Hope

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  It then surges up in him, like a feeling of cowardly dereliction of duty, shame, renewed energy, courage and joy, love and belonging to the mocking, colorful and brutal machinations he has left behind: however far he may go may have strayed along the strange, hot path, he will turn back and live. But if he flinches in fear and aversion at the voice of life he hears, that memory, that jolly, challenging sound, makes him shake his head and put his hand behind him in defense and flee forward along the path that opened up to him for escape... no, of course, then he will die. – Four Chapter "It's not right, it's not right, Gerda!" said old Miss Weichbrodt, troubled and reproachful for the hundredth time. This evening she took a seat on the sofa in her former pupil's living room in the circle formed around the round central table by Gerda Buddenbrook, Frau Permaneder, her daughter Erika, poor Klothilde and the three Buddenbrook ladies from Breite Strasse. The green ribbons of her bonnet fell over her child's shoulders, one of which she had to pull up very high so that she could gesture with her upper arm on the tabletop; she was so tiny at seventy-five. "It's not right, let me tell you that it's not done well, Gerda!" she repeated in an eager and trembling voice. "I have one foot in the grave, I only have a short time left, and you want me... You want to leave us, want to separate from us forever... move away... If it were a trip, a visit to Amsterdam... alone forever !' And she shook her old bird's head with the brown, shy, sad eyes. "It is true that you have lost many things..." "No, she lost everything," said Frau Permaneder. “We mustn't be selfish, Therese. Gerda wants to go and she goes there is nothing to do. She came with Thomas, twenty-one years ago, and we all loved her, although we must have always been disgusting to her ... yes, we were, Gerda, no arguments! But Thomas is gone, and . . . no one is. What are we to you? Nothing. It hurts us, but travel with God, Gerda, and thank you that you didn't travel earlier, when Thomas died..." It was after supper, in the fall; Little Johann (Justus, Johann, Kaspar) had been lying out there on the edge of the wood under the sandstone cross and the family coat of arms for about six months, well endowed with the blessings of Pastor Pringsheim. In front of the house the rain rustled in the half-defoliated trees of the avenue. Sometimes gusts of wind came and drove him against the window panes.

• From Four Days to Glory: Wrestling with the Soul of the American Heartland (2005)

  EpilogueIn the late summer of 2005, Jay Borschel and Dan LeClere packed up their gear, made sure their cell phones and laptops were close by, hunkered down in their families’ cars, and blasted out of town. It was a 900-mile drive from eastern Iowa to the Virginia Tech University campus in Blacksburg, and the wrestlers had someone waiting for them. Though school wasn’t yet to officially begin, Tom Brands didn’t plan on wasting time. Joey Slaton also made the long trip East. Brent Metcalf, the incoming star from Michigan, was meeting up with his new teammates as they hit campus. T. H. Leet, a three-time state champion from Georgia, would be in Blacksburg as well. The second-ranked recruiting class in college wrestling was converging on its future, and Brands was one step ahead of them. Despite his team having won an Atlantic Coast Conference title and seemingly built instant momentum in his first year, Brands had already penciled things out for the coming season, and it added up to a difficult but forward-thinking conclusion: His new kids were going to have to sit out their freshmen years, no matter how much he wanted to see them on the mat. Using his own college and international competitive career as a guide, Brands recognized the value in giving Jay and Dan and the others a year to figure out how to make campus life and wrestling life work together, to learn to live away from home, to get stronger, quicker, tougher—to do all this the Brands way, without the pressure to win immediately. The year could be invaluable. It could set up Brands’s charges for four years of sustained success, and Brands believed both in his wrestlers’ talent and his own ability to harness it, even if it meant a season that, in some respects, would be invisible. His incoming freshmen would be able to train with Brands and the Hokies team, and they could enter national competitions as “unattached” wrestlers; but what Brands’s decision meant was that none of them could officially represent Virginia Tech in an NCAA dual or tournament. On the team scoreboard, in the context of the 2005–06 season, they would not exist. To Brands, this was a necessary sacrifice—and a sacrifice it was. Absent his incoming class, he didn’t have the overall talent on the mat to compete on a team level, and after having lost some seniors and chased off a few holdovers from the previous Virginia Tech squad, he was almost certain to run out of decent wrestlers before he ran out of ambition. Without the freshmen, the Hokies, not good enough and not deep enough, were going to make loud sucking noises as a group for a year. Brands, a win-or-go-home obsessive, was going to have to deal with it. And he would, because Brands understood the bargain he was striking.

