Quotes of Note

Each Monday, we share quotes we found encouraging, convicting, thought-provoking, or all of the above.


Deb

A common refrain in contemporary discussions of gender roles asserts that the concept of complementarianism was invented in the 1980's by a para-ministry. However, several historical sources cite the philosophical and theological seeds of the concept to the early church, through Aquinas, and in other scholastic writers. Formally, Prudence Allen documented how the terminology was coined in the early 20th century:

"With the development of quantum physics, the naming in 1927 of the principle of complementarity by Niels Bohr, and the application of complementarity to the married relation of a woman and a man by Dietrich von Hildebrand in 1929, integration of the history of the concept of woman reached a new high point. The simultaneous relation of equal dignity and significant difference now had a  name: complementarity." - Prudence Allen, The Concept of Woman, Volume 3: The Search for Communion of Persons, 1500–2015.

Persis

This is another quote from Simonetta Carr's Broken Pieces and the God Who Mends Them:

As a wise friend explained to me, the best thing is to lay open our hearts to God, admit that we don’t know how to resolve the situation, and pray that in his providence he would direct events so that our children can get help without hurting themselves in the process.

With that in mind, I kept praying my bumbling prayers, trusting that God would, by his Spirit, decipher the cry of my soul (see Rom. 8:26). As the Heidelberg Catechism teaches, “It is even more sure that God listens to my prayer than that I really desire what I pray for.” God’s answer was not always what I wanted to hear, but I knew it was according to his will, and he always supplied me with sufficient comfort and strength.

Prayer is one of the great privileges that Christ has purchased for us with his blood—it gives us the ability to go to our Creator and call him Father, and it is in itself a comfort in the midst of all the thorns and thistles that have filled our lives since Adam’s sin. In fact, Christ is constantly interceding for us in heaven, even when we forget (or are too lazy) to pray. He will never leave us or forsake us (see Deut. 31:6; Heb. 13:5; see also Matt. 28:20).

Rebecca

I'm still reading Can We Trust the Gospels by Peter J. Williams, but I'm almost finished. Here's a quote from the last chapter, Who Would Make All This Up?:

There are many particulars in the Gospels that the authors would be unlikely to have invented. Although one can usually think of complex reasons why someone might invent them, those are not the simplest explanations. The simplest explanation is that these reports are true.  

The most obvious example is the shameful death of Jesus through crucifixion, which of course was the Romans' way of showing that they were in charge and the one crucified was a defeated failure. However, the Gospel writers record this event and many others that could seem embarrassing to their cause. All four Gospels tell of the leading disciple, Peter, three times denying that he knew Jesus. In all four Gospels the disciples are portrayed as lacking understanding and as disloyal at the key moment of Jesus's arrest. 

It's hard to envisage why either the disciples themselves or anyone who looked to them for leadership would make up such stories. It is also hard to see why anyone would write a Gospel that implies its dependence on the disciples for information and then invent such things about them. And this is not the limit of the difficulty. Passages critical of disciples are found in different sorts of Gospel material. For the core texts of Christianity to contain so much material critical of the first Christian leaders is unusual when considered against other religious or political movements. A simple interpretation is that the critical accounts of early leaders signal the trustworthiness of the sources.