Methodism in Europe this day would have been as a thousand to one, if the Wesleyans had stood by the old landmarks of John Wesley; but no; they must introduce pews, literary institutions, and theological institutes, till a plain, old-fashioned preacher, such as one of Mr. Wesley's "lay preachers," would be scouted, and not allowed to occupy one of their pulpits.
Autobiography Of Peter Cartwright The Backwoods Preacher
Peter Cartwright
and I am perfectly satisfied that if force is resorted to, this glorious Union will be dissolved, a civil war will follow, death and carnage will ensue, and the only free nation on the earth will be destroyed.
Autobiography Of Peter Cartwright The Backwoods Preacher
Peter Cartwright
Sometimes he thought he was a poor mean devil to treat me as he had done; and surely I must be a Christian, or I never could treat him so kindly after he had said so many hard and bitter things about me.
Autobiography Of Peter Cartwright The Backwoods Preacher
Peter Cartwright
This revival among the slaves, with many others that I have been engaged in, fully satisfies -me that the Gospel ought to be carried to slaves and owners of slaves; for if the religion of Jesus Christ will not finally bring about emancipation of the shaves, nothing else will.
Autobiography Of Peter Cartwright The Backwoods Preacher
Peter Cartwright
I do firmly believe that if the ministers of the present day had more of the unction or baptismal fire of the Holy Ghost prompting their ministerial efforts, we should succeed much better than we do, and be more successful in winning souls to Christ than we are.
Autobiography Of Peter Cartwright The Backwoods Preacher
Peter Cartwright
"Is not that Church which has no children in it more like hell than heaven?"
Autobiography Of Peter Cartwright The Backwoods Preacher
Peter Cartwright
Look at the needless, not to say sinful expenditures in our older cities and districts of country; the unnecessary thousands expended, not in building needful and decent churches, for this is right, but ornamental churches, to make a vain show and gratify pampered pride.
Autobiography Of Peter Cartwright The Backwoods Preacher
Peter Cartwright
I could raise my children to work where work was not thought a degradation.
Autobiography Of Peter Cartwright The Backwoods Preacher
Peter Cartwright
But I say now, if the people would not be led by party considerations, but would select honest and capable men, I can not see the impropriety of canvassing for office on Christian principles.
Autobiography Of Peter Cartwright The Backwoods Preacher
Peter Cartwright
Just then my old Methodist preacher motto occurred to my mind, that is, "Never, retreat till you certainly know you can advance no further."
Autobiography Of Peter Cartwright The Backwoods Preacher
Peter Cartwright
On Monday morning I went over to see him. He was a high-strung Predestinarian in his views; believed, or professed to believe, that God had decreed every thing that comes to pass. After introducing myself to him, he presently bristled up for an argument. I told him I had not come to debate, but to invite him to the Savior. He said he could not receive any thing from me, for he cordially despised the Methodists. I told him if God had decreed all things, he had decreed that there should be Methodists, and that they should believe precisely as they did, and that they were raised up by the decree of God to torment him before his time, and that he must be a great simpleton to suppose that the Methodists could do or believe any thing but what they did; and now, my dear sir, you must be a vile wretch to want to break the decrees of God, and wish to exterminate the Methodists; that if his doctrine was true, the Methodists were as certainly fulfilling the glorious decrees of God, which were founded in truth and righteousness, as the angels around the burning throne; and several admonitions I gave him, and, by the by, he had some feeling on the subject. I talked kindly and prayed with him, and left.
Autobiography Of Peter Cartwright The Backwoods Preacher
Peter Cartwright
"I won't do it," said he. "You must leave something in pawn till you return, or I will not set you over." "What shall I leave?" "Your overcoat," said he. "No, sir; perhaps I shall need it before that time, and if you will not trust me I am afraid to trust you."
Autobiography Of Peter Cartwright The Backwoods Preacher
Peter Cartwright
But this is the way with all demagogues, and if our happy and glorious Union is destroyed, it will be done by these office-seekers, who go for their own little insignificant selves, while the true love of country is an eternal stranger in their traitorous hearts.
