Today marks the first day of the Lenten season, my favorite time to be a Christian. Throughout Lent, I want to try and make it a point to (daily) read something so theologically sound that it makes me re-think why I became a Christian in the first place. Something that throws a massive curve ball into my personal theology that I am forced to recognize the enormous weight of this incredible season.
Paul Elmer More's Pages from an Oxford Diary:
This whole dogma of redemption, with its corollaries of pardon and vicarious atonement, was one of the things that kept me long a rebel against Christianity. My philosophy, or my pride, repudiated the thought of suing for forgiveness and of accepting grace. Redemption also seemed to introduce an unreasonable and sentimental element into religion, relaxing the strict bonds of cause and effect upon which the moral law is founded. I liked to contrast the manner in which both Socrates and Buddha in their last moments bade their disciples depend upon themselves and work out their own salvation. I resented the notion that I was not competent to shape my own destiny, that I was not the captain of my own soul.
Well, age and experience, time that knoweth all things, have brought me to look on life with other eyes. I am impressed by the weakness of men and their dependence on help; I see my own humiliating limitations... Oh the battle will be won by him who said, "I have overcome the world." Surely we have offended and need forgiveness; we are fearful and feeble and need heartening. To fall on our knees and supplicate for that pardon and help seems to me not an abdication of our manhood, but an acknowledgement of our sin, an act of wisdom and of an enlightened will.
More so aptly puts that the incredible movement of man falling to his knees is the truest expression of free will that he has to offer, which is something hauntingly beautiful. The opportunity of man to choose to worship God because God has created man to choose not to, leaves me without words.
So blessed am I, the broken and downtrodden sinner, brought out of the muck and mire and into the light and newness of purity offered by Christ's atoning death on the cross.
No comments:
Post a Comment