Quotes by Theologians - Page 6

I find I need to put things into words before I can believe that they are entirely real.
Frederick Buechner
Always, in Lincoln's mature theology, there is paradox. There is starting this, yet there is also tenderness; there is melancholy, yet there is also humor: there is moral law, yet there is also compassion. History is the scene of the working out God's justice, which we can never escape, but it is also the scene of the revelation of the everlasting mercy.
Elton Trueblood
For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity
C.S. Lewis
I who know many present things by my art," replied the Hermit with a smile, "have yet little knowledge of things future. Therefore I do not know whether any man or woman or beast in the whole world will be alive when the sun sets tonight. But be of good hope. The damsel is likely to live as long as any her age.
C.S. Lewis
Like a sculptor, if necessary,carve a friend out of stone.Realize that your inner sight is blindand try to see a treasure in everyone.
Jalaluddin Rumi
All the trees of the world appeared to be rushing towards Aslan. But as they drew nearer they looked less like trees, and when the whole crowd, bowing and curtsying and waving thin long arms to Aslan, were all around Lucy, she saw that it was a crowd of human shapes. Pale birch-girls were tossing their heads, willow-women pushed back their hair from their brooding faces to gaze on Aslan, the queenly beeches stood still and adored him, shaggy oak-men, lean and melancholy elms, shock-headed hollies (dark themselves, but their wives all bright with berries) and gay rowans, all bowed and rose again, shouting, "Aslan, Aslan!" in their various husky or creaking or wave-like voices.
C.S. Lewis
I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now...Come further up, come further in!
C.S. Lewis
The Lord's Prayer may be committed to memory quickly but it is slowly learnt by heart.
Frederick Denison Maurice
Tasks don't have to be high-impact to be worthy of high effort. Most things we do in any given day are relatively low impact. The cumulative impact of thousands of low-impact test is huge. These tasks can be transposed into worship.
John Piper
... You must always remember... Whatever their bodies do affects their souls.
C.S. Lewis
God pours out his choicest blessings on those who are anxious that nothing shall stick to their hands. Individuals who value the rainy day above the present agony of the world will get no blessing from God.
William MacDonald
He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less.
C.S. Lewis
I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, hoever, turns out to be not a state but a process.
C.S. Lewis
The figure of the crucified invalidates all thought which takes success for its standard.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
For agnosticism is, in a sense, what I am preaching. I do not wish to reduce the sceptical element in your minds. I am only suggesting that it need not be reserved exclusively for the New Testament and the Creeds. Try doubting something else.
C.S. Lewis
Christmas is God lighting a candle; and you don't light a candle in a room that's already full of sunlight. You light a candle in a room that's so murky that the candle, when lit, reveals just how bad things really are.
N.T. Wright
The study of truth requires a considerable effort - which is why few are willing to undertake it out of love of knowledge - despite the fact that God has implanted a natural appetite for such knowledge in the minds of men.
Thomas Aquinas
One of the drawbacks about adventures is that when you come to the most beautiful places you are often too anxious and hurried to appreciate them; so that Arvis (though she remembered them years later) had only a vague impression of gray lawns, quietly bubbling fountains, and the long black shadows of cypress trees.
C.S. Lewis
It may be a movement towards becoming like little children to admit that we are generally nothing else.
Charles Williams
The Illusory SelfI am composed of body and soul, I seem to have mind, reason, sense, yet I find none of them my own. For where was my body prior to my birth, and whither will it go when I have departed? Where are the various states produced by the life stages of an illusory self? Where is the newborn babe, the child, the boy, the pubescent, the stripling, the bearded youth, the lad, the full-grown man? Whence came the soul, whither will it go, how long will it be our mate? Can we tell its essential nature? When did we acquire it? Prior to our birth? But we were not then in existence. What of it after death? But then we who are embodied, compounds endowed with quality, shall be no more, but shall hasten to our rebirth, to be with the unbodied, without composition and without quality. But now, inasmuch as we are alive, we are the dominated rather than the rulers, known rather than knowing. The soul knows us, though unknown by us, and imposes commands we are obliged to obey as wervants their mistress. And when it will, it will transact its divorce in court and depart, leaving our home desolate of life. If we press it to remain, it will dissolve our relationship. So subtle is its nature that it furnishes no handle to the body.
