Maurice Drury tells a story about an interaction he had with Wittgenstein where Drury said something about monastic kinds of life being a waste of time. Wittgenstein responded "how can you know what their problems were in those days and what they had to do about them?"
To Freidrich Waismann Wittgenstein said "At the end of my lecture on ethics, I spoke in the first person. I believe that is quite essential. Here nothing more can be established, I can only appear as a person speaking for myself."
It can easily be seen throughout Wittgenstein's comments and actions regarding his life and philosophy that his philosophical work was bound up in his life.
I would like to suggest that Wittgenstein's ethic was a kind of existential ethic. Ethical problems are seen as problems which need solved in life--by a form of life--and one cannot solve an ethical problem without encountering it in a life. We speak from where we are in matters of ethics. My answers to ethical questions are only valid insofar as they are livable, and so the best test for an answer to a problem of ethics, of life, is to live it out. The question is whether the solution can fit into a way of life.
Why are we incapable of speaking about what is ethical? This is an attack on the open question argument, or a kind of agreement with its force. The point, that is, is that we cannot capture the normative power of what is to be done, or what is good, in language. Normativity exceeds what can be expressed. What we should do is what would solve the lived problems of our lives. Why? And the answer is not given in words, so much as by our inability to truly ask the question if we have heard the answer rightly. We must see what is normative, we cannot merely speak it.
Sunday, June 15, 2014
Thursday, June 5, 2014
Body and Soul: A Normative Relationship
"The human body is the best picture of the human soul." Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations pt.II, iv, section 25.
I use this quote because it is what began the thought processes which led to the conclusions here, not as evidence for them.
My thesis here is that the physical ought to represent, picture, or better yet embody the spiritual (by which I will mean in this post anything one would refer to as mental, spiritual, relating to the soul, emotions, cognition, etc.).
As a Christian, the most obvious evidence in favor of this is in reference to those places where the spiritual is embodied in the context of Christianity. These are, first, the human person, but that is the case we wish to understand by reference to the others; second, Christ, who is God incarnate; third, the Christian sacraments and what went before them.
In the case of Jesus Christ, God became human and thereby took on "sinful flesh" in order to bear our sins, and our sin nature in the flesh, which nature is often referred to as our flesh. He suffered, bled, and died as sinner--in our stead, or as ourselves. He represented all humans and so became human.
I think the sacraments are more obvious, and to those I now turn. In baptism, one exhibits outwardly that one has been cleansed, that one has been buried and raised with Christ. In taking communion, we take Christ in bodily and in so doing show our taking him in spiritually. I take neither of these as salvific, but both as means of grace in which we meet God spiritually in the physical representation. I count neither of these as mere ceremonies or as merely representations, but as also involving the presence of God with us in spirit in a special way. If these were merely physical representations, then they would be of no help in understanding the relationship between the physical and the spiritual in this way.
So much for the particularly Christian points, on to more broadly theistic.
I take it that all of creation pictures God, whether by choice or not and whether in the short term or long. I further take it that, in a perfect (i.e., pre-fall or once Christ returns) world, we would be able to learn directly from creation how things stand regarding the nature of God. Those who take disaster as a sign of the displeasure of God should not be wrong, and likewise those who take riches as a sign of God's pleasure--their being wrong about these things is a consequence of the fall, and so to be lamented as it is in the psalms and by the prophets. Thus I take it that the right structure of the world as a whole was meant to be one of imaging the spiritual in the physical. It may be possible for this to be the case and yet particular physical things not be intended to relate in that way to particular spiritual realities, but I doubt that it is likely that that is how it is supposed to be. That is, I suspect that particular physical realities correspond relatively straightforwardly to spiritual realities as regards what they are supposed to image. Thus, human body is to picture human soul.
On to broadly philosophical points.
Insofar as what I am referring to here as the human soul is what directs the human body, it seems natural that it would exhibit itself in the human body, and insofar as there is design, it seems designed to do so. Thus there would seem to be a malfunction if the human soul was not pictured by the human body.
If the normative in no way shows up in the physical, then we cannot charge anyone with guilt on account of actions performed, but only on account of intent divorced of physical content, e.g., intent to commit murder, but not intent to drive an axe through the skull of a self-moving human body's skull. If the normative does show up in the physical, then I would expect it to do so by means of, at least, what is harmful or beneficial to human well-being, broadly construed. Such things would then indicate what is good or bad to us.
