I. Living in the Present
"A new beginning! We must learn to live each day, each hour, yes, each minute as a new beginning, as a unique opportunity to make everything new. Imagine that we could live each moment as a moment pregnant with new life. Imagine that we could live each day as a day full of promises." p.15
our imagination can lead us to the truth of our lives...The problem is that we allow our past, which becomes longer and longer each year, to say to us: 'You know it all; you have seen it all, be realistic; the future will be just another repeat of the past. Try to survive it as best as you can.' There are many cunning foxes jumping on our shoulders and whispering in our ears the great lie: 'There is nothing new under the sun...don't let yourself be fooled.' p.15
Rev 21:2-5
Without 'oughts' and 'ifs'
Here and now-the most important ; "Prayer is the discipline of the moment. When we pray, we enter into the presence of God whose name is God-with-us. To pray is to listen attentively to the One who addresses us here and now. When we dare to trust that we are never alone but that God is always with us, always cares for us, and always speaks to us, then we can gradually detach ourselves from the voices that make us guilty or anxious and thus allow ourselves to dwell in the present moment. This is a very hard challenge bc radical trust in God is not obvious." p.18
"Listening to the voice of love requires that we direct our minds and hearts toward that voice with all our attention. ...prayer." p.19
"One of the discoveries we make in prayer is that the closer we come to God, the closer we come to all our brothers and sisters in the human family. God is not a private God. The God who dwells in our inner sanctuary is also the God who dwells in the inner sanctuary of each human being." p.20
"We often wonder what we can do for others, especially for those in great need. It is not a sign of powerlessness when we say: 'We must pray for one another.' To pray for one another is, first of all, to acknowledge, in the presence of God, that we belong to each other as children of the same God. Without this acknowledgement of human solidarity, what we do for one another does not flow from who we truly are.' p.21
II. Joy
Joy & sorrow. "Joy is essential to spiritual life. ... Joy is the experience of knowing that you are unconditionally loved and that nothing--sickness, failure, emotional distress, oppression, war, or even death--can take that love away." p.25
Joy is not the same as happiness. We can be unhappy about many things, but joy can still be there bc it comes from the knowledge of God's love for us. ...sorrow and joy can exist together. ...when we think about some of our deepest life experiences, such as being present at the birth of a child or the death of a friend, great sorrow and great joy are often seen to be parts of the same experience. Often we discover the joy in the midst of the sorrow." p.25
"Joy doesnt simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day. It is a choice based on the knowledge that we belong to God and have found in God our refuge and our safety and that nothing, not even death, can take God away from us." p25
"It is important to become aware that at every moment of our life we have an opportunity to choose joy. Life has many sides to it. There are always sorrowful and joyful sides to the reality we live. And so we always have a choice to live the moment as a cause for resentment or as a cause for joy. It is in the choice that our true freedom lies, and that freedom is, in the final analysis, the freedom to love." p.26 at the end of the day decide to remember the day as a day to be grateful for. increase our heart's capacity to choose for joy. As our hearts become more joyful, we will become a source of joy for others.
Joy is contagious
"He is a realist, but his deep faith allows him to know that hope is more real than despair, faith more real than distrust, and love more real than fear." spiritualrealism p.27
Surprised by joy instead of sorrow (news)
Hope frees us from the need to predict the future and allows us to live in the present, p.32
III. Suffering
Jesus shows, both in his teachings and in his life, that true joy often is hidden in the midst of our sorrow, and that the dance of life finds its beginnings in grief. ...It is the way in which pain can be embraced, not out of a desire to suffer, but in the knowledge that something new will be born in the pain." p.37 Jn 16:21
Our desire for communion
Be faithful to our vocation
IV. Conversion
The Spirit of Love: "The Spirit of God is soft and gentle like a small voice or a light breeze. It is the Spirit of love. ...Maybe we still distrust the Spirit, afraid to be led to places where our freedom is taken away." p.51
Set your hearts on God's kingdom first...and all other thgs will be given you as well' summarise best the way we are called to live our lives. ...God's kingdom is, first of all, the active presence of God's Spirit within us, offering us the freedom we truly desire. p.52
How to set our hearts on the kingdom first when our hearts are preoccupied with so many things? Somehow a radical change of heart is required, a change that allows us to experience the reality of our existence from God's place." p52
Jesus answers from above to questions raised from below. e.g. Matt 20:22, Acts 1:7-8
the reverse mission
being freed from the burden of judgement-Only when we claim the love of God, the love that transcends all judgements, can we overcome all fear of judgement. p.61
V. Disciplined Living
Living for the one clear goal: What is our prize? Is it the divine life, the eternal life, the life with and in God?
Eternal life starts now, it is not the afterlife. It is living in communion with God p.68
Spiritual reading: books that have spiritual content or reading the news of today with a spiritual reading (not to master knowledge or info but to let God's Spirit master us." p71
VI. The Spiritual Life
Matt 11:28-30
God is eternal love
Fatalism vs. faith. Faith is the deep trust that God's love is stronger than all the anonymous powers of the world and can transform us from victims of darkness into servants of light. p.78
VII. Prayer
'Well, when you spend one hour a day adoring your Lord and never do anything which you know is wrong...you will be fine!'-Mother Teresa to Nouwen after he explained all his complicated problems p89
from worrying to prayer.
