on damaged goods.
“Don’t cast your pearls before swine.” Jesus says, as we spit in His face and nail Him to a cross.
“How shall we square what He says with what He does?”
“Perhaps we’re not swine?”
posted by Derek at 10:04 PM
Monday, April 16, 2012
Previous Posts
- on total depravity. Or something near enough...
- chief among the divine attributes.
- that emotional pain is worse than physical pain:
- on being inhuman.
- a slightly novel argument for God's existence.
- on avoiding theological hubris.
- on a kind of nihilism.
- that game's stupid
- whilst at CVS.
- on the Dark Ages.
2 Comments:
Is there not asymmetry between the foolishness in exposing God's truth to someone who will disrespect, mock, and abuse it without hesitation, and the wisdom in the Son of Man dying as a propitiation for mankind so that those who accept Him will become able to glorify and enjoy Him forever? Does it not seem like one is fruitful and the other futile? I'm not convinced the pearl metaphor was meant to be taken at the level of abstraction required by your application.
"Is there not asymmetry between the foolishness in exposing God's truth to someone who will disrespect, mock, and abuse it without hesitation, and the wisdom in the Son of Man dying as a propitiation for mankind so that those who accept Him will become able to glorify and enjoy Him forever?"
Wasn't Christ *both* the Very Truth and Light whom was shown to us but whom we despised and rejected?
"Does it not seem like one is fruitful and the other futile?"
Its futility was up to us, and so the act of the Father casting the Son before us "swine" wasn't inherently futile. Of course, in His Providence, he took the contingently futile and, as Providence always does, made a contingently futile act bear the most abundant fruit possible.
"I'm not convinced the pearl metaphor was meant to be taken at the level of abstraction required by your application."
I agree in this sense: they are two different kinds of acts, so it takes a level of abstraction to gleam the similarity.
BUT, because these two acts coalesce in a single person by means of our single act of rejection, I'm not convinced that my point was hopelessly abstract.
Post a Comment
<< Home