Courage to Proclaim, Openness to Critique

"[One] requirement I would suggest for a missionary encounter with our culture is simply the courage to hold and to proclaim a belief that cannot be proved to be true in terms of the axioms of our society. This may sound simplistic, but it is not. Our modern scientific culture has pursued the ideal of a completely impersonal knowledge of a world of so-called facts that are simply there, that cannot be doubted by rational minds, and that constitute the real world as contrasted with the opinions, desires, hopes, and fears of human beings, a world in which the words purpose and value have no meaning. This whole way of trying to understand the totality of human experience rests on beliefs that are simply not questioned. For every attempt to understand and cope with experience must rest on some such belief. Every such belief is, of course, open to critical question, but no criticism is possible except by relying on other beliefs that are - in the act of criticizing - exempt from criticism."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 148 (emphasis mine)

The Witness of Like-Minded Individuals

"[Denominations] cannot confront our culture with the witness of the truth since even for themselves they do not claim to be more than associations of individuals who share the same private opinions."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 146 (emphasis mine)

Firmly Centered, Open Dialogue

"Thus a true understanding of the gospel itself ought to enable Christians to be firm in their allegiance to Christ as the way, the truth, and the life, and also to be ready to enter into a genuinely listening dialogue with those who they have to be ready to learn."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 139

How Church Acted in Power

"We have to confess also, if we are to be honest, that the same churches that demanded freedom of conscience when they were in a minority have, when they became majorities, denied to others the freedom they claimed for themselves. How, if we are to think of a Christian society, can we ensure that the same sins are not repeated when and if Christians are in a position to impose their views on others?"


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 137

Death's Division of Values, Unity in Christ

"It is death that creates that fatal dichotomy between two worlds of meaning - one that sees ultimate meaning only in the destiny of my immortal soul and thus makes the public history of the world a story without meaning; the other that sees meaning only in the march of humanity toward a shared future, and thus makes the human person marginal and finally dispensable.
... The gospel is good news at this point because Christ has overcome the power of sin and death. Entering completely into our shared humanity with all its burden of sin, he has gone down into the darkness of death and judgement for us, and, in his resurrection, given us a sign and foretaste of total victory. ... Following that way, we can commit ourselves without reserve to all the secular work our shared humanity requires of us, knowing that nothing we do in itself is good enough to form part of that city's building, knowing that everything - from our most secret prayer to our most public political acts - is part of that sin-stained human nature that must go down into the valley of death and judgment, and yet knowing that as we offer it up to the Father in the name of Christ and in the power of the Spirit, it is safe with him and - purged in fire - it will find its place in the holy city at the end."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 135-136 (emphasis mine)

Privatized Religions Thriving in Empire

"This dichotomy between the private and the public worlds is the central clue to the ideology that governs our culture. To accept it is to make the surrender the early church refused to make - at the cost of the blood of countless martyrs. A private religion of personal salvation that did not challenge the public ideology was perfectly safe under Roman law, as it is safe under ours. On these terms the church of the first three centuries could have flourished under the rule of Caesar precisely as this kind of evangelicalism flourishes under the protection of our kind of society. But the authentic gospel cannot accept this kind of relegation."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 132-133

Salvation Without Discipleship: A False Gospel

"A preaching of the gospel that calls men and women to accept Jesus as Savior but does not make it clear that discipleship means commitment to a vision of society radically different from that which controls our public life today must be condemned as false."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 132

One Man's Unity, Another's Imperialism

"Imperialism is the name we give to other people's proposals for human unity. And, of course, we are right: every proposal for human unity that does not specify the center around which that unity is to be created, necessarily has the will, the vision, the beliefs of the proposer as its implied center."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 123 (emphasis mine)

