Quotes by Theologians - Page 87

Suicide is an attack on society--an attack on its omnipotence, on its denial of death, and on its own despair.
Robert E. Neale
Once very near the end I said, 'If you can -- if it is allowed -- come to me when I too am on my death bed.' 'Allowed!' she said. 'Heaven would have a job to hold me; and as for Hell, I'd break it into bits.
C.S. Lewis
Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand. Unless, of course, you can literally believe all that stuff about family reunions 'on the further shore,' pictured in entirely earthly terms. But that is all unscriptural, all out of bad hymns and lithographs. There's not a word of it in the Bible. And it rings false. We know it couldn't be like that. Reality never repeats. The exact same thing is never taken away and given back. How well the Spiritualists bait their hook! 'Things on this side are not so different after all.' There are cigars in Heaven. For that is what we should all like. The happy past restored.
C.S. Lewis
He, the Life of all, our Lord and Saviour, did not arrange the manner of his own death lest He should seem to be afraid of some other kind. No. He accepted and bore upon the cross a death inflicted by others, and those other His special enemies, a death which to them was supremely terrible and by no means to be faced; and He did this in order that, by destroying even this death, He might Himself be believed to be the Life, and the power of death be recognised as finally annulled. A marvellous and mighty paradox has thus occurred, for the death which they thought to inflict on Him as dishonour and disgrace has become the glorious monument to death's defeat.
Athanasius of Alexandria
Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me, and it is a place I can't avoid. I mean my own body. It had such a different importance while it was the body of H.'s lover. Now it's like an empty house.
C.S. Lewis
If a mother is mourning not for what she has lost but for what her dead child has lost, it is a comfort to believe that the child has not lost the end for which it was created. And it is a comfort to believe that she herself, in losing her chief or only natural happiness, has not lost a greater thing, that she may still hope to "glorify God and enjoy Him forever." A comfort to the God-aimed, eternal spirit within her. But not to her motherhood. The specifically maternal happiness must be written off. Never, in any place or time, will she have her son on her knees, or bathe him, or tell him a story, or plan for his future, or see her grandchild.
C.S. Lewis
It is hard to have patience with people who say, ‘There is no death’ or ‘Death doesn’t matter.’ There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as wel say that birth doesn’t matter.
C.S. Lewis
Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.
C.S. Lewis
If I could find one wordthat would shudder the airlike that frightened sob,that wordless prayerof my newly-born,who drew one breath,and with unopened eyessank back into death;If I could break the world's cold heartwith that cry,then this grief would liftand I could die.
Kenneth L. Patton
Once you are born in this world you’re old enough to die.
Søren Kierkegaard
No pain, no gain." You can hear the phrase in the world of physical exercise and conditioning. Muscles that feel no pain are probably getting neither stronger, nor more flexible. It presents an analogy for the exercise of the heart. Those who run the risk of genuine love alone must worry about emotional pain. The more friends; the more good-byes - and the more wakes to attend, the more graves to visit, the more deaths to share. Those who truly live life to the fullest will bear the full cup of suffering. Only those who are willing to pay the price in pain and anguish find life full to the brim. Happy people also suffer; they are no more lucky than the rest. They create their own happiness. That's the rule of thumb.Some thumbs, however, don't seem to rule very well. Slogans and catch-words, for all their conventional wisdom, fail to carry the whole weight of truth; they leave too much room for false inferences. "No pain, no gain" may leave one with nothing but pain - an intolerable amount of it. There is simply no guarantee that pain will bring gain, that hardship will yield happiness, that suffering will make one a better person. It may; but it's not inevitable.
Robert Dykstra
Look at your own povertywelcome itcherish itdon't be afraidshare your deathbecause thus you will share your love and your life
Jean Vanier
If you are a Buddhist, inspire yourself by thinking of the bodhisattva. If you are a Christian, think of the Christ, who came not to be served by others but to serve them in joy, in peace, and in generosity. For these things, these are not mere words, but acts, which go all the way, right up to their last breath. Even their death is a gift, and resurrection is born from this kind of death. (157)
Jean-Yves Leloup
And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not.