Contemplating Psalm 23
VIII. Compassion
be compassionate, as the Father is.
Being the beloved.
downward mobility Jn 12:25, Matt 18:3, Matt 20:25-28
"Compassion means to become close to the one who suffers. But we can come close to another person only when we are willing to become vulnerable ourselves." p.197
IX. Family
X. Relationships
XI. Who We Are
Dec 13, 2016-Jan 3, 2018
London: St Pauls, 2002.
Showing posts with label Jesus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jesus. Show all posts
Thursday, January 4, 2018
Thursday, May 25, 2017
21. The Overcoming Life - D. L. Moody
"If you are not overcoming temptations, the world is overcoming you.
How can the world be overcome? Not by education, not by experience; only by faith."
Fight worldly habits, temptations, pleasures.
Have humility, the yoke of Christ is light.
Hold up the candle.
There is no rest in sin.
"Let us go on turning as many as we can to righteousness. Let us be dead to the world, to its lies, its pleasures, and its ambitions, Let us live for God, continually going forth to win souls for Him. ...'Will you thus live and dies, O man immortal? Live for something. Do good, and leave behind you a monument of virtue that the storms of time can never destroy. Write your name in kindness, love, and mercy on the hearts of the thousands you come in contact with year by year" p.84
So many applicable, real life stories that is just as relevant today as when Moody wrote the book. Definitely worth a re-read to boost the spiritual life.
1-25 May, 2017
Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2010.
How can the world be overcome? Not by education, not by experience; only by faith."
Fight worldly habits, temptations, pleasures.
Have humility, the yoke of Christ is light.
Hold up the candle.
There is no rest in sin.
"Let us go on turning as many as we can to righteousness. Let us be dead to the world, to its lies, its pleasures, and its ambitions, Let us live for God, continually going forth to win souls for Him. ...'Will you thus live and dies, O man immortal? Live for something. Do good, and leave behind you a monument of virtue that the storms of time can never destroy. Write your name in kindness, love, and mercy on the hearts of the thousands you come in contact with year by year" p.84
So many applicable, real life stories that is just as relevant today as when Moody wrote the book. Definitely worth a re-read to boost the spiritual life.
1-25 May, 2017
Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2010.
Friday, January 6, 2017
5. The Prophetic Imagination-Walter Brueggemann
I. The Alternative Community of Moses
~The problem: -The enculturation of consumerism in our church today: "The internal cause of such enculturation is our loss of identity through the abandonment of the faith tradition. Our consumer culture is organized aganist history. There is a depreciation of memory and a ridicule of hope, which means everything must be held in the now..." p.1
~Hypothesis of the book: "The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us." ...to criticize in dismantling the dominant consciousness/engage in a rejection and delegitimizing of the present ordering of things. "On the other hand, that alternative consciousness to be nurtured serves to energize persons and communities by its promise of another time and situation toward which the community of faith may move." "...to live in fervent anticipation of the newness that God has promised and will surely give." p.3
-"The ministry of Moses...represents a radical break with the social reality of Pharoah's Egypt." p.5
"Prophecy is born precisely in that moment when the emergence of social political reality is so radical and inexplicable that it has nothing less than a theological cause."
-Breaking with (the religion of static) triumphalism and (politics of) oppression (and exploitation):
Moses discloses that Yahweh, the sovereign one who acts in his lordly freedom, is extrapolated from no social reality and is captive to no social perception but acts from his own person toward his own purposes." "At the same time, Moses dismantles the politics of oppression and exploitation by countering it with a politics of justice and compassion." p.6 "the emergence of a new social community in history, a community that has historical body, that had to devise laws, patterns of governance and order, norms of right and wrong, and sanctions of accountability. ...to match the vision of God's freedom." Moses' work "came precisely at the engagement of the religion of God's freedom with the politics of human justice." p.7
"Our sociology is predictably derived from, legitimated by, and reflective of our theology. And if we gather around a static god of order who only guards the interests of the 'haves,' oppression cannot be far behind. Conversely, if a God is disclosed who is free to come and go, free from and even against the regime, free to hear and even answer slave cries, free from all proper goodness as defined by the empire, then it will bear decisively upon sociology because the freedom of God will surface in the brickyards and manifest itself as justice and compassion." "we have split those two items much too easily but not without reason. The liberal tendency has been to care about the politics of justice and compassion but to be largely uninterested in the freedom of God. ...As a result, social radicalism has been like a cut flower without nourishment, without any sanctions deeper than human courage and good intentions. ...the tendency in other quarters to care intensely about God, but uncritically, so that the God of well-being and good order is not understood to be precisely the source of social oppression...The point that prophetic imagination must ponder is that there is no freedom of God without the politics of justice and compassion, and there is no politics of justice and compassion without a religion of the freedom of God." p.8
"The genuine alternative, entrusted to us who bear that calling, is rooted not in social theory or in righteous indignation or in altruism but in the genuine alternative that Yahweh is." p.9
-"Bringing hurt to public expression is an important first step in the dismantling criticism that permits a new reality, theological and social, to emerge. That cry which begins history is acknowledged by Yahweh as history gathers power..." p.12
"Surely history consists primarily of speaking and being answered, crying and being heard. If that is true, it means there can be no history in the empire because the cries are never heard and the speaking is never answered. And if the task of prophecy is to empower people to engage in history, then it means evoking cries that expect answers, learning to address them where they will be taken seriously..." the criticism of cry p.13
-Prophetic energizing. In this narrative, 1) energy comes from the embrace of the inscrutable darkness, 2) the LORD makes a distinction between the Egyptians and Israel Exod 11:7 3) "the great Song of the Sea (Exod 15:1-18) & Song of Miriam (Exod 15:21) are the most eloquent, liberating, and liberated songs in Israel. The last energizing reality is a doxology in which the singers focus on this free one and in the act of the song appropriate the freedom of God as their own freedom." p.16
"Prophecy cannot be separated very long from doxology, or it will either wither or become ideology." p.17 The energy of Moses' doxology includes: "The speaking of a new name that redefines all social perception. ......."
