NO ONE COMES TO THE FATHER EXCEPT THROUGH ME

'It avails nothing that a man is clever, learned, highly gifted, amiable, charitable, kind-hearted, and zealous about some sort of religion. All this will not his soul, if he does not draw near to God by Christ's atonement, and make use of God's own Son as his Mediator and Saviour. God is so holy that all men are guilty and debtors in his sight. Sin is so sinful that no mortal man can make satisfaction for it. There must be a mediator, a ransom-payer, a redeemer, between ourselves and God, or else we can never be saved. There is only one door, one bridge, one ladder, between earth and heaven, - the crucified Son of God. Whosoever will enter in by that door may be saved; but to him who refuses to use that door the Bible holds out no hope at all.'

JC Ryle, Expository Thoughts on John: Volume 3, p.67. 

WHAT KEEPS RELATIONSHIP GOING

'Delight without discipline eventually, inevitably dissipates. It runs out of steam. But when delight and discipline learn to dance, relationships thrive. They mature and endure.'

Pete Grieg, How to Pray: A simple guide for normal people, p.25.

SOCIAL MEDIA IS A FIG-LEAF

'We're using social media in the same way that Adam and Eve used fig leaves.'
Simon Cozens, Looking Shame in the Eye: A path to understanding, grace and freedom, p.56.

DISTINTIVE CHRISTIANITY

'[Christians] dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. They marry, as do all; they beget children; but they do not destroy their offspring. They have a common table, but not a common bed. They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven. They obey the prescribed laws, and at the same time surpass the laws by their lives. They love all men, and are persecuted by all.'

Anonymous in 'The Epistle to Diognetus' from Adam Ramsey, Faithfully Present, p.149.

BLISS NOW IS JUST THE BASELINE

'How easily we forget that the highest pinnacles of bliss in this life are merely the baseline for the world to come.'

Adam Ramsey, Faithfully Present: Embracing the Limits of Where and When God Has You, p.85.

EQUALITY IS NOT SELF-EVIDENT

'It is not self-evident that we are equal. That is the whole problem.'

Elizabeth Oldfield, Fully Alive, p.135.

THE DIGNITY CHRISTIANITY GIVES US

'Scripture allows me to claim that I am more than an invisible node in the indistinguishable mass of humanity. It affirms my particularity, makes it possible for me to believe myself to be seen and known, with a specific part only I can play, but it also humbles me. I can only begin to make sense as part of something bigger, an organ in a living body, a daughter in a family.'

Elizabeth Oldfield, Fully Alive, p.134.

WHAT GOD LOOKS LIKE

'Do you want to know what God is like, the form in which God reveals himself? Look in the mirror; look at your friends; look at your spouse. Start here: a human being with eyes and ears, hands and feet, eating meals with friends. Walking to the store for a bottle of milk, hiking in the hills and picking wildflowers, catching fish and cooking them on a beach for breakfast with friends.'

Eugene Peterson, As Kingfishers Catch Fire, p.227.

OUR CULTURE AND SIN

'Our sinless society, which promised liberation from the psychological harm that externally imposed guilt brings, has begun to feel a bit suffocating. No one is really responsible for anything, but neither can anyone really be forgiven. Two seemingly incompatible moral universe have meshed in a toxic brew. On the one hand, the ways we hurt each other are simply social conditioning. We might be able to unpack the triggers through therapy, but it's a tragic project of entanglement in trauma. On the other, there are certain beliefs and identities that function like unforgiveable sins - and these will be unique to your tribe. Some days the whole worlds seems high on self-righteous rage, locating evil conveniently outside ourselves and our group. I regularly feel tempted to performatively avoid causing offence, signal my moral purity or publicly align myself with whoever is the right tribe that day. It doesn't leave much energy for actually becoming more loving or more just.'

Elizabeth Oldfield, Fully Alive: Tending to the soul in turbulent times, p.29.

WISDOM

'Wisdom is the skilled living of truth in everyday life.'
Eugene Peterson, As Kingfishers Catch Fire, p.196.

