Four Quotes for Your Friday

Even though I am on vacation, I wanted to share four more quotes with you. Praise God for the gift of good books and articles:

“The pro-Nicene theology that emerged in the fourth century as the consensus doctrine of God in the Christian church was not a result of the imposition of Greek metaphysical ideas onto the Bible, as if Aristotle was preferred over Moses, Isaiah, and Paul. Rather, on the crucial issue of divine transcendence, Aristotle was corrected on the basis of Moses, Isaiah, and Paul. . . . Moltmann’s project is built on a faulty foundation because he simplistically equates the use of Aristotelian concepts with the uncritical use of such concepts, as when he writes smugly, ‘Aristotle’s God cannot love’ (Crucified God, 222), as if no one from Athanasius to Aquinas had noticed the fact” – Craig A. Carter, Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2021), 210, 210n11. 

“It is tempting to say that what you do with this time that you have is your own business. Briefly stated, however, the Christian position is that there’s no such thing as your own business”- Frederick Buechner, “X,” in Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner, ed. George Conner (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), 203. 

“To pray in Christ’s name, is to pray with confidence in Christ’s merit” – Thomas Watson, The Lord’s Prayer (1692; Carlisle, PA: The Banner of Truth Trust, 2020), 33.

“One of the grand myths of modernity has been that the operations of reason are a sphere from which God’s presence can be banished, where the mind is, as it were, safe from divine intrusion. To that myth, Christian theology is a standing rebuke. As holy reason at work, Christian theology can never escape from the sober realization that we talk in the terrifying presence of the God from whom we cannot flee (Ps. 139. 7). In Christian theology, the matter of our discourse is not someone absent, someone whom we have managed to exclude from our own intellectual self-presence and about whom we can talk away safely and undisturbed. We speak in God’s presence. When we begin to talk theologically about the holiness of God, we soon discover that the tables have been reversed; it is no longer we who summon God before our minds to make him a matter for clever discourse, but the opposite: the holy God shows himself and summons us before him to give account of our thinking. That summons—and not any constellation of cultural, intellectual or political conditions—is the determinative context of holy reason” – John Webster, Holiness (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 15.