Quotes by Theologians - Page 57

The master demon Screwtape identifies elitist humanity's tendency toward "an ingrained habit of belittling anything that concerns the great mass of their fellow men.
C.S. Lewis
To confess your sins to God is not to tell God anything God doesn't already know. Until you confess them, however, they are the abyss between you. When you confess them, they become the Golden Gate Bridge.
Frederick Buechner
The individualism of the Romantic theory of interpretation attempts to abstract the individual from his historical context by presenting him with the ideal of presuppositionless understanding; a truer theory of interpretation, which does not seek to elide the historical reality of the one seeking understanding, sets the interpreter himself within tradition. What we understand when we seek to understand the writings of the past is borne to us by tradition. Understanding is an engagement with tradition, not an attempt to escape from it.
Andrew Louth
As goes the family, so goes the faith; as goes the faith, so goes the culture.
Kenneth L. Gentry Jr.
It [speaking with words that bring about harmony] consists of speaking of what is good about people, instead of what is wrong with them. For some people this is an almost impossible exercise, for they have become totally habituated to speaking critically. We all seem to have a special talent for finding critical things to say about the world, about others, and about ourselves! (117)
Jean-Yves Leloup
if we are wayfarers who want to return home, then we must see the world as a means of transportation (terestibus vel marinis vehiculis) and always remember to distinguish the means and ends.
Augustine of Hippo
In Christ, for the first time, we see that in God himself there exists--within his inseparable unity--the distinction between the Father who gives and the Gift which is given (the Son), but only in the unity of the Holy Spirit.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
My own general thesis was somewhat to this effect: that Artists have worried the world by being wantonly, needlessly, and gratuitously progressive. Politicians have to be progressive; that is, they have to live in the future, because they know they have done nothing but evil in the past. But Artists, who have been right from the beginning of the world, who were, perhaps, the only people who were right even in the beginning of the world, decorating pottery or designing rude frescoes on the rock when other people were fighting or offering human sacrifice, they have no right to despise their own past.
G.K. Chesterton
Although I believe identity politics '"produces limited but real empowerment for its participants," it is important to note that it contains significant problems: first, its essentialist tendency; second, its fixed _we-they_ binary position; third, its homogenization of diverse social oppression; fourth, its simplification of the complexity and paradox of being privileged and unprivileged; and fifth its ruling out of intersectional space of diverse forms of oppression in reality.
Namsoon Kang
The author chuckles at the resistance to using a prepared, written liturgy in prayer. He compares it to being unwilling to dress in any clothing we did not make ourselves, or being unwilling to drive a car we did not construct entirely by ourselves.
N.T. Wright
But we also need stories. Great stories.
John Piper
The world does not need more Christian literature. What it needs is more Christians writing good literature.
C.S. Lewis
An earnest purpose finds time or makes it. It seizes on spare moments and turns fragments to golden account.
William Ellery Channing
If we are a people who pray, darkness is apt to be a lot of what our prayers are about. If we are people who do not pray, it is apt to be darkness in one form or another that has stopped our mouths.
Frederick Buechner
Prayer in the sense of petition asking for things is a small part of it confession and penitence are its threshold adoration its sanctuary the presence and vision and enjoyment of God its bread and wine.
C.S. Lewis
Large organization is loose organization. Nay it would be almost as true to say that organization is always disorganization.
G.K. Chesterton
Real morality is not the product of fearing a spanking. But what does fundamentalist hell-belief encourage? It retards any developing moral judgment by freezing moral maturity right at the most primitive, most childish, stage: the fear of retribution-and fundamentalism threatens one hell of a spanking.
Robert M. Price
I do not deny, but strongly affirm, the right of the State to interfere to cure a great evil. I say that in this case it would interfere to create a great evil; and I am not going to be turned from the discussion of that direct issue to bottomless botherations about Socialism and Individualism, or the relative advantages of always turning to the right and always turning to the left.
G.K. Chesterton
...so unbelief alone commits sin..Hence Christ calls unbelief the only sin.
Martin Luther
Just as there are none good but God, and nothing good but goodness, so there are no loves but love its self, the very love; and that what I call the other unnatural loves, are not loves at all in their own right but become so only so far as they participate in the very love.
