Quotes by Theologians - Page 27

Christ is, then, the perfect art work in the sense of that reality in whom is realised those goals that all artistic making has as its explicit or implicit ends. Because he is infinite meaning, life and being perfectly synthesised with finite form, the cave painters at Lascaux, or Hesiod penning his hymns, or Beethoven working on his last quartets, were all gesturing towards him though they realised it not.
Aidan Nichols O.P.
As we face the cross, then, we can say to ourselves both, “I did it, my sins sent him there,” and “He did it, his love took him there.
John R.W. Stott
He embraces all things that are lovely: he seals up the sum of all loveliness. Things that shine as single stars with a particular glory, all meet in Christ as a glorious constellation. Col. 1:19, "It pleased the Father that in him should all fullness dwell." Cast your eyes among all created beings, survey the universe: you will observe strength in one, beauty in a second, faithfulness in a third, wisdom in a fourth; but you shall find none excelling in them all as Christ does. Bread has one quality, water another, raiment another, medicine another; but none has them all in itself as Christ does. He is bread to the hungry, water to the thirsty, a garment to the naked, healing to the wounded; and whatever a soul can desire is found in him, 1 Cor. 1:30
John Flavel
Our Lord took on a body like ours and lived as a man in order that those who had refused to recognize Him in His superintendence and capacity of the whole universe might come to recognize from the works He did here below in the body that what dwelled in this body was the Word of God.
Athanasius of Alexandria
There is tremendous relief in knowing His love to me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me , so that no discovery can disillusion him about me , in the way I am so often disillusioned about myself, and quench his determination to bless me.
J.I. Packer
The temptation of Christ was harder, unspeakably harder, than the temptation of Adam; for Adam carried nothing in himself which could have given the tempter a claim and power over him. But Christ bore in himself the whole burden of the flesh, under the curse, under condemnation; and yet his temptation was henceforth to bring help and salvation to all flesh.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Thou has heard the words of Christ. . . . Dost thou weep, when I have thee, Poor soul, what aileth thee? Dost thou weep, when I have wept so much? Be of good cheer ; thy wounds are saving, and not deadly. It is I that have made them, who mean thee no hurt : though I let out thy blood, I will not let out thy life (628).
Richard Baxter
If you cannot undo what you have done, you are trapped. It is easy to understand how helpless and hopeless you then feel and why you might want to give up. . . . Restoring what you cannot restore, healing the wound you cannot heal, fixing that which you broke and you cannot fix is the very purpose of the atonement of Christ.
Robert L. Millet
We never feel Christ to be a reality, until we feel Him to be a necessity.
Austin Phelps
Divinity is great enough to be divine; it is great enough to call itself divine. But as humanity grows greater, it grows less and less likely to do so. God is God, as the Moslems say; but a great man knows he is not God, and the greater he is the better he knows it. That is the paradox; everything that is merely approaching to that point is merely receding from it.
G.K. Chesterton
What I need first of all is not exhortation, but a gospel, not directions for saving myself but knowledge of how God has saved me. Have you any good news? That is the question that I ask of you. I know your exhortations will not help me. But if anything has been done to save me, will you not tell me the facts?
J Gresham Machen
All heroes are shadows of Christ
John Piper
God without Christ is no God.
John Piper
There are no real personalities apart from God. Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self. Sameness is to be found most among the most 'natural' men, not among those who surrender to Christ. How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerers have been; how gloriously different are the saints.But there must be a real giving up of the self. You must throw it away 'blindly' so to speak. Christ will indeed give you a real personality; but you must not go to Him for the sake of that. As long as your own personality is what you are bothering about you are not going to Him at all. The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether. Your real, new self (which is Christ's and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him...Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ, and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.
C.S. Lewis
To love with expectations is, in the end, an oppressive, driven thing, and people know it when they receive it.
Mark Galli
So many people come to church with a genuine desire to hear what we have to say, yet they are always going back home with the uncomfortable feeling that we are making it too difficult for them to come to Jesus.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
If there is no element of asceticism in our lives, if we give free rein to the desires of the flesh (taking care of course to keep within the limits of what seems permissible to the world), we shall find it hard to train for the service of Christ. When the flesh is satisfied it is hard to pray with cheerfulness or to devote oneself to a life of service which calls for much self-renunciation.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
If we are cut loose from the anchor of God's Word, we will not be free. We will be slaves of personal passions and popular trends.
John Piper
The figure of the crucified invalidates all thought which takes success for its standard.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
[God says] Discipleship is not limited to what you can comprehend - it must transcend all comprehension. Plunge into the deep waters beyond your own comprehension, and I will help you to comprehend even as I do. Bewilderment is the true comprehension. Not to know where you are going is the true knowledge. My comprehension transcends yours.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The Bible Belt is collapsing. The world of nominal, cultural Christianity that took the American dream and added Jesus to it in order to say, 'you can have everything you ever wanted and Heaven too,' is soon to be gone. Good riddance.
Russell D. Moore
The Must be worthless by our estimation or keep us enslaved by an intemperate love of it.
John Calvin
We use the word cross in our hymns, in our piety, in our prayers, and in our pastoral language. But we use it too cheaply. We say that a person has to live with some sort of suffering in life: a sickness that cannot be cured, an unresolvable personality conflict within the family, poverty, or some other unexplainable or unchangeable suffering. Then we say, “That person has a cross to bear.” Granted, whatever kind of suffering we have is suffering that we can bear in confidence that God is with us. But the cross that Jesus had to face, because he chose to face it, was not—like sickness—something that strikes you without explanation. It was not some continuing difficulty in his social life. It was not an accident or catastrophe that just happened to hit him when it could have hit somebody else. Jesus’ cross was the price to pay for being the kind of person he was in the kind of world he was in; the cross that he chose was the price of his representing a new way of life in a world that did not want a new way of life. That is what he called his followers to do.
