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Christian Formation

 

Photograph: This is one of six famous Eastern Orthodox Christian monasteries in Thessaly, Greece.  They are built on the Meteora Rock formations.  Christians inhabited these mountains from the 9th century.  Photo credit:  Danel Solabatierra | CC2.0, Flickr. 

 

Introduction

We believe Jesus’ own human desires, journey, and teaching are normative for human becoming, so we pursue Christian Spiritual and Emotional Formation to help us better understand ourselves. Jesus gives us answers to pastoral, relational, and communal questions that come up as we pursue his vision for human flourishing.

 
 

Spotlight

How Our Desire for Beauty Points Us to Jesus. Video recording. Mako gave this message to his church, Neighborhood Church of Dorchester, on Matthew 17:1 - 8. Given on September 15, 2024. The basic idea: God made the fruit of creation delicious and beautiful. Humans can make food even more delicious and beautiful. So if there is beauty in creation, and if human beautifying is beautiful, then making the human more beautiful and less ugly is vital. This points us to Jesus, specifically his transfiguration of human nature, beautifying it with God’s glory, because Jesus overcame the ugliness in human nature without becoming ugly himself.

 
 

This is a curriculum for small group discussion or personal reflection. While healthy shame means regret, toxic shame is the desire to hide the self. Either way, glory is the response of God to invest Himself in us and renew His image in us. This material explores humanity as fundamentally good, but corrupted by sin, and not entirely in control of our own desires and emotions. Part of the spiritual and emotional struggle, then, is to know ourselves, know how God sees and loves us, and to receive into ourselves the Spirit of Christ. Peppered with insights from the early Christians, including some “desert fathers and mothers” who were the earliest “spiritual directors.” See more here.

 
 

Jesus demonstrated very human emotions and called forth our participation in God’s joy, sorrow, etc. In fact, Jesus’ emotions seem to heal and shape our emotions. The passages in this series of Bible studies and reflections give us valuable insights into God’s character and love for us. See more here.

 
 

Atonement, Justice, and Scapegoating

Like fallen Adam in the garden, we desire to deflect blame, and therefore we scapegoat others. On the political level, this builds group cohesion and creates a social outsider, who is blamed for the group’s woes, who the group must exile or kill or marginalize in order to maintain a hopeful lie. This series explores what political scapegoating has looked like in the U.S.

 
 

See also the slides to this presentation. Mako Nagasawa gave a guest lecture a class at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in February 2024. Here is the English text of the treatise, which Ambrose wrote in 389. Ambrose uses King Ahab as a case study of greed when he seized Naboth’s vineyard, in 1 Kings 21. This presentation relates to the Genesis creation story because Ambrose structures it around Genesis 1. He says that God gave all humans a shared dominion over the creation. In Christ, God gives us dominion, in principle, over sin. Covetousness, therefore, is a double problem. It interferes with the shared dominion over the creation, and it causes us to fail in exercising proper Christ-centered dominion over the sin in ourselves. Ambrose shows that Ahab became cruel, like the wild dogs that eventually fed off his dead, unburied body, as in 2 Peter 2:19 - 22. Ambrose also draws upon Matthew 6:19 - 24 because of how moths and rust share in our physical goods whereas God shares in the development of our moral goodness. Ambrose draws as well on Luke 12:13 - 34 because the greedy tear down barns/granaries and build bigger ones, finding more pleasure in the rising price of grain, not its widespread availability. A few slides refer to Ambrose’s understanding of the human being as a human becoming, Jesus’ work of atonement as a medical substitution healing human nature for us and inviting us to share in him, the pressing issue being human desires and not deservingness per se, and hell as the love of God but experienced by those who have become addicted to sin.

 
 

See also the slides to this presentation. It covers the early Christian understanding of human being, human becoming, and how we co-create with God our human desires and human nature. To the right is the video from the class. This is a full exploration of how hell is the love of God because (1) the united church taught that for over a thousand years; (2) God's Triune nature requires all other activity of God to flow out of His love; (3) literary exegesis of fire shows that it is God's call to purification. This study largely depends on the theme of fire in Scripture

 
 

See also the slides to this presentation. This material explores the biblical theme of human being and human becoming. God created us with good desires for more goodness and beauty, as well as the freedom to determine the direction of our love as constituting our human becoming. The biblical motif of meeting God on mountains is important. We glance at various Christian leaders, but do a deeper dive into Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Moses, in his interpretation of Moses meeting God on Mount Sinai, and returning with shining face.

 
 
 
 
 
 

Desire: Topics:

Here’s how to understand this section on Desire: God made us as Human Becomings, not as static. We believe Jesus’ own human desires, journey, and teaching are normative for human becoming, so we pursue Christian Formation to help us better understand questions that come up as we pursue Jesus’ vision for human flourishing. Human Destiny itself is best understood through the lens of desire. We stay aware of research and reflections on human emotional and Moral Development. We are helped by insights into the mind-brain-body connection in Brain, Genes and Rest. We follow research and reflections on Friendship and Happiness. Scapeogating is a dangerous impulse to wrongly blame others. Greed is dangerous, not least because more money makes us more greedy. Addiction and overconsumption challenges the notion that we are “sovereign individuals.” We maintain the biblical critique of interest rate Debt as a way people fund overconsumption and entrap themselves. Sex is part of human moral and emotional development; we critique the Sex Industry for how it distorts us.