"It is only a poem, and we might say rightly that singing a song does not change reality. However, we must not say that with too much conviction. The evocation of an alternative reality consists at least in part in the battle for language and the legitimization of a new rhetoric. The language of the empire is surely the language of managed reality, of production and schedule and market. But that language will never permit or cause freedom because there is no newness in it. Doxology is the ultimate challenge to the language of managed reality, and it alone is the universe of discourse in which energy is possible." "Only where there is doxology can there be justice, for such songs transifgure fear into energy." ep.18
-the Mosaic tradition affirms three things: 1) The alternative life is lived in this very particular historical and historicizing community. 2) This community criticizes and energizes by its special memories that embrace discontinuity and genuine breaks from imperial reality. 3) This community, gathered around the memories, knows it is defined by and is at the disposal of a God who as yet is unco-opted and uncontained by the empire." p.19
II. Royal Consciousness: Countering the Counterculture
"his concern was with the consciousness that undergirded and made such a regime possible."
-Solomon's economics of affluence, oppressive social policy, static religion (accessibility of God, security "He had replaced covenanting with consuming, and all promises had been reduced to tradable commodities. Every such trade-off made real energy less likely." p.33) as the dominant culture against which the prophets are regularly a counterpoint
-"Passion as the capacity and readiness to care, to suffer, to die, and to feel is the enemy of imperial reality." p.35
-It takes little imagination to see ourselves in this same royal tradition.
*Ourselves in an economics of affluence in which we are so well off that pain is not noticed and we can eat our way around it.
*Ourselves in a politics of oppression in which the cries of the marginal are not heard or are dismissed as the noises of kooks and traitors.
*Ourselves in a religion of immanence and accessibility, in which God is so present to us that his abrasiveness, his absence, his banishment are not noticed, and the problem is reduced to psychology. (p.36)
III. Prophetic Criticizing and the Embrace of Pathos
-"The imagination (vision) must come before the implementation." Poetic imagination is the last way left in which to challenge and conflict the dominant reality. ...not the formal aspects of poetry but the substantive issues of alternative prospects that the managed prose around us cannot invent and does not want to permit. "Such an activity requires that in the center of our persons and communities we have not fully embraced the consuming apathy espoused by the royal consciousness. It requires that we have not yet finally given up on the promise spoken over us by the God who is free enough to keep his promises." p.40
-the royal consciousness-apathy, numbness, the absence of pathos (Eccl 1:7-9), "In the language of R. D. Laing, people must simply practice the proper behavior because they are no longer able to experience their own experience." p.41
-numbness about death; we are incapable of facing our own death. denials about endings. "we have no adequate way to relate to death's reality and potential, so we deny it with numbness." A symbol gap in which "we do not have symbols that are deep or strong enough to match the terror of the reality. What takes place when symbols are inadequate and things may not be brought to public expression is that the experience will not be experienced." p.43 "The task of prophetic imagination is to cut through the numbness, to penetrate the self-deception, so that the God of endings is confessed as Lord." p.45 3 tasks: 1) To offer symbols that are adequate to confront the horror and massiveness of the experience that evokes numbness and requires denial. .. to reactivate out of our historical past symbols that always have been vehicles for redemptive honesty e.g. the Exodus symbol. 2) To bring to public expression those very fears and terrors that have been denied so long and suppressed so deeply that we do not know they are there. use the language of metaphor, so that the expression can be touched at many points by different people. 3) To speak metaphorically but concretely about the real deathliness that hovers over us and gnaws within us, and to speak neither in rage nor with cheap grace, but with the candor born of anguish and passion. the deathliness among us introduced in that royal garden of Genesis 2-3, wanting all knowledge and life delivered to our royal management. p.45-46
-Jeremiah as the clearest model for prophetic imagination and ministry. Jeremiah's poetry-ministry of articulated grief.
