[W]e should not fill out our knowledge of the life of the eternally triune God with elaborate, mythological imaginings. This is the perfect place for some realism and restraint in the use of the imagination in theological thinking. We know that God’s life as Father, Son, and Spirit is eternally rich and full, but we do not know its details, and we should not manufacture them. We cannot describe the geography of the happy land of the Trinity. We do no know what kind of music the persons of the Trinity listen to, or what they cook for each other, or who does the dishes, or if they carpool. We do not know if they hold hands and do some kind of liturgical round-dance, as has often been suggested in some of the more purple theological literature. The perfect life of the blessed Trinity is lived above all worlds, including all worlds that we can fill out with imagined furnishings. – Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God, 82-83
Posts Tagged ‘Quote’
Antecedents and Faith
We often talk about “trusting” God, that salvation is by “faith,” but I have often wondered how much people are really able to understand those words. I got to hear my nephew preach this morning, and he did a great job of explaining Eph 2:8-9 (although he never referenced it) using Isaiah 6. God reveals himself as a holy God. Isaiah’s appropriate response was to see the great chasm between himself as God and cry out, “Woe is me.” Isaiah is forgiven by merely receiving God’s atoning gift of the burning goals. Salvation, Dave preached, has to do with seeing God for who he is, with seeing myself for who I am, realizing that there is nothing I can do to move from being a sinner to being holy, and yet also believing that the holy God has done what only he can do in reaching out and offering forgiveness to us. “Faith” is believing that God has extended the fires of forgiveness. – Bill Mounce
A Matter of Business
In October 1915, at the height of World War I, the Berlin Goethe Society invited Albert Einstein to submit an essay for its journal. He did so but warned that he would not be surprised if they chose not to use his submission. The society reviewed it with some dismay and asked Einstein to strike this passage:
“When I look into the home of a good, normal citizen I see a softly lighted room. In one corner stands a well-cared-for shrine, of which the man of the house is very proud and to which the attention of every visitor is drawn in a loud voice. On it, in large letters, the word ‘Patriotism’ is inscribed.
“However, opening this shrine is normally forbidden. Yes, even the man of the house knows hardly, or not at all, that this shrine holds the moral requisites of animal hatred and mass murder that, in case of war, he obediently takes out for his service.
“This shrine, dear reader, you will not find in my room, and I would rejoice if you came to the viewpoint that in that corner of your room a piano or a small bookcase would be more appropriate than such a piece of furniture which you find tolerable because, from your youth, you have become used to it.”
Einstein eventually agreed to remove the passage, but his own views were steadfast. The state, he wrote, “does not play the least role in my spiritual life; I regard allegiance to a government as a business matter, somewhat like the relationship with a life insurance company.”
Source: Futility Closet
New Covenant Fasting
What then is new about the new Christian fasting? What’s new about Christian fasting is that it rests on all this finished work of the Bridegroom. It assumes that. It believes that. It enjoys that. The aching and yearning and longing for Christ and his power that drive us to fasting are not the expression of emptiness. Need, yes. Pain, yes. Hunger for God, yes. But not emptiness. The firstfruits of what we long for have already come. The downpayment of what we yearn for is already paid. The fullness that we are longing for and fasting for has appeared in history, and we have beheld his glory. It is not merely future. We do not fast out of emptiness. Christ is already in us the hope of glory (Colossians 1:27). We have been “sealed . . . with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is given [now!] as a pledge of our inheritance” (Ephesians 1:13-14; see also 2 Corinthians 1:22; 5:5). – John Piper, A Hunger for God, 41-41
Something Is Eternal
[Answering the objection of the infinite regress, “who created the creator?”] Unless there is a known principle excluding the eternality of anything at all, there could be no basis for such an objection. And were we to cook up such a principle, we would find that it excluded, not only God, but the possibility of us having a universe at all. Something is eternal. That something is either God, as we believe, or it is matter — stuff — as Hitchens believes. If infinite regresses are incoherent and any stopping point to head off that regress is always arbitrary by definition, then how’d we get here?” – Douglas Wilson, God Is, p. 31
Looking in the Right Direction
Now John’s disciples and the Pharisees were fasting. And people came and said to him, “Why do John’s disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?” And Jesus said to them, “Can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in that day. No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. If he does, the patch tears away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made. And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins—and the wine is destroyed, and so are the skins. But new wine is for fresh wineskins.” – Mark 2:18-22
There are folks who will follow a leader but not listen to him. Perhaps John’s disciples loved his fire and his preaching and how he laid into the Pharisees, but not all of them listened to what he was actually saying. They listened to the preacher but not the message preached.We looked at this passage in small group last night and the group had some really great observations. The contrast here is between the fasting Christians do, or New Covenant fasting, and what came before. The first observation didn’t come from the group but something I caught later. The contrast isn’t just between Christian fasting and the fasting the Pharisees did because John the Baptist is on the other side of this equation. That’s something. The group asked why John still had disciples if Jesus had come and that’s a great question too. I think it might be related to the fact that John’s fasting was different from Jesus’. John the Baptist was the last prophet of the Old Covenant and his job was to point forward to Jesus. When Jesus came to be baptized John said that he should be baptized by Jesus. John announced “Behold! The lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world!” when he saw Jesus. John was there when God spoke from heaven, “This is my beloved son, listen to him.” And yet, when John was in prison he sent his disciples to Jesus and asked, “Are you the one or should we wait for another?” John had his doubts, like we do, and that’s probably why he didn’t send his disciples after Jesus immediately. Also, there are folks who will follow a leader but not listen to him. Perhaps John’s disciples loved his fire and his preaching and how he laid into the Pharisees, but not all of them listened to what he was actually saying. They listened to the preacher but not the message preached.
