Adorno on the totality of individualism

I have been reading through Theodore Adorno's Lectures on an Introduction to Sociology and I really liked these quotes about how our society is united by individualism and competition and how this might possibly be self-destructive. 

“the totality within which we live, and which we can feel in each of our social actions, is conditioned not by a direct ‘togetherness’ encompassing us all, but by the fact that we are essentially divided from each other through the abstract relationship of exchange. It is not only a unity of separate parts, but a unity which is really only constituted through the mechanism of separation and abstraction.” 

“We live within a totality which binds people together only by virtue of their alienation from each other… it is precisely through the insistence on the principium individuationis - in other words, through the fact that within the dominant forms of society individual people seek their individual advantage, profit - that the whole is able to survive and reproduce itself at all - even if while moaning and groaning and at the cost of unspeakable sacrifices….. precisely because the whole or the totality of society maintains itself not on the basis of solidarity or from the standpoint of a comprehensive social subject, but only through the antagonistic interests of human beings, this society of rational exchanges is infected in its constitution and at its very root by a moment of irrationality which threatens to disintegrate it at any moment.” 

Bauman on Love, Commitment and Sacrifice

A few Quotes from Zygmunt Bauman's book "the art of life" about love, commitment and sacrifice:

“By loving we try to recast fate into destiny; but by following the demands of love, the logic or ordo amoris; we make our destiny a hostage to that fate… This is why love tends nowadays to be simultaneously desired and feared. This is also why the idea of a commitment (to another person, to a company of persons, to a cause), and particularly of unconditional and indefinite commitment, has fallen out of popular favor. To the detriment of those who let it lapse - since love, and self-abandonment and commitment to the Other, which is what love consists of, create the only space where the intricate dialectics of destiny and fate can be seriously confronted.” (pg.40)

“ ‘ Sacrificial culture is dead,’ declared Gilles Lipovetsky bluntly in his 1993 postface to his stage-setting 1983 study of contemporary individualism. ‘We've stopped recognizing ourselves in any obligation to live for the sake of something other than ourselves.’ Not that we have turned deaf to our concerns with the misfortunes of other people, or with the sorry state of the planet; nor have we ceased to be outspoken about such worries. Neither is it the case that we’ve stopped declaring our willingness to act in defense of the downtrodden, as well as in protection of the planet they share with us; not that we have stopped acting (at least occasionally) on such declaration.s The opposite seems to be the case: the spectacular rise of egotistic self-referentiality runs paradoxically shoulder to shoulder with a rising sensitivity to human misery, an abhorrence of violence, pain and suffering visited on even the most distant strangers, and regular explosions of focused (remedial) charity. But, as Lipovetsky rightly observes, such moral impulses and outbursts of magnanimity are instances of ‘painless morality’, morality stripped of obligations and executive sanctions, ‘adapted to the Ego-priority’. When it comes to acting ‘for the sake of something other than oneself’, the passions, well-being and physical health of the Ego tend to be both the preliminary and the ultimate considerations; they also tend to set the limits to which we are prepared to go in our readiness to help.As a rule, manifestations of devotion to that ‘something (or someone) other than oneself’, however sincere, ardent and intense, stop short of self-sacrifice. For instance, the dedication to green causes seldom if ever goes as far as adopting an ascetic lifestyle, or even a partial self-denial. Indeed, far from being ready to renounce a lifestyle of consumeristic indulgence, we will often be reluctant to accept even a minor personal inconvenience; the driving force of our indignation tends to be the desire for a superior, safer and more secure consumption.” (pg.41-42) 

