meaning Messiah.  This was an insider term in the Jewish context.  When Jesus was tried by Roman authorities he was asked if he was a "king" basileus.  If Jesus were presented as a king like Caesar, he would be a threat particularly since Herod was the King of the Jews (certainly not a messiah) in the time of Jesus.  People who believed that the Messiah was also a Political King with armies, like king David, represent the competing notion of the Messiah that in part divided the synagogue from the Jesus Movement.  Jesus did not prove to be a "basileus" king like Caesar or David.   His followers defined him as a "suffering servant" Messiah King.

Aphorism of the Day, March 23, 2018

How can one explain the glorification of the death event of Jesus on the Cross?  It is as though a spiritual vortex of Cosmic Karma is created when the holy and the innocent are unjustly persecuted, mistreated, tortured and killed.  Why is it that the early followers of Jesus did not become a zealot holy war cult out to seek revenge in suicidal ways to make the people responsible for the death of Jesus pay?  The Cosmic Karma of the resurrection appearances of the Risen Christ resulted in a forgiving kindness and the confession of the Roman Centurion at the Cross, "Truly this man was God's Son," became prophetic as the subtle but winsome Gospel of Christ converted the Roman Empire.  The irony is that when Christians have come to have "absolute power," they too have been guilty of being corrupted by that power to themselves be in the role of persecutors.  The Cross of Christ placed as an icon on shields and military planes and tanks, has falsely been used to promote corrupted power.  We need to represent authentically the winsome power of vulnerable kindness of the Cross of Jesus.


Aphorism of the Day, March 22, 2018

Question to Jesus are you the King of the Jews?  A very loaded question depending upon whether one was saying Christos or basileios.  One was the God anointed "king" or chosen leader and the other was "secular" king.  In the Passion narrative the suggestion that Jesus would be a "secular" king of the Jews like Herod being the King of the Jews was a political notion whose promotion would be a reason for crucifixion.

Aphorism of the Day, March 21, 2018

What is the good of death?  Death can end some dreadful things like pain and suffering, but what good is untimely death?  What good was the untimely death of a thirtysomething Jesus?  The early Christians believed that the meaning of the horrible death of Jesus made memorable by the post-resurrection appearances was the power to interdict the sin of the world which was manifest in the unworthy and misguided direction of desire focused upon doing and thinking and saying the wrong things.  In spiritual methodology of the early church, Christians used the mantra of the death of Jesus as internalized energy of identity to redirect the energy of desire away from idols and redirect the power of desire toward God who alone is worthy of the intensity of human.

Aphorism of the Day, March 20, 2018

While an anniversary might be seen as a return to an originating event, one cannot forget all that has happened since the originating event in the anniversary as an "imaginary" return to the event.  While we use imagination to return to the Passion of Jesus on Passion Sunday, we cannot pretend that the resurrection appearances and the aftermath did not occur. In an anniversary, the originating event is tinged with all of the subsequent accrued meanings.

Aphorism of the Day, March 19, 2018

The Bible is a triumph of the fact that people are language users.  Language use the ultimate unifying reality of all humanity.  Even if we are divided by particular use of words, we are still unified by the fact that we all are language users or language "used."  Word is God in the sense of language being co-extensive with knowing anything.  Word attains particularity in biblical language; the particularities of the word traditions that bear the traces of the biblical writers contexts and their own synthesis of word creations.  And biblical writers can use words to present contradiction and ambiguity in order create aesthetic and spiritual mood, as in: in Jesus, God is emptied of being divine in "achieving" death even death on the cross.  Such poetry had meaning for the early Christians even as much language use always has evocative meanings beyond the way in which scientists use language in the mode of empirical verification/falsification.

Aphorism of the Day, March 18, 2018

One of the signs of the insecurity of people is the need for excessive recognition to somehow authenticate their sense of worth.  Fame is the drug of the media culture and the spiritual counter part of fame is called "Glory."  St. Paul wrote, "Christ in you the hope of glory."  Christ is the Glory and that glory is shared with us in an inward event and to be known by Christ is the genuine fame of life.

Aphorism of the Day, March 17, 2018

Writing many years after the facts results in knowing what happened and so one can retell the story with the end results in mind and one cannot help but indicate how the future was guiding the past in the retelling of the past.  The advantage of speaking last means that one's interpretation prevail until one's latest interpretation gets surpassed by someone else's interpretation.  Such telling of the story make the heroes of the past seem very prophetic.  The Gospels were written well after the Risen Christ effect within the early Christian communities was the glory of Christ that guided the Gospel narratives.

Aphorism of the Day, March 16, 2018

Glory is perhaps the religious word for "fame."  Many people have become famous and many more are "infamous," meaning that they have become well-known for things that represent what most regard to be the worst of human behaviors, like continuous lying, or genocide.  Glory is the kind of fame that is a sign of God's imputing action.  The fame of the Risen Christ did not seem to be of human origin; the Risen Christ came to be known as an experience long after Jesus of Nazareth was no longer visible.  How did this kind of fame occur, the fame of convincing so many people that "Christ was in them?"  The New Testament writers attributed the kind of fame that the Risen Christ had attained to the fame called "glory" signified in one being overshadowed by the Holy Spirit and the life of Christ being "born" within oneself.  And so St. Paul wrote, "Christ in you, the hope of glory."  In-Christed people derive glory from Christ, not needing the rather shallow "15 minutes of fame."