So, how was John’s fasting like the Pharisees’ and not like Jesus’? The Pharisees fasting was probably all kinds of messed up. They prayed loud and long in order to get attention. They wore long robes in order to get seats of honor. They made their faces all downcast when they fasted so people would see how holy they were. But if you asked them why they fast, they’d probably have a very good reason that had nothing to do with why they really fasted. Their fast was one of anticipation. It was looking forward to the Kingdom of God coming. For them, that meant David’s son would show up and boot the dirty Romans, probably behead the compromised scribes and clean out the temple. It would mean that their party would be exalted. Messed up but looking forward. John’s was likewise looking forward, anticipating the coming of the one he was sent to herald. And like I said, John didn’t completely get it so his disciples most likely didn’t either. Christian fasting, on the other hand, looks back to the coming of the real Son of David and it looks forward to his return to take David’s throne also. John Piper put it this way in A Hunger for God:
Years ago I wrote in the margin of my Greek Testament beside Matthew 9:17 [a parallel to Mark 2], “The new fasting is based on the mystery that the bridegroom has come, not just will come. The new wine of his presence calls for new fasting.”
In other words, the yearning and longing and ache of the old fasting was not based on the glorious truth that the Messiah had come. (40)
In Jesus’ explanation talking about patches and wineskins you get the anticipation of his return as well as his passion. So Christian fasting looks back at the crucifixion as well as forward to His return. John only looked forward to his coming and the Pharisees were looking entirely in the wrong direction.
The other thing the group talked about was how Jesus’ talk about patches and wineskins applied to his talk about fasting. That may seem pretty obvious but I’ve engage in too many theological discussions where these ideas have been used and abused so they were kind of twisted in my brain. The group dove in without fear and made the observation that I recounted above. What is new is the kind of fasting. Trying to put Jesus’ fasting in the same category as John’s or the Pharisees’ is like sewing a new patch on an old garment or putting new wine in used skins. It won’t work.
And that brings up the last point, a minor one. If you pour grape juice in old wine skins there is no danger of the skins bursting. Only the fermentation process will produce enough gas to stretch new wineskins and burst old ones. The notion that Jesus only dealt with unfermented wine is nonsense and this text as well as others proves it.
Implicit or Explicit Self-glorification & Deification
Every form of modern secularism contains an implicit or explicit self-glorification and deification. Humanistic rationalism, forgetting that human reason as well as human physical existence is a derived, dependent, created, and finite reality, makes it into a principle of interpretation of the meaning of life; and believes that its gradual extension is the guarantee of the ultimate destruction of evil in history. It mistakes the image of God in man for God Himself. It does not realize that the freedom by which man is endowed in his rational nature is the occasion for his sin as well as the ground of morality. It does not understand that by this reason nature’s harmless will to live is transmuted into a sinful will to power. It is by this reason that men make pretentious claims for their partial and relative insights, falsely identifying them with absolute truth. Thus rationalism always involves itself in two descending scales of self-deification. What begins as the deification of humanity in abstract terms ends as the deification of a particular type of man, who supposedly possesses ultimate insights. – Reinhold Neibuhr, “The Christian Church in a Secular Age,” 1937
(Via: Lapham’s Quaterly)
Christ’s Descent
Into the lower parts of the earth. 1 “For ‘the lower parts of the earth,’ they may possibly signify no more than the place beneath; as when our Saviour said, (John viii. 23,) ‘Ye are from beneath, I am from above; ye are of this world, I am not of this world;’ or as God spake by the prophet, ‘I will shew wonders in heaven above, and signs in the earth beneath.’ Nay, they may well refer to his incarnation, according to that of David, (Ps. xxxix. 15,) or to his burial. (Ps. lxii. 9)” – Pearson These words mean nothing more than the condition of the present life. To torture them so as to make them mean purgatory or hell, is exceedingly foolish. The argument taken from the comparative degree, “the lower parts,” is quite untenable. A comparison is drawn, not between one part of the earth and another, but between the whole earth and heaven; as if he had said, that from that lofty habitation Christ descended into our deep gulf. – Calvin’s Commentary on The Epistle to the Ephesians, commenting on Ephesians 4:9
| ↩1 | “For ‘the lower parts of the earth,’ they may possibly signify no more than the place beneath; as when our Saviour said, (John viii. 23,) ‘Ye are from beneath, I am from above; ye are of this world, I am not of this world;’ or as God spake by the prophet, ‘I will shew wonders in heaven above, and signs in the earth beneath.’ Nay, they may well refer to his incarnation, according to that of David, (Ps. xxxix. 15,) or to his burial. (Ps. lxii. 9)” – Pearson |
|---|
Modern Deism
Although there were [at the time of the American Revolution] varieties of deism, the typical beliefs encompassed a God who guarantees justice via the application of punishments and rewards in the afterlife. It is a distilled version of the Christian faith that avoids question of miracles, complicated doctrines such as the Trinity, and ritual disputes such as whether a person should be baptized via immersion or sprinkling and at what age. Although we do not discuss deism very often outside of historical surveys, the propositions are highly recognizable as representing the worldview of a great many people today. – The End of Secularism, Hunter Baker, page 68
Long Form Politics
Why, the question is posed, with furrowed brow, did Obama withhold that certificate for years, spending millions to keep it out of public view, when it was always within his power to release it (as he just did). Hmmm? Well, obviously he was throwing chum into the water, trying to attract serious Republican presidential candidates. And all he got was Donald Trump! He was shark fishing and came back with a really big tuna. I think we should all hold our tummies and laugh for a while. – Doug Wilson, Blog and Mablog, Hold Our Tummies and Laugh for a While.
Excellent observation. Politicians will use politics for political gain, won’t they?