Missing You

And thy gentle voice will awaken my heart to see again with the Lord’s eyes that love is no temporary thing, that it will be lived, that we are forever bound by baptism into the blood of Christ, for blessing or for curse. How sweet were thy living presence! And in defiance of the devil, I say the kiss of peace shall indeed be exchanged, not only in the imagination of the heart.

I so desire the assurance that adelphophilia will not pass into legend and legend into myth, unlike the Ring of Sauron. I must see it live, or even the Sun will be darkened; I must live it, or even the flowers will pass to dust and the bread taste like ashes. Thou wilt stay with me, wilt thou not, in more than thy mere thoughts? Thy blessing hath been like the Lord’s spring in the parched wasteland of this present evil age.

Even if we be bound with chains for beheading and crucifixion, may the Holy Spirit be the holy love of fellowship that passes between us and in us. O Death, I shall not abide thine intrusion before Sheol. As none shall abide the day of the Lord’s coming, so shall I be bound in his love, and thy icy hands shall not tear out my heart but that it will know also the fire of the Holy Spirit burning as the fellowship of the holy Church.

Be not proud, for Resurrection’s glory is before our faces even now, and life shall be real. Lord Almighty, hide not our faces, but let us rather see more, more in the deep of the soul, that cords of three strands shall not be broken.

Merit?

There is nothing at all we can merit, if obedience is simply God’s due, as the fitting response to his grace in creating and providing for us. Can anyone boast for having paid his bills? I think not.

And then I find out that Steven Wedgeworth has already posted on this, more than a year ago. Well, I guess that means I think like the Reformers on my own, which isn’t bad.

Donatism and Homosexuality

In our dealings with individual ‘gay churches’, are a lot of us, perhaps even most of us, acting like the Donatists? If so, I think we have a doctrinal problem on our hands, and we need then to push catholicity as an important thing to uphold. If you refuse to be catholic, you refuse to be part of the one Church; if you refuse to be part of the Church, you refuse to be part of Christ; if you have no share in Christ, your sin damns you: obviously no laughing matter, this.

Or we could be a Donatist sect with rigorist, essentially Mosaic clean-unclean views of Christian purity. But Christ’s coming was in part to conquer the unclean with his purifying fire.

Gifts of Maturity

Can I get Peter Leithart’s relatively new Deep Exegesis for my turning twenty-one, to symbolize Israel’s coming to spiritual and exegetical maturity under her Christ?

Because I’m pretty tired of attributing exegetical powers to Jesus and New Testament writers that somehow are irrelevant to us upon the closing of the Canon of Scripture. We accept Hebrews in the Canon, after all, without knowing even who wrote it, yet somehow we invest it magically with interpretive authority entirely different from ours, in kind and not just in degree. I’d think that Christ, having given to the Church to share in all the authority given to him (Mt 28.18–20; Gal 3.23–29), would also have given us to be exegetical imitators of him (Eph 5.1).

I’m tired, therefore, of treating historical-grammatical reading as the only legitimately modern way to read God’s inspired word. I want to interpret Scripture along the same lines as Christ and his first followers. Being commissioned to be mature imitators of Christ, we should be able to read with proper attention to the texts at hand as well as to the whole of the Canon while also not making the Bible into the creature of our own devices and desires, improving our textual understanding century by century.

Or we could always deny the New Creation and insist on using only historical-grammatical principles for reading. Really, now.

Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God, who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit. For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. (II Cor 3.5–6)

And this must impinge on hermeneutics without turning our interpretation into the sludge of our own flesh.

He Will Break Them With a Rod of Iron

If you’re neglected, it’s probably my fault: I’m rather a neglectful person, particularly if you’ve contributed chromosomes (and your life) to me.

If you’re governed by reason (and you reason differently from others), I think you need not worry about being your own person, because you’ll see yourself not thinking the same thing as others. But when are we so much ourselves that we have no human self left? When does survival and its ‘practical’ needs crowd out the impractical needs of love? When is art swallowed up in death?

To hell with the appearance of life if living love – incarnate love, not its thought, not its memory, not its intention – must be forsaken. For if the living love, which is Christ himself and he in his Body, is gone… so too is everything, and we shall all be broken to pieces.

But the precious Body was also broken and the precious Blood shed for us, that the Holy Spirit might course through our spiritual veins and the Body be brought together from the four corners of the earth.