Aphorism of the Day, November 30, 2016
The Apostle Paul, a Pharisee became the theological founder of Gentile Christianity. How does one establish from Scripture the Christian Movement among the Gentiles? You quote Isaiah: "The root of Jesse shall come, the one who rises to rule the Gentiles; in him the Gentiles shall hope." So Christian expositors trace the genealogy of Jesus from Jesse and the rule of Jesus is within the interior hearts of the Gentiles until he eventually after Constantine becomes associated with Kings and Rulers. St. Paul's intuition about the success of the Jesus Movement is evident in the Epistle to the Romans. While he in some writings is inclined toward an imminent return of Jesus, in writing to the Roman churches, he solicits prayers for the Roman authorities, suggesting that he has an intuition about the success of the Jesus Movement riding on the coat tails of the Roman Empire presence throughout their known world. St. Paul even mentioned his intention of going to Spain. The reason that Gospels are anachronistically made to be more Roman friendly than Sanhedrin friendly is surely due to the growth of the Christian Movement among the Gentile peoples of the Roman Empire.
Aphorism of the Day, November 29. 2016
Utopian presentations in the Bible are an indication that people have lived knowing that the conditions of the world seem fatally imperfect and fatal imperfection cannot provide the source of being anything but the same. Within the conditions of fatal imperfection, there have arisen people who coincided with eras of "apparent prosperity" such that when that era passed away a "good 'ol days" nostalgia latches upon what those "good 'ol days" were and they tended to be idealized. David "knocked" lots of head and did lots of politically "back room" deals to solidify his reign and he was not so universally loved as to avoid having a coup executed against him led by his own son. Still the Davidic era was the good 'ol days for people who experienced some very bad days. If the Davidic era happened once it was because God divinized a shepherd boy and made him a messiah; then God could divinize again one who was from the Davidic "loins" and make such a one to usher in a new Davidic era. In Advent, we juxtapose the dreams for a new David with a drill sergeant named John the Baptist who was less of a dreamer and more of reformer of the human will. Quit whining about your imperfect conditions! Make better choices now! John challenged institutional religious righteousness; he went outside of the institutional religion and called people to the desert river, the Jordan to purify themselves and recommit themselves to change. Institutional Religion said you were God's people by following the rules of the Institution. John the Baptist said, "Baloney! You have to go back to the Jordan and re-enter the land or state of God's promise. You have to re-enter as an individual because it is individual performance which counts, not institutional identity.
Aphorism of the Day, November 28, 2016
Utopian ideals function within the biblical literature to inspire the direction of people's aspirations and ethical conducts. Exemplars of people and situation which in various ways instantiate the universal recommendable are extolled beyond their actual capacities to be perfect. The bar is really set too high for the human condition. Ideal leaders are supposed to be those who use power to take care of the poor. Ideal environments are those where predatory-prey antagonism is gone. The fallacy of utopian ideals assumes that time, change and freedom have been big mistakes and that there is an actual way of locking the total situation into a harmony that works better than a well-oiled machine. Utopian ideals function for us as synchronic snap shots of a momentary structural harmony but such ideals must surrender to diachronicity, time, change, process and the freedom for harmonies to be violated by the experience of antagonism. Utopian ideals written from conditions of distress unwittingly seem to be asking for the end of freedom as we know it. Freedom means the continuous conflict and competition of an infinite number of agents all with "little minds" of their own. Sometimes this cacophony of competing agents results in participants grasping a sense of peaceful harmony and yet the attempt to retain those states of harmony except as memorial traces are futile in the movement of time.
Aphorism of the Day, November 27, 2016
Some New Testament writers link the beginning and the end with God's ability to create and to destroy. For some it may be a comfort that God is presented as a Scientist in the laboratory bringing an experiment into existence with "seeming" free agents walking their mazes until they do it so badly that the experiment must be ended. Such a God in control might be comfort to those who need their pain and suffering to end quickly, so one can appreciate this as a discourse of comfort. In more sanguine reflection it seems that such a "context specific" metaphor may not be honest to the reality of freedom of all agents in motion together permitting all of the outcomes that may actually happen. Such a symphony or cacophony of all out play among agents with relative limited freedom accounting for the unknowable strings of cause and effect, is more inspiring than God as a puppeteer who can close down the puppet show when some of the puppets get their strings tangled.
Aphorism of the Day, November 26, 2016
The apocalyptic genre found in the Bible and elsewhere should not be too simply categorized. It is a discourse of futurism that functioned to relate to the mood of suffering in the present by means of the "fantasia" of utopian imagery and as well as "discourses" of endings, significant transitional phases whose threat of chaos are ameliorated by using language to re-create them to help form the mood of people. The language of the apocalyptic can thusly utilize both a imagery comporting to both positive and negative reinforcement discourse to be used to influence the moral and ethical actions of people in preparation for what seems to be an imminent foreboding future. As such it is the language of preparatory disaster relief. The attempt is actually to influence the outcome of the future by such apocalyptic discourse. Apocalyptic discourse is an attempt to present in language a future but it lies about the future; it really is meant as motivational and ameliorative discourse for the immediate conditions of people now. Failing to realize this, one can find among the religious many misappropriation of the apocalyptic notably serving the selfish fatalism of people who want to perpetuate their particular pieties as being God's favorite.
Aphorism of the Day, November 25, 2016
What influences our preparation, the probability of something good happening or the probability of something bad happening? If times are really oppressive and things in general are going bad for a particular community of people, it is natural to adopt a "negative outcome" motivational program. Winning the lottery or thief will rob my house? In life we often are like the donkey led by the positive motivation of the carrot on the stick in front of our nose or the whip of the stick on our tail telling us to go faster. The apocalyptic literature includes a negative actuarial assessment about imminent disaster. The discourse of predicating disaster is supposed to be an indication of the assertion of a larger agency of the divine that is in control. The larger agency of the Divine is in fact the freedom for some kind of life to go on forever and thus surpass everything that has come before. Hopeful speculation about our place in the Freedom of what will surpass our current situation is not to be precisely descriptively certain about the details of the events of our visible and invisible future; the hopeful speculation is meant mainly to motivate how we live now with the intensity of committed faith. Biblical literalists treat apocalyptic genre as prediction of the future rather than as a hyperbolic language of motivation for living now in faith and hope.
Aphorism of the Day, November 24, 2016
Thanksgiving and the Apocalypse? Some Christian people possessed by the "primary naivete" of predictive biblical prophesy about the end of the world, seem to savor the imminent possibility of evacuating the good ship "Earth" in some catastrophic end when "they, the good and correct interpreters of Scripture" will be saved in the midst of the catastrophic end. The apocalypse functions for too many as an apocalyptic fatalism, an inevitability of the sinful condition of humanity. Why save the planet when it is all going to end soon? It is rather ironic to confess that "God so loved the world to give the Divine Son" and yet not love the world enough to inspire God's people to love and cherish and take care of this world as good stewards. It is one thing for oppressed people to visualize the end of injustice through narratives of intervention; it is quite another thing to use these visualization as an excuse for not needing to take care of this planet because "we're all going to leave sometime soon." A true Christian Thanksgiving is to uphold the witness of Jesus as reconciliation of all things and people for as long as we can. Please don't embrace apocalyptic fatalism as an excuse for sloppy stewardship of the earth now. Earth, our island home, is too lovely to fall into apocalyptic fatalism. Thanksgiving is properly observed by a commitment to keep it a fit place for many future people to be thankful.
