For the Joy of the Journey

So Much To Think About

George September 28, 2024 Notes Anthology 0 Comments

Self sufficiency

…the saying in the Sesotho language is: Motho ke Motho ka Batho. A person is only human in relation to other humans.

…as a Christian the idea of self sufficiency is close to anathema. How else do we live the Christian life except in the context of the faith community as we engage the world around us?

Keith Regehr

role of God in mental health

I don’t think you can grow tomatoes by praying for them to appear out of thin air. There is this thing called gardening that God gave us to grow and cultivate tomatoes. In a similar way, God gave us technologies that promote mental health and well-being and it would be foolish not to use these when needed. And yet, I also think it’s a mistake to ignore the role faith and spirituality plays in psychological well-being. As I describe in The Shape of Joy (due out in about two weeks), one of the best kept secrets of psychology is that faith and spirituality have been repeatedly shown to be predictive of health and happiness. God is good for you.

This isn’t to say we should approach God in a therapeutic, utilitarian manner. I know a lot of pastors and theologians who worry about reducing God to “the therapeutic.” I tend to respond to this concern with Augustine: Our hearts are restless until they rest in God. If God is our Creator and the ground of our being then it stands to reason that we’ll thrive when we make contact with and abide in that ground. Mental health improves when psychology makes contact with ontology. Living in the real matters.

Richard Beck http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2024/09/psalm-69.html

Ethics

Ethics are formed. We are not born able to naturally make ethical decisions for the good of others. Have you ever seen a group of toddlers play? “Mine!” and “No!” are phrases that characterize the toddler years. Nor do we coincidentally happen upon becoming a virtuous person. The process by which ethics, and therefore character, is the academic study that spiritual formation engages in.

Kelly Edminson

Contemplation

Parker Palmer writes, “The function of contemplation in all its forms is to penetrate illusion and help us to touch reality.”

Contemplation is any way we can find to help us penetrate illusion and touch reality—and reality will always be bigger than us. It will always leave us a bit uncomfortable, a bit off center stage. If we’re still on center stage, it isn’t Reality.

Richard Rohr

Famine

Timmo Gaasbeek, a disaster expert who has modeled the crisis for a research institute in the Netherlands, told me that he foresees 13 million people starving to death in Sudan by October 2025, with a margin of error of two million. Such a toll would make this one of the worst famines in world history and the worst since the great Chinese famine of 65 years ago. By way of contrast, the famous Ukraine famine of the 1930s killed perhaps four million people, although estimates vary.

Nicholas Kristof NYT

A convenient rationale for euthanasia:

“The patient is mercifully put out of our misery.”
G Ezell

Remembering your reading

If we can’t remember the things we’ve read and watched and even loved, do they still “count”?

What does it mean for a book, a show, an experience to “count,” anyway? Do you need to be able to recall the plot in detail? Should you be able to describe scenes or bits of dialogue, larger themes, cultural relevance? Or is it enough to just remember enjoying a book, or to be able to conjure a feeling it inspired? I was mulling these questions when I came across this essay by James Collins from 2010. In it, he describes books that he loved about which he remembers nothing: “All I associate with them is an atmosphere and a stray image or two, like memories of trips I took as a child.”

Collins suspected, as I do, that the books he can’t remember must have had an effect on his brain anyway, that the experience of reading and engaging with the texts must have changed him in some deeper way, leaving “a kind of mental radiation — that continues to affect me even if I can’t detect it.” I want to believe that my immersion in the fascinating characters and rich plot of “Creation Lake” by Rachel Kushner are performing some kind of alchemy in my brain even if — and it seems unthinkable, halfway through the book — I am likely to forget it all.

Maryanne Wolf, a neuroscientist, confirmed for Collins that inability to recall a book’s details shouldn’t be taken as evidence that we didn’t assimilate it in some way. “We can’t retrieve the specifics, but to adapt a phrase of William James’s, there is a wraith of memory,” she told him. “The information you get from a book is stored in networks. We have an extraordinary capacity for storage, and much more is there than you realize. It is in some way working on you even though you aren’t thinking about it.”

