Quotes by Theologians - Page 10

Christ did not come to earth simply to be our moral teacher. If that were His only mission, He could have come as He did in former times, as the Angel of the Lord, without our flesh and blood to encumber Him. Instead, He had to become like us so that He could raise us up to be like Him.

Joel R. Beeke

Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight,At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more,When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death,And when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again.

C.S. Lewis

Prayer is in essence rebellion—rebellion against the world in its fallenness. Prayer is the undying refusal to accept as normal what is pervasively abnormal. It is the refusal of every agenda, every scheme, every interpretation that is at odds with the norm as originally established by God.

David G. Wells

Only God may be adored, because only God is unlimited goodness, truth, and beauty, and thus only God deserves unlimited love.

Peter Kreeft

The resurrection is the promise that death will not prevail, that nothingness does not have the last word. God promises to overcome it with life... We can trust that God will overcome death because Jesus is the resurrection, because on the third day Jesus rose again, as the first of many.

Andrew Root

I suspect there is something in our very mode of thought which makes it inevitable that we should always be baffled by actual existence, whatever character actual existence may have.

C.S. Lewis

O what a blessed day that will be when I shall . . . stand on the shore and look back on the raging seas I have safely passed; when I shall review my pains and sorrows, my fears and tears, and possess the glory which was the end of all!

Richard Baxter

The denunciation of injustice implies the rejection of the use of Christianity to legitimize the established order.

Gustavo Gutiérrez

I do not look at myself. I have given up myself. I had to, you know, after the murder. That was what it did for me. And that was how everything began

C.S. Lewis

For all works and things, which are either commanded or forbidden by God and thus have been instituted by the supreme Majesty, are 'musts.' Nevertheless, no one should be dragged to them or away from them by the hair, for I can drive no man to heaven or beat him into it with a club.

Martin Luther

When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.

G.K. Chesterton

SUDDEN RESURRECTION! Endless mercy!Blazing fire in the thickets of thought! Today you came laughing Unlocking dungeons Came to the meek Like god’s grace and bountyYou are the antechamber to the sunYou are the hope’s prerequisite You are sought Seeker Terminus PrincipiaYou pulse in every chest adorn every idea then permit their realizationSpirit- spring, irreplaceableDelight of action and cognition.All the rest is pretext, fraud- the former, illness; the latter, cureWe’re jaundiced by that fraudHeart-set to slay an innocentDrunk, now on angel eyesNow on plain bread and soupTaste this intoxication, drop your ratiocination Savor these delectable Drop the debatablesA little bread and greensShould not entail so much trouble*Ghazal 1

Jalaluddin Rumi

Sin and grace, absence and presence, tragedy and comedy, they divide the world between them and where they meet head on, the Gospel happens.

Frederick Buechner

[But] we inherit a whole system of desires which do not necessarily contribute God's will but which, after centuries of usurped autonomy steadfastly ignore it. If the thing we like doing is, in fact, the thing God wants us to do, yet that is not our reason for doing it; it remains a mere happy coincidence. We cannot therefore know that we are acting at all, or primarily, for God's sake, unless the material of the action is contrary to our inclination or (in other words) painful and what we cannot know that we are choosing, we cannot choose. The full acting out of the self's surrender to God therefore demands pain: this action, to be perfect, must be done from the pure will to obey in the absence, or in the teeth, of inclination. How impossible it is to enact the surrender of the self by doing what we like...

C.S. Lewis

The sin underneath all our sins is to trust the lie of the serpent that we cannot trust the love and grace of Christ and must take matters into our own hands

Martin Luther

The Bible is teh means through which we are introduced to Jesus and invited to follow Him in the life of humility and service. Secured by the knowledge that in Christ, our origin... and destination is God, we will yield the fruit of service to God. This is the "so what" of our Bible reading. Does it shape our spirits in love and humility? Does it lead us more fully into life with God? (Life with God, p. 34-35)

Richard Foster

The problem with carnal anger and outrage is that it's one of the easiest sons to commit while convincing oneself that he is being faithful.

Russell D. Moore

Rationality belongs to the cool observer, but because of the stupidity of the average man, he follows not reason, but faith, and the naive faith requires necessary illusion and emotionally potent oversimplifications which are provided by the myth-maker to keep ordinary person on course.

Reinhold Niebuhr

the real "work" of prayer is to become silent and listen to the voice that says good things about me.To gently push aside and silence the many voices that question my goodness and to trust that I will hear the voice of blessing-- that demands real effort.

Henri J.M. Nouwen

Grace, on the other hand, means that God is pursuing you. That God forgives you. That God sanctifies you. When you are apathetic toward God, He is never apathetic toward you. When you don’t desire to pray and talk to God, He never grows tired of talking to you. When you forget to read your Bible and listen to God, He is always listening to you. Grace means that your spirituality is upheld by God’s stubborn enjoyment of you.Charis: God's Scandalous Grace for Us (p. 76).