Aphorism of the Day, November 23, 2016
We moderns who are proud of our science and our actuarial predictive abilities based upon projecting of statistical approximation of past occurrences onto future probability have in our pride become very skeptical of biblical apocalyptic projections. For those committed to the "science" of actuarial probability the biblical images of the apocalyptic belong in the realm of artistic futurism. The modern world has in fact separated the apocalyptic from religion and has placed it into our entertainment genres found in literature and cinema. One could opine that in biblical days, and in the historical appropriation of the books of the Bible the biblical literature was so singular in its exclusivity that it had to comprise for its readership a larger role in being competent to all of the needs of the imagination of person. The modern world of science and the increase in world knowledge has divided discourse into specializations and developed them with "identities" of their own. They have been torn as a piece of the quilt of the Bible and given independent identities. So, modern people cannot look with scorn at the biblical apocalyptic because our modern world is full of the apocalyptic in our literature and cinema, proving that people are still entertained or engaged by the notion of a future with life as we now know it not being the same as we now know it. The "apocalyptic" proclivity is the human universal while fundamentalists absolutize a particular narrative of how they precisely think the world as we know it will end or be different. This is the idolatry of the particular when they should be "revering" the human universal of being "hopeful apocalyptic" people rooted in the "divinity of justice."
Aphorism of the Day, November 22, 2016
Apocalypse is the "unveiling" of things regarding the end. In academic studies, scholars study a wide ranging literature both biblical and extra-biblical as a genre of "apocalyptic" literature. In pop evangelical fundamentalism, it is more common to speak of biblical prophecy about the end of time. This group is often taken up with trying to match actual current events with the cryptic images in the Bible with a one-to-one predictive correspondence. Scholars believe that apocalyptic literature was generated as comfort to people in oppressed conditions. Pop American "biblical prophecy" serves mainly a white middle to upper middle class population who have taken on a "persecution" complex because of what they believe is the oppressive secularism of the European and American liberalism. And there are people of all faiths who suffer real physical persecution and real discrimination for the practice of their faith. For the persecuted and oppressed apocalyptic writing can still serve as the hope for the triumph of justice. We must resist the reduction of the "apocalyptic" to a narrow sectarian pride that believes, "God in the end will vindicate all of my particular and insider's interpretation of God, Jesus and the Bible." The apocalyptic is used by many to say, "God will win at the end and really mean, "my view of God" will win at the end." Apocalyptic discourse has often sadly been reduced to religious politics.
Aphorism of the Day, November 21, 2016
Advent brings to us the topic of the Apocalyptic, the end of life as we know it. So, why the concern, and even the obsession with the end? Each of us has the personal apocalypse of death and one can never be completely certain of the hour of its arrival or how it will come. Threatened groups of people have been faced with the possibility of extinction and these groups have a language of comfort to use during those day of threat. Apocalyptic language of religion has been transferred in secular culture today to the cinema and various kinds of literary genre. Cinematic imagery is much more prolifically apocalyptic than Scriptures are. Rather than literalizing the artistic apocalyptic story narrative in Scripture or cinema, it might be more instructive to assert the insight about human language users having an unavoidable apocalyptic genre in their language which can arise in context specific ways to function to give hope to people about the cosmic inevitability of justice. The cosmic inevitability of justice needs narratives and the apocalyptic genre is one such way to visualize the triumph of justice on its way to making itself actual in events in time.
Aphorism of the Day, November 20, 2016
Christ as King is mainly a "cosmic" designation without regional or national actual kingship. Such a cosmic and poetic designation is what has allow the message of Christ to spread so far. The cosmic Christ has allow may different local applications resulting in local notions of Christ being at odds with each other even while claiming the same cosmic Christ. The Cosmic Christ is the aspect of God which permits the differentiation in the local and region relevance of Christ even as local as the uniquely solipsistic individual experience of Jesus. The Cosmic Christ and the individual uniquely solipsistic experience of Jesus inhabit the two ends of a continuum which accounts for the continuous possibility of creativity in the church still becoming what it might to surpass itself.
Aphorism of the Day, November 19, 2016
I believe we underestimate the intuition and the sense of confidence that the Gospel writers had about the Christian Movement. Even in Caesar's Roman Empire, they had a sense of the inevitable. One of the ways of avoiding political involvement is to go against the adage, "all politics is local." For the Gospel writers, they wrote from the perspective that "all politics is cosmic" and that is how they published the cosmic propaganda of Christ as King. The Passion Narrative are written with dripping irony; the inscription on the cross, Jesus King of the Jews. They wrote the event of the cross as though King Jesus was holding an audience and with kingly power granting "clemency" to the thief who asked for pardon. The thief was offered immediate entrance into the kingdom designated as "Paradise."
Aphorism of the Day, November 18, 2016
A mouthful of "k's:" Quixotic Christians Claim Christ as King. Cervantes' Don Quixote was a character who imagined himself away from the real to be a knight in imaginary adventures. The quixotic state may be a pathological aversion to the actual, a defense against perhaps either the boredom of the quotidian whereby one begins to live out of being a legend in one's own mind or a salve in the conditions of oppression. Christ as King or The Messiah as King can seem to partake of a similar disjunction between the actual and the imaginary. Jesus was not a king; he had no administration and no armies to fight his battles or defend his followers. Jesus died on the cross and the quixotic Christians had and have had a continuous imagination that he was alive and still is alive and lives in an interior world where he can be messiah and king. Christians are not totally imaginary in their faith; they access a messianic realm in bringing the will of the interior kingdom into the real politics of our every day life. When Christians have tried literally instantiate Christ's Kingdom as visible Crusading Armies they misappropriate the quixotic ideals to justify the actual kingly oppressive force of power. Christianity is best when it is quixotically artistic in giving access to the realm of perfect virtues, messianic values. From the artistic inspiration we seek to make actual and incarnational the ideals of love and justice. A major problem with Christianity is that Christians have been defending it too long wrongly as either the expression of "carnal" kingly power or the apocalyptic hope that it could be such. The ideals of love and justice continually deconstruct our actual attempts and success at them and lure us to do better in the future. Love and justice cannot be implemented by the exterior force of "kingly" power. This is a false wish and a harmful wish of some who want the messiah to be a military general enforcing love and justice rather than as a poet who is winning our hearts toward the same.
Aphorism of the Day, November 17, 2016
For purposes of writing "sound and fury signifying nothing" but sound and fury in hope of evoking through the juxtaposition of words a coming to insight, I would like to problematize the notions of king,messiah, kingdom, and messiahdom. The last is not a word for me until now. The Hebrew language has the words malik and mashiach for king and messiah respectively. This begs the question of when is a king a messiah and when is a messiah a king. Similiarly in the Greek there are the words basilias and Christos for king and messiah. Apparently one can be a king and not a messiah and one can be a messiah and not a king. So what are the determining factors? Mashiach was the investiture procedure of the anointing with oil signifying a divine election. Yet in actual use the anointing effects could be seemingly permanent, sporadic, intermittent and temporary, even limited to context specific events. Saul was a king and a messiah but he and his line lost the messiahship. David was a king and a messiah and his deeds were mostly "messianic" even while his sins are well-documented. What is the difference between king and messiah? I would suggest that king refers to the external trappings of the "official" office and messiah refers to an inner charism or grace that may or may not accompanying the person in the office. What is ideal is that a person has both office and charism, the outer sign and the inner grace. Jesus Christ, literally, Jesus the Messiah, from a purely political point of view, was a Messiah but not a King. He is called a King of Angels and the principalities of the interior world but He did not have any actual earthly "Office of Kingship." He is confessed to be a visionary earthly "King" who will come back and in the opinion of some "knock heads" into submission. I perhaps would suggest that the Messiah does not need to "knock heads;" but rather has such an interior charism of winsomeness that we primarily know what is messianic through being charmed by a grace which makes us better.
