Reading Ruminations

From this week's reading:

ESV Study Bible

"The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law." Deuteronomy 29:29

The Hobbit

"Then the hobbit slipped on his ring, and warned by the echoes to take more than hobbit's care to make no sound, he crept noiselessly down, down, down into the dark. He was trembling with fear, but his little face was set and grim. Already he was a very different hobbit from the one that had run out without a pocket-handkerchief from Bag-End long ago."

"It was at this point that Bilbo stopped. Going on from there was the bravest thing he ever did. The tremendous things that happened afterwards were as nothing compared to it. He fought the real battle in the tunnel alone, before he ever saw the vast danger that lay in wait."

Chapter XII, Inside Information

Escape from Reason

"This new way of thinking spread in three different ways...it spread by classes...What is left was a middle-class that was not touched by it and often is still not touched by it...They do not understand why the think in the old way--they are continuing to act out of habit and memory after they have forgotten why the old form was valid. Often they still think in the right way--to them truth is truth, right is right--but they no longer know why (italics, mine). So how could they understand their children who think in the new way, who no longer think that truth is truth nor that right is right.

Chapter 3, Section Kierkegaard and the Line of Despair

He is There and He is Not Silent

"The dilemma of modern man is simple: he does not know why man has any meaning. He is lost. Man remains a zero. This is the damnation of our generation, the heart of modern man's problem. But if we begin with a personal beginning and this is the origin of all else, then the personal does have meaning, and man and his aspirations of the reality of personality are in line with what was originally there and what has always intrinsically been."

Chapter 1, The Metaphysical Necessity

Swallowing the
Golden Stone, Stories and Essays

...But the naming of stark creation was only one of the languages which the Creator used. There are two kinds of divine talk remembered in Genesis, for what God had made, he also named. Light and its temporal period he called "day." Its dimming and the period of its absence he called "night"...

Now, it is of crucial importance to understand that this naming did more than associate a particular sound with a particular thing. God's naming did more than produce the "word" by which speakers could refer to the object represented by that name. For the Hebrews, language was always an action. To speak was to accomplish. And to name a thing was actually to affect the thing named: it finished its creation, as it were, in three distinct ways:

1. The thing which is, but isn't named, cannot be known. If you can't talk about it, neither can you think about it or consider it or meditate upon it--nor, in consequence, can you know it at all! For the Hebrews, language is the stuff of knowing. Only when the created thing takes its place in language does it fully enter the realm of human awareness.

To name a thing, therefore, is to clothe it in visibility. To name a thing is to make it knowable, to grant its place in the human conception of the world. It seems suddenly to appear, that which had in fact existed before its appearing... (p.49)

Institutes of the Christian Religion

"This knowledge (of God's Providence) is necessarily followed by gratitude in prosperity, patience in adversity, and incredible security for the time to come."

Book 1.17.7