TOP BOOKS OF 2018

In the order I enjoyed them: 

• HFM Prescott, The Man on a Donkey 
• Brad & Drew Harper, Space at the Table: Conversations Between an Evangelical Theologian and His Gay Son
• Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ  
• John Bew, Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee
• George Eliot, Adam Bede 
• John D Inazu, Confident Pluralism: Surviving and Thriving Through Deep Difference 
• Rankin Wilbourne, Union with Christ: The Way to Know and Enjoy God 
• Thomas Savage, The Sheep Queen: A Novel 
• Hermione Lee, Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life 
• Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books 

WHERE FEAR DRIVES US

'"We all live in the hands of God."

"I tell myself that every time I'm really frightened. Unfortunately that's the only time I do think it."' 

William Maxwell, 'The French Scarecrow' in Over By the River and other stories, p.122. 

PERSONALITY AS VOCATION

'Without deemphasisizing the value of the Bible in knowing my calling, I have come to understand an even more basic place in which God's will for me has been communicated. That is in the givens of my being. My temperament, my personality, my abilities, and my interests and passions all say something about who I was called to be, not simply who I am. If I really believe that I was created by God and invited to find my place in his kingdom, I have to take seriously what God had already revealed about who I am.' 

David G Benner, The Gidt of Being Yourself, p.92. 

CHRISTIAN IDENTITY

'Some Christians base their identity on being a sinner. I think they have it wrong - or only half right. You are not simply a sinner; you are a deeply loved sinner. And there is all the difference in the world between the two.' 

David G Benner, The Gift of Being Yourself, p.60. 

SELF-KNOWLEDGE

'...to know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around.' 

Flannery O'Connor, 'The Fiction Writer & His Country' in Mystery & Manners, p.35. 

EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION

'When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock - to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.' 

Flannery O'Connor, 'The Fiction Writer & His Country' in Manners & Mystery, p.34. 

THE ESSENCE OF HUMILITY

'Once, when asked by a student at a lecture, "Miss O'Connor, why do you write?" she answered, "Because I am good at it." At first glance, this reply might seem conceited or proud. But the truth is that knowing what we are good at and what we are not, doing what we are supposed to do, and not what we aren't, being what we are supposed to be and not what we aren't, is the essence of true humility.' 

Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well, p.236. 

KINDNESS DEFINED

'Kind comes from the same root from which we get the word kin. To be kind, then, is to treat someone like they are family. To possess the virtue of kindness is to be in the habit of treating all people as if they were family.' 

Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well, p.207. 

LONELINESS & LUST

'Lust derives from a feeling of lack, and nothing feels more lacking than a sense of isolation. It is probably not coincidental that the technology that makes pornopraphy omnipresent is the very technology that is isolating human beings from one another more and more and generating greater loneliness.' 

Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well, p.173. 

THE PARADOX OF ADULTERY

'...the paradox of the extra-marital affair, confirmed by research: had the time, attention, and emotion spent on the affair been invested in the marriage instead, the affair may never have occured.' 

Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well, p.169. 

CHASTITY DEFINED

'Chastity is not the same as virginity or celibacy. Within Christianity, it is something both married and single people are called to. The person who is raped is not guilty of being unchaste. On the other hand, the consumer of pornography is. Chastity, most simply, is fidelity.' 

Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well, p.161. 

TYRANNICAL DESIRE

'There is no tyranny like the tyranny of a desire that draws us away from God.' 

Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well, p.145. 

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING LOVED

'What matters to us, beyond mere existence, is the explicit confirmation: It is good that you exist; how wonderful that you are! In other words, what we need over and above sheer existence is: to be loved by another person.' 

Josef Pieper in Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well, p.141. 

HOPE DEFINED

'...hope leads one to consider oneself within the context of one's story, stretching it forward to its best possible ending.' 

Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well, p.135. 

GOOD IS GOOD

'Some years ago, I noticed amid the grading of many papers (the plight of every English professor) how often the positive feedback I wrote on my students' work consisted simply of the comment "good." I contemplated varying that word with others. But then I realized that good is the best word. (It is certainly easy to write!). Once in a while, the world excellent might be warranted. But not often. We live in a society so obsessed with "the best" that good is seldom good enough. But good is good.  it is very good. It is the way God characterized his own creation in Genesis.' 

Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well, p.131. 

THE DANGER OF UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS

'...despair is often rooted in unrealistic expectations or idealism, the kind of thinking that inevitably brings disappointment. People quit relationships, jobs, and churches over unmet expectations, often expectations that were never fair or realistic in the first place.' 

Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well, p.125. 

READING GOOD BOOKS

'...as you seek books that you will enjoy reading, demand ones that make demands on you: books with sentences so exquisitely crafted that they must be reread, familiar words used in fresh ways, new words so evocative that you are compelled to look them up, and images and ideas so arresting that they return to you unbidden for days to come.'  

Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well, p.17. 

READING BAD BOOKS

'Since therefore the knowledge of and survey of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning or error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and with less danger, scout into the region of sin and falsity than by reading all manner of tractates and hearing all manner of reason? And this  is the benefit which may be had of books promiscuously read.'  

John Milton in Karen Swallow Prior, Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books, p.15. 

DYING WELL

'...it has struck me that, in his grace and compassion, our heavenly Father allows us to practise what it is like to die faithfully, to die as a believer and follower of Christ, every single night of our lives. You know precisely what it feels like to die in Christ: it is like falling asleep. I have tried to imagine that feeling of being exhausted and drained after a long and gruelling day, and then, at long last, your head touches that soft pillow. And all you have to do is give way to sleep, because you know you are safe, secure and protected. Falling asleep is not something strange and terrifying; it is an experience that our heavenly Father gives us in advance so that we need not be fearful.' 

John Wyatt, Dying Well, p.122. 

THE IMPORTANCE OF HUMANITY

'People are more important and more enduring than things. In an unstable and perishable universe the one stable and imperishable factor is human personality. It is with this that God is primarily concerned. A man's character is the only thing he can take out of this life with him.' 

Michael Green, 2 Peter and Jude, p.152. 

BELIEF & BEHAVIOUR

'There is an indissoluble link between conduct and conviction.'
Michael Green, 2 Peter and Jude, p.152. 

UNREALISTIC PARENTING

'I wanted him (& I also wanted this for his 2 younger sisters) to like all the things I liked to do & to do the things I did, & at the same time to be able to do all the things I couldn't...'

Penelope Fitzgerald in Hermione Lee, Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, p.163.

THE IMPORTANCE OF INTEGRITY

'No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.' 

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, p.161.

THE IMPORTANCE OF DIFFERENCE IN FRIENDSHIP

'It contributes greatly towards a man's moral and intellectual health, to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate.' 

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, p.19.

THE PASTORAL POWER OF A CUP OF TEA

'Dottie suddenly asked the woman if she would like a cup of tea, and Shelley said, "Oh, wouldn't that be nice," and so they sat in the living room, which was really the lounge. Shelly Small didn't take more than one sip of the tea; that was just a prop, as they would say in the world of theatre, just a piece of furniture, so to speak, allowing her to sit in Dottie's house on the autumn day while the light shifted through the room. That cup of tea, Dottie saw, gave her permission to talk.' 

Elizabeth Strout, Anything is Possible, p.187. 

KNOWING GOD

'The God who is Divine community is known only in human community.'
David G Benner, The Gift of Yourself: The Scared Call to Self-Discovery, p.49. 

GRIEF CAN'T BE FIXED

'Our culture is imbued with the belief that we can fix just about anything and make it better; or, if we can't, that it's possible to trash what you have and start all over again. Grief is the antithesis of this belief: it requires endurance, and forces us to accept that there are some things in this world that simply cannot be fixed.' 