IV. Prophetic Energizing and the Emergence of Amazement
-"...it is the task of the alternative prophetic community to present an alternative consciousness that can energize the community to fresh forms of faithfulness and vitality." p.59
-"The royal consciousness leads people to despair about the power to move toward new life. It is the task of prophetic imagination and ministry to bring people to engage the promise of newness that is at work in our history with God." pp.59-60
-the royal consciousness militates against hope. For those who are denied entry into prosperity a kind of hopelessness emerges because little or no prospect for change is on the horizon.
-to cut through the despair and to penetrate the dissatisfied coping that seems to have no end or resolution. by: 1) The offering of symbols that are adequate to contradict a situation of hopelessness in which newness is unthinkable. p.63 "the symbols of hope cannot be general and universal but must be those that have been known concretely in this particular history. ... The speech of God is first about an alternative future. ...the real world is the one that has its beginning and dynamic in the promising speech of God" p.64
2) to bring to public expression those very hopes and yearnings that have been denied so long and suppressed so deeply that we no longer know they are there. lyrical. "speech about hope must be primally theological, it must be in the language of covenant between a personal God and a community. Promise belongs to the world of trusting speech and faithful listening. ... It will finally be about God and us, about his faithfulness that vetoes our faithlessness." p.65 we are ordained of God to be people of hope. Puropse "to return the community to its single referent, the sovereign faithfulness of God. ...Only a move from a managed world to a world of spoken and heard faithfulness permits hope." p.66
3) speak metaphorically about hope but concretely about the real newness that comes to us and redefines our situation. p.67
-The language of amazement: "The hope announced is not a nice feeling or a new inner spiritual state. Rather, it is grounded in a radical discernment of Israel's worldly situation. ...the comfort (Isa 40:1-2). New reality, metaphor of enthronement (Isa 40:9-10, 52:7), "Israel is in a new situation where singing is possible again. ...Change resulted from being addressed, called by a name, cared for, recognized, and assured. ...If the lack of singing is an index of exile, then we are in it, for we are a people who scarcely can sing. The prophet makes the hopefulness of singing happen again." & the poet knows well that the inversion to real power happens only by suffering (Isa 49:14-15)
-New song time (Isa 42:10); The funeral is ended, for now it is festival time. ...The energy comes from the song that will sing Yahweh to his throne and Babylon to her grave. As Abraham Heschel has seen, only people in covenant can sing. p.74
-Birth to the Barren (Isa 54:1)
-Isa 40:28-29 vs 30-31: "a critique of every effort to reorganize on our own, and it is a warning about settling in any exile as home." p.78
Dec 13, 2016-Jan 6, 2017.
Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001. (Second Edition)
R: How can I relent control and management & sing a new song of the freedom and hope the Mighty God promised and the salvation in Him? To be free of the economics of affluence, politics of oppression and religion of immanence (praying to God only when I need his help?)
~The problem: -The enculturation of consumerism in our church today: "The internal cause of such enculturation is our loss of identity through the abandonment of the faith tradition. Our consumer culture is organized aganist history. There is a depreciation of memory and a ridicule of hope, which means everything must be held in the now..." p.1
~Hypothesis of the book: "The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us." ...to criticize in dismantling the dominant consciousness/engage in a rejection and delegitimizing of the present ordering of things. "On the other hand, that alternative consciousness to be nurtured serves to energize persons and communities by its promise of another time and situation toward which the community of faith may move." "...to live in fervent anticipation of the newness that God has promised and will surely give." p.3
-"The ministry of Moses...represents a radical break with the social reality of Pharoah's Egypt." p.5
"Prophecy is born precisely in that moment when the emergence of social political reality is so radical and inexplicable that it has nothing less than a theological cause."
-Breaking with (the religion of static) triumphalism and (politics of) oppression (and exploitation):
Moses discloses that Yahweh, the sovereign one who acts in his lordly freedom, is extrapolated from no social reality and is captive to no social perception but acts from his own person toward his own purposes." "At the same time, Moses dismantles the politics of oppression and exploitation by countering it with a politics of justice and compassion." p.6 "the emergence of a new social community in history, a community that has historical body, that had to devise laws, patterns of governance and order, norms of right and wrong, and sanctions of accountability. ...to match the vision of God's freedom." Moses' work "came precisely at the engagement of the religion of God's freedom with the politics of human justice." p.7
"Our sociology is predictably derived from, legitimated by, and reflective of our theology. And if we gather around a static god of order who only guards the interests of the 'haves,' oppression cannot be far behind. Conversely, if a God is disclosed who is free to come and go, free from and even against the regime, free to hear and even answer slave cries, free from all proper goodness as defined by the empire, then it will bear decisively upon sociology because the freedom of God will surface in the brickyards and manifest itself as justice and compassion." "we have split those two items much too easily but not without reason. The liberal tendency has been to care about the politics of justice and compassion but to be largely uninterested in the freedom of God. ...As a result, social radicalism has been like a cut flower without nourishment, without any sanctions deeper than human courage and good intentions. ...the tendency in other quarters to care intensely about God, but uncritically, so that the God of well-being and good order is not understood to be precisely the source of social oppression...The point that prophetic imagination must ponder is that there is no freedom of God without the politics of justice and compassion, and there is no politics of justice and compassion without a religion of the freedom of God." p.8
"The genuine alternative, entrusted to us who bear that calling, is rooted not in social theory or in righteous indignation or in altruism but in the genuine alternative that Yahweh is." p.9
-"Bringing hurt to public expression is an important first step in the dismantling criticism that permits a new reality, theological and social, to emerge. That cry which begins history is acknowledged by Yahweh as history gathers power..." p.12
"Surely history consists primarily of speaking and being answered, crying and being heard. If that is true, it means there can be no history in the empire because the cries are never heard and the speaking is never answered. And if the task of prophecy is to empower people to engage in history, then it means evoking cries that expect answers, learning to address them where they will be taken seriously..." the criticism of cry p.13
-Prophetic energizing. In this narrative, 1) energy comes from the embrace of the inscrutable darkness, 2) the LORD makes a distinction between the Egyptians and Israel Exod 11:7 3) "the great Song of the Sea (Exod 15:1-18) & Song of Miriam (Exod 15:21) are the most eloquent, liberating, and liberated songs in Israel. The last energizing reality is a doxology in which the singers focus on this free one and in the act of the song appropriate the freedom of God as their own freedom." p.16
"Prophecy cannot be separated very long from doxology, or it will either wither or become ideology." p.17 The energy of Moses' doxology includes: "The speaking of a new name that redefines all social perception. ......."