Aphorism of the Day, November 16, 2016
According to the Gospel of Luke, the inscription on the Cross of Jesus read: "This is the King of the Jews." This inscription was sarcastic mockery because it presented a propaganda statement purporting that Jesus was the King of the Jews. But the Roman propaganda was that this is what we do with any earthly king who opposes the Caesar of Rome. You pray: Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. The early Gospel writers believed in the power of words and so for them the Cross became the will of God done on earth and in heaven. Heaven must be a realm of possibilisms where freedom does permit the wounding of the good with some really awful things. But the reality of true freedom also includes the freedom to have faith and courage to resist the bad things which happen. Christians believed that in their resistance to the evil of the Cross, they were aided by the resurrection life of Christ which did not erase the event of the Cross but its meaning was rewritten from a more glorious subsequent outcome. Life is about living in the midst of the mockery of good things dying and being scorned in their defeat but also having hope about better outcomes and acting faith on that hope. This is the endurance that is needed everyday. We tend to just focus on big things as though the real players of history are the leaders and the kings; this cross, waiting in hope, glorious outcome and rewrite of the previous evil event is a continuous process in all that we face each day. The confusion is that in every issue specific thing a person, a community or a nation can be in different phase. This is why it is unwise to generalize with words like "all, always, none, and never" because events themselves are too full of ambiguous designation based upon the subject position of the observer. Lots of things are in dynamic mutual process all at once and in the complete system of Freedom designated causation is very difficult to know in a final absolute sense. As long as there is time, there is freedom and good and the bad has a future. Christ as King on the Cross represents the reign of irony then and irony reigns now. Yet because Irony reigns, we are not absolved from caring and standing up for our ideals. Irony may be a post-modern excuse for political quietism, a loser's regret for not winning. The irony of the Cross is that the followers of Jesus had so much love for the good man that he was that their profound love was met with the grace of his re-appearance and the ultimate remaking of the religious and political landscape. Christ as King means we learn to live with irony without quitting and we have faith while in flux.
Aphorism of the Day, November 15, 2016
How can biblical contexts lose their power to affect future contexts which are so much different? Using Hegel's notion of the master-slave dialectic in the developing appearance of new arising synthesis of dominating paradigmatic ideas, one can note that much of the writing of biblical is the result of people in the position of the oppressed, the slave. So what does Jesus do? Jesus baptized being the servant as the one who truly leads. The king who is after the heart of Jesus is the king who serves. So the slave side of the dialectic became not just the salve of the Christian Movement, it became the food which made it grow and soon Christianity found it had become so effective that it became Empire Christianity. How can Empire Christianity honestly continue to use the "servant discourse" when "Christian" people ascend to the place of "kingly" power? How can one continue to bless the state of servitude as the "preferred" Christ like "beatitudinal" state? America, the great Empire proud of its Christianity, has not solved the problem of being "Jesus of the Gospel" Christians with our general position of power. We go from electing administrations which are bombastically proud of our power to administrations which feign humility about our power in a kind of guilt that we have so much and share so little. Some like walking softly and other prefer the carrying of a big stick (to steal from Teddy Roosevelt). This is a good time to ponder the ironic concept of designating Christ as King as we approach this feast.
Aphorism of the Day, November 14, 2016
Nietzsche's critique of the Gospels involved what he called the "transvaluation" of values. The Sermon on the Mount instantiates this transvaluation of values whereby poverty and being persecuted are designated as states of blessedness. Nietzsche's Noble was one who could be one Darwinesque "Overcoming Man" (Ubermensch), a continually self-surpassing Superman, a fit one who could survive through domination. Probably no Christian concept gets more highly transvalued than the notion of "King." It becomes completely ironic in the presentation of Jesus as a King suffering on the Cross. Jesus was only a king in the "non-apparent" realm of resurrection and inner space in winning hearts and he is not one conquering with armies. The rise of Christendom Christianity and the addition of military complexes for countries populated with majority of Christians has once again transvalued the expression of the Kingly in the "name of Christ." We in America do not really believe that it is blessed to be poor in spirit or poor. We don't believe it is blessed to be persecuted; we in fact want our government to be militarily strong enough to impose our interests upon the world. We don't believe in the Sermon on the Mount; we in fact believe by electing those who promise to keep us the King of Power in our world. The Feast of Christ the King is a good time to be honest about the transvaluation of values in the history of Christianity. For most American Christians, we have long left the Sermon on the Mount values and the Suffering Servant King.
Aphorism of the Day, November 13, 2016
There are significant portions of the Bible by people in distress who see the only solution to be the end of time or the end of human experience as they were experiencing it. We call those portions the apocalyptic genre and the study of the end of human experience as we know it is called "eschatology." It is harder for people of modern science to envision an end of time, since time is sequence in the motion of things, even at the sub-atomic level. Somehow it is harder for us to assume the end of "time" even if there are no humans on earth to experience "time." We can however, appreciate visualizations of interventions in ending suffering and pain. The visualizations of the end of suffering do not necessarily end suffering or falsify the fact that we all die; the presentations of the visualizations of the end of suffering are necessary "pain management" rhetorical devices. You say that they are only words? We understand and define our suffering because we have words and so we must also use words to help us in our pain management. Does pain happen within the human body apart from an understanding of it by having words to say that we or someone, or even a pre-linguistic baby have pain? Our pain and our relief from pain are constituted through our words and biblical words pertain and partake of the constitution of the experience of suffering and its relief.
Aphorism of the Day, November 12, 2016
The words of Jesus warned against false messiahs, of those who come and proclaim, "I am He....I am the greatest, I will do everything in the best possible way." The messianic in the world is not so much the presence of God embodied in a single person but it is a faith understanding of how God can take the lemons of freedom and somehow make some good tasting lemonade. The prophet Isaiah referred to Cyrus the Great as God's messiah even though this dictator monarch over ran Israel and carried its people into captivity. This dictator was not a "personal messiah;" rather he was a messianic agent of the divine to do some things that he himself meant for evil but worked out for a further good in helping to solidify the identity of God's people and their preservation through the writing of salvation history by the future editors of the Hebrew Scriptures who lived in Persian exile.
Aphorism of the Day, November 11, 2016
A saying of Jesus gives hope to the balding: "Not a hair of your head shall perish." This was a word of promise to those who would be persecuted and probably not a literal reference to one's follicles and the hope of eternal life with a full head of hair. The saying was an expression that God's care was poignant and embracing to people even if their oppressors did not care for the hair or the lives of those whom they persecuted. The words of Jesus are the oracle within a phase of the persecuted church to reassure them that the oppressors seemed to be great but their greatness had "limited duration in time," whereas God the great one had no such limited duration in time and had the memory to reconstitute everyone and one's hair forever. May you have eternal life and your follicles too.
