I Heart Charles Gore.

Finished the Gore paper this morning. A few of my favorite quotes from him:

"Now what is it that has in fact made Christianity so real a Gospel? It is the simplicity of its message. It holds up the crucifix and says, 'Sic Deus dilexit mundum.' This is a simple message, and it is simple because it points to facts, to the old, old story of the life and death of Jesus. But observe, the facts only constitute a Gospel, because a certain interpretation of them is implied. It were no Gospel that the best of men, after a life of boundless self-sacrifice, should have been harried to death on Calvary. It only becomes a Gospel if He who submits to this ignominious death really reveals the love, not of man only, but of God, if He really was the Son of God, who out of the love which is His own and His Father's, had come to give Himself in sacrifice for man. It only becomes a Gospel again, if God's power is shewn through the weakness of Christ's death, and He gave assurance of this to all men in that He raised Him from the dead. If He was the Son of God, if He was raised form the dead, we have our Gospel for the world...But the power of this Gospel depends utterly on an interpretation of the facts which is necessarily theological, or (considered intellectually) metaphysical, involving the special doctrine of the pre-existent person of the Son who was sent into the world." -The Incarnation of the Son of God, 23-3, 1891.

“that any really true and distinctive presentation of the principles of Christian living and Christian brotherhood, made vivid and intelligible, and applied under modern conditions, must claim a profound change, not only in the region of the social and industrial life, but even more in the region of our prejudices and presuppositions” - Christianity Applied to the Life of Men and of Nations, 41, 1920.

“the evils which we deplore in our present society are not the inevitable results of any unalterable laws of nature…but are the fruits of human blindness (largely voluntary blindness), willfulness, avarice and selfishness on the widest scale and in the long course of history: and their alteration demands something more than legislative and external changes…it demands a fundamental change in the spirit in which we think about and live our common life” -Christ and Society, 178, 1928.