We will be convening here at the ZigZag café, Suisse, on Thursdays for conversation and dialogue. I invite you to stop by every Thursday for the question of the day. Your thoughts and participation are most welcome. Pull up a stool, avec un café, un thé, ou un chocolat chaud, et un croissant, and join in here on Thursday at the ZZ café.
For today:
What are you hoping for in 2011?
The radical life is often described as total abandonment to God. This translates into the notion that God does not want us to use our minds, hearts, imaginations, and wills, but instead to close everything down, withdraw, and let go. Get out of the way and take no responsibilities are assumed to be truly and ultimately spiritual. It goes something like this: the more we attempt to be zeroes, the more spiritual we are; we either adopt being zeroes or we’re not spiritual. Denial and rejection of ourselves, it is often said, will illuminate the path toward Christian spirituality. The aim is to banish tension from the Christian life and find harmony with God. In other words, tension is unspiritual and resolution is spiritual. To put it mildly, this is an impoverished notion of Christian spirituality. Many Christians fall prey to the assumption that attempting to be a zero is a more holy or spiritual direction for the Christian life. For some reason, this point of view sounds extremely attractive, even spiritual.
The major problem with this either/or orientation is its presentation of an idealism that, in the end, leads us to an unspiritual resolution. The tyranny of false options, as expressed in an either/or configuration of this kind, is devastating. Living spirituality is simply not like that. In spite of brokenness, God redeems and sanctifies us. He wants us to use our minds, hearts, imaginations, and wills in a creative and sanctified manner that sufficiently affirms and demonstrates that God is there, that we are God’s children, and that this is God’s world.
And that’s the radical life.
Finding a truthful dwelling in the middle of polarized extremes is a fitting place to be; it’s often the space where life is to be found. Extreme positions usually only produce further extremes and that’s why they are merely referents for themselves, inevitably pointing to an ideology of death. Fear not the middle voice, which speaks softly, yet with rigor and passion.
We will be convening here at the ZigZag café, Suisse, on Thursdays for conversation and dialogue. I invite you to stop by every Thursday for the question of the day. Your thoughts and participation are most welcome. Pull up a stool, avec un café, un thé, ou un chocolat chaud, et un croissant, and join in here on Thursday at the ZZ café.
For today:
Does God change due to human/outside influence?
The irony of sin. We are sinners all, but Christians sometimes major on this so strongly that they fall into the sin of pride in the act of confession. Notions of superiority and righteousness can pervade the recognition that we all sin. That’s it, that’s who we are – full stop - sinners. There is, however, a radical difference between being sinners and being Christians who are redeemed and therefore no longer slaves to sin. For this to take place we have to turn to Christ and accept the offer of salvation that has been brought about through his birth, ministry, death, and resurrection. Once done, we are then freed from the slavery of sin and enslaved to righteousness. This is indeed an ongoing process, but it is nevertheless a reality that all too often is overlooked. Having put on Christ means we have an entirely new orientation that is to be lived redemptively with and for others. While we won’t be perfect, we are called to live in the light of our destiny, which is in the present and the future to image the crucified and risen One.
Living spirituality is a web of truths that flow out of and back into being in community with God. Take personal evaluation as one of these. Surely, this dimension is interconnected with many others, and is desirable and necessary for developing a deeper interface with God. Our tendencies usually run along these lines. Either we focus way too much on the personal - God and ME, or we ignore it all together – God and THEM. Living the spiritual life – living spirituality, falters without insightful assessment of the past, present, and future, but it is equally impoverished without a personal us in the picture. So goes the tension of life with God, as we work out the varying degrees of community that are appropriate for each context.
Here’s my short take on the question raised at ZigZag Café yesterday. Prayer is first of all a response to an invitation from the God who is there. This God speaks through divine communicative action in creation, Scripture, covenant, Israel, the prophets, and ultimately the crucified―risen one, and summons us to enter into a dialogue with the Wholly Other. Prayer, as response, is personal, intentional, not exhaustive, live, planned or unplanned, verbal communication with the living God. Prayer requires language – God speaking and us hearing and us speaking and God hearing. Dual agency implicates dialogical interaction. To pray as Jesus did to God his father is an action that freely brings us more deeply into community with the Author of life and love sublime, in order that this reality and truth might be lived out into the world through us in redemptive ways.
