Classic and contemporary excerpts.
A Good Result
True guilt is a valuable asset for living. It helps us when we hurt others or betray our own standards and values. God uses guilt to influence us to change our minds about what we are doing, leading us to repentance. If we never felt guilt, we would not follow difficult rules or standards, obey the law, or have good relationships with loved ones.
—Brenda Poinsett in Understanding a Woman’s Depression
Two-Way Ticket
While it is a crucial mistake to assume that churches can be on an outward journey without being on an inward one, it is equally disastrous to assume that one can make the journey inward without taking the journey outward.
—Elizabeth O’Connor in Journey
Inward, Journey Outward
No “Simple” Faith
It is no good asking for a simple religion. After all, real things aren’t simple. They look simple, but they’re not. The table I’m sitting at looks simple: but ask a scientist to tell you what it’s really made of—all about the atoms and how the light waves rebound from them and hit my eye and what they do to the optic nerve and what it does to my brain—and, of course, you find that what we call “seeing a table” lands you in mysteries and complications which you can hardly get to the end of.…
Reality, in fact, is always something you couldn’t have guessed. That’s one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It’s a religion you couldn’t have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we’d always expected, I’d feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it’s not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have. So let’s leave behind all these boys’ philosophies—these over-simple answers.
—C. S. Lewis in The Case
for Christianity
Wisdom—Or Age?
I have lost all inclination to vice without knowing whether I owe this change to the weakness of an outworn body or the moderation of a mind that has grown wiser than it was before. At my age it is hard to tell whether the passions one no longer feels are extinguished or overcome.
—Saint-Evremond, quoted by
Simone de Beauvoir in
The Coming of Age
Living faith
Some time ago I was biking in Michigan and met another biker who, like myself, was a professor of theology. In the course of our conversation by the side of the road he said something I will never forget: “Bob, all I really want in life is for the Word of God to take up residence inside of me and form me into Christ-likeness.”
I think this statement hit me hard because my seminary training in the Bible was never that personal. We were always asking “What does it say?” and seldom if ever made the step into a deep personal application of “How can that truth take up residence in me?”
—Robert Webber in the Covenant
Companion (Jan. 1990)
Blessed Veil
God will not suffer man to have a knowledge of things to come; for if he had prescience of his prosperity, he would be careless; and if understanding of his adversity, he would be despairing and senseless.
—Saint Augustine, quoted in
New Beginnings
Inciting Revolution
To clasp hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.
—Karl Barth in Prayer
The Irony That Is Television
The worst thing about TV is not its badness. As long as we can still point out that something on TV is “bad,” we continue to invoke traditional aesthetic standards. Such criteria are not relevant to TV today, which is less recognizable as “bad” as it becomes increasingly self-referential and televisual. For all its promises of “choice,” TV is nearly perfect in its emptiness, all but exhausted by the very irony that it uses to protect itself from hostile scrutiny.
—Mark Crispin in Watching
Television, quoted in Harper’s
(Nov. 1986)
Obedience Means Rhythm
When the heart’s wrong, there can’t be peace. Selfishness is a gangrene, eating at the very vitals. Sin is a cancer, poisoning the blood. Peace is the rhythm of our wills with Jesus’ love-will. Disobedience breaks the music. Failure to keep in touch makes discord. The notes jar and grate. We have broken off. The peace can’t get in. Jesus made peace by his blood. We get it only by keeping in full touch with him.
—S.D. Gordon in
The Bent-Knee Time
