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anselm_the_presbyterian
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Name: Kent Will
Country: United States
Metro: Buieville
Birthday: 1/25/1987
Gender: Male
Interests: Books, Church music, Church history, Southern history, military history, natural history, any history, theology, pianos and fiddles, hunting and fishing, trees and gardens, pickup trucks and muscle cars, food...
Expertise: Away with expertise!
Occupation: Artist
Industry: Hospitality
Message: message me
Member Since:
10/28/2002
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| And when you've said that, you can't say much more"Beethoven was great, but he wasn’t country." -- Ben House
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| What's the deal with that?The opening of baseball season found me with a cynical, rolling eye, a spirit jaded and depressed from one season too many of the mismanaged, morale-flattening Mariners. As an antidote I turned to the lyrical Giamatti.
Although I did not quite regain the sempiternal optimism that is supposed to be the hallmark of the true baseball fan (I do not cry, "wait till next year!", but rather mutter, "ye gods, with what stultifying stupendities shall we be embarrassed this time?"), I got interested in some things Giammati said in Baseball and the American Character about...you might find this surprising...baseball and the American character.
Apparently a large reason for baseball's sudden popularity after the War Between the States was nostalgia. An' I started thinkin', nostalgia explains a whole lot about the American character, from "throwback uniform" nights in baseball to reenacting and living history exhibits, from "organic" and "local" foods to wilderness reserves, from classic car replicas and model trains to, uh, Graceland. America, it seems, is awash in nostalgia, and like Freudian psychologists we can trace most of her present neuroses to her traumatic adolescence.
One cannot underestimate the power, whether derived from biblical images or classical, of the image of the enclosed green space...on the American mind. Such imagery may be one reason why not almost forty-five million people a summer flow to baseball parks in the midst of urban wildernesses, flow in big cities to a place where perfection does not exist but which recalls in some distant way the place that promised perfection....paradise.
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For those native to American, particularly in cities, the game, whether watched or played, recalled the earlier, rural America, a more youthful, less bitterly knowing country....
Giamatti, I think, hit the nail on the head when it comes to the American story. The millennial hopes with which she was first settled did not wane with the religion that birthed it; from the Puritans to the western settlers everybody thought that, with proper encouragement, America could be the promised land. And, like everybody in the grip of an absolutised ideal, they became quite fanatical about it--only a zealot could be serenely convinced that total warfare against fellow citizens was the appropriate tool to preserve the Union. And once the South, the only part of the country that did not share (as fully) in the millennial dream, was out of the way, everybody thought that the last enemy had been defeated, that now nothing could stand in the way of the shining march of progress. Thus triumphant, America was translated in the twinkling of an eye--in a few brief decades--from a traditional to a modern society; that this happened not without violence only hastened its course, and, much like a child forced to grow up far too quickly, she has ever since been sorrowing for the youthful past that she barely knew.
Because we are all Americans, we all have in us this painful nostalgia for green fields, red barns, and mama's home cooking. I can feel myself getting sentimental right now. Yikes.
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| The aforementioned church father reveals a funky view of nature and grace (let funky = that which had not previously come to my attention). According to him, man was created by nature like any other beast, and the image of God was a gracious addition to this nature.
"Having taken especial pity, above all things on earth, upon the race of men, and having perceived its inability, by virtue of the condition of its origin, to continue in one stay [say what?--A the P], He gave them a further gift, and He did not barely create man, as He did all the irrational creatures on the earth, but made them after His own image, giving them a portion even of the power of His own Word...." And later, "For transgression of the commandment was turning them back to their natural state, so that just as they have had their being out of nothing, so also as might be expected, they might look for corruption into nothing in the course of time." And further, "Men...being, as I said before, by nature corruptible, but destined, by the grace following from partaking of the Word, to have escaped their natural state, had they remained good." (De Incarnatione, 3.2, 4.2, 5.1.)
Th'only reason I thought it was funky is because he almost implies that it comes in two stages: man was an animal like all the others until, somewhere in the process of creation, God took pity on him, lifting him out of his ignorance by bestowing on him the image of God. It's also how Athanasius explains man's capacity to decay and die--the loss of the image of God through sin returns him to his natural state. Previously, assuming that man was an image-bearer in his natural state, his default condition being one of perfect communion with God, I had wondered how man's sinless nature was capable of corruption while God's sinless nature was not.
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| God's longsufferingSez Athanasius:
"For this cause, then, death having gained upon men, and corruption abiding upon them, the race of man was perishing; the rational man made in God's image was disappearing, and the handiwork of God was in process of dissolution....So, as the rational creatures were wasting and such works in course of ruin, what was God in His goodness to do? Suffer corruption to prevail against them and death to hold them fast? And where were the profit of their having been made, to begin with? For better were they not made, than once made, left to neglect and ruin. For neglect reveals weakness, and not goodness on God's part--if, that is, He allows His own work to be ruined when once He had made it--more so than if He had never made man at all."
It were unseemly for God to tolerate corruption in His image, man, because the condition of man reflects on God. It is interesting, however, that such a long time elapsed between the beginning of corruption, in Adam, and the beginning of its restoration, in Christ. 4,000 years is a long time for God to tolerate something that reflects badly on Him. Why didn't Christ come within nanoseconds of the fall?
Well, I don't have the whole answer, but the question itself shows something about God's nature. It's easy to think of God's righteousness as working like a computer system, where everything must be conform rigidly in order for it to hum along. Introduce a single bug or glitch, and crash, down comes the whole system and cannot function until the glitch is fixed. Instead, God is a living person, and His constitution can handle 4,000 years of slander while He prepares the fix. | | |
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