Topic: Christianity

Quotes

Adam Seligman, Robert Weller, Michael Puett, & Bennett Simon, Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (2008)

• The importance of sincerity within Protestantism is in many ways a commonplace… It is, to be sure, not unique to Protestantism. It can be found to be equally salient among Hasidic Jews, Zen Buddhists, or Chinese Mohists of two millennia ago. Henri Peyre has traced its role from the Renaissance through twentieth-century French literature. But it is in and through its Protestant articulation that it has had such a pervasive and formative role in contemporary culture.#
• The famous Augustinian understanding of the Eucharist as the “visible sign of an invisible grace,” although it long predates the Reformation, has become the mode through which much of ritual has been understood. In such a view, the “thing itself” always resides beyond the ritual, and the ritual act is only its instrument. To be sure, this understanding has led to important exegesis of ritual’s symbolism, but it also led to an emphasis on inner states like sincerity or belief that may not always be relevant to the social and cognitive contexts of ritual action. Among other preconceptions, this orientation suffers from an overly subjectivist and individualist emphasis on meaning and interaction. Such a view sees the “essential” or constitutive arena of action (often read as intention) as something within the social actor or actors, with the external, formal ritual seen as but the marker of these internal processes.#

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905)

• Predestination made it fundamentally impossible for the State really to promote religion by intolerance. It could not thereby save a single soul. Only the idea of the glory of God gave the Church occasion to claim its help in the suppression of heresy. Now the greater the emphasis on the membership of the preacher, and all those that partook of the communion, in the elect, the more intolerable became the interference of the State in the appointment of the clergy.#
• A healthy fear is a better sign of grace than certainty, says Spener, Theologische Bedenken.#
• The idea that the glory of God requires the subjection of the damned to the discipline of the Church was gradually superseded by the other idea, which was present from the beginning and became gradually more prominent, that it was an insult to His glory to partake of the Communion with one rejected by God. That necessarily led to voluntarism, for it led to the believers’ Church the religious community which included only the twice-born.#
• Ethical principles for the reform of the world could not be found in Luther’s realm of ideas.#

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)

• Christians who are tempted to think that those who stoned to death the first martyrs must have been worse men than they themselves are, ought to remember that one of those persecutors was Saint Paul.#
• No Christian more firmly believes that Atheism is false, and tends to the dissolution of society, than Marcus Aurelius believed the same things of Christianity.#
• What little recognition the idea of obligation to the public [by a ruler] obtains in modern morality is derived from Greek and Roman sources, not from Christian.#

John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus (1974)

• The cross of Calvary was not a difficult family situation, not a frustration of visions of personal fulfillment, a crushing debt or a nagging in-law; it was the political, legally to be expected result of a moral clash with the powers ruling his society. Already the early Christians had to be warned against claiming merit for any and all suffering; only if their suffering be innocent, and a result of the evil will of their adversaries, may it be understood as meaningful before God (1 Pet. 2:18-21; 3:14-8; 4:1, 13-16; 5:9; James 4:10).#
• After the invitation to wives we saw that the Haustafeln addressed a similar and immensely more novel call to husbands to love their wives; after calling slaves to be subject, the early Christian moralists called upon the masters to be equally respectful; after calling children to remain subordinate to parents, the admonition was turned about and addressed to parents as well. When, however, the call to subordination is addressed to the Christian in his status as political subject, then in these texts exhortation is not reversed. There is no invitation to the king to conceive of himself as a public servant.#
• That God orders and uses the powers does not reveal anything new about what government should be or how we should respond to government.#

Michael Horton, Introducing Covenant Theology (2006)

• God is transcendent. Therefore, any relationship that one might have with this God would have to be something other than a natural relationship.#
• God’s predestination is hidden to us, but Christ is not.#
• Wherever there is a discussion of unity in the New Testament, the sacraments are close at hand.#
• Jesus did not make the law easier, but more difficult. When Jesus gave his Sermon on the Mount, corresponding to Moses’ giving of the law at Sinai, all notions of a “kinder, gentler” Moses in the person of Jesus are put to flight.#
• We cannot say that the new covenant replaces obligations of law with those of love, since the law had always been regarded as the specification of love’s duties.#

Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will (1754)

