How does Mark illustrate the importance of proper desires properly prioritized?

Throughout the book of Mark, Jesus continually rebukes the people, the Pharisees, and even his disciples for their wrong desires. He offers them eternal life, and they want party tricks. One desire that reoccurs a lot is a desire for physical healing. This is a good desire, but they focus on it to the exclusion of what else Jesus has to offer. They are so caught up in trying to be perfect on the outside that they completely miss the fact that they are rotting on the inside. The Pharisees focus so much on the law, trying to avoid even coming anywhere near to breaking it that they loose all sense of perspective. In the process of trying to be good, they become evil. They blew their desire for external goodness out of proportion, and their good desire made them bad. Similarly, the people desire healing for their bodies, but in the panic to get external deformities fixed, they miss their internal deformities and end up with whole bodies and lost souls.

Jesus is continually fighting this predisposition in those around him throughout the book of Mark. He points out that nothing is gained by getting the whole world if it costs you your life. He attacks the Pharisees as whitewashed sepulchers, pretty on the outside, and rotting on the inside. When the paralyzed man is lowered through the roof for him to heal, he starts out by forgiving the man’s sins. That was more important than solving his physical problems, although Jesus did that too. When the Pharisees are trying to get after Jesus for breaking the Sabbath when heals the man with the withered hand, he points out that it is more important to do good than to follow the minuscule bits and pieces of the rules that they have made up. Even though Jesus is trying to pound this point in, nobody seems to really get it until after his death and resurrection. They get that he is the Christ, but they have no idea what it would mean for him to save the world, or even the Jewish nation. They never seem to get past the physical realm to see into their spiritual brokenness that the Lamb came and was sacrificed to mend. It becomes clear through the epistles that they eventually do get it, and this becomes a major theme of the whole New Testament.

Proverbs

So, we were assigned to come up with some proverbs of our own after reading proverbs...here are mine.

A fool takes his identity from other people.

The wise man finds his identity in his Maker.

True love is deeper than the ocean.

In time, even a hamster wheel makes sense.

Cynicism is a cowards escape from reality.

A wise man can see past the thorns and into the beauty of a rose.

To marry a virtuous person is culmination of wisdom.

People are rarely thinking what you think they are thinking about you.

Why are Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon called wisdom literature?

Why are Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon called wisdom literature? I mean, Proverbs is obviously about how to be wise. It even says so in the beginning. But Psalms? Their just songs, right? Ecclesiastes? Isn’t that just a spoiled king whining about how having everything isn’t all it’s cracked up to be? Song of Solomon? Please. Isn’t that just an erotic love poem? It is not even clear why it is in the bible, let alone part of the wisdom literature. This really does not make any sense.

This is what it looks like at first glance, something odd and apparently random…they call it wisdom lit just because they can, and in order to confuse us. It just does not make any sense.

On a closer examination, things become a bit clearer. After looking at psalms in depth, it began to appear that the purpose of psalms is to teach us to have the proper emotional responses to things, to give us an example of proper emotions, and via poetry help us to conform to the ideal.

With study, the purpose of Ecclesiastes also becomes clearer. While at first the author seems to be merely whining, on closer examination, it can be seen that the author might be point out the intrinsic value of wisdom, being good, etc. That despite how crazy it all looks from here, God is in control, and there are indeed absolute standards.

Song of Solomon seems a harder nut to crack. I mean, it is a love song. How much of a deeper meaning can there be? The task of delving deeper into Song of Solomon is made much more difficult by our squeamishness. We are afraid to delve into the depths, because it is ‘gross’ or even ‘immoral’. We have a hard time dealing with how sexually charged it is. But this is the very reason that why song of songs is so important. We do not know how to think about love, especially erotic love. As Christians, we tend to shy away and try to shut it down completely because it is so strong and dangerous. But it is a part of us, something from deep within our very souls. We cannot silence it without loosing a part of our selves. Love is a powerful, dangerous thing, but it can also be beautiful. We need to be taught how to handle this part of us, because on our own we seem to be very good at only triggering the explosively damaging nature of love, and missing entirely the beauty.

