Thursday, May 14, 2009

Quotes to Ponder

Quotes on Culture and Christianity

“Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things” [1]

If one asks whether the traffic of influence flows more strongly from Christian churches to secular culture or from secular culture to the churches, it is plain that the secular deities of common culture influence the church far more than the God of the Christian faith influences the culture. Efficiency more than godliness is the criterion by which the pastor's success in a church is measured. Budget rather than vision determines policy. In many electronic churches of the conservative evangelical sort, high technology is used shrewdly, and skills in making money are practiced in the name of Christ, even under the sign of the cross. [2]

Although we might like to hold a fond illusion that the church is in the world, converting the world from secularism to Christianity, the fact is that the world is in the church, converting the church to secularism. [3]

The christian world has a temporal task, an earthly task to fulfil: an earthly task, since a civilisation, as civilisation, is directly ordered to a specific temporal end; an earthly christian task, since by hypothesis this civilisation is a christian one, since the world which is in question has received the light of the Gospel. This temporal task of the christian world is to work here on earth for a realisation in social and temporal terms of the truths of the Gospel: for if the Gospel is primarily concerned with the things of eternal life, and infinitely [4]

Quotes on Marriage and Family

“When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family we step into a fairy-tale.” [5]

“What is called matriarchy was simply moral anarchy, in which the mother alone remained fixed because all the fathers were fugitive and irresponsible.” [6]

“All the things that make monogamy a success are, in their nature, un-dramatic things: the silent growth of an instinctive confidence, the common wounds and victories, the accumulation of customs, the rich maturing of old jokes.[7]

Quotes About God and belief

What makes the biblical God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, different is that he takes pleasure in and responds to the reflection of his eternal Self in the mirror of creation, partaking not only of a Reality and Bliss that lies beyond our comprehension but, no less, the ups and downs, woes and weals of creaturely existence. This God is a participant in creation all the way through, the One who holds us in his hand so we can hear his story, listens in return as we tell ours, and, even, in the wondrous expanse of creation, allows us to hold him in return. Further, because God not only tells the story but hears and comprehends it, nothing is lost. From God to God in God. [8]

…in all honest religion there is something that is hateful to the prosperous compromise of our time. You are free, in our time, to say that God does not exist; you are free to say that He exists and is evil; you are free to say (like poor old Renan) that He would like to exist if He could. You may talk of God as a metaphor or a mystification; you may water Him down with gallons of long words, or boil Him to the rags of metaphysics; and it is not merely that nobody punishes, but nobody protests. But, if you speak of God as a fact, as a thing, like a tiger, as a reason for changing one’s conduct, then the modern world will stop you somehow, if it can. We are long past talking about whether an unbeliever should be punished for being irreverent. It is now thought irreverent to be a believer.[9]


Endnotes
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[1] Gilbert Keith Chesterton, The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton: Christendon in Dublin, Irish Impressions, The New Jerusalem, A Short History of England. Vol. 20, James V. Schall. (San fran. Ignatius Press, 1986) 211

[2]. Waldo Beach, Christian Ethics in the Protestant Tradition [book on-line] (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1988, accessed 5 November 2008), 7; available from Questia, http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=27957131; Internet.

[3]. Waldo Beach, Christian Ethics in the Protestant Tradition [book on-line] (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1988, accessed 5 November 2008), 7; available from Questia, http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=27957131; Internet.

[4]. Jacques Maritain, True Humanism [book on-line] (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1938, accessed 28 January 2009), 34; available from Questia, http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=91321499; Internet.

[5] Gilbert Keith Chesterton, The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton: Christendon in Dublin, Irish Impressions, The New Jerusalem, A Short History of England. Vol. 1, James V. Schall. (San fran. Ignatius Press, 1986) 143

[6]. G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man [book on-line] (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1955, accessed 21 January 2009), 53; available from Questia, http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=6237268; Internet.

[7] George Bernard Shaw by G. K. Chesterton (London: John Lane, 1909) pp.191

[8]. Richard L. Fern, Nature, God, and Humanity: Envisioning an Ethics of Nature [book on-line] (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002, accessed 28 January 2009), 146; available from Questia, http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=105096511; Internet.

[9] George Bernard Shaw by G. K. Chesterton (London: John Lane, 1909) pp. 231-232