Nick > Nick's Quotes

“Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.”
― John Locke

“The Philosopher, too, says of the wicked (Ethic. ix, 4) that "their soul is divided against itself . . . one part pulls this way, another that"; and afterwards he concludes, saying: "If wickedness makes a man so miserable, he should strain every nerve to avoid vice.”
― Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica: Complete Edition

“Paul’s version of this guidance from Jesus is found in his deeply Trinitarian formula for prayer found in Ephesians 2:18: “Through him [Christ] we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.” The word access was commonly used when an ancient king granted someone an audience. No one could simply walk into the presence of a powerful monarch. The consequences could be imprisonment or even death (cf. Esther 4:9–16). That, however, describes the power differential only between an ancient oriental king and a commoner. The gulf between a holy God and sinful human beings is infinitely greater (1 Sam 6:20; Ps 130:3; Na 1:6). No human being can look upon God and live (Ex 33:20). Paul’s claim that we now have access to God’s very presence “through him” is therefore quite astounding. We always have an audience because of what Jesus Christ has done. His death on the cross reconciled us to God (Eph 2:16) and made him our Father.”
― Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

“We are as strictly and solemnly commanded to pray as in the others . . . not to kill, not to steal, etc.”165 We must pray whether we feel like it or not.”
― Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

“It is possible to merely assent that something is a sin without getting the new perspective on it and experiencing the new inward aversion to it that gives you the power and freedom to change. Put another way, there is a false kind of repentance that is really self-pity. You may admit your sin, but you aren’t really sorry for the sin itself. You are sorry about the painful consequences to you. You want that pain to stop, so you end the behavior. It may be, however, that there hasn’t been any real inward alteration of the false beliefs and hopes, the inordinate desires, and the mistaken self-perceptions that caused the sin. For example, this husband did not come to grips with his misplaced pride and insecurity, and his need for exaggerated deference and respect from women. His “repentance” was completely selfish, caring only about his pain and not about the grief he was causing his wife and God. He was only sorry about himself, not about the sin.”
― Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

“Austin Phelps makes this point in a chapter in his volume on prayer. He tells of Ethelfrith, the pagan Saxon king of Northumbria, who had invaded Wales and was about to give battle. The Welsh were Christians, and as Ethelfrith was observing the army of his opponents spread out before him, he noticed a host of unarmed men. When he asked who they were, he was told that they were the Christian monks of Bangor, praying for the success of their army. Ethelfrith immediately realized the seriousness of the situation. “Attack them first,” he ordered.”
― Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

“That means there has never been a parent on earth who wants joy for his or her children as much as your Father in heaven wants joy for you, his child. There has never been a human father who wanted to answer his child’s petitions as much as God wants to answer yours. Yet we know that God is not only loving but holy and just. How can he shower blessings down on sinful people who deserve the opposite? The answer is that Jesus got the scorpion and the snake so that we could have food at the Father’s table. He received the sting and venom of death in our place (cf. 1 Cor 15:55; Heb 2:14–15; Gen 3:15).”
― Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

“If you recognize the genuineness of the testimony of Mary and Joanna, and realize that they became apostles, bearing witness to the risen Jesus, you have to recognize certain facts about the historical Jesus. He did not just present himself as a great teacher, a wise sage, a miracle worker, an exorcist. This inner circle knew better than that, and they were faithful to say so after the fact. The Jesus about whom the earliest disciples bore witness was and is the real Jesus of history and faith. The impact crater in the lives of these disciples, male and female, matches up with the impression Jesus deliberately left on these persons, as we will see in more detail as we turn now to Peter.”
― Ben Witherington III, What Have They Done with Jesus? Beyond Strange Theories & Bad History-Why We Can Trust the Bible

“Here we are able to reach a major conclusion of this study. None of these major figures who constituted the inner circle of Jesus would have become or remained followers of Jesus after the crucifixion if there was no resurrection and no resurrection appearances of Jesus. The church, in the persons of its earliest major leaders, was constituted by the event of the resurrection, coupled with the Pentecost event! The stories of these figures, especially their post-Easter stories, are the validation of this fact. There would be no church without the risen and appearing Jesus.”
― Ben Witherington III, What Have They Done with Jesus? Beyond Strange Theories & Bad History-Why We Can Trust the Bible

