Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.
- Screwtape (senior Demon) to Wormwood (junior Tempter) in The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis
…hermeneutics nourishes respect as respect for the otherness of the Other…[citing Gadamer:] ‘It is the Other who breaks into my ego-centredness and gives me something to understand.’…interpreters conditioned by their own embeddeness in specific times, cultures, and theological or secular traditions need to listen, rather than seeking to ‘master’ the Other by netting it within their own prior system of concepts and categories. This premature assimilation of the Other into one’s own prior grooves of habituated thought constitutes the ‘control’ and advance commandeering that Gadamer calls ‘Method.’
- Anthony Thiselton, Promise, 133-34.
Biblical scholarship in general has suffered from a preoccupation with the referential aspects of language and with the factual information that can be extracted from a text. Such an attitude is especially detrimental to the study of poetic and mythological material, which is expressive language, articulating feelings and attitudes, rather than describing reality in an objective way. The apocalyptic literature provides a rather clear example of language that is expressive rather than referential, symbolic rather than factual.
Collins, Apocalyptic Imagination, 17
Jesus is the the Champion of the Kingdom of God (Mk 3:27), the Initiator of the Kingdom (Mt 11:12), the Instrument of the Kingdom (Mt 12:28), the Representative of the Kingdom (Lk 17:20-21), the Mediator of the Kingdom (Mk 2:18), the Bearer of the Kingdom (Mt 11:5), the Revealer of the Kingdom (Mt 13:16-17).
~ G.R. Beasley-Murray, Jesus and the Kingdom of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1986), 145–6.
In the Church of Jesus Christ there can and should be no non-theologians
~ Karl Barth
But the biggest reason most of us write unclearly is that we don’t know when readers will think we are unclear, much less why. Our own writing always seems clearer to us than to our readers, because we read into it what we want them to get out of it. And so instead of revising our writing to meet our readers’ needs, send it off the moment it meets ours.
- Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace, p. 4
Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.
~ Pascal
Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It’s like upsetting a milk jug and hoping that the way it splashes itself will give you a map of London. But if I can’t trust my own thinking, of course I can’t trust the arguments leading to Atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an Atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.
—C.S. Lewis
