The Joy of Seminary Reading: Some Things to Ponder:
Just as a thought impregnates a word
And a hand fills a glove,
The Bible fills my spirit.
George Gilfillan, Poets and Poetry of the Bible, Auburn and Buffalo: Miller, Orton & Mulligan. 1854. p. 9
“Oh Lord, why does Thou receive these men?” And He will say: “This is why I receive them, oh ye wise, this is why I receive them, oh ye of understanding, that not one of them believed himself to be worthy of this.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (New York: Bantam Classics, 1981 [1866]), 20.
Oswald Chambers said, “Drudgery is the touchstone of character."
Albert Camus said, "Man's first faculty is forgetting!”
For Dr. Simmon's Ministry of Reconciliation Class we had to read The Sunflower. I attempted to have a better understanding of the book by watching the PBS Special on Bonhoeffer and Schindler's List. IMHO The Cost of Discipleship is a must read for those who seek to follow Christ. "Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate." "Costly grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York: Paulist Press, 1963), p. 45.
I must make time to read more of Richard Rohr. “... lets be honest, we would sooner have control than real conversion; we would sooner have well oiled church societies than transformed people. Cosmetic piety takes away our anxiety about God and about ourselves, but it does not address the real and subtle ways that we "lose our soul."
Ebert, Richard Rohr and Andreas. The Enneagram a Christian Perspective. New York: The Crossword Publishing Company, 2004. p. XVII
Eric Hoffer, the street philosopher, put it this way: “In times of great change (which is always), learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped for a world that no longer exists.”
I tend to lean toward inexpensive (cheap) wine, but if I had a taste for fine wine I am sure I would sip it slowly. I think The Enlightened Heart is like fine wine. It should be read slowly to be appreciated. In this book Robert Frost puts it politically: “the secret sits in the middle and knows, while others dance round in circles and suppose.”
Notice that he calls us not to make converts but to make disciples.
Foster, Richard J. Streams of Living Water : Celebrating the Great Traditions of Christian Faith. 1st ed. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998. p. 18.
“One December evening in 1929 on Signal Hill, Frank Laubach had a transforming experience. His own words describe it best:
“One evening I was sitting on Signal Hill looking over the province that had me beaten. Tip had his nose up under my arm trying to lick the tears off my cheeks. My lips began to move and it seemed to me that God was speaking.
"My child," my lips said, "you have failed because you do not really love these Moros. You feel superior to them because you are white. If you can forget you are an American and think only how I love them, they will respond."
I answered back to the sunset, "God, I do not know whether you spoke to me through my lips, but if you did, it was the truth … Drive me out of myself and come and take possession of me and think thy thoughts in my mind …"
My lips spoke to me again: "If you want the Moros to be fair to your religion, be fair to theirs. Study their Koran with them."
Laubach, Frank Charles. Thirty Years with the Silent Billion; Adventuring in Literacy. Westwood, N.J.: Revell, 1960, pp. 26-28
Let no sinner, then, lose heart when, after having been defiled with many lovers, his soul is received again; for the Fountain of Mercy, Jesus Christ, is exhausted by the iniquities of none, polluted by the crimes of none; but, always pure and always full to overflowing with grace and sweetness, receives all who return to Him, weak though they be, sinful though they be, and whatever be the sins that have defiled them.
St. Anselm’s Book of Meditations and Prayers Translated from the Latin by M.R. London:Burns and Oates, Portman Street and Paternoster Row, 1872. p. 74-75.
“According to Jewish tradition, even God Himself can only forgive sis committed against Himself, not against man.”
The Sunflower, Abraham Joshua Heschel p. 170.
“I think every conscious person, every person who is awake to the functioning principles within his own reality, has a moment where he stops blaming the problems in the world on group think, on humanity and authority, and starts to face himself. I hate this more than anything. This is the hardest principle within Christian spirituality for me to deal with. The problem is not out there; the problem is the needy beast of a thing that lives in my chest.”
Blue Like Jazz, p. 20.
‘He cannot die badly who lives well;
and scarcely shall he die well who lives badly.’
Augustine
St. Bernard of Clairvoix said,
Some desire to know merely for the sake of knowing,
and that is shameful curiosity.
Some desire to know that they may sell their knowledge,
and that too is shameful.
Some desire to know for reputation’s sake,
and that is shameful vanity.
