JESUS

'The Jesus of the New Testament has at least one advantage over the Jesus of modern reconstruction - He is real. He is not a manufactured figure suitable as a point of support for ethical maxims, but a genuine Person whom a man can love. Men have loved Him through all the Christian centuries. And the strange thing is that despite all the efforts to remove Him from the pages of history, there are those who love Him still.'

J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, p.116.

LANGUAGE

'...language is truthful, not when the meaning attached to the words by the speaker, but when the meaning intended to be produced in the mind of the particular person addressed, is in accordance with the facts.'

J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, p.112.

MIRACLES

'The New Testament without the miracles would be far easier to believe. But the trouble is, it would not be worth believing.'

J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, p.103.

CHURCH

'The fundamental fault of the modern Church is that she is busily engaged in an absolutely impossible task - she is busily engaged in calling the righteous to repentance...Even our Lord did not call the righteous to repentance, and probably we shall be no more successful than he.'

J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, p.68.

SINNERS

'In the presence of a psychiatrist I can only be a sick man; in the presence of a Christian brother I can dare to be a sinner.'

Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Graham Beynon, Mirror, Mirror: Discover your true indentity in Christ, p.131.

CHRISTIANS

'...glorious ruins...'
Francis Schaeffer in Graham Beynon, Mirror, Mirror: Discovering your true identity in Christ, p.67.

HUMILITY & PRIDE

'I know that have cause to be humble and yet I do not know one half of that cause. I know I am proud and yet I do not know half of that pride.'

Robert Murray M'Cheyne in Graham Beynon, Mirror, Mirror: Discover your true identity in Christ, p.63.

JESUS

'Remember Jesus' harshest words were for those who tended to think well of themselves and had forgotten the sin inside them, and his warmest words were for those who recognized that sin and were honest about it.'

Graham Beynon, Mirror, Mirror: Discover your true identity in Christ, p.62.

HOMOSEXUALITY & JESUS

'Some people hold up their hands in holy horror at even hearing that so and so has such a problem. But if they knew how sympathetic the Lord is to the affliction, and how he stands ready to use it when it is given to him, they might be shocked out of their self-righteousness.

Jesus is far more daring in what he does and whom he employs than many exceedingly pious souls dare to believe. Perhaps that's why hypocrites don't like to get too near him. He's a shocker.'

William Still, 'A Pastoral Perspective on Our Fallen Sexuality' in David Searle (Ed.), Truth and Love, p.64.

HOMOSEXUALITY

'I have known those who were faced with extreme temptation to 'unnatural sin' who so resolutely refused to succumb to what fatally attracted them but which they knew was wrong, that I was astonished. But on reflection, I knew why their aesthetic, pastoral, and preaching gifts were signally used of God. That very drive, which could have ruined them was used, when transmogrified into an instrument of God, as the means of saving and blessing many.'

William Still, 'A Pastoral Perspective on Our Fallen Sexuality' in David Searle (Ed.), Truth and Love, p.63.

CHRISTIANITY & LIBERALISM

'Here is found the most fundamental difference between liberalism and Christianity - liberalism is altogether in the imperative mood, while Christianity begins with a triumphant indicative; liberalism appeals to man's will, while Christianity announces, first, a gracious act of God.'

J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, p.47.

LIBERALISM

'The movement designated as "liberalism" is regarded as "liberal" only by its friends; to its opponents it seems to involve a narrow ignoring of many relevant facts.'

J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, p.2.

RELIGION

'The type of religion which rejoices in the pious sound of traditional phrases regardless of their meanings, or shrinks from "controversial" matters, will never stand amid the shocks of life.'

J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, p. 1.

TIME

'Our ability to measure and appportion time affords an almost endless source of comfort.'

Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road, p.213.

MARRIAGE

'Then the fight went out of control. It quivered their arms and legs and wrenched their faces into shapes of hatred, it urged them harder and deeper into each other's weakest points, showing them cunning ways around each other's strongholds and quick chances to switch tactics, feint, and strike again. In the space of a gasp for breath it sent their memories racing back over the years for old weapons to rip the scabs off old wounds; it went on and on.'

Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road, p.27.

THE PAST

'We are forever drawing up indictments against the past, then refusing to let it testify on its own behalf - it is so very guilty, after all.'

Marilynne Robinson, 'Marguerite of Navarre' in The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought, p.182.

IDEAS

'For at least a century we have diverted ourselves with the fact that it is possible to translate whole constellations of ideas into terms inappropriate to them. And when, thus transformed, they seem odd or foolish, we have acted as if we had exposed their true nature - in its essence, the alligator was always a handbag. We have alienated ourselves from our history by systematically refusing it the kind of understanding that would make it intelligible to us, until we are no longer capable of understanding it.'

Marilynne Robinson, 'Marguerite de Navarre' in The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought, p.181.

LOVE

'But I say: we ought to embrace the whole human race without exception in a single feeling of love; here there is no distinction between barbarian and Greek, worthy and unworthy, friend and enemy, since all should be contemplated in God, not in themselves. When we turn aside from such contemplation, it is no wonder we become entangled in many errors. Therefore, if we rightly direct our love, we must first turn our eyes not to man, the sight of whom would more often engender hate than love, but to God, who bids us extend to all men the love we bear to him, that this may be an unchanging principle: Whatever the character of the man, we must yet love him because we love God.'

