Classic & Contemporary Excerpts from June 17, 1988

Classic and contemporary excerpts.

On the way to self-indulgence?

The quest for freedom is becoming personal rather than political. It is a quest for self-hood, and its outcome is no better. When self-denial goes out of fashion, self-fulfillment takes its place.

—Kitty Muggeridge in Gazing on Truth

Strange bedfellows

In spite of the conflict between them, the two ideologies that officially operate on the two sides of the Iron Curtain have this in common: they are both atheist. The one attempts without success to enforce atheism in the private as well as the public sector. The other permits belief in God as an option for private life but excludes it from any controlling role in public life.

—Lesslie Newbigin in Foolishness to the Greeks

Too much talk

There is danger … in doing too many interviews. Too much talk can make you fatheaded: You get the idea that everything you say is worth being recorded and that you are in some sense a wise man and an interesting person. The more an author thinks of himself in that way, the less attentive he’s going to be to the business of trying to transcribe reality. We really are servants, basically, of reality, aren’t we? We’re trying to get a little piece of it in print.

—John Updike, quoted in U.S. News & World Report (Oct. 20, 1986)

The only stages of faith

Fowler’s excellent work [Stages of Faith] would be more palatable if it had been entitled “stages of the faith experience” or “stages of religious development.” In the Christian view, there are only two stages of faith: “No” and “Yes” in relation to Jesus Christ—not a mode of knowing or feeling, but a mode of believing.

—Arden K. Barden in a paper, “Spiritual Aging”

Like a river inglorious

Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream sometimes is filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shooting, and doing things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry, and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians and journalists are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river.

—Linda Ellerbee, quoted in the Christian Science Monitor

Misplaced faith

[Shirley] MacLaine is at least consistent: she argues that if your reality isn’t so great—if you’re poor or unemployed—you have only yourself to blame. You have victimized yourself by not living up to your potential. If a Republican said this, he’d be attacked as cruel and selfish, rationalizing his unwillingness to sacrifice for others. When New Agers say it, they congratulate each other on their openness to new ideas and faith in individual potential.

—Richard Blow in The New Republic (Jan. 25, 1988)

Never been there

Perhaps to be able to explain suffering is the clearest indication of never having suffered. Sin, suffering, and sanctification are not problems of the mind, but facts of life—mysteries that awaken all other mysteries until the heart rests in God.

—Oswald Chambers in Christian Discipline, Vol. 1

Lost language

I really detest political-speak. Words like “the people,” for example, have lost their meaning. We have to fight against fossilized language. Not only in the case of the Marxists who have petrified the language most, but the liberals too. “Democracy” is another such word. The Soviets say they’re democratic; the Americans say they’re democratic; El Salvador does, and Mexico too. Everyone who can organize an election says he’s democratic. “Independence” is another one. These are words that have come to mean very little. They’re disconnected; they don’t describe the reality they represent.

—Latin American novelist Gabriel García Márquez in the New York Times Book Review (Feb. 21, 1988)

Beyond the cocoon

Perhaps what we are called to do may not seem like much. But consider what one scientist has called “the butterfly effect”: even a butterfly moving its wings has an effect on galaxies thousands of light-years away.

—Madeleine L’Engle in A Stone for a Pillow

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