Julia Samuel in Robert McCrum, Every Third Thought, p.201. 

FIGHTING DEATH

'I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary.' 

Joseph Conrad in Robert McCrum, Every Third Thought: On Life, Death and the End Game, p.107. 

DON'T WAIT TO HAVE THE TIME

'The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavourable. Favourable conditions never come.' 

CS Lewis, 'Learning in War-Time' in CS Lewis Essay Collection: Literature, Philosophy and Short Stories, p.177.  

THE IMPORTANCE OF READING HISTORY

'A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village: the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.' 

CS Lewis, 'Learning in War-Time' in CS Lewis Essay Collection: Literature, Philosophy and Short Stories, p.176.  

OUR APPETITES MATTER

'...God makes no appetite in vain...'
CS Lewis, 'Learning in War-Time' in CS Lewis Essay Collection: Literature, Philosophy and Short Stories, p.175.  

WHAT MAKES WORK SPIRITUAL?

'The work of a Beethoven, and the work of a charwoman, become spiritual on the same condition, that of being offered to God, of being done humbly "as to the Lord."'  

CS Lewis, 'Learning in War-Time' in CS Lewis Essay Collection: Literature, Philosophy and Short Stories, p.175.  

EVERYTHING CAN BE WORSHIP

'All our merely natural activities will be accepted, if they are offered to God, even the humblest: and all of then, even the noblest, will be sinful if they are not. Christianity does not simply replace our natural life and substitute a new one: it is rather a new organisation which exploits, to its own supernatural ends, these natural materials.' 

CS Lewis, 'Learning in War-Time' in CS Lewis Essay Collection: Literature, Philosophy and Short Stories, p.174.  

WAR CHANGES LESS THAN WE THINK

'...war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on a precipice.' 

CS Lewis, 'Learning in War-Time' in CS Lewis Essay Collection: Literature, Philosophy and Short Stories, p.172.  

THE IMPORTANCE OF TALKING ABOUT HEAVEN & HELL

'...to a Christian the true tragedy of Nero must not be that he fiddled while the city was on fire but that he fiddled on the brink of hell. You must forgive me for the crude monosyllable. I know that many wiser and better Christians than I in these days do not like to mention heaven and hell even in a pulpit. I know, too, that nearly all the references to this subject in the New Testament come from a single source. But then that source was our Lord himself. People will tell you that it is St Paul, but that is untrue. These overwhelming doctrines are dominical. They are not really removable from the teaching of Christ or his Church. If we do believe them, our presence in this church is great tomfoolery. If we do, we must sometime overcome our spiritual prudery and mention them.' 

CS Lewis, 'Learning in War-Time' in CS Lewis Essay Collection: Literature, Philosophy and Short Stories, p.171.  

WHEN THE CHURCH HAD POWER

'There was a time when the church was very powerful - in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being "disturbers of the peace" and "outside agitators". But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were a "colony of heaven," called to obey God and not man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God intoxicated to be "astronomically intimidated." By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests. Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it an arch-defender of the status-quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent - and often even vocal - sanction of things as they are.' 

Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, p.24. 

THE POWER OF AN INJUSTICE

'Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. What affects one directly, affects all indirectly.' 

Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, p.2. 

THE POWER OF A SENTENCE OR TWO

'What I have learned from about twenty years of serious reading is this: It is sentences that change my life, not books. What changes my life is oem new glimpse of truth, some powerful challenge, some resolution to a long-standing dilemma, and these usually come concentrated in a sentence or two. I do not remember 99% of what I read, but if 1% of each book or article I do remember is a life-changing insight, then I don't begrudge the 99%!' 

John Piper in Tony Reinke, Lit! p.116. 

CHOOSING THE RIGHT BOOKS

'For every one book that you choose to read, you must ignore ten thousand other books simply because you don't have the time (or money!).' 

Tony Reinke, Lit! p.94

CHRISTIANITY & OTHER RELIGIONS

'All the elements and forms that are essential to religion (a concept of God, a sense of guilt, a desire for redemption., sacrifice, priesthood, temple, cult, prayer, etc.), though corrupted, nevertheless do also occur in pagan religions... Hence Christianity is not only positioned antithetically toward paganism; it is also paganism's fulfilment. Christianity is the true religion, therefore also the highest and purest; it is the truth of all religions. What in paganism is the caricature, the living original is here. What is appearance there is essence here. What is sought there can be found here.' 

Herman Bavnick in Tony Reinke, Lit! A Christian Guide to Reading Books, p.74. 

SPIRITUAL BLINDNESS

'There are those who become so involved in looking at the man-made lights of the city that they unconsciously forget to rise up and look at that great cosmic light and think about it - that gets up in the eastern hemisphere every morning and moves across the sky with a kind of symphony of motion and paints its technicolor across the blue - a light that man can never make. They become so involved in looking at the skyscraping buildings of the Loop of Chicago or Empire State Building of New York that they forget to think about the gigantic mountains that kiss the skies as if to bathe their peaks in the lofty blue - something that man could never make. They have become so busy thinking about radar and their television that they unconsciously forget to think about the stars that bedeck the heavens like swinging lanterns of eternity, those stars that appear to be shiny, silvery pins sticking in the magnificent blue pincushion. They become so involved in thinking about man's progress that they forget to think about the need for God's power in history. They end up going days and days not knowing that God is not with them.' 

Martin Luther King Jr., 'The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life' in Letter from a Birmingham Jail, p.40.

HUMAN INTERDEPENDENCE

'And don't forget in doing something for others that you have what you have because of others. Don't forget that. We are tied together in life and in the world. And you may think you got all you got by yourself. But you know, before you got out here to church this morning, you were dependent on more than half of the world. You get up in the morning and go to the bathroom and you reach for a bar of soap, and that's handed to you by a Frenchman. You reach over for a sponge, and that's given to you by a Turk. You reach over for a towel, and that comes to your hand from the hands of a Pacific Islander. And then you go on to the kitchen to get your breakfast. You reach over to get a little coffee, and that's poured into your cup by a South American. Or maybe you decide that you want to drink a little tea this morning, only to discover that that's poured into your cup by a Chineses. Or maybe you want a little cocoa, that's poured in your cup by a West African. Then you want a little bread and you reach over to get it, and that's given to you by the hands of an English-speaking farmer, not to mention the baker. Before you get through eating breakfast in the morning, you're dependent on more than half the world. That's the way God structured it; that's the way God structured this world. So let us be concerned about others because we are dependent on others.'  

Martin Luther King Jr., 'The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life' in Letter from a Birmingham Jail, p.40.

THE GREATNESS OF THE GOOD SAMARITAN

'I say to you this morning that the first question that the priest asked was the first question that I asked on that Jericho Road of Atlanta known as Simpson Road. The first question that the Levite asked was, 'If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?' But the good Samaritan came by and he reversed the question. Not 'What will happen to me if I stop to help this man?' but 'What will happen to this man if I do not stop to help him?' This was why the man was good and great. He was great because he was willing to take a risk for humanity; he was willing to ask, 'What will happen to this man?' not 'What will happen to me?"

Martin Luther King Jr., 'The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life' in Letter from a Birmingham Jail, p.40.

A CHRISTIAN APPROACH TO WORK

'...if it falls to your lot to be a street sweeper, go on out and sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures; sweep streets like Handel and Beethoven composed music; sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry; sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will have to pause and say 'Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.'"

Martin Luther King Jr., 'The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life' in Letter from a Birmingham Jail, p.36.

KNOW THYSELF

'A Ford car trying to be a Cadillac is absurd, but if a Ford accepts itself as a Ford, it can do many things that A Cadillac could never do: it can get in parking spaces that a Cadillac can never get in. And in life some of us are Fords and some of us are Cadillacs.' 