C.S. Lewis
Smith. [Turning eagerly to the Doctor.] But this is rather splendid. The Duke's given £50 to the new public-house.Hastings. The Duke is very liberal.[Collects papers.Doctor. [Examining his cheque.] Very. But this is rather curious. He has also given £50 to the league for opposing the new public-house.Hastings. The Duke is very liberal-minded.
G.K. Chesterton
We read of preaching the Word out of season but we do not read of praying out of season for that is never out of season.
Matthew Henry
I beg readers to remember that this is a fantasy. It has of course - or I intended it to have - a moral. But the transmortal conditions are solely an imaginative supposal: they are not even a guess or a speculation at what may actually await us. The last thing I wish is to arouse factual curiosity about the details of the after-world.
C.S. Lewis
Though our feelings come and go God's love for us does not.
C.S. Lewis
May I love Him whom to love is to live indeed.
William of Saint-Thierry
Even innocent Adam is liker to forget God in a paradise, than Joseph in a prison, or Job upon a dunghill(376)[.]
Richard Baxter
My mother used to tell me, “Things always look worse at night.” For the most part, I believe her. But some of the troubles that keep me from sleeping look just as bad in the morning.
Carolyn Custis James
There is one inevitable criterion of judgment touching religious faith ... Can you reduce it to practice? If not have none of it.
Hosea Ballou
Every Christian would agree that a man's spiritual health is exactly proportional to his love for God.
C.S. Lewis
What again could this astonishing thing be like which people were so anxious to contradict, that in doing so they did not mind contradicting themselves?
G.K. Chesterton
A thousand half-loves must be forsaken to take one whole heart home.
Jalaluddin Rumi
Make no mistake,' He says, 'if you let me, I will make you perfect. The moment you put yourself in My hands, that is what you are in for. Nothing less, or other, than that. You have free will, and if you choose, you can push Me away. But if you do not push Me away, understand that I am going to see this job through. Whatever suffering it may cost you in your earthly life, whatever inconceivable purification it may cost you after death, whatever it costs Me, I will never rest, nor let you rest, until you are literally perfect - until my Father can say without reservation that He is well pleased with you, as He said He was well pleased with me. This I can do and will do. But I will not do anything less.
C.S. Lewis
We have not advanced very far in our spiritual lives if we have not encountered the basic paradox of freedom, to the effect that we are most free when we are bound. But not just any way of being bound will suffice; what matters is the character of our binding. The one who would like to be an athlete, but who is unwilling to discipline his body by regular exercise and by abstinence, is not free to excel on the field or the track. His failure to train rigorously and to live abstemiously denies him the freedom to go over the bar at the desired height, or to run with the desired speed and endurance. With one concerted voice the giants of the devotional life apply the same principle to the whole of life with the dictum: Discipline is the price of freedom.
Elton Trueblood
Theology starts with a crisis, the very crisis of reality itself. The crisis is the fact that you live, that you have a life to live. … The crisis is the very mystery of our existence and the yearning for there to be some kind of meaning to it.
Andrew Root
Don't forget to love yourself.
Søren Kierkegaard
and the creation, in the world and above the world, that once was at variance with itself, is knit together in friendship: and we ... are made to join in the angels' song, offering the worship of their praise.
Gregory of Nyssa
Soften my hard self-opinionatedness which time has hardened so exceedingly!
Gertrude the Great
Just as the church needs members with different skills, our world must have various forms of labor, interdependent and thus valuable. A world full of ministers would be without churches, bread for the Lord's Supper, and printed Bibles to read.
R.C. Sproul Jr.
I think the greatest weakness in the church today is that almost no one believes that God invests His power in the Bible. Everyone is looking for power in a program, in a methodology, in a technique, in anything and everything but that in which God has placed it—His Word. He alone has the power to change lives for eternity, and that power is focused on the Scriptures.
R.C. Sproul
Prayer should be the means by which I at all times receive all that I need and for this reason be my daily refuge my daily consolation my daily joy my source of rich and inexhaustible joy in life.