Philo of Alexandria
How can the past and future be, when the past no longer is, and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time, but eternity.
Augustine of Hippo
The love of God is like himself – equal, constant, not capable of augmentation or diminution; our love is like ourselves – unequal, increasing, waning, growing, declining. His, like the sun, always the same in its light, though a cloud may sometimes interpose; ours, as the moon, has its enlargements and straightenings.
John Owen
But God has not called us to be like those around us. He has called us to be like Himself. Holiness is nothing less than conformity to the character of God.
Jerry Bridges
Two there are, who are never satisfied; The lover of the world and the lover of Knowledge.
Jalaluddin Rumi
Many a man curses the rain that falls upon his head and knows not that it brings abundance to drive away hunger.
Saint Basil
They call him Aslan in That Place," said Eustace."What a curious name!""Not half so curious as himself," said Eustace solemnly.
C.S. Lewis
Caesar's messengers didn't go round the world saying, 'Caesar is lord, so if you feel you need to have a Roman-empire kind of experience, you might want to submit to him'.
N.T. Wright
The God who is human in his divinity is the precise opposite of an essence which in ill-willed fashion closes itself to all human thought and knowledge... As love, rather, God is thinkable, without a distinction capable of made between essence and existence. Love is essentially existing lovingly.
Eberhard Jüngel
Many pray with their lips for that for which their hearts have no desire.
Jonathan Edwards
And above all, you must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its paint and panelling…the question should never be: ‘Do I like that kind of service?’ but ‘Are these doctrines true: Is holiness there? Does my conscience move me towards this? Is my reluctance to move to this door due to my pride, or my mere taste, or my personal dislike for this particular door-keeper?
C.S. Lewis
Conversion does not make us perfect, but it does catapult us into a total experience of discipleship that affects - and infects - every sphere of our living.
Richard J. Foster
We are part of a holy community that for three thousand years and more has been formed inside and out by these words of God, words that have been heard, tasted, chewed, seen, walked. Reading Holy Scripture is totally physical. Our bodies are the means of providing our souls access to God in his revelation: eat this book. A friend reports to me that one of the early rabbis selected a different part of our bodies to make the same point; he insisted that the primary body part for taking in the Word of God is not the ears but the feet. You learn God, he said, not through your ears but through your feet: follow the Rabbi.
Eugene H. Peterson
The secret prayer chamber is a bloody battleground. Here violent and decisive battles are fought out. Here the fate of souls for time and eternity is determined, in quietude and solitude.
Ole Hallesby
Helplessness is unquestionably the first and the surest indication of a praying heart. ... Prayer and helplessness are inseparable. Only he who is helpless can truly pray.
O. Hallesby
Solitude is the furnace in which transformation takes place.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
Prayer without study would be empty. Study without prayer would be blind.
Karl Barth
Proclaim the truth and do not be silent through fear.
Catherine of Siena
Forgiveness is man's deepest need and highest achievement.
Horace Bushnell
The story that the church has been telling for two thousand years is an outrageous tale about a man who was executed by the state but rose up from the dead. The crux of the story isn't that Jesus figured out the right answer to all the questions facing Israel in his day. What makes all the difference is that Jesus defeated the ultimate enemy and got up from the dead.
Emmanuel Katongole
The very power of [textbook writers] depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is ‘doing’ his ‘English prep’ and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake. It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all.
C.S. Lewis
Christian, Jew, Muslim, shaman, Zoroastrian, stone, ground, mountain, river, each has a secret way of being with the mystery, unique and not to be judged
Jalaluddin Rumi
Study cannot happen until we are subject to the subject.