Martin Luther King Jr., 'The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life' in Letter from a Birmingham Jail, p.34.

THE CALVINIST BELIEF IN THE SOVEREIGNTY OF GOD

'This apparent fatalism is actually confidence that life is shaped by divine intention, which will express itself in ways that can be baffling or alarming but that always bring an insight, pose a question, or make a demand, to the benefit of those who are alert to the will of God.' 

Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things, p.100. 

OUR ETHICS SHOULD NOT BE LIMITED BY OUR CAPACITY

'Sigmund Freud said that we cannot love our neighbor as ourselves. No doubt this is true. But if the reality that lies behind the commandment, that our neighbor is as worthy of love as ourselves, and that in acting on this fact we would be stepping momentarily out of the bog of our own subjectivity, then a truth is acknowledged in the commandment that gives it greater authority than mere experience can refute. There is a truth that lies beyond our capacities. Our capacities are no standard or measure of truth, no ground of ethical understanding.' 

Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things, p.100. 

THE INTEGRITY OF JESUS

'Jesus asks everything of us, but he asks nothing of us that he has not first endured.' 

Tim Chester, Enjoying God: Experience the power and love of God in everyday life, p.76. 

CHRISTIAN MEDITATION

'...three distinctives of Christian meditation: it is centred on the truth of God, moved by the love of God, and directed to the praise of God.' 

Edmund P Clowney, Christian Meditation, p.91. 

OUR SUNG PRAISE IS MEDITATION

'Through the centuries the rich Word of Christ, working in the meditating hearts of Christians, has produced the spiritual wisdom in which Christians have addressed one another in songs of exhortation and God in songs of praise. In spite of many detours into formalism or sentimentalism, the hymnody of the church has returned again and again to the richness of devotional meditation on the Word of the Lord. If Christians begin to understand the meditative nature of the praise together, their approach to the corporate praise of God would be transformed. The recovery of meditation will also bring a tide of fresh songs of praise. Motre Christians will begin to sing their meditations and to compose hymns of thanksgiving to the Lord for his mighty works of saving love.' 

Edmund P Clowney, Christian Meditation, p.80. 

THE WONDER OF THE GOSPEL DEMANDS MEDITATION

'Grace and meditation go together. If our relation to God were legalistic, we might computerize his commandments like a motor code so that meditation would be eventually unnecessary. But our minds cannot encompass the marvel of God's grace. The more we reflect, the more the wonder increases and we are drawn and driven to further meditation and worship.' 

Edmund P Clowney, Christian Meditation, p.48. 

FOLLOWING JESUS HURTS

'No one who commits to following Christ, and does so, lives a life of ease. No one. If your Christianity has not brought discomfort to your life, something is wrong. A committed heart knows the discomfort of loving difficult people, the discomfort of giving until it hurts, the discomfort of putting oneself out for the ministry of Christ and his church, the discomfort of a life out of step with modern culture, the discomfort of being disliked, the occasional experience of having nowhere to lay your head.' 

R Kent Hughes, Luke (Vol.1): That You May Know the Truth, p.372. 

CHRISTIAN MEDITATION

'Meditation reflects on the truth of God in the presence of God.' 

Edmund P Clowney, Christian Meditation, p.46. 

CHRISTIAN MEDITATION

'To seek the face of the living God the Christian does not launch a voyage in inner space nor does he enter of abstract infinity. Rather he mediates on Christ of the scripture and on the scripture of Christ. He fills his thoughts with what the Bible says about Jesus, for he is not attempting to imagine a Christ but to learn about the real Christ. The disciple who would learn from his Master must treasure is words.'  

Edmund O Clowney, Christian Meditation: What the Bible teaches about meditation and spiritual exercises, p.29. 

INTIMACY AVOIDANCE

'When we are with other people, we are apt to talk about almost anything under the sun except for what really matters to us, except for our own lives, except for what is going on inside our own skins. We pass the time of day. We chatter. We hold each other at bay, keep our distance from each other even when when God knows it is precisely each other that we desperately need.' 

Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces, p.5. 

WHERE TRUE LOVE LEADS

'The only reason the love of parents, the love of a spouse, the love of children, and the love of friends are precious is because they in some way resemble God's love. All human love derives from God and is meant to direct us back to God.' 

Dorothy Day in Jana Marguerite Bennett, Singleness and the Church, p.206. 

SAFE HERMENEUTICS

'The safest of all hermeneutical principles is to know the whole of the Scriptures.' 

John Stott, Challenges of Christian Leadership, p.43. 

THE IMPORTANCE OF REST

'Birdwatchers seldom get nervous breakdowns.'
John Stott, Challenges of Christian Leadership, p.37

CHRISTIAN IDOLATRIES AROUND MARRIAGE

'...Christians' idolatries surrounding marriage...that God can help us find The One who will make life more or less perfect; that Jesus commanded us to live in nuclear families just like in the 1950s; that marriage is primarily about love...' 

Jana Marguerite Bennett, Singleness and the Church, p.154. 

THE IMPORTANCE OF HAVING ENEMIES

'The good man has enemies. He would not be like his Lord if he had not.'

Charles Spurgeon, Psalms (Volume 1), p.91.  

WHERE MARITAL UNION POINTS US

'...the sacrament of monogamous marriage in our time is a symbol that in the future we shall all be united and subject to God in one heavenly city.' 

Augustine of Hippo in Jana Marguerite Bennett, Singleness and the Church, p.74. 

WHERE A LACK OF RESPECT FOR FRIENDSHIP LEADS

'Loss of respect for nonsexual relationships itself fuels a desire for sexual relationships...' 

Jana Marguerite Bennett, Singleness and the Church: A New Theology of the Single Life, p.38.

THE CHRISTIAN LIFE IS LIKE SAILING

'Life with God is not like a motorbike, where we are in control of the power and direction. But neither is it like a raft, where we just sit back and are carried along. It's like sailing. While we can't control the most important thing - the wind that makes us move - that doesn't mean there is nothing left for us to do. We have to draw the sail to catch the wind. We must labor to be brought near.' 

Rankin Wilbourne, Union with Christ, p.215. 

UNION WITH CHRIST APPLIED

'Christ has made holiness a reality for you (you are in Christ) and a possibility for you (Christ is in you).' 

Rankin Wilbourne, Union with Christ, p.185. 

THE BEAUTY OF HOLINESS

'As the beauty of the divine nature primarily consist in God's holiness, so does the beauty of divine things. Herein consists the beauty of the saints, that they are saints, or holy ones: it is the moral image of God in them, which is their beauty; and that is their holiness.' 

Jonathan Edwards in Rankin Wilbourne, Union with Christ, p.178. 

THE GOSPEL IS DEIFICATION

'The purpose of the gospel [is] to make us sooner or later like God; indeed it is, so to speak, a kind of deification.' 

John Calvin in Rankin Wilbourne, Union with Christ, p.165. 

UNION WITH CHRIST DOESN'T DESTROY THE INDIVIDUAL

'...our self is not obliterated by our union with Christ; our self is fully realized. God the Creator clearly delights in our unique particularity. From sunsets to snowflakes, he makes endless variations of beautiful things for the sheer joy of it.He never repeats himself and never runs out of ideas.' 

Rankin Wilbourne, Union with Christ, p.162. 

CHRISTIANITY IS THE TRUE HUMANISM

'The Christian doctrine of sin proves to be a remarkable resource in helping us understand ourselves, but it's intelligible only against the background of a profound Christian optimism about the created potential of humanity. The caricatures of Christianity paint it as pessimistic and life denying. But in fact, Christianity is the true humanism. We are royal masterpieces, yet we are marred. The glorious image of God in us needs to be restored, and it is worth the effort of restoration. 