“Love, which we need to conclude, abstains from promising an easy road to happiness and meaning. The ‘ pure relationship’ inspired by consumerist practices promises that kind of easy life; but by the same token it renders happiness and meaning hostages to fate. To cut a long story short: love is not something that can be found; not an objet trouve or a ‘ready made’. It is something that always still needs to be made anew and remade daily, hourly; constantly resuscitated, reaffirmed, attended to and cared for. In line with the growing frailty of human bonds, the unpopularity of long-term commitments, the stripping away of ‘duties’ from ‘rights’ and the avoidance of any obligations except the ‘obligations to oneself’, love tends to be viewed as either perfect from the start, or failed- better to be abandoned and replaced by a ‘new and improved’ specimen, hopefully genuinely perfect. Such love is not expected to survive the first minor squabble, let alone the first serious disagreement and confrontation…” (pg.132-133)

“Faith” from Back to Virtue by Peter Kreeft (pg.72-73)

"Faith is first. But what is it? It is not mere belief, or mere trust, though it includes both. Belief is an intellectual matter (I believe the sun will shine tomorrow; I believe I am in good health; I believe the textbooks). Trust is an emotional matter (I trust my psychiatrist, or my surgeon, or my architect). Faith is more. It flows from the heart, the center of the person, the prefunctional root out of which both the intellectual and the emotional branches grow. Faith is the yea-saying of the I, the commitment of the person. 

The object of faith is God, not ideas about God. It is essential to know things about God, but it is more essential to know God. Saint Thomas Aquinas, that most rational (not the same as rationalistic) of theologians, insists that ‘the primary object of the act of faith is not a proposition but a reality’, God himself…. The creedal truths about him are a description of faith, a defining, a statement of structure. The creeds are like accounting books, God is like the actual money. 

Though the root of faith is not intellectual, its fruit is. ‘Faith seeing understanding’, fides quarens intellectum - this was the operative slogan for a thousand years of Christian philosophy. ‘Unless you believe, you will not understand’ - faith first. But ‘in they light we see light’ - understanding follows. How accurately the saints knew God; how mistaken all the unbelieving geniuses were!

Faith is more active than reason. Faith runs ahead of reason. Reason reports, like a camera. Faith takes a stand, like an army. Faith is saying Yes to God’s marriage proposal. Faith is extremely simple. Saying anything ore would probably confuse it. Most of what is written about faith is needlessly complex. The word yes is the simplest word there is. "

Bauchkham on Moltmann's Eschatology

Jurgen Moltmann  is a german reformed theologian at Tubingen who in a way is carrying on the theological legacy of Barth. He is known for his "theology of hope" which centers around resurrection and eschatology. Here are some quotes by Richard Bauckham explaining Jurgen Moltmann’s Eschatology taken from Alister Mcgrath’s Christian Theology Reader (3rd ed. - pg.671-672).

“the eschatological orientation of biblical Christian faith towards the future of the world requires the church to engage with the possibilities for change in the modern world, to promote them against all tendencies to stagnation, and to give them eschatological direction towards the future of the Kingdom of God. The gospel proves relevant and credible today precisely through the eschatological faith that truth lies in the future and proves itself in changing the present int he direction of the future.” 

“Authentic Christian hope is not that purely other-worldly expectation which is resigned to the unalterability of affairs in this world. Rather, because it is hope for the future of the world, its effect is to show present reality to be not yet what it can be and will be. The world is seen as transformable in the direction of the promised future. In this way believers are liberated from accommodation to the status quo and set critically against it. They suffer the contradiction between what is and what is promised. But this critical distance also enables them to seek and activate those present possibilities of world history which lead in the direction of the eschatological future. Thus by arousing active hope the promise creates anticipations of the future kingdom within history. The transcendence of the kingdom itself beyond all its anticipations keeps believers always unreconciled to present conditions, the source of continual new impulses for change.” 

Evelyn Underhill on Prayer

"In the first place, what do we mean by Prayer? Surely just this: the part of our conscious life which is deliberately oriented towards, and exclusively responds to spiritual reality. God is that spiritual reality, and we believe God to be immanent in all things: He is not far from each one of us: for in him we live and move and have our being."