• From Love & Sex: A Christian Guide to Healthy Intimacy (2018)

  Experts say only one out of ten people who receive helpful information or opportunities for growth will actually apply what they learn to their personal lives. Growth isn’t easy or automatic and one of my biggest concerns for the body of Christ is our passive rescue wishes. We pray God will change something or rescue us from something bad or hard, but we never apply ourselves to the situation. Then we get mad at God for “not showing up for me.” God never promised to be our magic genie. I love what Dallas Willard says, “Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action.”1 We don’t need to do a thing to earn His love, His attention, or His grace. But we do need to apply ourselves to the health and wholeness of our own lives and that takes effort. Olivia and the other women in the group could feel hope rising, as the women gave labels to their emotions through telling their stories. You have to give negative emotions a name. In one MRI study, appropriately titled “Putting Feelings into Words” participants viewed pictures of people with emotional facial expressions. Predictably, each participant’s amygdala activated to the emotions in the picture. But when they were asked to name the emotion, the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex activated and reduced the emotional amygdala reactivity. In other words, consciously recognizing the emotions reduced their impact. Hiding or stuffing our emotions doesn’t work. Neuroscientists have found that people who tried to suppress a negative emotional experience failed to do so. While they thought they looked fine outwardly, inwardly their limbic system was just as aroused as without suppression, and, in some cases, even more aroused. Kevin Ochsner, at Columbia, repeated these findings using fMRI. Working hard to keep negative emotions under wraps doesn’t work and typically backfires.2 I ask people who are experiencing an emotion to give it a name. Typically, giving it one or two names is the most impactful. Stopping to label an emotion reduces the arousal in the limbic system by activating your prefrontal cortex. It helps people who are recalling a trauma memory to calm their nervous system and get back into their smart brain (the prefrontal cortex or the governor of the brain), not wanting them to get stuck in the emotionally fired up amygdala. Becoming whole is a process of defining and giving names to what we think, feel, and want. It’s a process of healthy self-differentiating our thinking from our emotions. This is the process group work helps with. I know that reading some of these stories can feel heavy, shocking, sad. Here is the truth: as these women tell their stories, label their emotions, and become honest with others in a safe place, they are healing their trauma. Trauma is bad, and I never want to minimize the horrible things we humans do to one another, but we must remember there is so much hope.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  Mark had written several articles for secular magazines and had been interviewed a few times on the radio and had gotten this reputation as a pastor who said cusswords. It is true that Mark said a lot of cusswords. I don’t know why he did it. He didn’t become a Christian till he was in college, so maybe he didn’t know he wasn’t supposed to say cusswords and be a pastor. I think some of my friends believed that it was the goal of the devil to get people to say cusswords, so they thought Mark was possessed or something, and they told me I should not really get into anything he was a part of. Because of the cusswords. But like I said, I was dying inside, and even though Mark said cusswords, he was telling a lot of people about Jesus, and he was being socially active, and he seemed to love a lot of people the church was neglecting, like liberals and fruit nuts. About the time I was praying that God would help me find a church, I got a call from Mark the Cussing Pastor, and he said he had a close friend who was moving to Portland to start a church and that I should join him. Rick and I got together over coffee, and I thought he was hilarious. He was big, a football player out of Chico State. At the time we both chewed tobacco, so we had that in common. He could do a great Tony Soprano voice, sort of a Mafia thing. He would do this routine where he pretended to be a Mafia boss who was planting a church. He said a few cusswords but not as bad as Mark. Rick said there were a few people meeting at his house to talk about what it might look like to start a church in Portland, and he invited me to come. I could feel that God was answering my prayer so I went. There were only about eight of us, mostly kids, mostly teens just out of high school. I felt like I was at a youth group, honestly. I didn’t think the thing was going to fly. Rick’s wife made us coffee, and we sat around his living room, and Rick read us some statistics about how very many churches have moved out of the cities and into the suburbs and said how he wanted us to plant in the city. Rick really wanted to redeem the image of the church to people who had false conceptions about it. Pretty soon there were twenty or so of us, so we got this little chapel at a college near downtown and started having church. It felt funny at church, you know, because there were only twenty of us and it was mostly just kids, but I still believed this was how God was going to answer my prayer.

• From New Testament Words (1964)

  Surely there is no more gracious group of words than this. The Christian shares in the manhood of all men; he shares in the common experience of joy and tears; he shares in the things divine and in the glory that shall be; and all his life he must be a sharer of all he has, for he knows that his true wealth lies in what he gives away. MAKROTHUMIA THE DIVINE PATIENCE The noun makrothumia and the verb makrothumein are characteristically biblical words. They do not occur in classical Greek at all, and only very seldom in later Greek. They are indeed characteristically Christian words, for, as we shall see, they describe a Christian virtue which to the Greek was no virtue at all. In the NT makrothumia occurs fourteen times and makrothumein ten times. The AV varies between ‘long-suffering’ and ‘patience’. These words have two uses. (i) They describe the ‘steadfast spirit which will never give in’. It is that spirit of ‘patience’ and faith which will ultimately inherit the promise. It was because Abraham ‘patiently endured’ that he in the end received the promise (Heb. 6.15). ‘Patience’ is a virtue that the Christian must have as he waits for the Day of the Lord, and he may learn it from the ‘patience’ of the farmer as he waits for the crop, and from the ‘patience’ of the prophets who never gave up their hope in God (James 5.7-10). On this I Mac. (8.4) has a very illuminating use of the word. In that passage, as Trench points out, the Roman supremacy over all the world is ascribed to the Roman ‘policy and patience’. And by that is meant, ‘the Roman persistency which would never make peace under defeat’. The Christian must have this makrothumia which can endure delay and bear suffering and never give in. (ii) They describe the ‘attitude that a man should have towards his fellow-men’. This is the typically NT use of the words. Chrysostom defined makrothumia as the spirit which could take revenge if it liked, but utterly refuses to do so. Lightfoot explained it as the spirit which will never retaliate. Now this is the very opposite of Greek virtue. The great Greek virtue was megalopsuchia , which Aristotle defined as the refusal to tolerate any insult or injury. To the Greek the big man was the man who went all out for vengeance. To the Christian the big man is the man who, even when he can, refuses to do so. (a) This patience with men is the characteristic of the ‘Christian minister’. It is that very quality which Paul claims to be the proof of real apostleship (II Cor. 6.6. cp. I Tim. 1.16; II Tim. 3.10). No one can ever lead and guide and direct a Christian congregation without this patience, this makrothumia .