Song of Solomon, then, is an instruction book. Not on the art of seduction, but on what love is, what it is supposed to look like, and how we are supposed to respond. As well as teaching us how to love, Song of Solomon teaches us about beauty. It is a story about a beautiful love for a beautiful person told with beautiful words. To categorize Song of Solomon as ‘merely an erotic love poem’ is to categorize the David as ‘just another nude statue’. There is such a depth to the beauty of Song of Solomon that I do not think it would be easy to come to the end of it. It is a textbook on the appreciation of beauty.

Proverbs, then, seems the least profound of the wisdom literature, the least worthy. It only helps us to see truths in the patterns of reality that we have a hard time seeing ourselves. While Proverbs schools our minds, the other members of the wisdom literature school our very souls.

What is wisdom that schooling our souls fits into it? Or rather, how does one become wise by training one’s soul? What is wisdom? What differentiates it from knowledge? Is wisdom the ability to properly respond to knowledge and other external stimuli? In that case, training one’s soul is helping it to respond properly to external stimuli and knowledge, or growing in wisdom.

Ecclesiastes: Why can't we ignore the cynics?

I fond that when I was reading Ecclesiastes, it was really hard to not discount what he says simply because it sounds so cynical. This, however, prevented me from listening closely enough to understand what he was saying. Because I judged the book so naturally, I couldn’t see the truth that is in Ecclesiastes.

I think that this tendency to ignore cynicism on principle is dangerous because although the picture that cynics see is often incomplete, it is usually true to life. We need to know the truth that is there, and we have to find the missing pieces whose absence led to despair.

In the case of Ecclesiastes, although it seems really cynical at first glance, I do not think that is the point of the book. As we discussed Ecclesiastes and got beyond the apparent cynicism, we found that Solomon was asking some really deep questions. One question is what is the meaning of life. Another is what does it mean to be wise. Yet another is whether things have objective value.

The last verse of Ecclesiastes seems to be somewhat of a non sequitur, but it is an answer to each of these questions. “The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.”[1] The meaning of life is to serve God, and wisdom is knowing and doing that. There is objective value to our deeds, and God will judge them in the end. Thing are crazy right now, but in the end, God will make everything right. The world is not as senseless as it seems.

I missed this when I read Ecclesiastes because all I could see was his apparent cynicism. We can’t ignore people who are apparently cynics, because we don’t know what truth they have to speak unless we take the time to listen, and to think about what they are saying.

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[1] Ecclesiastes 12.13-14

Civilization and Its Discontents

To what extent can we baptize Freud? To what extent can we use Freud’s mechanisms of guilt and conscience to explain Christian conception of sin?

When Freud talks about the human conscience, he is using the term to describe a part of the self that exists for the express purpose of attacking self for doing things that are instinctive, but that it has been trained are ‘bad’. This contrasts greatly with the Christian definition of conscience, a part of ourselves that responds to the Holy Spirit’s prompting about the intrinsic value of an action. While there are several problems with Freud’s analysis of the conscience, a major one that stands out is his lack of absolute values. The reduction of the perceived value of actions to an acquired flinching that has nothing to do with the action itself, and only with the punishment, is dangerous. It sounds plausible. It is a comforting thought, to think that everything that we feel bad about having done is just us being mildly neurotic. It is something that we want to believe, because then we are not responsible, and there is nothing wrong with doing whatever we want. We are free.

The thing is, it does not work. Humanity self-destructs when anarchy reigns. Also, contrary to Freud’s assertions, it does not kill us to exercise self-control, and in the long run we are happier when we do so. This lines up with his comment on pages twenty-five and twenty-six, “We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things.” To deny one’s self is to create a contrast in which good things are even better, causing one’s self to be happier overall than one would be if one stayed in a continual state of self indulgence and moderate happiness.

Another of Freud’s fallacies is that denying a temptation only makes it stronger. I know from experience that denying a temptation makes subsequent denials easier. We grow in strength, not our desires, and eventually we can weed out desires almost entirely.

