Property Of God
Member
- Joined
- Oct 13, 2007
- Messages
- 786
"You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve, and that's both honor enough to lift up the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth."
C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian
" ...badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness . . . Evil is a parasite, not an original thing."
C.S. Lewis - Mere Christianity, II, 2, para. 10
"Evil usually contains or imitates some good, which accounts for its potency."
C.S. Lewis - Letters to Arthur Greeves, p. 176, L 17 Jan 40
God whispers to us in our pleasures,
speaks in our conscience,
but shouts in our pains;
it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
"Spirituality, like that found in the New Age movement, is big on grand historical meanings, such as the "Age of Aquarius, " and down on belief in a Devil, Hell, and sin. Belief in the Devil is about as welcome to "spiritual" people as the Devil himself is to religious people (i.e., orthodox Jews, orthodox Christians, and Muslims)."
Peter Kreeft, "Satan and the Millennium", article in Crisis Magazine
"Prayer is central to our lives because it reaches into the very core of our being, into the heart of human existence. In his Confessions,....Augustine said that our central drive is our desire for God, whether we recognize this or not. We are not capable of generating our own happiness; we must go outside ourselves to find it. Augustine once told his congregation:
Men are not sufficient for their own bliss.
C.S. Lewis described this process as being "surprised by joy"-the sudden discovery that all our lives we were looking for something beyond our relationships, achievements and successes. We were, in fact, looking for God, but did not know it. Only when our drives and desires, hopes and loves are redirected towards God, do we become fully human. We were made for our relationships, created to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. The function of prayer is to bring these realizations to the surface of our lives. Prayer points us beyond ourselves, beyond our friendships, to the deepest realization of all: that God made us to be lovers of God. He is at the very heart of our hearts."
James Houston, The Transforming Friendship
"The word of Christ is the great stabilizer of our lives. Listening to Him leads us into truth and freedom."
Klaus Bockmuehl, "Listening to the God who Speaks"
"Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of hosts, The whole earth is full of His glory."
Isaiah 6:3
"And this is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all.
I John 1:5
"For Thou alone art Holy"
Revelation 15:4
"The Rock! His work is perfect, For all His ways are just: A God of faithfulness and without injustice, Righteous and upright is He." Deuteronomy 32:4
"for God is love."
I John 4:8
"For the mountains may be removed and the hills may shake, but My lovingkindness will not be removed from you, and My covenant of peace will not be shaken," says the Lord who has compassion on you."
Isaiah 54:10
"Surely our griefs He Himself bore; and our sorrows He carried" Isaiah 53:4
"No joy on earth is equal to the bliss of being all taken up with love to Christ. If I had my choice of all the lives that I could live, I certainly would not choose to be an emperor, nor to be a millionaire, nor to be a philosopher, for power and wealth and knowledge bring with them sorrow. But I would choose to have nothing to do but to love my Lord Jesus-nothing, I mean, but to do all things for his sake, and out of love to him."
Charles Spurgeon
"I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."
C.S. Lewis, "Is Theology Poetry?
...early America knew both her legitimate heritage and what she would not borrow. Centuries have passed, and as America has grown and waxed strong, the belief that was once rejected-that man is the measure of all things-is now espoused. The conviction that was once held-the fallen nature of men-is now rejected. And in every sense of the term, a major conflict for the cultural control has begun to emerge. On the one hand there is the cry for liberty from the superintendency of law over private practice. On the other hand the same voices call upon the law to ban the assumptions of the Christian truths of the fall of man and of mankind's redemption. And the Christian, bewildered by this dramatic turn, sees the darkening horizon because of the encroaching deformity within the cultural soul. The call of the Supreme Artist, who created all things beautiful, is being mocked. Secularism has grabbed its philosophical knife to silence the Artist in the public square. But the memory of where the nation first began still haunts, and the evil being evidenced is painful. The heart and mind cry out in prayer.
