Jacob Moore > Recent Status Updates

P. 101: Members of his faction have frequently admitted that if ever we came to understand what he means by love, the war would be over and we should re-enter Heaven. And there lies the great task. We know that he cannot really love: nobody can: it doesn't make sense. If we could only find out what he is really up to! Hypothesis after hypothesis has been tried and still we can't find out.

P. 12: In literature and art, no man who bothers to be about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. Originality, then, is a by-product thay can occur when an author sets sights on higher goals.

P. 61: It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one -- the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

XI: Dickens is the artist as tycoon, dedicated to building up an impregnable personal empire, literary, domestic, financial. His ambition throbs unmistakably in his letters... yet his power is infinitely refined by its supreme confidence in itself, in short by his consciousness of genius; and his greatness is of the proudly accomodating type.

Really awful start. Very bad anthropology. Also, for a book that has as its chief verse Ephesians 5:33, I am amazed I have made it so far into the book without any discussion of "reverence for Christ" as central to marriage.

Begetting ... is ... our capacity to give existence to another... not by making that him the end of a project of our will, but by imparting to him our own being, so that he is formed by what we are and not by what we intend. P. 17

O'Donovan is such an intense read. Challenging and stimulating on each page. Glad I am finally engaging this work!

The church is no longer her own. They do not own themselves. They have been set free from the curse of thinking that everything ... can be treated as their own property. For they don't belong to themselves; they belong to Christ, and because they belong to him they also belong to one another... belonging to one another is not a ... regret; it doesn't mean giving up life but finding life by being dispossesed. - p. 132

A society is incapable of acknowledging the inappropriateness of technical intervention
.. when every activity is understood as making. Then every situation into which we act is seen as a raw material, waiting to have something made out of it. If there is no category in thought for an action which is not artifactual, then there is no restraint in action [for] phenomena which aren't artificial. - p. 4

What is it to be a human creature? Ultimately, it's to be one who praises God. Before we are rational or moral creatures, we're creatures made for praise, doxological creatures. If that is really true of us, then it means that praise of God is the supremely normal activity of human life: in it, our real humanity is expressed. - p. 99

One of the primary jobs of Scripture is to make sure that the life of the church is open to judgment... That's why reading the Bible isn't a tame business: these texts that we read when we meet to worship ... aren't the domestic chit-chat of Christianity. They're part of the great struggle of which ... Christian congregations are part -- namely, the struggle between God and sin, between truth and untruth. - P. 91

Pilate said to him: "What is truth?" What are we to make of Pilate's reply as he turns away from Jesus to return to his accusers? Skepticism? Perplexity? And we are a cynicism of the hard pressed man of affairs? All of these - but above all, evasion, an attempt to slip away from the terrible directness of Jesus' testimony, to hide from the fact that unlike all others, Jesus hasn't made his peace with falsehood. P. 71

We will understand very little of the Christian Gospel unless we understand this: election is a way of talking about God's pity for us ... God's election is his utter determination that we will flourish, his steadfast and tender mercy that holds us fast. It's the authority with which he takes from us our evil capacity to undo ourselves, and sets us under the conclusion of his love. - p. 50

"We get in the way of God's work in us; we are deaf to what he says and blind to what he shows; we lack eagerness, love, and desire. In and of ourselves we can do nothing to change the situation; in the things of God, we're as weak as kittens. But God is not weak. He will undertake for us and that is why we pray to God's Spirit he will do for us what we cannot do for ourselves ... and make us alive." P. 25

"Precisely because the relationship of man and woman is the deepest foundation of ethics and culture, when eros it's misdirected, it leads to the 'wrote moral disorder that deforms both sexual life and the functioning of social, economic, and eve cultural life.' Christy wants to save each human person and all humanity at its roots, and our roots are inextricably linked with words." P. 103

"What are we to do in response to the miracle of God's saving love? In a very real sense, we're to do nothing. We do nothing because there is in one sense nothing to do. God has done it all for us. We don't need to try to make salvation happen by moral effort or the liturgical performance or having wretched thoughts about our sins. That God loves us and has saved us is as sure as the fact that the sky is blue." P. 4

"Rabbi Akiva responded to challenges over the Song's canonicity, "Heaven forbid! No one in Israel ever suggested that Song of Songs was not canonical. For the entire world is not as precious as the day upon which the Song of Songs was given to Israel, for all the writings are holy and Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies!" P. 27