Wesley on time

Though I am always in a haste, I am never in a hurry, because I never undertake more work than I can go through with perfect calmness of spirit. 

 John Wesley
gosh.

Strong pastors

Is it healthy or biblical for the church to cultivate an eldership of pastors (weak in the Word) and an eldership of professors (strong in the Word)?

John Piper, Brothers....p.84

(commenting on surrendering responsibility for in depth technical knowledge to the academy)

Keller: the gospel and sympathy for the poor

[Jonathan Edwards says] "The Christian spirit will make us apt to sympathise with our neighbour when we see him under any difficulty...we ought to have such a spirit of love to him that we should be afflicted with him in his affliction."   Christ literally walked in our shoes and entered into our affliction.  Those who will not help others until they are destitute reveal that Christ's love has not yet turned them into the sympathetic persons the gospel should make them....

...We all want to help kind-hearted, upright people, whose poverty cam upon them through no foolishness or contribution of their own, and who will respond to our aid with gratitude and joy.  However, almost no one like that exists.

Generous Justice, p69-71

The Books #3

I'd be lying if I said I remembered al the essays in this book.  But I do remember clearly reading through and perhaps this was the first book of essays  (other than Lewis) I had read.

What particularly stuck out for me were the ones entitled "Hot Tub Religion: towards a theology of pleasure" and "Joy: a neglected discipline" -  because I really think up until then that it had not occurred to me that Christianity was directly related to happiness.  I don't mean I wasn't ever happy;  just that the link between Christianity and happiness wasn't something that crossed my mind (which either says something about me or the churches I attended, or both).  For the first time I realised that saints of old had pursued joy, and that this was something intimately involved with knowing God, and outstripped earthly fun on every count.  No longer was it incidental, but something God was interested in. And it was something to be taken seriously.

It also had helpful chapters on issues of the (my) moment: guidance and healings etc.  But the two essays above were the ones that effected me and formed a preparation for the big bombshell of Desiring God some years later.

Planning for the end

When a believer acknowledges that he is headed toward death (tomorrow or in 50 years), he can stop expending the tremendous energy it takes to deny his mortality and start living into his eternal destiny, here and now. And he can be intentional about investing himself in the things he wants to be with him at the end...

Carolyn Arends, CT

John the Baptist's better approach to work

The major centre of the Dead Sea community was located near John's activities.  Tax collectors or soldiers who sought membership in the Dead Sea community would be required to sell everything, drop out of society, and join the ascetic life of the holy congregation. After a probationary period of testing, and if they proved worthy, they would be accepted.   According to Luke, John the Baptist gave a different answer to people who desired forgiveness.  When the tax-collectors asked John, "What shall we do?" they were seeking a true relationship with God through repentance.  They wanted to renew proper relationship with their Father in heaven.  John said, "Collect no more than is appointed you" (LK3:13).   The soldiers asked him the same question...He challenged them with the exhortation, "Rob no one by violence or by false accusation, and be content with your wages" (LK3:14).  In stark contrast to the religious community at Qumran, John did not even ask tax-collectors and soldiers to leave their questionable occupations and drop out of society...Instead his prophetic message implored the people to live  a holy life in the mainstream of society.  The religious mindset at Qumran could not tolerate John's approach...

Brad H Young, Jesus the Jewish Theologian, p16

The Books#2

I bought this one on holiday in Austria and started reading it one evening instead of going to the evening meeting (Oak Hall, in case you're wondering, 1988 or 9).

I really think it needs to be seen as one of the great books of the 20th Century.  And read by a good many very serious people who seem to go through life thinking Christians don't struggle.  Here is one of the all-time great serious people saying: actually we do have problems that get us down, and joylessness is a bad thing, and here's how the gospel deals with it.

It's just great, and so much more powerful coming from someone definitely in the serious-reformed-we-can't-call-him airy-fairy department.

Church buildings frozen in time

Rebuilding petered out during the middle of the 16th century,  The outsides of churches were frozen in time.  For the next 300 years the characteristic church in the Cornish (and indeed in the English) landscape was one of the 15th or early 16th century, usually with a tower and aisles.  What the builders of the period achieved became what people understood churches to be, an understanding that is still with us.

Nicholas Orme, Cornwall and the Cross, p156

(I love that last phrase)

Keller: Samaritan

By depicting a Samaritan helping a Jew, Jesus could not have found a more forceful way to say that anyone at all in need - regardless of race, politics, class, and religion - is your neighbour.  Not everyone is your brother or sister in the faith, but everyone is your neighbour, and you must love your neighbour.

Generous Justice, p68

Chesterton: paradoxical attacks on Christianity

As I read and re-read all the non-Christian or anti-Christian accounts of the faith, from Huxley to Bradlaugh, a slow and awful impression grew gradually but graphically upon my mind -- the impression that Christianity must be a most extraordinary thing. For not only (as I understood) had Christianity the most flaming vices, but it had apparently a mystical talent for combining vices which seemed inconsistent with each other. It was attacked on all sides and for all contradictory reasons. No sooner had one rationalist demonstrated that it was too far to the east than another demonstrated with equal clearness that it was much too far to the west. No sooner had my indignation died down at its angular and aggressive squareness than I was called up again to notice and condemn its enervating and sensual roundness.

Orthodoxy, ch 6

Luther: valuing rightly

This is a great on a number of levels, especially two.  1st: recognising the value of things without losing perspective;  2nd: giving me implicit permission to be able to say "strumpet" in church.

