Miscellanea

None are more bold and ready to fall on debates than those who are weakest in religion.

For myself, I find I become less cynical rather than more—remembering my own sins and follies; and realize that men’s hearts are not often as bad as their acts, and very seldom as bad as their words.

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket-safe, dark, motionless, airless-it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

Prefer even vicious people to be cured rather than condemned …. If you want to quarrel with your enemy, quarrel first with your own heart. Quarrel, I tell you. Quarrel with your own heart.

We need more singing!

Sing more and murmur less!

Sing more and slander less!

Sing more and cavil less!

Sing more and mourn less!

Evangelical theology faces tough times ahead: the church seems variously determined to prioritise management technique, religious experience, or that nebulous bane of contemporary life, ‘relevance’, over any notion of careful reflection upon and articulation of its irreducibly doctrinal message and experience.

The church is required to be the body of Christ in which the unmarried may find fulfillment as persons in the fellowship and companionship of the congregation of believers. The church should recognize that being unmarried the single members are free to be ‘anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to please the Lord’ (1 Corinthians 7:32). Therefore they must be given the opportunity within the fellowship of believers to serve the body of Christ and experience the love and acceptance of the body of the Lord.

Law-gospel is a wonderful theological category. It’s lousy exegesis. If every command that you find you put in the category of law, and every promise you put in the category of gospel, and every time you see a command you say, ‘Well the point of this command must be, you can’t do this but Jesus has done it for you and therefore be thankful for the justification you have in him, you are absolutely eradicating scores of imperatives and exhortations that Paul treasures in the New Testament and things that are deeply important for us to embrace as Christians.

I read [the 740 page N.T. Wright book on the Resurrection of Jesus] while brushing my teeth over a period of time. … One page in the morning, one in the evening.

When I ask students who are the most influential pastors in their life, it’s concerning that they rarely mention their local pastors.