“In other words, we have no basis at all to think that Paul was plagued by guilt feelings or self-doubt while a Jew and that this was what drove him to consider Christ and finally convert. This all-too-prevalent, all-too-modern psychological approach to Paul fails to reckon with the clear statements Paul makes in Philippians 3, where he states that his conversion involved a revelation and a miracle. There is no evidence of tortured spiritual turmoil that led to this conversion. As Fred Craddock sees it, “We do not have in this text a portrait of a man at war with himself, crucified between the sky of God’s expectation and the earth of his own paltry performance. Paul is not in this scene a poor soul standing with a grade of ninety-nine before a God who counts one hundred as the lowest passing grade.”294 We ought not to read Paul as an early example of the introspective conscience of the West.295”
― Ben Witherington III, What Have They Done with Jesus? Beyond Strange Theories & Bad History-Why We Can Trust the Bible

“Paul was not only a spirited man, as any reading of his more polemical letters will attest, but also a man of the Spirit. It is important that we not downplay this factor, and it is equally important that we not anachronistically contrast it with the notion of Paul being a profound and rational thinker. We are talking about a person who manifests both life in the Spirit and life of the mind, and in fact we see a marriage of the two. No doubt Paul might have said that the only people really in their right minds are those who are filled with and inspired by the Spirit to think God’s thoughts after God has revealed those thoughts.”
― Ben Witherington III, What Have They Done with Jesus? Beyond Strange Theories & Bad History-Why We Can Trust the Bible

“It has been said that necessity is the mother of invention. It might be better to say that experience is the mother of invention. It was the experience of seeing the risen Lord that created the inner circle of Jesus, and the coming of the Spirit that birthed the church. In other words, naturalistic historical explanations alone will never adequately explain the crucial events that led to the rise of the inner-circle leaders within the Christian movement and the rise of the movement itself.”
― Ben Witherington III, What Have They Done with Jesus? Beyond Strange Theories & Bad History-Why We Can Trust the Bible

“It was not the fault of Christian censors or a theological thought-police that the “other” Gospels were criticized and rejected. The “other” Gospels were not recognizable as “gospel,” and they failed to capture the hearts, minds, and imaginations of Christians in the worldwide church. The proof of this is the limited number of extant manuscripts for many of these “other” Gospels and the fact that many Jesus books were not known beyond their own immediate circles. The exclusion of other Gospels was not the result of the victory of the orthodox. It was rather based on an objective claim as to who more properly transmitted the teaching of Jesus and the Apostles. In the end, the reason the “other” Gospels lost out is that they simply failed to convince the majority of their antiquity and authenticity as stories of Jesus.”
― Michael F. Bird, The Gospel of the Lord: How the Early Church Wrote the Story of Jesus

“Further to that, it is surely interesting that many church fathers did not know about several of these so-called Gospels. Whereas Bart Ehrman thinks that the Gospel of Peter was just as popular as the Gospel of Mark, Bishop Serapion of Antioch had never heard of the Gospel of Peter before the church at Rhossus brought it to his attention. However, we can assume that Serapion knew all four canonical Gospels because his predecessor Theophilus compiled a Gospel harmony.95 While Irenaeus had his own collection of “other” Gospels, including the Valentinian Gospel of Truth and the Sethian Gospel of Judas,96 these are never once mentioned by either Clement of Alexandria or Origen, the two authors who cite “other” Jesus books more liberally, nor are they known to the catalogs of Eusebius and the Gelasian decree. Consequently we must wonder precisely how widely many of these “other” Gospels circulated beyond their point of origin.”
― Michael F. Bird, The Gospel of the Lord: How the Early Church Wrote the Story of Jesus

