Quotes by Theologians - Page 79

Spiritual mentors or peers who are mature in their relationship with God and whose present walk with God we trust can seek God with us and provide us with a sort of “safety net.” If we feel the Spirit is leading us to do something but recognize that much is at stake if we are wrong, we may do well to talk the matter over with other mature Christians. Proverbs advised rulers that wisdom rests in a multitude of counselors, and that advice remains valid for us as well. In the end, we may not always settle on the counsel others give us—like us, they too are fallible—but if they are diligent students of the Scriptures and persons of prayer, we should humbly consider their counsel.
Craig Keener
Blessed and fortunate creature, your eyes shall behold Him and not another's. All that you are, sins apart, is destined, if you will let God have His good way, to utter satisfaction. The Brocken spectre 'looked to every man like his first love', because she was a cheat. But God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it--made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand
C.S. Lewis
To suggest that the grief of Christ issues from his perfect wisdom andcharity would confirm that true sorrow is human and therefore cannotcorrespond to despair, since the hopelessness of despair would yield nothingabout which to sorrow. If life is meaningless, there is no reason tomourn. Truth is what makes grief authentic and real, and so it followsthat Truth Incarnate, come down from heaven to our vale of tears, wouldgrieve at the highest pitch. The “tragic experience of the most completedesolation”49 depends on “the knowledge and experience of the Father.”50Or as Adrienne von Speyr puts it: “The Father is never more present thanin this absence on the Cross.
Aaron Riches
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
The specific sufferings of Jesus do not amount to redemption: rather, redemption is wrought through the uniqueness of the person who suffered and the perfect charity for which, in which and by which he suffered. The uniqueness of the suffering of Christ, then, lies in the pro knobs, which is bound to the freedom through which the Son endures “every human suffering” on account of love. To say that Jesus endured “every human suffering” does not mean that he specifically suffered every thing that every person ever did or could suffer, but the he “sums up” in this Passion the suffering so fate world, mystically including them in his own suffering and recapitulating them in the form of perfect love. The whole weight of this psychological and physical dereliction of humanity is, in Christ, suffered and sorrowed now within God himself, in the sense that the human sufferings of Christ are “one” with the divine filial relation that constitutes his unity with the Father.
Aaron Riches
As long as he retains externally the habits of a Christian he can still be made to think of himself as one who has adopted a few new friends and amusements but whose spiritual state is much the same...And while he thinks that, we do not have to contend with the explicit repentance of a definite, fully recognised, sin, but only with his vague, though uneasy, feeling that he hasn’t been doing very well lately. This dim uneasiness needs careful handling. If it gets too strong it may wake him up...if you suppress it entirely...we lose an element in the situation which can be turned to good account. If such a feeling is allowed to live, but not allowed to become irresistible and flower into real repentance, it has one invaluable tendency. It increases the patient’s reluctance to think about the Enemy. All humans at nearly all times have some such reluctance; but when thinking of Him involves facing and intensifying a whole vague cloud of half-conscious guilt, this reluctance is increased tenfold...In this state your patient will not omit, but he will increasingly dislike, his religious duties...He will want his prayers to be unreal, for he will dread nothing so much as effective contact with the Enemy.
C.S. Lewis
God is not a being among other beings, but the infinite Whither that makes possible the very functioning of our human spirit.
Elizabeth A. Johnson
I would make it a rule to eradicate from my patient any strong personal taste which is not actually a sin, even if it is something quite trivial such as a fondness for county cricket or collecting stamps or drinking cocoa. Such things, I grant you, have nothing of virtue in them; but there is a sort of innocence and humility and self-forgetfulness about them which I distrust. The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring twopence what other people say about it, is by that very fact fore-armed against some of our subtlest modes of attack. You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favour of the “best” people, the “right” food, the “important” books.
C.S. Lewis
As Christians, we are all engaged in the business of discerning and obeying God’s call, and this usually means that soon enough we find ourselves out beyond our own competence, frightened at what God demands and feeling cosmically abandoned, left in the lurch with a job for which our own resources are completely inadequate…Sooner or later, the panic touches each one of us who accepts God’s call and heads, eyes wide open, straight into some difficult and mysterious work—like pastoring a church, teaching a class, going back to school, learning a language, creating a work of art. The panic descends on everyone who accepts God’s call to do something that engages our heart and wracks our soul—like making a marriage proper through better and worse, raising a child and letting her go into adulthood, enduring a terrible illness, growing up, growing old. In fact, being called out far beyond our own competence is part of our regular experience with God.