But there are some who desire to know that they may edify others,
and that is praiseworthy;
and there are some who desire to know that they themselves may be edified,
and that is wise.
Seneca says, that ‘We are attracted to novelties rather than to great things.’
Lightfoot, Joseph Barber. The Epistle of St. Paul to the Galatians : Grand Rapids, Mich : Zondervan. Seventh printing 1969. p. XII
“The abnegation of reason is not the evidence of faith but the confession of despair.”
Letham, Robert. The Work of Christ Contours of Christian Theology. Downers Grove, Ill.: Inter-Varsity Press, 1993. p. 64.
“… Jesus identified with the poor. He lived a life of poverty. He attacked injustice and oppression. His onslaught on sin was directly mainly against its corporate form. He aroused the murderous opposition of the elite. Throughout, he was in solidarity with the poor, recognizing that they were more sinned against than sinning.” “In turn, the church, if it is to be faithful to the reality of the kingdom, must live in solidarity with the poor and the marginalized, recognizing that God has a preferential love for them. The church has the task, then, of struggling against the structures which cause poverty and injustice. These structures enhance the privilege of the ruling class.”
"The law, in other words, was the means of regulating life within the covenant, not the basis of the covenant itself. The difference between (Hab. 2:4 and Lev. 18:5) is that the former talks of a relationship lived out on the basis of faith, whereas the latter has the more limited purview of doing the law and of living within its terms."
Dunn, James D. G. The Epistle to the Galatians Black's New Testament Commentaries. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1993. Second Printing 2002. p. 175.
Gregory of Nazianzus - “what is not assumed cannot be healed.”
“A culture is a system of inherited conceptions (intellectual), a set of common standards of behavior (morals), a pattern of meanings embodied in symbols (material), and a series of conventions governing human interaction (institutional), by which human beings communicate and perpetuate, but also modify and develop, their knowledge about attitudes to life.”
A. Nichols, Christendom Awake.
“Put simply, we learn to speak correctly about God when first we have learned to be silent in the face of the mystery of God.”
Greene, Colin J. D. Christology in Cultural Perspective : Marking out the Horizons. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Pub., 2004. p. 55.
“True theology is apophatic theology, a theology of negation. Genuine knowledge of God is not found in the scholastic organization of concepts and theorems but in the contemplative practice of prayer and silence that takes us beyond words into the realm of the ineffable, i.e. mystical union with Christ, who is the revelation of the divine nature.”
Pelikan, Christian Tradition, Vol. 2, 255.
Melanchthon said, “Christ as mediator is the double mirror, in his divinity representing God to us and in his humanity representing us to God.”
cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am.
Descartes
“to seek and to find this infinite and eternal in all that lives and moves, in all growth and change, in all action and passion, and to have and to know life itself only in immediate feeling -- -- that is [the essence of] religion.”
F. Schleirmacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultural Despisers. p. 79.
"Since the emergence of historical consciousness, the unity of all reality is conceivable only as a history. The unity of truth is still possible only as a historical process, and can be known only from the end of the process … The unity of truth is possible only if it includes the contingency of events in the openness of the future."
W. Pannenberg, What Is Truth in BQIT, 2, 27.
"If God created humanity so that he could share his own life of love and grace with us, then that possibility of loving relationship is part of what constitutes our fundamental humanity. We are creatures orientated towards the transcendent possibilities of grace. Creation or nature is consequently ordered towards the supernatural life of grace as its deepest purpose and goal. It is a supernatural existential because it is part of our human existence only through the free and gracious act of God. Openness to the divine mystery may be a constitutive aspect of our nature but elevation towards the divine mystery is a free and gratuitous action of God that is a pre-given in human experience. While sin distorts our nature, it does not obliterate the presence of God within the created orders of reality."
Greene, Colin J. D. Christology in Cultural Perspective : Marking out the Horizons. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Pub., 2004.
“The purpose of a fish trap is to catch fish and when the fish are caught, the trap is forgotten. The purpose of a rabbit snare is to catch rabbits. When the rabbits are caught, the snare is forgotten. The purpose of the word is to convey ideas. When the ideas are grasped, the words are forgotten. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words? He is the one I would like to talk to.”
Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu (New York: New Directions, 1965), p. 154.
“If we allow grace to guide our responses, we will realize what we need to know as we need to know it.”
Gerald G. May. Addiction and Grace. 1st ed. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988. p. 97.
