28 August 2007

Random Thoughts

Random Thought #1

Praying in the Psalter the other day, it hit me why God would say that he "knows the proud from afar." He knows them from afar because He hangs out with the humble! He's not with the great and proud; He's in the cow's feeding trough and hanging on the wood of the tree and looking at us through the eyes of everyone in need. Our God ISN'T proud, and so the only way He can know the proud is from a distance.

Random Thought #2

Taught OT Catechesis this morning and it really hit me how utterly polemical Genesis 1 is. This is a tract that takes direct aim at the ancient idolatries. It refuses to name "sun and moon" and refers to these objects of ancient worship as "the big lamp and the little lamp" and it just throws in "oh, and the stars." Youch! A decent Zoroastrain would be screaming in anger. And then, all the idolatries of the beasties of the earth. I think of the snake worship in Cancun and the Mayan territories. The message from Genesis one is: Oh, yeah, all those things you worship as Gods OUR God made AND He put us in charge of all of them. We're so used to story that we no longer hear the real "in your face-ness" of that text in its original context. "In the beginning, GOD created." THEM be fightin' words!

9 comments:

Chaz said...

Did I ever send you my M.Div thesis? Random thought #2 is about the first 10 pages. ;-)

William Weedon said...

Ten pages for that one paragraph? See, there's where cutting to the chase comes in. ;)

Seriously, though, I don't think we'd ever talked about it before, had we? It is a joy when someone else tracks along the same way with a passage - makes you think, "I'm not ENTIRELY nuts."

Chaz said...

It was a T-H-E-S-I-S...

The rest of it was on the liturgy in Genesis 1-3. If you have some time, I'd love your feedback on it, because it's something I might work some more on eventually.

Anonymous said...

Great stuff as usual, Will.

I trust you keep a notebook of these thoughts all catalogued. If not, you should. They could come in very handy.

Tom Fast

Past Elder said...

I believe the Herz work that I have mentioned makes the same point -- that Genesis places all the things that natural religion tends to deify as creature or created, not Creator or God. It has a similar take on the plagues leading up to the Exodus, how each of them overturned a part of the Egyptian religion.

Anonymous said...

It occurred to me that I was spending way too much time on the internet with it's abbreviations when I read your opening statement on Random Thought #2 as "Taught Off Topic Catechesis".

123 said...

Ratzinger points out these kinds of things in his little book on Genesis from lectures he gave at the Cathedral in Munich (?).

Anonymous said...

Random thought #1.a

If one sets out to "love Jesus as He has never been loved before," which category does that fall into?

Anastasia,
trying to love Him a little better today than I did yesterday

Doorman-Priest said...

I am a great fan of random thoughts. Keep them coming.

Have a look at my new Lutheran blog:
http://theworldofdoorman-priest.blogspot.com
Blessings
D.P.