good books

I'm trying to catch up on my "reading plan" for 2008 and am enjoying time with books. The primary challenge has been rainy afternoons and late nights. Both of these sabotage my reading by inducing sleep. Here are two neat quotations that I've come across recently.

This is from the chapter on Apologetics: "Corresponding to human blindness is God's hiddeness. God hides himself from those who would know him without loving him. Pascal glories in the obscurity of Christianity, its "folly" as Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 1. This obscurity is what we should expect from a God who hides himself from those who have no desire to love him. The revelation of God in Christ is ambiguous. Only through the gift of faith do we discern the presence of God in the same of the cross. ... The cross is the revelation of God to those disposed to love God, but it hides God from those disposed to reject his reign." This is a thought provoking book and as the authors here speak of the hiddenness of God they are arguing for the necessity of a faithful church community to show God's goodness. The chapter concludes "We need to make people want Christianity to be true. Then we might be able to persuade them that it is true."

This has also been a thought provoking book and still is. (I haven't finished either of these books yet.) N.T. Wright is a very smart and hard working guy who has done a lot of thinking about the resurrection. His primary thesis is that the early church's belief in the resurrection is only explainable by the fact that there was a resurrection. This may sound simple but after reading 250 pages there is a lot to his argument. A major theme that I've seen is how belief in a resurrection challenges power structures in this world. "The future resurrection and glorification of Jesus' followers will vindicate them as the true people of the one true God, despite their present suffering and humiliation, and herald the victory of the gospel of the powers of the world through the final act of new creation. ... Resurrection challenges the powers of the world, as no other theology or spirituality can do, with the news of the kingdom of the creator and covenant God."