Daily pages of reflection...for knowledge, understanding, to wisdom
Section of The Last Supper, Leonardo Da Vinci Section of The Last Supper, Leonardo Da Vinci

Addiction

January 20, 2018
Year 3, Day 20 | No Comments
Section of Christ and the Adulteress, Lucas Cranach the Younger and Workshop, ca. 1545–50

A free society is the only society in which persons can get to know themselves – to the degree anyone may know personal self.  Freedom relieves us from some external distractions (like oppressive governments), but we may create our own distractions so as to mute our freedom.  Escape from external restricting influences does not mean freedom is gained if the individual provides various substitutes for self-defeat that distorts a life meant to find balance (golden mean).  The complications of life are such that we will never know, during the earth sojourn, what comprises all of the life we live.  Life is one, characterized on earth as generated from life, through birth, to a maturation process and goal perceived in growing… Read more

Names in Life and Death

January 19, 2018
Year 3, Day 19 | No Comments
Section of The Taking of Christ, Caravaggio, 1602

One of my great-grandsons is named Isaac, another is named Judah.  Obviously, both are Bible names.  Names for sons and daughters in the ancient world, and among various cultures, had some deliberate meaning, perhaps expectation.  In the modern style the old formations may seem quaint, even forced.  Some of the doubts of persons about the Bible relate to naming about events and persons, so they turn them into fables or tribal parables about events rather than the events themselves.  For them in different cultures, the old seems contrived, even false.  For purposes of God some persons were given pseudonyms for names to separate them from their own private experiences and lives so to illustrate principles without settling judgment on real… Read more

Love Missed By The World

January 18, 2018
Year 3, Day 18 | No Comments
Section of Christ and the Adulteress, Lucas Cranach the Younger and Workshop, ca. 1545–50

The Christian is commanded in Scripture to love.  Some love concepts are so often repeated that they may have in repetition softened the profound meaning of the injunction for the masses.  We are to absorb a nature of love.  It is a commandment, not to be determined by the agreement of emotions, or ideal conditions, or absence of conflict.  It is to be a prevailing orientation of the self-conscious individual, but it even spills over into the animal world where it is often seen and is so compelling that it can make the news reports.  When we see, in animals, signs of factors found in human beings, we are impressed and may even use a factor to relate the matter… Read more

Mind, Culture And Emotions

January 17, 2018
Year 3, Day 17 | No Comments
Section of Adoration of the Magi, artist unknown

I am hopeful that these Pages will speak meaningfully to any future generation no matter what the changes in general culture may be.  There are no changes in the fundamentals of Christian culture, all generated from the holiness of the nature of God.  In nature we refer to righteousness which ought to characterize the Christian, and is available for application to culture.  It is change.  The outline of that righteousness, making it practical for human life, is found in Scripture.  Scripture, by the nature of its uniqueness, must be interpreted in itself in that there is no other instrument for interpreting it, and no culture that alleges to be formed in a model (revelation) from outside nature.  For biblical Christians… Read more

Judgment To Truth

January 16, 2018
Year 3, Day 16 | No Comments
Section of The Descent from the Cross, Rogier van der Weyden, c. 1435

The human condition is marred by sin, a recurring theme in Scripture and in these Pages.  Believing that assertion a Christian designs a scenario to account for it, theorizes from it, and is encouraged to live an affirmative life because of it.  Adaptation is not acceptance in personal life.  That adaptation helps the Christian in the proper resistance to sin and sins.  Sin is in our nature as human beings, and sins become the expression of that nature.  Those who reject depravity will end up with a different scenario for life, even a different scenario for Christianity.  The first scenario has God defining the matter in Scripture, and the second one has mankind defining the context that includes secular perceptions,… Read more

Emotions

January 15, 2018
Year 3, Day 15 | No Comments
Section of Sistine Chapel ceiling, Michaelangelo, 1508-1512

Emotions are by-products of human life and thought given of God.  As human life and thought have been cursed by evil, they have also been blessed by good.  The good preceded the evil, and may be expected to win the wars of tension between mutual contradictions.  I am beneficiary of good growing emotions, and the victim in fading good ones.  I want the good ones, and dissolve the bad ones.  All this is related to the fact that the individual is an emotional person, and has some say over the emotions to be cultivated and those to be rejected – and that with never denying that human beings would not be human without the nature that includes emotion as a… Read more

Man And Beast

January 14, 2018
Year 3, Day 14 | No Comments
Section of Christ and the Adulteress, Lucas Cranach the Younger and Workshop, ca. 1545–50

Scripture reveals God’s regard for animals.  Jonah, distorted in his faith about God and world mission, resisted the call of God to ministry in Nineveh, a city perceived by many in Israel as pagan beyond the grace of God.  Jonah runs from God when called to an evangelistic directive to Nineveh.  He appears to have come to the belief in God as tribal, so if he can escape from Israel’s boundaries he will be free from what he feels is an onerous task.  The story of Jonah’s ordeal with the great fish follows.  He then realizes there is no escape from the mission.  Pleased to learn that a fierce judgment would visit the spiritually recalcitrant people of Nineveh in forty… Read more

Interpretations

January 13, 2018
Year 3, Day 13 | No Comments
Section of The Taking of Christ, Caravaggio, 1602

The early pages of Mark Noll’s, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, contain various observations and quotations of eminent ministers of the period supporting and condemning slavery in America.  The quotations include a number of Scripture verses and extensions from them that appear to support and reject slavery.  Both sides argued strongly that God was on their side, and favored their view.  So contradictory were these ministers perceived to be good and honest men, that the conflicting claims became sternly blatant causing many abolitionists to turn away from spiritual arguments against the practice of slavery.  That led some persons into doubts about biblical veracity, and contributed to a serious theological shift. The church so largely influential, (convincingly shown in… Read more

Theological Hoops

January 12, 2018
Year 3, Day 12 | No Comments
Section of The Crucifixion, Pedro Orrente, ca. 1625–30

Theologians, whether Christian or in some other context, are serious people.  They have to be so in their natures.  If they were not they would surely do something else.  Even though some persons berate theologians for their orientations, especially in regards to God (unseen and mysterious), in assumptions that cannot be proved or disproved since they deal with out-of-nature contexts; in a variety of theories about God, his nature and activity; and, in the affirmations of the teachings of theologians that assume their field is the Queen of the Sciences when, in fact, theology is not a science.  If it were a natural science I would believe it false and there may be much asserted that is false even for… Read more

Debate and Faith

January 11, 2018
Year 3, Day 11 | No Comments
Section of Adoration of the Magi, artist unknown

In my recent reading I have sometimes felt barraged by contradictions, paradoxes, disagreements, variant conclusions all garnered through the same evidence.  In the reports of a number of experiments and field studies I am informed that the archaeological evidence is not complete enough to decide who burned Hebron, as noted in the Book of Joshua.  One editor does not presuppose God at work in any of the studies.  The impression is that of humanism.  The preponderance of authors support the burning by the invading Israelites under Joshua in natural course.  Other serious scholars in the field offer this cause, or another, and so the saga continues.  A book by an eminent scholar relates the differences in those students believing the… Read more

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