Rankin Wilbourne, Union with Christ, p.160. 

THE PROBLEM WITH HUMANITY

'The central core difficulty in people, as I have come to know them, is that in the great majority of cases they despise themselves, and regard themselves as worthless and unlovable.' 

Carl Rogers in Rankin Wilbourne, Union with Christ, p.156. 

YOU FIND YOURSELF WHEN YOU FIND GOD

'Against the prevailing mindset of our day - you are what you make yourself - union with Christ tells you that you can discover your real self only in relation to the One who made you. You are not, you cannot be, self-made. Union with Christ tells that you can only understand who are you are in communion with God and others. And that is a wildly countercultural claim.' 

Rankin Wilbourne, Union with Christ, p.135.  

THE POWER OF THE SUPERNATURAL

'As an odd sort of proof that no amount of scientific or technological advance can eradicate our sense of the supernatural, look at the number of movies and television shows today that contain supernatural or spiritual themes. No sooner does one area of our culture try to convince us nothing exists beyond the visible world than another stream rushes into fill the void.' 

Rankin Wilbourne, Union with Christ, p.119. 

WHAT THE CROSS REVEALS

'...the cross is our best picture of who God is: God providing from within his own life the gift of bringing us back into his life.' 

Rankin Wilbourne, Union with Christ, p.111. 

THE IMPORTANCE OF UNION WITH CHRIST

'Being in Christ, and united to him, is the fundamental constitution of a Christian.' 

Thomas Goodwin in Rankin Wilbourne, Union with Christ, p.107. 

THE SILVER BULLET OF UNION WITH CHRIST?

'The church is in desperate need of a way to express the grace of the gospel and the demand of the gospel in a way that enhances both without canceling either. If you have ever asked these questions, union with Christ is your answer.' 

Rankin Wilbourne, Union with Christ, p.93. 

UNION WITH CHRIST AS A MARRIAGE

'...becoming a Christian means more than believing Christ did certain things for you long ago. It means that Christ joins his life to yours in such an intimate and comprehensive way that the prevailing metaphor for this union in the Bible is marriage (Eph. 5:32). It's a metaphor, but it's not only a metaphor because the Holy Spirit, the bond of this connection, it is not metaphorical. The Holy Spirit is real, which means if you are "in Christ," Christ has truly made himself one with you.' 

Rankin Wilbourne, Union with Christ: The Way to Know and Enjoy God, p.71. 

WHEN TALK OF DUTY HELPS

'We often use "care" or "carer" for people who would once have thought that what they were doing in say, looking after incapacitated relatives, was a duty. To call the act of changing someone's soiled underclothing an act of caring can make you feel as if you should be doing it because you want to do it, whereas the idea that you're doing it because it's your duty makes it more impersonal and therefore - to my mind, anyway - a lighter burden. It leaves you free to dislike what you are doing while still feeling you are doing the right thing in doing it.' 

John Lanchester in Jennifer Senior, All Joy and No Fun, p.248. 

JOY

'Joy is connection.'
George Vaillant in Jennifer Senior, All Joy and No Fun, p.242. 

TRUE LIBERALISM

'...liberalism is not a partisan claim for the universal authority of a particular morality, but the search for terms of coexistence between different moralities. In this alternative view, liberalism has to do with handling the conflicts of cultures that will always be different, not founding a universal civilization.' 

John Gray in Adam Phillips, On Balance, p.56. 

WHAT EXCESS MOST APPALS YOU?

'There is nothing more telling, nothing more revealing of one's character and history and taste, than one's reaction to other people's excess. Tell me which kinds of excess fascinate you, tell me which kinds of excess appal you and I will tell you who you are. This would be one, excessive, way of putting it. Or one could more sensibly say: notice which excesses you are drawn to (and there is, of course, an excess of excesses to choose from now - road rage, fundamentalism, self-improvement, shopping), the ones you can;'t stop complaining about, the ones that make you speak out, or the ones that just give you some kind of secret, perhaps  slightly embarrassing pleasure, and try to work out what about them is so compelling.' 

Adam Phillips, On Balance, p.8.  

THE POWER OF BOOKS

'Books connect you to others. It sounds trite but it is true. You are kept company by characters, by a story and by the consciousness - held literally in the hand, seemingly entire - that wrote the book. They all speak to you now across time and space, a commonality of minds, a sharing of experience, a proffering of thoughts and philosophies effortlessly spanning dimensions that would otherwise defeat all such efforts. They are insurmountable proof that the bundle of flaws, fancies, idiocies, instincts, anxieties and aptitudes that is you is neither unique or alone.' 

Lucy Mangan, Bookworm, p.306. 

THE PLUS OF PESSIMISM

'What people forget about pessimists is that although we're often anxious, we're also very easily pleased.' 

Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading, p.117. 

THE IMPACT OF SUFFERING

'For every person for whom tragedy leads to a life travelling the world to speak of Christ (and we rightly rejoice in these stories) there are others for whom tragedy means they never leave their room again, never speak again.' 

Matt Searles, Tumbling Sky: Psalm Devotions for Weary Souls, p. 9.

OUR LAST BINDING COMMITMENT?

'Most Americans are free to choose or change spouses, and the middle class has at least a modicum of freedom to choose or change careers. But we can never choose or change our children. They are the last binding obligation in a culture that asks for almost no other permanent commitments at all.' 

Jennifer Senior, All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenting, p.44. 

THE NEW CREATION

'...at some particular hour when we least expect it, a veil will be lifted and there will be an ending and a beginning, creation purged, healed, and renewed, afterward forever in a new and right relationship to God, who so loves the world. The clocks will stop, and we will find ourselves on the threshold of the everlasting.' 

Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things, p.237. 

SIN

'I have no problem with the word "sin." I think it is one of our most brilliant evasions to have associated sin so strongly with sexuality that we can by coy about it, or narrowly obsessed with it, or we can dismiss it with as a synonym for prudery, as we go on hating and reviling. as we go on grinding the faces of the poor. We alone among the animals can sin - one of our truly notable distinctions. Or, to put it another way - we are the only creatures who are, in principle if seldom in fact, morally competent. Responsible, or at least answerable.' 

Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things, p.236. 

IF YOU WANT TO BELONG YOU NEED TO PARTICIPATE

'...our sense of belonging is all about participation. We belong because we are part of the work of this place.' 

James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life, p.146. 

HONEST PARENTING

'When we share our own vulnerabilities with our children, we send a powerful message to their brains that they are not alone in their own weakness.' 

Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame, p.153. 

"JUST DO YOU BEST!"

'...possibly one of the least helpful things a parent can tell his or her child is "We only expect you to do your best." No one can do his or her best at everything, for no one has that much time and energy.' 

Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame, p.151.

"THEY'RE NO TROUBLE!"

'The potential downside to never having anything to do with trouble in your family is the possibility that your family never suspects that trouble ever has anything to do with you.' 

Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame, p.116.

HELL

'...is the counter echo of God's mandate that it is not good to be alone.'
Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame, p.114.

OUR DESIRE TO BE DESIRED

'...all sin, all idolatry, all coping strategies in which I indulge are ways for me to satiate my hunger for relationship, my longing to be known and loved, my desire to be desired.' 

Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe about Ourselves, p.105. 

THE IMPORTANCE OF INTUITION

'...the criticism of religion that derides its central intuition as a projection of human fears and desires onto a universe that is alien to such things is itself a projection of human influences, deductions, and expectations onto a universe that is wholly incommensurate with them.' 

Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things, p.220. 

