06 July 2012

Misattributed sayings

I really appreciated this article from Justin Taylor.  He looks at a quote that is attributed to C.S. Lewis, but apparently was not said by him, nor is it correct.  The statement is: "You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body."  The statement actually comes from George McDonald who was one a strong influence on Lewis.

What is more interesting is the tendency to assume these platitudinous statements without reflection.  The reality is that this approaches an early heresy called docetism, which stated that Christ only appeared to have a body and was distrustful of the physical body. 

I also liked how Taylor showed this tendency with other statements as well, perhaps most famously St Francis of Assisi's "Preach the Gospel always. If necessary, use words" which Francis probably did not say (it was inconsistent with his life), but is also contradictory to Scripture.  Preaching the Gospel necessitates words. 

I wonder how many other quotes we use are misattributions or flatly untrue.  Regardless, we must hold them up to Scripture to see if they are actually true.


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