Christian Leaders

"The Truth lies not in the Yes and not in the No, but in the knowledge and the beginning from which the Yes and the No arise."

"It is evident that the relation to God with which the Bible is concerned does not have its source in the purple depths of the subconscious, and cannot be identical with what the deep-sea psychical research of our day describes in the narrower or broader sense as libido fulfilment."

"God, the pure limit and pure beginning of all that we are, have, and do, standing over in infinite qualitative difference to man and all that is human, nowhere and never identical with that which we call God, experience, surmise, and pray to as God, the unconditioned Halt as opposed to all human rest, the Yes in our No and the No in our Yes, the first and last and as such unknown, but nowhere and never a magnitude amongst others in the medium known to us, God the Lord, the Creator and Redeemer . . . that is the living God."

"Religion is the possibility of the removal of every ground of confidence except confidence in God alone. Piety is the possibility of the removal of the last traces of a firm foundation upon which we can erect a system of thought."

"The revelation in Jesus, just because it is the revelation of the righteousness of God is at the same time the strongest conceivable veiling and unknowableness of God. In Jesus, God really becomes a mystery, makes himself known as the unknown, speaks as the eternally Silent One."

"We know that God is He whom we do not know, and that our ignorance is precisely the problem and the source of our knowledge. The Epistle to the Romans is a revelation of the unknown God; God chooses to come to man, not man to God. Even after the revelation man cannot know God, for he is ever the unknown God. In manifesting himself to man he is farther away than before."

"The power of God can be detected neither in the world of nature nor in the souls of men. It must not be confounded with any high, exalted, force, known or knowable."

"The Resurrection is the revelation: the disclosing of Jesus as the Christ, the appearing of God, and the apprehending of God in Jesus. The Resurrection is the emergence of the necessity of giving glory to God: the reckoning with what is unknown and unobservable in Jesus, the recognition of Him as Paradox, Victor and Primal History. In the Resurrection the new world of the Holy Spirit touches the old world of the flesh, but touches it as a tangent touches a circle, that is, without touching it. And, precisely because it does not touch it, it touches it as its frontier — as the new world."

"The name Jesus defines an historical occurence and marks the point where the unknown world cuts the known world . . . as Christ Jesus is the plane which lies beyond our comprehension. The plane which is known to us, He intersects vertically, from above. Within history Jesus as the Christ can be understood only as Problem or Myth. As the Christ He brings the world of the Father. But we who stand in this concrete world know nothing, and are incapable of knowing anything, of that other world. The Resurrection from the dead is, however, the transformation: the establishing or declaration of that point from above, and the corresponding discerning of it below."

"The known plane is God's creation, fallen out of its union with Him, and therefore the world of the flesh needing redemption, the world of men, and of time, and of things — our world. This known plane is intersected by another plane that is unknown — the world of the Father, of the Primal Creation, and of the final Redemption. The relation between us and God, between this world and His world presses for recognition, but the line of intersection is not self-evident."

"The Gospel is not a religious message to inform mankind of their divinity or to tell them how they may become divine. The Gospel proclaims a God utterly distinct from men."

"In conclusion, a word about your tired expression that there is a difference between theory and praxis. ... Thereby you want to say that praxis should be as unencumbered as possible by theory. Coming from you, this wish is quite intelligible. What you mean by praxis is private profit; what I mean by theory is justice."

"Even a child can see that an industrial enterprise would have neither net profits nor profits in general without the participation of the worker. Why does he receive only a wage from the entrepreneur instead of a share in the profits? There is no other reason other than the fact that the means of production are the private property of the entrepreneur. ... This inequality and dependence is precisely the injustice that we don't want."

"And now to my socialist friends who are here present: I have said that Jesus wanted what you want, that he wanted to help those who are least, that he wanted to establish the kingdom of God upon this earth, that he wanted to abolish self-seeking property, that he wanted to make persons into comrades. Your concerns are in line with the concerns of Jesus. Real socialism is real Christianity in our time."

"The best theology would need no advocates; it would prove itself."

"Joy is the simplest form of gratitude."

"Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God."

"Faith in God's revelation has nothing to do with an ideology which glorifies the status quo."

"Grace must find expression in life, otherwise it is not grace."

"Faith is never identical with "piety" even if it were the purest and finest."

"Take your Bible and take your newspaper, and read both. But interpret newspapers from your Bible."

"What expressions we used – in part taken over and in part newly invented! — above all, the famous 'wholly other' breaking in upon us ‘perpendicularly from above,’ the not less famous 'infinite qualitative distinction' between God and man, the vacuum, the mathematical point, and the tangent in which alone they must meet."