We will be convening here at the ZigZag café, Suisse, on Thursdays for conversation and dialogue. I invite you to stop by every Thursday for the question of the day. Your thoughts and participation are most welcome. Pull up a stool, avec un café, un thé, ou un chocolat chaud, et un croissant, and join in here on Thursday at the ZZ café.
For today:
What is prayer?
At Destinee Media we focus on the content of our books, but also try to ask questions concerning the book as a media. One of our aims is to challenge our own perception of how a book works. Design plays a significant role: “Can a less obvious typeface help the reader to better engage with the material?” or, “Can a book cover work as a visual interpretation of Biblical themes in contemporary culture?”
I’d like to invite you to take an excursion into the theological, philosophical, and hermeneutical tension, woven into Scripture and the Christian life. After reflection, please share you're thoughts on the book design for: Living Reflections. Does it suggest a clash of perspectives, or something of the reality of being in community with God, each other, and the world, or Darkness, Conflict, Strength, Peace? What themes do you discover?
Let me know what you think:
The virtual silence of God is deafening. It may go on for days, weeks, months, or even years. But then speaking comes, like precious gold, in its splendor and value, it enriches and orients us. Yet cycles of disorientation re-appear and we again find ourselves seemingly deaf to the sounds of action performed within the economy of light, shrouded in darkness. Awaiting the orchestration of reorientation calls for patient listening, for the Divine will surely be heard from soon on a coming horizon.
We will be convening here at the ZigZag café, Suisse, on Thursdays for conversation and dialogue. I invite you to stop by every Thursday for the question of the day. Your thoughts and participation are most welcome. Pull up a stool, avec un café, un thé, ou un chocolat chaud, et un croissant, and join in here on Thursday at the ZZ café.
For today:
The God of the Old Testament is described as being a jealous God in EX 20:5. Is this a fitting description for the God of the world?
Recent relational theological trends tend to identify all too closely divine and human emotions. Be it love or jealousy, the notion is that if we’re this or that way, then God must be. My term for this new direction in theology today is relationalism. There is a deep and somewhat understandable desire to have a God like us, yet this longing may create a god of our own making. It seems to me that we frequently make it up as we go along and in so doing shape God into our own image. The biblical God is the Creator and Redeemer, not fickle, but faithful. God, therefore, is utterly unique and does what God does for the realization of covenant fulfillment. This God is neither weak, nor vulnerable, but an agent of power who through his own commanding passion will bring about love and justice for his people and the whole world.
Renewal in these days of December, a friend wrote recently, is a desirable phenomenon. Yes, indeed, and especially during the last moments of the year, which mark the end of one period of time and the beginning of another. Being renewed is connected to a variety of dynamics, not least to the hearing of the communicative action of God in time. To receive the Voice opens us up to embrace living spirituality in the present, as we develop a realistic retrospective of the past and a viable vision for the future. In experiencing a time of reflection here and now, where renewal can break through into the whole of our lives, we find a trajectory of interaction that has the theological force to shape our destiny.
We will be convening here at the ZigZag café, Suisse, on Thursdays for conversation and dialogue. I invite you to stop by every Thursday for the question of the day. Your thoughts and participation are most welcome. Pull up a stool, avec un café, un thé, ou un chocolat chaud, et un croissant, and join in here on Thursday at the ZZ café.
For today:
Do you think language needs to be redeemed?
Time for Change
The Western world is facing a crisis of trust. Corruption in governments, institutions, banks, and corporations, have made us wary, and rightly so. Countries, whole countries are bankrupt and currencies gradually, on an international scale, becoming increasingly worthless. The credibility of belief in what appeared stable and safe is shattered. Hope for the present and future seems to be on the margins, and slowly, but surely is fading away. As the edifice of idolatry collapses, there’s no better time in recent history for the gospel to have an impact than now. Ironically, the church is ill-fitted at this defining moment to contribute to a necessary change. Conversely, God is definitely able to actively communicate through Christians, Word, and Spirit the viability and truth of new ways of doing culture, economics, government, and debt, that redemptively far outstrips our present lamentable state of being and living.