John Howard Yoder
What Paul understands by holiness or sanctification (is) the learning in the present of the habits which anticipate the ultimate future.
N.T. Wright
The desire we so often hear expressed today for “episcopal figures,” “priestly men,” “authoritative personalities” springs frequently enough from a spiritually sick need for the admiration of men, for the establishment of visible human authority, because the genuine authority of service appears to be so unimpressive.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
If you are looking for the way by which you should go, take Christ, because he himself is the way.
Thomas Aquinas
The cross is laid on every Christian. The first Christ-suffering which every man must experience is the call to abandon the attachments of this world. It is that dying of the old man which is the result of his encounter with Christ. As we embark upon discipleship we surrender ourselves to Christ in union with his death—we give over our lives to death. Thus it begins; the cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise god-fearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Mine is to chew on the appropriate texts and make them delectable.
Gregory of Nyssa
We have to grow into Scripture, like a young boy inheriting his older brother's clothes and flopping around in them, but he gradually builds out and grows up. Perhaps it's a measure of our maturity when parts of Scripture that we found odd or even repellent suddenly come up in a new light. Our sense is overtaken by a sense of the whole thing, wide, multicolored, and unspeakably powerful.
N.T. Wright
Christian discipleship is a decision to walk in his ways, steadily and firmly, and then finding that the way integrates all our interests, passions, and gifts, our human needs and eternal aspirations. It is the way of life we were created for.
Eugene H. Peterson
Tasks don't have to be high-impact to be worthy of high effort. Most things we do in any given day are relatively low impact. The cumulative impact of thousands of low-impact test is huge. These tasks can be transposed into worship.
John Piper
After death something new begins, over which all powers of the world of death have no more might.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
if we are wayfarers who want to return home, then we must see the world as a means of transportation (terestibus vel marinis vehiculis) and always remember to distinguish the means and ends.
Augustine of Hippo
Every good man resists others in those points in which he resists himself.
Augustine of Hippo
Worship may produce an outward change, but our inner condition will eventually be revealed
Richard J. Foster
The altar must be built in one place so that the fire may come down in another place.
Charles Williams
Freedom from anxiety is characterized by three inner attitudes. If what we have we received as a gift, and if what we have is to be cared for by God, and if what we have is available to others, then we will possess freedom from anxiety.
Richard J. Foster
It is a wicked sophistry to justify the worldliness of the Church by the cross of Christ.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Freedom in the Gospel does not mean license. It means opportunity.
Richard J. Foster
Spiritual disciplines answer the shallow world.
Richard J. Foster
Salvation is the creation of new desires, not just new goodies.
John Piper
Youth and age touch only the surface of our lives.
C.S. Lewis
The author sees Luke's loyalty to the apostle Paul "depicted architecturally in the great church at Rome known as St. Paul Outside the Walls. There, a statue of Luke holding a writing stylus commemorates not only his work as a Gospel author but his faithfulness to Paul.
Bryan Litfin
Don't make peace with the sin in your life.
John Piper
Desire for and delight in God's Word are inseparable.
John Piper
Unlike mere action, prayer is not subject to immediate evaluation or verification. If we are addicted to "results" we will quickly lose interest in prayer.
Eugene H. Peterson
As we grow into maturity in Christ our distinctiveness is accentuated, not blunted. General directions, useful as they are, don't take into account the details that face us as holiness takes root in the particular social and personal place we are planted.
Eugene H. Peterson
Preaching reveals God in action here and now -- for ME.
Eugene H. Peterson
There is nothing more common than for people who want to talk about God to lose interest in the people they are talking to.
Eugene H. Peterson
We need alert listeners to give dignity to those stretches in our lives when we are not aware of participating in anything we think might be embraced by the kingdom of God.
Eugene H. Peterson
We do not become less needy, less dependent when we pray; we become more needy, more dependent, which is to say, more human.
Eugene H. Peterson
The church is the primary arena in which we learn that glory does not consist in what we do for God but in what God does for us.
Eugene H. Peterson
Action without prayer thins out into something very exterior. A prayerless life can result in effective action and accomplish magnificent things, but if there is no developed interiority, the action never enters into the depth and intimacy of relationships.
Eugene H. Peterson
Prayer is a way of language practiced in the presence of God in which we become more than ourselves while remaining ourselves.
Eugene H. Peterson
Spontaneities offer one kind of pleasure and taste of sanctity, repetitions another equally pleasurable and holy.
Eugene H. Peterson
Christianity tells a big story. It allows us to see our own story in a new way.
Alister E. McGrath
God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out air-quality. He knew it already. It was I who did. In this trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the day all at once. He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize that fact was to knock it down.
C.S. Lewis
The Christian life does not just evolve. It also requires specific decisions and public commitments to deepen our faith and obedience.
Mark Galli
The follower aspires with all his strength to be what he admires. And then, remarkably enough, even though he lives amongst a 'Christian people,' he incurs the same peril as he did when it was dangerous to openly confess Christ. And because of the follower's life, it will become evident who the admirers are, for the admirers will become agitated with him. Even these words will disturb many - but then they must likewise belong to the admirers.
Søren Kierkegaard
One of the consequences of sin is that it makes the sinner pity himself instead of causing him to turn to God. One of the first signs of new life is that the individual takes sides with God against himself.
Donald Grey Barnhouse