THE LIMITS OF RATIONALISM

'I wish only to say one more time that the rationalistic arguments that claim to winnow out the implausible and the meaningless by applying the flail of common sense are products of bad education. Religions are expressions of the sound human intuition that there is something beyond being as we experience it in this life. What is often described as a sense of the transcendent might in some cases be the intuition of the actual. So the religions are quite right to conceptualize it in terms that exceed the language of common sense. The rationalists are like travelers in a non-English-speaking country who think that they can make themselves understood by shouting. Sadly, too many religious have abandoned their own language, its beauty and subtlety and power, accommodating to the utilitarian expectations of those demanding outsiders who have no understanding of the language or culture and refuse on principle to acquire any. But the unfathomable has a most legitimate place in any conceptualization of an unfathomable reality.' 

Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things, p.212. 

THE CENTRALITY OF THE TRINITY

'Is there are great Christian theology that does not have the Trinity at its center? Does the highest sense of the sacred abide where the Trinity as a concept is isallowed? Well, I think not, for what it's worth.' 

Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things, p.210. 

THE CIVILIZED MAN?

'Robert Birley, headmaster of Eton when I arrived there in 1959, defined a civilized man as someone who might be the chairman of the Atomic Energy Authority and capable of following the the second lesson at Evensong in the Greek.' 

William Waldegrave, A Different Kind of Weather: A Memoir, p.34. 

THE LOCAL CHURCH ALWAYS TRUMPS THE PARACHURCH?

'Parachurch organizations...need to regularly evaluate their philosophy and practice in the light of Christ's priority on the church. Similarly, individual Christians, especially those focusing on ministry, should consider whether or not they have slipped into a pattern in which a parachurch group holds more value to them in life and ministry than the local church. No doubt, most parachurch groups are easier to maneuver and get along with than a lot of churches. Yet Jesus sets his affections upon and entrusts the church with his mission in the world. So should we.' 

Phil A Newton, The Mentoring Church, p.121. 

YOU NEED TO HAVE EXPERIENCED A HEALTHY CHURCH TO LEAD A HEALTHY CHURCH?

'One great challenge for many young pastors and church planters happens when they try to lead a church to health when they've never experienced a healthy church firsthand. No academic training can replace the personal experience of a healthy congregation for those who lead a church toward health.' 

Phil A Newton, The Mentoring Church: How Pastors and Congregations Mentor Leaders, p.55. 

CONFIDENT PLURALISM

'Confident pluralism rejects stigmatising others through our speech. At the same time, it requires ut to distinguish between stigmatizing and causing offence...the civic aspiration of tolerance includes the space to make moral judgements. The liberal progressive must be able to say that the conservative moralist holds a view that he finds wrong, misguided, or immoral. And vice versa. Those assertions will likely cause offenses. But they are an important part of the effort to coexist with deep and genuine differences and to allow for people to be persuaded and to change their minds.'

John D Inazu, Confident Pluralism, p.101. 

THE CHALLENGE OF TRUE TOLERANCE

'Tolerance is the most important civic aspiration. It means a willingness to accept genuine difference, including profound moral disagreement. Achieving it is no easy task. As the philosopher Bernard Williams has observed, tolerance is most needed when people find others' beliefs or practices "deeply unacceptable"vor "blasphemously, disastrously, obscenely wrong." The basic difficulty of tolerance, Williams notes, is that we need it "only for the intolerable."'  

John D Inazu, Confident Pluralism, p.87. 

HE DIED FOR ME

'Awake, arise, lift your voice,
let Easter music swell;
rejoice in Christ, again rejoice
and on his praises dwell.

Oh, with what gladness and surprise
the saints in their Savior greet;
nor will they trust their ears and eyes
but by his hand and feet,
those hands of liberal love indeed
in infinite degree,
those feet still free to move and bleed
for millions, and for me.'
Christopher Smart in Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.612. 

SOMETIMES DISCRIMINATION IS GOOD

'Sometimes discrimination is a good thing. Elite universities would not be able to function if they had to accept everyone who wanted to attend. Professional choirs need to limit their vocalists to people who can carry a tune. And within the voluntary groups of civil society, we tolerate even some forms of discrimination that would elsewhere be impermissible. We would rightly be enraged if the federal government discriminated on the basis of gender or religion. But we allow Wellesley College to exclude men, and we allow the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to exclude non-Mormons.' 

John D Inazu, Confident Pluralism, p.43.

PLURALISM NEEDS TO ALLOW FOR DISSENT

'A political community that fails to honor the dissent premise is not truly pluralistic - it lacks confidence in itself.'

John D Inazu, Confident Pluralism: Surviving and Thriving through Deep Difference, p.31.

CHRISTIANS & CULTURE

'...to live as a Christian means to keep inserting a difference into a given culture without ever stepping outside that culture to do so. ' 

Miroslav Volf in Jeremy R Treat, 'Sexuality and the Church' in Beauty, Order and Mystery, p.56.

THE NEW MORALITY

'There is a new morality. The one indisputable law of the new morality is that you cannot deny yourself. Yet the call of Jesus is exactly that: "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me" (Lk 9:23).' 

Jeremy R Treat, 'Sexuality and the Church' in Beauty, Order and Mystery, p.56.

SEX & WORLD VIEWS

'...sex is never just about sex. Rather, one's beliefs about sex, gender and marriage mediate their broader views of life. The meaning we attribute sexuality is inseparable from the stories we live by, the wounds we have received, and the relationships we have (or do not have). The contemporary debates over sexuality, therefore, are not ultimately conflicts about what happens under the covers but are a collision of world views.' 

Jeremy R Treat, 'Sexuality and the Church: How Pastoral Ministry Shapes a Theology of Sexuality' in Beauty, Order and Mystery: A Christian Theology of Human Sexuality (Edited Hiestand & Wilson), p.46.

CHRISTIAN HUMILITY

'"Is it I?" is the best question that any disciple can ever ask when Jesus warns about sin, when any church discipline takes place, whenever we hear about the sin committed by anyone else. As we turn the pages of our hearts over against the pages of the Bible each morning, we ought to ask, "Is it I?" These three words reveal the heart of true believers, who know they are capable of any imaginable sin and that it is only Christ's saving grace indwelling them that reveals the truth about them and their desires. "Is it I?" are the assembled words by which the believer discovers himself - the condemning nature of his sin, the recreation of self in Christ.' 

Rosaria Butterfield, The Gospel Comes with a House Key, p.139. 

SAFEGUARDING

'On the one hand, we of course must protect our children from harm. On the other hand, we must not presume that sheltering them will accomplish this.' 

Rosaria Butterfield, The Gospel Comes with a House Key, p.108.

A CHRISTIAN'S HOME IS NOT THEIR CASTLE

'Our homes are not our castles. Indeed, they are not even ours.'
Rosaria Butterfield, The Gospel Comes with a House Key, p.100. 

REPLICATING MIRACLES TODAY

'We love the miraculous stories of Jesus, his feeding of the five thousand, his divine healing, his contagious grace. And we miss the most obvious things about these stories: that we are meant to replicate them in ordinary, nonmiraculous ways.' 

Rosaria Butterfield, The Gospel Comes with a House Key, p.100. 

YOU CAN LOVE WITHOUT APPROVING

'Last year an old friend of mine came out to me as a lesbian. She called and said, "I've been avoiding telling you this, but I like girls. I know that you don't approve."

I was grateful that she called me. She is an old, dear friend. So I asked her a simple question: "Do you think I wouldn't understand?"

She: "No, I know you'd understand. It's that you don't approve. I can't take knowing that you don't approve of me."

Me: "Did we always approve of each other?"

She: "No. No, we didn't."

Me: "We've disagreed on everything! Pixar films, chicken nuggets, spankings! We have never approved of each other, but we have always loved each other. True?"

