In the land of the unverifiable there are no efficient critical police

In the land of the unverifiable there are no efficient critical police.  When a writer expatiates amidst conjectural quotations from conjectural apocryphal Gospels, he is beyond the reach of refutation.

- Lightfoot, Essays on Supernatural Religion, 36

Why is there suffering in our world?

Sometimes God allows what he hates to accomplish what he loves.

- Joni Eareckson Tada

King of kings

There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, "Mine!"

- Abraham Kuyper

Mark Twain describes the average sentence in a German newspaper

An average sentence, in a German newspaper, is a sublime and impressive curiosity; it occupies a quarter of a column; it contains all the ten parts of speech — not in regular order, but mixed; it is built mainly of compound words constructed by the writer on the spot, and not to be found in any dictionary — six or seven words compacted into one, without joint or seam — that is, without hyphens; it treats of fourteen or fifteen different subjects, each inclosed in a parenthesis of its own, with here and there extra parentheses which reinclose three or four of the minor parentheses, making pens within pens: finally, all the parentheses and reparentheses are massed together between a couple of king-parentheses, one of which is placed in the first line of the majestic sentence and the other in the middle of the last line of it –after which comes the VERB, and you find out for the first time what the man has been talking about; and after the verb — merely by way of ornament, as far as I can make out — the writer shovels in “haben sind gewesen gehabt haben geworden sein,” or words to that effect, and the monument is finished.

- Mark Twain

procrastination is laziness in very thin diguise

Derek Kidner on the sluggard in Proverbs:

"[The sluggard] does not commit himself to a refusal, but deceives himself by the smallness of his surrenders.  So by inches and minutes, his opportunity slips away."

love covers a multitude of sins

If I do not give a friend "the benefit of the doubt," but put the worst construction instead of the best on what is said or done, then I know nothing of Calvary love.

If I take offense easily; if I am content to continue in a cool unfriendliness, though friendship be possible, then I know nothing of Calvary love.

If a sudden jar can cause me to speak an impatient, unloving word, then I know nothing of Calvary love. For a cup brimful of sweet water cannot spill even one drop of bitter water, however suddenly jolted.

If I say, "Yes, I forgive, but I cannot forget," as though the God, who twice a day washes all the sands on all the shores of all the world, could not wash such memories from my mind, then I know nothing of Calvary love.

- Amy Carmichael

study and the knowledge of God

It is possible to bury your head in a lexicon and arise in the presence of God.

- Edwyn Hoskyns

there are times when a man is his own devil

The Devil is not to be blamed for everything; there are times when a man is his own devil.

- Augustine

quoted in Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 2000, p. 241

Who needs prayer?

The church’s or Christian group’s methods are as important as its message. It is to deal consciously with the reality of the supernatural. Anything that exhibits unfaith is a mistake, or may even be a corporate sin. The liberal theologians get rid of the supernatural in their teaching, but the unfaith of the evangelical can in practice get rid of the supernatural.

May I put it like this? If we woke up tomorrow morning and found that all that the Bible teaches concerning prayer and the Holy Spirit were removed (not as a liberal would remove it, by misinterpretations, but really removed) what difference would it make in practice from the way we are functioning today? The simple tragic fact is that in much of the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ – the evangelical church – there would be no difference whatsoever.  We function as though the supernatural were not there.

If the Church does not show forth the supernatural in our generation, what will? The Lord’s work done in the Lord’s way does not relate only to its message; it relates also to the method. There must be something the world cannot explain away by the world’s methods, or by applied psychology.

- Francis Schaeffer, True Spirituality, in Complete Works of Francis A Schaeffer, 4.363.

The English bible was made in blood

The English bible was made in blood. 

- David Daniell, speaking about Tyndale's work

Scholars differ on the issue...

... more and more evangelical churches and institutions are overthrowing their heritage, sometimes on the superficial basis that scholars are divided on the issue. The truth is that scholars are divided on most theological issues, including even the doctrines of the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ and of the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ that validates him as the Son of God.  In other words, giving up a doctrine on the basis that scholars differ in their opinions shows that no doctrine is secure and the more liberal perspective and practice will prevail.  This is so because, if authorities differ - so the argument goes - one does as he or she thinks best. Anthony Thiselton, citing Robert Morgan, rightly notes that "some disagreements about what the Bible means stem not from obscurities in the text, but from conflicting aims of the interpreters."  Luther once said - borrowing from a saying of Euripides - that "whom God intends to destroy, he gives them leave to play with Scripture."

- Bruce Waltke, An OT Theology, p.236.

Gratitude

If you can't be thankful for what you recieve, be thankful for what you escape.

- Nancy Leigh DeMoss

Turning desire into policy

"Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy. "

- Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August, p.370

On the Kaiser's hesitance which led the German administration not to use their navy in WWI.

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