Søren Kierkegaard
A Second Childhood.”When all my days are endingAnd I have no song to sing,I think that I shall not be too oldTo stare at everything;As I stared once at a nursery doorOr a tall tree and a swing.Wherein God’s ponderous mercy hangsOn all my sins and me,Because He does not take awayThe terror from the treeAnd stones still shine along the roadThat are and cannot be.Men grow too old for love, my love,Men grow too old for wine,But I shall not grow too old to seeUnearthly daylight shine,Changing my chamber’s dust to snowTill I doubt if it be mine.Behold, the crowning mercies melt,The first surprises stay;And in my dross is dropped a giftFor which I dare not pray:That a man grow used to grief and joyBut not to night and day.Men grow too old for love, my love,Men grow too old for lies;But I shall not grow too old to seeEnormous night arise,A cloud that is larger than the worldAnd a monster made of eyes.Nor am I worthy to unlooseThe latchet of my shoe;Or shake the dust from off my feetOr the staff that bears me throughOn ground that is too good to last,Too solid to be true.Men grow too old to woo, my love,Men grow too old to wed;But I shall not grow too old to seeHung crazily overheadIncredible rafters when I wakeAnd I find that I am not dead.A thrill of thunder in my hair:Though blackening clouds be plain,Still I am stung and startledBy the first drop of the rain:Romance and pride and passion passAnd these are what remain.Strange crawling carpets of the grass,Wide windows of the sky;So in this perilous grace of GodWith all my sins go I:And things grow new though I grow old,Though I grow old and die.
G.K. Chesterton
Death is nothing at all,I have only slipped into the next roomI am I and you are youWhatever we were to each other, that we are still.Call me by my old familiar name,Speak to me in the easy way which you always usedPut no difference in your tone,Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrowLaugh as we always laughed at the little jokes we enjoyed together.Play, smile, think of me, pray for me.Let my name be ever the household world that it always was,Let it be spoken without effect, without the trace of shadow on it.Life means all that it ever meant.It it the same as it ever was, there is unbroken continuity.Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight?I am waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near,Just around the corner.All is well.
Henry Scott Holland
They say, 'The coward dies many times'; so does the beloved. Didn't the eagle find a fresh liver to tear in Prometheus every time it dined?
C.S. Lewis
My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself.
C.S. Lewis
I died as a mineral and became a plant,I died as a plant and rose to animal,I died as an animal and I was Man.Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?
Jalaluddin Rumi
Chronic anxiety is a state more undesirable than any other, and we will try almost any maneuver to eliminate it. Modern man is living in anxious anticipation of destruction. Such anxiety can be easily eliminated by self-destruction. As a German saying puts it: 'Better an end with terror than a terror without end.
Robert E. Neale
The man who kills a man kills a man.The man who kills himself kills all men.As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.
G.K. Chesterton
For in grief nothing "stays put." One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?But if a spiral, am I going up or down it?How often -- will it be for always? -- how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, "I never realized my loss till this moment"? The same leg is cut off time after time.
C.S. Lewis
The death of a beloved is an amputation.
C.S. Lewis
It is currently said that hope goes with youth, and lends to youth its wings of a butterfly; but I fancy that hope is the last gift given to man, and the only gift not given to youth. Youth is pre-eminently the period in which a man can be lyric, fanatical, poetic; but youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged; God has kept that good wine until not. It is from the backs of the elderly gentlemen that the wings of the butterfly should burst.
G.K. Chesterton
There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less
G.K. Chesterton
I who know many present things by my art," replied the Hermit with a smile, "have yet little knowledge of things future. Therefore I do not know whether any man or woman or beast in the whole world will be alive when the sun sets tonight. But be of good hope. The damsel is likely to live as long as any her age.
C.S. Lewis
To summarize, Easter Sunday is the most important Sunday. It is the Sunday of all Sundays. It is the day of the new beginning of the entire cosmos, the day of resurrection. In our worship we must be careful not to reduce our message to the Easter fact only. The Easter fact must include the message this fact proclaims: God makes all things new. It must also include the message that we have been raised with Christ. Calling God's people to die to sin and rise to the new life is central not only to Easter day but to the Easter season.
Robert E. Webber
The name outlaw Christian describes the kind of Christian I am and the kind I’m setting myself free to become: namely, a follower of Jesus who no longer accepts cocky clichés, hackneyed hope, or snappy theodicies—defenses of God’s goodness and power—that explain away evil and suffering with a theo-magical sleight of hand. An outlaw Christian doesn’t condemn questions or discourage doubt. Instead, an outlaw Christian seeks to live an authentic life of faith and integrity, and chooses the defy the unwritten laws governing suffering, grief, and hope that our culture and religious traditions have asked us to ingest. The faith of an outlaw Christian is bold, outspoken, and active in a world of pain.
Jacqueline A. Bussie
Why don't people ask us about our hope? The answer is probably that we look as if we hope in the same things they do. Our lives don't look like they are on the Calvary road, stripped down for sacrificial love, serving others with the sweet assurance that we don't need to be rewarded in this life.
John Piper
We need to shed our unearthly and nonsocial and idealistic and romantic and uber-spiritual visions of kingdom and get back to what Jesus meant. By kingdom, Jesus means: God's Dream Society on earth, spreading out from the land of Israel to encompass the whole world.
Scot McKnight
We can be redeemed only to the extent to which we see ourselves.
Martin Buber
Let the Lord your God be your hope – seek for nothing else from him, but let him himself be your hope. There are people who hope from him riches or perishable and transitory honours, in short they hope to get from God things which are not God himself.
