David > David's Quotes

“I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world's finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, for all the blood that they've shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.”
― C. S. Lewis

“Even our church growth can happen without Him. Let’s be honest: If you combine a charismatic speaker, a talented worship band, and some hip, creative events, people will attend your church. Yet this does not mean that the Holy Spirit of God is actively working and moving in the lives of the people who are coming. It simply means that you have created a space that is appealing enough to draw people in for an hour or two on Sunday.”
― Francis Chan, The Francis Chan Collection: Crazy Love, Forgotten God, Erasing Hell, and Multiply

“Sunday worship services are too frequently no more than a communal version of such energy-boosting, performance-enhancing, or get-well morning exercises.”
― Miroslav Volf, For the Life of the World (Theology for the Life of the World): Theology That Makes a Difference

“Many ministers are more the church’s institutional managers than its theological guides; correspondingly, many read more management (“leadership”) books than they do works of academic theology.”
― Miroslav Volf, For the Life of the World (Theology for the Life of the World): Theology That Makes a Difference

“it is hard for theology to persist when it has forgotten its purpose: to critically discern, articulate, and commend visions of the true life in light of the person, life, and teachings of Jesus Christ.”
― Miroslav Volf, For the Life of the World (Theology for the Life of the World): Theology That Makes a Difference

“We also give up on the quest for truth when we marshal all forces—in exegesis and history as well as in philosophical, moral, and practical theology—to “discover” and corroborate predetermined dogmatic stances.”
― Miroslav Volf, For the Life of the World (Theology for the Life of the World): Theology That Makes a Difference

“Our theology is insufficiently Christian—and less revealing of the truth than it should be, if Christian claims are indeed true (as we believe them to be)—when we repeat in religious idiom normative stances that nontheologians advocate, often with better arguments and greater rhetorical power.”
― Miroslav Volf, For the Life of the World (Theology for the Life of the World): Theology That Makes a Difference

“A theological articulation can be fruitful in one place at one time but not at that same place at a different time or at a different place at the same time.”
― Miroslav Volf, For the Life of the World (Theology for the Life of the World): Theology That Makes a Difference

“theologians do not create the “treasure” but present it ever anew; instead of “proclaiming” themselves and their theologies (see 2 Cor. 4:6), theologians proclaim, each in his or her own way, Jesus Christ, who has become for them “wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption” (1 Cor. 1:30). At their best, theologians’ visions unite with their lives in seeking to be what Paul called “the aroma of Christ,” who himself is the true life (2 Cor. 2:15).”
― Miroslav Volf, For the Life of the World (Theology for the Life of the World): Theology That Makes a Difference

“Virtuous theologians work as God’s stewards building God’s home (1 Cor. 3:9), not masters building their own little empires.”
― Miroslav Volf, For the Life of the World (Theology for the Life of the World): Theology That Makes a Difference

“Love of enemies is a central moral conviction of the Christian faith; theologians who see their work as a mode of Christian life ought to love their intellectual “enemies”: to respect them as human beings, even to seek their friendship, and certainly not to let a personal squabble rob them of a good and productive argument with them.”
― Miroslav Volf, For the Life of the World (Theology for the Life of the World): Theology That Makes a Difference

“Karl Barth imagined the Christian theologian in the role of John the Baptist in the painting of Matthias Grünewald: he is standing to the side of the cross, holding the open Hebrew Scriptures in one hand and pointing with a finger of the other to the crucified Christ.67 A theologian ought to draw attention to the way of life and to the one who originally embodied it, not to the intellectual prowess, fertile imagination, or dazzling rhetoric of the theologian.”
― Miroslav Volf, For the Life of the World (Theology for the Life of the World): Theology That Makes a Difference

“Living toward a world in which these identities no longer divide, but living in a world fundamentally structured by them, Paul takes up and lays down various identities for the sake of the gospel. Though free, he has made himself a slave. For the sake of the gospel, he lives sometimes as one under the Jewish law, other times as one free from it—all while recognizing the truth of his situation as one no longer under “the law” but nevertheless under “Christ’s law.”
― Miroslav Volf, For the Life of the World (Theology for the Life of the World): Theology That Makes a Difference