![Exhibit #127 for Why Beauty Matters (and profits [mostly] don’t). This sort of work—“the book for book’s sake” work—is ought to be a huge part of any dogmatic account of creation and man.
“This publication fulfilled Morris’s vision of what could be achieved through a combination of modern printing techniques and traditional crafts. The medieval style font, ornamental borders, decorative capitals and frames, combined with the woodcut illustrations, provide a fine setting for the poetic works of Chaucer (The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, The Parliament of Fowls, The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, and The Romaunt of the Rose). Burne-Jones considered it the finest book ever published and called it ‘a pocket cathedral’.”
» A Pocket Cathedral | I love typography](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3rfrxkWm71qz54swo1_500.jpg)
“[My greater clarity] chiefly has strengthened my confidence that the time is not far off when it will no longer be necessary to write with fulness on topics many of which either are by now finally antiquated or even yet are misunderstood. When that time comes, some later thinker occupying the same standpoint will be able to write a much shorter Dogmatic. That in the future such a Dogmatic will be written, I have no doubt at all…
…Since the preliminary process of defining a science cannot belong to the science itself, it follows that none of the propositions which will appear in this part [the definition of Dogmatics] can themselves have a dogmatic character.”
[FDE Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, viii, 2; please review the proprietor’s content manifesto in which posting does not necessarily entail agreement or positive affirmation]
“There’s one more important point to make about this lust for mastery: we can’t not do this. That is to say, the aspiration to not be sinful is itself almost certainly to be understood as a sinful aspiration. Augustine would certainly say that the right response to perceiving one’s own sin is not to say, “All right. Now I’m going to stop that.” That’s the Pelagian response; that’s the response that says human beings are capable of following through with such a decision. The right response is to acknowledge our powerlessness before our own sin. That returns it to God. And only in that kind of acknowledgment is the capacity to move away from sin possible at all.” — Yes: Paul Griffiths, from this wise and perceptive interview (via wesleyhill)
more than 95 theses: academics and families -
Wisdom from the good Dr Jacobs as I enter this arena.
For the last couple of days I’ve been thinking about this post from my buddy Rod Deeher’s blog, quoting an essay claiming that academic life is a bad choice for someone who wants a family. There’s general agreement on that point in the comments. I think we need some distinctions here.
Being a…
“The task of evangelical ecclesiology is to describe the relation between the gospel and the church. It is charged to investigate the sense in which the existence of a new human social order is a necessary implicate of the gospel of Jesus Christ, asking whether the life of the Christian community is internal to the logic of the gospel or simply accessory and accidental. …the matter of the gospel is the free majesty of the triune God’s grace in his works of creation, reconciliation, and completion. Out of the plenitude and limitless perfection of his own self-originating life as Father, Son and Spirit, God determines to be God with his creatures.…
The Christian faith is thus ecclesial because it is evangelical. But it is no less true that it is only because the Christian faith is evangelical that it is ecclesial; that is to say, its ecclesial character derives solely from and is wholly dependent upon the gospel’s manifestation of God’s sovereign purpose for his creatures. The church is, because God is and acts thus.”
[John Webster, “Evangelical Ecclesiology,” in Confessing God, 153–154]
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It is a widely accepted norm of moral theology that the Church should not expect the civil law of a secular state to approximate in every particular the content of the moral law, stricto sensu. Prudential judgment about what the Church should advocate is needed in every particular case of divergence between the two. Relevant to such judgment is consideration of the degree to which what the Church teaches on the matter is likely to prove comprehensible to the locals. In the America of our day, it is about as difficult (or as easy) to make what the Church teaches about marriage comprehensible and convincing (the latter more difficult than the former) to the educated locals as it is to make the doctrines of the Immaculate Conception or the Real Presence so.
If that empirical claim is right… , then the conclusion strongly suggested by it is that the Church should not, at the moment, oppose legal recognition of same-sex unions. Those who have undergone a profoundly pagan catechesis on these questions will believe and behave as pagans do; it would be good for them and for the Church if the Church were not to attempt to constrain them by advocating positions in public policy based upon the view that what she teaches resonates in all human hearts—because it doesn’t, true though it is.
What the pagans need on this matter is conversion, not argument; and what the Church ought do to encourage that is to burnish the practice of marriage by Catholics until its radiance dazzles the pagan eye.
” — via wesleyhill: “Paul Griffiths (from his old blog). I recalled this post after hearing the remarks on same-sex marriage that President Obama made yesterday. Griffiths’ stance is the sort of position that will satisfy almost no one, on the left or the right. Nonetheless, I think it’s worthy of careful consideration, if for no other reason than that it highlights the role traditional Christians’ own practice contributes, in large measure, to the implausibility of traditional Christian sexual ethics in the public square.”
Exhibit #127 for Why Beauty Matters (and profits [mostly] don’t). This sort of work—“the book for book’s sake” work—is ought to be a huge part of any dogmatic account of creation and man.
“This publication fulfilled Morris’s vision of what could be achieved through a combination of modern printing techniques and traditional crafts. The medieval style font, ornamental borders, decorative capitals and frames, combined with the woodcut illustrations, provide a fine setting for the poetic works of Chaucer (The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, The Parliament of Fowls, The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, and The Romaunt of the Rose). Burne-Jones considered it the finest book ever published and called it ‘a pocket cathedral’.”
» A Pocket Cathedral | I love typography
Exhibit #126 in the case for Why Beauty Matters.
The Lisbon Bible is the most accomplished dated codex (that is, a manuscript in book form rather than a scroll) of the Portuguese school of medieval Hebrew illumination. Completed in 1482, the Lisbon Bible is a testimony to the rich cultural life the Portuguese Jews experienced prior to the expulsion and forced conversions of December 1496.
