HOARDERS OF LIFE
27/02/24 07:50
Many conservatives are so stuck on maintaining the past that they cannot cope in the present or prepare for the future. We see much of this in current politics. But it has its image in religion. This kind of paralysis comes from fear of change that comes from the fear of losing what you have. Stagnation comes from our clinging onto the old to preserve vested interests. If we are not willing to abandon our pet ideas in favour of the true, we consign ourselves to stagnation and eventual decease.
JOIN LIFE
To attach ourselves to narratives that are true because they are true is to join life and unfolding revelation. To deny truth, to ignore it or suppress it in any way is to head for stagnation and disintegration. Jesus defined the issue when He said, ‘Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them’ Matt 13.2 NIV. Anti-truth societies will eventually implode.
JESUS IS TRUTH AND LIFE
The truth of God is revealed in Jesus Christ who is the truth of who God is and who we are.
Thomas Torrance highlights the conceit of an obscurantist god and a crooked gospel. “What kind of God would we have, then, if Jesus Christ were not the self-revelation or self-communication of God, if God were not inherently and eternally in his own being what the Gospel tells us he is in Jesus Christ? Would 'God' then not be someone who does not care to reveal himself to us? Would it not mean that God has not condescended to impart himself to us in Jesus Christ, and that his love has stopped short of becoming one with us?
It would surely mean that there is no ontological, and therefore no epistemological, connection between the love of Jesus and the love of God - in fact there would be no revelation of the love of God but, on the contrary, something that rather mocks us, for while God is said to manifest his love to us in Jesus. he is not actually that love in himself.” (1) 134 Certainly not that love in Himself when we have morphed Him into a construct of moralism and the law.
HOW TO BELITTLE YOURSELF AND OTHERS
If our gospel is not the Gospel of Jesus, the apostles and the Christian Church our christ is crippled and we are shrunken versions of ourselves. Our agency is dimmed and we have nothing to heal the self or offer the world other than our proprietary version of the knowledge of good and evil. Thus we continue the deceit that caused the fall as if it is life. What we think of as our perspective is nothing more than ‘cunningly devised fables’.
(1) Thomas Torrance. Trinitarian Faith. The Evangelical Theology of the Ancient Catholic Faith.134.
