Quotes by Theologians - Page 84

According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.
G.K. Chesterton
But very quickly they all became grave again: for, as you know, there is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.
C.S. Lewis
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.
G.K. Chesterton
Aim at Heaven and you will get Earth 'thrown in': aim at Earth and you will get neither.
C.S. Lewis
I like a cook who smiles out loud when he tastes his own work.Let God worry about your modesty I want to see your enthusiasm.
Robert Farrar Capon
Religion is for people who're afraid of going to hell. Spirituality is for those who've already been there.
Vine Deloria Jr.
Grace is the pleasure of God to magnify the worth of God by giving sinners the right and power to delight in God without obscuring the glory of God.
John Piper
But, first, remember, remember, remember the signs. Say them to yourself when you wake in the morning and when you lie down at night, and when you wake in the middle of the night. And whatever strange things may happen to you, let nothing turn your mind from following the signs. And secondly, I give you a warning. Here on the mountain I have spoken to you clearly: I will not often do so down in Narnia. Here on the mountain, the air is clear and your mind is clear; as you drop down into Narnia, the air will thicken. Take great care that it does not confuse your mind. And the signs which you have learned here will not look at all as you expect them to look, when you meet them there. That is why it is so important to know them by heart and pay no attention to appearances. Remember the signs and believe the signs. Nothing else matters.
C.S. Lewis
Oh, Adam’s sons, how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good!
C.S. Lewis
I have so much to do that I shall spend the first three hours in prayer.
Martin Luther
A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.
C.S. Lewis
Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.
G.K. Chesterton
You would not have called to me unless I had been calling to you," said the Lion.
C.S. Lewis
Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning...
C.S. Lewis
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.
G.K. Chesterton
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
Bad times, hard times, this is what people keep saying; but let us live well, and times shall be good. We are the times: Such as we are, such are the times.
St. Augustine of Hippo
Unless God has raised you up for this very thing, you will be worn out by the opposition of men and devils. But if God be for you, who can be against you? Are all of them together stronger than God? O be not weary of well doing!
John Wesley
Only those who look with the eyes of children can lose themselves in the object of their wonder.
Eberhard Arnold
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.
Martin Luther
Ignore those that make you fearful and sad, that degrade you back towards disease and death.
Jalaluddin Rumi
Modern tragic writers have to write short stories; if they wrote long stories…cheerfulness would creep in. Such stories are like stings; brief, but purely painful.
G.K. Chesterton
[A] finished tale may give a man immortality in the light and literary sense; but an unfinished tale suggests another immortality, more essential and more strange.
G.K. Chesterton
Against the disease of writing one must take special precautions, since it is a dangerous and contagious disease.
Pierre Abélard
In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities...it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.
G.K. Chesterton
In writing. Don't use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was "terrible," describe it so that we'll be terrified. Don't say it was "delightful"; make us say "delightful" when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, "Please will you do my job for me.", 26 June 1956]
C.S. Lewis
People who read your ideas tend to think that your writings reflect your life.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
The desire to write grows with writing.
Erasmus
I never exactly made a book. It's rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.
C.S. Lewis
Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.
C.S. Lewis
If you want to change the world, pick up your pen and write.
Martin Luther
You can make anything by writing.
C.S. Lewis
The Prayer that precedes all other prayer is, may the real me meet the real you.
C.S. Lewis
The perfect surrender and humiliation were undergone by Christ: perfect because He was God, surrender and humiliation because He was man.
C.S. Lewis
And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or a hellish creature: either into a creature that is harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with God.
C.S. Lewis
Being in love' first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise. It is on this love that the engine of the marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it.
C.S. Lewis
To us, recollection is a holy act; we sanctify the present by remembering the past. To us Jews, the essence of faith is memory. To believe is to remember.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness.