There are many things in Civilization and It’s Discontents that are similarly appealing and wrong. It is tempting to try to baptize Freud, and to pick out the truth from among the chaff. The problem is, he is so clever that it is ridiculously hard to find all of the places where he goes wrong. Each place he goes wrong, however, is major in itself, and even missing one would lead to major problems. While it might be possible to salvage the truth in Freud, it is not to be taken lightly, or to be thought easy.

Anna Karennina: What separates Levin from Anna? What sends her to her doom, and allowed Levin to be saved?

In the beginning, Levin and Anna seem similar, except that Levin is in a state of panic over Kitty, and Anna is happily married. They both have morals, and are moderately self-sufficient. Suddenly, however, things change. Anna breaks. She finds that the love and respect that he has for her husband and the love she has for her son are not enough to control her passionate desire for Vronsky. From then on she is doomed. Even when she repents after a brush with death, her penitence cannot stop her from going back to Vronsky. Levin, on the other hand, goes on to win Kitty, and eventually to find faith.

Why does Anna fall prey to her desires, and Levin never seem to? They have a similar beginning. The thing that separates them is the temptation. Anna had morals, but her thinking was not strong enough to make her actions follow when push came to shove, and eventually even her morals changed. Levin too had a discrepancy between his head and his heart, but because he was never faced with a strong enough temptation, his actions followed his heart until finally his head caught up. Levin got lucky, and Anna really didn’t. The major temptation that Anna faced seems to be the one thing that separates the two characters. They were both unstable, but only one got pushed over the edge.

The consequences of a discrepancy between what one believes and what one thinks can be seen in young Christians without a strong theological and apologetical background who have been raised in the ‘Christian greenhouse’, and are then thrust into an environment that is intellectually hostile to Christianity. Without an intellectual foundation for their beliefs, they crumble, and loose their faith. Their heart ends up following their head.

There are other young Christians who also are raised in a reasonless Christianity who are never challenged strongly and eventually figure our why they believe what they believe, and find an intellectual basis for it. Their head catches up with their heart.

Programs, like Torrey, that seek to unite the head and the heart, are then immensely important. They help to equip students to stand firm against the attacks of the secular world, both intellectual and otherwise. They equip students not only to survive, but also to excel and to change to world.

Brother’s K: Is it possible for God to be good given that he created creatures with free will who turned to evil?

