People who believe in God but don’t believe that creation is teleologically imbued essentially believe in a dumb God, likely a God who merely exists to serve their own purposes. 

Teleology has a troublesome way of pushing back on our disordered desires, and I suspect that this is largely the reason we don’t, and in some instances can’t, see what is there.

As the dawn breaks on Holy Saturday two things come to mind…

Though Adam named all the animals and all creation, he did not name himself.

There are things in your soul that cannot be named for they alone belong to God.

I wonder if the foundational debate undergirding most if not all debates happening in our culture right now is about the definition of freedom: of whether freedom is to pursue one’s proper end, or whether it’s about denying there is a proper end so that one can pursue whatever they want.

A weird and sad expression of my fallenness is the fact that though I am far, far less holy than God is, I am also more judgmental.

I am learning that a critical key to spiritual growth is the realization that your sin is worse than you imagine and that God’s grace is greater than you imagine.

If we’re going to reflect upon the promises and pitfalls of Capitalism in light of the Gospel, we’re going to have distinguish the Hand of God from the Invisible Hand. To distill and paraphrase Catholic Social Teaching recently renewed in the words of Pope Francis, society must not serve markets, markets must serve the common good.

I and the church I belong to are complying with the government’s request that non-essential gatherings discontinue until the end of March, but it has me wondering at what point I should perhaps not continue to comply. I say this because I was a bit alarmed at how readily church gatherings were placed in the non-essential category. I get that I am wading into contested ecclesiological waters (belief about the nature of the church), but there are a number of us who have been living in the tension between the call to obey the authorities, and the call to not forsake the gathering of the brethren. When push comes to shove, I know I must obey God rather than men, but it’s not always clear when the civil authorities are placing Christians in a dichotomy where they have to choose.

Before continuing to develop this tension, I want to clarify that I believe our leaders should be respected, and it should be acknowledged that they are making hard decisions. Along with this, the call from leadership to restrict large gatherings, due to the threat of Covid 19, aligns with the biblical call to love our neighbors, which complicates the tension. But, having made these qualifications, I want to express my concern because gathering for worship is not merely a community event of people who happen to have the same religious beliefs. It is a metaphysical moment when the Body of Christ is made corporate at the local level, because it is the gracious encounter wherein the people of God are renewed and reconstituted through hearing God’s word publicly read, hearing the Word preached, and receiving the body and blood of Christ through Communion. As far as I understand, according to the Scriptures and the Tradition of Faith, gathering for worship is an essential part of Christian existence, and failure to do so, particularly in an ongoing sustained manner, is a practical capitulation to Gnosticism (a belief in the insignificance of matter, and corporate realities) which is a belief the church fought hard against in its early years, and this matters because Gnosticism denies the very essence of Christian faith (God fully becoming human, the significance of Jesus bodily offering himself on the cross, the significance of the resurrection). Connecting all this to ecclesiology, a people scattered, even if connected via media platforms, does not proclaim in word and deed that the resurrected Christ is Lord.

One implication of the Son of God being born as one of us is that the fullness of God was present in the undeveloped state of a baby, which further means that the fullness of God can be present in all those places where we remain undeveloped.

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“For that which He has not assumed He has not healed; but that which is united to His Godhead is also saved.” -St. Gregory of Nazianzus

Anyone remember the evangelism trope, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life?” I’ll be honest, I don’t know if this is coming from the snarky part of me or not, but I was thinking that a better presentation would be “God loves you and wants to kill you…  and raise you up in his Son, and outside of that all your plans are going to perish!”

Should I start making some tracts???

The purpose of grace is to not make you better but to make you His. A person who is a wretch but who rushes to meet God in his wretchedness is far better than a “righteous” person who manages well enough without God. We were made for intimacy, not for righteousness. Righteousness matters, but as the fruit of intimacy, for through the cross God has embraced our wretchedness and made it the path by which we come to intimately know his gracious work meeting us in the broken, twisted, and resistant contours of our soul. It seems to me that inverting the relationship of intimacy and righteousness is the root problem of religion, and the essence of much that impairs the Church’s witness and ministry to the world.