Ellen F. Davis
Let us not project our own spiritual limitations onto the modern world, for it is not the world which prevents us from being religious. The kind of world we live in shapes the manner and mode of our religiousness
Harvey Cox
Liturgy gathers the holy community as it reads the Holy Scriptures into the sweeping tidal rhythms of the church year in which the story of Jesus and the Christian makes its rounds century after century, the large and easy interior rhythms of a year that moves from birth, life, death, resurrection, on to spirit, obedience, faith, and blessing. Without liturgy we lose the rhythms and end up tangled in the jerky, ill-timed, and insensitive interruptions of public-relations campaigns, school openings and closings, sales days, tax deadlines, inventory and elections. Advent is buried under 'shopping days before Christmas.' The joyful disciplines of Lent are exchanged for the anxious penitentials of filling out income tax forms. Liturgy keeps us in touch with the story as it defines and shapes our beginnings and ends our living and dying, our rebirths and blessing in this Holy Spirit, text-formed community visible and invisible.When Holy Scripture is embraced liturgically, we become aware that a lot is going on all at once, a lot of different people are doing a lot of different things. The community is on its feet, at work for God, listening and responding to the Holy Scriptures. The holy community, in the process of being formed by the Holy Scriptures, is watching, listening to God's revelation taking shape before an din them as they follow Jesus, each person playing his or her part in the Spirit.
Eugene H. Peterson
Whether we "spiritualize" our life or "secularize" our religion, whether we invite men to a spiritual banquet or simply join them at the secular one, the real life of the world, for which we are told God gave his only begotten Son, remains hopelessly beyond our religious grasp.
Alexander Schmemann
Sometimes the best answer to a question is another question. Is it not by asking questions that we stimulate each other to reach more deeply into our own source and, thereby, approach the Source, both together and in our different ways? (7)
Jean-Yves Leloup
The ego is like a clever monkey, which can co-opt anything, even the most spiritual practices, so as to expand itself. (155)
Jean-Yves Leloup
[N]one of us drinks the chalice of our existence to the last drop. None of us is fully obedient. Each of us falls short of the human nature entrusted to us.
Johann Baptist Metz
This man's spiritual power has been precisely this, that he has distinguished between custom and creed. He has broken the conventions, but he has kept the commandments.
G.K. Chesterton
In the spiritual body moreover, man appears such as he is with respect to love and faith, for everyone in the spiritual world is the effigy of his own love, not only as to the face and the body, but also as to the speech and the actions
Emanuel Swedenborg
Now God, who has made us, knows what we are and that our happiness lies in Him.
C.S. Lewis
Now the proper good of a creature is to surrender itself to its Creator - to enact intellectually, volitionally and emotionally, that relationship which is given in the mere fact of its being a creature when it does so, it is good and happy.
C.S. Lewis
England and the English governing class never did call on this absurd deity of race until it seemed, for an instant, that they had no other god to call on… the truth of the whole matter is very simple. Nationality exists, and has nothing in the world to do with race. Nationality is a thing like a church or a secret society. It is the product of the human soul and will; it is a spiritual product. And there are men… who would think anything and do anything rather than admit anything could be a spiritual product.
G.K. Chesterton
I haven't any language weak enough to depict the weakness of my spiritual life. If I weakened it enough it would cease to be language at all. As when you try to turn the gas-ring a little lower still, and it merely goes out.
C.S. Lewis
Let us then, my brethren, endure in hope. Let us devote ourselves, side-by-side with our hoping, so that the God of all the universe, as he beholds our intention, may cleanse us from all sins, fill us with high hopes from what we have in hand, and grant us the change of heart that saves. God has called you, and you have your calling.
Cyril of Jerusalem
We typically misunderstand what's wrong about consumerism. It's not that it makes us love material things too much. To be a good consumer, you have to desire to get lots of things, but you must not love any of them too much once you have them. Consumerism needs children who do not stay attached to their toys for very long and learn to expect the next round of presents as soon as possible. When consumerism succeeds, our attachments are shallow, easily broken, so we can move on to the next thing we're supposed to get. Being a good consumer means desiring new things, not cherishing old ones. And the new things you're supposed to desire are not always material things. Spirituality is now a consumerist enterprise, too.
Phillip Cary
If I discover within myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
C.S. Lewis
...morally speaking, there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings, that indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, that in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce that it is not genteel comedy even that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential dearth in which its subject's roots are plunged. The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters.
Henry James Sr.
Love consists in desiring to give what is our own to another and feeling his delight as our own
Emanuel Swedenborg
When we touch the place in our lives where sexuality and spirituality come together, we touch our wholeness and the fullness of our power, and at the same time our connection with a power larger than ourselves.
Judith Plaskow
... the worst possible heritage to leave with children: high spiritual pretensions and low performance.
D A Carson
The Christian's whole desire, at its best and highest, is that Jesus Christ be praised. It is always a wretched bastardization of our goals when we want to win glory for ourselves instead of for him.