“Insecurity and the desire to achieve characterize the boomer generation (1943-1960). They are the products of an age of experimentation in which some sought new ways of personal fulfillment through the use of drugs that enhanced sensory experiences, in meditation techniques and by seeking the wisdom of the ages distilled in Hinduism and Buddhism. Others found meaning through encountering Christ in the Jesus Movement. Some were eclectic in their spiritual pilgrimage, adopting a mix-and-match approach. religious experience and belief became a means to personal fulfillment. As they grew older boomers shed their radicalism and became more materialistic and supportive of the establishment.”
Eddie Gibbs. Churchnext : Quantum Changes in How We Do Ministry. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2000. p. 229-230.
“For He was made man that we might be made God; and He manifested Himself by a body that we might receive the idea of the unseen Father; and He endured the insolence of men that we might inherit immortality.”
Athanasius On the Incarnation of the Word 54. 3 Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church Vol. 4.
“The ancients turned good things into idols; we moderns call them addictions. In either case, what ceases to be a servant becomes a tyrant
Philip Yancey. Soul Survivor : How My Faith Survived the Church. 1st ed. New York: Doubleday, 2001. p. 55.
“What is the ultimate purpose of the local church? If the church exists merely to be a safe haven from secular society, a place to raise children, get married, and hold social events, then there really is no reason for a church to try to make an impact on the surrounding world.”
James D. Berkley. Leadership Handbook of Outreach and Care. 5th paperback ed. Grand Rapids, Mich. Carol Stream, Ill. Christianity Today,: Baker Books; 2004. p. 106.
“Reinhold Niebuhr warned that any of our acts can be self-serving, that we can deceive ourselves into seeing our selfishness as altruism, that we are liable to cloak or sugar coat our evil.”
Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, 2 vols. (New York: Scribner’s, 1964) p. 11.
“The spirit in its depth and height reaches into eternity … and this vertical dimension is more important for the understanding of man than merely his rational capacity for forming general concepts … It is the quality of the human spirit … to lift itself as living organism and to make the whole temporal and spatial world including itself the object of its knowledge.”
R. Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, vol. 1 (New York: Scribner’s, 1949), 157.
“O. Hobart Mowrer once stated, “It is easier to act your way into a new way of feeling than to feel your way into a new way of acting.”
Quoted in H. Clinebell, Basic Types of Pastoral Counseling (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon), p. 171.
Phil Marshall Negley says, "... five areas of concern that bring people to spiritual direction: union with God, imitation of Christ, ways of prayer and forgiveness, making sense of foundational experiences, and searching for meaning in life."
Quoted in Howard W. Stone, Strategies for Brief Pastoral Counseling. p. 128.
“Healing involves efforts to help others overcome some impairment and move toward wholeness. These curative efforts can involve physical healing as well as spiritual healing, but the focus is always the total person, whole and holy. Sustaining refers to ask of caring designed to help a hurting person endure and transcend a circumstance in which restoration or recuperation is either impossible or improbable. Reconciling refers to efforts to reestablish broken relationships; the presence of this component of care demonstrates the communal, not simply individual, nature of Christian soul care. Finally, guiding refers to helping people make wise choices and thereby grow in spiritual maturity.”
Moon, Gary W., and David G. Benner. Spiritual Direction and the Care of Souls : A Guide to Christian Approaches and Practices. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2004. p. 11-12.
"Holistic spirituality opposes pitting the body against the soul, the sacred against the secular, "this world" against "that world," the spiritual against the material. Holistic spirituality is rooted in the incarnational belief of the pervasive presence of God in all reality."Moon, Gary W., and David G. Benner. Spiritual Direction and the Care of Souls : A Guide to Christian Approaches and Practices. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2004. p. 65.
“The exegete will almost immediately think of the distinction between what a text meant and what a text means. The first and main purpose of a commentary is to help the reader to discover what the text meant in its original setting—that is, exegesis.”
Donald A. Hagner, vol. 33A, Word Biblical Commentary : Matthew 1-13, Word Biblical Commentary (Dallas: Word, Incorporated, 2002). p. XL.
"With Luther we have a man utterly riddled with guilt and fear, a man desperately searching for forgiveness -- to the point of crawling up steps on his hands and knees in his quest for a gracious God. With CS Lewis we have a man searching for life, not forgiveness. The two are related, of course, but they are distinct. And the difference between searching for forgiveness and the quest for life in all its fullness is the difference between 1500 and 2000 A.D.”
