Kindle Notes & Highlights
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April 12 - April 28, 2018
The thesis, simply put, is that memory of the past is essential to proper functioning in the present. Without a knowledge of the past, the Church knows neither where it has been or where it is going. Worse yet, it does not know where it should go.
Christian theology has always insisted that apophatic theology, which proceeds by denial of what God is not, is higher than kataphatic theology, which proceeds by affirmation.
For Calvin, the Catholic Church was like this overstuffed attic. It had schlepped everything along from century to century—good traditions, bad traditions, bright ideas, bad ideas—until it could barely move under the weight of what it could not bring itself to discard.
See Phyllis Tickle and “rummage sale.”
These four themes from early Protestant thought—the denial of the possibility of preparation for the reception of grace, the insistence on the church as the context in which genuine repentance takes place, the description of conversion as a continuous and lifelong process, and the warning that there is no conversion that does not exact a price from the penitent—are certainly not the only themes that need to be considered by the church in the present as it ponders its own evangelistic mission. Indeed, they may even need to be corrected by insights derived from the Bible or other voices in the
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The Latin and Greek fathers worked with metaphysical categories and with philosophical assumptions that we do not share. If we take literally many of the things they said, we would be forced to reject them. But rejection is a sign of failure of nerve; it is a sign of the inability or unwillingness to penetrate beneath the culturally conditioned statement of a doctrine to its intention.
The late Carl Michalson of Drew used to suggest to his classes that they ought to preach the faith of the church even if they could not claim the whole of that faith for themselves.
