Archive for the 'Love' Category
Alvin Plantinga and the Definition of Fundamentalist
Travis Gilmore February 6th, 2008
So I found this quote by Alvin Plantinga taken from his magnum opus “Warranted Christian Belief.” To give a little context to the quote, Plantinga had been talking about his Calvin/Aquinas model for the necessity of the “internal instigation of the Holy Spirit” due to the noetic effects of sins. For fundamentalists like Plantinga (and myself) it offers some humor and insight.
“But isn’t this just endorsing a wholly outmoded and discredited fundamentalism, that condition than which, according to many academics, none lesser can be conceived? I fully realize that the dreaded f-word will be trotted out to stigmatize any model of this kind. Before responding, however, we must first look into the use of this term ‘fundamentalist’. On the most common contemporary academic use of the term, it is a term of abuse or disapprobation, rather like ’son of a bitch’, more exactly ’sonovabitch’, or perhaps still more exactly (at least according to those authorities who look to the Old West as normative on matters of pronunciation) ’sumbitch.’ When the term is used in this way, no definition, no definition of it is ordinarily given. (If you called someone a sumbitch, would you fell obligated first to define the term?) Still, there is a bit more to the meaning of ‘fundamentalist’ (in this widely current use); it isn’t simply a term of abuse. In addition to its emotive force, it does have some cognitive content, and ordinarily denotes relatively conservative theological views. That makes it more like ’stupid sumbitch’ (or maybe ‘fascist sumbitch’?) than ’sumbitch’ simpliciter. It isn’t exactly like that term either, however, because its cognitive content can expand and contract on demand; its content seems to depend on who is using it. In the mouths of certain liberal theologians, for example, it tends to denote any who accept traditional Christianity, including Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and Barth; in the mouths of devout secularists like Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett, it tends to denote anyone who believes there is such a person as God. The explanation that the term has a certain indexical element: its cognitive content is given by the phrase ‘considerably to the right, theologically speaking, of me and my enlightened friends.’ The full meaning of the term, therefore (in this use), can be given by something like ’stupid sumbitch whose theological opinions are considerably to the right of mine’” (Warranted Christian Belief, pp. 244-245).
- Church Fathers , Creeds , Ethics , Love , Othering , Unity
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Dreaming of a Brave New World
jr. January 21st, 2008
from the hands and heart of a white, anglo-saxon protestant male:
Today is the day many in our nation have set aside to remember and honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his dream of racial equality. I often wonder how seriously we take this any more. After all, I’ve heard over the past several years countless Americans of European descent choose to speak of “reverse-racism”, bemoan Affirmative Action as outdated and unfair and of course rage against the swelling tide of illegal immigrants. This is nothing new in our country. In the immigration swells of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, “white people” were just as racist. The difference was that ‘we’ were discriminating against Italian and Irish immigrants. In fact, the rhetoric used to describe those immigrants was strikingly similar to that used of blacks and now of the current tide of immigrants. Now, however, most every American considers Irish and Italian peoples to be nothing more than another flavor of ‘white’, and even black persons are welcomed by the white majority so long as they conform to white culture.1
No, America’s racism grows out of the same old problem - we are afraid of that which is unlike us. We have not become less racist; rather, we’ve managed to incorporate more of those formerly Other races into ourselves. We demand that you look like us (as much as possible), speak like us (English only, please), believe like us (liberal, Judeo-Christian)2 and act like us (2.5 kids, nuclear family, share our values, etc.). So long as you conform to We, you may stay here, and you may thrive here. But if you do not, if you choose not to conform and instead to celebrate your distinctiveness, then you are a threat to We. You take Our jobs and You threaten to undermine Our values and Our way of life. So long as You demand that you be allowed to remain You, You will have no place among We. We will drive you out, and We will build walls to keep You out, where You belong.
And this is why Dr. King’s dream is still so far from reality. We are not yet a country where a person is judged by “the quality of his character”. We are still judged by the color of our skin, by the type of clothing we wear, by the words we speak (and the accent with which we speak them), by the god we worship (and the theologies to which we hold), and by the nation to which we pledge allegiance.
