GOD

'"...Eternal Fact..."'
CS Lewis, The Great Divorce, p.42.

CHRISTIANITY

'The Christian faith is not true because it works, it works because it is true.'

Os Guiness, God in the Dark, p.77.

CONVERSION

'What happens in conversion - at least, what happened in mine - is that a person concludes the truth is in Jesus.'

Lauren F Winner, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis, p.xiii.

TRUTH,

'The relativism which is not willing to speak about truth but only about "what is true for me" is an evasion of the serious business of living. It is the mark of a tragic loss of nerve in our contemporary culture. It is a preliminary sympton of death.'

Lesslie Newbiggin in C FitzSimmons Allison, The Cruelty of Heresy, p.20.

BOOKS

'Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books...None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we certainly shall increase it, amd weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can only be done by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People are no cleverer then than we are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes.'

CS Lewis, 'Introduction' in St.Athanasius, On the Incarnation, p.4.

TRUTH

'Truth is truth, and error, error, and that which is unlawful is unlawful, whether men think so or not. God has put an eternal difference between light and darkness, good and ill, which no creatures's conceit can alter; and therefore no man's judgment is the measure of things further than it agrees to truth stamped upon things themselves by God.'

Richard Sibbes, The Bruised Reed, p.84.

TRUTH

'...you don't always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it too.'

Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird, p.156.

TRUTH

'...truth doesn't come out in bumper stickers. There may be a flickering moment of insight in a one-liner, in a sound bite, but everyday meat-and-potato truth is beyond our ability to capture in a few words.'

Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird, p.103.

TRUTH

'...the key to restoring a unified concept of truth is to recover a robust concept of creation. Christianity has always taught that there is "a single reality" because it was created by a single omnipotent and all-wise God, explains one historical account. "Given this creation story, it followed that knowledge, too, comprised a single whole." It was the doctrine of creation that undergirded confidence in the unity of truth.'

Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth, p.247.

TRUTH

'Truth is both fixed and constant. It is not changing or something to be created. Good and evil are realities that are both extrinsic to us. The forces of good and evil are not determined by our choices and preferences. In opposition to the dominant mindset of our day, something is not evil simply because it is not in accord with what we feel or desire, and neither is something else good because we like it or enjoy it. Rather things are objectively good or evil regardless of how or what we may feel about them. This is why we must determine whether something is good or evil, right or wrong, based on the objective, unmoving standard of the Bible rather than our subjective, constantly shifting feelings and preferences.'

Tim Challies, The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment, p.95.

TRUTH

'There is no truth towards Jesus without truth towards man. Untruthfulness destroys fellowship, but truth cuts false fellowship to pieces and establishes genuine brotherhood. We cannot follow Christ unless we live in revealed truth before God and man.'

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, p.89.

TRUTH

'It is not he that receives most of the truth into his head, but he that receives most of the truth affectionately into his heart, that shall enjoy the happiness of having his judgment sound and clear...'

Thomas Brooks, Precious Remedies Agaisnt Satan's Devices, p.93.

TRUTH

'...the truth comes. It encounters us in an unexpected form, not with trailing clouds of glory and dazzling clarity, but as the crucified truth, as the crucified Christ. And the truth speaks to us. It says to us, "Who has crucified me, the truth?" And in the same moment it answers itself, "See what you have done. You have hated the truth of God. You have crucified it. And you have set up your own truth. You believed you knew the truth, you possessed it, you thought to make men happy with your truth and thereby you made yourself into God. You have robbed God of his truth and proclaimed your own truth instead - but you have thereby ruined yourself by playing God and with that comes destruction. You have crucified truth."

And if we find this mystery too difficult for us to understand, listen to what the truth says more clearly: You are living as though you were alone in the world. You have thought to find within yourself the source of truth, which can only be found in God. For that reason you hate the other person who does the same. You found in yourself the center of the world and this is the source of the lie. You saw your brothers as part of your personal kingdom, lording it over them and not seeing that you and they live by the truth of God. Your tear yourself out of communion with God and your brother and you think you can live alone. You hate God and your brother and think you can live alone. You hate God and your brother becasue they deny the truth. That was the lie and you are therefore liars through and through. Your wish to be alone, self-sufficient, and your hatred of others - that is the lie. For that reason you crucified God's truth. You thought you would become free if you tore away and hated the truth. But you have become a slave, a slave of your hatred and your lies.'

Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Edwin Robertson (Ed.), Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Christmas Sermons, p.69.

CONFESSING CHRIST

'If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the Devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved, and to be steady on all the battlefield besides, is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.'

Martin Luther in Randy Newman, Questioning Evangelismn: Engaging People's Hearts the Way Jesus Did, p.154.

MOUNTAINS & MOLEHILLS

'When molehills are turned to mountains, inevitably mountains are reduced to molehills - forgetting humility, truth, justice and love.'
Dick Keyes, Seeing through Cynicism: A Reconsideration of the Power of Suspicion, p.207.

TRUTH

'Truth prevails!'
Jan Hus quoted in Richard Burton, Prague, p.13.

CONTROVERSY

'Every really great Christian utterance...is born in controversy. It is when men have felt compelled to take a stand against error that they have risen to the really great heights in the celebration of truth.'

J. Gresham Machen in John Piper, The Future of Justification, p.29.

GOODNESS

'The simple truth is that people can be good and be wrong. Early in my religious life I acquired the notion that those who believed Christ's truth were good and those who ignored or rejected it were bad. But life is not that simple. Sometimes those who hold to truth are scoundrels and those who affirm error are saintly. One can hold steadfastly to a system of half-truths and subtle distortions and still live a moral life. There is not a necessary connection between truth and apparent morality.'

Tom Hovestol, Extreme Righteousness, p.37.

HERESY

'Error, indeed, is never set forth in its naked deformity, lest, being thus exposed, it should at once be detected. But it is craftily decked out in an attractive dress so as, by its outward form, to make it appear to the inexperienced (ridiculous as the expression may seem) more true than truth itself.'

Irenaeus in Timothy George, Galatians (New American Commentary), p.103.

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.