Head Scratching About a Profile

I think I know what my problem is with a blog profile.  The crux of a profile should be the writer's viewpoint, which informs his or her approach to the blog.  By this blog's description, however, it is (I hope) apparent that my concern is about a human state prior to the coalescing of viewpoints.  I can only put forth the bare bones of the concept with which I engage, as follows:

The teachings of Jesus do not have as an emphasis the great ideas of theology (God, Man, Heaven, Hell, etc.), nor the purported frameworks of salvation, nor the concerted "reasonings-together" of religious thinkers, nor the wrestling-bouts with sin that can occupy our daily discourse and activities, but rather the momentary pilings-up of unbidden experience to which we respond before we can grasp them.  We don't know why we respond as we do--or, rather, why our responses can leave us asking ourselves, "Why?"  This is the experience-realm of shadows through which the teachings of Jesus guide us, with the shadows themselves the divinely-bestowed architecture of that necessary realm, even as the denominations distract and drain us with fantasies of the Christian Life of assurance and light.  On the contrary, the experience-realm of shadows being co-equal with light, and of trust burgeoning prior to understood assurance, is the realm of the newborn, and this realm necessary to our salvation is, as we will see, the only realm in which the teachings of Jesus make sense.

Scratching at a Profile

I, as an old kinsman of Cain, have been given to know, and to be able to do, that which would make me acceptable.  Like me in desiring a formula, the rich young man is told only to formalize his divestiture that would be implicit in his following Jesus, and that will fall to the poor in any event.  And like another young man, we are all told that we teeter at the gate of the kingdom.

The Trodden Shards Part One

This is the first part of what I intend to be a larger work, titled The Trodden Shards.

Luther, of the "faith alone" principle, lived not knowing from moment to moment if each would be his last.  Paul, who lamented in Romans that his sinful nature was perplexing to him, experienced a similar jeopardy.  Those men, convicted as they were of their sinfulness, had great cause to convince themselves in a moment that they had been squared with their damnable moral qualities.  For Luther, "faith alone" must have been a great comfort.  Paul, on the other hand, is a livelier question--if only because he was in the instant both the writer and the recipient of his doctrine, balm as it was to him.