Category: Quotations

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Piety Preaching Quotations Theological Reflections

Patience with the Provisional

The church itself is still an advent church; for we are still waiting for him who is to come in the unveiled radiance of unconditional Godhead with the eternal kingdom. And that church rightly tells the impatient who want to see God directly here and now: Prepare for this God the true way, the way of faith, of love, of humility, and the way of patience with its unimpressive provisional messengers and their poor words and small signs. For then God will certainly come. He only comes to those who in patience love his forerunners and the provisional. The Pharisees of the Gospel, however, who rejected the forerunner of the messiah because he was not the definitive reality, did not recognize him who was the definitive reality either.

Karl Rahner, The Great Church Year

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Piety Quotations Theological Reflections

Faith Must Increase

Faith and a desire for more faith frequently go hand in hand. The reason is that through faith we lay hold upon God, and in grasping the infinite object, the utter inadequacy of each single act of appropriation immediately reveals itself in the very act. It is the same in the Gospel: ‘Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief’.

Geerhardus Vos, Biblical Theology

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Piety Quotations

The Present Advantage of Godliness

But what advantage have godly men by these temporal promises?
Answer. This is not their advantage, to be always abounding in these outward things; that is, neither so de facto and eventually, nor were it meet it should be so. But 1. They have a promise of what is needful and useful simply, even of temporal things, which no wicked man has. They shall (Psa. 84) want no good thing; yea, though lions suffer hunger (Psa. 34:10), yet they that seek the Lord shall not want any good thing.
2. They may pray for these things so far as they are needful, and may confidently expect them, and go to God for them, by virtue of that right, ere they get them. So it is our daily bread by allowance, and promised before we get it (Matt. 6:11).
3. If a natural man abound, he cannot promise himself the continuance of meat till the end of his life; no, not so much as his dinner tomorrow, nor life till then. But, if a believer live, he may expect the continuance of as much food as shall be necessary for him; if he have nothing, he may confidently promise himself both life and food tomorrow, if either or both of them be needful, more than a wicked man, that has more wealth, health, and outward protection, can do.
4. He may promise himself the blessing, and the sanctified use of what he enjoys, which another cannot.
5. He may have peace, whether he have or want, in the enjoyment of creatures, or in their scarcity, because he has a right to them; for it is not from want of right to creature-comforts that scarcity of them comes, but God, like a wise and skilful physician, keeps back meat for health, where there is abundance in the right, and to be given also when needful. So that, comparing him with a wicked man, whether he have or want, whether he enjoy more plentifully, or be in scarcity, he has still the better of him by far; which should make us all love godliness the more, which has so great an advantage as this attending it.

-James Durham, Practical Exposition of the Ten Commandments speaking of the promise attached to the 5th Commandment, and of the promise that godliness has for the life that now is.

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Literary Criticism Practical Notes Quotations

It Ought to Mean Something

One of Miller’s tricks is to be constantly using apocalyptic language, to sprinkle every page with phrases like “cosmological flux”, “lunar attraction” and “interstellar spaces” or with sentences like “The orbit over which I am travelling leads me farther and farther away from the dead sun which gave me birth.” The second sentence in the essay on Proust and Joyce is: “Whatever has happened in literature since Dostoievsky has happened on the other side of death.” What rubbish it is, when you think it out! The key words in this kind of writing are “death”, “life”, “birth”, “sun”, “moon”, “womb”, “cosmic” and “catastrophe”, and by free use of them the most banal statement can be made to sound picturesque, while what is outright meaningless can be given an air of mystery and profundity. Even the title of this book, The Cosmological Eye, doesn’t actually mean anything, but it sounds as though it ought to mean something.

-George Orwell, “Review of The Cosmological Eye by Henry Miller”

Which nicely sums up quite a bit of theological literature as well, though of course words like “semiotic” are substituted for dramatic terms.

