Remembering the Christian Past is a good book to ground the topics and concerns of Jesus followers today in the historic voices of the early church. Robert Wilken is a master at drawing connections between the two worlds and showing the similarities between some of the arguments of the early apologists and the discussions of today.
Here are some nuggets from the chapter called "No Other Gods":
- "We affirm that human nature is not sufficient in any way to seek for God and to find Him in his pure nature, unless it is helped by the God who is the object of the search." from church father, Origen. (56)
- "The key point here is that faith is not a form of intepretation, one perspective among others, but a seeing of what there is to see, and hence a form of knowing." (56-7)
- "Faith is not something that is added to knowing: it is a constitutive part of the act of knowing God." (58)
- "Faith's certainty comes from participating in the reality that is believed--that is, through fellowship with God... It is not possible to know God form a distance, to be a spectator... "Knowing" means "being joined to" or "united with." The knowledge of God, then is experiential." (58)
- Walter Ulbricht, German Communist Leader, was in conversation with theologian Karl Barth, bragging that Communists would be teaching the Ten Commandments in schools and that the decalogue would be the moral foundation for the new society. "Barth listened politely and then said: 'I have only one question, Herr Minister. Will you also be teaching the First Commandment?'" (62)
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