Classic and contemporary excerpts.
The last taboo?
If religion is the opiate of the masses, as Marx said, then why isn’t Hollywood out peddling the stuff from every street corner? If movies were all we had to judge from, one might never suspect the enormous resurgence of religious faith in this country.… This—certainly not sex—may be the last cinema taboo.
—David Ansen in Newsweek
(Oct. 14, 1991)
Individuals in God’s image
God does not make clones; each person is different, a tribute to God’s creativity. If we are to love our neighbors as ourselves, we must accept people as they are.
—Henry Fehren in U.S. Catholic
(March 1991)
Valueless grace
Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our church. Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like cheapjack’s wares. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, without church discipline, communion without confession, absolution without personal confession.
—Dietrich Bonhoeffer in
The Cost of Discipleship
Silly woodpeckers
A woodpecker tapped with his beak against the stem of a tree just as lightning struck the tree and destroyed it. He flew away and said, “I didn’t know there was so much power in my beak!” When we bring the Gospel there is a danger that we will think or say, “I have done a good job.” Don’t be a silly woodpecker. Know where your strength comes from. It is only the Holy Spirit who can make a message good and fruitful.
—Corrie Ten Boom in
Each New Day
The attractive Christian
You and I are to be such that as we walk up and down the streets of life, people will be struck and attracted. You have seen them turn and look at a well-dressed person.… They should be struck by us, and look at us, and think, “What is this person? I have never seen anybody quite like this before!” … That is the kind of people we can be and the kind of people that we must be. And when we become such people, believe me, the revival we are longing for will start, and the people outside, in their misery and wretchedness, will come in and will want to know about it.
—D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones in
Growing in the Spirit
City of peace?
The feeling of being beset by blind forces is especially strong in the mixed city of Jerusalem.… Hardly a day passes in the “holy city” without a riot or a stoning, without cars being torched or firebombs thrown, without attempted lynchings or the stabbing of an Israeli by a Palestinian (or vice versa). After each incident, municipal cleaning machines, marked “CITY OF PEACE” in three languages, appear on the scene to wash blood from the streets in time for the next group of pious pilgrims to pass by, fingering their rosaries and muttering solemn prayers.
—Amos Eton in The New Yorker
(Dec. 24,1990)
The best there is
I feel nearly certain … that any civilization we contact will be far wiser than we. To think we are the best the universe could manage—the mediocrity of it all!
—Harvard physicist Paul
Horowitz, on why he has
dedicated his career to the search
for extraterrestrial intelligence,
quoted in The Atlantic
(August 1988)
God’s a training school
I humbly bless his gracious Providence, who gave me his Treasure in an Earthen Vessel, and trained me up in the School of Affliction, and taught me the Cross of Christ so soon; that I might be rather Theologus Crucis, as Luther speaketh, than Theologus Gloriae; and a Cross-bearer, than a Crossmaker or Imposer.
Richard Baxter in Reliquiae
Baxterianae: or Narrative of His
Life and Times, I, 21.
