For the Life of the World

Alexander Schmemann was a Russian Orthodox theologian and scholar. I just got done reading his book For the Life of the World. A really good book, though I do not agree with all he said. The book pulls us out of an overly rational approach to Church and mission by using the liturgy/order of service in the Orthodox Church as a guide to how we should think about life. Very fascinating read and difficult. I will probably read it again soon to try and get a handle on all of what he is saying. In the meantime, I thought I would post some quotes to give you a taste of his thinking.

"Man must eat in order to live; he must take the world into his body and transform it into himself, into flesh and blood. He is indeed that which he eats, and the whole world is presented as one all-embracing banquet table for man. And this image of the banquet remains, throughout the whole Bible, the central image of life." (p. 11)

"The first, the basic definition of man is that he is the priest. He stands in the center of the world and unifies it in his act of blessing God, of both receiving the world from God and offering it to God." (p. 15)

"Christianity often appears, however, to preach that if men will try hard enough to live Christian lives, the crucifixion can somehow be reversed. This is because Christianity has forgotten itself, forgotten that always it must first of all stand at the cross." (p. 23)

Symbolism

Here is another quote from R. Smith's Trinity and Reality:

"The power of symbolism is the power of worldview presuppositions. It is the greatest power in the world. All of language is symbolic, of course, but symbolism is not limited to words. Symbolism creates reality, not vice versa. This is another way of saying essence precedes existence. God determined how things should be and then they were."

Endangered Species?

Some how the environmentalists missed 125,000 gorillas!!!! Kind of makes you wonder what else they have missed. The entire article is still very pessimistic, but this shows us that maybe things are not as bad as the "scientists" claim they are.

Beards and the Bible

Jeff Moss is a friend of mine who is currently in training to be a pastor. Part of his training is to write several papers on various topics. Most recently he wrote a paper on beards. Now I love beards, as you can tell, so I was thrilled to read his paper. He goes over the various biblical passages on beards, as well as the historical data. I will not recap the entire paper, but there is one quote from St. Clement that I thoroughly enjoyed and thought I would share.

“How womanly it is for one who is a man to comb himself and shave himself with a razor, for the sake of fine effect, and to arrange his hair at the mirror, shave his cheeks, pluck hairs out of them, and smooth them!…For God wished women to be smooth and to rejoice in their locks alone growing spontaneously, as a horse in his mane. But He adorned man like the lions, with a beard, and endowed him as an attribute of manhood, with a hairy chest—a sign of strength and rule.”

Aliens in Nature

Al Mohler has a good post about how our children have become accustomed to being indoors. Creation is another world to them. They are aliens in nature. TV and video games are what is normal. This is not how it should be. Of course, TV, the internet and even video games are not inherently sinful, but when they crowd out the grandeur of God's creation something has gone awry. Creation is one of God's great theaters in which He displays His glory. We and our children should feel at home in nature. We should love the pleasures it provides, such as crisp, fall air. And we should love, not just the beauty of the world, but the odd things God has placed in it. For example, my son, Samuel, recently told me that the sea-cucumber, when threatened, will spew out it's insides and then grow them back! Our tendency is to revolt when we hear of animals like this, but God thought it was a good idea. Who are we to talk back?

One irony is that our culture claims to love the environment, yet they are raising children that are rarely in nature. Reject the Creator and you lose the creation as well.

Kissing and the Movies

This is a funny story from Jamie Soles about how kissing in the movies affects our children.

Solmusic: The Difficulty of Movie Smooches