City Notes: Books in 25 minutes or less
City Notes (CN) are more than a book review. They are meant to provide you with direct quotes from some books I've read in the last year, so you can get a taste of the overall theme of the book and then begin to chew on what your life might look like if you applied what you read. Here are links to the previous CN books: AND; Life Together; A Meal with Jesus; The Art of Neighboring; A Praying Life; Family on Mission; Leading Missional Communities; Marks of a Faithful Missional Church; Baptism: The Water That Unites; Leadership in Anxious Times; Encounters with Jesus; Exploring More Part 1 and Part 2
Chapter Seven | Communities of Inquiry
" ... we start our explorations from where we are – and that usually means beginning with concerns that are rooted in our personal histories and experiences. But we cannot stay there. ... we have real conversations when we begin to care about each other's learning more than our own. This is a simple point, taken straight from Scripture's admonition to look not only to our own interests but the interests of others. ... From that point on, I treated conversations as microcosms of my life, which meant striving to follow other people's concerns rather than seek my own. If we are clinging to our need for answers, then we will struggle to lay down our pursuits for the good of others. If all we can feel is the existential angst of our own uncertainties, then it will be hard to attend to other people's concerns. If our explorations are paths of our self-justification, then we never learn to lay aside our own learning and carry the cross of someone else's. The euphoria of an epiphany has an intoxicating quality; it is like an explosion of joy and those who have tasted it once can easily be addicted to it and base their lives on it. Such a pleasure isn't wrong: if anything, that it accompanies learning is partly because encountering the truth is a fundamental human good. But to sacrifice such a good for the sake of another is simply to acknowledge that our justification lies in Jesus Christ's death, resurrection, and inevitable return and not in the satisfaction we momentarily feel. The hope and waiting that sanctifies our exploration frees us to treat other people's questions as more important than our own. ... when people who have toiled and worked, have struggled and fought, finally catch a glimpse of that which they have longed for – there is enough joy there to make us forget ourselves altogether." – pgs. 127-128
"The moment each new generation awakes and discovers itself in a strange world, they face the temptation to believe that they are the first to reach an undiscovered country, especially if the church has neglected to hand down a tradition to them. But a properly traditioned community passes down both the tenets of the faith and the questions that accompany them. When the questions are forgotten, tradition ossifies into a rigid, hardened legalism that everyone must accept even if no one can remember why." – pg. 129
"One of my 'favorite' cliches is that we 'shouldn't put God in a box.' That may be true on one level. But what if God has put Himself in a box, like a Scripture-shaped box? What then? Is the problem the box or the shape? If it was a circle-box that were infinitely large, could God fit inside of it? What if we have to be able to say this and not that of something in order to know it? If we say 'God doesn't judge,' does that put God in a box? (Yes, I just dropped one cliche against the other.) If God isn't in a box, even a Jesus-shaped box, can we know Him? Does God know He lacks a box? Is He able to communicate to His creatures the shape of a box He could fit in? I think the cliche means something like 'God is ineffable,' a beautiful word that simply means 'beyond speech.' But does God have a language for His own ineffability? Can He teach it to us? ... It is the nature of cliches to avoid examination. That is how they end up as cliches, because they are uttered with the authority of 'Everyone knows that ... ' regardless of whether anyone knows that at all. They are platitudinous precisely because we think they are beyond question. But those who question well recognize that what everyone treats as obvious often isn't. When Jesus meets a lame man at the pool of Bethesda, He asks whether the man wants to be healed. It's a funny question that most of us would never ask. Of course people who are lame want to be healed. But where we make assumptions, Jesus poses a question. Resisting the urge to resort to cliches would be a good start for any community to begin questioning well." – pgs. 130-131
"If anything, communities that love authority the most will question best, for they will demonstrate a deeper love for the truth on which any authority must ultimately and finally be based. Belief in the authority of Scripture or of those who expound it doesn't end our exploration. It invigorates it by guiding it. We look to our pastor's and church's proclamations for guidance and for insight into the meaning of the text. We give authorities the 'benefit of the doubt.' Their training, expertise, and familiarity with the text means that we should privilege their interpretation above our own. But when we inquire, we search through the text after them to try to see things as they do. We read what they read and look along with them. Pastors who don't 'show their exegetical work' in their sermons should be especially open to and encouraging of their flock's questions. Within the church, elders and the body have distinct responsibilities. We are commanded to avoid 'foolish, ignorant controversies' that 'breed quarrels.' And elders are responsible for preserving 'sound doctrine,' which means exercising oversight. But those responsibilities mean even more that pastors should willingly submit themselves to questioning and that they should model healthy inquiry themselves. As authoritative voices within the community, they should be first to establish such a deep humility before the truth that they are constantly deepening their knowledge of it." – pg. 134
