The human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given in this life

If a man diligently followed his desire, pursuing the false objects until their falsity appeared and then resolutely abandoning them, he must come out at last into the clear knowledge that the human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given — nay, cannot even be imagined as given — in our present mode of subjective and spatio-temporal existence. . . .

- CS Lewis, Surprised by Joy

Augustine on Inerrancy

If you chance upon anything in Scripture that does not seem to be true, you must not conclude that the sacred writer made a mistake; rather your attitude should be: the manuscript is faulty, or the version is not accurate, or you yourself do not understand the matter.

- St Augustine (quoted by Kevin Vanhoozer in "Well-Versed Augustinian Inerrancy")

Much "Historical Jesus scholarship" is nothing more than self-reflection

The Christ that Harnack sees, looking back through nineteen centuries of "Catholic darkness", is only the reflection of a Liberal Protestant face, seen at the bottom of a deep well.

- George Tyrrell, Christianity at the Cross-roads, 1913, p.44.

How strange the views of "scholars"

There is a world - I do not say a world in which all scholars live but one at any rate into which all of them sometimes stray, and which some of them seem permanently to inhabit - which is not the world in which I live. In my world, if The Times and The Telegraph both tell one story in somewhat different terms, nobody concludes that one of them must have copied the other, nor that the variations in the story have some esoteric significance. But in that world of which I am speaking this would be taken for granted. There, no story is ever derived from facts but always from somebody else's version of the same story. ... In my world, almost every book, except some of those produced by Government departments, is written by one author. In that world almost every book is produced by a committee, and some of them by a whole series of committees. In my world, if I read that Mr Churchill, in 1935, said that Europe was heading for a disastrous war, I applaud his foresight. In that world no prophecy, however vaguely worded, is ever made except after the event. In my world we say, 'The first world-war took place in 1914-1918.' In that world they say, 'The world-war narrative took shape in the third decade of the twentieth century.' In my world men and women live for a considerable time - seventy, eighty, even a hundred years - and they are equipped with a thing called memory. In that world (it would appear) they come into being, write a book, and forthwith perish, all in a flash, and it is noted of them with astonishment that they 'preserve traces of primitive tradition' about things which happened well within their own adult lifetime.

- A. H. N. Green-Armytage, John Who Saw, 1952, p. 12f (cited in JAT Robinson, Redating the NT, p.356)

Can pursuing personal satisfaction lead to human flourishing?

I would probably say that the most significant challenge that we face today—a challenge with which many other significant issues are connected, such as poverty, ecological degradation, runaway technological developments, et cetera—is the notion that human flourishing consists in experientially satisfying life. Put differently, one of our main challenges is that we live in a culture of the managed pursuit of pleasures, not of the sustained pursuit of the common good. To me, that is one of the fundamental issues of the day. My horror-image, so to speak, of where we might go as a culture is what I have called in one place, the Hiltonization of culture—Paris Hilton as a paradigm of what culture becomes.
...
More abstractly, by Hiltonization of culture I mean [that] kind of fleeting life of self-interest and the pursuit of pleasure. This seems to me to be the main malaise of contemporary society, which of course is led by very powerful cultural currents and institutional arrangements. So I think one of the key issues for us is to think anew about the nature and character of human flourishing within the context of larger creation. So the project in which I am involved right now is entitled “God and Human Flourishing.” What is the relationship between our overarching interpretation of life and our account of human flourishing? For Christians, that means what is the relationship between who God is and how God is related to creation and what it means for us to flourish?

- Miroslav Volf

Thoroughgoing materialism

"I say that inner beauty doesn't exist. That's something that unpretty women invented to justify themselves." 

- Osmel Sousa, the longtime head of the Miss Venezuela pageant on the popularity of plastic surgery in Venezuela (NY Times Quotation of the Day, 7 Nov 2013)

My thoughts:

This is materialism in its most honest and consistent form: the only things that are real are those that we can see and touch and manipulate.  Somehow I don't think this leads to human flourishing.

