Fire vs. Theological Craft

Jul24

Enthusiasm sees God. Love sees God. Fire sees God. But we have escaped the revealing, sympathetic fire and have built our prudent religion upon the sand. On the sand! Think of it! So we go to it, and walk around it, and measure it, and break it up into propositions, and placard it on church walls, and fight about it with infinite clamor and some spitefulness.

My soul, amid all Unknowableness, Incomprehensibleness, and other vain and pompous nothings, hold fast to the faith that you can know God and yet know nothing merely about Him. You can know Him by love and pureness, and not know about Him by intellectual art or theological craft.

Joseph Parker: Poet, Seer, Preacher

Crutches for Wings: Lame

Jul23

Alas, he who mistakes crutches for wings! Yet this absurdity has so recommended itself to our coldness as to win the name of prudence, sobriety, and self-suppression. We have lost the broad and mighty pinions that found their way to heaven’s gate and the eye of burning love that looked steadfastly into the sacred cloud.

We have now taken to walking, and our lame feet pick their uncertain way over such stones as Unknown, Unknowable, Invisible, and Incomprehensible, and we finish our toilsome journey exactly where we began it.

Joseph Parker: Poet, Seer, Preacher

Ripping Open Graves

Jul22

God! God! God! Ever hidden, ever present, ever distant, ever near; a Ghost, a Breath, making the knees knock in terror, ripping open a grave at the very feet of our pleasure; a mocking laugh at the feast, filling all space like the light, yet leaving room for all His creatures; a Terror, a Hope—Undefinable, Unknowable, Irresistible, Immeasurable. God is a Spirit!

More Messages by J. Parker HERE

Joseph Parker: Poet, Seer, Preacher

Deus Absconditus

Jul21

Deus absconditus. God hides Himself, most often in the light; He touches the soul in the gloom and vastness of night, and the soul, being true in its intent and wish, answers the touch without a shudder or a blush. It is even so that God comes to me.

God does not come through man’s high argument, a flash of human wit, a sudden and audacious answer to an infinite enigma, or a toilsome reply to some high mental challenge. His path is through the pathless darkness—without a footprint to show where he stepped; through the forest of the night he comes, and when he comes the brightness is all within!
My God—unknown and unknowable—cannot be chained as a Prisoner of logic or delivered into the custody of a theological proposition or figured into literal art. Shame be the portion of those who have given Him a setting within the points of the compass, who have robed Him in cloth of their own weaving, and surnamed Him at the bidding of their cold and narrow fancy!