Omniscience, Karl Marx and John 6 - Musings - FEEDBACK PLEASE
Two Unrelated Musings (the first is short :) - I would LOVE FEEDBACK ON THESE, both the content and writing style. I am thinking of posting this for a much broader group of friends on MySpace. Though it's not the sort of thing I normally share this one feels right, especially the Marx/John 6 part. I would really appreciate diverse commens and criticisms, meaning I would love to hear from my Christian and non-Christian friends to get as many 'world views' involved as possible. By the way, if I've kept track correctly I have three faithful LJ friends/readers (and now editors) left - Ashley, Kati, Megan thank you sooo much for putting up with my overly long, rambling and often neurotic personal entries. I love you three!!! My thanks also go in advance to the non-LJ friends I will be specifically inviting to read and comment on this.
Omniscience: I was walking to an appointment yesterday that I wasn't looking forward to and ran into a guy holding a cardboard sign that said, "Please Help, Have Family, God Bless" or something close to that. The specifics of our encounter don't matter for this discussion. Suffice it to say that as I was getting water at Acme it occurred to me how my feeling bad for poor Randall out there in the Northeast Ohio weather had somehow distracted me from my apprehension at getting Novacaine shots in my mouth and having my teeth drilled.
For whatever reason, the burden of omniscience on a loving God who watches a broken world suddenly struck me. No matter what, God cannot look away. When someone is barefoot and shivering in the cold Cleveland wind He cannot turn his head and think of something else to take His mind off the pain. When someone watches their father breathing his last in the ICU, gets cheated on and left by a spouse of twenty-odd years, when some kid gets beaten by his drunken stepdad every night, God is stuck with the pain and grief of watching every moment and knowing intimately every feeling, sympathizing as we, His own beloved creatures, undergo the torments of the fallen creation over which we find ourselves stewards. He cannot distract himself or look away; He cannot think of something else to make things more pleasant. Quite correctly, we Christians think of God as having ultimately born all the consequences and grief of sin in the person of Christ, His Son, upon the Cross, for the salvation of all who believe. But in another, non-saving way, God bore our burdens from before the foundation of the world. He spoke the world into existence, knowing even in the beginning that it would fall through sin and that because of His nature and character he was doomed to watch the people he loved suffer tragedy after tragedy, both those who accept His offer of salvation and those who don't. It must be a terrible thing to love everyone and know everything.
Karl Marx and John 6:22-27 I've been encountering some radical communists selling newspapers on campus lately and there is a fairly active and visible socialist group here at Kent State. So, in preparation for some dialogue, I ordered some literature and started reading The Communist Manifesto today and got through section one. The relevance of this will become apparent in due course.
I've also been going most mornings during Lent to a friend's place for prayer meetings. We read a passage of scripture over and over silently, pray about it individually and then just listen to God for a little while. Then we have breakfast and chill. Today's passage was John 6:25-51. It's a long passage with far too much to assimilate in a brief morning session. It takes place the day after the miraculous feeding of the five thousand from a few loafs and a couple of fish, when Jesus and the disciples have escaped under cover of night after the crowd wants to forcibly make Jesus king. The masses who had been miraculously fed the day before come looking for Him and inquire about his stealthy departure. Jesus cuts to their motives: "Truly, truly I say to you, you are seeking me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not labor for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you. For on him God the Father has set his seal." (6:26-27, English Standard Version) In other words, the people are chasing Jesus for one reason: food. They want their sustenance. And there's nothing wrong with that per se, "Give us our daily bread" and such. They're not following out of interest in spiritual matters, with questions about God or how to live in the world. They aren't even genuinely curious about his miracles. There is much more that follows in the passage, but my point is made here. Their motives may be summed up in one word: materialistic. It may be worth mentioning that at the end of a long dialogue which contains lessons they don't like, they decide Jesus isn't worth it after all.
"Thanks for the Bible lesson but I tuned in for Marx. Now what does all of this have to do with Communism?" Marx's plan is purely materialistic. History is solely the story of struggle between social classes, and the rise of the the proletariat (the poor working class) accompanied by the violent overthrow of their middle-class bourgeoisie masters and with them all pre-existing social instutuions is inevitable. He uses the word 'oppression' with some frequency, but nowhere does he seem to care about the justice aspect - in the Manifesto oppression is an amoral event, it simply happens and is neither right nor wrong. The rise of the proletariat has absolutely nothing to do with justice in Marx's plan. It is the obvious climax of a generations-old economic struggle that has had various phases. If anything else, it has to do with merit. The bourgeoisie will be overthrown because in using the proletariat they become dependent upon them and are incompetent (Marx uses that word specifically) to keep their slaves fed and in slavery. It's sort of a social class version of Nietzsche if you think about it hard enough. Under the long-awaited reign of the proletariat, family relations will be changed virtually beyond recognition and people will lose their "national character." Three things the proletariat will rightly fear for their ties to bourgeoisie interests and private property: law, morality and religion. These are to be abolished.
