Fire and Knowledge

[G]rade inflation is not only dangerous but actively uncivil: When college professors give easy grades, we show that we do not respect our students enough to face their fury or disappointment. We make no sacrifices on their behalf but instead require sacrifices of others, both the exceptional students, who are unable to distinguish themselves because the merely fair students earn grades every bit as good, and the marginal students, who believe they know more than they do because we gift them with grades their work does not earn.

—Stephen L. Carter, Civility (1998), p. 217

I’ll be on “vacation” for the next two weeks, so posting will be a little less frequent than usual. I will still be posting quotes from what I’ve been reading. Does anyone else find these quotes helpful other than me? I hope so.

[T]he very distinguishing mark of faith is that it takes God’s word just because it is God’s word, whether or not it can at present understand it. Man’s part, therefore, is to humble his proud mind, to renounce the sinful self-sufficiency which prompts him to treat himself as the measure of all things, to confess the blindness of his corrupt heart, and thankfully to receive the enlightening Word of God. Man is by nature as completely unable to know God as to please God; let him face the fact and admit it! Let God be God! let man be man! let ruined sinners cease pretending to be something other than ruined sinners! let them realise that they lie helpless in the hand of an angry Creator; let them seek Christ and cry for mercy.

—J.I. Packer and O.R. Johnston in the introduction to The Bondage of the Will by Martin Luther, pp. 46-47

The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.

—Mark Twain

Pelagianism is bad enough, for it tells us that we are able to earn our salvation, and this is to flatter man; but semi-Pelagianism is worse, for it tells us that we need hardly do anything to earn our salvation, and that is to belittle salvation and to insult God.

—J.I. Packer and O.R. Johnston in the introduction to The Bondage of the Will by Martin Luther, p.50

The seemingly arcane and primitive idea of sacrifice—that life is made possible by the death of another living being—is reenacted every time we site down to a meal. What is true physically—life’s dependence upon sacrifice—is also true spiritually.

—Gene Edward Veith, Jr., State of the Arts, p. 213

If you don’t want to know how Bleak House ends, look away now

Some of the most complicated and wordy works of English literature are being compressed into the jerky speedwriting of text messages, to help students choose classics and master their revision.

The dark labyrinth of plots in Bleak House and the epic verse of Paradise Lost are among masterpieces picked for drastic slimming into a couple of lines for sending automatically to mobile phones.

The scheme uses the crafty shorthand of texting to turn the most famous line in Hamlet into 2b?Ntb?=? Key passages to quote in exams or seminars are also picked out, such as F Scott Fitzgerald’s warning to the Great Gatsby about his gilded youth:
“MembaDatAlDaPplnDaWrldHvntHdDaVantgsUvAd”.

Man through sin has ceased to be good. He has now no power to please God. He is unable to do anything but continue in sin. His salvation, therefore, must be wholly of Divine grace, for he himself can contribute nothing to it; and any formulation of the gospel which amounts to saying that God shows grace, not in saving man, but in making it possible for man to save himself, is to be rejected as a lie. The whole work of man’s salvation, first to last, is God’s; and all the glory for it must be God’s also.

—J.I. Packer and O.R. Johnston in the introduction to The Bondage of the Will by Martin Luther, p. 48