Thoughts for a Friday
At one time there was a popular romantic picture of the courageous man who had rejected the props of religion and its illusory comforts, who stood erect on the darkling plain, swept with confused alarms of struggle and fight, facing boldly the fact that life does not provide him with any meaning at all. He is prepared with honesty to manage without it. The difficulty with this alluring picture is that concepts like courage and honesty have to belong to a character in a story, and if in the end there is no story then there is no courage or honesty either. You might as well speak of the honesty and courage and integrity of the warrior ant.
Herbert McCabe, Faith Within Reason, Continuum Books, 2007, (p. 42.)
I’m on something of a McCabe tear lately, it being Lent. The man left behind a mountain of superb material and thanks to Brian Davies, it’s being edited and released in a marvelous series of books like the above.
I expect to be posting more from his works when I can. I think Christian theology is desperately in need of more thinkers like McCabe. Especially these days when the whole tiresome argument seems to be between zealots of Darwin and zealots of Design.