• From New Testament Words (1964)

  Winter, Life and Letters in the Papyri. S. Witkowski, Epistulae privatae Graecae quae in papyris aetatis Lagidarum servantur. I should like to think of this book as an attempt to make the results of linguistic scholarship available for the ordinary reader of the NT. It is my hope and my prayer that it may do something to make the NT more meaningful for at least some than it was before. WILLIAM BARCLAY Trinity College Glasgow Note on the transliteration and pronunciation of Greek words For the most part Greek letters are commonly pronounced as in English. But there are certain things which ought to be noted. (i) Greek has four letters which represent more than a single letter in English. These four letters are phi, psi, chi and theta; they are transliterated respectively, ph, ps, ch and th. (ii) Two of the Greek vowels have a double sound. Omicron and omega both represent the English letter o. But omicron represents a short o as in the word hot, and omega represents a long o as in the word go. In this book o represents omicron, and ō represents omega. Similarly epsilon represents a short e as in the word get, and eta represents a long e, which is pronounced as the a in hate, or as the ee in feet. In this book e represents epsilon and ē represents eta. (iii) When two g’s come together in Greek they are pronounced ng. So aggelos (messenger or angel) is pronounced angelos. AGAPĒ AND AGAPAN THE GREATEST OF THE VIRTUES Greek is one of the richest of all languages and it has an unrivalled power to express shades of meaning. It therefore often happens that Greek has a whole series of words to express different shades of meaning in one conception, while English has only one. In English we have only one word to express all kinds of love; Greek has no fewer than four. Agapē means love, and agapan is the verb which means to love. Love is the greatest of all the virtues, the characteristic virtue of the Christian faith. We shall therefore do well to seek to discover its meaning. We shall best begin by comparing these words with the other Greek words for love, so that we can discover their distinctive character and flavour. We begin, then, by looking at the other Greek words for love. 1. The noun erōs and the verb eran are mainly used for love between the sexes. They can be used for such things as the passion of ambition and the intensity of patriotism; but characteristically they are the words for physical love.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  Second chapter Thomas Buddenbrook was never able to look into the future of little Johann with the look of dull displeasure with which he awaited the rest of his own life. His sense of family, that inherited and cultivated, backwards as well as forwards-looking, reverent interest in the intimate history of his house prevented him, and the affectionate or curious expectation with which his friendship and acquaintance in the town, his sister, and even the Buddenbrook ladies looking at his son on Breite Strasse influenced his thoughts. He told himself with satisfaction that no matter how worn out and hopeless he himself felt for himself, he could, in the face of his small successor's ever-enlivening future dreams of efficiency, practical and uninhibited work, success, acquisition, power, What if, in his old age, from a quiet corner he himself could see the beginning of the old days again, the time of Hanno's great-grandfather? Was this hope so utterly impossible? He had found music to be his enemy; but was it really so serious? Admittedly, that the boy's love of free play without notes testified to a not entirely normal disposition - in regular instruction from Mr. Pfühl he was by no means extremely advanced. Music, there was no question, was his mother's influence, and it is no wonder that this influence was predominant during the early years of his childhood. But the time began when a father is given the opportunity to influence his son in turn, to pull him a little on his side and to neutralize the previous female influences with male counter-impressions. And the senator was determined not to let any such opportunity go to waste. Hanno, now eleven years old, had been transferred to Quarta at Easter, just like his friend, little Count Mölln, with exacting difficulties and two re- examinations in arithmetic and geography. It was clear that he should attend the real classes, because it was a matter of course that he would have to become a businessman and take over the company one day, and to his father's questions as to whether he felt a desire for his future profession, he answered yes ... a simple, shy away from something Yes, without any additions, which the senator tried to make a little livelier and more detailed with further pressing questions - and mostly in vain.

