Status Updates From Beyond Tragedy: Essays on t...

"Repentance does not accuse life or God but accuses self. In that self-accusation lies the beginning of hope and salvation. If the defect lies in us and not in the character of life, life is not hopeless. If we can only weep for ourselves as men we need not weep for ourselves as man." -Reinhold Niebuhr, Beyond Tragedy, (1937), pg. 168.

"David's problem was: How can a man involved in the conflicts of life build a temple to a God who transcends those conflicts and who judges the sins involved in our highest values?"

"But sex may also become the perverse centre of human interest and the source of disharmonies, unknown in animal behavior." O RLY? This from a man who waited to marry till he was almost 40? He seems to have read Freud though, which would give him lots of options.

Even without judgment in history, "The Christian faith is centered in one who was born in a manger and died on a cross." Why the return to incarnation and cross here? I know why I'd do it that is, but does N mean the same thing?

"God's ultimate judgment upon the mighty is also a periodic judgment in history." Thesis of this ch. When will Nietzsche come back in?

"History is nature; and in nature the strong devour the weak and the shrewd take advantage of the simple. But human history is more than nature. It is a realm of freedom where the inequalities of nature are accentuated by human imagination until they become intolerable and destroy themselves. Thus the ultimate religious judgments ... are always momentarily defied with impunity, but ultimately validated in history."

Use of Nietzsche on Xty as resentment. Shallow reading I think. Must check against Barth or Volf.

"Mankind does not destroy the law of life by violating it. It operates in history, if in no other way by destroying those who violate it. ... The pattern of life is not corrupted by historic existence but in historic existence. Thus the Kingdom of God must come in history. "Yet when it comes, it is the end of history. ... History presents a problem which points beyond history." Awesome.

Discussion of monastics. "The ascetic is a parasite on the sins of his fellowmen"-- ouch! But if not self-righteous, can be a testimony to the new law. Nothing about prayer in this description, oddly.

"The righteousness of the Kingdom of God stands above [relative justice] and condemns it. Without the acceptance of that judgment, that is, without repentance, there is no entrance into the Kingdom of God." Pretty low bar for repentance.

"The implication is that human nature has deviated from the law of its existence, that man is estranged from his essential nature." This is imprecise but possibly correct. Go on.

"The suffering servant does not impose goodness upon the world by his power. Rather he suffers, being powerless, from the injustices of the powerful." Preach!