Quotes by Theologians - Page 28

A few people have ventured to imitate Shakespeare's tragedy. But no audacious spirit has dreamed or dared to imitate Shakespeare's comedy. No one has made any real attempt to recover the loves and the laughter of Elizabethan England. The low dark arches, the low strong pillars upon which Shakespeare's temple rests we can all explore and handle. We can all get into his mere tragedy; we can all explore his dungeon and penetrate into his coal-cellar, but we stretch our hands and crane our necks in vain towards that height where the tall turrets of his levity are tossed towards the sky. Perhaps it is right that this should be so; properly understood, comedy is an even grander thing than tragedy.
G.K. Chesterton
[T]he most comic things of all are exactly the things most worth doing--such as making love.
G.K. Chesterton
The limitation of the ethical phenomenon to its place and time does not imply its rejection but, on the contrary, its validation. One does not use canons to shoot sparrows.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
By setting such strong, harsh dichotomies God taught Israel that any assimilation to pagan idolatry is intolerable. It was His way of preserving Israel’s spiritual health and posterity. God knew that if these Canaanite children were allowed to live, they would spell the undoing of Israel. The killing of the Canaanite children not only served to prevent assimilation to Canaanite identity but also served as a shattering, tangible illustration of Israel’s being set exclusively apart for God.
William Lane Craig
Hope is a passion for the possible.
Søren Kierkegaard
It is not at all surprising that the disciples imagined that the law had been abrogated, when Jesus made promises like this. For these promises reversed all popular notions of right and wrong, and pronounced a blessing on all that was accounted worthless.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Socialism is politicized envy.
Rousas John Rushdoony
The difficulty was not that of following a moral principle at personal cost; the difficulty was that of knowing what to do when there is more than one principal, and when the principles clash.
Elton Trueblood
I think that a good start at this problem is to enunciate our ethical theory that underlies our moral judgements. According to the version of divine command ethics which I’ve defended, our moral duties are constituted by the commands of a holy and loving God. Since God doesn’t issue commands to Himself, He has no moral duties to fulfill. He is certainly not subject to the same moral obligations and prohibitions that we are. For example, I have no right to take an innocent life. For me to do so would be murder. But God has no such prohibition. He can give and take life as He chooses. We all recognize this when we accuse some authority who presumes to take life as “playing God.” Human authorities arrogate to themselves rights which belong only to God. God is under no obligation whatsoever to extend my life for another second. If He wanted to strike me dead right now, that’s His prerogative.What that implies is that God has the right to take the lives of the Canaanites when He sees fit. How long they live and when they die is up to Him.
William Lane Craig
Romantic enthusiasm lifts the good aloft and removes it into the dim distance of the incomparable and unattainable; at the same time it portrays the good in a human countenance out of which it looks at us and we can look back at it, face to face, in admiration and ecstasy, and stretch out our arms towards it. Thus the moral good is represented in human, and at the same time superhuman, form; it is of our own kind, and yet above our kind; it confronts us, but makes no demands. IT is not really a standard and lacks the power to issues commandments. Both are given at once: the ethical which one would like to love; and the passive, the romantic, in which one wants to live. As a substitute for constant activity demanded by the ethical commandment, we have adoration in which the romantic impression of the moment in vented, and yearning which need only admire and enjoy but not achieve anything.
Leo Baeck
No justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite skeptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat’, than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers.
C.S. Lewis
An ethics of desire is good news for those of us who have become allergic to an ethics of law.
Jean Vanier
The thinking (person) must oppose all cruel customs, no matter how deeply rooted in tradition and surrounded by a halo. When we have a choice, we must avoid bringing torment and injury into the life of another.
Albert Schweitzer
The thinking man must oppose all cruel customs, no matter how deeply rooted in tradition and surrounded by a halo. When we have a choice, we must avoid bringing torment and injury into the life of another, even the lowliest creature; but to do so is to renounce our manhood and shoulder a guilt which nothing justifies.
Albert Schweitzer
Good and evil both increase at compound interest.
C.S. Lewis
The word "good" has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.
G.K. Chesterton
Ideas are not immaculately conceived.
