Category: Contemporary Theologians

Quotes from Theologians of the past few centuries

To Believe in Him without Doing His Will is Not to Believe in Him at All

To believe in Him and not to believe in what He believed, not to love what He loved and not to desire what He desired, is not to believe in Him. To separate Him from the “content” of His life, to expect miracles and help from Him without doing what He did, and finally to call Him “Lord” and worship Him without fulfilling the will of His Father, is not to believe in Him. We are saved not because we believe in His “supernatural” power—such faith He does not want from us—but because we accept with our whole being and make ours the desire that fills His life, which is His life and ultimately makes Him descend into death and abolish it.

Alexander Schmemann
Of Water and Spirit
pg. 65

The Sacraments Pass Us Over Into the Kingdom of God

The holy water in Baptism, the bread and wine in the Eucharist, stand for, i.e. represent the whole of creation, but creation as it will be at the end, when it will be consummated in God, when He will fill all things with Himself.

It is this end that is revealed, anticipated, made already real to us in the sacrament; and in this sense each sacrament makes us pass over into the Kingdom of God. It is because the Church herself is the sacrament of this passage and in each of her sacraments takes us there, into the Kingdom of God, that the water of Baptism is holy, i.e. the very presence of Christ and the Holy Spirit; that the bread and wine of the Eucharist are truly, i.e. really, and with a reality more real than all the “objective” realities of “this world,” the Body and Blood of Christ, His parousia, His presence among us. Thus consecration is always the manifestation, the epiphany of that End, of that ultimate Reality for which the world was created, which was fulfilled by Christ through His Incarnation, Death, Resurrection and Ascension, which the Holy Spirit reveals today in the Church  and which will be consummated in the Kingdom “to come.”

Alexander Schmemann
Of Water and Spirit
pg. 49-50

Denouncing prescribed prayer is a form of self exhaltation

The best thing, where it is possible, is to keep the patient from the serious intention of praying altogether. When the patient is an adult recently reconverted to the Enemy’s party, like your man, this is best done by encouraging him to remember, or to think he remembers, the parrot-like nature of his prayers in childhood. In reaction against that, he may be persuaded to aim at something entirely spontaneous, inward, informal, and unregularised; and what this will actually mean to a beginner will be an effort to produce in himself a vaguley devotional mood in which real concentration of will and intelligence have no part. One of their poets, Coleridge, has recorded that he did not pray “with moving lips and bended knees” but merely “composed his spirit to love” and indulged “a sense of supplication.” That is exactly the sort of prayer we want; and since it bears superficial resemblance to the prayer of silence as practised by those who are very far advanced in the Enemy’s service, clever and lazy patients can be taken in by it for quite a long time. At the very least, they can be persuaded that the bodily position makes no difference to their prayers; for they constantly forget, what you must always remember, that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls. It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.

C.S. Lewis
The Screwtape Letters

The unraveling onion of the Reformation criticism of tradition

Like many of the Protestant critics who followed him, Semler could claim to be following in the footsteps of Luther and the Reformation, and to be doing so with greater consistency than the political situation of the 16th century had permitted the first Protestant reformers themselves to do. The same kind of historical–critical scrutiny to which Luther and his fellow reformers had subjected to cherished traditions and doctrines of the medieval church, such as the claims of the Papacy or even the sacramental system, could and should be rolled back to the very first centuries of the history of the church. Even the first century, revered as “apostolic,” must not be beyond the reach of historical criticism.

Jaroslav Pelikan
Whose Bible Is It?
The Canon and the Critics

The irony of pitting the Bible against the Church

Another aspect of the divine irony that we have seen repeatedly in the history of the use of the Bible within both Judaism and Christianity is that the Bible being used as a weapon against church and tradition had itself come from the arsenal of the church and had been preserved and protected by the tradition.

Jaroslav Pelikan
Whose Bible Is It?
The Bible Only

The Bible is not self authenticating

The very conflict over the biblical canon between the Protestant Reformers and the Council of Trent made it clear that even in a doctrine of sola Scriptura the authority of the Bible did not authenticate itself automatically (which would have required some kind of doctrine of repeated inspiration in each generation of the history of the church) but depended on recognition by tradition and by the church for acceptance.

Jaroslav Pelikan
Whose Bible Is It?
The Bible Only