Mixed bag

- Vad händer om en präst i Svenska kyrkan hävdar att:

"Det finns ingen fallen skapelse och därför blir hela försoningsläran orimlig! Plocka bort allt tal om synd, skuld, skam, blod, slaktade lamm och annat förfärligt! Det hör inte hemma i modern tid, bland upplysta människor!" 

Kyrkans tidning rapporterar och Marie Demker reflekterar klokt med anledning av domkapitlets beslut.

- En adventspredikan av Stanley Hauerwas.

- Benedict XVI om rättvisans rötter:

"In this world of ours, in which, despite the profession of good intentions, the value of the person, of human dignity and human rights is seriously threatened by the widespread tendency to have recourse exclusively to the criteria of utility, profit and material possessions, it is important not to detach the concept of justice from its transcendent roots. Justice, indeed, is not simply a human convention, since what is just is ultimately determined not by positive law, but by the profound identity of the human being. It is the integral vision of man that saves us from falling into a contractual conception of justice and enables us to locate justice within the horizon of solidarity and love(6).

We cannot ignore the fact that some currents of modern culture, built upon rationalist and individualist economic principles, have cut off the concept of justice from its transcendent roots, detaching it from charity and solidarity: “The ‘earthly city’ is promoted not merely by relationships of rights and duties, but to an even greater and more fundamental extent by relationships of gratuitousness, mercy and communion. Charity always manifests God’s love in human relationships as well, it gives theological and salvific value to all commitment for justice in the world”."

Påve mot positivism

Via I Think I Belive hittade jag ett intressant utdrag från Benedikt XVI tal vid hans besök i den tyska förbundsdagen nyligen. Talet, som är värt att läsa i sin helhet, finns här!

Where positivist reason dominates the field to the exclusion of all else – and that is broadly the case in our public mindset – then the classical sources of knowledge for ethics and law are excluded. This is a dramatic situation which affects everyone, and on which a public debate is necessary. Indeed, an essential goal of this address is to issue an urgent invitation to launch one.

The positivist approach to nature and reason, the positivist world view in general, is a most important dimension of human knowledge and capacity that we may in no way dispense with. But in and of itself it is not a sufficient culture corresponding to the full breadth of the human condition. Where positivist reason considers itself the only sufficient culture and banishes all other cultural realities to the status of subcultures, it diminishes man, indeed it threatens his humanity.

I say this with Europe specifically in mind, where there are concerted efforts to recognise only positivism as a common culture and a common basis for law-making, so that all the other insights and values of our culture are reduced to the level of subculture, with the result that Europe vis-à-vis other world cultures is left in a state of culturelessness and at the same time extremist and radical movements emerge to fill the vacuum.

Om tro & förnuft på ett nytt sätt

While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them. We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically falsifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons. . .

Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today. . . . A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures.

—Påve Benedict XVI, Regensburg, September 2006

Gamla falska dikotomier som den mellan tro och förnuft börja sakta, sakta ge vika. Konferenser såsom denna är glädjande tecken på att det våras! Njut av talarlistan!