Who said it?

It’s been around six weeks since our last ‘Who said it?’ competition, so probably time for another round (not that we need an excuse or anything). Here’s one from the archives:

‘Can it be just that God should bring beings into the world unprotected by an infinite armour of foresight against the infinite chances and temptations to wrong, and yet hold them liable to infinite punishment when they had gone wrong? … Punish a man for his sin, that is just; punish him for ages (if in that other world you can reckon time), that may be just; but make no end of punishing him for that sin, reduce him from a man to a devil and keep him there, let him become for ever vile, mainly because he was ignorant to start with, that is not just … Preach the eternal, unappeasable wrath of God upon lost souls and you offer men a devil to worship’.

So, who said it?

We’ll wrap it all up on Friday.

5 comments

  4. This is a nice one, Jason. Although the response to your challenge might not have been great, it certainly drove me crazy. I knew I had read the quote before, but could not remember from where. It was eating me up. So I ploughed through R.J. Campbell, Samuel Cox, James Baldwin Brown, John Stuart Mill, John Hick etc. (OK, sometimes it was doing keyword searches on soft copies of their works, but that still takes effort.) Finally, I saw the light: P.T. Forsyth in his pre-“conversion” sermon, Mercy the True and Only Justice. Great – that’s what I get for letting you reproduce my copy of this sermon while we were together in St Andrews.
    But seriously, thanks for taking the effort to do this: It’s an opportunity to reacquaint myself with Forsyth, whom I have sort of neglected after my studies.

    Like

  5. The answer is PT Forsyth. So well done Bruce (and Theng Huat, again). As a prize, Hamill can take his pick from any three of the following titles:

  6. The City in the Valley: Biblical Interpretation and Urban Theology by Dieter Georgi
  7. The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations by Carol A. Newsom
  8. Believing Scholars: Ten Catholic Intellectuals edited by James L. Heft
  9. The Myth of a Christian Religion: Losing Your Religion for the Beauty of a Revolution by Gregory A. Boyd
  10. Reality of God and the Problem of Evil by Brian Davies
  11. Sacred Attunement: A Jewish Theology by Michael Fishbane
  12. Finding the Groove: Composing a Jazz-Shaped Faith by Robert Gelinas
  13. A Greener Faith: Religious Environmentalism and Our Planet’s Future by Roger S. Gottlieb
  14. Feminist Reconstructions of Christian Doctrine: Narrative Analysis and Appraisal by Kathryn Greene-McCreight
  15. Naming the Silences by Stanley Hauerwas
  16. Spirituality and the Ethics of Torture by Derek S. Jeffreys
  17. Getting on Message: Challenging the Christian Right from the Heart of the Gospel edited by Peter Laarman
  18. Providence Lost by Genevieve Lloyd
  19. Jesus Wants to Save Christians: A Manifesto for the Church in Exile by Rob Bell
  20. Rediscovering Confession: The Practice of Forgiveness and Where it Leads by David A. Steere
  21. The Epistemology of Belief by Hamid Vahid
  22. Re-thinking Christianity by Keith Ward
  23. Justification: God’s Plan & Paul’s Vision by N.T. Wright

    24. Like

Comments welcome here

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.