Aphorism of the Day, November 10, 2016
The oracle of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke: "You will be hated by all because of my name." The early Christians had to prepare themselves for being in the role of martyrs. We forget how much of the Gospel writing was generated by people who were faced with extreme persecution. Today when having faith is so easy in such a permissive environment of believing anything that we want, it may be hard to make one-to-one applicable identity with the Gospel writing. We should remember there are places in the world where Christians suffer for their witness because there are forces of oppression who identify Christianity with outside foreign armies. There are Christians who are persecuted today because Christianity has become over-identified with political and military actions of Western countries.
Aphorism of the Day, November 9, 2016
In the Gospel of Luke, written after the destruction of the Temple, understands the oracle of Jesus in the future anterior tense to be saying, "when all of the stones of the temple will have been thrown down." Future interior tense presented as prediction interjected into a narrative of the past is used to assure people that a "really bad thing" will come to have a providential interpretation in subsequent experience. The Roman army crashed down upon Palestine and the secret army of Christians formed house by house churches in city by city of the Roman Empire and eventually both the institutions of the Temple and the institutions of the Roman Empire were impacted. The destruction of the Temple forced Christians to "safer" places in Roman cities right under the nose of all things Roman and they gradually became a force of stealth. God's Spirit is everywhere and can be caught by each human being with a body, a temple of the Holy Spirit. Let the Spirit continue to do some "body snatching." With faith we can use the future anterior tense: On November 9, it is confessed that all things will have been well, well indeed.
Aphorism of the Day, November 8, 2016
Architecture as destiny? The institution of certain strains of Judaism was centered upon the presence of the Temple and its maintenance and its veneration as a sacred space. What happened after the institution losts it identity with the Temple in its destruction? In post-Temple times scattered members of Jewish religious parties had to center the "institution" in more informal ways in mobile synagogues or home churches. The transfer of identity of the Temple as the locus of God's presence to the individual body of a person as a temple of the Holy Spirit characterizes a feature of the early Christian revolution. Historically the church has tried to reinstitutionalize buildings and hierarchy as the main locus of God's presence and reformation continually occurs when the person is identified as the locus of the dwelling place of God's Spirit.
Aphorism of the Day, November 7, 2016
Apocalypticism is a mindset formed in the study of the "end" of life as we know it. The formal theological term is "eschatology" from the Greek "eschaton" for "end." This mindset is known from the literature and words which have derived from people who inhabit "fox-hole" situations of life. How does one find comfort, meaning and faith in the middle of the chaos of being under fire and threat from people who do not want your point of view to have social expression. The justified situation of having "group paranoia" influences the crafting of the words of apocalyptic literature. "We may be paranoid, but the bullets are really being aimed at us because of our faith." A feature of the literature is the generation of "cryptic" images known only to the insiders and the persecuted. One can also note that the state of distress of the writers resulted in their being able to access a state "savantism" rife with expression of a liminal state, a delta state between the interior space of dream world and the conscious world of the writer's life situation. Much of the meaning of the apocalyptic is lost to us today because we are not "there" and privy to the how the cryptic connotations attained communicable significance in the original setting. Apocalypse means "unveiling" as it pertains to the end of life as we know it. For us today, apocalypse is better understood as "visualization words" to minister to people under the distress of threats to their existence. One of the problems today is that most people under the threat to their existence do not have a community which can rally them for comfort and survival. We see today that the groups of distressed people today become prey to leaders of "death cults" who have access to the resources of weaponry to incite the view, "if we can't be in power and control, we are going to take as many down as possible." This expresses a very negative apocalyticism of our time and may be due to the climate of dystopia caused by the aftermath of war.
Aphorism of Day, November 6, 2016
To avoid the belief in a God who already knows the future as actual and thus a completely "determined" reality, one must posit a genuine creative Freedom which does not determine all outcomes. This means that Freedom is open to having the great wounds known under the designation as evil and badness within the realm of probable occurrences. In our lives of faith, one must admit such awesome Freedom even while acknowledging that having faith is a most free human way to live under the conditions of freedom particularly as it pertains to salvation as "healing the wounds" of Freedom in the salvatory actions of overcoming evil with good.
Aphorism of the Day, November 5, 2016
Apocalypticism is born as a rhetorical analgesic to deal with the great wound of Freedom, namely that bad things can and do happen, even really bad things. The rhetorical analgesic are visualization words to personalize the great state of Freedom as a living state which can give birth to significant events of intervening goodness to overcome the really, really bad things that can occur in Freedom's ground.
Aphorism of the Day, November 4, 2016
In the history of people reflection of the end of life as we know it has attained various narratives. When threats of destruction happens to large populations, it is a normal impulse to generalize an ending to all things, even while one cannot know what will be happening in a far distant solar system. We cannot avoid being "anthropocentric" =human-centered in our thinking about the end. A suffering people under the tyranny of Roman dictators did not think such horrendous condition were worthy of God and so the intense hope of imminent intervention of a Second Coming of Jesus was a comforting analgesic to people in the conditions of long-sufferers. Today, the advances of science and the industrial age has generated new narratives of the end of life since modern knowledge and ability provide us with scenarios of nuclear disasters, environmental disasters or a potential crashing meteor. Narratives of our end have actually moved from being more mythical to becoming more real. Faith means that we can express hope for life beyond the "anthropocentric" which has sustained human life because it is greater than human life. Human life has memory and we build artificial computer "byte" memory as a way to preserve the human experience; believing in God's preserving memory beyond our "anthropocentric" limitations means that we can imagine a super-creative memory of God that is able to reconstitute continuing identities through and beyond the transitional milestones which have come to language in words like "death" and "endings."
Aphorism of the Day, November 3, 2016
New Testament writers pose both Paul and Jesus involved with Sadducees about the validity of the resurrection. In one encounter with Jesus, the Sadducee interlocutors wanted specifics about the afterlife marriage situation of a proverbial woman who had seven husbands in the levirate marriage succession. "Jesus, the resurrection can present some continuity problems with human life; consider that a woman theoretically could be married to seven brothers at the same time in the resurrection. That's a big problem so how can the resurrection be real?" Jesus answered by essentially saying that one's identity in the afterlife no longer will come from "human relationship identity" such as son, daughter, husband or wife, but rather in the kingdom of heaven one is only a child of God. This is consistent with the early church proclamation of being in Christ brought about the erasure of human identities which cause discrimination based upon differences. "In Christ, there is no Jew or Gentile, male or female slave or free, fill in the blank of oppositional differences...... but a new creation.
Aphorism of the Day, November 2, 2016
In politics there is the phrase, "all politics is local." It essentially means that we are most concerned where issues effect us in our immediate lives in our immediate neighborhoods. One might say too that "all saints are local" in that the telling saints of one's life are the ones who were present to us to help us and guide us in the way of wisdom. The church has All Souls' Day to commemorate the fact that all saints are local. The canonized global saint might be useful for general instruction but the very local person who was there for us at crucial times has intimate pragmatic significance for our lives.
Aphorism of the Day, November 1, 2016
The Apostle Paul, a Pharisee became the theological founder of Gentile Christianity. How does one establish from Scripture the Christian Movement among the Gentiles? You quote Isaiah: "The root of Jesse shall come, the one who rises to rule the Gentiles; in him the Gentiles shall hope." So Christian expositors trace the genealogy of Jesus from Jesse and the rule of Jesus is within the interior hearts of the Gentiles until he eventually after Constantine becomes associated with Kings and Rulers. St. Paul's intuition about the success of the Jesus Movement is evident in the Epistle to the Romans. While he in some writings is inclined toward an imminent return of Jesus, in writing to the Roman churches, he solicits prayers for the Roman authorities, suggesting that he has an intuition about the success of the Jesus Movement riding on the coat tails of the Roman Empire presence throughout their known world. St. Paul even mentioned his intention of going to Spain. The reason that Gospels are anachronistically made to be more Roman friendly than Sanhedrin friendly is surely due to the growth of the Christian Movement among the Gentile peoples of the Roman Empire.