Autobiography Of Peter Cartwright The Backwoods Preacher
Peter Cartwright
They were generally tolerably well furnished with old manuscript sermons, that had been preached, or written, perhaps a hundred years before. Some of these sermons they had memorized, but in general they read them to the people. This way of reading sermons was out of fashion altogether in this western world, and of course they produced no good effect among the people. The great mass of our western people wanted a preacher that could mount a stump, a block, or old log, or stand in the bed of a wagon, and without note or manuscript, quote, expound, and apply the word of God to the hearts and consciences of the people.
Autobiography Of Peter Cartwright The Backwoods Preacher
Peter Cartwright
I have thought, and do still think, if I were to set out to form a plan to contravene the laws of God, to encourage wickedness of all kinds, to corrupt the morals and encourage vice, and crowd hell with the lost and the wailings of the damned, the Universalist plan should be the plan, the very plan, that I would adopt. What has a Universalist, who really and sincerely believes that doctrine, to fear? Just nothing at all; for this flesh-pleasing, conscience-soothing doctrine will not only justify him in his neglect of duty to God and man, but gives fallen nature an unlimited license to serve the devil with greediness in any and every possible way that his degenerate, fallen soul requires or desires.
Autobiography Of Peter Cartwright The Backwoods Preacher
Peter Cartwright
What has become of him I know not, but it is probable he is at Utah, and has fifteen or twenty wives.
Autobiography Of Peter Cartwright The Backwoods Preacher
Peter Cartwright
When God calls any man to preach his Gospel, if he will not reason with flesh and blood, but do his duty and live faithful, my experience for it, God will qualify him for the work if he never saw a college.
Autobiography Of Peter Cartwright The Backwoods Preacher
Peter Cartwright
Religion always makes better slaves and better masters, and will se cure the freedom of more slaves than all the run-mad abolitionism in the world.
Autobiography Of Peter Cartwright The Backwoods Preacher
Peter Cartwright
As it is, one trouble with all the churches is that they have too many incurable saints in them, men and women who pray too much and do too little, who cannot forget their own selfish salvation enough to look after other people's without feeling their own spiritual pulse all the time they are doing it. Of late I've sometimes suspected that it is nearly as debilitating to stay in the church all the time as it would be to stay in a hospital all the time.
A Circuit Rider's Wife
Corra Harris
"That the times are so transient, that a preacher is called to deliver a message about what is far more permanent."
A Circuit Rider's Wife
Corra Harris
His joy was not natural like mine (in so far as I had any)—it was supernatural, and not at all dependent upon the actual visible circumstance about him.
A Circuit Rider's Wife
Corra Harris
This resolution is not in keeping with some views and sentiments I have written in these pages, but, being a woman, I thank God I can be as inconsistent as is necessary to feminine peace of mind.
A Circuit Rider's Wife
Corra Harris
"Up here the best, the wisest people don't know what the truth of God is; they think they can find it in science. Faith is for fools who cannot think. They are not trying to reconcile God to man, but man to God, and trimming down the Holy Ghost to suit his scientific bug faculties."
A Circuit Rider's Wife
Corra Harris
They know what is right, but righteousness does not appeal to them, because it has never been sanctified by love.
A Circuit Rider's Wife
Corra Harris
The calculation begins by assigning a beta of 1 to a broad market index. If a stock has a beta of 2, then on average it swings twice as far as the market. If the market goes up 10 percent, the stock tends to rise 20 percent. If a stock has a beta of 0.5, it tends to go up or down 5 percent when the market rises or declines 10 percent. Professionals call high-beta stocks aggressive investments and label low-beta stocks as defensive.
A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Twelfth Edition)
Burton G. Malkiel
There is evidence that a portfolio of stocks with relatively low earnings multiples (as well as low multiples of book value, cash flow, and/or sales) produces above-average rates of return even after adjustment for risk, as measured by the capital-asset pricing model.
