Jacob Moore > Recent Status Updates

Lectio divina carefully navigates between two extremes -- the gnostic impulse & the materialist impulse. The gnostic impulse would have us bypass the particularity of biblical words... The materialist impulse treats Scripture as an object of empirical analysis. We dare not stare ourselves blind looking for the history behind the words, for it is the reality in the words that we are meant to adore & worship.

Oh! Eternity, thou depth without bottom, thou sea without a shore, must I sail upon thy boundless waves forever in one undeviating track -- and must I either plough through seas of bliss, or else be driven by the stormy winds of vengeance, over gulfs of misery? ... Am I prepared? For, prepared or not, death admits of no delay, and if he is at my door, he will take me where I must go forever, prepared or not.

Worship services teach congregants the grammar of the faith through Scripture readings, sermons, prayers, & songs. Yet the purpose of grammatical rules is to help competent speakers form new sentences. The rules of grammar are the enabling condition of free speech. Similarly, the liturgical formation of disciples, though rule-based, is the condition for their exercising their Christian freedom in the Spirit.

Disciples are fit for their kingdom not when they can fight for its coming, but rather when they can witness, with every fiber of their being, to its arrival.

The best way to remain Protestant and to uphold the supreme authority of Scripture, is to make catholic disciples -- men and women who become part of the universal church, and are thus attuned to the remarkable consensus reflected in the Great Tradition.

God's good pleasure is that this poor planet, so long swathed in darkness, shall soon shine out in brightness, like a new born sun. Christ's death hath done it. The stream that flowed from his side on Calvary shall cleanse the world from all its blackness.

Oh man! I could weep o'er thee, warnings that as the bullock goeth to the slaughter and as the lamb licks the knife, so dost thou go back to the sin that destroys thee, and to the lust that ruins thee.

God is not angry with you; his anger is passed away, and his hands are stretched out still. Inasmuch as he has brought you to feel that you have sinned against him, and to desire reconciliation with him there is no wrath in his heart. The only sorrow that he feels is sorrow that you should have brought yourself into a state so mournful as that in which you are now found.

"And what need did you have to 'lie,' as you put it?"

"Devil knows. Maybe in order to boast...well... about squandering so much money... Or maybe in order to forget about the money I had sewn up... yes, that's exactly why... ah, the devil... how many times must you ask me? So I lied, and that's it, I lied once and then I didn't want to correct it. Why does a man lie sometimes?"

How unspeakable the satisfaction of a poor sufferer when he hears the physician minutely describe all his ailments! But to hear him speak with confidence that, however painful, no symptom is beyond his skill, how the patient will brighten up... Think for one moment how far God's mercies exceed our miseries! How far his cure extends beyond our maladies!

Here is a heir of glory & immortality, and the neighbor who touches his arm is dead in sins. What! Will ye not weep & feel for them? Will your hearts be like stone & steel? And will ye be worse than brutes, and let them perish without a sigh, without a prayer, without a tear? No; if we can pray, we will pray for them, that God in his mercy may yet give them grace.

"And do you see our Sun, do you see him?"

"I'm afraid...I don't dare to look," whispered Aloysha.

"Do not be afraid of him. Awful is his greatness before us, terrible is his loftiness, yet he is boundlessly merciful, he became like us out of love, and he is making merry with us, turning water into wine, that the joy of the guests may not end. He is waiting for new guests, he is ceaselessly calling new guests..."

The world says: "You have needs, therefore satisfy them, for you have the same rights as the noblest & richest men. Do not be afraid to satisfy them, but even increase them." ... Taking freedom to mean the increase of needs, they distort their own nature, for they generate meaningless & foolish desires, habits, and the most absurd fancies in themselves. They live only for mutual envy, pleasure seeking, & self conceit

In a world made up of systems, the immune system replaces what was formerly called an individual or person... reducing persons born for suffering & delight to provisionally self-sustaining information loops... The medical establishment has become a major threat to health.

