CONTRA FATUM

Clocktower in Prague. A friend recently posted this quote on Facebook: “The present moment is all that is real. The past is gone. The future is not yet. We remember the past and anticipate the future, but we always do so in the present. Reality is always now...” (Greg Boyd, Present Perfect) I have much good to say about Boyd (and I haven't read the book, it might be good, who knows). But I believe that Boyd here relies on a tradition of thought that is deeply problematic. This way of thinking about time can at least be traced back to the Platonism of Augustine: “How can the past and future be, when the past no longer is, and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time, but eternity.” (Augustine of Hippo, Confessions)

Yet one of those blog-posts that are "to be updated" as  I find more quotes on the subject matter. There is a tendency to think of prayer as a mechanism of obtaining things. You ask, you receive. God is imagined to be some sort of cosmic mechanical dispenser. You put in prayer, you get something, whatever, out. Of course it has to be honest prayer from a pure heart, and so on. We also tend to think of prayer as an initiative we take in order to get God's attention. But what we forget is that the only prayer acceptable to God is the one animated by the Spirit.

In his pivotal work 'The Meaning of the City' ( Sans feu ni lieu: Signification biblique de la Grande Ville ) French professor of law, theologian and author Jacques Ellul identifies 'the city' as the spiritual, though concrete, phenomena in which humankind's rebellion against God gets its actual expression in such things as power, money and technology. For this reason the city is also the concrete locus of God's work in Christ. The liberation from sin and death is in practice a liberation from the spiritual and material powers dwelling in the city. The dialectics of salvation (the Kierkegaardian double-movement?) becomes concrete as a movement between city and desert: "No longer does man belong to the city, exactly as he no longer belongs to the crowd, because his individuality has been affirmed by his encounter with Jesus Christ. He was made separate, set aside when he left the city to go out into the desert. And this is accomplished in a d...

In danish we have an idiom which literally means “to create oneself” 1 but in daily use means being childish, losing one’s head or simply being mad. With a modern view on human nature this seems to be non-sensical. Do we not create ourselves constantly—isn’t that the meaning of life? In times where the greatest political challenge by many is believed to be the ”creation” of “economic growth,” and where “personal identity” is a product we create out of nothing in order to sell ourselves on the job market or in the social life, a negative answer to this question seems to contradict every tenet of common sense. But then again, isn’t it mad to think that we actually “create” our own selves ex nihilo—or anything at all for that matter? Answering questions such as these are important for understanding and countering the prevalent ideology of growth, or productivism. One (traditional) explanation for the power of the ideology of economic growth, is that branding and commer...

”All the evils, and I choose my words carefully, all the evils of the world stem from our taking ourselves to be the Creator. Some, as warriors, transform the planet through their flashing conquests. Others, as dictators, shape a society. But the image always remains the same: a hand that molds a shapeless hunk of clay. We give glory to the creator of a state, a new order, or an empire, but also to the scientist who takes himself for the Creator – even though he inevitably ends up with the atomic bomb. Every time you take yourself to be a creator (even as an artist!), you become a destroyer, an annihilator. [...] [but] Every human work created in silence, discretion, and humility (in the image of the Creator, who works incognito!) is positive, useful, and life-giving. Every work of power, in which a person takes himself for a creator, becomes a work of emptiness that produces emptiness.” (Ellul, Reason for Being, p. 281)