Sunday Thought: Superman

[for Zippy]

retrieved from the old archives, originally posted for Ash Wednesday, Feb. 2004. I believe Professor Harnack was a 19th or early 20th century theologian who was possibly going soft on Christ's divinity; but his tribute, taken in isolation, does not:

"That Jesus' message is so great and so powerful," says Harnack, "lies in the fact that it is so simple and on the other hand so rich; so simple as to be exhausted in each of the leading thoughts which he uttered; so rich that every one of these thoughts seems to be inexhaustible and the full meaning of the sayings and parables beyond our reach. But more than that - he himself stands behind everything that he has said. His words speak to us across the centuries with the freshness of the present. It is here that that profound saying is truly verified: 'Speak, that I may see thee.' "

Sublime indeed, born of superhuman wisdom and celestial holiness is the teaching of Jesus Christ, and consequently, He Himself must be more than a mere man. By the compelling majesty of His Person Jesus looms as the ideal "Superman." His very features, His words and actions, are so human and yet at the same time so exalted, that we instinctively feel He is a superior being. We are justified in asking Professor Harnack whether his own description of Christ would fit a mere man:

"The sphere in which he lived, above the earth and its concerns, did not destroy his interest in it; no, he brought everything in it into relation with the God whom he knew, and he saw it as protected in him: 'Your Father in heaven feeds them.' The parable is his most familiar form of speech. Insensibly, however, parable and sympathy pass into each other. Yet he who had not where to lay his head does not speak like one who has broken with everything, or like an heroic penitent, or like an ecstatic prophet, but like a man who has rest and peace for his soul and who is able to give life and strength to others. He strikes the mightiest notes; he offers men an inexorable alternative; he leaves them no escape; and yet the strongest emotion seems to come naturally to him, and he expresses it as something natural; he clothes it in the language in which a mother speaks to her child."

Pohle-Preuss, Christology 1913

Wishing God's care...

...for Amy Welborn and her children.

Update on Lydia, media star

She done good. She was coherent. She has a nice voice with an interesting quality. She sounds like a mom while lecturing, in the same way that Sarah Palin sounded like one while politicking. The subject under discussion was (in general) the voice of the religious in the public square, and how best to make it heard and heeded. I have only a few bones to pick. First, she missed the opportunity of informing listeners that her masterpiece on the subject could be found at The Christendom Review. Second, she pronounces Paul Cella's name Chella, as a Brooklynite might pronounce 'cello'. Third, in making a larger, valid point, she asserted that newborns have no self-awareness. It's a matter of hospital record, eyewitnesses attending, that on the very night of my birth, after my mother had recovered from the ordeal - ("You're a pain in the pelvis," was her way of reminding me in later years) - I snatched the vanity mirror from her hand and began admiring myself in it. Otherwise, she was sterling.

If you missed the program, it should soon be archived on the James Allen show website. Click the "audio" tab and select the player for Feb. 1.

Sunday Thought - If I Have Not Love

This is one from the past that didn't make it over to the archives when I changed sites. Originally from November 16, 2003:

As memory scans the past, above and beyond all the transitory pleasures of life, there leap forward those supreme hours when you have been enabled to do unnoticed kindnesses to those around about you, things too trifling to speak about, but which you feel have entered into your eternal life.

I have seen almost all the beautiful things that God has made; I have enjoyed almost every pleasure that He has planned for man; and yet as I look back I see standing out above all the life that has gone four or five short experiences when the love of God reflected itself in some poor imitation, some small act of love of mine, and these seem to be the things which alone of all one's life abide. Everything else in all our lives is transitory. Every other good is visionary. But the acts of love which no man knows about, or can ever know about - they never fail.

In the Book of Matthew, where the Judgement Day is depicted for us in the imagery of One seated upon a throne and dividing the sheep from the goats, the test of a man then is not, "How have I believed?" but "How have I loved?"...I say the final test of religion at that great Day is not religiousness, but Love; not what I have done, not what I have believed, not what I have achieved, but how I have discharged the common charities of life. Sins of commission in that awful indictment are not even referred to. By what we have not done, by sins of omission, we are judged. It could not be otherwise. For the withholding of love is the negation of the spirit of Christ, the proof that we never knew Him, that for us He lived in vain. It means that He suggested nothing in all our thoughts, that He inspired nothing in all our lives, that we were not once near enough to Him to be seized with the spell of His compassion for the world. It means that:

"I lived for myself, I thought for myself,
For myself and none beside -
Just as if Jesus had never lived,
As if He had never died."

It is the Son of Man before whom the nations of the world shall be gathered. It is in the presence of Humanity that we shall be charged. And the spectacle itself, the mere sight of it, will silently judge each one. Those will be there whom we have met and helped; or there the unpitied multitude whom we neglected or despised. No other witness need be summoned. No other charge than lovelessness shall be preferred...

From The Greatest Thing in the World by Henry Drummond (1851-1897)