• From Love & Sex: A Christian Guide to Healthy Intimacy (2018)

  God created us to heal. He created our brains to rewire. He gave us neuroplasticity; our brain wiring isn’t rigid. If we practice and participate in healing—healing takes place. Healing is less about the actual trauma and more about whether we are willing to engage in the healing process. I believe with all of my heart that, if we engage in the process, the process will work for us. I want to encourage you not to waste your story and to not let your story define you. Where you are today isn’t where you will have to be tomorrow if you will make the decision to engage in the process. Here are some questions for you to process before moving on to the next chapter. MOVING FORWARD 1.​Label and name the emotion you are experiencing right now. Are you sad? Mad? Disgusted? 2.​Explore your own level of resistance. On a scale of one to ten (ten being highly resistant), how resistant are you to entering into the healing process? Why? 3.​Are you shocked by the amount of sexual abuse these women experienced? It is shocking, but it is a reality. Are you willing to face this reality? Look at your own history? Become an advocate for those who have experienced sexual trauma? Become a part of the solution? 4.​Take a few moments and invite God to search your heart to see if there is any unfinished business concerning your sexual history. 5.​Invite God into any memory and to lead you in the healing process. NINE Sexual Wholeness Seminar PART I: MORNING SESSION The truth is most adults have never had anyone talk with them about human sexuality. Most people do not receive a healthy sexual education. Many issues and problems can be resolved through biblical sex education and having some-one or a group of safe people to talk things through with. This is Olivia’s goal for this intensive seminar. She is hoping to create a dialogue for people to learn, ask questions, and to process their own issues. Her prayer is the isolation of sexual shame will be broken and people will find God’s healing and redemption through open and honest conversations around the topic. She has witnessed it many times and prays today will be another day of guiding a group into a deeper connection with themselves, others, and God, through the topic of sex. As Olivia reflects, she is grateful for the hard work she has done in partnership with God, in the process of recovering her own soul from the abyss of sexual abuse. She wouldn’t change a thing about her history, believing wholeheartedly her history is now God’s history and he has permission to use her story for good. At the least, she knows she could not invite people to go places she refused to go. She is happy she said “Yes” so many years ago.

• From New Testament Words (1964)

  All things that were fitting I did.... But all the same in the face of such things there is nothing that anyone can do.’ That was the pagan outlook in the face of death. But the good news brings the certainty that death is not the end but the beginning of life, not the departure into annihilation but the departure to be for ever with God. (vi) The euaggelion is ‘good news of the risen Christ’ (I Cor. 15.1ff.; II Tim. 2.8). The good news which Christianity brings is that we do not worship a dead hero, but we live with a living presence. We are not left with only a pattern to copy and an example to follow, we are left with a constant companion of our way. Our faith is not a faith in a figure in a book who lived and died, but in one who rose from death and who is alive forever more. (vii) The euaggelion is ‘good news of salvation’ (Eph. 1.13). It is news of that power which wins us forgiveness for past sin, liberation from present sin, strength for the future to conquer sin. It is good news of victory. EUSEBEIA THE WORD OF TRUE RELIGION There is a very great group of Greek words which is characteristic of the language of the Pastoral Epistles. As we shall see, they are not easy to translate, but they all have in them one essential idea. There is eusebeia, the noun, which is usually translated godliness in the AV. The RSV usually retains this translation. Moffatt translates it either piety, or religion, in the sense of true religion. There is eusebēs, the adjective, which the AV translates devout or godly, a translation which the RSV retains; Moffatt translates it religious, religiously- minded, or pious. There is eusebein, the verb, which means to worship, to carry out the duties of true religion. There is eusebōs, the adverb, which the AV translates godly. There is the closely related word theosebeia, which the AV translates godliness, and the adjective theosebēs, which means worshipping God. It can be seen that all these words come from the same root; and the root meaning of them all is awe in the presence of that which is more than human, reverence in the presence of that which is majestic and divine; not only do they express that feeling of awe and reverence, but they also imply a worship which befits that awe, and a life of active obedience which befits that reverence. The fact is that in so far as Greek has a word for religion that word is eusebeia. Let us then begin by seeing what the Greeks themselves said about these words. The Platonic Definitions define eusebeia as right conduct in regard to the gods. The Stoics defined it as knowledge of how God should be worshipped.