STRENGTH IS SELF-HARM

'The wall of pretended strength that I build to conceal my weakness cuts me off from Christ and you.'

John Hindley, Weakness Our Strength, p.47.

THE WEAK CARING FOR THE WEAK

'In the church, we know that we should care for the weak, but so often we seek to do so as the strong, the capable ones, the copers, those who have their stuff sorted. Strong people care for weak ones, after all.

The Lord's way is different. It is to bring the weak ones together to care for one another. This is not nearly so attractive to us. For those of us who like to be dependable, it is challenging to think we might need to depend on others.'

John Hindley, Weakness Our Strength: Learning from Christ Crucified, p.39.

CREEDS SHOULD TELL THE TRUTH

'The necessary condition for assessing the value of creeds is that we should fully understand that they claim to be, not idealistic fancies, not arbitrary codes, not abstractions irrelevant to human life and thought, but statements of fact about the universe as we know it.'

Dorothy L Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, p.14.

THE CREATIVE IMPULSE

'Every act of creativity is an intuitive response to offer back to God what has been given to us. We twist this intuition and may create something transgressive and injurious, but the source of the creative impulse is the Creator.'

Makoto Fujimura, Art and Faith, p.177.

HOW THE PSALMS GET US LOOKING FORWARD

'The book of Psalms, God's poetry, gives us an ecosystem of metaphors and a garden of words to describe the thriving offered to us in the New Creation.'

Makoto Fujimara, Art and Faith, p.37.

A PARABLE FOR MAKING

'Here, then, is the central parable for our Making journey:

Imagine a father taking his child to the beach. The father watches his child make a sandcastle, which will be washed away by the high tide.

But the father happens to be an architect. Imagine that this father loves his child so much and is astonished at the design of the castle that is child has made.

Several years later, the child looks in amazement as the father creates a real castle that is based on the the sandcastle that the child created.

This may be close to what the New Creation will be like. God desires in God's heart to be with the child as the child plays on this side of eternity. God chooses, out of God's gratuitous heart, to co-create into the New World. There is no particular need for the architect father to create an actual building, but the father re-creates in love, and he has the power to do so. The New Creation is filled with such attentive, self-giving outworking of God's love toward us.'

Makoto Fujimara, Art and Faith, p.35.

HOW BEAUTY SUSTAINS

'Art literally feeds us through beauty in the hardest, darkest hours. Christians can have a foretaste of what is to come by celebrating through making and through the exegetical work of culture. Through this wine of New Creation we can be given the eyes to see vistas of the New, ears to hear the footsteps of the New, even through the works of non-Christians in the wider culture.'

Makoto Fujimura, Art and Faith, p.34

THE BEAUTY OF HOLINESS

'Beauty is our sensory access to holiness. God reveals himself, that is, in creation and in Christ, in ways we can see and hear and touch and taste, in place and person. Beauty is the term we apply to these hints of transcendence, these perceptions that there is more going on here than we can account for.'

Eugene H Peterson, As Kingfishers Catch Fire, p.80.

WHAT BEAUTY DOES

'Beauty. It arrives through a sustained and adorational attentiveness to what is there: a rock, a flower, a face, a rustle in the trees, a storm crashing through the mountains. When our senses dull and our attention wavers, writers and singers and artists grab us by the ears and say, "Look, listen, feel. Embrace and respond to Life within and around you!"'

Eugene H Peterson, As Kingfishers Catch Fire, p.79.

WHAT PRAYER DOES

'Prayer is not a way in which we order things; it is a way in which we become ordered.'
Eugene Peterson, As Kingfishers Catch Fire: A Conversation on the Ways of God Formed by the Words of God, p.75.

THE IMPORTANCE OF MAKING THINGS

'I have come to believe that unless we are making something, we cannot know the depth of God's being and God's grace permeating our lives and God's Creation.'

Makoto Fujimura, Art and Faith, p.7.

WHAT WE SHARE WITH GOD

'The characteristic common to God and man is apparently...the desire and ability to make things.'

Dorothy L Sayers in Makoto Fujimura, Art and Faith, p.6. 