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Quotations Theological Reflections

God is Wisdom

Wisdom (sapientia) is predicated univocally only of God inasmuch as God alone is truly wise � and therefore is predicated equivocally of human beings. Therefore, when predicated of God, wisdom does not indicate a genus of wise things of which God is one. The divine sapientia is a proper attribute of God: it is divine wisdom in the sense of being identical with the divine essence in its utter simplicity and its freedom from all composition. The theologia archetypa, then, is God himself, the identity of self and self-knowledge in the absolutely and essentially wise God.

(Richard Muller, Post Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: Prolegomena to Theology, p.231)

And that ought to show that the doctrine of divine simplicity is a very fruitful ground for meditation.

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Practical Notes Quotations

Self-Defeating Triumphant Apologetics

From James Sutherland, The Late Seventeenth Century:

As Dr. Samuel Mintz has shown, Hobbes forced his critics to debate with him on his own terms, and not by simply citing Scripture or falling back on traditional authority. ‘The critics were satisfied that they had cut Hobbes down to size; in fact they had yielded, slowly and imperceptibly but also very surely, to the force of his rationalist method.’

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Quotations Theological Reflections

Trinitarian and Christological Belief

John of Damascus provides a concise overview of what to believe about the Trinity and the person of Christ.

We, therefore, both know and confess that God is without beginning, without end, eternal and everlasting, uncreate, unchangeable, invariable, simple, uncompound, incorporeal, invisible, impalpable, uncircumscribed, infinite, incognizable, indefinable, incomprehensible, good, just, maker of all things created, almighty, all-ruling, all-surveying, of all overseer, sovereign, judge; and that God is One, that is to say, one essences; and that He is known, and has His being in three subsistences, in Father, I say, and Son and Holy Spirit; and that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are one in all respects, except in that of not being begotten, that of being begotten, and that of procession; and that the Only-begotten Son and Word of God and God, in His bowels of mercy, for our salvation, by the good pleasure of God and the co-operation of the Holy Spirit, being conceived without seed, was born uncorruptedly of the Holy Virgin and Mother of God, Mary, by the Holy Spirit, and became of her perfect Man; and that the Same is at once perfect God and perfect Man, of two natures, Godhead and Manhood, and in two natures possessing intelligence, will and energy, and freedom, and, in a word, perfect according to the measure and proportion proper to each, at once to the divinity, I say, and to the humanity, yet to one composite person; and that He suffered hunger and thirst and weariness, and was crucified, and for three days submitted to the experience of death and burial, and ascended to heaven, from which also He came to us, and shall come again. And the Holy Scripture is witness to this and the whole choir of the Saints.

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Quotations Theological Reflections

What Remains

In his Reformed Dogmatics, Heinrich Heppe collects statements on what was lost to humans of the image of God as a result of the fall, and what still lingers:

All later Reformed dogmaticians adhere to the distinction established in Melanchthonian theology between the substance and the virtutes of the divine image, and they accordingly teach that the original virtus and the imago has been irretrievably lost.
Cf. Polan (VI, 5): “From this it is plain what of the divine image is left in corrupt man. There remained the substance of the soul; there remained the essential faculties of the soul, knowledge and will; there remained the essential attributes, as a kind of natural knowledge, reasoning power, judgement and thought, freedom from compulsion in the will; there remained natural life and the immortality of the soul. Therefore the image of the nature is not utterly destroyed by the sin of Adam and Eve; this must be credited to the mercy of God towards the human race. Nevertheless it has been lost in part and what is left is wretchedly corrupt and misshapen. Moreover all the rightness, i.e., the sanity and integrity of the perception and recognition of God and divine things, the original righteousness and holiness by which in particular man was a partner in the divine nature, has been completely destroyed, extinguished and left out”.
Hence this point of doctrine also belong to those who represented the difference between the Reformed and the Lutheran systems.
So, e.g., Wendelin (Systema, p.508): “There remains in man corrupted by Adam’s lapse a rational soul, which is an immortal spirit; there remain the faculties, thought and will; in thought there remain as though inborn the theoretical and practical principles of truth.�In short there is still some portion of dominion. Meanwhile none of these has been so acquired that by it fallen and corrupt man is able either to rise again or to prepare himself to receive the offer of grace, or to co-operate with God even when He is laying the first foundations of grace”.
Similarly in the Collatio, p.125: “We assert that the principal part of the divine image, namely original righteousness, was plainly lost and abolished through the fall and sin of origin. Meanwhile we deny that the entire image of God in all its parts was utterly lost and abolished, which those will easily concede who recognise part of the divine image in the rational soul as an immortal spirit endowed with thought and will. By the fall man did not cease to be man, although he did cease to be righteous”.

