Quotes by Theologians - Page 8

What a difference! Under the esthetic sky, everything is buoyant, beautiful, transient! when ethics arrives on the scene, everything becomes harsh, angular and infinitely boring
Søren Kierkegaard
When consent takes the form of seeking to possess the things we wish, this is called desire. When consent takes the form of enjoying the things we wish, this is called joy.
Augustine of Hippo
. Nature's so terribly good. Don't you think so, Mr. Stanhope?"Stanhope was standing by, silent, while Mrs. Parry communed with her soul and with one or two of her neighbours on the possibilities of dressing the Chorus. He turned his head and answered, "That Nature is terribly good? Yes, Miss Fox. You do mean 'terribly'?""Why, certainly," Miss Fox said. "Terribly--dreadfully--very.""Yes," Stanhope said again. "Very. Only--you must forgive me; it comes from doing so much writing, but when I say 'terribly' I think I mean 'full of terror'. A dreadful goodness.""I don't see how goodness can be dreadful," Miss Fox said, with a shade of resentment in her voice. "If things are good they're not terrifying, are they?""It was you who said 'terribly'," Stanhope reminded her with a smile, "I only agreed.""And if things are terrifying," Pauline put in, her eyes half closed and her head turned away as if she asked a casual question rather of the world than of him, "can they be good?"He looked down on her. "Yes, surely," he said, with more energy. "Are our tremors to measure the Omnipotence?
Charles Williams
Good intentions are not good at all.
Fritz Chery
If it be good to come under the love of God once, surely it is good to keep ourselves there. And yet how reluctant we are!
Andrew Bonar
Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
C.S. Lewis
It is appropriate to speak of the artisans as possessed of wisdom (and not just "skill"), because the biblical writers share the understanding common to most traditional societies that the active form of wisdom is good work. Wisdom does not consist only in sound intellectual work; any activity that stands in a consistently productive relationship to the material world and nurtures the creative imagination qualifies as wise.
Ellen F. Davis
He who has God and everything else has no more than he who has God only.
C.S. Lewis
I generally give the title-page a fair chance," Roger said. "Once can't always judge books merely by the cover.
Charles Williams
In this sense every serious choice has a tragicomic dimension. For it is impossible to be a human being without choosing, and it is impossible to choose without value denials, and it is impossible to deny values without guilt. That is a very simple though, but it forms the core definition of guilt: an awareness of significant value loss for which I know myself to be responsible. Guilt is the self-knowing of moral loss.
Thomas C. Oden
I want that love that moved the mountains. I want that love that split the ocean. I want that love that made the winds tremble. I want that love that roared like thunder. I want that love that will raise the dead. I want that love that lifts us to ecstasy. I want that love that is the silence of eternity
Jalaluddin Rumi
Only the learned read old books, and... now... they are of all men the least likely to acquire wisdom by doing so. ...[G]reat scholars are now as little nourished by the past as the most ignorant mechanic who holds that "history is bunk..." [for] ...when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer's development, or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (specially by the learned man's colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the "present state of the question." To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge-to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behavior-this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded. ... [Therefore, even though] learning makes a free commerce between the ages... every generation [is cut] off from all others... [and] ...characteristic errors of one [are not] corrected by the characteristic truths of another.
C.S. Lewis
God never denied that soul anything that went as far as heaven to ask it.
John Trapp
The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse.
Charles Williams
[Christ] is the Mediator, not only between God and man, but between man and man, between man and reality.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
How I wish that more men who claim to be evangelical really believed the Word of God--that it IS the Word of God, that it is God speaking.
J. Vernon McGee
Fear not that thy life shall come to an end but rather that it shall never have a beginning.
John Henry Cardinal Newman
That's why I tell stories: to create readiness, to nudge the people toward receptive insight. In their present state they can stare till doomsday and not see it, listen till they're blue in the face and not get it.
Eugene H. Peterson
There's a lot of difference between listening and hearing.
G.K. Chesterton
Though I have forgotten the reason, there is spread over everything a vague sense of wrongness, of something amiss. Like in those dreams where nothing terrible occurs—nothing that would sound even remarkable if you told it at breakfast-time—but the atmosphere, the taste, the whole thing is deadly. So with this.
C.S. Lewis
It must be recognized that in any culture the source of law is the god of that society.
Rousas John Rushdoony
Prayer is as natural an expression of faith as breathing is to life.
