The Pagan's Intellect

"What we see in Satan is the horrible co-existence of a subtle and incessant intellectual activity with an incapacity to understand anything."

C.S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost, 99.

The Battered but Safe εκκλησια

"There is pleasure to be on board a ship battered by a storm, when we are certain that it will not perish: the persecutions buffeting the Church are of this kind."

Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 617.

All Truth is God's Truth

A person who is a good and true Christian should realize that truth belongs to his Lord, wherever it is found, gathering and acknowledging it even in pagan literature, but rejecting superstitious vanities and deploring and avoiding those who 'though they knew God did not glorify him as God...'

Saint Augustine, On Christian Teaching II.75

The Fullness of Our Happiness

For the fullness of our happiness, beyond which there is none else, is this: to enjoy God the three in whose image we were made.

St. Augustine, De Trinitate, I.18

The Unnameable Names of God

How then can we speak of the divine names? How can we do this if the Transcendent surpasses all discourse and all knowledge, if it abides beyond the reach of mind and of being, if it encompasses and circumscribes, embraces and anticipates all thins while itself eluding their grasp and escaping from any perception, imagination, opinion, name, discourse, apprehension, or understanding? How can we enter upon this undertaking if the Godhead is superior to being and is unspeakable and unnameable?

-Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names, 5.

Realizing all this, the theologians praise it by every name--and as the Nameless One...This surely is the wonderful "name which is above every name: and is therefore without a name...And yet on the other hand they give it many names, such as "I am being," "life," "light," "God," the "truth." These same wise writers...use names drawn from all the things caused: goo, beautiful, wise, beloved, God of gods, Lord of Lords, Holy of Holies, eternal, existent, Cause of the ages. They call him source of life, wisdom, mind, word, knower, possessor beforehand of all the treasures of knowledge, power, powerful, and King of Kings, ancient of days, the unaging and unchanging, salvation, righteousness and sanctification, redemption, greatest of all and yet the one in the still breeze. They say he is in our minds, in our souls, and in our bodies, in heaven and on earth, that while remaining ever within himself he is is also in and around and above the world, that he is above heaven and above all being, that he is sun, star, and fire, water, wind, and dew, cloud, archetype stone, and rock that he is all, that he is no thing.

-Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names, 6.

Speaking in Tongues

There is, however, another dimension to this unusual phenomenon of speaking in tongues, if the tongues in view here and in the church at Corinth were in the nature of foreign languages. In discussing the question of tongues-speaking in 1 Corinthians 14, Paul cites Isaiah 28:11-12 ('Through men of strange tongues and through the lips of foreigners I will speak to this people, but even then they will not listen to me') and indicates that tongues are 'a sign, not for believers but for unbelievers' (1 Cor. 14:21-22)

Sinclair B. Ferguson, The Holy Spirit - Contours of Christian Theology, 61.

Death & Resurrection

The one thing that is "not good" in the original creation is Adam's loneliness. And how does God go about addressing that imperfection? He puts Adam into deep sleep, tears out a rib from his side, closes up the flesh, and builds a woman from the rib. The solution to what is "not good" is something like death, and something like resurrection.

That's always the solution. When God sees that something is "not good" in us, in our life situation, He tends not to ease us into a new stage. He kills us, in order to raise us up again. That has to happen, because it is a universal truth that "unless the seed go into the ground and die, it cannot bear fruit."

-Peter Leithart

Turning the Cheek

A student, Daniel Foucachon, gave some very thoughtful perspectives on Jesus' instructions in the Sermon on the Mount. He noted that Jesus is not commending non-resistance, but a particular kind of resistance. Our resistance is modeled on Jesus' own; He conquered by going willingly to the cross, and He instructs us to do the same in the details of life.

Regarding the instructions to give more than adversaries ask, he points out that the Bible says the borrower is the slave of the lender. When we give more than is demanded of us, we become lenders and place our opponent in the place of a borrower. Giving more than asked thus reverses the power relationship, so that the "oppressed" takes mastery of the situation. We really do "overcome" evil with good.

-Dr. Leithart, Leithart.com

Lordship of Jesus Christ

This world belongs to our Saviour, and we have been given custodial charge of it. We are responsible to him for how we use it. The problem of sin includes not only questions of personal morality but also the careless use of Christ's environment. A host of matters, in the personal, political and social arenas, are transformed when we see Christ's mediatorial kingship in this way.

-Robert Letham,
The Work of Christ - Contours of Christian Theology, 208.

Harmony of the Gospels

If you hold that Dante's Divine Comedy was written verse after verse, then you must also judge the Gospels as separate entities. However, you then must forgive me if I am not interested in your views because you prove yourself a complete barbarian in matters of creation. A great symphony first exists as a whole and later it unfolds in its single movements. Quacks may patch four movements together; that, however, entitles us to call them quacks. The whole test of Christianity is that it binds all the times together.

- Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Fruit of Lips, 133.

Gregory of Nazianzen

Gregory of Nazianzen wrote against Apollinarianism, the belief that Jesus incarnated into man but did not indwell a human mind, saying,

If anyone has put his trust in him as a man without a human mind, he is wholly bereft of mind, and quite unworthy of salvation. For that which he has not assumed he has not healed; but that which is united to his Godhead is also saved

-Gregory of Nazianzen, Letter to Cledonius in The Person of Christ by Donald Macleod, 160.