Karen

“The irrational bias of the myth of progress can be seen in the tendency to criticize orthodox church fathers for reading Greek metaphysics into the text, while overlooking Baruch Spinoza's rationalism and Bruno Bauer's Hegelianism on their own biblical interpretation. Is this because "Greek" metaphysics is bad, but "German" metaphysics is good? According to the history of hermeneutics as told from an Enlightenment perspective, if it were not for the pagan Enlightenment, Christians would still be reading Greek metaphysics into the Bible like Augustine and making it say whatever they pleased like Origen. Is it not rather bizarre that this narrative asks us to believe that it took the pagan Epicureanism of the Enlightenment to rescue us from the "subjectivism" of the Nicene fathers, medieval schoolmen, and Protestant Reformers?”
― Craig A. Carter, Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition: Recovering the Genius of Premodern Exegesis

“Death can radically enable us to enjoy life. By relativizing all that we do in our days under the sun, death can change us from people who want to control life for gain into people who find deep joy in receiving life as a gift. This is the main message of Ecclesiastes in a nutshell: life in God’s world is gift, not gain.”
― David Gibson, Living Life Backward: How Ecclesiastes Teaches Us to Live in Light of the End

“In fact, the ongoing and deepening contrast between the Jesus of the Gospels and popular cultural misconfigurations is the principal reason I have written this book. Jesus is far more beautiful than many have imagined. It all has to do with love, but not just any kind of love, but with holy love.” Jesus the Stranger: The Man from Galilee and the Light of the World, p. xviii.”
― Kenneth J. Collins, Jesus the Stranger: The Man from Galilee and the Light of the World

“It was a question of steering Christian dogma between the Scylla of pantheism and the Charybdis of materialism and its logical conclusion, scepticism.”
― Owen Barfield, History in English Words