Melissa kirsch NYT

Envy

Envy is the dominant destructive emotion in most people. It’s a tricky emotion in that it can be both healing and lethal. A small dose can motivate a person to excel, but a large dose can lead a person to hop on an endless treadmill of chasing what they can never catch. It’s an addiction that only increasing amounts can satisfy and even then the satisfaction is fleeting and the hunger returns.

Kareem Abdul Jabbar

A Good Story

Let this be said: evangelicalism loves a good conversion or spiritual life story. Let this be added quickly: but only so long as the story confirms the boundary lines.

Scot McKnight

Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Today’s post introduces what is planned to be a regular feature in SMTTA. “Reverberation from the Echo Chamber”. I will share excerpts from an essay entitled “Echo Chambers” written in 2018. You can read the complete essay HERE.

“Reverberation from the Echo Chamber”

Who are we?

My hope is readers will gain an awareness of echo chambers. More importantly, readers will better understand personal implications of residing in an echo chamber.
This is not about Republican or Democrat, et al. It is not about giving up what we believe to be right. It is not about proving the other side wrong.
It is ultimately irrelevant whether we are right or wrong about our cause.
Continual, unfiltered reinforcement of our rightness, will, ironically, result
in unhealthy outcomes that can result in destructive consequences.
It is revealing to read comments on controversial subjects that appear in social media. There is no limit as to how despicable comments can be. Living constantly in an echo chamber can transform us in ways that are inexplicable. The “safety” of an echo chamber is a darkness that shields us from face to face interaction and allows us to escape responsibility and grants permission for words and conduct that we would never consider otherwise.

Consider two comments posted recently on Linkedin I believe illustrate the point:

Bull@#$% comments from trolls or morons are completely useless and waist of my time to read. I am not neatral in what i am.I stand without doubt a hardcore constitutional republican ,a Master automotive technician, and above all
a christian. So call me what you want i am confident in my beliefs, ideas and religion.What the naysayers have to say has ZERO EFFECT ON ME and makes no difference to anyone but the one calling names.

… we should all support each other…men ,women and others.we are all gods children.lets stop dividing ourselves into categories.men ,women, black ,white straight ,gay.lets just be one people with the same mission.being good citizens of our wonderful country.I agree that women should not put down other women nor should any group denounce other groups just to self promote or to attack others you dont agree with.Lets debate and find common ground and work together for the greater good for all.

The first comment was, obviously, in response to a subject a commenter did not agree with.
The second comment came in response to an idea a commenter agreed with.

The most revealing thing about these two comments is that the author of both was the same person.
I wonder which one he would say most represents who he is??

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

Dying Well 4.0 – the fear of death

George September 24, 2024 Death & Dying 0 Comments

Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.
Hebrews 2.14-15

With the exception of a few conclusions/comments, very little of this is post original to me. No surprise to regular readers, Richard Beck is my primary resource. His book “The Slavery of Death” has been formative in my engagement with the subject of death and dying. I highly recommend his blog “Experimental Theology” for current posts and as a great resource.

An important, perhaps the most important, factor in dying well is acknowledging our fear of death and it’s spiritual, mental, emotional and psychological manifestations in our lives.

The central contention of this book is that death, not sin, is the primary predicament of the human condition. Death is the cause of sin. More properly, the fear of death produces most of the sin in our lives.
Beck, Richard. The Slavery of Death (p. 3)

The following quote from The Slavery of Death summarizes Beck’s contention:

Through the power of death and the devil, sin that reigns in men gives rise to fear and anxiety and to the general instinct of self-preservation or survival. Thus, Satan manipulates man’s fear and his desire for self-satisfaction, raising up sin in him. . . . Because of death, man must first attend to the necessities of life in order to stay alive. In this struggle, self-interests are unavoidable. Thus, man is unable to live in accordance with his original destiny of unselfish love. This state of subjection under the reign of death is the root of man’s weakness in which he becomes entangled in sin at the urging of the demons and by his own consent. Resting in the hands of the devil, the power of the fear of death is the root from which self-aggrandizement, egotism, hatred, envy, and other similar passions spring up. In addition to the fact that man “subjects himself to anything in order to avoid dying,” he constantly fears that his life is without meaning. Thus, he strives to demonstrate to himself and to others that it has worth. . . Fear and anxiety render man an individual.
This passage is a concise summary of the entire argument to this point. As mortal creatures the selfish pursuit of survival and self-preservation becomes our highest good, and these survival fears lead us into all sorts of sinful practices. Almost every unwholesome pursuit of humanity—from hedonism to self-aggrandizement to acquisitiveness to rivalry to violence—can be traced back to these basic survival fears.

