Posted by: gcarkner | April 15, 2013

Transcendence and the Good…2

Further Pressing Notes on Transcendence and the Human Good

Late modernity’s picture of a lone will choosing between good and evil, or embracing both in an aesthetic move of conscious moral self-mutilation constitutes a tragic distraction from a move into the goodness-which-is-God, being captivated and transformed by transcendent, epiphanic goodness. D. Stephen Long’s focus is to build one’s life-orientation, one’s identity, one’s lifestyle around this goodness. He suggests that it ought not to be reduced to an achievement of the human will alone. Goodness-making is not a faculty within the self that can be conjured. It requires something outside the self, calling us into a higher level of being.

Long writes that “Human freedom is not about the capacity to choose between good and evil. Human freedom occurs when our desires are so turned toward God and the good that no choice is necessary ….  Jesus shows us that such a life is possible in our humanity—not against it.” (D.S. Long, The Goodness of God. 2001, p. 46)

Moral transformation in this situation comes through a commitment to the good, not through seeking a controlling knowledge of good and evil, nor through creative strategies for self-control or manipulation of precarious power relations and truth games however important. Human creatures as self-legislating beings do not possess the moral resources within to enact true goodness. Acts of the will do not automatically constitute acts of goodness; it is discovered not invented. Read More…

Leave a Comment

Posted in Apologetics, Faith & Culture, Stewardship

Posted by: gcarkner | April 15, 2013

Transcendence and the Good

Transcendent Goodness & the Human  Potential for the Good

Following Charles Taylor’s lead, there must be a source of empowerment for living in a positive, inspiring relationship to the good, for the practices of the good, for mediating transcendent goodness in everyday life. Otherwise, it remains a fantasy. If one pursues it, how can transcendent goodness avoid the charge of unattainable ideal and thus discouragement (Nietzsche)? What is human possibility for mediating a good that is transcendent of self (i.e. not self-fabricated)? This argument follows the series on Quality of the Will.

With these questions in mind, it is crucial knowledge that the Holy Spirit is a key inspirational and transformational factor in human goodness, human actualization and mediation of divine goodness. To use Taylor’s language, this is the constitutive good. D. S. Long (The Goodness of God, 2001) is optimistic about the human quest for the good because of this. He believes that with the Holy Spirit, moral self-constitution can be intimately and fruitfully related to the goodness of God, and that this will rejuvenate ethics and moral self-constitution to a significant degree. Moral relativism leading to moral cynicism is not the only alternative for thinking people. The Holy Spirit offers a reconstitution of both goodness and freedom for the moral self. Dostoyevsky spoke of this in his idea of the circulation of grace.

The Holy Spirit infuses a goodness into us that makes us better than we know we are by ourselves. This better is what theologians mean by grace. People find themselves caught up in a journey that results in the cultivation of gifts and beatitudes they did not know were possible. They discover that this journey was possible only through friendship … The mission of the Holy Spirit is to move us towards the charity that defines the relationship between the Father and the Son, a charity so full that it is thoroughly one and yet cannot be contained within a single origin or between an original and a copy, but always, eternally, exceeds that relationship into another. The Holy Spirit is that relationship. (D. Stephen Long, The Goodness of God. 2001, pp. 302-3)

Divine goodness is made available as a gift by means of the Holy Spirit for the transformation of the self; the Holy Spirit offers relationship and empowerment towards both doing and promoting the good. Amazingly, humans can become entrepreneurs of divine goodness by this very means. Here lies incredible meaning and purpose for life and flourishing. Read More…

Leave a Comment

Posted in Apologetics, Faith & Culture, Stewardship

Posted by: gcarkner | April 5, 2013

Marilynne Robinson Impressive Author

Marilynne Robinson Award Winning Author

Marilynne Robinson

Robinson (née Summers) was born and grew up in Sandpoint, Idaho, and did her undergraduate work at Pembroke College, the former women’s college at Brown University, receiving her B.A., magna cum laude in 1966, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington in 1977.

Robinson has written three highly acclaimed novels: Housekeeping (1980), Gilead (2004) and Home (2008). Housekeeping was a finalist for the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (US), Gilead was awarded the 2005 Pulitzer, and Home received the 2009Orange Prize for Fiction (UK). Home is a companion to Gilead and focuses on the Boughton family during the same time period.

