Your actions are the direct outworking of your belief. Too, you will only do actions (without outside force), that correspond to your beliefs.
If I cook a huge batch of salsa (which I just did), it shows my belief that salsa is good; and believe me, if you saw how much salsa I made you would say, "Sean believes salsa is good."
Likewise, my love for Christ, the local physical church, and those who don't know him, will be best shown in how I live my life, and how I spend the resources given to me on those things I claim to love (time, talent, money). Saying I love my wife is one thing, but her opinion of whether or not I love her might be something completely different.
I guess this question hits at: you can talk the talk, but the truth is in your actions, since your actions reveal your thoughts better than your mouth.
Unfortunetely, we judge ourselves by our intentions (beliefs), whereas, others judge us by our actions.
After my head quit hurting about the nature of thought...(i.e. Is a book a thought? And if not, then at what point during the act of conversation [reading or listening] does this external idea become my thought?)...I returned from my rabbit trail, and my answer was quite simple.
No. My thought life influences both my feelings and behaviors. I cannot have thoughts without behaviors. The resulting feeling or behavior may not be that exact thought, but it will have influence – and quite often this is subtle. What I choose to cultivate, in my teensy weensy pea brain, does in fact express results in my feelings and subsequent actions.
Very rarely, if ever, do I act or feel in a totally spontaneous manner. Rather, I sympathetically ‘react’ to my environment through the choices available to me.
But I would ask if thought (or a point of view) needs to be shared beyond one's self in order to be orthodoxy. Can orthodoxy be my beliefs alone, or does it need to be considered a 'cultural' norm of sorts prior to placement on the rungs of holy hierarchy?
5 comments:
sure...it's called theology for the most part...but i do contend you can't have true orthopraxy without some kind of orthodoxy
I don't think you can...
If we take it for granted that our beliefs will always manifest in our actions, then we cannot have orthodoxy without orthopraxy.
I don't think you can either...
Your actions are the direct outworking of your belief. Too, you will only do actions (without outside force), that correspond to your beliefs.
If I cook a huge batch of salsa (which I just did), it shows my belief that salsa is good; and believe me, if you saw how much salsa I made you would say, "Sean believes salsa is good."
Likewise, my love for Christ, the local physical church, and those who don't know him, will be best shown in how I live my life, and how I spend the resources given to me on those things I claim to love (time, talent, money). Saying I love my wife is one thing, but her opinion of whether or not I love her might be something completely different.
I guess this question hits at: you can talk the talk, but the truth is in your actions, since your actions reveal your thoughts better than your mouth.
Unfortunetely, we judge ourselves by our intentions (beliefs), whereas, others judge us by our actions.
After my head quit hurting about the nature of thought...(i.e. Is a book a thought? And if not, then at what point during the act of conversation [reading or listening] does this external idea become my thought?)...I returned from my rabbit trail, and my answer was quite simple.
No.
My thought life influences both my feelings and behaviors.
I cannot have thoughts without behaviors.
The resulting feeling or behavior may not be that exact thought, but it will have influence – and quite often this is subtle.
What I choose to cultivate, in my teensy weensy pea brain, does in fact express results in my feelings and subsequent actions.
Very rarely, if ever, do I act or feel in a totally spontaneous manner. Rather, I sympathetically ‘react’ to my environment through the choices available to me.
But I would ask if thought (or a point of view) needs to be shared beyond one's self in order to be orthodoxy. Can orthodoxy be my beliefs alone, or does it need to be considered a 'cultural' norm of sorts prior to placement on the rungs of holy hierarchy?
I like salsa...
I believe you like salsa.
After asking the question I thought we might need to define orthodoxy, to some degree.
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