Beck’s assertions regarding the relationship between the power of death, devil and sin challenged my assumptions about Genesis chapter 3, original sin, salvation and a variety of other related subjects and passages. For that reason, it is a impossible task to do Beck’s case justice in this post.
I will say, after reading The Slavery of Death, I have embraced his belief — “that death, not sin, is the primary predicament of the human condition. Death is the cause of sin. More properly, the fear of death produces most of the sin in our lives.”
My purpose is not to convince readers but hopefully stimulate curiosity, investigation and reading of “The Slavery of Death”.
Implications of the fear of death being the source of sin in our lives are profound. They not only effect our capability to die well, almost every aspect of our relationship with Christ is affected; from praxis and discipleship to spiritual formation and more. I cannot say you will be convinced, but I will say you will profit from the experience.

To conclude this post I will share a couple of observations that nudged toward my conclusion:

>Christian resistance to accepting death..

A recent Harvard study found that patients with high levels of support from their religious communities are more likely to choose aggressive life support and to die in intensive-care units. They were also less likely to enroll in hospice.
THe lost Art of Dying – L .S. Dugdale

Although religious communities are not defined, it is reasonable to assume a significant population oof the study to be Christian or hold some belief in life after death. My limited, anecdotal, experience supports the study’s conclusion. Why would people who believe in heaven fight vigorously using all possible means to avoid their enviable death? I believe the answer, at least in part, is a fear of death. The most honest testimony I have read describing the terror of death for a Christian was written by Pastor and Theologian Timothy Keller. You read his essay HERE.

>Evidence from ars moriendi

According to Tractatus artis bene moriendi, or “Treatise on the Art of Dying Well, there are five temptations faced by the dying. Of his eleven woodcut prints, five depicted those temptations, and another five pictured their resolutions. This meant that the illustration of disbelief was paired with an image of encouragement in faith, despair was coupled with an illustration of comfort through hope, impatience with a print encouraging patience, pride with humility, and avarice with “letting go” of the earthly.
Those temptations are eerily familiar in the protracted dying experiences in our modern context.
Interestingly, temptation of disbelief, despair, impatience and avarice are continually present in the Christian’s life, when we yield to them we lead to sin.
Connecting the dots of between ars moriendi and temptations of everyday Christian experience, was a significant nudge toward Beck’s position.

Changing the way we die takes work. What sort of work? …dying well requires the recovery of a sense of finitude and the embrace of community —both central features of the original ars moriendi.
L. S. Dugdale

I plan additional posts filtered through the lens of “death is the cause of sin”.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

So Much To Think About

George September 17, 2024 Notes Anthology 0 Comments

Before you speak of peace, you must first have it in your heart.?
—St. Francis of Assisi?

Being Interruptible

“It is a strange fact,” writes Bonhoeffer, “that Christians and even ministers frequently consider their work so important and urgent that they will allow nothing to disturb them. They think they are doing God a service in this, but actually they are disdaining God’s ‘crooked yet straight path.’”

This is us

We all must admit that our secret inner attitudes are often cruel, attacking, judgmental, and harsh. The ego seems to find its energy precisely by having something to oppose, fix, or change. When the mind can judge something to be inferior, we feel superior. We must recognize our constant tendency toward negating reality, resisting it, opposing it, and attacking it on the level of our mind. This is the universal addiction.

Richard Rohr

the Cross

“the resurrection does not eradicate the crucifixion.” The Christians chose the most hideous of symbols to identify who they were. They chose a cross, not a stone that had been rolled away. “There was only one reason to carry a cross in the Roman Empire: to certify Rome’s absolute power and any resisters abject weakness.” No wonder the Greeks and Romans saw the Christians as a weak people with a weak Messiah.

The Gospels are not ashamed to show Jesus’s ‘weak’ side; they do not mythologize him into some airbrushed superhero or fantasize a utopian version of his kingdom. The Gospels render the highest, most honest honor to God and Jesus, merited by their solidarity with a struggling people, not a perfunctory or begrudging honor like that coerced by narcissistic Caesars and other strongmen.