Baxter Kruger, C. The Great Dance : The Christian Vision Revisited. Jackson, MS: Perichoresis Press, 2000. p. 16-17.
"If you start with a legal holiness as the fundamental truth about God, then, when you come to Jesus, you are in such a hurry to get to the cross to solve the same problem that you fly past the incarnation. When you start with legal holiness, you have eyes only for the cross, and you never see that in Jesus Christ, nothing less than the eternal Trinitarian life of Father, Son and Spirit is being lived out inside human existence. You never really get the staggering meaning of the incarnation. And you never see the equally staggering meaning of the Ascension. The cross, on the legal model, looms so large on the horizon that the incarnation, resurrection and ascension of Jesus are overshadowed. Do you know what the Ascension means? Have you ever heard a sermon or a series of sermons on the Ascension? The Ascension means that the incarnation is not over. The Ascension means that now and forever the Son continues to live out his sonship as a human being."
Baxter Kruger, C. The Great Dance : The Christian Vision Revisited. Jackson, MS: Perichoresis Press, 2000. p. 37-38.
"I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."
C.S. Lewis, “Is Theology Poetry?” in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (New York: Simon & Schuster, A Touchstone Book, 1996), p. 106.
"What is contemplation? We are not here using the word in its mystical meaning. We are using it in a sense that is closer to the meaning Ignatious of Loyola gave it when he proposed (in his spiritual exercises) that a person look at Jesus as he appears in the gospel events and let himself become absorbed in what he is like, what he cares about, and what he is doing. Contemplation in this sense begins when a person stops being totally preoccupied with his own concerns and lets another person, event, or object take his attention. When it is a person who is being contemplated, he lets that person, with his personality, concerns, and activity take his attention. He lets himself be absorbed, for a moment at least, and at some level, in the other person. Contemplative prayer, as we use the term here, means paying attention to and becoming a least slightly absorbed in the person of Jesus, in God, or in Biblical persons or outstanding Christians. A contemplative attitude can develop from such prayer and, if it does, it allows one to find some ease and spontaneity in paying attention to the Lord as he reveals himself in Scripture, creation, one's own life, and the life of the world, rather than seeing him simply as a background figure from one's own concerns."
Barry, William A., and William J. Connolly. The Practice of Spiritual Direction. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982. p. 48.
"Scripture is not the Lord, but a privileged place to meet him." Barry, William A., and William J. Connolly. The Practice of Spiritual Direction. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982. p. 55.
"We tolerate the unexplained but not the inexplicable."
Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Cambridge, Mass. : Hrvard University Press, 1974), p. 30.
"Although anxiety may undeniably at times be a relatively, even severely, disabling symptom, it is nevertheless to be regarded as an affect which is absolutely inseparable from successful growth and maturation in almost every phase of the life cycle. In summary, not all anxiety is to be regarded as pathological."
Elizabeth R. Zetzel and William W. Meissner, Basic Concepts of Psychoanalytic Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 201.
"The enjoyment of God should be the supreme end of spiritual technique; and it is in that enjoyment of God that we feel not only saved in the evangelical sense, but safe; we are conscious of belonging to God, and hence are never alone … In that relationship nature seems friendly and homely; even its vast spaces instead of eliciting a sense of terror speak of the infinite love; and the nearer beauty becomes the garment with which the Almighty clothes Himself."
J. S. MacKenzie, Nervous Disorders and Character (1946), pp. 36-37. Quoted in Henry Guntrip, Psychology and Religion (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1957), p. 200.
"If you and I do not practice the Presence of God, we will practice the presence of another. If we do not listen for the Word, we will be in subjection to the words of the world, the flesh, and the Devil"
Payne, L. (1995). The Healing Presence: Curing the Soul through Union with Christ. Grand Rapids, MI: Hamewith Books. p. 73.
Katie Skurgia said, "The shape of our God-shaped hole (our Imago Dei) is also the shape of Christ. To be a dock that is securely grounded in each person of the Trinity is a picture of what it means to abide in Christ, to know who you truly are. The extent that we abide in Christ is the extent to which we will not sin because we live by grace instead of by our own might. Paradoxically, it is in abiding that we become more aware of our propensity toward selfishness and we come to realize that we truly can do nothing pure apart from the grace of God." You are tearing me loose from earthly ambitions and attachments, plucking the world from my heart as You loosen my chains giving me the choice of whether to flee into Your waiting arms or to stay in what I think is a safe place, only to find that safety is a sentence of no growth, a place where it rains not, the wind does not blow and even the sky is sterile, unable to submit itself to seasons of change. Give me the cold grays over the too even sameness of ever blue skies, for at least with the death of winter there is also the hope of warm reds and oranges of summer.
