Quotes by Theologians - Page 23

If the beloved is everywhere,the lover is a veil,but when living itself becomesthe Friend, lovers disappear.
Jalaluddin Rumi
You were sent to unite peopleYou were not been sent to divide people.
Jalaluddin Rumi
You were sent to unite peopleYou were not sent to divide people.
Jalaluddin Rumi
Religion demands above all the concentration of the spirit...it is a thrusting into the unity of all things so as to come to grips in the hiddenness of the soul with the unity of the One from Whom it all comes.
Abraham Kuyper
Say I Am YouI am dust particles in sunlight.I am the round sun.To the bits of dust I say, Stay.To the sun, Keep moving.I am morning mist, and the breathing of evening.I am wind in the top of a grove, and surf on the cliff.Mast, rudder, helmsman, and keel,I am also the coral reef they founder on.I am a tree with a trained parrot in its branches.Silence, thought, and voice.The musical air coming through a flute,a spark of a stone, a flickering in metal.Both candle and the moth crazy around it.Rose, and the nightingale lost in the fragrance.I am all orders of being, the circling galaxy,the evolutionary intelligence, the lift,and the falling away. What is, and what isn't.You who know Jelaluddin, You the one in all,say who I am. Say I am You.
Jalaluddin Rumi
You say grace before meals. I say grace before I dip the pen in the ink.
G.K. Chesterton
A good death is a death in solidarity with others. To prepare ourselves for a good death, we must develop or deepen this sense of solidarity.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
If Roman Catholic Christianity has always struggled with the threat of works righteousness, Reformed Protestantism has always struggled with the threat of cheap grace. For many, if not the majority of Protestants, God's love and acceptance do not lead to personal transformation. Evangelical formation often involves seeking to reestablish a pattern of maturing behaviour that should be integral to one's conversion. So both traditions can be challenged on whether there is a genuinely helpful connection between conversion and transformation.
Gordon T. Smith
To do for yourself the best that you have it in you to do—to grit your teeth and clench your fists in order to survive the world at its harshest and worst—is, by that very act, to be unable to let something be done for you and in you that is more wonderful still. The trouble with steeling yourself against the harshness of reality is that the same steel that secures your life against being destroyed secures your life also against being opened up and transformed
Frederick Buechner
For the first time I was beginning to discern a God whom I actually wanted to live for. I was beginning to discover the motivation of Paul when he proclaimed, “Christ’s love compels us” (2 Cor. 5: 14). All my life I’d tried to be good to avoid hell, or the ugly-stick flogging, or my stepmother’s beatings with a two-by-four. But while most people would undoubtedly be better at behaving well with these frightful motivations than I ever was, no one could ever be transformed by these sorts of motivations. Threatening motivations address behavior, but they can never transform our identity. They motivate people to change as a means of protecting themselves, but for this reason they can never move us beyond ourselves to become someone fundamentally different from who we currently are. And threatening motivations can certainly never transform us into people with an other-oriented, self-sacrificial, loving character. Only a motivation that is anchored in love can do this.
Gregory A. Boyd
He had turned into a dragon while he was asleep. Sleeping on a dragon's hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself.
C.S. Lewis
The gospel, then, is not a message about the salvation of individuals from the world, but news about a world transfigured, right down to its basic structures.
Walter Wink
The author challenges how much sanctity has to do with sameness, as he says saints are as different from each other as those in any group -- even murderers.
G.K. Chesterton
Anyone can see that intending and not acting when we can is not really intending, and loving and not doing good when we can is not really loving.
Emanuel Swedenborg
If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them.
C.S. Lewis
You are the source of the sun.And I am the willow's shadow. Oh, you have struck me on the head,Wretch that I am, on fire am I.
Jalaluddin Rumi
The world's flattery and hypocrisy is a sweet morsel:eat less of it, for it is full of fire.Its fire is hidden while its taste is manifest,but its smoke becomes visible in the end.
Jalaluddin Rumi
I hold my plush monkey over the bannister and let it drop. Its eyes light up when you squeeze its kidneys as whose eyes, I suppose, would not.
Frederick Buechner
I sometimes think that shame, mere awkward, senseless shame, does as much towards preventing good acts and straightforward happiness as any of our vices can do.
