Infallible text vs infallible interpretation
From my Evangelical Covenant upbringing, I absorbed the belief I still hold: the Holy Scriptures, the Old and New Testaments, are the word of God and the only perfect rule for faith, doctrine, and conduct. “In all we believe, do, and say,” explained the Covenant’s resource paper on the Bible (2008), “we place ourselves under the authority of God’s written word and seek its direction.”
But it’s Scripture that’s our perfect rule, not any person’s, group’s, or institution’s interpretation of Scripture. As the resource paper’s authors immediately added: “Scripture itself is our compass, not formulations about Scripture or about its inspiration.”
Indeed, they warned that the record of misreadings in Christian history is cause for humility in our own reading of the Bible. It should cause us to pause before we make authoritative statements about a particular interpretation of a passage—especially if it is an interpretation on which Christians authentically disagree.
Simply put: we sometimes get it wrong. When reading faithfully, we will often find the Bible challenging the way we live rather than affirming it.
Chris Gehrz
https://chrisgehrz.substack.com/p/the-bible-has-authority
Celebrity
…celebrity is social power without proximity. It’s the ability to shape hearts and minds from the distance of the stage and screen. In that distance creeps all sorts of temptations: the evade accountability, to avoid difficult conversations with the people who actually know you and are invested in your spiritual and mental health, to create a false persona, to start thinking you can get away with things that others can’t because you’re just that big and important.
Katelyn Beatty
Knowing
When the ego invests itself in its knowing, it is convinced that it has the whole picture. At that point, growth stops. The journey stops. Nothing new is going to happen to us after that point. The term we’re using here, “beginner’s mind,” comes from Buddhism. For Buddhists, it seems to refer to an urgent need to remain open, forever a student. A beginner’s mind always says, “I’m a learner. I’ve got more to learn.” It has to do with humility before reality, and never assuming that I understand. If there are fifty thousand levels of the mystery, maybe I’m at level forty-five. Maybe there’s more that needs to show itself to me. Can you imagine what a different world it would be if we all lived with that kind of humility?
Richard Rohr
Common Sense
Recently I was asked to help the manager of an apartment complex to revise and update the Rules and Regulations by which both owners and renters must abide. As I was talking with the complex manager about the details, he suggested some additions to which I responded “But aren’t those common sense?” He rightly responded “There no such thing as common sense anymore.” I couldn’t argue with that.
On what do I blame this loss of common sense? I blame American individualism—as strongly promoted by the mass media, social media, popular culture. “To yourself be true.” “Be yourself.” “Don’t fit in; stand out.” Advertising: “You deserve [everything]….” “No limits.”
The problem, as I see it, is that a society cannot survive long without SOME sense of common sense, of right and wrong. Not everything can be legislated nor should it be. A society must be a community to survive. And a community must have some consensus about what constitutes “good” and “bad” behaviors. In America today the one dominating “common sense” consensus is individual freedom, self-realization and fulfillment, being happy on one’s own terms, NOT being a community. We are, I think, the most individualistic society that ever existed. And that is a problem. I can foresee the demise of America as a nation state sometime in the future, not from forces outside our borders but by slow disintegration of any sense of unifying common sense from within. https://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2023/03/whatever-happened-to-common-sense/
Asbury Revival
Ross Douthat put his finger on the problem of assessing a phenomenon such as Asbury. How do modern people conditioned to live by empirical data use those same skills to evaluate something that defies the five senses? In the study of religion, Douthat wrote, secular academics “emphasize the deep structural forces shaping practice and belief — the effects of industrialization or the scientific revolution, suburbanization or the birth control pill.” In contrast, theologians inclined to believe in spiritual phenomena “emphasize theological debates and evangelization strategies.” Neither intellectual approach, he concluded, can determine whether “the mystical has suddenly arrived.”
Nostalgia
Author Marguerite Yourcenar called nostalgia “that melancholy residue of desire.” The melancholia of nostalgia is both an ache and a filter. The yearning for a curated version of the past tends to strain out all of the unpleasant bits.
