Real Consistency
The only way to be truly consistent is as a non-Christian. If we are to be Christians at all, we will be inconsistent ones. We will be right some of the time and wrong some of the time. What Jesus asks of us is that we strive to take that “right some of the time” and make it an ever-increasing portion of the time (Christian growth).
—James Sennett in The Wittenburg Door (Dec. 1984/Jan. 1985)
Afghanistanitus
The freedom to give is often vitiated by the moral disease of Afghanistanitus, the idea that the real opportunities for significant acts of giving are in faraway places or extreme situations.
—Eugene Peterson in Traveling Light
Growing The Wrong Direction?
[American Christianity] is more Petrine than Johannean; more like busy Martha than like the pensive Mary, sitting at the feet of Jesus. It expands more in breadth than in depth. It is often carried on like a secular business, and in a mechanical or utilitarian spirit. It lacks the beautiful enamel of deep fervor and heartiness, the true mysticism, an appreciation of history and the church; it wants the substratum of a profound and spiritual theology; and under the mask of orthodoxy it not infrequently conceals, without intending or knowing it, the tendency to abstract intellectualism and superficial rationalism. This is especially evident in the doctrine of the church and of the Sacraments, and in the meagemess of the worship … [wherein] nothing is left but preaching, free prayer, and singing.
—Philip Schaff, a Swiss theologian, analyzing American Christianity for a German audience in 1854
Risking Success
If a man is centered upon himself the smallest risk is too great for him, because both success and failure can destroy him. If he is centered upon God, then no risk is too great, because success is already guaranteed—the successful union of creator and creature, beside which every thing else is meaningless.
—Morris L. West in The Shoes of the Fisherman
The Sins Of The Fathers
There is a popular school of thought … that violently resents the operation of time upon the human spirit. It looks upon age as something between a crime and an insult. Its prophets have banished from their savage vocabulary all such words as adult, mature, experienced, venerable; they know only snarling and sneering epithets such as middle-aged, elderly, stuffy, senile, and decrepit. With these they flagellate that which they themselves are, or must shortly become, as though abuse were an incantation to exorcise the inexorable. Theirs is neither the thoughtless courage that “makes mouths at the invisible event,” nor the reasoned courage that foresees the event and endures it; still less is it the ecstatic courage that embraces and subdues the event.…
Such men, finding no value for the world as it is, proclaim very loudly their faith in the future, “which is in the hands of the young.” With this flattery they bind their own burden on the shoulders of the next generation.
—Dorothy Sayers in The Whimsical Christian
Offensive Language
Busy. A horrible word. It suggests a spiritual disease. Someone has said that a bore is someone who, when you ask her how she is, tells you. A bigger bore is someone who, when you remark that he is busy, details how busy he is and with what activities. I sometimes do that; few of us live up to the standards we promote in our own advice. But I think “busy” means being egotistic and arrogant—believing the world needs me so much. It means being inhospitable: I regale you with how much work your presence demands of me, how intrusive you are. I play God. I imply that you are less important if you are less busy. It’s hard to expunge “busy” from the vocabulary, but it helps to remember its use is offensive.
—Martin E. Marty in The Christian Century (Dec. 7, 1988)
