Quotes by Theologians - Page 7

Every disability conceals a vocation, if only we can find it, which will 'turn the necessity to glorious gain.

As for the negation of the Christian Trinity in the Quran - and this negation is extrinsic and conditional - we must take account of certain shades of meaning. The Trinity can be envisaged according to a "vertical" perspective or according to either of two "horizontal" perspectives, one of them being supreme and the other not. The vertical perspective- Beyond-Being, Being and Existence - envisages the hypostases as "descending" from Unity or from the Absolute - or from the Essence it could be said - which means that it envisages the degrees of Reality. The supreme horizontal perspective corresponds to the Vedantic triad Sat (supraontological Reality), Chit (Absolute Consciousness) and Ananda (Infinite Beatitude), which means that it envisages the Trinity inasmuch as It is hidden in Unity(1). The non-supreme horizontal perspective on the contrary situates Unity as an essence hidden within the Trinity, which is then ontological and represents the three fundamental aspects or modes of Pure Being, whence the triad : Being, Wisdom, Will (Father, Son, Spirit).Now the concept of a Trinity seen as a deployment (tajalli) of Unity or of the Absolute is in no way opposed to the unitary doctrine of Islam ; what is opposed to it is solely the attribution of absoluteness to the Trinity alone, or even to the ontological Trinity alone, as it is envisaged exoterically. This last point of view does not, strictly speaking, attain to the Absolute and this is as much as to say that it attributes an absolute character to what is relative and is ignorant of Maya and the degrees of reality or of illusion ; it does not conceive of the metaphysical - but not pantheistic - identity between manifestation and the Principle; still less, therefore, does it conceive of the consequence this identity implies from the point of view of the intellect and the knowledge which delivers.(1) The Absolute is not the Absolute inasmuch as it contains aspects, but inasmuch as It transcends them; inasmuch as It is Trinity It is therefore not Absolute.

And certainly both Horses were doing, if not all they could, all they thought they could; which is not quite the same thing.

I know a beautiful garden, where there are a great many children in fine little coats, and they go under the trees and gather beautiful apples and pears, cherries and plums; they sing and run about and are as happy as they can be. Sometimes they ride on nice little ponies, with golden bridles and silver saddles. I asked the man whose garden it is, “What little children are these?” And he told me, “They are little children who love to pray and learn and are good.

Forgiving does not erase the bitter past. A healed memory is not a deleted memory. Instead, forgiving what we cannot forget creates a new way to remember. We change the memory of our past into a hope for our future.

No scientist ever begins his work de novo; while he works with the methodological questioning of what he has already known he builds on knowledge already achieved and engages in a movement of advance. But it is one of the worst characteristics of theological study, whether in biblical interpretation or in dogmatic formulation, that every scholar nowadays thinks he must start all over again, and too many give the impression that no one ever understood this or that until they came along.

Where lowland is, that's where water goes. All medicine wants is pain to cure.

In our desire to impose form on the world and our lives we have lost the capacity to see the form that is already there; and in that lies not liberation but alienation, the cutting off of things as they really are.

...marriage is foremost a vocation. Two people are called together to fulfill a mission that God has given them. Marriage is a spiritual reality. That is to say, a man and a woman come together for life, not just because they experience deep love for each other, but because they believe that God loves each of them with an infinite love and has called them to each other to be living witnesses of that love. To love is to embody God's infinite love in a faithful communion with another human being.

To be self-contented is to be vile and ignorant, ans that to aspire is better than to be blindly and impoitently happy.

Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey 'people.' People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war. If it is held that the instinct for preserving the species should always be obeyed at the expense of other instincts, whence do we derive this rule of precedence? To listen to that instinct speaking in its own case and deciding in its own favour would be rather simple minded. Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of all the rest. By the very act of listening to one rather than to others we have already prejudged the case. If we did not bring to the examination of our instincts a knowledge of their comparative dignity we could never learn it from them. And that knowledge cannot itself be instinctive: the judge cannot be one of the parties judged: or, if he is, the decision is worthless and there is no ground for placing preservation of the species above self-preservation or sexual appetite.

Nothing, not even the best and noblest, can go on as it now is. Nothing, not even what is lowest and most bestial, will not be raised again if it submits to death. It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. Flesh and blood cannot come to the Mountains [heaven]. Not because they are too rank, but because they are too weak. What is a Lizard compared with a stallion? Lust is a poor, weak, whimpering whispering thing compared with that richness and energy of desire which will arise when lust has been killed.

