Encounters With Christ

The Gospel According To Luke

“And it came about that while they were there, the days were completed for her to give birth. And she gave birth to her firstborn son; and she wrapped Him in cloths, and laid Him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.”

- Luke 2:6-7

John’s Reflection

“What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we beheld and our hands handled, concerning the Word of life – and the life was manifested, and we have seen and bear witness and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was manifested to us – what we have seen and heard we proclaim to you also, that you also may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ.”

- I John 1:1-3

Malcolm Muggeridge

“The coming of Jesus into the world is the most stupendous event in human history….Either Jesus never was or he still is. As a typical product of these confused times, with a skeptical mind and a sensual disposition, diffidently and unworthily, but with the utmost certainty, I assert that he still is.” Malcolm Muggeridge

1903-1990

Muggeridge on Blaise Pascal

“In that short lifetime Pascal invented the computer, started the first public passenger service in Paris, mastered the problem of the vacuum, expounded his scientific and mathematical studies with such brilliance that it was considered by no means inappropriate to compare him with Aristotle, engaged in vituperative (strong depreciation) and extremely effective theological polemics with the Jesuits, and finally, in spite of appalling ill health and pain, attained a serene relationship with God and with his fellows, in the process producing one of the great masterpieces of all time – the Pensées, a work of Christian apologetics before which the most skeptical mind, indulgent flesh, and arrogant spirit stand defenseless.”

Pascal: Scientist, Inventor, & Mathematician

“Not only do we only know God through Jesus Christ, but we only know ourselves through Jesus Christ; we only know life and death through Jesus Christ. Apart from Jesus Christ we cannot know the meaning of our life or our death, of God or of ourselves. Thus without Scripture, whose only object is Christ, we know nothing, and can see nothing but obscurity and confusion in the nature of God and in nature itself.”

Statue of Blaise PascalBy Eugène Guillaume, 1879Clermont-Ferrand, France

Pascal On Jesus Christ

“Knowing God without knowing our own wretchedness makes for pride.Knowing our own wretchedness without knowing God makes for despair.Knowing Jesus Christ strikes the balance because he shows us both God and our own wretchedness.”

Blaise Pascal1623-1662

Simone Weil

“The French writer and philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943) devoted her life to a search for God – while avoiding membership in organized religion. She had a startling intellect, the social conscience of a grassroots labor organizer, and the certainty and humility of a mystic. And she persistently carried out her spiritual search in the company of the poor and oppressed.”

- Dr. Robert Coles, M.D.Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Humanities

Harvard University

Os Guinness on Simone Weil

Simone Weil, the Jewish philosopher and follower of Christ, disliked the casual arrogance of the term seeker. “I may say,” she wrote in understandable reaction, “that never at any moment in my life have I ‘sought for God.’ For this reason, which is probably too subjective, I do not like this expression, and it strikes me as false.”

Simone Weil’s Story

“In 1937 I had two marvelous days at Assisi. There, alone in the little twelfth-century Romanesque Chapel of Santa Maria degli Angeli, and incomparable marvel of purity where Saint Francis often used to pray, something stronger than I was compelled me for the first time to go down on my knees.” Professor Robert Coles: “I think it fair to say that she fell in love with Jesus; that he became her beloved; that she kept him on her mind and in her heart. She spent the last five years of her life thinking about Jesus, writing about him, praying to him, fitting him into her social and economic and political scheme of things….She was an ambitious, dedicated follower, anxious to meet him.”

Weil: A Jewish Intellectual

• “I had never read any mystical works because I had never felt any call to read them. In reading as in other things I have always striven to practice obedience. There is nothing more favorable to intellectual progress, for as far as possible I only read what I am hungry for at the moment when I have an appetite for it, and then I do not read, I eat. God in his mercy had prevented me from reading the mystics, so that it should be evident to me that I had not invented this absolutely unexpected contact.”

• “All that man vainly desires here below is perfectly realized in God.”• “We cannot take a step toward the heavens. God crosses the universe

and comes to us.”

C.S. Lewis’ Story

“You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and

C.S. Lewis’ Story

knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words compelle intrare, compel them to come in, have been so abused by wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.”

Lewis: An Oxford Don

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. 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

C.S. Lewis1898-1963

Lewis: An Oxford Don

be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

C.T. Studd: A Cambridge Cricketer

“If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for Him.”

1860-1931

G.K. Chesterton

“And then followed an experience impossible to describe. It was as if I had been blundering about since my birth with two huge and unmanageable machines, of different shapes and without apparent connection – the world and the Christian tradition. I had found this hole in the world: the fact that one must somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it; somehow one must love the world without being worldly. I found this projecting feature of Christian theology, like

1874-1936

G.K. Chesterton

a sort of hard spike, the dogmatic insistence that God was personal, and had made a world separate from Himself. The spike of dogma fitted exactly into the hole in the world – it had evidently been meant to go there – and then the strange thing began to happen. When once these two parts of the two machines had come together, one after another, all the other parts fitted and fell in with an eerie exactitude. I could hear bolt after bolt over all the machinery falling into its place with a kind of click of relief. Having got one part right, all the other parts were repeating that rectitude, as clock after clock strikes noon. Instinct after instinct was answered by doctrine after doctrine. Or, to vary the metaphor, I was like one who had advanced into a hostile country to

G.K. Chesterton

take one high fortress. And when that fort had fallen the whole country surrendered and turned solid behind me. The whole land was lit up, as it were, back to the first fields of my childhood.”

Chesterton: A Brilliant, Prolific Writer

• “Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a god who knew the way out of the grave” (The Everlasting Man).

• “There is something to be said for every error, but, whatever may be said for it, the most important thing to be said about it is that it is erroneous” (All Is Grist).

• “If there were no God, there would be no atheists” (Where All Roads Lead).

• Later in life, to encourage a friend who was bothered with certain difficulties about the Faith, he said, “I doubt if there is a doubt anywhere I have not entertained, examined, and dismissed.”

Council of Chalcedon, A.D. 451

“Therefore, following the holy Fathers, we all with one accord teach men to acknowledge one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, at once complete in Godhead and complete in manhood, truly God and truly man, consisting also of a reasonable soul and body; of one substance with the Father as regards his Godhead, and at the same time of one substance with us as regards his manhood; like us in all respects, apart from sin; as regards his Godhead, begotten of the Father before the ages, but yet as regards his manhood begotten, for us men and for our salvation, of Mary the Virgin, the God-bearer; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, recognized in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without

Council of Chalcedon, A.D. 451

separation; the distinction of natures being in no way annulled by the union, but rather the characteristics of each nature being preserved and coming together to form one person and subsistence, not as parted or separated into two persons, but one and the same Son and Only-begotten God the Word, Lord Jesus Christ; even as the prophets from earliest times spoke of him, and our Lord Jesus Christ himself taught us, and the creed of the Fathers has handed down to us.”