#100

In honor of this, my one hundreth entry, I present the top ten quotes of the previous ninety-nine entries:

10) David Lipscomb from The Wisdom of David Lipscomb. As tempting as it was to quote Lipscomb on the question of civil government or pacifism (issues about which I feel strongly), this quote is infintely more compelling to me.

And it may be set down as a truth that all reformations that propose to stop short of a full surrender of the soul, mind, and body up to God, are of the devil.

9) Bill Burton from Muslims: Do They EVER Pray?. I have comment on a number of obscenely stupid news articles, and this quote typifies them all.

The president is obviously a Christian. He prays every day.

8) Symeon the New Theologian from An Earnest Prayer For Taking the Eucharist. It is hard for me to read this and not think that I am missing something every Sunday morning when I pass the Lord's Supper down the aisle.

You have vouchsafed me, O Lord, that this corruptible temple, my human flesh, should be united to your holy flesh, that my blood should be mingled with yours, and henceforth I am your transparent and translucent member. I am transported out of myself. I see myself such as I am to become. Fearful and at the same time ashamed of myself I venerate you and tremble before you.

7) G. K. Chesterton from The Wisdom of G. K. Chesterton (Excursus 1). Chesterton, among other things, revolutionized the way I thought about love. His was by no means the only voice as I began to reconsider how I understood the affirmation that God is love, but his was very likely the initial voice. These are a pair of related quotes to illustrate his points.

Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.

A man's friend likes him but leaves him as he is: his wife loves him and is always trying to turn him into somebody else.

6) David Bentley Hart from Recommendation: Atheist Delusions. The full quote--and for that matter, the entire book--is very enlightening, but in the interest of brevity, I will include only the introduction.

There is, after all, nothing inherently reasonable in the conviction that all of reality is simply an accidental confluence of physical causes, without any transcendent source or end. Materialism is not a fact of experience or a deduction of logic; it is a metaphysical prejudice, nothing more, and one that is arguably more irrational than almost any other.

5) Georges Florovsky from The Wisdom of Georges Florovsky. This opinion of the role of history in theology (particularly in churhces like the Orthodox Church) stands in stark and refreshing contrast with the lifeless formalism and repitition which is at least the stereotype of so many tradition oriented churches.

This call to 'go back' to the Fathers can be easily misunderstood. It does not mean a return to the letter of patristic documents...What is really meant and required is not a blind or servile imitation and repetition but rather a further development of this patristic teaching, both homogeneous and congenial. We have to kindle again the creative fire of the Fathers, to restore in ourselves the patristic spirit.

4) Rene Descartes from Descartes, Unexpected. It was hard to choose a single quote about the foolishness of using logic to limit God, but Descartes stands out as something of a surprising (at least to me) spokesman for the "irrational" position.

The mathematical truths which you call eternal have been laid down by God and depend on him entirely no less than the rest of his creatures...In general we can assert that God can do everything that is beyond our grasp but not that he cannot do what is beyond our grasp. It would be rash to think that our imagination reaches as far as his power.

3) Vladimir Lossky from The God of the Square-Circle. No less than the inability of logic to limit God, the limits which reason imposes on human knowledge have enticed me. It would be easier, and perhaps more appropriate, to cite a fourteenth century hesychast on this point, but Lossky sums it up nicely nevertheless.

The only rational notion which we can have of God will still be that of His incomprehensibility. Consequently, theology must be not so much a quest of positive notions about the divine being as an experience which surpasses all understanding.

2) James A. Garfield from A Sentiment Plagarized from James A. Garfield's Journal, June 14, 1853. This quote, while seemingly devoid of content, expresses shockingly well my attitude about the way I have spent the better part of the last two years.

I sit down to insult my journal by making a few senseless marks upon its page – merely stating that this day shared the fate of its predecessors, and perhaps brought no more to pass.

1) Helmut Thielicke from The Wisdom of Helmut Thielicke. This quote takes precedence for me over all others I have posted because, as much as the previous quote described my actual experience, this quote describes what I continue to hope for in pursuing theology as an occupation, as a obsession, as an act of devotion to God.

Theological thinking can and ought to grip a man like a passion.

Why I Gave Up Paleo-Orthodoxy...Before I Had Even Heard of It

I heard of Thomas Oden and paleo-Orthodoxy for the first time recently, and the more I read about it, the more I realized that Oden was pursuing an aim which I myself had begun to pursue at the beginning of my training as a historian. There is a certain simple allure in what Oden offers, particularly for those of us deeply disturbed by the ongoing fracturing of the Church and the seemingly endless capitulation of faith to secular culture. The Bible has quite clearly proved insufficient as an objective uniting ground for Christianity. Even the Stone-Campbell churches who share a basic theology and hermeneutic could not stay united on the principle of "the Bible alone." So in proposing a broadened basis for unifying orthodoxy, Oden's suggestion of the earliest church as an alternative is promising.

