Ash Wednesday

It’s 10:22pm on Ash Wednesday, and Lent hasn’t got off to a flying start. Shrove Tuesday was a black day indeed. Jen was very distressed—the cause is immaterial—and instead of giving the sympathy and support she might expect, I opened the cranky valve and vented, loudly and at length.

One nurses a grievance so that it can grow big and strong, and one day strike out on its own in the wide world. On that day one experiences a momentary surge of delight; the righteous release of pent-up bile in a welter of abandonment. Then the sanity comes flooding back in. Does this sound familiar? Continue reading “Ash Wednesday”

The Gestalt of Faith

I suppose there are those who come to the faith gradually; upon whom it steals up and like a rising tide claims more and more of the territory of the soul by imperceptible increments. Presumably, such people’s sensibility is attuned to Christianity, but its tines have not been struck just so. It’s not surprising that there would be many such. We live in the decline of Christian societies, and move among the neglected monuments of Christian culture, morality, law, philosophy, theology and the science that studied the rational and good works of God, rational and good. Theirs is not the situation I wish to discuss. Continue reading “The Gestalt of Faith”

Bultmann: The Problem 2. Obsolete Mythology

This is a follow-on from my previous post. It looks at the subsection that follows from the summary view of the NT as mythology. I urge you to read this subsection in its entirety in Kerygma and Myth. I will summarise it here, but it is such an unreasonable and unreasoning series of assertions that you may want to verify that this is, indeed, what Bultmann wrote. Continue reading “Bultmann: The Problem 2. Obsolete Mythology”

Bultmann: The Problem 1. The Myths

As mentioned in a previous post, Kerygma and Myth contains the text of Bultmann’s New Testament and Myth in the first two parts authored by Bultmann. I will look at the first of those, The Mythological Element in the Message of the NewTestament and the Problem of its Re-interpretation Part I. That document is further subdivided by Bultmann into

Part I: The Task of Demythologizing the New Testament Proclamation
A. The Problem

Continue reading “Bultmann: The Problem 1. The Myths”

Candy Glass

I watched the last twenty minutes or so of the movie Ratatouille with a four year old boy the other night, doing my shift while his parents were having dinner with us. The animation was very good, and the visual syntax was varied, dramatic and assured. They sure know how to make animated movies nowadays.

One scene that struck me was when the girl, having walked out of the restaurant with all but one of the staff, for reasons I could not fathom due to ongoing discussions with the four year old, is stopped in traffic on her motorbike, and looks to the side at something which invokes remorse at her leaving. The lanes of traffic on either side of her drive off, with her sitting on the bike, and the traffic held up behind her. (It loses in translation.) Another is the previous scene when the staff walk out of the kitchen, and we have a rat’s eye view of the feet and legs in regulation black and white checks as they tramp out. Continue reading “Candy Glass”

Bultmann, Kerygma and Myth

This is a handshake introduction to an extremely influential work: Kerygma and Myth by Rudolf Bultmann and Five Critics. The work was originally published in Germany in 1948; the original English translation appeared in 1953.

The first two parts of the piece reproduce Bultmann’s 1941 paper, translated as New Testament and Mythology. The paper is most easily accessible in the Kerygma and Myth collection, and it is accompanied by some useful commentary. Continue reading “Bultmann, Kerygma and Myth”

Memo: The Faith of Scientists

I have just read this in Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (towards the end of  XII. The Resolution of Revolutions):

The man who embraces a new paradigm at an early stage must often do so in defiance of the evidence provided by problem-solving. He must, that is, have faith that the new paradigm will succeed with the many large problems that confront it, knowing only that the older paradigm has failed with a few. A decision of that kind can only be made on faith.

 More later.

God’s Metaphors

The Shroud of Turin is an object subject to a great deal of devotion and a great deal of controversy. Many believe it to be the shroud in which Jesus was buried. While it’s provenance is not known before 1349, it is a relic that will not go away. For every study that definitively determines it is of European medieval origin, another is published to establish that it is not.

My purpose is not to discuss the likelihood that the shroud is or is not genuine.  Let us assume for the moment that it is an accurate picture of the kind of crucifixion that Jesus suffered.  My interest is in the position of the wounds on the back of the hands of the the figure; more precisely, in the position of the wounds on the back of the wrists of the figure. Continue reading “God’s Metaphors”

The Scale of God

The cosmology of the ancient Hebrews has subject to a lot of snide comments by enlightened moderns, ever since those Copernicans appeared. Let’s face it, it looks kind of quaint. The universe is viewed from the same platform that all but a tiny handful of us have always shared; the surface of planet Earth; but whereas we have built for ourselves models of the earth in its galactic context, no such detached and purely intellectual perspectives were available to them.

By human criteria, this home of ours is pretty substantial. It has a vastness which awed the Hebrews, and still more cast was the firmament, the waters above the firmament, and the waters below the earth. There is a mismatch, though, between Hebrew cosmology and Hebrew faith. Continue reading “The Scale of God”

Pio’s daemon, Pio’s angel

Thanks to Daniel, I have been reading Patricia Treece’s Meet Padre Pio. It is a compact summary of Pio’s life and vocation, drawn in large part from the documentation that supported the cause of his canonisation. Pio was always a challenge to Catholic Church authority, simply by virtue of the vortex of inexplicable events and experiences that drew others to him. But Pio had trouble with daemons. Treece quotes from the diary of one of Pio’s spiritual directors, Padre Agostino, at a time when Pio was very ill. Continue reading “Pio’s daemon, Pio’s angel”