Aphorism of the Day, March 15, 2018

Jeremiah understood the future of the law as interior event rather than an external suppressive force in the hands of the strongest.  He wrote that "the law would be written" on the heart.  The law was always in the form of word or language guiding the action or behaviors of people.  The law being seen in the Sinai event as being written on the stone tablets and venerated as an outside force was not effective if the leaders with the power did not follow the law themselves.  Jeremiah saw something of the democratization of the Torah; every one would have the interior Torah as a personalized rabbi.  This Omni-presence of the law was an accessibility of the law that was necessary given that people with power were not modelling lawful living.

Aphorism of the Day, March 14, 2018

The notion of the glorification of Christ probably derives from the totally shocked group of Christians who had to deal with the fact that Christ did not cease to be relevant and present in telling ways after his death on the cross.  The only way that the Christians could rhetorically deal with the staying power of Christ after his death and the ability of the experience of the Holy Spirit was to proclaim the glorification of Christ and return to the Cross of Jesus as the "rocket launcher" to his glory.  In story form, Greeks came to a feast in Jerusalem asking to see Jesus and a booming voice from heaven said, "I have glorified and will glorify Jesus...."  This is the booming voice of the post-resurrection success of Jesus in history saying Christ did not go away because God glorified Him and made his fame evident in the hearts of many.

Aphorism of the Day, March 13, 2018

Impressionists were artists who seemed to be rebels of realism; they saw differently and presented a different version of the real.  One could call the Christian mystics of the New Testament, Impressionist artists because what they saw often contradicted the "realism" of the situation.  Realism: the cross of Jesus was a spectacle of cruel torture to end an insurrectionist movement.  Christian Impressionists: the cross of Jesus was a launching pad of glory which "lifted up" Christ and totally contradicted the real purpose of execution on a cross.  We can be both Christian realists and Christian Impressionists in living in both the kingdom of humanity and the kingdom of God.

Aphorism of the Day, March 12, 2018

Bible translators have the choice of translating words or translating corresponding meanings.  If they translate words without translating meaning they can perpetuate ambiguity.  For example, when Jesus said that one has to hate one's life to save it or to lose one's life to save it what does "life" mean?  It refers to "psueche" life, life of the soul or life of the mind, emotional and will.  Education means the continual renewal of the mind, emotional or will where former states are died and pass away and are "hated" in favor of the soul which surpasses itself in a future state.  To translate without imparting the meanings results in literal absurdities.  Reading the Bible means accepting the fact that precise meaning and context for much of it remains a mystery.  Much guessing at relevant correspondences for our time ensues, as in the unsolvable "koan" of Jesus cursing a tree for not bearing fruit out of season.

Aphorism of the Day, March 11, 2018

The discursive Jesus in John's Gospel speaks continually about himself in the third person as Son of Man and Son of God.  Such an oracle Voice of Jesus in the Johannine churches indicate the belief in the humanity and divinity of Jesus as expressing their Christology, or the proclamation of the meaning of Christ for them.

Aphorism of the Day, March 10, 2018

"As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness even so must the Son of Man be lifted up." This simile has some similarity of contexts but also many dissimilarities.  Jesus dying on the cross and a bronze poisonous snake on a pole.  Simile check: Jesus is not poisonous snake; is death more like the poisonous snake?  The cross is not a pole, though both may be made of wood and create elevation for visibility or spectacle.  The sinful Israelites who were punished with snake bites received a cure by merely gazing with faith at the bronze snake on the pole.  Christo-mysticism: The cross of Jesus being raised as a symbol of transformation in the consciousness of those who in faith use the power of the death of Jesus to die to what is unworthy and the effects of the unworthy.  Talk among yourselves about the effective communicative value of this simile for you.

Aphorism of the Day, March 9, 2018

What frustrated preachers often don't tell is that they are caught in the debates of scholars about what things mean in the Bible.  If the scholars who have studied history and the original languages all of their academic lives don't agree, what is the poor preacher supposed to do as he or she clumsily prefaces a sermon, "In the name of God....?"  One such notion of disagreement is whether Son of Man and Son of God are interchangeable in referring to Jesus and do we capitalize them because they have the definite article "the" in front of them indicating singularity?  Does the use of "son of man" represent the Aramaic modesty of Jesus saying something like "yours truly" lifted up?  Does Son of Man vs. Son of God represent the theologies of the editors and redactors regarding Jesus as God from the beginning or as an adopted divinized person receiving the anointing as God's Messiah?  Do Son of Man and Son of God use in the Gospels presage the debate of Arius and Athanasius at Nicaea?  Like many things of the ancient past, we often have to confess agnosticism humbly saying, "Perhaps I would know, if I had been there."