Scot McKnight

Sexism

“Sexism is a misuse of power in which men hold power over women and use that power for themselves while diminishing and restricting women’s God-given power.”

Heather Mathews

…the kingdom that is coming in fullness. A kingdom that is “a new, reconciled humanity where there are no more barriers based on ethnic, socioeconomic, or gender distinctions.” I genuinely, and with tears in my eyes, long for this day. The New Testament shows us how Jesus came to create a new humanity, one devoid of lines drawn around race, gender and economic status. A church where slaves could function as elders, women could teach and shepherd, and the poor are sought out for their perspective on the kingdom.

Matthew’s work reminds us that a theology of antisexism is a theology that truly believes men and women are created equal. Jesus was not sexist. He did not accuse women of seeking power, in fact his harshest words were for the men who used their power to restrict others in the kingdom.

Karen Fletcher Smith

The Professor said to write what you know
Lookin’ backwards
Might be the only way to move forward
– Taylor Swift

Present in Liturgy

We are not an audience in the Liturgy. We are not gathering information in order to make a decision. We are in the Liturgy to live, breathe, and give thanks, in the presence of God.

The struggle for a Christian in the modern world is to renounce the life of the audience. Within the audience we experience a deep estrangement from God. We are always “watching” from somewhere else, always engaging the false self with its criteria of judging, weighing, deciding. The world becomes a beauty contest but never a wedding. Modernity creates false distinctions. We are anxious that if we are not “part of the show,” then we are somehow being excluded. “Where are the women?” a visitor asked, commenting on the group within the altar. Ironically, they were spread throughout the Church, participants in the marriage of heaven and earth that is the Divine Liturgy. “Watching” one of their gender “perform” would make none of them more present, only somehow satisfied in the judgment of the audience that some abstract sense of inclusion had been satisfied.

Father Stephen Freeman

Forgiveness

Among the most powerful of human experiences is to give or to receive forgiveness. I am told that two-thirds of the teaching of Jesus is directly or indirectly about this mystery of forgiveness: God’s breaking of God’s own rules. That’s not surprising, because forgiveness is probably the only human action that reveals three goodnesses simultaneously! When we forgive, we choose the goodness of others over their faults, we experience God’s goodness flowing through ourselves, and we also experience our own goodness in a way that surprises us. That is an awesome coming together of power, both human and divine.

Richard Rohr

Parallels

(Praise And worship)

Back in February, the music historian Ted Gioia wrote an essay on the state of American culture. He argued that many creative people want to create art (work that puts demands on people), but all the commercial pressures push them to create entertainment (which gives audiences what they want). As a result, for the past many years, entertainment (superhero movies) has been swallowing up art (literary novels and serious dramas).

Wanting to die

My grandfather, in his 90s, often told me he didn’t want to continue living. He once looked me in the eye and told me that my weekend visits were wonderful but didn’t outweigh the pain he suffered all week. He also felt guilty about the burden he put on his own family. With no legal options, he finally chose to undergo an elective surgery because a surgeon cautioned it was quite risky. The surgery was successful, and my grandfather woke up furious. When he got a serious infection a few weeks later he pumped his fist, and died soon after.

View from the Front Porch

[adapted from a post in2020]

“the sky is falling” is currently the weapon of choice. If you are unfamiliar with the story of Chicken Little, you can read it HERE.

The pressing question for me is, how should I respond to “the sky is falling”? Chicken Little is helpful.

When encountering an unexplained and/or unanticipated threat (acorn), resist knee-jerk assumptions. Gather facts necessary to determine the magnitude of danger.
Seek reliable counsel for confirmation and appropriate action.
Only when confident of the reality and magnitude of threat, and, having clarity necessary for a response, should you alert others.
When fearful We are most vulnerable to seduction we would never consider otherwise.
Resist the temptation think the worst.

The moral of the story is not to be a “Chicken” but to have courage.

