an outlet of encouragement, explanation, and exhortation

Category: Quotes (Page 9 of 10)

Peace with God means conflict with the world…

I’m not really trying to get into deep theological controversies and discourse around Moltmann. I don’t think I’m up to speed on the modern theological scene. However, I find this quote from him to be something worth chewing on.

But on the other hand, all this must inevitably mean that the man who thus hopes will never be able to reconcile himself with the laws and constraints of this earth, neither with the inevitability of death nor with the evil that constantly bears further evil. The raising of Christ is not merely a consolation to him in a life that is full of distress and doomed to die, but it is also God’s contradiction of suffering and death, of humiliation and offence, and of the wickedness of evil. Hope finds in Christ not only a consolation in suffering, but also the protest of the divine promise against suffering. If Paul calls death the ‘last enemy’ (1 Cor. 15:26), then the opposite is also true: that the risen Christ, and with him the resurrection hope, must be declared to be the enemy of death and of a world that puts up with death. Faith takes up this contradiction and thus becomes itself a contradiction to the world of death. That is why faith, wherever it develops into hope, causes not rest but unrest, not patience but impatience. It does not calm the unquiet heart, but is itself this unquiet heart in man. Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it. Peace with God means conflict with the world, for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present.

Jürgen Moltmann. Theology of Hope

John Stott: Two Instructions

Here then are two instructions, “love your neighbor” and “go and make disciples.” What is the relation between the two? Some of us behave as if we thought them identical, so that if we have shared the Gospel with somebody, we consider we have completed our responsibility to love him. But no. The Great Commission neither explains, nor exhausts, nor supersedes the Great Commandment. What it does is to add to the command of neighbor-love and neighbor-service a new and urgent Christian dimension. If we truly love our neighbor we shall without doubt tell him the Good News of Jesus. But equally if we truly love our neighbor we shall not stop there.”

–John Stott

“That person must be a Christian”

David Lyle Jeffrey writes about Sino-Christian Studies in China in a review entitled A Critique of All Religions in the July/August 2011 issue of Books and Culture

The essays in this volume are indispensable reading for anyone who wishes to understand what is happening in Chinese Christian intellectual life today. There is no hint in them either of triumphalism or of condescension. Rather, as Guo Shining puts it, all of us who seek to follow Christ live under one marker for authentic delegation: “When people use the phrase, ‘that person must be a Christian,’ it highlights … behavior [that] conflicts with the main trend of profitable,worldly, self-centered, materialistic value-systems.” To be a sign of contradiction, says Guo, is both natural and necessary to a Christian in any walk of life. Addressing the wider church of which he is a part, he notes the corollary: this requires all believers to “strengthen their faith,” since “it is much harder to be a Christian in China.” Well—yes. And perhaps that particular reality works to the advantage of our Chinese brothers and sisters.

That person must be a Christian… I wish it meant what it means in China when people said that here! What does it mean when you hear people say that?

Way Down in the Hole

Way Down in the Hole
by Tom Waits

When you walk through the garden
you gotta watch your back
well I beg your pardon
walk the straight and narrow track
if you walk with Jesus
he’s gonna save your soul
you gotta keep the devil
way down in the hole
he’s got the fire and the fury
at his command
well you don’t have to worry
if you hold on to Jesus hand
we’ll all be safe from Satan
when the thunder rolls
just gotta help me keep the devil
way down in the hole
All the angels sing about Jesus’ mighty sword
and they’ll shield you with their wings
and keep you close to the lord
don’t pay heed to temptation
for his hands are so cold
you gotta help me keep the devil
way down in the hole

And now you know what I’m watching on video these days. Fall, 2011, that is. So far, despite the R-rated visuals and language, I’m thinking it is pretty real. Serious television. Not for the kids. Definitely for the thoughtful.

“independent of the ordinary currents of human action”

The world looks with some awe upon a man who appears unconcernedly indifferent to home, money, comfort, rank, or even power and fame. The world feels not without a certain apprehension, that here is someone outside its jurisdiction; someone before whom its allurements may be spread in vain; someone strangely enfranchised, untamed, untrammelled by convention, moving independent of the ordinary currents of human action.

-Winston Churchill

No time for fear.

These are the last lines of Escape, the first episode of season two of the television version of This American Life.

