Friday, June 25, 2010

Asking The Right Questions

From the blog of Dr Uwe Simon Netto. He is one of the few theologians that is asking such questions. For the church to prepare for unpleasant reality is not a violation of the two Kingdoms. In times of disaster, act of mercy are more necessary, but can only be enacted by those who prepared.

"But then how is the Church to react in the event of terrorist attacks with nuclear or biological devices; how will it function when the supplies of food and energy are disrupted, and when communications have broken down? How will it respond to severe persecution perhaps even in America and Western Europe? How will it minister to its faithful when they are cut off from their sanctuaries, and when pastors have lost contact to their scattered flocks?


Are these unthinkable scenarios? It would be foolish to assume that they were – even in the United States. Take the word of a septuagenarian for this, a man who has spent his childhood in a country that used to be the most civilized in the world and was reduced to an antechamber of hell almost overnight".read the rest............

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Wisdom from Father Robert Hart

This gem of a sermon ties together the tables of the law,our inability to save ourselves, and the importance of real charity as an act towards neighbor as a person, not abstract humanity. Here is an excerpt:

"The Law is weak, because of the sinful condition into which each of us was born, and so the Law cannot provide the grace to love God. We have no power to love God, which love is manifested if we obey His commandments. Without the grace of God made known by Jesus Christ in all his saving acts, and without the grace given to us by the Holy Spirit within us, we have no power to love God".

As a student of history, I like this part too:

"The righteous man considers the life of his beast. But, the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel" says the Book of Proverbs (12:10). Utopian ideologues since the French Revolution, such as Marx and his followers, spoke lofty words about what was best for mankind. It reminds me of one of Charles Schultz’s Peanuts cartoons. Linus tells his sister Lucy that he wants to be a doctor, a great doctor. She tells him 'you cannot be a great doctor. You know why? Because a doctor must love mankind. You don’t love mankind.' Linus, stunned, retorts 'I do love mankind…It’s people I can’t stand!' The ideologues have always loved mankind; and they have made many people suffer for it. They have offered millions of innocent victims to some idea of 'the greatest good for the greatest number,' and all of that Satanic propaganda about what is best for humanity. Crowds enjoying the spectacle of heads being cut off in Paris, Communists dictating who should live, who should die, and who must go to the camps, and, indeed, the Nazis destroying millions in order to advance human evolution to the state of perfection, believed they were lovers of mankind, saviors of that abstract and impersonal thing called 'humanity.'"...................Read the rest here

Look around you, who is your neighbor?