In Awe

This morning I am just in awe of the man, Jesus Christ… and I am quite  (maybe naively) unsettled when others aren’t.

It has to be pride, but yet even the proud were in awe.

Think of what Napoleon said of Jesus,

I know men and I tell you that Jesus Christ is no mere man. Between Him and every other person in the world there is no possible term of comparison. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I have founded empires. But on what did we rest the creation of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded His empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men would die for Him.

It could be that Jesus is one among many.  Yet even Ghandi recognized,

A man who was completely innocent, offered himself as a sacrifice for the good of others, including his enemies, and became the ransom of the world. It was a perfect act.

Maybe the lack of historical scholarship… although H.G. Wells had once written,

I am an historian, I am not a believer, but I must confess as a historian that this penniless preacher from Nazareth is irrevocably the very center of history. Jesus Christ is easily the most dominant figure in all history.

I want to know this man.  I want to know Him then and now.  I want to know Christ, His every traceable footfall on this earth, and his untraceable ways in heaven.  Is there a more worthy pursuit than to learn this man’s, this Savior’s life?

Not a butterfly in a showcase

Frederick Copleston, Jesuit priest and philosopher wrote,

“I do not think that it can be justifiably demanded of the human mind that it should be able to pin down God like a butterfly in a showcase.”

Some modern, or more accurately labeled, “post-modern” Christian philosophers and emergent ministers have moved into a contemporary form of gnosticism that details in books written by the hemp-weaved basket load the belief that there is really nothing we can pin down about God. In coffee-shop vernacular, these bohemian theologians kill thousands of trees to tell us simply that God cannot be understood.

While I believe that this new gnostic teaching is vacuous, and will last only as long as the colorful personalities who stage it, I think Copleston’s classic angle strikes a great blow for theism in the battle for the soul of the thinking unbeliever.

The old debater explains,

“God becomes a reality for the human mind in the personal movement of transcendence. In the movement, God appears as the unseen goal of the movement. And inasmuch as the Transcendent cannot be grasped in itself and overflows, so to speak, our conceptual web, doubt inevitably tends to arise. But, within the movement of transcendence, doubt is at once counterbalanced by the affirmation involved in the movement itself. It is within the context of this personal movement of the human spirit that God becomes a reality for man.”

Can we know the God who appears as the unseen goal of the movement of transcendence? I think so; in fact I am sure of it. It comes through this movement which I would translate as relationship. It is a relationship built on staying engaged in that movement, and based on faith in what is, has been, and will be established in that movement… faith that is the EVIDENCE of things unseen, the substance of things hoped for.

You don’t know Jack!… but you should

Is there anything better to start your day with than a quote from Clive “Jack” Staples Lewis?

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.