Nevertheless, paleo-orthodoxy and the Vincentian Canon which forms its implicit grounds for unity are flawed in two important ways: one of them historical and one philosophical.

Historically there is very little that has been "believed everywhere, always and by all." If the full scope of those who claim adherence to the Christian faith is considered, then doctrines like the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Resurrection are out. In fact, what was measurably shared between Gnostics and "proto-Catholics" (to borrow a distasteful term from modern scholarship) is almost entirely semantic, reducible to the name "Christian" derived from largely unrelated understandings of "Christ." Of course, Oden and others would never suggest that heretics be included in the "everyone" who is believing. Yet, if heresy is excluded some definition of orthodoxy is assumed and the argument becomes circular. The problem is further compounded by the great diversity even between saintly persons who are recognized as authoritative. For example, the Cappadocian and Augustinian views of free will are not merely in tension, capable of coexisting side by side in a reunited Christianity. They are fundamentally incompatible. Oden elects the Cappadocian view over Augustine's, but the grounds for this are not entirely clear to me. Millions of Calvinists, among others, would certainly object that voluntarism is the universal testimony of the earliest church. Even within the orthodox historical witness, there is so much variation and ambiguity that to suggest that we can in any sense pool the record and come up with a clear majority on orthodoxy is at best optimistic, at worst deluded.

Even if, for the sake of argument, there was sufficient uniformity on matters of faith to select an arbitrary point in time before which orthodoxy would be understood to be in tact, there is a deeper problem to be considered. What are the grounds for assuming that consensus results in truth? The history of the church has rejected this claim as often as it has made it. Certainly Athanasius, who Oden cites as an orthodox father, would not have suggested that the Arian emperor was right to have him exiled by virtue of the Arian majority in the Empire at the time. Maximus the Confessor, another father Oden relies on as a source of truth, was mutilated and died specifically for his claim that even if the whole world testified that he was wrong God would vindicate him in the end. Christian truth can never be understood to be rooted in or even recognized by the consensus of Christians. Truth has as its root the True One, and no other source may be posited. Suggesting that by consensus the Fathers reveal what is orthodox to us is more or less the equivalent of suggesting that Christians might hold a worldwide poll today to determine what we should all believe, with the results being binding on everyone.

I had long since given up on paleo-orthodoxy as a grounds for ecumenicism before I ever encountered Thomas Oden or his theories. Nevertheless, in reading about his theology I am able to better understand precisely why the system is flawed. The practical outcomes of paleo-orthodoxy are certainly desirable as far as I'm concerned. A renewed respect by modern Christians for the theologians who came before. An effort to solve present issues by appealing to the core truths which have been articulated throughout time. A deference paid to the great minds - greater than most of ours, great enough to be preserved much longer than my thoughts here will be - who peered into the abyss that is God and preserved what they saw for the benefit of this blind generation. But as a system for recognizing truth and uniting Christians, it falls woefully short in view of its critical defects. Thus, I agree with Ralph C. Wood (who wrote one of the articles I read about Oden) both when he writes, "Our experience of the Cross is immensely deepened by learning how major (and also minor) theologians have interpreted it. So long as we remain mentally and existentially imprisoned within the cage of modernity, our faith itself is fettered" and, immediately afterwards, when he adds "that the Gospel requires a contemporary re-visioning as much as it needs a classical repeating." It does nothing, to paraphrase a quote I once read from Florovsky, to have a patristic faith if we spend all our time looking at the Fathers and no time following their example.

The Wisdom of Georges Florovsky

Quotes taken from George A Maloney's A History of Orthodox Theology Since 1453

"Patristic writings are respected indeed, but more as historical documents than as books of authority. Numerous patristic references or even quotations are still usual in our theological essays and textbooks. But so often these old texts or quotations are simply interpolated into a scheme borrowed elsewhere. As a matter of fact, the conventional schemes of our theological textbooks came from the West, partly from Roman sources, partly from Reformed ones. Patristic texts are kept and repeated. The patristic mind is too often completely lost or forgotten."

"This call to 'go back' to the Fathers can be easily misunderstood. It does not mean a return to the letter of patristic documents...What is really meant and required is not a blind or servile imitation and repetition but rather a further development of this patristic teaching, both homogeneous and congenial. We have to kindle again the creative fire of the Fathers, to restore in ourselves the patristic spirit."