Of course most of you know that I hold no special love in my heart for America. What breaks my heart about our continuing racism this is that the Church is one of the biggest advocates of continuing racism in this country. Sunday morning continues to be ‘the most segregated hour of the week’. Many do not even see this as a problem; a leader at my church has said repeatedly when I bring up the idea of working for a more integrated congregation, “They’re more comfortable in their own churches.” Nearly every Evangelical with whom I speak about immigration thinks that a person should be required to learn English to even cross the border. And at the Crystal Cathedral’s ReThink conference this weekend, prominent Evangelical leader Chuck Colson made this statement: “Islam is a tragically regressive religion, because it has proven itself incapable of producing a great civilization.” Now, I’m going to blog about this more extensively later, but these attitudes pervade God’s Church. And we are not meant to be so.
We are to welcome the alien, the stranger among us, because we were once aliens in Egypt. We are to welcome the Other into ourselves just as they are, for so has God opened Godself to us even while we were yet sinners. We are to offer love because we first were loved. I have a dream that one day God will teach God’s people what it means to be God’s children. Or maybe I should dream instead that one day we will have eyes to see the object lessons God’s placed all around us, and ears to hear the cries of the stranger in our lands, ears that will remember our own cries, and note how similar They are to We. Not because we speak the same language or worship the same way or look the same or believe the same. But because we are all children of the same God, and we all have equal need of the same redemption.
May God give us eyes of faith to see the reality of what it means to be human today. And may God give us ears to hear the cries of God’s children who are still in bondage. And may God teach us how to love the Other as perfectly and redemptively as God has.
“It’s a long way from the shadows in my cave up to Your reality, to watch the sunlight taking over. Take me over.”
– Switchfoot, “Home”
- Consider sitcoms such as the Cosbys, Family Matters and Fresh Prince of Bel Aire, in which the family structure, economic status and weekly problems mirrored that of white suburban America much moreso than they reflected (primarily urban) black culture] [↩]
- Not, of course, political liberalism, but true philosophic liberalism, which sees religion primarily as a private, individual concern rather than as a corporate reality/worldview. [↩]
- Culture , Love , Othering , Race
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Love and the Trinity
jr. September 18th, 2007
Check out The Fuerst Shall Be Last. This guy has some fantastic insights on Trinitarian theology.
It’s an excellent starting point for some discussion. And, I think, a cogent argument for the supremacy of Love over sovereignty as God’s defining attribute.
- God , Love , Nature of God , Trinity
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…Because God First Loved Us…
jr. September 5th, 2007
“[Your dream to become great] is the dream of every living creature, the desire that is the very root of life itself. To grow until every space is a part of you. It’s the desire for greatness. There are two ways of fulfilling this, however. One way is to kill anything that is not yourself, to swallow it up until and destroy it until there is nothing left to oppose you. But that way is evil. You say to all the universe, “Only I will be great, and to make room for me, all the rest of you must give up even what you already have to make room for me.” – Ender Wiggin, Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card
“7Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. 9 God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. 10 In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. … 19 We love because he first loved us.” – John the Elder (1 John 4)
What does it mean to say that God is Love? For much of our history, Christian theology has spoken of God’s central attribute as existence or glory or something of the like. But John is claiming something all-together different. John tells us that “God is love”, and another writing from that same community defines Love as Sacrifice: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13). But what then does it mean to say that God is Sacrifice? To sacrifice is to give up that which we value. Giving up that which is not dear to us is hardly sacrifice; rather, to sacrifice is in a very real way to give of ourselves, to give that which comprises our identity. So imagine a God who is defined not by self-glorification or –gratification, but by self-emptying, self-sacrifice. Imagine a God existing in three persons who are engaged in an eternal dance of joyful, selfless giving. This sort of God finds glory not in self-aggrandizement, but rather in selfless giving. The greater the sacrifice, the greater the glory. It is this sort of God who, out of the overflow of joy and sacrifice, the overflow of Love, creates a world filled with being who, like himself, have a will that they can willfully sacrifice (for one cannot be selfless if one has no Self to give).
