doubt
Nick Owchar reviews Sarah Sentilles' Breaking Up With God: A Love Story:
"I believed in a male God," she writes, early in the book. "I loved him. I needed him. Sometimes he was gentle and kind. Sometimes he frightened me."Like many, she started with a child's Sunday-school version of God — the kindly man watching our lives through a hole in the clouds. "Breaking Up With God" describes her childhood in New Jersey and Texas, her beginnings as a Catholic and her quest to shed that juvenile version of God during years of academic achievement and distinction at Yale and Harvard, and explores her loneliness and self-esteem issues. She also spends time in Southern California as a teacher in Compton in the Teach for America program (see her 2005 book "Taught by America") and as a member of All Saints Church in Pasadena, where she discovers a loving, welcoming community. They treat her like a little sister or a daughter, showing her love in the smallest of gestures:
"People knew what was going on in my life. They prayed for me, prayed for my students, let me cry, brought me soup when I had the flu, sent me home with hot toddies after night meetings when I had a sore throat… I belonged.… When the priest dismissed the congregation at the end of a church service one Sunday she said, 'We are home,' and I knew it was true."
They're also the ones who tell her that she has spiritual gifts and should consider entering the Episcopal priesthood. She does.
"Other twenty-three-year-olds I knew didn't want to be priests, and that was, at least in part, why I chose the vocation," she says with brutal honesty. "Wanting to be a priest marked me as different, and being different felt like being chosen."
But it doesn't work out. Sentilles struggles too much with the judgment in so many people's attitudes toward faith and God, especially self-proclaimed God-fearing people who use religion to attack other people's sexuality and lifestyles. As an apprentice pastor she learns that no one wants to hear provocative political talk from the pulpit even though, she says, "faith and politics weren't separate for me … I went to divinity school … because I thought churches could help make the world more just and life-giving for everyone." After struggling with an Episcopalian discernment committee helping her make a decision about her vocation, she calls it quits.
via latimes.com.
the little red book
Mao Tse-Tung's "Little Red Book" is the closest thing to a bible that Marxist-Leninist, materialist and atheist Chinese society can have. By some estimates, five billion copies of The Thoughts of Chairman Mao were published during its heyday, the Cultural Revolution, that violent period of ideological fervour in the 1960s and 1970s. But questions have now been raised about whether the Great Helmsman actually wrote it himself, or got a ghost writer to do it for him.
The book of quotations from communist China's founding father Chairman Mao Tse-tung, was a must-have in the days when Red Guards roamed the streets looking for any signs of ideological wavering. It was also the revolutionary tome of choice for every western Marxist-Leninist hipster on university campuses. Pithy and strident aphorisms such as, "it is the duty of the cadres and the Party to serve the people. Without the people's interests constantly at heart, their work is useless," helped to establish a cult of personality around Mao Tse-tung so powerful that the current leadership of China is still trying to shake it off.
But lately there has been a flurry of online rumours that some of Mao's writings were not written by Mao himself, but by his secretary Hu Qiaomu...
via The Independent.
church dogmatics I/1
Barth's outline:
The Doctrine of the Word of GodIntroduction
§ 1. The Task of Dogmatics § 2. The Task of Prolegomena to Dogmatics
Chapter I. The Word as the Criterion of Dogmatics
§3. Church Proclamation as the Material of Dogmatics §4. The Word of God in its Threefold Form §5. The Nature of the Word of God §6. The Knowability of the Word of God §7. The Word of God, Dogma & Dogmatics
Chapter II. The Revelation of God
Part I. The Triune God
§8. God in His Revelation §9. The Triunity of God §10. God the Father §11. God the Son §12. God the Holy Spirit
My bits of Barth:
April 29, 2011 [9]
April 30, 2011 [3]
May 1, 2011 [14]
May 2, 2011 [21]
May 3, 2011 [1]
May 4, 2011 [19]
May 5, 2011 [4]
May 6, 2011 [35]
bits of barth
"What has to happen in order that the proclamation of the church may be the Word of God...has already happened" http://goo.gl/XUjJU
"of God it is impossible to speak… if we speak of Him, we are no longer speaking of Him" http://goo.gl/8fYbW
"if [we] are dependent on prayer, undoubtedly [we] are also dependent on serious & honest work"
"Christian preaching is speaking about God in the name of Jesus Christ"
"is not the Church completely lost if the grace of the Word of God is not at all points mightier than the weakness of man?"
