food for thought: January 2005 Archives
I added the following Torrance quotation to my blog post on January 24th (entitled NT Survey lecture summary):
“In Jesus God Himself descended to the very bottom of our human existence where we are alienated and antagonistic, into the very hell of our godlessness and despair, laying fast hold of us and taking our cursed condition upon himself, in order to embrace us for ever in His reconciling love…The Gospel tells us that at His Baptism Jesus was baptized ‘into repentance’, for as the Lamb of God come to bear our sins He fulfilled that mission…in a way in which He bore our sin and guilt upon His very soul which He made an offering for sin. That is to say, the Baptism with which he was baptized was a Baptism of vicarious repentance for us which He brought to its completion on the Cross where He was stricken and smitten of God for our sakes, by whose stripes we are healed. He had laid hold of us even in the depths of our human soul and mind where we are alienated from God and are at enmity with him, and altered them from within and from below in radical and complete repentance…Sin has been so ingrained into our minds that we are unable to repent and have to repent even of the kind of repentance we bring to God. But Jesus Christ laid hold of us even there in our sinful repentance and turned everything round through His holy vicarious repentance” (Thomas F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ).
"To know this God, who both condescends to share all that we are and makes us share in all that He is in Jesus Christ, is to be lifted up in His Spirit to share in God's own self-knowing and self-loving until we are enabled to apprehend Him in some real measure in Himself beyond anything that we are capable of in ourselves. It is to be lifted out of ourselves, as it were, into God, until we know Him and love Him and enjoy Him in His eternal Reality as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in such a way that the Trinity enters into the fundamental fabric of our thinking of Him and constitutes the basic grammar of our worship and knowledge of the One God" (Thomas F. Torrance, The Ground and Grammar of Theology, p. 155).
“After I finished my lecture Professor Jurgen Moltmann stood up and asked one of his typical questions, both concrete and penetrating, ‘But can you embrace a cetnik?’ It was the winter of 1993. For months now the notorious Serbian fighters called ‘cetnik’ had been sowing desolation in my native country, herding people into concentration camps, raping women, burning down churches, and destroying cities. I had just argued that we must embrace our enemies as God has embraced us in Christ. Can I embrace a cetnik—the ultimate other, so to speak, the evil other? What would justify the embrace? Where would I draw the strength for it? What would it do to my identity as a human being and as a Croat? It took me a while to answer, though I immediately knew what I wanted to say. ‘No, I cannot—but as a follower of Christ I think I should be able to.’
“…My thought was pulled in two different directions by the blood of the innocent crying out to God and by the blood of God’s Lamb offered for the guilty. How does one remain loyal both to the demand of the oppressed for justice and to the gift of forgiveness that the Crucified offered to the perpetrators? I felt caught between two betrayals—the betrayal of the suffering, exploited, and excluded, and the betrayal of the very core of my faith. In a sense even more disturbingly, I felt that my very faith was at odds with itself, divided between the God who delivers the needy and the God who abandons the Crucified, between the demand to bring about justice for the victims and the call to embrace the perpetrator. I knew, of course, of easy ways to resolve this powerful tension. But I also knew that they were easy precisely because they were false. Goaded by the suffering of those caught in vicious cycles of conflict, not only in my native Croatia but around the globe, I went on a journey, whose report I present in this book” (Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation by Volf Miroslav, preface).
I don’t know about you, but I think I am going to purchase and read this book.
On January 6th I posted a quotation that I was planning on using in my January 12th sermon. BBC's president, Jim Jeffrey, gave me the opportunity to introduce a 3-part series (each message by a different Bible faculty member) on personal holiness this first week of school. The title of my January 6th post was "a mere outline of a human being." The title of my sermon was "Personal Holiness: More than a Mere Outline of a Human Being." If you are interested, you can listen to it by downloading the link below (right-c lick and then c lick on "save as" to download).
I found this insightful quotation in preparation for a sermon I am preaching in chapel on January 12th. It is a powerful reminder of my profound need of the gospel.
"All idolatry is not only treacherous but also futile. Human desire, deep and restless and seemingly unfulfillable, keeps stuffing itself with finite goods, but these cannot satisfy. If we try to fill our hearts with anything besides the God of the universe, we find that we are overfed but undernourished, and we find that day by day, week by week, year after year, we are thinning down to a mere outline of a human being" (Cornelius Plantinga, Not the Way It's Suposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin, pp. 122-123).
It reminds me of the words of Bilbo: "I feel thin--sort of stretched like butter scraped over too much bread. I need a holiday, a very long holiday, and I don't expect I shall return. In fact, I mean not to!" I would just change one thing in Bilbo's statement of need: "I need the Gospel, all of it, and I don't mean to stop feeding upon it!"
