United States or Iran ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"A thing of price is man," wrote Synesius about 410 A.D., "because for him Christ died." The two things go together Jesus' death and Jesus' Theocentric thought of man. It is a familiar criticism of idealists and other young hearts, that it is easy to idealize what one does not know. "Omne ignotum pro magnifico" is the old epigram of Tacitus.
When looked upon from the theocentric point of view, the new forms which we had to suppose as called into existence only by selection, would remain products of divine creation: the "God said, and it was so," would retain its undiminished importance; but looked upon from the cosmic point of view, they would present themselves as products of the divine providence and government of the world, still more exclusively than in every principal of explanation which finds the causes of development in the organisms themselves or in an immaterial cause acting upon the organisms from within.
The emphasis falls on our duty of kindness and tenderness to all men and women, because we and they are alike God's children. With his emphasis on tenderness we may group his teaching on forgiveness. The teaching as ever is Theocentric. He sees how quarrels injure life, and alienate a man from God.
He views these things, as the old phrase puts it, "sub specie aeternitatis", from the outlook of eternity. Right and wrong do not meet at infinity. There is no higher synthesis that can make them one and the same thing. Everything with Jesus is Theocentric, and until God changes there will be no very great change in right and wrong.
It is Theocentric, positive, active rather than passive not a state, but a relation and a force. Holiness with him is a living relation with the living God. That is why the first feature in it that strikes us is Courage.
The Son of Man, historically, has again and again found the lost the lost gifts, the lost faculties, the lost charms and graces and given them back to the man whom he had also found and brought home to God. Let us once more try to get our thoughts Theocentric as Jesus' are, and our problems become simpler, or at least fewer.
His tests of discipleship illumine his ideal of character Theocentric thinking negation of self the thought-out life. That is the energy of mind that Jesus asks of men, that he admires in men. On the other side, he is always against the life of drift, the half-thought-out life. It is quite striking with what a variety of impressive pictures Jesus drives home his lesson.
The Lutheran system emphasizes the love of God to all men; the Reformed system emphasizes predestination; which, by selecting some, excludes the others. As the theologians describe it, Lutheranism is Christocentric, Reform is theocentric. Calvin, like Luther, read theology through Augustine and without his ecclesiology, but from an altogether opposite point of view.
Word Of The Day