Kelly, Thomas R., and Douglas Van Steere. A Testament of Devotion. London: Hodder & Stoughton Limited, 1941. p. 43.
Meister Eckhart wrote: “There are plenty to follow our Lord half-way, but not the other half. They will give up possessions, friends and honours, but it touches them too closely to disown themselves.”
It is the nature of metaphors that they succeed in conveying the truths which they convey only on condition that they are recognized to be literal falsehoods, for it is part of their metaphorical meaning that they are literally false. Thus, we might very well say, or imply, by means of the metaphor ‘God is a rock’ that God is ‘lifeless’. And we will do this in order to convey, in a manner we otherwise could not, something about God’s reliability which is greater than any shifty living beings could be counted upon to possess.”
Note: This may appear to be cast in doubt by such negative metaphors as Donne’s ‘No man is an island’, which is, of course, a literal truth. But as we will see, a negative metaphor entails its metaphorical contrary, ‘every man is part of the mainland’, and that is a literal falsehood.
Turner, Denys. The Darkness of God : Negativity in Christian Mysticism. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. p. 37.
You do not negate a metaphor by negating its literal falsehood. What negates a metaphor is only another metaphor.
“Negative metaphors are negations of affirmative metaphors and what holds of literal utterances and their contraries also holds of metaphorical utterances, affirmative and negative: eadem est scientia oppositorum, what the one affirms the other denies.”
Turner, Denys. The Darkness of God : Negativity in Christian Mysticism. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. p. 38.
"Any time the church tunes its practices to the norms and expectations of a given or potential audience, it can claim to be seeker sensitive.”
Best, Harold M. Unceasing Worship. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2003. p. 86.
I like what Leonard Sweet said in his book Out of the Question and into the Mystery, "Christianity has much less to do with being 'right' than it has to do with building right relationships -- the strong protecting the weak, the rich serving the poor, the insiders making room for the outcasts. p. 133-34.
"Two things have I required of Thee, O Lord, deny Thou me not before I die; remove far from me vanity and lies; give me neither poverty nor riches, feed me with food convenient for me; least I be full and denies Thee and say, who is the Lord? Or lest I be poor and steal, and take the name of my God in vain. Let me learn to abound, let me learn to suffer need, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. For nothing earthly, temporal, mortal, to long nor to wait. Grant me a happy life in piety, gravity, purity, in all things good and fair, in cheerfulness, in health, in credit, in competency, in safety, in gentle estate, in quiet; a happy death, a deathless happiness.”
Andrewes, Lancelot, and John Henry Newman. The Private Devotions of Lancelot Andrewes. New York,: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1950. p. 75-76.
“One-half of the Jews born in the last eight hundred years were murdered. One third of the Jews who have lived in the last fifty years have been killed because they had Jewish parents.”
Irwin J. Borowsky, foreward to Jews and Christians: Exploring the Past, Present and Future, ed. James H. Charlesworth (New York: Crossroad, 1990).
"Man (sic) is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul. The other things on the face of the earth are created for a man to help him in attaining the end for which he is created. Hence, man is to make use of them in so far as they help him in the attainment of his end, and he must rid himself of them in so far as they prove a hindrance to him."
Barry, William A. Paying Attention to God : Discernment in Prayer. Notre Dame, Ind.: Ave Maria Press, 1990. p. 15.
"All we need is to keep alive the desire for God and the desire to know Jesus more intimately, and God will do the rest."
Barry, William A. Paying Attention to God : Discernment in Prayer. Notre Dame, Ind.: Ave Maria Press, 1990.p. 69.
"We can understand the kingdom of God as God's intention for the universe, or rather as God’s one action which is the universe, to use again the words of John McMurray. Any action of a person is guided by an intention. One can only think the universe has God's one action informed by one intention. "We have already argued that God has revealed his intention for our world, namely that all human beings live as brothers and sisters in a community of faith, hope and love united with Jesus Christ as sons and daughters of God, our father and in harmony with the whole created universe."
Barry, William A. Paying Attention to God : Discernment in Prayer. Notre Dame, Ind.: Ave Maria Press, 1990.p. 80.