THE LIMITS TO SERMONS

'Some things, of course, are best conveyed in a three-point sermon. But we would lose a great deal if we heard the Good News delivered only as linear, propositional information, for the gospel is a song!'

Makoto Fujimara, Art and Faith, p.6.

WHY EVANGELICALISM IS FAILING TO EVANGELISE

'I often wonder whether the younger "None" generation (meaning they mark "None" when asked on forms whether they belong to any religious denomination or group or espouse a particular creed), for whom the old wineskin of how church is done may no longer seem relevant, is now limited to experiencing God authentically primarily through culture and nature, two areas that evangelicalism in the United Sates has abandoned in order to "evangelize" the world.'

Makoto Fujimura, Art and Faith: A Theology of Making, p.5

FRIENDSHIP DEFINED

'News of Lincoln's death was withheld from Seward. The doctors feared that he could not sustain the shock. On Easter Sunday, however, as he looked out the window towards Lafayette Park, he noticed the War Department flag at half-mast. "He gazed awhile," Noah Brooks reported, "then, turning to his attendant," he announced, "The President is dead." The attendant tried to deny it, but Seward knew with grim certainty. "If he had been alive he would have been the first to call on me," he said, "but he has not been here, nor has he sent to know how I am, and there's the flag at half-mast." He lay back on the bed, "the great tears coursing down his cheeks, and the dreadful truth sinking into his mind." His good friend, his captain and chief was dead.'

Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, p.744.

THE PURPOSE OF OUR LIVES

'We are sent into the world for a short time to say - through the joys and pains of our clock-time - the great "Yes" to the love that has been given to us and in so doing return to the One who sent us with the "Yes" engraved on our hearts. Our death thus becomes the moment of return. But our death can be this only if our whole life has been a journey back to the One from whom we come and who calls us the Beloved.'

Henri JM Nouwen, Life of the Beloved, p.79.

THE INTIMACY OF EATING TOGETHER

'Isn't a meal together the most beautiful expression of our desire to be given to each other in our brokenness? The table, the food, the drinks, the words, the stories: are they not the most intimate ways in which we not only express the desire to give our lives to each other, but also to do this in actuality?'

Henri JM Nouwen, Life of the Beloved, p.65.

PAIN & SUFFERING ARE TRULY INDIVIDUAL

'Our brokenness is always lived and experienced as highly personal, intimate and unique. I am deeply convinced that each human being suffers in a way no other human being suffers. No doubt, we can make comparisons; we can talk about more or less suffering, but, in the final analysis, your pain and my pain are so deeply personal that comparing them can bring scarcely any consolation or comfort . In fact, I am more grateful for a person who can acknowledge that I am very alone in my pain than for someone who tries to tell me that there are many others who have a similar or a worse pain.'

Henri JM Nouwen, Life of the Beloved, p.52.

WHERE OUR TRUE VALUE COMES FROM

'Long before any human being saw us, we are seen by God's loving eyes. Long before anyone heard us cry or laugh, we are heard by God who is all ears for us. Long before any person spoke to us in this world, we are spoken to by the voice of eternal life. Our preciousness , uniqueness and individuality are not given to us by those who meet us in clock-time - our brief chronological existence - but by the One who has chosen us with an everlasting love, a love that existed from all eternity and will last through all eternity.'

Henri JM Nouwen, Life of the Beloved, p.37.

GOD'S LOVE FOR US

'Listening to that voice with great inner attentiveness, I hear at my centre words that say: "I have called you by name, from the very beginning. You are mine and I am yours. You are my Beloved, on you my favour rests. I have moulded you in the depths of the earth and knitted you together in your mother's womb. I have carved you in the plasm of my hands and hidden you in the shadow of my embrace. I look at you with infinite tenderness and care for you with a care more intimate than that of a mother for her child. I have counted every hair on your head and guided you every step. Wherever you go, I go with you, and wherever you rest, I keep watch. I will give you food that will satisfy all your hunger and drink that will quench all your thirst. I will not hide my face from you. You know me as your own and I know you as my own. You belong to me. I am your father, your mother, your brother, your sister, your lover and your spouse...yes even your child...wherever you are I will be. Nothing will ever separate us. We are one.'"