Saint John Chrysostom
There are no two hours alike. Every hour is unique and the only one given at the moment, exclusive and endlessly precious. Judaism teaches us to be attached to holiness in time; to learn how to consecrate sanctuaries that emerge from the magnificent stream of a year.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Even if we have a reliable criterion for detecting design, and even if that criterion tells us that biological systems are designed, it seems that determining a biological system to be designed is akin to shrugging our shoulders and saying God did it. The fear is that admitting design as an explanation will stifle scientific inquiry, that scientists will stop investigating difficult problems because they have a sufficient explanation al
William A. Dembski
But whatever you do, find the God-centered, Christ-exalting, Bible-saturated passion of your life, and find your way to say it and live for it and die for it. And you will make a difference that lasts. You will not waste your life.
John Piper
Free love may try to dissolve, and the concubinate to desecrate, the holiest tie, as it pleases; but, for the vast majority of our race, marriage remains the foundation of human society and the family retains its position as the primordial sphere in sociology.
Abraham Kuyper
Rather than equating the terms 'local' and 'cosmopolitan' with geographical areas (rural and urban respectively), sociologist Wade Clark Roof suggests that these terms refer to character types who can be found in a diversity of settings in the United States. Locals are strongly oriented toward community or neighborhood, favor commitments to primary groups (family, neighborhood, fraternal and community organizations), tend to personalize their interpretations of social experience, and are more traditional in their beliefs and values. Cosmopolitans, on the other hand, are oriented toward the world outside the residential community, prefer membership in professional or special interest organizations, and are more open to social change and more tolerant of diversity in belief than locals. While a disproportionate number of locals are found in smaller communities, studies indicate that other factors - such as length of residence in a community, age, and educational level - play an even stronger role in determining orientation.
Leonora Tubbs Tisdale
There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man. That is a perfectly simple fact which the modern world will find out more and more to be a fact. Every other basis is a sort of sentimental confusion, full of merely verbal echoes of the older creeds. Those verbal associations are always vain for the vital purpose of constraining the tyrant.
G.K. Chesterton
Wait on the Lord" is a constant refrain in the Psalms, and it is a necessary word, for God often keeps us waiting. He is not in such a hurry as we are, and it is not his way to give more light on the future than we need for action in the present, or to guide us more than one step at a time. When in doubt, do nothing, but continue to wait on God. When action is needed, light will come.
J.I. Packer
The less I pray the harder it gets the more I pray the better it goes.
Martin Luther
The most total opposite of pleasure is not pain but boredom, for we are willing to risk pain to make a boring life interesting.
Peter Kreeft
If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.
C.S. Lewis
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero, but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. It does much more than that, it tells us the truth about its readers; and, oddly enough, it tells us this all the more the more cynical and immoral be the motive of its manufacture.
G.K. Chesterton
If in thirst you drink water from a cup, you see God in it. Those who are not in love with God will see only their own faces in it.
Jalaluddin Rumi
Since it is likely that, being men, they would sin every day, St. Paul consoles his hearers by saying ‘renew yourselves’ from day to day. This is what we do with houses: we keep constantly repairing them as they wear old. You should do the same thing to yourself. Have you sinned today? Have you made your soul old? Do not despair, do not despond, but renew your soul by repentance, and tears, and Confession, and by doing good things. And never cease doing this.
John Chrysostom
You can do more than pray after you have prayed but you cannot do more than pray until you have prayed.
A.J. Gordon
Theologians are to look to the _beyond_-community–– _beyond_ nationality; skin-color, gender; sexual orientation, citizenship, religious affiliation––because God, the Divine, who is the primary frame of reference for theologians, is for, with, in, among those individual human beings. It is to reaffirm the sheer truth: No one is better or worse, superior or inferior than any other; and, 'Ich bin du, wenn Ich Ich bin' [I am you, when Iam I.]
Namsoon Kang
For it is not needful, to use a common proverb, that one should drink up the ocean who wishes to learn that its water is salt.
Irenaeus of Lyons
A humble and contrite heart knows that it can merit nothing before God and that all that is necessary is to be reconciled to one's helplessness and let our holy and almighty God care for us just as an infant surrenders himself to his mother's care.
O. Hallesby
If thy meditation tends to fill thy note-book with notions, and good sayings, concerning God, and not thy heart with longing after him, and delight in him, for aught I know thy book is as much a Christian as thou (553).
Richard Baxter
It is to the Cross that the Christian is challenged to follow his Master: no path of redemption can make a detour around it.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
True wisdom consists in two things: Knowledge of God and Knowledge of Self.
John Calvin