The Little Friar

From Paul Tillich's Shaking of the Foundations : Do we know what it means to be struck by grace? It does not mean that we suddenly believe that God exists, or that Jesus is the Saviour, or that the Bible contains the truth. To believe that something is, is almost contrary to the meaning of grace. Furthermore, grace does not mean simply that we are making progress in our moral self-control, in our fight against special faults, and in our relationships to men and to society. Moral progress may be a fruit of grace; but it is not grace itself, and it can even prevent us from receiving grace. For there is too often a graceless acceptance of Christian doctrines and a graceless battle against the structures of evil in our personalities. Such a graceless relation to God may lead us by necessity either to arrogance or to despair. It would be better to refuse God and the Christ and the Bible than to accept them without grace. For if we accept without grace, we do so in the ...

From Karl Barth's The Christian Life :  Grace is the presence, event, and revelation of what the human cannot think or do or reach or attain or grasp, but of what is, in virtue of its coming from God, the most simple, true and real of all things for those to whom it is addressed and who recognise it.  Grace is the factual overcoming of the distinction between God and humanity, creator and creature, heaven and earth -- something that cannot be grasped in any theory or brought about by any technique or human practice.  ...  Grace is God's sovereign intervention on the human’s behalf.  The work and gift of this grace of his is the freedom of the children of God -- their freedom to call upon him as Father. From TF Torrance's Apocalypse Today : [The Gospel] is indeed God's almighty power, and so the Gospel is still the secret of what happens in the world.  This Gospel of pure grace, which deals with [us] solely on the basis of the death of Chr...

Some years ago, as a pastor, I was called upon to give Ann a Christian burial.   I'd gotten to know her only months before.  So I needed to talk to friends and family, to get a picture of her life.  Ann, you see, had committed suicide.   This is Ann's story, and what she taught me.  Ann's father deserted her when she was 3.  Her mother filled his void with a number of temporary replacements.  But they always saw Ann as "under foot".  She was discarded.  Passed around family members, shuffled from town to town, school to school.  She made acquaintances.  No friends.  Not enough stability.  So at 17, she created her own stability.  She latched onto the first man who'd give her attention.  She married young, and poorly.  He abandoned her eventually, with four kids, no job, no home, no money.  Her dreams withered.  She survived as best she could.  Bad jobs, followed by worse ones.  Abusive bo...

Random thought:  Perhaps the greatest sign that a theologian is growing in grace -- the stronger one's theological convictions, the greater one's love for those who differ with you.  

The trouble with praying -- my  praying -- is that I sin so often.  And so boldly.  Sin makes it difficult for me to pray.  That's because sinning makes me believe that prayer is so "holy", and I'm so un holy.  Thing is, if I'm sick, it's also difficult to get me to go to the doctor.  So these things really must be related.   But how? From the perspective of despair, sin (and sickness) are an admission of my humanity.  So any seeking of healing -- either in spirit (through prayer) or body (by getting to the doctor) -- confronts my bull-headed notion that I should be complete in myself.  I know enough, I'm "good enough". But am I?  It's interesting to me that Jesus refused  to be called "good".  " No one is good -- except God alone" (Luke 18.19).   No, I'm still too much like the "rich young man".  I depend on justifying myself in the face of rules.  And those rules can always do nothing more than shine a ligh...