God created creatures with free will. Does that make God evil, to create creatures with free will? No, because he isn’t creating evil. He knew that the free willed creatures were going to turn against him, and he created them anyway. Does that make God evil? No, because he didn’t make them with no choice to do ill. They still had the option to chose good rather than ill. It was their own choice, not God’s. What of the evil done here on earth? Humans have free will. God, having created them with said free will, does not interfere directly in humanities choices. He has, however, set up boundaries that were not to be crossed with definite punishments if they were crossed. When humans choose to cross those boundaries they reap the consequences. However, it is not God who makes the choice to inflict them. It is their own choice to break the rules that inflicts the punishment. Unfortunately, the consequences are of a wide reaching nature, so the world is full of ills as we have seen. But that does not mean that a good God and the ills here on earth cannot co-exist. In fact, the particular nature of the ills on this earth cannot exist save a good God, and if God is good and humans disobedient then these ills are unavoidable. If God allowed evil to go unpunished then he would be unjust and no longer good. The other question is that of the existence of disobedient free-willed creatures and an omniscient and good God. If God is omniscient, then he knew before creating free willed creatures that they would turn out evil. If he knew that before their creation did he create them for evil? If one’s actions are foreknown does one have a choice? I think one does. If I know that if I present you with an apple and a chocolate bar and tell you that you can only have one of them, I know that most people would choose the chocolate. But I have a friend who despises chocolate. I know without a doubt that she would refuse the chocolate. That is not to say that she cannot choose the chocolate, but that she doesn’t want to. I did not force the apple upon her. Also, if God is omnipotent and omnipresent as well as omniscient then the whole question of foreknowledge and doom may be academic. If God is not trapped in linear time as we are then it doesn’t matter that he can see something before it has happened, because not only is he there when it happens, he is there before and after it. What happens happens, and God just happens to be able to see everything at once because he is not human. Also, do the ends justify the means as far as God is concerned? If he allows evil to exist for a time, and creates creatures with free will that he know are going to fall into disobedience in order that when the evil is vanquished he is brought glory, is that wrong? If he is the standard by which everything is judged, can anything he does be wrong? Did he create us with moral sense that is in alignment with his own? If so, does it seem wrong for him to allow a problem to develop in order that the solution could be unveiled for his glory? Is it like a parent allowing a child to do something painful so that the child will learn a lesson and learn to listen to the parent? That kind of seems like that is what it is like. You can tell a child not to do some things and almost guarantee that they will do it. But they will learn so much from the results that it is worth whatever they suffered. It seems like that is what God was doing in creating human kind. So then what he was doing was for our own good? How was it for the good of the souls in hell that he created them? Are they worse off than if they had never existed? I suppose that they are. But those who are not condemned are greatly elevated. So is it worth the sacrifice of the damned souls in order to create the subcategory of humanity: redeemed saints? What about the creation of Satan? If his creation was just, the creation of humans could simply be seen as the creation of weapons against Satan and the means of his destruction. Satan was created to serve God. He chose not to, and chose to fight him instead. When God created him, he knew that was going to happen. If he foreknew does that necessitate predestination? How can God who is all powerful and all knowing be good and yet create creatures who he allows to do evil? If God doesn’t stop the evil thing from happening isn’t he a party to it? Isn’t the evil at least partially his fault for not stopping it? Is it like when you give a little kid matches in a dry field and tell him not to play with it? If he sets the field on fire it is your fault for giving him the matches. I mean, it is the kid’s fault, but he should never have had the matches. Little kids are not responsible. I guess it comes down to God is the adult. Are we kids or adults? Was Satan a kid or an adult? Which court do we try ourselves in? If we are responsible, then it isn’t God’s fault. However, if we are not fully sufficient to stand then it is God’s fault? I guess it comes down to that. If God know that we are going to fall, are we truly sufficient to stand? Was Satan truly sufficient to stand? How then was he able to fall? Somewhere in here we have been lied to. I am not sure, but some of the reasons that God might be culpable sound like the excuses of a five year old or of our culture of lawsuits. “It was the neighborhood I was raised in. People weren’t nice to me. It’s my parents fault, etc.”. What about personal responsibility? Are we responsible? Why or why not? If we are not responsible for the ill that we do, then there is no such thing as justice. If we are not responsible for what we do, then we have no right to punish those who do wrong. But God set up a justice system. Whether or not we say that we believe that people are responsible for their actions, we live like we believe that they are. If this is so, then we are responsible for our fall. We were sufficient to stand. If this is the case, then it follows that Satan too was sufficient to stand, and is culpable for his own fall. This means that God is not culpable for the fall of either Satan or of humanity.

John Donne: Why is love poetry dangerous? Can it be redeemed?

Donne’s pre-Christian love poetry is captivatingly beautiful. It captures some of the intensity of love, the beauty and power of love. His sacred poetry, however, while being beautiful, passionate and stirring, seems to lack the fire of his love poems. His sacred poems are beautiful and true, but they lack the laughter, the true to life absurdity of the human heart and of human love. His sacred poetry is dignified. While we can relate to his sacred poetry in a deep way, it is dealing with something other than humanity. There is something a bit foreign about loving God, whereas loving other people is loving something like us. Human love is comfortingly familiar, and loving and being loved by God seems a bit disorienting.

This tendency to prefer human love over loving, and being loved by, God, is dangerous. It is placing a lesser, albeit more well known, good over the greatest good. Yes, human love is familiar, and comfortable, but God is God. While his love is less comfortingly familiar, it is perfect, the ultimate good.

Love poetry, and especially excellent love poetry, is potentially dangerous because it tempts us to idolatry. It shows us the most beautiful aspects of the human heart, and unless it points us back to God, it tempts us to make love our highest good.

Non-Christian love poetry in particular is dangerous because poetry has the power to shape our emotions. It is a dangerous weapon, and used for ill it is deadly because of its power to shape our emotions without our conscious consent. If it not subject to God, it has the potential to corrupt its readers by shaping their emotions into something bad.