Henri JM Nouwen, Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World, p.24

THE DANGER IN OUR VIRTUES

'When we're young, so much time is spent keeping our vices in check. Our anger, our envy, our pride. But when I look around, it seems to me that so many of our lives end up being hampered by a virtue instead. If you take a trait that by all appearances is a merit - a trait that is praised by pastors and poets, a trait that we have come to admire in our friends and hope to foster in our children - and you give it to some poor soul in abundance, it will almost certainly prove an obstacle to their happiness.'

Amor Towles, The Lincoln Highway, p.495.

WHAT A CHILDHOOD OF SUFFERING GIVES YOU

'For her sake I have regretted that miserable homestead, and blamed my father for the blind and ignorant lemming-impulse that brought us to it. But on my own account I would not have missed it - could not have missed it and be who I am, for better or worse. How better could a boy have known loneliness, which I must think a good thing to know? Who ever can came more truly face to face with beauty than a boy who in a waste of characterless grass and burnouts came upon the first pale primrose on the coulee bank, or on some day of great coasting clouds looked across acres of flax in bloom? Why, short of exile, would anyone ever submit to the vast geometry of sky and earth, to the glare and heat, to the withering winds? But how else could he have met the mystery of nights when the stars were scoured clean and the prairie was full of breathings from a long way off, and the strange, friendly barking of night-hunting owls?'

Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow, p.281.

THE INTIMATE ACT OF MAKING A PATH

'Wearing any such path in the earth's rind is an intimate act, an act like love, and it is denied to the dweller in cities.'

Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow, p.273.

THE POWER OF PLACE

'Expose a child to a particular environment at his susceptible time and he will perceive in the shapes of that environment until he dies.'

Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow, p.21.

THE DANGER OF OVERPLAYING DIFFERENCE

'People say to me, "Men are different from women." Yes, but I have never met any differences so great as the differences between some men and other men.'

Theodore Roosevelt in Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt, p.237.

OUR RELATIONAL GOD

'The God, who in his very triune being us both union and communion, has created us for communion with one another and with himself.'

John Wyatt, Transforming Friendship, p.156.

OUR FRIENDS POINT US TO JESUS

'Christ himself kisses us in the love of our friends.'
Bernard of Clairvaux in John Wyatt, Transforming Friendship, p.155.

HOW RELATIONAL INTIMACY STRENGTHENS CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP

'One thing is clear to me: the temptation of power is greatest when intimacy is a threat. Much Christian leadership is exercised by people who do not know how to develop healthy, intimate relationships and have opted for power and control instead. Many Christian empire-builders have been people unable to give and receive love.'

Henri JM Nouwen in John Wyatt, Transforming Friendship, p.119.

FRIENDSHIP AS A CATALYST FOR FRIENDSHIP

'This is one of the wonders of friendship. The intimacy and depth of one relationship is in no way diluted by my friendship with another. In fact, as I learn and grow in one friendship, I develop greater abilities and resources for deepening friendships with others.'

John Wyatt, Transforming Friendships, p.114.

FRIENDSHIP AS TIME TRAVEL

'If you want to transcend time, build friendships across generations. Though you can't stand outside your own season, you can hear from those who've lived through your season. In my experience this is one of the great gifts of multigenerational friendships. Friendship in this respect is akin to time travel...if we can relinquish the myth of utter singularity, then listening to those generations ahead of us is a way of learning from our future. Granted it is the nature of youth to spurn such gifts. But when we are humbled, friendship across the generations becomes a lifeline, an almost sacramental means of transcending the purview of our now as God gives us an outside glimpse of our moment. But the gifts traverse time both ways. Older generations attentively listening to those younger avail themselves of different ears to hear what's whispering or shouting now.'

James KA Smith in John Wyatt, Transforming Friendship, p.113.