She is also the author of non-fiction works including Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution (1989),The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998), Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (2010), and When I Was a Child I Read Books: Essays (2012). She has written articles, essays and reviews forHarper’s, The Paris Review and The New York Times Book Review.

She has been writer-in-residence or visiting professor at many universities, including the University of Kent, Amherst, and theUniversity of Massachusetts Amherst‘ MFA Program for Poets and Writers. In 2009, she held a Dwight H. Terry Lectureship atYale University, giving a series of talks titled Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self. On April 19, 2010, she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In May 2011 Robinson delivered Oxford University‘s annual Esmond Harmsworth Lecture in American Arts and Letters at the university’s Rothermere American Institute. She currently teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in Iowa City. She was the keynote speaker for the Workshop’s 75th anniversary celebration in June 2011. On February 18, 2013, she was the speaker at the Easter Convocation of the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee and was awarded the degree of Doctor of Literature, honoris causa. Read More…

Leave a Comment

Posted in Faith & Culture

Posted by: gcarkner | March 29, 2013

Why Aren’t Things All Better?

Why Didn’t Everything, including Us, Become Perfect after the Cross?

Dr John Stackhouse Jr.

 

We often ask questions of the “Why didn’t God just . . .” variety. Why didn’t God just avoid the whole painful business of the Incarnation? Why didn’t God in particular just spare his Son the Cross? Why didn’t God just heal all the sick and raise all the dead at once in the career of Jesus? Why didn’t God just . . . and so on, and so on. In each of these cases, the Christian answer is the same: God elected either the best of the available choices or, indeed, the only choice available for God to pursue his purposes.

Jesus’ anguish in the Garden of Gethsemane the night of his betrayal is a key case in point. He badly wants to avoid the horrors to come and tells his Father so, begging him to find another path, to give him a different cup to drink. As he prays, however, Jesus becomes convinced once for all that there is no other path to take. So he willingly goes on to drink the cup of suffering and death. Apparently, even God couldn’t “just” wave a magic wand and make everything better. Quite the contrary.

The natural follow-up question, furthermore, might best be explained in a paradoxically similar fashion. Most people who encounter the Christian teaching about the Cross of Christ wonder why, if Jesus suffered all of that on our behalf, did evil and its effects not then immediately disappear from the world? Read More…

Leave a Comment

Posted in Apologetics, Faith & Culture, Seeker Corner, Stewardship

Posted by: gcarkner | March 29, 2013

Evil & Suffering Poses Deeper Questions

The Presence of Evil and Suffering Pushes to Deeper Thought  

Many people think that the problem of evil, with the suffering it brings, is a barrier to belief in God. Let’s face it; this is the big one that leads to much skepticism and troubled faith. Philip Yancey (Finding the Invisible God) thinks it the major apologetic challenge for God and Christian faith, although William Lane Craig claims that philosophers no longer worry about it. The New Atheists have much commentary on the topic; they want the suffering to stop as well. Let’s take it to a bit deeper level because for most of us, it is a problem or at least a confusion. The current conflict in Syria is just one nasty example. There is much wisdom to be garnered as we grapple with such major human concerns.

Aldous Huxley wrote: “In the form we have posed it, the Riddle of the Universe requires a theological answer. Suffering and enjoying, men [women] want to know why they enjoy and to what end they suffer. They see good things and evil things, beautiful things and ugly, and they want to find a reason–a final and absolute reason–why these things should be as they are.”

Here’s how the discussion often proceeds:

1. A God who is infinitely good and loving would not want evil to exist.

2. A God who is all·powerful could remove all evil, if he so desired.

3. Therefore, if God is both good and all-powerful, there would be no evil. Sounds forceful and convincing on surface.

4. But evil continues in the world. Evidence for this is in the news every day. That bugs everyone, both believer and skeptic!

