‘Twas ever thus …

… Writing in the Sand: The Poetry of Doubt and Faith by Christian Wiman. (Hat tip, Dave Lull..)

There is a profound tension in the eighteenth century between divine grace and human reason. Grace is absolutely beyond all human capacity, one thinker after another (like Edwards) will say, and then they begin furiously reasoning their way toward it. The idolatry of logic – and it does often seem like that – led to some miraculous discoveries, such as those of Isaac Newton. And it led to some pretty strange Nostradamus-like noodlings in the margins of the Book of Revelation as one thinker after another tried to pin down the exact instant of the Rapture.