Quotes by Theologians - Page 60

The Fall is where the nation is. The Fall is the locus of America.
William Stringfellow
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Erasmus
Without books, God is silent, justice dormant, natural science at a stand, philosophy lame, letters dumb, and all things involved in darkness.
Thomas Bartholin
If no divine law is recognized above the law of the State, then the law of man has become absolute in men's eyes--there is then no logical barrier to totalitarianism.
Greg L. Bahnsen
Within biblical theology it remains the case that the one living God created a world that is other than himself, not contained within himself. Creation was from the beginning an act of love, of affirming goodness of the other. God saw all that he had made, and it was very good; but it was not itself divine. At its height, which according to Genesis 1 is the creation of humans, it was designed to REFLECT God, both to reflect God back to God in worship and to reflect God into the rest of creation in stewardship. But this image-bearing capacity of humankind is not in itself the same thing as divinity. Collapsing this distinction means taking a large step toward a pantheism within which there is no way of understanding, let alone addressing, the problem of evil.
N.T. Wright
I am an old man, and I here declare that I never knew them to be productive of any good in the worship of God, and have reason to believe that they are productive of much evil. Music as a science I esteem and admire, but instrumental music in the house of God I abominate and abhor. This is the abuse of music, and I here register my protest against all such corruption of the worship of the author of Christianity.
Adam Clarke
The answer is simple: if you cannot find meaning inherent in life right now, as you live it in this visible world, the addition of an infinite amount more of the same isn't about to somehow make it any more meaningful! Add a whole string of zeroes to a zero and watch what happens.
Robert M. Price
In relation to Monotheism considered as such, Judaism stabilized but “confiscated” the Message; Christianity universalized but “altered” it; Islam in turn restored it by stabilizing and universalizing it.
Frithjof Schuon
We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito.
C.S. Lewis
For, indeed, everything about is marvelous, and wherever a man turns his gaze he sees the Godhead of the Word and is smitten with awe.
Athanasius of Alexandria
Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
If I could repeat it,people passing by would be enlightened and go free.
Jalaluddin Rumi
The Grand essentials of happiness are: something to do something to love and something to hope for.
Allan K. Chalmers
If your life is Christ, then your death will be only more of Christ, forever. If your life is only Christlessness, then your death will be only more Christlessness, forever. That's not fundamentalism, that's the law of non-contradiction.
Peter Kreeft
The assumption that the gospel can be reduced to a note card is already off on the wrong track.
Scot McKnight
Christianity's goal is not escape from this world. It loves this world and seeks to change it for the better.
Marcus J. Borg
The door of the visible church is incomparably wider than the door of heaven (522)[.]
Richard Baxter
Protestants believe that the sacraments are like ladders that God gave to us by which we can climb up to Him. Catholics believe that they are like ladders that God gave to Himself by which He climbs down to us.
Peter Kreeft
You erased my famine, unpicked my angerYour energy charges my voice, it radiates my heart;Now I am alive with the ore of words pouringFrom my lips like molten lava glittering with joy.
Jalaluddin Rumi
... A few centuries earlier... humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning. But what with the weekly press and other such weapons, we have largely altered that... Man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily "true" or "false," but as "academic" or "practical," "outworn" or "contemporary," "conventional" or "ruthless." Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don't waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong or stark or courageous - that it is the philosophy of the future. That's the sort of thing he cares about.
C.S. Lewis
There come times when I have nothing more to tell God. If I were to continue to pray in words I would have to repeat what I have already said. At such times it is wonderful to say to God "May I be in Thy presence Lord? I have nothing more to say to Thee but I do love to be in Thy presence."
O. Hallesby
There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.
C.S. Lewis
Those in whom the Spirit comes to live are God's new Temple. They are, individually and corporately, places where heaven and earth meet.
N.T. Wright
At home, besides being Peter or Jane, we also bear a general character; husband or wife, brother or sister, chief, colleague or subordinate. Not among Friends. It is an affair of disentangled, or stripped, minds. Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.
C.S. Lewis
The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything.
Bishop WC. Magee
She's the sort of woman who lives for others - you can tell the others by their hunted expression.
C.S. Lewis
Only union with you gives joy. The rest if tearing down one building to put up another.
Jalaluddin Rumi
Down through the centuries, the Church has carefully preserved, protected, and defended its Marian teachings, because to give them up would be to give up the gospel.
Scott Hahn
It is often said by the critics of Christian origins that certain ritual feasts, processions or dances are really of pagan origin. They might as well say that our legs are of pagan origin. Nobody ever disputed that humanity was human before it was Christian; and no Church manufactured the legs with which men walked or danced, either in a pilgrimage or a ballet. What can really be maintained, so as to carry not a little conviction, is this: that where such a Church has existed it has preserved not only the processions but the dances; not only the cathedral but the carnival. One of the chief claims of Christian civilisation is to have preserved things of pagan origin.
G.K. Chesterton
You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you. Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God, as misers do in gold, and Kings in sceptres, you never enjoy the world.Till your spirit filleth the whole world, and the stars are your jewels; till you are as familiar with the ways of God in all Ages as with your walk and table: till you are intimately acquainted with that shady nothing out of which the world was made: till you love men so as to desire their happiness, with a thirst equal to the zeal of your own: till you delight in God for being good to all: you never enjoy the world.
