Silent as light
At the church gathering we were part of this week, we sang the old hymn "Immortal, Invisible." Two lines especially struck me ... "silent as light" and "'tis only the splendor of light hideth thee."
I remember hearing Dallas Willard preach many years ago on 1 John 1:5: "This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you ..."
How would you complete that sentence? With one of the ancient creeds? With the four spiritual laws? With a doctrine like justification by grace through faith, or penal substitutionary atonement? With the anti-imperial message of the gospels, or the inclusion of the other?
Here's how 1 John 1:5 completes the sentence: "This is the message ... God is light; and in God there is no darkness at all."
God is light ... silent, but powerful ... bright, but often invisible until it reflects off something else ... and even when visible, containing spectra beyond our ability to see ... sometimes so bright that we are blinded by it ... light that is literally - directly or indirectly - the source and support of all life on earth ... an absolute in this universe of relativity ... a mystery to us, even as it is the reality by which we see everything we see.
0 Comments1 Minutes
Worship and Justice … Jeremy del Rio and Louis Carlo get it right
Jeremy del Rio and Louis Carlo have a beautiful and needed article on worship and justice available here.
0 Comments1 Minute
Lengthy post on Christianity and Islam …
The physical part of the Ramadan fast is getting easier at this halfway point, and so my attention is shifting from making it through another afternoon to the spiritual lessons this experience offers me. For me, that means learning more of what it means to be a peacemaker between two faith communities. From both the vehemence of the negative responses I've received and the heartfelt appreciation in the positive responses, it's clearer to me than ever that this issue needs to be addressed. I felt it again Wednesday night, when I had a wonderful conversation with nine sharp young adults who have to varying degrees dropped out of church and Christian faith, and the question of pluralism was one of the most pressing questions on their minds. (By the way, all of the questions we discussed were included in the "big ten" I'll be addressing in my upcoming book - that was encouraging to see.)
I have been tremendously surprised by ...
(More after the jump ...)
0 Comments14 Minutes
God and/of evolution …
Sister Joan Chittister writes a provocative reflection on God and evolution, and on the God of evolution, here. (Thanks Mike Todd!) There are strong resonances between what Joan is saying and what my upcoming book explores. Most of us grew up learning about the God of Laws, the God who made sense in Sir Isaac Newton's mechanistic universe. (Nothing expressed this contextualization better than the little booklet "Four Spiritual Laws," which could have been called "Four Spiritual Mechanisms.") Now, we are struggling to imagine a bigger God, a God who makes sense in the evolutionary universe of Darwin, Einstein, LeMaitre, Hubble, Heisenberg, and Kuhn ... Here's how Joan expresses it ...
(after the jump)
0 Comments3 Minutes