'Prayer' says Walter Hilton, 'is nothing else but an ascending or getting up of the desire of the heart into God by withdrawing it from earthly thoughts." It is ascent says Ruysbroeck, of the Ladder of Love. In the same spirit William Law defines prayer as the rising of the soul out of the vanity of time into the riches of eternity.

It entails, then a going up or out from our ordinary cirlce of earthly interests. Prayer stretches out the tentacles of our consciousness not so much towards that Divine Life which is felt to be enshrined within the striving, changeful world of things; but rather to that 'Eternal turth, ture Love and loved Eternity' wherein the world is felt to be enshrined. 

The whole of a person's life consists in a series of balanced responses to this Transcendent-Immanent Reality. Because we live under two orders, we are at once a citizen of Eternity and of Time. "

Thoughts on Historical Criticism and Fundamentalism and Inconsequential theology/ethics from Resident Aliens

From Resident Aliens:

Historical Criticism and Fundamentalism- two sides of the same coin: 

"Tragically, many of us are trying to preach without scripture and to interpret scripture without the church. Fundamentalist biblical interpretation and higher criticism of the Bible are often two sides of the same coin. The fundamentalist interpreter has roots in the Scottish Common Sense school of philosophy (fundamentalism is such a modernist heresy), which asserted that propositions are accessible to any thinking, rational person. Any rational person ought to be able to see the common sense of the assertion that God created the heavens and the earth. A Christian preacher merely has to assert these propositions, which, because they are true, are understandable to anybody with common sense.
This historical-critical method denies the fundamentalist claim. Scripture, higher-criticism asserts, is the result of a long historical process. One must therefore apply sophisticated rules and tools of historical analysis to a given biblical text, because one cannot understand the text without understanding its true context. Presumably, anybody who applies the correct historical tools will be able to understand the text.
Both the fundamentalist and the higher critic assume that it is possible to understand the biblical text without training, without moral transformation, without the confession and forgiveness that come about within the church. Unconsciously, both means of interpretation try to make everyone religious (that is, able to understand and appropriate scripture) without everyone's being a member of the community for which the Bible is scripture. Perhaps the recent enthusiasm for so-called inductive preaching- preaching that attempts to communicate the gospel indirectly, inductively through stories rather than through logical, deductive reasoning- is an attempt to understand scripture without being in the church. Inductive preaching presents the gospel in a way that enables everyone to "make up his or her own mind." But we suspect that scripture wonders if we have a mind worth making up! Minds worth making up are those with critical intelligence, minds trained to judge the true from the false on the basis of something more substantial than their own, personal subjectivism." (pg.163-164)

Theology and Ethics:

"Not that we are much better off in our seminary courses in theology and ethics. There we are introduced to assorted theories of moral rationality and justification. We debate whether or not a deontological or a teleological ethic is to be preferred; or what is the correct understanding of love and justice. Christian ethics and theology are reduced to intellectual dilemmas, schemes of typology rather than an account of how the church practically discusses what it ought to be. The situation is aggravated as contemporary theologians and ethicists write for other theologians and ethicists rather than for those in ministry. Which helps explain why those in ministry read fewer and fewer books on theology and ethics. It also explains why he have the new discipline of "practical theology," which is supposed to translate academic theology into something usable. Theology, to be Christian, is by definition practical. Either it serves the formation of the church or it is trivial and inconsequential. Preachers are the acid test of theology that would be Christian. Alas, too much theology today seems to have as its goal the convincing of preachers that they are too dumb to understand real theology. Before preachers buy into that assumption, we would like preachers to ask themselves if the problem lies with theologies which have become inconsequential."  (Pg.164-165)

Barth on the church and the word of God

Karl Barth- God Here and Now:

