Death took the husband of a neighbor of mine
On a highway with a drunk at the wheel
She told me keep your clean hands off the laundry he left
And don’t tell me you know how I feel
She had a tape that he’d sent her from a Holiday Inn
That she never played much in the day
But when I heard him say I love you through the window at night
I just stayed the hell away

There’s a hole in the middle in the middle of the prettiest life
So the lawyers and the prophets say
Not your father nor your mother nor your lover’s ever gonna make it go away
Now there’s too much darkness in an endless night
To be afraid of the way we feel
Let’s be kind to each other
Not forever but for real…

For the hole in the middle of a pretty good life
I only face it ’cause it’s here to stay
Not my father nor my mother nor my daughter nor my lover
Nor the highway made it go away
But now there’s too much darkness in an endless night
to be afraid of the way I feel
I’ll be kind to my loved ones
Not forever but for real

Some say god is a lover, some say it’s an endless void
And some say both, and some say she’s angry
And some say just annoyed
But if God felt a hammer in the palm of his hand
Then God knows the way we feel
And then love lasts forever
Forever and for real

[“For Real,” written by Bob Franke, performed by David Wilcox]

His Pity For the Guilty

“Trained, too, by a protracted discipline in the school of affliction, He knows the temptations of our race – He knows what it is to weep, He knows the burden of a heavy heart. It was, perhaps, one design of the varied scenes of trial through which He passed to give Him that experience of our state which should call into the liveliest exercise the exquisite sympathy of His soul. In generous natures common troubles and afflictions have a tendency to knit them together; it is only where the heart has been seared by sin and immersed in selfishness that it can look with indifference upon struggles of others similar to those through which it has passed. The Apostle assures us that Jesus was tempted in all points as we are, that He might be a merciful and faithful High Priest. And those who have felt His presence in their trials can appreciate the priceless value of His sympathy. He has gone before us through every path of sorrow, and we cannot utter a groan nor heave a sigh which does not go to His heart. His pity for the guilty is as tender as His sympathy with the saints.”

[ James Henley Thornwell on the priesthood of Christ, Works, vol. II; via Carl Trueman]

Do Not Protest Too Swiftly

“The doctrine of the incarnation is an attempt at conceptual expansion of the church’s confession that Jesus Christ is Lord. It is humble, delighted, repentant and joyful repetition at the level of theological concepts of the primary affirmation of the church: that the church’s Lord, Jesus, is the incomparably comprehensive context of all creaturely being, knowing and acting, because in and as him God is with humankind in free, creative and saving love. Theological talk of the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ is thus the orderly intellectual exposition of the divine self-exposition; it is a constructive (and therefore critical) attempt to trace the movement of the being and act of God the Son who takes flesh.

To write in such terms is to invite the reproach that confession and critical inquiry have been fatally confused. But theology would be wise not to rise too swiftly or with too much determination to protest against this reproach. Partly this is because the charge of ‘foolishness’ is a permanent accompaniment for any authentically Christian theology which is serious about struggling against sin in the intellectual realm: the question of the regeneration of the mind can never be laid aside in the way in which theology responds to its critics. Partly, again, theology’s reluctance to make a response of the kind for which its critics might hope is a function of the fact that theology is a positive science, that is, a mode of intellectual activity ordered towards a given reality of a particular character. Theology cannot establish on transcendental grounds the conditions of possibility of its object, either to itself nor to its critics. To attempt to do so would be to adopt a perverse stance towards the object, one which would, indeed, be almost a willful rejection of that object and its claim. For that object — God incarnate, the Word made flesh — is not one more matter for the free play of intellectual judgment. Rather, the object is itself judge, wholly and originally; and perhaps the test of the authenticity of any theology of incarnation will be whether it emerges from that judgment or prefers, instead, to establish an independent colony of the mind from which to make raids on the church’s confession.”

[John Webster, “Incarnation” in Word and Church, 113–114]