She: "Very true. We've never approved. We've always loved."

ME; "So why are you changing the rules on me?"

Rosaria Butterfield, The Gospel Comes with a House Key: Practicing Radically Ordinary Hospitality in Our Post-Christian World, p.52. 

WE ARE ALL DISCIPLES

'To be human is to disciple. God didn't present Adam and Eve with a choice between discipleship and independence, but between following him and following Satan. We are all disciples; the only question is, of whom?' 

Mark Dever, Discipling, p.44. 

DISCIPLING AS FASHION MODELING

'...discipling is a kind of fashion modeling. No, you're not showing off clothes for the photographer; you're demonstrating a fashion, a way of living, for others to follow. Discipling is inviting them to imitate you, making your trust in Christ an example to be followed. It requires you to be willing to be watched, and then folding people into your life so that they actually do watch.' 

Mark Dever, Discipling, p.40. 

CREATING A SPIRITUAL LEGACY

'For me, discipling is the only way I can evangelize non-Christians and equip Christians in that one place where I can never travel - the future beyond my life. Discipling others is how I try to leave time-bombs of grace.' 

Mark Dever, Discipling, p.34.

DEFINING DISCIPLING

'...discipling is deliberately doing spiritual good to someone so that he or she will become more like Christ.' 

Mark Dever, Discipling: How to help others follow Jesus, p.13.

EXPLAINING GOD'S JUDGEMENT TODAY

'Perhaps the best way of constructing the idea of punishment in our time is in terms of exclusion or rejection. If God is to exclude violence and injustice from his coming kingdom, something has to be done about violence and injustice and every form of enmity that seek to thwart God's good purposes. These are manifestations of the reign of Sin and Death, and they cannot be overlooked or ignored - although many construals of salvation attempt to do so.'

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.504. 

PENAL SUBSTITUTION ONLY MAKES SENSE IN A STORY

'The difficulty with "necessity" in the context of the cross is the idea that God is subject to external logic rather than love for his fallen creation. When presented in narrative form, the motif of substitution has unparalleled warmth.' 

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.496. 

GOD LOVED US EVEN WHEN WE HATED HIM

'God's love is incomprehensible and unchangeable. For it was not after we were reconciled to him through the blood of his Son that he began to love us...Rather, he has loved us before the world was created...The fact that we were reconciled through Christ's death must not be understood as if his Son reconciled us to [The Father] so that he might now begin to love those whom he had hated. Rather, we have already been reconciled to him who loves us, with whom we were enemies on account of sin. The apostle will testify whether I am speaking the truth: "God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us" [Romans 5:8]. Therefore he loved us even when we practiced enmity toward him and committed wickedness. Thus in a marvellous and divine way he loved us even when he hated us. For he hated us for what were that he had not made; yet because our wickedness had not entirely consumed his handiwork, he knew how, at the same time, to hate in each one of us what we had made and to love what he had made.' 

Augustine of Hippo in Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.487. 

TRUE SPIRITUAL KNOWLEDGE

'Divine knowledge fills a man full of spiritual activity; it will make a man work as if he would be saved by his works, and yet it will make a man believe he is only saved upon the account of free grace.'

Thomas Brooks, Heaven on Earth, p.178.

THE POWER OF THE PAST

'The secret of our emotions never lies in the bare object but its subtle relations to our own past: no wonder the secret escapes the unsympathising observer, who might as well put on his spectacles on to discern odours.'

George Eliot, Adam Bede, p.245. 

DEATH - THE GREAT RECONCILER

'When death, the great Reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.' 

George Eliot, Adam Bede, p.97.

THE CHALLENGE OF FAMILY LIKENESSES

'Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearnings and repulsion; and ties us by our heartstrings to the beings that jar us at every moment. We hear a voice with the very cadence of our own uttering the thoughts we despise; we see eyes - ah! so like our mother's - averted from us in cold alienation; and our last darling child startles us with the air and gestures of the sister we parted from in bitterness long years ago. The father to whom we owe our best heritage - the mechanical instinct, the keen sensibility of harmony, the unconscious skill of the modelling hand - galls us, and puts us to shame by his daily errors; the long-lost mother, whose face we begin to see in the glass, as our own wrinkles come, once fretted our young souls with her anxious humours and irrational persistence.'

George Eliot, Adam Bede, p.83.

GEORGE ELIOT'S AIM AS A NOVELIST

'...the only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling erring human creatures.' 

George Eliot quoted in Stephen Gill's Introduction to Adam Bede, p.39.

THE INNOCENCE OF LAMBS

'One runt lamb is born dead, another dies within hours, and for both I grieve with clenched eyes for the life never lived. There is nothing so innocent as a new-born lamb; the scion of the sheep was not appropriated as the Christian symbol for Jesus for nothing. The lamb of God.'

John Lewis-Stemple, Meadowland: The Private Life of an English Field, p.70.

THE BEAUTY OF SMALL ISLANDS

'It is the boundedness of the smaller island, encompassable in a glance, walkable in one day, that relates it to the human body closer than any other conformation of land.'

John Fowles in Philip Marsden, Rising Ground: A Search for the Spirit of Place, p.290.

THE GENTRIFICATION OF EMOTIONS

'There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feelings - depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage - are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment, of doing time, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails.

I don't believe the cure for loneliness is meeting someone, not necessarily. I think it's about two things: learning how to befriend yourself and understanding that many of the things that see to afflict us are in fact a result of larger forces of stigma and exclusion, which can and should be resisted.' 

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City, p.280. 

FAME - THE NEW INTIMACY

'...fame; intimacy's surrogate, its addictive supplanter.'

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City, p.244.

INTIMACY & SELF-ESTEEM

'...intimacy requires a solid sense of self to be successful and satisfying.'

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City, p.241.

SOCIAL MEDIA & RELATIONSHIPS

'The miracle of laptops and smartphones is that they divorce contact from the physical, allowing people to remain sealed into a private bubble while they are nominally in public and to interact with others while they are nominally alone.'

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City, p.227. 

LONELINESS & INTIMACY

'If loneliness is to be defined as a desire for intimacy, then included within that is the need to express oneself and to be heard, to share thoughts, experiences and feelings. Intimacy can't exist if the participants aren't willing to make themselves known, to be revealed. But gauging the levels is tricky. Either you don't communicate enough and remain concealed from other people, or you risk rejection by exposing too much altogether: the minor and the major hurts, the tedious obsessions, the abscesses and cataracts of need and shame and longing. My own decision had been to clam up, though sometimes I longed to grab someone's arm and blurt the whole thing out...'

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City, p.75.

LONELINESS DEFINED

'...the exceeding unpleasant and driving experience connected with inadequate discharge of the need for human intimacy.' 

Harry Stack Sullivan in Olivia Laing, The Lonely City, p.23.

LONELINESS AS A PHYSICAL FEELING

'What does it feel like to be lonely? It feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast. It feels shameful and alarming, and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged. It hurts, in the way that feelings do, and it also has physical consequences that take place invisibly, inside the closed compartments of the body. It  advances, is what I'm trying to say, cold as ice and clear as glass, enclosing and engulfing.' 

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City, p.11.

URBAN LONELINESS

'You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavour to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of people. One might think this state was antithetical to urban living, to the massed presence of other human beings, and yet the the mere physical proximity is not enough to dispel a sense of internal isolation. It's possible - easy, even - to feel desolate and unfrequented in oneself while living cheek by jowl with others. Cities can be lonely places, and in admitting this we see that loneliness doesn't require physical solitude, but rather an absence or paucity of connection, closeness, kinship: an inability, for one reason or another, to find as much intimacy as is desired. Unhappy, as the dictionary has it, as a result of being without the companionship of others. Hardly any wonder, then, that it can reach its apotheosis in a crowd.'

