Classic & Contemporary Excerpts from October 27, 1997

REAL REPENTANCE Repentance is not a popular word these days, but I believe that any of us recognize it when it strikes us in the gut. Repentance is coming to our senses, seeing, suddenly, what we’ve done that we might not have done, or recognizeing … that the problem is not in what we do but in what we become.

—Kathleen Norris in The Cloister Walk

ICONS OF HUMANITY There is something wonderful about a beaten-up heavily marked, tattered Bible. Madeleine Delbrel, the French Catholic activist who lived a little more than a generation ago, stuffed her Bible with snapshots, clippings, ticket stubs, postcards and other detritus to remind her that she was praying in the world of people and events. She called these scraps “icons of humanity” that prompted one to celebrate the “liturgy of life.”

—Lawrence S. Cunningham in America, “Praying the Psalms”

TAINTED SPIRITUALITY When you look at our history, it is no wonder that spirituality is so often treated with suspicion, and not infrrequently with outright hostility. For in actual practice spirituality very often develops into neurosis, degenerates into selfishness, becomes pretentious, turns violent. How does this happen? The short answer is that it happens when we step outside the Gospel story and take ourselves as the basic and authoritative text for our spirituality; we begin exegeting ourselves as a sacred text … True spirituality, Christian spirituality, takes attention off of ourselves and focuses it on another, on Jesus.

—Eugene H. Peterson in Subversive Spirituality

GREATER POWER The longer one lives, the more one realizes that everything depends upon chance, and the harder it is to believe that this omnipotent factor in human affairs arises simply from the blind interplay of events. Chance, Fortune, Luck, Destiny, Fate, Providence, seem to me only different ways of expressing the same thing, to wit, that a man’s own contribution to his life story is continually dominated by an external superior power.

—Winston Churchill in Winston S. Churchil: Thoughts and Adventures

HOME MISSION FIELD We have a real problem in this country when it comes to values. We have become the kind of societies that civilized countries used to send missionaries to.

—William Bennett, interviewed on the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour

SECRET FEAR A closed mind is a sign of hidden doubt.

—Harold DeWold in Theology of the Living Church

PEACE EFFECTS PEACE First put yourself at peace, and then you may the better make others be at peace. A peaceful and patient man is of more profit to himself and to others, too, than a learned man who has no peace.

—Thomas a Kempis in The Imitation of Christ

WHAT SIN ISN’T Many people confuse the conviction of sin with such feelings as inferiority, lack of self-confidence and so on. Yet whoever observes people closely can see that these feeling and the conviction of sin are not only different from each other but incertain regards are mutually exclusive.

A diffuse and vague guilt feeling kills the personality, whereas the conviction of sin gives life to the personality. The former depends on people, on public opinion, while the latter depends on God.

—Paul Tournier in Escape from Loneliness

WHO’S MASTER? Whatever injury wicked men-in-power inflict upon good men is to regarded … as a test for the good man’s virtues. Thus, a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For, a wicked man serves not just one master, but, what’s worse, as many masters as he has vices. For, it is in reference to vice that the Holy Scripture says: “For by whom a man is overcome, of the same also he is the slave” (2 Peter 2:19).

—Saint Augustine in The City of God

HEALING IN WEAKNESS We live in a world full of people struggling to be, or at least to appear strong, in order not to be weak; and we follow a gospel which says that when I am weak, then I am strong. And this gospel is the only thing that brings healing.

—N.T. Wright in For All God’s Worth

Copyright © 1997 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Also in this issue

The Annual Bible Issue Asks: Do Inclusive-Language Bibles Distort Scripture? Also, the Confessions of a Bible Translator.

Cover Story

Thank God for Our Bibles

Do Inclusive-Language Bibles Distort Scripture? (Part 3 of 4)

Partial-Birth Abortion: States Approving Bans on Partial-Birth Abortion

National Baptists: Lyons Survives Challenge

Reconciliation: Leaders Help Fighting Factions Build Bridges

A Bad Week in Hell

Your Sins Shall Be White as Yucca (Part 1 of 3)

Your Sins Shall Be White As Yucca (Part 2 of 3)

Your Sins Shall Be White As Yucca (Part 3 of 3)

Do Inclusive-Language Bibles Distort Scripture? (Part 1 of 4)

Do Inclusive-Language Bibles Distort Scripture? (Part 2 of 4)

Southern Baptists: Denominational Restructuring Trims 200 Agency Positions

Do Inclusive-Language Bibles Distort Scripture? (Part 4 of 4)

Fraud: New Era's Bennett to Prison, Part 1

Fraud: New Era's Bennett to Prison, Part 2

GOP Leaders Back Wolf-Specter Bill

Trinity Western Accreditation Ordered

Rich Mullins Killed in Crash

Tiller Invites Lawmakers to Facility

Regent Names New President

News

News Briefs: October 27, 1997

Laughter in the Jungle

Fiction: Yes!

MAF Pilots Killed in Mountain Crash

Jewish Scientists Enter Debate

Baptist Library Burglarized, Set Afire

Editorial

The Great Translation Debate

Editorial

Why the World Listened

News

News Briefs: October 27, 1997

On the Shoulders of King James

The Women in Paul's Life

Confessions of a Bible Translator

A View from the Wheelchair

Putting Belief and Practice Back Together

Testimony: Bennett Confesses 'Dream' Became 'Delusion'

Orthodox Rekindle Evangelistic Heritage

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