Freedom & Equality: Opposite Ends of The Enlightenment Stick

"Both capitalism and socialism draw strength from a vision of human life, and this vision sustains them in face of their failures. For capitalism it is the vision of freedom - the freedom of the individual person to develop his own powers, to achieve the greatest success he is capable of and to enjoy the fruit of his achievement. For socialism it is the vision of equality. ... Both derive from the Enlightenment vision of human beings as autonomous individuals with innate and equal rights to pursue self-chosen ends to the limit of their powers. Each ideology can accuse the other of violating a faith they both hold by the denial of freedom on the one side and by the denial of equality on the other. ... The breakdown of relationships will destroy freedom and will destroy equality, but neither of these will be achieved by being sought for itself. True freedom is not found by seeking to develop the powers of the self without limit, for the human person is not made for autonomy but for true relatedness in love and obedience; and this also entails the acceptance of limits as a necessary part of what it means to be human."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 118-119 (emphasis mine)

Religious Right, Sacralized Politics

"The sacralizing of politics, the total identification of a political goal with the will of God, always unleashes demonic powers. ... This confusion of a particular and fallible set of political and moral judgments with the cause of Jesus Christ is more dangerous than the open rejection of the claim of Christ in Islam, just as the shrine of Jereboam at Bethel was more dangerous to the faith of Israel than was the open paganism of her neighbors, for the worship of Ba'al was being carried on under the name of Yahweh. The 'Religious Right' uses the name of Jesus to cover the absolute claims of one national tradition."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 116

Christian Public Truth

"Christians can live and bear witness under any regime, whatever its ideology. But Christians can never seek refuge in a ghetto where their faith is not proclaimed as public truth for all. They can never agree that there is one law for themselves and another for the world. They can never admit that there are areas of human life where the writ of Christ does not run."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p.115

The Family in Capitalism

"The family ... is precisely the place where the noncapitalist values have to be learned, where one is not free to choose his company and where one is not free to pursue self-interest to the limit. Because capitalism pursues the opposite goals - the freedom of each individual to choose and pursue his own ends the the limit of his power - the disintegration of marriage and family life is on e of the obvious characteristics of advanced capitalist societies."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 113

The Guidance Capitalism Needs

"To say that capitalism requires a certain kind of moral foundation is to say that capitalism cannot survive permanently in a purely secular society. To quote a recent writer, 'The disinterested devotion which was vital to the creation of the capitalist world order and to the public life of industrial nations and whic rested on a religious idea-system appears as a type of moral capital debt which is no longer being serviced.' ... If capitalism depends on the insights of a moral conscience, then that conscience has to have authority over the working of capitalist economics. ... The conscience that is required to keep capitalism going has no ontological basis. It is a carry-over from an earlier world view."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 112 (emphasis mine)

The interior quote is B. Wilson, quoted in Habgood, Church and Nation in a Secular Age p. 47

Capitalism's Idolatrous Gods

"Traditional Christian ethics had attacked covetousness as a deadly sin, and Paul had equated it with idolatry: the putting of something that is not God in the place belonging to God (Col. 3:5). The eighteenth century, by a remarkable inversion, found in covetousness not only a law of nature but the engine of progress by which the purpose of nature and nature's God was to be carried out."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 109

Theology, Queen of Economics

"Neither for Luther nor for Calvin would it have appeared as anything other than incomprehensible blasphemy to suggest that human behavior in the sphere of economics was outside the jurisdiction of theology. On the contrary, buying and selling, hiring labor and working for a master, amassing wealth and enclosing land - these are precisely the human activities in greatest need of the reminder that every man stands under the law of God and will be accountable to God for his treatment of his neighbor."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 107

