Tasty Tidbits 9/8/11

1. Losing faith.
2. Kerygma and Creed.
3. Fully invested in drunken sailors.
4. Cheering for killing.
5. There will never be another Hitch.
6. 2 mpg! Woohoo!

1

I’ve never had great, faith-shaking suffering. I hope that if I ever do, my attitude will be “Why not me? Why should I think that if rain falls on just and unjust alike, hail won’t? I pray ‘all eventualities fulfill Thy holy will;’ now’s the time to test that.”

The good folks at Mercatornet review a film, Higher Ground, about someone who ran the gamut, from rock’n’roller to Evangelical to lost faith. The film appears to avoid easy, triumphalist answers (e.g., “but then she found Catholicism and they all lived happily ever after”).

2

Is Jesus Christ the bearer of the kerygma or its content?

The contents of the creed do not constitute simply some system of metaphysical affirmations, but first and foremost a kind of “phenomenology of salvation”; the experience of redemption – of being joined by the Spirit to the Son and through the Son to the Father – was the ground from which the church’s doctrinal grammar arose …

… Schleiermacher’s The Christian Faith – was one of progressive and irrepressible abstraction, a moralization and spiritualization of salvation that made of Christ the unique bearer (as opposed to the unique content) of the Christian kerygma …

In the early centuries of Christian thought, the Trinity was gradually apprehended as the mystery truly revealed in God’s saving action, and not as a metaphysical secret imparted mystically to the church….

(Last night’s excerpts from The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth.)

3

Reading this morning’s debate coverage in the Wall Street Journal, I’d have to say Rick Perry is closer to the truth about Social Security than Mitt Romney is. It may be reckless for a politician to tell the truth about it – heck, it may be reckless for a blogger to tell the truth about it – but Social Security is a Ponzi Scheme in the sense that its trust fund is fully invested in promissory notes from drunken sailors (U.S. Government obligations, which someday will either default or be repaid with worthless dollars printed by the only people who can legally print extra money).

If you want to think it’s not a Ponzi Scheme because the sailor’s did sign the promissory notes, I can’t stop you, but I know the Supreme Court Disciplinary Commission would not exonerate me were I to borrow from my firm’s trust account but give it a promissory note.

4

I’m glad I didn’t watch the debate. It makes me nauseous just to read from both both Rod Dreher and Daniel McCarthy that the crowd cheered at Texas executing 234 prisoners under Rick Perry. I don’t think I could have born the real thing.

5

The world, including those of us for whom he was a thorn in the flesh, will be a poorer place without Christopher Hitchens. This isn’t an obituary, but esophageal cancer is not good.

6

Woohoo! Cancel everything I’ve said about peak oil! Ford has a new technology that improves mileage by 2 mpg!

Bon appetit!