A sliver of Fall Plowing, by Grant Wood.

Your daily dose of quality quotes.

C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, points out that Christ claimed to forgive sins:

"Now unless the speaker is God, this is really so preposterous as to be comic. We can all understand how a man forgives offences against himself. You tread on my toe and I forgive you, you steal my money and I forgive you. But what should we make of a man, himself unrobbed and untrodden on, who announced that he forgave you for treading on other men’s toes and stealing other men’s money? ... He told people that their sins were forgiven, and never waited to consult all the other people whom their sins had undoubtedly injured. He unhesitatingly behaved as if He was the God whose laws are broken and whose love is wounded in every sin. In the mouth of any speaker who is not God, these words would imply what I can only regard as a silliness and conceit unrivalled by any other character in history.

Yet (and this is the strange, significant thing) even His enemies, when they read the Gospels, do not usually get the impression of silliness and conceit. Still less do unprejudiced readers. Christ says that He is "humble and meek" and we believe Him; not noticing that, if He were merely a man, humility and meekness are the very last characteristics we could attribute to some of His sayings."

Lewis also warns "A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic–on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg–or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse."

I’d like to close with a quotes from one of the books stacked on my bedside table, waiting to be finished– Trinity & Reality: An Introduction to the Christian Faith, by Ralph A. Smith.

"Of all the gods in all the religions of the world, only the triune God of the Bible is truly and wholly personal. This point is often not recognized, so we will dwell on it briefly. First consider the non-Christian theism embraced by Jews and Muslims, the belief in a single god who rules the world. By itself, theism will not suffice to give us a truly personal god, for a god who is utterly and simply one–a mere monad–fails to have the qualities we know to be essential to personality. Although an absolute monad, like the god of Islam, is the most exalted non-Christian idea of deity, a monad is a being who is eternally alone–with no other to love, no other with whom to communicate, and no other with whom to have fellowship. In the case of such a solitary god, love fellowship and communication cannot be essential to his being. Indeed, they are no part of the monad at all. But without these qualities it is difficult to imagine that the deity so understood is in any meaningful sense personal. To conceive of a god who does not know love, a god who has never shared, a god for whom a relationship with another is eternally irrelevant, is to conceive of an abstraction, an idea or a thing more than a person.

If, to make his god more personal, a believer in such a deity suggested that his god loved the world after he created it, the result would be a god who changes in time and who needs the world in order to grow into his self-realization as a god of love– a god who becomes personal only with the help of the creation. Suppose one asserted that the monad loved the world from eternity? Then the personality of this deity and his attribute of love would still depend for their existence on the world he created. Creation would be a necessary act of self becoming...of course, neither orthodox Jews nor orthodox Muslims imagine their god as a changing or contingent being...they must be satisfied with a god who exists in an eternal vacuum, even though they will find irresistible the temptation to ascribe personality to the monad."

– (Pages 18 & 19, chapter 2- Personhood and Harmony)

Last week I had a rash notion that I should try to make a souffle. As I look through it tonight, titles sound so good-- Pineapple Souffle, Chocolate, Lemon, Fresh Fruit, and Hazelnut Souffle's all seem to beckon my imagination. Of course, my imagination is hampered slightly by the fact that I can't remember what a souffle is supposed to look like, but my imagination has never been one to give up at small obstacles. On page 203, the authors begin the section labeled "About Souffles and Timbales".
The quote:

'The souffle is considered the prima donna of the culinary world...usually based on a Bechamel or cream sauce...must always be kept away from drafts and be served at once in the ovenproof straight sided dish in which it was cooked...If your guests are assembled, prepare the souffle. If not it may be like the beauty Horace Walpole commented on: "She is pretty with the bloom of youth but has no features and her beauty cannot last." '

I quickly realized that I am nowhere near the level of cookery I'd need to be at to even think about trying a souffle. ;-)