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“The action of Jesus in giving his life is an act both of complete freedom and of filial obedience. He is not the passive victim of other men’s purposes. … Jesus in going this way offers his life to the Father in whose will is his joy, confident that what he has so offered cannot be lost but will be received back. This path of freely willed and obedient surrender to the Father is the way which Jesus is, and along which he leads his people.”
— Lesslie Newbigin
“Thy mercy my God is the theme of my song; the joy of my heart and the boast of my tongue. Thy Free Grace alone from the first to the last, hath won my affections and bound my soul fast.”
—John Stocker, 1776
“Listening… means real listening, intense listening, listening which hurts. It means attentive straining after what is said, giving ourselves wholly to the task of attention to Jesus. Why? Because he is God’s Word, he is what God says to us. …It is a way–the way–of being human. Listening means obedience… the lifelong task of giving my consent to the shape which God has for my life. Obedience is letting God put me in the place where I can be the sort of person I am made by God to be. I come to see what kind of person this is when I stop trying to be in charge of myself, and instead acknowledge that God is my Lord, that I can only be myself if I walk in his ways. So listening to Jesus is always a practical matter…”
—John Webster
“So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”
— 1 Corinthians 13:13 (ESV)
“‘Learning’ virtue—becoming virtuous—is more like practicing scales on the piano than learning music theory: the goal is, in a sense, for your fingers to learn the scales so they can then play ‘naturally,’ as it were. Learning here isn’t just information acquisition; it’s more like inscribing something into the very fiber of your being.”
—James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love
“When God’s Son took on our flesh, he truly and bodily took on, out of pure grace, our being, our nature, ourselves. This was the eternal counsel of the triune God. Now we are in him. Where he is, there we are too, in the incarnation, on the cross, and in his resurrection. We belong to him because we are in him. This is why the Scriptures call us the Body of Christ.”
—Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“Christmas is not a reminder that the world is really quite a nice old place. It reminds us that the world is a shockingly bad old place, where wickedness flourishes unchecked, where children are murdered, where civilized countries make a lot of money by selling weapons to uncivilized ones so they can blow each other apart. Christmas is God lighting a candle, and you don't light a candle in a room that's already full of sunlight. You light a candle in a room that's so murky that the candle, when lit, reveals just how bad things really are. The light shines in the darkness, says St. John, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
—NT Wright, For All God’s Worth
“[L]ove is a vital principle uniting, or seeking to unite two together, the lover, to wit, and the beloved."
— Augustine
“He will come, will come,
will come like crying in the night,
like blood, like breaking,
as the earth writhes to toss him free.
He will come like child.”
—Rowan Williams, Advent Calendar
“When uprightness is joined to superabundant prosperity, the motivation for the uprightness is murky. At best, the source of the uprightness is uncertain; and, because it is untested, to that extent the commitment to righteousness is comparatively shallow. There is, therefore, something less than optimal about virtues developed and preserved in great affluence. So, until prosperity and goodness are pulled apart, it may not be a determinate matter whether Job loves the good for its own sake, or whether what he loves is mingled good and wealth.”
—Eleonore Stump, Wandering in Darkness