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“It has become customary to classify views on the relation of Christianity to the world religions as either pluralist, exclusivist, or inclusivist… . [My] position is exclusivist in the sense that it affirms the unique truth of the revelation in Jesus Christ, but it is not exclusivist in the sense of denying the possibility of the salvation of the non-Christian. It is inclusivist in the sense that it refuses to limit the saving grace of God to the members of the Christian church, but it rejects the inclusivism which regards the non-Christian religions as vehicles of salvation. It is pluralist in the sense of acknowledging the gracious work of God in the lives of all human beings, but it rejects a pluralism which denies the uniqueness and decisiveness of what God has done in Jesus Christ.”

-----Lesslie Newbigin, in The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (1983)

"Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn't mind it at all: and again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself...I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving God (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even tho' I could not say in cold prose 'what it meant.'

Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with the tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God's myth where the others are men's myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing himself through the minds of poets, using such images as he found there, while Christianity is God expressing himself through 'real things.'

The 'doctrines' we get out of the true myth are of course less true: they are translations into our concepts and ideas of that wh. God has already expressed in language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection."

-----C.S. Lewis

"The demands of God are understood in the Reformed tradition as the good gift of God to be received with gratitude, exercised for the welfare of all human beings, and obeyed in confidence that God's grace gives us the ability to do what God's law requires. Law, in other words, is a part of the gospel of saving grace, not something opposed to it or some alternative to it."

-----"The Confessional Nature of the Church: A Report," taken from the 209th General Assembly of the PCUSA, 1997.

“Please do not think that one of these views [i.e. naturalism and supernaturalism] was held a long time ago and that the other has gradually taken its place. Wherever there have been thinking men both views turn up. And not this too. You cannot find out which view is the right one by science in the ordinary sense. Science works by experiments. It watches how things behave. Every scientific statement in the long run, however complicated it looks, really means something like, ‘I pointed the telescope to such and such a part of the sky at 2:20am on January 15th and saw so-and-so,’ or, ‘I put some of this stuff in a pot and heated it to such-and-such a temperature and it did so-and-so.’ Do not think I am saying anything against science: I am only saying what its job is.

And the more scientific a man is, the more (I believe) he would agree with me that this is the job of science—and a very useful and necessary job it is too. But why anything comes to be there at all, and whether there is anything behind the things science observes—something of a different kind—this is not a scientific question. If there is ‘Something Behind’, then either it will have to remain altogether unknown to men or else make itself known in some different way. The statement that there is any such thing, and the statement that there is no such thing, are neither of them statements that science can make. And real scientists do not usually make them. It is usually the journalists and popular novelists who have picked up a few odds and ends of half-baked science from textbooks who go in for them. After all, it really is a matter of common sense. Supposing science ever became complete so that it knew every single thing in the whole universe. Is it not plain that the questions, ‘Why is there a universe?’ ‘Why does it go on as it does?’ ‘Has it any meaning?’ would remain just as they were?”

-----C. S. Lewis, from Mere Christianity

"A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste, and such a society is a house built upon sand."

"The economist is inside the squirrel cage and turning with it. Any question about absolute values belongs to the sphere, not of economics, but of religion. And it is very possible that we cannot deal with economics at all, unless we can see economy from outside the cage; that we cannot begin to settle the relative values without considering absolute values. And if so, this may give a very precise and practical meaning to the words: 'seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness; and all these things shall be added to you.'...I am persuaded that the reason why the Churches are in so much difficulty about giving a lead in the economic sphere is because they are trying to fit a Christian standard of economics to a wholly false and pagan understanding of work."

"It is the business of the Church to recognize that the secular vocation, as such, is sacred."

"No piety in the worker will compensate for work that is not true to itself; for any work that is untrue to its own technique is a living lie."

"We are coming to the end of an era of civilization which began by pandering to the public demand, and ended by frantically trying to create public demand for an output so false and meaningless that even a doped public revolted from the trash offered to it and plunged into war rather than swallow any more of it."

