THE IMPORTANCE OF STRUCTURE

'...the students talked loudly about wanting to be free to dance, to make love, to be themselves. So do I. So we left literature and talked about the body, and I kept asking questions: what is it in you which gives you freedom? Finally one of the young men, with great reluctance, pulled out the word: skeleton. It is our bones, our structure, which frees us to dance, to make love. Without our structure we would be an imprisoned, amorphous blob of flesh, incapable of response. The amoeba has a minimum of structure, but I doubt it has much fun.'

Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet, p.123.

WHAT WILL YOUR MORAL LEGACY?

'We all grew up in one moral ecology or another. We all create microcultures around us by the way we live our lives and the vibes we send out to those around us, One of the greatest legacies a person can leave is a moral ecology - a system of belief and behavior that lives on after they die.'

David Brooks, The Second Mountain, p.4.

LIVING THE SIMPLE CHRISTIAN LIFE

'Living Christianly is not complicated, though it is profound (and exceedingly difficult). The simplicity flows from the fact that everything commanded comes down to loving God and neighbor, while everything forbidden can be traced back to the worship of false gods, which places some other god before the Lord.' 

James M Hamilton Jr. Work and our Labor in the Lord, p.74. 

WHAT ARE OUR BLIND SPOTS?

'Every age before this one has performed or permitted acts that to us are morally stupefying. So unless we have any reason to think we are any more reasonable, morally better or wiser than at any time in the past, it is reasonable to assume there will be some things we are presently doing - possibly while flushed with moral virtue - that our descendant will whistle through through their teeth at, and say "What the hell were they thinking?" It is worth wondering what the blind spots of our age might be. What might we be doing that will be regarded by succeeding generations in the same way we now look down on the slave trade or using Victorian children as chimney sweeps.' 

Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds, p.184. 

THE IMPORTANCE OF HISTORY IN THE CHRISTIAN LIFE

'...history is important, for without it we are at the mercy of whims. Memory is a databank we use to evaluate our position and make decisions. With a biblical memory we have two thousand years of experience from which to make the off-the-cuff responses that are required each day in the life of faith. If we are going to live adequately and maturely as the people of God, we need more data to work from than our own experience can give us. 

What would we think of pollster who issues a definitive report on how the American people felt about a new television special, if we discovered later that he has interviewed only one person who had seen only ten minutes of the program? We would dismiss the conclusions as frivolous. Yet that is exactly the kind of evidence that too many Christians accept as the final truth about many much more important matters - matters such as answered prayer, God's judgement, Christ's forgiveness, eternal salvation. The only person they consult is themselves, and only experience they evaluate is the most recent ten minutes. But we need other experiences, the community of experience of brothers and sisters in the church, the centuries of experience provided by our biblical ancestors. A Christian who has David in his bones, Jeremiah in his bloodstream, Paul in his fingers tips and Christ in his heart will know how much and how little value to put on his own momentary feelings and the experience of the past week.' 

Eugene H Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, p.160.  

PLUMBING & MORALITY

'...next to plumbing, morality is social convenience number one.'
Austin Farrer in Eugene H Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, p.114. 

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 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.

THE POLITICALLY CORRECT

'A great many of those who "debunk" traditional or (they say) "sentimental" values have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process.' 

CS Lewis, The Abolition of Man, p.29. 

ETHICS TODAY

'One of the ironies in the story of Western theology during my lifetime has been the way in which the"liberal" tradition, which used to pride itself above all on clear, rational thinking, has quietly been taken over by emotivism, not least in the area of ethics. Meanwhile, the "conservative" tradition, which used to pride itself on carefully articulated ethical as well as doctrinal stances, has often been so worried about the danger of "work-righteousness" that it has turned a blind eye to the nature of moral understanding and effort upon which Paul is doing his best to insist, and has effectively ruled out virtue before it begins, lest people should suppose themselves to be contributing to their own salvation. No wonder that, when we try to debate key issues, we find ourselves in a dialogue of the deaf.' 

Tom Wright, Virtue Reborn, p.138.  

BE WHO YOU ARE

'If I had to summarize New Testamenty ethics in one sentence, here's how I would put it: be who you are. That may sound strange, almost heretical, given our culture's emphasis on being true to yourself. But like so many of the worst errors in the world, this one represents a truth powerfully perverted. When people say, "Relax, you were born that way." or "Quit trying to be something you're not and just be the real you," they are stumbling upon something very biblical. God does want you to be the real you. He does want you to be true to yourself. But the "you" he's talking about is the "you" that you are by grace, not by nature. You may want to read through that last sentence again because the difference between living in sin and living in righteousness depends on getting that sentence right. God doesn't say, "Relax, you were born this way." But he does say, "Good news, you were reborn another way."'

Kevin DeYoung, The Hole in Our Holiness, p.100.

ETHICS

'Those who wish even to focus on the problem of a Christian ethic are faced with an outrageous demand - from the outset they must give up, as inappropriate to this topic, the very two questions that led them to deal with the ethical problem: "How can I be good?" and "How can I do something good?" Instead they must ask the wholly other, completely different question: "What is the will of God?"'

Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer, p.468.

ETHICS

'Philosophy does not excite many people today, and many people do not even want to hear personal testimony and the simple gospel. But they do care about right and wrong. Christians who can talk about ethics in a cogent way, therefore, have great apologetic and evangelistic advantage.'

John Frame, The Doctrine of the Christian Life, p.5.