Aphorism of the Day, November 29. 2016
Utopian presentations in the Bible are an indication that people have lived knowing that the conditions of the world seem fatally imperfect and fatal imperfection cannot provide the source of being anything but the same. Within the conditions of fatal imperfection, there have arisen people who coincided with eras of "apparent prosperity" such that when that era passed away a "good 'ol days" nostalgia latches upon what those "good 'ol days" were and they tended to be idealized. David "knocked" lots of head and did lots of politically "back room" deals to solidify his reign and he was not so universally loved as to avoid having a coup executed against him led by his own son. Still the Davidic era was the good 'ol days for people who experienced some very bad days. If the Davidic era happened once it was because God divinized a shepherd boy and made him a messiah; then God could divinize again one who was from the Davidic "loins" and make such a one to usher in a new Davidic era. In Advent, we juxtapose the dreams for a new David with a drill sergeant named John the Baptist who was less of a dreamer and more of reformer of the human will. Quit whining about your imperfect conditions! Make better choices now! John challenged institutional religious righteousness; he went outside of the institutional religion and called people to the desert river, the Jordan to purify themselves and recommit themselves to change. Institutional Religion said you were God's people by following the rules of the Institution. John the Baptist said, "Baloney! You have to go back to the Jordan and re-enter the land or state of God's promise. You have to re-enter as an individual because it is individual performance which counts, not institutional identity.
Aphorism of the Day, November 28, 2016
Utopian ideals function within the biblical literature to inspire the direction of people's aspirations and ethical conducts. Exemplars of people and situation which in various ways instantiate the universal recommendable are extolled beyond their actual capacities to be perfect. The bar is really set too high for the human condition. Ideal leaders are supposed to be those who use power to take care of the poor. Ideal environments are those where predatory-prey antagonism is gone. The fallacy of utopian ideals assumes that time, change and freedom have been big mistakes and that there is an actual way of locking the total situation into a harmony that works better than a well-oiled machine. Utopian ideals function for us as synchronic snap shots of a momentary structural harmony but such ideals must surrender to diachronicity, time, change, process and the freedom for harmonies to be violated by the experience of antagonism. Utopian ideals written from conditions of distress unwittingly seem to be asking for the end of freedom as we know it. Freedom means the continuous conflict and competition of an infinite number of agents all with "little minds" of their own. Sometimes this cacophony of competing agents results in participants grasping a sense of peaceful harmony and yet the attempt to retain those states of harmony except as memorial traces are futile in the movement of time.
Aphorism of the Day, November 27, 2016
Some New Testament writers link the beginning and the end with God's ability to create and to destroy. For some it may be a comfort that God is presented as a Scientist in the laboratory bringing an experiment into existence with "seeming" free agents walking their mazes until they do it so badly that the experiment must be ended. Such a God in control might be comfort to those who need their pain and suffering to end quickly, so one can appreciate this as a discourse of comfort. In more sanguine reflection it seems that such a "context specific" metaphor may not be honest to the reality of freedom of all agents in motion together permitting all of the outcomes that may actually happen. Such a symphony or cacophony of all out play among agents with relative limited freedom accounting for the unknowable strings of cause and effect, is more inspiring than God as a puppeteer who can close down the puppet show when some of the puppets get their strings tangled.
Aphorism of the Day, November 26, 2016
The apocalyptic genre found in the Bible and elsewhere should not be too simply categorized. It is a discourse of futurism that functioned to relate to the mood of suffering in the present by means of the "fantasia" of utopian imagery and as well as "discourses" of endings, significant transitional phases whose threat of chaos are ameliorated by using language to re-create them to help form the mood of people. The language of the apocalyptic can thusly utilize both a imagery comporting to both positive and negative reinforcement discourse to be used to influence the moral and ethical actions of people in preparation for what seems to be an imminent foreboding future. As such it is the language of preparatory disaster relief. The attempt is actually to influence the outcome of the future by such apocalyptic discourse. Apocalyptic discourse is an attempt to present in language a future but it lies about the future; it really is meant as motivational and ameliorative discourse for the immediate conditions of people now. Failing to realize this, one can find among the religious many misappropriation of the apocalyptic notably serving the selfish fatalism of people who want to perpetuate their particular pieties as being God's favorite.
Aphorism of the Day, November 25, 2016
What influences our preparation, the probability of something good happening or the probability of something bad happening? If times are really oppressive and things in general are going bad for a particular community of people, it is natural to adopt a "negative outcome" motivational program. Winning the lottery or thief will rob my house? In life we often are like the donkey led by the positive motivation of the carrot on the stick in front of our nose or the whip of the stick on our tail telling us to go faster. The apocalyptic literature includes a negative actuarial assessment about imminent disaster. The discourse of predicating disaster is supposed to be an indication of the assertion of a larger agency of the divine that is in control. The larger agency of the Divine is in fact the freedom for some kind of life to go on forever and thus surpass everything that has come before. Hopeful speculation about our place in the Freedom of what will surpass our current situation is not to be precisely descriptively certain about the details of the events of our visible and invisible future; the hopeful speculation is meant mainly to motivate how we live now with the intensity of committed faith. Biblical literalists treat apocalyptic genre as prediction of the future rather than as a hyperbolic language of motivation for living now in faith and hope.
Aphorism of the Day, November 24, 2016
Thanksgiving and the Apocalypse? Some Christian people possessed by the "primary naivete" of predictive biblical prophesy about the end of the world, seem to savor the imminent possibility of evacuating the good ship "Earth" in some catastrophic end when "they, the good and correct interpreters of Scripture" will be saved in the midst of the catastrophic end. The apocalypse functions for too many as an apocalyptic fatalism, an inevitability of the sinful condition of humanity. Why save the planet when it is all going to end soon? It is rather ironic to confess that "God so loved the world to give the Divine Son" and yet not love the world enough to inspire God's people to love and cherish and take care of this world as good stewards. It is one thing for oppressed people to visualize the end of injustice through narratives of intervention; it is quite another thing to use these visualization as an excuse for not needing to take care of this planet because "we're all going to leave sometime soon." A true Christian Thanksgiving is to uphold the witness of Jesus as reconciliation of all things and people for as long as we can. Please don't embrace apocalyptic fatalism as an excuse for sloppy stewardship of the earth now. Earth, our island home, is too lovely to fall into apocalyptic fatalism. Thanksgiving is properly observed by a commitment to keep it a fit place for many future people to be thankful.