Christian but definitely not Republican

"Well, what is a Christian, after all? Can we say that most of us are defined by the belief that Jesus Christ made the most gracious gift of his life and death for our redemption? Then what does he deserve from us? He said we are to love our enemies, to turn the other cheek. Granted, these are difficult teachings. But does our most gracious Lord deserve to have his name associated with concealed weapons and stand-your-ground laws, things that fly in the face of his teaching and example? Does he say anywhere that we exist primarily to drive an economy and flourish in it? He says precisely the opposite. Surely we all know this. I suspect that the association of Christianity with positions that would not survive a glance at the Gospels or the Epistles is opportunistic, and that if the actual Christians raised these questions those whose real commitments are to money and hostility and potential violence would drop the pretense and walk away."

...

"Something I find regrettable in contemporary Christianity is the degree to which it has abandoned its own heritage, in thought and art and literature. It was at the center of learning in the West for centuries—because it deserved to be. Now there seems to be actual hostility on the part of many Christians to what, historically, was called Christian thought, as if the whole point were to get a few things right and then stand pat. I believe very strongly that this world, these billions of companions on earth that we know are God’s images, are to be loved, not only in their sins, but especially in all that is wonderful about them. And as God is God of the living, that means we ought to be open to the wonderful in all generations. These are my reasons for writing about Christian figures of the past. At present there is much praying on street corners. There are many loud declarations of personal piety, which my reading of the Gospels forbids me to take at face value. The media are drawn by noise, so it is difficult to get a sense of the actual state of things in American religious culture."

- Marilynne Robinson

Silence in the face of evil is evil

Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.

- Bonhoeffer

a culture of decadence

When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent. The term is not a slur; it is a technical label. A decadent culture offers opportunities chiefly to the satirist...

- Barzun, Dawn to Decadence, 11

the sin of respectable people

The sin of respectable people reveals itself in flight from responsibility.

- Bethge, on Bonhoeffer's decision to be involved with the Resistance.  Life Together, intro.

Freedom and bondage

Where there are no absolutes, society is the only absolute.

- James Hitchcock, summarizing the thought of Francis Schaeffer on the loss of objective reason in Western culture and the resulting desire for "freedom."

James Hitchcock, “Taking the Disease Seriously,” in Francis Schaeffer: Portrait of the Man and His Work, ed. Lane Dennis (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1986) 81.

You can be saved without knowing when you were converted

“I hope I am saved,” says one, “but I do not know the date of my conversion.” That does not matter at all. It is a pleasant thing for a person to know his birthday; but when persons are not sure of the exact date of their birth, they do not, therefore, infer that they are not alive. If a person does not know when he was converted, that is no proof that he is not converted.

- Spurgeon, From sermon #2,000, "Healing by the Stripes of Jesus"

are you willing to learn from imperfect people?

HT: VitaminZ

Save time, avoid shortcuts

The shortcut that’s sure to work, every time:

Take the long way.

Do the hard work, consistently and with generosity and transparency.

And then you won’t waste time doing it over.
- Seth Godin

The letter of the law or the spirit?

For under the smooth legal surface of our society there are already moving very lawless things. We are always near the breaking-point when we care only for what is legal and nothing for what is lawful. Unless we have a moral principle about such delicate matters as marriage and murder, the whole world will become a welter of exceptions with no rules. There will be so many hard cases that everything will go soft.

GK Chesterton

On the justice of God

Though the mills of God grind slowly;
Yet they grind exceeding small;
Though with patience he stands waiting,
With exactness grinds he all.
-Longfellow, "Retribution"

Vision casting

When you set goals, consider what could be and what should be for the glory of God.

don't wait for change, do it now

 It is wrong to long for a daydream future while ignoring the importance of what you can do in the present.
- paraphrase of Edith Schaeffer

I'd rather be inspired by people who suffer than suffer myself

I always wanted to be inspired by parents of kids with a disease, but I never wanted to be one.
- Anonymous, mother of child with life-threatening disease.