A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Twelfth Edition)
Burton G. Malkiel
The standard measurement of the value factor is referred to as HML—the return on the 30 percent of stocks selling at the highest ratios of book-to-market value from the 30 percent of stocks selling at the lowest ratios of book-to-market value. From 1927 through 2017, the annual risk premium available from holding a portfolio of “value” stocks has been 4.9 percent. Another way to measure the value premium is by calculating its Sharpe Ratio. Since 1927 the value factor (as measured by HML) has produced a Sharpe Ratio of 0.34—a sizeable reward to risk ratio that is almost as large as that for the beta market factor discussed above.
A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Twelfth Edition)
Burton G. Malkiel
Another pattern that academic investigators have found in stock returns is the tendency over long periods of time for small-company stocks to generate larger returns than large-company stocks.
A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Twelfth Edition)
Burton G. Malkiel
Over the short holding periods, there is some evidence of momentum in the stock market. Increases in stock prices are slightly more likely to be followed by further increases than by price declines. For longer holding periods, reversion to the mean appears to be the pattern.
A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Twelfth Edition)
Burton G. Malkiel
High-beta stocks do not produce the higher returns hypothesized by the capital-asset pricing model. (Forgetful readers can turn back to the chart on page 216, which presents the results of the Fama-French study.) But since low-beta stocks are less volatile, an investor can improve her Sharpe Ratio by holding low-beta portfolios. Hence low volatility can be considered an additional factor that can improve the investor’s risk-return tradeoff. The relationship between beta and return is relatively flat both in the United States and internationally.
A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Twelfth Edition)
Burton G. Malkiel
The evidence is clear that single-factor smart beta products have not produced superior results.
A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Twelfth Edition)
Burton G. Malkiel
By weighting each stock in an index equally, rather than weighting by its total capitalization, an investor can obtain similar results to those from some of the multifactor models.
A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Twelfth Edition)
Burton G. Malkiel
Multifactor “smart beta” funds appear to have produced better results by taking advantage of the low or negative correlations between the factors. Especially if they can be obtained with low expense ratios, they could supplement a broad-based core index portfolio.
A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Twelfth Edition)
Burton G. Malkiel
high beta stocks (those with the highest sensitivity to general declines in stock prices) do not provide investors with any higher rates of return than more stable stocks. Subsequent studies have confirmed these results. These findings underlie one possible risk parity strategy. If the historical pattern of a flat return-beta relationship continues, it will be optimal to buy low-beta assets on margin to increase risk and return of the portfolio to the level the investor desires.
A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Twelfth Edition)
Burton G. Malkiel
Risk parity recognizes such apparent empirical regularities and attempts to take advantage of them by buying bonds on margin to increase the bond portfolio’s rate of return while increasing the investor’s risk up to the level of risk inherent in holding a portfolio of common stocks.
A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Twelfth Edition)
Burton G. Malkiel
In practice, risk-parity portfolios will include a number of asset classes, and overall portfolios will include more than just stocks and bonds. For instance, real estate assets (accessed, for example, with an REIT index fund) could be included in the overall portfolio; so could commodity funds as well as Treasury inflation-protected securities (TIPS).
A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Twelfth Edition)
Burton G. Malkiel
There is one predictable pattern in the stock market that also augurs for at best modest stock-market returns over the longer term. Depending on the forecast horizon involved, as much as 40 percent of the variability of future market returns can be predicted on the basis of the initial P/E multiple of the market as a whole. An interesting way of presenting the results is shown in the diagram on page 342. The diagram was produced by measuring the P/E of the broad U.S. stock market each quarter since 1926 and then calculating the market’s subsequent ten-year total return through 2018. The observations were then divided into deciles depending upon the level of the initial P/E multiple. In general, the exhibit shows that investors have earned higher total rates of return from the stock market when the initial P/E of the market portfolio was relatively low, and relatively low future rates of return when stocks were purchased at high P/E multiples. MEDIAN TEN-YEAR ANNUAL COMPOUND TOTAL RETURN FROM HISTORIC P/E DECILES 1926 TO DATE Source: The Leuthold Group. In measuring the P/E for the market, these calculations do not use actual earnings per share but rather cyclically adjusted earnings. Thus, the measured P/Es are often referred to as CAPEs—cyclically adjusted P/E multiples. The CAPEs are available on Robert Shiller’s website, and the earnings are calculated as average earnings over the last ten years. (Similar calculations can be obtained by averaging the past five years of earnings.) The Shiller CAPE in 2018 averaged about 30. CAPEs do a reasonably good job of forecasting returns a decade ahead and confirm the expectation presented here of modest single-digit returns over the years ahead that could be less than the 7 percent estimate presented above.
