CQOD: 09/22/05 -- Newman: contemplating self instead of Christ

Christian Quotation of the Day

September 22, 2005Meditation:
    The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, "Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!"
    -- John 1:29 (NIV)

---

Quotation:
    A system of doctrine has risen up during the last three centuries, in which faith or spiritual-mindedness is contemplated and rested on as the end of religion, instead of Christ. I do not mean to say that Christ is not mentioned as the author of all good, but that stress is laid on the believing rather than on the object of belief, on the comfort and persuasiveness of the doctrine than on the doctrine itself. And in this way religion is made to consist of contemplating ourselves, instead of Christ; not simply in looking to Christ, but in seeing that we look to Christ; not in His divinity and atonement, but in our conversion and faith in Him... The fashion of the day has been to attempt to convert by insisting on conversion; to exhort men to be converted; to tell them to be sure they look at Christ instead of simply holding up Christ; to tell them to have faith rather than to supply its object; to lead them to work up their minds, instead of impressing upon them the thought of Him who can savingly work in them; to bid them to be sure their faith is justifying, that it is not dead, formal, self-righteous, or merely moral, instead of delineating Him whose image, fully delineated, destroys deadness, formality, self-righteousness; to rely on words, vehemence, eloquence, and the like, rather than to aim at conveying the one great idea, whether in words or not.
    ... John Henry Newman (1801-1890)

---

Quiet time reflection:
    Lord, keep my eyes fixed on You.

---

---

See Believer's Desktop Companion 2004
    http://www.cqod.com/cqoddtcb.html

---

CQOD Compilation Copyright 2005, Robert McAnally Adams, Curator
CQOD Home Page:    http://www.cqod.com/
Subscription info: http://www.cqod.com/cqodlist.htm
Comments and problems: email to curator@gospelcom.net