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 it seem to you that humans are not just interpreters of, but are interpreted by objects in the world, and texts, and works of art, and others?
The spirit of fear, not the Spirit of Christ tends to dominate in many Christian circles today. Fearful of being carried away by the spirit of the age, the faith can grow narrow, lack credibility, and become lifeless. While it is true that believers want to be cautious about adopting the cultural, philosophical, or scientific trends of any given moment, there is an important place to engage new ideas and to be somewhat open to where they may lead. The Spirit of Christ casts out fear and releases us to a new configuration of confidence and humility. This Spirit allows for discussion, questioning, and, investigation. To have received the life giving Spirit who inaugurates community with God, over against a spirit that leads to a separation from him, means that we are free to seek, find, and follow truth where it may be found. Fear not, says the Lord, for I am with you.
A crucial theological question is central to spirituality. Our concern here is not with something that we 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 questions. A real and genuine spiritual connection, through the redemptive work of the crucified One to the personal God who is actually there, results in release from sin, a changed heart, and a transformed mind—life amidst the divine community. From Living Spirituality: Illuminating the Path.
Who am I? What is real? We are and are meant to be interactive agents in time. We interact with ourselves, God, others, and the world. Our brains, for example, are material multi-taskers that fit us for life on the planet. We are geared and finely tuned in such a complex way that we can’t be conscious of it all. What we do, and are plenty conscious of however, is both deceive and tell truth to and about ourselves – to ourselves, to others, and even to God. To be truth telling does much good and does not appear to be problematic, but to be deceptive carries consequences that we are unable to deal with entirely on our own. Countering self, other, and God deception alone is a monumental task, something like a vicious story with the same plot told again and again. We need to find and embrace a better narrative, notably the portrayed in time biblical recounting of redemption, which will begin to free us from the labyrinth of deception and bring us into growing spheres of truth telling.
Christians all too often reject or ignore the material and physical, promoting a heaven like picture of reality that borders on idealism. Too much of an other worldly focus can lead to a denigration of our actions and relationships in this one. Surely, this is an inappropriate trajectory. Being re-directed towards what God has created and is out to renew will help us keep our feet on the ground and to be engaged with the matters at hand.
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:
Can there be any such thing as ‘good death’ in a biblical world view?
One of the major fallacies that many Christians embrace is that they don’t have biases, problems with ideas, or serious shortcomings. If anything undoes the necessity of the cross and resurrection of Christ, it is this kind of perspective. When we are pointing the finger at everyone else and arguing they’re influenced by secularism or materialism and therefore have it all wrong, we forget that critique needs to start at home and that our own views also have to be examined, evaluated, and assessed in order to help us sort through our own blindness, before offering a real vision to the rest of the world.
God invites us out of the bomb shelter of safety and into the battle for life. Self protection, while appropriate in many circumstances, can be a one dimensional and destructive cycle that prevents us from encountering an-other. Depriving the other of oneself and guarding oneself from the other becomes deceptively secure within insecurity. Yep, secure in one’s own insecurity. Breaking down the walls of falsehood is a formidable task, but the call to relate and connect draws us into a world of reality, love, and truth that knows no end. Engage and choose life – it’s costly, but it’s worth it.
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 that people you know who don't have faith in God have faith in someone or something else?
To not have faith in God is to have faith in someone or something else. There is no neutral place available for us to be without faith. If this is the case, which appears likely, then if we don’t have faith in God, the question becomes who or what we do have faith in, and does this who or what merit our trust. It is essential not to stack the deck in favor of one world view or the other and to be willing to entertain the same kinds of questions and implications for whatever our faith position may be. Faith, it appears to me, is a feature of being human and a choice - something like a relational justified true belief. Whatever and whoever this belief is in would require a holistic (not reductionist or compartmentalized) interactive connectivity, which is capable of coherently flowing through and making sense of a web of important matters, including self, other, world, and God.
The power of despair is highly significant and provocatively tempting. One of the realities we most desire – to be known – is what we tend to fear. Being known is a dangerous enterprise that challenges our control over ourselves and the other. The risk factor appears so momentous, we retreat and dare not expose who we are. De-relationship though brings us further and further into deception. This direction is often embraced because we assume it’s safer to be unrelated than it is to connect with the other. Better to deprive ourselves, before we allow anyone else to do it to us. But this is one of the worst forms of attempting to be a self that will ever come across our paths, as it will only produce death. A turn towards an-other, however, while it will no doubt be a challenge, has the possibility of generating life, since life is deeply rooted in real relationships with all their perils and joys.
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:
Neuroscience is starting to show that religious belief may be a natural part of who we are. What do you think?