Jack Provonsha
Bigotry may be roughly defined as the anger of men who have no opinions. It is the resistance offered to definite ideas by that vague bulk of people whose ideas are indefinite to excess. Bigotry may be called the appalling frenzy of the indifferent. This frenzy of the indifferent is in truth a terrible thing; it has made all monstrous and widely pervading persecutions. In this degree it was not the people who cared who ever persecuted; the people who cared were not sufficiently numerous. It was the people who did not care who filled the world with fire and oppression. It was the hands of the indifferent that lit the faggots; it was the hands of the indifferent that turned the rack. There have come some persecutions out of the pain of a passionate certainty; but these produced, not bigotry, but fanaticism--a very different and a somewhat admirable thing. Bigotry in the main has always been the pervading omnipotence of those who do not care crushing out those who care in darkness and blood.
G.K. Chesterton
Very often, gleams of light come in a few minutes' sleeplessness, in a secondperhaps; you must fix them. To entrust them to the relaxed brain is like writing on water; there is every chance that on the morrow there will be no slightest trace left of any happening.
Antonin Sertillanges
Absolute autonomy inevitably leads to tyranny.
Jack Provonsha
A conscience that is forbidden to operate in the choice of goals for economic activity is not conscience in the sense in which any moralist, pagan or Christian, has every understood the term. And the family (which [Michael] Novak regards as vital to the spirit of democratic capitalism) is precisely the place where the noncapitalist values have to be learned, where one is not free to choose his company and where one is not free to pursue self-interest to the limit. Because capitalism pursues the opposite goals - freedom of each individual to choose and pursue his own ends to the limit of his power - the disintegration of marriage and family life is one of the obvious characteristics of advanced capitalist societies.
Lesslie Newbigin
Inside you there’s an artist you don’t know about… say yes quickly, if you know, if you’ve known it from before the beginning of the universe.
Jalaluddin Rumi
We may know who we are or we may not. We may be Muslims, Jews or Christians but until our hearts become the mould for every heart we will see only our differences.
Jalaluddin Rumi
Gentleness is given to those who have learned that God will not have his kingdom triumph through the violence of the world, for such a triumph came through the meekness of a cross.
Stanley Hauerwas
We meet like sovereign princes of independent states, abroad, on neutral ground, freed from our contexts
C.S. Lewis
Courtship is the time for sowing those seeds which grow up ten years later into domestic hatred.
C.S. Lewis
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
Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.
C.S. Lewis
In times of adversity Satan will seek to plant the thought in our minds that God is angry with us and is disciplining us out of wrath. Here is another instance when we need to preach the gospel to ourselves. It is the gospel that will reassure that the penalty for our sins has been paid, that God's justice has been fully satisfied. It is the gospel that supplies a good part of the armor of God with which we are to stand against the accusing attacks of the Devil (see Ephesians 6:13-17).
Jerry Bridges
a man in earnest finds means, or if he cannot find he creates them. A vigorous purpose makes much out of little, breathes power into weak instruments, disarms difficulties, and even turns them into assistances. Every condition has means of progress, if we have spirit enough to use them.
William Ellery Channing
Even innocent Adam is liker to forget God in a paradise, than Joseph in a prison, or Job upon a dunghill(376)[.]
Richard Baxter
The more difficulties one has to encounter, within and without, the more significant and the higher in inspiration his life will be.
Horace Bushnell
Every disability conceals a vocation, if only we can find it, which will 'turn the necessity to glorious gain.
C.S. Lewis
You are guilty of no evil, Ransom of Thulcandra, except a little fearfulness. For that, the journey you go on is your pain, and perhaps your cure: for you must be either mad or brave before it is ended.
C.S. Lewis
If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever.
Thomas Aquinas
If you are foe, we do not fear you. If you are friend, your foes will be taught the fear of us.
C.S. Lewis
I made an oath to myself:as long as I liveas long as my soul remains in this bodyI won't deviate from the right waybut later I looked to my left and then to my rightand I saw our beloved everywherehow could I make a wrong turn?
