…the results of modern science, properly understood, are no threat to Christian faith. Christian faith and scientific method are understood to be complementary ways of knowing God’s creative work, each having its distinctive ways of knowing, methods and areas of validity.
– John Jefferson Davis, The Frontiers of Science and Faith (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2002), 7.
We are told that in the early days of the Church the pagans were often amazed at the calmness of the Christians in the hour of death. There was something about their noble and fearless bearing that pagan philosophy could not explain. That attitude seemed strange then, and still does, to the man of the world, for he cannot understand how it is possible for anyone to view death mildly and calmly.
– Loraine Boettner, Immortality (Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian and Reformed), 44.
Through most of the church’s history Christians, like the Jews from whom they sprang, have believed that the Biblical Adam and Eve were actual persons, from whom all other human beings are descended, and whose disobedience to God brought sin into human experience.
– C. John Collins, Did Adam and Eve Really Exist? (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2011), 11.
Christian apologetics works fall into three categories: Top, Pop, and Slop.
– Kenneth Samples, from a lecture at my Sunday morning church class
Richard [of St. Victor: d. 1173] argued that if God were just one person, he could not be intrinsically loving, since for all eternity (before creation) he would have had nobody to love. If there were two persons, he went on, God might be loving, but in an excluding, ungenerous way. After all, when two persons love each other, they can be so infatuated with each other that they simply ignore everyone else—and a God like that would be very far from good news. But when the love between two persons is happy, healthy and secure, they rejoice to share it. Just so it is with God, said Richard. Being perfectly loving, from all eternity the Father and the Son have delighted to share their love and joy with and through the Spirit.
– Michael Reeves, Delighting in the Trinity (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic), 31.
Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body—which believes that matter is good, that God Himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body is going to be given to us even in Heaven and is going to be an essential part of our happiness, our beauty, and our energy.
– C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 91.
Posted in C. S. Lewis, Quote of the Week
Tagged C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, quote
It is a mark of Christian maturity to be able to learn from those with whom we disagree on this or that.
– Robert Letham, Through Western Eyes (Mentor: UK, 2007), 271.
Posted in Quote of the Week
Tagged Christian maturity, disagreement, quote, Robert Letham
Using current psychological jargon to describe his [Augustine of Hippo] background, a prima facie reading of his Confessions reveals that he grew up in a dysfunctional family, suffered through a childhood of unhappiness, was prone to theft and dishonesty, abhorred study and formal education, was virtually addicted to sex and food, enjoyed the life of the theatre and cabaret, studied off-beat philosophies and religions, and for a time was a single parent. His life was unquestionably disordered, and like many of our contemporaries, he found himself on a restless course in search of healing and happiness.
— David K. Naugle, “St. Augustine’s Concept of Disordered Love and It’s Contemporary Application,” March 12, 1993, http://www3.dbu.edu/naugle/pdf/disordered_love.pdf.
Nothing about us except our neediness is, in this life, permanent.
— C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (San Diego: Harcourt, Inc., 1960), 33.
I could believe in the death of a man called Jesus, I could believe in his bodily resurrection, I could even believe in a salvation by grace alone; but if I do not believe in this God, then, quite simply, I am not a Christian. And so, because the Christian God is triune, the Trinity is the governing center of all Christian belief, the truth that shapes and beautifies all others. The Trinity is the cockpit of all Christian thinking.
— Michael Reeves, Delighting in the Trinity (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic), 16.
My hope is that this blog will help and challenge Christians to think carefully about the implications of their worldview.
-Kenneth Richard Samples
Straight Thinking I Didn’t Know That!
