Christianity came into the world firstly in order to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain. The only fun of being a Christian was that a man was not left alone with the Inner Light, but definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners.
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 76.
But the problem with readers, the idea we’ve been given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television. So the greatest principal is, ‘I should sit here and be entertained.’ And the more classical model is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don’t know who they probably couldn’t comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and the artist gives you. That’s an incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it. It’s an old moral, but it’s completely true.
Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals. Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one bears the other. In fact, this hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world. This is another thing about the world which is upsidedown: all the friendly and likable people seem dead to me; only the haters seem alive.
Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (New York: Vintage, 1998), 100.
A great post by Ben Myers on the relation between exegesis and dogmatics.
Here’s an excerpt:
In other words, there’s no one-way street from exegesis to dogmatics – the traffic always moves in both directions. And as Bultmann rightly insisted, there can never be a “presuppositionless exegesis,” in which the exegete confronts the text of scripture with a theological blank slate. Theology is always there already – indeed, it’s already inscribed in the texts themselves, and in the whole array of lexical, text-critical and historical tools which are used to translate and interpret these texts. It’s theology all the way down!
Every creative philosopher is a hidden theologian (sometimes even a declared theologian).
Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 25.
A covenant is a voluntary agreement on the part of two or three persons to enter into friendship on certain conditions, or to renew it when broken, and is usually accompanied for the purpose of confirmation by the observance of ceremonies of various kinds.
The covenant of works it is said consisted in the agreement entered into between God and man, according to which the latter by rendering perfect and uninterrupted obedience to the divine commands in his own strength would have secured for himself.
Hermann Venema, Institutes of Theology, trans., Alex W. Brown (Andover: Draper Brothers, 1853), 445-446.
Proki 