Oh, so very TRUE, dear brother in Christ!
When a "calling" is reduced to a "career," then something ineffable, the consciousness of something vastly important, has already been lost.
The loss of this "ineffable" reduces man to the status of an animal, or worse, to the status of a machine.
Thank you so very much, dear brother YHAOS, for writing!
betty: The loss of this “ineffable” reduces man to the status of an animal, or worse, to the status of a machine.
Spirited: Dying seminaries and dying churches point to the loss of faith in the living God and Christian Truth which had sustained our souls and culture.
Death of faith means no heaven above and no hell below. And this is nihilism.
Nihilism is the logical assumption if the God of Revelation does not exist. If there is no heaven above and no hell below, then neither does man’s soul/spirit exist.
Nihilism is spiritual, moral, and intellectual suicide, it is the absolute abyss.
For over two hundred years, nihilist philosophies have been working their way through our culture, embedding themselves, often unconsciously, within our psyches. This means that not only is the way we see ourselves and America colored by nihilism, but to the degree that our minds have been polluted are we immobilized by apathy, the spiritual emptiness that says in reaction to our peculiarly twisted, degraded culture, “Why bother?’
The strangely twisted atmosphere of our age is the “death of God” made tangible and it is Nietzsche who describes our meaningless, disordered, ugly, atonal, brutal, upside-down climate of nothingness:
“We have killed him (God), you and I! ...But how have we done it? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What did we do when we loosened this earth from its sun? Whither does it now move? Whither do we move? ...Do we not dash on unceasingly? Backwards, sideways, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an above and below? Do we not stray...through infinite nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us? ...Does not night come on continually, darker and darker?” (Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age, Eugene Rose, p. 108)
Such is the theater of the absurd in which there is neither up nor down, male nor female, right nor wrong, true nor false, normal nor abnormal because the living God is dead, and while America and the West drift aimlessly in “infinite nothingness” nihilism progressively dissolves the foundation of soul, mind, worth, morality, family, and individual liberty.
America and the West are swirling ever downward in a spiraling vortex issuing into the abyss.....hell.
The loss of this "ineffable" reduces man to the status of an animal, or worse, to the status of a machine.
But I am not troubled. With the notable exception of Paul, the Apostles Jesus called were not educated men. He taught them personally. Likewise, He taught Paul personally (Galatians 1).
Indeed, the educated men - the Pharisees - evidently thought Jesus was beneath them.
So I'm not concerned for even if every single seminary put out 100% Pharisee-like people who had the appearance of faith but denied the power thereof - God's will cannot be thwarted. Just like in the Communist countries where Christianity was banned, His people - ordinary uneducated Christians - keep talking about Him. We can't and won't stop.