some preliminary roughings out of my thesis


since the very dawn of philosophy, man has looked to mathematics to describe the world accurately. we rely on math for certainty. 


in chimes the frenchman. 
"we are not merely skeptics, nor only mathematicians. we are Christians. we can not only doubt, we may not only affirm. we must, somewhere, submit." - pascal, in a rough paraphrase of pensée 201.

 in the Christian cosmos, then, what abides? where can we stand? what abides? 


the jew. 
"So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love." - st. paul, 1 cor. 13:13
              
faith                 hope                          love                          -- normative aspect: philosophy of math
   |                       |                                 |
knowledge      truth                         wisdom                      -- situational aspect: physics (math applied)
   |                       |                                 |
grammar         logic                         rhetoric                     -- existential aspect: teaching math
   |                       |                                 |
   |                       |                                 |
   |                       |                                 |
arithmetic     algebra              quantum theory                   -- the kinds of mathematics we learn
                     calculus      non-euclidean geometries


math, at its foundation, is faith
               we have faith in God as the Creator, as the Constant One, the Righteous one. math is trustworthy not because it is self-evident, it is trustworthy because God is; because He loves us and does not lie to us. 2+2=4 because He is forever 1 which is always 3. 

math next is hope
               we hope to one day have dominion over creation. the Creator has hidden glories everywhere for us to search out. this means that when we do a calculus problem involving a decreasing mass, increasing acceleration, highly variable friction, and decreasing gravitational force, we simply hope that our rocket will actually escape the atmosphere. we have faith in the numbers working out, but there is only hope that it will actually describe the world. we hope in the righteousness, the trustworthiness of our God. 


and the greatest of these is love. 
               mathematics is the meter of creation, which was sung by God. and He is love. mathematics, then, is the meter chosen by love. and so, to choose the right meter, we must be loving. i declare to you a mystery. force is nothing more or less than the mass of a thing times its acceleration. always. most of the time. unless you're not on earth. then, at least you can be sure that the energy is equal to the mass of the thing counted as many times as light is fast squared. except, that's not really how it works all the time. because turns out there's something faster than light on the universe. truly, a great mystery, yet i give you a greater. my mother's forehead wrinkled between her eyebrows. it was a wednesday. my father says, "come on, let's grab lunch quick. you're getting a headache from not eating, aren't you?" my mother's forehead wrinkled between her eyebrows. this time it was a thursday. my father says, "hey let's get out of here. you're worried about eating too much. so let's go." 
               here is the riddle's heart, here the knot of the mystery: for the creation is our bride, and we are her husband. we must know her parts well enough to know which language we use to speak to her. we should love creation enough to know that the language of newton's calculus is wonderful, but creation doesn't like that language when we're speaking about black holes and electrons. what will happen on the day that we actually love the handiwork of our Creator? i daresay we'll fly faster than light, fall upwards, and burn things without them being consumed. i dare, even, to say that we shall be creators ourselves. that we shall give life at last, and not death. then, death, thou too shall die. 

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light.

The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John bore witness about him, and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks before me, because he was before me.’”) And from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known.

st. john's Gospel, 1:1-18

the Light has shone in the darkness, and we have seen His glory where we are. we have seen Him coming afar off, and now through the mirror of faith dimly, yet soon face to face. for like He did this day, we too shall rise unto Life eternal. today is the day that puts all may days and earth days and arbor days to shame, for today is the day of Life. today is the day that death lost and earth, the earth, was given Life. Happy Easter.

Furthermore, we declare, we proclaim, we define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff.

boniface viii, unam sanctam, 1302 a.D.

unam sanctam was a papal bull which, by every standard in a brief search of the interwebs, is ex cathedra and infallible. The document itself is prefaced in part:

"The statements concerning the relations between the spiritual and the secular power are of a purely historical character, so far as they do not refer to the nature of the spiritual power, and are based on the actual conditions of medieval Europe. 'Unam' is frequently quoted, and misquoted, by anti-Catholics trying to prove that Boniface VIII, and Popes in general, are arrogant and evil men, intent on extending their own power."

seriously people. remember innocent iii? just misquoted. the borgias? well, it's hard to misquote a slit throat, but you've definitely misinterpreted them. i have no problem with the brothers and sisters in the Roman Catholic church. what i have a problem with is a man telling me i am going to hell unless i believe him to be the sole arbiter of the Word of God. that's called a Mediator, and i already have One.

i think if we fully realized the magnitude of God's constant interest in every molecule of this universe our heads would explode. God continually speaks every molecule of ink in every word on every page of every grocery store novel? the snow that randomly fell down the back of my neck friday went there because He was continually speaking water molecules in the icey-snow mode in the key of sliding-due-to-gravity. awesome doesn't begin to describe it.