King Lear: Were the Deaths of King Lear and Cordelia Futile?

Because King Lear is killed by events that he himself set in motion, it can be argued that his death is futile. Cordelia’s death, as well, is arguably futile because although she dies to save Lear, he dies anyway. These arguments, however, fail to take into account that death is not the worst thing that can happen, and the implications of a character’s death do not end with the character themselves. If one takes the larger context into account, neither King Lear’s death nor Cordelia’s death are in vain.

Although Cordelia failed to save her father from death, she did save him from the power of her sisters, and from his disgrace. In the brief time before his death, he regains some of his honor, and is once more like a king. Cordelia, however, gave her life not only for her father, but for her country. Cordelia’s actions that led to her death saved England from the drawn out civil war that would likely have taken place as her sisters fought for the crown. Her actions also saved the kingdom of England from being ruled by one of her sisters. In this light, Cordelia’s death was far from futile.

In a similar way, Lear’s death also saved the kingdom of England. Lear was a fool, and although he regains some honor near the end of the play, he was a broken man. Such a man should not be king, lest he destroy the kingdom, and Lear starts off the play by doing. If Lear had survived, it would have been bad for England. Even if he was wiser from having seen the results of his folly, he was mentally unhinged because of the abuse that he suffered at the hands of his daughters. Because of his previous actions, it would have been questionable how much power he should have, and whether he should be obeyed as king. Quite likely, someone as cunning as Edmund would have seized the opportunity to take the crown, and England would be faced with revolt. It was much better that King Lear die in peace before he could cause any more damage.

As You Like It: Jacque or Rosalind?

In As You Like It, we are made to sympathize with three seemingly incompatible characters: Jacques, who is a raving cynic, Orlando, who is a raving idealist, and Rosalind, who is down to earth but not stuck there. Jacques is disgusted with the many characters who fall in love, and says that they have gone mad.

It is tempting to side with Jacques when he starts complaining about the madness of those in love. They are, after all, acting quite out of their wits. Things like hanging poems on trees, claiming that one girl can posses all the virtues and none of the vices of the most acclaimed women in mythology and history, pretending to be what they aren’t, and many other such oddities become commonplace when the characters fall in love. Jacques would have us believe that they have lost their senses, and ought to be whipped until they find them. He would have them prefer earth to heaven because the heaven that they have found is intangible.

Some would dub Jacques a realist for this preference of the tangible world. The proper title for such a man, however, is cynic. Humans are more than the carbon and water that their physical bodies consist of. As You Like It itself is evidence for the fact that humans have been given imaginations, minds, and emotions. Humans are also not solitary creatures. We need love.

Orlando, Rosalind, Touchstone, Celia and the others who happily fall in love are the happy ones. They have something that Jacques doesn’t have and doesn’t even want, love. He claims that the others are mad as he stubbornly chooses to be unhappy and ‘sane’. It would seem that he chooses what he thinks is reality over love.

The dichotomy that Jacques faces is not as real as he thinks it is. It is possible to be a realist and still be an idealist. He doesn’t have to choose between reality and love. Rosalind is well aware that women are not all that Orlando has been taught that they are, so she carefully works to instruct him in who she really is. She loves him, but she is also capable of dealing with reality. Jacque is less of a realist than Rosalind because she sees reality enough to understand that it is worth loving.

Confessions: Is Augustine right to condemn story?

In Confessions, Augustine talks about theatre and story, and argues that they do more damage than good. His first argument against theatre in particular and story in general is that it is stupid to want to sympathize with a character. We are not invited to help, but only to enjoy the pain. We are inflicting ourselves with pain that is not our own, and Augustine argues that it is pointless[1]. Seeing someone else’s pain, however, prompts us to look at our own lives, and helps us to see what causes such pain. It helps us to see where we need to change.

