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Enduring Divine Absence & the discipline of a loving parent

11/13/2019

Recently a bible study group I'm a part of was pondering what it means for a loving parent to discipline (train) their child through hardship; unpleasant hardship. Such training, Hebrews assures us, produces a harvest of peace.

No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.
(Heb. 12:11)

The above passage brought to mind the following wonderful excerpt from the book Enduring Divine Absence by Joseph Minich.

"The British sociologist, Anthony Giddens, for instance, writes about the way in which infants develop through their parents’ absence as well as their presence. Crucial to the intersection of trust with emergent social capabilities on the part of the infant is absence... a fundamental feature of the early formation of trust, is trust in the caretaker's return.

A feeling of the reliability... of others is predicated upon the recognition that the absence of the mother does not represent a withdrawal of love.

Trust thus brackets distance in time and space and so blocks off existential anxieties which, if they were allowed to concretise, might become a source of continuing emotional and behavioural anguish throughout life." (page 61)

Trusting God during seasons of his apparent absence is hard and deeply painful. However, through such seasons we learn to trust that God's apparent absence does not signal a withdrawal of his Fatherly love. Hebrews assures us that this painful tilling will produce a harvest of peace; the peace of a child who has truly and securely learnt to trust that they are loved.

Buy the book here: https://davenantinstitute.org/divine-absence/

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Authority, its nature, and its potential failures (O'Donovan)

11/10/2019

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The pdf. link posted below is an attempt to paraphrase O'Donovan's account of authority. The diagram aims to integrate some of Andrew Errington's suggested amendments to O'Donovan's account. No doubt the diagram does not do justice to Andrew's article - let's just say it was my attempt to process some of the article's key points.

Find Andrew Errington's really stimulating article in Studies in Christian Ethics 2016, Vol. 29(4) 371–385

Authority in O'Donovan.pdf
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Enduring Divine Absence & the discipline of a loving parent

Authority, its nature, and its potential failures (O'Donovan)

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