"It is only a poem, and we might say rightly that singing a song does not change reality. However, we must not say that with too much conviction. The evocation of an alternative reality consists at least in part in the battle for language and the legitimization of a new rhetoric. The language of the empire is surely the language of managed reality, of production and schedule and market. But that language will never permit or cause freedom because there is no newness in it. Doxology is the ultimate challenge to the language of managed reality, and it alone is the universe of discourse in which energy is possible." "Only where there is doxology can there be justice, for such songs transifgure fear into energy." ep.18
-the Mosaic tradition affirms three things: 1) The alternative life is lived in this very particular historical and historicizing community. 2) This community criticizes and energizes by its special memories that embrace discontinuity and genuine breaks from imperial reality. 3) This community, gathered around the memories, knows it is defined by and is at the disposal of a God who as yet is unco-opted and uncontained by the empire." p.19
II. Royal Consciousness: Countering the Counterculture
"his concern was with the consciousness that undergirded and made such a regime possible."
-Solomon's economics of affluence, oppressive social policy, static religion (accessibility of God, security "He had replaced covenanting with consuming, and all promises had been reduced to tradable commodities. Every such trade-off made real energy less likely." p.33) as the dominant culture against which the prophets are regularly a counterpoint
-"Passion as the capacity and readiness to care, to suffer, to die, and to feel is the enemy of imperial reality." p.35
-It takes little imagination to see ourselves in this same royal tradition.
*Ourselves in an economics of affluence in which we are so well off that pain is not noticed and we can eat our way around it.
*Ourselves in a politics of oppression in which the cries of the marginal are not heard or are dismissed as the noises of kooks and traitors.
*Ourselves in a religion of immanence and accessibility, in which God is so present to us that his abrasiveness, his absence, his banishment are not noticed, and the problem is reduced to psychology. (p.36)
III. Prophetic Criticizing and the Embrace of Pathos
-"The imagination (vision) must come before the implementation." Poetic imagination is the last way left in which to challenge and conflict the dominant reality. ...not the formal aspects of poetry but the substantive issues of alternative prospects that the managed prose around us cannot invent and does not want to permit. "Such an activity requires that in the center of our persons and communities we have not fully embraced the consuming apathy espoused by the royal consciousness. It requires that we have not yet finally given up on the promise spoken over us by the God who is free enough to keep his promises." p.40
-the royal consciousness-apathy, numbness, the absence of pathos (Eccl 1:7-9), "In the language of R. D. Laing, people must simply practice the proper behavior because they are no longer able to experience their own experience." p.41
-numbness about death; we are incapable of facing our own death. denials about endings. "we have no adequate way to relate to death's reality and potential, so we deny it with numbness." A symbol gap in which "we do not have symbols that are deep or strong enough to match the terror of the reality. What takes place when symbols are inadequate and things may not be brought to public expression is that the experience will not be experienced." p.43 "The task of prophetic imagination is to cut through the numbness, to penetrate the self-deception, so that the God of endings is confessed as Lord." p.45 3 tasks: 1) To offer symbols that are adequate to confront the horror and massiveness of the experience that evokes numbness and requires denial. .. to reactivate out of our historical past symbols that always have been vehicles for redemptive honesty e.g. the Exodus symbol. 2) To bring to public expression those very fears and terrors that have been denied so long and suppressed so deeply that we do not know they are there. use the language of metaphor, so that the expression can be touched at many points by different people. 3) To speak metaphorically but concretely about the real deathliness that hovers over us and gnaws within us, and to speak neither in rage nor with cheap grace, but with the candor born of anguish and passion. the deathliness among us introduced in that royal garden of Genesis 2-3, wanting all knowledge and life delivered to our royal management. p.45-46
-Jeremiah as the clearest model for prophetic imagination and ministry. Jeremiah's poetry-ministry of articulated grief.
