December 08, 2011
Waiver
I’m in the process of signing up for on-line classes through a
Christian university. One of the documents that I have to sign and send in with
the application is the ‘Life Together
Covenant’, which says I agree to accept the stated responsibilities as a
participant in the university. There are Biblical responsibilities stated with
book, chapter and verse and then there are the university’s expectations. They
include illegal substances, tobacco, alcoholic beverages and gambling. The covenant
appears to be Ten Commandment-ish – as in chiseled in stone with no waivers.
The expectations are directed toward fresh out-of-high school young people.
However I’m a senior adult and occasionally I like to have a glass of wine and
take a chance on the lottery when the prize money gets high. Using worldly
thinking I could get around the alcohol issue because the university would never
know, but it would be just my luck to win the Powerball and I’d have to fess-up
to breaking the covenant.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Gail;
-----Life is complex. Nobody knows the same set of things exactly as anyone else. Some know more; some know less; and everyone perceives the meaning of what they know differently from anyone else. Worse yet, nobody knows anything with absolute accuracy much deeper than the surface of the simpler facts of reality. Everything else we know actually involves some slight theory at least, common sense assumption normally, or wild inept guessing at worst. And from even the best developed theory to the worst guess there is inaccuracy and error galore in what we bring as ideas, insights, and principles to our reasoning processes. You would think much Bible study would help this situation, and it does, but it does not correct it, because the Bible presents far more mystery to its students than it does plain and absolute answers. So it is that Paul said every man should be convinced in his own mind regardless of the fact that of what each man is convinced is diametrically opposed to of what the other is convinced. (Rom 14:5)
-----So each is right if each is convinced. How could it be any other way for a people with minds so plagued by inaccuracy? If to be right, another had to be conformed to the mind of one, then would that one become the correctness to which everyone else must conform as well? And which one of us all will that one be? Will his correctness be limited to just that one neighbor being subservient to his thinking, and everyone else will be free to think their own? For each of us then to be Biblically correct by being convinced in our own mind, each has to allow the others to hold and operate according to their own conclusions about things not absolutely determinable. What then is our attachment to one another? Thankfully, not knowledge. For Paul said knowledge puffs up rather than builds up. It is love which builds up. (I Cor 8:1)
-----Love is a blessed thing. I like the Koine Greeks for the nerdy, nit picky way they communicated their obsessively refined thoughts. They had to have four different words to express the whole scope of love. The love God tells us to have for Him, each other, and everyone else, including our enemies, is the truest, most basic, philosophically pure form of such an idea of attachment to another. In it’s simplest, yet ideologically expandable sense, such attachment is the sincere desire for actual good to happen to the one loved. In the cases of matters not completely determinable, then, for desiring that good to be truly sincere, good must be defined according to the assessments made by the one loved, rather than by the one loving. It is sort of: if you are going to love me then you will be loving what I like, or you won‘t really be loving me, because I am what I like. Well, in a lot of cases, if love were necessarily more than the sincere desire for actual good, then love ain’t gonna happen because we don’t always like what someone else likes. But if I allow him his Biblically given space to frame his mind according to what he knows, then I can easily love what he likes, even though I don’t exactly know how or why he likes it and certainly do not like it myself.
-----Now, you go win the lottery, girl. And when that college comes poking around into the God given private parts of your mind, you let them know with what they are puffed up. Then give them a goodly sized contribution to help them swallow the truth about what really should be building them up.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
Post a Comment