American Theologian Quotes

Billy Graham

Brigham Young

Fulton J. Sheen

Reinhold Niebuhr

Lyman Abbott

Francis George

John Woolman

No great advance has ever been made in science, politics, or religion, without controversy.

God has allowed hard things in your life so you can show the world that your God is great and that knowing Him brings peace and joy, even when life is hard.

These are the two factors that lead to the destruction of our environment: money and time-or to say it another way, greed and haste. The question is, or seems to be, are we going to have an immediate profit and an immediate saving of time, or are we going to do what we really should do as God's children?

Francis Schaeffer

Say what men may, it is doctrine that moves the world. He who takes no position will not sway the human intellect.

William Greenough Thayer Shedd

For ages the world has been waiting and watching; millions, with broken hearts, have hovered around the yawning abyss; but no echo has come back from the engulfing gloom —silence, oblivion, covers all. If indeed they survive; if they went away whole and victorious, they give us no signals. We wait for years, but no messages come from the far-away shore to which they have gone.

Randolph Sinks Foster

Authentic Christianity is not just about keeping and protecting the faith and keeping the rules. It is even more than living to deepen your relationship with Jesus. Authentic Christianity, the real deal, is about embracing all of these important elements.

I am as sure as I am of the fact of Christ's reign, that a comprehensive and centralised system of national education, separated from religion, as is now commonly proposed, will prove the most appalling enginery for the propagation of anti-Christian and atheistic unbelief and of anti-social nihilistic ethics, social and political, which this sin-rent world has ever seen.

Archibald Alexander Hodge

Seminary also introduced me to the historical study of Jesus and Christian origins. I learned from my professors and the readings they assigned that Jesus almost certainly was not born of a virgin, did not think of himself as the Son of God, and did not see his purpose as dying for the sins of the world... I also found the claim that Jesus and Christianity were the only way of salvation to be troublesome.

The first ministers were the twelve disciples. There is no evidence that Jesus chose them because they are brighter or nicer than other people. Their sole qualification seems to have been their initial willingness to rise to their feet when Jesus said, "Follow me."

Frederick Buechner

Sight is not faith, and hearing is not faith, neither is feeling faith; but believing when we neither see, hear, nor feel is faith; and everywhere the Bible tells us our salvation is to be by faith. Therefore we must believe before we feel, and often against our feelings, if we would honor faith.

Hannah Whitall Smith

Most blacks want school vouchers, but most liberals vehemently oppose them. Why? Because what is good for teachers' unions is of more importance to the Left than what is good for blacks. Who, then, is racist? By their own admission, and by the policies they pursue, the answer is the people who call themselves progressive.

Woven into our lives is the very fire from the stars and the genes from the sea creatures, and everyone, utterly everyone, is kin in the radiant tapestry of being. This relationship is not external or extrinsic to our identity but wells up as the defining truth from our deepest being.

Elizabeth Johnson (theologian)

The method of idealistic epistemology is like that of the quack physician; it first administers a drug which makes the patient's ailment chronic, thus making its own further services seem permanently indispensable.

Douglas Clyde Macintosh

History is driven, over the long haul, by culture - by what men and women honor, cherish, and worship; by what societies deem to be true and good, and by the expressions they give to those convictions in language, literature, and the arts; by what individuals and societies are willing to stake their lives on.

Sloth is the desire for ease, even at the expense of doing the known will of God. Whatever we do in life requires effort. Everything we do is to be a means of salvation. The slothful person is unwilling to do what God wants because of the effort it takes to do it. Sloth becomes a sin when it slows down and even brings to a halt the energy we must expend in using the means to salvation.

All things are ordered by God, but His providence takes in our free agency, as well as His own sovereignty.

There never has been a great and beautiful character, which has not become so by filling well the ordinary and smaller offices appointed of God.

Horace Bushnell

There is one only and true God, but in the unity of the Godhead there are three coeternal and coequal Persons, the same in substance but distinct in subsistence.

Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield

I delight not in spreading any thing mysterious, for I consider it all lost time; but the things that all of us can see and know if we will.

The art of life consists in taking each event which befalls us with a contented mind, confident of good.... With this method... rejoice always, though in the midst of sorrows, and possess all things, though destitute of everything.

James Freeman Clarke

Somehow proper prayer must put more trust in God's will than in human wants; otherwise failure to get the things we want will force us to doubt either the power of prayer or the ability of God.

The Bible gives no hint that a Christian "belief system" might be isolated from the life of the Church, subjected to scientific analysis, and have its truth compared with competing "belief systems".

Placing economic activity in the context of the whole earth requires attention to the question of scale. Bigger is obviously not better, so the optimum scale of human economy in relation to the total economy becomes basically a question of sustainability. When the effects of the economy on the environment undercut the possibility of its own continuance, the scale is too large.

Natural man's sin is precisely this: He wants the benefits of God without God Himself.

All Church power is, therefore, properly ministerial and administrative. Everything is to be done in the name of Christ, and in accordance with his directions.