Quotes by Theologians - Page 71

Art is the effort to appreciate and express the God who is its Beauty.
William Temple
Slaves are governed by the fear of man, and, whenever the fear of man replaces the fear of God in a society, slavery reappears and increases.
Rousas John Rushdoony
Salvation is the creation of new desires, not just new goodies.
John Piper
All believers in Christ, the Scripture teaches, will suffer-all of us. You will be glorified, Paul says, if you suffer with him. The problem with too many of us is not that we don't suffer, but that we assume that only Third World Christians or heroic missionaries are suffering. My boys didn't know that they were suffering in Russia; they would feel it as suffering now.
Russell D. Moore
Wherever you turn, you can find someone who needs you. Even if it is a little thing, do something for which there is no pay but the privilege of doing it. Remember, you don't live in a world all of your own.
Albert Schweitzer
He's not safe, but he's good (referring to Aslan, the Lion, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe)
C.S. Lewis
It is the gods who have been accused. They have answered her. If they in turn accuse her, a greater judge and a more excellent court must try the case.
C.S. Lewis
The heaven-and-hell framework has four central elements: the afterlife, sin and forgiveness, Jesus’s dying for our sins, and believing.
Marcus J. Borg
Suffering invites us to place our hurts in larger hands. In Christ we see God suffering – for us. And calling us to share in God’s suffering love for a hurting world. The small and even overpowering pains of our lives are intimately connected with the greater pains of Christ. Our daily sorrows are anchored in a greater sorrow and therefore a larger hope.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you...God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it--made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.
C.S. Lewis
If we want to benefit most from our suffering, by prayer and meditation, we will approach our suffering as a good soldier approaches war. What do I mean by that? A good soldier who has trained and trained is not surprised when he fins himself in war! He has been trained for it. Likewise, consider it your Job to be be prepared to suffer. That puts a whole different cast on Sunday morning, doesn't it? You are gathering with God's people Lord's Day after Lord's Day to train as good soldiers of Jesus Christ so that when your time of trial and testing sand suffering comes, you will be ready.
J. Ligon Duncan III
Choosing the way of Christ not only means identifying with Christ, however; ‘it also means identifying with the stubborn, recalcitrant, and frequently offensive flock that he calls his own. . . .Yet as flawed as the people of God are, if the Lord is to be our God then his people must be our people too.
Iain M. Duguid
Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us.
C.S. Lewis
I count myself as one of the number of those who learn as they write and write as they learn.
John Piper
Our prayers are granted as soon as we have prayed, even though the process of fulfilling our requests has not yet begun.
Thomas Goodwin
The Church is the Church only when it exists for others...not dominating, but helping and serving. It must tell men of every calling what it means to live for Christ, to exist for others.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed. It is frustrating to have discovered a new author and not to be able to tell anyone how good he is; to come suddenly, at the turn of the road, upon some mountain valley of unexpected grandeur and then to have to keep silent because the people with you care for it no more than for a tin can in the ditch; to hear a good joke and find no one to share it with. . . . The Scotch catechism says that man’s chief end is ‘to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.’ But we shall then know that these are the same thing. Fully to enjoy is to glorify. In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him.
C.S. Lewis
Every creature thinks itself best in its own element, that is the place it thrives in, and enjoys its happiness in; now Christ is the element of a Christian.
Richard Sibbes
In order to pronounce a book bad it is not enough to discover that it elicits no good response from ourselves, for that might be our fault.
C.S. Lewis
The compassionate person does not require other people to be stupid, in order to be intelligent. Their intelligence is for everyone, so as to have a world in which there is less ignorance. (118)
Jean-Yves Leloup
Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country: but none will rise again until it has been buried.
C.S. Lewis
To stand on one leg and prove God's existence is a very different thing from going on one's knees and thanking Him.
Søren Kierkegaard
Those blessings are sweetest that are won with prayer and worn with thanks.
Thomas Goodwin
The desire to write grows with writing.
Erasmus
We're free Narnians, Hwin and I, and I suppose, if you're running away to Narnia you want to be one too. In that case Hwin isn't your horse any longer. One might just as well say you're her human.
C.S. Lewis
Tomorrow I plan to work work from early until late. In fact I have so much to do that I shall spend the first three hours in prayer.
Martin Luther
The world might stop in ten minutes; meanwhile, we are to go on doing our duty. The great thing is to be found at one's post as a child of God, living each day as though it were our last, but planning as though our world might last a hundred years.