C.S. Lewis
The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in. For that purpose the worst of the rooms (whichever that may be) is, I think, preferable. It is true that some people may find they have to wait in the hall for a considerable time, while others feel certain almost at once which door they must knock at. I do not know why there is this difference, but I am sure God keeps no one waiting unless He sees that it is good for him to wait. When you do get into your room you will find that the long wait has done you some kind of good which you would not have had otherwise. But you must regard it as waiting, not as camping. You must keep on praying for light; and, of course, even in the hall, you must begin trying to obey the rules which are common to the whole house. And above all you must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its paint and panelling. In plain language, the question should never be: 'Do I like that kind of service?' but 'Are these doctrines true: is holiness here? Does my conscience move me towards this? Is my reluctance to knock at this door due to my pride, or my mere taste, or my personal dislike of this particular door-keeper?'When you have reached your own room, be kind to those who have chosen different doors and to those who are still in the hall. If they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if there are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house.
C.S. Lewis
But the great thing to remember is that, though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not. It is not wearied by our sins, or our indifference; and, therefore, it is quite relentless in its determination that we shall be cured of those sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to Him.
C.S. Lewis
I believe this not in the sense that it is part of my creed, but in the sense that it is one of my opinions. My religion would not be in ruins if this opinion were shown to be false.
C.S. Lewis
If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will - that is, for making a live world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings - then we may take it (that) it is worth paying.
C.S. Lewis
If I, being what I am, can consider that I am in some sense a Christian, why should the different vices of those people in the next pew prove that their religion is mere hypocrisy and convention?
C.S. Lewis
In fighting those who serve devils one always his this on one's side; their Masters hate them as much as they hate us. The moment we disable the human pawns enough to make them useless to Hell, their own Masters finish the work for us. they break their tools.
C.S. Lewis
It takes a purely human courage to renounce the whole temporal realm in order to gain eternity, but this I do gain and in all eternity can never renounce—it is a self-contradiction. But it takes a paradoxical and humble courage to grasp the whole temporal realm now by virtue of the absurd, and this is the courage of faith.
Søren Kierkegaard
Who stands fast? Only the man whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, or his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when he is called to obedient and responsible action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God--the responsible man, who tries to make his whole life an answer to the question and call of God.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
History belongs to the intercessors - those who believe and pray the future into being.
Walter Wink
You are a hater of activity in life; quite right, for before there can be any meaning in activity, life must have continuity, and this your life lacks. You occupy yourself with your studies, that is true, you are even industrious. But it is only for your own sake and is done with as little teleology as possible. Otherwise you are unoccupied; like those workers in the Gospel, you stand idle in the marketplace (Matthew 20:3). You stick your hands in your pockets and observe life. Then you rest in despair, nothing occupies you, you don’t step aside for anything: “if someone were to throw a tile down from the roof I wouldn’t get out of the way.” You are like someone dying, you die daily, not in the profound, serious sense in which one usually takes that word, but life has lost its reality and “you always reckon your lifetime from one day’s notice to quit to the next”. You let everything pass you by, it makes no impression, but then suddenly something comes which grips you, an idea, a situation, a smile from a young girl, and then you are “in touch”; for just as on some occasions you are not in touch, so at others you are in touch and of service in every way. Wherever something is going on you are “in touch”. You conduct your life as it is your custom to behave in a crowd, you “work your way into the thickest of it, trying if possible to be forced up above the others so as to be able to lie on top of them”; if you manage to get up there you “make yourself as comfortable as possible”, and this is also the way you let yourself be carried along through life. But when the crowd disperses, when the event is over, you stand once more at the street corner and look at the world. A dying person possesses, as you know, a supernatural energy, and so too with you. If there is an idea to be thought through, a work to be read through, a plan to be carried out, a little adventure to be experienced - yes, a hat to be bought, you take hold of the matter with an immense energy. According to circumstance, you work on untiringly for a day, for a month; you are happy in the assurance that you still have the same abundance of strength as before, you take no rest, “no Satan can keep up with you”. If you work together with others, you work them into the ground. But then when the month or, what you always consider the maximum, the six months have gone, you break off and say, “and that’s the end of the story”. You retire and leave it all to the other party, or if you have been working alone you talk to no one about what you were doing. You then pretend to yourself and others that you have lost the desire and flatter yourself with the vain thought that you could have kept working with the same intensity if that is what you desired. But that is an immense deception. You would have succeeded in finishing it, as most others, if you had patiently willed it so, but you would have found out at the same time that it needs a kind of perseverance quite different from yours.
