Note: Thanks to all those who recognized my latest birthday (there have been so many) and to those who have given to Chains of Grace. We have raised more than $1200 as of last night. Some people do not wish to donate on line but have promised to send checks. Those are starting to come in to our hard mail address, which is:
Chains of Grace
PO Box 1344
Midlothian, Texas 76065
My current goal is to raise $20,000, which will enable us to eliminate the debt on one ministry house. So far we have cash and pledges for $8000, with more coming as we speak to donors. Please help us help our parolees.
Now, to our subject.
The Why question is always most helpful. When we ask Why, we acknowledge the validity for the Nietzche quote from yesterday’s post. You remember Nietzche opined:
If a man has a Why, he can tolerate almost any How.
Life is often difficult. Various world religions (and schools of philosophy) recognize the hardships life can put on us. I know some people who will not read Religion or Philosophy because they seem so dismal in their outcomes!
Christianity recognizes suffering. The exemplar of the Christian faith (Jesus, the Christ) even participates in human suffering. In fact, Christianity is alone among the major faiths of the world (and minor) in this sense: in Christianity God who is offended by sin pays the sin price to redeem the very race guilty of offending God. This is grace.
The Wesleyans teach of prevenient grace. This grace is the grace (xaris) that comes looking for us with the intent to do us good. Prevenient grace embraces our (self inflicted) suffering, washes it and starts us to a maturity of person able to exist happily and express compassion with open heart and mind.
Why? Well, Niethzche is right, so far as he goes, when he asserts:
Adventavit asinus puncher et fortissimus
Latin for “The donkey arrives beautiful and brave.”
By which Nietzche means all philosophies intimately partake of the nature of their leading proponent. Nietzche;s own mental illness, resulting in and from his loss of faith, leads him to despise other philosophers (all of them) and religious teachers as mere “donkeys,” seemingly in comparison to him. After all he is the man who boasts “I can write in a sentence what it takes others a book to write.”
I mention this because I believe for all his rightness he is wrong because he stops at the spiritual/emotional/intellectual place where he, faith lost and life in limbo, he fails to notice the superiority of the Christ and, so, of Christian teaching. Perhaps the Church of his day fails him at this point, so besotted by the social culture around them as they are (and as we are) but this is no reason to mislead oneself on the nature of the Christ
Jesus is the Agent of Creation (John 1:1-14) who chooses to live among Created Beings in order to reclaim us. In so doing Jesus reestablishes the ancient teaching on cosmology; this is the best of all possible worlds. We receive a world of meadows in which we sow minefields. This is the loss of stewardship over the world, which dominion is to be caretaker of the world, not master only. We are more dangerous to the world when we divide ourselves into waring tribes than we do when we start our cars.
Jesus pitches His tent among us (John 1:14). In so doing He refashions the ancient form of leadership, wherein the Leader walks in front of his/her people during the day, then camps among them by night. He is no Elitist or Communist. Jesus is among His people, night and day, at great personal sacrifice. Jesus establishes sustenance for His beloved, rather than teach us to divide by classes, or to hate those who have more or need more.
Jesus is the King of Kings, but that is a term too small for Him, as we shall see when we discuss Jesus as Potentate. To call Him King of KIngs compares Him to other, earthly rulers, inaccurate toward Him and unfair to them.
No one compares to Jesus favorably. He is just too good.
See you tomorrow.