Tom

“Having written some pages in favor of Jesus, I receive a solemn communication crediting me with the possession of a “theology” by which I acquire the strange dignity of being wrong forever or forever right. Have I gauged exactly enough the weights of sins? Have I found too much of the Hereafter in the Here? Or the other way around? Have I found too much pleasure, too much beauty and goodness, in this our unreturning world? O Lord, please forgive any smidgen of such distinctions I may have still in my mind. I meant to leave them all behind a long time ago. If I’m a theologian I am one to the extent I have learned to duck when the small, haughty doctrines fly overhead, dropping their loads of whitewash at random on the faces of those who look toward Heaven. Look down, look down, and save your soul by honester dirt, that receives with a lordly indifference this off-fall of the air. Christmas night and Easter morning are this soil’s only laws. The depth and volume of the waters of baptism, the true taxonomy of sins, the field marks of those most surely saved, God’s own only interpretation of the Scripture: these would be causes of eternal amusement, could we forget how we have hated one another, how vilified and hurt and killed one another, bloodying the world, by means of such questions, wrongly asked, never to be rightly answered, but asked and wrongly answered, hour after hour, day after day, year after year—such is my belief—in Hell.”
― Wendell Berry, This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems

“While touting radical difference from mainline Protestantism, evangelical Protestantism strikingly parallels mainline Protestantism. In a way, both liberal and conservative modes of American religion are the same tune but played in strikingly different ways. Both evangelicals and mainliners accentuate the subjective dimension of religion. Both seek a therapeutic Jesus, who can heal my psychological pain, in order to issue a socially transformative Christ. For the political right, this Christ liberates an agenda that supports stability for the traditional family but license for the economy (even when that economy is indifferent to the traditional family’s well-being). For the political left, this Christ liberates an agenda that promotes diversity in family structures but seeks to tame an economy run amok.”
― Mark Mattes, Law & Gospel In Action: Foundations, Ethics, Church

“In order to put to death our works and the [old] Adam, God hangs around our necks many unpleasant burdens that make us angry, much suffering that tries our patience, and finally death and the world’s contempt. By doing these things, God is simply trying to expunge our anger, impatience, and turmoil and replace them with his work, that is, with his peace. As Isaiah says in chapter 28: “God undertakes a strange work” in order to arrive at his proper work.q What does this mean? He means that God sends us suffering and turmoil in order to teach us patience and peace. God permits us to die in order to make us alive until each person is so peaceful and quiet that it does not matter whether things go well or poorly, whether one lives or dies, is honored or dishonored. At that point, God alone dwells there and human works are no more. This is what it means to keep the Sabbath rest and make it holy in the right way. Here there is no human control, delight, or sorrow at all. Instead, God alone leads each human being, and nothing is present but divine delight, joy, and peace along with all the other works and virtues.”
― Martin Luther, A Treatise on Good Works

“Over time, the active verbs of the Shema-recite,
walk, talk, lie down, rise, bind, fix, write, all in the service of love-become too much for us to imagine, let alone perform.
Our search for superpowers has created many of the most pressing problems of our time.

The defining mental activity of our time is scrolling
Our capacities of attention, memory, and concentration are diminishing; to compensate, we toggle back and forth between infinite feeds of news, posts, images, episodes - taking shallow hits of trivia, humor, and outrage to make up for the depths of learning, joy, and genuine lament
that now feel beyond our reach.

The defining illness of our time is metabolic syndrome, the chronic combination of high weight, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and high blood sugar that is the hallmark of an inactive life. Our strength is atrophying and our waistline expanding, and to compensate, we turn to the superpowers of the supermarket with the aisles of salt and fat convincing our bodies’ reward systems, one bite at a time, that we have never been better in our life.

The defining emotional challenge of our time is anxiety, the fear of what might be instead of the courageous pursuit of what could be. Once, we lived with allness of heart, with a boldness of quest that was too in love with the good to call off the pursuit when we encountered risk. Now we live as voyeurs, pursuing shadowy vestiges of what we desire from behind the one-way mirror of a screen, invulnerable but alone.

And, of course, the soul is the plane of human ex-
istence that our technological age neglects most of all. Jesus asked whether it was worth gaining the whole world at the cost of losing one's soul. But in the era of superpowers, we have not only lost a great deal of our souls-we have lost much of the world as well. We are rarely overwhelmed by wind or rain or snow. We rarely see, let alone name, the stars. We have lost the sense that we are both at home and on a pilgrimage in the vast, mysterious cosmos, anchored in a rich reality beyond ourselves. We have lost our souls without even gaining the world.

So it is no wonder that the defining condition of our time is a sense of loneliness and alienation.

For if human flourishing requires us to love with all
our hearts, souls, minds, and strength, what happens
When nothing in our lives develops those capacities? With what, exactly, will we love?”
― Andy Crouch, The Life We're Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World