Christian Mind Quotes

Nothing is so destitute as a mind philosophizing about God when it is without Him.

There is nothing in our experience, however trivial, worldly, or even evil, which cannot be thought about christianly.

To know God, and yet know nothing of our wretched state breeds pride: to realize our misery and know nothing of God is mere despair: but if we come to the knowledge of Jesus Christ we find our true equilibrium, for there we find both human misery and God.

When comprehension fails, let admiration take place.

Beauty isn’t worth thinking about; what’s important is your mind. You don’t want a fifty-dollar haircut on a fifty-cent head.

Truth to be understood must be lived because we can only possess what we experience. There is a difference, a qualitative difference between what I know as a fact, and what I know as truth. The facts of theology can be altogether cold; though true in every way they alone can’t change me. Truth is creative, transforming… and alive. It’s truth that keeps me humble, saved and set free.

I accepted the “cogito ergo sum” with less reserve than I should have, although I might have had enough sense to realize that any proof of what is self-evident must necessarily be illusory. If there are no self-evident first principles, as a foundation for reasoning to conclusions that are not immediately apparent, how can you construct any kind of philosophy? If you have to prove even the basic axioms of your metaphysics, you will never have a metaphysics, because you will never have any strict proof of anything, for your first proof will involve you in an infinite regress, proving that you are proving what you are proving and so on, into the exterior darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth.

[New forms of anti-intellectualism] came… with the assumption that, in order to be spiritual, one must no longer pay attention to the world.

[Any theology] that encourages Bible reading primarily to understand a “world out there,” instead of the “world for me,” is not only bad theology but a theology prejudicial to the intellectual life.

Wherever two elements appear, as in this case the sinner and saint, the temporal and the eternal, the terrestrial and the heavenly life, there is always danger of losing sight of their interconnection and of falsifying both by error or onesidedness. Christendom, it must be confessed, did not escape this error. A dualistic conception of regeneration was the cause of the rupture between the life of nature and the life of grace. It has, on account of its exclusive love of things eternal, been backward in the fulfillment of its temporal duties. It has neglected the care of the body because it cared too exclusively for the soul.