• It is as absurd to say, that God decreed the dependence of the world upon himself, as it is to say, he decreed that two and two shall be equal to four, rather than five.#
• It is equally improper to talk of months and years of the Divine Existence, as of square miles of Deity: and we equally deceive ourselves, when we talk of the world being differently fixed, with respect to wither of these sorts of measures.#
• Inasmuch as sin is not the fruit of of any positive agency or influence of the Most High, but, on the contrary, arises from the withholding of his action and energy, and, under certain circumstances, necessarily follows on the want of his influence; this is no argument that he is sinful, or his operation evil, or has anything of the nature of evil; but, on the contrary, that he, and his agency, are altogether good and holy, and that he is the fountain of all holiness.#
• These events will be ordered by something. They will either be disposed by wisdom, or they will be disposed by chance; that is, they will be disposed by blind and undesigning causes, if that were possible, and could be called a disposal. Is it not better, that the good and evil which happen in God’s world, should be ordered, regulated, bounded, and determined by the good pleasure of an infinitely wise being, who perfectly comprehends within his understanding and constant view, the universality of things, in all their extent and duration, and sees all the influence of every event, with respect to every individual thing and circumstance, throughout the grand system, and the whole of the eternal series of consequences; than to leave these things to fall out by chance, and to be determined by those causes which have no understanding or aim?#
• On the whole, it is manifest, that God may be, in the manner which has been described, the orderer and disposer of that event, which, in the inherent subject and agent, is moral evil; and yet his so doing may be no moral evil.#

Jonathan Edwards, Concerning the End for which God Created the World (1765)

• That perfection of God which we call his faithfulness, or his inclination to fulfil his promises to his creatures, could not properly be what moved him to create the world.#
• If we suppose God has real pleasure and happiness in the holy love and praise of his saints, as the image and communication of his own holiness, it is not properly any pleasure distinct from the pleasure he has in himself; but is truly an instance of it.#
• Though these communications of God – these exercises, operations, and expressions of his glorious perfections, which God rejoices in – are in time; yet his joy in them is without beginning or change.#
• We must suppose that God’s revealed law, and the law of nature, agree; and that his will, as a lawgiver, must agree with his will as a creator. Therefore we justly infer, that the same thing which God’s revealed law requires intelligent creatures to seek, as their last and greatest end, that God their creator had made their last end.#

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (1961)

• If [the love of God] is consistent with hurting us, then he may hurt us after death as unendurably as before it.#

Cornelius Van Til, A Survey of Christian Epistemology (1969)

• The character of salvation itself is conceived of as in no sense an eternization of man, but as a restoration and development of this original perfection. The work of Christ did not remove anything of the finitude of man; it removed the sin of man.#

Martin Luther, On the Bondage of the Will (1525)

• Let wretched men abjure that blasphemous perversity which would blame the darkness of their own hearts on the plain scriptures of God!#
• What fear may we suppose there was among the Jews, when the Gospel freed all men from the law of Moses? What scope did not this great liberty appear to give to evil men? Yet the Gospel was not, on that account, taken away; instead, the godly were told not to use their liberty to indulge the flesh, and the ungodly were left to their own devices.#
• God preached works to the end that sin and death may be taken away, and we may be saved. But God hidden in majesty neither deplores nor takes away death, but works life and death, and all in all; nor has he set bounds to himself by his word, but has kept himself free over all things.#
• This is what we come to when we seek to measure God and make excuses for him by human reason . . . we are overwhelmed by the glory . . . and instead of a single excuse we vomit out a thousand blasphemies.#
• By the omnipotence of God I mean, not the power by which he omits to do many things that he could do, but the active power by which he mightily works all in all.#

Augustine, City of God

• Vice, too, is so contrary to nature, that it cannot but damage it. And therefore departure from God would be no vice, unless in a nature whose property it was to abide with God. So that even the wicked will is a strong proof of the goodness of the nature. But God, as he is the supremely good creator of good natures so he is of evil wills the most just ruler, so that while they make an ill use of good natures, he makes a good use even of evil wills.#
• In scripture they are called God’s enemies who oppose his rule, not by nature, but by vice; having no power to hurt him, but only themselves. #
• When the will abandons what is above itself, and turns to what is lower, it becomes evil – not because that is evil to which it turns, but because the turning itself is wicked.#
• His [God’s] leisure, therefore, is no laziness, indolence, inactivity; as in his work is no labor, effort, industry.#
• Wherefore it is not without meaning said that all sin is a lie. For no sin is committed save by that desire or will by which we desire that it be well with us, and shrink from it being ill with us. That, therefore, is a lie which we do in order that it may be well with us, but which makes us more miserable than we were.#
• And indeed, this is already sin, to desire those things which the law of God forbids, and to abstain from them through fear of punishment, not through love of righteousness.#
• For though God is said to change his determinations (so that in a tropical sense the Holy Scripture says even that God repented), this is said with reference to man’s expectation, or the order of natural causes, and not with reference to that which the Almighty had foreknown that he would do.#
• It is true that wicked men do many things contrary to God’s will; but so great is his wisdom and power, that all things which seem adverse to his purpose do still tend toward those just and good ends and issues which he himself has foreknown. And consequently, when God is said to change his will, as when, for example, he becomes angry with those to whom he was gently, it is rather they than he who are changed, and they find him changed insofar as their experience of suffering at his hand is new, as the sun is changed to injured eyes, and becomes as it were fierce from being mild, and hurtful from being delightful, though in itself it remains the same as it was.#
• There is no true virtue except that which is directed toward that end in which is the highest and ultimate good of man.#

Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism (1898)

• [Calvinism] does not seek God in the creature, as Paganism; it does not isolate God from the creature, as Islamism; it posits no mediate communion between God and the creature, as does Romanism; but proclaims the exalted thought that, although standing in high majesty above the creature, God enters into immediate fellowship with the creature, as God the Holy Spirit.#
• The effect of every clerical interposition invariably was, and must be, to make religion external and to smother it with sacerdotal forms. Only where all priestly intervention disappears, where God’s sovereign election from all eternity binds the inward soul directly to God Himself, and where the ray of divine light enters straightway into the depth of our heart-only there does religion, in its most absolute sense, gain its ideal realization.#
• Rome perceived very clearly how liberty of conscience must loosen the foundations of the unity of the visible Church, and therefore she opposed it. But on the other hand it must be admitted that Calvinism, by praising aloud liberty of conscience, has in principle abandoned every absolute characteristic of the visible Church.#
• The Church may not be forced to tolerate as a member one whom she feels obliged to expel from her circle; but on the other hand no citizen of the State must be compelled to remain in a church which his conscience forces him to leave.#

J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (1946)

• Christianity will indeed accomplish many useful things in this world, but if it is accepted in order to accomplish those useful things it is not Christianity. Christianity will combat Bolshevism; but if it is accepted in order to combat Bolshevism, it is not Christianity: Christianity will produce a unified nation, in a slow but satisfactory way; but if it is accepted in order to produce a unified nation, it is not Christianity: Christianity will produce a healthy community; but if it is accepted in order to produce a healthy community, it is not Christianity: Christianity will promote international peace; but if it is accepted in order to promote international peace, it is not Christianity. Our Lord said: “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you.” But if you seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness in order that all those other things may be added unto you, you will miss both those other things and the Kingdom of God as well.#Quoted in Russell Moore, The Kingdom of Christ (2004)

Russell Moore, The Kingdom of Christ (2004)

• When the primary outlet of evangelical engagement with social and political matters is a political action committee rather than the community of the church, the shaping authority on matters of social and political outlook all too often becomes polling data or party platforms, rather than an authoritative text. Political solutions are then grounded in the social contract of a “moral majority” rather than by the righteousness of the coming Kingdom of God in Christ. In such a situation, when the “silent majority” is culturally marginalized, so is the witness of evangelical Christianity.#

Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (1951)

• Christianity seems to threaten culture at this point not because it prophesies that of all human achievements not one stone will be left on another but because Christ enables men to regard this disaster with a certain equanimity.#
• The word ‘Father’ on the lips of Jesus is a greater, more faithful, and more heroic word than is evident when fatherhood and deity are identified.#
• The idea of ascribing “infinite” or “intrinsic” value to the human soul seems wholly foreign to Jesus. He does not speak of worth apart from God.#
• As he cannot derive the laws of medical procedure from the gospel when he deals with a case of typhus, so he cannot deduce from the commandment of love the specific laws to be enacted in a commonwealth containing criminals.#
• If we look to the revelation of God for knowledge of geology, we miss the revelation; but if we look to geology for faith in God, we miss both him and the rocks. If we make a rule for civil government out of the structure of the early Christian community, we substitute for the spirit of that community, with its dependence on Christ and his giving of all good gifts, a self-righteous independence of our own; if we regard our political structures as kingdoms of God, and expect through papacies and kingdoms to come closer to him, we cannot hear his word or see his Christ; neither can we conduct our political affairs in the right spirit.#
• The Christ who commended a good Samaritan for pouring oil and wine into wounds would scarcely likewise honor a man who, trained in contemporary methods of giving first aid, regarded the Biblical example as his absolute guide.#
• Faith in this sense is prior to all reasoning, for without a cause – let it be truth, or life, or reason itself – we do not reason.#