For Christians, hope is ultimately hope in Christ. The hope that he really is what for centuries we have been claiming he is. The hope that despite the fact that sin and death still rule the world, he somehow conquered them. The hope that in him and through him all of us stand a chance of somehow conquering them too. The hope that at some unforeseeable time and in some unimaginable way he will return with healing in his wings.
No one in the New Testament calls a spade a spade as unflinchingly as Saint Paul. "If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile," he wrote to the Corinthians. "If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied" (1 Corinthians 15:17,19). That is the possibility in spite of which Saint Paul andthe rest of us go on hoping even so. That is the possibility that led Dostoyevski to write to a friend, "If anyone proved to me that Christ was outside the truth, and it really was so that the truth was outside Christ, then I would prefer to remain with Christ than with the truth."
~originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words
To receive daily Quote of the Day emails, sign up here.
Humans are so the universe will have something to talk through, so God will have something to talk with, and so the rest of us will have something to talk about.
The biblical view of the history of humankind and of each individual man or woman is contained in the first three chapters of Genesis. We are created to serve God by loving God and each other in freedom and joy, but we invariably choose bondage and woe instead as prices not too high to pay for independence. To say that God drove Adam and Eve out of Eden is apparently a euphemism for saying that Adam and Eve, like the rest of us, made a break for it as soon as God happened to look the other way. If God really wanted to get rid of us, the chances are God wouldn't have kept hounding us every step of the way ever since.
~originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words
To receive daily Quote of the Day emails, sign up here.
Humility is often confused with saying you're not much of a bridge player when you know perfectly well you are.Conscious or otherwise, this kind of humility is a form of gamesmanship.
If you reallyaren'tmuch of a bridge player, you're apt to be rather proud of yourself for admitting it so humbly. This kind of humility is a form of low comedy.
True humility doesn't consist of thinking ill of yourself but of not thinking of yourself much differently from the way you'd be apt to think of anybody else. It is the capacity for being no more and no less pleased when you play your own hand well than when your opponents do.
~originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words
To receive daily Quote of the Day emails, sign up here.
A good joke is one that catches you by surprise-like God's, for instance. Who would have guessed that Israel of all nations would be the one God picked or Sarah would have Isaac at the age of ninety or the Messiah would turn up in a manger? Who could possibly see the duck-billed platypus coming or Saint Simeon Stylites or the character currently occupying the pulpit at First Presbyterian? The laugh in each case results from astonished delight at the sheer unexpectedness of the thing.
Satan's jokes, on the other hand, you can usually spot a mile off. As soon as the serpent came slithering up to Adam and Eve, almost anybody could tell that the laugh was going to be on them. That a person as blameless, upright, and well-heeled as Job was bound to have the rug pulled out from under him before he was through. That Faust, being Faust, was sure to be conned out of his soul. And so on.
In the last analysis, the only one who gets much of a kick out of Satan's jokes is Satan himself. With God's, however, even the most hardened cynics and bitterest pessimists have a hard time repressing an occasional smile. When God really gets going, even the morning stars burst into singing and all the sons of God shout for joy.
~originally published in Beyond Words
To receive daily Quote of the Day emails, sign up here.
Idolatry is the practice of ascribing absolute value to things of relative worth. Under certain circumstances, money, patriotism, sexual freedom, moral principles, family loyalty, physical beauty, social or intellectual preeminence, and so on are fine things to have around; but to make them the standard by which all other values are measured, to make them your masters, to look to them to justify your life and save your soul is sheerest folly. They just aren't up to it.
Idolatry is always popular among religious people, but idols made out of things like the denomination, the Bible, the liturgy, the holy images are apt to seem so limited in real power even to their idolaters that there is always the hope that in time they will overthrow themselves.
It is amongunreligiousthat idolatry is a particular menace. Having ushered God out once and for all through the front door, the unbeliever is under constant temptation to replace God withthe something spirited in through the service entrance. From the moment the eighteenth-century French revolutionaries set up the goddess of Reason on the high altar of Notre Dame, there wasn't a head in all Paris that was safe.
~originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words
To receive daily Quote of the Day emails, sign up here.