Ravi Zacharias, Deliver Us From Evil
Where do we go from here? Nearly everyone agrees that we are standing at the end of an age, perhaps at a new axial period. We have left modernity behind almost as surely as we have left antiquity behind. We are "postmodern". But we do not yet know what that means. From our unique experiment in living without a set of objective values, only two roads lie open: return or destruction. Once the sled is on the slippery slope leading to the abyss, we either brake or break; and no amount of rhetoric about "progress" can alter that fact. Crying "progress" as we die will not raise us from death. Yet our diagnosis gives us reason to hope. We came from a place closer to home; therefore it is possible to return. Our illness is not wholly hereditary. There is, of course, a far deeper illness in us that is hereditary. It is called "Original Sin", and for that a remedy far deeper than philosophy is needed, and in fact has been provided, and that is "the greatest story ever told". But there is also a cure, a hope, a home to return to on the natural level. It is our own human nature. The four cardinal virtues, which we shall explore in chapter four, are the heart of natural morality, and they lie embedded and ineradicable in our very nature. That nature is weakened and perverted by sin, but it is not obliterated. Natural virtue cannot save our souls, but it can save our civilization, and that is no mean feat. But it can save us only if we both know it and practice it. On the supernatural level there is also hope because there too is a home from which we came - Paradise - though the road back is only by grace. Since we were once home, there is home and thus a hope, a possibility of return - or even something better. The road to Paradise is supernatural virtue, the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity and the blessedness, or beatitude, that flows from them.
Peter Kreeft, Back to Virtue
"We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ."
2nd Corinthians 10:5
"In the erosion of Christian culture, post-Christian man has turned from the truth of God but still twists uncomfortably, holding what he needs of truth to be man while denying what he dislikes of truth in favor of his own chosen premises. Some search for social justice but to their shame exchange the Galilean carpenter for the bourgeois scribbler in the British museum; some seek for the suffering but miss the Man of Sorrows and follow shadowy avatars to a Nirvanic no man's land; others, looking for an exit from it all, miss the clarion call to freedom, "I am the Way, I am the Truth and I am the Life" and stumble along a road which leads nowhere, dusty with death. ...The Christian life is not just difficult for man; it is impossible. But it is exactly here that humanism leaves off and Christianity begins. That is also why this uniquely "impossible" faith-with a God who is, with an Incarnation that is earthly and historical, with a salvation that is at cross-purposes with human nature, with a Resurrection that blasts apart the finality of death-is able to provide an alternative to the sifting, settling dust of death and through a new birth open the way to new life.
Os Guinness, The Dust of Death
There were some ages in Western history that have occasionally been called Dark. They were dark, it is said, because in them learning declined, and progress paused, and men labored under the pall of belief. A cause-effect relationship is frequently felt to exist between the pause and the belief. Men believed in things like the Last Judgment and fiery torment . . . Then the light came . . . Men were freed from the fear of the Last Judgment; it was felt to be more bracing to face Nothing than to face the Tribunal . . . The myth sovereign in the old age was that everything means everything. The myth sovereign in the new is that nothing means anything. Thomas Howard, Chance or the Dance: A Critique of Modern Secularism Anyone who has . . . read Mere Christianity . . . knows something of the sheer force and magnificence of Lewis in argument. There is nothing snide, nothing petty, nothing ad hominem, disingenuous, or irrelevant. All is magnanimity, clarity, and craftsmanship. Lewis knew backwards and forwards the art of argument - of rhetoric, actually, in its Renaissance meaning, designating the whole enterprise of opening up and articulating and working through a given line of thought.