FRIENDSHIP POINTS TO THE RENWAL OF ALL THINGS

'The gospel, the good news about Jesus, concerns the re-creation and renewal of everything and everyone for communion, through the person of Christ. And the deepest and most intimate friendships between Christian believers can become a living embodiment, a tangible enactment, of the restoration of communion between broken human beings which the gospel enables.'

John Wyatt, Transforming Friendship: Lessons from John Stott & Others, p.60.

TRUE POWER

'To refrain, to put aside power is Godlike.'
Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis, p.217.

GRACE MAKES US SUSPICIOUS

'Grace, being apart from the calculus of deserving, is often suspect.'
Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis, p.215.

GOD'S EMOTIONS

'There is a long tradition in theology of divine "impassibility," which teaches that God has no emotions, since if He were capable of anger or pleasure that would mean He was capable of change, including change caused by something outside Himself. The Hebrew Flood narrative is interesting as a meditation on this question. It tells that God can be grieved and angered, and at the same time that God is and will be faithful, to earth and to Adam. He can change and not change. Immutability is not an inevitable consequence of His nature, as if options were denied Him by philosophical consistency. Rather, as the Psalmist says, His steadfast love endures forever.'

Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis, p.65.

GOD'S GRACE

'God's great constancy lies not in any one covenant but in the unshakeable will to be in covenant with willful, small-minded, homicidal humankind.'

Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis, p.53.

THE REALITY OF THE BIBLE

'...the Bible does not exists to explain away mysteries and complexities but to reveal and explore them with respect and restraint that resists conclusion.'

Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis, p.19.

THE HUMAN AUTHORS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE

'...the Bible itself indicates no anxiety about association with human minds, words. lives, and passions. This is a notable instance of our having a lower opinion of ourselves than the Bible justifies.'

Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis, p.5.

THE BIBLE AS THEODICY

'The Bible is a theodicy, a meditation on the problem of evil. This being true, it must take account of things as they are. It must acknowledge in a meaningful way the darkest aspects of the reality we experience, and it must reconcile them with the goodness of God and of Being itself against which this darkness stands out so sharply. This is to say the Bible is a work of theology, not simply a primary text upon which theology is based.'

Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis, p.3.

DISCERNMENT GIFTS

'The good news is that nearly everyone develops talents as they grow up, although sometimes they are a little harder to identify due to certain life experiences. Another way of thinking of these talents is that they aren't what you can do, but what you can't help yourself doing.'

James Lawrence in Nay Dawson, She Needs: Women flourishing in the church, p.20.

THE CHRISTIAN AS A HOLY OBJECT

'...If you wish to boast of a holy object, why do you not praise the holy object that Jesus Christ, God's Son, has touched with His own body? What does He touch? My living and dying; my walking, standing; my suffering, misfortune, and trials - all of which He experienced, bore, and passed through.'

Martin Luther in John W Kleinig, Wonderfully Made, p.68.

LUTHER ON MALE & FEMALE

'God divided mankind into two classes, namely male and female, or a he and she... Therefore each of us must have the kind of body God has created for us. I cannot make myself a woman, nor can you make yourself a man; we do not have that power. But we are exactly as he created us; I am a man and you are a woman. Moreover, he wills to have his excellent handiwork honored as his divine creation, and not despised. The man is not to despise or scoff at the woman or her body, nor the woman the man. But each should honor the other's image and body as a divine and good creation that is well pleasing unto God himself.'

Martin Luther in John W Kleinig, Wonderfully Made: A Protestant Theology of the Body, p.23.

BIBLICAL REALISM

'...what is going on in Christianity? What other system (religious or ideological) is so fastidious about systematically pointing out the real, concrete, serious flaws of its leaders? In a culture where sorry is the hardest word to say, not only among politicians but also in the workplace and frequently at home as well, the Bible offers us a rogues gallery of flawed heroes who lie, steal, commit adultery, covet, hate, kill, and find 1,001 ways not to love God with all their hearts, souks, minds, and strength. This is so pronounced in the Bible, and so relatively rare outside of it, that we may call it a distinctive biblical figure.'

Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory, p.128.