Resident Aliens Working for Common Good

"Faith working through love is the foundation of justice, and without justice there is no commonwealth. It follows that, like the exiles whom Jeremiah urged to seek the peace of Babylon, and like the early Christians who were urged to pray for kings and rulers, those who - as citizens of the city of God - are resident aliens in the earthly city, must nevertheless seek its good order, and, when called to responsibility as rulers, must accept it in the spirit of servants of the common good. This is required by obedience to the law of God, which is love. Thus the citizens of the heavenly city will actively seek the peace and good order of the earthly city, not seeking to forestall, but patiently awaiting, the final judgment when the two will be visibly separated and the heavenly city will appear in all its beauty. Meanwhile, the monastic communities, such as the one to which Augustine belonged, are a visible sign and preliminary realization of a world ruled solely by the love of God in the midst of a world ruled by the love of self."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 104-105

Love, Training and Maturity

"We develop into mature human beings not by an automatic process operating from within the human person as a separate organism but as a response to the cherishing and training of our parents and teachers. The process by which a human fetus eventually becomes a mature person able to recognize and follow what is good depends on the loving and purposeful will of those who have gone before."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 92

Reciprocal Love Without Subordination

"We know that at the deepest levels of interpersonal relationships - of friend with friend, of man and woman in love - there is always the longing for complete mutual understanding. But we know that it is never in fact complete, and never wholly free from the danger that on subordinates the other, uses the other, manipulates the other. Can there ever be complete reciprocity, or is this an unattainable ideal to be striven for but never reached? Is it a mirage or a reality that can be reached? The Christian testimony is that it is a reality within the being of the Triune God."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p.89

Religious Experience is not Religion

"That the word religion points to a kind of experience that is widely diffused throughout human history is an obvious fact. But that what is called religion is the only or the primary form of contact between the human race and its Creator is a mere assertion that has no logical foundation."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p.88

Natural Theology, Natural Anthropology

"We do not infer the existence of another person from an analysis and classification of the audiovisual sensations we receive, but rather we attend directly to the person as a living center of meaning and purpose, and for this direct relationship our awareness of the sounds and gestures made by the other person is subsidiary and tacit. Thus it would also be idle to suppose that we could come to the knowledge of a supernatural personal reality by induction from all the data of our natural experience. At this point the only relevant questions are: Is there anyone present? Has he spoken? Natural theology ends here; another kind of enterprise begins, and another kind of language has to be used - the language of testimony."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 88

Negotiation Without Criterion

"There is no way of dealing with conflicts between differing purposes except by a process of mutual exchange, in which each tries to communicate to the other his perception of what is the the proper objective of purposeful action, in other words, of what is good. In this context, the word good is obviously irrelevant if it means only 'what I want for myself.' It can only mean 'good absolutely, good for all.' If it does not mean this, the whole exercise in mutual communication is meaningless. If there is nothing that is 'good' in this universal sense, then in every conflict of interest the only argument that is not meaningless is 'this is what I want to do.'"





Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 86

Methodological Atheism & Our Contingent World

"The 'methodological atheism' of modern science has been part of the clue to its dazzling success. It was and is part of the recognition of contingency in the nature of things. As long as scientific thought was controlled by the idea of perfect numbers and perfect circles, or by the concept of the purposeful organism (and both of these were legacies of Greek science) - in other words, as long as it was controlled by the idea of a completely immanent rationality - the breakthrough to modern science could not occur."


Leslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 72

Presuppositionalist Science

"Without that passionate faith in the ultimate rationality of the world, science would falter, stagnate, and die - as has happened before. Thus science is sustained in its search for an understanding of what it sees by faith in what is unseen. ... The necessary precondition for the birth of science as we know it is, it would seem, the diffusion through society of the belief that the universe is both rational and contingent. Such a belief is the presupposition of modern science and cannot by any conceivable argument be a product of science. One has to ask: Upon what is this belief founded?"