Preston Sprinkle

For if we see that the sun, in sending forth its rays upon the earth, to generate, cherish, and invigorate its offspring, in a manner transfuses its substance into it, why should the radiance of the Spirit be less in conveying to us the communion of his flesh and blood? Wherefore the Scripture, when it speaks of our participation with Christ, refers its whole efficacy to the Spirit. Instead of many, one passage will suffice. Paul, in the Epistle to the Romans (Rom. 8:9-11), shows that the only way in which Christ dwells in us is by his Spirit. By this, however, he does not take away that communion of flesh and blood of which we now speak, but shows that it is owing to the Spirit alone that we possess Christ wholly, and have him abiding in us.

John Calvin

Lucy buried her head in his mane to hide from his face. But there must have been some magic in his mane. She could feel lion-strength going into her. Quite suddenly she sat up. "I'm sorry, Aslan," she said. "I'm ready now.""Now you are a lioness," said Aslan. "And now all Narnia will be renewed.

C.S. Lewis

A miracle is when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A miracle is when one plus one equals a thousand.

Frederick Buechner

First of all, you have to keep unmasking the world about you for what it is: manipulative, controlling, power-hungry, and, in the long run, destructive. The world tells you many lies about who you are, and you simply have to be realistic enough to remind yourself of this. Every time you feel hurt, offended, or rejected, you have to dare to say to yourself: 'These feelings, strong as they may be, are not telling me the truth about myself. The truth, even though I cannot feel it right now, is that I am the chosen child of God, precious in God's eyes, called the Beloved from all eternity, and held safe in an everlasting belief.

Henri J.M. Nouwen

As a moth gnaws a garment, so doth envy consume a [person].

John Chrysostom

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

Faith consists not in ignorance but in knowledge and that not only of God but also of the divine will.

John Calvin

It is the Godfather, not God the Father, who makes you an offer you can’t refuse.

Peter Kreeft

The deformity of Christ forms you. If he had not willed to be deformed, you would not have recovered the form which you had lost. Therefore he was deformed when he hung on the cross. But his deformity is our comeliness. In this life, therefore, let us hold fast to the deformed Christ.

Augustine of Hippo

Job was comfortless before the speech of Jehovah and is comforted after it. He has been told nothing, but he feels the terrible and tingling atmosphere of something which is too good to be told.

G.K. Chesterton

The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)

C.S. Lewis

Knock, And He'll open the doorVanish, And He'll make you shine like the sunFall, And He'll raise you to the heavensBecome nothing, And He'll turn you into everything.

Jalaluddin Rumi

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

C.S. Lewis

as Schulz himself has pointed out, Snoopy is capable of being 'one of the meanest' members of the entire Peanuts cast ... he is lazy, he is a 'chow-hound' without parallel, he is bitingly sarcastic, he is frequently a coward, and he often becomes quite weary of being what he is basically -- a dog. He is, in other words, a fairly drawn caricature for what is probably the typical Christian.

Robert L. Short

I need not pause to explain that crime is not a disease. It is criminology that is a disease.

G.K. Chesterton

A community is nothing else than a harmonious collection of individuals.

Augustine of Hippo

He who is not liberal with what he has, does but deceive himself when he thinks he would be liberal if he had more

William Swan Plumer

The wit taught by God to the beeIs withheld from the lion and the wild ass.

Jalaluddin Rumi

To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labours, and holidays; to be Whitely within a certain area, providing toys, boots, cakes and books; to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can imagine how this can exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone and narrow to be everything to someone? No, a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute.

G.K. Chesterton

Orthodoxy, however, entails a revolution in our metaphysical conception of the relationship between God and humanity, and therefore between the uncreated Unum and the maior dissimilitudo of the creature before the Unum. Properly understood, the apostolic confession of the unity of Christ does not stand midway between a “too unitive Christology” on the one hand, and a “too differentiating Christology” on the other; rather, it wholly recapitulates the nature of the difference of man before God.

Aaron Riches

We must accept finite disappointment but we must never lose infinite hope.

Martin Luther King

Infinite mercy flows continuallyBut you're asleep and can't see it.The sleeper's robe goes on drinking river waterWhile he frantically hunts mirages in dreamsAnd runs continually here and there shouting,"There'll be water further on, I know!"It's this false thinking that blocks himFrom the path that leads to himself,By always saying, "Further on!"He's become estranged from "here":Because of a false fantasyHe's driven from reality.

Jalaluddin Rumi

The method that is required is not one of correlation but of liberation. Even the term “method” must be reinterpreted and in fact wrenched out of its usual semantic field, for the emerging creativity in women is by no means a merely cerebral process. In order to understand the implications of this process it is necessary to grasp the fundamental fact that women have had the power of naming stolen from us. We have not been free to use our power to name ourselves, the world or God. The old naming was not the product of dialogue- a fact inadvertently admitted in the genesis story of Adam’s naming the animals and the women. Women are now realizing that the universal imposing of names by men has been false because partial. That is, inadequate words have been taken as adequate.

