Quotes by Theologians - Page 89

The Limit of Happiness Is the Presence of GodBut it is something great that Abraham asks, namely that God shall not pass by nor remove to a distance and leave his soul desolate and empty (Gen. 18:3). For the limit of happiness is the presence of God, which completely fills the whole soul with his whole incorporeal and eternal light.
Philo of Alexandria
For though God has promised to do whatsoever his people may ask, yet he does not allow them an unbridled liberty to ask whatever may come to their minds; but he has at the same time prescribed to them a law according to which they are to pray. And doubtless nothing is better for us than this restriction; for if it was allowed to every one of us to ask what he pleased, and if God were to indulge us in our wishes, it would be to provide very badly for us. For what may be expedient we know not; nay, we boil over with corrupt and hurtful desires. But God supplies a twofold remedy, lest we should pray otherwise than according to what his own will has prescribed; for he teaches us by his word what he would have us to ask, and he has also set over us his Spirit as our guide and ruler, to restrain our feelings, so as not to suffer them to wander beyond due bounds. For what or how to pray, we know not, says Paul, but the Spirit helpeth our infirmity, and excites in us unutterable groans. (Romans 8:26.) We ought also to ask the mouth of the Lord to direct and guide our prayers; for God in his promises has fixed for us, as it has been said, the right way of praying.
John Calvin
For it is not we who call God by these names. We do not invent them. On the contrary, if it depended on us, we would be silent about him, try to forget him, and disown all his names. We take no delight in the knowledge of his ways. We tend continually to oppose his names: his independence, sovereignty, righteousness, and love, and resist him in all his perfections. But it is God himself who reveals all his perfections and puts his names on our lips. It is he who gives himself these names and who, despite our opposition, maintains them. It is of little use to us to deny his righteousness: every day he demonstrates this quality in history. And so it is with all his attributes. He brings them out despite us. The final goal of all his ways is that his name will shine out in all his works and be written on everyone’s forehead (Rev. 22:4). For that reason we have no choice but to name him with the many names his revelation furnishes us.
Herman Bavinck
Go where thou wilt, thou canst not go out of thy Father's ground.
Thomas Boston
God's image…is found not best in individual humans, but in humans as they relate to each other.
Luke Timothy Johnson
Ninguna cosa es más propia a Dios que el amor, ni al amor hay cosa más natural que volver al que ama en las condiciones e ingenio del que es amado.
Luis de León
... the divine knowing - what the Father knows, and what the Word says in response to that knowing, and what the Spirit broods upon under the speaking of the Word - all that eternal intellectual activity isn't just daydreaming. It's the cause of everything that is. God doesn't find out about creation; he knows it into being. His knowing has hair on it. It is an effective act. What he knows, is. What he thinks, by the very fact of his thinking, jumps from no-thing into thing. He never thought of anything that wasn't.
Robert Farrar Capon
Our crucifixes exhibit the pain, but they veil, perhaps necessarily, the obscenity: but the death of the God-Man was both.
Charles Williams
One of the most striking things about the New Testament teaching on homosexuality is that, right on the heels of the passages that condemn homosexual activity, there are, without exception, resounding affirmations of God's extravagant mercy and redemption. God condemns homosexual behavior and amazingly, profligately, at great cost to himself, lavishes his love on homosexual persons.
Wesley Hill
Washed and waiting. That is my life – my identity as one who is forgiven and spiritually cleansed and my struggle as one who perseveres with a frustrating thorn in the flesh, looking forward to what God has promised to do. That is what this book is all about.
Wesley Hill
To know myself as woman in the image of God to know God as Mother and to know my own mother as a window into God: these three are inseparable.If one is implausible to the heart the other two are as well.
Roberta C. Bondi
First and foremost, God is the true hero of the story. No matter how captivating the other characters may be, our top priority is to discover what the Bible reveals about God.
Carolyn Custis James
God's holiness is not an unloving holiness, and God's love is not an unholy love. It is only by keeping these two primary moral qualities of the divine being closely related that we may rightly behold the character of God. (p. 98)
Thomas C. Oden
The suffering of the Christian or anyone else in this world is never ultimately an accident. All suffering is within the pale of divine sovereignty. All suffering comes within the broader context of the sovereignty of God.
R.C. Sproul
The real crisis of worship today is not that the preaching is paltry or that it’s too drafty in church. It is that people have no sense of the presence of God, and if they have no sense of His presence, how can they be moved to express the deepest feelings of their souls to honor, revere, worship, and glorify God?
R.C. Sproul
No mi kršćani upućeni smo po središtu našega Creda - 'mučen pod Poncijem Pilatom' - u povijest u kojoj je bilo razapinjanja i mučenja, u kojoj se plakalo i tako rijetko ljubilo. I nikakav od povijesti udaljeni mit, nikakav Platonovi idejni Bog, nikakva gnostička soteriologija i nikakav apstraktni govor o povijesnosti naše egzistencije ne mogu nam vratiti onu nedužnost koju smo u toj povijesti izgubili.