But at the same time the Cross blocks the road backwards towards any of these streams [of speech] ... The modern Greeks, i.e., the physicists, and the modern Jews, i.e., the Zionists, certainly are not the Greeks or Jews of antiquity. The Greeks glorified the beauties of the cosmos; our physicists empty it of meaning. The Jews glorified nothing but God. The Zionists have built a university in Jerusalem, as their first communal building. This road-block of the Word, then, is a fact.

rosenstock-huessy, fruit of lips, p.9

Tell me who speaks to you and I shall know who you are.

eugen rosenstock-huessy, fruit of lips, 1.1

Instead of a mere harmony of the Gospels, I have asked: Are they movements of a symphony? Of course they are. And he who climbs this stair of the wondrous four events, called the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, understands again the wondrous 'Anno Domini' by which we count the stepping stones of the incarnation of the Christian era.

eugen rosenstock-huessy, fruit of lips, preface.xxi

In reading the Platonic books I found expressed in different words, and in a variety of ways, that the Son, 'being in the form of the Father did not think it theft to be equal with God,' because by nature he is that very thing. But that 'he took on himself the form of a servant and emptied himself, was made in the likeness of men and found to behave as a man, and humbled himself being made obedient to death, even the death of the cross so that God exalted him' from the dead 'and gave him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should box, of celestial, terrestrial, and infernal beings, and every tongue should confess that Jesus is Lord to the glory of God the Father' (Phil.2:6-11) -- that these books do not have.

augustine, confessions, vii.14

In particular, it is vital to the whole thrust of John's theology that the logos becomes a human being. Sirach, somewhat loftily, could not envisage a human being ever fully fathoming Wisdom. John sees this Wisdom becoming, fully, a human being. In doing so he is still conscious of writing a new version of Genesis. The climax of the fist chapter of Genesis is the creation of the human being in the image of the creator. The climax of John's prologue is the coming to full humanness of the logos, who, in taking on so many of the characteristics of Wisdom, may be assumed also to be the divine image-bearer. When Pilate declares to the crowds, 'Here is the man,' John intends his readers to hear echoes that have been present since the very beginning. Jesus, as the logos having become flesh, is the truly human being.

bishop n.t. wright, new testament and the people of God, p.416

Prepare your work outside; get everything ready for yourself in the field, and after that build your house.

prov. 24:27

What is desired in a man is steadfast love, and a poor man is better than a liar.

prov. 19:22

it seems to me that these two passages complement each other well in describing when a man is ready for marriage.

something i wrote on the road between Wenatchee and Moscow. while watching one of the more stunning sunsets i've seen. on a Sunday.

to write, one must have been loved. to write well, one must be a lover.

writing about life, now, in the 21st century, is to write about things that have been written about, at best, a dozen times. the better bits of life: the sunsets, the sunrises, the lovers' kisses over morning coffee, they have all been written about too many times to even think about, much less count. but boredom is only done by the bored. it's the trivializing, the quick-to-look-away, the all-too-easily-pleased-by-flashing-things, in short, the cool teenage boys among us, who are the only ones to think that a sunset is a sunset is a sunset.

it's easy to know in your head that each sunset is different. every night a different ray of light hits different water particles at different angles. seems like a ridiculous waste of creative energy and time.

many girls have good legs. it took the wisdom of Solomon to see that the Shulamite's were unlike others girls' because they were carved out of ivory. it took him several chapters to describe them. and you get the feeling that he never really was satisfied with his attempts. he kept going back to the legs with different approaches. and then he gave it up all together. vanity of vanities, indeed.

if you love, you will see. if you want to love, you must see. it's one of those vicious cycles life seems to be full of. if you want to appreciate sunsets, you must watch them. again and again. and to truly watch them, you must appreciate them. you can watch them one way, the way you usually do, or you can watch and choose to appreciate. and, after a few weeks or perhaps, if your soul is still delicate, a few days, you will realize that the sky wasn't quite that shade of pink yesterday, that the clouds weren't fiery like that last week, and that the sun looks more like a drop of God's blood tonight than it did on Monday. when you choose to love something, you get acquainted with it, you understand it, and in the end you know it. even, no, especially in the King James sense of the word.