“According to the Gospels, Christianity is not a system of neo-platonic philosophy lodged inside a Jewish casing, not German existentialism waiting to be set free from its religious mythology, not a conservative or liberal political program looking for legitimation in religious tracts. Rather, the Gospels show that Christianity is about following Jesus the Christ. Finally, the Gospels are reminders that the words and deeds of Jesus must be uppermost in the minds, hearts, prayers, thoughts, and devotion of the church. The Gospels urge that those who bear Christ’s name must be willing to believe in him and follow him, through Galilee and Judea, through Gethsemane and Golgotha, through to the empty tomb and one day into the kingdom of heaven.”
― Michael F. Bird, The Gospel of the Lord: How the Early Church Wrote the Story of Jesus

“As these quotations are examined and exposed, it will become quite clear that those Jesus mythicists citing the Church Fathers in such a fashion are not competent students on the subject of Christianity's origins. They have merely copied accusations from less than reliable sources without concern for whether their citations were interpreted properly or even existed. Nor have they ever bothered investigating the responses given by Christian apologists to these quotes. That it attacks Christianity is enough for them.”
― Albert McIlhenny, Neither New Nor Strange: How Jesus Mythicists Misrepresent the Church Fathers

“But if any man undertake to write a history, that has to be collected from materials gathered by observation and the reading of works not easy to be got in all places, nor written always in his own language, but many of them foreign and dispersed in other hands, for him, undoubtedly, it is in the first place and above all things most necessary, to reside in some city of good note, addicted to liberal arts, and populous; where he may have plenty of all sorts of books, and upon inquiry may hear and inform himself of such particulars as, having escaped the pens of writers, are more faithfully preserved in the memories of men, lest his work be deficient in many things, even those which it can least dispense with.”
― Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans

“So difficult is it to observe moderation in the defence of liberty, while each man under the presence of equality raises himself only by keeping others down, and by their very precautions against fear men make themselves feared, and in repelling injury from ourselves we inflict it on others as though there were no alternative between doing wrong and suffering it.”
― Titus Livy, History of Rome

“Militant atheists seek to discredit religion based on a highly selective reading of history. There was a time not long ago—just a couple of centuries—when the Western world was saturated by religion. Militant atheists are quick to attribute many of the most unfortunate aspects of history to religion, yet rarely concede the immense debt that civilization owes to various monotheist religions, which created some of the world’s greatest literature, art, and architecture; led the movement to abolish slavery; and fostered the development of science and technology. One should not invalidate these achievements merely because they were developed for religious purposes. If much of science was originally a religious endeavor, does that mean science is not valuable? Is religiously motivated charity not genuine? Is art any less beautiful because it was created to express devotion to God? To regret religion is to regret our civilization and its achievements.”
― Bruce Sheiman, An Atheist Defends Religion

“The militant atheists lament that religion is the foremost source of the world’s violence is contradicted by three realities: Most religious organizations do not foster violence; many nonreligious groups do engage in violence; and many religious moral precepts encourage nonvio lence. Indeed, we can confidently assert that if religion was the sole or primary force behind wars, then secular ideologies should be relatively benign by comparison, which history teaches us has not been the case. Revealingly, in his Encyclopedia of Wars, Charles Phillips chronicled a total of 1,763 conflicts throughout history, of which just 123 were categorized as religious. And it is important to note further that over the last century the most brutality has been perpetrated by nonreligious cult figures (Hitler, Stalin, Kim Jong-Il, Mao Zedong, Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Fidel Castro, Slobodan Milosevic, Robert Mugabe—you get the picture). Thus to attribute the impetus behind violence mainly to religious sentiments is a highly simplistic interpretation of history.”
― Bruce Sheiman, An Atheist Defends Religion

“Religion’s misdeeds may make for provocative history, but the everyday good works of billions of people is the real history of religion, one that parallels the growth and prosperity of humankind. There are countless examples of individuals lifting themselves out of personal misery through faith. In the lives of these individuals, God is not a delusion, God is not a spell that must be broken—God is indeed great.”
― Bruce Sheiman, An Atheist Defends Religion

“In conclusion: Knowledge of the material world and the natural order of things have brought humanity unimaginable wealth and prosperity. Yet what we desire the most is truth: understanding our special place in the world; purpose: a meaningful personal destiny; and wisdom: the guidance to lead a good life. Material knowledge is entirely the province of science; truth, purpose, and wisdom are largely the province of religion.”
― Bruce Sheiman, An Atheist Defends Religion