Johann Baptist Metz
Tko npr. formulira govor o Bogu Abrahamovu, Izakovu i Jakovljevu tako da se u njemu više ne čuje Jobov uzdisaj i tužaljka 'Ta dokle još?', taj se ne bavi teologijom nego mitologijom.
Johann Baptist Metz
What is less often noticed is that it is precisely the kind of moral instruction that parents are constantly trying to give their children — concrete, imaginative, teaching general principles from particular instances, and seeking all the time to bring the children to appreciate and share the parent's own attitudes and view of life… The all-embracing principles of conduct
J.I. Packer
Only when it is seen that what decides each individual's destiny is whether or not God decides to save him from his sins, and that this is a decision that God need not make in any individual case, can one begin to grasp the biblical view of grace.
J.I. Packer
So whom does God wrong in commanding the destruction of the Canaanites? Not the Canaanite adults, for they were corrupt and deserving of judgment. Not the children, for they inherit eternal life. So who is wronged? Ironically, I think the most difficult part of this whole debate is the apparent wrong done to the Israeli soldiers themselves. Can you imagine what it would be like to have to break into some house and kill a terrified woman and her children? The brutalising effect on these Israeli soldiers is disturbing.
William Lane Craig
You must make your choice: either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
C.S. Lewis
The evil and suffering in this world are greater than any of us can comprehend. But evil and suffering are not ultimate. God is. Satan, the great lover of evil and suffering, is not sovereign. God is.
John Piper
Like Adam, we have all lost Paradise; and yet we carry Paradise around inside of us in the form of a longing for, almost a memory of, a blessedness that is no more, or the dream of a blessedness that may someday be again.
Frederick Buechner
The place that the shepherds found was not an academy or an abstract republic, it was not a place of myths allegorised or dissected or explained or explained away. It was a place of dreams come true.
G.K. Chesterton
If we require some kind of sign, or "proof," for our belief in God, then we believe, or place our tust, not in God but in the sign or proof.
Robert L. Short
It is not objective proof of God's existence that we want but, whether we use religious language for it or not, the experience of God's presence.
Frederick Buechner
Your mind was made to know and love God.
John Piper
Lord, I believe; help my unbelief' is the best any of us can do really, but thank God it is enough.
Frederick Buechner
If we are to believe he is really alive with all that that implies, then we have to believe without proof. And of course that is the only way it could be. If it could be somehow proved, then we would have no choice but to believe. We would lose our freedom not to believe. And in the very moment that we lost that freedom, we would cease to be human beings. Our love of God would have been forced upon us, and love that is forced is of course not love at all. Love must be freely given. Love must live in the freedom not to love; it must take risks. Love must be prepared to suffer even as Jesus on the Cross suffered, and part of that suffering is doubt.
Frederick Buechner
Fundamentalists offer us a "loving" God who is some kind of divine stalker.
Robert M. Price
Warren knows God doesn't chow down on Doritos or caviar. What he fails to see, however, is that there is no difference in principle between the old animal sacrifice theology and his own. Surely the same principle applies to emotional gratification. He is still manifestly talking about the care and feeding of God. His God, like an insecure boyfriend, seems to need emotional stroking.
Robert M. Price
The only people who soul can truly magnify the Lord are...people who acknowledge their lowly estate and are overwhelmed by the condescension of the magnificent God.
John Piper
To paraphrase Paul, God often uses the cheesy to confound the sophisticated. He regularly honors those who are confused about his leading as if they have nailed it.
Mark Galli
That very breath wherewith they utter their complaints is a blessing and a fundamental one too for if God would withdraw that they were incapable of whatsoever else either have or desire.
Richard Allestree
As is typical of this God [of Israel], he calls his people into freedom in the most unlikely place.
Mark Galli
As Wade Clark Roof noted in his study, "the 'weightlessness' of contemporary belief in God is a reality...for religious liberals and many evangelicals.
Mark Galli
No matter what God's power may be, the first aspect of God is never that of the absolute Master, the Almighty. It is that of the God who puts himself on our human level and limits himself.
Jacques Ellul
When God breaks in, the only thing you can do is believe it or not. YOu cannot ask for a receipt of the transaction or a sign for the dubious. God does not offer to cover your backside.
Anna Carter Florence
O my God, how does it happen in this poor world that you are so great and yet nobody finds you, that you call so loudly and yet nobody hears you, that you are so near and yet nobody feels you, that you give yourself to everybody and yet nobody knows your name? Men flee from you and say they cannot find you; they turn their backs and say they cannot see you; they stop their ears and say they cannot hear you.
Hans Denck
If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe -no more than the architect of a house could actually be a wall or staircase or fireplace in that house. The only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be inside us as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way. And that's just what we do find inside us.
C.S. Lewis
Were the judgments of mankind correct, custom would be regulated by the good. But it is often far otherwise in point of fact; for, whatever the many are seen to do, forthwith obtains the force of custom. But human affairs have scarcely ever been so happily constituted as that the better course pleased the greater number. Hence the private vices of the multitude have generally resulted in public error, or rather that common consent in vice which these worthy men would have to be law.
