Mark

“When, in June 2015, relatives of the murder victims in Charleston, South Carolina, came face-to-face with the killer, several of them told him at once that they forgave him. Something similar happened after the Amish school shooting in October 2006. These incidents, widely reported, strike secular journalists and their readers as strange to the point of being almost incredible. Do these people really mean it? It is clear that they do. The forgiveness was unforced. It wasn’t said through clenched teeth, in outward conformity to a moral standard, while the heart remained bitter. Forgiveness was already a way of life in these communities. They were merely exemplifying and extending, in horrific circumstances, the character they had already learned and practiced.”
― N.T. Wright, The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus's Crucifixion

“The scribes and Pharisees “began to reason” (dialogizesthai); we might also construe this as “rationalize,” and it would make sense of their discourse as to purpose. They see the evidence that, for Jesus, forgiveness is somehow integral to the man’s healing and see the healing itself therefore as blasphemy, since they believe that none but God can forgive sins (5:21). As a species of legal reasoning, given the eyewitness evidence they have chosen to exclude (a miracle has taken place and must owe to some power greater than human reason), their logic is, ironically, “reasonable.” This is one of those instances of which one may, however, say with Lord Peter Wimsey (in Dorothy Sayers’s novel Whose Body?), “There is nothing you can’t prove, if only your outlook is sufficiently limited.” Jesus knows their mind and motive and reveals them to themselves with one devastating question, “Why are you reasoning in your hearts?” (5:22)—a phrase indicating that he knows well enough that their motive has malice—followed by another: “Which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven you’ or to say, ‘Rise up and walk’?” (5:23).”
― David Lyle Jeffrey, Luke (Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible):

“Just because we want to think clearly, that doesn’t mean we can escape the methodological demands of Christian virtue. To cash these out: it requires humility, to understand the thoughts of people who thought differently from ourselves; patience, to go on working with the data and resist premature conclusions; penitence, to acknowledge that our traditions may have distorted original meanings and that we have preferred the distortions to the originals; and love, in that genuine history, like all genuine knowledge, involves the delighted affirmation of realities and events outside ourselves, and thoughts different from our own.”
― N.T. Wright, History and Eschatology: Jesus and the Promise of Natural Theology

“According to Lewis, imagination was “the organ of meaning,” while reason was “the natural organ of truth,” and it was always his aim in his writing to combine the two organs as fully and naturally as possible, whatever the communicative task in hand. Works of philosophy, no less than works of creative fiction, required the marriage of fertile imagination and penetrating reason.”
― Michael Ward, After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man