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, p.3.

FRIENDSHIP & FAMILIES

'The capacity of friendship is God's way of apologizing for our families.'
Jay McInerney, The Last of the Savages, p.3.

THE PERFECT PROVISION OF JESUS

'...we have no warmth in ourselves; it is true, but Christ came even in winter. We have no light in ourselves; it is true, but he came even in the night.'

John Donne, 'Christ the Light' in Poems and Devotions (Edited Robert Van de Weyer), p.81.

CONTEMPORARY RESPONSES TO SUBSTITUTIONARY ATONEMENT

'It is not an exaggeration to say that in some circles there has been something resembling a campaign of intimidation, so that those who cherish the idea that Jesus offered himself in our place have been made to feel that they are neo-Crusaders, prone to violence, oppressors of women, and enablers of child abuse.' 

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.464. 

OUR INSTINCTIVE SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS

'There is nothing more characteristic of humanity than the universal tendency of one portion of that humanity to justify itself as deserving and some other portion as undeserving. Nothing is more foundational in Christian faith than the recognition that we can never be justified in that way. To speak of "deserving" is to divide up the world in a fashion that is utterly alien to the gospel.' 

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.451. 

MEETING THE DEVIL

'After one of my many presentations following my return from Rwanda, a Canadian Forces padre asked me how, after all I had seen and experienced, I could still believe in God. I answered that I know there is a God because in Rwanda I shook hands with the devil. I have seen him. I have smelled him and I have touched him. I know the devil exists, and therefore I know there is a God.' 

Roméo Dallaire in Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.439. 

THE EXPERIENCE OF EVIL

'Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.' 

Simone Weil in Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.425.

SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS EXPOSED

'Until the sun slipped finally behind the tree line, Mrs. Turpin remained there with her gaze bent to them as if she were absorbing some abysmal life-giving knowledge. At last she lifted her head. There was only a purple streak in the sky, cutting through a field of crimson and leading, like an extension of the highway, into the descending dusk. She raised her hands from the side of the pen in a gesture hieratic and profound. A visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vaste horde of souls were rumbling towards heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognised at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away. She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead. In a moment the vision faded but she remained where she was, immobile. 

At length she got down and turned off the faucet and made her slow way on the darkening path to the house. In the woods around her the invisible crickets choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.'   

Flannery O'Connor, 'Revelation' in Collected Stories, p.508. 

THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE IN PRACTICE

'Since Scripture is our only final and authoritative source in understanding truths about God and his relation to the created order, two things are required of us. First,we must submit to and embrace all that Scripture does teach, despite its agreement or disagreement with the values and teaching of our culture. If the authority of Scripture means anything, it means that our mistaken ideas must change to conform to Scripture's teachings, and we must resist at every turn the temptation to conform Scripture's teaching to what seems so clear and true to us from our culture. Granted, this is easier said than  done. Nonetheless, this must be our goal and earnest desire if we are to honor God and his Word in the process of our theological formulation. Second, we must also be ready to stop our theological formulations at the point that Scripture's revealed truth stops. We can violate the authority of Scripture as much by going beyond what it says into areas wherein Scripture is silent as we can by distorting and reshaping what it actually does say to fit the mindset of our culture. In other words we must discipline our minds and our theology to conform to Scripture and to be content to say what it says and remain silent where it is silent.' 

Bruce Ware, God's Greater Glory: The Exalted God of Scripture and the Christian Faith, p.99. 

THE PROBLEM WITH JUST TALKING ABOUT RECONCILIATION

'It is not uncommon, both in and out of the church, for the people who do the most talking about reconciliation to be the ones who find it easier to smooth things over than struggle through them.' 

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.344. 

HUMILITY

'Some of us seem to imagine that because we understand much, we should be able to understand everything, and that science will continue pulling up the blinds, exposing to the light more and more of the dark room that is our ignorance. But this is a faith one need not be embarrassed to decline. Despite all our knowledge about ourselves and the universe we inhabit, much more is unknown than is known; our ignorance drowns our knowledge...The world is large, and our minds are small, so the latter cannot always contain the former. We cannot but expect there to be mysteries - permanent mysteries - on every side.' 

Dale C Allison Jr., The Luminous Dusk, p.174. 

TV & PRAYER

'I am sure, although I can offer no proof, that those who spend hours every day in front of a TV pray less than they otherwise might, not because they have less faith, not because their morals have been corrupted, nor because their time is consumed by the tube. Rather, their attention spans, like their imaginations, have been made lazy. If prayer is sustained concentration upon the seemingly unexciting, how well can it be practiced by those habituated more and more to just the opposite? Surely the great sin of the modern world is indolence.'

Dale C Allison Jr., The Luminous Dusk, p.153.

GOD'S UNCHANGING LOVE

'...God and God's love are, from one point of view, monotonous stimuli, for they are always present and never changing.' 

Dale C Allison Jr., The Luminous Dusk, p.150. 

THE PRECIOUSNESS OF GOD'S WORD

'I want this book read to me on my deathbed. Despite my modernity and my cynical nature, despite my dissection of it and my quarrels with it, the Bible remains profitable for teaching, for correction, and for training in righteousness. It comforts, It inspires. It commands,. When I push its pages apart, I lay my finger on God's heart. I hate to see people not reading it.'

Dale C Allison Jr., The Luminous Dusk, p.111. 

THE IMPORTANCE OF BIBLICAL ALLUSIONS

'We fail to catch scriptural allusions not because most of the Bible is Heraclitus, who wrote obscurely so that only the highbrows would read him. The problem is, rather, us. Let me draw an analogy. Much of the power of Martin Luther King Jr.'s widely appreciated rhetoric came from his expectation that his hearer's would perceive the implicit. When he gave his famous "I have a Dream" speech, he expected his audience to hear his first words, "Five score years ago," an echo of the first words of the Gettysburg Address. It was a way of saying, "My cause is the completion of what Lincoln began." When King spoke of "this sweltering summer of the Negro's discontent," he was alluding to the opening lines of Shakespeare's Richard III  - "now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this sun of York" - and thereby telling the whites in his audience, "You cannot ignore me. I know your European tradition as well as you do." When he said "We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream," surely he believed that his hearers would know this was from the Bible (Amos 5:24). King was asserting, "God is on my side."' 

Dale C Allison Jr., The Luminous Dusk, p.107. 

THE IMPORTANCE OF BOOKS

'The proper study of mankind is books.'
Aldous Huxley in Dale C Allison Jr., The Luminous Dusk, p.94. 

FAITH NEEDS IMAGINATION

'Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen, and its eye is the religious imagination.' 

Dale C Allison Jr., The Luminous Dusk, p.85. 

OUR IMAGINATIONS & PRAYER

'Seeing our imaginations have great power over hearts, and can mightily affect us with their representations, it would be great use to you if, at the beginning of your devotions, you were to imagine to yourself some representation as might heat and warm your heart in a temper suitable to those prayers that you are then about to offer unto God.' 

William Law in  Dale C Allison Jr., The Luminous Dusk, p.68. 

A PRESENT VISION OF ETERNAL BEAUTY

'One mid-afternoon, when I was twenty-four years old, I walked by my apartment window, which framed a garden in the cemetery next door. I noticed that the scene, which I had looked at often enough to pay no attention, was somehow magically transfigured. Everything was self-shining as my eyes saw not the surface of things but through them. The trees and tulips were colored jewels, the air a clear crystal, the boulders (in the words of Ezekiel) stones of fire. The whole multi-colored bliss was a sea of glass, each object a stained-glass window. A preternatural brilliance, a slowly breathing radiance, intense yet painless, the essence of beauty, suffused everything; and a thought arose in my mind: the expulsion from Eden was only a dimming of vision; we are even yet in paradise.'

