The great difference between present-day Christianity and that of which we read in these letters is that to us it is primarily a performance; to them it was a real experience. We are apt to reduce the Christian religion to a code, or at best a rule of heart and life. To these men it is quite plainly the invasion of their lives by a new quality of life altogether. They do not hesitate to describe this as Christ “living in’ them. Mere moral reformation will hardly explain the transformation and the exuberant vitality of these men’s lives…We are…driven to accept their own explanation, which is that their little human lives had, through Christ, been linked up with the very Life of God.”
–J.B. Philips,
Letters to Young Churches, p. xiv
Category: Quotes (Page 8 of 10)
Today I was reminded or informed (I’m unclear whether I never knew or forgot) of Richard of Chichester’s poem:
Thanks be to Thee, my Lord Jesus Christ
For all the benefits Thou hast given me,
For all the pains and insults Thou hast borne for me.
O most merciful Redeemer, friend and brother,
May I know Thee more clearly,
Love Thee more dearly,
Follow Thee more nearly.
I’m sure I first heard these lines in and remembered them from a song from a musical. Day by Day, Godspell.
A couple of paragraphs I read recently quite caught my attention.
There are, with the best will in the world, profound differences between the religions. Here is a passage taken from a mid-twelfth-century Syrian text, taken from the new biography of Saladin by Anne-Marie EddÈ (quoted in a review in The Spectator):
The most amazing thing in the world is that the Christians say that Jesus is divine, that he is God, and then they say that the Jews seized him and crucified him. How then can a God who cannot protect himself protect others? Anyone who believes his God came out of a woman’s privates is quite mad; he should not be spoken to, for he has neither intelligence nor faith.
This is, we should say, quite sensible. Wrong, of course, but quite sensible, and not just from the Muslim’s point of view. It helps to remember this, for the memory helps Christians be thankful that we have been given the grace to see something the sensible man may think quite mad.
First Things, March, 2012 While We’re At It
“The glory of God is a human being fully alive; and to be alive consists in beholding God.â€
–Irenaeus
He is not what we would make him.
David Bentley Hart, in the February issue of First Things, tells of a old monk on Mt. Athos who told him this about Jesus. More context is helpful:
But it is wise to recall that the Christ of the gospels has always been, and will always remain, far more disturbing, uncanny, and scandalously contrary a figure than we usually like to admit. Or, as an old monk of Mount Athos once said to me, summing up what he believed he had learned from more than forty years of meditation on the gospels, “He is not what we would make him.”
This was the tail end of a short essay on the parable of the Rich Young Ruler and prominent but ill-conceived commentary on the Occupy movement by conservative Christians. Christians of every culture tend to make Jesus in their own image.
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless–it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
— C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves
So near, so very near to God, I cannot nearer be. For in the person of His Son, I am as near as He. So dear, so very dear to God, I cannot dearer be. The love with which He loves His son – such is His love for me.
This is what I remember of a quote by James Houston in the fifth lecture of the Christian Thought and Culture series from Regent College. I was listening today as I was working out and walking home and making lunch. The lecture was on the Trinity, and Houston was urging his believing listeners to understand the privileges we are granted in the divine life of God. Striking, is it not?
So I looked up the hymn from which he was quoting:
A MIND at perfect peace with God
by Catesby Paget (19th Century)
sung to Evan
by W. H. Havergal (1793-1870)
(C.M.)428: A MIND at perfect peace with God:
Oh, what a word is this!
A sinner reconciled through blood:
This, this indeed is peace.By nature and by practice far,
How very far from God!
Yet now by grace brought nigh to Him
Through faith in Jesus’ blood.So nigh, so very nigh to God,
I cannot nearer be;
For in the person of His Son,
I am as near as He.So dear, so very dear to God,
More dear I cannot be;
The love wherewith He loves the Son,
Such is His love to me.Why should I ever anxious be
Since such a God is mine?
He watches o’er me night and day,
And tells me, “Thou art Mine”.
I’m not really trying to get into deep theological controversies and discourse around Moltmann. I don’t think I’m up to speed on the modern theological scene. However, I find this quote from him to be something worth chewing on.
But on the other hand, all this must inevitably mean that the man who thus hopes will never be able to reconcile himself with the laws and constraints of this earth, neither with the inevitability of death nor with the evil that constantly bears further evil. The raising of Christ is not merely a consolation to him in a life that is full of distress and doomed to die, but it is also God’s contradiction of suffering and death, of humiliation and offence, and of the wickedness of evil. Hope finds in Christ not only a consolation in suffering, but also the protest of the divine promise against suffering. If Paul calls death the ‘last enemy’ (1 Cor. 15:26), then the opposite is also true: that the risen Christ, and with him the resurrection hope, must be declared to be the enemy of death and of a world that puts up with death. Faith takes up this contradiction and thus becomes itself a contradiction to the world of death. That is why faith, wherever it develops into hope, causes not rest but unrest, not patience but impatience. It does not calm the unquiet heart, but is itself this unquiet heart in man. Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it. Peace with God means conflict with the world, for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present.
Jürgen Moltmann. Theology of Hope
Here then are two instructions, “love your neighbor” and “go and make disciples.” What is the relation between the two? Some of us behave as if we thought them identical, so that if we have shared the Gospel with somebody, we consider we have completed our responsibility to love him. But no. The Great Commission neither explains, nor exhausts, nor supersedes the Great Commandment. What it does is to add to the command of neighbor-love and neighbor-service a new and urgent Christian dimension. If we truly love our neighbor we shall without doubt tell him the Good News of Jesus. But equally if we truly love our neighbor we shall not stop there.”
–John Stott
David Lyle Jeffrey writes about Sino-Christian Studies in China in a review entitled A Critique of All Religions in the July/August 2011 issue of Books and Culture…
The essays in this volume are indispensable reading for anyone who wishes to understand what is happening in Chinese Christian intellectual life today. There is no hint in them either of triumphalism or of condescension. Rather, as Guo Shining puts it, all of us who seek to follow Christ live under one marker for authentic delegation: “When people use the phrase, ‘that person must be a Christian,’ it highlights … behavior [that] conflicts with the main trend of profitable,worldly, self-centered, materialistic value-systems.” To be a sign of contradiction, says Guo, is both natural and necessary to a Christian in any walk of life. Addressing the wider church of which he is a part, he notes the corollary: this requires all believers to “strengthen their faith,” since “it is much harder to be a Christian in China.” Well—yes. And perhaps that particular reality works to the advantage of our Chinese brothers and sisters.
That person must be a Christian… I wish it meant what it means in China when people said that here! What does it mean when you hear people say that?