Words'nTone

“What a way to welfare, that hated Babylon is the place of well-being.  Thus exile is not only the place of unexpected word.  It is also the place of unexpected unacceptable vocation—exiles seeking welfare for others!  Seek only justice and righteousness, even in anxiety, and get the kingdom (Matt 6:33).  Seek shalom, and you’ll get the land” ~Walter Brueggemann reflecting on Jeremiah 29:7 in The Land: Place As Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical Faith , 1977

“But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” ~Jeremiah (29:7)

“Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction. We cannot avoid revising the fundamental definitions of human life and human society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man’s life and society’s activities have to be determined by material expansion in the first place? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our spiritual integrity?” ~Alexander Solzhenitsyn , “A World Split Apart ,” Harvard Commensement, June 8, 1978

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience” ~C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock

“The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false” ~Paul Johnson

“Can never be lost.  Someone’s already worked the way” ~Special Agency Don Eppes, CBS’s Numbers

“For 42 years I had made small, regular deposits of education, training, and experience…And the experience balance was sufficient that on Jan. 15th I could make a sudden, large withdrawal” ~ Captain Sullenberger, Pilot of US Air Flight 1549

“The new frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises--it is a set of challenges” ~John F. Kennedy

“The technical term for the private-zoo factor is privatization.  By privatization I mean the process by which modernization produces a cleavage between the public and the private spheres of life and focuses the private sphere as the special arena for the expansion of individual freedom and fulfillment.” ~Os Guinness, in The Gravedigger File, referencing Peter Berger

“The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.” ~Alfred North Whitehead

“It is no secret that Christ’s church is not at all in good health in many places of the world.  She has been languishing because she has been fed, as the current line has it, ‘junk food’ … As a result, theological and biblical malnutrition has affected [us]…[A] worldwide spiritual famine resulting from the absence of any genuine [diet] of the Word of God continues to run wild and almost unabated in most quarters of the church.” ~Walter Kaiser, Toward an Exegetical Theology

“In a society in which idolatry runs rampant, a church that is not iconoclastic is a travesty.  If it is not against the idols it is with them.” ~Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction

We look back upon history, and what do we see?  Empires rising and falling.  Revolutions and Counterrevolutions.  Wealth accumulated and wealth disbursed. Shakespeare has written of the rise and fall of great ones, that ebb and flow with the moon. I look back upon my own fellow countrymen, once upon a time dominating a quarter of the world, most of them convinced, in the words of what is still a popular song, that the God who made them mighty, shall make them mightier yet.

I have heard a crazed, cracked Austrian announce to the world the establishment of a Reich that would last a thousand years. I have seen an Italian clown say he was going to stop and restart the calendar with his own ascension to power. I have heard a murderous Georgian brigand in the Kremlin, acclaimed by the intellectual elite of the world as wiser than Solomon, more humane than Marcus Aurelius, more enlightened than Ashoka.

I have seen America, wealthier and in terms of military weaponry, more powerful than the rest of the world put together, so that had the American people so desired, they could have outdone a Caesar, or an Alexander in the range and scale of their conquests.

All in one lifetime, all in one lifetime, all gone. Gone with the wind. England part of a tiny island off the coast of Europe, threatened with dismemberment and even bankruptcy. Hitler and Mussolini dead, remembered only in infamy. Stalin a forbidden name in the regime he helped found and dominate for some three decades. America haunted by fears of running our of those precious fluids that keeps their motorways roaring, and the smog settling, with troubled memories of a disastrous campaign in Vietnam, and the victories of the Don Quixotes of the media as they charged the windmills of Watergate. All in one lifetime, all in one lifetime, all gone. Gone with the wind. ~Malcolm Muggeridge

“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” - C. S. Lewis

“If man would stop gazing and staring like the donkey by the manger, he would realize that he has been placed in a storm on the Spirit, and that God’s wonder is the element of his life.” ~Hendrikus Berkhof