Aphorism of the Day, November 23, 2016
We moderns who are proud of our science and our actuarial predictive abilities based upon projecting of statistical approximation of past occurrences onto future probability have in our pride become very skeptical of biblical apocalyptic projections. For those committed to the "science" of actuarial probability the biblical images of the apocalyptic belong in the realm of artistic futurism. The modern world has in fact separated the apocalyptic from religion and has placed it into our entertainment genres found in literature and cinema. One could opine that in biblical days, and in the historical appropriation of the books of the Bible the biblical literature was so singular in its exclusivity that it had to comprise for its readership a larger role in being competent to all of the needs of the imagination of person. The modern world of science and the increase in world knowledge has divided discourse into specializations and developed them with "identities" of their own. They have been torn as a piece of the quilt of the Bible and given independent identities. So, modern people cannot look with scorn at the biblical apocalyptic because our modern world is full of the apocalyptic in our literature and cinema, proving that people are still entertained or engaged by the notion of a future with life as we now know it not being the same as we now know it. The "apocalyptic" proclivity is the human universal while fundamentalists absolutize a particular narrative of how they precisely think the world as we know it will end or be different. This is the idolatry of the particular when they should be "revering" the human universal of being "hopeful apocalyptic" people rooted in the "divinity of justice."
Aphorism of the Day, November 22, 2016
Apocalypse is the "unveiling" of things regarding the end. In academic studies, scholars study a wide ranging literature both biblical and extra-biblical as a genre of "apocalyptic" literature. In pop evangelical fundamentalism, it is more common to speak of biblical prophecy about the end of time. This group is often taken up with trying to match actual current events with the cryptic images in the Bible with a one-to-one predictive correspondence. Scholars believe that apocalyptic literature was generated as comfort to people in oppressed conditions. Pop American "biblical prophecy" serves mainly a white middle to upper middle class population who have taken on a "persecution" complex because of what they believe is the oppressive secularism of the European and American liberalism. And there are people of all faiths who suffer real physical persecution and real discrimination for the practice of their faith. For the persecuted and oppressed apocalyptic writing can still serve as the hope for the triumph of justice. We must resist the reduction of the "apocalyptic" to a narrow sectarian pride that believes, "God in the end will vindicate all of my particular and insider's interpretation of God, Jesus and the Bible." The apocalyptic is used by many to say, "God will win at the end and really mean, "my view of God" will win at the end." Apocalyptic discourse has often sadly been reduced to religious politics.
Aphorism of the Day, November 21, 2016
Advent brings to us the topic of the Apocalyptic, the end of life as we know it. So, why the concern, and even the obsession with the end? Each of us has the personal apocalypse of death and one can never be completely certain of the hour of its arrival or how it will come. Threatened groups of people have been faced with the possibility of extinction and these groups have a language of comfort to use during those day of threat. Apocalyptic language of religion has been transferred in secular culture today to the cinema and various kinds of literary genre. Cinematic imagery is much more prolifically apocalyptic than Scriptures are. Rather than literalizing the artistic apocalyptic story narrative in Scripture or cinema, it might be more instructive to assert the insight about human language users having an unavoidable apocalyptic genre in their language which can arise in context specific ways to function to give hope to people about the cosmic inevitability of justice. The cosmic inevitability of justice needs narratives and the apocalyptic genre is one such way to visualize the triumph of justice on its way to making itself actual in events in time.
Aphorism of the Day, November 20, 2016
Christ as King is mainly a "cosmic" designation without regional or national actual kingship. Such a cosmic and poetic designation is what has allow the message of Christ to spread so far. The cosmic Christ has allow may different local applications resulting in local notions of Christ being at odds with each other even while claiming the same cosmic Christ. The Cosmic Christ is the aspect of God which permits the differentiation in the local and region relevance of Christ even as local as the uniquely solipsistic individual experience of Jesus. The Cosmic Christ and the individual uniquely solipsistic experience of Jesus inhabit the two ends of a continuum which accounts for the continuous possibility of creativity in the church still becoming what it might to surpass itself.
Aphorism of the Day, November 19, 2016
I believe we underestimate the intuition and the sense of confidence that the Gospel writers had about the Christian Movement. Even in Caesar's Roman Empire, they had a sense of the inevitable. One of the ways of avoiding political involvement is to go against the adage, "all politics is local." For the Gospel writers, they wrote from the perspective that "all politics is cosmic" and that is how they published the cosmic propaganda of Christ as King. The Passion Narrative are written with dripping irony; the inscription on the cross, Jesus King of the Jews. They wrote the event of the cross as though King Jesus was holding an audience and with kingly power granting "clemency" to the thief who asked for pardon. The thief was offered immediate entrance into the kingdom designated as "Paradise."
Aphorism of the Day, November 18, 2016
A mouthful of "k's:" Quixotic Christians Claim Christ as King. Cervantes' Don Quixote was a character who imagined himself away from the real to be a knight in imaginary adventures. The quixotic state may be a pathological aversion to the actual, a defense against perhaps either the boredom of the quotidian whereby one begins to live out of being a legend in one's own mind or a salve in the conditions of oppression. Christ as King or The Messiah as King can seem to partake of a similar disjunction between the actual and the imaginary. Jesus was not a king; he had no administration and no armies to fight his battles or defend his followers. Jesus died on the cross and the quixotic Christians had and have had a continuous imagination that he was alive and still is alive and lives in an interior world where he can be messiah and king. Christians are not totally imaginary in their faith; they access a messianic realm in bringing the will of the interior kingdom into the real politics of our every day life. When Christians have tried literally instantiate Christ's Kingdom as visible Crusading Armies they misappropriate the quixotic ideals to justify the actual kingly oppressive force of power. Christianity is best when it is quixotically artistic in giving access to the realm of perfect virtues, messianic values. From the artistic inspiration we seek to make actual and incarnational the ideals of love and justice. A major problem with Christianity is that Christians have been defending it too long wrongly as either the expression of "carnal" kingly power or the apocalyptic hope that it could be such. The ideals of love and justice continually deconstruct our actual attempts and success at them and lure us to do better in the future. Love and justice cannot be implemented by the exterior force of "kingly" power. This is a false wish and a harmful wish of some who want the messiah to be a military general enforcing love and justice rather than as a poet who is winning our hearts toward the same.
Aphorism of the Day, November 17, 2016
For purposes of writing "sound and fury signifying nothing" but sound and fury in hope of evoking through the juxtaposition of words a coming to insight, I would like to problematize the notions of king,messiah, kingdom, and messiahdom. The last is not a word for me until now. The Hebrew language has the words malik and mashiach for king and messiah respectively. This begs the question of when is a king a messiah and when is a messiah a king. Similiarly in the Greek there are the words basilias and Christos for king and messiah. Apparently one can be a king and not a messiah and one can be a messiah and not a king. So what are the determining factors? Mashiach was the investiture procedure of the anointing with oil signifying a divine election. Yet in actual use the anointing effects could be seemingly permanent, sporadic, intermittent and temporary, even limited to context specific events. Saul was a king and a messiah but he and his line lost the messiahship. David was a king and a messiah and his deeds were mostly "messianic" even while his sins are well-documented. What is the difference between king and messiah? I would suggest that king refers to the external trappings of the "official" office and messiah refers to an inner charism or grace that may or may not accompanying the person in the office. What is ideal is that a person has both office and charism, the outer sign and the inner grace. Jesus Christ, literally, Jesus the Messiah, from a purely political point of view, was a Messiah but not a King. He is called a King of Angels and the principalities of the interior world but He did not have any actual earthly "Office of Kingship." He is confessed to be a visionary earthly "King" who will come back and in the opinion of some "knock heads" into submission. I perhaps would suggest that the Messiah does not need to "knock heads;" but rather has such an interior charism of winsomeness that we primarily know what is messianic through being charmed by a grace which makes us better.