" ... it can be hard for those whose questions morph into doubts to find room within the church. The hesitating moments of uncertainty–the first half of all those psalms–rarely show up in our worship liturgies. Many churches have taken it upon themselves to disciple us in joy. But they have not taught us the mourning, and in moments when sin and brokenness come upon us, we do not know how to respond. Similarly, the (appropriate) emphasis on faith often forgets to acknowledge the possibility of faith's frailty. When that occurs, our proclamations about faith take the tone of expectation and law rather than of exhortation toward a deeper and more assured confidence and maturity. When we forget that we were once weak, we quickly demand that everyone be strong. ... we should (also) not forget the lesson from Jesus and the paraplegic: not all who are doubting want to let their divided mind go in order to enter into the confidence of faith. We can pose a question to shoe who doubt about whether they want to believe or not. Having mercy on those who doubt does not entail demanding that they leave their condition if they have not desire to. Still, given the difficulties in discernment, we should err on the side of waiting with each other and pointing toward the finality of heaven, retelling to each other the narrative of grace and the freedom and forgiveness of sins. For those who wish to be strong and believe may spend years striving to enter the healing waters before Jesus comes and lifts them in." – pgs. 135-137
" ... the church (should) welcome those of us with fears and doubts without hesitation and without question. But like the gentle nurse to the moribund hospital patient, she also undertakes for us the slow and painful work of diagnosing our ailments and providing us relief. ... Those who sit with divided souls must be willing to colabor, to fellowship in another's sufferings, to bear another's burden to keep up their strength. And the church often fails at that. It might seem problematic that a church that proclaims mercy would struggle to extend it. But what else would we expect, given that the church is made up of humans living in a fallen world, awaiting its final perfection? Each time those who doubt are failed by the church, they will be drawn one step deeper into maturity if they extend grace to those who have given none. It is partly for this reason that we should not give up meeting together, even if we are wracked with doubt. If we remove ourselves from the conext of prayer, worship, and the proclamation of the Word, then we cut ourselves off from the very mysterious, secret formation of our hearts and minds that helps us escape our doubts. Continuing to attend may feel like suffering. But if Karl Barth is right, then 'suffering and not triumph' is just what the church means. The church is sometimes the place where we feel the sufferings of Christ on the cross the most. ... The church welcomes those who doubt not as object lessons of what to avoid but as signs of God's grace and reminders of the frailty of belief in a fallen world. As the church listens and attends to those who struggle, its exhortation to believe will be more insistent, more urgent and powerful. What's more, those who feel the absences and endure until the end reorient the church's witness away from the immediate satisfaction of emotional lives toward faithful obedience regardless of the circumstances." – pgs. 139-141
" ... when we orient out lives toward the edification of others, we begin to see the ways in which our lives are entangled in the very mindsets that aggravated us – we catch glimpses of the planks firmly lodged in our eyes. It is tempting for those of us who question to be frustrated at other people's 'naive belief' and their simplistic acceptance of authority. Yet we too believe all sorts of things on authority, without questioning – and quite reasonably so. None of us has done the experiments demonstrating that light acts simultaneously like a wave and particles. Yet broad-minded, reasonable people that we want to be, we are happy to accept it." – pg. 141
" ... as long as we continue to care for the orphans and widows, then the broader context of our lives with Christ will keep our inquiries in their appropriate context – as important moments in our pursuit of understanding, but by no means the sum of the Christian life. The moment our questions stand in the way of our loving and serving our neighbors is the moment we must lay them down. Can the church be a place where we can ask our questions, and even a place where those afflicted by doubts can feel the welcome safety of a home? It often will not feel like it, for the home that we enter into is one that demands our death. There is no place so dangerous to our existence, no place that demands so much as the place where Christ is proclaimed as King. For in taking on Christ's life as ours, we find our own lives and pursuits laid down on behalf of others. Our searching and exploring, our doubting and our weakness, these too are given to us not only for our own good and God's glory but for the building up of the people of God. We travel by faith, each with the measure we have been apportioned and with the degree of confidence that God has granted us. For the church is a wounded but merry band, walking together arm in arm down the long road toward that final day when all the songs we sing now shall be swept up into the great chorus of Hallelujahs and Amens." – pg. 142
