- Gabriel Fackre posts on Time in Eternity: the Lively Life to Come.
- A timely challenge by Andrew Hamilton by way of a reconsideration of Bonhoeffer’s ethics.
- Byron Smith offers some thoughts on Rowan Williams ‘two styles of Anglicanism.
- And Halden shares two great quotes from Jacques Ellul’s Hope in Time of Abandonment: on prayer and on hope and apocalyptic.
- And while we’re on that book, I’ll post here some further gems:
- ‘We were saying that God is no longer anything to some … it would be better to say that on behalf of the practicing unbeliever, the systematic atheist, the doctrinal or practicing materialist, the antitheist, God makes himself nothing in order always to remain at man’s level. But when God makes himself nothing, it is still for the sake of the unbelieving man. He remains sovereign in so doing. In that case we have to be on our guard, for God is both the weak adversary who accepts the combat without putting up a fight and also the one who is capable at any time of revealing Himself as possessed of infinite power’. (p. 104)
- ‘When man is not made hopeless by God’s silence, it is because he (man) has destroyed his awareness, to the point of wanting nothing better than to be identical instead of identifiable’. (p. 116)
- ‘God, who has let himself be put to death in Christ, withdraws into His discreetness before the absence of love, the absence of filial relations, the absence of trust, the absence of gift, the absence of loyalty, the absence of truth, the absence of self-discipline, the absence of freedom, the absence of authenticity. God makes Himself absent in this world of absences, which modern man has put together with enthusiasm. Man certainly has not killed God, but in creating this world of absence for himself he has brought about the discreetness of God, which is expressed in God’s turning away and silence’. (p. 124)
- ‘The passion for language and analysis and hermeneutics is the unintentional expression of God’s silence. It is reasons like this: God is absent, (we are not saying so, of course), so we are going to get along without Him. This demonstrates that it is not all essential that God speaks here and now in order that the witness be heard and received’. (p. 141)
- ‘The tragedy of interpretation [of Scripture] is a tragedy, not because scientific interpretations enter into overturning the traditional Christian interpretations, nor because the procedures are highly sophisticated, but because God is silent. The Promethean role of Hermeneutics is that of claiming to find a meaning as though God were speaking. Strictly, it is a matter of putting oneself in the place of God’s decision. It is a matter of making Scripture alive and meaningful without God’s making it alive and meaningful. It is a matter of effecting the transition from Scripture to word, or of making language into the word, by putting together highly sophisticated humans means to economize on the use (or role) of the Holy Spirit. Hermeneutics is the business of interpreting revelation without revelation’. (p. 145)
- ‘I fail to see the justification for accepting as legitimate all the questions about the revelation, more or less, validly raised from different points of view, while at the same time refusing to question those systems, methods, and conclusions from the point of view of revelation’. (p. 145)
- And my favourite: ‘Man is living in an illusionary world, illusionary because it is made up of images transmitted by communications media. His world is no longer that of his daily experience, of his lived mediocrity of his personality or of his repeated relationships. It has become an enormous decor, put there by the thousands of news items which are almost completely useless for his life, but which are striking, arousing, threatening, glorifying and edifying in their radical insignificance. They give him the feeling of living an experience, which is worth the trouble, in contrast to the rest of his experience, which is colorless and too plainly unimportant. It is an odd perversion which leads the person of this age to bestow importance and sense on that which does not concern him at all … while rejecting the importance and sense of that which is in fact his own experience 24 hours of every day’. (p. 35)
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jasongoroncy.com 
Ellul’s description of the “death” of God in that book has been a very important influence on me. May we all respond to God’s lovingkindness, so that God may be alive to us, in us and for us and for the world he seeks to save! Amen.
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Thanks! I loved the last quote, and have placed it on my facebook profile. Delicious irony.
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Having been an atheist, I find most comments on the issue amusing. God is not quite so laid-back. He has and works His own plan of invasions. When they occur, we often find ourselves traumatized by the Presence that we had formerly denied.
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