A very early example containing the basic motif and many of the elements of the ” chicken little tale” is some 25 centuries old and appears in the Buddhist scriptures. the Buddha, upon hearing about some particular religious practices, comments that there is no special merit in them, but rather that they are “like the noise the hare heard.” He then tells the story of a hare disturbed by a falling fruit who believes that the earth is coming to an end. The hare starts a stampede among the other animals until a lion halts them, investigates the cause of the panic and restores calm. The fable teaches the necessity for deductive reasoning and subsequent investigation.
Wikipedia

We need a lion.

A Word or Two

Steve Elliott September 11, 2024 A Word or Two 0 Comments

Once upon a time …

(…with gratitude to Frederick Buechner who put these thoughts in my head)

Once upon a time, or so the fable goes, there was an orphaned, motherless lion cub who was adopted by goats and brought up by them to speak their language, eat their food, and in general, to believe that he was goat himself.

Then one day, the king of the lions happened by and all the goats scattered in fear leaving the young lion … that thought it was a goat … all alone, to confront the king of beasts. He was afraid, of course and yet somehow, strangely not afraid.

The great lion king asked the young one what he meant by the foolish masquerade of being a goat, but all the young one could do was bleat nervously as any goat would and tried to ignore the question by nibbling at the grass.

So the lion king picked up the young beast by the scruff of the neck and took him to a pond nearby where he was forced to look at their two reflections side by side in the pool and draw his own conclusions. The poor goat could only bleat in confusion.

Finally, the lion king took him to the carcass of a recent kill and offered him his first taste of raw meat. At first, the young lion was repulsed by the idea and recoiled at the unfamiliar taste of it.

But then, as he ate more and more of it, and began to feel it warming something deep within him, it began to dawn on him. Lashing his tail and digging his claws into the earth, the young lion finally raised his head high and the landscape trembled at the sound of his first, mighty roar.

This old fable illustrates a very basic point about life: that as human beings, we usually live life in this world at less than what we were created to be. We are supposed to be lions, but we usually live as goats.

The goat in this fable is really not a goat at all, of course, he is really a young lion. But he doesn’t know that. And as long as he believes he is a goat, in one sense, he really is a goat. Or at the very least, he is really not a lion.

To cast it then in terms of the humanity that is ours and the spirituality that is available to us in Jesus Christ, we were created in the image of God, a spiritual image, but something has gone desperately wrong. Like a young lion cub, orphaned, left to live among goats, we have been orphaned by our sin to live far below what we were meant to be.

What all this means is that we have wrenched ourselves out of the kind of spiritual relationship we were intended to have with God and with each other. Like Adam, we have all lost paradise … lost our birthright as lions … lost our full spiritual capacity for life. We have been orphaned by sin.

And yet … and yet… we all carry something of the original intentions of paradise around inside of us like a haunting memory … like a deep longing for what we have lost or a strong yearning for what we dream could one day be.

In the language of our fable, if the lion who thought he was a goat, could really be a goat, he wouldn’t have this problem. He’d just go on being a goat. But there is still enough lion left in him, as there is left in all of us, to make us discontented with being a goat.

So we may run with the other goats, ignore the larger question of identity and meaning, nibble at the grass and hope that the Lion of Judah will just leave us to bleat along with the rest. But real meaning in life seems to forever elude us, and life as a goat never seems to satisfy us … there is always some something we cannot name, dangling out there, twisting the in the wind of our soul, just beyond our reach. We may bleat well enough, but deep down …there is a gnawing suspicion that we were really made to roar.

SVE

So Much To Think About

George September 5, 2024 Notes Anthology 0 Comments

I intend to live forever … So far, so good.

Scarcity

Brene’ Brown describing the impact of scarcity upon our lives:

We get scarcity because we live it…Scarcity is the “never enough” problem…Scarcity thrives in a culture where everyone is hyperaware of lack. Everything from safety and love to money and resources feels restricted or lacking. We spend inordinate amounts of time calculating how much we have, want, and don’t have, and how much everyone else has, needs, and wants.

Brown goes on to share this assessment from Lynne Twist:

For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is “I didn’t get enough sleep.” The next one is “I don’t have enough time.” Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it. We spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don’t have enough of…Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we’re already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds are racing with a litany of what we didn’t get, or didn’t get done, that day. We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to that reverie of lack…This internal condition of scarcity, this mind-set of scarcity, lives at the very heart of our jealousies, our greed, our prejudice, and our arguments with life.