Chapter Eight | Friendship, Disagreement, and Our Fundamental Commitments
“When inquiry is modeled and discipled, the gap between healthy questioning and subversive questioning will be easier to discern. I have long wondered – and the question is unanswerable – whether Adam and Eve might have been better prepared to see and reject the serpent’s game if they had inquired themselves before they learned to question from the serpent. We should not underestimate the expulsive power of healthy questioning, in other words. For it is not whether we will inquire but only when and how.” – pg. 150
“Sometimes defense is precisely what is called for. As G.K. Chesterton pointed out, there are thoughts that stop thought – and they merit satire and a healthy dose of scorn. When the gospel was threatened in Galatia, Paul responded with thunderous rebukes. When Jesus denounced opponents with ‘woes,’ He humorously added the lawyers to His list after one of them piped up because he was offended. ... Yet there are stark differences between the world of Jesus and Paul and our own. Neither of them were cloistered within an echo chamber, as we tend to be these days. Paul listened closely enough to the best philosophy of his day to take his message to Mars Hill. Jesus offered His above pronouncements in the company of those at whom He aimed them and suffered their responses. When Jesus warns His followers to beware the teaching of the Pharisees, He exhorts them to ‘watch’ it, not ignore it altogether. The paradox is that as information has become more widely available, our worlds have become more narrow.” – pg. 151
“Self-criticism in movements is a sign of health and confidence, when it is undertaken with a desire to understand and grow. And cultivating a posture of self-criticism helps protect our thunderous denouncements uttered with tongues of angels from sounding like tinny dismissals coming from clanging gongs. We need a polemics and defense that is aimed first at restoration rather than separation. As a people who proclaim ‘one Lord, one faith, one baptism,’ the unity of the church is as much a witness to the world as our truthful proclamation. ... (In 1 Corinthians 5) Paul’s authority is bound by the truth, that it is an authority that is ‘for building up and not for tearing down, and that it is encompassed by his prayers for the Corinthian church. If we genuinely felt the weight of judgment, labored in prayer for others, and mourned the tragedy of the task before us, I suspect we might be less hasty to draw lines and a good deal more effective when we did so.” – pgs. 152-153
“The ability to question alongside someone else is a form of ‘intellectual empathy.’ When we have it, we imaginatively enter into how another person is looking at the world. We go beyond the willing suspension of disbelief to momentarily granting premises and commitments that we might otherwise reject to see how their framework holds together – if the whole framework holds together – and to discern how to respond in light of that. ... Like all virtues, intellectual empathy needs sharp edges to be of much use. In the same way that ‘compassion’ can be reduced to a reactionary impulse that forgoes considering what is actually good for people, so too ‘mutual understanding’ can be reduced to the goal of all our conversation, as though that is enough. ... It is precisely because of our confidence in the truthfulness of our own commitments that we are able to enter into how others see the world and have the freedom to explore along with them. ... the more comfortable we are of where we are coming from, the more confident we will be in venturing out the door. And as Christians, given that God has already given us every square inch of the world before us, we can step out with the knowledge that all will be well.” – pgs. 155-157
“Intellectual integrity ... means having the courage to entertain - another hospitality word - the alternatives placed before us by those we respect and giving reasons when we discern they’re wrong. ... In that process, though, we have to show our work. We ask ‘Why?’ of each other, and then explain away. We give long lists of reasons for our positions (or sometimes, very short lists!) and those are evaluated and questioned to see whether they will stand up. In that mutual process of digging out our commitments and making public our chains of reasoning, we begin to grasp some of the subterranean issues that are often buried beneath the disagreements - our stories, personal experiences, and our worries and anxieties that brought us to our differing conclusions. ... The fruit of such intellectual empathy is persuasion. My goal is to convince (insert name) to see the world the way I do - and ‘doing unto others’ means that I should open myself to the possibility of being converted by him. ... When we see the person beneath the arguments, we begin to be moved out of care and love for the other. I want (insert name) to change his opinions because he really is wrong and because I really care about him and being wrong really matters. And he approaches me the same way.” - pgs. 158-159