A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Twelfth Edition)
Burton G. Malkiel
The key principles are: 1. History shows that risk and return are related. 2. The risk of investing in common stocks and bonds depends on the length of time the investments are held. The longer an investor’s holding period, the lower the likely variation in the asset’s return. 3. Dollar-cost averaging can be a useful, though controversial, technique to reduce the risk of stock and bond investment. 4. Rebalancing can reduce risk and, in some circumstances, increase investment returns. 5. You must distinguish between your attitude toward and your capacity for risk. The risks you can afford to take depend on your total financial situation, including the types and sources of your income exclusive of investment income.
A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Twelfth Edition)
Burton G. Malkiel
If possible, keep a small reserve (in a money fund) to take advantage of market declines and buy a few extra shares if the market is down sharply. I’m not suggesting for a minute that you try to forecast the market. However, it’s usually a good time to buy after the market has fallen out of bed.
A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Twelfth Edition)
Burton G. Malkiel
Pick no-load mutual funds to accumulate your nest egg because direct investments of small sums of money can be prohibitively expensive.
A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Twelfth Edition)
Burton G. Malkiel
Under the “4 percent solution,” you should spend no more than 4 percent of the total value of your nest egg annually. At that rate the odds are good that you will not run out of money even if you live to a hundred. It is highly likely, too, that you will also be able to leave your heirs with a sum of money that has the same purchasing power as the total of your retirement nest egg. Under the 4 percent rule, you would need $450,000 of savings to produce an income in retirement of $1,500 per month or $18,000 per year.
A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Twelfth Edition)
Burton G. Malkiel
Thus, I believe that if an investor is to buy only one U.S. index fund, the best general U.S. index to emulate is one of the broader indexes such as the Russell 3000, the Wilshire Total Market Index, the CRSP Index, or the MSCI U.S. Broad Market Index—not the S&P 500.
A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Twelfth Edition)
Burton G. Malkiel
But this is not an argument against indexing because index funds currently exist that mimic the performance of various international indexes such as the Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) index of European, Australasian, and Far Eastern (EAFE) securities, and the MSCI emerging-markets index. In addition, there are index funds holding real estate investment trusts (REITs) as well as corporate and government bonds.
A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Twelfth Edition)
Burton G. Malkiel
Is there any way to select an actively managed fund that is likely to be an above-average performer? I have undertaken many studies of mutual-fund returns over the years in an attempt to explain why some funds perform better than others. As indicated earlier, past performance is not helpful in predicting future returns. The two variables that do the best job in predicting future performance are expense ratios and turnover. High
A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Twelfth Edition)
Burton G. Malkiel
If I had actually understood what was happening, understood it as spiritual process, I should have been wildly alarmed. Or, again, if I had deeply understood, perhaps I shouldn’t have been alarmed—but for deep understanding I’ d have had to be a Christian.
A Severe Mercy
Sheldon Vanauken
Notice how we are perpetually surprised at Time. (‘How time flies! Fancy John being grown-up & married! I can hardly believe it!’) In heaven’s name, why? Unless, indeed, there is something in us which is not temporal.
A Severe Mercy
Sheldon Vanauken
‘This, you know, is a time of taking in— taking in friendship, conversation, gaiety, wisdom, knowledge, beauty, holiness—and later, well, there’ll be a time of giving out.’
A Severe Mercy
Sheldon Vanauken
Goodness and love are as real as their terrible opposites, and, in truth, far more real, though I say this mindful of the enormous evils like Nazi Germany. But love is the final reality; and anyone who does not understand this, be he writer or sage, is a man flawed in wisdom.