What is conducive to our well-being, broadly construed, is what is conducive to our being what we are as fully as possible. We are humans which are both spiritual and physical, with the spiritual directing the physical, by and large. Thus, what is good for us is, in part, what is conducive to our exhibiting who we are as spiritual persons in what we are as physical bodies.
There is much complication which may follow, such as balancing changing insides versus changing outsides, but the point here is to establish that, all else being equal, one's spiritual person should show up in one's physical body. I take it, further, that this extends to speech and to social life and exhibiting spiritual relations via physical ones, which we do naturally, indeed, instinctively, by adjusting distances between us, shifting foot positions, crossing arms, etc.
I use this quote because it is what began the thought processes which led to the conclusions here, not as evidence for them.
My thesis here is that the physical ought to represent, picture, or better yet embody the spiritual (by which I will mean in this post anything one would refer to as mental, spiritual, relating to the soul, emotions, cognition, etc.).
As a Christian, the most obvious evidence in favor of this is in reference to those places where the spiritual is embodied in the context of Christianity. These are, first, the human person, but that is the case we wish to understand by reference to the others; second, Christ, who is God incarnate; third, the Christian sacraments and what went before them.
In the case of Jesus Christ, God became human and thereby took on "sinful flesh" in order to bear our sins, and our sin nature in the flesh, which nature is often referred to as our flesh. He suffered, bled, and died as sinner--in our stead, or as ourselves. He represented all humans and so became human.
I think the sacraments are more obvious, and to those I now turn. In baptism, one exhibits outwardly that one has been cleansed, that one has been buried and raised with Christ. In taking communion, we take Christ in bodily and in so doing show our taking him in spiritually. I take neither of these as salvific, but both as means of grace in which we meet God spiritually in the physical representation. I count neither of these as mere ceremonies or as merely representations, but as also involving the presence of God with us in spirit in a special way. If these were merely physical representations, then they would be of no help in understanding the relationship between the physical and the spiritual in this way.
So much for the particularly Christian points, on to more broadly theistic.
I take it that all of creation pictures God, whether by choice or not and whether in the short term or long. I further take it that, in a perfect (i.e., pre-fall or once Christ returns) world, we would be able to learn directly from creation how things stand regarding the nature of God. Those who take disaster as a sign of the displeasure of God should not be wrong, and likewise those who take riches as a sign of God's pleasure--their being wrong about these things is a consequence of the fall, and so to be lamented as it is in the psalms and by the prophets. Thus I take it that the right structure of the world as a whole was meant to be one of imaging the spiritual in the physical. It may be possible for this to be the case and yet particular physical things not be intended to relate in that way to particular spiritual realities, but I doubt that it is likely that that is how it is supposed to be. That is, I suspect that particular physical realities correspond relatively straightforwardly to spiritual realities as regards what they are supposed to image. Thus, human body is to picture human soul.
On to broadly philosophical points.
Insofar as what I am referring to here as the human soul is what directs the human body, it seems natural that it would exhibit itself in the human body, and insofar as there is design, it seems designed to do so. Thus there would seem to be a malfunction if the human soul was not pictured by the human body.
If the normative in no way shows up in the physical, then we cannot charge anyone with guilt on account of actions performed, but only on account of intent divorced of physical content, e.g., intent to commit murder, but not intent to drive an axe through the skull of a self-moving human body's skull. If the normative does show up in the physical, then I would expect it to do so by means of, at least, what is harmful or beneficial to human well-being, broadly construed. Such things would then indicate what is good or bad to us.
What is conducive to our well-being, broadly construed, is what is conducive to our being what we are as fully as possible. We are humans which are both spiritual and physical, with the spiritual directing the physical, by and large. Thus, what is good for us is, in part, what is conducive to our exhibiting who we are as spiritual persons in what we are as physical bodies.
There is much complication which may follow, such as balancing changing insides versus changing outsides, but the point here is to establish that, all else being equal, one's spiritual person should show up in one's physical body. I take it, further, that this extends to speech and to social life and exhibiting spiritual relations via physical ones, which we do naturally, indeed, instinctively, by adjusting distances between us, shifting foot positions, crossing arms, etc.
Wednesday, April 9, 2014
Analysis of Skye Jethani’s Categorization in WITH: A MacIntyrean Proposal
WITH, in case that is too obscure. MacIntyre wrote After Virtue.
