Braxton Bragg > Recent Status Updates

A chief reason Christian’s ought to dedicate themselves to the study of God’s attributes:

“The true way to ennoble and improve ourselves is by fixing our love on the divine perfections, and we should always have them before us and derive an impression of them upon ourselves” (Pg. 72).

In other words, Scougal is saying that it’s in the beholding of God’s attributes that are changed (2 Cor. 3:18).

“Oh, that the life of the blessed Jesus might be always in my thoughts and before my eyes so that I may gain a deep sense of the graces that shoneso eminently in him! Let me never cease my endeavors till that new and divine nature prevails in my own soul and Christ is formed within me. Amen” (Pg. 66).

“[Jesus] was so entirely swallowed up with a deep sense of the perfections of God that he appeared as nothing in his own eyes (I mean insofar as he was human)” (Pg. 62).

“Religion is a reflection of the divine perfections, the image of the Almighty shining in the soul of man. It is a real participation of his nature. It is a beam of the eternal light, a drop of that infinite ocean of goodness. And those who are endowed with it can said to have God dwelling in their souls and Christ formed within them” (Pgs. 37-38).

“I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can't believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us.”

“This means only that grace sets in order what creation has given, so that virtues are nothing other than ordered affections.” (Pages 77-78)

Bernard… so good.

“Because of our willing faculty, we are able to will; but because of grace, to will the good. Just as, simply to fear is one thing, and to fear God, another; to love, one, and to love God, another, -since to fear and to love, on their own signify affections, but, coupled with the additional word "God," virtues, -so also will is one thing, and to will the good, another” (page 72).

Bars…

“It is our duty and delight to adore our great God. And he is not honored by merely ignorant adoration, for that can only be a charade. Adoration of God as Trinity must be based on some knowledge. Otherwise it is not God himself whom we adore.” (pg. 93)

“Worship trains our affections in such a way that we begin to desire everlasting things” (pg. 100).

“We know only in love; we make progress in the truth by loving. When we love, we enjoy; we also desire to share the fruits of our contemplation. As the doctors of the church universally recognized, knowledge of God is deeply participatory” (pg. 60).

“The radical interruption of our idolatries by God in Jesus Christ is radically regenerative: new creation is its fruit. I was blind but now I see. But what do I see but the one who has been there all along, declaring ‘himself in all of being’?” (pg. 40)

“The more we are like him, the more human we are, and the more human we are, the more we resemble him as his likeness. We grow in being, becoming more rather than less real, and all that because we live in a believing relation to the one who ‘is being’” (pg. 35).

“Accordingly, it is fitting to begin treatment of the Christian life with God's existence. This name above all others instructs us in the nature of the relationship between the created and uncreated. This relationship, we discover, is a participatory one. For example, God is life. Life belongs to God, and life, whether it be human or the life of living things such as trees, exists only in relation to God” (pg. 7)