(“The Violation of the Covenant of Works”, slightly edited)

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Piety Practical Notes Quotations

Inconsistency and Hypocrisy

There is much in Coventry Patmore that is superficial or wrong or even abominable, but from time to time there is a good remark as well. Here is one such, from the “Magna Moralia” section XXXII in The Rod, the Root, and the Flower:

The world is not scandalised by anything so much as by the inconsistencies of believers, which it attributes to hypocrisy. But a great deal of ‘inconsistency’ and shortcoming is consistent with an entire absence of hypocrisy. The world having to do only with objects of the senses, discerns and believes a thing fully or not at all, and acts accordingly; and expects that Christians should do the same. But God and the truths of faith are ‘infinitely visible and infinitely credible’; and discernment and belief vary infinitely in degree, from the obscure longing which cries, ‘O God, if Thou be a God, save my Soul, if I have a Soul’, to that of the Saint who sees God, as it were, face to face; and as faith thus varies, so varies the life which comes of it.

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Hermeneutical Considerations Quotations

Prophecy, not Prediction

Alfred Edersheim, Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, Book 2, Chapter 8:

Of two passages in his own Old Testament Scriptures the Evangelist sees a fulfilment in these events. The flight into Egypt is to him the fulfilment of this expression by Hosea, ‘Out of Egypt have I called My Son’ (Hos. 11:1). In the murder of ‘the Innocents,’ he sees the fulfilment of Rachel’s lament (Jer. 31:15, who died and was buried in Ramah) and there was bitter wailing at the prospect of parting for hopeless captivity, and yet bitterer lament, as they who might have encumbered the onward march were pitilessly slaughtered. Those who have attentively followed the course of Jewish thinking, and marked how the ancient Synagogue, and that rightly, read the Old Testament in its unity, as ever pointing to the Messiah as the fulfillment of Israel’s history, will not wonder at, but fully accord with, St. Matthew’s retrospective view. The words of Hosea were in the highest sense ‘fulfilled’ in the flight to, and return of, the Saviour from Egypt.[53] To an inspired writer, nay, to a true Jewish reader of the Old Testament, the question in regard to any prophecy could not be: What did the prophet�but, What did the prophecy�mean? And this could only be unfolded in the course of Israel’s history. Similarly, those who ever saw in the past the prototype of the future, and recognised in events, not only the principle, but the very features of that which was to come, could not fail to perceive, in the bitter wail of the mothers of Bethlehem over their slaughtered children, the full realisation of the prophetic description of the scene enacted in Jeremiah’s days. Had not the prophet himself heard, in the lament of the captives to Babylon, the echoes of Rachel’s voice in the past? In neither one nor the other case had the utterances of the prophets (Hosea and Jeremiah) been predictions: they were prophetic. In neither one not the other case was the ‘fulfilment’ literal: it was Scriptural, and that in the truest Old Testament sense.

[53]In point of fact the ancient Synagogue did actually apply to the Messiah Ex. 4:22, on which the words of Hosea are based. See the Midrash on Ps. 2:7. The quotation is given in full in our remarks on Ps. 2:7 in Appendix 9.