Quotes by Theologians - Page 22

A moment of happiness,you and I sitting on the verandah,apparently two, but one in soul, you and I.We feel the flowing water of life here,you and I, with the garden's beautyand the birds singing.The stars will be watching us,and we will show themwhat it is to be a thin crescent moon.You and I unselfed, will be together,indifferent to idle speculation, you and I.The parrots of heaven will be cracking sugaras we laugh together, you and I.In one form upon this earth,and in another form in a timeless sweet land.
Jalaluddin Rumi
Children only know what you teach them.
Paul Ramsey
Religion is no more possible without prayer than poetry without language or music without atmosphere.
James Martineau
Hush my dear lie still and slumber Holy angels guard thy bed! Heavenly blessings without number Gently falling on thy head.
Isaac Watts
The safest road to Hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope soft underfoot without sudden turnings without milestones without signposts.
C.S. Lewis
Music. A meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience.
C.S. Lewis
here is nothing which any way pertains to the the worship of God left to the determination of human laws, besides the mere circumstances, which neither have any holiness in them, forasmuch as they have no other use and praise in sacred than which have in civil things, nor yet were particularly determinable in Scripture.
George Gillespie
It's just because I have picked a little about mystics that I have no use for mystagogues. Real mystics don't hide mysteries, they reveal them. They set a thing up in broad daylight, and when you've seen it it's still a mystery. But the mystagogues hide a thing in darkness and secrecy, and when you find it, it's a platitude.
G.K. Chesterton
Love gives you eyes.
Peter Kreeft
Fear is the denomination of the Old Testament belief is the denomination of the New.
Benjamin Whichcote
Magic is that paganistic reversal of the process of religion, in which man, instead of letting himself be used by God for the divine purpose, drags down his god to the level of a tool, which he uses for his own selfish purpose.
Geerhardus Vos
Nature never taught me that there exists a God of glory and of infinite majesty. I had to learn that in other ways. But nature gave the word "glory" a meaning for me.
C.S. Lewis
All heroes are shadows of Christ
John Piper
If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.
C.S. Lewis
To shrink back from all that can be called Nature into negative spirituality is as if we ran away from horses instead of learning to ride. There is in our present pilgrim condition plenty of room (more room than most of us like) for abstinence and renunciation and mortifying our natural desires. But behind all asceticism the thought should be, ‘Who will trust us with the true wealth if we cannot be trusted even with the wealth that perishes?’ Who will trust me with a spiritual body if I cannot control even an earthly body? These small and perishable bodies we now have were given to us as ponies are given to schoolboys. We must learn to manage: not that we may some day be free of horses altogether but that some day we may ride bare-back, confident and rejoicing, those greater mounts, those winged, shining and world- shaking horses which perhaps even now expect us with impatience, pawing and snorting in the King’s stables. Not that the gallop would be of any value unless it were a gallop with the King; but how else— since He has retained His own charger—should we accompany Him?
C.S. Lewis
How quickly self rises to the surface, and the instrument is ready to believe he is something more than an instrument! How sadly easy it is to make of the very service God entrusts us with a pedestal on which to display ourselves. But God will not share His glory with another, and therefore does He "hide" those who may be tempted to take some of it unto themselves. It is only by retiring from public view and getting alone with God that we can learn our own nothingness.
Arthur W. Pink
It was a costly triumph. But God’s values are not so easily reckoned. If God had simply terminated Satan, then it would not have been so clear that God is both stronger and infinitely more to be desired than Satan. God wills for his glory to shine forth not only through acts of physical power, but also through acts of moral and spiritual power that display the beauty of his grace with lavish colors. To take sinners out of Satan’s hands by virtue of Christ’s sin-bearing sacrifice and his law-fulfilling obedience to the Father was a more glorious victory than mere annihilation of the enemy.
