Function and Form

Thamus simply  takes for granted – and therefore does not feel it necessary to say – that writing is not a neutral technology whose good or harm depends on the uses made of it. He knows that the uses made of any technology are largely determined by the structure of the technology itself – that is, that its functions follow from its form.

Neil Postman, Technopoly, 7

Proverbial Ethics

People do not come to a moral issue as a tabula rasa, so that they may choose either the good or the evil, as though it were in each case an open question how they would choose; they come with their character already formed, and the good infallibly choose the right way, the bad the evil way.

John Barton, Virtue in the Bible

Beliefs and Practices

Christianity has always been more interested in the history of its beliefs than in the history of real practices.

Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self

Right and Wrong

The things that make me right for this job – maybe they’re the same things that make me wrong for everything else.

Jimmy McNulty

Echoing the Glory

The creature has no voice of its own. It does not point to its own picture. It echoes and reflects the glory of the Lord. It does this in its heights and its depths, its happiness and misery. The angels do it (and unfortunately we have almost completely forgotten that we are surrounded by the angels as crown witnesses to the divine glory). But even the smallest creatures do it too. They do it along with us or without us. They do it also against us to shame us and instruct us. They do it because they cannot help doing it. They would not and could not exist unless first and last and properly they did this and only this. And when man accepts again his destiny in Jesus Christ in the promise and faith of the future revelation of his participation in God’s glory as it is already given Him here and now, he is only like a late-comer slipping shamefacedly into creation’s choir in heaven and earth, which has never ceased its praise, but merely suffered and sighed, as it still does, that in inconceivable folly and ingratitude its living centre man does not hear its voice, its response, its echoing of the divine glory, or rather hears it in a completely perverted way, and refuses to co-operate in the jubilation which surrounds him. This is the sin of man which is judged and forgiven in Jesus Christ, which God Himself has made good and cast behind man’s back. It is this which in Jesus Christ has once for all become his past. In the eternal glory before us it will not exist at all even as the past. In the eternity before us the groaning of creation will cease, and man too will live in his determination to be the reflection and echo of God and therefore the witness to the divine glory that reaches over to him, rejoicing with the God who Himself has eternal joy and Himself is eternal joy.

Karl Barth, CD II.1: The Doctrine of God, 648-9

The Core of His Being

God’s glory is God Himself in the truth and capacity and act in which He makes Himself known as God. This truth and capacity and act are the triumph, the very core, of His freedom. And at its core it is freedom to love. For at the core of His being, and therefore in His glory, God is the One who seeks and finds fellowship, creating and maintaining and controlling it. He is in Himself, and therefore to everything outside Himself, relationship, the basis and prototype of all relationship. In the fact that He is glorious He loves.

Karl Barth, CD II.1: The Doctrine of God, 641