But, in general, take my advice, when you meet anything that’s going to be human and isn’t yet, or used to be human once and isn’t now, or ought to be human and isn’t, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet.
Mr. Beaver, Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, p. 147
I’m presently reading “Resident Aliens” by Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon and just read the following quote which goes along well with my thoughts from yesterday.
… the fundamental issue, when it comes to Christian ethics, is not whether we shall be conservative or liberal, left or right, but whether we shall be faithful to the church’s peculiar vision of what it means to live and act as disciples. p. 69
“Friend” is not an official title, or a role we have to play, or a function in society. We have our brothers and sisters in the nature of things, and have to live with them. But friendships grow up out of free encounter. Friendship is a personal relationship between people who like one another. Friendship combines affection with respect.
Combining affection with respect does not mean wanting to serve the other person, or having to help him, or making use of him. It means simply liking someone for themselves, just as they are. The affection has to do with the being of other people, the respect has to do with their freedom. Friendship is the opposite of appropriation or the desire to possess. If we become aware of any such intention, we are put off, and the friendship withers. In friendship we sense that there is a wide space of freedom in which we can expand, because we are trusted and can lay aside the protective mechanism of mistrust.
I am finishing reading “The Spirit of Life” and loved this quote. I love his description of friendship. All the more interesting when you consider that apparently Jesus’s enemies said the following concerning Him.
The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’ But wisdom is proved right by her deeds. (Matthew 11:19)
I think that is consistent with the picture of Jesus presented in the New Testament. He loved people. He loved being around people, no matter their state of being. This doesn’t mean that He didn’t call everyone to repentance, He just also respected people’s freedom of will (sorry my Calvinist friends).
Just me and my bud Miroslav hanging out with each other. 🙂
A while back I read “Free of Charge” by Miroslav Volf. I believe I have mentioned in the past that I love Volf’s writing and speaking. He is wonderful. Here’s a quote from “Free of Charge” that I really enjoy.
God is an inexhaustibly fertile source of everything. But is it true that God demands nothing? If it were true, how could Jesus urge us, as he does in the Sermon on the Mount, to be perfect as God is? Here is what we do as worshipers of a Santa Claus God: We embrace the conviction that God is an infinitely generous source of all good, but conveniently forget that we were created in God’s image to be in some significant sense like God – not like God in God’s divinity, for we are human and not divine, but like God “in true righteousness and holiness” (Ephesians 4:24), like God in loving enemies (Matthew 5:44). To live well as a human being is to live in sync with who God is and how God acts.
“Free of Charge”, p. 26.
I bear the image of God. Therefore, I need to be like Him in His holiness yes, but also in His justice, His mercy, His grace, His generosity, His sacrifice, His suffering, His love. To bear the Imago Dei is a powerful demand and a powerful thing. To believe in a generous God should lead to us understanding and acting on the truth that we were created in the image of that generous God. The image we are created bearing is supposed to shape who we are and how we act.
That’s the problem with a Santa Claus god. Santa Claus doesn’t serve as a challenge to us to live in generosity and sacrifice (though the story of the real St. Nick should do just that). Nope Santa is culturally someone who just gives to us, supposedly when we are nice and not naughty, but usually no matter what. But a truly generous God Whose image we are created bearing, well that’s another thing all together. Being created in the image of that generous God calls us to live that image out. It calls us to give as God gives, to all who were created in His image.
In addition since there are traces of the Imago Dei (these traces are known as the vestigia Dei) all around us, we, as image bearers, should be drawn to and respond to those traces. While the saying may be that “Opposites attract” the reality is that we are drawn to things and people with which we have similarities. For an odd example consider the report that has been recently released by the Federal Reserve Board suggesting that people with similar credit scores tend to have more successful committed relationships. We connect more strongly with people and things with which we have a common resonance. Like attracts like.
Jürgen Moltmann writes that early Christians often preferred eros to the word agape when referring to our response to God’s love, because eros is a surrendering to attraction and desire, while agape reflects a self’s decision. Eros has God as the initiator and us as those who respond out of desire. If (and when I say “if” I mean “since”) there are traces of God’s image in the people (and creation) all around us, no matter how distorted those traces are, we should still be driven to love them because of the attraction we have to the traces of God’s image in them. The Imago Dei in us can’t help but be attracted to the Imago Dei we see in others. We are driven by the desire of “like attracting like” to love our neighbor because of the desire we have been created with to love God. Like a teenager who can’t stand to be away from her first crush, our desire for God should pull us.
Courage is not something that you already have that makes you brave when the tough times start. Courage is what you earn when you’ve been through the tough times and you discover they aren’t so tough after all.
“As total man, as ideal man, as the man of possibilities or the man of decision, man must himself accomplish things which he cannot accomplish. The divinization of man makes him not more human, but rather more inhuman. An anthropology which, in the modern post-Christian sense, intends to be the heir of theology, loses sight not only of the real God but also of real man.” p. 107.
The messianic hope was never the hope of the victors and the rulers. It was always the hope of the defeated and the ground down. The hope of the poor is nothing other than the messianic hope.
A quote from Martin Buber’s classic I and Thou that is hitting me pretty hard right now.
Martin Buber – Smart man, funny name, awesome beard.
Even in the original relational event, the primitive man speaks the basic word I-You in a natural, as it were still unformed manner, not yet having recognized himself as an I; but the basic word l-It is made possible only by this recognition, by the detachment of the I.The former words splits into I and You, but it did not originate as their aggregate, it antedates any I. The latter originated as an aggregate of I and It, it postdates the I.
Martin Buber, I and Thou, p. 73-4.
I’m not sure I could adequately express the thoughts that are running through my head as I struggle with this quote. I am just amazed at the thought of us defining ourselves as “I”s through separation, which those produces an “It” because a “You” requires relation. Treating others as objects/”It”s leads to “I”s and separation, whereas being in I-You relations leads to union and an understanding of each other and ourselves in relation to others. In I-You relations we understand ourselves through a connection with a “You”, while I-It relations to us defining ourselves through separation.
I believe the God Who is relational in His being created as to be relational creatures,
I called Pam to talk through some of this and see then blew my mind (yep that’s right, my wife is as smarter as Martin Buber). She mentioned from her knowledge of child development that babies do not initially recognize themselves as separate from their parents. The infant/parent relationship is so tight that the understanding of “I” in that relation doesn’t happen till later. The “I” in that relation comes out of the initial “I-You” relation. Whereas objects are initially understood as separate. How do experts determine this? That is a question that you would need to ask Pam. She explained a little but not enough for me to be able to describe it adequately.
Struggling with understanding the implication of what Buber has written. How often have I defined myself through treating others as an “It,” rather than my “I’ coming out of and I-You relation?
Buber is brilliant, while I am not the best and conveying his brilliance. See, I think I just defined myself through separation from Buber.
