Jacob Moore > Recent Status Updates

You love Jesus, young man! I put it to you, then, will you refuse to tell the tale of his love to you? Shall your lips be dumb, when his honor is concerned? Will you not, wherever you go, tell of the God, who loved you and died for you?

The exercise of political authority is the search for a compromise which, while bearing the fullest witness to the truth that can in the circumstances be borne, will, nevertheless, lie within the scope of possible public action in the particular community of fallen men which it has to serve.

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Moral freedom can never be established on a basis of self-sufficiency & independence of the world. Freedom, if it is freedom to act within the world, must itself be of the world. Man's status as agent is part and parcel of his created being in the world... therefore, he has nothing to fear from the world-order.. He has only to fear being cut off from it. God has given him his freedom ... & a world in which to be free

We may say that a development poses new moral questions... but this is only a rhetorical performance. If a moral 'issue' has arisen about this new technique, it has arisen not because the technique has put it to us, but of questions which we have put to the technique.

God is great in power & therefore doth he keep in his anger. A man who had a strong mind can bear to be insulted, can bear offenses, because he is strong. The weak mind snaps & snarls ... If he were less of a God than he is ... he would long ere this have sent forth the whole of his thunder & emptied the magazines of heaven ... We bless God that ... he is slow to anger because he is great in power.

Knowledge of the natural order is moral knowledge, and as such it is co-ordinated with obedience. There can be no true knowledge of that order without loving acceptance of it & conformity to it, fo it is known by participation & not by transcendence.

And the once condemned sinner came back to Mercy; prostrate at her feet he lay, and vowed henceforth to be hers forever, if she would keep him to the end, & make him what she would desire him to be. Then no longer did the trumpet ring, but angels rejoiced, & heaven was glad, for the sinner was saved.

Historicism with its incapacity to distinguish natural from historical teleology, will always tend to confuse the goodness of natural structures with sin & disorder. For if all teleology is historical teleology, & the natural structures have no integrity as totalities within themselves, then actual good & evil alike stand together under the judgment of historical fulfilment, as 'imperfect.'

Men will have no God interfere with their lusts. They could not go on in their sins, if they once believed there was an everlasting God above them ... and because the thought of God checks them in their impiety and their lusts, therefore they cry out, "There is no God."

We must go to Christ on bended knees; for though he is a door big enough for the greatest sinner to come in, he is a door so low that men must stoop if they would be saved.

All ordering becomes deliberative ordering & scientific observation, failing to report the teleological order within nature, becomes the servant of techne. Of course, man continues to eat vegetables; but he no longer does so because vegetables are food, & comes to imagine that he has devised a use for them. So he looks for other uses of them, which will seem to him to have as much validity as the use given by nature.

Balaam, you know, offered sacrifices to God upon the altar of Baal; that was just the type of his character. So many do; they offer sacrifices to God on the shrine of Mammon; and while they give the building of a church, & distribute to the poor, they will at the other door of their counting-house grind the poor for bread, & press the very blood out of the widow, that they may enrich themselves.

And so it is that as man is given by the Spirit to share Christ's authority, he cannot do so without love, both for the created order in general and for the particular beings, human and other, which stand within it in various problematic relationships... It achieves its creativity by being perceptive. It attempts to act for any being only on the basis of an appreciation of that being.

When we think quite specifically about Christian action we have to single out the resurrection moment which vindicates the creation into which our actions can be ventured with intelligibility. In action the integrity of the world is supposed, and that integrity is answered for by the empty tomb, where God has stood by the life he made and not allowed it to be brought to nothing.

You today are like the burning metal running forth from the cauldron in the mold; death cools you in your mold, and you are cast in that shape throughout eternity. The voice of doom crieth over the dead, "He that is holy let him be holy still; he that is unjust let him be unjust still; he that is filthy, let him be filthy still."

Augustine says: "I want you to grasp ... that our Lord Christ has laid upon us a gentle yoke & a light burden. Accordingly, he has bound together the society of the new people by sacraments very few in number, very easy to observe, very excellent in meaning. Such are baptism, ... communion of the Lord's body & blood, & any other that is approved in the canonical Scriptures. (4.19.3)

After Christ's sacrifice was accomplished, the Lord instituted another method for us, that is, to transmit to the believing folk the benefit of the sacrifice offered to himself by his Son. He has therefore given us a Table at which to feast, not an altar upon which to offer a victim; he has not consecrated priests to offer sacrifice, but ministers to distribute the sacred banquet. (4.18.12)

My name is somewhat esteemed now, and the great ones of the earth think it no dishonor to sit at my feet; but this makes me fear lest my God should forsake me now that the world esteems me.

Let pastors & presbyters be especially watchful to privately admonish the saints, for their duty is not only to preach to the people, but to warn & exhort in every house, wherever they are not effective enough in general instruction. (4.12.2)

It usually happens that where these perverse lawgivers have once taken authority, they never cease to command & forbid, until they come to the limit of overscrupulousness. (4.10.13)

The word "consubstantial," I admit, does not exist in Scripture. But when it is so often asserted in Scripture that there is one God, and further, when Christ is so often called the true and eternal God, one with the Father-- what else are the Nicene fathers doing when they declare them of one essence but simply expounding the real meaning of Scripture. (4.8.16)

Jerome adds immediately that the glory of the bishop is to provide for the poor; the disgrace of all priests, to seek after their own riches. (4.5.19)

Monsieur Bienvenue turns out to be a good Calvinist. :)

When we categorically deny to the papists the title of *the* church, we do not for this reason impugn the existence of churches among them. Rather, we are only contending about the true & lawful constitution of the church, required in the communion not only of the sacraments but also especially of doctrine. (4.3.12)

Compton -- speaking for Oppenheimer -- wrote, "We feel that this development (the H-bomb) should not be undertaken, primarily because we should prefer defeat in war to victory obtained at the expense of the enormous human disaster that would be caused by its determined use."

Abraham would not have taken such meticulous care about his wife's tomb if religion, & a value higher than this world, had not been set before his eyes; that is to say, that by adorning his wife's dead body with the signs of the resurrection, he might strengthen his own faith & that of his household. (3.25.8)

If God be God, if he made you, I demand that you serve him; if it is he who puts breath into your nostrils, I demand that you obey him. If God be really worthy of your worship, and you really think so, I demand that you either follow him, or else deny that he is God at all.

As soon as Chrisitian freedom is mentioned, either passions boil or wild tumults rise unless these wanton spirits are opposed in time, who otherwise most wickedly corrupt the best things. Some, on the pretext of this freedom, shake off all obedience to God & break out into unbridled license. (3.19.1).

Done with volume 1, on to volume 2!

Because God examines our works according to his tenderness, not his supreme right, he therefore accepts them as if they were perfectly pure; and for that reason, although unmerited, they are rewarded with infinite benefits, both of the present life & also the life to come. (3.15.4)

Keeness of sight, so long as it confines itself to examining nearby objects is convinced of its discernment. But directed towards the sun, stricken & numbed by excessive brightness, our vision feels as weak as it did strong gazing at objects below... Though we consider ourselves either equal or superior to other men, that is nothing to God, to whose judgment the decision of the matter must be brought. (3.12.2).

He didn't have Sitzfleisch ... perseverance, the Germans call it "sitting flesh"... He never wrote a long paper or did a long calculation, anything of that kind. He didn't have patience for that; his own work consisted of little aperçus but quite brilliant ones. But he inspired other people to do things, & his influence was fantastic.