Archive for the ‘Quotations’ Category
Shapes
If children belong at the table, if we’re to rejoice at the feast of the kingdom with our sons and daughters, then they’ve got to be washed up. If our children belong at the table of the Father, if they participate in the body and blood of the Lord, if they share the holy things as living stones in the temple of the Spirit, then they should also receive the effective sign of baptism.
The role of children in the church divides Baptistic Christians from others. It’s not a minor issue. Whether we baptize babies or not, we’re making a statement about the boundaries of the city of God. And not just a statement: The way we baptize, whom we baptize, shapes the kind of city we are.
Without children, the church is a club for the religiously mature. Without children, the feasts of the church are more restrictive than the feast of old Israel, as if God’s hospitality had, unthinkably, contracted after the coming of the Son and Spirit. Without children, the church cannot be the new humanity that extends as far as the old humanity, from the cradle to the death–bed. Without children, the church is something less than the city of God. Without children, it may be a city under judgment, a city without children laughing in the streets and playing in the squares.
Peter Leithart, The Theopolitan Vision, 39–40
Always
The Lord’s Supper should be part of every Lord’s day liturgy. Worship in the Bible always takes place at a table. An altar is a table (cf. Ezek 41:22), and ever since the flood the people of God have erected altars at places of worship (Gen 8:20; 12:7–8; 33:20; Exod 20:24).
If you could see an ancient Israelite preparing for a feast, you’d see him pick an unblemished animal from his flock or herd, prepare flour or bread, and grab a flagon of wine. If you didn’t know better, you might suspect he’s preparing for a barbecue. Because he is. At the tabernacle and temple, priests offer the Lord’s bread and worshipers share His food (cf. Lev 21–22). Covenant renewal climaxes with a covenant meal, a sign of restored harmony between the parties to the covenant.
Biblically, worship without a meal isn’t worship at all. When we worship without the Supper, it’s as if we’re disciples on the road to Emmaus, who hear Jesus speak but never recognize Him because we don’t stick around for the breaking of bread (Luke 24). A liturgy without the Supper is like a contract without signatures; it is (not just like) a wedding feast without food, a party without hors d’oeuvres and wine, as if the Lord were to open His house to extend hospitality but never offered chips or brought the beer out of the fridge.
Peter Leithart, The Theopolitan Vision, 31
Contentment
You should probably be using the tool that you hate the most. You hate it because you know the most about it.
Dan McKinley
Crossposted to full◦valence.
Self-discipline
Why not do the thing you admire, instead of admiring the thing you do?
Lisa Moonen
Rehearsal
A theme, a melody, is a definite statement in tones—and apparently music can never have enough of saying over again what has already been said, not once or twice, but dozens of times; hardly does a section, which consists largely of repetitions, come to an end before the whole story is happily retold over again.
How is it that a procedure which, in any other form of expression, would produce sheer nonsense proves, in the language of music, to be thoroughly sensible—to such an extent that rehearing what has already been heard is one of the chief sources—for many, the chief source—of the pleasure given by music?
Victor Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol. HT: John Barach
Anti-natural
Gentlemen, organic processes delay the fall. . . . When you build a wall of a house, you do not delay the fall, but you dam it up. You prevent it. You put on the brakes. You dam it off. So, gentlemen, you stop the fall. That’s what all work does, because all work tries to build, energetically, resistance against what would otherwise happen by nature. Work is always an anti–natural. By nature, the thing would crumble. By your work, you stop the fall. . . .
If you are passionate, gentlemen, you defy all the gravity. A lover, and anybody who is passionate can swing—can overcome hurdles and obstacles. He can swing himself over fences, which no impassionate man can. Passion, therefore, gentlemen, overcomes gravity. It defies gravity, and it can soar with the wings of the dawn.
(Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Comparative Religion, 1954)
Gravity
I don’t believe in passion just as a word, my dear man. Passion means to be given wings so that you can do deeds which otherwise you couldn’t do. The drab worker who works eight hours a day, when he is in love can suddenly work on the site four more hours to build a house for his sweetheart, or whatnot, I mean. Or he can suddenly get a better job, because he is winged. Love, you see, . . . goes uphill. . . . Wherever you are in love, gentlemen, the difficult becomes the easy. . . And that’s why the salmons go upstream, to spawn. That shows their vitality. When you are in love, gentlemen, you overcome gravity. That’s the test. This is the test of love, gentlemen, that you do overcome gravity. Otherwise you are not in love.
(Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Comparative Religion, 1954)
Intrepid
It’s the same, gentlemen, the difference between courage and intrepidity. . . . You all have intrepidity, I take it. It’s the great American virtue. But that intrepidity is something that comes this side of fear. Now gentlemen, a courageous man is not a man who has intrepidity, who never trembles. But a courageous man is a man who doesn’t give a damn for his own cowardice. That is, if you don’t have the coward inside yourself, you can’t be courageous. You’re just foolhardy. That’s not courage. . . . Courageous is the man who is able to overcome his cowardice, and whom I shall respect. But I shall not respect the foolhardy, who doesn’t even know of the danger.
(Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Comparative Religion, 1954)
Conceal
In his lectures on Exodus, Jim Jordan mentions his (then) recent interview with the science fiction and fantasy novelist Gene Wolfe:
“Wolfe’s most striking piece of fiction so far is a set of five novels which are in continuation with one another called The Book of the New Sun. It’s real complex and there’s been a lot of analysis saying ‘What did he mean by this? What’s really going on in this chapter?’ and so forth.
“I asked him about it. ‘Are you trying to confuse the reader?’ He said, ‘No, I always leave enough clues and you have to find them.’ He said, ‘Remember: I worked on this for five or six years, so I had a lot of time to put in everything I wanted and to get it the way I wanted it to be.’ He rewrote it five times before it was done.
“Now the reader doesn’t usually take that much time. It’s true of Wolfe’s books—as one reviewer put it: ‘If you buy a novel by Gene Wolfe, you really get about four novels because you can read it over and over and get all kinds of new things out of it each time, so it’s a good investment.’
“But I was struck by the fact that he said: ‘I had five years to work on this and to get things exactly the way I wanted it and to rework this and to get the story exactly the way I wanted it, to make some things clear, to obscure some things, and to put challenges before the reader.’
“And I thought, ‘Well, God had eternity to put things in the Bible and there are plenty of things in the Bible that are clear to us and then there are things that are puzzles.’ The Book of Proverbs says, ‘The glory of God is to conceal a matter and the glory of kings is to search it out.’
Jordan goes on to mention that when Moses, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, preaches the sermon we call Deuteronomy, he has been meditating on Genesis and Exodus and Leviticus for thirty-eight years. If we haven’t done that, we can’t really expect Deuteronomy to be crystal clear to us on a first reading:
“Moses has done that for 38 years. You and I haven’t. Now he puts Deuteronomy down, and what is Deuteronomy? It’s the fruit of 38 years of reflection on all the details in Exodus and Leviticus.
“To understand Deuteronomy really well, we would need to understand everything in Exodus and Leviticus and then we’d have to think about how they go together in a real life context for a long time. Then you’d be in a position to understand what was in Moses’ mind when he wrote Deuteronomy.
“That’s not to say that we can’t get anything out of Deuteronomy. But it is to say that there’s some complicated things in here that a lot of people haven’t gotten and that we’re not going to get today either.
“But it illustrates just how rich this book is, because Deuteronomy is the culmination of the first five books of the Bible. Everything is rolled together in Deuteronomy as a result of Moses’ reflections, under divine inspiration. So we shouldn’t expect it to be completely transparent.”
Source: John Barach
Eucharist
We consecrate the things we receive by prayer, the word of God, by thanksgiving. Everything we touch becomes holy if we receive it with gratitude, with the word of God, and prayer: our food becomes holy food for holy people if we give thanks; our friends and family are holy to us; our talents are holy to us; . . . the material goods we receive are holy as we receive them with thanksgiving.
As we are giving thanks for everything in all circumstances we are consecrating the world, which means we are laying God’s claim on everything. When something is holy, it doesn’t belong to us; if I receive food and I give thanks to God for it, that means this is now God’s food, and I better use it the way God wants me to. That means, among other things, that I better share it, because that’s part of what God wants me to do with my food: it’s not just mine anymore; I’ve consecrated it to God.
Everything you give thanks for—every person, every circumstance you give thanks for, every material good you give thanks for—you are laying God’s claim on that thing, you are extending God’s rule over the world by acts of thanksgiving. . . .
Receiving something with thanksgiving also means to ask how can this thing, this person, this circumstance, how can this thing which I’ve consecrated to God by thanksgiving, how can that become, as it were, food that I can share with others? And this, I think, helps us to see how . . . we can respond with gratitude [for] even the bad things that happen in our lives: . . . you’re looking for ways to break out those circumstances as bread, to make them nourishing for other people. . . . How can you turn that into eucharist, a shared meal? . . .
We can also give thanks in bad circumstances, because thanksgiving is proleptic; we give thanks before the deliverance comes. David does this constantly: he’s surrounded by enemies, but then he gives God thanks even though he’s not yet rescued. We celebrate the Lord’s supper in the midst of our enemies; the Lord sets his table in the midst of our enemies. He sets us a table of thanksgiving when he hasn’t yet fulfilled all his promises, and yet we’re giving thanks to him for fulfilling all his promises.
How can we do that? Because his promises are so certain to be fulfilled, because we are so confident that they will be fulfilled, that our deliverance will come whatever form it might take, that we give thanks for it now, before it happens.
Peter Leithart, Continuous Gratitude
I gotta have my orange juice. 