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 71

Privacy and the God of the Bible

"The currently popular way of coping with the science-religion debate by reagarding it as an example of two ways of 'seeing as' is, I fear, only a particular manifestation of that dichotomy between the public world of facts and the private world of values ... But if we are talking as the Bible talks about God, who is Creator and Governor of all things, who acts in specific ways, and whose purpose is the criterion for everything human, whether in the public or the private sectors, then there is an inevitable conflict."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 67

The Gospel Questioning Our Assumptions

"The [statement that the tomb was empty] can be accepted as a fact only if the whole plausibility structure of contemporary Western culture is called into question. To accept it as a fact means that history has a meaning that cannot be found from any study of the regularities and recurrences of the past. It means that the whole existing order of nature and history is confronted by a new reality that gives it a new meaning"


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 62

Scientific Worldview

"The modern scientific world-view functions as a plausability structure in the same way as does Islam or Catholicism. This is not, of course, to say anything about the truth of the views embodied in these structures, but only about the way they function in limiting the freedom of the individual in deciding questions about truth."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 54

Wider Rationality

"The Christian claim is that, thought that other way of understanding the world can in no way be reached by any logical step from the azioms of this one, nevertheless that other way does offer a wider rationality that embraces and does not contradict the rationality of this."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 54

4 Modes of Scriptural Authority

"Many different strategies have been developed in the attempt to retain an authentic place for the Bible in the post-Enlightenment world. One was to continue to assert as a matter of faith that the Bible is a factually accurate account of creation and history and that where the account is contradicted by modern science, modern science is wrong. 1) [This strategy] is difficult to maintain without a kind of split personality if one is going to live an active life in the modern world. As Langdon Gilkey has remarked, even the most devout fundamentalist in Texas, when prospecting for oil, consults geologists and not biblical scholars. 2) Those who hold this position are themselves part of the modern world; consequently, when they say that the Bible is factually accurate, they are working with a whole context of meaning, within a concept of factuality that is foreign to the Bible. Fundamentalism in this form is a post-Enlightenment product."

"Much more common than this has been the strategy that seeks to conserve the religious meaning of the Bible without any attempt to defend its factual accuracy in matters of natural science or history. ... But this can lead to a situation in which the scholar simply subjects the biblical text to the same kind of critical analysis that he would use in the case of any other text of similar antiquity. The scholar is the active subject; the Bible is the passive object. ... The scholar examines the text but is not, in any profound sense, examined by the text. If he is a believer, he will draw from the text illumination for his own faith. But his faith does not rest on the authority of the text."

"Another way of seeking to relate the Bible to the post-Enlightenment world has been to distill from it concepts of principles that could be applied to modern life. ... It is not clear what their provenance in the Bible gives them or why it should give them any authority other than the authority that their intrinsic rightness may give them to the reason and conscience of modern men and women."

"Another strategy has been to concentrate on the character of the Bible as history - the history of the acts of God. God's revelation of himself, in this view, is not in the text itself but in the events reported and interpreted in the text. ... It is for the modern believer to understand the story of these acts, the salvation history, in contemporary terms. ... But it is not always clear whether the series of divine acts that constitute the salvation history is to be understood as forming the central thread of universal history ... or whether it is understood as the clue to the specifically religous experience that is available as a personal option within public history."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 45-48

Subjective Religion IS a Projection

"In The Christian Faith Schleiermacher defined the nature of theology in terms that place it firmly on one side of the divide between the world of public facts and the world of private values. 'Christian doctrines,' he writes, 'are accounts of the Christian religious affections set forth in speech." ... "It is clear that Feuerbach was only drawing the obvious conclusion when he said that the very idea of God is a brockenspecter, the projection of an image of the human ego onto the cosmos."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 44-45

The 'Light' in the Enlightenment

"The 'light' in the Enlightenment was real light. We are able in some respects to understand the Bible better than we did before, and we are able in some ways to understand what actually goes on in the life of the church better than we did before the Enlightenment. Whatever else may be possible, it is not possible to put ourselves back before that experience. It is not possible to unknow what we have learned."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 43