Jonathan Edwards
Prayer is a rising up and a drawing near to God in mind and in heart and in spirit.
Alexander Whyte
I would have every minister of the gospel address his audience with the zeal of a friend with the generous energy of a father and with the exuberant affection of a mother.
François Fénelon
Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household. One keeps this anxiety at a distance by looking at the many round about who are related to him as kin and friends, but the anxiety is still there, nevertheless, and one hardly dares think of how he would feel if all this were taken away.
Søren Kierkegaard
By remembering it too often I have blurred the memory itself.
C.S. Lewis
this is a book about something
C.S. Lewis
By daily contrition, and habitual mortification of the flesh, man is day by day RENEWED, bearing heavenly fruits and celestial graces, of an inexplicable sweetness. Contrariwise, the pleasure of the world bringeth heaviness of heart, vexation of spirit, and a wounded conscience: yea, so great hence is the calamity of the soul, and so heavy the loss of the heavenly gift (a loss which necessarily flows from the pleasures of the flesh, and from worldly delights) that he who duly calls the same to mind, cannot be exceedingly fear and dread any of the fleshly and worldly joys, which serve but to divert him from those that are spiritual and heavenly, and to quench in him the most sweet grace of devotion that brings the soul into the kingdom of God.
Johann Arndt
[T]he more man accepts his limitations, the better is he enabled to know things truly.
Rousas John Rushdoony
It is one thing to believe in witches, and quite another to believe in witch-smellers.
G.K. Chesterton
But if subjective pietism is not the real crux of this all-important Gospel, if it is instead belief in the plan of salvation, how are we not dealing with "salvation by (cognitive) works" and Gnosticism (salvation by special knowledge)? Fundamentalists hotly deny it, but isn't it finally a matter of believers in the right religion being saved and everyone else being disqualified?
Robert M. Price
On the one hand the younger son realizes that he has lost the dignity of his sonship, but at the same time that sense of lost dignity makes him also aware that he is indeed the son who had dignity to lose," (pp. 49).
Henri J.M. Nouwen
The task is to become church for them, among them and with them, and under Spirit of God to lead them to become church in their own culture.
Tim Chester
sexuality isn’t ancillary to Christianity, in the way some other cultural or political issues are. Marriage and sex point, the Bible says, to a picture of the gospel itself, the union of Christ and his church. This is why the Bible spends so much time, as some critics would put it, “obsessed” with sex. That’s why, historically, churches that liberalize on sex tend to liberalize themselves right out of Christianity itself.
Russell D. Moore
It is now certain that the public does know. It is not so certain that the public does care.
G.K. Chesterton
But if I want to murder somebody, will it really be the best plan to make sure I'm alone with him?'Lord Pooley's eyes recovered their frosty twinkle as he looked at the little clergyman. He only said: 'If you want to murder somebody, I should advise it.
G.K. Chesterton
Turn over the rudder in God's name, and sail with the wind heaven sends us.
Catherine of Siena
There is a quality of lightness, easiness, and in some sense blatant unseriousness that pervades Classical Christianity's dialogue with modernity. The Christian intellect has no reason to be intimidated in the presence of later-stage modernity. Christianity has seen too many 'modern eras' to be cowed by this one.
Thomas C. Oden
Eve was not taken out of Adam's head to top him, neither out of his feet to be trampled on by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected by him, and near his heart to be loved by him.
Matthew Henry
I do not know by what extraordinary mental accident modern writers so constantly connect the idea of progress with the idea of independent thinking. Progress is obviously the antithesis of independent thinking. For under independent or individualistic thinking, every man starts at the beginning, and goes, in all probability, just as far as his father before him. But if there really be anything of the nature of progress, it must mean, above all things, the careful study and assumption of the whole of the past.
G.K. Chesterton
Every time we mention God we become theologians, and the only question is whether we are going to be good ones or bad ones.
J.I. Packer
Even-money that my liver lasts through my wife's metamorphosis to my mother-in-law.
Tim Heaton
In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
C.S. Lewis
Attend to your Configuration.
Edwin A. Abbott
You see, I don't think age matters so much as people think. Parts of me are still 12 and I think other parts were already 50 when I was 12….
