BECOMING A CHRISTIAN

'To transition from believing you live in a world where death is the end, to one in which an almighty God calls dead things to life.'

Esau McCaulley, Lent: The Season of Repentance and Renewal, p.7.

TRUE FREEDOM

'...Christian freedom...is the essential freedom of human beings to develop themselves as human creatures.'

Hans Rookmaaker in Marsh Moyle, Rumours of a Better Country: Searching for trust and community in a time of moral outrage, p.53.

DON'T LOSE THE SUPERNATURAL THRUST OF CHRISTIANITY

'Once the supernatural thrust has gone from Christianity, what remains? Well-meaning sentiment and a set of commandments found to be crushing, the finality of change they were meant to serve having been summarily dismissed.'

Erik Varden, Chastity, p.114.

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.

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 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 RESILIENCE OF CHRISTIANITY

'Again and again it has been thought Christianity was dying, dying by persecutions from without and corruptions from within, by the rise of Mohammedanism, the rise of the physical sciences, the rise of great anti-Christian revolutionary movements. But every time the world has been disappointed. Its first disappointment was over the crucifixion. The Man came to life again. In a sense - and I quite realise how frightfully unfair it must seem to them - that has been happening ever since. They keep on killing the thing that He started: and each time, just as they are down the earth on its grave, they suddenly hear that it is still alive and has even broken out in some new place. No wonder they hate us...'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.222.

THE ACCESSIBILITY OF CHRISTIANITY

'...one of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself.'

CS Lewis, Mere Orthodoxy, p.78.

CHRISTIANITY COULD NOT HAVE BEEN MADE UP

'Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is not the sort of thing that anyone would have made up.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.41.

CHRISTIAN BEAUTIFICATION

'Christian living is participation in God, in "the supreme loveliness of his nature". And if what defines God supremely is his beauty or loveliness or excellency, then to participate in the triune life of God is to be swept up into, and to exude that heavenly resplendence. A Christian is one who id being beatified.' 

Jonathan Edwards in Julian Hardyman, Jesus, Lover of My Soul, p.146.

MARRIAGE & THE BIBLE

'The marriage metaphor...keeps popping is again in the Bible like rocky granite outcrops revealing what underlies the whole landscape.'

Julian Hardyman, Jesus, Lover of My Soul, p.100.

THE AUDACITY OF CHRISTIANITY

'To be a Christian is to believe that God became man, and suffered a death as terrible as any mortal has ever suffered. This is why the cross, that ancient implement of torture, remains what it has always been: the fitting symbol of the Christian revolution. It is the audacity of it - the audacity of finding in a twisted and defeated corpse the glory of the creator of the universe - that serves to explain more surely than anything else, the sheer strangeness of Christianity, and of the civilization to which it gave birth.' 

Tom Holland, Dominion, p.524.

THE CHRISTIAN REVOLUTIONS

'Repeatedly, like a great earthquake, Christianity has sent reverberated across the world. First there was the primal revolution: the revolution preached by St Paul. There there came the aftershocks: the revolution in the eleventh century that set Latin Christendom upon its momentous course; the revolution commemorated as the Reformation; the revolution that killed God. All bore an identical stamp: the aspiration to enfold within their embrace every other possible way of seeing the world; the claim to a universalism that was culturally highly specific. That human beings have rights; that they are born equal; that they are owed sustenance, and shelter, and refuge from persecution; these were never self-evident truths.' 

Tom Holland, Dominion, p.523,

THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY

'I have written so much in this book about churches, and monasteries, and universities; but these were never where the mass of the Christian people were most influentially shaped. It was always in the home that children were likeliest to absorb the revolutionary teachings that, over the course of two thousand years, have come to be so taken for granted as almost to seem human nature. The Christian revolution was wrought above all at the knees of women.' 

Tom Holland, Dominion, p.519.

HOW CHRISTIANITY ITSELF UNDERMINES CHRISTIAN ARROGANCE

'Repeatedly, whether crashing along the canals of Tenochtitlan, or settling the estuaries of Massachusetts, or trekking deep into the Transvaal, the confidence that had enabled Europeans to believe themselves superior to those they were displacing was derived from Christianity. Repeatedly, though, in the struggle to hold this arrogance to account, it was Christianity that had provided the colonised and the enslaved with their surest voice. The paradox was profound. No other conquerors, dismissing with contempt the gods of other peoples, had installed in their place an emblem of power so deeply ambivalent as to render problematic the very notion of power. No other conquerors, exporting an understanding of the divine peculiar to themselves, has so successfully persuaded people around the globe that it possessed a universal import.'

Tom Holland, Dominion, p.487.

THE SELF-DESTRUCTION OF LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY

'Like a team of suicide bombers who obliterate themselves yet irrevocably change the cultural atmosphere, liberal Christianity has essentially destroyed itself as an ecclesiological, institutional force, yet has won the culture over to its vision of a Christianity reshaped for contemporary tastes.' 

Mark Sayers, Disappearing Church: From Cultural Relevance to Gospel Resilience, p.23. 

THE NEED FOR DISGUST BEFORE CONVERSION

'A person has to be thoroughly disgusted with the way things are to find the motivation to set out on the Christian way. As long as we think the next election might eliminate crime and establish justice or another scientific breakthrough might save the environment or another pay rise might push us over the edge of anxiety into a life of tranquillity, we are not likely to risk the arduous uncertainties of the life of faith,. A person has to get fed up with ways of the world before he, before she, acquires an appetite for the world of grace.'

Eugene Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, p.19. 

THE CHRISTIAN FAITH IS ABOUT WAITING

'There is a kind of high comedy about our faith. There is a kind of high comedy about our seeing and not seeing, about waiting, about being human but not quite human. We wait for him to come - more than we know, each of us waits for our heart's desire - and he comes only in metaphors, in shadowy glimpses through the tall and bleeding trees; in long silences through which some words should be spoken and are spoken but never quite audibly enough for us to be sure we've heard them right: "The blood of our Lord Jesus Christ which was shed for thee preserve they body and soul unto everlasting life" 

Body and soul, we wait for the new life to make us everlastingly alive, new blood to flow through our dusty and sorrowing world, soft as rainwater and almost without taste but with the faintest tinge of sweetness to it. He was a fine man, our Lord and General. He was everything a man should be. He was everything we all should be and from the deepest part of ourselves yearn to be - loving, brave, just - but are not yet, not by a long shot.' 

Frederick Buechner, 'A Little While' in A Room Called Remember, p.103. 

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 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.