Jethani's Stances:
Jethani has five different stances we might take up toward God, which I briefly characterize here, with notes following them.
OVER:
An attitude of control—If I…then God will…(positive: If I
get it right, then God will reward me).
The goods are external to God.
UNDER:
An attitude of hopeless striving—The inverse of the above:
If I…then God will…(negative: If I don’t get it right, then God will punish me).
Here, the bads are external to God, and the goods are not
considered worth it, or are ignored.
FOR:
An attitude of activity, doing, production.
One is producing goods, again, external to God.
FROM:
An attitude of easy reception from God.
Again: reception of goods external to God.
WITH:
An attitude of being with God, whatever that means.
Here, the good is considered to be God, i.e., the good which
one is after is one internal to one’s relationship with God, not one which one’s
relationship is a means to.
The Difference:
the stances Jethani is urging us to
avoid are all stances which take one’s relation to God as a means to an end, or
otherwise separable from the goods one is after. WITH, the stance Jethani wants
us to take up towards God, is different in that it takes the goods of life to
be ones which are internal to being with God, and not available apart from
being with God. The other stances are taken as contingent: they are means to a
good. This stance is bound up with the good—it is essential to the good that it
be obtained in this way, and can only be obtained as a part of taking this
stance.
Implications:
This suggests that being with God
is a kind of practice, a way of life. The question, then, is what kind of life
it is. How does one be with God? What is a life with God? We might use
alternate phrasings to try to shed some light on it. It is being in the
presence of God (Brother Lawrence). It is standing before him as beloved. This
is all very well, but none of these quite yet show what kind of life it is.
They all seem to be static, they do not seem to have the dynamic quality of
life. God is with you—live like it. But how is this developed? Is it a life
fearing what God will do, or trying to please God? No: those make God the
source of goods and bads. God is with you, and is staying with you whatever you
do—live like it. He can stay and punish, he can stay and bless. The difficulty
is in showing what makes God himself the good. What is so great about God?
I am suggesting taking a MacIntyrean
approach to Christianity as a practice, where the practice is “being with God”, or "being a Christian"
and the good internal to the practice is God. MacIntyre suggests that a living practice is one where there is argument about what the goods internal to the practice are. Thus, on MacIntyre’s account,
what makes for a living Church is argument about what makes God so great, and, I suspect as a part of that, who/what God is.
Beyond the Stances
The other stances may, then, be enveloped,
to some extent, in the final stance. The stances must change, of course, in
that the sought good must no longer be external to God.
OVER*:
This becomes appealing to God for God, in some way or
another. It may take the form of lament, of “where are you, God?” Or of other
kinds of intercession. The difference between OVER* and OVER is that in OVER*
the good being sought from God is God, whereas in OVER it is something external
to God. Further, God must be presumed good, So any time we seek things by God
we must presume that he has the best in mind, and trust him to be good. A “your
will be done” caveat is thus added.
UNDER*:
This becomes seeking to do right by God. It is the desire to
remain near to God. It loses its often legalistic character because of the
trust that God is a loving God. The legalism is further hindered by the
recognition that God is a living God who seeks us, and will not leave us on our
own. The greatest we can fear from God is still less than is outweighed by God’s
abiding with us. We are not afraid that God will leave us, since he has promised
not to, and he is good.
FOR*:
This changes from doing good works for God to doing good
works of God. The good works are a participation in God’s life, a
representation of the life of Christ. The good of the good works, then, is the
good we ourselves seek in being with God.
FROM*:
The change in this one is most obvious: what we want from
God is God, and anything else we receive from him is good only because it is
from him and is a reminder, or symbol, to us of him.
Friday, April 4, 2014
Missionaries aren't Special
I noticed a distinction made between a "sending church" and a "sent church" (which are to be one).
I am puzzled by the distinction.
What makes someone "sent"? If they moved away from where they lived before? It doesn't help to add to this "with the intent of furthering God's kingdom," we are all supposed to have that intent in whatever we do. What is the difference between a Christian migrant and a Christian sent to be a missionary in other parts of the world? Is it that not all Christian migrants work for Christian organizations? Is it that we fund missionaries?
I am not against missions agencies. I am against a certain kind of valorization of missionaries. There are missionaries I am comfortable valorizing in a certain way. Not because they are missionaries, but, rather, because of their attitude towards God which is lived out in particularly visible ways. In the way that all Christian missionaries are special, so are all Christians.