Aphorism of the Day, November 16, 2016
According to the Gospel of Luke, the inscription on the Cross of Jesus read: "This is the King of the Jews." This inscription was sarcastic mockery because it presented a propaganda statement purporting that Jesus was the King of the Jews. But the Roman propaganda was that this is what we do with any earthly king who opposes the Caesar of Rome. You pray: Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. The early Gospel writers believed in the power of words and so for them the Cross became the will of God done on earth and in heaven. Heaven must be a realm of possibilisms where freedom does permit the wounding of the good with some really awful things. But the reality of true freedom also includes the freedom to have faith and courage to resist the bad things which happen. Christians believed that in their resistance to the evil of the Cross, they were aided by the resurrection life of Christ which did not erase the event of the Cross but its meaning was rewritten from a more glorious subsequent outcome. Life is about living in the midst of the mockery of good things dying and being scorned in their defeat but also having hope about better outcomes and acting faith on that hope. This is the endurance that is needed everyday. We tend to just focus on big things as though the real players of history are the leaders and the kings; this cross, waiting in hope, glorious outcome and rewrite of the previous evil event is a continuous process in all that we face each day. The confusion is that in every issue specific thing a person, a community or a nation can be in different phase. This is why it is unwise to generalize with words like "all, always, none, and never" because events themselves are too full of ambiguous designation based upon the subject position of the observer. Lots of things are in dynamic mutual process all at once and in the complete system of Freedom designated causation is very difficult to know in a final absolute sense. As long as there is time, there is freedom and good and the bad has a future. Christ as King on the Cross represents the reign of irony then and irony reigns now. Yet because Irony reigns, we are not absolved from caring and standing up for our ideals. Irony may be a post-modern excuse for political quietism, a loser's regret for not winning. The irony of the Cross is that the followers of Jesus had so much love for the good man that he was that their profound love was met with the grace of his re-appearance and the ultimate remaking of the religious and political landscape. Christ as King means we learn to live with irony without quitting and we have faith while in flux.
Aphorism of the Day, November 15, 2016
How can biblical contexts lose their power to affect future contexts which are so much different? Using Hegel's notion of the master-slave dialectic in the developing appearance of new arising synthesis of dominating paradigmatic ideas, one can note that much of the writing of biblical is the result of people in the position of the oppressed, the slave. So what does Jesus do? Jesus baptized being the servant as the one who truly leads. The king who is after the heart of Jesus is the king who serves. So the slave side of the dialectic became not just the salve of the Christian Movement, it became the food which made it grow and soon Christianity found it had become so effective that it became Empire Christianity. How can Empire Christianity honestly continue to use the "servant discourse" when "Christian" people ascend to the place of "kingly" power? How can one continue to bless the state of servitude as the "preferred" Christ like "beatitudinal" state? America, the great Empire proud of its Christianity, has not solved the problem of being "Jesus of the Gospel" Christians with our general position of power. We go from electing administrations which are bombastically proud of our power to administrations which feign humility about our power in a kind of guilt that we have so much and share so little. Some like walking softly and other prefer the carrying of a big stick (to steal from Teddy Roosevelt). This is a good time to ponder the ironic concept of designating Christ as King as we approach this feast.
Aphorism of the Day, November 14, 2016
Nietzsche's critique of the Gospels involved what he called the "transvaluation" of values. The Sermon on the Mount instantiates this transvaluation of values whereby poverty and being persecuted are designated as states of blessedness. Nietzsche's Noble was one who could be one Darwinesque "Overcoming Man" (Ubermensch), a continually self-surpassing Superman, a fit one who could survive through domination. Probably no Christian concept gets more highly transvalued than the notion of "King." It becomes completely ironic in the presentation of Jesus as a King suffering on the Cross. Jesus was only a king in the "non-apparent" realm of resurrection and inner space in winning hearts and he is not one conquering with armies. The rise of Christendom Christianity and the addition of military complexes for countries populated with majority of Christians has once again transvalued the expression of the Kingly in the "name of Christ." We in America do not really believe that it is blessed to be poor in spirit or poor. We don't believe it is blessed to be persecuted; we in fact want our government to be militarily strong enough to impose our interests upon the world. We don't believe in the Sermon on the Mount; we in fact believe by electing those who promise to keep us the King of Power in our world. The Feast of Christ the King is a good time to be honest about the transvaluation of values in the history of Christianity. For most American Christians, we have long left the Sermon on the Mount values and the Suffering Servant King.
Aphorism of the Day, November 13, 2016
There are significant portions of the Bible by people in distress who see the only solution to be the end of time or the end of human experience as they were experiencing it. We call those portions the apocalyptic genre and the study of the end of human experience as we know it is called "eschatology." It is harder for people of modern science to envision an end of time, since time is sequence in the motion of things, even at the sub-atomic level. Somehow it is harder for us to assume the end of "time" even if there are no humans on earth to experience "time." We can however, appreciate visualizations of interventions in ending suffering and pain. The visualizations of the end of suffering do not necessarily end suffering or falsify the fact that we all die; the presentations of the visualizations of the end of suffering are necessary "pain management" rhetorical devices. You say that they are only words? We understand and define our suffering because we have words and so we must also use words to help us in our pain management. Does pain happen within the human body apart from an understanding of it by having words to say that we or someone, or even a pre-linguistic baby have pain? Our pain and our relief from pain are constituted through our words and biblical words pertain and partake of the constitution of the experience of suffering and its relief.
Aphorism of the Day, November 12, 2016
The words of Jesus warned against false messiahs, of those who come and proclaim, "I am He....I am the greatest, I will do everything in the best possible way." The messianic in the world is not so much the presence of God embodied in a single person but it is a faith understanding of how God can take the lemons of freedom and somehow make some good tasting lemonade. The prophet Isaiah referred to Cyrus the Great as God's messiah even though this dictator monarch over ran Israel and carried its people into captivity. This dictator was not a "personal messiah;" rather he was a messianic agent of the divine to do some things that he himself meant for evil but worked out for a further good in helping to solidify the identity of God's people and their preservation through the writing of salvation history by the future editors of the Hebrew Scriptures who lived in Persian exile.
Aphorism of the Day, November 11, 2016
A saying of Jesus gives hope to the balding: "Not a hair of your head shall perish." This was a word of promise to those who would be persecuted and probably not a literal reference to one's follicles and the hope of eternal life with a full head of hair. The saying was an expression that God's care was poignant and embracing to people even if their oppressors did not care for the hair or the lives of those whom they persecuted. The words of Jesus are the oracle within a phase of the persecuted church to reassure them that the oppressors seemed to be great but their greatness had "limited duration in time," whereas God the great one had no such limited duration in time and had the memory to reconstitute everyone and one's hair forever. May you have eternal life and your follicles too.
Aphorism of the Day, November 10, 2016
The oracle of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke: "You will be hated by all because of my name." The early Christians had to prepare themselves for being in the role of martyrs. We forget how much of the Gospel writing was generated by people who were faced with extreme persecution. Today when having faith is so easy in such a permissive environment of believing anything that we want, it may be hard to make one-to-one applicable identity with the Gospel writing. We should remember there are places in the world where Christians suffer for their witness because there are forces of oppression who identify Christianity with outside foreign armies. There are Christians who are persecuted today because Christianity has become over-identified with political and military actions of Western countries.