Close your eyes and imagine really hard. We have no rules to protect the weak from the strong, no code of conduct for how we interact with one another or decide the correctness of our actions. Above and encompassing those, religion is to be cast aside too. You may not seek a relationship with your creator. Absolution I suppose is irrelevant since we have no morality, but in case you should feel guilt over anything, any sense of being out-of-sync with Whatever Made Us, you will not be permitted to seek forgiveness or redemption of any sort. Any shame or burden of conscience you might intuitively sense despite our professed lack of ethical code you must simply live with. You may not wonder whose breath makes the wind blow, whose hand strew the stars across the heavens. You may not dream about That One, try to talk to It. You serve capital; you are an economic instrument and beyond that is no truth, no love in which you may take refuge.
What a relief, upon reading this to realize we dodged a bullet. We could have been born in the old Soviet regime, in China after all. "There but for the grace of God go I" and so forth. But have we really dodged it? I'm going to try my best to get through this conclusion without mentioning specific, current political issues - that was never the point, much though their supreme importance as moral and spiritual questions is precisely part of the point. We don't have to embrace communism to live in the hellish world described in the paragraph above. Capitalism taken too far will usher in that nightmare quite nicely. When our lives are built around our things rather than our souls and that new stereo, our clothes, our 401K plan or our groceries come before whatsoever things are good, pure, just and true and before the welfare of our neighbor, we are well on our way. The glorious, hysterical drama of the bourgeoisie being bloodily overthrown is completely superfluous to the core of the philosophy in question. All we have to do is make a habit of attending to how we plan to earn our money without understanding if and why we should and the horrors of Marxism have arrived, cleverly disguised as attending to the real world and making sure we have food on the table before concerning ourselves with academic, philosophical nonsense or dabbling in religion, that naive superstition best left to our grandmothers, young children and the unsophisticated. I will spare you a long digression, but the less tangible threat of 'Distractionism' as I call it, where we spend hours watching mindless television shows and reading and writing inane MySpace surveys filled with dozens of stupid questions rather than thinking through and working for the world around us is an equal and similarly prevalent threat.
Elsewhere, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells his disciples not to worry about what they should eat or what they will wear. His instructions are too often misinterpreted as a license to be foolish with our resources but the point nevertheless must not be watered down. The key verse is where He says, "But seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you." (Matthew 6:33) This is set by the way in a very long ethical discourse which addresses both how we deal with one another and how we talk to God. Our attention to and obedience of Truth (which Jesus defines and is, but that's another essay) and one another's welfare must come before attention to our own food, clothes and shelter and are the only sure foundation for making sure that our things serve us rather than the reverse. Peruse the Gospels long enough and you will find that these material objects do indeed have a very critical place in our lives, or for the compact version jump to James 1:21-27 and pay particular attention to the last verse. The central conflict between Jesus and Marx is a question of whether man has any identity beyond his role in economic affairs. It frankly has little to do with private property and everything to do with priorities. Are we statistics or are we souls? If we watch the news and examine the standards by which contemporary culture expects us to measure the success or failure of our lives I think we find that the shadow of Marxism has fallen much longer upon us than we are aware.
Omniscience: I was walking to an appointment yesterday that I wasn't looking forward to and ran into a guy holding a cardboard sign that said, "Please Help, Have Family, God Bless" or something close to that. The specifics of our encounter don't matter for this discussion. Suffice it to say that as I was getting water at Acme it occurred to me how my feeling bad for poor Randall out there in the Northeast Ohio weather had somehow distracted me from my apprehension at getting Novacaine shots in my mouth and having my teeth drilled.
For whatever reason, the burden of omniscience on a loving God who watches a broken world suddenly struck me. No matter what, God cannot look away. When someone is barefoot and shivering in the cold Cleveland wind He cannot turn his head and think of something else to take His mind off the pain. When someone watches their father breathing his last in the ICU, gets cheated on and left by a spouse of twenty-odd years, when some kid gets beaten by his drunken stepdad every night, God is stuck with the pain and grief of watching every moment and knowing intimately every feeling, sympathizing as we, His own beloved creatures, undergo the torments of the fallen creation over which we find ourselves stewards. He cannot distract himself or look away; He cannot think of something else to make things more pleasant. Quite correctly, we Christians think of God as having ultimately born all the consequences and grief of sin in the person of Christ, His Son, upon the Cross, for the salvation of all who believe. But in another, non-saving way, God bore our burdens from before the foundation of the world. He spoke the world into existence, knowing even in the beginning that it would fall through sin and that because of His nature and character he was doomed to watch the people he loved suffer tragedy after tragedy, both those who accept His offer of salvation and those who don't. It must be a terrible thing to love everyone and know everything.
Karl Marx and John 6:22-27 I've been encountering some radical communists selling newspapers on campus lately and there is a fairly active and visible socialist group here at Kent State. So, in preparation for some dialogue, I ordered some literature and started reading The Communist Manifesto today and got through section one. The relevance of this will become apparent in due course.
