“Jesus Christ was a personality cult. Would we have a stronger, better attended church if our parish priests had strong personalities which drew like-minded people into their churches? Or should we continue with that style of priesthood common in so many of our churches, which is a “lowest common denominator” style avoiding confrontation and offence, where sermons always start with “some people think” and are always qualified with an “on the other hand.” The latter allows congregations containing a broad range of beliefs and attitudes to worship together, but does it make better Christians? Even more important, would somebody entering such a church for the first time want to stay?”
—The Rev. Jonathan Hagger in “The Personality of the Priest and the Potluck Church”
June 2012
97 posts
“I have yet to find an argument that I’ve found compelling to convince me that process thought does not, by virtue of taking away crucial elements of the divine omnipotence, seriously vacate the notion of divine providence. If the universe is free to act either in accord with or against God’s plan then it is possible that, contrary to God’s desires or intentions, the universe could propel itself, not toward God’s salvific purposes, but into a cosmic death spiral. Only if God’s intentions for the universe are understood to be implied by divine transcendence, and unalterable in principle except by God, is the idea of soteriology in any cosmic sense possible.”
—“Scott Paeth Responds to the Process Theologians”
“Christianity begins in contradictions, in the painful effort to live with the baffling plurality and diversity of God’s manifested life - law and gospel, judgement and grace; the crucified Son crying to the Father. Christian experience does not simply move from one level to the next and stay there, but is drawn again and again to the central and fruitful darkness of the cross. But in this constant movement outwards in affirmation and inwards in emptiness, there is life and growth. The end is not yet; the frustrated longing for homecoming, the journey’s end, is unavoidable. Yet we can perhaps begin to see, through all the cost and difficulty, how we are entering more deeply into a divine life which is itself diverse and moving - Father and Son eternally brought to each other in Spirit. To discover in our ‘emptying’ and crucifying the ‘emptying’ of Jesus on his cross is to find God there, and so to know that God is not destroyed or divided by the intolerable contradictions of human suffering. He is one in the Spirit, and in the same Spirit includes us and our experience, setting us within his own life in the place where Jesus his firstborn stands, as sharers by grace in that eternal loving relationship, men and women made whole in him. In the middle of the fire we are healed and restored - though never taken out of it. As Augustine wrote, it is at night that his voice is hear. To want to escape the ‘night’ and the costly struggles with doubt and vacuity i to seek another God from the one who speaks in and as Jesus crucified. Crux probate omnia. There is no other touchstone. ‘I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified … that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God’ (I Cor. 2:2,5).”
—Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge (via furnaceofdoubt)
May 2012
108 posts
“There are ethical corporations, yes, and ethical businesspeople, but ethics in capitalism is purely optional, purely extrinsic. To expect morality in the market is to commit a category error. Capitalist values are antithetical to Christian ones. (How the loudest Christians in our public life can also be the most bellicose proponents of an unbridled free market is a matter for their own consciences.) Capitalist values are also antithetical to democratic ones. Like Christian ethics, the principles of republican government require us to consider the interests of others. Capitalism, which entails the single-minded pursuit of profit, would have us believe that it’s every man for himself.”
—William Deresiewicz in “Capitalists and Other Psychopaths”
“If one human being exists in the image of God, then all human beings exist in the image of God. None of us is more fully the image than another. In Christian teaching, Christ Himself is the definition of the image of God. To the question, “What does it mean to be human?” Christ is the answer. In Christian understanding, Christ as incarnate image of God is celebrated from conception (the feast of the Annunciation) to His ascension to the right hand of God. No quality of Christ (sentience, wisdom, volition, race, age, gender, etc.) defines or establishes His place as imago dei. He is the image of God. In the same manner, our own unqualified existence establishes us as the image of God.”
—Father Stephen Freeman in “What is Man?”
“Always remember that at the Last Judgement we are judged for loving Him, or failing to love Him, in the least person.”
—Archbishop Anastasios of Albania (via orthodoxbrit)
“One of the most admirable effects of Holy Communion is to preserve souls from falling, and to help those who fall from weakness to rise again.”
—St Ignatius of Loyola (via my-crazy-catholic-life)
“One of the startsi said to his disciple, ‘Watch, lest you harbour a traitor in yourself.’ ‘Who is the traitor?’ asked the disciple. ‘Self-gratification,’ answered the staretz. And this is indeed so. Self-gratification is the cause of all evils. If you examine all the bad things that you have done, you will see that in each case they originated from pandering yourself.”
—Theophan the Recluse, The Art of Prayer, an Orthodox Anthology
“Those Christian opponents of slavery didn’t somehow “just know” that slavery was wrong — it seemed to them a gross denial of the Golden Rule. They read the Bible in a different way than the “commonsense” literalists who defended slavery, but it didn’t require some new, innovative form of liberal Protestantism. It simply required them to stop the “commonsense” practice of pretending that the book of Exodus didn’t exist or to stop relying on the “literal” reading that pretended Jesus did not announce his ministry by proclaiming Jubilee or …”
—Fred Clark in “Slavery and same-sex marriage (cont’d.)” (via honor-not-honors)
“War is America’s central liturgical act necessary to renew our sense that we are a nation unlike other nations.”
—Stanley Hauerwas (via fcb4)
“I don’t want peace of mind. I want to embrace the anxiety of what it means to be human. Any religion that takes away my anxiety, I think, takes away my humanity.”
—JOHN SHELBY SPONG (via bananena)
