Canon Formation as a Survival of the Fittest

At the conclusion of his excellent and wide-ranging discussion of the formation of the New Testament (The Canon of the New Testament, 286-67), Bruce Metzger makes a few well-put general comments:

Instead of suggesting that certain books were accidentally included and others were accidentally excluded from the New Testament Canon--whether the exclusion be defined in terms of the activity of individuals, or synods, or councils--it is more accurate to say that certain books excluded themselves from the canon. Among the dozen or more gospels that circulated in the early Church, the question of how, and when, and why our four Gospels came to be selected for their supreme position may seem to be a mystery--but it is a clear case of the survival of the fittest.

From this point of view the Church did not create the canon, but came to recognize, accept, affirm, and confirm the self-authenticating quality of certain documents that imposed themselves as such upon the Church. If this fact is obscured, one comes into serious conflict not with dogma but with history. 

See also,

• My review of C. E. Hill's Who Chose the Gospels?

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Yielded Secrets

One of the wonderful things about books is that they don't grow agitated or dismissive. They patiently bear all the scrutiny you choose to give them, and the more carefully you read them the more of their secrets they yield.

–Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, 53.

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The Complexity of Unalloyed Dialogue

Updike on Hemingway:

It was he who showed us all how much tension and complexity unalloyed dialogue can convey, and how much poetry lurks in the simplest nouns and predicates.

–John Updike, "Foreword," in John Updike: The Early Stories, x.

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The Entire Fabric of the Bible

Christ not only fulfills the Old Testament but fills out the entire fabric of the Bible, summing up all things in Himself.

–Joshua E. Williams, "How the Birth of Jesus Fulfills the Old Testament"

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The Purpose of Liberty

Liberty is intended by God for you to use as an instrument for loving others (Gal. 5:13), and not as an instrument for suiting yourself.

–Doug Wilson

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Art and Splendor

Art is worthless
unless it plants
a measure of splendor in people's hearts.

–Taha M. Ali, in Poetry 199.3 (Dec 2011): i.

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Updike on the Aging Writer

In the work Updike was editing before he died, he muses about the "advantages, for a writer, of youth and obscurity."

You are full of material--your family, your friends, your region of the country, your generation--when it is fresh and seems urgently worth communicating to readers. No amount of learned skills can substitute for the feeling of having a lot to say, of brining news. Memories, impressions, and emotions from your first twenty years on earth are most writers' main material; little that comes afterward is quite so rich and resonant.

By forty, you have probably mined the purest veins of this precious lode; after that, continued creativity is a matter of sifting the leavings. You become playful and theoretical; you invent sequels, and attempt historical novels. The novels and stories thus generated may be more polished, more ingenious, even more humane than their predecessors;

But none does quite the essential earthmoving work that Hawthorne, a writer who dwelt in the shadowland "where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet," specified when he praised the novels of Anthony Trollope as being "as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case."

–John Updike, Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism, 3-4.

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A Language the Dark Voices Do Not Understand

The gospel gives me hope, and hope is not a language the dark voices understand.

–Andrew Peterson, from the foreword to Behold the Lamb of God: An Advent Narrative, by Russ Ramsey (via).

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Giving Thanks For God

I'm thankful for this reminder from Jason Lee about the effects that our thanksgiving discourse has on how we think about the God who gives. A few excerpts that I appreciated:

On the Implications of "Thanks-Giving":

For the secular mind, the whole holiday makes no sense. Thanksgiving? Thanksgiving somehow implies that I am not in charge of my own destiny. Thanksgiving somehow implies that a higher power not only exists but is in some way personally interested and personally involved in my life. To the secular mind, the very notion of “Thanksgiving” is repulsive and must be replaced. So, the movement to the title of “Turkey Day” is no real surprise.

On Thanksgiving To God:

Believers recognize that we are not just thankful for the good things that we have but that we should direct our thanksgiving to God. If we do not add to whom we are thankful, then our thanksgiving becomes little more than a progress report or satisfaction quotient. So, it is not just that we are thankful for (i.e. happy with) our jobs, our homes or our health. We are thankful to God who is our provider, our protector and our sustainer.

On Thanksgiving For God:

See, it is not just that we remember that we should be thankful to God, but that we are also thankful for God (e.g. Ps. 9:1-2). It is true that we are often overwhelmed by the gracious and loving acts of God including His good gifts of material provisions and life/health for us or our family. We are truly amazed at His provision of spiritual benefits such as forgiveness of sins, the fruit of the Spirit or a loving community of believers.

However, we must never let our thanksgiving for the good provisions of God overshadow our thanks for God Himself. We need to thank Him because of His glorious nature. There would be no possibility of wonderful things such as love, mercy, truth, righteousness, beauty and life, except through God who IS these things. So, pass the rolls, but first remember to be thankful to God for God.

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Hey, It Looks Like You're Installing Windows . . .

This might only be funny if you were once a heavy user of MS Word 2003 (and a lover of arid paronomasia):

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Fleeting Affluence and Empty Cathedrals

A good word from a Reformation Day sermon I heard in 2005:

Right now is the time for American Christianity to influence the world for Christ.

We cannot be sure how long our time will last. We can spend our time, money and energy constructing affluent church buildings, but I have been to the great cathedrals of both Protestant and Catholic Europe–those cathedrals are empty.

How did they spend their days of affluence? How will we spend ours?

–Jason K. Lee, "Faith and Freedom," 6.

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Could the Apostles Pass Your Hermeneutics Class?

The question of whether a New Testament apostle would pass a contemporary hermeneutics course may have more to say about our hermeneutics than the apostles'.

–Matt Smethurst, "Hermeneutical Hall Pass"

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