The important thing about missionaries is that a greater portion of them, more frequently, have to do what we are all supposed to be willing to do: sacrifice everything for the sake of knowing God. Missionaries happen to be the source for most of our stories about people doing things we cannot imagine them doing if it was not because God was worth everything to them. That, I am comfortable valorizing in a certain way.
But this is along with the martyrs and for the same reason.
And the "sending church" might have its own kinds of martyrs. People who give up everything because God is more important to them than anything else. People who would love to travel the world, or just want to go be a missionary, but give that up because God's kingdom here is more important to them than doing what they want, hope, they would get to do for God. Reluctant missionaries are still missionaries (Jonah). So, too, reluctant martyrs are still martyrs. Neither of these groups are actually martyrs (or, I have not explicitly mentioned any--some in each category are), but they are somewhere on a spectrum which has martyr at the extreme end. They are those who live lives according to the belief that God is more important than anything else--lives filled with a passion for God. And it is good to recognize those who have lived lives which show what the Christian life should look like (that is the point of recognizing Saints in the Roman Catholic Church, I take it).
I am puzzled by the distinction.
What makes someone "sent"? If they moved away from where they lived before? It doesn't help to add to this "with the intent of furthering God's kingdom," we are all supposed to have that intent in whatever we do. What is the difference between a Christian migrant and a Christian sent to be a missionary in other parts of the world? Is it that not all Christian migrants work for Christian organizations? Is it that we fund missionaries?
I am not against missions agencies. I am against a certain kind of valorization of missionaries. There are missionaries I am comfortable valorizing in a certain way. Not because they are missionaries, but, rather, because of their attitude towards God which is lived out in particularly visible ways. In the way that all Christian missionaries are special, so are all Christians.
The important thing about missionaries is that a greater portion of them, more frequently, have to do what we are all supposed to be willing to do: sacrifice everything for the sake of knowing God. Missionaries happen to be the source for most of our stories about people doing things we cannot imagine them doing if it was not because God was worth everything to them. That, I am comfortable valorizing in a certain way.
But this is along with the martyrs and for the same reason.
And the "sending church" might have its own kinds of martyrs. People who give up everything because God is more important to them than anything else. People who would love to travel the world, or just want to go be a missionary, but give that up because God's kingdom here is more important to them than doing what they want, hope, they would get to do for God. Reluctant missionaries are still missionaries (Jonah). So, too, reluctant martyrs are still martyrs. Neither of these groups are actually martyrs (or, I have not explicitly mentioned any--some in each category are), but they are somewhere on a spectrum which has martyr at the extreme end. They are those who live lives according to the belief that God is more important than anything else--lives filled with a passion for God. And it is good to recognize those who have lived lives which show what the Christian life should look like (that is the point of recognizing Saints in the Roman Catholic Church, I take it).
Thursday, April 3, 2014
Religious Belief
http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/2014/04/03/what-is-a-religious-belief/
In the above piece, Joe Carter, working off of Roy Clouser, offers analysis of what a religious belief is, according to which "A belief is a religious belief provided that it is (1) a belief in something as divine or (2) a belief about how to stand in proper relation to the divine, where (3) something is believed to be divine provided it is held to be unconditionally nondependent."
He goes on to argue that by this definition materialism is a religious belief, and that, in fact, we all have religious beliefs. Carter thinks this definition is neither too broad nor too narrow. I will begin by arguing against these two claims.
Is my belief in the principle of non-contradiction a religious belief? I do not think it is dependent on anything else, nor do I see how it could be, so, by the above definition, it is a religious belief. There is a problem here: we do not use the word "religious" or "divine" to refer to logic most of the time. Further, the definition above, as shown by this example, makes "religious belief" equivalent to "belief about what is necessarily non-dependent" i.e., "belief about what is necessarily a brute fact if it is a fact at all." Or, "belief about where reasoning must, necessarily, come to an end." (or a belief about how to stand in proper relation to such things). I therefore think that the definition is too broad.