John Piper
Atheism is partly the result of bad theology, an unpaid bill resulting from failures in depicting God. It is not surprising that many have rejected God when there has been so little to attract them to him. Perhaps they would not reject as readily the God disclosed in Jesus Christ, who is an event of loving relationally and relates readily to the temporal world.
Clark H. Pinnock
There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.
G.K. Chesterton
To train a citizen is to train a critic. The whole point of education is that it should give a man abstract and eternal standards, by which he can judge material and fugitive conditions.
G.K. Chesterton
Faith is the response of our spirits to beckonings of the eternal.
George A. Buttrick
historical arguments; traditional apologetics breaks down here. Since man is here dealing with God and this by definition means with the invisible, impalpable, uncontrollable, only one attitude is appropriate and required : believing trust, trusting faith.
Hans Küng
The idea of Christian perfection, which began in the ancient monasteries and spread to the world as an ideal, is one of the most appealing, demanding and ultimately hopeless notions of the spiritual life. By definition, only God is perfect—that is, complete and independent unto [God’s] self. Humans, on the other hand, are radically imperfect, and that, paradoxically, is welcome news, for the recognition of our incompleteness throws us on the mercy of God and enables us, as Saint Paul stressed, to put up with one another’s faults.
Donald Spoto
... the mind was designed not to defend what we want, but to discover what is ultimately true, which should shape our wants and satisfy them more deeply with God. The purpose of the mind is not to rationalize subjective preferences, but to recognize objective reality and to help the heart revel in God.
John Piper
The world is not a theater large enough to display the glory of Christ upon or unfold even half of the unsearchable riches that lie hidden in Him. And such is the deliciousness of this subject, Christ, that were there ten thousand volumes written upon it, they would never become tiring to the heart. We used to say that any one thing can finally tire us and this is true, except about this one eminent thing, Christ, and then one can never tire, for such is the variety of sweetness in Christ.
John Flavel
Sins of ignorance or infirmity are to be admonished in a different way than intentional sins of malice of intention. The assurance of forgiveness is not to be offered carelessly by those whose conscience is seared, but to penitents who come contritely to the table of the Lord.
Thomas C. Oden
Heresy is usually quite sophisticated, actually has a meaning, and is to be taken very seriously. It is therefore to be carefully distinguished from turgid, pretentious, badly-written Bullsgeshichte, to use the technical German theological term.
Carl R. Trueman
The full Christian experience, however, is not an individual experience which may be isolated from all else; it is, unconditionally, an experience within the context of the Church. It is 'a personal history which is imbedded in the greater history of the Church - a spiritual becoming which is incarnate and is lived within the Church's own process of becoming. It is the effort to develop what has been given, to discover what is hidden, the effort to attain to oneself by attaining, though the Church and within her, to the mystery of Christ, the Saviour'.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
There are two kinds of people: those who say to God "Thy will be done " and those to whom God says "All right then have it your way."
C.S. Lewis
What is existence for but to be laughed at if men in their twenties have already attained the utmost?
Søren Kierkegaard
What distinguishes war is not that man is slain but that he is slain spoiled crushed by the cruelty the injustice the treachery the murderous hand of man.
William Ellery Channing
All our good is apparently from God, because we are first naked and holy without any good, and afterwards enriched with all good.
Jonathan Edwards
Faith itself is an act of human willing enabled and disciplined by grace.
Thomas C. Oden
For Christians it's always a love game ... that He is love itself ... Indeed, some have suggested that one way of understanding the Spirit is to see the Spirit as the personal love which the Father has for the Son and the Son for the Father.
N.T. Wright
The tendency to turn human judgements into divine commands turns religion into one of the most dangerous forces in the world.
Georgia Harkness
We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading.
C.S. Lewis
Mathematics effectively began when a few Greek friends got together to talk about numbers and lines and angles.
C.S. Lewis
I am your moon and your moonlight tooI am your flower garden and your water tooI have come all this way, eager for youWithout shoes or shawlI want you to laughTo kill all your worriesTo love youTo nourish you.