A sanctified and upright Christian says: My wife, my children, my art, my wisdom, my money and wealth, help and avail me nothing in heaven; yet I cast them not away nor reject them when God bestows such benefits upon me, but part and separate the substance from the vanity and foolery which cleave thereunto. Gold is and remains gold as well when a strumpet carries it about her, as when `tis with an honest, good, and godly woman. The body of a strumpet is even as well God’s creature, as the body of an honest matron. In this manner ought we to part and separate vanity and folly from the thing and substance, or from the creature given and God who created it.

Tabletalk 294

Keller: Job & Justice

[Job] is not at all satisfied with halfway measures for the needy people in his community.  He is not content to give them small, perfunctory gifts in the assumption that their misery and weakness are a permanent condition.

Generous Justice, p14

Last one from Stark: where the prejudice lies

...national surveys, which show that evangelical Christians, including persons who identify themselves as supporters of the Religious Right, are substantially more favourable towards Israel, and somewhat more favourable towards Jews in general, than are liberal Christians or the irreligious - despite the fact that evangelicals continue to support missions to convert Jews to Christianity!  Moreover a new study has demonstrated that the only significant form of religious prejudice in America is "Anti-Fundamentalism" and is concentrated among highly educated people without a religious affiliation (Bolce & DeMaio, 1999).

One True God, 256

Child gambling

Millions of grade-school kids just like Jerry have become hooked on gambling. They often begin gambling between the ages of 10 and 13. Four out of five adolescents have gambled in the past year, according to the Annenberg Risk Survey of Youth.

A federal commission estimated that 7.9 million adolescents in the United States are problem gamblers — that's 113 NFL stadiums filled to capacity. Clearly, gambling is not innocent entertainment for children; it's a gateway to addiction.

Unfortunately, the problem doesn't stop at gambling. Recent research on seventh- to 12th-graders in Oregon indicates that students who gamble are two to three times more likely to consume alcohol, take drugs, have sex or become violent. Other research shows that suicide attempts among pathological gamblers are higher than for all other addictions.

Focus

Eagleton on evil

...We know nothing any more of choirs of heavenly hosts, but we know about Auschwitz …. Perhaps evil is all that now keeps warm the space where God used to be...

...original sin is not the legacy of our first parents but of our parents, who in turn inherited it from their own. The past is what we are made of. Throngs of ghostly ancestors lurk within our most casual gestures, preprogramming our desires and flicking our actions mischievously awry...

Terry Eagleton, CT Review

Hillenbrand: vicarious story

(Laura Hillenbrand is author of Seabiscuit and the current bestseller  Unbroken)

Hillenbrand suffers from debilitating chronic fatigue syndrome, and remains largely confined to her home. On the irony of writing about physical paragons while being so incapacitated herself, she says, "I'm looking for a way out of here. I can't have it physically, so I'm going to have it intellectually. It was a beautiful thing to ride Seabiscuit in my imagination. And it's just fantastic to be there alongside Louie as he's breaking the NCAA mile record. People at these vigorous moments in their lives - it's my way of living vicariously"

Washington Post via WP

Stark: willful distortion re evangelicals

"Fashionable" opinion "knows" that traditional believers, and especially those who conceive of God as an active, all-seeing being who actually hears prayers, are stupid, crazy, ignorant and dangerous.  But competent social scientists know that these are lies, entirely equivalent to fantasies concerning Jewish conspiracies or orgies in Catholic convents.  Nor are these beliefs about evangelicals to be excused on grounds of "ignorance".  I have too often acquainted reporters with the facts, only to find no trace of them in the final article or film segment.  Once again, let it be noted that htere is an immense body of research refuting these efforts to denigrate religious people.  It even turns out that religious people are rather superior in terms of their mental and physical health.

One True God, p254

Stark: secular civility

As for Southerners as ignorant fundamentalists, that brings me to the worst current offenders of norms of civility: secularists, both churched and unchurched.

Recently the local media expressed approval when the chief of police of Seattle prohibited his officers from wearing uniforms to take part in March for Jesus.  The media were equally agreeable when, the next day, the chief wore his uniform to march in the LGBT Parade...
[Stark goes on to give several other similar examples of this kind of dichotomy]
...The clear standard used by most of the media is that moral engagement is wonderful so long as it is entirely secular.  As for religious morality, or indeed any deeply felt religious expression, nothing could be more misguided or even dangerous.

One True God, p251-252

The Books#1

Not doing it in poptastic chart fashion this time, as I can't fathom an order.  And my criteria is the level of influence, not legendary status or even competence!  So in response to Minty's first:

Who would give a new Christian a copy of this?!   But I was, and the amazing thing is a I read it.  I also bought the remaining two volumes in the sequence as well.  I'd read pretty much no Christian books, and these three were amongst the earliest, and I lived to tell the tale.

Gurnall's work is a very long look at the armour of God and Christian life.  I have to say I can remember almost nothing specific from them (mind you it is over 20years since I read it), but what soaked in quietly I cannot say.

Here's why it starts my list (in addition to being practically the first thing I read): 
1. It taught me to keep going and follow an argument all the way through
2. It showed me that what "everyone knows" about Puritans is wrong.
3. What they hadn't said, though, is they take a VERY long time to say important things
4. It got me started reading Puritans ('Puritan Paperbacks', what a great concept)

Stark: pagan face of holocaust

The end of this story will never be known;  the Nazis destroyed the entire world.  East and West, from the most fully assimilated Jews to the most Orthodox, gone.  Ironically, after nearly two thousand years of conflict with their Christian neighbours, when the Holocaust came, it wore a pagan face and spoke the language  of race and blut, not faith.

One True God, 210