Posts tagged Seminary
This Side of Heaven
This is it
God’s “Yes” is stronger than any “No”.
Nothing of the goodness of our humanity is punishable. Nothing in the way God created us.
God is not like anything on earth, because if it was like anything else on earth, it would be easy to see it as simply a projection by humans.
Don’t give up ANYTHING to people who would use it negatively. That’s just throwing away language.
If you love, you will suffer. In a broken world there is no love without suffering. God suffers on the cross through the lens of LOVE, rather than just the lens of suffering.
When we internalize inferiority, we internalize the self-loathing and that is a sin because we are made in God’s image. It is the sin of self-doubt.
The Trinity does not have parts. It is three divine persons, but not parts. The Trinity is not your car.
It’s the end of my first year at seminary.
And throughout it, whenever a professor says something interesting and succinct enough to be recorded on my Tumblr, I copy it down in the margins of my notebook. In honor of finishing, I’m posting all of the un-posted quotes from my Intro to Theology course.
Enjoy this brief furlough into the mind of my Theology professor!
Why is it that the Bible is full of narratives rather than definitions? The case is that the story is best told as a story. Doctrine is shorthand for the story.
Anytime someone becomes a metaphor or a symbol rather than a human, there may be a trap involved. Mary becomes a symbol for the Church…but in that case she is erased as a human being. She becomes a feminine presence, but not as an important female. Which she is…but when you make her into a principle…ugh. We need to rescue the Mary of the Magnificat. She’s sweet and I like her, I just don’t want her to become a symbol rather than a human.
It is why we need to respect the text. Not necessarily obey the text, or be enslaved by the text, but RESPECT the text and listen to it. So that we can be good midwives and help give birth to a new text that has new life.
So, this happens to me a lot.
Finals.
Amen.
(Source: bizgator)
‘El Shaddai’, or ‘The Many Breasted One’. A portrayal of God that is just so feminine, so fertile, that she is just bursting at the seams with this life-giving milk, this nurturing being. There’s boobs all over the place!
My Theology professor.
Sometimes she starts with these brilliant statements, then ends up getting so passionate about it that she ends up turning into this kind of Incredible Hulk of theology. And crazy theology things just start flying out of her mouth, loudly. Sometimes she even clenches her fists and flails her arms like the Hulk. It’s exciting.
We live in a privileged country, in a truly gifted, gifted age of technology.
Where a girl can sleep through dinner with her friends and still be able to order food online, without ever having to talk to a single human being. She can even tip online, so that the only words that need be traded between her and the delivery person are:
“This yours?” “Yes” “Alright, have a goodnight” “Thank you, you too.”
And then she can retreat back into her hovel of a room and not directly engage with anyone else for the rest of the night. Gifted, I tell you.
