Ievitable Error Error is the inevitable consequence of living.
Mutual error is the inevitable consequence of living together.
Argument or faultfinding is the defensive mechanism to preserve anego in trouble.
Confession is the sacrifice of ego on the altar of love.
Forgiveness is the balm of healing that soothes and heals the wounds of error.
Joy is the fresh new path, stretching out before the forgiver and the forgiven.
—V. Gilbert Beers in Joy Is …
Faith on the Line What is hazardous in my life is my work as a Christian. Every day I put faith on the line. I have never seen God. In a world where nearly everything can be weighed, explained, quantified, subjected to psychological analysis and scientific control I persist in making the center of my life a God whom no eye hath seen, nor ear heard, whose will no one can probe. That’s a risk.
—Eugene Peterson in Living The Message
An Amusing Pagen [Kate said to her Jewish colleague]: “There were a dozen different religions among the children at [my school]. We seemed always to be celebrating some kind of feast or ceremony. Usually it required making a noise and dressing up. The official line was that all religions were equally important. I must say that the result was to leave me with the conviction that they were equally unimportant. I suppose if you don’t teach religion with onviction it becomes just one more boring subject. Perhaps I’m a natural pagan. I don’t go in for all this emphasis on sin, suffering and judgment. If I had a God I’d like Him to be intelligent, cheerful and amusing.”
He said: “I doubt whether you’d find him much of a comfort when they herded you into the gas chambers. You might prefer a god of vengeance.”
—Novelist P.D. James in Original Sin
Messy World, Messy Mission I am sometimes asked by people my age and younger how in this world I can still be committed to something as messy as mission. I believe it is time we ask how in a place as messy as this world we can legitimately be committed to anything but mission.
—James R. Krabill, missionary in Ivory Coast
Liturgical Dissonance Christian liturgy should intensify the “cognitive disonance” between the community of faith and the world surrounding it.
—Richard John Neuhaus in The Catholic Moment: The Paradox of the Church in the Postmodern Age
Watch How You Walk As a child of God, you need to be prudent. You cannot simply walk around in this world as if nothing and no one can harm you. You remain extremely vulnerable. The same passions that make you love God may be used by the powers of evil.
—Henri J. M. Nouwen in The Inner Voice of Love
Unimportant Dreams We take less notice of dreams than the ancients, because we are more sophisticated. One reason why Judaism, and Christianity which sprang from it, were so much an advance on pagan religions is that they attached comparatively little importance to dreams. True, there are 116 references to dreams in the Old Testament, but most are clustered in two sections: 52 in Genesis in the early patriarchal period and 29 in the Book of Daniel. Only 14 dreams are specifically recorded. In each case, moreover, God is the initiator for particular purposes and hes meaning is plain—no need for the interpretative dream-books of paganism. As Daniel told Nebuchadnezzar, only God discloses the secrets of dreams. … The message of the Bible is that God regards dreaming as a secondary mode of communication.
—Paul Johnson in the Spectator (June 8, 1996)
A Lethal Dose Pride is a poison so very poisonous that it not only poisons the virtues; it even poisons the other vices. … And we all do in fact know that the primary sin of pride has this curiously freezing and hardening effect upon the other sins.
—G. K. Chesterton: “If I Had Only One Sermon to Preach” in As I Was Saying
Copyright © 1996 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
Last Updated: October 4, 1996