the danger of wanting the Word of God without God, bringing it under our power & understanding: http://t.co/Zm4w2pl
truth, beauty & heresy : t.co/1xejVdi
"as though man has to make the Word of God powerful by the weight of his own will..." t.co/hIBmVn2
"though their doctrine is imperiled by their errors, it does not exclude them from the one Church which is ours." t.co/VLTwLri
"the ghosts of the true Church of the past may lead the Church astray no less than the spirits of the present" t.co/2qpeEsG
"for it is an honour & a joy, an inner necessity & a gracious privilege to serve & therefore to teach the Word of God"
the word for the day
Barth, CD I/2, p.842:
... [we] exclude the possibility of a romantic dogmatics, a dogmatics which does not start honestly from the Church of the present day, but goes back more or less successfully to the past and critically or uncritically tries to think and speak from the standpoint of a past century of the Church. Now it is implied in what we have defined as its confessional attitude that dogmatics has to think and speak in constant contact with the history of the Church, in the unity of the Church of all time. But this does not mean that it must pretend to be a primitive Christian dogmatics or one belonging to the 4th or 16th or 17th century, though if it did, in many respects it would no doubt be more imposing, profound and pious, more rich in content, than if tried to be simply a modern dogmatics speaking in and to the Church of the present. If we think we can meet the needs of the contemporary generation by retiring to the secure ground of a better epoch of the past, and engaging in a process of excavating and rehabilitating, we may obtain the specious results which can always be obtained when ghosts are conjured. But we must add that the Church is not edified by magic of this kind, and that therefore dogmatics must divest itself of romantic as of every other form of magic. The ghosts even of the true Church of the past may lead the Church astray and into temptation no less than the spirits of the present.
How perfectly put!
locating barth
Barth, CD I/2, pp.829-832:
In this sense, and corresponding to our own direction into the Church, we have marked off the Evangelical Church as the Church of Jesus Christ from the three heresies: Neo-Protestantism, which at almost every point resembles the Evangelical Church in organization and administration but is essentially alien to it in spirit; Roman Catholicism; and the Eastern Orthodox Churches. But even when Neo-Protestantism is strictly excluded as foreign to it, as in this discussion, it is obvious that the Evangelical Church is not a unity. At least three great forms are to be distinguished in it. And to some extent they have distinguished themselves with the same definiteness as if it were a question of an opposition between the Church and one of the heretical sects. These are the Lutheran, the Reformed and the Anglican branches of the Evangelical Church. Let us admit at once that when we speak of the Evangelical Church and therefore of the Church generally in this presentation of dogmatics we mean the Evangelical Reformed Church, in conformity with our own Church position, and the fathers and the dogma to which we owe loyalty in obedience to the Word of God until we are led by that same Word to something better...Even within the Evangelical Church we have only the one choice, which is no choice. A false choice jeopardizes the whole character of dogmatics as Church dogmatics. We must take upon ourselves a necessary opposition to other types of Evangelical dogmatics. We cannot practice indifferently Anglican, Lutheran or Reformed dogmatics, but only Reformed dogmatics. By this we mean the dogmatics of the particular Church which was purified and reconstituted by the work of Calvin and the confession which sealed his testimony.
As Reformed thinkers, it is impossible for us to say of the Anglican and Lutheran Church, as we do of the Roman Catholic Church, that in them also there is a Church; we must say of them what in view of their doctrine may seem strange and difficult to approve, that in another form they are the one Church of Jesus Christ just as much as is the Reformed Church. The grounds of objection and division are not heresies but specific errors, specific theological notions, badly, misleadingly, erroneously and arbitrarily construed, of a type which may easily arise within the Reformed Confession itself without necessitating disruption...
What we feel is that, though their doctrine is imperiled by what we consider their errors, it does not exclude them from the one Church which is ours.
Well, then. All clear now?
ecclesiastical earnestness
Barth, CD I/2, p. 808:
...there exists in the Church, before heresy arises... the possibility that a false moralistic earnestness will dominate proclamation, as though it is man's affair whether it is victorious or defeated, as though man has to make the Word of God powerful by the weight of his own will, as though it lies in man's hands to compel decisions about it. When this is the case, the Church strengthens itself to serve the Word of God, as though it is a matter of the organization and running of a business, or the instituting and carrying through of a great law-suit, or the deployment and operations of an army... it is impossible to handle the truth this way. As a rule, this kind of ecclesiastical earnestness involves a trimmed and therefore a truncated version of the truth. It may not be guilty of actual heresy, but it presupposes a deviation which sooner or later will lead to heresy.