The first truth about human being is that we are not autonomous but evoked: to be a human person is to be called out of nothingness into dialogical fellowship with God and others. Our general vocation as human beings is to respond to the divine summons to be the creature the Creator intended for us to be…. Personal identity is less a matter of some underlying substance than it is of the characteristic style of one’s relationship with others, the style of our answerability to the calls of others and especially to the call of God.
A hypocrite…is one who fails to achieve identity, a “pretender” who avoids the project—the privilege and responsibility—of achieving integral selfhood. Hypocrisy is wrong not simply because it deceives others, then, but also because it injures oneself.
Finally watched (yes, for the first time) It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). Loved it!
The canon is the norm of theology, but it need not follow that theological understanding be confined to the past…. The historicist (and biblicist) temptation is to transpose oneself into the position of the original reader, as if two thousand years of intervening history counted for nothing. It is a mistake to think that one gains a “purer” understanding by forgetting one’s own culture and immersing oneself in a past culture.
Finished reading: For the Time Being by W. H. Auden 📚
This was my first time reading For the Time Being. I was hoping to finish by Christmas but that didn’t happen. That said, the final bit of the poem actually fit really nicely with our day at home packing up decorations. I’ll be pondering this one for some time.