Quotes of Note

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

Kim:

I am almost at the end of the final volume of the selected journals of Lucy Maud Montgomery. I read from it before bed. This entry is at the end of 1937, a year when her husband's mental illness had some very serious re-occurrences, and her son Chester made mistakes which caused her heart sickness.

December 31, 1937 

This has been a fitting close to a year of hell. Today I had another dreadful cup of disillusionment to drink in many ways the worst yet. What can be the end of this? Can there be any end? Will it not go on thus all my life? 

Nineteen hundred and thirty seven is ended. Oh, what a year! How can I have lived through it? And how can I live through 1938? If anyone tomorrow wishes me a happy New Year I shall shriek in his face. There has never been any happiness in this house -- there never will be.

While Montgomery had to deal with a lot (her husband was only the tip of the iceberg; her extended family often turned to her in times of struggle, financial and otherwise), some of her problems were made more unbearable because her own heart. By 1937, she had become very bitter. She often worried more about what people would think than she did about the actual people involved. But she was a desperate woman. It is so sad that she found little solace in Christ.

Deb:

Michael Kruger writes about the power that "deconversion stories" have on people like Jen Hatmaker, Rob Bell, Peter Enns, and Bart Erhman:

De-conversion stories are designed not to reach non-Christians but to reach Christians. And their purpose is to convince them that their outdated, naïve beliefs are no longer worthy of their assent. A person simply shares his testimony of how he once thought like you did but have now seen the light.

He details the pattern of the deconversionist playbook and relates it to recent accounts in this article and this interview.

Rebecca:

In his Commentary on Hebrews, Tom Schreiner sums up the prologue of Hebrews (1:1-4) like this:

Jesus is the culmination of God’s revelation. The OT Scriptures point to him and are fulfilled in him. We see in the introduction of Hebrews that Jesus is the prophet, priest, and king. He is the prophet, for God’s final word is spoken by him and in him. He is the priest by whom final cleansing of sins is accomplished. He is the king who reigns at God’s right hand. The last days have arrived in Jesus and the final word has been spoken, and hence there will be no further revelation until Jesus’ return. The great revelatory events have taken place in Jesus’ ministry, death, resurrection, and exaltation. Believers do not need any other word from God for their lives. They are to put their faith in what God has revealed in and through Jesus the Christ.

Have you been taught that you should read and study a passage thoroughy on your own, and then—only then—should you check out a commentary to see what it says about the passage? I break this rule all the time. I love to read commentaries for their own sake, and paragraphs like the one quoted above is one of the reasons.

Persis:

I thought this was a helpful explanation of systematic theology found in The Son Who Learned Obedience by D. Glenn Butner, Jr. (pgs. 7-8)

Systematic theology stands one step further removed from the Bible than does biblical theology. Biblical theology attempts to explain synthetically the meaning of the biblical text in continuity with the meaning intended for the original audience, but it extends this meaning through redemptive historical analysis. Systematic theology draws on the Bible directly and on the conclusions of biblical theology to explain questions that are often foreign to the biblical authors and even the canon as a whole, questions which can nonetheless be answered with confidence given the scope of the Bible. Systematics treats the Bible in terms of the "comprehensive whole", the "overarching story"in which we are called to participate. It seeks not only to explain the logical connection between the explicit or intended meaning of various passages of Scripture, but also to uncover implicit meanings evident in the broad biblical witness but never elaborated in any detail in a single passage.