Tag Archives: Atonement

The Limits of Love

1 Reply

What are the limits of love?  The phrase “I love you” is one of the most ubiquitous and inescapable phrases in the English language.  I’m sure its counterpart phrases are almost equally ubiquitous in other languages.  I doubt you’ve never heard the phrase or spoken it yourself.  But what does it mean?  Fifteen seconds’ thought reveals that we don’t know what it means.  Or maybe we know parts of what it means but are unable to articulate in one succinct explanation the full gamut of the ramifications that come from uttering the words “I love you” to another person.  And I am talking about those words applying to another person, and not just a thing.  I can say I love my can opener, but this is necessarily an objective (in the grammatical sense) love, since there’s no chance of reciprocity of love with an object.  The distinction between subject and object when it comes to love is important, but I think we regularly confuse the two in our love of both people and things. Continue reading →

Good Friday

Leave a reply

The horrors of the scourging and crucifixion of Jesus, had we the eyes to see them, would undoubtedly haunt us for our entire lives.  Every year on the Friday before Easter, Christians try to have the eyes to see that horror.  Good Friday is the day “to know nothing … but Christ and him crucified.”  Because reconciliation with our loving maker came at the greatest cost imaginable, the Church unites in the personal work of trying to feel that pain as acutely as possible.  We visualize the scenes from the accounts we have — the trail, beating, mocking, and crucifixion of Jesus.  We don’t eat much food, because, since we’ve put ourselves there in Israel on that day, we wouldn’t desire food anyway.  While full time ministers and monastics are more fully able to enact their own presence at and participation in the events of that day in the early 30’s A.D., the rest of us have to try while we’re at work or otherwise interacting with a thoroughly secular world that can’t grasp what this day is. Continue reading →

The Project – Part 3

Leave a reply

This has been a difficult little article series for me to write because it’s stretched me so much.  These are big concepts, and the implications of chasing them out are big.  Though the writing hasn’t come easy, part 3 has finally arrived.  [See Part 1 and Part 2].  So far I’ve given sort of a thumbnail proposal about how we ought to look at the pictures we find in Genesis 1-2 and in Revelation 21-22 (the first two and last two chapters of the Bible, the story of the world).  It’s a difficult endeavor to imagine a world which depended upon sinless people to tend and care for it.  And imagining a re-created world surging with the glory of God which affords redeemed humanity the dignity of a purposeful, active eternity is even more difficult. Continue reading →