Archive for the 'Cracking Quote, Gromit' Category

Tarzan, he exhibit mimetic desire

John H April 28th, 2010

I love this brief summary by James Alison (in his book The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter Eyes) of the concept of “mimetic desire”:

In a nutshell, Girard has discovered that human beings desire not lineally, as most thought presupposes (i.e., a subject desires an object – Tarzan, he love Jane), nor even, as Hegel, interpreted by Kojève, thought, by desiring the desire of another (i.e., what I really want is that you should want me – Tarzan, he want Jane to love Tarzan). Rather we desire according to the desire of the other (Visiting Hollywood Director fancies Jane, and Tarzan, suddenly, he find Jane fascinating). All desire is triangular, and is suggested by a mediator or model.

The church: “a veritable catastrophe for man in general”

John H April 26th, 2009

One thing I love about Jacques Ellul is that you can open one of his books at random and almost always find something profound and illuminating. (This also makes his books quite hard to read: there’s so much in there that I can only read him in short bursts before being overwhelmed by the density of the material.)

For example, I opened his Ethics of Freedom (which I’ve yet to read) at random the other day and found the following (p.90):

How can it be said, then, that freedom exists only in Christ and only for those who confess Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour? In spite of the experience of history, however, I do say this. Only in Christ and through Christians can authentic and undeviating freedom arise, take form, and spread in the world.

Nevertheless, the history of Christianity and the church is also marked by terrible failures. As I have often said, I do not like to accuse our forefathers in the faith of having been wrong, as though we were better and more enlightened than they. The church is a unity in time.

We cannot dissociate ourselves from the church in the middle ages, at the time of the Reformation, or in the nineteenth century. At these periods, too, the church was the church of Jesus Christ. It was his authentic witness. It carried the truth to men.

But in relation to its ethical task, and its function of representing the lordship of Jesus Christ on earth, we can only say that it has been a serious failure and indeed a veritable catastrophe for man in general. This enables us to measure the degree to which grace alone has made it the church of Jesus Christ and always sustained it as such.

Wonderful stuff. Not many writers are able to make such high claims for the gospel and Christian faith (“freedom exists only in Christ and only for those who confess Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour”) while at the same time being so clear-eyed about the failure of the church (and Christians) to live up to their calling (“a serious failure and indeed a veritable catastrophe”), yet also avoiding the arrogance of blaming this on those ignorant hick Christians back then (“as though we were better and more enlightened than they”). Genius.

“Far from regarding ourselves as sinners”

John H November 3rd, 2008

Some convicting words from St Barsanufius, as quoted in Per-Olof Sjgren’s book, The Jesus Prayer:

You call yourself a sinner, but in effect you show that you do not feel yourself to be one. A man, who admits himself to be a sinner and the cause of many evils, disagrees with no one, quarrels with no one, is not wroth with anyone, but considers every man better and wiser than himself. If you are a sinner, why do you reproach your neighbor and accuse him of bringing afflictions upon you? It seems that you and I are as yet far from regarding ourselves as sinners.

The communal interpretation of Scripture

John H October 8th, 2008

Great quote from Michael Horton (via Justin Taylor)

The best way to guard a true interpretation of Scripture, the Reformers insisted, was neither to naively embrace the infallibility of tradition, or the infallibility of the individual, but to recognize the communal interpretation of Scripture. The best way to ensure faithfulness to the text is to read it together, not only with the churches of our own time and place, but with the wider ‘communion of saints’ down through the age.

That is the best explanation I have read yet as to how “sola Scriptura” differs from “solo Scriptura”. “Sola Scriptura” is not just “me and my Bible” deciding everything. Understood properly, it anchors our interpretation and use of Scripture within the worshipping and proclaiming community of the church, both past and present, and in particular within the church’s proclamation of the gospel through the word and sacraments.

“Things should be fine, but they’re not…”

John H September 7th, 2008

Some prophetic (as in “forthtelling” rather than “foretelling”) words from William Leith’s book Bits of Me are Falling Apart: Dark Thoughts from the Middle Years, as quoted in the Spectator’s review (which describes Leith’s book as “a fascinating, shambling, often very funny meditation on failure, remorse, physical frailty, the fear of death and the fear of pretty much everything else, now you come to mention it”):

My instinct here is to say that things should be fine, but they’re not, things should be fine, but we’re not happy, really not happy at all, when you think about the fact that we’re so incredibly comfortable it seems weird that we’re not happy, but our comfort comes at a price.