Is my belief that Jesus was the Christ who died for my sins a religious belief? Is it not a religious belief if I hold that God could have done things otherwise, perhaps by keeping the Fall from happening, or simply because I think it was dependent on the Fall's happening that Christ would die for our sins? Is my belief that he was born of the virgin Mary not a religious belief because I think he could have been born of someone else? It would seem strange to think that these are not religious beliefs. It may be that Carter would group these as having to do with how to stand in proper relation to the divine, but, then, what are the bounds of that category? If they are supposed to be beliefs about things like "what I must do to be saved," then, depending on one's beliefs about how much is required, "born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate" seem not to be religious beliefs. Nor would beliefs about whether miracles happen be religious beliefs in themselves, what would be religious beliefs instead would be beliefs about how to stand in relation to the fact that miracles do or don't happen, under the presupposition that miracles are done by the divine (or that their happening is unconditionally nondependent).
Finally, it may be that materialism is not a religious belief, even given the above definition, if it is held that matter is all that exists but that its existence is dependent, or could be dependent, on something else. A materialist might hold that matter could have been created by God if God existed, that God would have been unconditionally nondependent had he existed, but that God does not exist. Dependency is not the same as contingency, and a thing can be both contingent and nondependent.
Thus far the negative part of this post. On to the positive (which is always harder). I do not pretend to be able to offer necessary and sufficient conditions for a belief's being religious. Rather, I offer a few circumstances where we seem to call beliefs religious relatively unproblematically.
1. We call some beliefs religious because they affect how we live in significant ways which are dependent on the person's holding the belief in that way. We may well want to say that a belief can only be called "religious" as a kind of generalization: most people who hold this belief hold it as a religious belief.
2. We call some beliefs religious because they are held in the context of a religion. I take a religion to be something like a practice or tradition whose reason for being is based in beliefs of the first sort.
These two may not exhaust all the kinds of things a religious belief might be, but I cannot think of any others at the moment.
We might, then, still call materialism a religious belief. By this we would mean, I think, that it has certain effects on life beyond what one might expect given simply its propositional content and degree certainty.
In the above piece, Joe Carter, working off of Roy Clouser, offers analysis of what a religious belief is, according to which "A belief is a religious belief provided that it is (1) a belief in something as divine or (2) a belief about how to stand in proper relation to the divine, where (3) something is believed to be divine provided it is held to be unconditionally nondependent."
He goes on to argue that by this definition materialism is a religious belief, and that, in fact, we all have religious beliefs. Carter thinks this definition is neither too broad nor too narrow. I will begin by arguing against these two claims.
Is my belief in the principle of non-contradiction a religious belief? I do not think it is dependent on anything else, nor do I see how it could be, so, by the above definition, it is a religious belief. There is a problem here: we do not use the word "religious" or "divine" to refer to logic most of the time. Further, the definition above, as shown by this example, makes "religious belief" equivalent to "belief about what is necessarily non-dependent" i.e., "belief about what is necessarily a brute fact if it is a fact at all." Or, "belief about where reasoning must, necessarily, come to an end." (or a belief about how to stand in proper relation to such things). I therefore think that the definition is too broad.
Is my belief that Jesus was the Christ who died for my sins a religious belief? Is it not a religious belief if I hold that God could have done things otherwise, perhaps by keeping the Fall from happening, or simply because I think it was dependent on the Fall's happening that Christ would die for our sins? Is my belief that he was born of the virgin Mary not a religious belief because I think he could have been born of someone else? It would seem strange to think that these are not religious beliefs. It may be that Carter would group these as having to do with how to stand in proper relation to the divine, but, then, what are the bounds of that category? If they are supposed to be beliefs about things like "what I must do to be saved," then, depending on one's beliefs about how much is required, "born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate" seem not to be religious beliefs. Nor would beliefs about whether miracles happen be religious beliefs in themselves, what would be religious beliefs instead would be beliefs about how to stand in relation to the fact that miracles do or don't happen, under the presupposition that miracles are done by the divine (or that their happening is unconditionally nondependent).
Finally, it may be that materialism is not a religious belief, even given the above definition, if it is held that matter is all that exists but that its existence is dependent, or could be dependent, on something else. A materialist might hold that matter could have been created by God if God existed, that God would have been unconditionally nondependent had he existed, but that God does not exist. Dependency is not the same as contingency, and a thing can be both contingent and nondependent.
Thus far the negative part of this post. On to the positive (which is always harder). I do not pretend to be able to offer necessary and sufficient conditions for a belief's being religious. Rather, I offer a few circumstances where we seem to call beliefs religious relatively unproblematically.
1. We call some beliefs religious because they affect how we live in significant ways which are dependent on the person's holding the belief in that way. We may well want to say that a belief can only be called "religious" as a kind of generalization: most people who hold this belief hold it as a religious belief.
