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 being loved carry with it any legitimate expectations as to how this love must be given and expressed?
At the emergence of creation, God is depicted as the Divine Transcendent One, who imminently orchestrates a symphony of words. These words become vehicles of creating something aesthetically marvelous and intricately complex, although not free of risk. Creation is a wild and diverse marvel, a purposefully directed wonder, and God is the Speaking Sculptor who speaks and it unfolds. This God, the Genesis God, is the God who sees, names, replies to, and proclaims that what is created is good for its purpose.
Proof-texting – taking a verse here and there from the Bible – can be a dangerous enterprise when it comes to understanding God, self, other, and world. Random reading leaves too much to chance. No doubt sometimes God can use his word in this very selective sort of way, but most of the time if we want to understand better, we need to be informed about the historical, theological, and literary context of a passage, before assuming that it is speaking directly to and for us. Surely, this more careful approach is part of what it means to hold a high view of Scripture and to honor God and his revelation.
The ZigZag Café - June 21
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 do you see as the building blocks for the biblical narrative in Genesis 2-3?
Recently, on a hike through the Swiss Alps nearby our chalet, I was struck again not only by the beauty, but also by the problematic of perception. Winding my way up the mountain side I kept reflecting on how at different points in the walk perceptions change, yet the goal to get to the top of the mountain remains the same. Being in community with God, I believe, has some inviting similarities. When we are in a particular place in the journey, life appears to be one way, but then a different vista opens up and as we go further we see more than we did before. Gradual climbing and clawing our way along can be arduous, but new perceptions invite us to continue on the path towards our destiny of being transformed into the image of Christ and seeing God face to face.
There are at least two ways a personal crisis of hope may express itself. First, pessimism: cynicism overtakes us and we decide to take matters into our own hands. Second, optimism: naïve idealism saturates us and we decide that God will resolve it all for us. Neither of these false options has much to do with Living Spirituality and both will leave us hopeless. Yet, this may not stop us from spending significant amounts of time and energy floating from pessimism to optimism and back, attempting to solidify and barricade ourselves in one unlivable perspective or the other. Life with God, however, is never this simple, as it will challenge these tendencies and in so doing, refigure the false options into growing opportunities for developing a realistic hope, which affirms that two realities are true at the same time: God is at work and we are to be at work. Embracing and living out the salvific possibilities of redemption in the present is both gift and task, as we await the ultimate realization of God's promises in the future.
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:
Is poetry as important as history in the Bible – what are your thoughts?
In addition to Freud's atheism, there are many others, including Nietzsche, Barthes, and Foucault, who argue that God is a contradiction to life, for the death of the Author, and that the strategic alignments of power interests are out to control, knowledge, relationships, and truth. While these thinkers have some salient insights, their wayward conclusions have contributed to the cultural construction and propagation of a cynical, pessimistic, and decentered self. Yet, in the face of such views, the counter-cultural and always avant-garde perspective of Christian promise and hope defies this manufactured status quo. Destroying idols and listening to symbols is one of the keys that unlock living spirituality and possibilities for engaging the God of love and truth. When this takes place we are no longer trapped within a network of self – other power plays that exploit us, but we are embraced by a Divine love without measure, where freedom leads to redemption and transformation. Being loved in this manner supplies us with a new self and an identity that goes far beyond any of our own making.
A crucial theological question is central to spirituality. Is anyone there? Our concern here is not with something that we merely feel or experience as “beyond” or “transcendent,” but with the issue of who is speaking and acting, who is calling, and who is addressing us. Of course, impersonal entities neither speak nor act, and if we have little or no accurate information about the referent of our spirituality, we should have some serious reservations concerning its viability. A real and genuine spiritual connection, through the redemptive work of the crucified and risen Christ, can be formed with the One who is there beyond us. This union results in a release from sin, a changed heart, and a transformed mind—life amidst divine community, towards the other, and in the world. From my book Living Spirituality: Illuminating the Path.
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 legalist mantra runs deep. When this happens, doing and more doing to validate who one is becomes difficult to dismiss. What might be a fitting response to someone caught in this scenario?
Our obsession with ME subverts the truth that the death of Christ is a key event in the establishment of God’s rule. Why did Christ die? Christians often respond, “He died for ME and my sins.” While this is astonishingly true, there is a caveat—Christ died for far more than that. The whole of God’s reign is at stake in Christ’s death, as he takes the covenant curses upon himself. The Kingdom of God has burst on the scene, and the death of Christ is first and foremost about inaugurating this rule. Christ’s death is not about less than ME and my sins, but it is always superabundantly about so much more—God’s establishing his rule and restoring all things. And that is what we miss.
When I put myself, ME, at the center, the death of Christ and living spirituality are considerably impoverished. There is a place for me, but it is important to say no to ME being at the center. This involves a real battle—the battle with sin. Life and death are at stake. And if we choose to center on ME, we are facing the significant danger of embracing forms of spiritual impoverishment—notably, idolatry and self-deception.
Christians are called to live otherwise: for the Other and others. We are not called to constantly focus on ourselves. The scriptural mapping speaks of loving others and serving them. It speaks of evangelism, social action, and putting others before ourselves, as illuminating the true path toward living spirituality.
The desperate search for who I am often appears to lead to a dead end. Faced with no future, the failure of the past, and the suspicion of the present, selfhood is a question without an answer. When the self-centered ultimate authority self or the self-decentered entrapped reduced self collapse, drifting begins to emerge as our only option. The supposed inaccessibility to knowledge and truth, portrayed today as merely subjective forays in the dark, plays into this and tends to leave us without a place to be. Selfhood is stranded, seeking someone or something to be with and belong to. But God’s love generates the possibility of welcome and embrace, inviting us into community; a space to be in and with, which is deeply connected to the power to forgo the self-centered and decentered selves and to be caught up in being recentered, through redemption and the gift of a new self.
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 the Bible forbid a believer to marry an unbeliever?