“Friendships across party lines help us destroy caricatures. We find ourselves in conversations that reach down to the substantive disagreements, which is the place we must reach for genuine conversion to occur. As Christians, we take an interest in the common good, the well-being of the society that we momentarily call home. But there can be no common good if there is no common ground. And if there is no intellectual empathy, no fundamental interest in understanding each other, there can be no space in which meaningful and constructive disagreement can occur. It is our calling and duty as the church to show the world a ‘more excellent way’ in how we work out our intellectual disagreements and seek reconciliation with those who we think are leaving the faith behind. ... friendships despite disagreement point toward a world where differences don’t necessarily end relationships.” – pgs. 159-160
“It’s tempting to dismiss intellectual opposition altogether as problematic and seek to overcome it at any cost. Even if it were possible, it wouldn’t be good. Opposition is an important source of intellectual and creative energy. Augustine and Athanasius wrote reams of content trying to disabuse the church of heresies that had infiltrated it. Aquinas, Calvin, and Luther – all similarly giants – didn’t shy away from a debate. Dante wrote beautiful poetry tossing his enemies into hell, Michelangelo painted his foes into it, and Solzhenitsyn wrote literature to end communism. My own intellectual hero, Chesterton, wrote a book called Heretics. A healthy dose of opposition clarifies what’s at stake on an issue and sharpens our own thinking. ... A good question sets up an intellectual tension inside of us; it creates mental opposition to our own position. ... Allow me to repeat one caution, though: we will be tempted to attach ourselves more to our disagreements and our desire to appear ‘reasonable’ in the face of them than to the truthful answers that obligate us to move beyond understanding toward persuasion.” – pgs. 160-162
Chapter Nine | How to Ask a Good Question
“Socrates wasn’t the wisest man in Athens for demonstrating his vast knowledge but for having the courage to pose his questions even at great personal cost. Those who love understanding risk their reputations to pursue it. Only the haughty and the dead never have a question reach their lips. ... As a teacher, I didn’t care whether the students’ first questions were any good: I simply wanted them to be interested enough to ask them.” – pg. 164
“When someone asks a question that goes to the heart of the matter and asks it sincerely, it feels different. It will cut through a conversation with the clarity of a bell. Think about being in a meeting when someone voices the question that everyone felt but no one had quite articulated: the transformation in those moments is almost physically palpable. Everyone leans in and focuses a little more.” – pg. 165
“Good questions emerge slowly. It takes time for the whole to unfold for us.” – pg. 167
“We may choose to sacrifice our time for the children’s center down the road one day. But if on the next we choose to tell everyone about our good deed, we corrode the quality of our serving as much as we inflate our own ego. The moment of bragging calls into question the integrity of our reasons for serving to begin with. Many of the most significant moments in our lives will not be clear to us until long after they have passed, but their final meaning will not be fixed until death. Only then will we know for sure whether the play will end in redemption or tragedy. And each of our decisions and all that they bring about will be read through that lens. Only when we pass through that veil will the whole of our lives be made complete. And yet the paradox of the Christian life is that we are given a whole life to interpret our lives through, and so the uncertainty that our own death reminds us of can be driven out by the confidence we have in His. Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again - interpreting our fragmentary moments requires integrating them into that narrative, to see how the meaning of Christ’s life shapes and determines the meaning of each moment of our own. We can live with the partiality of our lives because we have the fullness of God’s. We can live the questions, we might say, because we have an answer who is life Himself. As we explore our experience in light of the Scriptures, we are driven back to the Scriptures with a new thirst for understanding. And through that process of exile and return, of experience and interpretation, our questioning and understanding of God and His world will take us to depths of love and joy and pain and sorrow that we never thought possible. ... The Word cannot be reduced to principles. It creates a way of seeing the world that we enter into and look through. Scripture is not ‘applied’ to our lives. We live within its domains. The more we saturate ourselves in Scripture’s language, the more we will find ourselves inquiring well.” – pgs. 168, 172