Regarding the above quote, so then, as I have heard Dr. Larry Shelton say, "If we know something is Kingdom Theology and we know how to do it, why don't we do it now, instead of waiting for the Kingdom?"
2008 class in Essentials of Theology, George Fox Evangelical Seminary.
“The concept that the saving power of a past event is brought into the present through reenactment is basic whether one is celebrating Passover or Good Friday. The recovering of past events through the observation of commemorative times underlies what both Christians and Jews still do. The experience of God’s self-giving through ritual acts is a permanent part of Christian sacraments just as it is in Jewish worship.”
White, James F. A Brief History of Christian Worship. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1993. p. 16.
It is all about praxis. “Nevertheless, factual reality and theological intent cannot be sundered. They are bound together in the functional context of social action.”
Theissen, Gerd. The Social Setting of Pauline Christianity : Essays on Corinth. Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2004. p. 168.
The failure to distinguish an outward, ethnic identity marker from the hidden work of the Spirit in the heart, and to play down the importance of the former in favor of the latter means that the typical Jew is in no better (indeed, maybe worse) standing before God than the Gentile (Rom 2:25–29).
Gerald F. Hawthorne, Ralph P. Martin and Daniel G. Reid, Dictionary of Paul and His Letters (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1993), p. 845.
The author is really hitting on what speaks strongly to me from Romans. Our identity; gender, ethnic, national, religious, denominational (or even what we do; job, position etc.) is an outward form. It is the ‘thing’ that joins us to some and separates us from others. We should not root our identity, we should not define ourselves, in these outward forms. Too often we confuse outward forms with what God does in the heart of the individual.
On the other hand, I don't believe that Communion and other sacraments are merely outward forms, except when the spiritual attitude of the one partaking does not assume a posture of gratefulness and humility.
"The root of our trouble is a fundamental misconception as to the nature of religion. We mistake the trappings of religion for religion itself. Actually, the external forms and rites of religion bear about the same relationship to true religion as a puppet to a man. True religion is life, not form. It is not making orthodox affirmations, saying prayers, going to church, receiving the sacrament, or doing any other external act. It is rather the "union of the soul with God, a real participation of the divine nature, the very image of God drawn upon the soul, or, in the apostle's phrase, it is Christ formed within us."
Scougal, Henry. The Life of God in the Soul of Man. Philadelphia,: Westminster Press, 1948. p. 10.
I do not see a contradiction between the previous two quotes. It is not the sacrament, the outer form that has the power. The power of transformation is in the connection the sacrament makes possible when received in a humble spirit. The connection, the connection, the connection ... relationship.
"The outward forms of religious expression and devotion, Scougal asserts, are not to be repudiated but subordinated. An undue emphasis upon them, by diverging attention from essentials to nonessentials, tends to produce bitterness and division. Moreover, an emphasis upon outward forms transforms religion from a spontaneous expression of the divine life within into a series of external duties to be performed. It thus becomes forced an artificial, heavy and languid, cold and spiritless, scanned and niggardly; whereas true religion is "an inward, free, and self moving principle, and those who have made progress in it are not actuated only by external motives..., nor constrained by laws," but are naturally inclined to the exercises of religion and delight in the performance of them. No law need not be prescribed to those that love God, for the "divine love wherewith they are actuated makes them become a law unto themselves."
Scougal, Henry. The Life of God in the Soul of Man. Philadelphia,: Westminster Press, 1948. p. 10.
By the way, Henry Scougal was born in 1650 and died in 1678 of tuberculosis.
“If we rightly understand ourselves, our problems are the problems of Paul; and if we be enlightened by the brightness of his answers, those answers must be ours.”
Karl Barth, Romans (London:Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 1.
“To the [person] who longs for God and cannot find him; to the [person] who wants to be acknowledged by God and cannot even believe that he is; to the [person] who is striving for a new imperishable meaning of his life and cannot discover it – to this [person] Paul speaks.“
Malcolm Muggeridge and Alec Vidler, Paul, Envoy Extraordinary (London: Collins, 1972), p. 13.
Drury, Keith. The Wonder of Worship: Why We Worship the Way We Do. Indianapolis, IN: Wesleyan Publishing House, 2004. ISBN: 0898272432. p. 27.
"I highly encourage church leaders to study and explore the history of worship. I highly encourage church leaders to ask why you even do the things you currently do in your worship gatherings. You may be surprised to discover that many things you do are forms of your denomination's origin culture and not from the Scriptures themselves."