A second argument Augustine gives against stories is that when you sympathize with the characters you love them, and the stories that he was exposed to taught you to love the immoral characters, and to feel badly when they got their just desserts. The problem, however, is not with the idea of story itself. The problem was with those particular stories. Story is a powerful tool that affects us deeply. It changes the way we think and feel about things, often without our consent or knowledge. Stories that teach bad things are pernicious because without our conscious consent we are changed for the worse. Good stories, however, are helpful, because they train our emotions in a good way, and help us to change in a way that we cannot consciously change. They are a way to communicate the truth to people who would not otherwise listen.

Augustine was right to argue against the theatre of his day, and the stories that were told then, because they were pagan and used as the mind control tools of demons. With the advent of Christian stories, however, story has been redeemed. We now have a wealth of Christian stories with which to combat the old pagan stories.

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[1] Augustine Confessions III.ii(2)

In Confessions, Augustine talks about theatre and story, and argues that they do more damage than good. His first argument against theatre in particular and story in general is that it is stupid to want to sympathize with a character. We are not invited to help, but only to enjoy the pain. We are inflicting ourselves with pain that is not our own, and Augustine argues that it is pointless[1]. Seeing someone else’s pain, however, prompts us to look at our own lives, and helps us to see what causes such pain. It helps us to see where we need to change.

A second argument Augustine gives against stories is that when you sympathize with the characters you love them, and the stories that he was exposed to taught you to love the immoral characters, and to feel badly when they got their just desserts. The problem, however, is not with the idea of story itself. The problem was with those particular stories. Story is a powerful tool that affects us deeply. It changes the way we think and feel about things, often without our consent or knowledge. Stories that teach bad things are pernicious because without our conscious consent we are changed for the worse. Good stories, however, are helpful, because they train our emotions in a good way, and help us to change in a way that we cannot consciously change. They are a way to communicate the truth to people who would not otherwise listen.

Augustine was right to argue against the theatre of his day, and the stories that were told then, because they were pagan and used as the mind control tools of demons. With the advent of Christian stories, however, story has been redeemed. We now have a wealth of Christian stories with which to combat the old pagan stories.

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[1] Augustine Confessions III.ii(2)

Plato's Symposium: Which speech is the most dangerous to the city?

There are six speeches in the symposium. There is Phaedrus, who proposes that love is a goad towards virtue, Pausanias who proposes that there are two loves, and that love is only as good as it makes us[1], Eryximachus, who proposes that love is central to everything, and that good love must triumph over bad love, Aristophanes, who says that love is a desire for oneness because we have been split in half, Agathon, who proposes that love is the best and most beautiful god, and Socrates, who says love isn’t a god but rather a search for the true form of beauty. The first three speeches share a focus on love being linked to virtue, which is beneficial to the city. The last two focus on the attributes of love and the focus of love, which seems neutral in its effect on the city. Aristophanes speech, however, is different. He teaches that love is a force that is intrinsic, unstoppable, and should never be resisted. That is deeply dangerous.

If Love is nothing but the longing of two halves to become a whole, and becoming whole is the ultimate good, then everything else is going to go out the window. If ‘becoming one’ is all that people do in a city, and all that they are interested in, the city will fall to pieces. Literally. The city needs people to do things like building things, growing food, keeping things in order, and defending the city against invasion. Those aren’t going to happen unless there is a higher moral good than becoming a whole. Virtue is necessary.

Aristophanes’ speech is all the more deeply dangerous because it is very difficult to defeat. The idea of allowing love to rule is very appealing, and throws out all need of logic. There is no good evidence that he is wrong in his history of human kind, and it actually does sound like the kind of thing that the gods would do. There is nothing but the ruin that it will cause that I can think of that is a good argument against it, and even that is on shaky ground.

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[1] 465

Three Theban Plays: Is it right to defy authority for the sake of a higher authority? If it is, what is the appropriate way to go about it?

Antigone presents a way to examine this question in an environment that is not as charged as the modern day. Looking at this issue through Antigone gives perspective, because it is not one’s own city or life that is at risk. In Antigone one is able to see the issue from both the perspective of the authority and also of the defying the authority.

Creon is looking out for the city. He holds up the unburied body of Polynices as an example of what happens to those who betray their city[1]. This is a safeguard against anarchy, and a very good incentive for the people to never betray their city. To allow someone to disobey this command and live is to invite anarchy. For the good of the city, that decree had to be enforced.