Aphorism of the Day, November 9, 2016
In the Gospel of Luke, written after the destruction of the Temple, understands the oracle of Jesus in the future anterior tense to be saying, "when all of the stones of the temple will have been thrown down." Future interior tense presented as prediction interjected into a narrative of the past is used to assure people that a "really bad thing" will come to have a providential interpretation in subsequent experience. The Roman army crashed down upon Palestine and the secret army of Christians formed house by house churches in city by city of the Roman Empire and eventually both the institutions of the Temple and the institutions of the Roman Empire were impacted. The destruction of the Temple forced Christians to "safer" places in Roman cities right under the nose of all things Roman and they gradually became a force of stealth. God's Spirit is everywhere and can be caught by each human being with a body, a temple of the Holy Spirit. Let the Spirit continue to do some "body snatching." With faith we can use the future anterior tense: On November 9, it is confessed that all things will have been well, well indeed.
Aphorism of the Day, November 8, 2016
Architecture as destiny? The institution of certain strains of Judaism was centered upon the presence of the Temple and its maintenance and its veneration as a sacred space. What happened after the institution losts it identity with the Temple in its destruction? In post-Temple times scattered members of Jewish religious parties had to center the "institution" in more informal ways in mobile synagogues or home churches. The transfer of identity of the Temple as the locus of God's presence to the individual body of a person as a temple of the Holy Spirit characterizes a feature of the early Christian revolution. Historically the church has tried to reinstitutionalize buildings and hierarchy as the main locus of God's presence and reformation continually occurs when the person is identified as the locus of the dwelling place of God's Spirit.
Aphorism of the Day, November 7, 2016
Apocalypticism is a mindset formed in the study of the "end" of life as we know it. The formal theological term is "eschatology" from the Greek "eschaton" for "end." This mindset is known from the literature and words which have derived from people who inhabit "fox-hole" situations of life. How does one find comfort, meaning and faith in the middle of the chaos of being under fire and threat from people who do not want your point of view to have social expression. The justified situation of having "group paranoia" influences the crafting of the words of apocalyptic literature. "We may be paranoid, but the bullets are really being aimed at us because of our faith." A feature of the literature is the generation of "cryptic" images known only to the insiders and the persecuted. One can also note that the state of distress of the writers resulted in their being able to access a state "savantism" rife with expression of a liminal state, a delta state between the interior space of dream world and the conscious world of the writer's life situation. Much of the meaning of the apocalyptic is lost to us today because we are not "there" and privy to the how the cryptic connotations attained communicable significance in the original setting. Apocalypse means "unveiling" as it pertains to the end of life as we know it. For us today, apocalypse is better understood as "visualization words" to minister to people under the distress of threats to their existence. One of the problems today is that most people under the threat to their existence do not have a community which can rally them for comfort and survival. We see today that the groups of distressed people today become prey to leaders of "death cults" who have access to the resources of weaponry to incite the view, "if we can't be in power and control, we are going to take as many down as possible." This expresses a very negative apocalyticism of our time and may be due to the climate of dystopia caused by the aftermath of war.
Aphorism of Day, November 6, 2016
To avoid the belief in a God who already knows the future as actual and thus a completely "determined" reality, one must posit a genuine creative Freedom which does not determine all outcomes. This means that Freedom is open to having the great wounds known under the designation as evil and badness within the realm of probable occurrences. In our lives of faith, one must admit such awesome Freedom even while acknowledging that having faith is a most free human way to live under the conditions of freedom particularly as it pertains to salvation as "healing the wounds" of Freedom in the salvatory actions of overcoming evil with good.
Aphorism of the Day, November 5, 2016
Apocalypticism is born as a rhetorical analgesic to deal with the great wound of Freedom, namely that bad things can and do happen, even really bad things. The rhetorical analgesic are visualization words to personalize the great state of Freedom as a living state which can give birth to significant events of intervening goodness to overcome the really, really bad things that can occur in Freedom's ground.
Aphorism of the Day, November 4, 2016
In the history of people reflection of the end of life as we know it has attained various narratives. When threats of destruction happens to large populations, it is a normal impulse to generalize an ending to all things, even while one cannot know what will be happening in a far distant solar system. We cannot avoid being "anthropocentric" =human-centered in our thinking about the end. A suffering people under the tyranny of Roman dictators did not think such horrendous condition were worthy of God and so the intense hope of imminent intervention of a Second Coming of Jesus was a comforting analgesic to people in the conditions of long-sufferers. Today, the advances of science and the industrial age has generated new narratives of the end of life since modern knowledge and ability provide us with scenarios of nuclear disasters, environmental disasters or a potential crashing meteor. Narratives of our end have actually moved from being more mythical to becoming more real. Faith means that we can express hope for life beyond the "anthropocentric" which has sustained human life because it is greater than human life. Human life has memory and we build artificial computer "byte" memory as a way to preserve the human experience; believing in God's preserving memory beyond our "anthropocentric" limitations means that we can imagine a super-creative memory of God that is able to reconstitute continuing identities through and beyond the transitional milestones which have come to language in words like "death" and "endings."
Aphorism of the Day, November 3, 2016
New Testament writers pose both Paul and Jesus involved with Sadducees about the validity of the resurrection. In one encounter with Jesus, the Sadducee interlocutors wanted specifics about the afterlife marriage situation of a proverbial woman who had seven husbands in the levirate marriage succession. "Jesus, the resurrection can present some continuity problems with human life; consider that a woman theoretically could be married to seven brothers at the same time in the resurrection. That's a big problem so how can the resurrection be real?" Jesus answered by essentially saying that one's identity in the afterlife no longer will come from "human relationship identity" such as son, daughter, husband or wife, but rather in the kingdom of heaven one is only a child of God. This is consistent with the early church proclamation of being in Christ brought about the erasure of human identities which cause discrimination based upon differences. "In Christ, there is no Jew or Gentile, male or female slave or free, fill in the blank of oppositional differences...... but a new creation.
Aphorism of the Day, November 2, 2016
In politics there is the phrase, "all politics is local." It essentially means that we are most concerned where issues effect us in our immediate lives in our immediate neighborhoods. One might say too that "all saints are local" in that the telling saints of one's life are the ones who were present to us to help us and guide us in the way of wisdom. The church has All Souls' Day to commemorate the fact that all saints are local. The canonized global saint might be useful for general instruction but the very local person who was there for us at crucial times has intimate pragmatic significance for our lives.
Aphorism of the Day, November 1, 2016
All Saints' Day is like the Christian Hall of Fame. Humanity is ever in the quest for exemplars, people whose lives in some way rise to the top in informing superlative values for living. Such people are memorialized so as to inform the direction of excellence that we strive for in our lives. Historically, Jesus became God with us to inform us in godly living but in practice Jesus became treated as inaccessibly perfect and the cult of saints grew to make holiness more "accessible" to the masses. The masses turned to the saints as their media of intercession with God. The Reformation brought a return to the mode of "going directly to Jesus" as almost a reaction against the displacement of Jesus by the Blessed Virgin Mary and the saints in the piety of the masses. For many today, it does not have to be a question of veneration of the saints or Jesus; one can have the freedom to go directly to Jesus in one's practice of piety and at the same time venerate what has been Christly in the lives of the saints who dwell in a Communion of the continual living. As we ask prayers from each other without disassociating what is holy in the living from Christ, so too we can ask prayers of the great saints and the local saints who have passed over into the invisible and yet who at the very least inhabit a community of continual intercessors who are still for us and with us, even as the Risen Christ is.
