An Answer

-

Happy New Year!

Let’s begin the year with one of the big questions.  No, not, “Why am I here?”  Instead, “Why am I a Christian?”  I don’t believe I have ever attempted to answer this directly.  At the level of intuition, it’s simple.  But piecing it together, articulating the intuition is too complicated. So, here’s an attempt to go straight to simple.

I am a Christian first because I am certain that god exists. That’s half the journey, the smaller half.  From there everything—nature, civilizations, past and present events, human nature, etc.—opens up into one utterly compelling question, “What is god like?”  There is an answer.  God is Personal, Powerful, Good.  Experiencing this answer is why I continue breathing.

That’s it.  The rest is details.  A great many details.  All of them amazing.  Some difficult.  Many beautiful.  All incomprehensible.  So much more remains unknown.  What is knowable resonates most fully in the worship and teachings of Christians, of the historic Church.  As I like to say, this is the God of Abraham, Moses, David, the Virgin Mary and the Apostles.  Fountain of life, of goodness, of beauty.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Year Will Not End

-
Be not rash with your mouth, nor let your heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven and you are on earth. Therefore let your words be few.  (Ecc 5, ESV) I was mute and silent; I held my peace to no avail, and my distress grew worse. My heart became hot within me. As I mused, the fire burned; then I spoke with my tongue: (Ps. 39, ESV) Surely oppression drives the wise into madness,and a bribe corrupts the heart. Better is the end of a thing than its beginning, and the patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit. Be not quick in your spirit to become angry, for anger lodges in the heart of fools. (Ecc 7, ESV) What I wrote back in March has now seen the maturation of those patterns.  New experience and information has been acquired.  More than ever COVID19 resembles that class of infection we are well acquainted with, and which we call the Flu.  And more than ever we react to it as though it were small pox. Outrage follows outrage.  The Lie is the way of the
Read more

The Will to Live

-
In 1868, in Russia, Dostoyevski published Crime and Punishment , and later in 1880 published The Brothers Karamazov , not long before his death.   In the 1870’s, a continent away in Europe, Nietzsche was developing himself and his philosophy, and it wasn’t until after Dostoyevski’s death that Nietzsche published Thus Spoke Zarathustra , and Beyond Good and Evil .    My experience of these authors, however, was the opposite order.   I first read Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the early 1990’s, and a few years later Crime and Punishment .   There could hardly have been a better parry to “God is Dead” than Dostoyevski’s “If there is no God, everything is permitted,”   and that ended the “debate” for me, for the time.   These many years later I found that both Dostoyevski and Nietzsche were responding to similar philosophies, Dostoyevski to Russian nihilists, Nietzsche to German skeptics.   If you don’t believe in an Evil One who works to deceive the human race, I can sympathize.   But e
Read more