Sources
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I offer up the following compilation of the "sources" of my thinking and my life agendas mainly as an exercize in self-understanding. In the act of gathering all this, I realized early on the obvious fact that the collection could not be exaustive, but would have to be representative. Moreover, I am also conscious that the thoughts collected here may not best represent the sources of my commitments. Their virtue is that they are close at hand in the bookshelves of my study. My greatest despair is that I have not made room for early formative literature like Kipling's Just So Stories or Alice or Pooh, nor the cartoons that continue to shape my imagination even today. No New Yorker cartoons, no Punch, no Pogo, no Mad magazine, no Robert Crumb or Krazy Kat or Calvin and Hobbes. Just these books which, with the single exception of Paulo Friere, come without pictures.

If in this approach we make our conscious goal the transformation of persons toward the possibilities inherent in them, then we cannot be content with simply “having a good group”, or helping people to “understand the Bible better”, or “giving them more information”, or even “trying to build fellowship”. These are temptations to do the good, not the better. If nothing less that human transformation is our goal, then everything we do must be aimed at enabling people to become more precisely and fully the selves that they need to be in order to be available to God as effective agents of the Kingdom. Walter Wink, Transforming Bible Study (Abingdon, 1980), 82.

Gott existiert nicht, er geschieht. Through a man who was . . . nothing but man the rule of God . . . breaks in.. . . .Authentic speech about God can be made only by one who lets himself be reached and countered, by the event which is God. To make authentic statements about God without being betroffen is impossible. Jesus confronted his disciples with a claim. He could not in any way legitimize that claim . . . one could only entrust his words. People can now not meet Jesus directly; they can only be confronted by the word of proclamation, and that word is just as ambiguous as the human appearance of Jesus was. Willi Marxen, The Beginnings of Christology: A Study in Its Problems (Fortress, 1969), 36.

The stories span our lives and wait an answer. To use a slang expression, they ‘put us on the spot’. The stories are so graphic that we are bound hand and foot. Our conscience must stand and deliver. What is interesting here is the suggestion that it takes a good story to make people realize what the right thing to do is. The road to moral judgment is by way of the imagination! One is tempted to say that aesthetics and ethics are not so far apart in the Gospel as is often supposed. They both have to do with the fitness of things. Amos Wilder, Early Christian Rhetoric (Harvard U., 1964), 60.

Our survey of the modern historical method has led us to the concept of poetry in the sense of a narrative produced by the imagination (“fiction”). This is an elastic formula which comprehends the antique epic, the drama, and the novel of ancient and modern times. But Greek mythology falls within it too. For, as Herodotus says, Homer and Hesiod created their gods for the Greeks.

The creative imagination which makes myths, stories, poems, is a primary function of mankind. Is it a final fact, which cannot be analyzed further? Or can philosophic thought resolve it and integrate it into our comprehension of the contemporary world? Among the numerous autarchic philosophies of contemporary Germany I see none capable of doing so. They are far too occupied with themselves and with the problem of “existence”, and hence have little to give to one who thinks historically. The only one philosopher who attacked the problem was Henri Bergson (1859-1941). In 1907 (L’Évolution créatrice) he had interpreted the cosmic process under the image of an “élan vital”. ….The fiction-making function (“function fabulatrice”) has become necessary to life. For our study, Bergson’s discovery of the fabulatory function is of basic importance. For thereby the much-debated relations between poetry and religion are for the first time cleared up conceptually and integrated into a comprehensive scientific picture of the universe. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Bollington Foundation, 1953), 8-9.