Status Updates From The Church in Dark Times: U...

Definitions of spiritual abuse are helpful

I like the explanation of Job, but not sure what it has to do with ideology.

Finally getting into some modern issues

Very theoretical, philosophical as opposed to studying the word of God or modern issues in the church. Since Driscoll is no longer with Mars Hill and has done a whole lot of new crazy stuff, this feels outdated & irrelevant. Also I’m not connecting with the Hannah Arrent stuff. It’s 20% in and I don’t know why he keeps talking about her

“Arendt is describing a private realm that is insulated from the seduction of the social. It requires us to remember that our appearances in the world, regardless of how significant or laudatory they may be, are merely that – appearances and not who we truly are. Keeping that distinction is essential if we are to maintain our consciences and morality.“ p. 154

“What the church needs is to practice anti-ideology. It needs to reject the premises of comprehensibility and certainty and display a healthy skepticism of “world-changing” ambition. This posture resists cynicism on one hand, believing that there is always reason to hope, and resists grandiosity on the other, believing that we are always at the mercy of God, uncertainty, and complexity.” P. 131-132

“To be a moral actor in dark times, then, one doesn’t need superior intellect or superhuman strength; one simply needs to protect their capacity to think. This means resisting the seductive logic of ideology, being skeptical of a movement’s meaning-making stories, and above all rejecting the idea that the consensus of others should compel us to suspend our capacity to judge.” P. 123

It’s not enough to say that ordinary men and women can do terrible things…these terrible things are actually transformed in the moral universe of the Nazis into a positive good. The wholesale murder of an entire race was an act of liberation, and as such, murder became part of the state’s everyday operations. Eichmann [had been] recruited… because of his rootlessness, mediocrity, and lack of purpose. P. 115

“Job’s friends… took a single idea (justice) and distorted the rest of their moral universe to conform to it. Their version of God was a tyrant… like every ideology, this provides an explanation and a pattern with which one can make sense of the chaos and unpredictability of life. Embracing it allowed them to create a psychological distance between themselves and Job’s suffering.” p. 81