My fellow scriber, Sonja, has tagged me in a meme. Here’s how it works:

Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. No cheating!
Find Page 123.
Find the first 5 sentences.
Post the next 3 sentences.
Tag 5 people.

I blog in my room where I am surrounded by two beautiful bookcases crafted by my Dad. One he made for me before I left for D.C. five and a half years ago, which is now chuck full. The other he gave me for Christmas, which is steadily filling to capacity with nice, fresh commentaries and seminary books!

So I am surrounded by books, and in the interest of full disclosure, there were 3 books closest to me: Sacred Rhetoric (Michael Pasquarello III), Heaven is a Place on Earth (by my professor Dr. Michael Wittmer), and Not The Way It’s Suppose to Be (Cornelius Plantinga, Jr.) I chose Plantinga’s book because I was curious what might be embedded on page 123, and he’s a helluva writer.

So without further ado:

George Bernanos’s country priest remarks that Satan has involved himself in a hopeless program of swimming against the stream of the universe, of “wearing himself out in absurd, terrifying attempts to reconstruct in the opposite direction the whole work of the Creator.” Thus, while moral evil is destructive, and sometimes infuriating, it is also in some ways ludicrous. Mere Christianity, says C.S. Lewis, commits us to believing that “the Devil is (in the long run) an ass.”

Wowie, what a doosie of a quote! I’m with Lewis: the Devil’s an ass 🙂

Tag, you’re it:
John Frye at jesustheradicalpastor.com
Josh Brown at iamjoshbrown.com
Jake Bouma at jakebouma.com
Michael Lee at addisonrd.com
Scot McKnight at jesuscreed.org (hmm…we’ll see if he catches this and joins in!)