“A lot of ink has been used in the discussion of Christ’s statement that the bread was His body. Comparatively little has been said about His statement that the cup was the new covenant. Thus we will not have a full understanding of the Supper until we recover an ability to think in covenantal categories” …
Hell Made Immanent
“The concentration and death camps of the twentieth century, wherever they exist, under whatever regime, are Hell made immanent. They are the transference of Hell from below the earth to its surface. They are the deliberate enactment of a long, precise imagining.” (George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle, p. 54).
Partaking
“This sort of covenantal participation is not limited to the godly. Something similar happened to the idolaters of Corinth. They were partakers at a demonic table, but no sacerdotal miracle was occuring there either. But by eating at an idolatrous feast, those worshippers were covenantally identified with the demons behind their idols” (Mother Kirk, p. …
Intensity as Sanctity
“Romantic ideals of love, notably the stress on incest, dramatize the belief that sexual extremism, the cultivation of the pathological, can restore personal existence to a full pitch of reality and somehow negate the gray world of middle-class fact . . . The artist becomes hero . . .” (George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle, p. …
Not Water Through a Hose
“There is true blessing here, and it is the result of covenantal identification. This is a blessing that is poured out on the believer by a sovereign God in a providential response to the believer’s obedience. The blessing does not come through the elements, like water through a garden hose. But it does come on …
The Uber-Goober
“In Nietzsche, the ethic of transgression has been stripped of scenes of explicit sexual torture and destruction and raised to an alluring intellectual Valhalla of lyric philosophy. We have no evidence that Nietzsche ever read the divine marquis. Nevertheless, the philosopher of the Overman offers a modified product with enhanced appeal for some: Sade without …
No Covenantal Island
“This shows us that the sacrament is not a covenantal island in the middle of a noncovenantal world. Rather, everything around us must be seen in covenantal categories — unbelief included — with the Table of the Lord at the center of believing covenantal living” (Mother Kirk, p. 100).
And Lord Acton Knew His Onions
“The strong man with the dagger is followed by the weak man with the sponge” (Lord Acton, as quoted in Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge, p. 236).
Two Kinds of Real Christian
“Suppose a man marries and he knows that he is going to be unfaithful to his wife — in fact, he already has adulterous plans. But for various reasons, he thinks it expedient to be married, so he does to the church and makes the vows. Now, is he married? Of course he is — …
Not Much Changes
“In its impact on people’s behavior and sense of ‘alienation’ and by its apparent sincerity of feeling, The Stranger came close to becoming the mid-twentieth century equivalent of Goethe’s best-selling The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), which provoked hundreds of suicides all over Europe” (Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge, p. 161).