When indeed it is in God we live, and move, and have our being. We cannot draw a breath without his help.

Of course, I quiet agree that the Christian religion is, in the long run, a thing of unspeakable discomfort. But it does not begin in comfort; it begins in the dismay and it is no use at all trying to go on to that comfort without first going through that dismay. In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is one thing you cannot get looking for it. If you look for the truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth-only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and the in the end, despair.

All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.

But the more shrewdly and earnestly we study the histories of men, the less ready shall we be to make use of the word ‘artificial.’ Nothing in the world has ever been artificial. Many customs, many dresses, many works of art are branded with artificiality because the exhibit vanity and self-consciousness: as if vanity were not a deep and elemental thing, like love and hate and the fear of death. Vanity may be found in darkling deserts, in the hermit and in the wild beasts that crawl around him. It may be good or evil, but assuredly it is not artificial: vanity is a voice out of the abyss.

He came to destroy sin because it is fatal.

What we love we shall grow to resemble.

Even of his sins the Enemy does not want him to think too much: once they are repented, the sooner the man turns his attention outward, the better the Enemy is pleased.

Friendship, then, like the other natural loves, is unable to save itself. In reality, because it is spiritual and therefore faces a subtler enemy, it must, even more wholeheartedly than they, invoke the divine protection if it hopes to remain sweet. For consider how narrow its true path is. Is must not become what the people call a "mutual admiration society"; yet if it is not full of mutual admiration, of Appreciative love, it is not Friendship at all.

It doesn’t cause me to doubt God’s existence, but it does force me to admit there’s a lot about God I don’t understand.

Revenge loses sight of the end in the means, but it's end is not wholly bad - it wants the evil of the bad man to be to him what it is to everyone else. This is proved by the fact that the avenger wants the guilty party not merely to suffer, but to suffer at his hands, and to know it, and to know why. Hence the impulse to taunt the guilty man with his crime at the moment of taking vengeance: hence, too, such natural expressions as 'I wonder how he'd like it if the same thing were done to him' or 'I'll teach him'. For the same reason when we are going to abuse a man in words we say we are going to 'let him know what we think of him'.

The only opportunity you will ever have to live by faith is in the circumstances you are provided this very day: this house you live in, this family you find yourself in, this job you have been given, the weather conditions that prevail at the ...moment.

Not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point which means at the point of highest reality.

Stripped of its arrogance, its desire to make off with half of the patrimony and never be seen again, history belongs at the family table. If theology, the older brother, pretends not to need or notice him it will be a sign that he has forgotten, after all, who his father is.

...only in the late 1100s and 1200s did scholars in Sicily and Spain translate Aristotle's greatest philosophical and scientific texts. These translations had an impact reminiscent of those science fiction stories in which the world suddenly encounters a civilization far in advance of its own. Aristotle had systematically answered the widest range of questions on everything from ethics to physics to biology. Students flocked to the universities advertising that they taught Aristotle. For Christian theologians, all of this posed at least two problems. First, the whole Augustinian tradition had taught that faith provided the standpoint from which one could understand the world correctly. Since Aristotle had not been a Christian, how had he managed to understand so much? Second, most theologians had drawn on the idea, going back to Aristotle's teacher Plato, that the road to knowledge involves turning away from the senses and looking inward to the truths of the soul. Aristotle, on the other hand, taught that all knowledge begins with sense observation.

In words which can still bring tears to the eyes, St. Augustine describes the desolation into which the death of his friend Nebridius plunged him (Confessions IV, 10). Then he draws a moral. This is what comes, he says, of giving one’s heart to anything but God. All human beings pass away. Do not let your happiness depend on something you may lose. If love is to be a blessing, not a misery, it must be for the only Beloved who will never pass away.

One of the few things in life that cannot possibly do harm in the end is the honest pursuit of the truth.

So go back to the books. They will comfort you and cheer you. If you earnestly work with them, neither sorrow nor anxiety nor distress nor suffering need trouble your mind any more, no, not evermore.

There are as many ways of loving as there are people, and that wildflower variety is the great beauty of this dimension of existence.

...you have to be godly to be wise ...

The attempt to interpret human behavior in terms of models derived from the natural sciences eventually destroys personal responsibility.

Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible.

The crux and crisis is that man found it natural to worship, even natural to worship unnatural things

If we require some kind of sign, or "proof," for our belief in God, then we believe, or place our tust, not in God but in the sign or proof.

