Showing posts tagged God
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Lord, how great is our dilemma! In Thy Presence silence best becomes us, But love inflames our hearts and constrains us to speak.
Were we to hold our peace the stones would cry out; yet if we speak, what shall we say? Teach us to know that we cannot know, for the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God. Let Faith support us where reason fails, and we shall think because we believe, not in order that we may believe.
In Jesus’ name. Amen.
A. W. Tozer, the Knowledge of the Holy, page 6.
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It is never safe to call a church a puppet-no matter how dead, no matter how subservient and temporizing it may appear on the surface. It is called by God’s name, it has God’s eye upon it, at any moment He may sweep the surface away with the purifying wind of His Spirit.

Brother Andrew, God’s Smuggler, page 163.

I listened to two thirds of Brother Andrew’s book this weekend during a long drive. I was struck by this description of a Bulgarian church that the government thought they had under control, but was a great help to Brother Andrew’s missionary work. It’s a good reminder that no one-or institution- is beyond redemption. 

Leland Ryken, The Bible as Literature in The Origin of the Bible, Page 150. View high resolution

Leland Ryken, The Bible as Literature in The Origin of the Bible, Page 150.

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O Lord, you have searched me and known me!
You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
you discern my thoughts from afar.
You search out my path and my lying down
and are acquainted with all my ways.
Even before a word is on my tongue,
behold, O Lord, you know it altogether.
You hem me in, behind and before,
and lay your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
it is high; I cannot attain it.

Psalm 139:1-6 (ESV).

We studied the 139th Psalm in Sunday School class this morning. The first five verses of the Psalm outline all the ways that God knows us: our actions and thoughts (2), the direction of our lives (3), our words - before we speak them (4), indeed; us completely (1). Later in the Psalm, in the King James translation, the Psalmist says, Thine eyes did see my substance.

After laying all the knowledge that God has of us, in the sixth verse Psalmist says, that “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high; I cannot attain it.” What knowledge is unattainable? Self-knowledge equal to God’s. Not only are God’s thoughts about himself higher than us, but his very knowledge about us is unattainable. We can’t ever know ourselves as well as God does.

So does the Psalmist ask for greater self-knowledge? Teach me about myself, oh Lord, so that I may know what you know? On the contrary, the Psalmist invites God to widen the gap even further  “Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts!” (23).

In the Psalm, there is only one action on the part of the Psalmist: praise (14). Once it is understood how much more God knows us and how we can never have perfect self knowledge, the only appropriate response is to invite him to an even deeper knowledge and then to praise him.

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Instead of the Cartesian self-grounding of ‘I think, therefore I am,’ beginning with God’s love means ‘I am loved, therefore I am.’ The birth of self and an identity is a bestowal of the love of others, birthed in and through the love shown by others. The human self is intersubjective: in the we there is the I; in the I there is the we. The self finds its center in mutuality. Consequently, the healthy decentering of the modernist self as self-centering need not lead to the postmodern non-self, but to a recentering of the self in relations of love in community.
James H. Olthius, Crossing the Threshold:  Sojourning Together in the Wild Spaces of Love (via thepoorinspirit)

(Source: thepoorinspirit)

(Reblogged from happinessweareallinittogether)
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If we were to unchain God from the artificial strictures of preconceived rationality that reduce him to an object that either can be known and grasped like other objects or, alternatively, is completely unknowable, and if we were to allow reason to find its conditions in this unchaining, we would have to find ourselves believing in God by virtue of the compelling force of revelation’s own rationality, its capacity to illumine the meaningfulness of existence.

And if God is God, this rationality would emerge out of the faith by which one places their entire existence at God’s disposal in an attitude of complete surrender and total trust in the unconditional goodness of such a posture, taking the orientation of one’s life from this absolute starting point.

The Hebrew Bible calls this conception of truth emeth - that which is solid, firm, reliable and can be trusted with all one’s weight. Such a religious rationality is wild and daring, but it is no monster. Perhaps it is the paragon of sanity itself. What but an ultimate divine word is capable of bearing the immeasurable weight that we sense our lives to bear and of which we find time and again nothing less is worthy? What else can provide the ultimate horizon of intelligibility within which the world and our humanity find the satisfaction of truth worth living?

Chris Hackett, The problem of religious diversity and the dead-end of reason, ABC Religion & Ethics. This article is written on the eve of the annual Australasian Philosophy of Religion Association, which is themed: “Religious Diversity and Its Philosophical Significance.” The program looks quite interesting. Hackett’s address is on the interest of contemporary Continental philosophers in St. Paul, something I have recently read much about in St. Paul Among the Philosophers. Another looks at John Milbank’s critique of Jean Luc Marion. I would love to be a fly on the wall for this conference.

H/T to the Centre of Theology & Philosophy.

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The widespread confidence that medicine will someday “cure” death is a fantasy. The attempt to develop and maintain a medicine so aimed, moreover, depends on the creation of wealth as an end in itself. A social order bent on producing wealth as an end in itself cannot avoid the creation of a people whose souls are superficial and whose daily life is captured by sentimentalities. They will ask questions like “Why does a good God let bad things happen to good people?” Such people cannotP imagine that a people once existed who produced the Psalms. If we are to learn to say “God,” we will do so with the prayer, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Stanley Hauerwas, Hannah’s Child: A Theologian’s Memoir.
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In place of knowing, there is trusting and faith. In place of possessing, there is the gift. God and his love are given to us, but not in a way that would make either one ours, not in the sense that they become our personal property.
Bruce Ellis Benson, Graven Ideologies: Nietzsche, Derrida & Marion on Modern Idolatry