Thomas Howard, C.S. Lewis: Man of Letters
"Mere Christianity" was the term C. S. Lewis employed to describe essential Christianity--those core Christian beliefs held through the ages by Catholics and Protestants alike. What most people don't realize is that Lewis adapted this term from an author who wrote more than three hundred years ago. The author's name was Richard Baxter, and his writings on the "essentials" of Christianity provide a useful background to the views articulated by Lewis. A Protestant clergyman in England, Baxter lived from 1615 to 1691. Though all but forgotten today, Baxter was a popular and prolific author in his own day and for many decades following his death. He wrote more than 160 separate works--nearly 200, by some estimates. One Anglican Bishop said of Baxter that had he lived during the earliest years of Christianity, he would have been "one of the fathers of the church." The famed Dr. Samuel Johnson, when asked by Boswell which books by Baxter he should read, replied: "Read any of them; they are all good." In particular, Dr. Johnson thought that Baxter's Reasons for the Christian Religion "contained the best collection of the evidences of the divinity of the Christian system." Many years after Baxter's death, famed English statesman William Wilberforce called Baxter's writings on the spiritual life "a treasury of Christian wisdom." From Baxter's Church-history of the Government of Bishops (1680): "I am a CHRISTIAN, a MEER CHRISTIAN, of no other Religion; and the Church that I am of is the Christian Church, and hath been visible where ever the Christian Religion and Church hath been visible...."
John G. West, Jr., "Richard Baxter and the Origin of Mere Christianity"
The most certain assurance of life after death for the Christian is the historical, literal resurrection of Christ. The Christian believes in life after death not because of an argument, first of all, but because of a witness. The Church is that witness; 'apostolic succession' means first of all the chain of witnesses beginning with eyewitnesses: "We have been eyewitnesses of His resurrection. . . and we testify (witness) to you." This is the answer to the skeptic who asks: "What do you know for sure about life after death anyway? Have you ever been there? Have you come back to tell us?" The Christian reply is: "No, but I have a very good Friend who has. I believe Him, and I follow Him not only through life but also through death. Come along"
Peter Kreeft, "The Case for Life after Death", Truth Journal
Then I looked and heard the voice of many angels, numbering thousands upon thousands, and ten thousand times ten thousand. They encircled the throne and the living creatures and the elders. In a loud voice they sang: "Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise!" Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all that is in them, singing: "To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be praise and honor and glory and power, for ever and ever!" The four living creatures said, "Amen," and the elders fell down and worshiped.
Revelation 5:11-14
C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian
" ...badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness . . . Evil is a parasite, not an original thing."
C.S. Lewis - Mere Christianity, II, 2, para. 10
"Evil usually contains or imitates some good, which accounts for its potency."
C.S. Lewis - Letters to Arthur Greeves, p. 176, L 17 Jan 40
God whispers to us in our pleasures,
speaks in our conscience,
but shouts in our pains;
it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
"Spirituality, like that found in the New Age movement, is big on grand historical meanings, such as the "Age of Aquarius, " and down on belief in a Devil, Hell, and sin. Belief in the Devil is about as welcome to "spiritual" people as the Devil himself is to religious people (i.e., orthodox Jews, orthodox Christians, and Muslims)."
Peter Kreeft, "Satan and the Millennium", article in Crisis Magazine
"Prayer is central to our lives because it reaches into the very core of our being, into the heart of human existence. In his Confessions,....Augustine said that our central drive is our desire for God, whether we recognize this or not. We are not capable of generating our own happiness; we must go outside ourselves to find it. Augustine once told his congregation:
Men are not sufficient for their own bliss.
C.S. Lewis described this process as being "surprised by joy"-the sudden discovery that all our lives we were looking for something beyond our relationships, achievements and successes. We were, in fact, looking for God, but did not know it. Only when our drives and desires, hopes and loves are redirected towards God, do we become fully human. We were made for our relationships, created to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. The function of prayer is to bring these realizations to the surface of our lives. Prayer points us beyond ourselves, beyond our friendships, to the deepest realization of all: that God made us to be lovers of God. He is at the very heart of our hearts."
James Houston, The Transforming Friendship
"The word of Christ is the great stabilizer of our lives. Listening to Him leads us into truth and freedom."
Klaus Bockmuehl, "Listening to the God who Speaks"
"Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of hosts, The whole earth is full of His glory."
Isaiah 6:3
"And this is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all.
