Classic and contemporary excerpts.
Man The Magician
Science enormously emphasizes the unique status of Man. It makes him much more obviously the lord of creation, the measure of all things, the image of God. What it does not do is to give any guarantee whatever that this magician will use his powers well, that he will advance pari passu in moral as in material things. Put those two facts together, and you find yourself facing the two dogmas of the Creation and the Fall.
—G. K. Chesterton
America, November 12, 1927
An Uneasy Confrontation
The late Professor Jacques Monod, the famous French geneticist and Nobel prize winner, in the course of a television session in Toronto with Mother Teresa, spoke of how in his opinion all our destiny was locked up in our genes, which shape and direct our character and outlook, thus destroying the individual. As he held forth on this theme, Mother Teresa sat with her eyes closed and her hands folded, deep in prayer. On being asked by the programme’s compère whether she had anything to say, she replied: “I believe in love and compassion,” and resumed her devotions.
As the Professor was leaving the studio he was heard to mutter: “If I saw much more of that woman I should be in bad trouble!”
—Kitty Muggeridge
Gazing on Truth
Blessed By Humility
Christianity is not one ideology over against other ideologies. It is a life inspired by the Holy Spirit. Its victories are nothing but victories over itself, not over others.
It propagates itself through humility and self-examination, not through triumphs.
—Paul Tournier
The Whole Person in a Broken World
Overrefinements
Euphemism has its place, says this Anglican priest, but not in the Bible. His criticism of the New English Bible [for example] is included in Fair Speech: The Uses of Euphemism (Oxford), edited by D. J. Enright:
There is a great deal of this polite drawing-room chat in most new translations of the Bible, as if sin were not bad but only bad form. “Be perfect”—Paul’s uncompromising injunction to those same Corinthians—comes out as “mend your ways”; Christ’s white-hot condemnation of the Pharisees in the words “Ye fools and blind” (Matt. 23:18) is cooled into the impersonal abstraction “What blindness”; and his rebuke to the disciples on the road to Emmaus “O fools and slow of heart” (Luke 24:25) is weakened to become “How dull you are.” … Even the end of the world is described as if it were only an exceptionally hot afternoon at Good-wood: “My dear friends [that is the NEB’s urbane, housetrained Saint Peter], do not be bewildered by the fiery ordeal that is coming upon you, as though it were something extraordinary.”
—Peter Mullen quoted in
New York Times
Book Review
The Missing Person
In many Christian circles the Holy Spirit is either neglected, forgotten, or misunderstood. The One given to unite the body of Christ is the center of controversy.
This is a nettle which ought to be firmly grasped. So often Christian work is so rigidly programmed that it seems we need no longer depend on Him-yet Jesus said, “Without Me you can do nothing.” … The late Dr. A. W. Tozer, author and pastor, said, “If the Holy Spirit was withdrawn from the church today, 95 percent of what we do would go on and no one would know the difference. If the Holy Spirit had been withdrawn from the New Testament church, 95 percent of what they did would stop, and everybody would know the difference.”
—Alan Redpath
in Christian Life magazine
Beginning Again
Forgiveness isn’t pretending nothing has happened, or pretending that what happened didn’t hurt. It isn’t even forgetting it completely, and it isn’t going back and starting over as though it hadn’t ever happened. Instead, forgiveness is refusing to let anything permanently destroy the relationship. There’s a place for saying, “I’m sorry.” There’s a place for assuring the other person that “all is forgiven.” But the goal of both is to rebuild the relationship. One of the amazing things about a healthy beginning again is that the relationship is often stronger than it was before.
—Kenneth Chafin
How to Know When You’ve
Got It Made
Purpose Or Chaos?
There are, in every situation, two factors: there is what happens, and there is how we take what happens. How we take what happens goes back to what kind of person we are, and what kind of belief we have about life as a whole. If the whole scheme of life is not a scheme at all but a chaos, if there is no thread of purpose running through it all but only confusion, then our misfortunes are just part of the general mess. But if God is, and if life is His creation, with meaning in the middle of it, then we may hope to discover a pattern which will both give coherence to it all and help to interpret any one event in the unfoldment.
—Sam Shoemaker
quoted in I Stand By the Door
Sport As Religion
“Sport is America’s newest and fastest-growing religion, far outdistancing whatever is in second place,” says Charles S. Prebish, associate professor of religious studies at Pennsylvania State University.… It is not merely like a religion, he argues, nor is it a “secular” religion, as other religion scholars and soliologists have postulated. To Mr. Prebish, sport can and does provide its followers everything that traditional religions have provided over the centuries. He writes: “For me, it is not just a parallel that is emerging between sport and religion, but rather a complete identity. Sport is religion for growing numbers of Americans, and this is no product of simply facile reasoning or wishful thinking. Further, for many, sport religion has become a more appropriate expression of personal religiosity than Christianity, Judaism, or any of the traditional religions.…”
Athletes and spectators for whom sport is religion may differ in their ideas about what the “ultimate” is, Mr. Prebish says, but sport is the vehicle by which all of them find it.
—M. Scott Vance
The Chronicle of Higher Education