D A Carson
Peaceful is the one who's not concerned with having more or less.Unbound by name and fame, he is free from sorrow from the world and mostly from himself.
Jalaluddin Rumi
We were talking of DRAGONS, Tolkien and I In a Berkshire bar. The big workman Who had sat silent and sucked his pipe All the evening, from his empty mug With gleaming eye glanced towards us: "I seen 'em myself!" he said fiercely.
C.S. Lewis
This silence, this moment, every moment, if it’s genuinely inside you, brings what you need. There’s nothing to believe. Only when I stopped believing in myself did I come into this beauty.Sit quietly, and listen for a voice that will say, ‘Be more silent.’ Die and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign that you’ve died. Your old life was a frantic running from silence. Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.Live in silence.
Jalaluddin Rumi
Nothing in all creation is so like God as stillness.
Meister Eckhart
O heavenly Father,protect and bless all thingsthat have breath: guard themfrom all evil and let them sleep in peace.
Albert Schweitzer
My heart is so smallit's almost invisible.How can You place such big sorrows in it?"Look," He answered,"your eyes are even smaller,yet they behold the world.
Jalaluddin Rumi
You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that.
C.S. Lewis
For I need not remind such an audience as this that the neat sorting out of books into age-groups, so dear to publishers, has only a very sketchy relation with the habits of any real readers. Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us. No reader worth his salt trots along in obedience to a time-table.
C.S. Lewis
A man reading the Dickens novel wished that it might never end. Men read a Dickens story six times because they knew it so well.
G.K. Chesterton
Without books, God is silent, justice dormant, natural science at a stand, philosophy lame, letters dumb, and all things involved in darkness.
Thomas Bartholin
I generally give the title-page a fair chance," Roger said. "Once can't always judge books merely by the cover.
Charles Williams
I would look at the first chapter of any new novel as a final test of its merits. If there was a murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I read the story. If there was no murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I dismissed the story as tea-table twaddle, which it often really was.
G.K. Chesterton
Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistake of our own period. And that means the old books.
C.S. Lewis
The more we have known of the really good things, the more insipid the thin lemonade of later literature becomes, sometimes almost to the point of making us sick. Do you know a work of literature written in the last, say, fifteen years that you think has any lasting quality? I don't. It is partly idle chatter, partly propaganda, partly self-pitying sentimentality, but there is no insight, no ideas, no clarity, no substance and almost always the language is bad and constrained. On this subject I am quite consciously a laudator temporis acti.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
There are books showing men how to succeed in everything they are written by men who cannot even succeed in writing books.
G.K. Chesterton
It must be a really great book because one can read it as a boy in one way, and then re-read it in middle life and get something very different out of it - and that to my mind is one of the best tests.
C.S. Lewis
Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old.
C.S. Lewis
To live among such excellent helps as our libraries afford, to have so many silent wise companions whenever we please.
Richard Baxter
If the college you visit has a bookstore filled with t-shirts rather than books, find another college.
R. Albert Mohler Jr.
Make careful choice of the books which you read: let the holy Scriptures ever have the preeminence. Let Scripture be first and most in your hearts and hands and other books be used as subservient to it. While reading ask yourself: 1. Could I spend this time no better? 2. Are there better books that would edify me more? 3. Are the lovers of such a book as this the greatest lovers of the Book of God and of a holy life? 4. Does this book increase my love to the Word of God, kill my sin, and prepare me for the life to come? "The words of the wise are like goads, their collected sayings like firmly embedded nails—given by one Shepherd. Be warned, my son, of anything in addition to them. Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body." Ecclesiastes 12:11-12
Richard Baxter
So go back to the books. They will comfort you and cheer you. If you earnestly work with them, neither sorrow nor anxiety nor distress nor suffering need trouble your mind any more, no, not evermore.
Walter Wangerin Jr.
There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book, and a tired man who wants a book to read.
G.K. Chesterton
Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought.
Austin Phelps
The true reader reads every work seriously in the sense that he reads it whole-heartedly, makes himself as receptive as he can. But for that very reason he cannot possibly read every work solemly or gravely. For he will read 'in the same spirit that the author writ.'... He will never commit the error of trying to munch whipped cream as if it were venison.
C.S. Lewis
Every book is a great action and every great action is a book!
Martin Luther
The books that influence the world are those that it has not read.
G.K. Chesterton
Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us.
C.S. Lewis
Our experience is coloured through and through by books and plays and the cinema, and it takes patience and skill to disentangle the things we have really learned from life for ourselves.
C.S. Lewis
The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes connot write books. Very gladly would I learn what face things present to a mouse or a bee; more gladly still would I perceive the olfactory world charged with all the information and emotion it carries for a dog. Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality... in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad of eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.
C.S. Lewis
Before you sleep, read something that is exquisite, and worth remembering.
Erasmus