The sacred beauty of creation

"There are two occasions when the sacred beauty of Creation becomes dazzlingly apparent, and they occur together. One is when we feel our mortal insufficiency to the world, and the other is when we feel the world's mortal insufficiency to us"

(p.280, Marilynne Robinson, Gilead)

Scribes and prophets

Listening to: the ubiquitous Mumford and Sons: Sigh no More

The fictional Reverend John Ames is reading an magazine article entitled 'God and the American People':

it says 95 percent of us say we believe in God. But our religion doesn't meet the writer's standards, not at all. To his mind, all those people in all those churches are the scribes and the Pharisees. He seems to me to be a bit of a scribe himself, scorning and rebuking the way he does. How do you tell a scribe from a prophet, which is what he clearly takes himself to be? The prophets love the people they chastise, a thing this writer does not appear to me to do.

(p.162, Marilynne Robinson, Gilead)

Alternative audio

• A sermon by Rico Tice: Catching Heaven's Passion - Affection for the self-satisfied (2 Corinthians 6: 1-13). An absolutely stonking sermon I listened to a while back on the recommendation of Yemsee. Very arresting, it includes the wonderful line, "Do you see yourself as a laid back person.... it's unbiblical"
• An Interview by Michael Horton: Novelist Marilynne Robinson on her book of essays called The Death of Adam (HT and introduction to Robinson). Covers Darwinism, Calvin, Puritans and Prigs, the human condition, contemporary society, and what makes good fiction. I've read a few interviews with Robinson and they've all been a little disappointing. This interview between intelligent conservative-Reformed-theologian/radio-host and supremely talented liberal-yet-Calvin-and-Puritan-appreciating novelist is a wonder to listen to. Brilliant.
• 1979 Public Lecture at Moore College by Helmut Theilicke. I've only listened to it once and I'm still trying to work out what it was about. I don't think I was paying enough attention. But I'm still putting it out there because its probably the only audio out there by the great German theologian, and nobody seems to have mentioned it much.

Worms just a little lower than the angels

Chris Oldfield comments that "the gospel dignifies who we are by calling us into question."

Few people I have read calls humanity to question more than John Calvin. Marilynne Robinson (Pulitzer Prize winning novelist) observes that the extreme disparagements of humanity under sin by theologians such as Calvin comes from an understanding that we have dignity as creatures made just a little lower than the angels (Psalm 8:5).

Cauvin [Calvin] employs a characteristic language [...] including extreme disparagements of the physical body, and more generally of humankind under the aspect of sin or fallenness. [This is done] in the service of an extraordinarily exalted vision of the human soul. It is a form of hyperbole - purity is corruption, pleasure is illusion, wisdom is folly, virtue is depravity, by comparison with the holiness that can be imagined, not as the nature of God only, but as the nature of humankind also [...]

The self-abnegation that is always the condition of a true perception of the self or of God can only be understood as the rigorous imagination of a higher self. This is more complex than it sounds. Cauvin has an unsettling habit of referring to himself or to any other human being as a "worm." [Understood as a reference to Psalm 22] the word describes temporal estrangement from God and at the same time ultimate identity with Christ. In context it is the farthest thing from a term of contempt.

(pp. 182-183, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought)

Thank you Steve for lending me that book all those years ago.