“But when the Bible speaks of love, it measures it primarily not by how much you want to receive but by how much you are willing to give of yourself to someone. How much are you willing to lose for the sake of this person? How much of your freedom are you willing to forsake? How much of your precious time, emotion, and resources are you willing to invest in this person? And for that, the marriage vow is not just helpful but it is even a test. In so many cases, when one person says to another, “I love you, but let’s not ruin it by getting married,” that person really means, “I don’t love you enough to close off all my options. I don’t love you enough to give myself to you that thoroughly.” To say, “I don’t need a piece of paper to love you” is basically to say, “My love for you has not reached the marriage level.”
― Timothy Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God

“What, then, is marriage for? It is for helping each other to become our future glory-selves, the new creations that God will eventually make us. The common horizon husband and wife look toward is the Throne, and the holy, spotless, and blameless nature we will have. I can think of no more powerful common horizon than that, and that is why putting a Christian friendship at the heart of a marriage relationship can lift it to a level that no other vision for marriage approaches.”
― Timothy Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God

“Romance, sex, laughter, and plain fun are the by-products of this process of sanctification, refinement, glorification. Those things are important, but they can’t keep the marriage going through years and years of ordinary life. What keeps the marriage going is your commitment to your spouse’s holiness. You’re committed to his or her beauty. You’re committed to his greatness and perfection. You’re committed to her honesty and passion for the things of God. That’s your job as a spouse. Any lesser goal than that, any smaller purpose, and you’re just playing at being married.”
― Timothy Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God

“In my own life, I must confess that I had never felt “manly” until I got married. I was a nerd before it was fashionable, playing trumpet in the marching band and staying in the Boy Scouts through high school. Good things, no doubt, but not cool or macho. I was often mocked and excluded, especially during high school, for my uncoolness. But Kathy looked at me like her knight in shining armor. She has always told me, and continues to tell me, that though all the world may look at me and see Clark Kent, she knows that underneath I have on blue underwear. She has always been very quick to point out and celebrate anything I have done that is courageous. Over the years, bit by bit, it has sunk in. To my wife, I’m Superman, and it makes me feel like a man in a way nothing else could.”
― Timothy Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God

“Sex is glorious not only because it reflects the joy of the Trinity but also because it points to the eternal delight of soul that we will have in heaven, in our loving relationships with God and one another. Romans 7:1ff tells us that the best marriages are pointers to the deep, infinitely fulfilling, and final union we will have with Christ in love. No wonder, as some have said, that sex between a man and a woman can be a sort of embodied out-of-body experience. It’s the most ecstatic, breathtaking, daring, scarcely-to-be-imagined look at the glory that is our future.”
― Timothy Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God

“Today there is virtually a consensus... that Jesus came on the scene with an unheard of authority, with the claim of the authority to stand in God’s place and speak to us and bring us to salvation. With regard to Jesus there are only two possible modes of behavior: either to believe that in him God encounters us or to nail him to the cross as a blasphemer. Tertium non datur. [There is no third way.]2”
― William Lane Craig, Did Jesus Rise From The Dead?

“In so many ways, the same impulse to know the world and our place in it is at the roots of both science and spirituality. Both are attempts to illuminate the mysteries of our world and expand our vision of the greater whole. By charting the history of science, I hope these pages have shown how vital and awesome real science is. Throughout history, scientific discovery has brought us closer to the wonders of life and the universe—and immeasurably deepened our appreciation for creation. It engages the world and inspires the best in us. But the pursuit of truth should not be driven by zealous agenda. Nor should it overreach and speak with righteous authority where it’s on unsolid ground. That’s not science—and let’s not allow those who falsely invoke its name to diminish us.”
― Amir D. Aczel, Why Science Does Not Disprove God

“Whether Jesus rose or not isn’t affected by the brutality, chauvinism, or downright tediousness of his followers through the ages. It’s a matter of mere history: the fact or fallacy of the resurrection is in the same class of alleged facts as the contention that the battle of Agincourt was fought in 1415, or that I caught the 0856 train this morning. And so it is subject to the same sort of historical inquiry.”
― Charles Foster, The Jesus Inquest: The Case For and Against the Resurrection of the Christ