The challenge for us all is to reasonably engage our faith, isn't it?
Reason and faith do not need to be either/or scenarios, yet we are led to believe that they are diametrically opposed... Some of it has to do with the basic difficulty that we all have believing in things and people that we cannot see, hear, or otherwise experience with one or more of our basic five sense. The reality is that we need a reason to believe- belief doesn’t just happen.
In this letter to the Corinthian church, a church that Paul himself has planted just eighteen months earlier, he writes to a group of Christians that have started to form little unity-threatening factions. These are probably not people who have grown up in Jewish households singing psalms and hearing stories of Moses and Egypt or David and the Philistines. They are probably greeks, having their own rich tradition of philosophy and logic, their own famous teachers like Homer, Plato and Virgil, and their own gods and goddesses. The temple of Aphrodite with its 1000 temple prostitutes is right in the middle of town. The Corinthians are a wild and affluent bunch, favouring a life of lasciviousness and justifying it all by worshiping a goddess that is into that kinda thing. The Christians in town are carrying a bit of baggage with them, and their baggage is slowing them down, so Paul sends them a letter meant to redirect them a bit... to share around some of the wisdom afforded him by God. In it, he explores many themes in chunks. One such theme is this idea of wisdom.
In this letter to the Corinthian church, a church that Paul himself has planted just eighteen months earlier, he writes to a group of Christians that have started to form little unity-threatening factions. These are probably not people who have grown up in Jewish households singing psalms and hearing stories of Moses and Egypt or David and the Philistines. They are probably greeks, having their own rich tradition of philosophy and logic, their own famous teachers like Homer, Plato and Virgil, and their own gods and goddesses. The temple of Aphrodite with its 1000 temple prostitutes is right in the middle of town. The Corinthians are a wild and affluent bunch, favouring a life of lasciviousness and justifying it all by worshiping a goddess that is into that kinda thing. The Christians in town are carrying a bit of baggage with them, and their baggage is slowing them down, so Paul sends them a letter meant to redirect them a bit... to share around some of the wisdom afforded him by God. In it, he explores many themes in chunks. One such theme is this idea of wisdom.
Wisdom: Knowlege of what is true, coupled with just judgement as to action
We’re okay with the knowledge bit... we have a pretty good handle on the difference between truth and falsity (except for all of the lies that get hurled into our consciousness from hell, designed to cause us to doubt our worth, devalue our gifts and devise ways to approximate joy by embracing worship counterfeits that distract us from the voice of God:
We’re okay with the knowledge bit... we have a pretty good handle on the difference between truth and falsity (except for all of the lies that get hurled into our consciousness from hell, designed to cause us to doubt our worth, devalue our gifts and devise ways to approximate joy by embracing worship counterfeits that distract us from the voice of God:
- entertainments
- possessions
- some relationships...
Jesus is
our ziggurat,
our Jacob’s ladder,
our Mercury space craft,
our stairway to heaven...
Jesus is
Jesus is
God’s just judgement to action
and this makes no sense to our natural and cultural reason.
Paraphrasing Paul's thoughts as written to the church in Corinth, E J Smith says:
Jesus is the way God sent his wisdom to us.
In Christ,
forgiveness is offered to even the most notorious of sinners;
grace is offered to even the most faithless of the fallen;
hope and peace are offered to even the most desperate of the tormented.
This kind of just judgement to action is exactly the kind of thing that makes no sense to minds developed within the aftermath of Eden- that great tragedy that tore the holy from the common so that it has become increasingly common to be holy. It makes no sense- this good news is too good to be true, so humankind has created religious structures that allow us to have some boundaries, enabling us to intellectually and emotionally fathom the boundlessness of the love and grace of God by restricting access to it- in short, by making it more difficult to receive these things than God ever intended when he sent Jesus to die for us all and bring new life.
Paul addresses this in a letter written to a different church plant a decade later when he challenges his readers in the Colossian church to 'see to it that no one holds [them] captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy which depends on human tradition and the forces of this world rather than on Christ.' The same things seem to happen wherever people are involved, whether ten years or two thousand years later.
So what’s the simple message- the uncluttered word of God's wisdom?
This kind of just judgement to action is exactly the kind of thing that makes no sense to minds developed within the aftermath of Eden- that great tragedy that tore the holy from the common so that it has become increasingly common to be holy. It makes no sense- this good news is too good to be true, so humankind has created religious structures that allow us to have some boundaries, enabling us to intellectually and emotionally fathom the boundlessness of the love and grace of God by restricting access to it- in short, by making it more difficult to receive these things than God ever intended when he sent Jesus to die for us all and bring new life.
Paul addresses this in a letter written to a different church plant a decade later when he challenges his readers in the Colossian church to 'see to it that no one holds [them] captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy which depends on human tradition and the forces of this world rather than on Christ.' The same things seem to happen wherever people are involved, whether ten years or two thousand years later.
So what’s the simple message- the uncluttered word of God's wisdom?
- God loves us
- We all have sinned and sin separates us from God
- but Jesus came to die for us in our sin
- so what we need to do is accept this work of Grace
This is the message of the cross and if I am a fool for believing it then so be it. My own solitary hopelessness is just the beginning of my reasons to believe.
Wise men say only fools rush in
But I can't help falling in love with you
Take my hand, take my whole life too
Cause I can't help falling in love with you.
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