5. Therefore, God (at least a good and all·powerful God) cannot exist. So people like Bertrand Russell conclude.

This argument is superficially convincing. But it has one major flaw. The third point does not follow logically from the first two. All that is required, if God were both good and all-powerful, is that evil would not exist forever. God would at some point have to deal with evil and remove it from his creation. It would require a final reckoning, or settling of the accounts. Read More…

Leave a Comment

Posted in Apologetics, Faith & Culture, GCU Personality

Posted by: gcarkner | March 27, 2013

Epiphany of the Transcendent

Easter as Epiphany

Epiphanies are suggestive of transcendence. Michael Morgan (1994, pp. 56f)) points out that Charles Taylor sees a parallel between the epiphanies of art and poetry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the I-Thou epiphany of religious encounter with the divine. Taylor elaborates the idea of epiphanies (1989, pp. 419f, especially 490-93). He sees Post-Romantic and modernist art as oriented to epiphanies, episodes of realization, revelation, or disclosure. Epiphanies and epiphanic art are about a kind of transcendence, about the self coming in touch with that which lies beyond it, a ground or qualitative pre-eminence.

Taylor reviews various ways of articulating epiphany in Sources of the Self (1989, pp. 419- 93). He articulates how God, inserted into this idea of epiphany, fits as a moral source (Sources of the Self, pp. 449-52). Epiphanies can be a way of connecting with spiritual and moral sources through the exercise of the creative imagination: sources may be divine (Taylor), or in the world or nature (Romantics), or in the powers of the imaginative, expressive self (Foucault).

These epiphanies are a paradigm case of what Taylor calls recovering contact with moral sources. A special case of this renewal of relationship between the self and the moral source is religion and the relation to God, which he sees in the work of Dostoyevski. The relationship to art parallels the relationship to religion. The self is oriented in the presence of the inaccessible or sublime, that which captures one’s amazement or awe, for example, when one’s eyes are riveted to a certain painting, and one’s inner emotions are deeply moved by a poem. One is taken beyond oneself, in an experience of transcendence; the experience involves both encounter and revelation. Read More…

Leave a Comment

Posted in Apologetics, Faith & Culture, Seeker Corner

Posted by: gcarkner | March 25, 2013

Evidence of a Resurrection?

Under Investigation: Some Allege that the  Resurrection of Jesus was a Hoax

If this statement is true, there is no evidence for the most central Christian belief next to the existence of God. That would be tragic indeed. As the Apostle Paul wrote to one of the first Christian churches, “If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless, and so is your faith” (1 Corinthians 15:14). Easter becomes pure myth without historical substance. This is a powder keg question.

But a reasonable and responsible person needs solid evidence. It is common historical knowledge that Jesus died on a Roman cross and was buried. And the biblical records indicate both that his tomb was found empty shortly afterwards and that a large number of people claimed to have spoken, walked and eaten with him after his death. These claims are indeed unusual, even  startling! They need explanation. We must decide whether there is a more plausible alternative than an actual physical, bodily resurrection. Much hangs on the answer.

Alternate explanations abound: 1) that thieves stole the body of Jesus; 2) that the Roman or Jewish authorities stole it; 3) that Jesus’ disciples stole it; and 4) that Jesus was not actually dead when buried and left the tomb on his own. Below we deal with each one briefly. Read More…

Leave a Comment

Posted in Apologetics, Faith & Culture, Seeker Corner

Posted by: gcarkner | March 20, 2013

The Age of Rights

Entering the Age of Human Rights and Pluralism: Public Religion in Canada from MacKenzie King to Trudeau

 George Egerton PhD, Professor Emeritus History, UBC

What wisdom can we find in the longer history of engagement between religion and politics in Canadian history which can shed some light on our present choices? These are some concluding remarks.

First, I would argue that the resistance of some fundamentalist Protestants and Quebec ultra-Catholics to the protection of human rights, an aversion mixed sometimes with xenophobia and anti-Semitism, is to be shunned by all Christians. Both Protestant and Catholic forms of Christianity developed rich theological rationales for human rights protection, both internationally and nationally; this framework should be powerfully sustained in contemporary theological and political engagements.

