Incarnation is untheological

“That is what incarnation means,” writes Frederick Buechner. “It is untheological. It is unsophisticated. It is undignified. But according to Christianity, it is the way things are. All religions and philosophies that deny the reality or the significance of the material, the fleshly, the earthbound, are themselves denied.”

http://www.rzim.org/a-slice-of-infinity/the-world-we-know-2

Advent

Eugene Peterson writes, “Waiting does not diminish us, any more than waiting diminishes a pregnant mother. We are enlarged in the waiting. We, of course, don’t see what is enlarging us. But the longer we wait, the larger we become, and the more joyful our expectancy.”(2) Waiting itself is, of course, a reminder that we are earthbound.

http://www.rzim.org/a-slice-of-infinity/the-world-we-know-2

Preparation for preaching

“I read myself full. I pray myself hot. I let myself go!”

http://blog.logos.com/2014/01/finding-your-voice-as-a-preacher-an-interview-with-greg-laurie

Rethinking Economic Theodicy

When a God who is supposed to be both powerful and good is involved, we have the problem of theodicy. This problem received its canonical formulation in David Hume's Dialogues on Natural Religion: "Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?"

Besides human nature and ends, another thing banished from contemporary economic discussion is evil.

This combination of the centrality of a deformed concept of scarcity and the neglect of evil means contemporary economics has a very different view of suffering to that of Robert Malthus or Adam Smith. Suffering is both trivialized by the neglect of evil and made an insoluble problem by the deformed view of scarcity.

economics as a technical discipline can contribute to the formulation of adequate theodicies

For philosophers and theologians who favour "free will" theodicies, an account of such connections is an essential ingredient of a contemporary economic theodicy. For those who favour "best of possible worlds" theodicies, it is crucial to identify what if any economic phenomena are separable from the larger system.

we all need a richer understanding of economic suffering and evil, and a renewal of the discussion of economic theodicy

http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2014/01/03/3920284.htm.

Hamann on metaphors

Hamann acknowledges that the formal work of metaphor mimics the primordial act of condescension as much as it proposes it. To say that God humbles himself for the sake of his creation is to use an analogy with the human world to understand something of the divine world, and the reason Hamann and others find it (or any Christological reading of kenosis) acceptable, despite its Catholic censure, is because it comes as close as possible to describing the level of otherwise unthinkable sacrifice which must attend any possibility of a God willfully dividing from a state of absolute fullness. And, once contracted, this image also helps to orient our (admittedly poetic) imagining of the ends for which such contraction was willfully enacted. Hamann takes it to be neither accident nor blithely poetic irony that when metaphors do their work, they succeed with the same symbolic action of condescension.

http://katieterezakis.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/is-theology-possible-after-hamann_final_1.pdf