#iain provan

"God remains the God who is "for us," even in the midst of our wrongdoing and shame." - Iain Provan

"Then one of the criminals who were hanged blasphemed Him, saying, “If You are the Christ, save Yourself and us.”

But the other, answering, rebuked him, saying, “Do you not even fear God, seeing you are under the same condemnation? And we indeed justly, for we receive the due reward of our deeds; but this Man has done nothing wrong.” Then he said to Jesus, “Lord, remember me when You come into Your kingdom.”

And Jesus said to him, “Assuredly, I say to you, today you will be with Me in Paradise.”

CERTAINLY it is.

It is dangerous to anyone who does not wish to think of every other human being as their image bearing “neighbor” or to love him or her as such.

It is dangerous, for example, to everyone who wishes to “assimilate man without remainder to the rest of nature,” insisting that (after all) there is nothing very special about human beings as a class, and certainly not as individuals.

Biblical faith is also dangerous to those who have become confused about where the boundaries between science and philosophy lie and who think that because human beings are, in some sense, products of a great evolutionary struggle in which only the fittest survive, society itself should be organized on that same basis.

Biblical faith is dangerous, moreover, to those among the powerful who would like to be left alone to use and oppress the weak and to those among the rich who would like to be left alone to use and oppress the poor.

Such faith threatens all those for whom the current social order is everything or for whom individual human beings are merely dispensable flotsam and jetsam on the great sea of inevitable social change.

It challenges every “ends justifies the means” and every “greatest good” argument.

It confronts any idea that anyone is too young or too old, too black or too white, too sick, too different, or too foreign to have the same rights as everyone else, including the right to life.

It opposes any diminution of the importance of the individual person out of regard for the convenience of other family members, the health of the economy, the good of the state, or the well-being of the planet.

The biblical idea about the human being is, in truth, very dangerous.

"Were there no God, we would be in this glorious world with grateful hearts, and no one to thank."

[Christina Rossetti]

To have "grateful hearts, and no one to thank" - that, to me, makes no sense.

“Right knowledge, of itself, evidently does not bring about moral transformation in human beings - even supposing that right knowledge is something we are predisposed to desire in the first place. There is in fact, a certain kind of moral depravity that only the highly educated can attain, because it requires sophisticated skills of rationalization and self-deception. Both Confucianism and Islam, however, place a high degree of confidence in education as a solution to the problem of evil.

If you know what is good, you will do it. It is not surprising, perhaps, that there should be such confidence, since both philosophies are premised on an understanding of the good that is far more limited than biblical faith suggests it ought to be.

They consider the good to be achievable because they begin with a narrow idea of what it entails. This is clear in the Confucian idea that what is required of human beings is only a return to some ancient Chinese attitudes and customs. It reveals itself also in the Islamic idea that “God does not require anything of us that is beyond our capabilities.” Since the good is so narrowly defined, there is (correspondingly) no robust understanding of evil - the absence of the good - or the difficulty involved in conquering it.”

"Surely it is not the case "that the object of opening the mind is simply opening the mind." Surely "the object of opening the mind, as opening the mouth is to shut it again on something solid." The inquisitive opening of the mind needs be followed, at the appropriate time, by an at least partial (yet judicious) closing of it."

It is certainly incoherent to be thankful to a deity that is not personal, although this has not prevented people from speaking in such terms - of being thankful to such entities as “Nature,”...

G.K. Chesterton addresses precisely this case, arguing that if someone,

“can manage to be thankful when there is nobody to be thankful to, and no good intentions to be thankful for, then he is simply taking refuge in being thoughtless, in order to avoid being thankless.”

He goes on to suggest that,

“Nature” is nothing other than a “fairy godmother” in a “fireside fairytale.”

He points out, however, that,

“there can only be fairy godmothers because there are godmothers; and there can only be godmothers because there is a God.”