-----Dorothy Sayers, excerpts from the essay, "Why Work?", found in the collection, "Creed or Chaos: Why Christians Must Choose Either Dogma or Disaster (Or, Why It Really Does Matter What You Believe). Originally Delivered, April 23, 1942.

Irish Times Piece on Papal Encyclical

This is a must read.

X

How can we be so superior to our forebears?
The truth will never be complete
in any mind or time. It will never
be reduced to an explanation.
What you have is only a sack of fragments
never to be filled: old bones, fossils,
pieces of writing, sprawls of junk.
You know yourself only poorly and in part,
the best and the worst maybe forgotten.
However you arrange the bits, authentic
and random, a fiction is what you'll have.
But go ahead. Gather your findings into
a plausible arrangement. Make a story.
Show how love and joy, beauty and goodness
shine out amongst the rubble.

-----Wendell Berry, from his unpublished 2006 "Sabbaths" series.

This made me interested in learning more about Cornel West.

"West never committed fully to the Black Panthers' view of the world. 'I could never join, because of my Christian faith,' he says. 'You had to be an atheist. My whole life as a person on the left, I've been saying, "I'm with you, but I'm never fully with you, because I'm a Christian." He believes in Marx's radical critique of capital and empire but believes just as strongly in God. To West, Marxism without what he calls 'the love ethic' is inhumane, just as Christianity without systemic economic and political analysis is incomplete."

-----Jeff Sharlet, from an article on Cornel West in Rolling Stone Issue 1079.

What thou lovest well remains,
the rest is dross
What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage

-----Ezra Pound, excerpt from "The Pisan Cantos"

Augustine would be proud.

IN DEFENSE OF "MUSLIM WOMEN'S SWIM TIME"

This past Sunday I went to the Princeton University pool to swim after church. I arrived a bit early, around 12:45. The pool wasn't supposed to open until 1pm. When I walked down into the basement of Dillon gym there was a sign on the door, "WOMEN ONLY SWIM, MEN KEEP OUT." Perplexed, I sat down on the steps outside the pool deck and waited for 1pm.

Not too long after I sat down, I was joined by a diminutive old man in a speedo who pulled a face when he saw the sign, and then sat down next to me. As we were sitting there---speculating to one another about why the pool was closed to men---two other guys in business suits (apparently touring the facility) walked past us into the pool area. Whereupon the lifeguard began yelling, telling them to clear out.

As the lifeguard ushered the two unsuspecting men off the pool deck, a lady in a one-piece suit with wild hair walked up and said, "what's all the commotion?" The old man and I shrugged. Then the lifeguard explained that the pool was closed so that female Muslim students could swim without revealing themselves to any men. This made perfect sense to me, and I was quite proud that Princeton had chosen to respect the wishes of their female Muslim students by setting aside this time. But just as I was about to respond to the lifeguard with this thought, the lady with the wild hair raised her voice and made the following comment; "You know what this is? I'll tell you what this is. This is the institutional perpetuation of the religious abuse of women!"

No lady, what this is... is in fact the freedom of religion and cultural sensitivity being carried out, it's meant to protect all of us from the tyranny of people like you.

"I felt it in myself, the glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it's there in your hands. To release the energy that fuels the stars. To let it do your bidding. And to perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky, it is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is in some ways responsible for all our troubles, I would say, this is what you might call 'technical arrogance' that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds."

-----Freeman Dyson, talking about his work on nuclear weaponry in the NYT Magazine

“Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain, because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from.”

