Chesterton: acceptable ideas

Whatever else is true, it is emphatically not true that the ideas of Jesus of Nazareth were suitable to His time, but no longer suitable to our time. Exactly how suitable they were to His time is perhaps suggested in the end of His story.

Baker: Trinitarian community

The fulfilment of God's image is when we enter into the Trinitarian indwelling (keep the greatest commandment) and reproduce it among ourselves (keep the second, which is like the first). this is our eternal purpose; to do this is life...

God, having set Himself the task of making a creature that dwells in a community resembling the community of the Trinity, will not rest until He has accomplished all he has said.

Baker, p.93

Fenelon: stubborn sins

Bear with yourself in your involuntary frailties as God bears, wait patiently for His appointed time of complete deliverance, and meanwhile go on quietly and according to your strength in the path before you, without losing time in looking back; sorrowing over [your sins] with humility, but putting them aside to press onwards; not looking upon God as a spy watching to surprise you, or an enemy laying snares for you, but as a Father who loves you. … Such you will find to be the path toward true liberty.

The value of the unborn

From this week's West Briton:

A YOUNG woman whose unborn child was killed in an horrific car crash has called for a change in the law after the driver responsible – her ex-boyfriend – was fined £200 and given six points on his licence.

Care worker Christopher Sloggett, 21, admitted driving without due care and attention.

He had lost control of his vehicle on the A39 at Playing Place a year ago and hit an oncoming car.

His badly injured ex-girlfriend in the front seat, 20-year-old Kim Quigley, had been eight months pregnant by another man at the time and lost her unborn boy, Thomas.

Serious charges of causing death by driving could not be brought against Sloggett because the law regards a person as alive only once they have taken their first independent breath outside the womb.

After the court case at Truro Magistrates last week, former nursery nurse Miss Quigley, now 21, called for a change in the law.

The police officer in charge of the case, Motor PC Claire Hawkins, said: “While we have to accept the sentence was proportionate to the charge brought against Mr Sloggett, nothing can reflect the terrible loss that Miss Quigley has suffered.

“Unfortunately, legislation does not account for the death of an unborn child and it was therefore not possible to bring a more serious charge before the court.”

Unfortunately for this lady she doesn't stand much of a chance. The lobby fighting for the 'rights of women' would prevent her very logical wish - they cannot afford to allow the unborn to be termed as 'alive', the psychological effect of this would reinforce the very gradual rise in support for unborn children. And if they are alive and human, then what? Where would it all end? We would have to take responsibility for our actions. Deary me.

Ideas from Postman

...the adoration of technology pre-empts the adoration of anything else...[religious symbols must] be made impotent as quickly as possible - that is, drained of sacred, or even serious, connotations. The elevation of one god requires the demotion of another.

(an example would be the way clergy are portrayed in the media as idiots or terrorists)

Those who resist 'technopoly' are people-

who pay no attention to a poll unless they know what questions were asked and why...

people who:

• refuse to accept efficiency as the pre-eminent goal of human relations
• who have freed themselves from the belief in the magical power of numbers
• who are, at least, suspicious of the idea of progress, and who do not confuse information with understanding
• who do not regard the aged as irrelevant
• who take the great narratives of religion seriously
• who know the difference between the sacred and the profane, and who do not wink at tradition for modernity's sake.

Quoted in Dawn, p.271, 282 &283

I suppose it was going to happen

Barbara Wagner is dying of lung cancer, and Oregon won't pay for any more treatment. But it will cover a fatal dosage of drugs so she can kill herself, according to citizenlink.org. Dr. Kevin Olson, a member of the Oregon Health Services Commission, said coverage is limited to "those services that offer the most benefit in terms of prolonging life, especially those services that are low cost and high value." So the state is offering Wagner end-of-life "comfort care" — suicide. A pharmaceutical company has stepped in to pay for the medicine Wagner was denied.

Interruption.........

Just to say: this is the 200th post!

Who would have thought it?

Thanks again, Mintiernational.

Degree of Image

Humanity is made both to represent God, to stand in his place, and also to resemble him to such a degree that we might be mistaken for him.

Baker, Covenant and Community, p68-69

What to do in danger

Thou mayest do in this as it is in thy heart. If it is in thy heart to fly, fly: if it be in thy heart to stand, stand. Anything but a denial of the truth. He that flies, has warrant to do so; he that stands, has warrant to do so. Yea, the same man may both fly and stand, as the call and working of God with his heart may be. Moses fled (Ex. 2:15); Moses stood (Heb 11:27). David fled (1 Sam. 19:12); David stood (1 Sam. 24:8). Jeremiah fled (Jer. 37:11-12); Jeremiah stood (Jer. 38:17). Christ withdrew himself (Luke 19:10); Christ stood (John 18:1-8). Paul fled (2 Cor. 11:33); Paul stood (Act 20:22-23). . . . There are few rules in this case. The man himself is best able to judge concerning his present strength, and what weight this or that argument has upon his heart to stand or fly. . . Do not fly out of a slavish fear, but rather because flying is an ordinance of God, opening a door for the escape of some, which door is opened by God's providence, and the escape countenanced by God's Word (Matt. 10:23).

John Bunyan, Advice to Sufferers

Pleasing people the wrong way

To give the whole store away to match what this year's market says the unchurched want, is to have the people who know least about the Christian faith determine most about its expression.

This writer fears that we are on the verge of seeing happen what happened in the 1950s to mainstream Protestant churches: they retooled for people who were casually attracted and liked big parking lots, spectacle, and low demands; and people left as easily as they came. You can see that I lean toward the search for the dynamisms in the longer-pull worship traditions and against the emerging market orientation. But I am never cocksure abut this and try to listen.

Martin E Marty, quoted in Dawn Reaching Out... p258