Jason Chan

“The assumption that marriage existed to cement alliances between two families—an assumption as universal as it was primordial—had not easily been undermined. Only once the great apparatus of canon law was in place had the Church at last been in a position to bring the institution firmly under its control. Catherine, refusing her parents’ demands that she marry their choice of husband, insisting that she was pledged to another man, had been entirely within her rights as a Christian. No couple could be forced into a betrothal, nor into wedlock, nor into a physical coupling. Priests were authorised to join couples without the knowledge of their parents—or even their permission. It was consent, not coercion, that constituted the only proper foundation of a marriage. The Church, by pledging itself to this conviction, and putting it into law, was treading on the toes of patriarchs everywhere. Here was a development pregnant with implications for the future. Opening up before the Christian people was the path to a radical new conception of marriage: one founded on mutual attraction, on love. Inexorably, the rights of the individual were coming to trump those of family.”
― Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“The best joys, says Edwards, cast the soul “down low and in the dust in humility and poverty of spirit. Though it be a much sweeter joy than that which so elevates the soul, yet it is attended with too solemn a sense of the infinite greatness of divine things, the awful excellency of Christ, and majesty of God, and its own nothingness.” And yet it is in this very lostness in the greatness of God and the nothingness of self that “the soul is filled with joy.” In short, as Edwards puts it in a November 1735 sermon, “There is such a thing as praising God in a humble, brokenhearted manner, and yet in a very joyful manner at the same time.”
― Dane C. Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life: Alive to the Beauty of God

“Humility is not thinking poorly of oneself. It is rather thinking of oneself in harmonious proportion and appropriate relation to God.”
― Dane C. Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life: Alive to the Beauty of God

“The good things of this world—the tastes, the sights, the smells, the accomplishments, the relationships—are all echoes of the true Joy, the joy of which every earthly pleasure is a shadow. Edwards would agree with the way modern thinker Cornelius Plantinga puts it: “Ultimate joy comes not from a lover or a landscape or a home, but through them. . . . They point to what is ‘higher up’ and ‘further back.’ The Christian life is not an ascetic life, but a life in which every received pleasure draws the mind up to supreme Pleasure, Christ himself, in his resplendent beauty. Joy is fundamentally a vision of God.
Edwards therefore saw what many writers and preachers today do not: that the way to cultivate joy in God’s people was not to talk about joy but to talk about God. If a New York park guide wants to help his band of tourists feel awe at the Niagara Falls, he doesn’t give a lecture on awe. He shows them the falls. If a Christian leader wants believers to feel joy in Christ, he doesn’t give a lecture on awe. He shows them the falls. If a Christian leader wants believers to feel joy in Christ, he doesn’t mainly tell them about joy. He shows them Christ. Joy sneaks unbidden in the back door”
― Dane C. Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life: Alive to the Beauty of God