Archive for the ‘Mystery’ Category

December 9, 2009 1

Theses on Mysticism and Dialectic

By Robert Minto in Epistemology, Learning, Mystery, Thinking, Virtue

(Courtesy of the prompting of Maimonides, Yair Lorberbaum, Karl Barth, and my all-nighter—on whom be no blame for the result.)

Mysticism and dialectic share a willingness to suspend the certainty and comfort of dogmatic pronouncement for better things. Mysticism refuses to degrade the divine by insisting that one apparently mutually exclusive truth disproves another, while dialectic [...]

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December 5, 2009 2

A Conflict About Mystagogy: Maimonides and Eckhardt

By Robert Minto in Education, Mystery

The remarkable Jewish polymath Maimonides first stated his theory about teaching mysteries in his Commentary on the Mishnah. This work is, historically, the first total summary of Jewish law embracing both the content of the Torah and also its commentators. In the second part of his introduction to this work, Maimonides discusses the haggadah—the homiletic [...]

December 4, 2009 0

Simone Veil on “Attention”

By Robert Minto in Devotion, Learning, Mystery

“Prayer being only attention in its pure form and studies being a form of gymnastics of the attention, each school exercise should be a refraction of spiritual life.” — Simone Weil

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November 20, 2009 0

Faith: Foundation or Target?

By Robert Minto in Faith, Mystery, Self-subversion, Theology

There is a malicious understanding of the life of faith. It goes something like this: to have faith is to believe in certain foundational ideas. The proper result of this belief is a logical and rigorous application of those ideas to all of life. And make no mistake (this understanding says)—all of life will be [...]

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September 7, 2009 0

Miracles, the Allowable Duality, and Personhood

By Robert Minto in Creation, Man, Miracles, Mystery

The “reformational” thought rampant at Dordt demonizes, among other things, “dualisms.” This term of opprobrium extends, in reformational thought, to things like body/soul, work/worship, nature/grace, etc. But two dualities are endorsed: God/Creation, and Good/Evil.
Sometimes thinkers in this tradition point to a “supernaturalistic view of miracles” as an example of an improper dualism. This line of [...]

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August 10, 2009 0

Iconography of a Glory Stain: or, Why Is There a Smashed Bug Dotting My I?

By Robert Minto in Death, Gospel, Mystery

A friend has recently accused me of being a wagon-circler. My preferred mode of discourse, it seems, is to ride my un-pin-down-able pony around the perimeter of some respectable idea and shoot arrows at it. I can appreciate this criticism. My suspicion, however, is that it’s inevitable. I see Christianity as far too dialectically vigorous [...]

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June 17, 2009 0

Blood: The Narrative for a Service in Three Parts

By Robert Minto in Gospel, Mystery

This has actually been posted before on an old blog. Possibly the only thing from that venture worth salvaging. The following three narratives were used to hold together a Good Friday service at Dordt College, which I planned and conducted with the rest of the chapel committee.
I.
Blood.
Scripture is soaked in one of the most lurid [...]

May 28, 2009 1

Does the Gospel Explain Life?

By Robert Minto in Gospel, Mystery, Scripture

This is one of those telling but simple questions that distinguishes between the maze of superficially similar but fundamentally differing theologies. It has immense implications. For Protestants, the various issues that the question raises have a tendency to re-coalesce around another question: does the Bible explain life?
It’s very popular to answer “Yes!”
For example, Reinhold Niebuhr, [...]

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