The similar phrase 'Worldly Christianity' is one used by Bonhoeffer. It's J Gresham Machen that I want to line up most closely with. See his Christianity and culture here. Having done commentaries on Proverbs (Heavenly Wisdom) and Song of Songs (Heavenly Love), a matching title for Ecclesiastes would be Heavenly Worldliness. For my stance on worldliness, see 3 posts here.

2010 and eternity


A little slow off the mark I guess - I wasn't sure just where to begin until I found this quotation near the very end of F W Boreham's Bunch of everlastings. He says
I recently took a long, long railway journey through a thousand miles of civilisation, a thousand miles of desert, and a thousand miles of bush. The train bore me to a part of this vast continent in which I found myself surrounded by trees that were entirely new to me, and by flowers such as I had never seen before. I freely expressed my admiration, and, when the time came to commence my homeward journey, I found among the mementoes with which I was presented a beautiful bunch of everlastings. A Bunch of Everlastings! It seems to me I have this morning been gathering just such a bouquet. Here is Stephen Grellet listening to the great word that rings through the silence of the forest Etemity! Eternity! Eternity! Here is Uncle Tom uttering the same word with strange and wonderful effects: Eternity! Here is Dr Chalmers confessing that the mistakes of his life lay in his forgetting the greatness of Eternity! The list could be indefinitely continued; the valleys are full of everlastings. ‘That night,’ says Ebenezer Erskine, in recording in the pages of his diary the greatest spiritual crisis that he ever knew ‘that night I got my head out of Time into Eternity!’ ‘The vastness of the word Eternity was impressed upon me,’ says Andrew Bonar in his diary; and, a few months later, he says again, ‘I strive to keep the feeling of Eternity always before me!’ ‘Gentlemen,’ exclaims old Rabbi Duncan to his students as he dismisses them at the end of the year’s work, ‘many will be wishing you a Happy New Year. Your old tutor wishes you a happy Eternity!’.

1 comment:

William Wilson said...

Hello Gary i just want to wish you and your family a very Happy Newyear2010.