Augustine of Hippo
A truly Christian love, either to God or men, is a humble broken-hearted love. The desires of the saints, however earnest, are humble desires. Their hope is a humble hope; and their joy, even when it is unspeakable and full of glory, is a humble broken-hearted joy, and leaves the Christian more poor in spirit, and more like a little child, and more disposed to a universal lowliness of behaviour.
Jonathan Edwards
Here the whole world (stars, water, air,And field, and forest, as they wereReflected in a single mind)Like cast off clothes was left behindIn ashes, yet with hopes that she,Re-born from holy poverty,In lenten lands, hereafter mayResume them on her Easter Day."(Epitaph for Joy Davidman)
C.S. Lewis
We must be content to grow slowly. Most of us will still barely be at the beginning of our recovery by the time we die. But that is better than killing ourselves pretending to be healthy.
Simon Tugwell
Hope is something that is demanded of us; it is not, then, a mere reasoned calculation of our chances. Nor is it merely the bubbling up of a sanguine temperament; if it is demanded of us, it lies not in the temperament but in the will... Hoping for what? For delivereance from persecution, for immunity from plague, pestilence, and famine...? No, for the grace of persevering in his Christian profession, and for the consequent achievement of a happy immortality. Strictly speaking, then, the highest exercise of hope, supernaturally speaking, is to hope for perseverance and for Heaven when it looks, when it feels, as if you were going to lose both one and the other.
Ronald Knox
If you are seeking, seek us with joyFor we live in the kingdom of joy.Do not give your heart to anything elseBut to the love of those who are clear joy,Do not stray into the neighborhood of despair.For there are hopes: they are real, they exist –Do not go in the direction of darkness –I tell you: suns exist.
Jalaluddin Rumi
What we have at the moment isn't as the old liturgies used to say, 'the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead,' but a vague and fuzzy optimism that somehow things may work out in the end.
N.T. Wright
...left to ourselves we lapse into a kind of collusion with entrophy, acquiescing in the general belief that things may be getting worse but that there's nothing much we can do about them. And we are wrong. Our task in the present...is to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final day, with our Christian life, corporate and individual, in both worship and mission, as a sign of the first and a foretaste of the second.
N.T. Wright
In an age of hope men looked up at the night sky and saw “the heavens." In an age of hopelessness they call it simply “space.
Peter Kreeft
There is hope in forgiveness
John Piper
I have come," said a deep voice behind them. They turned and saw the Lion himself, so bright and real and strong that everything else began at once to look pale and shadowy compared with him.
C.S. Lewis
At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.
C.S. Lewis
Turn around and believe that the good news that we are loved is better than we ever dared hope, and that to believe in that good news, to live out of it and toward it, to be in love with that good news, is of all glad things in this world the gladdest thing of all. Amen, and come Lord Jesus.
Frederick Buechner
Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate.
G.K. Chesterton
The Christian says, 'Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or to be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that country and to help others to do the same.
C.S. Lewis
We should ask God to increase our hope when it is small, awaken it when it is dormant, confirm it when it is wavering, strengthen it when it is weak, and raise it up when it is overthrown.
John Calvin
There is a secret medicine given only to those who hurt so hard they can't hope.The hopers would feel slighted if they knew.
Jalaluddin Rumi
Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.
G.K. Chesterton
Love is not maximum emotion. Love is maximum commitment.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
Romance is the deepest thing in life. It is deeper than reality.
G.K. Chesterton
People settle for a level of despair they can tolerate and call it happiness.
Søren Kierkegaard
Unhappy! of course you'll be unhappy. Who the devil are you that you shouldn't be unhappy, like the mother that bore you?
G.K. Chesterton
Das Glück ist das einzige, das sich verdoppelt, wenn man es teilt.
Albert Schweitzer
There is no greater misery than false joys.
Bernard of Clairvaux
[Happiness] comes when we choose to be who we are, to be ourselves, at this present moment in our lives.
Jean Vanier
Let me implore the reader to try to believe, if only for a moment, that God, who made these deserving people, may really be right when He thinks that their modest prosperity and the happiness of their children are not enough to make them blessed: that all this must fall from them in the end, and if they have not learned to know Him they will be wretched. And therefore He troubles them, warning them in advance of an insufficiency that one day they will have to discover. The life to themselves and their families stands between them and the recognition of their need; He makes that life less sweet to them.If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is 'nothing better' now to be had.
C.S. Lewis
The end of the creation is that God may communicate happiness to the creature
John Piper
Happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory ... we are all kings in exile.
G.K. Chesterton
As Venus within Eros does not really aim at pleasure, so Eros does not aim at happiness. We may think he does, but when he is brought to the test it proves otherwise... For it is the very mark of Eros that when he is in us we had rather share unhappiness with the Beloved than be happy on any other terms.
C.S. Lewis