"The sovereignty of the Word of God is always the sovereignty of Jesus Christ. When the Church recognizes in the witness of the prophets and the apostles its own foundation, the source of all wisdom and the norm of its teaching and life; when it dares in obedience, in the exposition and application of this witness, to proclaim God's Word itself; when it baptizes in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit; when it calls men to the Lord's Supper as to the visible proclamation of the death of Jesus Christ and thus to the true spiritual food of His body and blood given for us; and further, when this witness runs and works in the Church itself and in the world; when it awakens to life but also executes justice; when it brings peace but also causes discomfort, struggle, and suffering; when it gives answers but also raises new questions; when men are called out of the world so that they are sent forth again into the same world as sheep among wolves; when the question of the just state is raised by the free gospel in an unavoidable way- then all of that, together and in each of its parts, insofar as it happens in truth and non in mere appearance, all of that is the one sovereign act of the Word of God as it unfolds, reaches out near and far, works directly or indirectly. Always it is He himself, Jesus the Lord, who is acting in all that." (pg.19-20)

Church as Missionary Church

“The Christian church, according to Acts, is a missionary church that responds obediently to Jesus’ commission, acts on Jesus’ behalf in the extension of his ministry, focuses its proclamation of the kingdom of God in its witness to Jesus, is guided and empowered by the selfsame Spirit that directed and supported Jesus’ ministry, and follows a program whose guidelines for outreach have been set by Jesus himself.”

(From NIV Expositor's Commentary on Acts 1:8) 

Augustine on the Two Different Loves

Augustine in his book “On Nature and Grace” (415AD) talks about the two different cultures in this world: secular and celestial: 

“That which animates secular society is the love of self to the point of contempt for God. That which animates divine society is the love of God to the point of contempt for self. The one prides itself on itself, the pride of the other is in the Lord. The one seeks for glory from men, the other counts its consciousness of God as its greatest glory...These desires may therefore be described respectively as greed and love. The one is holy, the other foul; the one social, the other selfish; the one thinks of the common advantage for the sake of the higher association, the other reduces even the common good to a possession of its own for the sake of the selfish ascendancy. The one is subject to, the other a rival to God; the one is peaceful, the other turbulent; the one pacific, the other factious; the one prefers truth to the praises of the foolish, the other is greedy of praise on any terms; the one is friendly, the other envious, the one desires the same for his neighbor as himself, the other to subject his neighbor to himself, the one governs his neighbor in his neighbor’s interest, the other in his own.” 

C.S. Lewis on personality and denying ones self (book excerpt)

Thoughts from C.S. Lewis on denying ourselves from his last pages in Mere Christianity: 

“In that sense our real selves are all waiting for us in Him. It is no good trying to be myself without Him. The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. In fact what I so proudly call ‘Myself’ becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never started and which I cannot stop. What I call ‘My wishes’ becomes merely the desires thrown up by my physical organism or pumped into me by other men’s thoughts or even suggested to me by devils. Eggs and alcohol and a good nights sleep will be the real origins of what I flatter myself by regarding as my own highly personal and discriminating decision to make love to the girl opposite to me in the railway carriage. Propaganda will be the real origin of what I regard as my own personal political ideas. I am not, in my natural state, nearly so much of a person as I like to believe: most of what I call ‘me’ can be very easily explained. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own. At the beginning I said there were Personalities in God. I will go further now. There are no real personalities anywhere else. Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self. Sameness is to be found most among the most natural men, not among those who surrender to Christ. How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints. 

The principle runs through all of life from top to bottom. Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will really be yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with him everything else thrown in.”

Bonhoeffer and Christology

"Teaching about Christ begins in silence. 'Be still, for that is the absolute', writes Kierkegaard. That has nothing to do with the silence of the mystics, who in their dumbness chatter away secretly in their soul by themselves. The silence of the church is silence before the Word. In so far as the Church proclaims the Word, it falls down silently in truth before the inexpressible: In silence I worship the unutterable' (Cyril of Alexandria). The spoken Word is the inexpressible; this unutterable is the Word. 'It must become spoken, it is the great battle cry' (Luther). Although it is cried out by the Church in the world, it remains the inexpressible. To speak of Christ means to keep silent; to keep silent about Christ means to speak. When the Church speaks rightly out of a proper silence, then Christ is proclaimed." 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

 "Christ the Center" 

This is the opening paragraph from the Introduction of Bonhoeffer's christology lectures. I had that tiny but incredibly important book running through my mind as I sat in church this morning. It was not so much the book, as it was the subject of the book: Christology...that was running through my mind. As I thought about why I went to church in a place where I could understand so little of the sermon and all the songs were simply melody without meaning to me because of my lack of knowing the language....the reason came to me: because of Christ, because this is his body and it is good to come and join the body. That alone, is worth it. (However, I do plan to learn the language  to get over the language barrier and be able to communicate better with the body that I meet with every sunday!)

