on repeat this afternoon…
Kirsten Sanders, in an essay ostensibly about the current online discourse around “Rules of Life,” offering some programmatic statements that resonate deeply with me:
Improving people is not the primary work of the church.
People can’t be programmed.
The Church is not a social program.
Rules of Life arise from community, they don’t exist as individual devices, or to form a community.
If we do not stop expecting worship to do something, it will never do the thing it is actually for.
Like Sanders, I’m fairly ignorant of the “Rules of Life” discourse. Which also means I’m uninterested in how well her piece speaks into that conversation. Regardless, I do think she’s putting her finger on something really important—in this essay and in her writing more generally. She says this, almost in passing:
I’ll tell you now that I think sin, and its opposite, grace, is the chief misunderstanding we are having in our technological age. It’s not “the problem of the human” merely; it is how we operate, what kinds of things we are prone to, how we will and don’t and how our desires can so turn us against ourselves that we become hedgehogs, operating at a remove from ourselves, we desire to outsource virtue and vice. This is why things like algorithms and advertising are so so hideous. We consider that man himself might be bought and sold and formed, as an outcome, as a product, as a result.
Thus, she fittingly concludes:
And so I will continue to risk the misunderstanding and say again, you do not need a technique or a strategy or a Rule. The fact that you think you do suggests to me that what you do need is a better understanding of what it is you are. A creature, a vessel, a sinner in need of grace. “Holiness” is not an output.
Holiness is not an output. Let that one sink in for a while.
All Christian social order has an equalizing tendency toward friendship, toward mutual agency and mutual fellowship in the good things of God. This doesn’t mean that all Christians are friends–at least not yet–for our spatial, temporal, and social finitude precludes this. Nor does it mean that there is no place for authority in the family, the church, and society. It does mean that all Christian agency is friendly, aimed at mutual agency and mutual fellowship, including the agency of those in authority.
The systematic theologian’s job when it comes to theology is not to invent the relationships between one theological concept and another but to discover them.
Finished reading: The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen 📚
Meh. As a work of American intellectual history, The Ideas That Made America offers fairly bland summaries of major ideas in American history while failing to weave them into any larger narrative that would provide the book with some raison d’être. Also, Ratner-Rosenhagen undersells the influence of religious ideas. Verdict: save the time and skip this one.
Afternoon run at Lake Pflugerville with Lily - she rode her bike and wore her new watch!
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, clarifying why debates over “day” in Genesis are exercises in missing the point:
When the Bible speaks of six days of creation, the term “day” may well have been meant in the sense of a day of morning and evening. Even so, however, it did not mean such days as periods of time that one could just count up; instead what is being thought of is the power of the day, which alone makes the physical day what it is: the natural dialectic of creation. Where the Bible speaks of the “day,” it is not at all the physical problem that it is discussing. Whether the creation occurred in rhythms of millions of years or in single days, this does no damage to biblical thinking. We have no reason to assert the latter or to doubt the former; the question as such does not concern us. That the biblical author, to the extent that the author’s word is a human word, was bound by the author’s own time, knowledge, and limits is as little disputed as the fact that through this word God, and God alone, tells us about God’s creation. God’s daily works are the rhythms in which the creation rests.
Currently reading: Creation and Fall by Dietrich Bonhoeffer 📚
Currently reading: A Century of Poetry by Rowan Williams 📚