• From New Testament Words (1964)

  5.2). It is the hope that no longer shall we see the glory of God in the cloud and through a glass darkly. It is the certainty that the day will come when we shall see and be clothed with the glory of God. (iii) It is the hope of a new dispensation (II Cor. 3.12). So long as men regarded themselves as governed by law, there was room for nothing but despair, for there is none who can obey and satisfy the perfect law of God. But when we see that the key-note of religion is not law but love a new hope is born. (iv) It is the hope of righteousness (Gal. 5.5). In Paul righteousness or justification means a right relationship with God. When a man regards religion as law he must be ever in default before God, and therefore ever in terror of God. But the message of Jesus Christ enables a man to enter into a new relationship with God where the terror is gone and where childlike confidence takes its place. (v) It is the hope of salvation. This has two aspects. (a) It is the confidence of safety in this world (II Cor. 1.10), not in the sense of protection from trouble and danger, but in the sense of independence of them. As Rupert Brooke wrote, Safe shall be my going, Secretly armed against all death’s endeavour; Safe though all safety’s lost; safe where men fall; And if these poor limbs die, safest of all. (b) It is the confidence of safety in the world to come. It is the hope of safety amidst the perils of earth, and rescue from the judgment of God. (vi) It is the hope of eternal life (Titus 1.2; 3.7). In the NT the word eternal always stresses, not the duration, but the quality of life. Eternal is the word which describes anything which is proper to God. Eternal life is the kind of life God lives. The hope of the Christian is that some day he will share the very life of God. (vii) It is the hope of the triumphant Second Coming of Christ (Titus 2.13; I Peter 1.13; I John 3.3). The Second Coming is not a fashionable doctrine today, but it does conserve this great truth—that history is going somewhere, that history is not a knotless thread, and a haphazard collection of meaningless and disconnected events. There is a consummation. The Christian is a man who regards himself and all life as being on the way to a goal.

• From New Testament Words (1964)

  Apolutrōsis looks, not only backwards to forgiveness, but forwards to a re-created life. (iv) Apolutrōsis does not end with this life. It is eschatological. It is the foretaste of a process and a glory which will find their consummation in the coming of Christ and in the heavenly places (Luke 21.28; Eph. 4.30). This redemption which was wrought by the death of Christ makes possible for us forgiveness of sins, a new relationship with God, a new life upon earth, and in the end the glory of heaven. Now let us enquire what is implied in all these words which have to do with ‘ransom’, ‘redemption’, ‘rescue’, ‘liberation’. (i) They all imply that man was in captivity, in slavery, in subjection to an alien power. There was something which had man in its grip. (ii) They all imply that by no conceivable means could man have effected his own liberation or rescue. He was helpless in the grip of a power and a situation which he could not mend and from which he could not break away. (iii) His liberation was effected by the coming of Jesus Christ who paid the price which was necessary to achieve it. (iv) Nowhere in the NT is there any word of to whom that price was paid. It could not have been paid to God because all the time God was so loving the world. It was in fact God’s love that sent Christ into this world. It could not have been paid to the devil for that would put the devil on an equality with God. All that we can say is this—it cost the life and death of Christ to liberate man from the past, the present and the future power of sin. Beyond that we cannot go, but although thought may be baffled, experience shows that it cost the life of Jesus Christ to bring us home to God. MAKROTHUMIA THE DIVINE PATIENCE The noun makrothumia and the verb makrothumein are characteristically biblical words. They do not occur in classical Greek at all, and only very seldom in later Greek. They are indeed characteristically Christian words, for, as we shall see, they describe a Christian virtue which to the Greek was no virtue at all. In the NT makrothumia occurs fourteen times and makrothumein ten times. The AV varies between ‘long-suffering’ and ‘patience’. These words have two uses. (i) They describe the ‘steadfast spirit which will never give in’. It is that spirit of ‘patience’ and faith which will ultimately inherit the promise. It was because Abraham ‘patiently endured’ that he in the end received the promise (Heb. 6.15). ‘Patience’ is a virtue that the Christian must have as he waits for the Day of the Lord, and he may learn it from the ‘patience’ of the farmer as he waits for the crop, and from the ‘patience’ of the prophets who never gave up their hope in God (James 5.7-10).

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Neither is it a valid objection to urge, that monks ought not to act thus at present, while there is no dearth of secular teachers. For, the common welfare ought not to be sought by any means that may offer, but by the surest means possible. Now a plurality of teachers is greatly to the public advantage; for one will be well versed in subjects of which another is ignorant. Hence we read in Wisdom vi., 26, “The multitude of the wise is the welfare of the whole world.” “O that all the people might prophesy,” Moses cried out in his zeal for knowledge (Numb. xi. 29). The Gloss remarks upon his words, that, “a faithful preacher would have all men utter the truth, which he himself does not suffice to declare.” And, in another place, the Gloss continues, in the same strain, “He” (i.e., Moses) “wished all men to prophesy; for he was not jealous of the gift bestowed upon him.” It matters little whether teaching be conveyed by the word of a master who is present, or by the writing of one who is absent. To quote St. Paul (2 Cor. x. 11), “Such as we are in word by epistles when absent; such we will be in deed when present.” Now no one has seen the libraries of books, composed by monks, for the instruction of the Church, doubts that they can teach by writing, when absent. Therefore, it is lawful for them to teach by word, when present. We will now proceed to the easy task of confuting the objections brought against the right of religious to teach. The first argument, namely, that Our Lord gave a counsel to His disciples not to be masters, is, for several reasons, misleading. First, because the works of supererogation, concerning which the counsels are given, are rewarded by a peculiar recompense. “Whatever you spend over and above, I, at my return, will repay you” (Luke x. 33). These words are applied by the Gloss to works of supererogation. Hence it cannot be a counsel to abstain from works that are to be specially rewarded. Now teachers, like virgins, are promised a peculiar recompense. For we read in Daniel xii. 3, “Those who instruct” (ie., by word and example, as the Gloss explains) “many to justice, (shall shine) as stars for all eternity.” Hence there is no better ground for saying that it is a counsel to refrain from the function of teaching, than there is for maintaining that it is a matter of counsel to abstain from virginity, or from martyrdom.

