Pilgrim Notes

Reflections along the way.

Month: February 2014

What Do I Know?

February 24, 2014 / / 2 Comments

trees

I’m not sure how people keep up. The amount of information humans produce and consume rains down like a flood across the globe. Last spring, Science Daily suggested that 90% of the world’s data had been produced in 2011 and 2012: 90%. Companies face the never-ending challenge of storing, sorting and analyzing the endless stream of data.

I love and hate technology at the same time. Some days, I feel like I’m struggling to breathe beneath the endless rain of information.

How do people read, let alone write as much as they do? Sometimes I want to simply breathe. Pause. Stare at the dead leaves on my tree in the backyard that refuse to let go and fly away in the late winter breeze. Every year, these leaves will not fall until mid-spring. Continue reading

February 18, 2014

calvin on piety“‘The whole life of Christians ought to be a sort of practice of piety [pietatis], for we have been called to sanctification’ (3.19.2). For Calvin this practice of piety is itself a divine gift, a gracious way for disciples to participate in a life of communion with Christ.” – Matthew Myer Boulton (Life in God: John Calvin, Practical Formation, and the Future of Protestant Theology)

3 Tools of Fundamental Coherence in Richard Hooker

February 17, 2014 / / 0 Comments

In “Richard Hooker and the Vision of God,” Charles Millers suggests that a “fundamental coherence” may be better language than “system” when referring to Richard Hooker’s thought in “Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.”

Instead of a formal system, Hooker works out a “constellation of fundamental ideas,” according to Olivier Loyer (cited by Miller). Working from this core, Hooker has a set of tools that help him explore a range of questions. These tools include rationality, hierarchy, and participation.

Drawing upon a vision of God’s creation as rooted in His divine order, Hooker sees the world as pervaded by “a sense of the rational character of law” and “the human mind’s rational capacity is fulfilled in apprehending and coordinating itself to such laws.” Continue reading

February 15, 2014

In the eucharist we Christians concentrate our motives and act out our theory of human living. Mankind are not to be ‘as Gods’, a competing horde of dying rivals to the Living God. We are His creatures, fallen and redeemed, His dear recovered sons, who by His free love are ‘made partakers of the divine nature’. But our obedience and our salvation are not of ourselves, even while we are mysteriously free to disobey and damn ourselves. We are dependent on Him even for our own dependence. We are accepted sons in the Son, by the real sacrifice and acceptance of His Body and Blood, Who ‘though He were a Son, yet learned He obedience by the things which he suffered; and being made perfect, He became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey Him; called of God an High-priest after the order of Melchisedech’. – Dom Gregory Dix

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