Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000
RAMANAM
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.
Countrymen,
ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT
Francis’ plane interview is 100% pastoral and legal, 0% theological. Nothing apposite the need in re the latter. He evinces a small background intellectually, not comfortable in the howling winds of statecraft, which he should be as a Head of State. Francis was a sweet man, but in Egypt he was accorded the latitude reserved in refined cultures for lunatics. Franciscans make lousy statesmen. Advisors, surely, but executives, certainly not. Still, he must be exactly what the cardinals wanted. So I would not put it on him, but on them.
Perhaps I am sclerotic now, but I cannot or do not see other than Biblical/Traditional/Reasonable Logos Theology of the utmost learned rigor supporting Christian life and culture in current and foreseeable conditions. A modern Portrait Of A Christian would not speed amiss ….
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WW III is a war against Christianity, from two currently coordinating vectors of power: Socialism and Caliphism. “Fundamental transformation” means de-Christianizing the cultures of the American and European land-masses.
Since, as Paul Tillich says, culture is the form of religion and religion is the substance of culture, to “fundamentally transform” America and Europe is to remove their substance and dismantle their form. Comparable to a “live-birth abortion” or straight up genocide. Quite an undertaking, a megalomaniacal mission, deliberately murderous.
Mr. Putin is attacking one of those vectors. An American President would join him and also attack the other vector. And the attacks would continue until both anti-Christian vectors were all still and quiet. Mr Putin and an American President also would invite India to join their efforts. And India would gladly do that.
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Thank you very much for this!!! (Also here.) I read all the way through. Very competently constructed and written. Also, reminds me of why I did not want to stay in academic ecclesia, the tone was just too cute fasco-commie for my taste, and the grasp of the Church — as contrasted with the churches — just worldly. Think Harvey Cox, the dernier cri of the parochial clergy while I was at Union, where even that faculty and student body had rejected his nonsense. The German bishops have gone that route. As with Harvey, who loved attention and money, the money from taxpayers seems to underly their betrayal of the magisterium. Tax money into religious organizations corrupts both giver and receiver. Their, as also Cox’s, mental and theological contortions to disguise their corruption is stupendous. Kucharczyk faithfully and comprehensively illuminates those contortions.
Some passages I noted and thoughts I had while reading:
“All efforts of theological knowledge must in the end lead to God Himself.”
Or as Luther put it: Ob sie Christum treiben. The Church is one who or that illuminates by conforming to the principle, Ob sie Christum treiben: that which deals with, concentrates on or drives toward Christ, the intense presence of divinity (Para-ousia), the Prophetic Imperative, the Effusion of Love.
“During the Second Vatican Council it was believed that a positive answer to the problem of God could be formulated.”
No, only a negative answer is possible. A theologian can say what God is not. He cannot say what God is. There is no problem of God. There is a problem of ignoring God, but that only lasts for a relatively brief span of time. 🙂
“All theology is based on Holy Writ. Ground the entire theological message on Scripture and continually refer to it.”
No, Holy Writ is based on theology, it proceeds from doctrine, specifically Logos Theology. This is an old argument between scripture guys and systematics guys. It’s a baseless argument: Logos is anterior to, precedes, is the prius of speaking (and writing). Genesis and John — scripture — say so downrightly. Benedict XVI implies this at Regensburg. Also, the boiled spaghetti legs of modern churchmen were created by their own biblical criticism, starting with Reimarus. They could have fallen back on Logos Theology, as John and Augustine do — and Jerome, if one looks carefully — and pulled their legs out of the kettle, but they did not do this, not even the Roman Catholics once they — I think it was by Jesuit urging, memory fuzzy — took up biblical criticism to backfire the Protestant and Reformed inferno raging through the churches on account of their biblical criticism. I’m all for biblical criticism, but not without the backstop of Logos Theology, which gives scripture its purpose and marching orders.
“The bridge between Holy Writ and our present concerns does not arise for the Catholic theologian without the mediation of tradition. Tradition does not substitute the biblical Word of God, but rather is a witness to it throughout the ages, always explaining it anew. Remain in a dialogue with the living tradition of the Church. Learn the undiscovered treasures from it. Bring forth to the people in the Church that these are not relics of the past, but that it contains our great heritage from the Apostolic times to today and at the same time a great potential, which can solve today’s problems. (…) Theology also assumes faith. Theology can explain it and develop it, but not create it.”
A very mixed-up panegyric. Systematics (Logos Theology) mediates between scripture, tradition and present concerns. Anglicans think tradition substitutes for systematics and scripture, which is where the German bishops are headed. Cox said, make a new tradition and to hell with systematics and scripture. Live! Then he married a Jewess. Yes, theology (systematics) assumes faith, but so do scripture and tradition. Only an act of God can create faith, and really, only acts of God can sustain it.
Were I to attempt an inspirational, Church-fostering panegyric such as Kucharczyk rightly feels needed, it would run along these lines: Think Logos. Speak Logos. Write Logos. Hear Logos. Be Logos. Love Logos. Feel Logos. Taste Logos. Make Logos.
“A man is called to freedom. All of you listening to me, I say: the fullness and perfection of this freedom has one name – Jesus Christ.”
Ob sie Christum treiben. Yup!
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Nothing is less inevitable than the inevitable.
Glenn Gould, auto-biographically, on Richard Strauss and the art and arts of life generally, The Glenn Gould Reader, p 86., Key Porter Books, 1984; originally an article, An Argument for Richard Strauss, High Fidelity, 1962:
“Richard Strauss, then, seems to me to be more than the greatest man of music of our time. He is in my opinion a central figure in today’s most crucial dilemma of aesthetic morality – the hopeless confusion that arises when we attempt to contain the inscrutable pressures of self-guided artistic destiny within the neat, historical summation of collective chronology. He is much more than a convenient rallying point for conservative opinion. In him we have one of those rare, intense figures in whom the whole process of historical evolution is defied.”