• From New Testament Words (1964)

  Preaching is not the proclamation of a preacher’s private opinions; still less is it the public airing of his doubts; it is the proclamation of the word of God. ‘Tell me of your certainties,’ said Goethe, ‘I have doubts enough of my own.’ (ii) They proclaimed Christ. Paul does not care how the preaching is done so long as Christ is preached (Phil. 1.16, 18). It is Christ whom he himself preached (Col. 1.28). In the early days the preachers did not deal with things on the circumference of the faith; they proclaimed the facts of the life, and the death, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Their primary aim was to confront men with Christ. (iii) They proclaimed through Jesus the resurrection from the dead (Acts 4.2). The message of the preacher was the defeat of death. They preached a risen Christ, and they preached a life that was indestructible. (iv) They proclaimed the Messiahship of Jesus. It was Paul’s message that ‘this Jesus whom I preach to you is Christ’ (Acts 17.3). It was the message of the early preachers that in this man Jesus God’s promises were fulfilled, that eternity had invaded time, that heaven’s rule had begun. (v) They proclaimed that the way was open to the God whom men had ever sought but never found. It was Paul’s proclamation that he brought to the Athenians news of the God who to them had always been the unknown God (Acts 17.23). The time of guessing and groping had gone, and the time of knowing had come. The time of searching was ended, and the time of finding had come. George Borrow tells us that once when he was on one of his tours he was surrounded by some gipsies, who cried out: ‘Give us God! Give us God!’ Not knowing what to do, he put his hand in his pocket and scattered some money amongst them. But they disregarded the money. ‘Not your money,’ they said. ‘Give us God!’ It was God whom the early preachers claimed to give to men. (vi) They proclaimed a gospel It was the gospel which the preacher preached; it was good news (I Cor. 9.14). Any preaching which ultimately depresses a man is wrong, for preaching may begin by cutting a man to the heart with the sight and the realization of his sins; but it must end by leading him to the love, the forgiveness and the grace of God. The very word which is so often used for preaching shows that in the early preaching there was nothing apologetic, nothing diffident, nothing clouded with doubts and misted with uncertainties. It was preaching with authority; and the things it preached with authority are still the basis of the message of the preacher today.

• From New Testament Words (1964)

  (i) It involves believing that God is the kind of God Jesus told men about. (ii) It involves the certainty that Jesus is the Son of God, and therefore has the right to speak about God in a way that no one else ever could or ever will be able to speak. (iii) It involves living all life on the assumption that these things are true. When we do that, we share nothing less than the life of God, the power and the peace which God alone can give. We have already said that eternal life is the gift of God; all God’s gifts are freely given, but they are not given away. They are there for the taking, but they must be taken. Let us use a human analogy. All the beauty and the wealth and the loveliness and the wisdom of classical literature are there for any man to take; but before he can enter into them, he must undergo the work, the study and the discipline which the learning of Latin and Greek demands. God’s offer of eternal life is there; but man must claim it and enter into it before he can receive it. (i) Eternal life demands knowledge of God. Eternal life means ‘to know the only true God’ (John 17.3). Now man can only know God through three avenues. He must use his mind to think; he must use his eyes to see and his heart to love Jesus Christ; he must use his ears to listen to what God is seeking to say to him. If we are to enter into life eternal we must never be too busy with the things of time to think about the eternal things, to walk looking unto Jesus, and to be regularly in a listening silence wherein we wait upon God. (ii) Eternal life demands obedience to God. God’s commandment is eternal life (John 12.50). Jesus is the author of eternal salvation to all that obey him (Heb. 5.9). Only in doing his will is our peace. God’s pleading is with the rebellious; but God’s gifts are for the obedient. We can never enter into complete intimacy and unity with someone from whom we continually differ, and whom we continually grieve by our disobedience. Obedience to God and eternal life from God go hand in hand. (iii) Eternal life is the reward of strenuous loyalty (I Tim. 6.12). It comes to the man who has fought the good fight of faith and who has clung to Christ through thick and thin. Eternal life comes to the man who hears and follows (John 10.27, 28). No man who goes his own way can enter into eternal life; eternal life is for the man who in complete loyalty takes the way of Jesus Christ.

