Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘biblical reflection’

self-restraint: Proverbs 29

Posted in textures, tagged , , on December 10, 2008| Leave a Comment »

It is almost impossible to overvalue self-restraint. This is particularly true of the spoken word. When in doubt, a quiet pause is almost always a good idea. To think rather than speak right now is rarely a mistake.

Proverbs 29.20 gets at the matter from the negative side:

Do you see someone who is hasty in speech?
There is more hope for a fool than for anyone like that.

Not often is ‘hope for a fool’ the more likely of two outcomes. So does the proverb-teller underscore the disastrous path of what Seinfeld might have called the ‘fast-talker’.

It’s odd that creatures with an organ of speech planted right in the middle of our faces should inhabit an environment where using it is more often than not a bad idea. The Proverbs bear a second burden, that of teaching us to speak well. But before we can accomplish that, we must be taught to say less.

Read Full Post »

two I’s: Revelation 1

Posted in textures, tagged , , on December 9, 2008| Leave a Comment »

Rarely does the identity of a drama’s principal players come so clearly stated. At the beginning of the apocalyptic scroll that we call John’s Revelation, both the Lord God and the work’s human author declare themselves. It is a most pregnant juxtaposition:

‘I am the Alpha and the Omega,’ says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty. I, John, your brother who share with you in Jesus the persecution and the kingdom and the patient endurance, was on the island called Patmos because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.

The Lord God declares himself earlier and later than all reality that is knowable from our human perspective. He is its antecedent and its epilogue. There is no seeing beyond him, no shape or substance outside of him and his creative will. He has no shelf date, no competitor in the race of time.

This is conventional stuff, though hardly superficial. Faith in one God is capable of absorbing these statements without violence to its tissue, although the knowing of God in the flow of time will absorb all the energy, conviction, and life of those who determine to know him here. (more…)

Read Full Post »

refusing reduction: Jude

Posted in textures, tagged , , on December 8, 2008| Leave a Comment »

It is the nature of pragmatism to reduce the task to a single thing. Whether this be ‘to save souls’ or ‘to plant churches’ or to ‘show compassion’, the allure of reductionism is—like the poor—seemingly always with us.

It is perhaps most important for those who strive to be ‘biblical’ and who find an identity marker in the urgent purity of their faith to pause over the multifaceted nature of the task as the biblical materials themselves present. (more…)

Read Full Post »

unmovable: Psalm 125

Posted in textures, tagged , , on December 6, 2008| 3 Comments »

Often considered one of the soft qualities of personality and character, trust does not immediately associate itself with sturdiness. The iconic self-made man of the American psyche trusts no one but himself. By definition self-reliant, he does not attach his fortune to the reliability of anyone else.

Not so the life of YHWH’s people. Here a different logic holds sway. The very reliability of YHWH establishes a baseline of sturdiness for those who choose to entrust their lot to his character:

Those who trust in the LORD are like Mount Zion,
which cannot be moved, but abides forever.
As the mountains surround Jerusalem,
so the LORD surrounds his people,
from this time on and forevermore. (Psalm 125:1-2 NRSV)

Geographical strongholds stand in as metaphor for YHWH’s existential bedrock. Those who anchor themselves to this most sturdy Protector will themselves be unshakable. A soft quality becomes, in paradox, the hardest.

Read Full Post »

love’s unreason: Hosea 3

Posted in textures, tagged , , on December 5, 2008| Leave a Comment »

The Bible wastes little time attempting to uncover the reason YHWH loves his renegade Israel or Christ loves his deeply flawed church. Time and again its pages stake the claim that the audacity and perseverance of such ardour defies logic. At the very least it outpaces any reason to which human beings have direct access. (more…)

Read Full Post »

great expectation: Daniel 7

Posted in textures, tagged , , on November 30, 2008| Leave a Comment »

The remarkable vision of the book of Daniel involved a lot of giving and receiving. This redemptive-historical passing of the baton occurs with regard to great pagan kings who must learn that their dominion has been given to them, the stripping of imperial privilege from one pretender after another and its deliverance into the hands of a successor, and the Ancient of Days’ deliverance of a power that was apparently his to claim from the start into the possession of ‘one like a son of man’. (more…)

Read Full Post »

MapQuest for the harassed: Psalm 119

Posted in textures, tagged , , on November 27, 2008| Leave a Comment »

Poetry often speaks as clearly by its form as by the words it employs. In such cases, structure trumps sound. This is particularly the case when self-selected rigidities of form limit the poet’s options. In such moments, he can do and must do only what he he has chosen to do.

Take the ‘acrostic psalms’. These unnatural compositions shackle themselves to a letter of the Hebrew alphabet, imposing upon the poetic spirit the requirement that it begin the next eight lines of verse with the equivalent of say, ‘c’ or ‘d’ or ‘e’. Like an athlete training with repeated forty-yard sprints even though he knows he’ll never perform exactly that movement after the whistle blows and the frenzy begins, the poet hones his muscles with an acrostic psalm. He finds out what he can do and, in the meantime, discovers facets of reality that the normal, more liquid course of life simply does not throw up. (more…)

Read Full Post »

be afraid: Proverbs 28

Posted in textures, tagged , , on November 25, 2008| 2 Comments »

The naked cut and thrust of the biblical proverbs is sometimes too much for the pious soul to take. Given to brevity rather than to elaboration, these aphorisms often claim that the truth lies right over there rather than describe the meandering path and the two or three streams that will need to be traversed before one can safely rest one’s tired feet in that place. Such literature is not easy going for the reader who must have everything spelled out. Exhaustive surveys of the moral landscape escape the priority list of the biblical proverbialist. He has no time for nuance and is not bothered by the danger of hurt feelings. He counts on his readers knowing that some truths are best risked as absolutes. (more…)

Read Full Post »

precious mettle: 1 Peter 1

Posted in textures, tagged , , on November 22, 2008| Leave a Comment »

The heat and burning of fire comprise an inconveniently common motif in the biblical literature. Some of the best and worst things that happen are mediated by that flame which destroys or purifies.

The Petrine literature, with its tilt towards apocalyptic and its extreme sobriety, is particularly fond of such imagery. Peter is convinced, like the prophets Isaiah and Zechariah before him, that fire can be a very good thing indeed. Good, even very good, but always unpleasant for the time of its burning:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who are being protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. In this you rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials, so that the genuineness of your faith—being more precious than gold that, though perishable, is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed

The remarkable conceptual medley that makes of such an opening doxology the very stuff of life as it is worked out in the non-idyllic life of Christian believers, joins the Lord’s keeping of his newborn children to the reality that their faith will even within God’s own design be tested by fire. Close inspection suggests that Peter is not confused or undisciplined in his merger of two motifs that lesser souls might choose to keep remote one from another. Rather, he has understood that protective divine love is purposeful, determined, and resolute. It is not, however, cuddly.

C.S. Lewis, in his The Problem of Pain, taught us to anticipate that a God who genuinely loves humankind will not settle for the object of his affections wallowing or stagnating in its decrepit and mediocre stagnation. He will love it until it becomes something better.

So comes fire.

.

Read Full Post »

choosing sadness: James 4

Posted in textures, tagged , , on November 20, 2008| Leave a Comment »

A modest tributary to the stream of biblical wisdom carries the thought that it is proper to choose mourning over celebration. The funeral home is, at moments, a more wisely chosen venue than the dance hall. Sadness, sometimes, produces when rejoicing has become an amiable pickpocket, slapping backs and telling jokes while relieving us of our substance. (more…)

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »