St. Boniface House

“‘Having said this he breathed his last.’ Dead. Jesus is dead…We are told in John 1:18 that without the Son no one can see the Father. Von Balthasar, therefore, reminds us ‘when the Son, the Word of the Father is dead, then no one can see God, hear of him or attain him. And this day exists, when the Son is dead, and the Father, accordingly, inaccessible.’ This is the terror, the silence of the Father, to which Jesus has committed himself, this is why he cried the cry of abandonment. He has commended himself to the Father so he might undergo the dark night of death. Jesus commends himself to the Father, becoming for us all that is contrary to God.”

     –Stanley Hauerwas, Cross-Shattered Christ: Meditations on the Seven Last Words, 97.

“We take comfort…that we are citizens fo the greatest, most powerful nation in the history of the world. Doing so, we are tempted to support exercises of American might and wealth that may be unjust but are assumed to be necessary to secure our nation’s power.  To be a citizen of such a nation at least suggests our lives will not be forgotten. When the history of history is written, America, like Rome, cannot be forgotten; as Americans we will have a place in history. Is it any wonder that a people so formed believe that what is happening in this man Jesus’ life is something about our significance? Is it any wonder that we find the lean and gaunt account of the life and crucifixion of Christ so unsatisfying?”

     –Stanley Hauerwas, Cross-Shattered Christ: Meditations on the Seven Last Words, 41-42.

“Is it any wonder we find Good Friday so shattering? On this day and with these words, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing,” all our presumptions about God and the salvation wrought by God are rendered presumptuous. Moreover, that is how we discover that what happens on the cross really is about us, but the ‘what’ that is about us challenges our presumptions about what kind of salvation we need. Through the cross of Christ we are drawn into the mystery of the Trinity. This is God’s work on our behalf. We are made members of a kingdom governed by a politics of forgiveness and redemption. The world is offered an alternative unimaginable by our sin-determined fantasies.”

     –Stanley Hauerwas, Cross-Shattered Christ: Meditations on the Seven Last Words, 31.

“I believe with all my heart that the constant temptation to betray the gospel, a temptation amply displayed by the history of the church, cannot be resisted in our day by Christians trying to imitate the false humility of tolerance. Rather, the only resource for Christians to resist the ideological distortions of our faith–distortions all the more tempting because to be ’self-servingly dramatic’ seems a better alternative than to be boring–is our faith in the God to whom Christ prays on the cross.”

     –Stanley Hauerwas, Cross-Shattered Christ: Meditations on the Seven Last Words, 19.

Here’s another home run by Douglas Jones.

“What is the purpose of the holy cleansing of confession, if not to unload the weight of sin, and the remorse it involves, into the very bosom of our Lord, obtaining with absolution a new and airy lightness of soul, such as to make us forget the body tormented by wickedness?”

–Adso, in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose

One of the dumb people around Douglas Wilson writes an excellent post here.  It’s, well, refreshing, to see someone who rejects the Christian left’s “interfaith” pluralism and the idolatry of the Christian right.

 Also, he’s my long lost twin brother, or so they tell me up in Moscow.

I have a fruit tree in my back yard. I don’t want it to get too attached to the soil, though, so I don’t give it any water or fertilizer. Instead of just pruning it, I cut off all its branches. Also, I let the weeds grow around it.  Then when the weeds take over and the tree shrivels up and dies, I call that “fruit”.

“Theological thinking can and ought to grip a man like a passion.  But passionate devotion means a way of thinking and speaking which all too consistently is borrowed from the circles in which a person has just been moving…

“You can see that the young theologian has by no means grown up to these doctrines [i.e. 'the problems of the Trinity'] in his own spiritual development, even if he understands intellectually rather well the logic of the system…

“Therefore it is evident how and where, given such a state of affairs, serious crises must arise. There is a hiatus between the arena of the young theologian’s actual spiritual growth and what he already knows intellectually about this arena. So to speak, he has been fitted, like a country boy, with breeches that are too big, into which he must still grown up…Meanwhile, they hang loosely around his body, and this ludicrous sight of course is not beautiful…

“Some truth or other has not been ‘passed through’ as a primary experience, but ahs been replaced by ‘perception’ of the literary or intellectual deposit of what another’s primary experience…has discovered.  Thus one lives at second hand. But because this kind of perception of another’s religiosity or spirituality can be extremely lively and even passionate, it is easy to lapse into auto-suggestion, as if a person had experienced and passed through all that himself.  He lapses into an illegitimate identification with the other.  It is possible to be thoroughly bewitched intellectually by the mighty thoughts of the young Luther [for example] and then to lapse into the illusion that what is ‘understood’ in this way and makes such an impression is genuine faith.  In reality, it is only a case of perception and of being victimized by the seduction of conceptual experience.  In his own life, the young man is not that far along! Young theologians manifest certain trumped-up intellectual effects which actually amount to nothing.

“Speaking figuratively, the study of theology often produces overgrown youths whose internal organs have not correspondingly developed.  This is a characteristic of adolescence. There is actually something like theological puberty.  Every teacher knows that this is a matter of signs of natural growth over which there is no reason to become excited. Churches must also understand it and must have it explained to them in every possible way.

“It is a mistake for anyone who is just in this stage to appear before the church as a teacher.  He has outgrown the naivete with which in young people’s work he might by all means have taken thsi part.  He has not yet come to that maturity which would permit him to absorb into his own life and reproduce out of the freshness of his own personal faith the things which he imagines intellectually and which are accessible to him through reflection.  We must have patience here and be able to wait. For the reasons I have mentioned I do not tolerate sermons by first-semester young theological students swaddled in their gowns. One ought to be able to keep still. During the period when the voice is changing we do not sing, and during this formative period in the life of the theological student he does not preach.”

–Helmut Thielicke, A Little Exercise for Young Theologians, pp. 9-12

I saw the craziest thing the other day. I have a fruit tree in my back yard. You will not believe what I saw happen. I saw one branch of my fruit tree take a set of pruning shears, and cut itself off my fruit tree. Then (it gets wilder!) I saw another branch from another tree cut itself off, walk over to my fruit tree, and graft itself in. Wow! It’s a good thing, too, because I wanted that very thing to happen. I just didn’t feel right about doing it myself.