But here, of course, is the steep cost of Love. Beings created in the Imago Dei, the Image of God, can choose to sacrifice, or they can choose not to sacrifice. We can choose to give of ourselves or we can choose to preserve our Selves, to fight and to battle until we have created a space in which only We exist. This is the essence of Sin: that we would choose to preserve I at the expense of the Other, rather than to give I in service, in sacrifice to the Other. This tendency to think first of ourselves, to work for self-preservation, has been at work in us since the beginning, and we are nothing if not creatures of habit.
This Self, this Sin has infected us all since the beginning. We Self-full beings see the beauty of creation through the lens of Self; we tend to ask only “how can this serve my needs?” Rather than work with God to cultivate his Garden, we have chosen instead to do as we please, and in doing so, we serve to unmake that which God called good (Genesis 6). In choosing not to serve God even as God gives himself to us, we have become captives in our own minds, unable to see or care for anything beyond that which is good for I. We have lost what it means to abandon our Selves, to live for something other than I, and so have been cut off from God, unable to enter into his Garden of giving, of true Life anymore.
Thanks be to God that he did not leave us in this sorry state! Rather, he gave once more of himself, emptying himself of his divine nature and taking the form of a slave. He came to We who could tolerate no Other and he refused to be one with us. Rather, he offered us a different way to live, a way that did not demand the preservation of the Self, but rather offers the Self in acts of Love, of Sacrifice. We could not tolerate his Otherness, his difference, and yet still he gave himself to Us, and let us have our way with him. We did what any Self does when it feels threatened. We lashed out and destroyed that which threatens. He knew this, and yet he still gave. He gave and gave, until it killed him.
And only then was the power of Love revealed. For we were made to see that in the end, all of our attempts to preserve I will only end in destruction, for we were not created to take. We were created to give, in imitation of the Self who gave himSelf for us.
Darkness settled in behind me, tapped me on the shoulder singing shivers to my spine from the corners of my mind,
“I’ve been wanting to remind you of everything you’ve left behind and wouldn’t you, shouldn’t you remember me?
Should you forget, I haven’t yet.”
She’s there when I’m alone and she always seems to know the stories that’ll take me back to where my comforts sleep.
A caress with velvet paws that hide her sharpened claws along the walls that time has built high searching for the blemishes.
And i know she’s breathing murder, that it is folly to endure her. But there is sweetness in her whisper,
“When you’ve had enough, I’ll be waiting. Wouldn’t you, shouldn’t you remember me?
Should you forget, I haven’t yet.’”– Stavesacre, “The Two Heavens”
Golden Oldies
Honzo August 22nd, 2007
As I was studying me some Attic Greek tonight I was reminded of Hank’s retranslation of John 3:16. Hank did an excellent 5-part series on this verse and went through the translation process step-by-step. I would recommend reading reading through each of the five parts (one two three four five) to get a feel for the translation process.
His translation reads as follows:
“Thus in this manner God loved the world that he gave his one and only Son so that everyone that is believing in him will never perish but have life forever.”
I especially like two of his changes/emphases. First, Hank rightly translates the “so” in the phrase “For God so loved the world…” as “in this manner.” It describes how the love of God was shown to the world. God showed his love through a selfless sacrificial act.
The second aspect that I appreciated was Hank’s emphasis on the middle voice of ἀπόληται, or to perish. The emphasis on the middle voice demonstrates that the perishing was a result of our own actions. Restated, we perish ourselves. It demonstrates that although we have shot our selves in the foot, God action of love for us is his providing a way into eternal life despite our shooting of our own foot.
The only thing I would really change about his translation is restoring the subjunctive forms of “will never perish” and “have” in the last two clauses. The verbs are in the subjunctive form, which describe possible worlds, not actualized ones. Those that believe, by their believing enter into this possible world where they do not perish and instead have eternal life. This world is make possible by God’s giving of his son, Jesus.
My changes would read as follows:
“Thus in this manner God loved the world that he gave his one and only Son so that everyone that is believing in him might never perish but might have life forever.”