Theological Fragments

[From Part I Chapter II.C, " You  Shall Love Your Neighbor "] “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. (Matthew 5: 43-5, ESV) “Men think that it is impossible for a human being to love his enemies, for enemies are hardly able to endure the sight of one another.” [1] I must say, this applies absolutely to me. I find it so hard to love the people I don’t like, or who don’t like me. It feels wrong, like it’s the opposite of what I’m supposed to do. And yet Christ orders us to love our enemies, and to pray for those who persecute us. But how? How do I get myself into the mindset of one who loves their enemy? Kierkegaard continues:  “Well, then, shut your eyes—and your enemy looks just like your neighbor. Shut your eyes and remember the command that you shall love; then you are to love—your enemy

III Narrator Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree, Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes -- Some have got broken -- and carrying them up to the attic. The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt, And the children got ready for school. There are enough Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week -- Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot, Stayed up so late, attempted -- quite unsuccessfully -- To love all of our relatives, and in general Grossly overestimated our powers. Once again As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed To do more than entertain it as an agreeable Possibility, once again we have sent Him away, Begging though to remain His disobedient servant, The promising child who cannot keep His word for long. The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory, And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought Of Lent and Good Fri

I really enjoy the Advent/Christmas season. It wasn't always this way. For a long time I hated it because I was working in retail and Christmas meant Christmas shoppers, which meant angry, demanding people for long hours (of course, I never gave a thought to the fact that I had become one of those angry people myself). But over the past few years, as I've really tried to focus on Advent--which is about waiting for God--I've seen my Christmas Spirit slowly return. This year has been my favorite Christmas season in a long time, and not just because I'm not working retail anymore. Well, it is exactly because of that, but there's more to it. Let me explain. When I finished seminary I expected to go into a PhD program. That didn't happen right away, and so I had to wait. Then it didn't happen again. So I had to wait. And I slowly began to realize that what I was waiting for was probably not a PhD program anymore; God probably had something else in mind. A

[From Part I Chapter II.B, " You Shall Love Your Neighbor "] If you really fulfil the royal law according to the Scripture, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” you are doing well. But if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. ~ James 2:8-9  (ESV) In this section (Chapter 2 part B, to be precise) Kierkegaard discusses the object of love—that is, who a person loves. Here he distinguishes between erotic (romantic) love and friendship on one side and Christian love on the other in terms of who they love and why: “…Christianity has misgivings about erotic [romantic] love and friendship because preference in passion or passionate preference is really another form of self-love. Paganism had never dreamed of this. Because paganism never had an inkling of self-renunciation's love of one's neighbor whom one shall love, it therefore reckoned thus: self-love is abhorrent because it is love of self, but

[From For the Time Being,  by W.H. Auden] HEROD One needn’t be much of a psychologist to realize that if this rumor is not stamped out now, in a few years it is capable of diseasing the whole Empire, and one doesn’t have to be a prophet to predict the consequences if it should. Reason will be replaced by Revelation. Instead of Rational Law, objective truths perceptible to any who will undergo the necessary intellectual discipline, and the same for all, Knowledge will degenerate into a riot of subjective visions—feelings in the solar plexus induced by undernourishment, angelic images generated by fevers or drugs, dream warnings inspired by the sound of falling water. Whole cosmologies will be created out of some forgotten personal resentment, complete epics written in private languages, the daubs of school children ranked above the great masterpieces. Idealism will be replaced by Materialism. Priapus will only have to move to a good address and call himself Eros

[From Part I Chapter II.A, " You Shall Love "] And a second [commandment] is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself . ~Matthew 22:39 (ESV) In the second chapter of Works of Love Kierkegaard begins a reflection on one verse that will take him three chapters to finish. The verse is quoted above, and in this chapter he focuses on the phrase “you shall love”—which, as Kierkegaard explains, is perhaps one of the most revolutionary things ever said: A political cartoon of Kierkegaard  “[I]n relation to this Christian imperative, as in relation to everything Christian, you will humbly confess with the wonder of faith that such a thing did not arise in any human being’s heart. Now after it had been commanded throughout Christianity’s eighteen centuries and previously in Judaism, now when everyone is instructed in this and, in a spiritual sense, like someone brought up in his prosperous parents’ house, is almost made to forget that those brought up in it f

[From For the Time Being  by W.H. Auden, about the experience of Joseph after hearing that Mary is pregnant.]           JOSEPH My shoes were shined, my pants were cleaned and pressed, And I was hurrying to meet           My own true Love: But a great crowd grew and grew Till I could not push my way through           Because A star had fallen down in the street;           When they saw who I was, The police tried to do their best.

[From Part I Chapter I, " Love's Hidden Life and Its Recognizability by Its Fruits "] Each tree is recognized by its own fruit. People do not pick figs from thornbushes, or grapes from briers.  ~Luke 6:44 (NIV) Kierkegaard hard at work in a Copenhagen Cafe "There is no word in human language, not one single one, not the most sacred one, about which we are able to say: If a person uses this word, it is unconditionally demonstrated that there is love in that person. On the contrary, it is even true that a word from one person can convince us that there is love in him, and the opposite word from another can convince us that there is love in him also. It is true that one and the same word can convince us that love abides in the one who said it and does not in the other, who never the less said the same word.    “There is no work, not one single one, not even the best, about which we unconditionally dare to say: The one who does this unconditionally demonstrates

It is one of the great tragedies of our time that Christians are taught to be ashamed of our past. Anyone who has taken a course in Western history in the last seventy years is undoubtedly aware of the long list of atrocities that are laid at the feet of Christianity, while the list of its victories is short (if it exists at all). Evangelicals have tried to deflect this phenomenon by pointing the finger at certain denominations (mainly Catholicism) or at Denominationalism in general—a maneuver that is neither fair, accurate, nor true—but have largely failed to avoid condemnation. We all drown beneath the onslaught of historical crimes: crusades, witch-burnings, subjugation of native peoples, human slavery, the list goes on. Of course, no one points out the hypocrisy of these accusations (For instance, on what basis can the secular world tell us that killing in the name of God is barbaric—which it is—while killing in the name of a government is perfectly moral?), nor do they acknowled