“To be quiet and still is a special thing.”
Christianity does not simply affirm or simply deny the horror of death; it tells me something quite new about it. Again, it does not, like Nietzsche, simply confirm my desire to be stronger, or cleverer than other people. On the other hand, it does not allow me to say, ‘Oh, Lord, won’t there be a day when everyone will be as good as everyone else?’ In the same way, about vicariousness. It will not, in any way, allow me to be an exploiter, to act as a parasite on other people; yet it will not allow me any dream of living on my own. It will teach me to accept with glad humility the enormous sacrifice that others make for me, as well as to make sacrifices for others.
Gerhard Ebeling famously declared that church history is essentially the history of biblical interpretation. It is true that many of the significant turning points in ecclesiastical history had to do with conflicting interpretations over the meaning of particular texts and over the methods of biblical interpretation. Yet Ebeling’s comment is susceptible of another reading as well. The history of the church is essentially the story of how the church interprets Scripture “bodily,” through the shape of its community life. Church history is thus the history of biblical performance. The church, as a performance of the word in the power of the Spirit, is a living commentary on the gospel. The life of the church just is its theological interpretation of Scripture, an index of its understanding of the theo-drama and of the God who puts it in motion.
Currently reading: The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story by Craig G. Bartholomew 📚
James R. Wood, asking in Comment “Can the Church Still Speak?":
Can the Church still speak? Perhaps the better question in our modern world is: Even if it did, would we listen?
It is hard to hear the muffled voice of a divided Church that has been imagined into the margins of opinion and otherworldly concerns. But Christians should reconsider the Church as the given bride of Christ who is also the mother of believers. And we should position ourselves first and foremost to listen to that Church wherever we are. And we should continually pray that ecclesiastical leaders will continue to find ways to make the Church’s voice more audible to the world and that the Spirit would go out and give those with ears the ability to hear.
Afternoon session: “liner” by Justin Vernon
“powers” on repeat this AM
For those interested: an update on where life has taken us
C. S. Lewis, in answer to a question about the divided church and the hope of reunion:
The time is always ripe for re-union. Divisions between Christians are a sin and a scandal, and Christians ought at all times to be making contributions towards re-union, if it is only by their prayers. I am only a layman and a recent Christian, and I do not know much about these things, but in all the things which I have written and thought I have always stuck to traditional, dogmatic positions. The result is that letters of agreement reach me from what are ordinarily regarded as the most different kinds of Christians; for instance, I get letters from Jesuits, monks, nuns, and also from Quakers and Welsh Dissenters, and so on. So it seems to me that the ‘extremist’ elements in every Church are nearest one another and the liberal and ‘broad-minded’ people in each Body could never be united at all. The world of dogmatic Christianity is a place in which thousands of people of quite different types keep on saying the same thing, and the world of ‘broad-mindedness’ and watered-down ‘religion’ is a world where a small number of people (all of the same type) say totally different things and change their minds every few minutes. We shall never get re-union from them.