Indulgent Puritans

But there is no understanding the period of the Reformation in England until we have grasped the fact that the quarrel between the Puritans and the Papists was not primarily a quarrel between rigorism and indulgence, and that, in so far as it was, the rigorism was on the Roman side. On many questions, and specially in their view of the marriage bed, the Puritans were the indulgent party; if we may without disrespect so use the name of a great Roman Catholic, a great writer, and a great man, they were much more Chestertonian than their adversaries.

- CS Lewis  (“Donne and Love Poetry” (1938), in Selected Literary Essays [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979], 116).  Cited by Doug Wilson.

deliver me, o God!

The thing that we most want to be saved from may be exactly what God intends for us to go through so that we are saved from something much worse.

If there is a hell, Rome is built over it

If there is a hell, Rome is built over it.

- An Italian proverb used by Luther upon visiting Rome and seeing the degradation of its religious leaders.

Litigiousness

When the republic is at its most corrupt the laws are most numerous (corruptissima re publica plurimae leges)

-Tacitus, Annals, III, 27.

In the land of the unverifiable there are no efficient critical police

In the land of the unverifiable there are no efficient critical police.  When a writer expatiates amidst conjectural quotations from conjectural apocryphal Gospels, he is beyond the reach of refutation.

- Lightfoot, Essays on Supernatural Religion, 36

Why is there suffering in our world?

Sometimes God allows what he hates to accomplish what he loves.

- Joni Eareckson Tada

King of kings

There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, "Mine!"

- Abraham Kuyper

Mark Twain describes the average sentence in a German newspaper

An average sentence, in a German newspaper, is a sublime and impressive curiosity; it occupies a quarter of a column; it contains all the ten parts of speech — not in regular order, but mixed; it is built mainly of compound words constructed by the writer on the spot, and not to be found in any dictionary — six or seven words compacted into one, without joint or seam — that is, without hyphens; it treats of fourteen or fifteen different subjects, each inclosed in a parenthesis of its own, with here and there extra parentheses which reinclose three or four of the minor parentheses, making pens within pens: finally, all the parentheses and reparentheses are massed together between a couple of king-parentheses, one of which is placed in the first line of the majestic sentence and the other in the middle of the last line of it –after which comes the VERB, and you find out for the first time what the man has been talking about; and after the verb — merely by way of ornament, as far as I can make out — the writer shovels in “haben sind gewesen gehabt haben geworden sein,” or words to that effect, and the monument is finished.

- Mark Twain

procrastination is laziness in very thin diguise

Derek Kidner on the sluggard in Proverbs:

"[The sluggard] does not commit himself to a refusal, but deceives himself by the smallness of his surrenders.  So by inches and minutes, his opportunity slips away."

love covers a multitude of sins

If I do not give a friend "the benefit of the doubt," but put the worst construction instead of the best on what is said or done, then I know nothing of Calvary love.

If I take offense easily; if I am content to continue in a cool unfriendliness, though friendship be possible, then I know nothing of Calvary love.

If a sudden jar can cause me to speak an impatient, unloving word, then I know nothing of Calvary love. For a cup brimful of sweet water cannot spill even one drop of bitter water, however suddenly jolted.

If I say, "Yes, I forgive, but I cannot forget," as though the God, who twice a day washes all the sands on all the shores of all the world, could not wash such memories from my mind, then I know nothing of Calvary love.

- Amy Carmichael

study and the knowledge of God

It is possible to bury your head in a lexicon and arise in the presence of God.

- Edwyn Hoskyns

there are times when a man is his own devil

The Devil is not to be blamed for everything; there are times when a man is his own devil.

- Augustine

quoted in Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 2000, p. 241

Who needs prayer?

The church’s or Christian group’s methods are as important as its message. It is to deal consciously with the reality of the supernatural. Anything that exhibits unfaith is a mistake, or may even be a corporate sin. The liberal theologians get rid of the supernatural in their teaching, but the unfaith of the evangelical can in practice get rid of the supernatural.

May I put it like this? If we woke up tomorrow morning and found that all that the Bible teaches concerning prayer and the Holy Spirit were removed (not as a liberal would remove it, by misinterpretations, but really removed) what difference would it make in practice from the way we are functioning today? The simple tragic fact is that in much of the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ – the evangelical church – there would be no difference whatsoever.  We function as though the supernatural were not there.

If the Church does not show forth the supernatural in our generation, what will? The Lord’s work done in the Lord’s way does not relate only to its message; it relates also to the method. There must be something the world cannot explain away by the world’s methods, or by applied psychology.

- Francis Schaeffer, True Spirituality, in Complete Works of Francis A Schaeffer, 4.363.

The English bible was made in blood

The English bible was made in blood. 

- David Daniell, speaking about Tyndale's work

Scholars differ on the issue...

... more and more evangelical churches and institutions are overthrowing their heritage, sometimes on the superficial basis that scholars are divided on the issue. The truth is that scholars are divided on most theological issues, including even the doctrines of the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ and of the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ that validates him as the Son of God.  In other words, giving up a doctrine on the basis that scholars differ in their opinions shows that no doctrine is secure and the more liberal perspective and practice will prevail.  This is so because, if authorities differ - so the argument goes - one does as he or she thinks best. Anthony Thiselton, citing Robert Morgan, rightly notes that "some disagreements about what the Bible means stem not from obscurities in the text, but from conflicting aims of the interpreters."  Luther once said - borrowing from a saying of Euripides - that "whom God intends to destroy, he gives them leave to play with Scripture."

- Bruce Waltke, An OT Theology, p.236.

Gratitude

If you can't be thankful for what you recieve, be thankful for what you escape.

- Nancy Leigh DeMoss

Turning desire into policy

"Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy. "

- Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August, p.370

On the Kaiser's hesitance which led the German administration not to use their navy in WWI.

The human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given in this life

If a man diligently followed his desire, pursuing the false objects until their falsity appeared and then resolutely abandoning them, he must come out at last into the clear knowledge that the human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given — nay, cannot even be imagined as given — in our present mode of subjective and spatio-temporal existence. . . .

- CS Lewis, Surprised by Joy

Augustine on Inerrancy

If you chance upon anything in Scripture that does not seem to be true, you must not conclude that the sacred writer made a mistake; rather your attitude should be: the manuscript is faulty, or the version is not accurate, or you yourself do not understand the matter.

- St Augustine (quoted by Kevin Vanhoozer in "Well-Versed Augustinian Inerrancy")

Much "Historical Jesus scholarship" is nothing more than self-reflection

The Christ that Harnack sees, looking back through nineteen centuries of "Catholic darkness", is only the reflection of a Liberal Protestant face, seen at the bottom of a deep well.

- George Tyrrell, Christianity at the Cross-roads, 1913, p.44.