Aphorism of the Day, March 8, 2018

Ponder the theology of English capitalization of words translated from the Greek New Testament.  Son of Man/son of man, Son of God/son of god.  Some translator used English language habits of emphasis to relate the uniqueness of Jesus.  We don't speak in "capitalizations" even though we speak with intonation to impart nuance and emphasis.  Technically, Jesus was Son of Woman (Mary) since Jesus did not have the genetics of Joseph.  However, the Greek for Son of Man refers to "Anthropos" or humanity, meaning that a woman, Mary, truly represents humanity in a unique way in Christian mystical theology.

Aphorism of the Day, March 7, 2018

The older events are the more legendary language is used to recount them.  The pre-historic lore of most cultures have God and gods acting directly the world and speaking directly to people.  The pre-historic lore as we know it was at some time edited and re-presented  as "origin" and "identity" discourse for why we came to do and believe the things that we do and in the way that we do it.  Modern Science problematized lore by requiring that it be judged by the known conditions of empirical verification.  In the face of modern science defenders of pre-historic lore had the option of defending it as "science with the supernatural breaking the laws of science" or defending it as a special artistic discourse pertaining to quest of people attaining metaphorical meanings in their lives in negotiating the inward world and the outward world.  The latter view can reconcile science and the truth of discourses which pertain to inner realities and outer living.  The fact that every person is a Word user means that Word is big enough and most True, as to be able to encompass all sorts of discursive practices.

Aphorism of the Day, March 6, 2018

Understanding the New Testament writings means understanding how the writers appropriated the metaphors from stories in the Hebrew Scriptures.  For example, the rather imprecise metaphorical use of the bronze serpent which Moses put on a pole so that his people could look at the bronze serpent and be spared from death from the poisonous snakes in the camp.  The writer of John relates in one of the long discourses of Jesus that as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted so that those who looked at the Son of Man lifted up on the cross, could be saved/healed from the poisonous condition of sin and death.  Literally, only a few people saw the actual Cross of Jesus.  The Johannine writer through the discourse of Jesus was referring to the cross as a metaphorical symbol of inward spiritual transformation, attaining salvation=spiritual health by having faith in the power of the death of Christ to end what is unworthy.  Pity the poor literalists who don't appreciate spiritual poetry and metaphors.

Aphorism of the Day, March 5, 2018

The writings which have made it to the canonical New Testament represent those that maintain a connection with the Hebrew Scriptures, albeit, not of the sort that was retained in the synagogue tradition.  Ponder the disadvantage of Gentile Christians.  They never had the opportunity to be "Jews as a pre-Christian Jews," and for them to catch up on the background of the Hebrew Scripture tradition must have been an impossible tasks.  They had to rely upon what the founders of the Jesus Movement from the Judaic tradition presented to them as what the new "telos" of the Hebrew Scriptures had become for Christians.

Aphorism of the Day, March 4, 2018

God as the Playwright of the Great Play of Life, might be a metaphor for our lives since the Genesis account relates that God "spoke" all things into existence and since the Gospel of John relates that the Word was God.  The script for humanity might be the borders of human possibility and so the script allows for ad libbing.  Human freedom is the important ad libbing that we do as we try to perform God's script for living as sublime as we can.

Aphorism of the Day, March 3, 2018

Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols.  One might do the semiotics of the Cross of Jesus.  Roman crucifixion meant the end of a person who was viewed as the chief instigator or leader of social unrest or insurrection.  That is what it meant for the Roman bureaucracy. For St. Paul, the Cross of Jesus symbolized the power of interior interdiction to "die to one's self" in order that the Christ nature might be realized in oneself.  Death has the power to end life.  Death is non-discriminating; it will kill cancer in a person but it also ends all of the good constitution of a person as well.  St. Paul saw the Cross of Jesus as something like the targeting procedures of radioactive treatment of cancer; using the power of the death of Jesus to "smart bomb" the unworthy controlling interior impulses to allow the goodness of the Christ nature to thrive and assert controlling influence within a person.

Aphorism of the Day, March 2, 2018

Languages evolve and change as well as the meanings of words as the contexts for the use of words change.  Words place value on what they refer to.  Consider the cross when the event of the crucifixion was actually happening and then consider the meaning of the cross for what it had become in St. Paul's mystical theology of personal transformation.  They seem to be the "same" cross but they are quite different.  The Cross has had quite a linguistic makeover and cultural and social one since we memorialize it in gold and silver jewelry.  The power of later interpretation in a different setting totally revalues the meaning of previous events.

Aphorism of the Day, March 1, 2018

One of the issues of sign in the New Testament was this: How could the Cross of Jesus signify something that was triumphant?  It would not seem to follow that the death of Jesus would mean the success of the Jesus Movement; it would seem to signify its end.  Such seeming non sequitur is why St. Paul said the Greek mind regarded the cross to be "foolish."  One must note that the Cross of Jesus was revalued because of the presence of the Risen Christ in the life of the members of the early church.  For those who did not know the Risen Christ, the Cross was indeed foolish.