Dale C Allison Jr., The Luminous Dusk, p.49. 

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

'...we can wrongly interpret unintended effects as once-conscious aims - as though Luther, when he nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of Wittenberg castle, envisioned Protestantism. It is like the man who unwittingly cracks a joke and then takes credit for it, misleading others into thinking him clever. We repeatedly credit famous names with too much power, as if some of them actually intended the consequences of their deeds and so truly held the reins of history. But none did; and those presumptuous enough to think themselves exceptions have only been like the hard-hearted Pharaoh of the Exodus, who decisions were not his own ("God hardened Pharaoh's heart").'.

Dale C Allison Jr., The Luminous Dusk: Finding God in the Deep, Still Places, p.30

THE ALLIANCE BETWEEN THE YOUNG & OLD

'Sometimes very young children can look at the old, and a look passes between them, conspiratorial, sly and knowing. It's because neither are humans to the middling ones, those in their prime, as they say, like beef.' 

Margaret Laurence, The Stone Angel, p.4.

JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH NOT WORKS

'The reason we can speak of justification/ rectification by faith, not by works, is that faith is not a work.' 

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.331.

JUSTIFICATION

'...when we say that God will "justify" rather than merely "acquit," the action has a reconstituting force - hence the insufficiency of the courtroom metaphor "to acquit," God's righteousness is the same thing as his justice, and his justice is powerfully at work justifying, which does not mean excusing, passing over, or even "forgiving and forgetting," but actively making right that which is wrong.' 

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.329. 

GOD'S CONSISTENT ATTITUDES & ACTIONS

'God has no attitudes that are not actions; the two things are one.' 

Austin Farrer in Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.327. 

PREACHING

'There is always a bit of agony in preaching...'
Dale Ralph Davis, Faith of Our Father: Exposition of Genesis 12-25, p.7. 

TALKING ABOUT THE WRATH OF GOD

'The challenge for pastors and preachers is to show that, given the nature of God, it can be said without qualification that the wrath of God is always exercised in the service of God's good purposes. It is the unconditional love of God manifested against anything that would frustrate or destroy the designs of his love.' 

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.323. 

THE HARM OF SELF-IMPORTANCE

'Half of the harm that is done in this world
Is due to people who want to feel important.
They don't mean to do harm - but the harm does not interest them.
Or they do not see it, or they justify it
Because they are absorbed in the endless struggle
To think well of themselves.'
TS Eliot in Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.306. 

WHAT MAKES AN IMPACT

'It often happens that we are most touched by what we are least capable of.'
Clive James, Unreliable Memoirs, p.61.

HOW THE CROSS SHAPES MINISTRY

'The fundamental insight lying at the heart of the cross is the notion that God acts in the present in continuity with the way he has acted in the past...Just as God revealed himself, and worked salvation through a crucified Messiah, God still works in and through what is to conventional human understanding, weak, powerless and apparently irrational rather than through what is strong, powerful and reasonable.' 

Graham Tomlin in Jeremy R Treat, The Crucified King, p.229. 

THE CENTRALITY OF THE CROSS

'The cross must be central but never solo.' 
Jeremy R Treat, The Crucified King, p.218. 

REPELLING THE ACCUSER

'When the devil throws our sins up to us and declares we deserve death and hell, we ought to speak thus: "I admit that I deserve death and hell. What of it? Does this mean that I shall be sentenced to eternal damnation? By no means. For I know One who suffered and made a satisfaction in my behalf. His name is Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Where he is, there I shall be also.' 

Martin Luther in Jeremy R Treat, The Crucified King, p.202. 

SUFFERING

'...it is with men as trees: if you lop off their finest branches, into which they were pouring their young life-juice, the wounds will be healed over with some rough boss, some odd excrescence; and what might have been a grand tree expanding into liberal shade, is but a whimsical trunk. Many an irritating fault, many an unlovely oddity, has come of a hard sorrow, which has crushed and maimed the nature just when it was expanding into plenteous beauty; and the trivial erring life which we visit with our harsh blame, may be but as the unsteady motion of a man whose best limb is withered.' 

George Eliot, 'Mr Gilfil's Love-Story' is Scenes of Clerical Life, p.244. 

THE ADVANTAGES OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE

'...we have all our secret sins; and if we knew ourselves, we should not judge each other harshly.' 

George Eliot, 'Mr Gilfil's Love-Story' in Scenes of Clerical Life, p.236. 

TRUE POWER

'True power is best seen in a life willingly offered as sacrifice for the sake of others. There is unexcelled strength in such sacrifice when it is embraced - not simply imposed or inflicted - as a way of aligning oneself with the good kind of power.' 

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.274. 

THE BEAUTIFUL IRONIES OF THE CROSS

'...it was appropriate that, just as death entered the human race through a man's disobedience, so life should be restored through a man's obedience; and that, just as the sin which was the cause of our damnation originated from a woman, similarly the originator of our justification and salvation should be born of a woman. Also that the devil who defeated the man whom he beguiled through the taste of a tree, should himself similarly be defeated by a man through tree-induced suffering which he, the devil inflicted. There are many other things too.' 

Anselm of Canterbury in Jeremy T Treat, The Crucified King, p.179. 

THE CROSS & RESURRECTION

'Jesus' death is not a defeat that needs to be made right by the resurrection, but a victory that needs to be revealed and implemented in the resurrection.' 

Jeremy R Treat, The Crucified King, p.152. 

POWER

'...the capability to influence people or situations and to transform them.' 

Graham Tomlin in Jeremy R Treat, The Crucified King, p.142. 

CHRIST TRIUMPHANT!

'The suffering of Christians is a sign, not of Satan's victory, but of the saints' victory over Satan because of their belief in the triumph of the cross, with which their suffering identifies them.' 

GK Beale in Jeremy R Treat, The Crucified King: Atonement and Kingdom in Biblical and Systematic Theology, p.126. 

ALIENS & STRANGERS

'The church should always have a sense of being in a strange land, and if we are not feeling this tension, we are not really being the church.'  

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.241. 

TOTAL CARE

'Imagine a person totally committed to your best interests, devoted to seeing you flourish, fighting for you against all enemies, determined to eliminate everything destructive from your life, attentive to every detail of who you are, never thinking of himself at all but only of you. That is Jesus in relation to us all - sacrificial in his life, sacrificial in his death.' 

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.238. 

OLD & NEW TESTAMENTS

'The Old Testament is not just a source of further information for the New Testament, or an interesting sideshow attached to it, or even the indispensable prelude to it. The New Testament will not work without the Old Testament.' 

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.214. 

DEFINING SIN

'Sin, then, is an exclusively biblical concept. The word is used, of course, in various nonbiblical contexts by people who know nothing of the Bible, but outside its biblical matrix it simply comes to mean wrongdoing of some sort, defined by whoever happens to be using it - almost without reference to someone other than themselves. To be in sin, biblically speaking, means something very much more consequential than wrongdoing; it means being catastrophically separated from the eternal love of God. It means to be on the other side of an impassable barrier of exclusion from God's heavenly banquet. It means to be helplessly trapped inside one's own worst self, miserably aware of the chasm between the way we are and the way God intends us to be. It means the continuation of the reign of greed, cruelty, rapacity, and violence throughout the world.' 

Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.174. 

ANSELM ON THE CROSS

'He freed us from our sins, and from his own wrath, and from hell, and from the power of the devil, whom he came to vanquish for us, because we were unable to do it, and he purchased for us the kingdom of heaven; and by doing all these things, he manifested the greatness of his love towards us.' 

Anselm of Canterbury in Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p.164.