A Brick in the Valley

Paul Tripp shares this Leo Tolstoy quote in What Did You Expect?: Redeeming the Realities of Marriage.  It will be out soon . . . I highly recommend it.

Leo Tolstoy:

What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility.

Dorothy Sayers in Letters to a Diminished Church: Passionate Arguments for the Relevance of Christian Doctrine :

Official Christianity, of late years has been having what is known as a bad press.  We are constantly assured that the churches are empty because preachers insist too much on doctrine – -dull dogma as people call it.  The fact is the precise opposite.  It is the neglect of dogma that makes for dullness.  The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man – - and the dogma is the drama. . .

Now, we may call that doctrine exhilarating, or we may call it devastating; we may call it revelation, or we may call it rubbish; but if we call it dull, then words have no meaning at all.  That God should play the tyrant over man is a dismal story of unrelieved oppression; that man should play the tyrant over man is the usual dreary record of human futility; but that man should play the tyrant over God and find him a better man than himself is an astonishing drama indeed.  Any journalist, hearing of it for the first time, would recognize it as news; those who did hear it for the first time actually called it news, and good news at that; though we are likely to forget that the word Gospel ever meant anything so sensational.

Perhaps the drama is played out now, and Jesus is safely dead and buried.  Perhaps.  It is ironical and entertaining to consider that at least once in the world’s history those words might have been spoken with complete conviction, and that was upon the eve of the Resurrection.

For more on Dorothy Sayers, see this recent post.  Notice the question I asked in the comments.

Flannery O’Connor quotes:

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd.

It is the business of the author to uncover the strangeness of truth.

[The truth] does not change according to our ability to stomach it,” there are periods in the lives of us all, even of the saints, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive.

For those who wish to study O’Connor further, I recommend Jill Pelaez Baumgaertner’s, Flannery O’Connor: A Proper Scaring. 

Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow:

But of course the story of my life is not finished yet.  I will not live to tell the end of it.

My life, though, has been something (as only now at last I am able to see), but it is something that it has made of itself, not something that I have made of it.

W.H. Auden:

We would rather be ruined than changed;

We would rather die in our dread

Than climb the cross of the moment

And let our illusions die.

In attempting to understand the complexities of life, I find my experience similar to Flannery O’Connor’s:

Mystery isn’t something that is gradually evaporating.  It grows along with knowledge.  (See the Gooch biography, page 348).

If you’re looking for good fiction, I commend to you Wendell Berry.  Jayber Crow is a wonderful place to begin.

Burley Coulter is the man in Berry fiction.  My favorite quote may be the one found in this post . . .Or, in this one.  But, here is another quality Burley Coulter response.

They found a certain wondrous glee in the joke of getting old, and they varied it endlessly.

“Age,” said River Bill Thacker toward the end of a conversation to the general effect that time, contrary to expectation, made old men out of young ones.  “Age has more more for my morals that Methodism ever did.”

“Well,” Burley said, “thinking maybe of his mother’s years of dying away by bits,” some people live a long time.”

Catching his tone, Bill said, “What’s the matter with living a long time?  It ain’t going to kill you.”

“No,” Burley said.  “Not for a long time.”

David L. Turner:

In evangelism and apologetics the Christian should not attempt to prove the existence of God to the unbeliever.  The unbeliever, if he is honest with himself, knows this already.  The Christian should proclaim the gospel, God’s appointed dynamic for turning the lost to himself.

In an article, “Cornelius Van Till and Romans 1:18-21: A Study in Presuppositional Apologetics,” GTJ 2:1 (Spr 81).

Matthew 16:24:

Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me."

Philip Yancey:

Take up your cross and follow me,’ Jesus said, in the least manipulative invitation that has ever been given (Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew, 80)."

Martin Luther:

In the words of Scripture you will find the swaddling clothes in which Christ lies.

Merry Christmas.

Quoted in Timothy George, The Theology of the Reformers, page 83.