In response to the statement that “If God’s presence was fully with us then surely the evil and alienation and suffering would end.”
That depends on what “fully” means. Does it mean “concretely,” “observably,” “manifestly,” etc.? Does it mean “deeply,” “intimately,” or “in the heart”? Does it mean “transformationally”? “Gloriously”? “Victoriously”? “Ubiquitously”? Something else?
If we are using quantitative metaphors (fully, partially) to talk about how concretely or manifestly God is present, then no, God being fully present doesn’t mean the end of the old order. It doesn’t get any more concrete and manifest than the incarnation—one could literally see, hear, and touch God in Jesus—and that did not bring the old order to its end.
If we are describing God’s presence with quantitative metaphors as a way to discuss how he relates to us, then once again, no. The Holy… more
In reply to this post by Michael Raburn regarding international aid to Africa:
Very interesting. One of the points the author makes, regarding the debilitating effects of governmental corruption, gets close to what appears to be the heart of all this problem, but doesn’t quite state it. It is this: most everything that is “wrong” in the “developing world” is the result of the imposition of culturally alien standards and structures onto these people and their societies. At the most abstract level, the very notion that they are “developing” is a (patronizing) imposition of Western values onto other cultures; their societies and economies don’t work like our industrialized and urbanized ones do, so they are “behind” us on The One, True, Universal Scale of Human Development. But what if we were to think of these cultures and their corresponding socioeconomic structures as simply… more
Maria:
Jon, my learned friend, do humans not come from spirit in your books… or is it from a terrible void that we arise… and is the robe of our genetics, animated solely by matter devoid of our eternal spirits or are our eternal spirits housed in the robe of our humanity?
Jon:
We are entirely both material and spiritual. Our origin lies in the act of God, creator of both heaven and earth, who formed us of both spirit and matter to be the image of God’s own being. Matter and spirit are not two different planes of existence, but one, single, unified reality. Rocks, angels, trees, demons, animals and humans are all part of one cosmos. Spirit cannot be reduced to matter, nor matter dismissed as illusion or whatever. Neither can they be separated. And as with the cosmos, so also with humans. We are utterly material and utterly spiritual. We are not merely spirits clothed… more
The Wesleyan quadrilateral is great. However, it needs a very important nuance (one which Frank has already pointed to). We do not have epistemologically unmediated access to any of the four elements. We can’t just access Scripture, but only our interpretations of Scripture. We can’t just access the tradition, but only our interpretations of the tradition, We can’t simply access even our experience, for it, too, is always already interpreted by the time we access it; even reason is not directly accessible, for what we have access to is always our interpretation of what is reasonable and how to reason. This is important, for it means that everything involved in our attempts to know and understand anything are always only provisional interpretations, and therefore never settled.
Communal discernment, interpretation, and learning are our best ways to help make our knowledge as… more