2. We call some beliefs religious because they are held in the context of a religion. I take a religion to be something like a practice or tradition whose reason for being is based in beliefs of the first sort.
These two may not exhaust all the kinds of things a religious belief might be, but I cannot think of any others at the moment.
We might, then, still call materialism a religious belief. By this we would mean, I think, that it has certain effects on life beyond what one might expect given simply its propositional content and degree certainty.
Wednesday, January 1, 2014
Self Love, God Love
Loving oneself, accepting oneself, for who oneself is has become popular. Probably since before I was born.
I suspect (hope) that I am utterly confused by what people mean by "am" when they talk about "loving myself for who I am."
I am a sinner. Nothing to love there. Jesus loves me. Jesus loves the unlovable. Jesus makes the unlovable lovable. Jesus gives me his righteousness. I don't love who I am. I love Christ. I love who I am in Christ. I love who Christ is turning me into. I am justified, and in that sense, sure, I love myself for who I am. It's just that my love for myself--in the ways in which it is justified--has nothing to do with what I have done. Jesus doesn't love me because of what I have done. He loves me, yes. He even loves me particularly as who I am. But not for what I have done. I have never done anything so that anyone should love me, except what I have done by the power of the Holy Spirit. Only what Christ has done through me is any good.
I do not hate myself, though. I am justified by Christ. I have the power of the Holy Spirit within me to change me from who I once was, the man who only ever sinned, to who I shall be shown to be when I stand before the Judge, clothed in the righteousness of Christ, and therefore holy and blameless. I love being used, ever so rarely, by God to the glory of God. That is what I live for--or aspire to live for. I only have reason to love myself insofar as I am in Christ and I love Christ. That is also the only way I have reason to love others: their lives are being directed--whether directly or, like pharaoh's, indirectly--to show the glory of God. The glory of God appeared and died for us, and this served to evidence, more than any other event in history, the glory of God. Loving the unlovable glorifies God. The hope which I have as a Christian, that no one is beyond God's help, that anyone might come to be found in Christ like I am, gives reason to love everyone with the love of God.
Thus: love God. Because of God's glory and his love toward you: love others. Love your neighbor as Christ loves yourself. As you do it to the least of these, you do it to him.
Of course, you can't do anything good apart from Christ in you. You are crap, and he has offered to glorify himself in your life. Some vessels are for honorable use, and, Christian, God calls you, the messed up mug, a vessel for honorable use, which he can use to display his Son to the world and so glorify himself. We have this treasure in jars of clay.
I suspect (hope) that I am utterly confused by what people mean by "am" when they talk about "loving myself for who I am."
I am a sinner. Nothing to love there. Jesus loves me. Jesus loves the unlovable. Jesus makes the unlovable lovable. Jesus gives me his righteousness. I don't love who I am. I love Christ. I love who I am in Christ. I love who Christ is turning me into. I am justified, and in that sense, sure, I love myself for who I am. It's just that my love for myself--in the ways in which it is justified--has nothing to do with what I have done. Jesus doesn't love me because of what I have done. He loves me, yes. He even loves me particularly as who I am. But not for what I have done. I have never done anything so that anyone should love me, except what I have done by the power of the Holy Spirit. Only what Christ has done through me is any good.
I do not hate myself, though. I am justified by Christ. I have the power of the Holy Spirit within me to change me from who I once was, the man who only ever sinned, to who I shall be shown to be when I stand before the Judge, clothed in the righteousness of Christ, and therefore holy and blameless. I love being used, ever so rarely, by God to the glory of God. That is what I live for--or aspire to live for. I only have reason to love myself insofar as I am in Christ and I love Christ. That is also the only way I have reason to love others: their lives are being directed--whether directly or, like pharaoh's, indirectly--to show the glory of God. The glory of God appeared and died for us, and this served to evidence, more than any other event in history, the glory of God. Loving the unlovable glorifies God. The hope which I have as a Christian, that no one is beyond God's help, that anyone might come to be found in Christ like I am, gives reason to love everyone with the love of God.
Thus: love God. Because of God's glory and his love toward you: love others. Love your neighbor as Christ loves yourself. As you do it to the least of these, you do it to him.
