From Harold E. Masback, Divinely Simple" (January 23, 2005):
In 1989, a Presidential Committee on Information Literacy said: “To be information literate, a person must be able to recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information.”
From Thomas Kelly:
God never guides us into an intolerable scramble of panting feverishness.
From Charles Baudlaire, My Heart Laid Bare" in Intimate Journals, sct.111. (1887):
“We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work.”
1263
From St. Thomas Aquinas, De Potentia (1263):
It is one of the glories of the Bible that it can enshrine many meanings in a single passage. . . . Each man marvels to find in the divine Scriptures truths which he has himself thought out.
From Anonymous:
Other books were given for our information, the Bible was given for our transformation.
2006
From Fred R. Anderson, Does Prayer Work?" in The Living Pulpit, July-September 1993, Volume 2, No. 3, at 24-25:
I decided to use a then popular resource written by Bruce Larson and Keith Miller, “The Edge of Adventure.” I will not forget the unit in that study devoted to prayer. It introduced me to the notion of prayer as “conscious contact with God.” Larson and Miller encouraged the group to be specific in our prayer requests for one another and others in need, but to do so in the midst of a conversation with God-talking things over: not only talking but also listening! RefMgr field[16]: “Does Prayer Work?”
From Anonymous, The Cloud of Unknowing, (14th Century):
And why pierceth heaven, this little short prayer of one syllable [God]? for it is prayed with a full spirit, in the height and in the depth, in the length and in the breadth of his spirit that prayeth it.
From Paul Achtemeier, Romans 1:14-23:
Both to Greeks and barbarians, both to wise and foolish, I am under obligation (to preach the gospel: so v.5).
15 For that my purpose is also to preach the gospel even to you who are in Rome (Why even in Rome?); 16 Because I am not ashamed of the gospel. (Why am I not ashamed of the it?); 16 Because it is God’s power for salvation for everyone who believes. Jew first and also Greek. (Why to everyone who believes?) 17 Because God’s righteousness is revealed in it from faith for the purposes of faith. Just as Scripture says: The one who is righteous by faith shall live.” (Why is God’s righteousness needed in order to live?) 18 Because God’s wrath is being revealed from heaven against every impiousness and wickedness of those people who are suppressing the truth by wickedness. (How do we know they are suppressing truth by wickedness?) Because what is known of God is plain to them. (Why is it plain to them?) 19 Because God made it plain to them (But how can it be plain to them?) 20 Because God’s unseen attributes, both his eternal power and deity, are seen from the creation of the world, perceived through the things God has done. (But why then the wrath?) 21 Because although they knew God they did not glory in him as God or give thanks to him, but they were made foolish in their reasonings, and their stupid minds were darkened. (What is the result of all that?) 22 Thinking they were wise, they fell into stupidity, 23 and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for the likeness of the image of mortal humans and birds and animals and reptiles.
From Thomas F. O'Meara, Theology of Ministry, (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1999):
I know that life is not uninterrupted joy” and “no life escapes the cross.”
2006
From Harold Masback, The Three Stages of Blessing" (March 5, 2006):
So you won’t be surprised by the question I most wanted to ask Miroslav Volf when he first lectured at our church three years ago. We hadn’t even gotten half-way down the hill to dinner before I started nudging the conversation into the question of grace. He hadn’t even gotten two bites down before I was pushing for an answer to my classic “type A” question: “even accepting that grace is a free unmerited gift we neither earn nor deserve, isn’t there something, anything the human can do to set the table, to open our arms, to make ourselves more available for these gifts of the Spirit?” Volf put his fork down, looked up, and answered with a question of his own: “Don’t you suppose that’s what the Theologia Germanica was trying to address?”
I nodded sagely and then doubled back up to my office after dinner to Google this Theologia Germanica. It turns out the Theologia is a 13th century devotional book written by an anonymous German author. Luther thought it was the most important work he’d ever read other than the Bible and the works of St. Augustine. Not surprisingly, you can trace the themes of the Theologia right through Luther, right through the lectures Professor Volf gave at our church and right down into the new book he released last month: Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace.///The Theologia understands God as the giver of all gifts, the fountain of all grace, the infinite source of all love flowing out into God’s creation. We miss the experience of God not because the font has run dry or been diverted, but because we choke off the flow. And how do we choke off the flow? By closing inward on ourselves, by clutching the gifts as if they were ours and we were their final destination, by centering our concern not on God but rather on what the Theologia calls the “I, me, mine” of a self-centered life. [According to the author of the Theologia Germanica, the flow of God’s gifts is facilitated only through human yielding to God: “And in this bringing back and healing, I can, or may, or shall do nothing of myself, but just simply yield to God, so that He alone may do all things in me and work, and I may suffer Him and all His work and His divine will. And because I will not do so, but I count myself to be my own, and say “I,” “Mine,” “Me” and the like, God is hindered, so that He cannot do His work in me alone and without hindrance; for this cause my fall and my going astray remain unhealed. Behold! this all cometh of my claiming somewhat for my own,” (Theologia Germanica, trans. by Susanna Winkworth, www.ccel.org/a/anonymous/theologia/formats/theologia.htm, chapter 4.) Martin Luther discovered the Theologia and first published it in 1516. In his preface to the Second Edition, Luther wrote: “And I will say, though it be boasting of myself and ‘I speak as a fool,’ that next to the Bible and St. Augustine, no book hath ever come into my hands, whence I have learnt, or would wish to learn more of what God, and Christ, and man and all things are . . . .”]