Here are four more quotes that grabbed my attention during my reading this week. Think, meditate, ruminate, and let me know which quote made you do some hard thinking!
“The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. . . the whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately” – Seneca, On the Shortness of Life, trans. C. D. N. Costa (New York: Penguin, 1997), 13.
“Deconstructionist analysis and an enshrined relativism make of every phenomenon but a ghostly apparition, dependent upon the interpreter for meaning. . . . The only certainty in this plastic process is the critic, endowed with the empowering insight to realize that all meaning (except, of course, that which the critic discerns) is a chimera. Nothing could be more despotic than this ‘democracy of meaning,’ for in it the Western critic controls the process by which meaning itself is to be discerned. The apostles of ‘diversity’ control the processes by which thought itself is to be judged as ‘valid.’ Thus Western secular intellectuals use the mind in much the same way as the Western news media use the camera: selectively, and with the conviction that the tool confers existence itself upon that on which it focuses” – Anthony Ugolnik, “Living at the Borders: Eastern Orthodoxy and the World Disorder,” First Things 34 (June/July 1993): 16.
“It will scarcely do, first to construct a priori a Jesus to our own liking, and then to discard as ‘unhistorical’ all the New Testament transmission which would be unnatural to such a Jesus. It is not these discarded passages but our a priori Jesus which is unhistorical” – Benjamin B. Warfield, “The Biblical Doctrine of the Trinity,” in Biblical and Theological Studies, ed. Samuel G. Craig (Philadelphia, PA: P&R, 1968), 45.
“We must not ask about the sufficiency of Scripture as if it were a matter awaiting our judgment. The children of Adam do not know what they need to know; they are not competent to determine what gifts they must receive at the hands of God; they must simply receive what has been given, in all its apparent incompleteness and limitation. There is a necessary chastening of curiosity here; sufficiency goes along with teachableness, deference, self-distrust and fear of the Lord. It is part of our unredeemed condition that we hate the knowledge which God offers and prefer other counsel (Prov. 2. 22, 29). Healing and refreshment (Prov. 3. 8), however, come from not being wise in our own eyes (Prov. 3. 5, 7) and from trust in the fact that ‘the Lord gives wisdom’ (Prov. 2. 6)” – John Webster, The Domain of the Word: Scripture and Theological Reason (New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013), 18.
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