A Severe Mercy
Sheldon Vanauken
How strange that we cannot love time. It spoils our loveliest moments. Nothing quite comes up to expectations because of it. We alone: animals, so far as we can see, are unaware of time, untroubled. Time is their natural environment. Why do we sense that it is not ours?
A Severe Mercy
Sheldon Vanauken
Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance.
Bartleby, the Scrivener A Story of Wall-Street
Herman Melville
I might give alms to his body; but his body did not pain him; it was his soul that suffered, and his soul I could not reach.
Bartleby, the Scrivener A Story of Wall-Street
Herman Melville
"At present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable,"
Bartleby, the Scrivener A Story of Wall-Street
Herman Melville
besides my ugliness, I have no sense; I know very well that I am a poor, silly, stupid creature." "'Tis no sign of folly to think so, (replied Beauty,) for never did fool know this, or had so humble a conceit of his own understanding."
Beauty and the Beast
Marie Le Prince de Beaumont
it is neither wit nor a fine person in a husband, that makes a woman happy; but virtue, sweetness of temper, and complaisance:
Beauty and the Beast
Marie Le Prince de Beaumont
Our feelings have nothing to do with whether God loves us or is still involved in our lives.
Blessed Are the Misfits: Great News for Believers who are Introverts, Spiritual Strugglers, or Just Feel Like They're Missing Something
Brant Hansen
Do you know what I want? I want justice—oceans of it. I want fairness—rivers of it. That’s what I want. That’s all I want.” (Amos 5:13–14, 21–24 THE MESSAGE)
Blessed Are the Misfits: Great News for Believers who are Introverts, Spiritual Strugglers, or Just Feel Like They're Missing Something
Brant Hansen
But the wisdom of God says something different: that we can act ourselves into a new way of feeling much quicker than we can feel ourselves into a new way of acting.”
Blessed Are the Misfits: Great News for Believers who are Introverts, Spiritual Strugglers, or Just Feel Like They're Missing Something
Brant Hansen
Yes, God is at work, but if the Bible is any indication of how He actually operates, He’s at work on the margins, not on the stages.
Blessed Are the Misfits: Great News for Believers who are Introverts, Spiritual Strugglers, or Just Feel Like They're Missing Something
Brant Hansen
Someone once said that the word Christian makes for a lousy adjective, and I thought, That’s so true.
Blessed Are the Misfits: Great News for Believers who are Introverts, Spiritual Strugglers, or Just Feel Like They're Missing Something
Brant Hansen
The designation Catholic or Protestant is unimportant. The important thing is God’s word.
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Eric Metaxas and Timothy J. Keller
As long as we let the word be our only armor we can look confidently into the future.
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Eric Metaxas and Timothy J. Keller
Bonhoeffer was a remarkably independent thinker, especially for one so young. Some professors regarded him as arrogant, especially because he refused to come too directly under the influence of any one of them, always preferring to maintain some distance.
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Eric Metaxas and Timothy J. Keller
Where a people prays, there is the church; and where the church is; there is never loneliness.
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Eric Metaxas and Timothy J. Keller
Nothing is so at odds with prayer as vanity.
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Eric Metaxas and Timothy J. Keller
“Christianity preaches the infinite worth of that which is seemingly worthless and the infinite worthlessness of that which is seemingly so valued.”
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Eric Metaxas and Timothy J. Keller
“Look, God created human beings and also animals, and I’m sure he also loves animals. And I believe that with God it is such that all who loved each other on earth—genuinely loved each other—will remain together with God, for to love is part of God. Just how that happens, though, we admittedly don’t know.” You should have seen the happy face on this boy; he had completely stopped crying. “So then I’ll see Herr Wolf again when I am dead; then we can play together again”—in a word, he was ecstatic. I repeated to him a couple of times that we don’t really know how this happens. He, however, knew, and knew it quite definitely in thought. After a few minutes, he said: “Today I really scolded Adam and Eve; if they had not eaten the apple, Herr Wolf would not have died.” This whole affair was as important to the young boy as things are for one of us when something really bad happens.
