bits of barth
Barth CD I/2 10:13 am
"the virgin birth at the opening & the empty tomb at the close... bear witness that this life... is marked off from all the rest"
"[the church] is not created, formed & introduced by individual men on their own initiative, authority & insight"
"in face of such a church [man initiated] we... must appeal to the free grace of God to be made blessed outside of it"
"a church of that description is not the Church but the work of sin, of apostasy in the Church"
"with God all things are possible, and with us at least very many" barthian humor?
"the revelation of God in its subjective reality [is] the existence of men who have been led by God himself to a certain conviction"
"the work of the Holy Spirit is that our blind eyes are opened &... in thankful self-surrender we recognize & acknowledge it: Amen"
Barth is either impossibly narrow or impossibly broad. can't yet figure it out. no worries, still have 8000p left. all in good time.
maybe that's where wisdom lies. in the tension between impossibly narrow & impossibly broad. or the harmony thereof. Paul, anyone?
"when we ask how a man comes to hear the Word of God, to believe in Christ... at once we must turn and point to the inconceivable..."
"the Word creates the fact that we hear the Word. Jesus Christ creates the fact that we believe in Jesus Christ"
"true preaching from the Holy Spirit will not consist in pointing to our own or other men's seizure, but to the divine seizing"
bits of barth
Barth CD I/2 12:10 pm
"what in the OT (the expectation) was God's covenant with man, is here in the NT (the fulfillment) God's becoming man"
"To the protest of the Synagogue we can and must reply unreservedly that God's becoming man is the goal of the Old Testament"
"...there ceases to exist in the NT the manifold and multiform office of men of God, the instruments of the covenant"
"the whole problem of the OT is compressed into the twofold question as to why it goes so ill with this people, & why it is so evil"
"it is only because Jesus lives that His cross is the sign under which His Church marches"
"against the whole unending burden... stand the words: it is finished"
"in the most artless possible way all the NT Easter narratives fail to supply... an account of the resurrection itself"
"not a line of the real NT can be properly understood unless it is read as ... the witness to hope"
"Christ is always He who stands at the door and knocks, & faith is always the decision in which a man opens to Him that He may enter"
"as Christians and theologians we do not reject the description of Mary as the 'mother of God'..."
"Mariology is an excrescence, i.e., a diseased construct of theological thought. Excrescences must be excised"
salman khan
In an undistinguished ranch house off the main freeway of Silicon Valley, in a converted walk-in closet filled with a few hundred dollars' worth of video equipment and bookshelves and his toddler's red Elmo underfoot, is the epicenter of the educational earthquake that has captivated Gates and others. It is here that Salman Khan produces online lessons on math, science, and a range of other subjects that have made him a web sensation.
via CNN.
Like so many entrepreneurial epiphanies, Khan's came by accident. Born and raised in New Orleans -- the son of immigrants from India and what's now Bangladesh -- Khan was long an academic star. With his MBA from Harvard, he has three degrees from MIT: a BS in math and a BS and a master's in electrical engineering and computer science. He also was the president of his MIT class and did volunteer teaching in nearby Brookline for talented children, as well as developed software to teach children with ADHD. What he doesn't know he picks up from endless reading and cogitation: His gift, like that of many teachers, is being able to reduce the complex. "Part of the beauty of what he does is his consistency," says Gates. Of Khan's capacity to teach, Gates, who says he spends considerable time trying to help his three kids learn the basics of math and science, tells Fortune, "I kind of envy him."
Micah & I are thoroughly enjoying Sal's pedagogy. He makes the basics crystal clear. In any field, gaining a deeply intuitive feel for the fundamentals is everything - the complexities are only impossibly or confusingly complex when the fundamentals aren't really understood. And teaching the basics well is very difficult - I myself haven't the patience or ability. And so, I'm incredibly grateful for Sal.
Micah says: this is simply not fair - he's making school-stuff exciting and fun!
calm violence
He put away the rage, though. He locked it up. He decided that he would be a more effective tool of punishment if he did not speak the rage inside him, did not attempt to describe it, to verbalize the rage itself. Bin Laden never ranted or raved as other men of great violence do. The speeches of Adolf Hitler are always a touching point. Hitler would whip himself into a frenzy as he spoke, driving himself into heights of outrage that spilled over and into the audience. The point was to unleash those demons of violence in himself and therefore let everyone listening know that they, too, could unleash those demons. Hitler wanted to sculpt a German public that was comfortable with the angry and dark passions of violence. He wanted them to feel that rage was appropriate and that the actions resulting from rage were the natural next step. Hitler never found it difficult to express his rage. He gloried in expressing it. He lived to express it. He became one of the acknowledged masters of expressing rage.
Osama bin Laden went the opposite route. His was the calm and deliberate side of violence.
via The Smart Set.
For comparison, here's a bit from Hitler at Nuremberg.
in search of gladness
Tony Woodlief in Image:
It’s a galling irony that I am frequently asked to speak to young people, to tell them something about life, and what I have learned in mine, and what they should therefore go and do with theirs.It is an irony because my life feels like a slow-moving disaster, and most nights all I can hope is that if the second half doesn’t bring redemption, perhaps it will bring something different than what I have lived thus far.
I don’t tell them this, because young people don’t want to hear about your mistakes, other than the salacious details. Our mistakes are usually more interesting to us, and they don’t help anyone anyway; mostly we each commit our sins thinking we are doing right, or that we can’t bear for another second whatever it is that’s crushing us. What good is someone’s else’s cautionary tale in the face of false virtue or aching hunger?
via Andrew Sullivan.
So I warn them that while I have hopes for them, my greatest hope is that they can live better lives than I.
Then I direct them to the words of Frederick Buechner.
I love Fred. More than once, when I’d thought too long about where I could go to put my 9 mm in my mouth, how I might arrange it so my children wouldn’t be the ones to find the corpse, it was Buechner’s words that assuaged my impulse to self-destruction.
Buechner, who found the body of his own father, a suicide. Sweet, tortured Buechner, the minister who does not preach in a church, but in pages.
The particular words of Buechner’s to which I direct them concern vocation. What he says is that our vocation is that place where our deep gladness meets the world’s great hunger. “In a world where there is so much drudgery, so much grief, so much emptiness and fear and pain, our gladness in our work is as much needed as we ourselves need to be glad.”
These are scandalous notions, that we need to be glad, that the world needs our gladness. Our Puritan forbears were certainly suspicious of gladness, and their modern, secular inheritors of grimness—professors and politicians and preachers—demand not gladness, but utility.
Finally:
Do you know what brings you gladness?
It would be a pity to reach the end of this life not having known, not having stretched out our hands toward the gladness for which we were surely crafted. But it’s a frightening thing, to look fully at our work and relationships and amusements, to gauge whether they bring us true gladness, or just momentary respite from fear, from hurt, from regret.
So here’s my offer to you, dear stranger: I’ll look if you look.
And may we each have the courage to embrace what is good for us, what draws us nearer to ourselves and to God, no matter from what it draws us away. Because if we don’t find our gladness, and pursue it to the deep-running needs of this world, how will our children ever know to do the same?
I just returned from a bike ride with Micah. That makes me glad, every time.