Rw Quotes

Time is a river...and books are boats. Many volumes start down that stream, only to be wrecked and lost beyond recall in its sands. Only a few, a very few, endure the testings of time and live to bless the ages following.

We must be global Christians with a global vision because our God is a global God.

So you, too, like fruitcake? (RW on meeting Lenin in Zurich during World War I.)

Perhaps the transformation of the disciples of Jesus is the greatest evidence of all for the resurrection.

Who delivered up Jesus to die? Not Judas, for money; not Pilate, for fear; not the Jews, for envy;—but the Father, for love!’181

There is a big difference between being a good person and having good intentions. Having good intentions is a fleeting thought. Being a good person is a full time job. RW

Many people visualize a God who sits comfortably on a distant throne, remote, aloof, uninterested, and indifferent to the needs of mortals, until, it may be, they can badger him into taking action on their behalf. Such a view is wholly false. The Bible reveals a God who, long before it even occurs to man to turn to him, while man is still lost in darkness and sunk in sin, takes the initiative, rises from his throne, lays aside his glory, and stoops to seek until he finds him.

Christianity is not just about what we believe; it’s also about how we behave.

The astonishing paradox of Christ's teaching and of Christian experience is this: if we lose ourselves in following Christ, we actually find ourselves. True self-denial is self-discovery. To live for ourselves is insanity and suicide; to live for God and for man is wisdom and life indeed. We do not begin to find ourselves until we have become willing to lose ourselves in the service of Christ and of our fellows.

The gift of singleness is more a vocation than an empowerment, although to be sure God is faithful in supporting those He calls.

To create laughter, you must first learn to smile

Youth is a gift that goes largely unappreciated by its proprietor. Like a single raindrop falling on hot pavement it evaporates before your eyes and transcends into adulthood. The innocence and energy become merely a file in one’s repository of memories… there its value is priceless and nonrenewable.” RW

Self-denial is not denying to ourselves luxuries such as chocolates, cakes, cigarettes and cocktails (although it might include this); it is actually denying or disowning ourselves, renouncing our supposed right to go our own way.

Christianity is a religion of salvation, and the fact is that there is nothing in any of the non-Christian religions to compare with this message of a God who loved, and came after, and died for, a world of lost sinners.

Other world! There is no other world! Here or nowhere is the whole fact.

There is a big difference between knowing and understanding. If I had a choice of being remembered as a knowledgeable or an understanding man,give me understanding... hands down. RW

It is when we begin to see the gravity of sin and the majesty of God that our questions change. No longer do we ask why God finds it difficult to forgive sins, but how he finds it possible.

The very first step to becoming a follower of Jesus Christ is the humble admission that we need him. Nothing keeps us out of the kingdom of God more surely than our pride and self-sufficiency.

Human beings are comfortable with what is outward, visible, material and superficial. What matters to God is a deep, inward, secret work of the Holy Spirit in our hearts.

A marriage that isn't built around the Cross will be devoid of grace, mercy, and humility that come when both husband and wife recognize their need for a savior.

As we face the cross, then, we can say to ourselves both, “I did it, my sins sent him there,” and “He did it, his love took him there.

Anyone who has to take a test to see how smart they are can't be that bright.

we cannot receive the mercy and forgiveness of God unless we repent, and we cannot claim to have repented of our sins if we are unmerciful towards the sins of others

Jesus never concealed the fact that his religion included a demand as well as an offer. Indeed, the demand was as total as the offer was free. If he offered men his salvation, he also demanded their submission. He gave no encouragement whatever to thoughtless applicants for discipleship. He brought no pressure to bear on any inquirer. He sent irresponsible enthusiasts away empty. Luke tells of three men who either volunteered, or were invited, to follow Jesus; but no one passed the Lord’s test. The rich young ruler, too, moral, earnest and attractive, who wanted eternal life on his own terms, went away sorrowful, with his riches intact but with neither life nor Christ as his possession…The Christian landscape is strewn with the wreckage of derelict, half built towers—the ruins of those who began to build and were unable to finish. For thousands of people still ignore Christ’s warning and undertake to follow him without first pausing to reflect on the cost of doing so. The result is the great scandal of Christendom today, so called “nominal Christianity.” In countries to which Christian civilization has spread, large numbers of people have covered themselves with a decent, but thin, veneer of Christianity. They have allowed themselves to become somewhat involved, enough to be respectable but not enough to be uncomfortable. Their religion is a great, soft cushion. It protects them from the hard unpleasantness of life, while changing its place and shape to suit their convenience. No wonder the cynics speak of hypocrites in the church and dismiss religion as escapism…The message of Jesus was very different. He never lowered his standards or modified his conditions to make his call more readily acceptable. He asked his first disciples, and he has asked every disciple since, to give him their thoughtful and total commitment. Nothing less than this will do

We will be able to depart this life with the quiet peace-giving notion, that we were permitted to contribute to the happiness of many who will live after us. In our long lives we endeavored to unfold the collective consciousness. In our lives we have known hell and heaven; the final balance, however, is that we helped pave the way to dynamic harmony in this earthly house. That, I believe, is the meaning of life.

God. Our highest destiny is to know God, to be in personal relationship with him. Our chief claim to nobility as human beings is that we were made in the image of God and are therefore capable of knowing him.

Your call is clear, cold centuries across; You bid me follow you, and take my cross, And daily lose myself, myself deny, And stern against myself shout ‘Crucify’. My stubborn nature rises to rebel Against your call. Proud choruses of hell Unite to magnify my restless hate Of servitude, lest I capitulate. The world, to see my cross, would pause and jeer. I have no choice, but still to persevere To save myself – and follow you from far, More slow than Magi-for I have no star. And yet you call me still. Your cross Eclipses mine, transforms the bitter loss I thought that I would suffer if I came To you- into immeasurable gain. I kneel before you, Jesus, crucified, My cross is shouldered and my self denied; I’ll follow daily, closely, not refuse For love of you and man myself to lose.

Jesus Christ, we believe, is the fulfilment of every truly human aspiration. To find him is to find ourselves.

People will not remember what you say, People will not remember what you do, But people will never forget how you made them feel.

We must trust in him as our Saviour and submit to him as our Lord; and then go on to take our place as loyal members of the church and responsible citizens in the community.

A life with purpose can only end in honor.

To witness a fallen tree, but hear no sound......creates an illusion of its importance.

If the Cross of Christ is anything to the mind, it is surely everything – the most profound reality and the sublimest mystery.

Even as she began to slip into the gloaming of her life, the primal need to live…to survive...clawed at her soul.

To be disrespectful of tradition and of historical theology is to be disrespectful of the Holy Spirit who has been actively enlightening the church in every century.

If we claim to be Christian, we must be like Christ.

Never grow up!

The essence of discipleship is union with Christ, which means identification with him in both his sufferings and his glory.

God hides himself from intellectual dilettantes, but reveals himself in Christ to those who humbly seek him.

The Christian message has a moral challenge. If the message is true, the moral challenge has to be accepted. So God is not a fit object for man’s detached scrutiny. You cannot fix God at the end of a telescope or a microscope and say “How interesting!” God is not interesting. He is deeply upsetting. The same is true of Jesus Christ … We know that to find God and to accept Jesus Christ would be a very inconvenient experience. It would involve the rethinking of our whole outlook on life and the readjustment of our whole manner of life. And it is a combination of intellectual and moral cowardice which makes us hesitate. We do not find because we do not seek. We do not seek because we do not want to find, and we know that the way to be certain of not finding is not to seek … Christ’s promise is plain: "Seek and you will find.

All Christian preachers have to face this issue. Either we preach that human beings are rebels against God, under his just judgment and (if left to themselves) lost, and that Christ crucified who bore their sin and curse is the only available Saviour. Or we emphasize human potential and human ability, with Christ brought in only to boost them, and with no necessity for the cross except to exhibit God’s love and so inspire us to greater endeavour. The former is the way to be faithful, the latter the way to be popular. It is not possible to be faithful and popular simultaneously.

I’ve never put much stock in the act of arguing. Most folks I’ve encountered who are accomplished at the craft refuse to let the truth stand in the way of winning the debate…so what’s the point. RW

Adversity and hardship are the building stones of character. How can you appreciate good times and savor happiness if you have never dealt with ill fortune, discomfort and sorrow. It’s like a child learning the difference between hot and cold. RW

We may wish, indeed,’ wrote C. S. Lewis, ‘that we were of so little account to God that he left us alone to follow our natural impulses – that he would give over trying to train us into something so unlike our natural selves: but once again, we are asking not for more love, but for less....To ask that God’s love should be content with us as we are is to ask that God should cease to be God....

The most significant factor lies elsewhere, and it is on this that I intend to concentrate in this first chapter. Why I am a Christian is due ultimately neither to the influence of my parents and teachers, nor to my own personal decision for Christ, but to ‘the Hound of Heaven’. That is, it is due to Jesus Christ himself, who pursued me relentlessly even when I was running away from him in order to go my own way. And if it were not for the gracious pursuit of the Hound of Heaven I would today be on the scrap-heap of wasted and discarded lives.

The fundamental metaphor of National Socialism as it related to the world around it was the garden, not the wild forest. One of the most important Nazi ideologists, R.W. Darré, made clear the relationship between gardening and genocide: “He who leaves the plants in a garden to themselves will soon find to his surprise that the garden is overgrown by weeds and that even the basic character of the plants has changed. If therefore the garden is to remain the breeding ground for the plants, if, in other words, it is to lift itself above the harsh rule of natural forces, then the forming will of a gardener is necessary, a gardener who, by providing suitable conditions for growing, or by keeping harmful influences away, or by both together, carefully tends what needs tending and ruthlessly eliminates the weeds which would deprive the better plants of nutrition, air, light, and sun. . . . Thus we are facing the realization that questions of breeding are not trivial for political thought, but that they have to be at the center of all considerations, and that their answers must follow from the spiritual, from the ideological attitude of a people. We must even assert that a people can only reach spiritual and moral equilibrium if a well-conceived breeding plan stands at the very center of its culture.

What then must we do? We must commit ourselves, heart and mind, soul and will, home and life, personally and unreservedly to Jesus Christ. We must humble ourselves before him. We must trust in him as our Saviour and submit to him as our Lord; and then go on to take our place as loyal members of the church and responsible citizens in the community.

Nowadays the really great mind is thought to be both broad and open – broad enough to absorb every fresh idea which is presented to it, and open enough to go on doing so for ever.

This is the worst thing about poisons and deadly sins - that we enjoy them.

The glory of the gospel is that when the Church is absolutely different from the world, she invariably attracts it.

Every calling is great if greatly pursued."-Late Former Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes

God has little patience with triflers; ‘he rewards those who seek him’.7

The faithful preaching of the gospel is the God-appointed means by which the prince of darkness is overthrown and God shines his light into human hearts.

If we are looking for a definition of love, we should look not in a dictionary, but at Calvary.

I suppose life is what you believe it to be. Perhaps believing in life is its true nature.

Life will succeed life, as we know it.

On days such as this, Death’s long shadow hung like a broken halo over everyone—a sign of things to come.

Second, we are to discover this purpose of God in Scripture. The will of God for the people is in the Word of God.

All students know the dangers of approaching their subject with preconceived ideas. Yet many would-be enquirers come to the Bible with their minds already made up.

Some of us think holding on makes us strong; But sometimes it is letting go.” Hermann Hesse, 1877-1962

Meditation turns from its purgatory role to recognize in self-knowledge and in the mind's images of the external world the general essences in which all things have their being.

The radical biblical perspective is to see death not as the termination of life but as the gateway to life.

Give someone a foot up now and you may relieve a hand up when they reach the top

You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you.’ This situation is tragic beyond words. We are missing the destiny for which God made us.

And self-sacrifice is what the Bible means by 'love.' While sin is possessive, love is expansive. Sin's characteristic is the desire to get; love's characteristic is the desire to give.

Of all the great forces which have formed the past, none has disappeared more effectively, or when recalled retains less of its once compelling force, than the power of the spoken word.

The New Testament uses five main Greek words for sin, which together portray its various aspects, both passive and active. The commonest is hamartia, which depicts sin as a missing of the target, the failure to attain a goal. Adikia is ‘unrighteousness’ or ‘iniquity’, and ponēria is evil of a vicious or degenerate kind. Both these terms seem to speak of an inward corruption or perversion of character. The more active words are parabasis (with which we may associate the similar paraptōma), a ‘trespass’ or ‘transgression’, the stepping over a known boundary, and anomia, ‘lawlessness’, the disregard or violation of a known law. In each case an objective criterion is implied, either a standard we fail to reach or a line we deliberately cross.

The politician dispenses wealth which other men have produced, and we say he is “compassionate,” while the businessman who produces the wealth is dismissed as “greedy” and “materialistic.

We are not, therefore, to regard the cross as defeat and the resurrection as victory. Rather, the cross was the victory won, and the resurrection the victory endorsed, proclaimed and demonstrated.

The first thing that has to be said about the biblical gospel of reconciliation, however, is that it begins with reconciliation to God, and continues with a reconciled community in Christ. Reconciliation is not a term the Bible uses to describe ‘coming to terms with oneself’, although it does insist that it is only through losing ourselves in love for God and neighbour that we truly find ourselves.

Life is a pilgrimage of learning, a voyage of discovery, in which our mistaken views are corrected, our distorted notions adjusted, our shallow opinions deepened and some of our vast ignorances diminished.

Insistence on security is incompatible with the way of the cross. What daring adventures the incarnation and the atonement were! What a breach of convention and decorum that Almighty God should renounce his privileges in order to take human flesh and bear human sin! Jesus had no security except in his Father. So to follow Jesus is always to accept at least a measure of uncertainty, danger and rejection for his sake.

Even the excruciating pain could not silence his repeated entreaties: ‘Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.’ The soldiers gambled for his clothes. Some women stood afar off. The crowd remained a while to watch. Jesus commended his mother to John’s care and John to hers. He spoke words of kingly assurance to the penitent criminal crucified at his side. Meanwhile, the rulers sneered at him, shouting: ‘He saved others, but he can’t save himself!’ Their words, spoken as an insult, were the literal truth. He could not save himself and others simultaneously. He chose to sacrifice himself in order to save the world.

What man needs is a radical change of nature, what Professor H. M. Gwatkin called ‘a change from self to unself’. We cannot do this for ourselves any more than patients needing surgery can perform their own operations.

I remember a young man coming to see me when he had just left school and begun work in London. He had given up going to church, he said, because he could not say the creed without feeling that he was a hypocrite. He no longer believed it. When he had finished telling me what he thought, I said to him, ‘If I were to answer your problems to your complete intellectual satisfaction, would you be willing to change the way you live?’ He smiled slightly and blushed. The answer was clearly ‘No’. His real problem was not intellectual but moral. This, then, is the spirit in which our search must be conducted. We must set aside apathy, pride, prejudice and sin, and seek God – no matter what the consequences. Of all these hindrances to the search for truth, the last two are the hardest to overcome: intellectual prejudice and moral self-will. The reason is that both are expressions of fear – and fear is the greatest enemy of the truth.

It is now time for us to ask the personal question put to Jesus Christ by Saul of Tarsus on the Damascus road, ‘What shall I do Lord?’ or the similar question asked by the Philippian jailer, ’What must I do to be saved?’ Clearly we must do something. Christianity is no mere passive acquiescence in a series of propositions, however true. We may believe in the deity and the salvation of Christ, and acknowledge ourselves to be sinners in need of his salvation, but this does not make us Christians. We have to make a personal response to Jesus Christ, committing ourselves unreservedly to him as our Savior and Lord … At its simplest Christ’s call was “Follow me.” He asked men and women for their personal allegiance. He invited them to learn from him, to obey his words and to identify themselves with his cause … Now there can be no following without a previous forsaking. To follow Christ is to renounce all lesser loyalties … let me be more explicit about the forsaking which cannot be separated from the following of Jesus Christ. First, there must be a renunciation of sin. This, in a word, is repentance. It is the first part of Christian conversion. It can in no circumstances be bypassed. Repentance and faith belong together. We cannot follow Christ without forsaking sin … Repentance is a definite turn from every thought, word, deed, and habit which is known to be wrong … There can be no compromise here. There may be sins in our lives which we do not think we could ever renounce, but we must be willing to let them go as we cry to God for deliverance from them. If you are in doubt regarding what is right and what is wrong, do not be too greatly influenced by the customs and conventions of Christians you may know. Go by the clear teaching of the Bible and by the prompting of your conscience, and Christ will gradually lead you further along the path of righteousness. When he puts his finger on anything, give it up. It may be some association or recreation, some literature we read, or some attitude of pride, jealousy or resentment, or an unforgiving spirit. Jesus told his followers to pluck out their eye and cut off their hand or foot if it caused them to sin. We are not to obey this with dead literalism, of course, and mutilate our bodies. It is a figure of speech for dealing ruthlessly with the avenues along which temptation comes to us.

To say that somebody ‘is not responsible for his actions’ is to demean him or her as a human being. It is part of the glory of being human that we are held responsible for our actions. Then, when we also acknowledge our sin and guilt, we receive God’s forgiveness, enter into the joy of his salvation, and so become yet more completely human and healthy. What is unhealthy is every wallowing in guilt which does not lead to confession, repentance, faith in Jesus Christ and so forgiveness.

we are to ‘hunger and thirst for righteousness’. For what is the use of confessing and lamenting our sin, of acknowledging the truth about ourselves to both God and men, if we leave it there? Confession of sin must lead to hunger for righteousness.

Either I’ve got a wart on my nose they find curious, or I’ve grown a tail, Albie Merani muttered to himself. Just then he thought. I’d better get a move on, got work to do. He hurried across to some stairs, heading down deeper into station, then followed the signs to the pod station.

For our sake, he made him sin who knew no sin, so that in him we may become righteousness of God... As we look at the cross, we begin to understand the terrible implication of these words. At twelve noon, 'there was darkness over the whole land' which continued for three hours until Jesus died. With the darkness came silence, for no eye should see, and no lips could tell, the agony of the soul which the spotless Lamb of God now endured. The accumulated sins of all human history were laid upon him. Voluntarily he bore them in his own body. He made them his own. He shouldered full responsibility for them.

An example of such emergent phenomena is the origin of life from non-living chemical compounds in the oldest, lifeless oceans of the earth. Here, aided by the radiation energy received from the sun, countless chemical materials were synthesized and accumulated in such a way that they constituted, as it were, a primeval “soup.” In this primeval soup, by infinite variations of lifeless growth and decay of substances during some billions of years, the way of life was ultimately reached, with its metabolism characterized by selective assimilation and dissimilation as end stations of a sluiced and canalized flow of free chemical energy.

Dialogue is a token of genuine Christian love, because it indicates our steadfast resolve to rid our minds of the prejudices and caricatures that we may entertain about other people, to struggle to listen through their ears and look through their eyes so as to grasp what prevents them from hearing the gospel and seeing Christ, to sympathize with them in all their doubts, fears and “hang-ups.” For such sympathy will involve listening, and listening means dialogue. It is once more the challenge of the incarnation, to renounce evangelism by inflexible slogans, and instead to involve ourselves sensitively in the real dilemmas that people face.

[In geology,] As in history, the material in hand remains silent if no questions are asked. The nature of these questions depends on the 'school' to which the geologist belongs and on the objectivity of his investigations. Hans Cloos called this way of interrogation 'the dialogue with the earth,' 'das Gesprach mit der Erde.

She sucked in a tremulous breath. The subsequent damage since the fatal wreck was cosmic. One celestial quake and the timeline belonging to her had imploded in the heavens like a dying star. It was like falling into oblivion, the tattered remains of her life drifting aimlessly—unanchored in a vacuum of what was and what little remained.

We must freely admit that our minds, being finite, cannot possibly discover God by their own efforts. We depend on God to make himself known. I am not saying that we should suspend rational thinking. On the contrary, the psalmist encourages us not to be ‘like the horse or the mule which have no understanding’. We must use our minds; but we must also admit their limitations

Christ’s fourth indirect claim was to judge the world. This is perhaps the most fantastic of all his statements. Several of his parables imply that he will come back at the end of the world, and that the final day of reckoning will be postponed until his return. He will himself arouse the dead, and all the nations will be gathered before him. He will sit on the throne of his glory, and the judgment will be committed to him by the Father. He will then separate men from one another as a shepherd separates his sheep from his goats. Some will be invited to come and inherit the kingdom prepared for them from the foundation of the world. Others will hear the dreadful words, 'Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.' Not only will Jesus be the judge, but the criterion of judgment will be men’s attitude to him as shown in their treatment of his 'brethren' or their response to his word. Those who have acknowledged him before men he will acknowledge before his Father: those who have denied him, he will deny. Indeed, for a man to be excluded from heaven on the last day, it will be enough for Jesus to say, "I never knew you.

     I was led by the spirit of ambition and immersed myself entirely in the waves of the world. I put God, the Church and my Order behind me and set myself to gather what riches I could, rather than to take what God sent. Forgetting those things which were behind, I reached forth (but not as the Apostle did) to those things which were before. (Phil. iii, 13) … Ambition made me drunk, and the flattering promises of our Prince overthrew me.

Indeed, an honest and humble acknowledgment of the evil in our flesh, even after the new birth, is the first step to holiness. To speak quite plainly, some of us are not leading holy lives for the simple reason that we have too high an opinion of ourselves. No man ever cries aloud for deliverance who has not seen his own wretchedness. In other words, the only way to arrive at faith in the power of the Holy Spirit is along the road of self-despair.

And that is how it would have stayed, had God not taken the initiative to help us. We would have remained forever agnostic, asking – just like Pontius Pilate at the trial of Jesus – ‘What is truth?’ but never staying for an answer, never daring to hope that we would receive one. We would be those who worship, for it is part of human nature to worship someone or something, but all our altars would be like the one the apostle Paul found in Athens, dedicated ‘To an unknown god’.

Thomas Cranmer in his ‘Homily of Salvation’ explained that three things had to go together in our justification: on God’s part ‘his great mercy and grace’, on Christ’s part ‘the satisfaction of God’s justice’, and on our part ‘true and lively faith’. He concluded the first part of the homily: ‘It pleased our heavenly Father, of his infinite mercy, without any our desert or deserving, to prepare for us the most precious jewels of Christ’s body and blood, whereby our ransom might be fully paid, the law fulfilled, and his justice fully satisfied.’15

No one openly talked about the accident, which had taken John, and their sons—Luke, Sam and Liam. However, it lingered on people’s tongues like a bad aftertaste. It stuck in the forefront of her friends’ brains like a migraine, and lurked in the shadows wherever she went. Hushed conversations abruptly ended when she approached, and she knew why. She rested her forehead against the steering wheel. The burden of living this lie was heavy. The energy required to maintain the daily facade was beyond exhausting. It had taken a toll. She was bone tired. Soul tired.

Seldom if ever should we have to choose between satisfying physical hunger and spiritual hunger, or between healing bodies and saving souls, since an authentic love for our neighbour will lead us to serve him or her as a whole person. Nevertheless, if we must choose, then we have to say that the supreme and ultimate need of all humankind is the saving grace of Jesus Christ, and that therefore a person’s eternal, spiritual salvation is of greater importance than his or her temporal and material well-being. . . . The choice, we believe, is largely conceptual. In practice, as in the public ministry of Jesus, the two are inseparable. . .

Perhaps it is a deep-seated reluctance to face up to the gravity of sin which has led to its omission from the vocabulary of many of our contemporaries. One acute observer of the human condition, who has noticed the disappearance of the word, is the American psychiatrist Karl Menninger. He has written about it in his book, Whatever Became of Sin? Describing the malaise of western society, its general mood of gloom and doom, he adds that ‘one misses any mention of “sin”’. ‘It was a word once in everyone’s mind, but is now rarely if ever heard. Does that mean’, he asks, ‘that no sin is involved in all our troubles...? Has no-one committed any sins? Where, indeed, did sin go? What became of it?’ (p.13). Enquiring into the causes of sin’s disappearance, Dr Menninger notes first that ‘many former sins have become crimes’, so that responsibility for dealing with them has passed from church to state, from priest to policeman (p.50), while others have dissipated into sicknesses, or at least into symptoms of sickness, so that in their case punishment has been replaced by treatment (pp.74ff.). A third convenient device called ‘collective irresponsibility’ has enabled us to transfer the blame for some of our deviant behaviour from ourselves as individuals to society as a whole or to one of its many groupings (pp.94ff.).

Such a man is altogether beyond our reach. He succeeded where we always fail. He had complete self-mastery. He never retaliated. He never grew resentful or irritable. He had such control of himself that, whatever others might think or say or do, he would deny himself and abandon himself to the will of God and the welfare of his fellow human beings. ‘I seek not to please myself,’ he said, and ‘I am not seeking glory for myself.’ As Paul wrote, ‘For Christ did not please himself.’ This utter disregard of self in the service of God and man is what the Bible calls love. There is no self-interest in love. The essence of love is self-sacrifice. Even the worst of us is adorned by an occasional flash of such nobility, but the life of Jesus radiated it with a never-fading incandescent glow. Jesus was sinless because he was selfless. Such selflessness is love. And God is love.

Dear Sir—I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of “Leaves of Grass.” I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy.… I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perceptions only can inspire. I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging.… I wish to see my benefactor, and have felt much like striking my tasks and visiting New York to pay you my respects. R.W. Emerson

Half a century ago Ostwald (1910) distinguished classicists and romanticists among the scientific investigators: the former being inclined to design schemes and to use consistently the deductions from working hypotheses; the latter being more fit for intuitive discoveries of functional relations between phenomena and therefore more able to open up new fields of study. Examples of both character types are Werner and Hutton. Werner was a real classicist. At the end of the eighteenth century he postulated the theory of “neptunism,” according to which all rocks including granites, were deposited in primeval seas. It was an artificial scheme, but, as a classification system, it worked quite satisfactorily at the time. Hutton, his contemporary and opponent, was more a romanticist. His concept of 'plutonism' supposed continually recurrent circuits of matter, which like gigantic paddle wheels raise material from various depths of the earth and carry it off again. This is a very flexible system which opens the mind to accept the possible occurrence in the course of time of a great variety of interrelated plutonic and tectonic processes.

There is much shallowness and levity among us. Prophets and psalmists would probably say of us that ‘there is no fear of God before their eyes’. In public worship our habit is to slouch or squat; we do not kneel nowadays, let alone prostrate ourselves in humility before God. It is more characteristic of us to clap our hands with joy than to blush with shame or tears. We saunter up to God to claim his patronage and friendship; it does not occur to us that he might send us away. We need to hear again the apostle Peter’s sobering words: ‘Since you call on a Father who judges each man’s work impartially, live your lives...in reverent fear.’39 In other words, if we dare to call our Judge our Father, we must beware of presuming on him. It must even be said that our evangelical emphasis on the atonement is dangerous if we come to it too quickly. We learn to appreciate the access to God which Christ has won for us only after we have first seen God’s inaccessibility to sinners. We can cry ‘Hallelujah’ with authenticity only after we have first cried ‘Woe is me, for I am lost’. In Dale’s words, ‘it is partly because sin does not provoke our own wrath, that we do not believe that sin provokes the wrath of God’.40

First, we must boldly handle the major themes of human life, the incessant questions which men and women have always asked and which the great novelists and dramatists have treated in every age: What is the purpose of our existence? Has life any significance? Where did I come from, and where am I going to? What does it mean to be a human being, and how do humans differ from animals? Whence this thirst for transcendence, this universal quest for a Reality above and beyond us, this need to fall down and worship the Infinitely Great? What is freedom, and how can I experience personal liberation? Why the painful tension between what I am and what I long to be? Is there a way to be rid of guilt and of a guilty conscience? What about the hunger for love, sexual fulfillment, marriage, family life, and community on the one hand, and on the other the pervasive sense of alienation, and the base, destructive passions of jealousy, malice, hate, lust, and revenge? Is it possible truly to master oneself and love one’s neighbor? Is there any light on the dark mysteries of evil and suffering? How can we find courage to face first life, then death, then what may lie beyond death? What hope can sustain us in the midst of our despair?

The Zuma system resembled a medieval state in which the king or mafia don was owed fealty by mighty barons who paid him tribute and gave him political and military support if needed. Within their own baronies, the barons were almost absolute rulers, exacting tribute from those beneath them and exercising powers of patronage over lower-level appointments. Normally speaking, the king would not interfere with their administration though he did exercise powers of taxation over the whole populace. Only if a baron or his underlings exacted so much tribute as to cause a peasants’ revolt or create major scandal within the kingdom, would the king be forced to act – though naturally, any sign that a baron was no longer loyal to the king would trigger more severe action. The heart of the system was KwaZulu-Natal. Although the ANC there was just as prone to factional feuding as anywhere else, when it came to the crunch it would be bound to support the first Zulu president not only out of tribal loyalty but because of the rich rewards of patronage the province received as a result of its central position. With KwaZulu-Natal effectively sewn up, together with Free State and Mpumalanga, Zuma was invulnerable. Many commentators failed to understand this and, the wish being father to the thought, frequently speculated that the ANC might grow weary of the incessant cloud of scandal which hung over Zuma and decide to eject him, as it had ejected Mbeki. In fact this was quite impossible while the whole weight of tribal loyalty and

But why, an impatient critic will immediately object, should our forgiveness depend on Christ’s death? Why does God not simply forgive us, without the necessity of the cross? ‘God will pardon me’, Heinrich Heine protested. ‘That’s his métier [his job, his speciality].’4 After all, the objector might continue, if we sin against each other, we are required to forgive each other. So why should God not practise what he preaches? Why should he not be as generous as he expects us to be? Two answers need to be given to these questions. The first was given at the end of the eleventh century by Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury. He wrote in his magnificent book Why God Became Man: ‘You have not yet considered the seriousness of sin.’5 The second answer might be: ‘You have not yet considered the majesty of God.’ To draw an analogy between our forgiveness of each other and God’s forgiveness of us is very superficial. We are not God but private individuals, while he is the maker of heaven and earth, Creator of the very laws we break. Our sins are not purely personal injuries but a wilful rebellion against him. It is when we begin to see the gravity of sin and the majesty of God that our questions change. No longer do we ask why God finds it difficult to forgive sins, but how he finds it possible. As one writer has put it, ‘forgiveness is to man the plainest of duties; to God it is the profoundest of problems’.6 Why may forgiveness be described as a ‘problem’ to God? Because of who he is in his innermost being. Of course he is love (1 John 4:8, 16), but his love is not sentimental love; it is holy love. How then could God punish sin (as in justice he must) without contradicting his love? Or how could God pardon sin (as in love he yearned to do) without compromising his justice? How, confronted by human evil, could God be true to himself as holy love? How could he act simultaneously to express his holiness and his love? This is the divine dilemma that God resolved on the cross. For on the cross, when Jesus died, God himself in Christ bore the judgment we deserved, in order to bring us the forgiveness we do not deserve. The full penalty of sin was borne – not, however, by us, but by God in Christ. On the cross divine love and justice were reconciled.