Augustine on Youthful Lust and Marriage

I really enjoyed these thoughts by Augustine from the confessions on youthful lust and marriage. I am blessed to have "found the shore of marriage".

"I did not keep the moderate way of the love of mind to mind- the bright path of friendship. Instead, the mists of passion steamed up out of the puddly concupiscence of the flesh, and the hot imagination of puberty, and they so obscured and overcast my heart that I was unable to distinguish pure affection from unholy desire. Both boiled confusedly within me, and dragged my unstable youth down over the cliffs of unchaste desires and plunged me into a gulf of infamy....I was tossed to and fro, and wasted, and poured out, and I boiled over in my fornications...If only there had been some one to regulate my disorder and turn to my profit the fleeting beauties of the things around me, and to fix a bound to their sweetness, so that the tides of my youth might have spent themselves upon the shore of marriage! Then they might have been tranquilized and satisfied with having children, as they law prescribes, O Lord..."

I love the contrast between the "hot imagination of puberty" and the solid real shores of marriage! I read this from a book called "Readings in Christian Thought" by Hugh T, Kerr. It compiles snippets of writings from throughout church history, and I believe this one is compiled from both the confessions and "enchiridion". The ending paragraph is also worth quoting...a biting revelation of the disgustingness of sin:

"Such was my heart, O God, such was my heart- which thou didst pity even in that bottomless pit. Behold, now let my heart confess to thee what it was seeking there, when I was being gratuitously wanton, having no inducement to evil but the evil itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved my own undoing. I loved my error- not that for which I erred but the error itself. A depraved soul, falling away from security in thee to destruction in itself seeking nothing from the shameful deed but shame itself."

Alleluia the song of the desert; Merton on the dread and awe of the christian life

"The climate in which monastic prayer flowers is that of the desert, where the comfort of man is absent, where the secure routines of man's city offer no support, and where prayer must be sustained by God in the purity of faith. Even though he may live in a community, the monk is bound to explore the inner waste of his own being as a solitary. The word of God which is his comfort is also his distress. The liturgy, which is his joy and which reveals to him the glory of God, cannot fill a heart that has not previously been humbled and emptied by dread. Alleluia is the song of the desert

The christian is never merely an isolated individual. He is a member of the praising community, the people of God. Alleluia is the vicotrious acclamation of the Risen Saviour. Yet the people of God itself, while celebrating the praise of the Lord in a tabernale of beuty overshadowed by the Bright Cloud of his presence, is still on a pilgramage. We acclaim God as members of a community that has been blessed and saved and is traveling to meet him as he comes in his promised Advent. Yet as individuals we know ourselves to be sinners. The prayer of the monk is dictated by this twofold consciousness of sin and redemption, wrath and mercy- as is the prayer of every christian."

-Thomas Merton
from "Contemplative Prayer"

Tradition

"Tradition, like Scripture, is not  made holy by being carved into stone, but rather by being interpreted within a community, by being the heart of the community’s relationship to God and the world.  Tradition is thus alive and constantly relating to the world, not written in stone and frozen in some past understanding.  For St. Paul Tradition is dynamic, creative, vivifying and renewing and keeps people focused on the goal – where God is leading us to, not the past and where we were.   Tradition is not the ship’s anchor, but its sail.   It consists not of repeating past teachings, but of interpreting God’s Word for the current generation."

-FR. Ted