Thanks, Ed! In this post I see you wrestling with two imperatives that stand in tension, and maybe that’s part of what it means to be a good dialectical theologian. I deeply respect the way you take seriously what Paul would have called the dangers of a teaching role: wanting to give good, healing, trustworthy advice, while avoiding insofar as possible the sin that lies within even our best intentions. This may be one of those situations in which Luther might have advised us to “sin boldly”: to work out this dialectic between self-denial and rejecting self-hatred in fear and trembling, and to live by the results of our struggles as best we can, for we know that despite our proneness to sin and error, the grace of God is at work in us.
This is the loveliest response I could have imagined, Tim. It is wonderful to read your thoughts, which seem to me to express a profound and difficult truth that must always be worked out anew (and will very much help me in my own thinking/living).
I also hope that my gratitude for your question shone throughout the post, but will say explicitly here: thank you, for the spur to try and think within this particular space on this particular subject. It has been a very meaningful thing for me, and I hope that it makes the working out more spirit filled for you.
Someone wrote “The charge is to hold onto your faith until you die.” That’s from memory, so not the least authority behind it.
I think that the self-denial is required to hold on to faith; the hours will come when only blind holding will yield to confirmation, and at those times all hopes for “self” must die — but to be reborn as a self somewhat more steeped in the faith and thus somewhat better suited to spreading the word of Christ.
I went conservative evangelical upbringing (witness the key word) to Kierkegaard to Wittgenstein (mostly slow study of PI and later works) CD 1/2 (for years) and then finally the rest of CD.
Many thanks for these deeply thoughtful words, Greg. Our journeys are interestingly similar (just from a broad atheism for me, and Kierkegaard has appeared much later in my life!). In any case, you are more than welcome, and thank you once again for your comment.
Seems to me that this is the way one does theology - a constant conversation between life as life meets us on the street, in homes, in the therapy office, in the church, and probably other places, and the languaging that our foremother/fathers have used to describe their beliefs. I am as much influenced, in my reflecting on life and my "theologizing," by Barth's little book of sermons preached at the women's prison in Basel as by his Dogmatics.
Thanks, Ed! In this post I see you wrestling with two imperatives that stand in tension, and maybe that’s part of what it means to be a good dialectical theologian. I deeply respect the way you take seriously what Paul would have called the dangers of a teaching role: wanting to give good, healing, trustworthy advice, while avoiding insofar as possible the sin that lies within even our best intentions. This may be one of those situations in which Luther might have advised us to “sin boldly”: to work out this dialectic between self-denial and rejecting self-hatred in fear and trembling, and to live by the results of our struggles as best we can, for we know that despite our proneness to sin and error, the grace of God is at work in us.
This is the loveliest response I could have imagined, Tim. It is wonderful to read your thoughts, which seem to me to express a profound and difficult truth that must always be worked out anew (and will very much help me in my own thinking/living).
I also hope that my gratitude for your question shone throughout the post, but will say explicitly here: thank you, for the spur to try and think within this particular space on this particular subject. It has been a very meaningful thing for me, and I hope that it makes the working out more spirit filled for you.
Someone wrote “The charge is to hold onto your faith until you die.” That’s from memory, so not the least authority behind it.
I think that the self-denial is required to hold on to faith; the hours will come when only blind holding will yield to confirmation, and at those times all hopes for “self” must die — but to be reborn as a self somewhat more steeped in the faith and thus somewhat better suited to spreading the word of Christ.
I went conservative evangelical upbringing (witness the key word) to Kierkegaard to Wittgenstein (mostly slow study of PI and later works) CD 1/2 (for years) and then finally the rest of CD.
Thanks for this 🙏
Many thanks for these deeply thoughtful words, Greg. Our journeys are interestingly similar (just from a broad atheism for me, and Kierkegaard has appeared much later in my life!). In any case, you are more than welcome, and thank you once again for your comment.
Seems to me that this is the way one does theology - a constant conversation between life as life meets us on the street, in homes, in the therapy office, in the church, and probably other places, and the languaging that our foremother/fathers have used to describe their beliefs. I am as much influenced, in my reflecting on life and my "theologizing," by Barth's little book of sermons preached at the women's prison in Basel as by his Dogmatics.