“Our idea of holiness is greatly truncated today; we limit it in thousands of scrupling and schoolmarmish ways. We have lost any understanding of the numinous. We do not know what it would be like to walk through a grove of ancient trees sacred to the holy and terrible gods, and then be converted to …
Smoke in a Gale
“The psalmist asked the God of Israel to rise up and scatter His enemies; whenever the Power of His right hand is pleased to do so, those enemies are driven before Him like smoke in a gale. The Church today is a stranger to victories because we refuse to sing anthems to the king of …
Uncle God
“Our contemporary theism is really a pathetic and sorry affair. We want an avuncular figure in the sky, someone to hand out celestial candies when we are feeling a little blue” (Angels in the Architecture, p. 42).
Christian Books and Porn
A friend recently gave me the very thoughtful present of some gift credit at Hastings, so I toddled off to Hastings to see what I could see. (I wound up getting some blues CDs mostly.) But that is not the point. While there I noticed (again) the very large section of Christian books in the …
Mystic Puddles
“But we moderns have little interest in such redemptions or their results because the Church in our era is slack and effeminate. We do not look at an unbounded northern sky and by analogy see the eternity of God; rather, we look mystically inward to the swamps and standing puddles of our own hearts and …
Finite Limitations
“No created intellect can conceive of a single word suitable for God’s most infinite and simple essence. Any word we use to describe God will quickly fall to the ground exhausted–like us, our words fall short of the glory of God. But this does not mean that the use of such words is pointless. We …
Smaller Words?
“Words like sovereign, almighty, omnipotent are thought to be too restrictive–they are too tiny to express truth about God fully. This is quite right; they are too small, but the solution is certainly not to be found by opting for smaller words” (AIA, p. 37).
Choices
“The only possible conclusion is that the Church has forgotten the holiness of her God. He alone is true, and He alone is good. If we understood this, we would understand how beautiful His holiness is, and we could not be kept from writing concertos and building cathedrals. As it is, we are content with …