To Know and Love God Quotes

“Postmodernism is also simplistic in failing to see its own interpretation of the world (that all metanarratives are evil tools of oppression that must be deconstructed) as an alternative metanarrative.”
― David K. Clark, To Know and Love God: Method for Theology

“Human authorities will exercise authority rightly only if they acknowledge the authority of God over them.”
― David K. Clark, To Know and Love God: Method for Theology

“Thus, while God’s Word is not uniform, it is internally coherent. Given these assumptions, evangelical interpretation seeks the literal sense of Scripture. This is not “letter-ism,” a stilted literalism that ignores historical tradition, cultural background, grammatical conventions, figures of speech, or literary genres. The method is much like what readers use to interpret other forms of literature. If I read a letter from my wife, for example, the meaning I seek is what she meant as she wrote.”
― David K. Clark, To Know and Love God: Method for Theology

“Christianity can endure, not by surrendering itself to the modern mind and modern culture, but rather by a break with it: the condition of a long future both for culture and the soul is the Christianity which antagonizes culture without denying its place.”77”
― David K. Clark, To Know and Love God: Method for Theology

“Christian theology must free the gospel not only to specify the answers but also to shape the questions.”
― David K. Clark, To Know and Love God: Method for Theology

“The goal is to propel people to love God and neighbor, to cling to the salvation of Christ, and to submit joyfully to the Holy Spirit.58”
― David K. Clark, To Know and Love God: Method for Theology

“The true method of theology is . . . the inductive, which assumes that the Bible contains all the facts or truths which form the contents of theology, just as the facts of nature are the contents of the natural sciences. It is also assumed that the relation of these Biblical facts to each other, the principles involved in them, the laws which determine them, are in the facts themselves, and are to be deduced from them, just as the laws of nature are deduced from the facts of nature. In neither case are the principles derived from the mind and imposed upon the facts, but equally in both departments, the principles or laws are deduced from the facts and recognized by the mind.56”
― David K. Clark, To Know and Love God: Method for Theology

“The purpose of theology is not to conform the church to the world, but to invite society into the thought world of the church.”
― David K. Clark, To Know and Love God: Method for Theology

“Thus, reason tells us that it is rational to accept what reason alone cannot demonstrate.”
― David K. Clark, To Know and Love God: Method for Theology

“They disconnect biblical truths from each other like a depraved artist who rearranges the pieces of a beautiful mosaic.”
― David K. Clark, To Know and Love God: Method for Theology

“Anyone remotely aware of the current situation in philosophy knows of a revival of scholarship in philosophy of religion that promotes a critical realist view of God and of faith. This revival owes much to what is called the Reformed epistemology movement. In a remarkable article, naturalist Quentin Smith brought the news out of the closet, writing that orthodox Christians are making significant inroads in the philosophical world. “God is not ‘dead’ in academia,” wrote Smith. “He returned to life in the late 1960s and is now alive and well in his last academic stronghold, philosophy departments.”4”
― David K. Clark, To Know and Love God: Method for Theology