Quotes

Augustine of Hippo – A Prayer

Lord, you are great and infinitely worthy of praise.
Great is your power and inscrutable your widsom.
Man (sic) is a puny part of your creation, and his desire is to praise you. He bears everywhere his mortality, the sign of his sin, to remind him that you resist the proud.
And yet this man desires to praise you, since he is a puny part of your creation.
It is you who bring him to seek joy in praising you, because you have made us for yourself and our heart is restless until it finds rest in you.’

(Augustine of Hippo)

From The Confessions, Book 1

Davis on Contemplation and action

Contemplation and action are not separate strategies, nor is the latter a corrective to the former. They are part of a single complex process: accurate perception leading to metanoia*, and that in turn leading to more reflective behaviour.

*On metanoia. True contemplation can be achieved only by those who accept metanoia, a profound change of mind – what English speakers call (somewhat inadequately) “repentance” – “as a path and way of life”.

 

Davis, Ellen F. Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture : An Agrarian Reading of the Bible. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 47

 

Wendell Berry On Imagining

To preserve our places and to be at home in them, it is necessary to fill them with imagination, To imagine as well as see what is in them. Not to fill them with the junk of fantasy and unconsciousness, for that is no more than the industrial economy would do, but to see them first clearly with the eyes, and then to see them with the imagination in their sanctity, as belonging to the creation.

(Wendell Berry)

Source: Davis, Ellen F. Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture : An Agrarian Reading of the Bible. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 42

Bonhoeffer on God sees the world as good

God’s seeing protects the world from falling back into the void, protects it from total destruction. God sees the world as good, as created – even where it is the fallen world – and because of the way God sees his work and embraces it and does not forsake it, we live.

(Dietrich Bonhoeffer)

Source: Davis, Ellen F. Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture : An Agrarian Reading of the Bible. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 42

 

Luke Timothy Johnson, Imagining the World Scripture Imagines

‘If Scripture is ever again to be a living resource for theology, those who practice theology must become less preoccupied with the world that produced Scripture and learn again how to live in the world Scripture produces. This will be a matter of imagination, and perhaps of leaping.’

(Luke Timothy Johnson)

Luke Timothy Johnson, ‘Imagining the World Scripture Imagines’, in Theology and Scriptural Imagination: Directions in Modern Theology ed L. Gregory Jones and James J. Buckley (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 3

St Augustine on The self-interpreting nature of Scripture

‘It is a wondrous and beneficial thing that the Holy Spirit organised the Holy Scriptures so as to satisfy hunger by means of its plainer passages, and remove boredom by means of its obscurer ones … If you cannot yet understand [a passage of Scripture], you should leave the matter for the consideration of those who can; and since Scripture does not abandon you in your infirmity, but with a mother’s love accompanies your slower steps, you will make progress. Holy Scripture, indeed, speaks in such a way as to mock the proud readers with its heights, terrify the attentive with its depths, feed great souls with its truth and nourish little ones with sweetness’.

– Augustine

(Cited in Katherine Green-McCreight, Ad Litteram: How Augustine, Calvin, and Barth Read the ‘Plain Sense’ of Genesis 1-3 (New York, NY: Peter Lang, 1998), 164, 167)