I John 1:5
"For Thou alone art Holy"
Revelation 15:4
"The Rock! His work is perfect, For all His ways are just: A God of faithfulness and without injustice, Righteous and upright is He." Deuteronomy 32:4
"for God is love."
I John 4:8
"For the mountains may be removed and the hills may shake, but My lovingkindness will not be removed from you, and My covenant of peace will not be shaken," says the Lord who has compassion on you."
Isaiah 54:10
"Surely our griefs He Himself bore; and our sorrows He carried" Isaiah 53:4
"No joy on earth is equal to the bliss of being all taken up with love to Christ. If I had my choice of all the lives that I could live, I certainly would not choose to be an emperor, nor to be a millionaire, nor to be a philosopher, for power and wealth and knowledge bring with them sorrow. But I would choose to have nothing to do but to love my Lord Jesus-nothing, I mean, but to do all things for his sake, and out of love to him."
Charles Spurgeon
"I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."
C.S. Lewis, "Is Theology Poetry?
...early America knew both her legitimate heritage and what she would not borrow. Centuries have passed, and as America has grown and waxed strong, the belief that was once rejected-that man is the measure of all things-is now espoused. The conviction that was once held-the fallen nature of men-is now rejected. And in every sense of the term, a major conflict for the cultural control has begun to emerge. On the one hand there is the cry for liberty from the superintendency of law over private practice. On the other hand the same voices call upon the law to ban the assumptions of the Christian truths of the fall of man and of mankind's redemption. And the Christian, bewildered by this dramatic turn, sees the darkening horizon because of the encroaching deformity within the cultural soul. The call of the Supreme Artist, who created all things beautiful, is being mocked. Secularism has grabbed its philosophical knife to silence the Artist in the public square. But the memory of where the nation first began still haunts, and the evil being evidenced is painful. The heart and mind cry out in prayer.
Ravi Zacharias, Deliver Us From Evil
Where do we go from here? Nearly everyone agrees that we are standing at the end of an age, perhaps at a new axial period. We have left modernity behind almost as surely as we have left antiquity behind. We are "postmodern". But we do not yet know what that means. From our unique experiment in living without a set of objective values, only two roads lie open: return or destruction. Once the sled is on the slippery slope leading to the abyss, we either brake or break; and no amount of rhetoric about "progress" can alter that fact. Crying "progress" as we die will not raise us from death. Yet our diagnosis gives us reason to hope. We came from a place closer to home; therefore it is possible to return. Our illness is not wholly hereditary. There is, of course, a far deeper illness in us that is hereditary. It is called "Original Sin", and for that a remedy far deeper than philosophy is needed, and in fact has been provided, and that is "the greatest story ever told". But there is also a cure, a hope, a home to return to on the natural level. It is our own human nature. The four cardinal virtues, which we shall explore in chapter four, are the heart of natural morality, and they lie embedded and ineradicable in our very nature. That nature is weakened and perverted by sin, but it is not obliterated. Natural virtue cannot save our souls, but it can save our civilization, and that is no mean feat. But it can save us only if we both know it and practice it. On the supernatural level there is also hope because there too is a home from which we came - Paradise - though the road back is only by grace. Since we were once home, there is home and thus a hope, a possibility of return - or even something better. The road to Paradise is supernatural virtue, the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity and the blessedness, or beatitude, that flows from them.
Peter Kreeft, Back to Virtue
"We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ."
2nd Corinthians 10:5
"In the erosion of Christian culture, post-Christian man has turned from the truth of God but still twists uncomfortably, holding what he needs of truth to be man while denying what he dislikes of truth in favor of his own chosen premises. Some search for social justice but to their shame exchange the Galilean carpenter for the bourgeois scribbler in the British museum; some seek for the suffering but miss the Man of Sorrows and follow shadowy avatars to a Nirvanic no man's land; others, looking for an exit from it all, miss the clarion call to freedom, "I am the Way, I am the Truth and I am the Life" and stumble along a road which leads nowhere, dusty with death. ...The Christian life is not just difficult for man; it is impossible. But it is exactly here that humanism leaves off and Christianity begins. That is also why this uniquely "impossible" faith-with a God who is, with an Incarnation that is earthly and historical, with a salvation that is at cross-purposes with human nature, with a Resurrection that blasts apart the finality of death-is able to provide an alternative to the sifting, settling dust of death and through a new birth open the way to new life.
