Join The Underlines // The Best Of What I Read

A batch of the best highlights from what Joshua's read, .

Our slave-soul’s need to work, work, work for absolution must end. Our wandering as lost orphans must come to an end. The only way to see the ending of these things is not in warring against them to defeat them head on, rather it is by turning our attention to the privilege and favor of sonship. Sonship will displace the other broken self-views with such powerful force that they shatter and scatter into the wake behind our new lives moving forward in Christ.

Orphan Slave Son

Ben Pasley

Truly such as these, if when called they refuse to undertake offices of supreme rule, for the most part deprive themselves of the very gifts which they received not for themselves alone, but for others also; and, while they meditate their own and not another’s gain, they forfeit the very benefits which they desire to keep to themselves.

The Book of Pastoral Rule

Saint Gregory the Great

The first word, psychikos, does not in any case mean anything like “physical” in our sense. For Greek speakers of Paul’s day, the psychē, from which the word derives, means the soul, not the body. But the deeper, underlying point is that adjectives of this type, Greek adjectives ending in-ikos, describe not the material out of which things are made but the power or energy that animates them. It is the difference between asking, on the one hand, “Is this a wooden ship or an iron ship?” (the material from which it is made) and asking, on the other, “Is this a steamship or a sailing ship?” (the energy that powers it). Paul is talking about the present body, which is animated by the normal human psychē (the life force we all possess here and now, which gets us through the present life but is ultimately powerless against illness, injury, decay, and death), and the future body, which is animated by God’s pneuma, God’s breath of new life, the energizing power of God’s new creation.

Surprised by Hope

N. T. Wright

...catch up on these, and many more highlights