When I am with you, we stay up all night.When you're not here, I can't go to sleep.Praise God for those two insomnias!And the difference between them.

The "war" is being fought along the line between sin and righteousness in every family. It is being fought along the line between truth and falsehood in every school... Between justice and injustice in every legislature... Between integrity and corruption in every office... Between love and hate in every ethnic group... Between pride and humility in every sport... Between the beautiful and the ugly in every art... Between right doctrine and wrong doctrine in every church... Between sloth and diligence between coffee breaks. It is not a waste to fight the battle for truth and faith and love on any of these fronts.

You can grieve for me the week before I die, if I’m scared and hurting, but when I gasp that last fleeting breath and my immortal soul flees to heaven, I’m going to be jumping over fire hydrants down the golden streets, and my biggest concern, if I have any, will be my wife back here grieving. When I die, I will be identified with Christ’s exaltation. But right now, I’m identified with His affliction.

Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, "Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good--" At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their unmediaeval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.

... the preacher speaks both the word of tragedy and the word of comedy because they are both of them the truth and because Jesus speaks them both...

Oh! what a potent instrument for Satan is a misguided conscience(93)!

A God out there and values out there, if they existed, would be utterly useless and unintelligible to us. There is nothing to be gained by nostalgia for the old objectivism, which was in any case used only to justify arrogance, tyranny, and cruelty. People [forget] ... how utterly hateful the old pre-humanitarianism world was.

A tragedy means always a man's struggle with that which is stronger than man.

The truth is that wherever a man lies with a woman, there, whether they like it or not, a transcendental relation is set up between them which must be eternally enjoyed or eternally endured.

Faith is born and sustained by the Word of God, and out of faith grows the flower of joy.

Daily there have to be many troubles and trials in every house, city, and country. No station in life is free of suffering and pain, both from your own, like your wife or children or household help or subjects, and from the outside, from your neighbors and all sorts of accidental trouble.

We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this world for love of the other. But what are we to say of the fanatic who wrecks this world out of hatred of the other? He sacrifices the very existence of humanity to the non-existence of God. He offers his victims not to the altar, but merely to assert the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne. He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by which all things live, for his strange and eternal vengeance upon some one who never lived at all.

Pray as though everything depends on God. And work as if everything depends on you.

Wonder or radical amazement is the chief characteristic of the religious man's attitude toward history and nature.

There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less

Bad is so bad, that we cannot but think good an accident; good is so good, that we feel certain that evil could be explained.

...we should all fortify ourselves against the dark hours of depression by cultivating a deep distrust of the certainties of despair. Despair is relentless in the certainties of its pessimism. But we have seen again and again, from our own experience and others', that absolute statements of hopelessness that we make in the dark are notoriously unreliable. Our dark certainties are not sureties.

Suffering in the path of Christian obedience, with joy - because the steadfast love of the Lord is better than life (Psalm 63:3) - is the clearest display of the worth of God in our lives. Therefore, faith-filled suffering is essential in this world for the most intense, authentic worship. When we are most satisfied with God in suffering, he will be most glorified in us in worship. Our problem is not styles of music. Our problem is styles of life. When we embrace more affliction for the worth of Christ, there will be more fruit in the worship of Christ.

There is nothing better - nothing - than knowing that the risen Christ lives right now in heaven, singing over his people - singing over me - with love.

I have no duty to be anyone's Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

As Christ bore and received us as sinners so we in his fellowship may bear and receive sinners into the fellowship of Christ through the forgiving of sins.

The readiest way which God takes to draw a man to himself is, to afflict him in that he loves most, and with good reason; and to cause this affliction to arise from some good action done with a single eye; because nothing can more clearly show him the emptiness of what is most lovely and desirable in all the world.

Moses, without any mercy, breaks all bruised reeds, and quenches all smoking flax. For the law requires personal, perpetual and perfect obedience from the heart, and that under a most terrible curse, but gives no strength. It is a severe task master, like Pharaoh's, requiring the whole tale ofbricks and yet giving no straw. Christ comes with blessing after blessing, even upon those whom Moses had cursed, and with healing balm for those wounds which Moses had made.

We know many among ourselves who have given themselves up to bonds, in order that they might ransom others. Many, too, have surrendered themselves to slavery, that with the price which they received for themselves, they might provide food for others.

Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds' wings.