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Eric Metaxas and Timothy J. Keller
Theology must lead to the practical aspects of how to live as a Christian.
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Eric Metaxas and Timothy J. Keller
Jesus did not only communicate ideas and concepts and rules and principles for living. He lived. And by living with his disciples, he showed them what life was supposed to look like, what God had intended it to look like. It was not merely intellectual or merely spiritual. It was all these things together; it was something more. Bonhoeffer aimed to model the Christian life for his students. This led him to the idea that, to be a Christian, one must live with Christians.
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Eric Metaxas and Timothy J. Keller
If it is I who determine where God is to be found, then I shall always find a God who corresponds to me in some way, who is obliging, who is connected with my own nature. But if God determines where he is to be found, then it will be in a place which is not immediately pleasing to my nature and which is not at all congenial to me. This place is the Cross of Christ. And whoever would find him must go to the foot of the Cross, as the Sermon on the Mount commands. This is not according to our nature at all, it is entirely contrary to it. But this is the message of the Bible, not only in the New but also in the Old Testament.
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Eric Metaxas and Timothy J. Keller
Where books are burned, they will, in the end, burn people, too.
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Eric Metaxas and Timothy J. Keller
Bonhoeffer’s three conclusions—that the church must question the state, help the state’s victims, and work against the state, if necessary—were too much for almost everyone. But for him they were inescapable. In time, he would do all three.
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Eric Metaxas and Timothy J. Keller
He was thinking about the deep call of Christ, which was not about winning, but about submission to God, wherever that might lead.
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Eric Metaxas and Timothy J. Keller
There is no way to peace along the way of safety. For peace must be dared, it is itself the great venture and can never be safe. Peace is the opposite of security. To demand guarantees is to want to protect oneself. Peace means giving oneself completely to God’s commandment, wanting no security, but in faith and obedience laying the destiny of the nations in the hand of Almighty God, not trying to direct it for selfish purposes. Battles are won, not with weapons, but with God. They are won when the way leads to the cross.
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Eric Metaxas and Timothy J. Keller
education in a way that he didn’t feel was right. Christ must be brought into every square inch of the world and the culture, but one’s faith must be shining and bright and pure and robust. It must be free of cant and “phraseology” and mere religiosity, or the Christ whom one was bringing into the world and the culture was not Christ at all, but a tawdry man-made counterfeit.
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Eric Metaxas and Timothy J. Keller
“Write your sermon in daylight; do not write it all at once; ‘in Christ’ there is no room for conditional clauses; the first minutes on the pulpit are the most favorable, so do not waste them with generalities but confront the congregation straight off with the core of the matter; extemporaneous preaching can be done by anyone who really knows the Bible.”
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Eric Metaxas and Timothy J. Keller
faith “is the evidence of things not seen.”
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Eric Metaxas and Timothy J. Keller
“Confirmands today are like young soldiers marching to war, the war of Jesus Christ against the gods of this world. It is a war that demands the commitment of one’s whole life. Is not God, our Lord, worthy of this struggle? Idolatry and cowardice confront us on all sides, but the direst foe does not confront us, he is within us. ‘Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.’”
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Eric Metaxas and Timothy J. Keller
This inactivity, or rather activity in unimportant things, is quite intolerable when one thinks of the brethren and of how precious time is.
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Eric Metaxas and Timothy J. Keller
“One is less lonely when one is alone.”
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Eric Metaxas and Timothy J. Keller
I wonder if the Americans do not understand us at all because they are people who left Europe so as to be able to live out their faith for themselves in freedom? i.e. because they did not stand fast by the last decision in the question of belief? I feel that they would understand the fugitive better than the one who stays. Hence the American tolerance, or rather, indifference in dogmatic questions. A warlike encounter is excluded, but so too is the true passionate longing for unity in faith.
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Eric Metaxas and Timothy J. Keller
Bonhoeffer’s willingness to engage in deception stemmed not from a cavalier attitude toward the truth, but from a respect for the truth that was so deep, it forced him beyond the easy legalism of truth telling.