IV. Prophetic Energizing and the Emergence of Amazement
-"...it is the task of the alternative prophetic community to present an alternative consciousness that can energize the community to fresh forms of faithfulness and vitality." p.59
-"The royal consciousness leads people to despair about the power to move toward new life. It is the task of prophetic imagination and ministry to bring people to engage the promise of newness that is at work in our history with God." pp.59-60
-the royal consciousness militates against hope. For those who are denied entry into prosperity a kind of hopelessness emerges because little or no prospect for change is on the horizon.
-to cut through the despair and to penetrate the dissatisfied coping that seems to have no end or resolution. by: 1) The offering of symbols that are adequate to contradict a situation of hopelessness in which newness is unthinkable. p.63 "the symbols of hope cannot be general and universal but must be those that have been known concretely in this particular history. ... The speech of God is first about an alternative future. ...the real world is the one that has its beginning and dynamic in the promising speech of God" p.64
2) to bring to public expression those very hopes and yearnings that have been denied so long and suppressed so deeply that we no longer know they are there. lyrical. "speech about hope must be primally theological, it must be in the language of covenant between a personal God and a community. Promise belongs to the world of trusting speech and faithful listening. ... It will finally be about God and us, about his faithfulness that vetoes our faithlessness." p.65 we are ordained of God to be people of hope. Puropse "to return the community to its single referent, the sovereign faithfulness of God. ...Only a move from a managed world to a world of spoken and heard faithfulness permits hope." p.66
3) speak metaphorically about hope but concretely about the real newness that comes to us and redefines our situation. p.67
-The language of amazement: "The hope announced is not a nice feeling or a new inner spiritual state. Rather, it is grounded in a radical discernment of Israel's worldly situation. ...the comfort (Isa 40:1-2). New reality, metaphor of enthronement (Isa 40:9-10, 52:7), "Israel is in a new situation where singing is possible again. ...Change resulted from being addressed, called by a name, cared for, recognized, and assured. ...If the lack of singing is an index of exile, then we are in it, for we are a people who scarcely can sing. The prophet makes the hopefulness of singing happen again." & the poet knows well that the inversion to real power happens only by suffering (Isa 49:14-15)
-New song time (Isa 42:10); The funeral is ended, for now it is festival time. ...The energy comes from the song that will sing Yahweh to his throne and Babylon to her grave. As Abraham Heschel has seen, only people in covenant can sing. p.74
-Birth to the Barren (Isa 54:1)
-Isa 40:28-29 vs 30-31: "a critique of every effort to reorganize on our own, and it is a warning about settling in any exile as home." p.78
Dec 13, 2016-Jan 6, 2017.
Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001. (Second Edition)
R: How can I relent control and management & sing a new song of the freedom and hope the Mighty God promised and the salvation in Him? To be free of the economics of affluence, politics of oppression and religion of immanence (praying to God only when I need his help?)
Thursday, December 8, 2016
2. Gifted Response: The Triune God as the Causative Agency of our Responsive Worship-Dennis Ngien
-"how worship is our participation in God's causative agency... how the creature redeemed by grace is a passive recipient of God's grace that enables our response in worship."
-"It is not incidental that a Greek Father, two Latin doctors, and two Reformers all identify trinitarian agency as central to Christian worship."--foreword by Ralph Del Colle
Introduction:
"Much of the contemporary Church's emphasis on worship has been concerned primarily with what we do in the act of worshipping God. The focus has been on the 'how-to' aspect of worship and the discussion has been largely devoid of theological underpinning." (p. xv)
-Analysis of the theo-logic of worship in the major thinkers of each period.
-The unifying theme: "worship is God's gift, in which we participate. It is primarily God's causative action in us, and secondarily our corresponding response to him, the former being logically prior to the latter." (p. xv)
I. Basil of Caesarea's De Spiritu Sancto: not only is the Spirit the legitimate object of worship, the one who receives our praise, but also the perfector [of our worship], the one through whom worship offered in the Son joins with the heavenly choir of angels." (p. xvi)
II. Anselm's Proslogion: God is "that than which nothing greater can be thought" (the divine superlative) and must be worshipped as such. "The moment of understanding is precisely the moment of doxology."
-rational reflection and meditative prayer-Prayers and Meditations: "to stir up the mind of the reader to the love or fear of God or to self-examination." "Anselm habitually places more emphasis on I-thou encounter with God, without undermining the I-it aspect of knowing God...His intent is to issue a transposition from faith seeking understanding to understanding seeking worship, the latter being his chief end." (pp. 43-44) "the unsurpassable perfection...-demands a fiduciary response that is necessary, natural and proper to a being like God." (p. 44)
-a relationship of wonder, not a friend because of the hidenness of God. Anselm: "The truth is, I am darkened by myself and also dazzled by you. I am clouded by my own smallness and overwhelemed by your immensity; I am restricted by my own narrowness and mastered by your wideness."(p. 46)
-"Just as our knowledge of God is hindered by sin, so it is with our worship. The worshipping experience as ascent to God is rendered ineffectual, unless by the intervening grace of God the 'Re-creator'." (p.46)
-God as the object of faith->object of adoration/delight. John 16:24 not the joy that the Lord has but "a subjective one: the joy that the Lord is." (p.60) "joyous entrance into the superlative fullness" "to know God is to love him; to love him is to enjoy him. The more he knows God the more he loves him; the more he loves him the more he rejoices in him" --enabled through the counsel of the Holy Spirit (p.61).