On British Library’s online gallery you can view it in detail using the handy tool showed above.
“‘Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven’ (Matt. 16:17). Christian systematic theology takes place in the wake of that breathtaking dominical announcement. Yet it remains an earthly, flesh and blood enterprise, far indeed from the theology of the blessed, communicated to the perfected saints by the permanent intellectual light of the presence of God through the mediation of the Son. It is the rational work of the children of Adam who are only slowly learning what it is to be the children of God. This relativizes systematic theology in the present condition of creaturely infirmity after the Fall; yet it is accompanied by a promise of divine wisdom, already given and to be given again, by which creatures can be conducted from ignorance and unhappiness to knowledge and bliss. If systematic theology is to survive in a culture which has been deprived of a sense that rational creatures have a celestial final cause and which cannot envisage contemplation as a mode of science, it will find itself turning with some urgency to the divine promise.”
[John Webster, “Principles of Systematic Theology,” IJST Vol. 11:1 2009, 71]
Oh heck yes: Make the margins bigger | I love typography
“There is one final point. The knowledge of God as participation in the veracity of the revelation of God is a work of gratitude. But this means that it cannot take place except in joyfulness. There can be no acknowledgement of the revelation of God unless we ourselves are involved. But, involved in this way, we are placed strictly under the rule of the object and become obedient. This obedience, however, can only mean that we are ourselves requisitioned to be doers of this work. If the revelation reaches us, if it becomes for us the necessary basis of our knowledge, this does, of course, mean that it approaches us from without, but it also means—how else can it reach us?—that it does actually come to us and therefor into us. It does not cease to transcend us, but we become immanent to it, so that obedience to it is our free will.
But because God remains transcendent to us even in His revelation, the subjectivity of our acknowledgment of His revelation means our elevation above ourselves. It is this that of necessity makes our knowledge of God a joyful action. A gratitude that consists in an involuntary, mutinous and therefore forced and unjoyful action is not thanksgiving. A tribute to tyranny, however paid, is not thanks. A sacrifice offered in dread and constraint is not, in the biblical sense at least, a real sacrifice. Sacrifice and thanks are only what is offered gladly. And the basis which make s the true knowledge of God necessary is in itself the basis of knowing God gladly.”
[Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II.1, 219]
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“And now we must not say that it is not enough to live by forgiveness ‘alone’. This objection has been raised against the Creed and strengthened against the Reformers. What folly! As though just this, the forgiveness of sins, were not the only thing by which we live, the power of all powers! As though everything were not said in that phrase! It is precisely when we are aware that ‘God is for me’, that we are in the true sense responsible. For from that standpoint and from that alone is there a real ethic, have we a criterion of good and evil. So living by forgiveness is never by any means passivity, but Christian living in full activity. Whether we prefer to describe it as great freedom or as strict discipline, as piety or as true worldliness, as private morality or as social morality, whether we regard this life under the sign of the great hope or under the sign of daily patience, in any case we live solely by forgiveness.…
What does not pass over this sharp ridge of forgiveness of sins, or grace, is not Christian. By this we shall be judged, about this the Judge will one day put the question, Did you live by grace, or did you set up gods for yourself and perhaps want to become one yourself? Have you been a faithful servant, who has nothing to boast of? In that case you are accepted; for then you have surely been merciful as well and have forgiven your debtors; then you have surely also comforted others and been a light, then your works have surely been good works, works which flow from the forgiveness of sins.”
[Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, 152]
“I also think that Christians need to feel comfortable being critical of the wealthy even when this criticism doesn’t come with ready-made public policy implications. My sense is that many conservative religious believers are worried about saying anything remotely judgmental about, say, the depredations of Wall Street because they’re afraid of giving aid and comfort to the political left. But the Jesus of the New Testament managed to be hard on the rich and powerful without endorsing the revolutionaries and political utopians of his own day. And the same goes for Christian conservatives and libertarians today: If you don’t think the government should be responsible for cutting great fortunes down to size, that should only heighten your responsibility to issue a moral critique when rich people let greed and hubris get the better of them.” — » Ross Douthat (via ayjay)
(via ayjay)
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If you’ve never read a thorough, respectful, yet eviscerating book review, this one by Carl Trueman meets all those elements. Wow:
“Of course, Dr. Gregory knows about the Index; but he seems to see it as a response to Protestantism, not as an extension of the Church’s typical manner of handling deviation from its central tenets and practices which stretched back well before the Reformation. And therein lies the ironic, tragic, perplexing flaw of this brilliant and learned book: Dr. Gregory sets out to prove that Protestantism is the source of all, or at least many, of the modern world’s ills; but what he actually does is demonstrate in painstaking and compelling detail that medieval Catholicism and the Papacy with which it was inextricably bound up were ultimately inadequate to the task which they set - which they claimed! - for themselves. Reformation Protestantism, if I can use the singular, was one response to this failure, as conciliarism had been a hundred years before. One can dispute the adequacy of such responses; but only by an act of historical denial can one dispute the fact that it was the Papacy which failed.
Thanks to the death of medieval Christendom and to the havoc caused by the Reformation and beyond, Dr Gregory is today free to believe (or not) that Protestantism is an utter failure. Thanks to the printing press, he is also free to express this in a public form. Thanks to the modern world which grew as a response to the failure of Roman Catholicism, he is also free to choose his own solution to the problems of modernity without fear of rack or rope. Yet, having said all that, I for one find it strange indeed that someone would choose as the solution that which was actually the problem in the first place.”