Os Guinness, The Dust of Death
There were some ages in Western history that have occasionally been called Dark. They were dark, it is said, because in them learning declined, and progress paused, and men labored under the pall of belief. A cause-effect relationship is frequently felt to exist between the pause and the belief. Men believed in things like the Last Judgment and fiery torment . . . Then the light came . . . Men were freed from the fear of the Last Judgment; it was felt to be more bracing to face Nothing than to face the Tribunal . . . The myth sovereign in the old age was that everything means everything. The myth sovereign in the new is that nothing means anything. Thomas Howard, Chance or the Dance: A Critique of Modern Secularism Anyone who has . . . read Mere Christianity . . . knows something of the sheer force and magnificence of Lewis in argument. There is nothing snide, nothing petty, nothing ad hominem, disingenuous, or irrelevant. All is magnanimity, clarity, and craftsmanship. Lewis knew backwards and forwards the art of argument - of rhetoric, actually, in its Renaissance meaning, designating the whole enterprise of opening up and articulating and working through a given line of thought.
Thomas Howard, C.S. Lewis: Man of Letters
"Mere Christianity" was the term C. S. Lewis employed to describe essential Christianity--those core Christian beliefs held through the ages by Catholics and Protestants alike. What most people don't realize is that Lewis adapted this term from an author who wrote more than three hundred years ago. The author's name was Richard Baxter, and his writings on the "essentials" of Christianity provide a useful background to the views articulated by Lewis. A Protestant clergyman in England, Baxter lived from 1615 to 1691. Though all but forgotten today, Baxter was a popular and prolific author in his own day and for many decades following his death. He wrote more than 160 separate works--nearly 200, by some estimates. One Anglican Bishop said of Baxter that had he lived during the earliest years of Christianity, he would have been "one of the fathers of the church." The famed Dr. Samuel Johnson, when asked by Boswell which books by Baxter he should read, replied: "Read any of them; they are all good." In particular, Dr. Johnson thought that Baxter's Reasons for the Christian Religion "contained the best collection of the evidences of the divinity of the Christian system." Many years after Baxter's death, famed English statesman William Wilberforce called Baxter's writings on the spiritual life "a treasury of Christian wisdom." From Baxter's Church-history of the Government of Bishops (1680): "I am a CHRISTIAN, a MEER CHRISTIAN, of no other Religion; and the Church that I am of is the Christian Church, and hath been visible where ever the Christian Religion and Church hath been visible...."
John G. West, Jr., "Richard Baxter and the Origin of Mere Christianity"
The most certain assurance of life after death for the Christian is the historical, literal resurrection of Christ. The Christian believes in life after death not because of an argument, first of all, but because of a witness. The Church is that witness; 'apostolic succession' means first of all the chain of witnesses beginning with eyewitnesses: "We have been eyewitnesses of His resurrection. . . and we testify (witness) to you." This is the answer to the skeptic who asks: "What do you know for sure about life after death anyway? Have you ever been there? Have you come back to tell us?" The Christian reply is: "No, but I have a very good Friend who has. I believe Him, and I follow Him not only through life but also through death. Come along"
Peter Kreeft, "The Case for Life after Death", Truth Journal
Then I looked and heard the voice of many angels, numbering thousands upon thousands, and ten thousand times ten thousand. They encircled the throne and the living creatures and the elders. In a loud voice they sang: "Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise!" Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all that is in them, singing: "To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be praise and honor and glory and power, for ever and ever!" The four living creatures said, "Amen," and the elders fell down and worshiped.
Revelation 5:11-14
