Read The Fathers

Here is a great find on the inter webs, http://readthefathers.org, a blog that has put together a reading plan of the church fathers. It is a 7-year plan through the patristics while reading 7 pages a day at most, it started with Clement of Rome and over three years has gotten to Jerome.

I signed up for the daily email on the blog and am really enjoying getting an email from them everyday with a link to the reading for that day. They also do a few things other than the daily reading, like blogs on different figures in the church.

Anyways, check it out, its a really great resource.

“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. "

Timothy George on Karl Barth as a "church theologian"

I enjoyed this article by Timothy George on Karl Barth. The whole article is good and worth reading, I especially enjoyed the beginning note about Harvey Cox smuggling Barth's Dogmatics into the Soviet Union. Below is an excerpt from the article about Barth as a "church theologian": 

"Karl Barth was a churchly theologian. What does this mean? In the first place, it refers to the fact that, unlike the majority of professional theologians, both in his day and in ours, Barth did not possess an earned doctorate. This was obviously not from any lack of scholarly ability on his part, but rather from his prior decision to pursue pastoral ministry rather than an academic career. For twelve years Barth served as a pastor, first as a pastoral assistant at a German-speaking congregation in Geneva and then as pastor of the Swiss Reformed Church in Safenwil, a small industrial town in the Aargau. Barth’s distinctive theology emerged out of his pastoral struggles. What does the preacher say to the waiting congregation every Sunday morning? How dare he say anything at all? This tension between the preacher’s duty to speak for God, on behalf of God, and the enormous presumption, indeed the impossibility, of doing so is at the very root of Barth’s theological discovery. He once put it like this: “We ought to speak of God. We are human, however, and so cannot speak of God. We ought therefore to recognize both our obligation and our inability and by that very recognition give God the glory.”
Barth’s theological training in the great liberal tradition of Schleiermacher, Ritschl, Harnack, and Hermann had not prepared him to deal with this dilemma, nor had his immersion in the Swiss version of the social gospel movement, an involvement which earned him the title “red pastor” for a while. Barth was haunted by the question King Zedekiah posed to Jeremiah long ago: “Is there any word from the Lord?” (Jer. 37:17). This question, which is every preacher’s question, propelled Barth back to the Holy Scriptures, where he discovered a new orientation for preaching and a new basis for theology.

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.” 

Discussion about Christianity in Politics

 I really enjoyed this Discussion between Greg Boyd, Chuck Colson and Shane Claiborne about christianity in politics and find it very relevant with the 2016 election approaching.

Slow Reading

In the past I have practiced speed reading and greatly benefited from it. Besides increasing my reading speed about 3 times my beginning rate it has also taught me is to be a disciplined, focused reader with goals for how I read. But recently I have come across another style of reading and one that is just as important of a skill as speed reading : SLOW READING. 

The below two resources, an MP3 from regent summer program and an article from…., describe what I mean by “slow reading”. What I mean by slow reading is: meditative, reflective, thoughtful, critical reading. In the 21st century their are copious amount of written material in the form of blogs, published books, articles, tweets, etc., that can end up being superfluous and overwhelming. Speed reading is certainly helpful when dealing with so much information; but “slow reading” is also important. This looks like setting aside time to not just devour a book, but to slowly read and take stops to contemplate, write questions in the margins, respond in prayer, formulate a discussion question and talk about it… etc. Don’t just read alot, read well! Read in a way that shapes you, that gets deep into your inner man and allows the words to become powerful. 

Slow-reading is reminiscent of the ancient practice of “lectio divina” and fits well in the stream of the biblical tradition that places a high value on the spoken and written word. God created through speaking, gave man the role of “naming” animals, sin and pride divided languages at Babel, when Israel needed to be warned and restored God said prophets to speak the prophetic word, Christ is the incarnate word of God, the gospel as a verbal proclamation has the power to raise people from death to life, early church ministry was built on “word-based ministry” of preaching, teaching, prophesying, evangelizing (Eph.4), throughout all church history the people of God have read the book of God and still today discuss the depths and riches of meaning in the text that have not been completely mined for thousands of years. SO… the christian tradition is a tradition that values spoken and written word, we as christians should be good readers… both fast and slow! 

Here is a good talk on “slow reading”, it describes its importance as well as gives a small insightful history of reading: https://soundcloud.com/regencollege/deep-reading

Here is an article on Slow Reading: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jul/15/slow-reading

Notes on N.T.Wrights Christian Origin series vol.1-3 by Andrew Perriman

In a Previous post I mentioned Andrew Perriman's notes on N.T. Wright's Christian Origin Series. I struggled to post a pdf of them last time, but was able to now. Here they are below. And the link to the original as well as some other good resources by Perriman is: http://www.postost.net/2003/09/christian-origins-and-question-god