Anti-Climacus

ONE, TWO:

i. from Alan Jacobs, A Theology of Reading:

As John Milbank has convincingly argued, this difference [between philia and agape as the basis of love] may require a fundamental reconfiguration of the whole notion of virtue. It is not just that Christians will sometimes practice different virtues than Aristotelians, or that they will practice the same virtues in different ways, but that the very notion of virtue itself (arete) may not be commensurable with a properly Christian theological anthropology. Milbank's central point is that the sovereign Christian virtue is charity--and idea certainly essential to my argument--and that charity is simply not configurable according to any definition of arete.


ii. from Jaroslav Pelikan, Whose Bible Is It?:

To invoke a Kierkegaardesque figure of speech, the beauty of the language of the Bible can be like a set of dentist's instruments neatly laid out on a table and hanging on a wall, intriguing in their technological complexity and with their stainless steel highly polished--until they set to work on the job for which they were originally designed. Then all of a sudden my reaction changes from "How shiny and beautiful they all are!" to "Get that damned thing out of my mouth!" Once I begin to read it anew, perhaps in the freshness of a new translation, it stops speaking in clichés and begins to address me directly. Many people who want nothing to do with organized religion claim to be able to read the Bible at home for themselves. But it is difficult to resist the suspicion that in fact many of them do not read it very much. For if they did, the "sticker shock" of what it actually says would lead them to find most of what it says even more strange than the world of synagogue and church.