Brueggermann and Grace

Walter once told me that he is disliked by progressives because he still believes in the old formula, that it is by grace alone that we are saved. And then he confided in me, “Conrad, I have to work to stay in that place of grace.”

And I love that old truth. Work to stay in the place of grace. For without the work there is but cheap grace. But without the grace, the work matters not. And is ultimately, expensive work.

The Nature of Focus

Focus is fundamentally different from mere attention. Attention can be fleeting, easily shifting from one thing to another, often beyond our conscious control. It’s our reaction to the constant barrage of sensory inputs we face each day. In contrast, focus is the sustained, intentional direction of our mental faculties toward a specific goal or object. It involves narrowing our field of vision, both literally and figuratively, which deepens our engagement with what we are focusing on.

Hyperfocus, often described as the intense concentration seen in individuals with ADHD, illustrates the power of focus. During hyperfocus, distractions fade, and the person becomes deeply engrossed in their task. However, this state can also lead to neglecting other important aspects of life. The challenge is to harness the benefits of such focus while maintaining balance.

Brad Vaughn

Penny wise?

A conservative estimate holds that there are 240 billion pennies lying around the United States — about 724 ($7.24) for every man, woman and child there residing, and enough to hand two pennies to every bewildered human born since the dawn of man. (To distribute them all, in fact, we’d have to double back to the beginning and give our first six billion ancestors a third American penny.) These are but a fraction of the several hundreds of billions of pennies issued since 1793, most of which have suffered a mysterious fate sometimes described in government records, with a hint of supernaturality generally undesirable in bookkeeping, as “disappearance.” As far as anyone knows, the American cent is the most produced coin in the history of civilization, its portrait of Lincoln the most reproduced piece of art on Earth. Although pennies are almost never used for their ostensible purpose (to make purchases), right now one out of every two circulating coins minted in the United States has a face value of 1 cent. A majority of the ones that have not yet disappeared are, according to a 2022 report, “sitting in consumers’ coin jars in their homes.”

It’s crucial that they remain there. Five years ago, Mint officials conceded that if even a modest portion of these dormant pennies were suddenly to return to circulation, the resulting flow-back would be “logistically unmanageable.” There would be so unbelievably many pennies that there most likely would not be enough room to contain them inside government vaults. Moving them from place to place would be time-consuming, cumbersome and costly. (Just $100 worth of pennies weighs a touch over 55 pounds.) With each new penny minted, this problem becomes slightly more of a problem.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/01/magazine/worthless-pennies-united-states-economy.html?unlocked_article_code=1.HU4.9zWx.OIYO7dNndhkq&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

0.99

Retail legend claims that the “odd cents” pricing strategy (a Parisian trick imported by Rowland H. Macy to his New York City dry-goods store) proliferated after the cash register’s invention in 1879, as a tactic to prevent sales clerks from stealing. If a customer paid $3 for a $3 item, the logic went, a cashier could stealthily pocket the bills; if the price was $2.99, the customer would be owed a coin; to open the register, the cashier would need to key in the sale, thus creating, within the register’s hidden recesses, an incorruptible record of the transaction. That consumers tend to associate these prices with better deals (incorrectly, according to studies) was an added benefit.

Clarity of Scripture

Pop Protestantism believes in the clarity of Scripture in the sense of its perfect perspicuity. That is to say, that Scripture is clear enough that a Christian does not need a Pope or professor to tell them what to believe about the Bible. The plain sense of Scripture, combined with the illuminating power of the Holy Spirit, is sufficient itself to lead believers into truth. Which means I don’t take Bible study tips from an Italian guy in a pointy white hat wreaking of garlic let alone from a liberal “religion” professor at Penn State wearing a Che Guevera T-Shirt. Plus, if you combine the clarity of Scripture with a thing called soul competency where each soul is competent enough to interpret the Bible for himself and herself, then, you really can say that Bible interpretation requires only two things: Me and my ESV.

Except that such a view is neither truly Protestant nor a healthy approach to biblical interpretation.