Kimball, Dan. Emerging Worship: Creating Worship Gatherings For New Generations. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 2004. ISBN: 0310256445. p. 6.
"When I took a closer look at this I realized that I was caught in a web of strange paradoxes. While complaining about too many demands, I felt uneasy when none were made. While speaking about the burden of letter writing, an empty mailbox made me sad. While fretting about tiring lecture tours, I felt disappointed when there were no invitations. While speaking no statically about an empty desk, I feared the day on which that would come true. In short: while desiring to be alone, I was frightened of being left alone. The more I became aware of these paradoxes, the more I started to see how much I had in deed fallen in love with my own compulsions and illusions, and how much I needed to step back and wonder, "Is there a quiet stream underneath the fluctuating affirmations and rejections of my little world? Is there a still where my life is anchored and from which I can reach out with hope and courage and confidence?"
Nouwen, Henri J. M. The Genesee Diary : Report from a Trappist Monastery. Garden City, N.Y.: Image Books, 1981.p. 14.
"Without solitude there can be no real people. The more you discover what a person is, and experience what a human relationship requires in order to remain profound, fruitful, and a source of growth and development, the more you discover that you are alone-and that the measure of your solitude is a measure of your capacity for communion. The measure of your awareness of God's transcendent call to each person is the measure of your capacity for intimacy with others. If you do not realize that the persons to whom you are relating are each called to an eternal transcendent relationship that transcends everything else, how can you relate intimately to another at his center from your center?"
Nouwen, Henri J. M. The Genesee Diary : Report from a Trappist Monastery. Garden City, N.Y.: Image Books, 1981.p. 48.
"Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."
Henry D. Thoreau, Walden, and Other Writings, the Modern Library (New York: Random House, 1950), p. 290.
Diadochus of Photice’s views on the discernment of spirits. He says that we have to keep the surface calm so that we can see the end to the soul. "When the sea is calm, the eyes of the fishermen can penetrate to the point where he can distinguish different movements in the depth of the water, so that hardly any of the creatures who move through the pathways of the sea escape him, but when the sea is agitated by the wind, she hides in her dark restlessness what she shows in the smile of a clear day.""Diadochus of Photice "And who says that truth is made to be revealed? It must be sought. That is all. Assuming it is concealed in melancholy, is that any reason to seek elsewhere?"
Ellie Wiesel, Souls on Fire, Portraits and Legends of Hasidic Masters (New York: Random House, 1972), p. 235.
“The early Christians thus understood the deep meaning of the symbol instituted by Jesus. Its social impact was the main criterion of its value and credibility. That is why the early Christians were so acceptable to many, especially the poor, and so detested by some of the powerful, particularly the exploiters. Christianity was then I dynamic movement of human liberation from selfishness and exploitation. All were to be equal in the believing community and this was symbolized by the Eucharistic meal.”
Tissa Balasuriya, The Eucharist and Human Liberation (Mary Knoll, N.Y.:Orbis, 1979).
"Two theological terms are of particular importance in these reflections: the cataphatic way (or via positiva) and the apophatic way (or via negativa).
“The cataphatic path is that one in which God makes use of all the richness of our created world to touch our lives: our relationships with others, the meeting- and church – community, our jobs, the record of Scripture, our very ability to use language, images, and concepts in meditation, worship, and prayer. The list is almost endless. We probably have all had experiences of God’s healing, comforting, discomforting, or guiding presence through one or more of these avenues.”
“We find ourselves in the apophatic pathway when words, images, and even our deepest relationships with others cannot hold or express all that God is. Ultimately, God is beyond all avenues of experiencing. The richness and fullness of God’s presence so overwhelms our limited capacities for expression that silence may sometimes seem more appropriate than any speech.” … “They are two sides of the same reality.”
“The dark night is a time of preparation for a life lived more fully centered in God. In the stripping and emptiness, we discover that God bursts beyond all our previous avenues of knowing. It is a time of not knowing in one sense; and yet it is also a time of realizing that our life ultimately grows out of life with God.” … “The full apophatic pathway is the contemplative tradition of Christianity.”
Sandra Lee Cronk. Dark Night Journey : Inward Re-Patterning toward a Life Centered in God. Wallingford, Pa.: Pendle Hill, 1991. p. 4-5.
I still have pages of notes, but ... if I have messed up on the links to Amazon I apologize.