C.S. Lewis
I look back upon my youth and realize how so many people gave me help, understanding, courage – very important things to me – and they never knew it. They entered into my life and became powers within me. All of us live spiritually by what others have given us, often unwittingly, in the significant hours of our life. At the time these significant hours may not even be perceived. We may not recognize them until years later when we look back, as one remembers some long-ago music or a boyhood landscape. We all owe to others much of the gentleness and wisdom that we have made our own; and we may well ask ourselves what will others owe to us.
Albert Schweitzer
The image of a wood has appeared often enough in English verse. It has indeed appeared so often that it has gathered a good deal of verse into itself; so that it has become a great forest where, with long leagues of changing green between them, strange episodes of poetry have taken place. Thus in one part there are lovers of a midsummer night, or by day a duke and his followers, and in another men behind branches so that the wood seems moving, and in another a girl separated from her two lordly young brothers, and in another a poet listening to a nightingale but rather dreaming richly of the grand art than there exploring it, and there are other inhabitants, belonging even more closely to the wood, dryads, fairies, an enchanter's rout. The forest itself has different names in different tongues- Westermain, Arden, Birnam, Broceliande; and in places there are separate trees named, such as that on the outskirts against which a young Northern poet saw a spectral wanderer leaning, or, in the unexplored centre of which only rumours reach even poetry, Igdrasil of one myth, or the Trees of Knowledge and Life of another. So that indeed the whole earth seems to become this one enormous forest, and our longest and most stable civilizations are only clearings in the midst of it.
Charles Williams
... no person can be his own saviour ... An individual must come before God in penitence, confess his sin and obtain pardon from a merciful God who repudiates sin but shows covenant love to the sinner.
R.K. Harrison
Joy, sorrow, tears, lamentation, laughter -- to all these music gives voice, but in such a way that we are transported from the world of unrest to a world of peace, and see reality in a new way, as if we were sitting by a mountain lake and contemplating hills and woods and clouds in the tranquil and fathomless water.
Albert Schweitzer
[W]e need not become fixated upon our own suffering, whatever its origin. We offer it up, thus participating in the well-being of the universe. When we experience an illness or depression not as our own but as the universe’s, we are one with all beings who experience this kind of suffering. (78)
Jean-Yves Leloup
It is as absurd to argue men as to torture them into believing.
John Henry Cardinal Newman
Most joyful let the Poet be it is through him that all men see.
William Ellery Channing
Contentment is a pearl of great price, and whoever procures it at the expense of ten thousand desires makes a wise and a happy purchase.
John Balguy
The heart of the difference between cheap-grace doctrines of guilt-free existence and the Christian gospel is this: Modern chauvinism desperately avoids the message of guilt by treating it as a regrettable symptom. Christianity listens to the message of guilt by conscientious self-examination. Hedonism winks at sin. Christianity earnestly confesses sin. Secularism assumes it can extricate itself from gross misdeeds. Christianity looks to grace for divine forgiveness. Modern consciousness is its own fumbling attorney before the bar of conscience. Christianity rejoices that God himself has become our attorney. Modernity sees no reason to atone for or make reparation for wrongs. Christianity knows that unatoned sin brings on misery of conscience. Modern naturalism sees no need for God. Christianity celebrates God's willingness to suffer for our sins and redeem us from guilt.
Thomas C. Oden
The most common form of despair is not being who you are.
Søren Kierkegaard
The Christ event did not in that sense CHANGE the will of God, but rather it more clearly expressed God's eternal will toward the whole of history.
Thomas C. Oden
What is to be gained if we are so intent in reaching out to the unchurched that we then unchurch the reached?
David F. Wells
When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.
Erasmus
Woven into our lives is the very fire from the stars and genes from the sea creatures, and everyone, utterly everyone, is kin in the radiant tapestry of being.
Elizabeth A. Johnson
When I was very young and in the cave of Trophonius I forgot to laugh. Then, when I got older, when I opened my eyes and saw the real world, I began to laugh and I haven’t stopped since. I saw that the meaning of life was to get a livelihood, that the goal of life was to be a High Court judge, that the bright joy of love was to marry a well-off girl, that the blessing of friendship was to help each other out of a financial tight spot, that wisdom was what the majority said it was, that passion was to give a speech, that courage was to risk being fined 10 rix-dollars, that cordiality was to say ‘You’re welcome’ after a meal, and that the fear of God was to go to communion once a year. That’s what I saw. And I laughed.
Søren Kierkegaard