Ted Tschopp's Blog

Fairy Tales for Scientists

I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale. — Marie Curie

Vision

Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion. – Jack Welch

Success

I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed. – Michael Jordan

Love is Not Safe

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no-one... Wrap it carefully around with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket-safe, dark, motionless, airless-it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is hell.  – C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Anne Rice Quote

I never thought I would be quoting Anne Rice (yes, that Anne Rice), but last night I heard this on a Podcast and had to put it somewhere so I could remeber it.

All these skeptics insisted that the Gospels were late documents, that the prophecies in them had been written after the fall of Jerusalem. But the more I read about the fall of Jerusalem, the more...I found it absolutedly impossible that the Gospel writers could not have included the fall of the Temple in their work had they written it as critics insist ...Wouldn't the Christian writers have seen in the fall of Jerusalem some echo of the Babylonian conquest? Of course they would have...I am convinced that the key to understanding the Gospels is that they were written before all this ever happened. That's why they were preserved without question though they contradicted one another. Of course John A. T. Robinson made the case for an early date for the Gospels far better than I ever could. He made it brilliantly in 1975, and he took to task the liberal scholars for their
assumptions then in Redating the New Testament, but what he said is as true now as it was when he wrote those words.

In sum, the whole case for the non-divine Jesus who stumbled into Jerusalem and somehow got crucified by nobody and had nothing to do with the founding of Christianity and would be horrified by it if he knew about it -- that whole picture which had floated in the liberal circles I frequented as an atheist for thirty years -- that case was not made. Not only was it not made, I discovered in this field some of the worst and most biased scholarship I’d ever read....And I had also sensed something else. Many of these scholars who apparently devoted their lives to New Testament scholarship, disliked Jesus Christ. Some pitied him as a hopeless failure. Others sneered at him, and some felt an outright contempt...I’d never come across this kind of emotion in any other field of research, at least not to this extent. It was puzzling. The people who go into Elizabethan studies don’t set out to prove that Queen Elizabeth was a fool. They don’t personally dislike her. They don’t make snickering remarks about her, or spend their careers trying to pick apart her historical reputation...But there are NT scholars who detest and despise Jesus Christ...Now somewhere during my journey through all of this, I became disillusioned with the skeptics and with the flimsy evidence for their conclusions...Now the Gospels were becoming ever more coherent to me, the Gospels which appealed to me as elegant first-person witnesses, dictated to scribes no doubt, but definitely early, the Gospels produced before Jerusalem fell.  -- Anne Rice from her book Christ the Lord

To Teachers

“Deo, parentibus et magistris non potest satis gratiae rependi.” – To God, to parents, and to teachers we can never render sufficient gratitude and compensation. — Martin Luthers explanation of the 4^th (or 5^th if you are not Lutheran or Catholic) Commandment

I know that not everyone had great parents, and some people are agnostic or athiest.  But I think we have all had people that have taught us things.  When we look back to the screaming ball of snot and crap that we were when we were born and see how far we have come, we can only have feelings of gratitue. We realize the truth of the statement above. 

Martin Luther on the Use and Abuse of Music

“Oh, the art [Music] is a noble commodity. One shouldn’t use it for pay, for purse or coffer. The art is easy to practice, is esteemed everywhere, benefits all people, and nevertheless preserves its own integrity. Yet nobody wants to learn or love it.” — Martin Luther (Sometime bwetween August 31 and Octover 11, 1537)

An interesting thought these days.

Martin Luther on Beer

A couple weeks ago, I mentioned the following letter of Martin Luther to a friend of mine after drinking some beer that disagreed with us.  Last night we went out for some more beer, and he brought the letter up again.  I told him to check my blog and I would post the text of the letter.  I figured I might as well, cross post this to several of my blogs. 

I have also added a couple other quotes about beer that I thought were also good. 

During the summer of 1534 Luther and some of his friends twice visited the court at Dessau in order to give spiritual counsel to the sovereign Joachim of Anhalt, who at that time was seriously ill and was experiencing great spiritual struggles. During his second visit to Dessau Luther wrote this personal note to his wife. He tells first of the pending return of Melanchthon, and of the necessity for his own continued stay in Dessau. Then he informs his wife that “yesterday” he drank something which did not agree with him, and asks his wife to send him his whole wine-cellar and some of her homebrewed beer, because otherwise the beer at Dessau, to which he is not accustomed, would make him totally unable to return home. He concludes by commending his household to God.

