John Shelby Spong
John Shelby Spong is dead. If he had been an intelligent man, he would have developed more coherent and logical arguments against the Christian faith; if he had been a charitable man, he would have refrained from attempting to destroy the faith of Christians; if he had been an honest man, he would have resigned his orders fifty years or more ago. May God have mercy on his soul.
scholars
A scholar can never become a philosopher; for even Kant was unable to do so but, the inborn pressure of his genius notwithstanding, remained to the end as it were in a chrysalis stage. He who thinks that in saying this I am doing Kant an injustice does not know what a philosopher is, namely not merely a great thinker but also a real human being; and when did a scholar ever become a real human being? He who lets concepts, opinions, past events, books, step between himself and things – he, that is to say, who is in the broadest sense born for history – will never have an immediate perception of things and will never be an immediately perceived thing himself; but both these conditions belong together in the philosopher, because most of the instruction he receives he has to acquire out of himself and because he serves himself as a reflection and brief abstract of the whole world. If a man perceives himself by means of the opinions of others, it is no wonder if he sees in himself nothing but the opinions of others! And that is how scholars are, live and see.
— Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as Educator”
On the one hand, your noble and essential work is being mocked. On the other hand, it’s being mocked by illiterate Nazis.
a church in crisis
First-century Athens, Greece, was just as intellectually averse to Christianity as twenty-first-century Athens, Georgia – and far more sexually “liberated” too. And the gospel went forth and the churches grew. The problem now is not that people think the church’s way of life is too demanding, too morally rigorous, but that they have come to think the church doesn’t believe its own moral teachings. The problem is not that they reject the idea that God could send anyone to hell but that, when they see the church covering up predatory behavior in its institutions, they have evidence that the church believes God would not send “our kind of people” to hell.
If people reject the church because they reject Jesus and the gospel, we should be saddened but not surprised. But what happens when people reject the church because they think we reject Jesus and the gospel? People have always left the church because they want to gratify the flesh, but what happens when people leave because they believe the church exists to gratify the flesh – in orgies of sex or anger or materialism? That’s a far different problem. What if people don’t leave the church because they disapprove of Jesus, but because they’ve read the Bible and have come to the conclusion that the church itself would disapprove of Jesus? That’s a crisis.
For those of us who would love to see genuine Christian renewal in America — and not just people deciding to call themselves “evangelical” because they support Donald Trump — Russell Moore’s voice is an absolutely essential one.
Last week I read Kate Shellnutt’s long and carefully reported piece on the conflicts at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, and afterwards something was vaguely nagging at my mind. After reading Russell Moore’s essay I finally figured out what it is: The entire controversy at BBC is essentially a struggle about which group gets to rebuke another group. People are fighting at church over their right to rebuke their sisters and brothers.
Why does the American church today “disapprove of Jesus”? There are many reasons, but I think the essential one, the one from which everything else flows, is this: Jesus tells us to worry about our own moral and spiritual condition rather than that of our neighbor. He tells me to attend to the log in my own eye before I worry about the speck in someone else’s. If my neighbor abuses me, I am to pray for him and bless him. Rather than thanking God that I am not like that [black person, homosexual, Trump supporter] over there, I am to pray “Lord have mercy on me a sinner.”
When Christians begin to obey, or just begin trying to obey, Jesus in these matters, then we’ll have taken the first and essential step towards restoring our legitimacy. But until we take the commandments of Jesus seriously, why should we expect anyone else to?
When you’re teaching Thomas Aquinas and are trying to fill in the theological background, you need a big board. (I misspelled homoousios, but oh well.)
Envoy
repeat old incantations of humanity fables and legends
because this is how you will attain the good you will not attain
repeat great words repeat them stubbornly
like those crossing the desert who perished in the sand
— "The Envoy of Mr. Cogito" by Zbigniew Herbert