If there is such a thing as a categorical imperative, a normative form governing human action in all types & circumstances, it is not a principle but an acting person who appeared at a certain point in history & can be told of narratively.

No, I cannot admit it. Brother," Alyosha said suddenly, his eyes beginning to flash, "you have asked just now if there is in the whole world a being who could & would have the right to forgive. But there is such a being, an he can forgive everything, forgive all and for all, because he himself gave his innocent blood for all & for everything. You've forgotten about him... it is on him the structure is being built."

Since action is complex and extended over time, if we are to talk about it at all we must be able to talk about its relation to a continuous subject with a sustained practical rationality & purpose. Only so can we distinguish a course of action from a random sequene of occurrences.

You may think to live very well without Christ, but you cannot afford to die without him. You can stand very securely at present, but death will shake your confidence. Your tree may be fair now, but when the wind comes, if it has not roots in the Rock of Ages, down it must come.

A musician may sensibly desire to complete the Unfinished Symphony, of which Schubert left two perfect movements out... It makes no sense at all to desire to complete Sibelius' 8th Symphony, of which not a note that is definitely attributable survives. Without a real & known good, the desire to supply what it lacks is contentless. One cannot desire to supply what it lacks unless one's enjoyment has been cut short.

The task of practical reason was not to impose a restraint on interest in the goods, a curb on their uniformly seductive appeal, but to reach a clear view of them... To seize on the first good that offered itself would be a reflective failure, blind to the order of goods, blind to the opportunities for good at the present moment, and therefore neither wise nor prudent.

Ethics reflects on the living of human ... from the point of view of agents who ask deliberative & evaluative questions about their practical undertakings. There is no describable field of material data that defines the study of Ethics... its expertise is not defined by its data, but by the distinctive lines of practical questioning that it applies to them.

Do not think that the meditative man is necesarily lazy; contrariwise, he lays the best foundation for useful works. He is not the best student who reads the most books, but he who meditates the most upon them.

I looked at this woman for 3 or 5 seconds, then, with terrible hatred -- the kind of hatred that is only a hairsbreadth from love, the maddest love!

A life considered solely as fulfilling of a personal destiny, the working out of an individual charisma, is a vacant abstraction. The particularity of vocation must serve as a window through which the universal character of all Christian life may appear. Just as the variety of voices within the church are unified in a common confession ... so the variety of forms of life are unified within... the life of love.

However high some of us, and however low others of us may be, the same vessel bears us all, for we are one crew in one boat, and there is no dividing us.

We will read the Bible seriously only when we use it towards a comprehensive moral viewpoint
There may be resistance from those who have forebodings of a totalitarian theological construction which will legislate where it would be better to respect the Bible's silence. When such doubts have been raised, we are doomed to think the Scriptures inconclusive for questions worth doubting about in the first place.

The church may command with the sanctions of discipline in matters where a theological argument alone seems to require a certain conclusion. For example, the practice of euthanasia is inconsistent with biblical ethics, even though not explicitly condemned in the biblical text... So long as the argument commands general agreement among those who accept Christ's authority, a disciplinary sanction may be appropriate.

When a man knows better, and sins in the very teeth & face of his increased light & knowledge, then his sin deserves to be branded with this ignominious title of a presumptuous sin.

Fyodor suddenly felt that that he had blurted out some absurd nonsense, and he wanted at once to prove to his listeners & above all to himself that what he had said was not nonsense at all. And though he knew perfectly well that with each word he would be adding more & more absurdities of the same sort to the nonsense he had already spoken, still he could not help himself & plunged headlong off the mountain.

The teaching & life of Jesus must be morally authoritative if we are not to be thrown back upon the gnostic gospel of a visitor from heaven who summons us out of the world... Though the redemption of the world had to be wrought from outside it by God's gracious intervention, it had still to be the redemption of the world.