"Who hates his neighbor has not the rights of a child." And not only has he no rights as a read more

"Who hates his neighbor has not the rights of a child." And not only has he no rights as a child, he has no "father". God is not my father in particular, or any man's father (horrible presumption and madness!); no, He is only father in the sense of father of all, and consequently only my father in so far as He is the father of all. When I hate someone or deny God is his father, it is not he who loses, but I: for then I have no father.

Commemoration of Thomas Bray, Priest, Founder of SPCK, 1730 The indwelling of Christ's Spirit means not only moral discernment read more

Commemoration of Thomas Bray, Priest, Founder of SPCK, 1730 The indwelling of Christ's Spirit means not only moral discernment but moral power. Paul's count against the Law is that it was impotent through the flesh. Against this impotence Paul sets the ethical competence of the Spirit. "I can do anything in Him who makes me strong," (Phil. 4:13) he exclaims. For his friends in Asia he prays "that God may grant you, according to the wealth of His splendour, to be made strong with power through His Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through your trust in Him." (Eph. 3:16-17) This is the antithesis of the dismal picture presented in Romans 7, and it comes, just as evidently as that, out of experience. Indeed, we may say that the thing above all which distinguished the early Christian community from its environment was the moral competence of its members. In order to maintain this we need not idealize unduly the early Christians. There were sins and scandals at Corinth and Ephesus, but it was impossible to miss the note of genuine power of renewal and recuperation -- the power of the simple person progressively to approximate to his moral ideals in spite of failures. The very fact that the term "Spirit" is used points to a sense of something essentially "supernatural" in such ethical attainments. For the primitive Christians the Spirit was manifested in what they regarded as miraculous. Paul does not whittle away the miraculous sense when he transfers it to the moral sphere. He concentrates attention on the moral miracle as something more wonderful far than any "speaking with tongues." So fully convinced is he of the new and miraculous nature of this moral power that he can regard the Christian as a "new creation." (II Cor. 5:17) This is not the old person at all: it is a "new man," "created in Christ Jesus for good deeds." (Eph. 2:10) (Continued tomorrow).

Commemoration of Nicholas Ferrar, Deacon, Founder of the Little Gidding Community, 1637 To me there is a much more read more

Commemoration of Nicholas Ferrar, Deacon, Founder of the Little Gidding Community, 1637 To me there is a much more frightening ignorance in our modern world than the "ignorance of the heathen". I am referring to the almost total ignorance of the content and implication of the Christian Faith shown by many "clever" people today. Frankly, I find it horrifying to discover that men who are experts in their own line -- in astronomy, genetics, or nuclear physics, for example -- have no adult knowledge of what the Church of Christ stands for, and a complete blank ignorance of what the Church is achieving today. It is the more horrifying because people who rightly respect the expert for his knowledge in his own field have no idea that he has not carefully examined and reluctantly discarded Christianity; but in all probability he has never studied it at all!

The rejection as unhistorical of all passages which narrate miracles is sensible if we start by knowing that the miraculous... read more

The rejection as unhistorical of all passages which narrate miracles is sensible if we start by knowing that the miraculous... never occurs. Now, I do not want here to discuss whether the miraculous is possible: I only want to point out that this is a purely philosophical question. Scholars, as scholars, speak on it with no more authority than anyone else. The canon, "If miraculous, unhistorical", is one they bring to their study of the texts, not one they have learned from it. If one is speaking of authority, the united authority of all the Biblical critics in the world counts for nothing. On this they speak simply as men -- men obviously influenced by, and perhaps insufficiently critical of, the spirit of the age they grew up in.

Silence, indeed, is the one form of worship which is almost universally thought intolerable by Dissenting clergy. Despite their not-too-distant read more

Silence, indeed, is the one form of worship which is almost universally thought intolerable by Dissenting clergy. Despite their not-too-distant affinity to the Quakers, they think they will be heard for their much speaking. And since their organists too are equally reluctant to let any liturgical action pass without a ruminative obbligato on the Swell manual, congregations are subjected to unrelieved noise during a service which may well have begun with the reading of the sentence, "Be still, and know that I am God.".

Feast of Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, 988 I suddenly saw that all the time it was not I who read more

Feast of Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, 988 I suddenly saw that all the time it was not I who had been seeking God, but God who had been seeking me. I had made myself the centre of my own existence and had my back turned to God. All the beauty and truth which I had discovered had come to me as a reflection of his beauty, but I had kept my eyes fixed on the reflection and was always looking at myself. But God had brought me to the point at which I was compelled to turn away from the reflection, both of myself and of the world which could only mirror my own image. During that night the mirror had been broken, and I had felt abandoned because I could no longer gaze upon the image of my own reason and the finite world which it knew. God had brought me to my knees and made me acknowledge my own nothingness, and out of that knowledge I had been reborn. I was no longer the centre of my life and therefore I could see God in everything.

There are, I should say, four elements in a redemptive community. It is personal, with things happening between people as read more

There are, I should say, four elements in a redemptive community. It is personal, with things happening between people as well as to and in them individually; it is compassionate, always eager to help, observant but non judgmental toward others, breathing out hope and concern; it is creative, with imagination about each one in the group and its work as a whole, watching for authentic new vision coming from any of them; and it is expectant, always seeking to offer to God open and believing hearts and minds through which He can work out His will, either in the sometimes startling miracles He gives or in steady purpose through long stretches where there is no special "opening". It may fairly be said that unless one enmeshes himself in this "redemptive fellowship" of the church, he lessens his chances of steady growth and effectiveness, in his Christian life and experience.

Commemoration of Thomas Bray, Priest, Founder of SPCK, 1730 Continuing a short series on forgiveness: The Hebrew religion read more

Commemoration of Thomas Bray, Priest, Founder of SPCK, 1730 Continuing a short series on forgiveness: The Hebrew religion was an unfinished religion. That is one of the best proofs of its divine inspiration. The prophets had the forward look [and] great things were yet to come. As one of the most daring expressed it, the old and hallowed covenant, made by God at the Exodus, would be superseded by a new and higher relation; God would write his law into the hearts of the people; the old drill in outward statutes would disappear, for all men would know God by an inward experience of forgiveness and love.

In most parts of the Bible, everything is implicitly or explicitly introduced with "Thus saith the Lord". It is... not read more

In most parts of the Bible, everything is implicitly or explicitly introduced with "Thus saith the Lord". It is... not merely a sacred book but a book so remorselessly and continuously sacred that it does not invite -- it excludes or repels -- the merely aesthetic approach. You can read it as literature only by a tour de force... It demands incessantly to be taken on its own terms: it will not continue to give literary delight very long, except to those who go to it for something quite different. I predict that it will in the future be read, as it always has been read, almost exclusively by Christians.