“I just recently became truly aware of how tenuous my life is.  So I really don’t have time to waste on fear.”
– Michael Phillips

P.S. If you decide to watch, be forewarned that there are portions of the episode that are adult in nature.

Song on Reaching Seventy

An article on aging in First Things quoted from the poem Song on Reaching Seventy by John Hall Wheelock. The article, Thinking About Aging is a good article. With meticulous reasoning Gilbert Meilaender considers issues around the desire to live longer or delay aging. But the last page of the article, in which Meilaender considers the impact love has on our desire to live is profoundly beautiful. It is here that he quotes Wheelock’s poem. Not yet seventy or even sixty, but seeing seventy coming down the road, I want to remember.

Shall not a man sing as the night comes on?
He would be braver than that bird
Which shrieks for terror and is gone
Into the gathering dark, and he has heard
Often, at evening’s hush,
Upon some towering sunset bough
A belated thrush
Lift up his heart against the menacing night,
Till silence covered all. Oh, now
Before the coming of a greater night
How bitterly sweet and dear
All things have grown! How shall we bear the brunt,
The fury and joy of every sound and sight,
Now almost cruelly fierce with all delight:
The clouds of dawn that blunt
The spearhead of the sun; the clouds that stand,
Raging with light, around his burial;
The rain-pocked pool
At the wood’s edge; a bat’s skittering flight
Over the sunset-colored land;
Or, heard toward morning, the cock pheasant’s call!
Oh, ever sight and sound
Has meaning now! Now, also, love has laid
Upon us her old chains of tenderness
So that to think of the beloved one,
Love is so great, is to be half afraid –
It is like looking at the sun,
That blinds the eye with truth.
Yet longing remains unstilled,
Age will look into the face of youth
With longing, over a gulf not to be crossed.
Oh, joy that is almost pain, pain that is joy,
Unimaginable to the younger man or boy –
Nothing is quite fulfilled,
Nothing is lost;
But all is multiplied till the heart almost
Aches with its burden: there and here
Become as one, the present and the past;
The dead who were content to lie
Far from us, have consented to draw near –
We are thronged with memories,
Move amid two societies,
And learn at last
The dead are the only ones who never die.

Great night, hold back
A little longer yet your mountainous black
Waters of darkness from this shore,
This island garden, this paradisal spot,
The haunt of love and pain,
Which we must leave, whether we would or not,
And where we shall not come again.
More time — oh, but a little more,
Till stretched to the limits of being, the taut heart break
Bursting the bonds of breath,
Shattering the wall
Between us and our world, and we awake
Out of the dream of self into the truth of all,
The price for which is death.

–John Hall Wheelock

“It is said that for money you can have everything…”

“It is said that for money you can have everything, but you cannot. You can buy food, but not appetite; medicine, but not health; knowledge, but not wisdom; glitter, but not beauty; fun, but not joy; acquaintances, but not friends; servants, but not faithfulness; leisure, but not peace. You can have the husk of everything, but not the kernel.”
– Arne Garborg

Arne Garborg was a Norwegian writer who lived from 1851 to 1924. The quote is from an editorial for The Weekender Newspaper. Cluny, Alberta, Canada, March 4, 2005, according to Wikipedia. I don’t recall where I first heard it; I got it from my quote file, which has been in the making for quite some time.

Your doctrine of inspiration and revelation should arise from the data of the Bible…

Your doctrine of inspiration and revelation should arise from the data of the Bible, not from somewhere else. And if the Bible doesn’t fit your doctrine of inspiration and revelation then the problem’s with your doctrine; the problem’s not with the Bible. So change your doctrine. Or adjust it. Don’t abandon it, but adjust it. Think about the question ‘what does it mean that the Bible is inspired and revelatory? Why am I having a problem with this or that theory about process?’

This is a quote of Iain Provan, Professor of Biblical Studies, Regent College. You can read about Regent College on Wikipedia also. The quote is from lecture #5 of Old Testament Foundations near the 21st minute. I’m learning quite a lot from working through this class. On my own, of course! The textbooks are An Introduction to the Old Testament: Second Edition by Longman and Dillard and A Biblical History of Israel by Provan, Long and Longman.

It’s not that I haven’t studied this stuff before, mostly through reading and often assisted by various R.C. Sproul’s lecture series (among others). It’s that having taught through the Bible several times now, I have better questions and a better context to understand what I’m learning. Regent College has a treasure-trove of good stuff at their online bookstore. Check it out.

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