“What does it say about us that we are so eager to have the practical questions answered rather than exploring the world they emerge out of? ... As a matter of wisdom, questioning well is an intentional practice. It is one way in which the love God has placed in our hearts takes shape within our lives and communities. Questioning well takes a good deal of prudence; it involves knowing the right questions to ask at the right time and knowing when not to ask a question at all. And it demands inquiring in such a way that the inquiry leads ourselves and others into a deeper understanding of truth and into gratitude for the gracious kindness of God. The point is not simply to master a craft or a discipline – to perfect a technique – but through our questioning to become the sort of people who reflect the love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control that comes from living within the Spirit. Do our inquiries reflect those fruits? Do they engender those fruits in us and others?” – pg. 173
“The questions we send into the world reveal and reinforce ourselves and our interests. We may be too self-absorbed to risk looking bad by asking the questions we’re interested in. Or we may be too self-absorbed to ask anything else. But if practiced without repentance, both errors further inscribe our self-absorption in us. ... By being willing to fail – to experiment and pose questions that are met with blank stares or that go nowhere – we are freed to learn to question well without the pressure of perfection. Only such a freedom is not for recklessness or foolishness but for the unyielding pursuit of truth. Those who have the courage necessary to question well will desire the truth like water and drink their errors like wine, learning from them and sharpening their understanding after them. It is precisely that sort of courage that the cross releases, for there we remember that the God who saved us will also sanctify us, in His timing and His way. All will be well, one way or the other.” – pgs. 174-175
“Our local church communities, instead of on blogs or at conferences, should be where the hardest questions about the Bible are pursued (rather than passed over). Pastors who skip the controversial or difficult questions beneath the texts in favor of practical applications aren’t simply doing an injustice to the text; they are implicitly communicating that such questions are ‘off-limits’ and so undermining the confidence people have that Scripture will stand up to close scrutiny. We can only question well within our communities if we question courageously, which means exploring issues on which there is possibility for confusion, disagreement, and error.” – pg. 175
“We cannot inquire well if we have not the patience to sit through the discomfort of being quiet. I would often allow conversations during my classes to fade into moments of silence for as long as was necessary before someone had something interesting to say. As a good rule of thumb, not filling every pause with a question or statement is one of the first practices and habits that good discussion leaders need to inculcate – and the rest of us as well. Similarly, we should be willing to face the prospect of being bored in a conversation. We want the perpetual stimulation of our minds, but that’s partly because we’ve been badly formed. Conversations are a microcosm of life. And if we are not able to discipline our minds to stay on one subject for an hour without hopping around, then our conversations and inquiries will stay in the shallows. Boredom is the beginning of our learning, not the end, for it is the moment when we run out of thoughts in our own head and have to attend again to the text or world before us and inquire in new ways. I once spent sixteen weeks reading Philippians twice a day. It was the most exhausting, tiring, and mind-numbing reading I have ever done – but it also fundamentally reformed my life. I became so familiar with the book that everything in my life was somehow connected to it. Had a I not pushed through my boredom and reread the texts more times than I could stomach, I would have never encountered its power in the way that I did. The practice of reading and dialoguing is best done, though, within a community. I have long wanted to see church small groups read a passage of Scripture slowly and repetitively, sometimes out loud and sometimes silently, until they have exhausted all the questions that can be asked about it – and the text has exhausted them with all the questions it poses to us. Such a practice would involve (of course!) jettisoning the ready-baked study guides. But it would also embed the Word far more deeply in the minds and hearts of the hearers and break through the surface answers and cliches that we often allow to stop thought. The practice itself would inculcate as much virtue as it would demand of us. Reading slowly, deliberately, and patiently is crucial to questioning well – whether we are ‘reading’ our lives, or books, or the people around us. We should allow our minds the freedom to linger, to immerse themselves in what we are considering, and to explore its nooks and crannies. Love is patient, after all, and not only when the object of our affections doesn’t behave as we want.” – pgs. 176-177
“The only way we become like those we love is through imitation, which means not resting content with the answers they provide but learning to ask the questions that they asked. To make the point theologically, the only way we can think like Jesus thought is by reading what Jesus read and asking the questions He would have asked from it – which is why the Marcionist rejection or suspicion of the Old Testament is a damnable, soul-destroying heresy. ... We must be prepared to travel slowly and to not be discouraged if we do not feel we go at all. Sometimes the darkness comes upon us, which is, as T.S. Eliot puts it, ‘the darkness of God.’ When our understanding seems to collapse and we feel the weight of our unknowing, when our encounters undo our answers and we know not in which direction to turn – that is the moment when we remember we are kept by the hand of God and to wait until we are drawn ‘into another intensity, for a further union, a deeper communion.’ We will all one day enter the darkness of death, the negative space between now and resurrection. Yet the faith, hope, and love we have in the one who has already searched out the ‘undiscovered country’ will keep us safe within His hands until the end of all things, an end that is our beginning.” – pgs. 177-178