C.S. Lewis
There were always historians who said [historical Jesus research] can not be done because of historical problems. There were always theologians who said it should not be done because of theological objections. And there were always scholars who said the former when they meant the latter.
John Dominic Crossan
If you read history you will find that the Christians begin the most for the present world are just the ones that thought the most of the next. The Apostles themselves, who set on foot. in the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade, all left their mark one Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so in effective in this. And that Heaven and you'll get the earth "thrown in": aim at earth and you'll get neither.
C.S. Lewis
Lord, forgive us for the times we have read about Gethsemane with dry eyes.
Frederick S. Leahy
What, then, of the priest's iconic representation of Christ at the altar? If there is no specifically masculine or feminine charism or ontology, the significance of the priest's maleness fades away. What matters—as patristic Christology recognized centuries ago with its dictum, 'That which is not assumed [by the Son of God in the incarnation] is not healed'—is that Christ became human, assuming and thereby healing the nature common to men and women. Although biologically a man, Christ assumed human nature in such a way as to include both men and women in his salvific work. And that means, in turn, that to refuse to allow a woman to preside at the Eucharist may be to say much more than opponents of women's ordination realize—namely, 'that women are not adequate icons of Christ.' The result, notes [Sarah] Hinlicky Wilson near the end of her book, is nothing less than 'to leave both their humanity and their salvation in doubt.' If women can't reflect the human nature of Christ at the altar, how then can they trust Christ's human nature to save them at all?
Wesley Hill
An event is not any more intrinsically intelligible or unintelligible because of the pace at which it moves. For a man who does not believe in a miracle, a slow miracle would be just as incredible as a swift one. The Greek witch may have turned sailors to swine with a stroke of the wand. But to see a naval gentleman of our acquaintance looking a little more like a pig every day, till he ended with four trotters and a curly tail, would not be any more soothing. It might be rather more creepy and uncanny.
G.K. Chesterton
When Christians sing about the wrath of God, we are singing about ourselves.
Russell D. Moore
She made beauty all round her. When she trod on mud, the mud was beautiful; when she ran in the rain, the rain was silver. When she picked up a toad - she had the strangest and, I thought, unchanciest love for all manner of brutes - the toad became beautiful.
C.S. Lewis
The real cause for Paul’s rejection of the ‘works of the law’ liesbeyond both self-understanding and ethics. As we shall see, faith for Paul is the correlate to Christ’s cross and resurrection. It is obedience to the promise of God fulfilled in that event (see e.g. Rom. 4:13–25). One is justified not because of a mere inward disposition, but because of Christ in whom God has atoned for sin and effected a new creation.
Mark A. Seifrid
The knowledge of ourselves, therefore, is not only an incitement to seek after God, but likewise a considerable assistance towards finding him.
John Calvin
By prayer we couple the powers of heaven to our helplessness the powers which can capture strongholds and make the impossible possible.
O. Hallesby
Our [theological] study informs our prayers, and our prayers enliven our study. We cannot choose between prayer and study; faithful theology requires prayerful study.
Kelly Kapic
We remember, also, how that it is becoming increasingly difficult in these strenuous days for those who are desirous of studying the deeper things of God to find the time which such study requires.
Arthur W. Pink
Luther and Calvin believed that both the Roman church on the right and the Zwinglian and Anabaptist churches on the left made the Lord's Supper too much a place WHERE BELIEVERS DID THINGS FOR GOD - either by offering Christ to God (Rome) or by offering their deep devotion to God (the Radical Protestants). The main direction of the Supper, in both of these views, was up.
Frederick Dale Bruner
Christ’s fourth indirect claim was to judge the world. This is perhaps the most fantastic of all his statements. Several of his parables imply that he will come back at the end of the world, and that the final day of reckoning will be postponed until his return. He will himself arouse the dead, and all the nations will be gathered before him. He will sit on the throne of his glory, and the judgment will be committed to him by the Father. He will then separate men from one another as a shepherd separates his sheep from his goats. Some will be invited to come and inherit the kingdom prepared for them from the foundation of the world. Others will hear the dreadful words, 'Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.' Not only will Jesus be the judge, but the criterion of judgment will be men’s attitude to him as shown in their treatment of his 'brethren' or their response to his word. Those who have acknowledged him before men he will acknowledge before his Father: those who have denied him, he will deny. Indeed, for a man to be excluded from heaven on the last day, it will be enough for Jesus to say, "I never knew you.