There’s something murky and wrong about our way of life, something shifty and treacherous, and we can feel it, can’t we, and it’s beginning to tell, things are starting to give, things are starting to run out.

Sensible joy

John H July 30th, 2008

Revd Alex Klages posted this one – and he at least had followed the first rule of good quotation practice, which is to read the freaking book before quoting from it ;-) – but it’s such a good quote I’m going to shamelessly lift it and repost it here. From Elert’s The Structure of Lutheranism:

He who is no longer deeply sensible of the joy in Luther’s Christmas hymns, of the jubilation in our Easter hymns, of Paul Gerhardt’s “God for us” and “Christ for me,” should examine himself to see whether his theology is not more closely related to the Koran than to the Gospel.

My wife will enjoy that too, because it uses the word “sensible” in its proper, as-used-by-Jane-Austen sense…

Rubbing elbows with “the other lot”

John H May 4th, 2008

Interior of St Luke's Lutheran Church, LeedsWe’ve come up to Leeds for the weekend to stay with my parents, and this morning I paid a visit to St Luke’s Lutheran Church for their morning service.

St Luke’s is a congregation in the Lutheran Church in Great Britain (the UK’s LWF-affiliated Lutheran synod), and it was interesting to see the similarities and contrasts with the ELCE. It turns out that “the other lot” share the odd Lutheran predilection for sitting down for hymns, and the Lutheran Book of Worship is so similar to Lutheran Worship that it’s almost eerie (though not surprising given that the two books emerged from the same process of liturgical revision). It was a non-communion service, which helped avoid any awkward moments about intercommunion…

It was also good to meet blogging ordinand Doorman-Priest, who was leading the worship, in the flesh. Though I stupidly forgot to ask what his name was when we spoke afterwards: D-P, if you’re reading this, any chance you could email me with the secret of your mild-mannered alter ego? ;-)

The main reason for this post though is to share the following quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from Pastor Mark’s sermon. The sermon text was John 17:1-11, and the sermon emphasised Jesus’ words about unity as relating to the need for mutual love and community among Christians in the face of the world’s hostility and persecution (rather than (mis)interpreting Jesus’ “that they may be one” in institutional terms). As the pastor put it, we need to “rub elbows” with one another, and he quoted the following passage from Bonhoeffer’s book Life Together:

God has willed that we should seek and find His living Word in the witness of a brother, in the mouth of a man. Therefore, the Christian needs another Christian who speaks God’s Word to him. He needs him again and again when he becomes uncertain and discouraged, for by himself he cannot help himself without belying the truth.

He needs his brother man as a bearer and proclaimer of the divine word of salvation. He needs his brother solely because of Jesus Christ. The Christ in his own heart is weaker than the Christ in the word of his brother; his own heart is uncertain, his brother’s is sure.”

It’s so important that the gospel, the Word of God, should come to us principally as a living, spoken Word. Reading the Bible is good and beneficial for us, but it is secondary to hearing the Word, hearing the promises of God declared audibly to us. It is that living Word which both requires and creates community, the community of the church, of those who proclaim and hear the gospel together.

Without that constant renewal by the spoken Word, our faith (or “the Christ in our own heart”) inevitably grows weak, because Christ has not willed or promised that we should be able to keep our faith in him strong in the absence of the Word proclaimed among our fellow Christians.

The dead bark and the living tree

John H January 1st, 2008

Great quote from Eugene Peterson on the BHT masthead today:

What other church is there besides institutional? There’s nobody who doesn’t have problems with the church, because there’s sin in the church. But there’s no other place to be a Christian except the church. There’s sin in the local bank. There’s sin in the grocery stores. I really don’t understand this naïve criticism of the institution. I really don’t get it.

Frederick von Hugel said the institution of the church is like the bark on the tree. There’s no life in the bark. It’s dead wood. But it protects the life of the tree within. And the tree grows and grows. If you take the bark off, it’s prone to disease, dehydration, death.

So, yes, the church is dead but it protects something alive. And when you try to have a church without bark, it doesn’t last long. It disappears, gets sick, and it’s prone to all kinds of disease, heresy, and narcissism.

Believing in the living Christ

John H September 1st, 2007

We interrupt this hiatus to bring you the following cracking quote from Karl Barth, quoted in a 1962 TIME magazine cover story:

Do you want to believe in the living Christ? We may believe in him only if we believe in his corporeal resurrection. This is the content of the New Testament. We are always free to reject it, but not to modify it, nor to pretend that the New Testament tells something else. We may accept or refuse the message, but we may not change it.

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