While it can be comforting to flip through a highlight reel of the nicest bits of your once upon a time, nostalgia has a shadow side to it. Nostalgia’s melancholia can become a hothouse environment that is a perfect breeding ground for fear and bitterness. Our unfiltered present can never compete with an idealized past. And nostalgia’s rose-colored glasses give us a vision of the future that is unable to see anything the dark certainty that what is to come will steal, kill, and destroy all that was once good. Nostalgia can become noxious.
Psychiatrist Dr. Gordon Livingston called nostalgia an enemy of hope, and I believe that is why nostalgia is a barren imitation of the biblical call to remember. Nostalgia limits my view of my teen years to bell bottoms, blue mascara, and a lot of Led Zeppelin. Remembering gives a necessary context for my life as it intersects with God’s redemptive work in and around me. Nostalgia doesn’t have space for my teen drug and alcohol use, promiscuity, and suicidal ideation, and it shrink-wraps the power of God who rescued me during those dark years into a cheerful little package I can hold in my hand like a souvenir of my bad old good ol’ days.
Pastor Bruce Hillman wrote, “Nostalgia is often a technique for dealing with grief; it is a mechanism of narration that seeks to re-story the past as a way of dealing with the present. Like a drug, it gives a powerful escape from the responsibilities and struggles of the present moment. But it hinders the development of resilience.” Nostalgia suffocates our growth and stunts our hope. Forgetting the former days isn’t the antidote to noxious nostalgia.
God never called us to Make Yesterday Great Again. But he does call us to remember.
Remembering equips us to be fully present in our lives, able to draw on resources of God’s wisdom and strength, and able to make meaning out of our lived experience.
https://www.fathommag.com/stories/noxious-nostalgia
Looking Back
“[T]here’s not enough troops in the army to force the southern people to break down segregation and admit the negro race into our theaters, our swimming pools, into our homes and into our churches.“
Strom Thurmond – Dixiecrat Presidential Convention, Birmingham, 1948
A candidate for the Presidency of the United States said those words in his acceptance speech! Thurmond made this speech when he thought America was great, but a plot was afoot!
Face to Face
The face is not only our primary presentation to the world, and our primary means of relationship, it is also, somehow, that which is most definitively identified with our existence as persons. Developmental psychologists say that the face-to-face gazing of mother and child in the act of nursing is an essential building block in the development of personality and the ability to relate to others.
I cannot see the face of another without looking at them. To see your face, I must reveal my face. That face-to-face encounter is pretty much the deepest and oldest experience we have as human beings (first experienced with our mother in nursing). For the whole of our lives, our faces are the primary points of experience and reaction. We cannot truly know the other without encountering them face-to-face.
Psychologists describe the bonding between mother and child in nursing (and face-to-face) as communion:
Identification begins as a visual process, but quickly becomes an internal imagery process, encompassing visual, auditory, and kinesthetic scenes. It is that universal scene of communion between mother and infant, accomplished through facial gazing in the midst of holding and rocking during breast or bottle feedings, that creates the infant’s sense of oceanic oneness or union. (Psychology of Shame, Kaufman, pg 31)
Fr Stephen Freeman
https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/glory2godforallthings/2023/03/24/to-see-him-face-to-face/
Remembering
Remembering is a function of a relationship. When we remember Jesus through wine and bread shared together at the table, we are invited to experience it as though we are sitting with him at the final meal he shared with his friends. The Bible doesn’t invite us to recall a set of data points about Jesus when we come to the communion table but to participate with him who is Immanuel, God with us here and now.
(unknown)
Loving Conversations
My Conversation Matters posts have precipitated some serious opportunity for self-examination.
I have been deeply impressed with the importance of loving conversations and concluded they should be recognized and adopted as a spiritual discipline. That is all good, except for the realization I’m not very good at loving conversations. Reasonably decent at conversation, it’s the loving part that’s a challenge.
That became apparent, earlier this week, as I attempted to have a conversation with Ann . It was very discouraging to fail to employ insights I have been sharing in my posts.
The good news is that experience reinforced my conclusion that loving conversations should be a spiritual discipline.
My failure revealed an absence of — love, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, self-control — all qualities necessary for loving conversation and most importantly, fruits of the Spirit. The practice of loving conversations requires the “Spirit’s leading in every part of our lives“.
Lots to think about.
STILL ON THE JOURNEY