To my kind, dear lord, Lady Catherine von Bora, Mrs. Doctor Luther, at Wittenberg

Grace and peace in Christ! Dear Sir Katie! I know of nothing to write to you since Master Philip, together with the others, is coming home. I have to remain here longer for the devout Sovereign’s sake. You might wonder how long I shall remain here, or how you might set me free. I think that Master Francis will set me free, just as I freed him—but not so soon.

Yesterday I drank something which did not agree with me, so that I had to sing: If I don’t drink well I have to suffer, and [yet] I do like to do it. I said to myself what good wine and beer I have at home, and also [what] a pretty lady or (should I say) lord. You would do well to ship the whole cellar full of my wine and a bottle of your beer to me here, as soon as you are able; otherwise I will not be able to return home because of the new beer.

With this I commend you to God, together with our young ones and all the members of our household. Amen.

July 29, 1534
The Man whom you Love
Martin Luther, Doctor

Katie must have been quite a woman.  Not only did she ship him the beer, but Martin also mentions her beauty and calls her his lord. 

Table Talk No. 394: Prenatal Baptisms Are Ridiculed December, 1532

“... Besides, the Word is the principal part of baptism. If in an emergency there’s no water at hand, it doesn’t matter whether water or beer is used.”

Baptised by beer, that must be what makes us Lutherans so different.  I think we finally put our finger on it.

Table Talk No. 3483: Why Does the First Drink Taste Best? Between October 27 and December 4, 1536

“How is it that the first drink from a tankard tastes best? Perhaps it’s on account of sin, because our flesh and our lips are sinful.”

I thought this was an interesting quip.  In the fact that our flesh and lips are sinful they lie to us before the first bottle is drunk by telling us how great beer tastes.  Then on the second and third bottle they lie to us and tell us how bad it tastes.  Ahhh, to drink beer without sinful lips and flesh.  I look forward to the day.

Sermon on Soberness and Moderation against Gluttony and Drunkenness, 1 Peter 4:7-11, May 18, 1539

God does not forbid you to drink, as do the Turks; he permits you to drink wine and beer: he does not make a law of it. But do not make a pig of yourself; remain a human being. If you are a human being, then keep your human self-control. Even though we do not have a command of God, we should nevertheless be ashamed that we are thus spit upon by other peoples. If you want to be a Christian, do not argue in this way: Nobody reproaches me, therefore God does not reproach me. So it has been from the time of Noah. And so it was with the Sodomites, who wanted to rape the angels; they were all so drunk they could not find the door. Sodom and Gomorrah perished because of a flood of drunkenness; this vice was punished. God does not tolerate such confusion and inordinate use of his creatures [i.e., food and drink].

I thought this was important to include.  Here Luther uses the term Turk to refer to the Islamic laws.  It should be noted that in Christianity there are very few Thou Shalt Not’s.  Almost everything is permitted.  Even when something is forbidden, such as the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, God always provides a way out.  The message of Christianity is not a set of rules on how to appear holy.  Christianity is the message that a Holy God has made sinful people Holy.  Christianity is not about what one does or doesn’t do.  It is about what was done because I could not do what was asked of me.

On Religion by C.S. Lewis

“I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.” — God in the Dock

“The great difficulty is to get modern audiences to realize that you are preaching Christianity soley and simply because you happen to think it true; they always suppose you are preaching it because you like it or think it good for society or something of that sort. Now a clearly maintanied distinction between what the Faith actually says and what you would like it to have said or what you understand or what you personally find helpful or think probable, forces your audience to realize that you are tied to your data just as the scientist is tied by the results of the experiments; that you are not just saying what you like. This immediately helps them realize that what is being discussed is a question about objective fact — not gas about ideals and points of view.” — Mere Chrisitianity

Question: Do you feel, then, that modern culture is being de-Christianized?

Lewis: “I cannot speak to the political aspects of the question, but I have some definite views about the de-Christianizing of the church. I believe that there are many accommodating preachers, and too many practitioners in the church who are not believers. Jesus Christ did not say, ‘Go into all the world and tell the world that it is quite right.’ The Gospel is something completely different. In fact, it is directly opposed to the world.”  — Interview with Sherwood Eliot Wirt on CBN

 

 

 

C.S. Lewis on Study

“You cannot study Pleasure in the moment of the nuptial embrace, nor repentance while repenting, nor analyze the nature of humour while roaring with laughter.”  God in the Dock by C. S. Lewis