‘All marriages – all everythings – tote around contingencies whether we acknowledge them or don’t. In all things good and giddy, there’s always one measly eventuality no one’s thought about, or hasn’t thought about in so long it almost doesn’t exist. Only it does. Which is the one potentially fatal chink in the body armor of intimacy, to the unconditional this ‘n that, to the sacred vows, the pledging of truths, to the forever anythings. And that is: There’s a back door somewhere to every deal, and there a draft can enter.’
- Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land
‘A wise lord cannot and ought not keep faith when such observance may be turned against him, and when the reasons that led him to pledge faith no longer exist…But it is necessary to know well how to disguise this characteristic and to be a great pretender and dissembler.’
- Niccolo Machiavelli
‘Words are for those with promises to keep.’
- W.H. Auden
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‘If the Cross radically puts an end to all worldly aesthetics, then precisely this end marks the decisive emergence of the divine aesthetic, but in saying this we must not forget that even worldly aesthetics cannot exclude the element of the ugly, of the tragically fragmented, of the demonic, but must come to terms with these. … It is not only the limitation and precariousness of all beautiful form which intimately belongs to the phenomenon of beauty, but also fragmentation itself, because it is only through being fragmented that the beautiful really reveals the meaning of the eschatological promise it contains.’
- Hans Urs von Balthasar
‘Writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will have, in these times, the sharpest eye for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable…. To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.’
- Flannery O’Connor
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‘What hard travail God does in death!
He strives in sleep, in our despair,
And all flesh shudders underneath
The nightmare of His sepulcher.
‘The earth shakes, grinding its deep stone;
All night the cold wind heaves and pries;
Creation strains sinew and bone
Against the dark door where He lies.
‘The stem bent, pent in seed, grows straight
And stands. Pain break in song. Surprising
The merely dead, graves fill with light
Like opened eyes. He rests in rising.’
- Wendell Berry
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‘The church is sent into the world to challenge the false pretensions of the prince of the world, not in any power or wisdom or greatness of its own. It is sent in the power of his consecration. Its victory is the paradoxical victory of the cross. It is sent ‘bearing about in the body the dying of Jesus, that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in the body’ (II Cor. 4:10). The mission of the church is effected only through participation in the passion of Jesus as he challenges and masters the power of the evil one. And, conversely, there is no participation in Christ without participation in this passion and conflict.’
- Lesslie Newbigin
‘The cross alone is our theology.’
- Martin Luther
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‘I find nothing in theological Christianity to be more difficult for me to apprehend than the conception of Jesus Christ as a dying and reviving God. The Incarnation-Atonement-Resurrection complex shatters both the… Hebrew Bible… and the Jewish oral tradition. I can understand Yahweh as being in eclipse, desertion, self-exile, but Yahweh’s suicide is indeed beyond Hebraism.’
- Harold Bloom
‘His emergence on earth was as it were the swelling in of heaven. His sacrifice began before He came into the world, and his cross was that of a lamb slain before the world’s foundation. There was a Calvary above which was the mother of it all. His obedience, however impressive, does not take divine magnitude if it first rose upon earth, nor has it the due compelling power upon ours. His obedience as man was but the detail of the supreme obedience which made him man. His love transcends all human measure only if, out of love, he renounced the glory of heavenly being for all he here became. Only then could one grasp the full stay and comfort of words like these, ‘Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?’ Unlike us, he chose the oblivion of birth and the humiliation of life. He consented not only to die but to be born.’
- P.T. Forsyth
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‘When we are being bluntly honest with ourselves, we know that what makes us most resist dealing seriously with Scripture is not fundamentally the Bible’s pre-scientific worldview or its historical obscurities. It’s the way it fingers all too accurately where we fall short here and now. What troubles us is not what is not clear, but what is.’
-Marguerite Shuster
‘To write about the cross is, like Jacob at Peniel, to wrestle with something or, rather, with someone, who is totally mysterious and utterly unconquerable – a someone whom you cannot let go because you know that he has it in his power, certainly to wound you at the sore places he exposes, but also to bless you and to change your name and your destiny.’
- Thomas A. Smail
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‘Anyone who forbids… grief must forbid, if he can, all friendly conversation: he must prohibit or extinguish affection; he must with ruthless disregard sever the ties of all human companionship, or else stipulate that such companionship must merely be made use of, without giving rise to any delight of soul.’
- Augustine of Hippo
‘At the very beginning of this book I referred to the cry of God in the garden of Eden: “Adam, where are you?” The agonized father seeking for the son who has been lost. Now the beloved son of the father has shared the fate of the lost children, and with them, for them, on their behalf, as one of them, he cries out to the father: “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” He goes down into the very depths of dereliction so that there could be no depths of despair into which we could ever fall in which the son of God would not be there beside us.’
- Lesslie Newbigin
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