Words & the World

“The thickness and consistency of this original world was underwritten by the trustworthiness and faithfulness of the divine speaker, but it remained to be seen if the first human creatures would choose to remain within it and to commit themselves obediently to the divine command. It is no wonder, then, that the enemy began to try to unmake this first world by playing with words and specifically by intimating that God’s words might actually be less than wholly trustworthy.”

~ Craig Gay, Dialogue, Catalogue & Monologue (Vancouver, BC; Regent College Publishing, 2008), 49.

Teaching, Thinking & Important Questions

“The really hard part about teaching is the thinking. Because if you want to help people as an educator, you have to know what people are for, why they exist, what it would mean for them to be fulfilled, and what Good their existence is ordered toward. Suddenly, you are up to your chin in the most important philosophical questions that can ever be asked.”

~ Fred Sanders, review of “Education for Human Flourishing“

From Death to Life

“Scripture teaches that history does not degenerate from life to death but is translated from the reign of death into the reign of life.”

~ Peter J. Leithart, Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, and Hope in Western Literature (Moscow, Id.; Canon Press, 2006), xiii.

God and the Limits of Empiricism

“We want to know whether the universe simply happens to be what it is for no reason or whether there is a power behind it that makes it what it is. Since that power, if it exists, would be not one of the observed facts but a reality which makes them, no mere observation of the facts can find it. . . . If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe — no more than the architect of a house could actually be a wall or staircase or fireplace in that house.”

~ C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (London, Fount; 1977), 32.

God Gives with Interest

“Viewed as a whole, . . . the Christian account of history is eschatological not only in the sense that it comes to a definitive and everlasting end, but in the sense that the end is a glorified beginning, not merely a return to origins. The Christian Bible moves not from garden lost to garden restored, but from garden to garden-city. God gives with interest.

~ Peter J. Leithart, Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, and Hope in Western Literature (Moscow, Id.; Canon Press, 2006), xi.

The Deep Meaning of Happiness

“If God is the proper reference point for all aspects and things in life, then God gives them their true meaning and puts them in the proper order in our lives. This grand union of God, ourselves, and the whole cosmos in a sacred synthesis of rightly ordered love constitutes the deep meaning of happiness.”

~ David Naugle, Reordered Love, Reordered Lives (Grand Rapids, Mi.; Eerdmans, 2008), 23.

A Blind and Eager Pursuit

“There is not any thing in this world, perhaps, that is more talked of, and less understood, than the business of a happy life. It is every person’s wish and design; and yet not one in a thousand . . . knows wherein that happiness consists. We live, however, in a blind and eager pursuit of it; and the more haste we make in a wrong way, the further we are from our journey’s end.”

~ Seneca (3 BC – 65 AD), quoted by David Naugle in Reordered Love, Reordered Lives (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Eermands, 2008), 9.

The Pursuit of Happiness

“If we pay attention to our lives and observe the lives of others, we will soon discern that a desire for happiness of one kind or another is the conscious, subconscious, or unconscious motivation for just about everything we do. Most of our daily lives and activities are aimed at the goal of experiencing and enhancing some measure of well-being and delight, even if such intentions are in the unacknowledged background of our minds.”

~ David Naugle, Reordered Love, Reordered Lives (Grand Rapids, Mi.; Eerdmans, 2008), 4.

Common Grace or Cultural Compromise?

“That dominant culture has infiltrated our lives through new technologies and social mobility to such an extent that our conversations about common grace are now perhaps better framed this way: to what degree has the commonness that we have embraced in the culture that we share with our non-Christian neighbors compromised our commitment to the gospel?”

~ Richard Mouw, He Shines in All That’s Fair (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Eerdmans, 2001), 11.

What Modernity Promised & What Modernity Produced

“Modernity promised us a culture of unintimidated, curious, rational, self-reliant individuals, and it produced . . . a herd society, a race of anxious, timid, conformist ‘sheep’, and a culture of utter banality.”

~ Colin Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many (Cambridge, UK; Cambridge University Press, 1993, 2002), 13.