John R.W. Stott
Walking and talking are two very great pleasures, but it is a mistake to combine them. Our own noise blots out the sounds and silences of the outdoor world; and talking leads almost inevitably to smoking, and then farewell to nature as far as one of our senses is concerned. The only friend to walk with is one who so exactly shares your taste for each mood of the countryside that a glance, a halt, or at most a nudge, is enough to assure us that the pleasure is shared.
C.S. Lewis
How do we listen to his voice? With the ear of our heart. With love. Love has ears, as love has eyes. Just be there, and love him, and let him love you." (35). Easier said than done. "What will happen then? What will we hear? Let God take care of that. Seek only him, do not use him as a means to seek any other end. He is not your Santa, he is your Savior. I cannot tell you what he will give you, except for one thing: he will give you himself. He will give you more of himself the more you want him, that is, the more you love him. He wants to pour infinite riches into your soul; prayer is a way of opening up your soul so more of God can enter.
Peter Kreeft
Surely we cannot take an open question like the supernatural and shut it with a bang, turning the key of the madhouse on all the mystics of history. You cannot take the region of the unknown and calmly say that, though you know nothing about it, you know all the gates are locked. We do not know enough about the unknown to know that it is unknowable.
G.K. Chesterton
God is willing and able to turn his judgements into joys . . . Don't ever think that the sin of your past means there is no hope for your future.
John Piper
Jesus treats patriarchy the way he treats much else of the law and custom of his time: ambiguously, suggestively, and sometimes subversively, but never immediately revolutionarily outside the central matter of his own mission and person...The main scandal of Jesus' career is properly JESUS - not Jesus and feminism, or Jesus and the abolition of slavery, or Jesus and Jewish emancipation, or Jesus and anything else. Those other causes are good, and they are implicit in Jesus' ministry. But they are incipient at best, and Jesus' accommodation to these various social distinctions needs to be acknowledged and then accounted for in one's paradigm regarding gender.
John G. Stackhouse Jr.
We...advance toward a state of society in which not only each man but every impulse in each man claims carte blanche.
C.S. Lewis
It is often said that second thoughts are best. So they are in matters of judgment but not in matters of conscience.
John Henry Newman
Faith is a knowledge of the benevolence of God toward us and a certain persuasion of His veracity.
John Calvin
See to it night and day that you pray for your children. Then you will leave them a great legacy of answers to prayer which will follow them all the days of their life. Then you may calmly and with a good conscience depart from them even though you may not leave them a great deal of material wealth.
O. Hallesby
Unless some people are commissioned for the task, there will be no gospel preachers; unless the gospel is preached, sinners will not hear Christ’s message and voice; unless they hear him, they will not believe the truths of his death and resurrection; unless they believe these truths, they will not call on him; and unless they call on his name, they will not be saved.
John R.W. Stott
As God adds his ‘Yes’ to your ‘Yes,’ as he confirms your will with his will, and as he allows you, and approves of, your triumph and rejoicing and pride, he makes you at the same time instruments of his will and purpose both for yourselves and for others. In his unfathomable condescension God does add his ‘Yes’ to yours; but by doing so, he creates out of your love something quite new – the holy estate of matrimony…
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Confidence that one's impressions are God-given is no guarantee that this is really so, even when they persist and grow stronger through long seasons of prayer. Bible-based wisdom must judge them.
J.I. Packer
As Venus within Eros does not really aim at pleasure, so Eros does not aim at happiness. We may think he does, but when he is brought to the test it proves otherwise... For it is the very mark of Eros that when he is in us we had rather share unhappiness with the Beloved than be happy on any other terms.
C.S. Lewis
God can make good use of all that happens, but the loss is real.
C.S. Lewis
Wear the old coat and buy the new book.
Austin Phelps
The less theorizing you do about God, the more receptive you are to His inpouring.
Meister Eckhart
The modern evil, we have said, greatly turns on this: thatpeople do not see that the exception proves the rule. Thus it mayor may not be right to kill a murderer; but it can only conceivablybe right to kill a murderer because it is wrong to kill a man.
G.K. Chesterton
A quite specific astonishment stands at the beginning of every theological perception, inquiry, and thought.
Karl Barth
In a number of workshops, I have asked people whether they have had one or more experiences that they would identify as an experience of God and, if so, to share them in small groups. On average, 80 percent of the participants identify one or more and are eager to talk about them. They also frequently report that they had never before been asked that question in a church setting or given an opportunity to talk about it.
Marcus J. Borg