Fools for Christ: Essays on the True, the Good, and the Beautiful
Overview
Fools for Christ is a brilliant and balanced examination of the true, the good, and the beautiful. Pelikan first examines Kierkegaard and Paul, analyzing the relationship between the true and the holy. Next he examines Dostoevsky and Luther, and the relationship between the good and the holy. Lastly Pelikan looks at Nietzsche and Bach, and the relationship between the beautiful and the holy. The first section draws on the whole history of Western thought. The second looks into the background of Christian morality, and in the last reaches all the way back to the Greeks in a penetrating study of Western aesthetics. Theology, ethics, and aesthetics—they are all here. Beyond them all, Pelikan shows how the Holy cannot be captured and held by any of them, although the attempt is frequently made. Rather the Holy must remain unqualified, transfiguring within itself the experience of the true, the good, or the beautiful.
Top Highlights
“While the philosophy of Athens and the theology of Jerusalem were speculating about Him, He chose to be born in Bethlehem, to the utter consternation of both speculative philosophy and theology ever since.” (Page 20)
“For the task of Christian theology is to describe, afterwards, what God has done in Christ, and to do so in faith’s own terms. When it seeks to elevate itself into a higher metaphysic or some sacred or sacral science, it betrays and destroys itself.” (Pages 26–27)
“The goal of Christian faith is to subject the total life to God, to ‘take every thought captive to obey Christ.’ All life is under God, depending upon and subject to Him.” (Page viii)
“Kant disposed of one error only to fall into another, he rejected intellectualism to embrace moralism.” (Page 7)
“One of the values with which the Holy has frequently been identified is the True. It has been the peculiar temptation of systematic theology to make such an identification, and the history of Christian theology is replete with examples of the tendency to make faith equivalent to the acceptance of a set of truths.” (Page 1)