Chapter Ten | The End of Our Exploring
“(In Emmaus) Only through the breaking of bread, the joint sharing of life do they find the final satisfaction of their desire to understand the meaning of the Passion events. For these disciples, a truthful interpretation of the Scriptures isn’t sufficient. Having the right answer is necessary, but not enough. Even in the witness of the Scriptures, Jesus points forward to the final disclosure, the consummation of knowledge. The understanding we gain here and now is not false, even if it has not yet been brought to completion. The biblical instruction both intensifies their desire and prepares them for the revelation. Jesus gives them an outline so they will recognize Him when they see in full. Faithful interpretation prepares us for a communion that goes beyond it, a peace that transcends all understanding. Here we see, also, that Jesus is willing to hide Himself that He may be known. He renders Himself not-known that their desire for Him would increase. He hides Himself in their conversation so He might reveal Himself in communion. The light shines in the darkness, but it is a light that overpowers mortal eyes and makes them blind. The immortal, invisible, only wise-God ‘dwells in unapproachable light.’ As the old hymn put it, it’s only ‘the splendour of light (that) hideth thee.’ For what seem to us now negative spaces will one day be uncovered and our eyes strengthened so that we are able to see that the glory of God permeates even the darkest parts of our world. What the passage (in Luke 24) says raises enough questions on its own. But more provocative is what it does not say. As Jesus hides Himself from the disciples, so Luke hides Jesus’ interpretation of the Old Testament from us. The one definitive, infallible, finally authoritative reading of the Old Testament, from the mouth of Jesus Himself - and Luke does not bother to write it down. It is almost as though he is unwilling to short-circuit the process of learning for us. He leaves Jesus’ teaching in the shadows so that we ourselves may be moved to inquire and explore until the last day, when all shall permanently come into the light.” - pg. 180-181
“It is a long journey, this road home. There are detours and wrong turns, mistakes and sins. There is repenting, always repenting, and a mercy that stands with, in, and around us. And there is growth, the only law of the life of the Spirit. It is not always perceptible, for the seeds beneath the earth are reborn long before we see their shoots. And it is always painful, for except that a seed fall to the ground and die, it can bear no fruit. But still there is expansion, the stretching outward and upward to the heavens. We grow into sight. But we are not given it yet. We have heard the echo, but we have not grasped its source. We have seen the reflection, but we await the consummation. When shall I come and appear before me God? Questioning is one form our longing takes. We search out the earth for satisfaction, roaming like Odysseus until we too reach our home. We talk together, wondering on the path toward Emmaus. It is a journey of a thousand sorrows and of a thousand joys. And sometimes the joys and the sorrows come together, and are found within each other, in a collision like a cross that sends our wondering soaring to new heights." – pgs. 182-183
"It is not a framework, an understanding that will make us whole, but a Who. The authorized witness points to the man Jesus, the man back to the words that He makes life. Like those disciples, we stand in danger of resting at the one while missing the other. But the final question we will be asked is not what account we are able to provide but what person we are able to plead to. ... To see in the breaking of the bread the vision of the risen Lord. 'And we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father.' God comes as a stranger into His own home, that we might again have a home with Him. The end of our exploring and our path through the far-off country are one and the same. 'For to me, to live is Christ.' But to die, that too is Christ. And to inquire and to fail, these also must be Christ. ... The defining passage to St. Paul's life and ministry is not found in the argument of Romans or the majestic panoramas of Ephesians but in the heartfelt intimacy of his letter to the Philippians: 'I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.' The prize is not stasis but a movement toward the infinite center, the depths of the goodness of God in the face of Jesus Christ. ... Certainty is a charlatan, doubt a deceiver. The steadfast confidence of faith kneels between, neither triumphant nor defeated but possessed by a sober goodness, a joyful sorrow too powerful for the words that might bear it: 'Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.' Assurance and conviction, that we are kept not by ourselves or our ideas but by the One who is Lord of all." – pgs. 185-186
– Sully
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