Quotes

Atheism really is a belief system

In speaking of the fear of religion, I don’t mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions… in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking about something much deeper – namely the fear of religion itself… I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God, and naturally, hope there is no God. I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.

Thomas Nagel
The Last Word

Science does not have the right to give to me my reason for being. But I am going to take science’s view because I want this world not to have meaning. A meaningless world frees me to pursue my own erotic and political desires.

Aldous Huxley
Ends and Means

Lewis on the fact that the ancients understood the natural world as not being miraculous

“Joseph didn’t want to leave Mary because he didn’t know where babies came from but because he knew precisely where they did.”

Kallistos Ware on Lewis

Lewis’s actual quote

“He was the husband of the Virgin Mary. If you’ll read the story in the Bible you’ll find that when he saw his fiancée was going to have a baby he decided to cry off the marriage. Why did he do that?”

“Wouldn’t most men?”

“Any man would’, said I, ‘provided he knew the laws of Nature — in other words, provided he knew that a girl doesn’t ordinarily have a baby unless she’s been sleeping with a man. But according to your theory people in the old days didn’t know that Nature was governed by fixed laws. I’m pointing out that the story shows that St Joseph knew that law just as well as you do.”

“But he came to believe in the Virgin Birth afterwards, didn’t he?”

“Quite. But he didn’t do so because he was under any illusion as to where babies came from in the ordinary course of Nature. He believed in the Virgin Birth as something supernatural. He knew Nature works in fixed, regular ways: but he also believed that there existed something beyond Nature which could interfere with her workings — from outside, so to speak.”

C.S. Lewis
Religion and Science, God in the Dock

The Nature of the Logos

The name Word bestowed upon the Son of God reveals better than any other name the mystery of the inner relationship between the First and Second Persons of the Holy Trinity, God the Father and God the Son. A thought and a word are distinct from each other in that the thought dwells in the mind, whereas the word is the expression of the thought; yet the two are inseparable. The thought does not exist without the word, nor does the word without the thought. A thought is like a word which is concealed within, and a word is that which gives expression to the thought. The thought takes the form of a word to convey the content of the thought to its hearers. Looked at in this way, the thought, being an independent principle, is the father of the word, and the word is the son of the thought. The word cannot exist prior to the thought, yet it does not originate from without; it comes from the thought and remains inseparable from the thought. Similarly, the Father, the supreme and all-encompassing Thought, produced from His bosom the Son, the Word, His first Interpreter and Herald.

St. Dionysius of Alexandria
The Logos, 230-265 A.D.

Assessing an Interpretation of Christ’s Salvation

Does it suggest a change in God or in us?
Does it separate Christ from the Father?
Does it isolate the cross from the Incarnation and Resurrection
Does it suggest Christ just appeals to our feelings — or did He change our situation?

Kallistos Ware
Salvation in Christ

External orders should be chosen carefully

For even though from the viewpoint of faith, the external orders are free and can without scruples be changed by anyone at any time, yet from the viewpoint of love, you are not free to use this liberty, but bound to consider the edification of the common people, as St. Paul says, I Corinthians 14:40, ‘All things should be done to edify,’ and I Corinthians 6:12, ‘All things are lawful for me, but not all things are helpful,’ and I Corinthians 8:1, ‘Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.

…You cannot plead, ‘Externals are free. Here in my own place I am going to do as I please.’ But you are bound to consider the effect of your attitude on others. By faith be free in your conscience toward God, but by love be bound to serve your neighbor’s edification

Martin Luther
The Freedom of a Christian

For Luther, worship style is a balance

Those who devise and ordain universal customs and orders get so wrapped up in them that they make them into dictatorial laws opposed to the freedom of faith. But those who ordain and establish nothing succeed only in creating as many factions as there are heads, to the detriment of that Christian harmony and unity of which St. Paul and St. Peter so frequently write.

Martin Luther
A Christian Exhortation to the Livonians Concerning Public Worship and Concord