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djeter
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Another selection from David Burrell’s article on the theological consequences of the act of creation. He explores more of Aquinas’ contributions to our understanding of creation and how it underpins the whole Christian theology of revelation.
I had a dialogue with an atheist the other day, one who can’t help but associate “dogma” with “dogmatic,” and thought my faith had “blinded me with dogma.” I gave him Chesterton’s marvelous take on the wonders of dogma (pearls to swine, alas) but I will repeat it here because I know that those who have an interest in these things will appreciate it greatly:
“I found this projecting feature of Christian theology, like a sort of hard spike, the dogmatic insistence that God was personal, and had made a world separate from Himself. The spike of dogma fitted exactly into the hole in the world — it had evidently been meant to go there — and then the strange thing began to happen.
When once these two parts of the two machines had come together, one after another, all the other parts fitted and fell in with an eerie exactitude. I could hear bolt after bolt over all the machinery falling into its place with a kind of click of relief. Having got one part right, all the other parts were repeating that rectitude, as clock after clock strikes noon. Instinct after instinct was answered by doctrine after doctrine…
All those blind fancies of boyhood … I was right when I felt that roses were red by some sort of choice: it was the divine choice. I was right when I felt that I would almost rather say that grass was the wrong color than say it must by necessity have been that color: it might verily have been any other. My sense that happiness hung on the crazy thread of a condition did mean something when all was said: it meant the whole doctrine of the Fall.
Even those dim and shapeless monsters of notions which I have not been able to describe, much less defend, stepped quietly into their places like colossal caryatides [vocab: A supporting column sculptured in the form of a draped female figure] of the creed. The fancy that the cosmos was not vast and void, but small and cozy, had a fulfilled significance now, for anything that is a work of art must be small in the sight of the artist; to God the stars might be only small and dear, like diamonds.
And my haunting instinct that somehow good was not merely a tool to be used, but a relic to be guarded, like the goods from Crusoe’s ship — even that had been the wild whisper of something originally wise, for, according to Christianity, we were indeed the survivors of a wreck, the crew of a golden ship that had gone down before the beginning of the world.”
From *Orthodoxy *by G.K. Chesterton
The essay on creation is here (along with what that is a picture of):
payingattentiontothesky.com/2010/08/12/the-act-of-creation-and-its-theological-consequences-a-creator-unique-and-free/
You see there the WORK that went into understanding the gospels and the OT and how those spikes of dogma fit into the holes of the world…
dj
Another selection from David Burrell’s article on the theological consequences of the act of creation. He explores more of Aquinas’ contributions to our understanding of creation and how it underpins the whole Christian theology of revelation.
I had a dialogue with an atheist the other day, one who can’t help but associate “dogma” with “dogmatic,” and thought my faith had “blinded me with dogma.” I gave him Chesterton’s marvelous take on the wonders of dogma (pearls to swine, alas) but I will repeat it here because I know that those who have an interest in these things will appreciate it greatly:
“I found this projecting feature of Christian theology, like a sort of hard spike, the dogmatic insistence that God was personal, and had made a world separate from Himself. The spike of dogma fitted exactly into the hole in the world — it had evidently been meant to go there — and then the strange thing began to happen.
When once these two parts of the two machines had come together, one after another, all the other parts fitted and fell in with an eerie exactitude. I could hear bolt after bolt over all the machinery falling into its place with a kind of click of relief. Having got one part right, all the other parts were repeating that rectitude, as clock after clock strikes noon. Instinct after instinct was answered by doctrine after doctrine…
All those blind fancies of boyhood … I was right when I felt that roses were red by some sort of choice: it was the divine choice. I was right when I felt that I would almost rather say that grass was the wrong color than say it must by necessity have been that color: it might verily have been any other. My sense that happiness hung on the crazy thread of a condition did mean something when all was said: it meant the whole doctrine of the Fall.
Even those dim and shapeless monsters of notions which I have not been able to describe, much less defend, stepped quietly into their places like colossal caryatides [vocab: A supporting column sculptured in the form of a draped female figure] of the creed. The fancy that the cosmos was not vast and void, but small and cozy, had a fulfilled significance now, for anything that is a work of art must be small in the sight of the artist; to God the stars might be only small and dear, like diamonds.
And my haunting instinct that somehow good was not merely a tool to be used, but a relic to be guarded, like the goods from Crusoe’s ship — even that had been the wild whisper of something originally wise, for, according to Christianity, we were indeed the survivors of a wreck, the crew of a golden ship that had gone down before the beginning of the world.”
From *Orthodoxy *by G.K. Chesterton
The essay on creation is here (along with what that is a picture of):
payingattentiontothesky.com/2010/08/12/the-act-of-creation-and-its-theological-consequences-a-creator-unique-and-free/
You see there the WORK that went into understanding the gospels and the OT and how those spikes of dogma fit into the holes of the world…
dj