"Grant, we beseech thee, O Lord God, unto all thy servants, that they . . . may be delivered from present sadness [(tristitia)], and enter into the joy of thine eternal gladness [(laetitia)]."

"Concede nos famulos tuos quaesumus, domine deus, perpetua mentis et corporis sanitate gaudere et, gloriosa beatae Mariae semper virginis intercessione a praesenti liberari tristitia et futura perfrui laetitia.  Per."

     This prayer occurs in the mid-9th century Sacramentary of Modena (Modena, Biblioteca capitolare, ms O.II.7) and other later 9th-century manuscripts of the Gregorian sacramentary, and then often later on.  See Corpus orationum no. 706 (vol. 1, p. 344), which gives a number of variant readings, including aeterna for futura in Arbuth, Curia-Ott, Herford, Nivern, Sarum, and West II, none of those earlier than the 11th century (Nivern).

   

“perennial prodigies, . . . heirs to a lost sacred mission, . . . strangers among the people they called ‘the people.’”

     "To be a true intelligent meant being religious about being secular; asking 'the accursed questions' over lunch and dinner; falling deeper and deeper into doubt and confusion as a matter of principle; and feeling both chosen and damned for being better educated, more intelligent, and more honest than one’s milieu.  Whether a member of the intelligentsia could find the answers to the accursed questions and still be a member of the intelligentsia was open to question.  Lenin thought not (and did not consider himself one).  The authors of the antiradical manifesto Signposts believed there were no nondoctrinaire intelligentsia members left (and considered themselves an exception).  Most people used the term to refer to both the conscious and the confident—as long as they remained self-conscious about being better educated, more intelligent, and more honest than their milieu.  The proportion of those who had overcome doubt kept growing.  Most believed in the coming revolution; more and more knew that it would be followed by socialism."

     I.e. the eschaton.  Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government:  a saga of the Russian Revolution (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2017), 24.  The headline is from p. 23.

"The overall movement of modernity is a passage from magic to technology".

"Magic represents an effort to transform miracle-working into a permanent ability of man. . . .
     "The modern enterprise of a conquest of nature has the same project as magic. . . . it reconnects with late antiquity by bypassing the Christian Middle Ages.  The latter was little tempted by magic, which the Bible forbids. . . .
     "Contrary to what is often said, magic has nothing medieval about it.  To the contrary, in this area the Middle Ages represented a step back.  Its revival is one of the traits of modernity.  It was tied to the rediscovery by the Florentine Renaissance of pagan Neoplatonism, which gave it philosophical dignity. . . . In a general way, the Renaissance was not an age of the progress of rationality; rather, it was accompanied by a rebirth of credulity.  'The Renaissance was occultist, that is why the University classifies it among the eras of progress.'  The century of Enlightenment was also that of charlatans, of Cagliostro, Mesmer, the Rose-Croix or Masonic sects.  Without speaking of the complicity between socialism and occultism throughout the nineteenth century.
     "The overall movement of modernity is a passage from magic to technology, which took over for the discredited magic."

     Rémi Brague, The kingdom of man:  genesis and failure of the modern project, trans. Paul Seaton (Notre Dame, IN:  University of Notre Dame Press, 2018), 53-55.

Argumentum ad "ea quae parent" (1 Sam 16:7)

     Appeal to "those things that appear" (1 Sam 16:7 Douay-Rheims).  I.e. appeal to "the outward appearance" (RSV) of a man, or argument from "outward appearance" (argumentum ab eis quae parent).  As in (of Cardinal Raymond Burke on the dubia), "I'm sorry, but how can you take someone seriously who adorns himself like that?"

"The issues are . . . as substantial as the issues that came to the fore in the Nicene controversies in the fourth century".

"those who adopt a 'progressive' agenda in response to the novelty of gay consciousness should be set free [via a 'Mexit'] to work out their own confessional and theological commitments without the constraints that currently muzzle their endeavors.  What is at stake here minimally is a theological and moral research program that should be implemented by those who think that the future of the church rests with them. . . . by my own lights I do not think that this research program will bear the fruit its adherents promise; on the contrary I deem it to be a serious mistake that represents a further schism in the history of the church.  The issues are for me as substantial as the issues that came to the fore in the Nicene controversies in the fourth centur[y], in the division between East and West in the eleventh century, in the debates about justification and grace in the sixteenth century, and in the rejection of divine revelation in the nineteenth century."

     William J. Abraham, "In defense of Mexit:  disagreement and disunity in United Methodism," a paper presented at the GBHEM/AUMTS theological colloquy entitled "The Unity of the Church and Human Sexuality: Toward a Faithful United Methodist Witness," 10-12 March 2017, and published in Unity of the church and human sexuality:  toward a faithful United Methodist witness (Board of Higher Education and Ministry, United Methodist Church, 2018), 21.
     The quotations of Albert C. Outler (who invented "the Wesleyan quadrilateral" in order to make room for the theological pluralism represented by the United Methodist Church of 1968) that Abraham provides from the early 1970s (way back then!) are unforgettable.  "we are being asked to vote for or against antinomianism, in an acid test," etc.

     See also Pannenberg, Yeago, Jenson, and others on this blog.

"If we cannot be relatively sure of what God has revealed to us then revelation is an empty concept."

     William J. Abraham, "In defense of Mexit:  disagreement and disunity in United Methodism," a paper presented at the GBHEM/AUMTS theological colloquy entitled "The Unity of the Church and Human Sexuality: Toward a Faithful United Methodist Witness," 10-12 March 2017, and published in Unity of the church and human sexuality:  toward a faithful United Methodist witness (Board of Higher Education and Ministry, United Methodist Church, 2018), 14.

The issue here is not the need for intellectual humility, or the need to be open to further evidence and light; the issue is whether revelation is essentially opaque and needs one more commission to set us straight on what God requires of us.  If theology is yet one more theological seminar overseen by church officials and scholars—aided, of course, by the guidance of the Holy Spirit—then I, for one, dissent from this analogy with the life of the church.  If we really want to resolve matters in the conciliar manner proposed by O’Donovan, then the train to take is the train to Rome.  Vatican II supplies exactly the medicine that is needed to get us out of this dead end in moral theology.  However, Rome alone is no more a solution than scripture alone [(15)].

Cf. this.

"I would provide a more robust role for intuition in the epistemology of ethics" than Oliver O'Donovan

     William J. Abraham, "In defense of Mexit:  disagreement and disunity in United Methodism," a paper presented at the GBHEM/AUMTS theological colloquy entitled "The Unity of the Church and Human Sexuality: Toward a Faithful United Methodist Witness," 10-12 March 2017, and published also in the 2018 book of that same title.