"For here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come."
-- Hebrews 13:14
Christians are strangers and pilgrims in this world. We are "in" the world but not "of" the world and we live "between the times." We are citizens of the kingdom of God who are sojourning in a foreign land.
Christians should live in a peculiar manner. We should neither think nor act like those at home in this world. The world thinks by a logic of equivalence. At best, men of the world live by rules, regulations and laws. Laws help us treat each other equally and fairly, but laws do not permit us to respect individual differences.
Christians think by a logic of superabundance. We live by faith. That faith is expressed by a pattern of life that allows us to respond to each other as individuals and persons. We live according to a standard that is higher than justice and equity. We measure ourselves by Christ's love. That's why we can turn the other cheek, walk the second mile, give both our coat and our cloak, and forgive one another seventy times seven.
Christians should live in a peculiar manner. We should neither think nor act like those at home in this world. The world thinks by a logic of equivalence. At best, men of the world live by rules, regulations and laws. Laws help us treat each other equally and fairly, but laws do not permit us to respect individual differences.
Christians think by a logic of superabundance. We live by faith. That faith is expressed by a pattern of life that allows us to respond to each other as individuals and persons. We live according to a standard that is higher than justice and equity. We measure ourselves by Christ's love. That's why we can turn the other cheek, walk the second mile, give both our coat and our cloak, and forgive one another seventy times seven.
4 comments:
Let me see if I got you straight. Consider an elementary school teacher in a public school in Oklahoma. Consider further, that she is not a member of any Christian church, and she does not consider herself to be a Christian.
I take it you are telling me that to be legal in her profession she must treat each and every pupil exactly the same, ignoring all significant differences between them. She cannot try to individualize her instruction, or gear her interactions with her students in accordance with her perception of their needs.
The same thing presumaby applies to a physician or surgeon who works for the VA. He cannot individualize his treatment of his patients in accordance with his perception of their needs, but must treat all equally.
That looks like a reductio ad absurdum of your presumed distinction between man's logic and God's logic.
I suspect someone has slipped a gear somewhere along the way.
Asinus,
We are obviously on different wave lengths on this one.
Ultimately, God's logic leads to a cross and to divine suffering.
That's certainly not contemplated by the logic of the Greeks.
Yea! Socrates never ran into any trouble with his ideas on how to live; all he had to do was drink the hemlock. Plato never got sold into slavery, trying to implement his ideas in Syracuse. And, those Roman philosophers like Cicero and Seneca never were inconvenienced or killed because they took moral principles very seriously.
You seem not to have thought this stuff through very carefully!
Asinus,
There's nothing unique about humans suffering for their beliefs -- whether they be Greek or Hebrew.
Socrates, Plato, Cicero and Seneca were all in agreement that the experience of suffering is what distinguished the human from the divine. For them, God was God because he was beyond suffering.
That's not the biblical view of God, despite all the doctrines of divine impassibility that have long permeated philosophical and historical theology.
A friend of mine, Jeff Pool, has recently published a book on this topic that may be of interest to you. It is "God's Wounds: Hermeneutic of the Christian Symbol of Divine Suffering"
Post a Comment