Antigone knew that she had a duty to her kin. She knew that the gods and common decency demanded that she not allow the body of her brother to rot, unburied. She had to bury him, decree or no decree. Better to die than to betray this familial duty.

I think that Antigone was right to bury her brother, but she was wrong to try to destroy Creon’s authority. There is line between obeying a higher authority and promoting anarchy. If a higher authority conflicts with the governmental authority it seems appropriate to obey the higher authority. If one disobeys a lower authority for the sake of a higher authority, one ought to be willing to accept the consequences of having disobeyed the lower authority. For the good of the city, disobedience, no matter how well meant, must be punished, or anarchy reigns. Creon was right to punish Antigone for her crime. He, however, might have been wrong to make her deed a crime. This is why it is so important that leasers be just, and that they not make rash laws. Stupid laws are an invitation to anarchy just as much as unenforced laws.

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[1] Antigone 222-235

Psalms: How do they help us grow emotionally and in our relationship with God?

The Psalms are beautiful, full of passion and skillfully written. But they are more than that. They are a window into the soul of those who wrote them, beautiful people of God. As such, they offer us valuable insight into who we aught to become as followers of God.

I can’t put my finger on why, but it seems that Christians aren’t supposed to feel certain emotions. I think it comes from Puritanism, but I am not sure. This stigma that is placed on certain emotions is really unhealthy, because we cannot control our initial emotional reactions. We can control how we react to those emotions, whether we encourage them or not. If then, we are trained to feel shame for having certain initial emotional reactions despite the fact that we have little or no control over them, we are forced either into hopelessness, or into squelching or ignoring emotional responses. Neither of these options are healthy.

Psalms provides us with a way out of that trap. The psalmists felt and were honest about feeling rage, hatred, fear, and other emotions that we have stigmatized. They show us how to feel those emotions without being destroyed by them. It is true that those emotions are dangerous, and trying to be honest about them without indulging them is like walking through a minefield. The psalms provide us with a map. They show us how to respond, and how to find God in our rage, our despair, our hatred, our fear.

The psalms also show how we are supposed to interact with God. It is so weird to think of interacting with the Almighty God as our father, to actually talk with God. How are we supposed to do that? Isn’t it disrespectful, what if we don’t say things right, won’t he smite us or something? It’s frightening, because the stakes are so high. The Psalms show us that it is okay to be honest with God, and that it is the only way to find ourselves. They give us permission to be honest.

Psalms: Why are they included in the Cannon?

The psalms are part of what we call the inspired word of God. There seem, however, to be many similarities between the psalms and things that are not considered as divinely inspired. What is the difference between the psalms and the well written songs of a believer now? One argument for the superiority of the psalms is that David was a man after God’s heart, and that he had the spirit of God upon him. If, however, the status of Psalms is based solely on the merits of David, then there is nothing to differentiate them from things written by the saints, because the saints were really godly and Christians have the Holy Spirit. There is another problem, however, with basing the status of the psalms on David, which is that David didn’t write all of the psalms. Another reason that the Psalms should be counted as part of the cannon is that they are riddled with prophesy. While it can be argued that because the authors were not prophets per se the passages that seem prophetic are just a coincidence, there are too many instances where the Psalms clearly are referring to events in the future for them to simply to have been a coincidence. Whether or not the authors themselves knew what they were doing, there is something more organized than chance in the prophesy of the Psalms. However, while the presence of prophesy in the psalms is evidence of some supernatural intervention and inspiration, is that enough reason to include a book in the cannon?

I am really not sure then, why the Psalms are included in the scriptures and are counted the word of God. I really couldn’t think of good reasons why it should be included. However, I trust that there probably are some really good reasons to include it since the early church fathers chose to include it.

*edit*

After discussing psalms again with my group, I realized that the psalms provide us with examples of proper emotions and the proper way to interact with God. They are the real thoughts of godly people, and they show us how to be godly people. This is very different than the rest of the bible, which is either stories of people’s lives, or God telling us what to do and how to live through other people. The psalms, then, fulfill a very important and unique role.