• From The Triumph of Christianity (2018)

  < 69 < Lecture 10  The Christian Mission to the Jews yNowhere in the passage is the person called the messiah; he is called the Servant of the Lord. Moreover, the suffering this figure is said to undergo happened before Isaiah delivered the prophecy. It happened in the past. yOn the other hand, the vindication is predicted as something that will happen; for instance, the passage says that after his hour of darkness, “he will see the light.” `It is important to note that this part of Isaiah (chapters 40–55) was written during the time of the Babylonian Captivity, after the Babylonians had destroyed Jerusalem and taken its leaders and other important figures into exile. The people of Judea had suffered. These chapters were written to provide them hope in the midst of their despair. `Starting with chapter 40, the author explains that God will save them from their sufferings. Never did Jews think this was referring to the future messiah. In fact, when read in its own historical context it appears clear whom it is referring to. The suffering servant appears to be the people of Israel in exile.* `Why should we think Isaiah is referring to the suffering servant as the people of Israel? The answer is revealed explicitly in Isaiah 49:3. Talking again to the same figure, God says, “You are my servant, Oh Israel.” `All of the prophecies that Christians over the centuries have said point to Jesus in fact are like this. They originally referred to something else, and Christians later understood them to refer to the messiah Jesus. But before the Christians, these passages were never interpreted to refer to the future messiah. * Often in the Bible, an entire country or a people are addressed or described as an individual. Expectations of the Messiah `Many or even most Jews then probably weren’t giving much thought at all to a future messiah. They were just trying to survive life day by day. Those who were hoping for a messiah had various expectations.

• From The Triumph of Christianity (2018)

  < 35 < Lecture 5  The Life and Teachings of Jesus `We don’t know anything for certain about Jesus’s upbringing, although there are obviously good reasons for thinking he always was, or at least became, seriously committed to the religious traditions of Israel. His native language was Aramaic. It is debated whether he would have known other languages, such as Greek, but the evidence appears to be against it. `He almost certainly worked, possibly starting as a boy, doing what his father did. That may have involved making gates and yokes and other rough wood products, or possibly working with stone. `As an adult he appears to have left home to engage in an itinerant preaching ministry. We do not know his age at the time or how long his ministry lasted. `However, we do know the kind of views he brought to his teaching. Jews at the time were wide-ranging in their beliefs and practices. `One of the dominant Jewish belief systems at the time is called by scholars apocalypticism. Jewish apocalypticists believed the world was controlled by forces of evil, hence the poverty, misery, and suffering in it. But God would soon intervene in history to destroy the forces of evil to bring in a good kingdom on earth. yThis intervention would involve annihilation for the powers aligned against God and the people who sided with them. But it would lead to a paradise, a return to the Garden of Eden, for those who were faithful to God. yThis was a view endorsed by a wide swath of Jews in Jesus’s time in the Jewish homeland, including Pharisees, the members of the Dead Sea Scroll community, and John the Baptist, whom Jesus associated with before beginning his own ministry. yThe first recorded event in Jesus’s life was his decision to be baptized by John the Baptist. John was an apocalyptic preacher urging Jews to repent of their sins in light of the judgment of God that was soon to arrive. yThus, Jesus appears to have aligned himself with John at the outset of his ministry. This shows where his ministry was heading: He, too, was to proclaim the imminent arrival of God’s kingdom and the need to repent in preparation for it.

• From The Triumph of Christianity (2018)

  < 45 < Lecture 6  The Beginning of Christianity y No Jew at the time thought the messiah was going to die for the sins of the world. The messiah was to destroy the enemy and rule God’s people in the Promised Land. But the opposite happened. ` This is the key point: The radical disconfirmation of the disciples’ hopes that Jesus was the messiah was completely overturned by a radical reconfirmation and reinterpretation of their view. ` Sometime after Jesus’s death, some of his disciples reported they saw him alive again. According to the New Testament, these claims started three days later. That may be right, or it may have been a bit longer, but some of the disciples certainly made the claim. ` And they had only one explanation for it: God must have raised Jesus from the dead. How else could it have happened? God performed a miracle for the crucified Jesus. y That made the disciples rethink everything. If God raised Jesus from the dead, then he really was the one who stood under God’s special favor. He actually was the messiah. y But he obviously was a messiah in a way that differed from expectations. He wasn’t a political figure who would drive out the Romans with a sword. He was a different kind of savior. y To be sure, he actually would be the future king, but now the disciples came to think Jesus’s death was not an unexpected tragedy or an unintentional blip in the plan of God. It had all been part of the great divine design from the very beginning. y God had wanted his messiah to die. The messiah was not simply the future king of Israel who would deliver God’s people from their oppressors. His role was much larger than that. He was the one chosen by God to be sacrificed. y Like all people in antiquity, Jews understood that sacrifices could appease God. The disciples, as soon as they came to believe Jesus had been raised and therefore was the messiah, came to think that he must not have died as a punishment for any wrong he did. Instead, he died as a sacrifice for the sins of other people.