Søren Kierkegaard
For Christian writers, religious faith is not a rebellion against reason, but a revolt against the imprisonment of humanity within the cold walls of a rationalist dogmatism.
Alister E. McGrath
It is now clear that faith is a singular pledge of paternal love, treasured up for the sons whom he has adopted.
John Calvin
Human logic may be rationally adequate, but it is also existentially deficient. Faith declares that there is more than this - not contradicting, but transcending reason.
Alister E. McGrath
On the other hand, if God's moral judgement differs from ours so that our 'black' may be His 'white', we can mean nothing by calling Him good; for to say 'God is good', while asserting that His goodness is wholly other than ours, is really only to say 'God is we know not what'. And an utterly unknown quality in God cannot give us moral grounds for loving or obeying Him. If He is not (in our sense) 'good' we shall obey, if at all, only through fear - and should be equally ready to obey omnipotent Fiend. The doctrine of Total Depravity - when the consequence is drawn that, since we are totally depraved, our idea of good is worth simply nothing - may thus turn Christianity into a form of devil-worship.- The Problem of Pain, pp. 28 - 29
C.S. Lewis
The prayer of faith is a prayer of trust. The very essence of faith is trust.
R.C. Sproul
The day of one's birth is a good day for the believer, but the day of death is the greatest day that a Christian can ever experience in this world because that is the day he goes home, the day he walks across the threshold, the day he enters the Father's house.
R.C. Sproul
And we, too, being called by His will to Christ Jesus, are not justified by ourselves, nor by our own wisdom, or understanding or godliness, or works which we have wrought in holiness of heart; but by that faith through which, from the beginning, Almighty God has justified all men; to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.
Clement of Rome
Faith includes both an immediate awareness of something unconditional and the courage to take the risk of uncertainty upon itself. Faith says "Yes" in spite of the anxiety of "No."Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality
Paul Tillich
It hardly matters how the body of Jesus came to be missing because in the last analysis what convinced the people that he had risen from the dead was not the absence of his corpse but his living presence. And so it has been ever since.
Frederick Buechner
Faith requires at times marching into the waters before they part.
Walter Wink
Manifest in this trade (commercial sale of indulgences via bankers) at the same time was a pernicious tendency in the Roman Catholic system, for the trade in indulgences was not an excess or an abuse but the direct consequence of the nomistic degradation of the gospel. That the Reformation started with Luther’s protest against this traffic in indulgences proves its religious origin and evangelical character. At issue here was nothing less than the essential character of the gospel, the core of Christianity, the nature of true piety. And Luther was the man who, guided by experience in the life of his own soul, again made people understand the original and true meaning of the gospel of Christ. Like the “righteousness of God,” so the term “penitence” had been for him one of the most bitter words of Holy Scripture. But when from Romans 1:17 he learned to know a “righteousness by faith,” he also learned “the true manner of penitence.” He then understood that the repentance demanded in Matthew 4:17 had nothing to do with the works of satisfaction required in the Roman institution of confession, but consisted in “a change of mind in true interior contrition” and with all its benefits was itself a fruit of grace. In the first seven of his ninety-five theses and further in his sermon on “Indulgences and Grace” (February 1518), the sermon on “Penitence” (March 1518), and the sermon on the “Sacrament of Penance” (1519), he set forth this meaning of repentance or conversion and developed the glorious thought that the most important part of penitence consists not in private confession (which cannot be found in Scripture) nor in satisfaction (for God forgives sins freely) but in true sorrow over sin, in a solemn resolve to bear the cross of Christ, in a new life, and in the word of absolution, that is, the word of the grace of God in Christ. The penitent arrives at forgiveness of sins, not by making amends (satisfaction) and priestly absolution, but by trusting the word of God, by believing in God’s grace. It is not the sacrament but faith that justifies. In that way Luther came to again put sin and grace in the center of the Christian doctrine of salvation. The forgiveness of sins, that is, justification, does not depend on repentance, which always remains incomplete, but rests in God’s promise and becomes ours by faith alone.
Herman Bavinck
Duty performed gives clearness and firmness to faith, and faith thus strengthened through duty becomes the more assured and satisfying to the soul.
Tryon Edwards