Bryan > Bryan's Quotes

“The British nation is unique in this respect: they are the only people who like to be told how bad things are, who like to be told the worst.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“The unity that we discover in the New Testament is not the unity of a dogmatic system. Rather, the unity that we find is the looser unity of a collection of documents that, in various ways, retell and comment upon a single fundamental story.1 That story may be summarized roughly as follows: The God of Israel, the creator of the world, has acted (astoundingly) to rescue a lost and broken world through the death and resurrection of Jesus; the full scope of that rescue is not yet apparent, but God has created a community of witnesses to this good news, the church. While awaiting the grand conclusion of the story, the church, empowered by the Holy Spirit, is called to reenact the loving obedience of Jesus Christ and thus to serve as a sign of God’s redemptive purposes for the world.”
― Richard B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics

“There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations of Christians called holiness.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“What is true is that in all these despairing and strained efforts to believe, what we really wanted was not to believe. That is, we didn’t want that which is the first requirement of faith, namely, to surrender ourselves totally, not to think of ourselves anymore, to extinguish completely our need for recognition and recognize God alone, to put our trust and dare to believe in God alone. We would surrender what was uncomfortable to us, but not that which we cared about! To have faith means to trust and to dare unconditionally, and that we didn’t want; we wanted to set conditions, and thereby we missed the whole point, and our whole effort was not genuine. We did not want to believe. If”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Collected Sermons of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; and consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do. For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. The supporters of this system claimed that it embodied the meaning - the Christian meaning, they insisted - of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and justifying ourselves in our erotic revolt: we would deny that the world had any meaning whatever.”
― Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means

“A desacramentalized view of time tends to place the entire burden of doctrinal decision on the present moment: I, in the small moment of time allotted to me, am responsible to make the right theological (and moral) choice before God. The imposition of such a burden is so huge as to be pastorally disastrous. Furthermore, to the extent that as Christians we are captive to our secular Western culture, it is likely that this secular culture will get to set the church’s agenda. If we do not see ourselves sacramentally connected to the tradition (and thus to Christ), we sense no accountability to tradition, and we are likely to accommodate whatever demands our culture places on us and capitulate to them. By contrast, when we are faced with a theological and moral conundrum, a participatory approach to tradition will always ask how the catholic, or universal, church throughout time and place has dealt with the issue. The widespread assumption that Christian beliefs and morals are to a significant degree malleable has its roots in a modern desacralized view of time.”
― Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry

“We must picture hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives with the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“Nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust and ambition look ahead.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic.”
― Aldous Huxley

“Some of the best things I have ever thought of I have thought of during bad sermons.”
― Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

“There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves