FAITH4ANEWDAY
Throughout history each new generation has experienced the truth about the way God wants us to relate to him and his world and expressed it in its own language. These new insights enable us to understand better the same ideas expressed in the language of the past.
These quotes exemplify this for me:
| More than two
thousand years ago, Jesus said in response to a demand to justify His
claims:
The Pharisees and Sadducees came, and to test him they asked him to show them a sign from heaven. He answered them; "When it is evening, you say, ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is red. And in the morning, ‘It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening. You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times’. Matthew 16 v 1-3
|
Herbert Butterfield in the
20th Century likewise expressed the belief that understanding
comes through study of the everyday things in the world :
With the idea of progress (which grew from the science revolution at the end of the seventeenth century) ... it comes to be accepted that the long train of centuries has a meaning, because it produces something. The passage of time implies change of a fruitful character, the gradual introduction of things that are radically novel. Time itself is a generative thing. Without going outside the sphere of mundane events ... there appeared a purpose, and an objective in the world’s history.
|
| St John told
us what the apostles had seen:
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life ---- the life was made manifest, and we saw it, and we testify to it, and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was made manifest to us ---- that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you may have fellowship with us. 1st Epistle of John v 1-3, R.S.V.
|
Brother Lawrence told us
what he had found (to his surprise) in the 17th Century:
The first time I saw Brother Lawrence was upon the 3rd. of August 1666. He told me that God had done him a singular favour in his conversion at the age of eighteen. That he had been footman to M. Fieubert, the treasurer, and that he was a great awkward fellow who broke everything. That he desired to be received into a monastery, thinking that he would there be made to smart for his awkwardness and the faults he should commit, and so that he should sacrifice to God his life with its pleasures; but that God had disappointed him, he having met with nothing but satisfaction in that state.
|