Thomas Traherne
Every moment the patches of green grew bigger and the patches of snow grew smaller. Every moment more and more of the trees shook off their robes of snow. Soon, wherever you looked, instead of white shapes you saw the dark green of firs or the black prickly branches of bare oaks and beeches and elms. Then the mist turned from white to gold and presently cleared away altogether. Shafts of delicious sunlight struck down on to the forest floor and overhead you could see a blue sky between the tree tops. Soon there were more wonderful things happening. Coming suddenly round a corner into a glade of silver birch trees Edmund saw the ground covered in all directions with little yellow flowers- celandines. The noise of water grew louder. Presently they actually crossed a stream. Beyond it they found snowdrops growing.
C.S. Lewis
The child asks of the Father whom he knows. Thus, the essence of Christian prayer is not general adoration, but definite, concrete petition. The right way to approach God is to stretch out our hands and ask of One who we know has the heart of a Father.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous.
G.K. Chesterton
Where a people prays, there is the hurch; and where the church is; there is never loneliness.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
I died as a mineral and became a plant,I died as a plant and rose to animal,I died as an animal and I was Man.Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?
Jalaluddin Rumi
When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.
Martin Buber
I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice?
C.S. Lewis
My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours… it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known to each of us more powerfully and personally. If this is true, it means that to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but also spiritually.
Frederick Buechner
Not in the flight of ideas, but only in action is freedom. Make up your mind and come out into the tempest of the living.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
To many, "The Bible is a form of verbal wallpaper, pleasant enough in the background, but he stop thinking about it after you have lived in the house for a few weeks.
N.T. Wright
Virtues are formed by prayer.Prayer preserves temperance. Prayer suppresses anger. Prayer prevents emotions of pride and envy.Prayer draws into the soul the Holy Spirit, and raises man to Heaven.
St. Ephrem of Syria
. . . the humblest, and at the same time most balanced and capacious, praised most, while the crank, misfits and malcontents praised least.
C.S. Lewis
The great writings interact with one another. They cannot be read in isolation..
Richard J. Foster
Orthodoxy my Lord said Bishop Warburton in a whisper - "orthodoxy is my doxy - heterodoxy is another man's doxy."
Joseph Priestley
... I have always found that the Trough periods of the human undulation provide excellent opportunity for all sensual temptations, particularly those of sex. This may surprise you, because, of course, there is more physical energy, and therefore more potential appetite, at the Peak periods; but you must remember that the powers of resistance are then also at their highest. The health and spirits which you... use in producing lust can also... be very easily used for work or play or thought or innocuous merriment. The attack has a much better chance of success when the man's whole inner world is drab and cold and empty. And it is also to be noted that the Trough sexuality is subtly different in quality from that of the Peak - much less likely to lead to... "being in love," much more easily drawn into perversions, much less... generous and imaginative and even spiritual... It is the same with other desires of the flesh. You are much more likely to make [a] man a sound drunkard by pressing drink on him as an anodyne when he is dull and weary... than... when he is happy...
C.S. Lewis
I would like to coin the phrase alimentary theology, a theology that is more attentive to and welcoming of the multiple layers contained and implied in the making of theology. This is a theology that not only pays closer attention to matters related to food and nourishment, and the many ways they can relate, inspire, and inform theological reflection. Most importantly, it is an envisioning of theology as nourishment: food as theology and theology as food. Alimentary theology is envisioned as food for thought; it addresses some of the spiritual and physical hungers of the world, and seeks ways of bringing about nourishment.
Angel F. Mendez Montoya
No man will love you, though you gave your life for him, unless you have a pretty face. So (might it not be?), the gods will not love you (however you try to pleasure them, and whatever you suffer) unless you have that beauty of soul. In either race. for the love of men or the love of a god, the winners and losers are marked out from birth. We bring our ugliness, in both kinds, with us into the world, with it our destiny.
C.S. Lewis
Come let us give a little time to folly ... and even in a melancholy day let us find time for an hour of pleasure.
Saint Bonaventura
In the womb of the Virgin Mary, God “becomes” human, receiving from her the body that makes possible the “passion” of God; while on the Cross, through the Jewish flesh given of Mary, the divine Son is truly crucified. In the same way, in the Eucharist, Christians receive the very flesh the Logos received of Mary and united to himself, that “truly life-giving flesh of God the Word himself.” Only insofar as God receives the passability of human flesh does he become crucifiable and sacramentally givable.
Aaron Riches
When we believe that God is Father we also believe that such a father's hand will never cause his child a needless tear. We may not understand life any better but we will not resent life any longer.
William Barclay
Christianity sees in the picture of Jesus as the Christ a human life in which all forms of anxiety are present but in which all forms of despair are absent.
Paul Tillich
If you board the wrong train it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
He thought his detective brain as good as the criminal's, which was true. But he fully realised the disadvantage. "The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic," he said with a sour smile, and lifted his coffee cup to his lips slowly, and put it down very quickly. He had put salt in it.
G.K. Chesterton
When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it, what will it be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then - that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it. You say you have poets in your world. Do they not teach you this?
C.S. Lewis
The devil does not stay where music is.
Martin Luther
Prayer is listening.
Søren Kierkegaard
He (Lincoln) recognized the delicate balance between immanence and transcendence, refusing to settle for either of these alone. His was a God who was both in the world and above the world.
Elton Trueblood
If you asked twenty good men to-day what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you asked almost any of the great Christians of old he would have replied, Love - You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philological importance. The negative ideal of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point.
C.S. Lewis
What we do upon some great occasion will probably depend on what we already are: and what we are will be the result of previous years of self-discipline.
H. P. Liddon
The offspring of virtue is perseverance. The fruit and offspring of perseverance is habit and child of habit is character.
John Climacus