• From The Triumph of Christianity (2018)

  < 69 < Lecture 10  The Christian Mission to the Jews y Nowhere in the passage is the person called the messiah; he is called the Servant of the Lord. Moreover, the suffering this figure is said to undergo happened before Isaiah delivered the prophecy. It happened in the past. y On the other hand, the vindication is predicted as something that will happen; for instance, the passage says that after his hour of darkness, “he will see the light.” ` It is important to note that this part of Isaiah (chapters 40–55) was written during the time of the Babylonian Captivity, after the Babylonians had destroyed Jerusalem and taken its leaders and other important figures into exile. The people of Judea had suffered. These chapters were written to provide them hope in the midst of their despair. ` Starting with chapter 40, the author explains that God will save them from their sufferings. Never did Jews think this was referring to the future messiah. In fact, when read in its own historical context it appears clear whom it is referring to. The suffering servant appears to be the people of Israel in exile.* ` Why should we think Isaiah is referring to the suffering servant as the people of Israel? The answer is revealed explicitly in Isaiah 49:3. Talking again to the same figure, God says, “You are my servant, Oh Israel.” ` All of the prophecies that Christians over the centuries have said point to Jesus in fact are like this. They originally referred to something else, and Christians later understood them to refer to the messiah Jesus. But before the Christians, these passages were never interpreted to refer to the future messiah. * Often in the Bible, an entire country or a people are addressed or described as an individual. Expectations of the Messiah ` Many or even most Jews then probably weren’t giving much thought at all to a future messiah. They were just trying to survive life day by day. Those who were hoping for a messiah had various expectations.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  ORIGEN. (tom. ii. in Joan. c. 19) But they ask, why is not the Word Itself called the light of men, instead of the life which is in the Word? We reply, that the life here spoken of is not that which rational and irrational animals have in common, but that which is annexed to the Word which is within us through participation of the primæval Word. For we must distinguish the external and false life, from the desirable and true. We are first made partakers of life: and this life with some is light potentially only, not in act; with those, viz. who are not eager to search out the things which appertain to knowledge: with others it is actual light, those who, as the Apostle saith, covet earnestly the best gifts, (1 Cor. 12:31) that is to say, the word of wisdom. (c. 14.). (Ifk the life and the light of men are the same, whoso is in darkness is proved not to live, and none who liveth abideth in darkness.) CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. v. [iv.] c. 3)l. Life having come to us, the empire of death is dissolved; a light having shone upon us, there is darkness no longer: but there remaineth ever a life which death, a light which darkness cannot overcome. Whence he continues, And the light shineth in darkness: by darkness meaning death and error, for sensible light does not shine in darkness, but darkness must be removed first; whereas the preaching of Christ shone forth amidst the reign of error, and caused it to disappear, and Christ by dying changed death into life, so overcoming it, that, those who were already in its grasp, were brought back again. Forasmuch then as neither death nor error hath overcome his light, which is every where conspicuous, shining forth by its own strength; therefore he adds, And the darkness comprehended it notm.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  Some of my friends who aren’t Christians think that Christians are insistent and demanding and intruding, but that isn’t the case. Those folks are the squeaky wheel. Most Christians have enormous respect for the space and freedom of others; it is only that they have found a joy in Jesus they want to share. There is the tension. In a recent radio interview I was sternly asked by the host, who did not consider himself a Christian, to defend Christianity. I told him that I couldn’t do it, and moreover, that I didn’t want to defend the term. He asked me if I was a Christian, and I told him yes. “Then why don’t you want to defend Christianity?” he asked, confused. I told him I no longer knew what the term meant. Of the hundreds of thousands of people listening to his show that day, some of them had terrible experiences with Christianity; they may have been yelled at by a teacher in a Christian school, abused by a minister, or browbeaten by a Christian parent. To them, the term Christianity meant something that no Christian I know would defend. By fortifying the term, I am only making them more and more angry. I won’t do it. Stop ten people on the street and ask them what they think of when they hear the word Christianity, and they will give you ten different answers. How can I defend a term that means ten different things to ten different people? I told the radio show host that I would rather talk about Jesus and how I came to believe that Jesus exists and that he likes me. The host looked back at me with tears in his eyes. When we were done, he asked me if we could go get lunch together. He told me how much he didn’t like Christianity but how he had always wanted to believe Jesus was the Son of God. For me, the beginning of sharing my faith with people began by throwing out Christianity and embracing Christian spirituality, a nonpolitical mysterious system that can be experienced but not explained. Christianity, unlike Christian spirituality, was not a term that excited me. And I could not in good conscious tell a friend about a faith that didn’t excite me. I couldn’t share something I wasn’t experiencing. And I wasn’t experiencing Christianity. It didn’t do anything for me at all. It felt like math, like a system of rights and wrongs and political beliefs, but it wasn’t mysterious; it wasn’t God reaching out of heaven to do wonderful things in my life. And if I would have shared Christianity with somebody, it would have felt mostly like I was trying to get somebody to agree with me rather than meet God. I could no longer share anything about Christianity, but I loved talking about Jesus and the spirituality that goes along with a relationship with Him.