C.S. Lewis
If Innocent is happy, it is because he is innocent. If he can defy the conventions, it is just because he can keep the commandments. It is just because he does not want to kill but to excite to life that a pistol is still as exciting to him as it is to a schoolboy. It is just because he does not want to steal, because he does not covet his neighbour's goods, that he has captured the trick (oh, how we all long for it!), the trick of coveting his own goods. It is just because he does not want to commit adultery that he achieves the romance of sex; it is just because he loves one wife that he has a hundred honeymoons.
G.K. Chesterton
No,' said Gould, with an unusual and convincing gravity; 'I do not believe that being perfectly good in all respects would make a man merry.' 'Well,' said Michael quietly, 'will you tell me one thing? Which of us has ever tried it?
G.K. Chesterton
We were made for God. Only by being in some respect like Him, only by being a manifestation of His beauty, lovingkindness, wisdom or goodness, has any earthly Beloved excited our love.
C.S. Lewis
There is no excess of goodness. You cannot go too far in the right direction.
C.S. Lewis
Badness is only spoiled goodness.
C.S. Lewis
Love is a madman,working his wild schemes, tearing off his clothes,running through the mountains, drinking poison,and now quietly choosing annihilation.
Jalaluddin Rumi
All habits are bad habits. (...) Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
G.K. Chesterton
The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman. But the materialist's world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane.
G.K. Chesterton
Be careful how you suggest things to me. For there is in me a madness which goes beyond martyrdom, the madness of an utterly idle man.
G.K. Chesterton
There nearly always is a method in madness.
G.K. Chesterton
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
G.K. Chesterton
Christmas is an indictment before it becomes a delight. It will not have its intended effect until we feel desperately the need for a Savior.
John Piper
A prison cell, in which one waits, hopes - and is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside, is not a bad picture of Advent
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Advent creates people, new people.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The family is the key of Christmas.
Scott Hahn
All ceremony depends on symbol; and all symbols have been vulgarized and made stale by the commercial conditions of our time...Of all these faded and falsified symbols, the most melancholy example is the ancient symbol of the flame. In every civilized age and country, it has been a natural thing to talk of some great festival on which "the town was illuminated." There is no meaning nowadays in saying the town was illuminated...The whole town is illuminated already, but not for noble things. It is illuminated solely to insist on the immense importance of trivial and material things, blazoned from motives entirely mercenary...It has not destroyed the difference between light and darkness, but it has allowed the lesser light to put out the greater...Our streets are in a permanent dazzle, and our minds in a permanent darkness.
G.K. Chesterton
Here’s an Advent illustration for kids — and those of us who used to be kids and remember what it was like. Suppose you and your mom get separated in the grocery store, and you start to get scared and panic and don’t know which way to go, and you run to the end of an aisle, and just before you start to cry, you see a shadow on the floor at the end of the aisle that looks just like your mom. It makes you really happy and you feel hope. But which is better? The happiness of seeing the shadow, or having your mom step around the corner and it’s really her?That’s the way it is when Jesus comes to be our High Priest. That’s what Christmas is. Christmas is the replacement of shadows with the real thing.
John Piper
Always winter but never Christmas.
C.S. Lewis
Can you not see death as the friend and deliverer? It means stripping off that body which is tormenting you. What are you afraid of? Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave it with regret?
C.S. Lewis
Superabundant piety/righteousness (and its practices) is that form of life that enhances the individual and the community simultaneously.
Michael Joseph Brown
We may be little, insignificant servants in the eyes of a world motivated by efficiency, control and success. But when we realize that God has chosen us from all eternity, sent us into the world as the blessed ones, handed us over to suffering, can't we, then, also trust that our little lives will multiply themselves and be able to fulfill the needs of countless people?
Henri J.M. Nouwen
Our community with one another consists solely in what Christ has done to each of us.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
A willingness to share our possessions with one another is a very important aspect of true biblical community.
Jerry Bridges
Practice of true community involves responsibilities and actions that do not come naturally to us.
Jerry Bridges
Biblical community is first of all the sharing of a common life in Christ.