Mary Daly

God thundered again and again through the prophets that worship in the context of mistreatment of the poor and disadvantaged is an outrage.

Ronald J. Sider

I'm afraid that in the United States of America today the prevailing doctrine of justification is not justification by faith alone. It is not even justification by good works or by a combination of faith and works. The prevailing notion of justification in our culture today is justification by death. All one has to do to be received into the everlasting arms of God is to die.

R.C. Sproul

God’s downward descent to us in grace reversed by our upward ascent in pragmatic enthusiasm, we are increasingly becoming a sheep without a Shepherd—and all in the name of mission. Instead of churching the unchurched, we are well on our way to even unchurching the churched.

Michael S. Horton

[C]ontemporary Jesus research is still involved in textual looting, in attacks on the mound of Jesus tradition that do not begin from any overall stratigraphy, do not explain why this or that item was chosen for emphasis over some other one, and give the distinct impression that the researcher knew the result before beginning the search.

John Dominic Crossan

If you play games with the law of non-contradiction, then every time you open your mouth and say anything, you're cheating. Every time you make a choice in life you're cheating.

Ronald H. Nash

Surely we can only come to understand each other's beliefs by means of direct encounter and open, honest discussion. In the meantime, many free churches invite all believers in Jesus Christ to the Table for the sake of true spiritual unity that transcends intellectual differences of interpretation. Withholding sacramental sharing on the basis of disagreement about the nature of the Lord's Supper seems odd to us. What two people think exactly alike about the act? We are not offended by Catholics' closed Communion, but we find it odd and exclusive. It places intellectual understanding above fellowship among disciples of Jesus Christ.

Roger E. Olson

Lincoln did not admire those who think it is a mark of sophistication to sneer at patriotism. He believed that God has a will for a country and that is honest man should rejoice in the effort to try to remake his country after the Divine pattern, insofar as that pattern is revealed to him.

Elton Trueblood

I do not try, Lord, to attain Your lofty heights, because my understanding is in no way equal to it. But I do desire to understand Your truth a little, that truth that my heart believes and loves. For I do not seek to understand so that I may believe; but I believe so that I may understand. For I believe this also, that “unless I believe, I shall not understand.

Anslem of Canterbury

Nor is it the spirit of those Christians - alas, they are many - whose ambition in life seems limited to building a nice middle-class Christian home, and making nice middle-class Christian friends, and bringing up their children in nice middle-class Christian ways, and who leave the sub-middle-class sections of the community, Christian and non-Christian, to get on by themselves. The Christmas spirit does not shine out in the Christian snob. For the Christmas spirit is the spirit of those who, like their Master, live their whole lives on the principle of making themselves poor - spending and being spent - to enrich their fellowmen, giving time, trouble, care and concern to do good to others - and not just their own friends - in whatever way there seems need.

J.I. Packer

Every book is a great action and every great action is a book!

Martin Luther

What we do every time we pray is to confess our impotence and God's sovereignty.

J.I. Packer

An artist is identical with an anarchist,' he cried. 'You might transpose the words anywhere. An anarchist is an artist. The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything. He sees how much more valuable is one burst of blazing light, one peal of perfect thunder, than the mere common bodies of a few shapeless policemen. An artist disregards all governments, abolishes all conventions. The poet delights in disorder only. If it were not so, the most poetical thing in the world would be the Underground Railway.''So it is,' said Mr. Syme.'Nonsense!' said Gregory, who was very rational when any one else attempted paradox.

G.K. Chesterton

The Shield was another of the Fear's names. According to Laughter, it means he shields the seed of Abraham the way a man starting a fire shields the flame. When Sarah was about to die childless, the Fear gave her a son. When Abraham was about to slaughter the son, the Fear gave him the ram. He is always shielding us like a guttering wick, Laughter said, because the fire he is trying to start with us is a fire that the whole world will live to warm its hands at. It is a fire in the dark that will light the whole world home.

Frederick Buechner

The Right thinks that the breakdown of the family is the source of crime and poverty, and this they very insightfully blame on the homosexuals, which would be amusing were it not so tragic. Families and 'family values' are crushed by grinding poverty, which also makes violent crime and drugs attractive alternatives to desperate young men and sends young women into prostitution. Family values are no less corrupted by the corrosive effects of individualism, consumerism, and the accumulation of wealth. Instead of shouting this from the mountain tops, the get-me-to-heaven-and-the-rest-be-damned Christianity the Christian Right preaches is itself a version of selfish spiritual capitalism aimed at netting major and eternal dividends, and it fits hand in glove with American materialism and greed.

John D. Caputo

Nothing but prayer can make saints because nothing but God can make saints, and we meet God in prayer. Prayer is the hospital for souls where we meet Doctor God.

Peter Kreeft

The Bible is useful because it opens our eyes, and because it’s highly impractical to walk through life with our eyes closed.

Peter J. Leithart

The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour's talents--or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall.

C.S. Lewis

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