HOW BEAUTY CREATES A HUNGER FOR TRUTH

'The beautiful, almost without any effort of its own, acquaints us with the mental event of conviction, and so pleasurable a mental state is this that ever afterwards one is willing to labor, struggle, wrestle with the world to locate enduring sources of conviction - to locate what is true.'

Elaine Scarry in Karen Swallow Prior, You Have a Calling, p.118.

TELLING THE TRUTH

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —

Emily Dickinson in Karen Swallow Prioer, You Have a Calling, p.95.

EVIL DESTROYS ITSELF

'...evil carries the seed of its own destruction. In the long run right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.'

Martin Luther King Jr., 'The Death of Evil upon the Seashore' in The Gift of Love, p.86.

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.

BEAUTY & TRUTH

'We often hear it said that all truth is God's truth. By the same token, we might also say that all beauty is God's beauty...'

Alastair Gordon, Why Art Matters, p.78.

THE NEED TO RUN A RISK ASSESSMENT ON OUR BELIEFS

'A crucial task... for those with any convictions is surely to identify the risks peculiar to those convictions.'

Mark Meynell, Roots of the Malaise? The "O Tempora! O Mores!" Blogposts, p.82.

AN AUTHENTIC APOLOGY

'How can you tell the difference between an apology and a simple concession? An authentic apology, especially when it is offered in response to significant and long-term harm, will be so clearly distinct from every prior experience that it will be unquestionably received. It will appear like a flash of light in a darkened room, like an exploding clap of thunder in the dead of night, like the unveiling of a hidden treasure, like a resurrection from the dead - not because of any of the apologizer's qualities but because of the innate power of truth.'

Wade Mullen, Something's Not Right, p.131.

JESUS WORDS AND ACTIONS DEFINE TRUTH

'...anything that does not look like God incarnate is not truth...'
Diane Langberg, Redeeming Power, p.41.

GOOD TEACHERS

'The satisfied never make good teachers. It isn't the mastery of truth, but a relentless longing for it that qualifies those who become trusted guides for others. Mark it down as a rule: the desert alone possesses the secret knowledge of water.' 

Belden C Lane, Ravished by Beauty: The Surprising Legacy of Reformed Spirituality, p.1. 

TOLERANCE

'We need to make a distinction between the tolerant mind and the tolerant spirit. A Christian should always be tolerant in spirit - loving, understanding, forgiving and being patient with others, making allowances for them, and giving them the benefit of the doubt, for true love "always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres" [1 Corinthians 13:7]. But how can we be tolerant in mind of what God has clearly revealed to be wrong?'

John Stott in 'Andrew Atherstone & Andrew Goddard, Good Disagreement? Grace and Truth in a Divided Church, p.9.

THE DANGERS IN THE TRUTH

'Truth seduces us very easily into a kind of joy of possession: I have comprehended this and that, learned it, understood it. Knowledge is power. I am therefore more than the other man who does not know this and that. I have great possibilities and also greater temptations. Anyone who deals with truth - as we theologians certainly do - succumbs all too easily to the psychology of the possessor. But love is the opposite of the will to possess. It is self-giving. It boasteth not in itself, but humbleth itself.' 

Helmut Thielicke in Jared C Wilson, The Pastor's Justification, p.62. 

SEARCHING FOR TRUTH

'...each individual reasoner is really good at one thing: finding evidence to support the position she or he already holds, usually for intuitive reasons. We should not expect individuals to produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly when self-interest or reputational concerns are in play. But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some of the individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is why it's so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity within any group or institution whose goal is to find truth (such as an intelligence agency or community of scientists) or to produce good public policy (such as a legislature or advisory board).' 

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, p.105.

CHRISTIANITY

'Ideal Christianity doesn't exist, because anything the human being touches, even Christian truth, he deforms slightly in his own image.' 

Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being, p.516. 

TRUTH

'But I can never agree with you that the Incarnation, or any truth, has to satisfy emotionally to be right (and I would not agree that for the natural man the Incarnation does not satisfy emotionally). It does not satisfy emotionally for the person brought up under many forms of false intellectual discipline such as 19th century mechanism, for instance. Leaving the Incarnation aside, the very notion of God's existence is not emotionally satisfactory for great numbers of people, which does not mean that God ceases to exist. M.Satre finds God emotionally unsatisfactory in the extreme, as do most of my friends of less stature than he. The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. A higher paradox confounds emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of all of us, and of the saints, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive. Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.

There is a question whether faith can or is supposed to be emotionally satisfying. I must say that the thought of everyone lolling around in an emotionally satisfying faith is repugnant to me. I believe that we are ultimately directed Godward but that this journey is often impeded by emotion.' 

Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being, p.100.   

GOOD FRIDAY

'If what Christians say about Good Friday is true, then it is, quite simply, the truth about everything.'

Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon, p.xi.

THE FALL

'This page of Genesis is rewritten every day in the living out of the human story. Each of us has been there when we, godlike, decided that we would determine what is good and what is evil - at least for our own lives. Perhaps we shied away from the godlike pretension of making a universal rule that applies to all. Modestly - or so we said - we limited ourselves to deciding "what is good for me" and "what is wrong for me." "I can speak only for myself," we say. We would not think of "imposing" our judgment upon others. Under the cover of modesty, we deny the truth about the good and evil that does not require our permission to be true. Thus we would evade the truth of good and evil that brings us to judgment. The truth is that we do not judge the truth, the truth judges us.'  

Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon, p.13.

TRUTH

'If orthodoxy is to attain vitality - and stop frightening the rest of professing Christendom away from biblical thinking by producing such monuments as the American Bible Belt and South African Calvinism - orthodoxy must enlarge its task to include cleaning its own house along with detecting and denouncing heresy.'

Richard Lovelace, Dynamics of Spiritual Life, p.286.

HERESY

'Elements of truth can be found in almost any system, if not because of common grace, then because the devil needs an admixture of truth in order to market a lie successfully. The most effective heresies have capitalized on important elements of truth which were lacking in current Christian understanding.'

Richard Lovelace, Dynamics of Spiritual Life, p.218.

REFORMATION & REVIVAL

'Concentration on reformation without revival leads to skins without wine; concentration on revival without reformation soon loses the wine for want of skins.'

Richard Lovelace, Dynamics of Spritual Life: An Evangelical Theology of Renewal, p.16.

GOD

'"...Eternal Fact..."'
CS Lewis, The Great Divorce, p.42.