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.

Now, my friend, I beg you to consider that this blindness and unyielding hardness is the very core of your iniquity, and to be convinced that you are thus blind and stupid is true conviction of sin.

Archibald Alexander

The life-boat may have a tasteful bend and beautiful decoration, but these are not the qualities for which I prize it; it was my salvation from the howling sea! So the interest which a regenerate soul takes in the Bible, is founded on a personal application to the heart of the saving truth which it contains.

James Waddel Alexander

No suffering can be foreign to a Christian, not even the anguish that comes with the loss of God.

Thomas J. J. Altizer

Our earthly possessions will indeed perish in the final wreck of all things; but let the ship perish, let all we have sink in the deep, if we may come "safe to land." From these storms and billows — these dangerous seas — these tempestuous voyages — may we all be brought at last, safe to heaven.

The law of the harvest is to reap more than you sow. Sow an act, and you reap a habit; sow a habit, and you reap a character; sow a character, and you reap a destiny.

George Boardman the Younger

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

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

Any theology that is indifferent to the theme of liberation is not Christian theology.

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

Believers have a genuine, unfailing hope of a future reunion with loved ones…we can find joy in anticipating our future reunion.

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

Humor and paradox are often the only ways to respond to life's sorrow with grace.

On every important issue life transcends logic and it is folly to depend on reason alone.

All mankind is crying out for guidance, for comfort, for peace.

I am often criticized, or at least questions are raised, about what appears to be the absence of the Holy Spirit in my work.

Stanley Hauerwas

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

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.

We are to regard the mind, not as a piece of iron to be laid upon the anvil and hammered into any shape, nor as a block of marble in which we are to find the statue by removing the rubbish, nor as a receptacle into which knowledge may be poured; but as a flame that is to be fed, as an active being that must be strengthened to think and to feel -- and to dare, to do, and to suffer.

Live each day with an open ear toward heaven, eager to respond to any whisper from God.

He who thinks he hath no need of Christ, hath too high thoughts of himself. He who thinks Christ cannot help him, hath too low thoughts of Christ.

We may talk of the best means of doing good; but, after all, the greatest difficulty lies in doing it in a proper spirit. Speak- the truth in love, "in meekness instructing those that oppose themselves" — with the meekness and gentleness of Christ.

Asahel Nettleton

The idea that the profits of capital are really the rewards of a just society for the foresight and thrift of those who sacrificed the immediate pleasures of spending in order that society might have productive capital, had a certain validity in the early days of capitalism, when productive enterprise was frequently initiated through capital saved out of modest incomes.

Reinhold Niebuhr

Community doesn't just create abundance - community is abundance. If we could learn that equation from the world of nature, the human world might be transformed.

We have a name for those who try to praise when they have no pleasure in the object. We call them hypocrites.

John Piper (theologian)