Balthasar on the Resurrection

“[Liberal Protestant Theology] renders innocuous the kenotic figure of revelation in the Cross and Resurrection, turing it into a mere ‘teaching’, or even a ‘metaphor’, instead of interpreting the form in all seriousness as the dramatic manifestation of the triune love of God and as God’s battle of love for mankind. It is not the harmlessness of a verbal teaching that snatches the rotting corpse of the sinner out of the sealed three-day-old tomb and revives the flagging courage of the disciples, sending them into the world as witnesses to the Resurrection.”

Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone 148-49

Charnock on God's Goodness

"He is not first God, and then afterwards good; but he is good as he is God, his essence, being one and the same, is formally and equally God and good."

Stephen Charnock, quoted in A Puritan Theology pg 78

Wiman on Religion

"...when I hear people say that they have no religious impulse whatsoever, or when I hear believers, or would-be believers, express a sadness and frustration that they have never been absolutely overpowered by God.  I always want to respond: Really?  You have never felt overwhelmed by, and in some way inadequate to, an experience in your life, have never felt something in yourself staking a claim beyond your self, some wordless mystery straining through words to reach you?  Never?  Religion is not made of these moments; religion is the means of making these moments part of your life rather than merely radical intrusions so foreign and perhaps even fearsome that you can't even acknowledge their existence afterward."

Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditations of a Modern Believer (2013) 70.

McCormack on Names

"I have long been fascinated by the fact that names of God's elect are written in his "book of life" (Rev. 20:15).  It has to be one of the most special evidences of the dignity that God bestows upon human beings that the names which we give to our children are the names he himself has inscribed into his "book."  The role God gives to parents is that significant.  But even more significantly for our purposes here, these are the names by which God knew us and called us from eternity."

-Bruce McCormack, "What's at Stake in the Current Debates Over Justification?: The Crisis of Protestantism in the West" in Justification: What's at Stake in the Current Debates? ed by Husbands and Treier, pg 114.

Wright on the Lectionary

"Whenever you see, in an official lectionary, the command to omit two or three verses, you can normally be sure that they contain words of judgment.  Unless, of course, they are about sex."
--N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope (New York: HarperOne, 2008) 178.

Lewis on Hope

"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probably explanation is that I was made for another world.  If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud.  Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.  If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage.  I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same."

--C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Touchstone) 121.

Busch on Justification

     "Justification means: I do not have to justify myself any longer. I can, I may, be joyful and breathe freely.  Before my justification encounters me, I stand continually under pressure and stress, having to "justify" myself.  Beforehand, we live under some tribunal or other we must please, whose assent to us we have to safeguard.  We must do so because only in this way do we gain the consciousness that our life is worth something and has the right to exist.  It is a matter of indifference whether we call this tribunal "God" or whether it is a societal value or the psychological superego, or what Immanuel Kant called "the inner court" of conscience.  Yes, it is part of this system that the tribunals we have to please can change, and are interchangeable.  Now they are outer, now inner, now religious, now moral, now society, now psychic.  But however they change, the system remains the same.  And this was not just a problem for medieval anxiety; it functions in the modern world even more mercilessly.  You are the author of your own fortune: it lies in your hand; the duty to which you are condemned is to bring before the respective tribunal the evidence that you are worthy of living and have the right to exist.  You may need to bring it before the eyes of the so-called god, before the eyes of the societal convention, or the authority of your social group, or before the eyes of your superego, or your "conscience."  You are really nothing if you do not get attention and esteem through achievement and still more achievement--such as in the academy, with its law of "publish or perish."  The respective tribunal holds sanctions ready in order to drive us on: woe to you if you are a coward or a slacker or a failure or someone who dances out of line!
     In all this, I can never be sure whether I please the respective tribunal enough or whether it might withdraw its favor from me, for example, when I fail.  And this drives me on unceasingly to produce more, to make it better than before, until my death makes it impossible for me to make anything better than it once was.  At bottom, everything I do always falls short of what I ought to do, and this gives me a constant feeling of guilt.  For this I can try to get relief--in earlier times by accepting that divine grace strengthens me in my pressure to produce, today by pretending to be more than I am through an outward image.  But these kinds of relief are only provisional.  For if I am supported in my achievements by grace, or if I appear to be so much more than I am, then suddenly all the more achievement will be expected of me.
     To this whole system in which I have only as much worth as I acquire for myself, the gospel stands diametrically opposed.  For the gospel tells us: you do not have to justify yourself.  You are of worth, your life has the right to existence and respect, not because you make it worthy by production and still more production.  The endless battle is blown away, the battle that can never reach the goal because death, in which you cannot make anything better, breaks it off.  Canceled is the battle in which those who lose are actually of no worth.  You do not have to make yourself worthy, because you are already a person of worth.  You are already affirmed and loved by God in Jesus Christ, and this without any conditions you have to fulfill first in order for this to hold.  You are unconditionally and absolutely loved.  You are of worth because you are already affirmed--and affirmed just as you are.  You are affirmed, not because you are so acceptable, but because, although you are not acceptable, you are completely accepted, from head to toe.  You are of worth, not through what you try in vain to give yourself.  You are accepted by what God effectively gives you, not through your performance, but out of grace.  For this reason no one is worthless.  So it is not the case that a person's life is not worth living if that person has no achievement.  Who in the end has achievement when in death he or she can have no more achievement?  But you may breathe a deep sigh of relief, freely and joyously.  You do not have to justify yourself."

--Eberhard Busch, Drawn to Freedom: Christian Faith Today in Conversation with the Heidelberg Catechism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010) 261-262.