"I was by myself, wearing nylon warm-up pants and a black Pink Floyd tee shirt, trying to spin a soccer ball on my finger and watching the CBS soap opera “As The World Turns” on the room’s little black-and-white Zenith. . . . There was certainly always reading and studying for finals I could do, but I was being a wastoid. . . . Anyhow, I was sitting there trying to spin the ball on my finger and watching the soap opera . . . and at the end of every commercial break, the show’s trademark shot of planet earth as seen from space, turning, would appear, and the CBS daytime network announcer’s voice would say, “You’re watching ‘As the World Turns,’ ” which he seemed, on this particular day, to say more and more pointedly each time—“You’re watching ‘As the World Turns’ ” until the tone began to seem almost incredulous—“You’re watching ‘As the World Turns’ ”—until I was suddenly struck by the bare reality of the statement. . . . It was as if the CBS announcer were speaking directly to me, shaking my shoulder or leg as though trying to arouse someone from sleep—“You’re watching ‘As the World Turns.’ ” . . . I didn’t stand for anything. If I wanted to matter—even just to myself—I would have to be less free, by deciding to choose in some kind of definite way."

-----David Foster Wallace, excerpts from his unpublished last novel


After [his wife] left, Wallace went into the garage and turned on the lights. He wrote her a two-page note. Then he crossed through the house to the patio, where he climbed onto a chair and hanged himself. When one character dies in “Infinite Jest,” he is “catapulted home over . . . glass palisades at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear and nearly maternal alarmed call-to-arms in all the world’s well-known tongues.”
Green returned home at nine-thirty, and found her husband. In the garage, bathed in light from his many lamps, sat a pile of nearly two hundred pages. He had made some changes in the months since he considered sending them to Little, Brown. The story of “David Wallace” was now first. In his final hours, he had tidied up the manuscript so that his wife could find it. Below it, around it, inside his two computers, on old floppy disks in his drawers were hundreds of other pages—drafts, character sketches, notes to himself, fragments that had evaded his attempt to integrate them into the novel. This was his effort to show the world what it was to be “a fucking human being.” He had not completed it to his satisfaction. This was not an ending anyone would have wanted for him, but it was the ending he chose.


“This is a generation that has an inheritance of absolutely nothing as far as meaningful moral values, and it’s our job to make them up.”

-----David Foster Wallace, excerpt from a 1993 interview


“I do not know why the comparative ease and pleasure of writing nonfiction always confirms my intuition that fiction is really What I’m Supposed to Do, but it does, and now I’m back here flogging away (in all senses of the word) and feeding my own wastebasket.”

-----David Foster Wallace, from a letter to Don DeLillo

"Mere light sophistry is the thing that I happen to despise most of all things, and it is perhaps a wholesome fact that this is the thing of which I am generally accused. I know nothing so contemptible as a mere paradox; a mere ingenious defence of the indefensible. If it were true (as has been said) that Mr. Bernard Shaw lived upon paradox, then he ought to be a mere common millionaire; for a man of his mental activity could invent a sophistry every six minutes. It is as easy as lying; because it is lying. The truth is, of course, that Mr. Shaw is cruelly hampered by the fact that he cannot tell any lie unless he thinks it is the truth. I find myself under the same intolerable bondage. I never in my life said anything merely because I thought it funny; though of course, I have had ordinary human vainglory, and may have thought it funny because I had said it. It is one thing to describe an interview with a gorgon or a griffin, a creature who does not exist. It is another thing to discover that the rhinoceros does exist and then take pleasure in the fact that he looks as if he didn't. One searches for truth, but it may be that one pursues instinctively the more extraordinary truths. And I offer this book with the heartiest sentiments to all the jolly people who hate what I write, and regard it (very justly, for all I know), as a piece of poor clowning or a single tiresome joke."

-----G.K. Chesterton, from the introduction to "Orthodoxy"....lest you thought he was kidding.

I'll be reading through "The Ladder of Divine Ascent" by John Climacus, a 7th Century Eastern monk, for Lent this year. What follows for the next month will consist of a collection of quotations that I like from the work. Feel free to leave comments or add quotations of your own.

"It is risky to swim in one's clothes. A slave of passion should not dabble in theology."

