God does not play dice – Albert Einstein Do not tell God what to do – Niels Bohr To be in the world is to be related; to be folded together with people, nature, religions, art, cultures, architecture, languages, ideas and so on, and each moment of becoming is a unique opportunity to faithfully, prayerfully and playfully create new relations and thus new possibilities for truth, beauty, and goodness. My desire for the Church is for us to respond to God’s call to communally live creative lives in the sense that we actively connect ourselves to make possible new and positive opportunities in the world we live. The visible unity of the Church in the world should be a manifestation of this continues process…
Posts from the “Theology” Category
Common sense is judgment without reflection, shared by an entire class, an entire nation, or the entire human race. –Giambatista Vico The ingenuity of creative theologians; the living artists that invents new powers and weapons, can be described as weak and irrational, while the power of the oppressors can be traced from the commonsensical; the common judgment that is distant from both reflection and the will to movement. Those who worship the power of princes and principalities are therefore the same people that reject the prophetic rhythm while complacently watching how the veil of common sense gradually grows on-and-into things. They use every possible means to suffocate the unstoppable force of the continuous becoming of the world in order to forever secure their privileges. ‘With us’,…
When the Western world accepted Christianity, Caesar conquered; and the received text of Western theology was edited by his lawyers . . . The brief Galilean vision of humility flickered throughout the ages, uncertainly. In the official formulation of the religion it has assumed the trivial form of the mere attribution to the Jews that they cherished a misconception about their Messiah. But the deeper idolatry, of the fashioning of God in the image of the Egyptian, Persian and Roman imperial rulers, was retained. The Church gave unto God the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar. –Alfred North Whitehead The brief Galilean vision of humility was officially rejected by the Church and its lawyers. Rather than listening to Jesus’ words about the God who…
The idolatrous vision is guided by static concepts and the will to reduce the Other to a mere object in an all encompassing and closed off system. It suppresses differences and relations while desiring to consume what it sees. It repetitiously belittles both God and the world to the confines of its own limits because it is ultimately striving to rule and overtake the objects it perceives. The idolatrous vision is not curious; it lacks creativity, imagination and the ability to detect nuances. It is ruthless, violent and incapable of seeing colours and reflections. Ultimately, the idolatrous vision can only lead a people into an ever-deeper darkness because only blindness can satisfy the desire to avoid differences. An idolatrous people is robbed and plundered, all of them…
The admission that I am not God is the acceptance of being a subject; a finite individual with particular features and a limited perspective, or to put it in positive terms; the acceptance of subjectivity is the admission that I am not God. However, subjectivity is born in a web of intense relationships so the experience of subjectivity should not lead us to think that we are separate entities. We are connected to one another, we exist in multiplicity; folded together in various constellations in each moment of becoming. As Christians we confess to be one in Christ – who is in the Father and whom the Father is in. We accept that we are folded together within the divine, and thus that individuality…
Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer The infinite demand placed upon our lives by the kingdom of heaven reveals that discipleship is costly and that we therefore should not be searching for cheap grace, rather than for lethargy, the good news of the coming kingdom is a call for responsibility and a righteous way of life. Hence, we should not let sin exercise dominion in our mortal bodies, to make us obey its idolatrous rhythm, but accept the baptism into the death of Christ so we too might walk in the newness of life, which is a motion permeated by self emptying love. The proclamation of the kingdom of heaven…
If I ought to tell them that I pray, and describe how that could happen, according to what idiom and what rite, on one’s knees or standing up, in front of whom and what books, for if you knew, G., my experience of prayer, you would know everything, you who knows everything, you would tell me to whom to address them to. –Jacques Derrida The French philosopher Jacques Derrida once wrote that he rightly passes for an atheist. What for many people seem to be a contradiction is that he also claimed to be ‘a man of prayers and tears’. When asked to whom he prays he answered that if he knew the answer to this question he would know everything. Taking as…
The Church is to be an alternative community, an ecclesia, which has opened itself up to be disrupted by the coming of the kingdom and thus accepted both the infinite demands and the impossible possibilities contained within it. From this follows that we, as the community of believers, should not define our faith by negating that of the empires of the world. We are an alternative community to the empires but we are not their binary opposite, rather we should be understanding our communal being in the world on an entirely different plane since the kingdom is not from this world and we should therefore express our faith positively. Unfortunately we have all too often failed miserably in doing so and the consequence has…
The kingdom of heaven is at hand and it places an infinite demand upon our lives; it calls us to freedom from the shackles of having our hearts turned upon themselves and towards a communal life permeated by love, even for our enemies, and thus to become an alternative community to the empires of this world. The weight of this demand discloses that the life of faith and discipleship is costly but it should not be seen as unattainable, rather it unveils the possibility of the impossible since it breaks open the finite world in which a genuine love for our enemies is impossible and introduces us to the infinite possibilities hidden beneath the face of the deep. This is, I believe, how God…
If we stop seeking, we are no longer on the way. Faith seeking understanding has then turned into “belief that understands.” It then closes down the very root of quaerens, from which come both question and quest. Speaking the divine wisdom in a mystery, theology remains a work of human speech. Theology is not the same as faith or belief, but a disciplined and relational reflection upon them. God calls, but we are responsible for what we call “God”. And God may be calling us to that very responsibility! — Catherine Keller The life of faith is a rhythmic movement aimed towards the dynamic, eschatological horizon painted before us by the resurrected Christ, and theology is the disciplined and relational reflection upon this motion,…