Of course, you can't do anything good apart from Christ in you. You are crap, and he has offered to glorify himself in your life. Some vessels are for honorable use, and, Christian, God calls you, the messed up mug, a vessel for honorable use, which he can use to display his Son to the world and so glorify himself. We have this treasure in jars of clay.
Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Scripture and Sanctification
Words are important. Words communicate. Communication is a matter of one person communicating to a person about something. It is not always another person, however: sometimes it is me communicating something to myself. We do talk to ourselves. Sometimes it is not clear who is communicating. Words say something about how the world is.
Habits are also important. Habits provide a structure to lives. On this structure, other things can hang. Without a structure, lives seem to float. Whether they are routines for getting up or going to bed, patterns of thought or speech, or ways of carrying oneself, habits form the basic framework of life.
Habits of thought provide the framework for thinking. Thought often occurs in words. Thus, effecting patterns of speech ends up effecting patterns of thought.
Consider how you think about things. Often, we have a background collection of stories which provide an idea of how things go in the world. You might also have phrases which come to mind when you consider what to do. I have heard people, in Bible studies and sermons, say, "what is the therefore there for?" Questions like that--words--provide a reminder of what to think about. So do the key parts of the stories we carry around with us. Another source for patterns of thought, which is harder for me to show, is music. I doubt I need to show that music is an excellent memory aid, but notice, too, that music provides some guidance as to how to feel. There is happy music and sad music. This happiness and sadness is linked with any words. The words then stick in the memory along with the way that the music is teaching you to feel about them. As in the previous two cases, the words are then available to structure thought.
Now, the point: Reading, praying, and singing Scripture imbeds it into our hearts so that we think in Scripture--so that we might have, more and more, the mind of Christ. This is part of why I want preaching to be a matter of pointing to Scripture. This is also why I care about what gets sung--despite having no real musical ability of my own. This is why we are to take ever thought captive, and to meditate on what is good: because that will change how we think and feel, and, thus, how we act.
Scripture is where God is present. If you love him: go, spend time with him! If you don't love him yet: go, meet him, he is awesome! (I preach to myself here)
But we are also dependent on the Spirit to give us the mind of Christ so that we may understand Scripture. Apart from God we won't so much as seek God. Go, read Scripture, for it is God who works in you, to teach you by the Spirit, to raise you up into Christ's likeness. So long as we depend on human understanding, Scripture will probably look absurd, unless God gives us grace (and we will continue to depend on our own understanding apart from his grace), and we will not understand, let alone begin to think as Christ does.
Habits are also important. Habits provide a structure to lives. On this structure, other things can hang. Without a structure, lives seem to float. Whether they are routines for getting up or going to bed, patterns of thought or speech, or ways of carrying oneself, habits form the basic framework of life.
Habits of thought provide the framework for thinking. Thought often occurs in words. Thus, effecting patterns of speech ends up effecting patterns of thought.
Consider how you think about things. Often, we have a background collection of stories which provide an idea of how things go in the world. You might also have phrases which come to mind when you consider what to do. I have heard people, in Bible studies and sermons, say, "what is the therefore there for?" Questions like that--words--provide a reminder of what to think about. So do the key parts of the stories we carry around with us. Another source for patterns of thought, which is harder for me to show, is music. I doubt I need to show that music is an excellent memory aid, but notice, too, that music provides some guidance as to how to feel. There is happy music and sad music. This happiness and sadness is linked with any words. The words then stick in the memory along with the way that the music is teaching you to feel about them. As in the previous two cases, the words are then available to structure thought.
Now, the point: Reading, praying, and singing Scripture imbeds it into our hearts so that we think in Scripture--so that we might have, more and more, the mind of Christ. This is part of why I want preaching to be a matter of pointing to Scripture. This is also why I care about what gets sung--despite having no real musical ability of my own. This is why we are to take ever thought captive, and to meditate on what is good: because that will change how we think and feel, and, thus, how we act.
Scripture is where God is present. If you love him: go, spend time with him! If you don't love him yet: go, meet him, he is awesome! (I preach to myself here)
But we are also dependent on the Spirit to give us the mind of Christ so that we may understand Scripture. Apart from God we won't so much as seek God. Go, read Scripture, for it is God who works in you, to teach you by the Spirit, to raise you up into Christ's likeness. So long as we depend on human understanding, Scripture will probably look absurd, unless God gives us grace (and we will continue to depend on our own understanding apart from his grace), and we will not understand, let alone begin to think as Christ does.
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