Jalaluddin Rumi
No time for better words, no time to unsay anything.-Til We Have Faces
C.S. Lewis
And when we say also that the Word, who is the first-birth of God, was produced without sexual union, and that He, Jesus Christ, our Teacher, was crucified and died, and rose again, and ascended into heaven, we propound nothing different from what you believe regarding those whom you esteem sons of Jupiter. For you know how many sons your esteemed writers ascribed to Jupiter: Mercury, the interpreting word and teacher of all; Aesculapius, who, though he was a great physician, was struck by a thunderbolt, and so ascended to heaven; and Bacchus too, after he had been torn limb from limb; and Hercules, when he had committed himself to the flames to escape his toils; and the sons of Leda, and Dioscuri; and Perseus, son of Danae; and Bellerophon, who, though sprung from mortals, rose to heaven on the horse Pegasus. For what shall I say of Ariadne, and those who, like her, have been declared to be set among the stars? And what of the emperors who die among yourselves, whom you deem worthy of deification, and in whose behalf you produce some one who swears he has seen the burning Caesar rise to heaven from the funeral pyre? And what kind of deeds are recorded of each of these reputed sons of Jupiter, it is needless to tell to those who already know. This only shall be said, that they are written for the advantage and encouragement of youthful scholars; for all reckon it an honourable thing to imitate the gods. But far be such a thought concerning the gods from every well-conditioned soul, as to believe that Jupiter himself, the governor and creator of all things, was both a parricide and the son of a parricide, and that being overcome by the love of base and shameful pleasures, he came in to Ganymede and those many women whom he had violated and that his sons did like actions. But, as we said above, wicked devils perpetrated these things. And we have learned that those only are deified who have lived near to God in holiness and virtue; and we believe that those who live wickedly and do not repent are punished in everlasting fire.
Justin Martyr
It's not a question of God `sending' us to Hell. In each of us there is something growing up which will of itself be Hell unless it is nipped in the bud.
C.S. Lewis
Hell is a conspiracy, and the first requirement of a conspiracy is that it remain underground.
Richard F. Lovelace
Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts,
C.S. Lewis
What if you had once seen hell open, and all the damned there in their easeless torments, and had heard them crying out of their slothfulness in the day of their visitation, and wishing that they had but another life to live, and that God would but try them once again; one crying out of this neglect of duty, and another of his loitering and trifling, when he should have been labouring for his life; what manner of person would you have been after such a sight as this ? (284)
Richard Baxter
Do I not well deserve to be turned into hell, if the scorns and threats of blinded men, if the fear of silly, rotten earth, can drive me thither (588)?
Richard Baxter
I shrank from the faces and forms by which I was surrounded. They were all fixed faces, full not of possibilities but impossibilities,
C.S. Lewis
The fires of hell may be made of the very love of God, experienced as torture by those who hate him: the very light of God's truth, hated and fled from in vain by those who love darkness.
Peter Kreeft
There was, no doubt, a confusion of persons in damnation: what Pantheists falsely hoped of Heaven bad men really received in Hell. They were melted down into their Master, as a lead soldier slips down and loses his shape in the ladle over the gas ring.
C.S. Lewis
The horror of Hell is an echo of the infinite worth of God's glory.
John Piper
We must picture hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives with the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.
C.S. Lewis
Just as the church needs members with different skills, our world must have various forms of labor, interdependent and thus valuable. A world full of ministers would be without churches, bread for the Lord's Supper, and printed Bibles to read.
R.C. Sproul Jr.
As history shows, dead metaphors make good idols.
Elizabeth A. Johnson
No scientist ever begins his work de novo; while he works with the methodological questioning of what he has already known he builds on knowledge already achieved and engages in a movement of advance. But it is one of the worst characteristics of theological study, whether in biblical interpretation or in dogmatic formulation, that every scholar nowadays thinks he must start all over again, and too many give the impression that no one ever understood this or that until they came along.
T.F. Torrance
True thinking takes place within a frame of continuous historical development in which progress in understanding is being made. . . . No constructive thinking that is worth while can be undertaken that sets at nought the intellectual labours of the centuries that are enshrined in tradition, or be undertaken on the arrogant assumption that everything must be thought through de novo as if nothing true had already been done or said. He who undertakes that kind of work will inevitably be determined unconsciously by the assumptions of popular piety which have already been built into his mind.
T.F. Torrance
There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened.
C.S. Lewis
Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts,...Your affectionate uncle, Screwtape.
C.S. Lewis
[E]very heresy is due to an overemphasis upon some truth, without allowing other truths to qualify and balance it.
John R.W. Stott
Our true wisdom is to embrace with meek docility, and without reservation, whatever the holy scriptures have delivered.
John Calvin
Humor is a prelude to faith, and laughter is the beginning of prayer.
Reinhold Niebuhr
A theology that endangers life rather than "giving life" is one that cannot accept the title of being adequately Christian.
Michael Joseph Brown
Behold divinity divine enough to abandon divinity. Behold majesty secure enough to proceed un-majestically. Behold strength strong enough to become weakness, goodness good enough to be unmindful of its reputation. Behold love plenteous enough to give and take not again.
Paul Ramsey