Status Updates From Symbolism and Belief

“The desire that the world should be rational in the sense of realizing value is not a desire of the same quality as a man's craving for his private comfort or for the flattering of his vanity. It has to be remembered that even the belief that the world is rational in the sense in which it is presupposed by Science is the satisfaction of an exigence which cannot be proved by an argument not circular.”

“Thus the best answer which Christians can give to those who say they cannot see value in the Christian life, is to live the life more truly and thoroughly. In the end every man must see or not see its value for himself.”

“But the Theist or Christian does not merely say: "Act as there were a God who is a loving Father, and you will And certain desirable results follow" (that is Pragmatism): he says: "Act as if there were God who is a loving Father, and you will, in so doing, be making the right response to that which God really is.”

“For no one supposes that we can imagine, even faintly, what it is like to be God. We should all agree that all human terms used of God-wisdom, love, justice- are to some extent figurative modes by which we think of a Reality we cannot, except In the poorest and most fragmentary way, conceive.”

“A religion which consists simply in the enjoyment of numinous feelings without any effort to grasp the Reality by intellectual conceptions, criticized and corrected, is a very poor affair. But one may say with equal truth that a religion which thinks that it has enclosed the whole Truth of God in a set of dogmatic formulas is a poor affair.”

EDWYN IS COOKIN

“But in many cases art, whether painting or sculpture or poetry, may give us the feeling that it stands for a dream. world other than the world of everyday, without our being able to have any intellectual concept of that woul beyond its being a world which excites in us the feeling which we call
"sense of the beautiful."

“Whether you stand outside the Christian Church or within it, you can, I think, recognize that this problem of drawing the line between the literal and the symbolical affects Christianity to-day just in so far as Christianity asserts that Jesus is a Person still active, not only through the memory of his past life, but in the reality of his present life, in intercourse with the souls of men.”

“The consideration of merits in regard to God's action towards men has led us some way from our proper subject, the wrath of God. It left it possible to regard the grace of God as rich in bestowing immeasurably beyond any possible human merits.”

“It is, of course, important to grasp that in all these Hebrew conceptions of the action of the Divine ruakh upon man, whether in the days of the great prophets or in post-exilic Judaism, the distinction, one might say the distance, between God and man is maintained, far more firmly than in surrounding paganism.”

“We feel that we know best what is meant by the declaration that "God is light" when no attempt is made to explain it. We have come almost to lose the sense that light is only a symbol; we almost feel it to be a literal statement of recognized truth.”

Enjoying this book so far! The author has had 3 lectures so far - height, time and now light. The sections on Time were honestly very confusing but I just pushed right through them. I think not understanding the symbol of Time is appropriate

“In that world, too, he meets God at every turn, for God is the ground of the world and is active in all its movement. But the nature of man is such that he cannot be satisfed with meeting God only in the things of the world: if he practises the right way of withdrawal, he can meet God in the sphere of God's Sabbath rest too.”

“To think of God’s experience of Time prolonged is to think of Time as stronger than God”

“"In the beginning God created the heavens." If God created the heavens, He must have existed in almighty power before there was any heaven there at all. Perhaps one does not easily realize in the case of a verse so familiar what a breach it meant with the conception hitherto almost universal in the religious traditions of mankind.”