"For the millions that suffer unjustly, the Confessing Church does not yet have a heart."

""The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain: And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed!" This is the voice of our conscience, telling us of the righteousness of God. And since conscience is the perfect interpreter of life, what it tells us is no question, no riddle, no problem, but a fact — the deepest, innermost, surest fact of life: God is righteous. Our only question is what attitude toward the fact we ought to take. We shall hardly approach the fact with our critical reason. The reason sees the small and the larger but not the large. It sees the preliminary, but not the final, the derived but not the original, the complex but not the simple. It sees what is human but not what is divine. We shall hardly be taught this fact by men."

"Amicum qui diu quaeritur, vix invenitur, difficile servatur."

"When you have said what you like, you shall bear what you do not like."

"To sin is human, to lay snares is diabolical."

"In the case of Tertullian we praise his great talent, but we condemn his heresy. In that of Origen we admire his knowledge of the Scriptures, but nevertheless we do not accept his false doctrine. As to Didymus, however, we extol both his powers of memory, and the purity of his faith in the Trinity, while on the other point in which he erred in trusting to Origen we withdraw from him. The vices of our teachers are not to be imitated, their virtues are."

"Pardon me for having praised Origen's zeal for Scriptural learning in my youthful days before I fully knew his heresies; and I will grant you (Rufinus) forgiveness for having written an Apology for his works when your head was grey."

"To die is the lot of all, to commit homicide only of the weak man."

"Innocence would be dead long ago if wickedness were always allied to power, and calumny could prevail in all that it seeks to accomplish."

"Before Arius arose in Alexandria as a demon of the south, things were said incautiously [regarding the Trinity] which cannot be defended against a malevolent criticism."

"Non digne Graeca in Latinum transfero: aut Graecos lege (si ejusdem linguae habes scientiam); aut si tantum Latinus es, noli de gratuito munere judicare, et, ut vulgare proverbium est: equi dentes inspicere donati."

"They fill their houses through the plunder and losses of others, so that the saying of the philosophers may be fulfilled, 'Every rich man is unjust or the heir of an unjust one.' (Omnis dives aut iniquis aut iniqui haeres.)"

"De mysterio Trinitatis, cujus recta confessio est ignoratio scientiae"

"Ignoratio Scripturarum, ignoratio Christi est."

"Privilegia paucorum non faciunt legem."

"A dreadful rumor reached us from the West. We heard that Rome was besieged, that the citizens were buying their safety with gold, and that when they had been thus despoiled they were again beleaguered, so as to lose not only their substance but their lives. ...The speaker's voice failed and sobs interrupted his utterance. The city which had taken the whole world was itself taken; nay, it fell by famine before it fell by the sword, and there were but few to be found to be made prisoner."

"Neither Britain, a province fertile in tyrants, nor the people of Ireland, knew Moses and the prophets."

"The charges we bring against others often come home to ourselves; we inveigh against faults which are as much ours as theirs; and so our eloquence ends by telling against ourselves."

"It is no fault of Christianity that a hypocrite falls into sin."

"Audio religiosam habere te matrem, multorum annorum viduam, quae aluit, quae erudivit infantem et post studia Galliarum, quae vel florentissima sunt, misit Romam non parcens sumptibus et absentiam filii spe sustinens futurorum, ut ubertatem Gallici nitoremque sermonis gravitas Romana condiret nec calcaribus in te sed frenis uteretur, quod et in disertissimis viris Graeciae legimus, qui Asianum tumorem Attico siccabat sale et luxuriantes flagellis vineas falcibus reprimebant, ut eloquentiae toreularia non verborum pampinis, sed sensuum quasi uvarum expressionibus redundarent."

"Athletes as a rule are stronger than their backers; yet the weaker presses the stronger to put forth all his efforts."

"The tired ox treads with a firmer step."

"Let your daughter have first of all the book of Psalms for holiness of heart, and be instructed in the Proverbs of Solomon for her godly life."

"Proclivis est enim malorum aemulatio, et quorum virtutes assequi nequeas, cito imitaris vitia."

"Difficulter eraditur, quod rudes animi praebiberunt. Lanarum conchylia quis in pristinum colorem revocet?"

"Quotidie morimur, quotidie commutamur, et tamen aternos nos esse credimus."

"O mors quae fratres dividis, et amore societos, crudelis ac dura dissocias."

"Grandes materias ingenia parva non sufferunt."