However, the leftist, social gospel wing of Protestantism, represented in such figures as John Humphrey, Frank Scott, King Gordon, and Arthur Roebuck, in embracing the human rights agenda often abandoned any legitimating reference to religious foundations which might prove embarrassing in the context of pluralism. The liberal Protestant Canadian churches have also in the main traveled this path, accommodating liberal cultural agendas of extending human rights without a sense of constraint when this process involved violation of classic religious teachings. The result has been not only debilitating internal division within these churches and the loss of a distinctive prophetic voice in culture, but also the loss of any religious conscience within the secularized governance of Canada. Read More…

Leave a Comment

Posted in Faith & Culture

Posted by: gcarkner | March 18, 2013

Visiting Scholar John H. Walton

 

 

Screen Shot 2016-03-27 at 8.44.00 PM.png

Abstract

Online Presentation:  http://the3rdchoice.org/podcasts/ and http://biologos.org/ecf/grantees/origins-today-genesis-through-ancient-eyes

See also DVD called “From the Dust” which can be obtained at iTunes.

According to Notre Dame Sociologist Christian Smith, 70% of American university students sense a conflict between science and religious faith. Therefore, this topic of Origins is one of the most pressing issues with which we must grapple on universities worldwide.

This lecture has occurred and revealed fresh, unexpected insights into the important and complex issue of interpretation of ancient biblical text. Dr. Walton has focused his research on the literature and cultures of the ancient Near East and the Hebrew Scriptures (especially Genesis 1-3), drawing important clues from ancient cosmology. His rigorous work offers a close reading of the creation narrative within its cultural and historical context. This reading raises important questions about appropriate biblical insights for modern science regarding the natural world (cosmology, biology, human origins).  It also explores a unique and fruitful philosophical framework for thinking about the cosmos and our place in it. Are today’s scientific conclusions regarding old earth, common descent, and origins of the human race actually in conflict with the Hebrew Bible? Our speaker will explain his scholarly and critical perspective on the matter. Read More…

Leave a Comment

Posted in Faith & Culture, GCU Events, Grad Student Strategies, Public Lectures, Science Reflections

Posted by: gcarkner | March 16, 2013

Nihilism is Not the Final Word

A Wager on Tragic Optimism

Nihilism does not have the last word. Life is difficult; we all agree. There is no facile formula that makes everything all better, despite what millions of pundits offer. To be human in our world (a very good, but also very broken world) means that we often witness and experience hardship, pain and suffering and violence against the neighbour. A local Vancouver pastor’s son was killed in a case of mistaken identity. Stupid, senseless violence swallowing the innocent, cutting short a whole life of potential. Will the killing and displacement (nearing two million refugees) and destruction in Syria ever quit?  The choices we have to make, the risks that have to be taken, the responsibilities that have to be carried are not easy. The formulae we learn early in life often break down. Life is a lot more complex than we once thought and dreamed To be human means to experience disappointments and broken dreams; one often hears of the post-university seven year run at the career wall. We don’t always get what we want, even when we train for it all the way to a PhD. There are no guarantees of high correlation between aim and achievement, expectation and event, merit and honour. To live is to suffer, like it or not, and sometimes it occurs by the hands of those we love, admire and trust most. To love well even at its best is to suffer, to be misunderstood. This can cause deep stress, even trauma. But it can also create the space in which true wisdom and character begin to emerge.

The critical issue seems to be our response to, negotiation of, the painful and disappointing experiences of life. Many of us try the irresponsible (impossible) route: to avoid suffering at all costs. However, to mature means that we must find meaning in our suffering and grow from and through it. This is the way of health: taking courageous responsibility to find answers to life’s problems, to confront the Big Questions. We must be constantly willing to grow and learn from our mentors. Rethink, revise, re-approach, re-engage life. Some of the great treasures of our human existence involve digging deeper than we ever thought possible. The narcissism of our day tempts us to give up, accept easy answers, throw in the towel far too quickly–a road to neurosis, un-health and perpetual immaturity. It is a cheap trick for those who don’t want to live deeply. Technology won’t work either, won’t make us more human or bypass pain. No deeper character will emerge without learning the art of negotiating suffering; we will continue to skate on the surface and grab onto the nearest mythology, ideology package or live a cliché. Deconstruction only goes so far and then we are left with nothing; without a sound worldview, without a centre, without reckoning with our narrative self, we can go all the way down and find only an empty fantasy.

Read More…

Leave a Comment

Posted in Apologetics, Faith & Culture, Grad Student Strategies, Seeker Corner | Tags:

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »

Categories