Classic and contemporary excerpts.
“Cool” addicts
Everybody knows that TV is mostly false and stupid, that almost no one pays that much attention to it—and yet it’s on for over seven hours a day in the average household, and it sells innumerable products. In other words, TV manages to do its job even as it only yammers in the background, despised by those who keep it going. TV begins by offering us a beautiful hallucination of diversity, but it is finally like a drug whose high is only the conviction that its user is too cool to be addicted.
—Mark Crispin in Watching Television, quoted in Harper’s (Nov. 1986)
Let them eat bread
The question of bread for myself is a material question, but the question of bread for my neighbours, for everybody, is a spiritual and a religious question.… Christians ought to be permeated with a sense of the religious importance of the elementary daily needs of people, the vast masses of people, and not to despise these needs from a sense of exalted spirituality.
—Nicolai Berdyaev in Origin of Russian Communism
Choice, not destiny
Grief refuses to flee the past just because it is gone and things have now changed.… Consider when we lose our innocence—when we discover that we can injure and have injured others, that the slate of our lives is not clean. Suddenly we realize that we must travel into the future carrying not just any past, but our particular past, a past that cannot be changed. Whatever freedom means, we are not free to undo this past. The freedom comes in how we relate this past to our future. We can drown ourselves in regret, lose ourselves in nostalgia, or cling to these old injuries and losses. But if we do, it is our choice, not our destiny.
—John C. Raines in The Christian Century (Oct. 15, 1986)
Our Father’s children?
The fruits of the Holy Spirit are, it seems to me, largely fruits of sustained interaction with God. Just as a child picks up traits more or less simply by dwelling in the presence of her parent, so the Christian develops tenderheartedness, compassion, humility, forgiveness, joy, and hope through “the fellowship of the Holy Spirit”—that is, by dwelling in the presence of God the Father and Jesus Christ his Son. And this means, to a very large extent, living in a community of serious believers.
—Robert C. Roberts in The Reformed Journal (Feb. 1987)
Ministry begins at home
Our Lord did not say to His disciples: “I have had a most successful time on earth. I have addressed thousands of people and been the means of their salvation; now you go and do the same kind of thing.” He said: “If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, ye also ought to wash one another’s feet.” We try to get out of it by washing the feet of those who are not of our own set. We will wash the heathen’s feet, the feet in the slums; but fancy washing my brother’s feet! My wife’s! My husband’s! The feet of the minister of my church! Our Lord said “one another’s feet.”
—Oswald Chambers in The Love of God
Would Jesus a BMW?
Nothing is more controversial than to be a follower of Jesus Christ. Nothing is more dangerous than to live out the will of God in today’s contemporary world. It changes your monetary’ lifestyle.
… Let me put it quite simply: If Jesus had $40,000 and knew the kids who are suffering and dying in Haiti, what kind of car would he buy?
—Tony Campolo in U (April/May 1988)
Broken faith
My break with faith occurred in me as it did and still does among people of our social and cultural type. As I see it, in most cases, it happens like this: People live as everyone lives, but they all live according to principles that not only have nothing to do with the teachings of faith, but for the most part, are contrary to them. The teachings of faith have no place in life and never come into play in the relations among people; they simply play no role in living life itself. The teachings of faith are left to some other realm, separated from life and independent of it. If one should encounter them, then it is only as some superficial phenomenon that has no connection with life.
—Leo Tolstoy in Confessions