Jerry Bridges
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
There is a great difference between successfulness and fruitfulness. Success comes from strength, control, and respectability. A successful person has the energy to create something, to keep control over its development, and to make it available in large quantities. Success brings many rewards and often fame. Fruits, however, come from weakness and vulnerability. And fruits are unique. A child is the fruit conceived in vulnerability, community is the fruit born through shared brokenness, and intimacy is the fruit that grows through touching one another's wounds. Let's remind one another that what brings us true joy is not successfulness but fruitfulness.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
The idea of Christian perfection, which began in the ancient monasteries and spread to the world as an ideal, is one of the most appealing, demanding and ultimately hopeless notions of the spiritual life. By definition, only God is perfect—that is, complete and independent unto [God’s] self. Humans, on the other hand, are radically imperfect, and that, paradoxically, is welcome news, for the recognition of our incompleteness throws us on the mercy of God and enables us, as Saint Paul stressed, to put up with one another’s faults.
Donald Spoto
Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.
C.S. Lewis
If we construct an economy where quantities are controlled, based on the belief there is never enough for all, then we must compete to determine the winners. We begin this with grades in the first grade. There is the presumption that competition is essential and so there must be a normal distribution of grades. All students cannot receive high marks. If I get an A, someone in the class must perform poorly. It is an early lesson in how the marketplace ideology works. In a community organized around abundance, competition will occur, but it is not built into the system as a core design element. In a neighborly culture, the abundance of resources becomes the design element
Walter Brueggemann
In community we are called to care for each member of the community. We can. Choose our friends but we do not choose our brothers and sisters' they are given to us, whether in family or in community." Jean
Jean Vanier
Rather than equating the terms 'local' and 'cosmopolitan' with geographical areas (rural and urban respectively), sociologist Wade Clark Roof suggests that these terms refer to character types who can be found in a diversity of settings in the United States. Locals are strongly oriented toward community or neighborhood, favor commitments to primary groups (family, neighborhood, fraternal and community organizations), tend to personalize their interpretations of social experience, and are more traditional in their beliefs and values. Cosmopolitans, on the other hand, are oriented toward the world outside the residential community, prefer membership in professional or special interest organizations, and are more open to social change and more tolerant of diversity in belief than locals. While a disproportionate number of locals are found in smaller communities, studies indicate that other factors - such as length of residence in a community, age, and educational level - play an even stronger role in determining orientation.
Leonora Tubbs Tisdale
Those who are weak have great difficulty finding their place in our society. The image of the ideal human as powerful and capable disenfranchises the old, the sick, the less-abled. For me, society must, by definition, be inclusive of the needs and gifts of all its members. How can we lay claim to making an open and friendly society where human rights are respected and fostered when, by the values we teach and foster, we systematically exclude segments of our population? I believe that those we most often exclude from the normal life of society, people with disabilities, have profound lessons to teach us. When we do include them, they add richly to our lives and add immensely to our world.
Jean Vanier
If you look at every flower individually, they look quite miserable. Put them together in a vase and they become a bouquet and that's quite attractive. I think about our community often in that way
Henri J.M. Nouwen
Community is not an ideal; it is people. It is you and I. In community we are called to love people just as they are with their wounds and their gifts, not as we want them to be.
Jean Vanier
The church itself is a spiritual director. It tries to connect your story with God's story. Just to be a true part of this community means you are being directed, you are being guided, you are being asked to make connection. The Bible is a spiritual director. People must read Scripture as a word for themselves personally, and ask where God speaks to them. Finally, individual Christians are also spiritual directors. A spiritual director is a Christian man or woman who practices the disciplines of the church and of the Bible and to whom you are willing to be accountable for your life in God.
Henri Nouwen
But there is one thing that is privileged to be a paradoxical sign of God, in relation to which men are able to manifest their deepest commitment -- our Neighbor. The sacrament of our Neighbor!' -- Congar
Gustavo Gutiérrez
[Neighbor is] not he whom I find in my path, but rather he in whose path I place myself, he whom I approach and actively seek.
Gustavo Gutiérrez
Community is a sign that love is possible in a materialistic world where people so often either ignore or fight each other. It is a sign that we don't need a lot of money to be happy--in fact, the opposite.
Jean Vanier
A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.
Desmond Tutu
One of the marvelous things about community is that it enables us to welcome and help people in a way we couldn't as individuals. When we pool our strength and share the work and responsibility, we can welcome many people, even those in deep distress, and perhaps help them find self-confidence and inner healing.
Jean Vanier