“[To indwell the gospel story] it is clear that this “indwelling” must mean being part of the community whose life is shaped by the story which the Bible tells. When we live as part of this story, constantly remembering and reenacting its crucial events, as we do in the liturgy of the Church, it becomes like our language. It provides the models and concepts through which we seek to understand and cope with the events of daily life. In a stable Christian community, we learn it the same way we learn our mother tongue.”
—Lesslie Newbigin, Truth to Tell: The Gospel as Public Truth pp47-48 (via newbigin)
May 2012
17 posts
April 2012
15 posts
“In reality, subjective certitude cannot be secured, not because the world is nothing but the aleatory play of opaque signifiers, but because subjective certitude is an irreparably defective model of knowledge; it cannot correspond to or “adequate” a world that is gratuity rather than ground, poetry rather than necessity, rhetoric rather than dialectic. Every act of knowledge is, simultaneously, an act of faith (to draw on Hamann’s delightful subversion of Hume); we trust in the world, and so know it, only by entrusting ourselves to what is more than ourselves; our primordial act of faith meets a covenant that has already been made with us, before we could seek it, in the giving of the light. No one can shut his eyes to that splendor, or seal his ears against that music, except as a perverse display of will; then, naturally, knowledge can be recovered again only as an exertion of that same will. But one then has not merely lost the world momentarily, so as to receive it anew as “truth.” One has lost the world and its truth altogether, and replaced them with a phantom summoned up out of one’s need for a world conformable to the dimensions of one’s own power to establish meaning—a world that is nothing but the ceaseless repetition of otherwise meaningless instantiations of that power.”
—David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, pp. 138-139. (via bluedollar)
“Everything depends upon the starting point, the arche, the assumptions which you take for granted as the basis of your reasoning. It is not (as so often said) a question of reason versus revelation. It is a question of the data upon which reason has to work.”
—Lesslie Newbigin, Truth to Tell: The Gospel as Public Truth p24 (via newbigin)
“In any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.”
—Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy
“Indeed, the simple truth is that the resurrection cannot be accommodated in any way of understanding the world except one of which it is the starting point… If it is true, it has to be the starting point of a wholly new way of understanding the cosmos and the human situation in the cosmos.”
—Lesslie Newbigin, Truth to Tell: The Gospel as Public Truth p11 (via newbigin)
“Reading often means gathering information, acquiring new insight and knowledge, and mastering a new field. It can lead us to degrees, diplomas, and certificates. Spiritual reading, however, is different. It means not simply reading about spiritual things but also reading about spiritual things in a spiritual way. That requires a willingness not just to read but to be read, not just to master but to be mastered by words. As long as we read the Bible or a spiritual book simply to acquire knowledge, our reading does not help us in our spiritual lives. We can become very knowledgeable about spiritual matters without becoming truly spiritual people. As we read spiritually about spiritual things, we open our hearts to God’s voice. Sometimes we must be willing to put down the book we are reading and just listen to what God is saying to us through its words.”
—Henri Nouwen (via recycledsoul)
“There are infinite gradations of blame, a thousand fresh and pungent metaphors for detraction, the epithets of dissatisfaction seem never to stale…but the moment one finds a work which genuinely impresses and delights, there seems no article of expression other than the clichés that grin at one from every publisher’s advertisement.”
—Evelyn Waugh (qtd. here)
“Biblical faithfulness is more than just nailing down the meaning of a text. It is putting oneself in a position—by engaging the text—to recognize what God has done in the past as well as to discern what God is making possible for, and requiring of, us in the present. To that extent, we read the Scriptures not only with a rule of faith but also with a rule of hope.”
—William Stacy Johnson (via recycledsoul)
“We have a gospel to proclaim. We have to proclaim it not merely to individuals in their personal and domestic lives. We do certainly have to do that. But we have to proclaim it as part of the continuing conversation which shapes public doctrine. It must be heard in the conversation of economists, psychiatrists, educators, scientists, and politicians. We have to proclaim it not as a package of estimable values, but as the truth about what is the case, about what every human being and every human society will have to reckon with. When we are faithful in this commission we are bound to appear subversive to those who believe that the cosmos is a closed system. We may appear to threaten the achievements of those centuries in which this has been the reigning belief. In truth we shall be offering the only hope of conserving and carrying forward the good fruits of these centuries into a future which might otherwise belong to the barbarians.”
—Lesslie Newbigin, Truth to Tell: The Gospel as Public Truth p64 (via newbigin)
“The book was an unhealthy one, a cup filled to the brim with a poverty-stricken and selfish religion: such are always breaking out like an eruption here and there over the body of the Church, doing their part, doubtless, in carrying off the evil humours generated by poverty of blood, or the congestion of self-preservation. It is wonderful out of what spoiled fruit some children will suck sweetness.”
—
George MacDonald, “The Gifts of the Child Christ,” chapter 1
Interesting collection of metaphors.
“
Something I constantly notice is that unembarrassed joy has become rarer. Joy today is increasingly saddled with moral and ideological burdens, so to speak. When someone rejoices, he is afraid of offending against solidarity with the many people who suffer. I don’t have any right to rejoice, people think, in a world where there is so much misery, so much injustice.
I can understand that. There is a moral attitude at work here. But this attitude is nonetheless wrong. The loss of joy does not make the world better—and, conversely, refusing joy for the sake of suffering does not help those who suffer. The contrary is true. The world needs people who discover the good, who rejoice in it and thereby derive the impetus and courage to do good. Joy, then, does not break with solidarity. When it is the right kind of joy, when it is not egotistic, when it comes from the perception of the good, then it wants to communicate itself, and it gets passed on. In this connection, it always strikes me that in the poor neighborhoods of, say, South America, one sees many more laughing happy people than among us. Obviously, despite all their misery, they still have the perception of the good to which they cling and in which they can find encouragement and strength.
In this sense we have a new need for that primordial trust which ultimately only faith can give. That the world is basically good, that God is there and is good. That it is good to live and to be a human being. This results, then, in the courage to rejoice, which in turn becomes commitment to making sure that other people, too, can rejoice and receive good news.
” —Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) in Salt of the Earth p. 36–37 (via settledthingsstrange)