I've also been going most mornings during Lent to a friend's place for prayer meetings. We read a passage of scripture over and over silently, pray about it individually and then just listen to God for a little while. Then we have breakfast and chill. Today's passage was John 6:25-51. It's a long passage with far too much to assimilate in a brief morning session. It takes place the day after the miraculous feeding of the five thousand from a few loafs and a couple of fish, when Jesus and the disciples have escaped under cover of night after the crowd wants to forcibly make Jesus king. The masses who had been miraculously fed the day before come looking for Him and inquire about his stealthy departure. Jesus cuts to their motives: "Truly, truly I say to you, you are seeking me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not labor for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you. For on him God the Father has set his seal." (6:26-27, English Standard Version) In other words, the people are chasing Jesus for one reason: food. They want their sustenance. And there's nothing wrong with that per se, "Give us our daily bread" and such. They're not following out of interest in spiritual matters, with questions about God or how to live in the world. They aren't even genuinely curious about his miracles. There is much more that follows in the passage, but my point is made here. Their motives may be summed up in one word: materialistic. It may be worth mentioning that at the end of a long dialogue which contains lessons they don't like, they decide Jesus isn't worth it after all.
"Thanks for the Bible lesson but I tuned in for Marx. Now what does all of this have to do with Communism?" Marx's plan is purely materialistic. History is solely the story of struggle between social classes, and the rise of the the proletariat (the poor working class) accompanied by the violent overthrow of their middle-class bourgeoisie masters and with them all pre-existing social instutuions is inevitable. He uses the word 'oppression' with some frequency, but nowhere does he seem to care about the justice aspect - in the Manifesto oppression is an amoral event, it simply happens and is neither right nor wrong. The rise of the proletariat has absolutely nothing to do with justice in Marx's plan. It is the obvious climax of a generations-old economic struggle that has had various phases. If anything else, it has to do with merit. The bourgeoisie will be overthrown because in using the proletariat they become dependent upon them and are incompetent (Marx uses that word specifically) to keep their slaves fed and in slavery. It's sort of a social class version of Nietzsche if you think about it hard enough. Under the long-awaited reign of the proletariat, family relations will be changed virtually beyond recognition and people will lose their "national character." Three things the proletariat will rightly fear for their ties to bourgeoisie interests and private property: law, morality and religion. These are to be abolished.
Close your eyes and imagine really hard. We have no rules to protect the weak from the strong, no code of conduct for how we interact with one another or decide the correctness of our actions. Above and encompassing those, religion is to be cast aside too. You may not seek a relationship with your creator. Absolution I suppose is irrelevant since we have no morality, but in case you should feel guilt over anything, any sense of being out-of-sync with Whatever Made Us, you will not be permitted to seek forgiveness or redemption of any sort. Any shame or burden of conscience you might intuitively sense despite our professed lack of ethical code you must simply live with. You may not wonder whose breath makes the wind blow, whose hand strew the stars across the heavens. You may not dream about That One, try to talk to It. You serve capital; you are an economic instrument and beyond that is no truth, no love in which you may take refuge.
What a relief, upon reading this to realize we dodged a bullet. We could have been born in the old Soviet regime, in China after all. "There but for the grace of God go I" and so forth. But have we really dodged it? I'm going to try my best to get through this conclusion without mentioning specific, current political issues - that was never the point, much though their supreme importance as moral and spiritual questions is precisely part of the point. We don't have to embrace communism to live in the hellish world described in the paragraph above. Capitalism taken too far will usher in that nightmare quite nicely. When our lives are built around our things rather than our souls and that new stereo, our clothes, our 401K plan or our groceries come before whatsoever things are good, pure, just and true and before the welfare of our neighbor, we are well on our way. The glorious, hysterical drama of the bourgeoisie being bloodily overthrown is completely superfluous to the core of the philosophy in question. All we have to do is make a habit of attending to how we plan to earn our money without understanding if and why we should and the horrors of Marxism have arrived, cleverly disguised as attending to the real world and making sure we have food on the table before concerning ourselves with academic, philosophical nonsense or dabbling in religion, that naive superstition best left to our grandmothers, young children and the unsophisticated. I will spare you a long digression, but the less tangible threat of 'Distractionism' as I call it, where we spend hours watching mindless television shows and reading and writing inane MySpace surveys filled with dozens of stupid questions rather than thinking through and working for the world around us is an equal and similarly prevalent threat.
Elsewhere, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells his disciples not to worry about what they should eat or what they will wear. His instructions are too often misinterpreted as a license to be foolish with our resources but the point nevertheless must not be watered down. The key verse is where He says, "But seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you." (Matthew 6:33) This is set by the way in a very long ethical discourse which addresses both how we deal with one another and how we talk to God. Our attention to and obedience of Truth (which Jesus defines and is, but that's another essay) and one another's welfare must come before attention to our own food, clothes and shelter and are the only sure foundation for making sure that our things serve us rather than the reverse. Peruse the Gospels long enough and you will find that these material objects do indeed have a very critical place in our lives, or for the compact version jump to James 1:21-27 and pay particular attention to the last verse. The central conflict between Jesus and Marx is a question of whether man has any identity beyond his role in economic affairs. It frankly has little to do with private property and everything to do with priorities. Are we statistics or are we souls? If we watch the news and examine the standards by which contemporary culture expects us to measure the success or failure of our lives I think we find that the shadow of Marxism has fallen much longer upon us than we are aware.