Richard J. Foster
Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable. Never drink when you are wretched without it, or you will be like the grey-faced gin-drinker in the slum; but drink when you would be happy without it, and you will be like the laughing peasant of Italy. Never drink because you need it, for this is rational drinking, and the way to death and hell. But drink because you do not need it, for this is irrational drinking, and the ancient health of the world.
G.K. Chesterton
God sends his Son – here lies the only remedy. It is not enough to give man a new philosophy or better religion. A Man comes to men. Every man bears an image. His body and his life become visible. A man is not a bare word, a thought or a will. He is above all and always a man, a form, an image, a brother. And thus he does not create around him just a new way of thought, will and action but he gives us the new image, the new form. Now in Jesus Christ this is just what has happened. The image of God has entered our midst, in the form of our fallen life, in the likeness of sinful flesh. In the teaching and acts of Christ, in his life and death, the image of God is revealed. In him the divine image has been re-created here on earth. The Incarnation, the words and acts of Jesus, his death on the cross, all are indispensable parts of that image. But it is not the same image as Adam bore in the primal glory of paradise. Rather, it is the image of one who enters a world of sin and death, who takes upon himself all the sorrows of humanity, who meekly bears God’s wrath and judgment against sinners, and obeys his will with unswerving devotion in suffering and death, the Man born to poverty, the friend of publicans and sinners, the Man of sorrows, rejected of man and forsaken of God. Here is God made man, here is man in the new image of God.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Grace unfolds on every page [of Scripture]: God’s long march through the history of human rebellion and ruin to reach us with the love of his Son; the Savior’s humble service, sinless life, sacrificial death, victorious resurrection, and promised return; the Holy Spirit’s indwelling witness, power, and advocacy—all unswerving despite our wayward ways and hard hearts.
Bryan Chapell
If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.
C.S. Lewis
Grief is an element of aliveness and the answer to the denial the market demands of us. It is an index of our humanity. It is proof of the presence of our relatedness to each other. It is a communal practice that recognizes that choosing the wilderness of vulnerability, mystery, and anxiety was a good and life-affirming choice.
Walter Brueggemann
For every one pupil who needs to be guarded against a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.
C.S. Lewis
Faith is a practical attitude of the will.
John MacMurray
You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words “compelle intrare,” compel them to come in, have been so abused be wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.
C.S. Lewis
It is now my intention to draw out from the story of Abraham the dialecticalconsequences inherent in it, expressing them in the form ofproblemata, in order to seewhat a tremendous paradox faith is, a paradox which is capable of transforming amurder into a holy act well-pleasing to God, a paradox which gives Isaac back toAbraham, which no thought can master, because faith begins precisely there wherethinking leaves off.
Søren Kierkegaard
Is it rational to believe in a bad God? Anyway, in a God so bad as all that? The Cosmic Sadist, the spiteful imbecile?
C.S. Lewis
I should interweave my theology with prayer. I should frequently interrupt my talking about God by talking to God. Not far behind the theological sentence, "God is generous," should come the prayerful sentence, "Thank you, God." On the heels of, "God is glorious," should come, "I adore your glory." What I have come to see is that this is the way it must be if we are feeling God's reality in our hearts as well as describing it with our heads.
John Piper
[A] finished tale may give a man immortality in the light and literary sense; but an unfinished tale suggests another immortality, more essential and more strange.
G.K. Chesterton
Bear up the hands that hang down by faith and prayer support the tottering knees. Storm the throne of grace and persevere therein and mercy will come down.
John Wesley
Compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to mankind.
Albert Schweitzer
Our actions are the results of our intentions and our intelligence.
E. Stanley Jones
A woman means by unselfishness chiefly taking trouble for others a man means not giving trouble to others. Thus each sex regards the other as basically selfish.
C.S. Lewis
It is only when we pray for something according to the will of God that we have the promise of being heard and answered.
O. Hallesby
If you complain to someone, you assume that it's someone who really cares about you.
Scott Hahn