If you look at the Protestant confessions, whether the Westminster Confession or the London Baptist Confession, the clarity of Scripture only applies to the things necessary for salvation. So yeah, reading the Gospel of Mark and Epistle to the Romans, you can figure out “What must I do to be saved?” without doing a Master of Divinity. But after that, all bets are off, not everything is clear, some stuff is disputed and debatable, and some things are downright baffling!

Wayne Grudem is correct that Scripture’s clarity does not deny the difficulty of some passages and the need for effort in interpretation. He writes:

I understand the clarity (perspicuity) of Scripture as follows: Scripture affirms that it is able to be understood but (1) not all at once, (2) not without effort, (3) not without ordinary means, (4) not without the reader’s willingness to obey it, (5) not without the help of the Holy Spirit, (6) not without human misunderstanding, and (7) never completely.

Which means with some assistance and some effort, one can attain knowledge of God through Holy Scripture. As Thomas Cranmer, the Anglican Reformer, put it,

This Word, whosoever is diligent to read and in his heart to print that [which] he readeth, the great affection to the transitory things of this world shall be minished in him, and the great desire of heavenly things that be therein promised of God, shall increase in him. (A Fruitful Exhortation to the Reading and Knowledge of Holy Scripture)

And yet, precisely because Scripture is complex we need translators, historians and teachers to explain to us things like: women “will be saved from childbirth”; Who were the Nephilim or Pharisees? What is the kingdom of God? To help us wrestle with tensions like divine sovereignty and human responsibility or justification by faith and judgment according to works. This stuff is not self-evident and cannot be figured out after a 15-minute search on Wikipedia.

Michael Bird

Free Ride

Ana Ley, who covers mass transit, wrote a story this week focused on buses that quantified the problem in New York City with a jarring statistic: On nearly half of all bus rides in the city, people now skip paying the fare. As a result, about one million riders ignore the bus system’s most basic rule every weekday.

His faith was not a seamless garment but a ragged garment but a ragged garment with the seams showing. the tears showing. a garment that he clutched about him like a man in a storms
Fredrick Bruechner on James Muilenburg

Antimaterialist

an “antimaterialist,” that you believe reality is more than what science can investigate or reveal. An antimaterialist believes that truth is greater than facts, that reality includes more than the empirical.

Richard Beck

Weddings

Hassan Ahmed, 23, is charging his guests $450 for a ticket to his wedding next year in Houston, where he lives. Mr. Ahmed said he hadn’t heard back from many of his 125 wedding guests. But he has already spent over $100,000 on the wedding, including deposits for the venue, the D.J. and the photographer. In a video on TikTok, he said he was confused by the response, noting that many of his guests had spent more money on Beyoncé or Chris Brown tickets.

View from the Front Porch

As a result of participation in a recent class at church, I have been thinking about slippery slopes. The class focused on the interaction of Christians with the world on difficult subjects, i.e. LGBTQ+.
Leaders provided helpful information, stimulating hard but healthy conversations among participants. Varied viewpoints produced some anxiety. Rebuttals to ideas that conflicted with conventional thinking were often conciliatory but concluded with a warning that embracing them would be a slippery slope; implying danger and severe consequences and closing further discussion.

Slippery slope is an ideograph:

[a tool of persuasion, ideographs avoid arduous and often painful work of intimate, meaningful communication. Perfectly suited to a culture characterized by ambiguity, relativity and utility, they have metastasized into most arenas of communication, religious, business, personal, et al; rhetorical critics use chevrons or angle brackets (<>) to mark off ideographs.]

In personal communication, ideographs can impede conversation. For example, injecting “unbiblical” or “unchristian” can shut down a conversation that otherwise has potential for understanding and deepening relationship. Christ followers, called to love neighbor can ill-afford the use of ideographs.

Use of ideographs may indicate an anxious attachment to God.

“…those with anxious attachments to God have greater anxiety about abandonment, greater fears of being rejected by God. Consequently, these believers fear doing anything that might risk God’s disapproval. These fears interfere with faith development as any questioning or change in one’s beliefs risks making a “mistake.” A “better safe than sorry” dynamic comes to regulate how these anxiously-attached believers hold their beliefs and read the Bible.
Richard Beck

Slippery slopes are a reality and require deep and meaningful conversations. Christians best equipped to navigate slippery slopes are those securely attached to God.