John Calvin
... the proper self-knowledge and self-love of every created thing is ipso facto a participation in the knowledge and love of God. The entire universe moves by desire for the Highest Good simply because every part of it loves what God loves - namely, its own being.
Robert Farrar Capon
Without a spiritual wakefulness to divine purposes and connections in all things, we will not know things for what they truly are.
John Piper
But saints and angels behold that glory of God which consists in the beauty of His holiness; and it is this sight only that will melt and humble the hearts of men, wean them from the world, draw them to God, and effectually change them. A sight of the awful greatness of God may overpower men's strength, and be more than they can endure; but if the moral beauty of God be hid, the enmity of the heart will remain in its full strength. No love will be enkindled; the will, instead of being effectually gained, will remain inflexible. But the first glimpse of the moral and spiritual glory of God shining into the heart produces all these effects as it were with omnipotent power, which nothing can withstand.
Jonathan Edwards
‎God remains silent so that men and women may speak, protest, and struggle. God remains silent so that people may really become people. When God is silent and men and women cry, God cries in solidarity with them but doesn't intervene. God waits for the shouts of protest.
Elsa Tamez
Providence is wiser than you, and you may be confident it has suited all things better to your eternal good than you could do had you been left to your own option.
John Flavel
Our obedience is God's pleasure when it proves that God is our treasure. This is good news, because it means very simply that the command to obey is the command to be happy in God. The commandments of God are only as hard to obey as the promises of God are hard to believe. The Word of God is only as hard to obey as the beauty of God is hard to cherish.
John Piper
Her (Mary's) Son first had to be the Child of the Father in order then to become man and be capable of taking up on his shoulders the burden of a guilty world.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
But that is the nature of true grace and spiritual light, that it opens to a person's view the infinite reason there is that he should be holy in a high degree. And the more grace he has, and the more this is opened to view, the greater sense he has of the infinite excellency and glory of the divine Being, and of the infinite dignity of the person of Christ, and the boundless length and breadth and depth and height of the love of Christ to sinners. And as grace increases, the field opens more and more to a distant view, until the soul is swallowed up with the vastness of the object, and the person is astonished to think how much it becomes him to love this God and this glorious Redeemer that has so loved man, and how little he does love. And so the more he apprehends, the more the smallness of his grace and love appears strange and wonderful: and therefore he is more ready to think that others are beyond him.
Jonathan Edwards
Mary thus learns that the Most High has ever borne a Son in his bosom, and that this Son has now chosen her bosom as dwelling-place.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
In relationship to God one can not involve himself to a certain degree. God is precisely the contradiction to all that is 'to a certain degree'.
Søren Kierkegaard
It doesn’t cause me to doubt God’s existence, but it does force me to admit there’s a lot about God I don’t understand.
Carolyn Custis James
The Shield was another of the Fear's names. According to Laughter, it means he shields the seed of Abraham the way a man starting a fire shields the flame. When Sarah was about to die childless, the Fear gave her a son. When Abraham was about to slaughter the son, the Fear gave him the ram. He is always shielding us like a guttering wick, Laughter said, because the fire he is trying to start with us is a fire that the whole world will live to warm its hands at. It is a fire in the dark that will light the whole world home.
Frederick Buechner
Is it a time for you, you I say, to dwell in your roofed-in houses?' (Haggai 1:4). The reply might have been that it was unreasonable to expect anyone to live in a roofless house, but the question made its point. What worth did they set on their God, when they left His Temple in ruins?
Joyce G. Baldwin
I have to ask myself how I can possibly expect to know Jesus as he would want to be known if my life remains unscathed by trouble and grief. How can I hope to grasp anything of God's heart for this broken planet if I never weep because its brokenness touches me and breaks my heart? How can I reflect his image if I never share in his sufferings? And how will any of us ever learn to treasure his hesed and grace if we never experience phases where these blessings seem absent?
Carolyn Custis James
Bridge-players tell me that there must be some money on the game 'or else people won't take it seriously'. Apparently it's like that. Your bid - for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity - will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high, until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world.
C.S. Lewis
In a way, the futile excuses many people use to cover their superstitions are demolished. They think it is enough to have some sort of religious fervor, however ridiculous, not realizing that true religion must be according to God's will as the perfect measure; that He can never deny Himself and is no mere spirit form to be changed around according to individual preference.
John Calvin
People try to persuade us that the objections against Christianity spring from doubt. That is a complete misunderstanding. The objections against Christianity spring from insubordination, the dislike of obedience, rebellion against all authority. As a result, people have hitherto been beating the air in their struggle against objections, because they have fought intellectually with doubt instead of fighting morally with rebellion.
Søren Kierkegaard
The whole world is a theatre for the display of the divine goodness, wisdom, justice, and power, but the Church is the orchestra, as it were—the most conspicuous part of it; and the nearer the approaches are that God makes to us, the more intimate and condescending the communication of his benefits, the more attentively are we called to consider them.
John Calvin
The greatest cause in the world is joyfully rescuing people from hell, meeting their earthly needs, making them glad in God, and doing it with a kind, serious pleasure that makes Christ look like the Treasure he is.
John Piper