my father knows my mother well. he knows her like a connoisseur knows his favorite wine, like a student knows his favorite painting, like Adam knew Eve in that time full of blinding wonder and incredulity before he ate the fruit. there is between them all the familiarity of more than half a lifetime spent together and all the nervous joy of newlyweds. my mother once told me that a detective looking for counterfeit currency said, "i look at the real bills all day long so that when i see the false stuff, i know it's different right away." my father knows his wife like that. he's watched her so much, stared so often, lost himself so many times, that when anything changes, he knows.

my Father knows His bride like that, only more. my Father knows His spoken world like that, only more. my Father knows me like that, only more.

if you love it, it will become lovely. but you have to love every good thing about it. every little detail that changes day by day, every little bit that stays constant. and if you do, the whole thing becomes beautiful. that's why our Father is going to win.

MINISTRY TO DEATH, MINISTRY OF LIFE

by Dr. Peter Leithart

Pastors are specialists in death. Wherever death is, pastors are: Waiting beside the hospital bed, sharing a couple’s bewilderment over their third late miscarriage, reading Psalm 23 as the earth swallows up the casket.

But the pastor’s ministry to death doesn’t stop with the obvious. As a marriage disintegrates, as two who have been one split in two again, trust and love die, and it’s only a matter of time before hope too is a corpse. The Dow plummets, and before they know what happened a couple on the verge of retirement finds a lifetime of restraint and prudence deleted. A company downsizes, and a man whose identity has been bound up with his work stumbles around to find a new self to replace the one he lost. A child’s apostasy wounds more deeply than death.

Whatever form they take, crises are deaths, and to this we can add all the daily deaths that flesh is heir to. Pastors are wherever death is, and in our world death is everywhere.

In all these circumstances, the pastor brings a word of life. To be a real gospel, good news for a world of death, that word has to be a promise of life on the far side of death – or, more properly, the promise of life throughdeath. A message of life that skirts the edge of the grave is not the gospel of Jesus because it is not the gospel of the cross. The word we speak is good news that the Father of Jesus is faithful even to the grave, and yet again faithful. But it has to be at least about God’s faithfulness to death.

Pastoral ministry has a Eucharistic shape: We offer the Bread of life, but only after the bread is broken, after the blood is poured. The Bread of life is the bread that proclaims the Lord’s death until He comes.

At the beginning of Matthew’s Passion narrative, a woman pours oil over Jesus’ head (26:7). It is an anointing, acclaiming Jesus as King and Priest, but Jesus says that it is in preparation for His burial. Jesus is ordained for the grave, anointed to pass through death and out the other end.

This is the great privilege of pastoral ministry, to follow Jesus into the tombs that litter our world to announce the triumph of life.

via Credenda/Agenda

In the sermon text today, Jesus is anointed for burial. There are a number of things going on in the passage, but it is worth noting that Jesus is anointed on His head like a King or a Priest for burial. Jesus’ coronation is for death; His ordination is for the purpose of dying. His duty is to die. We too are anointed in baptism, and Paul says that in baptism we are buried with Christ, we are joined to the likeness of His death. Our baptisms are also ordinations. When we are baptized, we are given the same calling as Jesus. We are called to take up our crosses and follow Him. We are ordained to die. The way to life is through the cross; the way to be a King is through dying. And we enact this in numerous ways in our worship every Lord’s Day. But one of the important ways we enact this is through the Confession of Sin. One of the most important ways you ought to think about this Confession of Sin is as a Confession of Faith. As we enter the house of the Lord, we confess that we are sinners in need of forgiveness and grace. We begin worship by dying. We begin worship by telling God and everyone else here that we are failures. This confession of sin is a corporate confession to God and to one another that we are all miserable sinners in need of grace. We come here as priests and kings, having been anointed in baptism and by the Spirit, and therefore we begin by dying to ourselves, by proclaiming that we are failures, we are broken, we are sinners who desperately need grace. And that is what the Church is; it’s a family of people who know that they are lost, know they are empty, they are sick and they are dying apart from the grace and mercy of God. But our hope is in the God of the resurrection, the God who declares the filthy clean. We confess that we are sinners, but we are also sinners whom God declares forgiven. And that declaration of forgiveness is always a call for faith. When we believe that God does in fact accept us, and that He accepts us sinners as righteous in Christ, when we believe that, forgiveness washes over us and we are given grace to forgive one another and to forgive all those who have trespassed against us.

Pastor Toby Sumpter, Call to Worship, Nov. 1, 2009

maybe it's just 2 am, but this blows my mind:

“we will be like Him, for we shall see Him as He Is.” 

why we will be like Him? because we'll actually see Him. praise His name forevermore.