My marginalia from Out of the Silent Planet (1938) by C.S. Lewis

…was the fact that we had only one kind of hnau: they thought this must have far-reaching effects in the narrowing of sympathies and even of thought.

“Your thought must be at the mercy of your blood,” said the old sorn. “For you cannot compare it with thought that floats on a different blood.”

That was C.S. Lewis preaching on the virtues of diversity well before any around here was doing it.

“Be silent,” said the voice of Oyarsa. “You, thick one, have told me nothing of yourself, so I will tell it to you. In your own world you have attained great wisdom concerning bodies, and by this you have been able to make a ship that can cross the heaven; but in all other things you have the mind of an animal.”

It sometimes seems parts of our society are in the same state as Weston. And it sometimes seems I am, too. May I be fully alive in thought and morals and healthy relationships.

What is Christianity? “A Jesus-looking God raising up a Jesus-looking people to change the world in a Jesus kind of way.” At least, that’s the fetchingly simple way Greg Boyd put it in a podcast episode released back in late November.

“God speaks to us. Our answers are our prayers.”

— Eugene Peterson

Let it be true that my prayers are always answers to God’s speaking. But when I first read the quotation, which I found in a Krista Tippett interview, I read it as: “The answers we seek from God are the prayers we pray,” as if He is the one providing the food for prayer.

“We cannot be too careful about the words we use. We start out using them, and they end up using us.”

– Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places

Instead of God taking responsibility for creating, what would happen if we view God as taking responsibility for being created? That is, in Christ, God the human being fulfills humanity’s responsibility before God to present itself humbly, obedient and trusting in the face of all the vicissitudes inherent in that nature, and fulfills human nature’s calling and purpose. In this case Jesus’ death fulfills created nature, loving and trusting God within the constraints of created finitude. Christ, the God-Man, represents creation to God, takes responsibility for being creatED (not for creatING), unites creation to God, and in so doing reconciles the world to God, not God to the world.

— Tom Belt, “God takes responsibility for sin – or not.”

Now there’s a thought.

“I no longer spend most of my time with college professors like myself. I’ve traded in the PhDs for Kristi and my friends at Highland.”

— Richard Beck

“The dark paradox, then, is this: the more we seek to alleviate our loneliness through digital connectivity, the more lonely we will feel. Along the way, we will forsake solitude as a matter of course. Curiously, it may not even be loneliness as a desire for companionship that the design of social media fosters in us. Rather, it is a counterfeit longing that is generated: for stimulation rather than companionship. In the end, we will be left with the most profound loneliness: perpetually feeling a need for connection that we cannot satisfy and finding that we have not even our own company. To recap: no abiding sense of companionship, no solitude, no place for thought.”

— Michael Sacasas, “Solitude and Loneliness”

“I’m not Atlas, on any conceivable level.”

— Tom Belt, in a pithy, poetic expression of our dependency of God and others

“Next time, before you proclaim that ‘we never talk about X’—remember this only unveils how small your ‘we’ is.

— James K.A. Smith

“Now I know only in part; then I will know fully”—and in the meantime, it drives me my ignorance drives me crazy.

“God loved us while we were yet monsters.”

— Richard Beck, riffing on Paul

“Sexual puritanism is an attempt to safeguard possessions more valuable than pleasure. The good that it does outweighs the evil, the English knew this. They were seriously repressed, largely because repression prevented them from carelessly throwing away those things—chastity, marriage and the family—which slip so easily from the grasp of people whose natural tendency is to keep each other at a distance.”

— Roger Scruton, “English Character” in England: an Elegy

“Being incarnate was an embarrassment, a design-fault that God may have intended in the Italians but surely not in the English.”

— Roger Scruton, on the supposedly English “quiet suspicion of sensuality”

“I often think our broken church/social structures reflect our homes. Families teach us that even when are different and disagree, we are one.”

— Mike Friesen

Scripture is not a room filled with clairvoyant theologians who have the same ideas and agree on every point. It is better understood as a room of wise elders, each an invited guest because of his unique voice and relation to God. Every elder has insight, but no elder has all of the answers, nor are any of them wholly liberated from humanity’s broken, sinful condition. Every voice is of value, but each will perhaps push too far in one direction and not enough in another, and each will push, in some way or another, in the wrong direction. When we read Scripture well, we listen in on the conversations of these elders, and, in conversations with other readers, seek as best we can to understand God’s voice. It is through this communal reading experience that God points us to his one and only solution for our broken condition: Jesus Christ.

—Kent Sparks, “Genesis 1-11 as Ancient Historiography,” from Genesis: History, Fiction, or Neither?, via Pete Enns

“Your faith has saved you” (Luke 7:50). I realized the other night that there is a sensical way of summarizing faith’s role in healings and miracles: It’s not always necessary (cf. Acts 12:12-16), and it’s not always sufficient (cf. life), but sometimes, it’s definitely the clincher.

Ps 148 gives us a picture of how we might ‘rule’ and ‘serve’ simultaneously. In that Psalm, the psalmist summons all creation to give God praise—all angels, sun, moon, stars, sea monsters, fire, hail, mountains, wild animals, flying birds, kings, young and old. What if our rule in creation means that we ensure that creation can voice its praise to God? And how does hail praise God? By doing what hail does—crash down upon the earth. And how does the cheetah praise God? By chasing a Thompson’s Gazelle at 60+ mpg around a tight curve, keeping its tail steady, stretching out over 22 feet per stride. William Brown follows the environmental logic of this psalm:

Is there any doubt that God delights in watching the fastest land animal? That creation’s goodness is bound up with their plight?

I know that we all have our causes, and not all people are called to protect the cheetah. But some are, and it matters to God.

—Matt Lynch, “Genesis and Endangered Species”

Here’s why accusing God when he doesn’t save a baby about to drown in a swimming pool is casuistry: “While we may sometimes be blameworthy for failing to use our bodies to prevent genuine evils, the God without a localized divine body is not culpable” (Thomas Jay Oord).

“Think thoughts that are as clear as possible, but no clearer; say things as simply as possible, but no simpler.”

— William Sloane Coffin, Jr.

“Questioning involves courage, refusal to allow one’s beliefs to be challenged involves fear. And so which should be called ‘faith’ and which should be called ‘doubt’?

– James F. McGrath, “Doubt in Faith’s Clothing”

“[T]o say that God turns away from the wicked is like saying that the sun hides itself from the blind.”

– St. Anthony the Great, as quoted by Stephen Freeman in making the point that the talk in the Bible about God’s wrath is metaphorically referring to the natural consequences of separate from Him, not Him actually whooping us

You say you care about the poor?
Then tell me, what are their names?

— Gustavo Gutierrez, as tweeted by Jarrod McKenna

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

— Maya Angelou

“Trust is important, but trustworthiness is even more so. Trust is only as good as is the trustworthiness of that in which we place our trust.” Thank you, Miroslav Volf, for saying what I said two years ago about why faith is a virtue.

When the apostles returned, they gave an account to Him of all that they had done. Taking them with Him, He withdrew by Himself to a city called Bethsaida. But the crowds were aware of this and followed Him; and welcoming them, He began speaking to them about the kingdom of God and curing those who had need of healing (Luke 9:10-11).

Sometimes—probably often—Jesus gave preference to the needs, desires, and priorities of others over His own.