"Anyone trained in chastity should give himself no credit for any achievements.... When nature is overcome it should be admitted that this is due to Him Who is above nature.... The man who decides to struggle against his flesh and to overcome it by his own efforts is fighting in vain.... Admit your incapacity.... What have you got that you did not receive as a gift either from God or as a result of the help and prayers of others?.... It is sheer lunacy to imagine that one has deserved the gifts of God."

-----John Climacus, "The Ladder of Divine Ascent"

"Where the evil of the existing order is recognized, revolution is born. The revolutionary would like to overthrow the old order, replacing it with 'justice'. But in that he does so, he too claims for himself that which no human being can claim. He treats the 'right' as a thing which he can control: 'he forgets that he is not the One, the Subject of that freedom for which he thirsts; . . . not the Christ who stands over against the Grand Inquisitor but, on the contrary, always only the Grand Inquisitor who stands over against the Christ.' The revolutionary aims at 'the Revolution, which is the impossible possibility.' But instead, he carries out 'the other revolution . . . the possible possibility of dissatisfaction, hatred, insubordination, rebellion, and destruction.' What is the Christian to do in the face of this 'possible possibility'? She is to witness to the Revolution, by her 'not doing'; by not becoming angry, by not attacking and not destroying. She is to deprive the existing order of pathos, thereby starving it out of existence. That is the 'the great negative possibility'."

-----Bruce McCormack, quoting and explaining Karl Barth, from his book, "Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology"

Tolkien on exegesis. You can see here how he approached Christianity as myth become fact. I find this particularly interesting in light of the incompleteness of modern biblical criticism and the subsequent turn to theological/literary exegesis in biblical studies. It's also a strong argument against the reductions of classical materialism.

"We must be satisfied with the soup that is set before us, and not desire to see the bones of the ox out of which it has been boiled...By the 'soup' I mean the story as it is served up by its author or teller, and by the 'bones' its source or material--even when, (by rare luck), those can be with certainty discovered. But I do not forbid, of course, the criticism of 'soup' as 'soup'."

"The picture [of a tapestry] is greater than , and not explained by, the sum of the component threads. Therein lies the inherent weakness of the analytic (or 'scientific') method: it finds out much about things that occur in stories, but little or nothing about their effect in any given story."

"I had no special childish 'wish to believe'. I wanted to know. Belief depended upon the way in which stories were presented to me, by older people, or by the authors, or on the inherent tone and quality of he tale. But at no time can I remember that the enjoyment of a story was dependent on belief that such things could happen, or had happened, in 'real life'. Fairy-stories were plainly not primarily concerned with possibility, but with desirability. If they awakened desire, satisfying it while often whetting it unbearably, they succeeded."

"The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous 'turn' (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially 'escapist', nor 'fugitive'. In its fairy-tale---or otherworldly---setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophy, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief."

J.R.R. Tolkien, excerpts from his essay "On Fairy-Stories" in "Essays Presented to Charles Williams"

My life before Sarah...

"I wonder whether you are on the right track in expecting 'stable sentiments' and successful adjustment to life.' This is the language of modern psychology rather than of religion or even of common experience, and I sometimes think that when the psychologists speak of adjustment to life they really mean perfect happiness and unbroken good fortune! Not to get - or, worse still, to be- what one wants is not a disease that can be cured, but the normal condition of man. To feel guilty, when one is guilty, and to realise, not without pain, one's moral and intellectual inadequacy, is not a disease, but commonsense. To find that one's emotions do not 'come to heel' and line up as stable sentiments in permanent conformity with one's convictions is simply the facts of being a fallen, and still imperfectly redeemed, man. We may be thankful if, by continual prayer and self-discipline, we can, over years, make some approach to that stability. After all, St. Paul who was a good deal further along the road than you and I, could still write Romans, chapter 7, verses 21-23."

-----C.S. Lewis, from a letter to Michael Edwards (BOD) in "The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis: Volume III"