III. Bernard of Clairvaux's sermons on the Song of Songs: "worship is comprehended in the groom's kiss, which is shared with the bride in the efficacy of the Spirit, the unitive kiss between the Father and Son." [thinking about God in these pictures is quite foreign to me and so I find it difficult to comprehend-unfamiliar concepts...]
-3 kiss: 1. feet (repentance of sin and forgiveness) 2. the hands: liberality bc it gives generously & fortitude imparts the power to persevere and adorn with virtues (contrition, thanksgiving and pious deeds are the 3 ointments of worship by which the bride is anointed, which please the groom." (p. 71) growth in His grace, intimacy
3. mouth-"The kiss that the Bridegroom offers is the gift of the Holy Spirit, by which the bride is drawn into the infinite sweetness or embrace between the Father and the Son." "The Holy Spirit as the Bond of Love" (Augustine in De Trinitate); "the kiss of the kiss (the Spirit)"-for the bride, participated kiss instead of the constitutive kiss, which belongs to God's divine life (intra-Trinity) p.80
-"We learn to accustom ourselves with the gift of redemption and praise God through the merit of the cross, for making possible all intimacy with him." (p. 93)
-meditating on the groom's wound "while the kenotic movement (kissing humanity) of the Son sent by the Father to die constitutes the motive of worship, the ascending movement of Christ's resurrection and ascension is the completion of worship, as the bride reaches 'that holy hiding place, that hidden sanctuary, to look upon the Son in th eFather and the Father in the Son.'" (p.100)
IV. "the theme of worship is ontologically constitutive of Luther's theologia crucis... The creatures, of their own reason and strength, cannot ascend to heaven, obligating God and causing him to be gracoius. Thus..god alone must begin and lay the first stone (grace, we are passive recipients; God is the causative agency of our responsive worship of him)". "our worship reaches the heavenly sanctuary not by means of our response but by Christ's efficacious response (imputed to us through the Holy Spirit.) Worship then is a performative action in which God is both subject and object." (p. xvii)
-the 'performative authority' of the Word of God being preached (p.119) "For Luther, 'to hear God's Word and believe it,' Hughes Oliphant Old writes, 'is the essence of worship.'" (p.121)
-"Because hearing and believing God's Word is worship at its highest, ... God reveals himself in a hidden manner, under the visible, earthly means of creation in order to effect his presence for us." [Lord's Supper] (p.122)
-"True worship is communion with God, which therein includes a humble, reverent, thankful appropriation of his sacramental provision for our need of him." (p.125)
-Christ the Mediator, priestly role, the representative (p.133)
V. Calvin's theology of worship in his Institutes (1559): "Christ's mediation is the theological basis of the believer's active response to God: in his person, in his Name, our worship has access to God." As Basil, the double-movement in worship: "the God-humanwardness, in which God first descends to us in his Son, reveals himself by the Holy Spirit as the object of our worship; and the human-Godwardness, in which the Spirit elevates us to Christ's Ascension, to participate in the incarnate Son's communion with the Father" (p. xvii)
-God is the Giver of all" (p.139)
-"The true knowledge of God is always accompanied by reverential acknowledgement of him in that there is no speech about God without worship." (p.143) to know God and yet not worship him is idolatry, or using our own efforts to worship him is wrong too.
-"Christ's mediation does not derogate human agency, but inspires it." (p.156)
-"A proper theology of worship takes into consideration the two divine movements in Trinity: the God-humanward movement-God from the Father through the Son by the Spirit to us, and conversely, the human-Godward movement - we by the Spirit through the Son to the Father. This is not an ordo essendi, of essence, but an ordo cognoscendi, of experience." (p.162)
7-8 Dec, 2016
Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2008.
-Q: What is 16th century Protestant magisterial theology?
-Meditate on what Lex orandi, lex credendi (prayer and doctrine) means.
-"It is not incidental that a Greek Father, two Latin doctors, and two Reformers all identify trinitarian agency as central to Christian worship."--foreword by Ralph Del Colle
Introduction:
"Much of the contemporary Church's emphasis on worship has been concerned primarily with what we do in the act of worshipping God. The focus has been on the 'how-to' aspect of worship and the discussion has been largely devoid of theological underpinning." (p. xv)
-Analysis of the theo-logic of worship in the major thinkers of each period.
-The unifying theme: "worship is God's gift, in which we participate. It is primarily God's causative action in us, and secondarily our corresponding response to him, the former being logically prior to the latter." (p. xv)
I. Basil of Caesarea's De Spiritu Sancto: not only is the Spirit the legitimate object of worship, the one who receives our praise, but also the perfector [of our worship], the one through whom worship offered in the Son joins with the heavenly choir of angels." (p. xvi)
II. Anselm's Proslogion: God is "that than which nothing greater can be thought" (the divine superlative) and must be worshipped as such. "The moment of understanding is precisely the moment of doxology."