Jalaluddin Rumi
Religion is what you do with your solitude.
William Temple
The world is not perishing for the want of clever or talented or well-meaning men. It is perishing for the want of men of courage and resolution.
Robert J. McCracken
Every good thing in the Christian life grows in the soil of humility. Without humility, every virtue and every grace withers. That’s why Calvin said humility is first, second, and third in the Christian faith.
John Piper
It is indeed a song of steps. And as I have often said to you, these steps are not made to descend but to ascend. The questioner wishes then to ascend; and where does he wish to ascend if not to heaven? What does this mean—to ascend to heaven? Does he wish to ascend so as to be in the heavens with the sun, the moon, and the stars? Far from that! But there is in heaven an eternal Jerusalem where the angels, our co-citizens, are. From these co-citizens we on earth are estranged. In this exile we sigh; in the city we shall have joy.
Augustine of Hippo
Idling of our elders is called business; the idling of boys, though quite like it, is punished by those same elders, and no one pities either the boys or the men.
Augustine of Hippo
If we look into the matter of how Christian theology rose in the beginning, the Christian Church was always already earlier, and thus even now for each individual the Christian Church is earlier than theology.
Friedrich Schleiermacher
Now, it is of course well known that Christ continually uses the expression 'imitators.' He never says that he asks for admirers, adoring admirers, adherents; and when he uses the expression 'follower' he always explains it in such a way that one perceives that 'imitators' is meant by it, that is not adherents of a teaching but imitators of a life....
Søren Kierkegaard
Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.
Søren Kierkegaard
A head can be beaten small enough until it fits the hat.
G.K. Chesterton
We kill at every step, not only in wars, riots ad executions. We kill every time we close our eyes to poverty, suffering and shame.
Eberhard Arnold
Theology sits rouged at the window and courts philosophy's favor, offering to sell her charms to it.
Søren Kierkegaard
Since then your sere Majesty and your Lordships seek a simple answer, I will give it in this manner, neither horned nor toothed. Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. May God help me.
Martin Luther
Hospitality means primarily the creation of free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy. Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place. It is not to bring men and women over to our side, but to offer freedom not disturbed by dividing lines.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
Self-respect is the root of discipline: the sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself.
Abraham J. Heschel
Slowly, quietly, like snow-flakes—like the small flakes that come when it is going to snow all night—little flakes of me, my impressions, my selections, are settling down on the image of her. The real shape wil be quite hidden in the end.
C.S. Lewis
Judgment, then, is not an impersonal, legalistic process. It is a matter of love, and it is something we choose for ourselves. Nor is punishment a vindictive act. God's "curses" are not expressions of hatred, but of fatherly love and discipline. Like medicinal ointment, they hurt in order to heal. They impose suffering that is remedial, restorative, and redemptive. God's wrath is an expression of His love for His wayward children.
Scott Hahn
My Soul is my Guide, for my Soul is of that Abode I will not Speak of the Earthly, I am of the Unknown.
Jalaluddin Rumi
Unbelief is as much of a choice as belief is. What makes it in many ways more appealing is that whereas to believe in something requires some measure of understanding and effort, not to believe doesn't require much of anything at all.
Frederick Buechner
The private and personal blessings we enjoy-the blessings of immunity safeguard liberty and integrity- deserve the thanksgiving of a whole life.
Jeremy Taylor
My opinion is, of course, completely my own. I would not impose it on anyone else and decline any pressure to change it.
Søren Kierkegaard
Whoever is spared personal pain must feel himself called to help in diminishing the pain of others. We must all carry our share of the misery which lies upon the world.
Albert Schweitzer
I inquired what wickedness is, and I didn't find a substance, but a perversity of will twisted away from the highest substance – You oh God – towards inferior things, rejecting its own inner life and swelling with external matter.
Augustine of Hippo