DRG’s comment: “the inscrutable pressures of self-guided artistic destiny” = Kandinsky’s “inner necessity.” The great ones keep God busy by jumping constantly into thin air. He never fails them who concretize the “inscrutable pressures of self-guided artistic destiny.” They are heroes.
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It takes tremendous courage to resist the lure of appearances. The power of being which is manifest in such courage is so great that the gods tremble in fear of it. The Rev. Dr. Paul Tillich
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There is one only Christian value: liberty. Everything else, including laws, customs and all other values, all of which are imposed on a group with the barrel of a gun and the threat of starvation, is man-made from the hurly-burly of politics and its handmaiden, finance. And that is comme il faut.
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Excellent, you venture wisely and economically to territory I did not wish to approach, for not trusting my economics.
A question: by representing globalist, left-sounding politics and economics (which are intensely and overtly *not* for freedom of conscience), is this pope abandoning, or better, “moving beyond” the gist of Dignitatus?
I think he is. I think he is moving beyond the pre-Dignitatus days even, with a breathtakingly megalomaniacal expansion of “keys to heaven and earth” doctrine. To wit: The Church IS the world and The Holy See IS the seat of its global governance. Thus securing lectures on the world’s tallest stages.
Liberation Theology always had the taste of concretizing this ancient ambition, which I think is why it has survived repeated attacks against its tendentious bumptiousness. Very war-like. Very Jesuit, this pope.
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Larry Josephson not infrequently started In The Beginning, WBAI’s (NYC) weekday opening to their broadcast day, with a big belch. For a time he played Mason Williams’ Classical Gas with un-nauseating frequency. Charles Amerikanian at KPFA brought me on a segment of his show once, at the station’s Berkeley HQ, to intone sagely on congruences of theology and cybernetics/systems theory, roughly speaking. Gregory Bateson, rightly admired at the time (including by Jerry Brown), embodied that congruence. A great and good man. A resident at SRI called in to say Buddhism is the bees’ knees for that congruence. I never asked him, but I suspect Gregory would have mentioned the Augustinian alternative. Lama Anagarika Govinda mentioned clouds and rivers and told me I thought/talked not enough about them. KPFK made a compendious documentary about Jim Garrison’s work.
A concurrent root-level influence was a publication started by Beryl Korot, Phyllis Gershuny, and Ira Schneider, then joined by others, such as Michael Shamberg: Radical Software. These guys explored and reported on the potentials of Sony’s bulky personal but portable video recorders … which, in an other’s conceptuality, became the iPhone camera. I do not know if these guys had a Pacifica connection, but they were not less influential then and probably far more so long-term.
I did not know Cap Weinberger had a show on KPFA. Raises my eyebrows. Cap, as SecDef, was the guy who refused to pass on Reagan’s order to respond to the bombing of Marines in Beirut by, effectively, marching into Iran. Of course, Reagan was the guy who let Cap’s insubordination thwart that vital strategic opportunity.
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Dear John, from David, 90% into a delicious Manhattan: IANAL and YANAC (you are not a clergyman): Christian couples of every denomination, including RC, marry themselves in the presence of an officiating clergyman (who functions, regrettably, also as a state bureaucrat) and lay witnesses.
The clergyman does not marry the couple, they officiate at the marriage the couple performs themselves. Attend the liturgical language of the ceremony. It is explicit about who is doing what.
The cleric pronounces (announces to the witnesses/public for sacramental and, regrettably, also legal purposes) man and wife, they do not *make* man and wife (for either sacramental or legal purposes). The couple execute a Christian marriage ceremony. They, alone, make the marriage, and rightly so. The cleric blesses the marriage the couple makes with the trinitarian formula. They do not execute the marriage, they do not marry the couple. How could they? A threesome?
Christian marriage, almost uniquely in the world, is a sacramental bonding between two absolutely free and totally independent personalities, a man and a woman, for the purpose of procreation and all pleasures and responsibilities attending thereto, including Manhattans.
Jeremiah Wright is not a Christian. Nor an American. He’s a demogogic race hustler, like so many others of his generation. He deserves no attention. His supposedly most notorious parishoner, by Wright’s own telling, joined that institution, in which, believe it or not, I hold ordination (!), for social and political connections, not for spiritual education or moral uplift. Jeremiah, as is known, is a devotee of Jim Cone, the so-called Black Liberation Theologian, who joined the Union faculty the year I graduated that institution, then nothing like what it is since the elevation of Cone and more so.
Βασιλεία του Θεού
Kingdom of God
Update 1: Noonan on Shows Of Strength and Kirill (a KGB double agent inside the Russian church) on holy war
Update 2: Rush Limbaugh on what’s actually happening
Ed Driscoll, an example of Rush’s point. I commented:
Ed, you don’t get it. They’re not on the other side of an aisle. They’re under you and everything you cherish, making caverns and filling them with explosives to blow you and yours to oblivion. Rush recently did a segment on your kind’s ignorance of the game afoot.
Update 3: What Really Happened At Synod 2015?
Update 4: Richard Fernandez: The Global World Hits A Snag
Update 6: Waking Up In Minnesota
Update 7: Abortion at the Core of Both Left and Right
Update 8: In 1965 Life Magazine Showed That Life Begins At Conception
Update 9: Myron Ebell and Steven J. Milloy: Wrong Again: 50 Years of Failed Eco-pocalyptic Predictions
AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA
