Sublime

WHY SHOULD WE OBEY GOD? God was to be obeyed simply because he was God. . . . That is why, though it was a terror, it was no surprise to learn that God is to be obeyed because of what He is in Himself. If you ask why we should obey God, in the last resort the answer is, “I am.” To know God is to know that our obedience is due to Him. In his nature

For reflection Genesis 22:1–19

The Rule is another example of Augustine’s spiritual realism: it is an honest, unsentimental guide for the challenges of living in community, well acquainted with the heart’s crooked bent toward selfishness, snobbery, greed, and exclusion.

I heard John Stott say that some people had been talking about “the irreducible minimum gospel.” He dismissed such an idea. “Who wants an irreducible minimum gospel?” he asked. “I want the full, biblical gospel.”

by affirming Augustine’s inwardness and the ability of each individual to read the Bible and stand before God’s justifying action themselves, Luther rejects that some people are spiritually dependent on what other people do. What the priest and pope do is not superior in kind to what farmers and housemaids do.

Christianity was never “supposed” to be a philosophy in the first place.34 Christianity, understood correctly, should not claim to offer intellectually satisfying answers to all intellectual questions, even legitimate intellectual questions.

Tarsicius van Bavel, in a lucid digest of Augustine’s teaching on this topic,54 cites Sermon 341 as a focal text: here Augustine says that ‘Christ’ has three meanings, referring to the eternal and pre-existent Word, to the incarnate figure of the redeemer and mediator, and to the ‘whole Christ’, head and body.