THE VARIETY IN CREATION

'God made a riotous universe of fabulous functionality and superabundant systematicity, a perfect marriage between a tie-die bohemian artist and a round-spectacled besuited mathematician.'

Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory, p.72.

THE GOSPEL AS GIFT

'The Bible's picture of human beings is not as wheelers and dealers in the corporate boardroom, signing contracts with the gods or ultimate reality in order to get ahead; instead, we are joyful children on Christmas morning, receiving unexpectedly lavish gifts from loving parents. Free gift, not contractual obligation, is at the heart of the Bible's picture of reality, just as it at the heart of the Bible's picture of redemption. If this principle is followed through, it yields a world in which the poor, the weak, and the aged are not cast aside because they have nothing to put on the table in the great business deal of life, but they are cared for and honored. God gives freely to those who cannot stand on their own two feet, those who cannot cut a deal with him.'

Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory, p.64.

SHADES OF GREY

'..if no one is thoroughly unredeemable but the devil alone, and if the two cities are intermingled until the final judgement, then the Christian will be predisposed to expect any and every aspect of human culture to contain some mixture of good and evil, beauty and ugliness, truth and falsehood, and will refuse to give absolute allegiance to any human ideology, value, or institution. That refusal and the affirmation of God on which it rests give the Christian a wonderfully open but critical mind to engage with culture in all its diversity. In other words, if we begin and end with a black and white antithesis (God and creation, city of God and earthly city) we find many fine shades of grey in between.'

Christopher Watkin, Critical Thinking: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture, p.20.

GOD'S GOODNESS MUST RUB OFF ON US

'You cannot have [a] relationship with a good God without becoming a better man.'
Michael Green, 2 Peter and Jude, p.119.

MIRACLES & BELIEF

'Miracles don't make people believe!...It's the belief that is the miracle.'

Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower, p.84.

THE HOLY SPIRIT'S SPECIAL WORK

'To persuade a poor, sinful soul that God in Jesus Christ loves him, delights in him, is well pleased with him and only has thoughts of kindness towards him is an expressible mercy.

This is the special work of the Holy Spirit and by this special work we have communion with the Father in his love, which is poured into our hearts.'

John Owen, Communion with God, p.210. 

THE WIDE EMBRACE OF CHRISTIANITY

'Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religions. The scientific point of view cannot fit in any of these things, not even science itself. I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else.'

CS Lewis in 'Is Theology Poetry?', Essay Collection: Faith, Christianity and the Church, p.21.

THE REALISM OF CHRISTIANITY

'Christianity does not merely offer a new way of beholding our world, but an enhanced capacity to live within that world and cope with its uncertainty and complexity, as well as our own frailty and failings. It enables us to confront glib and shallow accounts of our situation, such as the superficial rationalism of the Enlightenment or the facile optimism of an ideology of 'positive thinking', which seeks to exorcise any recognition of the darker and more disturbing aspects of human nature or creation. Reality is complex and ambivalent; wisdom demands that we recognise this, rather than crudely forcing it to be uniformly simple and positive. Intellectual violence is unable to suppress this darker truth about our world, which Christianity has afformed and confronted, rather than implausibly denied.'

Alister McGrath, Through a Glass Darkly, p.207.

THE SELF-INTEREST IN ATHEISM

'It isn't just that I don't believe in God, and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.'

Thomas Nagel in Alister E McGrath, Through a Glass Darkly, p.173.

WE ARE MEANING SEEKING CREATURES

'We cannot simply eat, sleep, hunt and reproduce - we are meaning seeking creatures. The western world has done away with religion but not with religious impulses; we seem to need some higher purpose, some point to our lives - money and leisure, social progress, are not not enough.'

Jeanette Winterson in Alister E McGrath, Through a Glass Darkly, p.165.

THE NEWNESS OF FACTS

'...facts, like telescopes and wigs for gentlemen, were a seventeenth century invention.'

Alasdair MacIntyre in Alister E McGrath, Through a Glass Darkly: Journeys through Science, Faith & Doubt, p.158.