Leland Ryken Quotes

Earlier in this century someone claimed that we work at our play and play at our work. Today the confusion has deepened: we worship our work, work at our play, and play in our worship.

It is untrue that fiction is nonutilitarian. The uses of fiction are synonymous with the uses of literature. They include refreshment, clarification of life, self-awareness, expansion of our range of experiences, and enlargement of our sense of understanding and discovery, perception, intensification, expression, beauty , and understanding. Like literature generally, fiction is a form of discovery, perception, intensification, expression, beauty, and understanding. If it is all these things, the question of whether it is a legitimate use of time should not even arise.

Passion is a far better prioritizer than any organization system. Soul refreshment comes from SEEING glory – not getting stuff done.

As Francis Schaeffer reminded us, “The Christian is the one whose imagination should fly beyond the stars

literature enlarges our world of experience to include both more of the physical world and things not yet imagined, giving the “actual world” a “new dimension of depth” (Lewis, Of Other Worlds 29). This makes it possible for literature to strip Christian doctrines of their “stained glass” associations and make them appear in their “real potency” (37), a possibility Lewis himself realized in the Narnia series and the space trilogy.

The only knowledge that is worthwhile, writes Northrop Frye. "is the knowledge that leafs to wisdom, for knowledge without wisdom is a body without life.

Ease and luxury, such as our affluence brings us today, do not make for maturity; hardship and struggle do,

If you want to make a Christian work, then be Christian, and simply try to make a beautiful work, into which your heart will pass; do not try to “make Christian.

Vincit qui patitur [he who suffers conquers].

There is no valid reason for the perennial Christian preference of biography, history, and the newspaper to fiction and poetry. The former tell us what happened, while literature tells us what happens. The example of the Bible, which is central to any attempt to formulate a Christian approach to literature, sanctions the imagination as a valid form of truth. The Bible is in large part a work of imagination. Its most customary way of expressing truth is not the sermon or the theological outline, but the story, the poem, and the vision--all of them literary forms and products of the imagination (though not necessarily the fictional imagination). Literary conventions are present in the Bible from start to finish, even in the most historically factual parts.

Richard Rogers was lecturing at Wethersfield, Essex, someone told him, “Mr. Rogers, I like you and your company very well, but you are so precise.” To which Rogers replied, “O Sir, I serve a precise God.

The end of learning, he said, is to “repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him” by acquiring “true virtue” (Hughes 631). This reinforces and expands Sidney’s point that the end of learning is virtuous action.

Western culture generally, as well as the Christian subculture specifically, has had an unwarranted tendency to think that abstract ideas and facts are the only valid type of knowledge that we possess. Literature challenges that bias, and so does the Bible. The Bible is not a theological outline with proof texts attached. It is an anthology of literature.

Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take; The clouds ye so much dread Are big with mercy, and shall break In blessings on your head. Judge not the Lord by feeble sense, But trust him for his grace; Behind a frowning providence He hides a smiling face. His purposes will ripen fast, Unfolding every hour; The bud may have a bitter taste, But sweet will be the flower. Blind unbelief is sure to err, And scan his work in vain. God is his own interpreter, And he will make it plain.

As long as one has a living art, its forms will change. The past art forms, therefore, are not necessarily the right ones for today or tomorrow. To demand the art forms of yesterday in either word systems or art is a bourgeois error. It cannot be assumed that if a Christian painter becomes “more Christian” he will necessarily become more and more like Rembrandt. This would be like saying that if the preacher really makes it next Sunday morning, he will preach to us in Chaucerian English. Then we’ll really listen!

Part of what Milton valued in a good book then was contact with the mind of an author rendered otherwise inaccessible by distance or time. Such contact is precisely what much modern and postmodern criticism insists we cannot have. Perhaps a secular world view inevitably leads to a universe in which a text is merely a playing field for the reader’s own intellectual athleticism. Perhaps only a Christian view (such as Milton’s) of the imago descending from God to author to text can preserve the writing of literature as an act of communication.

In 1941, Dorothy L. Sayers provided a detailed analysis of that creative process in The Mind of the Maker. She developed the relevance of the imago Dei for understanding artistic creation in explicitly trinitarian terms. In every act of creation there is a controlling idea (the Father), the energy which incarnates that idea through craftsmanship in some medium (the Son), and the power to create a response in the reader (the Spirit). These three, while separate in identity, are yet one act of creation. So the ancient credal statements about the Trinity are factual claims about the mind of the maker created in his image. Sayers delves into the numerous literary examples, in what is one of the most fascinating accounts ever written both of the nature of literature and of the imago Dei. While some readers may feel she has a tendency to take a good idea too far, The Mind of the Maker remains an indispensable classic of Christian poetics.

in Edward Glaeser, The Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (New York: Penguin, 2011).   2. The Dictionary of Biblical Imagery (ed. Leland Ryken, James C. Wilhoit, and Tremper Longman III [Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1998], 150) speaks of the city as “humanity en masse” and therefore “humanity ‘writ large.’”   3. The Dictionary of Biblical Imagery (p. 150) defines city as a “fortified habitation.”   4. See Frank Frick, The City

How can we distinguish between the good and perverted use of beauty?

How does one balance the fallen and redeemed aspects of life in the artistic portrayal of human experience in the world?

William Perkins said, “The end of a man’s calling is not to gather riches for himself…but to serve God in the serving of man, and in the seeking the good of all men.

To enjoy in tragedy that which one would not willingly suffer in reality is “miserable madness” (miserabilis insania).

Puritan leaders, at least, valued an educated mind over material riches. Cotton Mather admonished his congregation with the comment, “If your main concern be to get the riches of this world for your children, and leave a belly full of this world unto them, it looks very suspiciously as if you were yourselves the people of this world, whose portion is only in this life.”30

The task is rather to assess whether and to what degree works are Christian in their viewpoint. Christian enthusiasts for literature too often seek to baptize every work of literature that they love.

Teaching the Bible involves far more than simply giving out information about the Bible. Bible teaching is ministering to people, liberating them from their inadequate concepts of God, expanding their notion of what it means to live faithfully before God, helping them cast aside old self-defeating habits and replace them with habits of holiness.

The Puritan divine Richard Steele wrote, God doth call every man and woman…to serve him in some peculiar employment in this world, both for their own and the common good.…The Great Governor of the world hath appointed to every man his proper post and province.

dizer quantos autores temos lido, o quanto somos familiarizados com os escolásticos, quão linguisticamente críticos nós somos ou coisa semelhante. É uma miserável ostentação”.

Os puritanos pensavam que o futuro da igreja repousava num clero distinguido... por um novo fervor, um equipamento intelectual superior, um poder de comunicar... O principal propósito do novo clérigo era comunicar zelo aos leigos, tornando-os capazes de unirem-se para selecionar seus próprios ministros, examinar suas próprias vidas espirituais, dirigir orações em família, ler livros santos e tomar parte na administração eclesiástica.[

De fato, a saúde da igreja depende do que acontece na família.

Vamos trazer nossos filhos tão próximo do céu quanto pudermos... Está em nosso poder restringi-los e reformá-los, e isso devemos fazer”.

O sermão puritano cita o texto e o “põe em aberto” tão resumidamente quanto possível, expondo as circunstâncias e o contexto, explicando seus significados gramaticais, reduzindo suas figuras e esquemas à prosa, e expondo suas implicações lógicas. O sermão então proclama numa frase peremptória e indicativa a “doutrina” contida no texto ou logicamente deduzida dele e procede à primeira razão ou prova. A razão segue a razão, sem qualquer transição, senão um ponto e um número; depois que a última prova é afirmada seguem-se os usos ou aplicações, também em sequência numerada, e o sermão termina quando não há mais nada a ser dito.

That is why we not only learn from literature but enjoy it: it delights as it teaches. And it conveys its kind of truth through the creation of concrete images which incarnate or embody ideas which would otherwise remain abstract and nebulous.

Works of art can simultaneously present ugliness (at the level of subject or content) and beauty (at the level of form). People who want things tidy and controlled will stumble at this paradox, but we will make far more sense of modern art if we are bold enough to accept the paradox.

Chad Walsh, a contemporary Christian poet, writes that the creative artist 'can honestly see himself as a kind of earthly assistant to God (so can the carpenter), carrying on the delegated work of creation, making the fullness of creation fuller.

The first thing the Bible does is introduce us to the God of the universe. He is introduced as a creative artist.

When we first read about the image of God in people in Genesis 1, we have as yet heard nothing about God as redeemer or the God of providence or the covenant God or the God of moral truth. The one thing that we know about God is that he created the world. In its immediate narrative context, then, the doctrine of the image of God in people emphasizes that people, are, like God, creators.

Meaning in fiction is thus viewed as what an action leads to, results in, or implies. If the experiment in living succeeds, the work can be said to affirm that world view. If the experiment fails, the work denies that view of reality and by implication usually suggests an alternative.

In a sermon I heard recently, the minister claimed that the portrait of God as a storm god (a literary motif that he did not name) in Psalm 97 is based on allusions to the Exodus and is 'not mere window dressing,' that is, metaphoric. As I observed to this preacher later, he used a metaphor in his denigration of metaphor as "mere window dressing.

Os puritanos sabiam que a Escritura é a regra inalterada da santidade, e eles nunca se permitiram esquecer disso.

No coração do puritanismo estava a crença de que a graça de Deus é a fonte de todo benefício humano e que não se pode adquiri-la por mérito humano.

O calvinismo não ensina uma ética de autoconfiança, como ensina nossa ética moderna do trabalho. É, ao contrário, uma ética da graça: quaisquer recompensas tangíveis advindas do trabalho são o dom da graça de Deus.