Onkur skuldi víst hendan á einum møti.
May 10, 2009
0
Dagsins – Niels Henrik Gregersen um vísindi og trúgv
By Arni Zachariassen in Gudfröði
What, then, about the differences between studying science and practising religion? One seminal difference is that, whereas the sciences aim to explain empirical phenomena by theoretical unification, religions are concerned with the ultimate horizons of reality, including life-orienting questions about how to attune oneself to overarching patterns of meaning. This transempirical orientation of religion comes to the fore in the idea of God. In the monotheistic traditions, God is not thought to be an empirical object, as if God “existed” as one item among others (within the world or beyond the world). Rather, God is assumed to be real and effective by being the creative source, which informs, pervades, and surrounds everything that exists. “No one has ever seen God”, as the Christian tradition soberly acknowledges (1 John 4:12). The reason is not that God is an absent reality but that God is the encompassing reality, the one “in whom we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).
-Niels Henrik Gregersen í fororðinum til Wolfhart Pannenberg, The Historicity of Nature: Essays on Science and Theology, síða xvi
Tags: niels henrik gregersen, trúgv, vísindi, Wolfhart Pannenberg
May 8, 2009
0
Busshugleiðingar
By Arni Zachariassen in Gudfröði
Eric Reitan hugleiðir um ateismu á sínum bloggi, The Piety That Lies Between,
What does the atheist slogan on this bus mean to someone like me? As I read it, I find it jarring. Not because it’s offensive, but because the first sentence is so incongruent with the second. Given what I mean by “God,” I wouldn’t follow up the first sentence with “Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” I’d follow it up, instead, with something like the following: “So the crushing horrors of history will never be redeemed, and those whose lives have been shattered by suffering and loss and brutality, and who have no prospects of transcending their miserable condition in this life, should just give up hope.”
Not that this would fit on the side of a bus.
Tags: Gudloysi
May 4, 2009
0
Herligheit og spekulatión
By Arni Zachariassen in Gudfröði
Úr Today we shriek as we hear of financial scams, corporate greed, and virtually anything money-related that isn’t entirely on the up-and-up. While religion has generally been a help in these economically difficult times, there is one segment of Christianity that is scamming as many as they can. Those who have ears (and debt) let them hear.
The Prosperity Gospel, also known as a facet of the Word of Faith movement (a louder voice in Pentecostalism), has been writing checks with its lips that’s its theology can’t cash. Last year’s Pew Foundation mega-poll, which surveyed nearly 35,000 people (one of the largest religion polls ever accomplished), revealed a few interesting facts about Christians in the Pentecostal tradition, among them:
• Pentecostals have the lowest incomes of any other Christian denomination.
• Pentecostals have the least education of any other Christian denomination.The results show that Pentecostals have the most high school dropouts, the fewest college graduates, and the fewest post-graduates. But the most interesting thing is that they earn the least annual income of any other Christian tradition polled. This is shocking, considering that a main feature in popular Pentecostalism is the Prosperity Gospel, where church members are promised that God will make them rich beyond their wildest dreams if they tithe generously and believe that they will receive the money.
April 24, 2009
0
Dagsins: Pannenberg um Guds alstyrki
By Arni Zachariassen in GudfröðiSambært Pannenberg, er Guds alstyrki ikki tað, at hann, vegna sína styrki, sum er størri enn nøkur onnur, noyðir sín vilja yvir alt annað. Heldur skal Guds alstyrki skiljast saman við hansara kærleika. Soleiðis vísir hansara alstyrki seg nemliga ikki í noyðslu ella tvangi, men í at geva tí, sum ikki er Gud, pláss at vera tað, tað er.
[T]he omnipotence of God demonstrates that it can be thought of only as the power of divine love and not as the assertion of a particular authority against all opposition. That power alone is almighty which affirms what is opposite to it in its particularity, and therefore precisely in its limits, which affirms it unreservedly and infinitely, so that it gives the creature the opportunity by accepting its own limits to transcend them and in this way itself to participate in infinity.
Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1, 422
Tags: alstyrki, dagsins, kærleiki, Wolfhart Pannenberg
April 23, 2009
0
Dagsins – Pannenberg um skapan
By Arni Zachariassen in GudfröðiIf the God of the Bible is the creator of the universe, then it is not possible to understand fully or even appropriately the processes of nature without any reference to that God. If, on the other hand, nature can be appropriately understood without reference to the God of the Bible, then that God cannot be the creator of the universe, and consequently he cannot be truly God and be trusted as a source of moral teaching either.
Wolfhart Pannenberg, “Theological Questions for Scientists” í Toward a Theology of Nature
Tags: skapan, vísindi, Wolfhart Pannenberg
April 21, 2009
0
Dagsins – Hví Bíblian mest er í søguformi
By Arni Zachariassen in GudfröðiFrá John Goldingay, Models for Scripture:
“Christians read the Gospels in the conviction that there they discover Christ. They are able to do that because over the centuries their spiritual forebears have done the same. Those forebears could do that because the church of the first few centuries had found itself compelled to preserve particular Gospels. It could preserve them because individuals and church of the first century or two had felt constrained to write and to receive certain Gospels. And they had done so because they had recognized in Jesus the climax of a story that began in the First Testament, which it was natural to continue in narrative form. The narrative books in the two Testaments pass on indispensable witness to what God did in Israel in the story that comes to its climax in Jesus.” – síða 21
“It is not by chance that the bulk of scripture is narrative. This characteristic corresponds to the nature of Christian faith. The fundamental Christian message is not an ethic, such as the challenge to humanity to live by the law of love, a challenge Christianity shares with some other religions. Not is it a theology, a collection of abstract statements such as “God is love” – statements that it also shares with some other religions. It is a gospel, an account of something God has done, a concrete, narrative statement: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son…” Christian faith affirms the ethic and the theology just described, which it is glad to share with other religions, but it believes that the grounds for the former and the evidence for the latter is the gospel.” – síða 23
April 20, 2009
0
Homofobi og rasisma
By Arni Zachariassen in GudfröðiThe forces opposing gay marriage and the forces supporting racism both use the Bible and Christianity to do their dirty work. Many of the arguments Christians use to prove that homosexuality is a sin and therefore not worthy of protection under the law (it says so in the Bible, it’s God’s will, it’s the natural order God intended for humanity) are the very same arguments that were used to justify slavery, to support segregation, and to sanction racism.