Schooled in the Facts

"Modern post-Enlightenment societies have, as an essential part of thier development set up public educational systems by which children are taken away from their parents and introduced to those areas of knowledge and skill that enable them to function effectively in the public world of facts. Science is taught as a true account of how things really are. But what can be done about values? On what basis are they to be taught? Values in any culture, insofar as they are consciously and reflectively affirmed and not merely embodied in customary behavior, are based on some vision of the ultimate nature of things."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 38

The Absence of Facts, Strong Convictions

"If purpose is not a feature of the world of 'facts,' and if human beings entertain purposes, that is their personal choice and they will have to create the purposes for themselves. Their purposes have no authority beyond the strength of conviction with which they hold them."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 37

Valuing the Value-less

"At the intellectual level, this fissure expresses itself in the search for 'value-free' facts, and for a science of human behavior that shall be 'objective' in the sense that no value judgments are allowed to have a place in its operations. ... An ideal that one might define paradoxically by saing that the only really valuable things are value-free facts - has enormous power in the public life of modern societies."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 36

Bureaucracy's Blind Rule

"Bureaucracy applies the mechanical model to this task. It provides machinery in which there is a high degree of division of labor, of specialization, of predictability, and of anonymity. It is of the essence of bureaucracy that it sets out to achieve a kind of justice by treating each individual as an anonymous and replaceable unit."

"In its ultimate development, bureaucracy is the rule of nobody and is therefore experienced as tyranny."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 33 (emphasis mine)

Market Economics and Division of Labor

"As the principle of the division of labor gained ascendency, the market moved into the central place as the mechanism that linked all the separate procedures with each other and with consumers. The modern science of economics was born. Once again teleology was removed, because economics was no longer part of ethics. It was not concerned with the purpose of human life. ... What does not enter the market is ignored. Gross National Product referes only to what enters the market. It excludes the work of the housewife, of the gardener growing his own food. .. Two further consequences follow. One is the removal of work from the home to the factory, with immense consequences for the nature of society. The home is no longer the unit of work, and the family is no longer the working unit. The way is opened for a deep divide between the public world of work, of exchange, of economics, and the private world that is withdrawn from the world of work and remains under another vision of how things are. In the public world the workers in the factory are related to each other anonymousely as units in a mechanical process. They are replaceable parts."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 30-31

Hope in the Future and Present Totalitarianism

"The eighteenth century transferred the holy city from another world to this. No longer would it be a gift of God from heaven; it would be the final triumph of the science and skill of the enlightened peoples fo the earth."

"If all hope is vested in a future that those now living will not share, and if the nation-state is posited as the guarantee of 'rights' that are in principle infinite, it opens the way for the kind of totalitarian ideologies that use the power of the state to extinguish the rights of the living for the sake of the supposed happiness of those yet unborn. And even when this extreme development does not take place, the vesting of all hope in an earthly future means that the relative positions of the young and the old are reversed."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 28

Securing the Infinite Demand for Happiness

"The nation-state replaces the holy church and the holy empire as the centerpiece in the post-Enlightenment ordering of society. Upon it devolves the duty of providing the means for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And since the pursuit of happiness is endless, the demands upon the state are without limit. If - for modern Western peoples - nature has taken the place of God as the ultimate reality with which we have to deal, the nation-state has taken the place of God as the source to which we look for happiness, health, and welfare."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 27

The Purpose of Happiness

"The question 'What is true happiness?' can only be finally answered on the basis of the answer to another question: What is the chief end of man? But the age of reason had banished teleology from its way of understanding the world, and so 'happiness' had no definition except what each autonomous individual might give it. Each individual has the right not only to pursue happiness but to define it as he wishes."

Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 26

Priority of Causal Explanation

"All causes, therefore, are adequate to the effects they produce, and all things can be in principle adequately explained by the causes that produce them. To have discovered the cause of something is to have explained it. There is no need to invoke purpose or design as an explanation. There is no place for miracles or divine intervention in providence as categories of explanation. God may be conceived, as in eighteenth-century Deism, as the ultimate author of it all, but one does not need to now the author personally in order to read the book. Nature - the sum total of what exists - is the really real. And the scientist is the priest who can unlock for us the secrets of nature and give us the practical master of its workings."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 25

How Explanations Work

"We accept something as an explanation when it shows how an unexplained fact fits into the world as we already understand it. Explanation is related to the framework of understanding we inhabit, the firm structure of beliefs we never question, our picture of how things really are."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 22

Privatized Faith and Church Choice

"Having lost the battle to control education, and having been badly battered in its encounter with modern science, Christianity in its Protestant form has largely accepted relegation to the private sector, where it can influence the choice of values by those who take this option. By doing so, it has secured for itself a continuing place, at the cost of surrendering the crucial field. As an option for the private field, as the protagonist for certain values, Christianity can enjoy considerable success. Churches can grow. People can be encouraged, as the posters in General Eisenhower's day used to put it, to 'join the church of your choice.'"

Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 19

Submissive Truth Claims

"It is indeed true that Christian theology cannot be done properly without facing the questions raised by modern science and by other world religions. But two things are here simply taken for granted, without argument: first, that the essence of Christianity is the same as that of the other world religions, and second, that all the religions have to submit their truth-claims to the discipline of the scientific method. At this point we are all required to be orthodox with respect to the plausibility structure that is called the modern scientific method. We are not allowed to be heretics."


Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 18

Fact-Value Heretics

"There is a world of what are called 'facts,' as distinct from what are called 'values.' In the latter world we are all free to choose what we will cherish and what we will neglect; in the world of values the heretical imperative operates. But it does not operate in the world of what our culture calls 'facts'; here it is assumed that statements are either true or false. Where statements of alleged fact are in contradiction to one another, we do not simply leave it at that, much less congratulate ourselves on our faithfulness to the principle of pluralism. We argue, experiment, carry out tests, and compare results, until we finally agree on what the facts are; and we expect all reasonable people to accept them. The one who does not accept them is the real heretic."

Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 16

We Are All Heretics Now

"Peter Berger is among those who have written extensively about the possibility of Christian affirmation in the context of modern Western culture. In The Heretical Imperative he has argued that the distinctive feature of this culture is that there is no generally acknowledged 'plausibility structure,' [-footnote- A 'plausibility structure,' as Berger uses the term, is a social structure of ideas and practices that create the conditions determining what beliefs are plausible within the society in question.] acceptance of which is normally taken for granted without argument, and dissent from which is regarded as heresy, that is, according to the original meaning of hairesis - choosing for oneself, making one's own personal decision instead of accepting the given tradition. ... In modern Western culture, so Berger argues, we are all required to be heretics, for there is no accepted plausibility structure. With respect to ultimate beliefs, pluralism rules, and thus each individual has to make a personal decision about ultimate questions. In that sense, we are all now subject to the 'heretical imperative.'"

Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p.10-11

Between Relevance and Syncretism

"In the attempt to be 'relevant' one may fall into syncretism, and in the effort to avoid syncretism one may become irrelevant."

Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 7

Culturally Conditioned Gospel

"The idea that one can or could at any time separate out by some process of distillation a pure gospel unadulterated by any cultural accretions is an illusion. It is, in fact, an abandonment of the gospel, for the gospel is about the word made flesh. Every statement of the gospel in words is conditioned by the culture of which those words are a part, and every style of life that claims to embody the truth of the gospel is a culturally conditioned style of life. There can never be a culture-free gospel. Yet the gospel, which is from the beginning to the end embodied in culturally conditioned forms, calls into question all cultures, including the one in which it was originally embodied."

Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 4

Miraculous Vision

"Father Vaillant began pacing reslessly up and down as he spoke, and the Bishop watched him, musing. It was just this in his friend that was dear to him. 'Where there is great love there are always miracles,' he said at length. 'One might almost say that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love. I do not see you as you really are, Joseph; I see you through my affection for you. The miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.'"

Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop, 1993 Modern Library edition p. 56