John Calvin in Marilynne Robinson, 'Puritans and Prigs' in The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought, p.172.

PURITANS

'I have not yet found a Puritan whose Calvinism was so decayed or so poorly comprehended that he or she would say to another soul, I am within the circle of the elect and you are outside it.'

Marilynne Robinson, 'Puritans and Prigs' in The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought, p.169.

MORALITY

'A great many of us, in the face of recent experience, have arrived with a jolt at the archaic-sounding conclusion that morality was the glue holding society together, just when we were in the middle of proving that it was a repressive system to be blamed for all our ills.'

Marilynne Robinson, 'Puritans and Prigs' in The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought, p.159.

JESUS

'Everything God wanted to say to the whole world - in a person.'

Sally Lloyd-Jones, The Jesus Storybook Bible, p.169.

THE WORLD

'This world is not simply a theater for individual conversion narratives, to be discarded at the end when we all go to heaven. No, the ultimate purpose of Jesus is not only individual salvation and pardon for sins but also the renewal of this world, the end of disease, poverty, injustice, violence, suffering and death.'

Timothy Keller, The Prodigal God, p.110.

GUILT

'If you are filled with shame and guilt, you do not merely need to believe in the abstract concept of God's mercy. You must sense, on the palate of the heart, as it were, the sweeteness of his mercy. Then you will know that you are accepted.'

Timothy Keller, The Prodigal God, p.109.

CHRISTIAN LIFE

'Our pleasure and our duty,
though opposite before,
since we have seen his beauty
are joined to part no more.'
John Newton in Timothy Keller, The Prodigal God, p.88.

REPENTANCE

'To find God we must repent of the things we have done wrong, but if that is all you do, you may remain just an elder brother. To truly become Christians we must also repent of the reasons we ever did anything right. Pharisees only repent of their sins, but Christians repent for the very roots of their righteousness too. We must learn to repent of the sin under all our other sins and under all our righteousness - the sin of seeking to be our own Savior and Lord.'

Timothy Keller, The Prodigal God, p.78.

CHURCH

'Jesus's teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day. However, in the main, our churches today do not have this effect. The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even our most avant-garde ones. We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people. The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church. That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishoners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did.'

Timothy Keller, The Prodigal God, p.15.

HUMANKIND

'Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.'

Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, p.134.

MENTAL HEALTH

'...mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become. Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being.'

Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, p.104.

SUICIDE

'I remember two cases of would-be suicide, which bore a striking similarity to each other. Both men had talked of their intentions to commit suicide. Both used the typical argument - they had nothing more to expect from life. In both cases it was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something from them; something in the future was expected of them.'

Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, p.79.

TEARS

'...there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.'

Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, p.78.

HOPE

'The prisoner who had lost faith in the future - his future - was doomed. With his loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay.'

Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, p.74.

HUMANKIND

'It is a peculiarity of mankind that he can only live by looking to the future.'
Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, p.73.

SUFFERING

'If there is meaning in life at all, there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life is incomplete.

The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity - even under the most difficult circumstances - to add a deeper meaning to his life.'

Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, p.67.

LOVE

'Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way - an honorable way - in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment.'

Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, p.37.

HAPPINESS AND SUCCESS

'Don't aim at success - the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself.'
Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, p.xiv.

JOY

'This is the double delight of joy. We enjoy what God has given us, and there is a bond - a knowing smile - that we share with him as we participate in his joy. True joy comes as when we learn to enjoy the things that God enjoys.'

Edward T. Welch, Depression: A Stubborn Darkness, p.270.

HOPELESSNESS

'If you are hopeless, there may be many contributors, but two are certain. First you have placed your hope in something other than God - a person, money, personal reputation - and it has let you down. Second, you may understand that Jesus conquered death, but you live as though he is still in the grave. All hopelesness is ultimately a denial of the resurrection.'

Edward T. Welch, Depression: A Stubborn Darkness, p.253.

CHRISTIANS

'...aching visionaries...'
Nicholas Wolterstorff in Edward T. Welch, Depression: A Stubborn Darkness, p.250.

CHRISTIAN LIFE

'One of the many unique features of God's ways is that we all shift back and forth between our roles as physician and patient.'

Edward T. Welch, Depression: A Stubborn Darkness, p.223.

GOD'S LOVE

'...a Never Stopping, Never Giving Up, Unbreaking, Always and Forever Love.'
Sally Lloyd-Jones, The Jesus Storybook Bible, p.36.

BROTHERS AND SISTERS

'...brothers condescend to their sisters. It is a sign of affection.'

Marilynne Robinson, Home, p.51.

PREACHING

'...parsing the broken heart of humankind and praising the loving heart of Christ...'

Marilynne Robinson, Home, p.50.

ADOLESCENCE

'...adolescence was a matter of watching unremarakable features drift off axis very slightly, of watching the nose knuckle just a little and the jaw go just a bit out off square.'

Marilynne Robinson, Home, p.41.