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Eric Metaxas and Timothy J. Keller
To be true to God in the deepest way meant having such a relationship with him that one did not live legalistically by “rules” or “principles.” One could never separate one’s actions from one’s relationship to God.
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Eric Metaxas and Timothy J. Keller
But he explained that the idea one could ever go back to a time before troubles and death was false to begin with. The war was only showing them a deeper reality that always existed:
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Eric Metaxas and Timothy J. Keller
It is not war that first brings death, not war that first invents the pains and torments of human bodies and souls, not war that first unleashes lies, injustice, and violence. It is not war that first makes our existence so utterly precarious and renders human beings powerless, forcing them to watch their desires and plans being thwarted and destroyed by more “exalted powers.” But war makes all of this, which existed already apart from it and before it, vast and unavoidable to us who would gladly prefer to overlook it all.
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Eric Metaxas and Timothy J. Keller
We know, of course, that God and the devil are engaged in battle in the world and that the devil also has a say in death. In the face of death we cannot simply speak in some fatalistic way, “God wills it”; but we must juxtapose it with the other reality, “God does not will it.” Death reveals that the world is not as it should be but that it stands in need of redemption.
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Eric Metaxas and Timothy J. Keller
God wanted his beloved children to operate out of freedom and joy to do what was right and good, not out of fear of making a mistake.
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Eric Metaxas and Timothy J. Keller
Here was the rub: one must be more zealous to please God than to avoid sin.
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Eric Metaxas and Timothy J. Keller
“It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.”
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Eric Metaxas and Timothy J. Keller
As long as Christ and the world are conceived as two realms bumping against and repelling each other, we are left with only the following options. Giving up on reality as a whole, either we place ourselves in one of the two realms, wanting Christ without the world or the world without Christ—and in both cases we deceive ourselves. . . .
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Eric Metaxas and Timothy J. Keller
doubting—freedom comes only through deeds, not through thoughts taking wing.
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Eric Metaxas and Timothy J. Keller
“The essence of chastity is not the suppression of lust, but the total orientation of one’s life towards a goal. Without such a goal, chastity is bound to become ridiculous. Chastity is the sine qua non of lucidity and concentration.”
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Eric Metaxas and Timothy J. Keller
Personally, I think what really matters is that the right kind of work renders one unselfish, and that a person whose heart is filled with personal interests and concerns develops a desire for such unselfishness in the service of others.
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Eric Metaxas and Timothy J. Keller
They learned to do what technology has deprived us of, namely, to commend each other daily to God and put their trust in him.
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Eric Metaxas and Timothy J. Keller
Anyway, what do happiness and unhappiness mean? They depend so little on circumstances and so much more on what goes on inside us.
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Eric Metaxas and Timothy J. Keller
he never tired of repeating that the only fight which is lost is that which we give up.
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Eric Metaxas and Timothy J. Keller
We bade him good-bye—he drew me aside—“This is the end,” he said. “For me the beginning of life.”
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Eric Metaxas and Timothy J. Keller
“Why,” Dietrich said on his last visit here, “should it always have to be the bad people who make the revolutions?”
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Eric Metaxas and Timothy J. Keller
The ears of our generation have been made so delicate by the senseless multitude of flatterers that, as soon as we perceive that anything of ours is not approved of, we cry out that we are being bitterly assailed; and when we can repel the truth by no other pretence, we escape by attributing bitterness, impatience, intemperance, to our adversaries.
Concerning Christian Liberty
Martin Luther
the Church of Rome, formerly the most holy of all Churches, has become the most lawless den of thieves, the most shameless of all brothels, the very kingdom of sin, death, and hell; so that not even antichrist, if he were to come, could devise any addition to its wickedness.
Concerning Christian Liberty
Martin Luther
Moreover, I cannot bear with laws for the interpretation of the word of God, since the word of God, which teaches liberty in all other things, ought not to be bound.
Concerning Christian Liberty
Martin Luther