-rational reflection and meditative prayer-Prayers and Meditations: "to stir up the mind of the reader to the love or fear of God or to self-examination." "Anselm habitually places more emphasis on I-thou encounter with God, without undermining the I-it aspect of knowing God...His intent is to issue a transposition from faith seeking understanding to understanding seeking worship, the latter being his chief end." (pp. 43-44) "the unsurpassable perfection...-demands a fiduciary response that is necessary, natural and proper to a being like God." (p. 44)
-a relationship of wonder, not a friend because of the hidenness of God. Anselm: "The truth is, I am darkened by myself and also dazzled by you. I am clouded by my own smallness and overwhelemed by your immensity; I am restricted by my own narrowness and mastered by your wideness."(p. 46)
-"Just as our knowledge of God is hindered by sin, so it is with our worship. The worshipping experience as ascent to God is rendered ineffectual, unless by the intervening grace of God the 'Re-creator'." (p.46)
-God as the object of faith->object of adoration/delight. John 16:24 not the joy that the Lord has but "a subjective one: the joy that the Lord is." (p.60) "joyous entrance into the superlative fullness" "to know God is to love him; to love him is to enjoy him. The more he knows God the more he loves him; the more he loves him the more he rejoices in him" --enabled through the counsel of the Holy Spirit (p.61).
III. Bernard of Clairvaux's sermons on the Song of Songs: "worship is comprehended in the groom's kiss, which is shared with the bride in the efficacy of the Spirit, the unitive kiss between the Father and Son." [thinking about God in these pictures is quite foreign to me and so I find it difficult to comprehend-unfamiliar concepts...]
-3 kiss: 1. feet (repentance of sin and forgiveness) 2. the hands: liberality bc it gives generously & fortitude imparts the power to persevere and adorn with virtues (contrition, thanksgiving and pious deeds are the 3 ointments of worship by which the bride is anointed, which please the groom." (p. 71) growth in His grace, intimacy
3. mouth-"The kiss that the Bridegroom offers is the gift of the Holy Spirit, by which the bride is drawn into the infinite sweetness or embrace between the Father and the Son." "The Holy Spirit as the Bond of Love" (Augustine in De Trinitate); "the kiss of the kiss (the Spirit)"-for the bride, participated kiss instead of the constitutive kiss, which belongs to God's divine life (intra-Trinity) p.80
-"We learn to accustom ourselves with the gift of redemption and praise God through the merit of the cross, for making possible all intimacy with him." (p. 93)
-meditating on the groom's wound "while the kenotic movement (kissing humanity) of the Son sent by the Father to die constitutes the motive of worship, the ascending movement of Christ's resurrection and ascension is the completion of worship, as the bride reaches 'that holy hiding place, that hidden sanctuary, to look upon the Son in th eFather and the Father in the Son.'" (p.100)
IV. "the theme of worship is ontologically constitutive of Luther's theologia crucis... The creatures, of their own reason and strength, cannot ascend to heaven, obligating God and causing him to be gracoius. Thus..god alone must begin and lay the first stone (grace, we are passive recipients; God is the causative agency of our responsive worship of him)". "our worship reaches the heavenly sanctuary not by means of our response but by Christ's efficacious response (imputed to us through the Holy Spirit.) Worship then is a performative action in which God is both subject and object." (p. xvii)
-the 'performative authority' of the Word of God being preached (p.119) "For Luther, 'to hear God's Word and believe it,' Hughes Oliphant Old writes, 'is the essence of worship.'" (p.121)
-"Because hearing and believing God's Word is worship at its highest, ... God reveals himself in a hidden manner, under the visible, earthly means of creation in order to effect his presence for us." [Lord's Supper] (p.122)
-"True worship is communion with God, which therein includes a humble, reverent, thankful appropriation of his sacramental provision for our need of him." (p.125)
-Christ the Mediator, priestly role, the representative (p.133)
V. Calvin's theology of worship in his Institutes (1559): "Christ's mediation is the theological basis of the believer's active response to God: in his person, in his Name, our worship has access to God." As Basil, the double-movement in worship: "the God-humanwardness, in which God first descends to us in his Son, reveals himself by the Holy Spirit as the object of our worship; and the human-Godwardness, in which the Spirit elevates us to Christ's Ascension, to participate in the incarnate Son's communion with the Father" (p. xvii)
-God is the Giver of all" (p.139)
-"The true knowledge of God is always accompanied by reverential acknowledgement of him in that there is no speech about God without worship." (p.143) to know God and yet not worship him is idolatry, or using our own efforts to worship him is wrong too.
-"Christ's mediation does not derogate human agency, but inspires it." (p.156)
-"A proper theology of worship takes into consideration the two divine movements in Trinity: the God-humanward movement-God from the Father through the Son by the Spirit to us, and conversely, the human-Godward movement - we by the Spirit through the Son to the Father. This is not an ordo essendi, of essence, but an ordo cognoscendi, of experience." (p.162)
7-8 Dec, 2016
Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2008.
-Q: What is 16th century Protestant magisterial theology?
-Meditate on what Lex orandi, lex credendi (prayer and doctrine) means.
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